Meet the dino dudes: South Florida Science Museum's paleontologists produced ...
Wearing a safari-style hat, sand-colored clothes and well-worn work boots, "dinosaur hunter" Robert DePalma looks ready to attend a Halloween party as Indiana Jones. His colleague, Rudy Pascucci, is similarly attired in field gear.
They say they dress like this all the time.
"Do you know how many people snicker at us?" says Pascucci, a Riviera Beach resident. "But it's something we do consciously. It tells people what we do and who we are. And I'm an old army officer - I'm comfortable in boots."
Says DePalma, a native of Boca Raton: "We like dressing like this. Like paleontologists."
They're rare creatures, these Palm Beach County paleontologists - Florida is a premier location for ice-age animal fossils, but not dinosaur bones - but Pascucci and DePalma have excavated multiple "terrible lizards" on digs throughout the American West.
Drawing from their collection, DePalma and Pascucci have produced "Dinosaur Attack!" an interactive exhibition on display at the South Florida Science Museum through mid-May.