Brian Vastag

When Washington Post science writer Brian Vastag found Ray Stanford, an amateur dinosaur footprint tracker in the D.C. suburbs who had found an unusual baby dinosaur footprint, he thought he had stumbled upon a “nice little day story.” Soon, though, he realized that Stanford’s newest find was only the most recent chapter in a far deeper story. The more time Vastag spent with Stanford, the stranger and more complex his story became. Vastag’s tale of one man’s obsession, and the scientific beliefs he overturned, is a model of profile writing — detailed but restrained, exuberant but never uncritical. [Tireless Tracker Rewrote the Book on Dinosaurs in Maryland appeared in the Washington Post on April 19, 2012.]

Here, Vastag tells the story behind his story:

How did you get the idea for this story?

Last September, Johns Hopkins put out a press release on a new baby dinosaur fossil that was found in College Park, Maryland. I saw that two of the authors were Hopkins dinosaur researchers, and the third was someone named Ray Stanford, whose affiliation was given as the “Mesozoic Track Project.” I looked at that, and I thought, “You know, that sounds like a guy. That doesn’t sound like a university project.” I thought maybe this guy was an amateur, and sometimes those stories are interesting. So I called him up, and immediately I knew that he was going to be a good interview. He was really articulate and very excited. He described this find that he had made, of this little five-inch hatchling. It looked like it had drowned on its back, which is unusual to find, and it was a species that had not been found in Maryland before. I thought this was interesting and it would make a nice little day story. So I arranged to go out to his house with a photographer.

As soon as I walked into the guy’s living room, I realized that there’s a much bigger story here. It’s like this river of rock — there are hundreds and hundreds of pieces, and there’s a dinosaur footprint on every one of them. It’s sensory overload. And Ray is like a kid. He wants to show everything that he’s found, every single piece. He’s probably the most interesting and unique person I’ve ever interviewed.

The photographer and I spent about four hours out there that day. It’s kind of infectious when somebody is so excited about their work like that. I asked him to tell me how this all got started, and he told me a story that goes back to the late 90s, about how he was out with his children and they found something that looked like a track. At first glance he didn’t think it was anything, but then went back to the same spot and he found more, and he realized that there were dinosaur tracks in the area. It kind of broke this orthodoxy. Experts had said that the geology was wrong [for dinosaur fossils], and no dinosaur tracks had been found around here.

So then a larger story began to take shape in my mind. This was a story of this one man’s amazing ability, but it was also a bigger story of how a self-taught person can overturn a scientific orthodoxy.

So I wrote that day story, and then I went back and asked my editor what she thought about me doing this as a story for the Sunday Magazine. She was really encouraging and supportive and said I should go ahead and give it a shot. I went and talked to the magazine editor, Lynn Medford, and asked whether she would be interested in this narrative piece about a guy who has a living room full of dinosaur footprints. And she slammed her hand on the desk and said, “Oh, I love it! Do it.”

I thought, “It was never this easy when I was a freelancer to sell a story to a big magazine.” Read more »