Dinosaurs for the People: An Interview with 2024 Emil W. Haury Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Dr. William Gibson Parker
Dr. William Gibson Parker, 2024 Emil W. Haury Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, has worked at Petrified Forest National Park for over two decades. He has made many contributions to the field of paleontology, advocated for protecting the park and understanding its history, and connected with park visitors and dinosaur enthusiasts across the world.
In this interview, Western National Parks talked with Dr. Parker about how his career took shape, what’s so special about working in a national park, some of his favorite discoveries, and what he’s excited about in the world of paleontology.
A career shaped by Petrified Forest National Park
Petrified Forest National Park preserves a tropical forest from the last 20 million years of the Triassic Period, including its fallen trees, pollen, spores, and thousands of other animal and plant fossils. Dr. Parker has made it his life’s work to bring the wonders of this park to people around the world.
“As a Triassic paleontologist, this is where you want to be,” he says. “It’s your Disney World.”
Since he began working at the park in 2001 as a paleontologist, Parker’s contributions to the understanding and protection of Petrified Forest have been numerous. Today, he is the park’s resource manager.
Over his lengthy career, he has uncovered hundreds of fossils, discovered 13 new-to-science species, and contributed to over 100 papers and 3,000 citations. He has secured $16 million in grants to protect the landscapes and has worked to nominate the park as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Parker’s contributions are not just limited to scientific study. He has appeared on ABC, NBC, and CBS News on Smithsonian Online and National Parks Traveler, consulted for the IMAX film Dinosaurs Alive and other documentaries, and shared his passion for paleontology as a faculty member at Northern Arizona University and Northland Pioneer College. He continues to be a sought-after presenter at academic conferences.
Western National Parks honored him with the Emil W. Haury Lifetime Achievement Award—which Parker said was a huge honor to receive—because of these significant contributions.
Parker's enthusiasm for dinosaurs makes his job easy. Thanks in part to popular franchises like The Flintstones, Jurassic Park, and The Land Before Time, people see and learn about dinosaurs at a young age, something that Parker says makes them “great ambassador[s] for science,” especially since so many kids are interested in them.
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Discovering a love of dinosaurs
Many paleontologists talk about how their interest in dinosaurs as children immediately set them on their scientific career paths. Parker’s trajectory into his chosen field was different. He “grew out” of his initial enthusiasm for these ancient creatures. After graduating high school, Parker managed restaurant kitchens for several years before planning his next steps.
“It was a total fluke thing,” he said, describing how his mother bought him a dinosaur calendar one year as she remembered that he liked dinosaurs when he was younger. “I was flipping through the artwork and thought, ‘Wow, this is different than I remember...’ So, I got a few paleontology books and I realized: ‘Oh, you can do this for a living.’”
Parker went to his local community college and told his advisors what he wanted to study. “They promptly enrolled me in archaeology classes because they didn’t know the difference,” he said.
He went on his first fossil dig in the Payson area with his mentor AJ Lombard, where he uncovered fossils and shells from ancient marine organisms. He then transferred to Northern Arizona University, where he earned his Bachelor’s and Master's of Science in Geology.
One day, his advisor mentioned that a woman had recently visited the museum to report finding what she believed was a cow fossil. It turns out the “cow” was an aetosaur, a Triassic-era reptile known for its huge, curved shoulder horns. And it was this fossil dig that set Parker on the path to studying animals from this era, which has become his life’s work.
After working with the US Forest Service on a fossil inventory project in Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest, Parker found an open position for a Physical Scientist at Petrified Forest National Park. It turned out to be the perfect fit, as they were looking for someone who had experience with Triassic-era fossils and fossil inventories. It was during his work at the Arizona park that he earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and made a discovery that would rewrite the story of dinosaur origins.
Rewriting dinosaur history with Revueltosaurus
In 2004, Parker was working in the Painted Desert when he found a blue band of mud stone; he was walking along the fossilized riverbed. As he investigated the rocks, he found many skeletons, including several aetosaurs. It was Parker’s supervisor who picked up a jawbone that Parker recognized as belonging to a Revueltosaurus—which was when he knew they had discovered something important.
Up until that time, Revueltosaurus was only known by its teeth, discovered in 1989 in New Mexico. It was believed that this species was a bird-hipped dinosaur that lived in the Triassic. Dinosaurs belong to two lineages, bird-hipped and lizard-hipped. It was believed that both lineages began in the Triassic, as by the Jurassic age, several million years later, there were many species from both lineages across the globe. However, while there were plenty of examples of lizard-hipped Triassic-era dinosaurs, the Triassic-era bird-hipped dinosaurs were only known to science by their teeth.
Until now, Parker and his team quickly realized that several of the skeletons along the riverbed belonged to Revueltosaurus, and they were previously unknown to science. But that wasn’t the only discovery that was made.
“It turns out that Revueltosaurus wasn’t actually a dinosaur at all,” Parker said. He and his team discovered that the animal was actually an early crocodilian. This meant that there were now no known fossil records of bird-hipped dinosaurs from the Triassic era, as Revueltosaurus was previously thought to be the only one. This “Rosetta Stone” species unlocked a completely different understanding of dinosaur lineages and how they evolved, as it is now unclear when, and from which species, bird-hipped dinosaurs originated from.
It is due to incredible discoveries like this one that Parker has been recognized by his fellow scientists with a unique honor. He has a prehistoric species named after him—Kwanasaurus williamparkeri, an herbivore that lived in what is today known as Colorado some 200 million years ago.
As for his own work, he plans to continue studying the fascinating resources at Petrified Forest for many years to come.
“There’s just so much to do here,” he said. “With so many questions to answer.”
By Nikki Stavile
