When I was a kid, my grandparents who lived in the black hills of South Dakota, you know,

by Mount Rushmore, they took me to this little town up in the hills called Hot Springs.

And at Hot Springs, they had opened up a mammoth, a woolly mammoth dig site.

Apparently a whole bunch of these prehistoric elephants, I don't know what happened, mass

suicide or they got stuck in a ditch or somebody hunched them all, I don't know how they died,

but they all died.

And they're all right there.

And you could go there, you could pay a little admission fee, I think you still can.

And you could just walk in and stay behind the railing and you could just watch all of

these real live experts dig in right there and just see them excavating these dead behemoths

from millennia ago.

And it's the coolest thing I ever saw.

And I remember after that, I was just, I'm in this cloud nine coming home from that all excited

about dinosaurs and what secrets lay covered in the earth.

And I went home and we got like a weekly reader or something in class that week.

And it was about some discovery in the desert in the Middle East.

And I was like, this is what I need to be for.

I mean, this is the job that I want.

I want to be an archaeologist.

I want to dig things up.

Never happened.

I'm a piece with that, but I have never lost my obsession with that idea.

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