A wide-eyed boy, no older than 7, dashes into the dinosaur hall on the second floor of the Field Museum of Natural History, with his parents lagging behind.
He excitedly spies the immense skeletons and plays with the interactive displays that provide a hint of what life might have been like 75 million years ago.
Then he comes within earshot of Dennis Kinzig, a museum volunteer specializing in dinosaurs. Kinzig asks if he likes the prehistoric creatures. The boy eagerly answers yes.
Kinzig tells him to look at an object on a television screen. It’s the tooth of a baby ankylosaurus, an armored dinosaur that ate plants, Kinzig says. The tiny tooth, magnified many times through a microscope fitted with a special camera lens, has the boy spellbound.
As the boy gets ready to leave, Kinzig hands him a small tooth from a prehistoric shark as a keepsake. The boy’s mother accepts it and promises to hold it for him.
Kinzig, 54, relishes the boy’s fascination and excitement. His main mission as a volunteer, he says, is to form a link with children and whet their appetites for learning.
“They’re the ones who have that magic in their eyes,” he says. “That little connection can keep him interested for life.”
Kinzig, who volunteers on Saturdays and Sundays, mainly lectures and answers questions from visitors to the three halls that make up the museum’s “Life over Time” exhibit, which traces the path of life on Earth. It is the largest and most popular permanent exhibit in the museum, he says. Most Sundays, he also helps in the museum’s special exhibit about bats.
He has worked on many of the major temporary exhibits; they include the ancient Chinese dynasties, the Inca empire in Mexico and meteorites. In addition, he is paid to conduct classes and workshops on paleontology, dinosaurs, geology and meteorites.
He still experiences a childlike thrill when discovering things, Kinzig says. “I’m one of those kids who never grew out of it.”
Discovery and learning are integral to his life. He is helping with a yearlong study that the museum is conducting with the paleontology department at the University of Chicago. The dinosaur and shark teeth that he showed the boy were discovered in bags of dirt shipped from Montana to the museum as part of the study.
He and another volunteer are spending much of their regular eight-hour shifts on Saturdays sifting through the dirt with tweezers. Using powerful microscopes, they look for tiny bits of bone and other materials from long-gone creatures.
The study is intended to give scientists greater knowledge of the environment of a region in central Montana millions of years ago, when much of the state was covered by a shallow ocean, Kinzig says. The region is known for its large number of dinosaur remains and fossils.
“We know very little about what the world was like when dinosaurs were around,” he says.
Dinosaurs don’t always provide good clues about the environment because they were so big and roamed over such great distances that they weren’t dependent on a local environment, Kinzig says. Smaller animals that didn’t travel far offer much better clues about the variety of life, geology and climate at that location.
During the study’s first six months, Kinzig and the other volunteer have found bits of fish, shark, reptiles such as crocodiles and turtles, dinosaurs, and mammals. Many of the mammals have never been seen before.
The project serves a dual purpose for the museum, Kinzig says.
“We’re sharing this with the public so they can see an actual scientific project in progress and what it means to be a paleontologist,” he says. “We want to show (that) science is more than digging out huge bones.”
Kinzig’s volunteer work at the museum began 16 years ago and grew out of his longtime interest in science. He loved museums and science while growing up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, he says.
He graduated from the now-defunct St. Michael’s High School in 1959, then enrolled at Loyola University. He studied theology, philosophy and history for two years, but when his parents became ill he left school and took a job working on the loading dock of a truck warehouse.
In 1963 after his parents recovered, he returned to college, attending DePaul University and studying physics and chemistry. Though he enjoyed his classes, he realized he needed to study something more marketable, so after a year he transferred to DeVry Institute of Technology, Chicago, and received an associate’s degree in electrical engineering in 1965. He went to work for a copier manufacturing company as a physics aide, setting up a testing lab at the company’s research center in New York.
In 1966, he was drafted into the Army. As he was in line to board a plane for Vietnam, a sergeant plucked him out of his 260-man company and he was sent to Germany. He served as a missile technician at a secret base near the Czechoslovakian border.
