Matt & Max

Hi there! We’re Mattison and Maximilian (aka Matt and Max). We met back in 2022 while working as

park rangers for the US Forest Service near Badlands National Park. Though we only worked together for

about three months, we considered each other lifelong friends by the end of the summer.

After that summer at Badlands, Max worked as a museum educator and paleontologist, visited

paleontology collections across the country for research, and is now knee-deep in finishing his master’s

thesis. In that time, Matt continued to work at Badlands, published her first paleontology paper, and is

lined up to start a PhD next fall. Though we went our separate ways for a few years, we were lucky

enough to reconnect in 2024. Flash forward to 2025, and you’ll find that we have progressed beyond

friendship and now live together. We’ve spent the last year as a couple exploring the country, doing

paleontology research, building our platform as social media science communicators, and so much

more.

Working as paleontologists has shown us the need to both protect species diversity and expand

research into ecosystem response to climate change in the deep past, but our time working as rangers

and educators has highlighted to us that, in addition to scientific progress, there is a distinct need for

accessible science education. We have experienced firsthand that an understanding and appreciation of

Earth history can inspire a sense of loyalty to the planet and drive people towards bettering the

environment on a time scale longer than our own lifespans. As such, our mission these days is to make

science fun and accessible for everyone by creating content for people who want to learn more about

the planet we all share to inspire environmental protection, sustainability, and responsible recreation.

As a dynamic duo on social media, Max and I have become known for making fun and engaging content

that synthesizes complex information into digestible, accessible bits.

Beyond communicating science, we participate in research that furthers the scientific

community’s understanding of Earth history and its conservation applications. For his master’s, Max has

parsed out information about animal behavior from ~70 million years ago (something that is tricky to

accomplish with only bones as evidence!). Inspired by our time working in the prolific fossil record of the

Badlands, we will both, in our next phases of education, be studying a time in Earth history that saw

significant climate change and hope to parse out lessons for the future from our future studies.

All said and done, we do what we do for the same reason conservationists do what they do – we

want to save our planet and the species on it. We want people to understand the rarity of every

individual lifeform so they know just how important conservation is. We want people to understand the

past and develop a greater appreciation of the present and future. We want to inspire change and

action at a societal level, before it’s too late. We hope you’ll join us!