when my character was described in 2003, people thought that there was a single origin of dinosaur and flight that led to both my character and birds. Because I forget what year was like 1905 or something, this guy named Vibi, it was just pontificating about how flight may have evolved in birds. And he hypothesized that flight evolved through a four-winged gliding phase. And he drew this animal.
It was all made up, but he drew this animal that he called pro-atus. And you can find the illustrations of it. It's this little thing with wings on its arms and wings on its legs. So when my character was described by Xi Jinping, people were like, wow, he was right.
And so this was thought that flight in birds first went through a four-winged gliding phase. And then eventually evolved to power flight with a single set of wings. But a single origin produces both these modes of flight, right? But now, once you realize a flight may have evolved more than once with the discovery of the Scansary Octorigence being volent.
And then you look at the phylogenetic position of micro-rafter, it seems that micro-rafter may also be an independent origin of flight. We know that dinosaurs evolved wing-like structures on their forelimbs for some other purpose, and that these structures were accepted for flight. Greetings, future fossils. Welcome to episode 216 of the podcast Explorers, Our Place in Time.
I'm your host, Michael Garfield. So this week I thought I would be bringing you a conversation with David J. Brown and Sarah Huntley about their work to catalog the entities of DMT space for an upcoming field guide published by Inter-Traditions, but elves got into the recording equipment, apparently. So here is a totally orthogonal and far more conventional slice into natural history, an unrepentantly geeky conversation with the delightful and brilliant Jingmayo Conner, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Jingmay is an extraordinary human being and a complete badass, and I am very grateful to have captured this candid conversation with her, something like the modern equivalent of a bird landing in early, Cretaceous lakeside silt and preserving a perfect fossil lung. Anybody who knows me knows I love fossil birds. And Dr. O'Connor is the priestess of fossil birds and wrote a fantastic children's book when dinosaurs conquered the skies, the incredible story of bird evolution, illustrated by Maria Brzowska, which is so beautiful and incredibly rich with information and just as well suited to adults who want to understand the gritty backstory of this very distinctive group of animals that I think most of us take for granted and do not realize how exceptionally strange they are.
But first, I want to give my deep and enduring thanks to everyone who has been supporting me on Patreon and Substack, especially new supporters, Cam, Cecilia Sang, Gregory Batera, Ciroba, John Oliver, Sebastian Machuca, Yasek, Griska, Breaking Math Podcast, Moses Silburger, Tim Ronko, and everyone who has pre-ordered my new album, The Age of Reunion, which includes a song about dinosaurs or what that's worth, and which I'm dropping one track every Wednesday on Bandcamp and All Streaming Services, now through April 24th, but is also already available in its entirety with a totally surreal and psychedelic companion feature-link music video to my substack and Patreon supporters. At some point I decided I would do the world more good, stepping out of the incredibly crowded and hyper-competitive field of paleontology and into the incredibly crowded and hyper-competitive field of podcasting and singer-songwriting, well, whatever. Here we are, my children thank you for your support. If you want to buy them food, go pre-order the album at microgarfield.bandcamp.com or become a subscriber at patreon.com.com.
Or just sign up for free updates and I will have much, much more to share with you soon because I'm working on some extremely intense collaborations in the domain and wisdom and technology. Anyway, Jingma Iokanar, she is amazing. I'm really glad that we could have a conversation, not just about the content of her work, but also about the structure of the field and the life of an academic, her own curious upbringing and unique position on things. And I'm really, really glad I get to share with you.
Enjoy and go buy that book for a kid you know, someone else's or your own inner child. When dinosaurs conquer the skies is seriously one of the most accessible well springs from which you can sip wonder and awe at deep time. I will link to the book in the show notes. Thank you and enjoy.
I want to start with an apology because if I were doing this in my old gig at SFI, I would have spent a week reading all of your papers. Don't read that. I spent a week's worth of evening reading your book to my four-year-old. I think in my book, I kind of joke, I was like, if little kids read my book, they basically know everything that I know except for boring anatomical details, but I really condensed everything I know into that book.
I mean, I shouldn't be asking you about the granular stuff here, but... I just don't think that most people would understand or I just don't think it would be relevant to most people. How many people know what even a delto pictorial crest is. It's like that's the kind of things that I just don't think is there's any point in going into, does that make sense?
Sure, although I'd say if anyone could get people excited about it, it would be you. Or at least as together we can jazz people about delto pictorial crest. Not that's why I'm here today. Yeah, if you want to do, but yeah, I think there's a lot more exciting stuff that we can talk about.
