Marie Jimenez is aiming for a career as a paleontologist, and her aspirations received a big boost last summer when she served as an intern at Dinosaur National Monument in northeast Utah. And yet she says she has very little interest in studying dinosaurs.

Unlike many paleontologists, Marie said she was definitely not into dinosaurs as a kid. In fact, she initially enrolled at URI to study engineering, after transferring from the Community College of Rhode Island. But a course in geology redirected her academic studies, which led to her interest in paleontology.

“Paleontology is all about uncovering the history of the Earth, whether by dinosaur fossils or other types of fossils,” she explained. “You have to know a little about everything to attack a problem. It’s sort of like being a geology detective.”

For her internship at Dinosaur National Monument, Marie worked nearly every day for 11 weeks to digitize archival documents, photographs, and maps from the early days of the 100-year-old fossil quarry to make the history of the site come alive. She searched through boxes of archival materials, unearthed hidden specimens, and scanned and wrote a description of each item. Her work can now been seen by anyone visiting a new website of the Digital Quarry Project. She also engaged in fieldwork mapping parts of the park and measuring and photographing bones in the quarry.

“My favorite part of the experience was being able to explore the area,” she said. “As long as we got our work done, we could explore the park and volunteer for other park-related jobs. I went on a six-day rafting trip with the park biologist to extract invasive species. It was hard work, but six days in the wilderness without a shower or a cell phone was a great experience.”