We’re in Fruita, Colorado at the Dinosaur Journey museum. This museum is part of a greater organization that includes a number of active paleontological digs, as well as another museum called the Museum of the West where exhibits tell the story of more than a thousand years of history about the area, an interpretive site called Cross Orchards where costumed guides help you step back in time more than a hundred years, the Lloyd Files Research Library, featuring, among thousands of other things, the Mesa County Oral History project. All of these facilities together are part of a museum complex called Museums of Western Colorado, which you can discover more about at museumofwesternco.com.

The truth is, we live in a time in which there seems to be a harder, brighter line than usual between the people who embrace the things that scientists are discovering about our world and the people who don’t. We’re seeing things like marches for science, and we’re hearing labels like “science deniers,” and at the Apple Seed, where we’re interested in all of the many ways that people use story to communicate important stuff, we recognize that there’s the valuable work of scientists, and then there’s the place at which that work interfaces with an interested public. And a place like the Dinosaur Journey Museum seems to exist right in that intersection. Today, we talk to Dr. Julia McHugh, someone on the front lines of figuring out how to use competent storytelling to help non-scientists catch the vision of what scientists are learning and discovering. We’ll also hear a mean Dinosaur blues, and a story by Diane Edgecomb about a girl who loves dinos so much, she becomes one.