About Nick Longrich

I was born and raised in the town of Kodiak, Alaska, on the island of the same name. My father was a commercial fisherman who skippered the Kodiak during the Bering Sea crab fishery in the 80s and my mother was an art school teacher.

I spent a lot of time in nature where I grew up, hunting for lithodid crabs under rocks in the tidepools, sundew plants in alpine bogs, catching water beetle larvae and soforth. When I wasn’t outside, I usually had my nose in a book. I did a lot of art, lots of drawing. 

In the summers I fished salmon with my father and brothers. I wasn’t terribly interested in the salmon, but found the weird sea life we caught with them fascinating. I did a lot of art and cartooning. In high school we used to go camping on a nearby island, camped out in old WWII fortifications, chasing after rabbits with sharpened sticks. It was a lot like Lord of the Flies… good times.

For college, I wanted to get as far away from Kodiak as possible, which ended up taking me to Princeton. I spent the first year and a half taking humanities classes, reading Plato and Moby-Dick, and taking creative writing classes before my love of nature drew me to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. But I remember that it was the humanities classes that really taught me to think critically, in a way the science classes never did. 

Under the patient and supportive mentorship of Rosemary Grant, I studied bird evolution, and after an internship at the Bird Division of the Smithsonian that saw me working on the weird ibis Xenicibis, I was hooked on paleontology. It was the collections that got me- wandering through endless rows of cabinets, drawers full of ivory-white skeletons, iridescent jeweled skins of tropical birds. It made me think that if there was a God, then he’d have a place like this… one of everything on file, for reference purposes.

Heaven, in my mind, looked like the Bird Division collections. Only larger.

After two a couple years at Chicago, which turned out not to be a great fit, I spent a few years in the wilderness, figuratively and often literally. This involved adventures from commercial halibut fishing on the fishing vessel Shuyak, to chasing lemurs through the leech-infested jungles of Madagascar; from art school classes in San Francisco to wandering across Patagonia looking at shipwrecks and dinosaurs with a copy of Voyage of the Beagle in my pack. I eventually found what I needed in Canada: vast, bone-rich badlands, endless drawers of fossils, a supportive doctoral advisor.

I did a postdoc at Yale for a couple of years, got some good projects done, and have spent the past few years at the University of Bath. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work in Africa, naming new dinosaurs and new mosasaurs; hunting Middle Stone Age artifacts and hanging out with hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.

It’s not a conventional path, but discovery means breaking away from the conventional. If you look at the world the same way everyone else does, you see the same things. Growing up in Alaska taught me to appreciate nature. Princeton taught me just how much you can learn from books. Growing up in a fishing community taught me to be practical and to trust experience over those books. Growing up around wily fishermen taught me to respect people for what they know and what they can do, not who they know, or where they went to school, or whether they even went to school. Growing up in a house full of art taught me to think creatively. Long ago I realized that I’ll never be a great analytical, linear thinker, no matter how hard I try. But learning how to draw and how to cartoon… well, I can look at disconnected lines and see the picture they make.

I still head back to Kodiak for the holidays, and to fish.