Tim Ziegler
Collection Manager
Vertebrate Palaeontology
Tim’s job involves taking care of the museum’s fossil collection of backboned animals, plants, and microfossils, which includes nearly 250,000 specimens, from ancient sharks to dinosaurs.
He’s particularly interested in studying traces left behind on fossil bones such as bite marks, weathering, and geochemical changes—clues that tell us about past environments and the way an animal lived and died.
But Tim also discovered something about his own past when he started work at Melbourne Museum. One of his earliest memories was a huge pair of arms with enormous claws bearing down on him. He could never remember where he’d seen this, until one day at work he came upon those very arms on a shelf in the museum’s storage area. The replica arms of Deinocheirus measure almost 2.5 metres in length, and they’re still intimidating to Tim, even as the one in charge of caring for them.
But with this mystery solved, Tim hopes future museum visitors will form their own lasting memories of an encounter with the Melbourne Museum Triceratops.