Especially because even with my own research, of course, anatomy is like a fundamental building block of paleontology, a murder of paleontology, but I argue that the soft tissues that we get in fossils tell us so much more than the skeletons do. Yeah, so we can talk about soft tissue anatomy. I do want to talk about soft tissue anatomy because I think this entire conversation is going to be framed by the fact that my paleontological fieldwork basically stopped almost 20 years ago. And so there's been this enormous explosion of really good specimens discovered in that time.
And reading your book was a shock to me. I was like, are you kidding me? We know this. What a particular, what was the shopping do?
I was like, is this the podcast? Has it started? I guess I like to ease into it. Okay.
Yeah, no, there was, I don't even remember now, because like I said, this was, oh, like the details, like, and I'll save this for later, but the bit about the chalasse, is that how I'm saying it? I always said the chalice, but I also have never looked it up and I've definitely heard it pronounced a myriad of ways. So maybe we should like this stuff to figure out how to actually pronounce that. Okay.
But yeah, just membranes in the ag and stuff that you can. That's not actually fossilized. We infer its absence or presence based on other things, like for example, nest structure. So for example, if the eggs are in a buried nest or the eggs are at least partially embedded in the ground, like for example, a chowadontanest or an anantioranethanest, then we infer the eggs are not being moved.
And if eggs are not being moved, we infer the absence of a kooza. But so like in order to move your eggs, you have to have this feature. So we just, we are, that is something that's whether or not a kooza was one of the major factors in the survival of crown birds and cretaceous mass extinction is just a hypothesis, because we have no idea how most of these cretaceous birds were nesting. We know an antioranethanes, even in the late cretaceous, at least some of them had emobleness, but whether or not what other nest structures were like, we don't know.
Also, eggs are pretty rare. So do we just not have fossil ground nests for other groups of birds because they were less common than the anantioranethanes, which are the dongate group of terrestrial birds? Or is it because they had aerial nests? An aerial nest, of course, have extremely low preservation potential.
An aerial nest implies that the egg can be moved and it would imply the presence of a kooza. So yeah, I'm not saying that we'll never find a fossilized kooza, because I think there's a lot of things right now that we've been finding in the past decade that we never thought we'd find. So I'm not really made out, but at the moment, we don't have it. We do have fossilized membrane testasia or that, you know when you boil an egg and there's like the egg shell and then that skin, that has been fossilized.
So there's a lot in there. We jumped off the diving board rather than walking down the stairs into the pool, because again, I don't know how many of my listeners are actually even like paleontologically minded. You're being dragged through this with me, everyone. But, okay, so I want to get to the eggs.
I want to get to soft tissues, but I want to start with you just as a way of you introducing yourself. And I'd love for you to take this opportunity to tell your origin story in a way that it's like refreshingly different for you. Because I feel like you have been interviewed many times. Yeah.
And you're a distinctive person. But it's one way, but it's very diplomatic of you. No, I get this whole born from two tribes in LA living an unusual life thing. I resonate with that.
Yeah, I'm definitely not like most other paleontologists. I think that's going to be changing. I think I'm probably like on the front of this like new generation of paleontologists that are much more diverse and not this cookie cutter dressed to go hiking, worship, pulsarino type. And so yeah, I'm excited about the future of paleontology.
And I'm not saying that there isn't a place for the traditional archetype of paleontologists. And so recently I got somebody was some troll was like on my Instagram saying all this nasty stuff because I posted what I mean, you picture a paleontologist picture like Indiana Jones, even though yes, Indiana Jones was an archeologist or an archeologist, I guess he's based on rich young man, and he was a paleontologist. Where's the picture that guy white guy probably out digging for dinosaurs. And all I said was that this is a very narrow picture of our field and that there are many other types of people who also contribute to paleontology.
And I said this because I had just given a tour to this kid who had two double lung transplants and wanted to be a paleontologist. And we were trying to make the point that you could be a paleontologist without doing fieldwork. That was a point I was trying to make. And so I was just like, that's a narrow view.
You can discover new species in a collection or you can make huge contributions behind a microscope. Just whatever. And then some troll jumps on me and you're like a reverse racist and you talk about adversity, but then you better. And I was just like, dude, I didn't respond because I have learned my lesson about engaging with trolls, even though I think they deserve to be told to be off.
