I wanted to be a paleontologist once. Most people think of paleontology as the study of dinosaurs, but most paleontologists study things much smaller, and usually older. I wanted to study very early water bugs (that would be marine arthropods from the Cambrian). I used several fossils as email addresses and nicknames, like marella, trilohunter, hallucegenius, etc. A couple stuck: trigonotarbida (a spider . . . kinda), and anomalocaris, or rather it's english equivalent, mysteryshrimp. It's the earliest true predator known from the fossil record. It was named as a shrimp because they kept finding just the mouth parts, which looked like shrimp with no exterior organs.

There's still a part of me that would like to do that, but the reality of paleontology, and in fact most sciences, is that the tv version of the job happens about once every five years. The rest of your time you are trying to get funding, you're hunched over a magnifying glass trying to get an accurate measurement, or cataloguing a collection of bivalves. Your dream job is never as you dreamed it would be.