When Sam Girouard was 8 years old, he visited his grandmother in Alabama. They explored an old abandoned mine, and what they found changed his life forever. "It was just packed with fossils," says Sam. "Ferns, horsetail plants, things like that. I still have all those fossils."
Sam has been hunting fossils ever since. The 16-year-old from Bellingham, Washington, is now a respected paleontologist. He even helped a team from a Canadian museum dig up a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
One of Sam's most exciting discoveries required hours of painstaking reconstruction work. "I found these little shiny fragments of bone," he says. "I realized that what I had was a complete tyrannosaur tooth in about five dozen pieces. So I spent the entire day on my hands and knees with a magnifying lens, picking up all these little tiny bitty pieces and gluing them together. By the end of the day, I had my tyrannosaur tooth."
In a gravel pit in eastern Washington State he found the wristbone of an American mastodon. Tests showed that it was 4 1/2 million years old--a million years older than any other known fossil of that species.
Sam spent his summer carefully chipping away at an ancient lake bed. He found the only raindrop fossils ever discovered in Washington and the delicate fossilized wing of an extinct biting fly. "Those are extremely rare," he says.
Sam's fellow paleontologists are often surprised to learn that he is so young. He doesn't include his age in the scientific reports he writes for professional journals. "I'm afraid that if people first knew I was a kid, my work wouldn't be taken seriously," says Sam. "I want people to see that I'm doing solid science, and then they can hear about my age."