That's not allowed. So anyways, yeah, I'm not going to respond. I'm surprised. Until my daughter shows up.
Oh, wait, so I can say like that. Oh, you can say whatever the fuck you want until my daughter's in the room. And even then I'm probably still going to. I was just like, yeah, I think that you should like when people are, you should, you know, why not tell them that they're being shitty.
But anyways, actually what was cool is that I didn't respond. I was good. I bit my tongue. I was like, whatever.
But this famous comic book artist, Louis LaRosa, who actually does really amazing dinosaur illustrations, he jumps in and it just like starts battling this guy. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. The end. I don't even know why we're talking about different types of paleontologists.
Being distinctive, yes. Yeah, I've always just been like, I'm me. And that's the only person I can be. And I can't be somebody else even if I tried, you know, even if it means when they all get fired, I don't know.
But yeah, that's just who I am. And yeah, so it's not like I'm trying to be distinctive. I'm just being myself. But yeah, I think I'm just a little bit different from paleontologists.
Other paleontologists have a different, I've got into the game differently. I always say I'm late to the party because I didn't have an interest in paleontology until I was in college, whereas like everyone else is their origin story is all, is the same origin story, right? I saw Jurassic Park or I played with dinosaurs when I was three years old. And you've got to admire their commitment.
Like their like, constancy. When I was a kid, I wanted to be this. I wanted to be that. I went through all so many different things.
But these guys are very simple minded, very focused. And I respect that. And I also recognize that they've had an extra 15 years at least to memorize all the dinosaur names and no lies. They got a head start for sure.
But what are you going to do? My turn is my own. So how did you get into it? Then?
Before that, before that, what was child? I read somewhere that you played violin in a folk band. Yeah, I did. So, well, like my mom being like a Chinese mom, makes sure all her kids play an instrument, right?
That's just what Asian moms do. And I'm really good because learning to read music is a language. So even though I'm not fluent in any other language, I can read music. I'm not fluent in it either.
But yeah, so I started violin, which I think is, I don't think they should allow little kids to play violin. Kids just get tortured for the parents. Not that I got noticeably better or appreciably better later on in life. I was, oh, I'm still a terrible violinist.
I haven't touched a violin in 10 years. That's probably for the better. But yeah, I was forced to play the violin. I wanted to play saxophone and my dad told me that wasn't for girls.
So I play violin instead. Yeah. My sister played the background. My wife teaches violin to kids and my four-year-old is like super into it.
She's awesome. Yeah. Anyway, go on. Yeah, I play violin.
But I really hated lessons. I wasn't good. And so at a certain point, I think when I was a junior in college, my mom said, all right, if you hate your violin lessons so much, you can quit if you join our folk band. So it's my parents' folk band.
My mom, my dad plays drums. My mom plays recorder. They both sing. Obviously my mom doesn't do the same thing at the same time.
But yeah, they had another violinist and the other violinist would just get nervous when they performed. So they wanted another violinist to like make it so she wouldn't be as nervous because there's not so much focus on a single violin, like screeching over the rest of the instruments. Yeah, that's how I got into it. And honestly, I really enjoyed it.
And the last time I did pick up my violin, it was not to play Vivaldi or whatever, like, stuff that I was trained in, but it was to play folk music. Yeah, we played Korshka, which is like the Tetris theme song. It's a Russian folk song about a hooker, I'm pretty sure. And yeah, we played folk songs from all over the world, like Mexican folk songs, Cuban folk songs, Japanese folk songs, yeah, all sorts of stuff.
And it was really fun. It was an enjoyed the experience. Right. Did you just tell me that the Tetris theme song was about a hooker?
Yeah, I think it's about a guy being like, oh, hey, prostitute or woman anyways, I want to have sex with you. And then it's song progresses, like you just like try to give her more and more things until she gets her everything he has and she's like, all right, let's go and push it. I think that's what it's about. And now I'm like, oh, I should back check myself.
That is Coro Bushdale about. Because I'm sitting here being like, Tetris. Yeah. We give you everything.
Yeah, I don't know. It's about it's a peddler and a girl haggling over the price of her, I don't know, it's her maiden head or just spin, but anyways. And with every line we accelerate. Okay, anyway.
Okay, so it's fun music. Yeah, no, this is what I actually wanted was just to talk to a person. Yeah, you're going to be like, you may never release this. The, that was your.
That was my junior and senior year in high school. I think it was only those two years and then I went to college and I stopped at the end of a band. Why? Okay, so what did you go off to college thinking you were going to do?
