A day in the life of a dinosaur researcher

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Paul Barrett is a dinosaur researcher at the National History Museum of London. He has been there for three years and says he can't imagine ever leaving.

"I generally get up in the morning at about seven thirty. I'm not very good in the mornings; it takes me a long time to get going. I usually find myself thinking about the day ahead in the shower, and daydreaming, which makes me later than I should be.

I get into work between 9:30 and 10. My day usually starts with checking my phone messages and email, and that takes me about an hour - replying to emails which have come in from colleagues all over the world.

I often have to sit in on a number of meetings during the day. These can be quite varied: administrative meetings, meetings to do with exhibitions or research projects, meetings with my students.

I like to do some research of my own when I have time. That usually involves looking at specimens in our collection, finding out information about them, or trying to get information on other specimens in other museums.

I work on plant-eating dinosaurs, and at the moment I'm working with some early dinosaurs from China and South Africa.

I'm looking at those specimens at the moment and trying to work out whether they're new types of dinosaurs and how they're related to other dinosaurs that we already know.

I leave the museum at about seven in the evening, and generally I do try and check my email when I'm at home, just so it doesn't build up too much for the next morning. But other than that, I usually switch off.

The best thing about my job is the variety. I get to travel to lots of interesting places, look at all sorts of interesting animals which I get to work with in all sorts of different ways - using different techniques, and with different colleagues from around the world.

I have lots of people coming to talk to me too; students, people from the media....so it's the variety of doing all those things which keeps it interesting.

I'm a very frequent visitor to China, and I'm due to go there again in a few weeks. China has certainly been one of the most important places in my career in terms of the animals I work on but also in terms of it just being a very interesting place to visit.

Last year, I visited a place called Lu Feng, which is a very small village outside Kunming in southern China.

It's a place where a lot of the early dinosaur material from China was found, and I'd been working this stuff for a number of years but had never visited the place it came from. Also, there was new material coming out of the ground while we were there, which was really interesting.

The most memorable moment of this career is probably that one thing that you first find out on your own.

My first one of those was when I was working on the feeding of Diplodocus, this big long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, and I suddenly thought of a way which it might have fed - I realized that it was using its teeth to strip leaves off branches and using its jaw and its teeth in a rather peculiar way.

It was a way that no one else had thought of before, so that was my first 'eureka' moment.

You do sometimes get low points - if you're away somewhere far from home, you've been away for some time, and things aren't going well, that kind of thing.

I have been in the museum overnight. It can be quite creepy because you only have the light on in parts of the museum and it's a very large building; very echo-y, lots of dark corners and so on. It can be quite creepy at times - especially if you have an overactive imagination.

I don't think new technology is a threat. The one thing we can offer that Playstation can't is the genuine scale of these things.

I know that computer and graphic technology is brilliant now and it can offer very realistic impressions of these things, but as soon as you turn up to a museum and you see something that's towering 30 meters (98 ft) above your head, I think that makes a much better impression on people than just seeing it on a screen.

As a museum, we haven't seen any kind of reduction in visitor numbers, in fact we probably now get more visitors than ever because people are more interested in things like the natural world in general.

I'm very happy where I am. I really enjoy my job - a bit of teaching, some research, and a bit of public outreach too, trying to explain the science we do to the public. So I can imagine staying here for a very long time."