CHICAGO | Dinosaur hunter Paul Sereno often makes the adventures of Indiana Jones and Jules Verne seem somewhat routine. The 51-year-old University of Chicago paleontologist has made a career of traveling the world to discover prehistoric creatures.

Searching for dinosaur fossils has led Sereno to some of the most remote, unpopulated areas on earth, including western Argentina and the Sahara Desert.

"I've always loved adventure, and I always wanted to go down to the river to be like Tom Sawyer, to travel around," said Sereno, who grew up in Naperville. "I had always found that very attractive when I was a kid."

Sereno's recent discovery of a new dinosaur in western Argentina helped solve the puzzle of how birds are the most closely related living animals to dinosaurs, which scientists estimate went extinct about 65 million years ago.

This newly discovered dinosaur, called "Aerosteon," created a wealth of academic and media attention when Sereno announced the discovery in September. The fossil provides the first evidence of dinosaur air sacs that pump air into the lungs in a similar way to that of modern birds.

"Really, the issue is dinosaurs are closer to birds than mammals," Sereno said.

"Odds are, they're going to be like birds in almost every detail. We found out they [dinosaurs] lay eggs, the egg structure looks like birds and the ones closest to the birds are brooding the eggs."

Besides his research to understand dinosaurs' buried evolutionary story, Sereno recently started work in a new area: excavating human remains.

On an expedition looking for dinosaurs in the Sahara Desert in 2000, Sereno's international research team found half-buried skeletons and pottery that are the remnants of two lost cultures that lived in the area between 4,500 and 10,000 years ago.

This human excavation site is in the northern part of Niger, in what was once a lush, water-rich area known as the "Green Sahara." Although the Sahara region of northern Africa has been a desert for most of the last 70,000 years, the monsoons on the continent temporarily shifted north about 12,000 years ago, bringing with them plentiful rain, lakes, vegetation and eventually people.

Sereno's fossil laboratory, located in a nondescript, electronically locked building on the University of Chicago campus, contains some of the rarest dinosaur fossils known, including some that have yet to be classified. Over sounds of power tools and sanding instruments, students and professors work together in the laboratory to piece together the baseball-size vertebrae columns, and to classify femur bones that are even taller than some of the researchers themselves.

His advice for students who want to begin a career in the field is to not exclusively concentrate in any specific subject in high school or college, but to pursue their academic creativity and to show an interest in science. Graduate programs in paleontology, he says, are where students get the most specific training for the field.

Getting kids interested in a field such as paleontology, which offers a sense of adventure along with the rewards of discovery, is part of the mission of "Project Exploration," a nonprofit science education organization that Sereno and his wife, Gabrielle Lyon, an educator, founded.

Project Exploration mainly targets minority kids and girls in Chicago, allowing them to directly participate in science projects with the goal of preparing them for college and eventually for careers in science.

But there is a definite focus on paleontology in Project Exploration, especially with the Junior Paleontologists program that takes a dozen 12- to 17-year-old Chicago public school students on excavations across the United States.

"Kids are naturally very interested in paleontology, and so in that sense I think it has an edge over other disciplines because I think it represents a lost world," Sereno said. "We hope that people tangibly see the change in life over time, and that's the most important contribution."