But this folk band still exists and my parents still have folk practice with them once a week and they still perform once a month. And they've gotten a lot better. I have to say every time I go home and I hear them, I'm like, wow, how many? How many of these?
The violin is a guitar accordion, a bass guitar clarinet would be the violin, the drums and the recorders. So seven or eight people. I've been members of change as they're all retired. So sometimes somebody moves away or something happens, but they're still doing it.
Did you tour? No, we'd like so my parents met folk dancing, a Chinese immigrant and a second generation Irishman from New York meet in LA in the 80s in a Bulgarian folk dancing troupe called choreor, which I don't think exists anymore. But yeah, that's how they met. And so as a little kid, like we would go to like a county fair and we performed folk music and they tried out as little kids dressed up in Bulgarian folk outfits and it was cute.
Yeah. Yeah, that's how they met. And then they did this other folk group that still exists and still meets every Friday and then on fifth Fridays they have live band performing for the end. Yeah.
Okay, your question. So my mom, she was a state home mother for most of my childhood, but my dad was an artist and we just didn't have a lot of money. So at a certain point, it reached a point where my mom had to get a job. So she decided to go back to school.
And originally she was going to do something like practical and become a social worker. And so she started to be the GRE and she got four kids that are trying to kill each other and she's dragging us to violin lessons and we don't want to go and piano lessons and all that wasn't the most present father. And yeah, so it was hard. And she's like driving us to violin lessons and she's memorizing GRE words.
And she's really hardworking women. She gets like a GRE was out of 1600 at the time. I don't know what it is now. She gets like a 1598 or something like that.
The doors open. She gets offered scholarships at least to place like USC which wants like beef up with reputation by having smart people. So she gets the Dean's fellowship there. And so she decides I'm not going to be a social worker because I'll probably be miserable if I do that.
And I'm going to do what I've always loved. I'm going to do geology. So she does a PhD in geology in three and a half years. And she could have done it faster, but her advisor was like, I'm not going to let you get out of here in three years.
It's too fast. And I was like 10 years old when she started. And so she would take us to the lab with her because we can't afford babysitter. And she's parking at meters and she sends us kids to wipe off the chalk.
The meter maids are putting on the tires. So like she can park in the meter more than two hours or whatever. And she puts us in the lab and gives us like cups of liquid nitrogen or like glass sticks and little blow torches. I was like, knock yourselves out.
I accidentally burned my little sister once. I put the end to the torches anyways. But we started putting the computer at home. We didn't have the internet.
We didn't have the internet. We were like I said, I was like, we're poor. So but then we had access to these computer labs at USC. And so me and my brother and sister were downloading all these stuff and printing things.
And we actually accidentally downloaded the virus. One of the computers and cost some grad student all their data. It was a feel bad. As somebody who has since done a PhD, I'm like, man, my mom and her little pack of kids were probably so annoying.
But yeah, for us it was an interesting experience. And that's how we got into geology. And yeah, I actually entered college having already taken geology 101 at a community college because that's what my mom did when she graduated. She got a job teaching geology at Long Beach Community College.
And yeah, she made me take her summer course because again, we needed the money and if not enough people signed up and they wouldn't happen. So she got to take this class. I took a couple of her classes. So I was able to skip all the intro geology classes.
And I was only declared geology major by freshman year. And technically I entered as a sophomore. And yeah, so I was doing geology. I was committed to that.
But I didn't know what aspect of geology really, no aspect of geology had really sparked my passion yet. I was mostly doing it to please my mom. Actually, like the story of my life. If you want to talk about everything I've ever done, it's to have my mom pat me on my head and tell me I've done a good job.
And so anyways, I was like, okay, I'm going to do volcanology. That sounds cool. Volcanoes are cool. Sure, why not?
And then I took a class by Donald Prothro who's a well-known paleontologist, written a ton of books, and like real books, not kids books, like mine. And he teaches a class called historical geology, really fascinating class. And it takes you from the origin of the universe, all the way up to the origin of planet Earth, and then up from there to modern day on planet Earth, right? And of course that involves the evolution, the appearance of life and how life has changed in the 3.8 billion years that life's been on our planet.
And I just totally got hooked by thinking about evolution and being told this is how it works. But then you try to actually run a simulation in your mind of okay, this animal has a bunch of babies and one of them is like a freak baby with a long tail, but that long tail is advantageous. So it survives better and has more babies than the ones with that long tail, and some of his babies also have freak long tails, and they survive better. And you try to like, put this in your mind, and it's just so big that you can't, right?
