Paleontologist
You dig up animals that died millions of years ago and work out how they lived — from bones, footprints, and the mess they left behind.
A day looks like
- You spend six hours on your knees with a brush, uncovering four inches of rib.
- You compare one tooth against hundreds of others to work out what it ate.
- You argue with another scientist about whether the marks on a bone are bites or scratches.
Where you have already seen this
- The label under a museum skeleton naming who found it and in which year.
- A fossil in a cliff face or a quarry that somebody had to recognise as bone rather than stone.
- Every time a film shows a dinosaur with feathers — that changed because of published work.
How you get there
- 01A degree in geology or biology, then a masters or doctorate — the fossils are the subject, but the training is earth science.
- 02Most positions are in universities and museums, and there are few of them.
- 03Volunteering on a dig or in a museum collection is how nearly everyone starts.
- 04A large part of the field is preparation and curation work rather than excavation.
- Subjects that help
- Biology · Geography · Chemistry
- Typical pay, US median
- $101,920
- O*NET OnLine, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers (19-2042.00), 2025
You might recognise this if
- You've picked up a rock because the shape of it looked deliberate.
- You'll do slow, careful work for hours when there's something at the end of it.
Try this week
Press a shell, a leaf and a key into clay, let it dry, then swap with someone and guess what made each mark.
Near this
- Animal Behaviourist
- Agronomist
- Volcanologist
This is one of 48 kinds of work in the same map. Grow Up Quest is how a parent finds which of them their child actually responds to — not by asking the child what they want to be, but by recording what they have already been seen doing.