Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
NINE
Our Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Is Auca Mahuevo the Real Jurassic Park?
In November of 1998 just before Thanksgiving, two articles about
the nesting site at Auca Mahuevo announced what we had found.
One was the scientific paper in
Nature;
the other was a popular arti-
cle that was published in
National Geographic.
The National Geo-
graphic Society had helped to fund our 1997 expedition, and they
wanted to let the public know what we had found.
To let other media outlets know about the discovery, we also
scheduled a news conference at the American Museum of Natural
History on the day that the articles were released. The museum had
sponsored the expedition, and at the time we both worked there. We
were fortunate that Rodolfo was able to come up from Argentina to
join us for the news conference.
Setting up a news conference requires a lot of work. The public
relations department of the museum spent several weeks contacting
journalists and correspondents at newspapers, magazines, television
stations, and radio stations, letting them know that we intended to
announce a major discovery about dinosaurs. Most of this responsi-
bility fell to Elizabeth Chapman, the director of media relations for
the museum at the time.
Elizabeth is a diminutive dynamo of energy and enthusiasm for
anything scientific that goes on at the museum. Her job was to
encourage media coverage of the institution's scientific research, and
there is no subject that she loves more than dinosaurs. She developed
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