So it blows the mind, literally your mind's low. And I don't know, I just fell in love with it. And because I was already a geologist, if you're going to study evolution through that lens, it's paleontology. Here I am.
Whitebirds. So that is, so when I made the choice to be a paleontologist, I tell Donald Prothro, like, hey, I want to be paleontologist like you, and he's, that's not a good idea. And he tells me all the reasons, not really, because don't do it. And he tells me all the reasons why I shouldn't do it.
And you can ask any student who's ever approached me, and they will tell you that I've given them the same lecture with my own personal additions. I want to hear that. I want to hear that. We'll sort of go back to that.
Don't forget also because that's what I'm doing. I'm not doing paleontologists, but yeah, I go. Why not to be paleontologists, very important. Yeah.
So he tells me, and I'm like, I don't care. I'm going to do it anyways. And so he, and then he's like, the last party words were at least don't do paleontology. And I was like, yeah, no problem.
I don't like people. And then I decided to do paleontology, but I knew to it. And I'm interested in everything. So I always say, I'm an equal opportunity, extinct animal enthusiast.
I love it all. Except for Dr. Lights. I was like, yeah, I told you I took a million times but it's true.
on Marine Rat tiles, which actually are my favorites. Like I also have a please answer tattoo on my ankle. I love Marine Rat tiles. And I got accepted to that program, but I also was really intimidated by his lab.
I was like, I'm not good enough at math to be in this lab. So I turned that one down. And then I got accepted to USC, where I could either work on mammals with Wang Xianging, who's a man, also mammal curator at the Elinatros Museum, or work on birds with who he's got. And so at this point, I had made the impractical decision to be a paleontologist.
So I decided to make a practical decision in what I studied because at this time, all these birds are coming out of China, right? Suddenly the diversity of mesosome birds is just exploding. So I knew that this was an area where I could actually make a significant contribution. You can just rehash what are T-Rex's arms for or T-Rex fight for is people are gonna be rehashing that forever.
But this is something new. This is something where you can really contribute. And even though I had no interesting birds, like really done. Like in fact, I actively disliked birds at the time because I had been doing fieldwork in Mongolia with Wang Xianging.
And I got chased by this rooster and a strong-tizing experience. I was like, I like birds, but yeah, I was like, I'm just doing them anyways. I like them now for the record. But I also think that whatever group of organisms I chose to work on, I would fall in love with and become obsessed with and start buying all these jewelry whatever and like just getting everything that's blurred and everything regardless.
Even it was got lights, perhaps. So it would have limited the amount of things available to buy. But yeah, so that's why I chose birds. But yeah, now do you wanna hear why you should not be a paleontologist?
Well, hold on. I just wanna comment for a moment before you go there on why your paleontology succeeded and my paleontology failed as far as a career strategy. Because I remember, I was one of those kids. I was like from days, like from the start dinosaurs, all the way through that admirable monomaniacal thing.
And I feel like now that was all just a prequel to what I'm actually supposed to be doing in the world is just like living this incandescent, disastrous, open question of come with me on an inquiry into the investigation of meaning that pops open at somebody at 22 when they think they know what they're gonna do for their whole life. And then they are diverted from that path. And it's in my case, it's so funny to hear you talk about this stuff because I painted myself into a corner, right? Okay, not just, I love dinosaurs.
But I was with Bob Ocker at Como Palof starting at age 12 and like getting to go out there a little bit every summer and work with him in that respect. When that dig team fell apart, it felt like Mario, the floor panel. And I was like, I've just been on this, the decaying floor panel side scroller thing ever since. And in a weird way, it's like, it's beautiful.
It's like the difference between, this is Ada. Say hello. Hi Ada. Hello.
Your hair looks so cute. Did you just have it in a pigtails? Yeah, she added up like puppy dog. Oh, nice.
Like all those like party bands. You wanna say hi? You wanna say hi? Did you know what I'm checking out for my book?
Did you like it? You don't have to say you like it if you didn't. I appreciate it, honestly. I am honest to a fault.
No, she does like it. And she was very excited to meet you. But some nights she wants something else. That's the full spectrum.
Fair enough. I don't read like when people are like, did you watch the prehistoric planet? I'm like, no, I'm dinosaurs all day. I'm not gonna go home and watch dinosaurs at night.
