Steven Hillenburg Was A Marine Biologist

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Stephen Hillenburg didn't create SpongeBob SquarePants out of the blue. In fact, Hillenburg had a long relationship with the ocean. Hillenburg was an actual marine biologist before he went into animation and he even got a degree in natural resource planning with an emphasis on marine resources.

He taught Marine Biology at the Orange County Marine Institute, where he created a comic book called The Intertidal Zone that featured an early iteration of SpongeBob. It was just enough to reignite Hillenburg's passion for animation, so he went back to school to study experimental animation at CalArts.