Huddled with her colleagues in the hot Wyoming sun, Mary Nalasco carefully brushed particles off of what slowly revealed itself to be a post-cranial bone and a portal to the past.
This summer, 30-year-old Nalasco was able to go on a two-week dig in Wyoming and Montana to dig for dinosaurs as part of her biology studies at UNH Manchester. Nalasco, who lives in Manchester and will graduate in May 2015, says she discovered the program with the help of her advisor.
"I needed a senior capstone for my major," Nalasco says. "My advisor knew I was interested in paleontology and dinosaurs and so he said, 'why don't you go on a dig?' I looked online and was able to find a program through the New Jersey State Museum."
During her trip, she learned how to identify fossils and record data as well as had a chance to examine more recently deceased specimens. She also was able to help unearth an actual dinosaur.
"It was mostly post-cranial, some limbs, a tooth, some toes and some digits," she says. "You don't necessarily excavate all the bones from what's there. Instead, they take out a big ole chunk of rock so they can see what they have. So there were bones on top and more substance underneath it. They think it probably died and then was washed down (a waterway) and got dammed up by leg bones."
Nalasco says she wouldn’t have even thought to go on a dig had it not been for her advisor, but that kind of creative thinking is not unusual for in the biology department.
"We didn’t want to offer such a highly structured program where students would be taking classes in areas that they really aren't that interested in," says Stephen Pugh, associate professor of biology and program coordinator. "There are core courses that all students of biology take and should have and then students can specialize and really focus in on whatever they would like to do after graduation."
And the reason for that, Pugh says, is the biology program is preparing students for a vast number of career options. Students come to the UNH biology program and leave able to pursue careers in ecology, biology teaching, environmental sciences, and much more. They also come here to prepare for graduate school in pharmacology, physician assistant studies, veterinary studies, ophthalmology and the like.
Nalasco says she's still deciding whether she wants to pursue a career in the Environmental Sciences or graduate school, but that so far UNH Manchester has been very helpful to getting her on her way to one of those goals.
"The faculty have been really good," she says. "The Manchester campus is a small campus, which is fine because I like small classes. I've seen other colleges, where you have more of a traditional college experience where you have 100 kids in the classroom. But UNH Manchester is more personal."
Click here to request more information about the biology program at UNH Manchester.