Like, no, I'm gonna watch it. I'm gonna go on and watch it. I'm gonna go on and watch it. I'm a period drama kind of person.
Oh, right on. Shouldn't I be getting paid for this right now? Shouldn't I be getting paid to? People are, yeah.
When people ask me, like, if I watched it, I'm like, why would I? It's not for scientists. It's not scientifically accurate. If anything, it would just be like having your fingernails pulled out for watching just the makeup, these things about dinosaurs and parade it as if it was factual.
Oh, it tries to be crazy. Every time one of these seasons come outside, peppered with people being like, oh, what do you think? What do you think? I'm like, eh, they did not try.
They did not try. They could have led in everything with hypothetically, based on comparison with birds, living dinosaurs, maybe some dinosaurs also had complex mating behaviors. They don't say that. They're like, oh, look at this dinosaur doing its mating dance.
This is what it did. It's totally misleading. It's all lies. It's garbage.
Sorry. My favorite part of that show is the making of where they show their work a little bit. They're like, this is why we cooked it up. But anyway, yes.
So there's something like, I'm seeing here, I feel like I went into this with the Western romantic ideal of marriage. And I had this dream of how it was going to be. And then when I realized that I wasn't going to get to work with those people and in that place, it got complicated. And I just love you.
I love hearing you be like, I don't know. I was into geology. And I was like, sure. I put out a PhD app to a university at Texas at one point.
And the guy there was like, if you like dinosaurs, don't come here because the guy running this place, he's going to make you work on turtles or something. And I was like, I don't know. That sounds pretty cool. I like turtles.
I've had pet turtles since I was a kid. But it was like, my academic thing was mostly people being like, you don't get to choose. They're going to choose for you. And me being like, ah, fuck that.
And then running off. I had no choice in my dissertation. Like Luis was like, if you work with me, this is your thesis. And that's very different from a lot of programs.
Here, it's do what you want. Shh, talk around. Do rotations and lots of people's different than different people's labs. Learn different things.
See what you like. And then choose something. And I think that's really awesome what the University of Chicago has. But the University of Chicago has the money to make this happen.
Because they are like the students in our evolutionary biology program come in fully funded. So it's not like one advisor needs to come up with the money. But in the case of with me, it's like my advisor had to come up with half the money for my PhD, which means he had to have the money, which means the money had to come from a project, a specific NSF grant that gave him money to do a specific set of research. And that's why there was limited choice.
And yeah, so it depends on the program for sure. But yeah, did you only apply to a single program? And then what? No, I applied to T and OK.
I was going to apply. I wrote applications to UT Berkeley in Chicago. And somewhere I still have my letter to Chicago. I never even sent the stuff.
And again, I haven't spoken to Bob Barker in almost 20 years. But you haven't had a longer podcast? I can't get him on my podcast. I can't get ahold of him.
I think not only is he notoriously diff. The last time I was at the SVP conference was 2018, because it happened to be in Albuquerque when we moved to New Mexico. And I ran into the guy that was working with Bob on Dimitradon's in Texas. And he was like, oh, yeah, Bob's always hitting me up on my 3 AM texting me.
I was like, OK, great. So he's not as hard to get ahold of as it seems. I think he's actually disappointed that I didn't become a paleontologist. And he just doesn't want to talk to me anymore.
I think that's what happened. But I'm not sure. It's a long time to hold a grudge. Yeah, yeah.
But like the older I get, the more convinced I am that. The more you're like, oh, I'm starting to hold long grudges too. I get it. I can do this.
So it becomes a part of your anatomy. Yeah. I think the difference between us is that because I got into paleo so late. I didn't have a set idea of what it was, or what it meant to be a paleontologist.
Whereas you had this more fixed idea of what you wanted and what you expected. And so that means you had less flexibility. And so I was just like, I don't know. It's all good.
Let's see. But I didn't have time to really imagine what it was going to be. And then be disappointed that it wasn't that. I guess I think one thing you'll notice everybody you'll see is you get disappointed in just what science is.
You're like, oh, these people don't know what they're doing. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah.
OK, love the one you're with. It seems like that's worked. That was the whole point of that. But I would love to hear why you think.
Do not be a paleontologist. Yeah, the talk. Yeah, OK, yeah, the talk. Here's the talk.
Well, essentially, there's a lot of people that are like, oh, paleontology is interesting. And there are a lot of people who want to be paleontologists. And so paleontology for educational institutes is cash cow. You get all these students coming in, and you can train them to be paleontologists.
