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[SPEAKER_02]: Season 20, episode 43.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: An interview with Dr. Tara Lapuri on Paleontology.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Erin.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Howard, and we're joined by paleontologist and newly minted Dr. Tara Lappori.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hey everybody, how's it going?
[SPEAKER_04]: We're so excited to have you here because we all have so many questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm going to lead with the big one.
[SPEAKER_04]: Are you in the feathers or no feathers camp?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you're cutting it deep right off the bat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, full disclosure the last five years of my paleontology work have been on mammals, but, you know, as a Velociraptor fan and also reader of many papers on feathers, I'm in the feathers camp.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in the there's a lot of evidence for feathers.
[SPEAKER_01]: but not all dinosaurs probably had feathers um yeah so we'll kick it off with the feather stuff that's that's what i have to say about that
[SPEAKER_04]: I gotta say we're all, I say we are all.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm of 56 year old dude and so my introduction to dinosaurs was kind of on the one hand was dynotopia and on the other hand was Jurassic Park.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're either gonna ride them like horses or they are going to eat us like we are livestock.
[SPEAKER_04]: And but we all were fascinated by them.
[SPEAKER_04]: We love them.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the look on your face for those who are not benefiting from a video feed tells me paleontologies actually a lot more than just dinosaurs Howard
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, although I will say full disclosure as a kid, I watched dino writers, which is another show about writing on top of dinosaurs that have lasers attached to their heads.
[SPEAKER_01]: Big fan, big fan, and we could talk about Beast Wars, you know, the, the, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the transformers with animals there to epic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but there is Howard a lot more to do with paleontology than just dinosaurs.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm happy to talk more about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I alluded to just a few minutes ago, I've been diving into the world of fossil and modern mammals and mammal evolution, and
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, yes, so we can we can zoom way out and talk about it all that could be one of my favorite questions to ask an expert on anything is and I'm going to I'm going to tee up mammals.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's the most interesting thing you've learned about paleontological mammals recently.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ooh, yeah, so part of my PhD dissertation research had to do with looking inside mammal teas.
[SPEAKER_01]: So slicing them up, these were deceased mammals, mostly modern mammals, I asked very nicely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was looking at all kinds of modern mammal teas looking for evidence of birth.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's actually like a little line that we can call like a birth certificate, a line called the neonatal line, like a neonate, and it forms in all the teeth that are forming during the birth transition in humans.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some friends of mine, some colleagues came out with a study looking at not just modern mammals, not just humans, but looking at one of the oldest mammals that has this evidence marker of what we would think of today as like plus central mammal birth, so the kind of birth that.
[SPEAKER_01]: that humans have with a placenta and this mammal had this line, this neonatal line inside its teeth, and it was from just after the end of the age of dinosaurs, which makes sense because mammals at that time would have been what we call placental mammals today, a lot of them would have given birth, like we think of birth today.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were also examples
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think it's so cool because if we can zoom in inside of teeth and look at the chemistry and the structure inside teeth, we can kind of connect our own history of birth as like human beings to some of the earliest mammals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would love to see where that line of work goes, like looking at the mammals that were around during the time of dinosaurs.
[SPEAKER_01]: So birth certificates inside our
[SPEAKER_01]: and mammal evolution.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's super, super cool.
[SPEAKER_04]: That is, that is, I mean, fascinating and mind-blowing.
[SPEAKER_04]: The idea that we have a, uh, there's a bone structure in our mouths that says,
[SPEAKER_04]: And you're saying that that shows that placental birth for mammals is 60 to 65 million years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: At least, and then there's a whole boatload of other pieces of evidence that we can look at in the skeleton of mammals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also in some of the genes that have to do with egg yolk and why don't humans have egg yolk, but we have other stuff that's yoke or amniotic at least.
[SPEAKER_01]: and all these other kind of pieces of evidence that come along with being a mammal, but looking inside the teeth is one really cool way that we can kind of get a better sense of where we came from and also what mammals were doing back in the time of dinosaur.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm super psyched about that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is so cool.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things that I really love about this is, you know, thinking about, if I said like all the information, this is a misstatement of what you said, but like all the information about you is in your teeth, that sounds like something that is very science fictional.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what I think is really cool about looking at these.
[SPEAKER_03]: like these types of scientific studies, are you can extrapolate pieces from them?
