Since taking a course in vertebrate paleontology, Erickson was destined to find his way to dinosaurs. He earned the second-highest grade out of five hundred students, and his professor invited him on a field expedition in Montana to collect dinosaurs for the university museum.
The professor became impressed with Erickson’s ability to visualize fossils as living animals and encouraged him to enter paleontology. Erickson says that in many ways, the field found him.
It's practically impossible to come to any definite conclusions, but a great deal of this area of paleontology remained a mystery to researchers even after Varricchio's contribution.
Despite all the technology, different fossils, and different minds working to uncover the mysteries, nothing definitive came to light. FSU professor Erickson gave a statement in 2017 to the university summarizing: “Did [dinosaur] eggs incubate slowly like their reptilian cousins, crocodilians and lizards? Or rapidly like living dinosaurs, the birds?”
Erickson hoped to answer the question once and for all, and he decided to throw caution and convention to the wind in his methods.
Erickson knew that reptiles, just like humans, produce a substance known as dentin on a daily basis. Dentin is found in teeth, and it's a tissue that mineralizes up in layers over time, forming a tough core and keeping teeth strong and secure.
Erickson then went on to the Montana State University in Bozeman to get a graduate degree in biology. During his research, he found daily-forming growth lines in dinosaur teeth, similar to alligators and modern mammals. His work doing so helped him earn the Alfred Sherwood Romer Prize for the best student presentation at the 1991 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting.
He then went on to get a doctorate in integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by post-doctoral research in biomechanical engineering at Stanford, and ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University.
Today Erickson is a professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleobiology at Florida State University in Tallahassee. His expertise in paleontology, engineering, anatomy, and zoology has led to him studying teeth and bones.
His research has led to questions about growth rates, feeding ecology, and biomechanics both in extinct and living reptiles. Thanks to his work, he co-discovered the approximate bite force of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex: a whopping 3,629 kilograms, which is similar to having three small cars land on you. Ouch.