In 1959, Jim Kirkland's dad returned from a business trip bringing a gift for the 5-year-old boy: a set of toy dinosaurs. The toys "basically ruined me for life," Kirkland chuckles.
"They were definitely the best toys that existed at that time . . . Within a few days I probably could say the name of every one, in my own way."He quickly learned to recite how long each of the giant creatures stretched and when each lived. Neighbors in Weymouth, Mass., began asking him questions about dinosaurs. He became a local curiosity, "the dinosaur geek."
The child who was dazzled by dinos has grown up to become Utah's new state paleontologist.
He is a jolly, energetic and enormously curious man, a scientist driven by the need to discover and teach.
When the Deseret News visited Kirkland on Friday at his laboratory behind the Utah Department of Natural Resources building, 1594 W. North Temple, it was his fourth day on the job. He replaced Dave Gillette, who left late last year for a position at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Ariz.
The state paleontologist is the official who leads field expeditions to dinosaur quarries, helps form state policy about which studies to pursue and which areas to excavate, writes scientific papers, directs fossil preparation, leads fund-raising efforts and carries out a host of other duties related to preserving and studying fossils.
Those toy dinosaurs sparked an interest in all subjects scientific, a process Kirkland wants to continue with the children of Utah.
As a child, Kirkland would take his microscope to a local pond and examine paramecium. He devoured libraries, reading every one of the old Time-Life books about science. He was delighted when a high school teacher took him on a fossil-hunting expedition.
The youngster would go to Harvard University's museum in Cambridge, Mass., and sit in front of dinosaur exhibits for hours, staring at the wonderful creatures.
After an education at New Mexico Tech, Socorro (bachelor's degree); Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff (master's); and the University of Colorado, Boulder (Ph.D.), he taught at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Meanwhile, he performed field work throughout the Colorado Plateau, in Nebraska and in Florida.
In the early 1990s the group Dinomation -- which builds realistic robotic dinosaurs for museum displays -- hired Kirkland as paleontologist for its non-profit arm, Dinomation International Society. Based in Fruita, Colo., he worked many quarries, including one near Moab that was studied in cooperation with the College of Eastern Utah in Price.
On that expedition Kirkland discovered the famous Utahraptor dinosaur, the real-life version of the terrifying carnivore of "Jurassic Park." The fierce monster sported 12- to 15-inch claws.
In his lab Kirkland showed a reconstruction of a Utahraptor claw, as curved and as sharp as a sickle. The dinosaur must have used it like a dagger, thrusting with its massive legs and ripping through a victim.
Kirkland taught laboratory and field techniques and led expeditions to Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Mexico. Eventually, he became an adjunct professor of geology at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo., and a research associate at the Denver Museum of Natural History.
In 1997 he shepherded a group to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. He has found several new species of armored dinosaurs and the world's oldest duckbill dinosaur.
He's a great believer in teaching paleontology. For one thing, a love of dinosaurs often inspires children about science in general, prompting many to become scientists.
An example may be the Kirklands' oldest daughter, Kelsey, 9. When she was a baby, she spent four months in a dinosaur quarry under the sun shades, hopping around in her little bouncy chair.
Now Kelsey has been telling all her family and friends "that she wants to be an exo-paleontologist. She wants to study fossils on other planets. She loves astronomy, too."
Jim and Sooz Kirkland's other daughter, Darcy, 5, has more worldly hopes. She wants to be a doctor when she grows up.
Now he is in the perfect position to make contributions to our understanding of the remote past. "Oh, I'm giddy about being here," he said.
"I've thought for a long time, this is really where I ought to be. Utah to my mind has the most complete, unstudied dinosaur record in the world."
Unlike anywhere else, the stratigraphic record of southern Utah is nearly complete for land-dwelling animals, stretching from 125 million years ago to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Southern Utah was sort of an embayment between two ancient mountain ranges. The ranges shed sediments that covered dinosaur bones and preserved them. Much of the rest of the world was awash in oceans.
Much of Utah's remarkable record has yet to be uncovered, and that is what excites Kirkland most of all.
"I'm focusing in my own mind on the mid-Cretaceous part," he said. During that period, roughly 100 million years ago, flowering plants developed and native North American dinosaurs died out.
New discoveries show that a land bridge between Asia and North America formed in what is now Alaska. It allowed more developed and successful dinosaurs from Asia to move into this region.
"All of a sudden, we get this great influx of animals moving in from Asia," he said. "It's almost a complete turnover."
Suddenly, long-necked browsers and carnosaurs like the allosaurus disappeared. Tyrannosaurus rex, horned dinosaurs and duckbill dinosaurs moved in.
Did diseases carried by the newcomers kill off the native dinos? Kirkland doubts it, though he thinks disease could have caused some weakness in the earlier populations. There is no evidence of disease by itself driving any species to extinction in this region, he said.
But a great deal remains to be discovered about what happened.
In August, Kirkland will lead another group to China, where they will work with their Chinese counterparts. He hopes to develop a Sino-Utah Cretaceous Project, to study the connection between Asia and North America.
"Was this land bridge open the whole time? There are lots of questions," he said.
Utah is a premiere place to discover the answers. "To the bottom of my soul, I'm convinced this is the most important geologic record out there . . . It's the best Mesozoic record there is, hands down."
Kirkland wants to encourage a great flowering of discovery about Utah's ancient life. He wants to promote existing research and start new programs that will help fill in the gaps in the fossil record.
"There's so much to learn," he says wistfully, "and our lifetimes are all too short."