Maria McNamara
Prof Maria McNamara - Ask a Palaeontologist
This month we chat to Maria McNamara, Professor of Palaeontology at University College Cork, about why she became a palaeontologist and the most exciting things about her work.
- Name: Maria McNamara
- Job: Professor of Palaeontology
- Location: University College Cork, Ireland
What inspired you to become a scientist?
I was always interested in the natural world, always loved finding creatures and bugs and plants and flowers in the fields. My granny would send us out with nets and tell us not to come back until we found three pink flowers or three grasshoppers or something like that, and we’d come back and we’d identify them all. So from an early age, we were getting drilled in natural sciences.
What inspired you to become a palaeontologist?
It happened by accident, I was never really particularly into palaeontology. I missed the palaeontology lectures in the first year of my Earth Sciences degree and I wasn’t sure whether to stick to Earth Sciences or whether to go to art college but when I went back for my second year and my first lecture on the first day was in palaeontology, that was it I was sold.
Describe your work/job
I’m a palaeontologist. A lot of my work is doing research, trying to solve questions and trying to figure out what are the right questions to ask. I spend a lot of my time talking to people, I mentor a lot of young researchers, I do a lot of lab work and chemical analyses and lots of imaging with powerful microscopes, a bit of fieldwork, and some talking to the public. It’s a very varied job.
What’s the best part of your job?
Doing the research, hands down! Also doing fieldwork, using the microscopes, and doing the chemical analyses.
What other jobs have you done?
I worked as a waitress when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t a very good waitress. I worked as a Geopark geologist when I left academia for a while. I worked in public communication of science which was great fun, I worked a lot with teachers, with kids, with farmers, with businesses it was very diverse and a very interesting job.
What were your favourite subjects at school?
Everything except business. I was just one of those kids, I loved everything. I didn’t know what I wanted to pick to do in college, because I loved English, languages, science, geography, history, sport, art, music, everything!
Where did you study geoscience/palaeontology?
I did an Earth Sciences degree at National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) and I then did a PhD in Palaeontology at University College Dublin.
What hobbies do you have outside of palaeontology?
I love running, I love yoga, I sing with a choir, I like making jam, I like cooking and spending time with my kids.
What is your favourite fossil?
I don’t know if I have a favourite fossil. I quite like trace fossils, they are always overlooked but I get really excited by them. I like feathered dinosaurs and pterosaurs, feathers and skin.
What’s your favourite place that you have travelled to, to study palaeontology?
Anywhere that’s not cold, I’ve been to loads of places that are really cold! Spain where I did my PhD fieldwork, it was hot 40 degrees all the time, lots of biting creatures though that wasn’t so good.
Why is it important for us to study palaeontology?
To understand the evolution of life, to understand how life adapts to environmental change and to understand how the planet is going to respond to the cataclysmic changes that are happening right now in the sixth mass extinction.
What advice would you give to somebody interested in becoming a palaeontologist?
Don’t expect to get rich out of it and don’t expect it to be easy but at the same time do if you really love it! If you want to do palaeontology study science subjects, keep your mind open, keep asking questions and keep reading! Read, read, read because that is where you get all your ideas from, the more you read the more you know and that just makes you realise how little you know which makes you really good at asking the right questions in terms of trying to understand things. Palaeontology is like being a detective so you’ve got to be very curious and to not give up easily.
Maria Online
- Follow Maria on Twitter:@MariaMcN_palaeo