Back when she was a first-grader — and long before she found herself in a Utah gully staring at the discovery of a lifetime — Dr. Marina Suarez used to find herself drawn to a large chunk of fossil located in the schoolyard at Boone Elementary School in San Antonio.
“We used to try to dig it out because it had little shells and things,” Suarez recalls. “We didn’t have any digging tools so I used bits of pencils and pens and things we got from the cafeteria and tried to get things out.
“Our teacher would shoo us away and say, ‘Get out of the dirt!’ Then she would go off and we would keep working on it.”
Even at the family home, Suarez and her identical twin sister, Celina, would use their father’s tools to dig holes in their backyard in a quest to find dinosaur bones.
“I always wanted to be a scientist and professor, and it’s kind of silly but I was a big fan of Indiana Jones when I was little,” Suarez says of the fictional archaeology professor whose adventures were featured in a series of movies in the 1980s.
“I was like, ‘Oh, man, if that’s what it’s like to be a professor — all those adventures — I want to be a professor,” Suarez says.
Today, that childhood dream has become a reality. Suarez is an associate professor of geology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
