You've watched movies like Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and wonder what it would be like to be an archeologist or paleontologist searching for lost history. But what is it really like to search for 'hidden treasure'? Walter Stein is a professional paleontologist and teaches every day people how they can go on the adventure of a lifetime and discover dinosaur bones. In today's episode Walter shares how he turned a childhood passion into a career and along the way blazed his own trail of how to make paleontology not only a career but a business. He shares some crazy stories of his digs, how a dinosaur was named after him, and what a new generation of scientist need to know to make their dreams come alive.


Links

PaleoAdventures.com

Virtual Dinosaur Museum

Pictures of our dig with PaleoAdventures


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Walter and his wife Heather started “PaleoAdventures” back in 2005. PaleoAdventures provides a wide range of services to the education, museum, and tourist related industries, including: Dig site tours, commercial internet fossil sales, lectures and educational programs for schools, clubs and museums, museum consultation, contract fossil preparation, paleontological resource assessments, and much, much more.

Walter is a professional vertebrate paleontologist and dinosaur hunter who has discovered, excavated, or prepared over 25 dinosaur skeletons and numerous isolated fossils over the last 18 years. One of Walter’s most famous discoveries is the skeleton of “Sir William” a juvenile Tyrannosaur skeleton collected in Petroleum County, Montana. Sir William is named after Walter and Heather’s young son William. Walter is a graduate of Appalachian State University (BS Geology, 1994), is former president of the Big Horn Basin Foundation, Staff Geologist/paleotechnician at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, Field Collections Manager for Triebold Paleontology Inc. and Curator for the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. For the last three years he has been working closely with the AAPS (Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences), as chairman of their new "Journal of Paleontological Sciences". He is also the author of the book, “So You Want To Dig Dinosaurs; A Field Manual on the Practice, Principles, and Politics of Vertebrate Paleontology, published back in 2002 and"The Top 256 Rules of Paleontology" published in 2009”. See "Resume/CV" for Walter's Online resume and list of credentials.

Heather has been a nationally certified massage therapist since 1997. She is a graduate of Suncoast School of Natural Health(1997), Tampa, Florida. She has worked at some of the finest hotels and resorts in the country including the 5 star/5 diamond Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs and Saddlebrook Resort & Spa in Florida. She has been trusted to work on many celebrities, and professional sports figures during her career. For the last five years, Heather has been an intergral part of the dinosaur business, working in both the field and the lab.

They married in 2002 and have two boys William and Stephen.