Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / The Day the Dinosaurs Died: Dr. Ian Miller, Director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science

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The Day the Dinosaurs Died: Dr. Ian Miller, Director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, how are we doing today?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing great.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: How about you?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: As usual, when we're recording Planet Geo, I'm doing great.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know, I know.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've been looking forward to this all day long.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: I feel the same way.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: I love doing this with you.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's a good part of my life.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: So today we interviewed Dr.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Ian Miller, who is a curator and director at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this was such a fun conversation.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was this was totally fun.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I knew right away.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: I I've seen Ian on lots of videos, and I in fact I assign some of the videos that he's in to my summer science students when we're out.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they watch him on his eye on the iPad, and he is such an engaging, intelligent, inspiring person that I yeah, you know, we just decided let's reach out to this guy and see if he'll talk to us.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and he was more than willing, which was just fantastic.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we cover a lot of stuff in this interview.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we wide-ranging things from what a mass extinction event looks like, how a giant meteorite impact, you know, killed off the dinosaurs and gave rise to basically mammals on Earth.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: And how this is like right in his backyard.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it's such a rare discovery.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what we're talking about, what he spent a lot of time talking about today, was the first million years after the meteor, you know, slammed into Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and gave a green card, if you will, to the mammals.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Wait.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: What the hell's a green card?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, not a green card.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's a bad analogy.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a green light.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Green light.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: A green light, okay.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: A green light to the Bible.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Green card.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: What's a green card?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how I was gonna go with it, but very cool.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you almost went off on some tangents there.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you what, I was a little worried.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like you, you got you you said, hey, let's get philosophical here, and I thought, oh shit, here we go.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh no.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh no.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Here goes Dr.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Jesse Ryman going off on his tangents.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Getting on my soapbox about things.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: My soapbox is pretty tall.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: What a you are a piece of work, you know that?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I avoided it.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: We we avoided disaster.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, hold on.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: That that kinda.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: You only kind of avoided it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: You got a little deep there, my friend.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you got to.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: And when you talk to somebody super interesting, you gotta get in the week.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: I know, you just gotta go with it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's super interesting conversation.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, let's get to it.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, let's do it.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: This week, uh, we are happy to interview Dr.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Ian Miller, who is the director of Earth and Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Miller, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here, you guys.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, thanks for having me on.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, it's great to have you.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: We are super excited to talk to you.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: We got a bunch of really cool stuff we're going to talk about.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: But just by way of a brief introduction, Dr.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Miller, you you're the director, as I said, uh uh of Earth and Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: You've been uh working there at the Denver Museum for a long time, since 2008.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, 2006 is when I showed up as a postdoc, but I be I became a curator in 2008.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, a curator since 2008.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, you got your PhD at Yale.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you also got a master's at Yale, and you have a Bachelor of Science from Colorado College, is that right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I I kind of came home uh here to Colorado when I got the job at the museum, which was exciting.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great place to do geoscience out there in the world.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just out the back out the back door, right?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you so you you've done a lot of stuff.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: You've published a lot of papers.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're kind of a paleontologist by by trade, which we'll we'll get to.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've won a few awards, I would like to highlight here.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: You you won the journalism award for the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists in 2012, and you won the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Geosciences in the Media Award in 2015.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last one I want to highlight, which is a particularly interesting one, is the Colorado College Spirit of Adventure Award.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is cool.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's a cool award.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell me what was that a particular thing that won you that award?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or what was the um mostly I think mentoring students uh over the years.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And since we're, you know, I'm geographically nearby Colorado College and it's my alma mater.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I mentor a lot of students from there, and they've just been involved in all these incredible projects.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, it was the students who put me up for the award, so it's an alumni association award.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh uh yeah, so I was lucky enough to receive it a couple of years ago from the from the alumni association.