Joe Burrow Is A Big-Time Fossils Guy: 'They go back millions of years. That's sick.'

Fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries are all the rage these days, and I've got to admit, it's always fun to learn a little bit about athletes off the field.

One thing we learned in the latest season of the Netflix series Quarterback is that Cincinnati Bengals signal-caller Joe Burrow is a big fossils guy.

Like, huge.

In the series, Burrow is seen on the practice field talking to Bengals staff about a recent trip to a natural history museum.

"Somehow there's this one fossil that proved Darwin's theory of evolution," Burrow said. "It's called the Archaeopteryx. There's like 12 of them in the world. We got to see one of those, and we got to see the little old lady that freaking works on it. Grinding."

So there's just some little old lady who fiddles around with an Archaeopteryx fossil all day in the bowels of a museum? What a gig.

"They took us behind the scenes and showed us some really cool stuff. It's like a library of fossils that they don't show everybody else," Burrow said of his tour through the museum. "It was like you go to the shoe store, and they're like, 'Maybe we have it in the back.' And it was like all the fossils back there. It was pretty sick. And they had the … field guy that goes and finds them talking to us about it. It was pretty cool."

I think we're close to seeing Joe Burrow spending his off-seasons dressed like Dr. Allen Grant digging through deserts with a toothbrush in search of specimens.

That, or he might go full-Nic Cage and start blowing his money on fossilized Velociraptor claws.

But what's with the fossil fascination? 

"Why were fossils on my mind?" Burrow mused. "I don't know. Because they're cool. When aren't fossils on your mind? They go back millions of years. That's sick."