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What do paleontologists do?
Mark Norell excavates a fossil specimen.
Mark uncovers a specimen in the Gobi desert.

Many people think that paleontologists spend all their time in far-off places, collecting every fossil they find, and bringing them back to a museum to put them on display. All the Indiana Jones stuff. But, that's really only a small part of what we do. We only spend a few weeks a year on expeditions. The rest of the year we are in our labs looking at what we found. We spend a lot of time classifying specimens, looking at their characteristics and how they are related to each other. I spend more time on the computer than I do in the field.