July 22, 2024, by Lisa Teas Conaway

You might wonder what would possess a pre-dental student from Utah to travel thousands of miles north to Fairbanks, Alaska. It was the love of getting his hands dirty and discovery–not within a person’s mouth, but within layers of rock hiding our planet’s distant past.

In the face of entrance exams for dental school, Ben Cragun realized he wasn’t excited about the path laid out before him. Though dentistry held the promise of a stable career, it did not hold his passion. Paleontology started as a hobby for Ben. He found it fascinating and would study what lived on our earth millions of years ago during his free time. As his hobby grew, he decided to take the leap and followed it all the way to Alaska where he found a graduate student position under the guidance of Dr. Patrick Druckenmiller, Assistant Professor of Geology, Curator of Earth Sciences, and director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

“For the first time in my life, I knew what I wanted.” -Ben

Ben’s degrees in both zoology and chemistry from Weber State University, Utah transferred perfectly into his new field of study, and a year into his graduate work at UAF has found him in the position of Fossil Collections Manager of the Earth Sciences department within the Museum of the North. The pathways we follow in life are often not linear, but full of twists and turns. Ben’s passion and curiosity has been his constant, leading him to Alaska in search of dinosaurs. When finished with his schooling, Ben plans on working within public education, possibly through a Museum, all with the intent of spreading the joy of curiosity. Ben smiles while saying, “Science is exciting. It’s doable. Anyone can do it.”

For the second week of July, we welcomed both Ben (dino expert) and rising 1^st through 3^rd grade students (dino enthusiast) to our Dino Tales themed summer camp. Ben not only brought fossils and fossil replicas from the Museum of the North, but also his love for the subject, igniting curiosity in the campers. Together they traveled through the Mesozoic Era spanning over 186 million years, all the while exploring how earth’s inhabitants changed and evolved, from early dinosaurs to the iconic T. rex and Triceratops that were lost during the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Ben showed our campers how paleontologists get to be detectives and piece together what life might have looked like from the clues left behind. He also highlighted dinosaurs found in Alaska, such as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, a hadrosaurid (duck-billed dinosaur) whose fossils have been numerous, and Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, a tyrannosaurid relative of T. rex.

Though Ben loves all of Alaska’s Dinosaurs, his favorite was found in Mongolia from the Late Cretaceous epoch, 70 million years ago. Deinocheirus was an herbivore and theropod with sickle claws. This combination of strange traits is why Ben loves it. There is still so much to discover out there and so much we simply don’t know in the paleontological world.