Science Writing Samples

Starting in 2023, I began writing occasional freelance science stories for the Natural History Museum of Utah.
Before that, I wrote stories on ocean conservation and research for the Monterey Bay Aquarium from 2016 to 2019. A few representative examples follow, with the most recent at the top:

Natural History Museum of Utah:
How One Amazing Fossil Is Upending Our Understanding of Ankylosaur Behavior

Dr. David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum gave me a preview of his keynote for the NHMU’s DinoDays event, which centers on a spectacular specimen of the armored dinosaur Zuul crurivastator. Thanks to its unique name, I also got to work in nods to Ghostbusters and Dan Akroyd.

Natural History Museum of Utah:
Dreaming of Stegosaur Mysteries with Dr. Susannah Maidment

Ahead of her keynote for the NHMU’s DinoDays event, I profiled a world-renowned expert on Stegosaurus, which happened to be my favorite dinosaur as a kid. She told me about her journey as a paleontologist—and how she sometimes has dreams where the fossils don’t quite fit together.


Natural History Museum of Utah:
Utah Fossil's Journey from Evidence Locker to Harvard

My first piece for the NHMU (2023) follows the journey of a 500-million-year-old sea squirt fossil that was seized as federal evidence before becoming the subject of a nine-page writeup in Nature Communications.

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
The deep impact of microplastic

Aquarium scientists and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute conducted groundbreaking research on the concentration of plastic hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface. I interviewed them before publication and distilled down the key findings for the Aquarium’s Conservation & Science blog.

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
Clash of the titans: white sharks vs. orcas

This post set a record for the Aquarium’s Future of the Ocean blog, racking up more than 11 thousand hits in a single day. A slew of news outlets subsequently picked up the story, including The Atlantic, Washington Post, Gizmodo, Newsweek, and Business Insider.

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
Using archaeology to uncover sea otters’ historical habitats

“When a hungry sea otter uses a rock to crack open a tasty mussel, it’s doing something unique among marine mammals: using a stone tool. Researchers are now revealing how this behavior makes it possible to study sea otters’ past through the lens of archaeology…”

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
Connecting historical tortoiseshell trade to modern illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing networks

“What began as research into historical data on rare hawksbill sea turtles could help illuminate the shadowy modern world of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The study also revealed that a dramatically larger number of the critically endangered turtles were killed for the tortoiseshell trade, six times higher than earlier estimates…”

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
SOS for South African penguins

I profiled an aviculture curator whose work included rehabilitating sick and injured penguins in South Africa—even when they got ornery.

“These are wild penguins,” Aimee explains. “Our penguins on exhibit know to take fish from our hand. Wild birds aren’t going to do that.” African penguins can bite hard enough to draw blood, and an angry one will hang on and beat you with its wings, she says.

Monterey Bay Aquarium on Tumblr:
Raising the “Beautiful Sea Goddess”

This was a fun, quick-turnaround post about the first successful effort to culture a bizarre, extremely delicate species of comb jelly called Leucothea pulchra, which is Latin for “beautiful sea goddess.”

In addition to the Aquarium’s Tumblr, a version of this story appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of Shorelines, the Aquarium’s member magazine.

Monterey Bay Aquarium:
Blood, bone and brainpower: A deep dive into sea otter DNA

This 2017 post profiles an effort by a PhD candidate at UCLA to sequence the sea otter genome using blood from Gidget, an otter at the Aquarium who, as a surrogate mother, reared four rescued pups.