Ry Williams Levitates Dinosaurs
True Calling Grants Participant
Director:
Chelsea Kanstrup
It all started when Ry Williams decided to run across the country. From there he became a motivational speaker, which led to learning how to weld and working in the oil and gas industry. Both of those careers culminated in becoming a welding teacher at Camosun College. But the universe wasn’t ready for him to settle down and live out the rest of his days teaching. One fateful day, Ry met Terry Ciotka, owner of Pangea Fossils, a wholesale fossil company specializing in full dinosaur skeletons, dinosauria, and mammoth tusks. Terry mentioned that he was looking for a welder to join his team, and soon Ry found himself immersed in a world of dinosaurs. One thing led to another, and now Ry uses his welding skills to build dinosaur mounts.
Now Ry spends his days cleaning bones, restoring bones, and most importantly, creating the mounts that will display the bones. His job is to turn back the clock millions of years to make the dinosaurs look like they’re alive— running, attacking, and in the position that they would have been in when they were in their prime.
So how did he get here? How do you go from being a motivational speaker to a welder to levitating dinosaurs? As Ry says, “You have to be open when something comes to you. I wasn’t necessarily pursuing a lifetime career of building dinosaur mounts, I don’t think many people do; but I have the skills and I was ready, and I was also brave enough to go, you know what, this is what I want to do.”
While it sounds like a rock star job, Ry explains that most days his work is quite tedious and meticulous. Attention to detail is paramount, which often means spending hours tweaking one piece of metal to get it just right. But he cranks his favourite music and gets great satisfaction out of how much he learns each day and how amazing it is to see it all come together. After all, he levitates dinosaurs, and it doesn’t get much cooler than that.
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