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it has a great ring to it, the uh dispirited.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no kidding.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Great job.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Ian, when you went to uh that college, did you go there with the idea that you were gonna major in geology right away?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I actually was uh I thought I would be a medical doctor, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's sort of one of those things like you, you know, you the parents and the grandparents and maybe the community and stuff put some kind of expectation on you of what you think you should be.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or and so I got to CC and I I you know I I knew I liked geology.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been collecting fossil plants and I grew up in a big mining district in eastern Washington state, and so I had tons of minerals on the my shelves in my bedroom and things like that.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it but I didn't realize it was gonna be a career choice, and that didn't happen until a couple of key classes at CC that sort of jump started that.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: What was it?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, was there a particular moment that inspired you to go into the geosciences?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, can you describe that to us?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there are a few.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um my first class at Colorado College.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Colorado College is on this thing called the block plan.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you take a single class at a time, it's the same number of hours as a normal class, but what it allows for is since you're completely steeped in that one class, the students and the professor can just sort of pick up and take off and go to some amazing locale in the American West.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And my first class at Colorado College took me to Yellowstone, and uh it was just this truly remarkable and memorable experience.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, the professor who who taught that class just threw us right into the elements.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember crossing rivers and sleet storms and things like that, which I'm sure was totally dangerous, and the school would have been completely unhappy with, but uh, but it left its mark.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: But what the school doesn't know won't hurt it, right?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's the approach to that.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was just that enthusiasm, right?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you're outside, and he was so enthusiastic.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was the you know, of course, he was leading the class, and in that particular case, we were in the Lamar River Valley, and um, and we crossed the river there and we hiked up uh what's called Speck Ridge, where they have the stacked uh forests, the buried fossil forests.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I can still sort of remember sitting next to these petrified standing redwood trees and thinking about what that meant.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so I don't ever want to give Chris too much credit, but this is my experience.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: My experience was Chris Boyce.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Chris leads this high school trip that goes out to Yellowstone and out to the mountain west for uh soon-to-be high school seniors.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I took this trip and Chris was that inspiration for me.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the last good thing I'll say about Chris Boyce for many weeks, but uh Chris was that inspiration for me.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm yeah, actually in Yellowstone.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: I remember we had a very, you know, very kind of uh uh detailed and intimate conversation about geoscience in Yellowstone.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, we did, yeah, we did.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: So Ian, uh, can I follow up on the the specimen ridge and the petrified forests?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is that because you're kind of uh you're an interesting mix of you know biology and geology.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: You're a paleobotanist, you're a geologist.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um is that where it all started then?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: With the did you develop an interest in the paleobotany because of that, also?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's a couple of different things.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that was key, there's no doubt, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of opened my eyes to this sort of world of of fossil plants uh in one aspect.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: The other person who made a big difference in that regard was this uh curator.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was sort of a volunteer curator at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and he's an incredibly eclectic guy.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: His name was uh Wes Ware, and he was a poet and clarinetist, and he actually became quite well known in the field.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: My family had some connections with him.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: My grandfather was also an artist, so he would come out to where we lived in eastern Washington, and uh we would collect fossil plants, and it's always a little bit of that experience, plus then getting to college and understanding that this data was was a way to understand ancient worlds, really.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a way to time travel, for lack of a better term.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a couple of threads, uh, Chris, that kind of got me to that idea that paleobotany could be could be the thing.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, very, very cool.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, Ian, I am extremely interested in the work that you and Tyler have done at Corral Bluffs.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of questions to ask you, but can you can you kind of set the stage for what you guys discovered here?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh at this site called Corral Bluffs, which is just outside of the city of Colorado Springs.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is it's actually incorporated Colorado Springs.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not developed yet, but it is within the city limits of Colorado Springs.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we made this remarkable discovery on life after the time of the dinosaurs.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it turns out that over the last hundred or so years, uh, paleontologists and geologists have been really interested in you know how life transitioned from the dinosaur time to the time afterwards, which is sort of the time of the mammals, the age of the mammals.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us what what yeah, what kind of times are we talking?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us some years or millions of years here?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the age of reptiles, which we call the Mesozoic, goes from about 250 million years ago until about 66 million years ago.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a whole bunch of time.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the time after that, which is the last 66 million years leading up to the present day, is the age of mammals.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a little bit of a you know a misnomer because mammals lived alongside dinosaurs.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in fact, our group of animals is slightly older than the dinosaur group of animals, but we just sort of were always in their shadow.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until 66 million years ago when we see the end of the time of the dinosaurs, the end of the Cretaceous, that sort of the world flips from this dinosaur-dominated world to a mammal dominated world.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm stopping in a few places just to, you know, so I just don't drone on.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: So please pass the that's awesome.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: We love that.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're very familiar with the feeling of droning on, especially Chris Bowen.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: So um all righty.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, can you talk a little bit about what exactly you found at Corral Bluffs and why that's so significant?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the life on Earth, multicellular life on Earth since about 545 million years ago, is sort of punctuated, if you will, by these extinction events.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: We call them mass extinction events.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And a mass extinction is when you lose 50% of the species on land and in the sea.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just sort of an arbitrary number, but suffice it to say, it's really bad, right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, and we've got we've got five of these things in the history of multicellular life, and the most recent of which is 66 million years ago, and these these events uh they all have different causes.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And these events uh serve to sort of reorganize life.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can kind of think of them as like the biological reset button.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the last one, we call it the N Cretaceous Extinction, it wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that that is to say, basically it caused all dinosaurs to go extinct except the birds.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And dinosaurs were this incredibly dominant group.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: They they dominated the planet for close to 200 million years, and uh mammals are around, but they're sort of in their shadow.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: But once they're off the landscape, mammals get a shot.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So this discovery in Kral Bloffs is all about that time right afterwards, it's all about when mammals start to re-sort of populate the planet and diversify.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So following up with that then, you or actually, I think the story goes in that a museum volunteer found a skull in a rock.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So um there's always more detail than what you know we sort of present uh, you know, in our sort of short snippets and our stories, but that is essentially right.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: So um Tyler and I are both paleontologists.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the plant side of the paleontology world, I'm a paleobotanist, and Tyler's a vertebrate paleontologist.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, his specialty is fossil turtles, but he covers the spectrum, he does all kinds of vertebrates.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: But he and I were both uh scientists who had worked on the extinction of the Cretaceous world, the extinction of the dinosaurs, so to speak.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: I was working on the plants, he was working on the vertebrates.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when he came to the museum, I've been at the museum for about 15 years, and he's been here about seven or so, six or seven.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we sort of put our heads together and thought, where could we make an impact in in the field?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: If we teamed up, we're like, where could we make an impact?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we knew, I mean, people always wanted have wanted to know for a long time what happened after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yet most people have really focused like who went extinct and why they went extinct.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the problem was there wasn't a lot of fossils after the boundary.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine this unbelievable diversity of fossils and all kinds of amazing things to study.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: You hit this line where you know it's this incredible event that caused that world to go extinct, and there was not a lot of fossils afterwards.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And without those fossils, we were sort of in the dark, right?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: We were just didn't really know you know what the story was.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, of course, we have the modern day, we in fact have many amazing fossil sites that are just a little bit younger, but they're not in that sweet spot right after the boundary.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, everything that we see outside our window today had to have some kind of ancestor that survived that extinction event.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we wanted to know what that sort of early period of this rediversification of the world looked like.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: So so yeah, so go ahead, Chris.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, so what did you find them in?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I'm really interested in.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we so we got so so we decided we were gonna spend some time trying to figure out if we could collaborate on this problem.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: We rolled out the geologic maps, and we kind of thought you know, we were gonna end up in Bolivia or Siberia fine making a discovery if we were so lucky to to make one in this time frame.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the first thing you do is you really need to look in your backyard, and particularly here in the American West, we have the right age rocks uh think about this problem.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so Tyler was looking through our collections, things that had been donated to us before, and I had worked in this area for a long time, but had not found these fossils that turned out to be in plain sight.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: But one of our volunteers had found a partial skull, it was the palate of a plant-eating mammal, and uh just two rows of teeth and then the pallet.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was for all intents and purposes a skull from that time period, but it was covered with this type of rock we call a concretion.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it had the teeth sticking through, but it had this really sort of whitish-colored uh precipitate, this minerals that had sort of globbed onto it that we call a concretion.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Tyler sort of put the pieces together.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: He he had previously worked in South Africa, and he put the pieces together that maybe there were some fossils in that area that we hadn't seen before because they were in concretions, and it all came down to this fossil that this volunteer had found and was sitting in our collections.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because then he knew what to look for, right?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: The kind of rock, right?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So all right.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Can you explain what a concretion is?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so a concretion is is it's just a type of rock formation and it forms around an organic nucleus.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: So in this case, you know, what we're talking about here today is really these skulls of early mammals, um, but it could be anything, it could be a chip of wood, you know, a twig, or it could be a tooth of a mammal or something like that.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as those things get stuck in the the mud of a stream or uh river or a floodplain, and they're rotting, if the minerals are in the groundwater are are the right sort of suite or a cocktail of minerals, they will start to glom onto that rotting thing and uh form sort of like a little shell around it.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: So what's the shape of it?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they're they're all bizarre shapes, right?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, are they?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they have a circular feel to them, but they can be very globos and sort of you know, bizarrely shape, bulbous, if you will.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: How careful do you have to be when you open these up?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because I see you on video all the time.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm you know, I see you just cracking these open with a geology hammer, you know.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's not really what you do, is it?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, unfortunately, we do have to break them and we don't like to.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: We really don't, because they are much more fragile than you might imagine.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they're they're really quite secure in the concretion themselves, but it turns out that something like only one and maybe three or four hundred of these things has something interesting in it.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: We've taken a few concretions where they look they look exactly like, let's say, a turtle skull that's been roll rolled in you know red dough or whatever.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, there's got to be a skull in this thing.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we said we send it off to our preparators who we it takes a very special and skilled hand to to extract these from the concretions, and it's all contract work and it costs a lot of money.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we've sent some of these things off to these folks, and they'll put in like eight or ten hours and they'll call us up, and you're like, Are you sure there's a fossil in this?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so suffice it to say, we do have to break these things to actually see if there's something in it, but they do have a tendency to break into little pieces.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that's what glue is for.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, so I have to ask then, Ian, uh why here?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, before before we get to that, I want to get to what did you find in the concretions?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we found these concretions, and like how does this tell us about the transition from dinosaurs to mammals?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it turns out the sort of the sweet spot is about a million or so years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot happens in those million years as the planet is is taken over by really placental mammals.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so the group of mammals that dominates the planet today.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um before this discovery, we had something like four or five partial skulls from this time period of mammals in all museums in North America.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, four or five?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Four or five.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And oh my gosh.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so those uh those four or five were found in a hundred years of paleontologists looking.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: We once the pieces came together, it was really just a moment.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was a Sunday, I can remember it vividly.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was like Sunday at like 10:30 in the morning, and we were in a place we now call Skull Valley, and Tyler sort of fatefully picked up the first one and cracked it open, and he saw the cross-section of a skull in this concretion.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we were there with it was me and then this volunteer who had found this uh specimen that had been sitting in the museum for like five or six years, and so she and I within minutes found a skull each as well.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Tyler found another one, and we literally doubled the number of skulls from this time period in 20 minutes.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: What a story! That was wild.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: We were blown away.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that probably will never happen to us again.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it was it was like a period of time that just was, you know, you might say it was shrouded in mystery or something like that, but it was just devoid of data.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we all of a sudden put a lot of data into the into the equation.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: So you say that probably won't ever happen again, but you're still you're discovering fossils in the same place, right?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, even yeah.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: We've got hundreds of skulls now.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, that's amazing.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and of course, we've built this whole plant record alongside it.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there we knew there were plants there before.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was the reason I'd been there a few times before, but plants aren't so rare from this age rocks.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: But without the vertebrate story, we're sort of we could tell a cool plant story, but it was pulling it all together, which made it so sweet.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, all right.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's great.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit about what you found?
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: And first of all, what is the KT boundary?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and then what's what was what did you find just below it at the KT boundary and then above it?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the KT boundary uh stands for Cretaceous and Tertiary, which marks this boundary between these two amazing periods in Earth's history.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: We actually refer to it today as the KPG boundary, Cretaceous Paleogene, which none of us like, so we still call it the KT.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we're still getting used to KPG.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: KT sounds like that.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't like that either.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um so what happens at that moment in time is remarkable.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're hit by a giant space rock moving at something like a hundred thousand miles an hour, and it comes in from the south, we think, and it slams into the Yucatan Peninsula and it pulls outer space literally to the surface of the planet, and it blows this hole in the ground, something.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like 100 miles across and 2015 miles deep, and sends a shockwave from Mexico to Alaska in five minutes.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And all this ejecta is blown out of the hole it creates.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out we think that there's this moment of incredible catastrophe, tsunamis, and blocks of rock the size of cars that make it all the way to Haiti, 500 miles from the impact site and this shockwave and firestorm.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then it quieted down a little bit.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: But there was all this stuff blown into suborbit around the Earth.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the modeling suggests that there's uh about a 20 to 24 hour periodicity to this.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And about 20 hours later, it started raining molten rock everywhere, which would have really sucked.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if you you survived the boundary, you survived the impact, but you're in New Zealand because that's where you might have survived it.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Can I interrupt with a quick question here?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we talked about plate tectonics before, but just for clarification, 66 million years ago, are we kind of in the general configuration?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is Denver where it is today?
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is Alaska where it is today?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: In general, is that true?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or when you say landed in Mexico, is that actual Mexico or is it uh you know Mexico where it used to be?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great question, Jesse.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it and uh we are more or less in our current configuration.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we, if you think about us moving around the planet a little bit, we've moved longitudinally.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we were closer to Europe, but our latitude is virtually the same.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Denver was about three degrees further north than it is today.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: But its relationship to Mexico, where the impact took place, is effectively the same.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's effectively the same.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: The coastlines would have looked different simply because sea level was higher, but by and large, everything's about where it is compared to the present.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: So carry on.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is a very quick catastrophic description that I interrupted here.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's really good though.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good thing.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is amazing.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: So all this rock material starts raining back to the surface of the earth, say of some 20 or 24 hours later.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere, it melts.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: At the boundary itself, we see what were formerly glass beads at the boundary.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: We now they're mostly clay now, but we see the evidence of raining molten rock everywhere on Earth.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: We find that in the ocean basins, we find it on all the continents.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it essentially the modeling, because of course we can't go back and test this, so we have to make some good guesses.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank goodness we can't test it.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my God, yeah.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds horrible.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the temperature we think of the atmosphere got to about the temperature it takes to bake cookies in the oven, like 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there must have been fires everywhere.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there were global fires, we think, though there's a lot of debate on whether or not there's increased soot at the boundary or not.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is how long did it take for most of the species to die?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: How long did they have to live through this horrible time?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, some of them probably it took them a while, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you were here in North America, you know, we would have been probably burnt to a crisp.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were close to the impact site.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were in the blast wave, you would have been liquefied.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: That would have been bad.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were on the other side of the planet, you might have you might have lived a little longer.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: But we know that the dust also dimmed the sun and started to shut down photosynthesis.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you survive all these things, right?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, three months later the sun is dimmed, and it was probably only dimmed like 20, 25%.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: But that's like taking a you know, a full sun plant in your house and putting it in the corner, and that plant does not survive.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the ability of many plants to photosynthesize is shut down.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you start collapsing the whole food web, and that probably starts a few months after the impact.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: So below the boundary, you have this amazing diversity of life.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: Plants, dinosaurs, even mammals, small though, right?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Small mammals at the boundary, which how thick are we talking about on average?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the boundary itself usually preserves as a centimeter or so, but but remember, it's crushed in a column of rock, and it's a layer of dust.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then what do you find then above it?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's hard to tease out some of these sort of events that I'm talking about, but we have a few bits of evidence that suggests that uh the whole ecosystem, the plant ecosystem was sort of um uh it was completely reset at some level.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like having a global wildfire, and then you go through ecological succession.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So think you know how a forest might burn and how things come back from that.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so the early pioneers of things that survive come back first, and that in this case was ferns.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So some groups of ferns really do well in disturbance.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: We see right after the boundary a blanket of ferns, and we call this the fern spore spike because the sediment is just packed with fern spores.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's what comes back first.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, and so that how much higher up is that uh above the boundary clay then or the KT?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's all playing out in centimeters.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: You see the boundary, which might be a centimeter or two thick, but the the fern spores are in just a few centimeters of rock above it.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, wow.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any idea of the time that it took for that to happen?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we do to a degree.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh again, it's a bit of conjecture, but we think the fern spore spike, there's actually two of them.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a ground cover of ferns first, and then tree ferns replace that ground cover.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's two spikes of different types of spores, and that may have played out over a few hundred years.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: Ian, if you can just kind of lay it out in terms of what did you guys find as you went from the bottom to the top?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, and then like how did you put a timestamp on this first million years after it?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: How you know how that's a very interesting story.
• 28:00
  unknown: Okay.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, just sort of laying it out.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: We we have a very diverse end Cretaceous ecosystem teeming with dinosaurs, really diverse forests.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: We see this moment of complete devastation from the KT asteroid impact.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right afterwards, we see this proliferation of ferns all over the landscape, and uh they become soon replaced by other successional plants.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: So those things that are sort of, as you can imagine, the forests coming back, and we see a lot of palms to start.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we see a uh palms also like disturbance, and we see a forest as kind of mixed palms and a few other sort of pioneering plants.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Soon they become replaced.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're talking a few hundred thousand years, it takes a while, and we see a couple of key groups of plants show up, one being the walnuts, and they are diversifying a lot at this moment.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: We call it sort of the pecan pie moment, uh because pecans are part of the walnut family, and so we think of that as the wow, walnuts, that's really interesting.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple of interesting things.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, when I think of a forest fire, you know, you think of this like pioneering species to get back to a very mature forest, it takes like a hundred years, but you're describing 200,000 years it takes to get back to some kind of primary producers.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: That what what's what's the relationship there in time?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you got it, right?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just that where you it's one thing if you burn a section of the landscape and the forest can come back from the edges of that burn patch.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Think about burning the whole planet, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it just it just plays out over a longer timescale.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's certainly places where plants must have survived and repopulate the planet, but it just plays out over such a longer timescale.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then the mammal skulls, you know, in these concretions, they come back after the ferns, is that right?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we actually see concreted bone below the boundary too.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have some dinosaur bones that are covered with this concretion stuff, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine the concretions are this preservational window that give us the data.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then the animals and plants are just doing their thing alongside it and getting into the fossil record.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so after the boundary, we're we see mammal fossils right away.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, we start seeing some sizable skulls about 200,000 years after the boundary when we really start seeing things kicking off.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: We know that there are little tiny critters before that, like rat-like things, eating lots of insects, you know, things think like a New York City rat kind of thing, running around in a landscape.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Fun, real, real fun stuff, yeah.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I mean, this is such an interesting thing.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have a couple, you know, sort of philosophical follow-up questions.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: But first, you you've described this really amazing visual of the planet being on fire, basically.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it's taking place over a couple centimeters in rock, right?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a a location that you know if I'm gonna go hang out in Denver for a while and you know, I don't want to go to Red Rocks or whatever?
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, where can I go to see this?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, where can I go to look at this and like visualize your your the visual you just painted?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a place to go see this?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: There is, and uh the best place is really a little bit south of us in Trinidad, Colorado.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's about a two and a half hour drive, and there you can actually see the KT Foundry, this white stripe, uh, right on a road cut on I-70.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you can like look out the window as you're blazing down the freeway, and you're like, there's the KT Foundry.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there's places there where you can get out of the car and actually go get a chunk if you want.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we don't want to see it from the highway.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: We want to get off, we want to put our finger on it, you know, we want to think about it.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Ian and Jesse, we can cut this out like if you want, but Ian, just a little background.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: I teach a three-week-long field course to high school seniors, it's like a 21-day geology field course.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: You're one of the videos that I make them that they have to watch.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it it's um how the earth was made, the Rockies, you know, and you're featured in that in a in a few parts that I found absolutely fascinating.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it's basically that you determine the height of the early Rockies using plant fossils.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk a little bit about that?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think it's absolutely awesome.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it turns out that plants are pretty good temperature gauges for ancient climates in that study, which we never managed to publish for lots of different reasons.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe it.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, I know, right?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's still that whole work kind of like ground to a halt.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: I still need to pick it back up.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it turns out there's this something called the terrestrial lapse rate or the temperature lapse rate.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's basically this measure of how chip temperature changes as you go up in elevation.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Having come here to Colorado, you know that you have to wear different clothes down here on the front range than you do up in the mountains.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you could quantify that difference in temperature, you can use this terrestrial lapse rate and temperature to back out elevation.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's a rather crude tool or crude approach in some ways because the air bars are so large.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it also turns out there's nothing even that kind of comes close to fossil plants for telling past temperatures like this.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there it goes.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, we found fossil plants high in the Rockies that gave us a temperature that was much lower than nearby forests that were should be on the lowlands.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then you can just take these two differences and back out the paleo elevation.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how old are these fossil, the fossil plants that are giving the high elevations or the low temperatures, therefore the high elevations?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so they're all you really need coeval sites, but in this case, they're all uh late Paleocene, so they're like 60 million years old.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the end of the sort of uplift of the Rockies here in Colorado.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it should be somewhere near their sort of maximum height or the maximum height compared to the nearby plain.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: So two things then that I want to real quick ask you about then.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: So you basically, just for our listeners to get kind of a visual of this, you're using like smooth margin plants to to plants that have a like a toothed margin, right?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so flowering plants, think of all the hardwoods and eastern forests, will have this this sort of remarkable thing where if you take a patch of land and all the different tree species in that patch of land, and you count the number of species with smooth margins versus the number of margins.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: What are we talking about for margins?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is the tree limbs or the leaves or what we're talking about the leaves here.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so you can think of them as like either toothy or serate, sort of saw-shaped on their edges, or smooth, having a completely continuous unbroken edge.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when you go to the tropics, almost every species produces a smooth margin leaf.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as you go further north, there's more and more toothed species.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: So you found then as you worked up the stratigraphic column that you encountered increasingly higher ratio of toothed or saw-toothed margin leaves.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: But rather than the stratigraphic column, we literally had a site that was sitting in the paleo mountains and a site that was sitting on the paleo land on the plains.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there are actually studies out there where they look at the uplift of the Andes, where in a single stratigraphic column through time you can see an increased number of toothy things, uh either suggesting the planet is cooling or the mountains are lifting.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what did you find?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: How high were the early Rockies then?
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: So at least as high as they are today, but maybe as much as twice as high as they are today.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you're talking Himalayan type height.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's we were a lot closer to sea level then.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the middle part of North America is sort of buoyed up to an elevation of about a mile high, right?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Denver's a mile high.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: But then Denver had like seawater lapping up at its at its edge.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the differential elevation was greater, but the absolute elevation might have even been lower.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that makes sense.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's amazing.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: I must say, you know, since my undergrad, I've really never been super enthralled with fossils.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: For some reason, they just don't grab me in the same way that like a good metamorphic rock does.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's something innate about them that's just not as exciting to me.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I find I know that's probably offensive.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: You've gone some way in convincing me that they're very interesting and very useful.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: So God, you just need to go out and collect some fossils.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: You'll be hooked.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just got to get some in your hands.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: That might be true.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'll I'll call you up next time I'm out in Denver, and you can convince me how useful fossils are.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll turn you into a paleobotanist yet.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he doesn't need any more hobbies.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, no, no, that's not a good idea.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's true at all.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious, Andy, look, we, if we could kind of get a little bit more, you know, personal on your career path here.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm curious about the your role in the museum and kind of what your day-to-day looks like.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: So can you explain the role of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and its sort of mandate?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then also what is your job within that?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: So our mission is to be a catalyst and to basically inspire people when it comes to science in the natural world.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a staff currently of about 350 people.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is we were much larger in the pre-COVID time.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not much.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: We were we were about 450 in the in the pre-COVID world.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we see about two to two and a half million people a year.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, about half of those come through the front door, and about half are out there in the community receiving some kind of virtual program, or we come to them.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we're kind of split up.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: We have a huge exhibits department, we have a huge experiences or programs department, uh, you know, lots of educators, we have a huge team of teachers on staff, and then there's a big uh science and collection side uh to the museum.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: And those are sort of like the three legs to the stool.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then around that, of course, is just the you know what keeps a big institution going.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Everything from building operations to finance to our whole volunteer department.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: We have about 2,000 volunteers that we work with here at the museum.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it's just getting good, accurate, compelling, exciting science to the people of Colorado and beyond.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's they're sort of it in a nutshell.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: You are right now the director of the earth and space sciences at the museum.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: But you before that, and you probably still have some role as a curator.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain what a curator does at the muse at a museum like the Denver Museum?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I am still a curator.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I so as the director of the earth and space sciences, I just I'm sort of like the chair at a at a um at a university.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of you know do the care and feeding of the all the earth and space scientists here at the museum.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: But as a curator, um, sort of analogous to a professor, uh, in that I'm doing primary research on my sort of area of interest and and expertise, though I don't teach, right?
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I have I don't have any students and I don't teach any classes, but I have collections.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the collections are, you can sort of think of us and museums writ large as sort of the library of the planet, right?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we are the the place in sort of our modern society where all the things we collect as humanity get preserved forever.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh great line, the curators are a planet.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, side cool down.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: What a cool job description, by the way.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is great.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you have the collector gene and you like to collect stuff, this is this is it, right?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you gotta be at the museum.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Ian, I see that you work with teens during the summertime.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do you still do that?