[SPEAKER_03]: So even if you aren't writing about dinosaur specifically or ancient mammals, there's something really cool in the way that you're studying it, that I could take that piece of information and put it in a story as some really interesting fact that I then build an entire world or species around.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so to think that's cool,
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, I just have a question as somebody who does not know much.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll be honest, like I am the like paleontological newbie, I guess, of the group, which is like, what then does make something paleontology?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it about the time period?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it about the type of creature?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are there any things where you're like, we will refuse to study bugs?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what is it that makes something fit within your realm?
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally our, and it's a great question, and it's one that we get a lot also in the kind of world of outreach and education as paleontologists.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my training is specifically in what I would call vertebrate paleontology, where I work really specifically on vertebrates.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've worked on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything within that from mammals and mammal teeth to dinosaur footprints and trackways to even, and this is a great party conversation starter, but dinosaur poop droppings.
[SPEAKER_01]: fossils known as corporalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: So really a lot of stuff can fall within vertebrate paleontology, but to get to your question, paleontology is the study of all life on Earth and it's how it came to be as we understand it today.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the evolution of life on Earth, it could be involving bacteria, plants, fungi,
[SPEAKER_01]: all kinds of vertebrates, invertebrates, sheld, all kind of sheld organisms.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a ton of stuff within paleontology that really is united by the study of the evolution of life on Earth.
[SPEAKER_04]: It sounds, and I could be two freely mixing of my disciplines here, but it sounds like paleontology
[SPEAKER_04]: organic chemistry, paleontology without geology, paleontology without astrophysics stops being complete paleontology because if you don't know how to tell, for instance, that an asteroid hit the Eucotan peninsula, then a lot of your fossils don't make sense and you don't have the whole story.
[SPEAKER_04]: or how is the wrong way to start that question.
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you guys draw like discrete lines?
[SPEAKER_04]: You, you are a geologist, not a paleontologist.
[SPEAKER_04]: Go to your, go to your rock room.
[SPEAKER_04]: Stay away from my bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have a rock room.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I wish I did actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's a really good question, Howard, because the program that I came from and you know, the way I was changed throughout different parts of my career is to think of what I do as integrative.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did my PhD in an integrative biology department.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you mentioned geology and you know, often people will need to learn a lot about geology
[SPEAKER_01]: to do different kinds of paleontological work.
[SPEAKER_01]: That being said, I am also a really big kind of supporter of thinking across what we might traditionally call boundaries between different disciplines.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we really learn a lot when we talk to the people who do organic chemistry or we talk to the people who are studying insects maybe that are alive today.
[SPEAKER_01]: In my line of work, I did quite a bit of cross talk with people who look at modern mammals and modern mammal birth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that also helped me understand a little bit more about the landscape of how mammals are born today and what do we know about them and what is there.
[SPEAKER_01]: parental care and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes in our scientific communities, we will have different conferences that can kind of push people into that silo effect, where we'll go to a geological society meeting, or a paleontology meeting, or a vertebrate paleontology over here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I also think that we have a lot to gain by breaking down those kind of silos.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, some structure exists, but I think we have a lot more fun and do a lot more interesting things when we have spaces where people can talk together and not just as scientists, but as people who do all kinds of different types of work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the best people I know in paleontology have
[SPEAKER_01]: come from really wide-ranging backgrounds.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a really good friend who had an English degree as their first degree.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really feel like we need to open up more spaces for that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's all about telling stories, stories about earth and life, and everything that's relevant to us today.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we benefit from a wide range of backgrounds.
[SPEAKER_04]: that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_04]: And as writers, we kind of have to be interdisciplinary, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: As Aaron pointed out, you know, oh, now that I know this thing about mammal teeth, I can invent a thing about, you know, these alien jaw bones or whatever and use it to inform my story.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Aaron doesn't need to be a paleontologist and I don't need to be an astrophysicist.
[SPEAKER_04]: But we need to know that those disciplines exist and we need to
[SPEAKER_04]: like the way English steels from other languages we need to steal from all the other disciplines in order to do the things that we want to do.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it was Terry Pratchett who said English doesn't borrow from other languages it follows them down dark alleys and mugs them and then goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
[SPEAKER_04]: But yeah the idea that the idea that
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't want these silos, getting an English degree is fine if you just want to know how English works.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you want to actually write stories about interesting things, you have to learn all the interesting things.
[SPEAKER_04]: And learning all the interesting things brings us to a nice spot to pause.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we want to give a shout out to the University of California Museum of Paleontology, or UCMP.
[SPEAKER_01]: And UCMP is the museum that I just finished up my graduate work at, and it is based at the University of California Berkeley.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have an amazing website, UCMP.verkly.edu.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a really great one-stop shop if you want to go on there and check out what it's like to be a paleontologist.
[SPEAKER_01]: They also have really great resources on understanding evolution and understanding science which is really widely accessed by a lot of teachers and other educators and there are a number of blog posts that are also written on the UCMP website that were written by a grad students myself included, but I also just want to give a shout out to
[SPEAKER_01]: everybody who shared their really great research through these blog posts.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you click on the UCNP website, you'll find a link for blog posts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I think it's a really great resource in general on that website just for people who want to learn more about paleontology.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're back.
[SPEAKER_04]: Tara, I have a question for you and it's a scary one.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's the question that you get
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, man, I'm getting tired just thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to preface all of this with I would never get mad or upset or push somebody away and be like, no, you don't know what you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I kind of grip my teeth a little when people try to relate to what I do as a paleontologist and they say something like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, I really love Indiana Jones too or I absolutely can relate to that because of Ross from friends and I feel like we're doing society as a whole a disservice because Indiana Jones
[SPEAKER_01]: for better words was supposed to be an archeologist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's also an important distinction that we can make in our conversation about that difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Ross from Friends, I mean, if you even watched friends or know that Ross, the character, was a paleontologist, if that's our only touch point for paleontology and people are skipping right over, like, I don't know, Ellie Sattler,
[SPEAKER_01]: Helen Grant, any of the other fictional people from the movies, then I think we're just missing out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, it makes me great my teeth a little.
[SPEAKER_03]: That gives me an idea for a question, which is a lot of that's about stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like we were talking a little bit earlier about how paleontology helps you tell these really interesting stories about the way that the Earth is
[SPEAKER_03]: existed in all the, you know, the thing that you said earlier that I'm not going to remember or do credit to, but these other stories have sort of taken the focus as like this is what paleontology is.
[SPEAKER_03]: So a question I have is what are some of the stories about our world about the beings and creatures on it that paleontology is able to tell in a way that no other field can.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a really good question because I think paleontology and other ways of looking at the natural world, different kinds of sciences and also social sciences, you know, when we unite all of these ways of thinking paleontology situated in that context.
[SPEAKER_01]: gives us like the next best thing to a time machine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really think that that's a powerful way that people can not only connect to paleontology as a concept, as a science, but to think about why it matters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: what can paleontology tell us about the story of life on earth, which is really our story, you know, as human beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course there's a whole field too that has to do with human history and human evolution and things like that, related to paleontology, some might say that there's a lot of overlap, but that would be things like paleoanthropology, for example,
[SPEAKER_01]: study of ancient humans and often those folks will work with people who are more expertise in other types of life besides humans.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think having the ability to look back into what we might call deep time, not just the time frame of human life spans or human history,
[SPEAKER_01]: but deep time that goes into thousands and millions and even billions of years, way back before humans were around.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think paleontology is a really cool kind of vector for us to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a big reason why I think it also captures a lot of people's imaginations, like paleontology can help us learn about what life was like before any people are here.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love the concept, just the idea, the mental framework that the words deep time create.
[SPEAKER_04]: Just this idea that the stories that we're able to tell from history, the stories
[SPEAKER_04]: 5,000 years old or whatever, those are shallow time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Those are back when, you know, the moon was still in basically the same orbit.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's in now.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, one of my favorite deep time stories is, oh yeah, y'all, the moon was a planet that slammed into Earth and, and
[SPEAKER_04]: spat back out and and you know there was a whole ring around earth for a long time.
[SPEAKER_04]: I say a long time.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know how long the ring lasted but Earth was a hot miserable place for a long time and the moon was really close and it's been moving away and I love that story.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't remember which there was some show I watched where they'd gone back in time and someone looked up at the sky and
[SPEAKER_04]: The Moon's too close.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, crap.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we went back further than we were supposed to, because if I can see that the Moon is bigger, you know, actually bigger, not on the horizon, optical illusion bigger, then, you know, we overshot.
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, I love, I love Deep Time.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I want to re-ask Aaron's question.
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you have a favorite Deep Time story?
[SPEAKER_04]: I've already told you, mind's the Moon.
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you have one?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wow, so deep time, you know, thinking about all the things that have happened to and on this planet that I'm aware of and there are many more than I'm not aware of.
[SPEAKER_01]: My mind immediately goes to how the planet has changed and Howard, you mentioned, you know, how the moon has formed and Earth has changed, it was as hot molten mess for so many millions and millions of years.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like thinking about how Earth has changed how it went through a period called Snowball Earth where at least there's good evidence that for several million years, the Earth was an ice ball planet and not entirely inhospitable to life, but very different from how we would think of it today.
[SPEAKER_04]: Not friendly to some mayors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there was great snowshoeing, but yeah, and then my area of thinking around this often comes back to the animals and plants and the interesting kind of creatures that number one, we have evidence of in the fossil record, but number two, this is sort of like not so much of my favorite part of deep time, but something I love thinking about is what are the
[SPEAKER_01]: probably existed, but never became fossilized, or if they did, we haven't found them yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I love thinking about the huge diverse array of life on Earth that we know of from the fossil record.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how,
[SPEAKER_01]: imperfect and incomplete that fossil record is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just is such an imaginative and creative saying, not just as a scientist, which I think can be a really creative endeavor, but as someone who likes to think about stories and you know, wonder what else was here?
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think that kind of stuff is really cool to think about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the one of the things that I love about that is how many possibilities it opens up again, not just for the thing that it is, but for the things we can imagine.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, because if you think about, okay, I'm writing a story that's, we're going to go to nice planet.
[SPEAKER_03]: Finding out that there was a snowball Earth, like there's actually a thing you could study looking back that could help you create an ice planet a million years away, or in a
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm wondering, like, if we wanted to get more of these stories, I mean, we could keep you here for hours and we wish we could, but like what are some other resources that like we could go to in addition to the one you shared at the break are there other places to start when looking for this kind of information to inspire us to create interesting stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I think that there are a whole number of different museums around the country and around the world that are doing really cool work.
[SPEAKER_01]: both online and in person trying to share these kinds of stories with the public and maybe with people who aren't always tapped into the say paleontology realm or maybe they're really interested in it but they don't know where to start.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's a really great just general shout out is if you have a local museum, even if it's really small, try checking them out and
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you can also search for like a what we would call accredited museums through the American Association of Museums is the AAM and so that's just another place where if you're like, I don't know if this museum is telling me the truth or what what's going on or what is truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: visit and I am a big fan of local museums.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got my start in paleontology as a volunteer, just going to my local museum.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that made a big impact on my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this sounds really old school, but just honestly the library, because a librarian or somebody that you can talk to and say, hey, what resources do you have on this?
[SPEAKER_01]: I really like the idea of just touching base with those kinds of folks.
[SPEAKER_01]: For me, a lot of that was something that I had really the privilege to access through this PhD program.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could talk with people, but I also really want to shout out like, check out your local library, talk to your local museum.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you don't have a local museum, look up a website of one in the
[SPEAKER_01]: I, uh, I think that's what I would probably highlight the most.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love librarians.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, they're like the original interdisciplinarians because, you know, they're not, they're literally not allowed to put a book on the shelf unless they've read it.
[SPEAKER_04]: So they've read all the books and this fact that I just made up now.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, wow, I'm so sorry, I'm a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare of a spare
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, gosh, yeah, we could, we could just keep talking and asking and talking and sharing.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I love this, but at some point, we have to send everybody home with some homework.
[SPEAKER_04]: Tara, do you have homework for our listeners?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I would love for the listeners to think about, you know, if you have any way of making deep time, this concept of deep time, you know, within the millions and even billions of years,
[SPEAKER_01]: um relevant to your upcoming or current writing project.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe pick three ways that deep time could be interwoven into what you're currently working on, whether that's a fit.
[SPEAKER_01]: fantasy with what kind of fossils could have been on that planet, or maybe it's as simple as how deep time and fossils and the Earth are relevant to your memoir.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, pick three things and see what comes up this next few weeks and enjoy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope it's an interesting exercise.
[SPEAKER_04]: This has been writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: For this episode, your hosts were Aaron Roberts and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
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