How to Become a Paleontologist
Between 2019 and 2022, an average of seven to nine permanent paleontology positions were advertised per year in the entire United States.
Most families spend around $30,000 a year on college. Almost nobody talks about that first number before committing to the second.
60 MINUTES INCLUDING Q&A · FREE · RECORDING FOR 72 HOURS
The number nobody gives you
What the measured job market looks like
Then add everyone who did not get a position last year, and the year before. There is a group called the Unemployed and Underemployed Paleontologist Support Group. As of August 2024 it had 2,400 members.
SOURCE · PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY EMPLOYMENT COMMITTEE · TWO YEARS OF DATA FROM THE AMERICAN GEOSCIENCES INSTITUTE, THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, SIX PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES AND JOB BOARD ARCHIVES · PUBLISHED IN PALEOBIOLOGY, 2025 · OPEN ACCESS
Before you register
Read this first
Your student is in college now, or heading there, and paleontology is the plan. You want to know what the training involves, what it costs, what the job market actually looks like, and what to do in the next twelve months.
You are the parent, trying to be supportive and honest at the same time. Only 38% of families ever discuss the starting salary for jobs in their student's field of study. If yours is in the other 62%, this hour is that conversation with the numbers in front of you.
You want a talk about dinosaurs. Evan does that every day for free and you should go watch it. This hour is about the profession, not the animals.
Come as a pair
If you are in high school or college, we strongly encourage a parent or guardian to attend with you.
Especially if they are helping pay for your education. A good part of this hour is about money and time, and it goes much better when the person funding the decision hears the numbers first-hand instead of secondhand from you afterwards. One registration, two people, one screen is fine.
Running order
The hour, in order
The employment data, and where it comes from
Seven to nine permanent positions a year against thirty-one-plus new PhDs, and a backlog on top. Including the one statistic that looks like good news until you see what it counts.
Geology or biology
There is no paleontology major at almost any school. What each degree buys you, what each leaves you missing, and how to supplement whichever one your student picks.
Research experience, which outranks grades
The highest-return thing an undergraduate can do. When to start, what counts, and how to do it with no paleontology within four hundred miles. Including the email that gets a student into a lab, and why most versions of it get ignored.
Where this training actually leads
Mitigation paleontology is the largest employer of paleontologists in the country and almost no student has heard of it. Several of these paths are more stable and better paid than the academic track.
If you are outside the US
Evan only knows the American system firsthand. He will say which parts of the hour transfer and which do not.
THEN LIVE Q&A
About the founder
Why him
Evan Jevnikar studied geology at the University of Kansas, then took a master's in biological sciences at NC State in Lindsay Zanno's lab, working on tyrannosaur growth. About a decade of fieldwork followed, on projects including Nanotyrannus, Falcarius and Fona herzogae. Full seasons of real excavation, not a week visiting somebody else's site.
He was going on to a doctorate. It was effectively settled.
Then a serious financial situation arrived while he was defending his thesis, and he could not afford to continue.
So he is not a professor, and he would rather tell you that himself than have you find it later. He is also not describing the employment numbers from outside them. He is one of the people inside them.
He went on to write Surviving Climate and Chaos and to build Daily Dino Guy, which reaches millions of people a month. Both were built on the training this hour is about.
Evan Jevnikar · M.S. Biological Sciences, NC State · Zanno Lab
Seven to nine jobs a year is a fact about the field. What your student does about it is not.
One hour, free, and the numbers in front of you.
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