Dr. Tom Broadhead, Geologist and Paleontologist at
UT Knoxville
How did you first become interested in rocks and geology?
"When I was about 5 or 6 years old my grandmother gave me a book called "All About Dinosaurs" by Roy Chapman Andrews. That's the book that really got me started. It was illustrated with line drawings and I used to take onion skin paper and trace them. You can still see the grooves where I kept tracing them over and over and over. Then my interest in paleontology and dinosaurs slacked off until I went to college. I was going to be a history major and then an economics major, but I was taking geology courses as a required science and I was making good grades.
"My great grandfather was a geologist. He published papers from the 1860s to the early part of this century so there was a point of family reference that I think added to my interest. During my junior year of college I decided that my geology grades were telling me something so I decided to become a geology major."
What kind of courses did you take?
"We didn't have a special class for earth sciences when I was in school so I took biology, chemistry, physics, and math (from algebra through calculus). Of all of those it was the biology courses that I found more interesting than the others. "
Why do you think geology is so interesting?
"There's an excitement that you get personally from discovery. In paleontology there's a lot of discovery to be made because anytime you go out into a field and pick up a rock, turn it over, and see a fossil on that rock, you are probably the first human that has ever seen that fossil. Most of the time, things that you see like that are things known to science, but sometimes they're not. Modern zoologists and botantists are continually finding new species, but the potential is there for anyone, even a five year old child, to find a species that has never been described."
What is the most exciting discovery you've ever made?
"Some fossils I found in Union County (TN) about 15 years ago represented, and still do represent, the earliest known examples of an extinct group of echinoderms called blastoids. Blastoids look like little flower buds, but are actually parts of animals that lived in the sea. The examples I found were tens of millions of years older than the next oldest. Those specimens are at the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington."