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Inspirational Geology - The Yale Peabody Museum · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: 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_03: Ah, Chris, you know what?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm juiced, man.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: That was uh that was a really fun conversation, and it I went it went in a bunch of different directions that I didn't expect it, I'll be honest.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: And that was awesome.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty much always the case.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: We never really know where things are gonna go.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Even when you and I just talked.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a good thing.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you throw two other people in the mix with us.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: We've never done that before.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we've never had it's always been you and I and one other person.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: And today we had two people on with us.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so the backstory here is we had Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: David Skelly, who's the director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: We also had Dr.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: Stefan Nicolescu, who is a curator in the meteoritics and mineral side of said museum, of the Yale Peabody Museum.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: And talk about passion.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_03: These two just absolutely I don't know.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: They've got it in spades and clearly they're exude it.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um passion is contagious, and that's why this was an enjoyable conversation because both David and Stefan they they come at, they have different jobs.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: David's the director and and Stefan's the curator of of the mineralogy and meteoritics and rocks and stuff like that.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: But they both are so passionate about what they do and what they talk about, and every bit of thought that goes into how they're gonna display the specimens in their museum.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's stuff that I've never really thought about before, especially when when David said, you know, you go to museums and you get just blasted with this information, they're answering questions that you never asked, and they didn't want to do that with this experience.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that was a for me, that was a takeaway, this whole philosophy and and very thoughtful approach to their displays.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so just a little a bit of a backstory here.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: David Skelly is an ecologist, faculty member, professor at Yale, professor of ecology, has been the director of the museum of the Peabody Museum for 10 years, has won all sorts of awards, massively successful individual at the research front, on the teaching front.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: But relevant to this discussion was directing the museum, as the director of the Peabody has overseen fundraising in excess of$250 million.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: That is an astonishing amount for a museum at a university, even a world-class university like Yale.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's astonishing.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: And then Dr.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: Stefan Nicolescu has had this very interesting career path.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: He says he's had three different geology careers.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: He worked on SCARNs, then he worked on geochronology, had some really interesting papers on geochronology of scarns and various thermochronometers, and now is a meteoritics and mineral curator at the museum and clearly passionate about all the types of minerals that they get to go around and collect and get on loans and navigate and just explore the beauty of.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: So these are two very accomplished, very passionate individuals.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: And Chris, I I like you.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: That that comment about museums kind of being inspirational rather than educational is a really I that I'm gonna have to stew on a bit because I think that that resonates a lot.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think Jesse, have you ever been to a uh a Japanese botanical garden before?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: No, I have not.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: This reminded me a little bit of of that approach.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: I have you're no, I I'll take that back.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I have, and you are totally right.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Botanical gardens do the same thing.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: Really, really well done botanical gardens do the same thing.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're totally right.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: That is a great analogy.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: I hadn't hadn't put that together, but you're totally right.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: I get the same feeling about plants at a botan at a really well laid out botanical garden.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, one other thing, Jesse, before we jump to this interview here shortly, is Dr.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Skelly David referred to Hell, Michigan.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I just want everybody to know that he's not ripping on Michigan.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: There is literally a community in Michigan.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's a place that is named Hell.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's a place.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually a place.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: So he was referring to the place.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: He wasn't being derogatory.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's a place called Hell, Michigan.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: There's a place called China, Michigan as well.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's a but several strange names in the state of Michigan.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's a place, uh Chris, in Pennsylvania called Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: Bird in the hand, no kidding.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: How fun is that?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, our focus of the discussion is the Yale Peabody Museum.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: And we refer a lot to David Friend, who who's a philanthropist, who that one of the sort of experiential mineral exhibits, there's a hall named for David Friend, and that has recently been renovated.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: And and kind of that strategy, that philosophy of this sort of inspirational design has sort of permeated throughout the rest of the Peabody Museum, and they just finished a big renovation.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so, I mean, it sounds like an exceptional place to go.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: I I was on Yale's campus a while back now, but uh I didn't get a chance to go through the Peabody Museum.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm wishing I did, but I'm looking forward to a visit soon because it sounds exceptional.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if it was even open when you were there.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it might not have been.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I I of course, my terrible memory, I can't remember what year I was there, but I know I didn't go into the Peabody Museum.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, Chris, what do you say?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: Let's get the interview.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: Let's do it.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: David and Stephon, thank you uh for joining us geohead.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: Glad to have you here.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: Great to be here.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is really a pleasure to be here.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's gonna be a fun conversation.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: We have well three nerdy geologists and a lone ecologist there.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: So it's just a finally in the discovery.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's about time.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's about time.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: We're we're used to it.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm sure.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so uh we we kind of always ask this traditional opening question, which is like, how'd you get into what you're getting into?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: But we're kind of centering our discussion here on you, you're both intimately affiliated with the LP Body Museum, which is going to center our conversation.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: So before we get into like how you got into your respective fields, can you give us the origin story of the museum itself, maybe?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: I I'd be curious, like I noticed, David, the endowment for the museum or the amount of money you've that has been raised for the museum while you've been director is astonishing.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: So, like, how did this whole enterprise kind of come to be?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm happy to relay a little bit of that.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So in the middle of the 1800s, at a lot of different American colleges, there were no American universities.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: There was an aspiration to include this new thing that people were calling science into the curriculum.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the great scientists of 19th century Yale and a great mineralogist was James Dwight Dana.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Dana gave a talk at graduation in 1856 where he laid out a vision for Yale College to become the first American university.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And as part of that vision, science was going to have to be brought into the foreground.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: There were jokes in the middle 1800s that you could have dropped a Roman centurion from the first century into a Yale classroom and they would have known exactly what was going on, down to the language being spoken and the material being read.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, that wasn't the future when people started being more future focused.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And Dana and Silliman, Benjamin Silliman, were two of the leaders.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: They were two of the very few scientists on the faculty.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And to them, a museum was kind of like what we think of today as a startup.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was a place where exciting new developments were going to happen.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: If we were going to do science, we needed evidence.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Evidence was physical, it lived in collections.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Stefan's in a good position to tell you a little bit about the antecedents to the museum, but the museum itself arrived 10 years after Dana's speech.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it was through the agency of an undergraduate who was one of Dana and Sullivan's students named O.C.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Marsh, who ended up becoming the first professor of paleontology and who happened to have an uncle named George Peabody.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Peabody was already preparing to give a gift.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: He had no children, no heirs.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's preparing to give a gift to Harvard, and Marsh lobbied for Yale.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Harvard already had the museum of comparative zoology, so they used the money to create an anthropology museum.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yale had nothing.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so we created a kind of a synoptic museum that covers the whole waterfront, and that's where it came from, and it's grown from there.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that was 1866.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: That's really amazing.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the first of many victories of Yale over Harvard, right?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Is that the not my place to comment?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, fair enough.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, perhaps.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: Fair enough.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: Fair enough.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's really amazing.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: I I like that uh the Roman centurion sort of analogy.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's I mean, I I didn't learn that history of American education system, you know, so it's it's interesting to see that trajectory and still see it preserved as a museum that's active and and growing and alive and well.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: And the museums as startups, that's not your typical view of museums, I think, right?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: We think of these as sort of places of artifacts and old stuff, but past focused.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not how they were conceived at all.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was bringing evidence together in a new way and organizing it so we could make sense of it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And really, if you think about it, research museums like ours, that's exactly what they're doing today.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: That core function hasn't changed.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's totally true.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, so interesting.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: And what an amazing resource, I guess, to have all these collections.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_03: And Stefan, you're sitting in front of some beautiful stuff in the background there that I'm assuming is is you know part of the collection.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what used to be the show and tell in the division, I'm in the collection room.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what's in my background it has been pilfered because many of the specimens that were there are now on permanent display in the mineral galleries.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Benjamin Silliman was the first professor of science both at Yale and in the nation.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was a lawyer by trade, and he was picked to teach chemistry and natural history because of the connection between the then president of Yale College and the Silliman family.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Dana and Marsh and other bright young people at that time came to Yale because it was the best school to learn geology and mineralogy thanks to Sullivan.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And specimen that Silliman acquired in 1805, the very beginning of his career in London, uh he visited the UK, is what's considered specimen number one for the Peabody collection, because now it is in the Peabody collection and on display in our history of mineralogy at Yale in the museum.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Dana eventually got another quality.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: He married one of Silliman's daughters, so he became Silliman's son-in-law, and his son Edward Salisbury Dana continued the tradition of his father in publishing the sixth edition of a system of mineralogy or Dana's mineralogy.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that uh that's an amazing history uh uh of yeah, the collections.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: So what is mineral, what is collection number one or item number one?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: What is it actually?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very unassuming specimen of hematite from Cumbria.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know the precise locality.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that you wouldn't look much at unless you don't pay attention to the label on it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a paper label stuck to the specimen in Silliman's hand.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: It says B.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Silliaman from F Acium, 1805 London, and then 1805 once again on it.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the I think I have a hematite specimen as sample number one in my collection because Chris Boy's took me on a field trip up to the upper peninsula of Michigan where hematite is very common, and we're walking around these mine tail, you know, old, old mine tailings where it's just specular hematite everywhere.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: The ground is just glittering.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that you know it was a rainy day, but the sun came out and big sunbeams landing on this hematite.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's how I remember it at least.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, so I have a big chunk of specular hematite.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: That was like, you know, I got in high school.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: That was one of I don't know if it was number one, but it was maybe number two or three.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is definitely not specular hematite, it's just a bulky brown thing.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: Gotcha.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, David, I'm gonna start with you if that's all right.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we ask all of our guests the same question, but you're the odd person out here because you're not a geoscientist, but that's okay.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us thank you?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us a little bit like Jesse and I have very personal stories about how we got into geoscience and what was that moment?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a very personal, like important thing.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what happened with you?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: What what drove you down the road of becoming an ecologist?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so on the fundamental level, I never remember making a decision in this direction.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: I just kind of was always outside.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: My mother referred to me as feral when I was a kid because I just always wanted to be out in the woods.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where I kind of hung out to the point that to get me to come home for dinner, she hung a schoolhouse bell on the back of the house.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the rule was that I had to go no farther than where I could hear that bell.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And when I heard it, I had to come running.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: But other than that, uh I had pretty free range.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: She grew up out in the Midwest on a farm, so the idea of her children just dissolving into the underbrush didn't really bother her.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And now that I'm a parent, I marvel at that.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I I appreciate it as well because that's where I became really comfortable and interested in trying to understand what this world was.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't have iNaturalists back then.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I had the golden book of dinosaurs and you know, all these other little field guides for kids.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually got them.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: This sounds like a television commercial or something, but I grew up in Connecticut and I went to the Peabody Museum as a very young kid.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where I kind of asked most that you didn't have to grow out of this, that you could just kind of keep doing it.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I became a dinosaur kid.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: My personal knowledge of dinosaurs peaked when I was around eight or nine.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But eventually, as happens, I think with a lot of dinosaur kids, it kind of bums you out that the stuff that you love is not there anymore, and you just have to study the remains.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I was too interested in living things.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I I turned towards ecology and ended up taking every field biology and ecology course I could in in college and and then went straight into grad school and really haven't looked back.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: So David, on that what about the what about the frog emphasis?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Hold on, Chris.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: I have a question real quick before that.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: You you went to the University of Michigan for your PhD, right?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: For my PhD, yeah.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: Did you uh spend a lot of summers up at the field station?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: I certainly spent time there uh and had friends who did all their research there, and it's Douglas Lake is a spectacular place.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up my uh my my dad was uh a lake biologist who worked on a bunch of lakes up in Michigan for the summer.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: So he was a high school teacher, but then he did his master's, he got his master's at by doing field work at the field station.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: So he was like a TA for the couple of the classes up there, and we live there.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: I have very distinctive memories of living in those cabins and swimming in the beach there and like you know, eating lunch in the big dining hall, the mess all there.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's just an amazing resource that the university's a magic place, yeah.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh anyway, uh yeah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: Good good times in Michigan.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the place where I worked, I don't know if the magic coefficient is quite as high, but it was a lot closer.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so in Pinckney, Michigan, which has the distinction of being right next to Hell, Michigan.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's right.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a a 1400-acre preserve called the E.S.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: George Reserve.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I did all my work there.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Back in the 60s and 70s, a couple of amphibian biologists named Henry Wilbur and Jim Collins had documented who was living there.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time I got there in the late 80s, that was old data, and nobody had ever really looked at long-term dynamics.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: But how I got into frogs is pretty interesting.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up, transitioned from the dinosaur thing, and I got really into fish and fishing and all that.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to Michigan to work with a very well-known fish ecologist named Earl Werner.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in the time between I was accepted and when I got there, he went through a divorce and I don't know whether it was a midlife thing, but definitely ecologists, when they go through traumatic life experiences, sometimes change their field system.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he switched to frogs, I rolled with it and just kept rolling or hopping or whatever.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's whatever.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, transitioning out of the tadpole stage.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's super interesting.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: So, how, okay, well, how does the ecology, I mean, so amazing that you went to the Peabody Museum as a kid.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: Do you kind of wake up sometimes and you're like, it's amazing I'm the director of this thing?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is it still Yeah, and and having kids whose interests align really helps?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Both of our boys, and we're not my wife and I are not people to go, you've got to do what we do.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: But they certainly had lots of opportunity to see all of that.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And my older son, even before I started as director of the Peabody 10 years ago, he was already super into dinosaurs.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I was actually sitting on a Sunday morning, believe it or not, that's when they called me to ask me to become the director of the Peabody, which makes me kind of wonder whether I was their first choice.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, yeah.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: The I get this phone call, and my son, who at the time would have been seven or eight, he's sitting next to me, and I get off the phone and he goes, Daddy, what was that about?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, guy from the Propost Office just asked me if I wanted to be director of the Peabody.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he looked at me, he said, I would totally do that.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And just to And you're like, I gotta do it now.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, to put the cherry on that.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: He just started as a freshman at Yale and he's gonna study paleontology.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, totally cool.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: So he didn't outgrow the dinosaurs.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: He he did not.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he did not.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's perfectly happy with the dead stuff.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: There we go.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great story.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: And David, you're so right.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: You just can't tell your kids the direction they should go.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I tried.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh my kids they didn't even listen to my podcast.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're so far away from geo, they have no interest in geoscience at all.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's my my older son, you know, ecology to him is like super duper boring.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, going and sitting there with a little brush or air scribe doing whatever they do over these things for days at a time, he's like, that is now that's interesting.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:24
  unknown: Yeah.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: It astonishes me that people like paleontology too.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, hey, it's cool with dinosaurs and stuff.
• 18:31
  unknown: Yeah.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: May I may I just ask Dave a question?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So your son that is uh going for paleontology, he's the son that you had out in the field at one stage with a coprolite stuck to his tongue.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually his younger brother.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that was about as into paleontology as he ever got.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we we traveled when the boys were quite young.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: We traveled out to North Dakota and the boys got to go into the field with uh a former PhD from Defin's department named Tyler Leeson, who's now the curator of Oh, he's amazing.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's uh he's like the child prodigy out there.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, he's amazing.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: So he's at the Denver Museum, and so we spent three days there shadowing him.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: We did the Great American driving vacation with the boys when they were young, and we spent three days in Marmoth in North Dakota.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Tyler had invited us, and my younger son just about died from heat prostoration because it was like 104.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: My older son, Aiden, who's the paleo guy, he was just in he's beside himself.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: He he wasn't even touching the ground, he was just so excited to be there.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he stuck to Tyler's heel the entire time.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Tyler is a very fit person, he prides himself on his fitness.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've ever been in the Badlands out there, it is this highly dissected terrain where, to me, the shortest way to get from A to B might be going around this not Tyler, man.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like B line right through it.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Tyler stuck to him, and he was the only one who could keep up with him.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And after three days of this and aiding sound a thesulosaurus and whatever, and he had this epiphany about field paleontology.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: He and Tyler got back to the trucks at least five minutes before the rest of us.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Tyler turned to him and said, You know, you grow up a little, you can come out and work for me.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think Tyler does that all the time.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so by the time I got up there, he turned to me, he goes, Daddy, I just got a job offer.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like 11 at the time.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's and you know, there's a lot of ground you cover between the time you're 11 and you're 16, but he never wavered.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Aiden has been working for Tyler for the last three summers.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's amazing.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's amazing.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's great that passion, you know, sort of doesn't go away, right?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: And it it sometimes takes that passion for it to not feel like work so that you work hard at it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's just such an important thing.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I think a lot of scientists in the natural sciences kind of have that in some way, shape, or form.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: That eight o'clock at night, it doesn't feel like work to be thinking for me about continent formation, you know.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: This is like fun.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, to be passionate.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: David, does does your son work on the Corral Bluffs thing that Tyler has going on?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think yeah, so he he is certainly aware of that.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the he divides his summer every year where the beginning and end of his time out there, he'll go out for six weeks, and at the beginning, he's in Denver and they're doing fossil prep and moving stuff around.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then they head up to Marmoth and they're in the field and doing whatever they're doing, and then they come back.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so on those shoulders, he might be prepping or moving stuff, but the stuff that he has worked on has mostly come from the greater marmot region, either right there in North Dakota, South Dakota, or or Montana.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Two summers ago, I don't know if you all have heard about there's a new film, IMAX film that came out called T Rex.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's Tyler on air being filmed by an IMAX crew, figuring out that this hadrosaur that they thought they had found was actually a T-Rex.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, no kidding.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: He figured out on camera.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, it was fantastic.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And Aiden was on that crew.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so the summer of whatever it was, 2023, he came back and he told me all the stuff that had gone down and that, you know, they'd found a T-Rex.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: He got to excavate it.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: It all happened on camera.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I told him you should probably quit because you just peaked.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: That's it.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Hard to go up from there.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no kidding.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but he's he's not worried about that, which I'm I'm glad about.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, but um that's a big thing.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: But the film's really great.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: You should check it out.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna screen it here and have Tyler come and do like a QA after the screening.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, very cool.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's very well done.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's interesting.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: I'll have to check that out.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't seen that, Chris.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: Have you or heard of it?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually premiering at the uh American Muse or no uh Smithsonian right now.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, right.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, cool.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, excellent.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: Stefan, your origin story as a geologist.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: You get to go second, but first in our hearts, because you're geologist.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it was a combination of several factors.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: First was reading one of Arun Tatiev's books on uh volcanoes, something uh translated, it will be close encounters with a devil or something like that, with beautiful photos of volcanoes.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that caught my attention.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was feral in a different way than David, but I was spending my summers at least two weeks, if not a whole month, hiking in the Carpathians with all the provisions on my back, uh living out of a tent and washing in uh ice-cold creeks up in the mountains.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started wondering why there's glacial cirques here and why Transylvania is just much flatter and lower area.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the thing that nailed it for me was actually when I decided to go to college, in uh one area of southwestern Romania where my family is originating from, the ancestors were mining the ore deposits there.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: I came across uh some impressive well-formed garnets in marble in a scarn deposit that nailed it from me that I stay in geology.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up doing my PhD on the same thing, and the rest is history.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of garnets were they?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: These were andordy, so andordy growth, so the the Ugarandite uh series, but obviously know your varovite there.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh one of the sposids that was recognized back in the early 1800s as being contact metamorphic.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: The term scorn came later, but uh the funny thing is that I did my PhD on those scarns in the country of origin for the word skorn, which is Sweden.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I didn't know that.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in Swedish, skorn means actually prostitute because it was it was the rejection from the iron deposits in central Sweden, the silicate, the useless material, and that was the this is something that not even the Swedes know.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: I presented this at uh at the Department of Geology in Gothenburg, and I got the same reaction that I got from you, laughter.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they were not aware of the etymology of the geologic term scarred.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a very exciting research field.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that is amazing.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, scarns are are beautiful, and we Chris and I have gone collecting a bunch of rocks around the United States together, not recently, but there's a scarn deposit in in upstate New York, right, Chris?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think where it had the the beautiful cinnamon-colored was it Maine?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: The cinnamon-colored garnets.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: I can never remember which compositions of garnets give different.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably grossular.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: If it is cinnamon-colored, probably grossular.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean grossular dominated.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: There is no very seldom you find N-member compositions in the garnet group.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's usually and then you got into thermochronology for quite a while too.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so uh my first life in geology was uh trace element geochemistry, and then I got into thermochronology in helium dating.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then my third life in geology is at the Peabody Museum.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_03: Moving up in the world or down in the moving up in the world, probably.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: Although geochronology is that's gotta be a high point doing geochronology.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I put it.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I put it this way that my metamorphosis in the field of geology is complete now when I became a museum exhibit.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's perfect.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh okay, so on that note, on the museum, we were reading, uh, we kind of read up on the museum, and there's a quote that I found interesting from David Friend, who I think donated a bunch of material, right, initially to the museum.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: And the quote was it struck my eye in that he said he wants people to kind of be inspired rather than learn, or something along those lines.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: The quote here is there's a minimum of descriptive labeling.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: I want visitors to leave this hall overwhelmed by the beauty of what they've seen and anxious to go home and learn more.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: So that's very different from most museums where you know you you're there to kind of learn rather than be inspired.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, how has that worked and and how has that, I don't know, bled into the greater museum culture there, I guess.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: Can I take on one second, David, before you answer that?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because I sure just has this always been a part of the Peabody Museum philosophy since its inception, or is this more you?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I guess what I would say is that David and I are very much kindred spirits on this.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: When I first met Dave right around the time that I became director about 10 years ago, and he had tried to create a gallery like this at Harvard at the Geological Museum, and long story short, he couldn't quite get there.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so he came to us a little bit, you know, kind of peeved and not very optimistic that it would be any different at Yale.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the early conversations that we had, I completely agreed with him that what we're doing as much as anything else, and I draw on my own experience here, is engaging people's curiosity first.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think about the doors that somebody who doesn't know anything about something can walk through, and one of them is this world of beauty and diversity and interest, and the other one is well-placed specimens with lots of text around them, most people will walk through that first door first.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that happens even if it isn't intentional almost universally with like dinosaur exhibits, because the dinosaurs at least can be a lot bigger than the signs.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: And when you walk under the neck of our Bronosaurus, you're not thinking about the signs.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go into almost any mineralogy exhibit, the signs are in the foreground.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: We have helpfully arranged calcites over here and sulfites over here and minerals that come from hydrothermal vents over there.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the way I think about it is it's answering a bunch of questions that I didn't ask.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't mean that it's not interesting or can't be interesting, but it's sort of like here, and most people are coming in here.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what we have noticed, and Stefan will probably agree, we need to do more to really quantify this and come up with solid estimates.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: But my impression, which is self-serving, is that we have those exhibits that explain the origination of minerals.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have a genetic mineral display, we have local minerals from Connecticut.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the history of mineralogy at Yale, and these are all exhibits that Stefan and our curator in charge, Jay Agu, have worked very hard on.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: But next door in David Front Hall, and we've got an annex next to that, and select pieces elsewhere in those spaces, there is very little signage, not none, but mostly just tombstone labels explaining this is what this is.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you watch people go sit in David Front Hall and watch people come in, and they're literally, if they haven't been in before, their jaws drop.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it just you you're giving them this moment where they carried their expectations into that space, and you have confronted them with a reality that exceeds or is vastly different than what they would have imagined.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: The provost at the time we opened David Front Hall for the first time in 2016, I invited him to the opening.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: We were gonna have a ribbon cutting with David and everything.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he looked at me, he goes, just to be clear, this is rocks.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Listen, Ben, come early.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Come 10 minutes early.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'll walk you through the space.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to turn around and go right back out the back door and not be there, fine.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I had him in the room for five minutes, and he's like, Okay, I get it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is awesome.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: And what we're seeing, the part of it that we need to quantify better is I think we get more traction.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think those exhibits talking about the genetic origin of minerals, I think they're stickier now than they were before.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh before we had this other space.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we put more in there, and I think people are spending a lot more time in that part of the museum.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: And all you've got to do, if you don't believe me, is go take a look at the Google or Yelp reviews.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we opened that hall in 2016.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back before that, it's all dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: After that, it's dinosaurs and minerals.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: So the inference there, I just wanted to understand it clearly.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're saying that because you have this David Friend hall that's very stunningly beautiful.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's emotionally driven.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: You're saying you're getting a lot more traction on the kind of more learning-centric side of the thing.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: I may be being self-serving, but I think that that's true.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's definitely true.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like our exhibit designer, Laura Friedman, was responsible for the two generations of display.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: We had a donor engaged for the second round of it who also contributed a lot of thinking for what went where.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, the driver of what you see and and some of the juxtapositions and so on was that those were aesthetically driven as much as anything else.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we definitely have tourmalines over here and so on, but it's not like ordered.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's not orderly, it's just mind-blowing.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: So, Chris, do you have a question?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: I have I have so many questions about this actually.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: I do too.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: David and and Stefan, you can feel free to jump in on this as well.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: But it's interesting what you said that a lot of times when you go to an exhibit like this, there's information to that's answering questions that weren't asked.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: So, what are you providing that everyone wants to know?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: I find myself thinking, if I were to walk into this, I've I've looked at the gallery photos online and so on, and it's it's shocking.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: What would I want to know?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, what what did you guys arrive at?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: What is the information provided?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, go go ahead, Stefan.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the specimen the mineral species name, the locality information.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: If it is loan, as we have most of the specimens in the David Frent Hall in the annex or on extended loan five years, then the name of the lender.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you wanted to say something, David?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think the question is Yeah, I think the question is in the space outside David Front Hall, what questions are we answering there?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: What do we think people want to know?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: If we have kind of provoked their curiosity inside David Front Hall, in the annex, in the gem space, and so on, what are we then prepared to help people understand?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: So what we have outside of the David Frent Hall is regional mineralogy, the regional being only Connecticut.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: So mineral specimens from Connecticut with a little bit of explanation about the geological variety of Connecticut, but not much.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a museum consumer as well, and I know that people don't have the patience and the stamina to read through lots of text.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: But this was the decision of the exhibit design group, and I agreed with it.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have uh three or four cases that are loosely genetic.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we have surficial minerals, we have uh hydrothermal, magmatic, and metamorphic, and again with a very short uh paragraph about how those minerals form.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we selected uh also aesthetic minerals to illustrate the different environments where minerals uh form.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: Then what we have now also thanks to Dave Friend, he a couple of years ago started a new uh endeavor and developed an app which has short clips uh attached to certain display cases speaking about uh certain minerals.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them were done by our exhibit uh group with uh very short fun uh videos, you know, thirty seconds, forty seconds.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And about a month ago we started doing them with me as well.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I'm going more into the descriptive, the genetic, and so on, but also very short.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: So these are with QR codes, you scan them on your phone, you can uh watch them there or watch them later, but there is a little bit of additional information besides that very minimalistic sport and explanation with name and locality.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: What I would add there backing out since I'm not a geologist, is that the the questions that I hear from people when they see this is like, what is this?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Where does it come from?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: How is it made?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think the displays do a nice job of doing that.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And also I really like having the local minerals there because that gives people a way, if they want to find out more.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like if you're gonna learn about birds, well, what birds can I go see outside in my yard?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people will come into the museum, and of course, they're gonna not gonna know that they can go find minerals themselves locally.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: I I mean, I think there's so there's so many aspects to this that again, I I'm I'm ignorant about museum high-level museum thinking, but it seems obvious that that the local stuff is really important, especially to get that across.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in our little Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum, you know, we've a big model of the Drake well, the first oil well ever drilled, like sitting right there, because it's like an hour and a half up the road.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's such an important thing that speaks to the history of the place you're kind of standing on.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: I have a question about the this inspiration.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jesse, hold that thought because the oil well drilled in Pennsylvania started after Benjamin Silliman Jr.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: cracked crude oil for the first time, and he figured out that it can be used for illumination, because until then it was the decimation of the whale population for whale oil.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: I uh I learned that statistic.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Yale is really integral to this entire history, the chemist and the the the overlap of chemistry, geology, and I don't know, whatever the scholarly science there was that you could be a jack of all trades back then.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_03: But the book by Richard Rhodes on the history of energy is just astonishing.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_03: The science of all that is just amazing uh leading up to that.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: So it's such a cool story.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's it's great.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: So, okay, the question was about about this sort of inspiration.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: You have these these halls for that are information light that must be really dependent upon spectacular specimens or even large specimens, maybe.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like, do you have to have a massive it's a stib knite or something that is in this?
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have to have like a a physically imposing specimen to do this with, or can you do it with something with lighting and you know, something really high quality and smaller?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, how do you think about this?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'm guessing sample number one of some crappy hematite is not like what you're gonna base this on.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: I don't but I maybe I'm wrong.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so what I would say is that the key is probably variety, but definitely we grabbed on to the idea that we had to have large anchor pieces and we work very closely big, physically big, like huge, like tons.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, you know, and so we've got spectacular calcite, and we've got a uh desert rose of selenite that's bigger than we've ever imagined.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that does two things.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: One is you don't have to know anything about minerals to go, that is wild.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: What is that?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_03: This was created in the future.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this is astonishing, right?
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and and it it also works spatially, just in a in a geographic sense.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've got this Namibian quartz crystal inside the door to David Front Hall.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And from the top of the stairs, when you come up to the third floor, that sucks you right into that room.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can see it from far away.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the big pieces definitely matter.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and we worked with uh a lender, a guy named Barry Yampel, who unfortunately passed away.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And much of what you'll see on display there is on loan from now his family.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: And Barry loved to refer to those really big pieces as decorator pieces.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that tells you what he he thought about them.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of hardcore mineral people have a similar sort of idea about it.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think he argued that they were effective, especially for people who are were not familiar with mineralogy.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: The exception being that I think sometimes that stibnite or the selenite, even the most jaded hardcore person is like, oh my lord, I've never seen something that big.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or we've got this uh tourmaline called the red rocket that is has been hidden and out of view.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we had the curator from the Harvard Museum, and she walked in and saw it, and she said, I've only ever seen photos.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so so these are things that have resonance.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: However, what you also said, like small things can work really well.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think what we learned is that really outstanding theatrical style lighting is absolutely critical.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the lesson that we learned in David Friend Hall, lighting that for the first time, we carried throughout the whole museum.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it was incredibly expensive for me as the fundraiser because that lighting is like through the roof.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you can even take probably the most individually boring, there's not much to look at sort of things we have in the whole museum where it's the content of it that's interesting are um cuneiform clay tablets.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're just little blobs of clay with little marks on them.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: You have to get people excited about what they are, but you can actually, if you light it right, you can get people to understand, oh, that's special.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's special.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: I better go look at that.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, what they look at is some kid's homework from 4,000 years ago, where he's calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle, and then you learn that that was 1,200 years before Pythagoras lived.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's just something like that where just a little blob of clay can take you someplace you didn't expect to go.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's really interesting that you you kind of, I'm guessing you can't you kind of set it up in the room with the lighting such that it kind of just draws people into it.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: 100%.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and the minerals are much easier because these things, I mean, they have gem-like quality, right?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you get the light on them just right and we have wonderful people we've worked with on this front, the room actually just glows.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's almost no ambient light in the room.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: All the light that you're really navigating the room with is reflecting off the specimens.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's very cool.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: The room feels special.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like someplace where people really care about these things.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've carried that into you know the displays that Stefan was was talking about, where it could be local geology, and some of the specimens are not sort of like the hematite specimen you're talking about, but you can make them feel special if you treat them like they're special.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have to?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, sorry.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, go ahead, Chris.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: Stefan, I think this is a question that's geared more to you, but can you talk about how acquisition happens?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: What does that process look like?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: You you got a lot on loan from David Friend.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Is that pretty much how you know how it works?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a combination.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: So from David Friend, we have donations.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: We have loans from big collectors like now the Yample family.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: The first iteration of the David Friend Hall had loans from 17 different collectors.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And from other museums.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: We actually would like very much to showcase on loans, on two-year loans, for instance, specimens from other museums.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: But for growing our collection, the Yale Peavody Museum Mineralogy and Meteoritics Collection, we are relying mostly on donations.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: We had some wonderful donations coming in just in the last year.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Quite a few of the specimens in those donations are already on display.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: That was a little bit hard to coordinate because we had everything already planned out, decided this goes there, that goes there, and then these amazing things come in.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, we cannot not have these on display.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: And here the flexibility of the team comes in and we put them on display and they are fantastic.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: We have a modest acquisition budget, and over the years I developed relationships with different trustworthy mineral dealers.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they know that I and for the museum I like uh unusual, odd.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Things.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, we have recently acquired a specimen that shows a little vogue of dark blue azurite crystals.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Azurite we saw before.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: But these are twinned azurites.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: How often did you come across twinned azurites?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or another thing we have also from a recent donation.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the azurite was purchased with funds from our acquisition fund, but just six months ago we got a donation with a 25.5 centimeter Z twinned crystal barrel crystal from Brazil.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: How can you not put that on display?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is a crystal barrel on steroids.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we get donations, we are lucky when we get good donations.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I am uh looking for specimens that I know will work well on display and with the public.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have several of these, and we have legacy specimens.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a couple of huge Ichinokawa stebnites.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ichinokawa is this famous stibnite mine, was a famous stib night mine in Japan on Kyushu.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it was actually mined intermittently only during war periods because antimony was used in manufacturing, I don't know, in ammunition or something.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's closed.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't anything coming out of there anymore.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: But when these specimens came to Yale, I think they were purchased.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a record for that.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when they came to Wasn't that Dana?
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I'm going.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the younger Dana, Edward Salisbury Dana, Silliman's grandson, felt compelled to do a crystallographic study on these two largest specimens.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: We have a total of about 20 specimens from Ichinokawa.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: But on these two larger specimens, he was so impressed he did a crystallographic study and he published it in the American Journal of Science, which was established by his grandfather in 1818, and is the longest continuously published journal in North America.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: The editorial office is above the room that I am here, a little bit to the other end of the hallway.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's in the same place as it was since 1818.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's very cool.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_03: Very cool.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how we acquire specimens.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh specimens that came in from George Gibbs, who was a Newport merchant, much more interested in natural history than in uh growing his business.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's how he ended up in 1825, uh giving Yale first refusal for the acquisition of his collection.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Benjamin Silliman was critical in raising the funds for acquiring that specimen.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it gives me goosebumps each time that I'm touching one of those specimens, knowing that many of them go back to the 1700s in France.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: The same goosebumps I get when I look at the mural, The Age of Reptiles, painted by Rudy Zalinger in the eighteen forties, because even if I was schooled behind the iron curtain in my paleontology book in college, I had a reproduction of that fresco.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is a fresco seco.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: It is how it was understood by the science of paleontology in the eighteen forties, uh 1940s, so it is a little bit dated.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm pinching myself each time.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot believe it that I am part of this institution of which I knew only through their reproduction in my paleontology textbook.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you two have just like uh these these sort of uh such amazing threads to the museum and uh clearly such passion for it.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's very fun to listen to and to to talk to you guys about.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh on the sort of personal note, I've I want to ask you both the same question.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe Stefan will start with you.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: What is the the best specimen?
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_03: Your well, your favorite specimen in the collection, and why?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: I know this is an impossible question, but you know, I gotta ask it anyways.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: They know you know the answer to this because anybody who has children knows that you love your children the same way.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do you pick between specimens?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I already confessed my fascination with Garnet because it's such a repository of information.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: The only one that outdoes Garnet is Zircon, but Zircon was already taken when I started.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I have a real quick, sorry to interrupt you, Stefan.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: But I I was asked to write for Nature Geoscience, they have started doing these all minerals considered things, which are like a little short.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's like 200 words or something.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know them.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so I was asked to write the one on Zircon.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, I'm writing this thing on Zircon.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like trying to shorten down the vast amount of knowledge on Zircon out there into an inspiring couple hundred words.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: And basically, I ended up in this rabbit hole of trying to figure out is this the most valuable mineral for geoscientists or is it Garnet?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: I actually couldn't convince myself that Zircon was more valuable than Garnet, so I didn't put it in there.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: But it, you know, it's like clearly these two are just unbelievable archives for for geoscientists and in information.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, that's my tangent on the internet.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh coming from the former geochronologist in me, zircon is such an amazing mineral for helium dating.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: The helium dating is basically the only dating mineral dating method that can go from the beginning of the solar system to the eruption of the Vesuvius, provided that there is no resetting, that the system didn't get reheated because then the clot is reset.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I applied helium dating to garnet as well and got meaningful numbers.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, good.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, interesting.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, garnet, but then there are these other specimens, even specimens on loan from the Yampel family.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking in awe at all the etched uh aquamarines, so the burial variety aquamarine which are etched.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm wondering what is the environment, what is the solution that can just deconstruct a mineral without leaving anything else behind it.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's just uh fascinating.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: These specimens are also aesthetically arresting, they're unbelievably beautiful.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: So garnet aquamarines of uh there is a garnet on display in the Connecticut case from New Haven, from East Rock, which is kind of like the Salisbury Rock in Edinburgh, where Benjamin Sullivan got almost killed in 1805 when a big block, he was walking at the base of the escarpment collecting minerals, and a big block came tumbling down.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the nick of time, he managed to take shelter under another rock.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: In his reminiscences, he says, uh, haven't I been lucky enough to find that protection, somebody else would have told this story.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: All right, David.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_03: Bus and you you it doesn't have to be a mineral, I guess, or rock.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: It can be something like that.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, I'm sorry, but it's not gonna be a mineral.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: I love I love our minerals.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it I'm also uh betraying my association with my home division in the museum, which is vertebrate zoology.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna go with a dinosaur that was my favorite dinosaur when I was a kid.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's stegosaurus, and we have then and now a type specimen on the floor that was the first stegosaurus that was ever mounted.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the sign when I was a kid talked about the fact that this animal had two brains, one in its head and one in its pelvis because there was this area of swelling.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: They interpreted that at that point as a second brain.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it was some sort of stuff about how these animals are so big, so they need to have these multiple cognitive centers to be able to react quickly.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't have anything about how that would be coordinated, right?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it turns out it was utter garbage.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: But that stuck Stegosaurus into a particular part of my brain, and then there's just great stories about it.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Stegosaurus means roof lizard, and that's because when Marsh found the first specimen of Stegosaurus, they just found some leg bones and ribs and stuff, and then some of those plates.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Marsh interpreted this animal as sort of like a turtle.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And those plates, instead of being erect like this, they were tiled shingles on the back.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, he was dead wrong.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: And they found this other specimen within a year or two.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Marsh was nothing if not resilient.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yep, got it wrong, published the new drawings.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then that was one of the very early pieces of evidence that these animals were having to protect themselves from big predators because they had these big tail spikes, and our old mount had the wrong number of tail spikes.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was six instead of four.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the meantime, one of my favorite stories from any of the sciences we cover is that you all, I'm sure, will know about Gary Larson and Farside cartoons.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: He had a Farside cartoon where somebody is giving a sort of a eulogy about dearly departed Thag who had gotten nailed by one of these tail spikes from a stegosaurus.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then some paleontologists came along and officially named those tail spikes Thagamizers.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's pretty cool.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: So lots of great stories, and it's a it's just a special, it's a set of memories.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I think that's what museums do, right?
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is that you develop a set of associations and you can remember, like I still to this day can remember the first time I walked under the neck of the Bronosaurus.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you can just feel that.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like I grew up and I moved away from Connecticut and I came back for a job interview many, many years later.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was asked, Well, what do you want to, is there anything you want to go do or see while you're in New Haven?
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, I'd love to go to the Peabody.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't being interviewed by the Peabody, I was being interviewed by the School of the Environment.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so they brought me over there and I walked into that hall for the first time as really a mature adult, and the hair on the back of my neck went up.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you and and I think we all have those associations, not always with a museum, of course, but there are things in the world that have that kind of effect on us.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if if you had to say this is what a museum is for, if you're doing it right, you're getting that to happen for people.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's so cool.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and there is a connection, sort of a connection, between Stegosaurus and what we have in the David Friend Hall.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you remember these, Dave.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when we got the big desert rows, this is a humongous desert rows.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: How big is it, by the way?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Five by five feet again from steroids.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: We are unpacking it in the basement.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And one of our former colleagues that was a paleontologist was there, Richard Kissle.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when Richard saw the plates, which are literally one foot in size, plates of gypsum coming out there all tangled, he said stegosaurus roadkill.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's the big name of the specimen.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: That's really good.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Put in a plug here.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: Just last Friday, a paper came out in the mineralogical record.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you are familiar with the journal that we wrote and which we tell both the history of the mineralogy collections at Yale and then the latest developments under uh Dave's uh directorship.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that that will give you some good pictures and the story.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's very cool.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we're running late here, Chris.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: What do you what do you think?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_03: You wanna wrap it up here with the last question?
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for sure.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, Stefan.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have a question for Chris and you, because I understand that the way that the two of you started, in my mind, is very similar to the way that George Jarvis Brush, who was the first curator of mineralogy at the Peabody, got started in geology.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was at one point, he was 15 only at that stage.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he was in school in West here in West Cromwell in Connecticut.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: And his teacher, a gentleman by the name Theodore Gold, inspired him into natural sciences and especially in mineralogy.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't something similar between Chris and you, Jesse?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for me, I mean, my origin story in geology is I was very, very focused by Chris, but I kind of started out in natural.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: My dad was a high school biology teacher, and I had these very idyllic summers up in I don't know if we were quite feral, but we were close to it.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: You know, especially for my generation, we were much more feral than your average millennial.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_03: But we were, you know, out collecting bugs in the uh all day in the summer, running around with bug nets in little cyanide jars, you know, just outside all the time.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: And um, we were up in Michigan where there's this on the on the west side of Michigan, on the east side of Lake Michigan, there's a lot of uh gravel uh shorelines.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of stones, and you go look and collect stones and spirit very beautiful.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I found a stone that was very interesting.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: I still have it.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we just moved, so it's not in my bookshelf behind me, but I have it.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like a very curious-looking thing that my dad, the biologist, didn't know.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_03: We brought it into the high school, and the earth science teacher didn't know how it formed.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_03: And that for me was like, oh, I found something that nobody can explain.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_03: This is amazing.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so that kind of you know sat on the shelf and festered a bit, and I had a little rock collection stuff.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_03: But then Chris was I had Chris in in ninth grade earth science, and that opened my eyes to mountains, which were a foreign thing to me in Michigan.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_03: Like the highest building I seed was like eight stories high at that point in time.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and so it's just very flat country.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_03: So mountains and volcanoes and earthquakes, and then I I was hooked, and so I took geology.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: Chris offers uh what is effectively a college level, well, it is a college-level geology class you can get college credit for.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_03: I did a a field course that Chris taught that went for three weeks out west.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I was very much inspired by uh Chris Blyce, um, you know, to kind of pursue this um as a as a career.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, it's great.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's the it's the power of like early exposure to stuff, I think.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's a real exercise in early exposure to cool stuff and passionate people.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I think that's just kind of what makes the world go round.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_03: So 100%.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, David, can you tell us what's been your best day uh in the museum?
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta tell you, it's probably pretty recently.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've had lots of great days.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: I feel very fortunate in what I get to do day in and day out.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been director for over a period of a decade, but over the last six or eight years, we were planning, planning, planning, and then getting ready to build.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we were planning to close the museum in July of 2020.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: As you can imagine, we didn't make it there.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: We closed in March.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: But we were fortunate in the sense that we were planning to close.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we had explored this new software called Zoom.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had kind of schooled ourselves up on doing remote programming and all that.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so that turned out to be sort of handy.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: But everything about renovating a museum, doing a big capital project, trying to keep donors engaged, it just made everything really challenging in a lot of ways.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to say, overall, it brought out the best in people.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I would start with our staff, but everybody involved our faculty curators, our donors, the administrators, people from facilities, our contractor.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody just figured out how do you renovate a museum in the middle of a pandemic.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we were the biggest project at Yale during those years, and they were learning how to do that across the campus based on our project.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm both really proud of that.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: And there were, there were great days in the middle of that.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: But really, you know, we were coming out of the pandemic as we were getting ready to open and finally, finally getting to the days last March when we opened for the first time.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the first hundred visitors to the museum were New Haven school kids.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: And just watching those kids come in, and then the days following that, just seeing people flooding in the door and watching their reactions and seeing them have these moments that I remember from when I was a kid, that's definitely, definitely been the big highlight.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know that I would have predicted that.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I'm a scientist and so I get really excited about the research we do and so on.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I was raised, even if I didn't take the lesson on board perhaps the way I should have, that people are a lot more important than anything else.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's been true.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's just been true.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's you know, we we built this place for audiences both on and off campus and seeing them really enjoying the space and not everything landed 100%, but a lot of it landed really well the way we had hoped.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's very cool.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and I don't know, David.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: I feel I love research.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_03: Nothing gets me more excited than the research side and many of those aspects.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_03: But at the same token, the big class I teach, I teach 200, you know, future engineers, the basics of geoscience.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_03: That's by far the most impactful thing that I'm doing.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm sure you feel that way about the directorship.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, guiding this museum is massively impactful as far as an outreach thing.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: So all right, Stefan, best day in the museum.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there are the good days when we were coming close to completion to installing the specimens, and then watching people's reaction.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is really, really, really marvelous and very, very satisfying.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, when we installed finally the the big uh tourmaline crystal, it's over one meter tall.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually not a crystal, it's a crystal cluster.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very famous specimen, but also the other uh specimens, both the Peabody Museum specimens and the loans, and then just watching people being pulled in.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the satisfaction comes also from the fact that I don't see people just uh rushing uh through the Yale port of the mineral galleries into the David Frent Hall, but they're spending time with the Yale Pivody Museum specimens as well.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: We have again a recent, very recent, a year-old, just a little bit over a year old, uh donation of one of these stunning uh Chinese Stepnike specimens from Wu Ning, and we displayed it in an unorthodox way, slanted at 60 degrees, so that you actually look into the specimen, this spray of crystals erupting from the specimen.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: And some people, I heard them the other day commenting that this must be like Superman's cave, Ryptonite, you know.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there is another specimen in the David Trent Hall on loan from the Yample family, is one of these amazing etched aquamarine burial varieties, and one guy was just passing by it and just so nonchalantly just threw it up, threw it out, Gatorade.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: So these reactions are also very, very fun to watch.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: And people are spending time, they are looking.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I'm not exaggerating, Dave will correct me, the mineral galleries are getting close to the attractive power of the dinosaur whole.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't argue against that.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: And those are the the two sets of spaces that come up most often in the reviews of the museum.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people expect to be excited about the dinosaurs.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think the minerals for first-time visitors are the the big surprise.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well I mean, uh, you you got both of your passion comes through and spades in it.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Chris, I think we gotta go go check out this museum.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_03: This sounds like a great you guys are invited anytime.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_03: This sounds awesome.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_03: I I think uh when I give a a talk in the EPS department, I think it was I think it was closed for renovations.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_03: It might have been around the 2016 kind of era or a little bit uh thereafter.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_03: So it was it's kind of I didn't get a chance to go and just kind of rush visit.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_03: But Chris, we'll have to go check it out.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_03: This sounds amazing.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_03: And checking this STIB night out at 60 degrees, that sounds totally cool.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_03: This has been super fun conversation, guys.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much, and thank you for your passion and just explaining all the interesting aspects of the Peabody Museum.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: And we we can't wait to check out the I want to double click on that too, with what Jesse said.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_02: Passion is is contagious with both of you.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_02: It just it comes out, it you're exuding it, and I really appreciate you both for that.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty clear why you guys are so integral and so good at what you do.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: We are fortunate individuals, you know, because we are doing what we're like doing, you know.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's approval it.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's clear.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for the opportunity.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and thank you for doing what you guys do.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really important.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, mostly it's just fun.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_03: Mostly I just get to give Chris a hard time on the air with other people listening.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_03: So it's good.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_03: No, thank you very much for joining us.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_03: This has uh been a great pleasure.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_03: And uh we'll we'll look you up when we make it to New Haven.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_03: It'll be fun.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_03: Please come.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_03: Serious guys.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:05:40
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• 1:05:42
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• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_03: Peace.