After his discharge in 1968, Kinzig realized he had been away from the research field too long to return to his previous job, so he returned to Chicago and landed a job with an electronics company working on closed-circuit television.
In 1972, he took a position with a telephone company as a technician. Five years later, believing technicians would become outmoded, he passed an aptitude test offered by the company, had three months of intensive training in computer programming, and became a programmer. He has remained with the company and is a performance-improvement consultant, working on training, productivity and efficiency.
Kinzig developed an interest in paleontology, and in 1991, he joined the national Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. He regularly attends seminars and lectures on the subject, and every two years, he spends part of his vacation in the West at a dinosaur dig.
A co-worker noted Kinzig’s interest in science and invited him to join her as a volunteer at the Field Museum in 1979. When he had volunteered there for a year in an information booth, he was asked to create a tour of the dinosaur exhibit because officials knew of his interest in dinosaurs.
About two years later, the museum planned a Dino Day and asked Kinzig to play a lead role by giving two lectures on dinosaurs. It was set for a Saturday, and museum officials didn’t expect many visitors-maybe 20 or 30-despite efforts to publicize it. But before the museum opened that day, a frantic worker came rushing over.
“Dennis, we’ve got a big problem,” she said. “We’ve got hundreds of people waiting out there. I don’t know what to do.”
The officials had seriously underestimated the interest in dinosaurs, Kinzig says. More than 1,000 people had shown up.
Two hundred people attended each lecture. To make sure everyone could hear him, Kinzig kept on the move, walking around inside the belly of the 80-foot-long apatosaurus, also known as the brontosaurus. He anticipated that the lectures would last half an hour each, but by the time all the questions were answered, each one lasted an hour. By the end of the day, he was so hoarse he couldn’t talk.
“In no way in our wildest dreams did we think we would have hundreds . . . of people here,” he says. “It really threw me for a loop.”
Kinzig’s talents receive praise from a museum employee who works with him. “Dennis is an amazing person,” says Peter Laraba, who is in charge of volunteers for the “Life over Time” exhibit. “He has almost total recall. I’ve seen him work with the youngest of kids, then turn around and talk with a person (who has a doctorate degree) without missing a beat. He’s on top of his material.
“A big part of (his success) is his enthusiasm for the subject, and he’s just passing it on in any way he can.”
Laraba adds that Kinzig is “a kid magnet; there’s no way around it.”
Kinzig’s affinity for discovery has given him a kinship with the children he meets, and he goes out of his way to nurture their curiosity.
He recalls an encounter about four years ago that occurred while he was showing off the dinosaur wagon, a cart that carries skulls, teeth, fossils and bones. It was a busy Sunday, and he was swamped with children when another volunteer sent over a precocious 6-year-old boy.
The boy appeared “peeved,” Kinzig says. He stomped over with his jaw set and fists clenched. When asked if he had a question, the boy insisted that the other volunteer was giving out wrong information by saying that flying pterosaurs were not dinosaurs.
Kinzig replied that this was correct, but the boy wouldn’t accept that. His parents then explained that he had been told by his favorite teacher that pterosaurs were dinosaurs, and he couldn’t believe she could be wrong.
Seeing how upset the boy was, Kinzig thought it important that he take the time to discuss the issue. He showed him other dinosaur skeletons and explained the differences between those and pterosaurs. Each time, the boy nodded in agreement.
But when Kinzig concluded that those differences meant pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, the boy balked. After trying to explain it several more times and using every analogy he could think of, Kinzig still couldn’t convince him. Finally, a frustrated Kinzig looked at the parents and gave up.
“I had to say I failed him because I couldn’t get him to understand,” Kinzig says.
The boy, his head hanging, and his family were leaving when a flash hit Kinzig and he called out to them. He brought the boy back and told him to think of dinosaurs as one type of marble, reptiles as another, mammals as a third type and so on. What happens, Kinzig asked him, when they get a pterosaur marble and it doesn’t exactly match the dinosaur or other marbles?
The boy replied they could call it a new group. Exactly, Kinzig says, and that new group was called pterosaurs. “A light went on in the boy’s head,” Kinzig says, and he happily said he understood.
“It made my day,” Kinzig says, “and it made his day.”