But for every 100 students, like it's trained to do paleontology, there is one job. So it is extremely competitive. So if you're not willing to sacrifice your life for paleontology, don't do it. Now, of course, that is an extreme.
If you want to be a curator at the AM&H or the Field Museum, that's what requires the ultimate sacrifice. You sure? If you want to be a small-time paleontologist in some national park or a small university, it definitely requires less out of you. I think you can have hobbies and things like that.
But I think it's just one thing it's to let people know is that it requires enormous amount of dedication, and that there are very few jobs. And it is very competitive. And because it is so competitive, this leads to another problem, is that it is an especially nasty area of academia. Like, all of academia is nasty.
I describe academia as a pit of my purse. Because it's so competitive, there's so little money, the amount of money that NSF makes available for grants. It does not grow. If anything, it shrinks, despite inflation, and despite increased applicants' pools.
So you have more and more people applying for this funding. That is not growing. And if anything is getting smaller. So grants are incredibly competitive and very difficult to come by.
And my job, description, is you will lead an externally funded research program. So you're under so much pressure to get money, to do your research. And then the museum takes overhead, which is 59%. At MIT and some places, it's 100%, which means that you're spending all your time applying for grants.
And then when you get them, your institution takes most of the money. And then, yeah, so academia is a scam. Because you're, you get nothing. Because they know you'll work for nothing.
And the jobs are so competitive. So they're like, if you won't take it, someone else will. Because there's 99 other pay-in-dollar just lining up behind you wanting your job, right? So they can pay you whatever they want.
And then you have to spend all your money trying to get grants, which you're going to get rejected for. If you're good at getting grants, you get one in five. And you know how much time it takes to put together one of these proposals? And then when you submit papers, you have to pay for your paper to be published.
So you're paying for to get published. But you are also for free doing the work as a reviewer to review other people's papers as an editorial board member to handle manuscripts. Oh, that's like these journals are making money while you give them money to make this just act, sorry, but do you understand how much of a scam academia is, period. But then anyway, so academia is a scam and it's highly competitive and it's an nasty place.
But for some reason, paleontology is the worst. And if you look online, one of the most toxic places on Twitter, like outside of like QAnon hypotheses or whatever is paleontology Twitter, it is so nasty. And people are so mean to each other and backstab each other and steal each other's ideas and steal each other's research and purposely reject each other's papers just to get ahead and all sorts of nasty backstabbing things. And that you really have to have a very thick skin to be in this field.
And so this is something my advisor did not tell me. This is something I add from my own personal experiences. And yes, I think the field of birds and the field of dinosaurs in general is a little bit worse than other fields. Definitely I'll tell these stories to like, paleobotanists and they're just like, you guys are crazy.
I get that, but most people like when they can dinosaur paleontologists make up a majority of paleontologists. And yeah, which is not necessarily makes sense. Anyways, yeah, the first, like when I first got into paleo, I'm not gonna name who this person was, but I kept submitting papers. And they're like your first neighbors, are your little babies, you put your heart and soul into your first papers and you're doing your best.
And then you send it out there for review and you're hoping that you're gonna get constructive criticism, right? And if you did something glaringly wrong, the person will point it out and it's gonna feel like a gut punch, but you did something wrong. So fair enough, this is what the review process is for. That's not what happens when your paper comes back.
It's just some asshole just saying all sorts of mean things about your paper that aren't even true because they are doing it with a specific purpose of crushing you while you are young and can be crushed and trying to prevent you to actually go from students to professional. And we see this in nature. There's animals that go out there and kill other baby animals because of their own species because they're just trying to prevent competition. So this is something that is extinct in whatever.
It is a known tactic, right? But yeah, and when this person did this to me repeatedly, it really hurts and I'll never forgive them, but never. Hoping that gross 20 years strong, Bob, Bob, I'll rest to you, it wasn't him, I'll say it. But anyways, but it was really hurtful and I cried.
Like when I got my paper's back review and you get these nasty comments that are not even factual. I cried and I remember sitting in my office crying and my visor, he's a lazy, he's a vatial guy and he doesn't cry. So he's like, what do I do? He's like patting me awkwardly.
Oh, it's okay. I don't wanna do that if you learn me. But yeah, I toughened up and I'm not everyone to do that. And not everybody wants to live a life where you're constantly fighting for everything.
Some people are like, you know what? I can get me, this is a miserable life. I don't wanna do this. That's not me, I'm a fighter.