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: And can you talk a little bit about that?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of is that an outreach?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we we run a program called the Teen Science Scholars, and we kind of think of our, you know, we do outreach in lots and lots of different ways.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to sort of doing that informal education of students, we kind of, you know, area focused on teens, one kind of focused on undergrads, and one kind of focused on graduate students.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: But for the teens, we run this program, which is actually really quite remarkable and is all donor funded.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, you know, private donations and things like that, but it's very well funded.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: We really focus on kids who would be the first in their family to go to college.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we really want kids who represent the demographics of Denver, the greater Denver area.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third sort of criteria is this idea that they're they have a tr a passion for science.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And right, and we are we give them a chance to just sort of figure out what it might be like to be a scientist.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so they they get paid a summer salary because we know that a lot of these kids really do need a summer job, right?
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna get a job at the grocery store or something like that.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we pay them uh a summer salary and they come and work right alongside the scientists, and we just put them to work in the field and the collections, and so they do about I don't know, about 160 to 200 hours of work, and then they have a big showcase where they need to present a scientific poster, if you will, but they can do it in all different kinds of formats.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of them do videos or they do presentations on a collection that they've been working on.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: By and large, these are kids that are local to the museum, and we take 20 a year, and they're in archaeology or sciences, zoology, health sciences, you know, all it runs a gamut.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Do they have to apply then?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's pretty competitive.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're taking about 20 kids out of maybe 350 applications or so.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, that's yeah, that's tight.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, what an amazing opportunity, though.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, to get exposed at that age to to really, you know, fundamental research is a crazy thing.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the ways we can give back, right?
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: Since since we aren't teachers per se, you know, we help build that network for these kids to get into college, to you know, figure out how to navigate those systems, and maybe to go on.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we've had a number of kids get their PhDs and and move on even beyond that, which is really cool.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's really cool.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: Ian, so one final question, and uh we always end our interviews with this this question right here.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, do you have a day?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: What's been your best day as a geoscientist slash paleobotanist?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_02: What's your best day you had?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, holy moly.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I guess what pops into my head, I you know, is this story of the discovery at Corral Bluffs.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that was just a moment of incredible elation and knowing that we had literally sort of, you know, figuratively and literally sort of cracked a code to um, you know, unleash a whole bunch of data on this problem that was really important to lots of paleontologists and turns out to lots of modern biologists and ecologists as well.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we kind of knew it was happening when it was happening, which is kind of unusual too.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I've been fortunate to make other discoveries and not really quite realize they were happening when they were happening.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh this one, this one we we knew.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that day is is definitely burned into the gray matter.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going, it's not going away anytime soon.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, that's a good answer.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:14
  unknown: Yeah.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: With that, Ian, this this has been super fun.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've we've you know been nerding out a lot talking to you, uh, but we really appreciate the time.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: This has been super informative and super super exciting stuff that we talked about.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we really appreciate the time.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: I want to reiterate that.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Ian, you um you just you have this this passion, and passion drives inspiration.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so I you know, it's just uh it's been a really cool day for me to get to talk to you.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate your time.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Chris.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my God, reach out when you bring if you bring the kids back to Colorado.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I Ian, I predict you're gonna be getting a phone call in like a week and a half, maybe, when he's planning the trip.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Ian, thank you so much for your time.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate it.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's been great.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's been great.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: Really appreciate it.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're welcome.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: I hope hopefully I gave you guys a break to ask some questions.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know I I have a tendency to talk too much.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_02: So no, no, it's all good.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: We love it.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: So does Chris.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's whatever.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: What a fun time that was.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, we could have we could have talked for a little longer.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: I would I would like to um suggest to our listeners um two videos that if you just do a Google search on this, and one of them is uh how the earth was made, the Rockies.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: It goes into some other detail that we didn't get into on our podcast.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: The other video that I would recommend, which is by PBS, is called The Rise of the Mammals.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: Those are absolutely fantastic videos to watch.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a wrap.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Super fun episode, and uh tune in next week for more Planet Geo.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: And as usual, if you liked this episode, if you if you got something from this podcast, all we ask is that you share it with somebody you think would find it interesting as well.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: And take care.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: See ya.