So I'm like, oh yeah, you want to fight, that's fine. And so I will push back and I have what it takes to play this game. But it's not, I refuse to ever sink to the level of the way other people play it. I won't do that.
I'm like, but at the same time, you have to recognize that most people, a lot of people out there play dirty and you're gonna have to always be dealing with this nastiness in your life. And so academia really is not for everyone. And I think that's really important for people to know also before they get in and they spend years of their life in a degree that they decide then that they're never gonna use or that this is not the life for them. So that's not just my topic.
There are some nuances to it. I'm sure that I'm like forgetting and like my passionate outrage against some of my mean colleagues. But yeah, that's like the main thing is you have to work super, super hard and you gotta deal with mean people at the end. Okay, okay, there's a choose or an adventure here.
One question would be, so did the kickboxing come first or did it come as an adaptation to an environment of studying what my former mentor called kickboxing, cycloclod creatures? The other one, maybe the more appropriate one is like, okay, paleontology is also weird in that it has a rather large, I don't know what you would call it, off grid, but like unaffiliated network of amateur researchers. There are lots of people who consider themselves paleontologists who are not academics also. Which is also uniquely paleontology.
Do you think there's people in their basements calling themselves chemists? No, it's not a scottie. Yeah, I live in New Mexico, so like breaking bad comes to mind. Yeah, okay, yeah.
So you would consider the meth kitchen to be a chemist, you know? This is what I'm getting at, right? Is that like this next thing maybe we talk about is, and I actually do wanna get to hearing you talk about your work in China and the actual birds and the stuff I do. But maybe the last thing that just, because I know it's gonna be frocky, I'm really curious, but I remember rooting for the Disney McDonald's assist on the Field Museum's purchase of Sue, which happened when I was in high school, I think you were probably in high school too, right?
Yes, but I also like a no interest in dinosaurs. Was this on my radar and no? Yeah, well my dad was working for Disney when this happened. It was weird, I was close to it, but I was also a teenager, and so I was like, capitalism man, and it's funny because when I had Steve Brusati on the show, who by the way, is the person that I, when I stepped out of paleontology, I was like, it's exactly what she said, there's a hundred people in mind for that job, and it was so funny because when I talked to Steve on the show, I realized, I was like, oh my God, I stepped out, and he took my place in mind.
I was like, I'm meeting, I had this weird, I had a cosmic mind fuck moment, where I was like, this is the guy that took the job. I would have been directly competing with him for- So you guys applied to University of Chicago at the same time, so what you're saying? No, not exactly, but like his interest in the Tyrannosaurus work and all this stuff, anyway, I was just like, he would have been my, and maybe this is just something that again, this causally does not make sense because you said you went into, you only came to appreciate birds after the fact, but I think about this stuff, and I'm like, Amabird in terms of kicking the other birds out of the nest, like the intense sibling rivalry piece, the pecking orders, there is something very birdlike about academia in that respect, but then there's this other thing, which is that we're at a time when, I'm gonna zoom way out and say that like, when I talk to Steve, and Steve was talking about the Golden Age of Paleontology being now, it's the Anthropocene, right? Because we're ripping up the surface of the planet and we are therefore finding things that are stored in the rocks at an unprecedented pace.
And so there is this relationship between development and capital finance and discovery and science, and it's all very twisted and weird, and what am I gonna get? Oh, that the same process is the process that is not just ripping up the literal earth, but is eroding the epistemic structures. This is like a big thing we talk about on the show a lot. The information scaling challenge to the institutions of modernity and the way that you may disagree with me on this, and if you do, you will disagree with me in an interesting way and I welcome that.
It strikes me that by the time that I've spent in the halls of ivory towers, that even experts, because of economic reasons are focused on particular things, they're not incented to, or perhaps they can't even keep up with the pace of research in especially busy areas, and like discovery is like on fire all over the planet right now, and like how can anyone even keep up? And so there are, in a way, it's usually the bonewars of the 19th century and how people were, they created this taxonomic mess where the same animal had multiple different names attached to it. And you see the same thing, I was just looking at some of my old friends from the Santa Fe Institute published a piece on quantifying evolution and selection with assembly theory. And I was watching on Twitter as, I don't think this is just limited to paleontology.
Like I was watching people being like, oh, I did that work 10 years ago, this kind of thing. And it's, I think we can be forgiven for this disjunction between the pace at which discovery is happening and the pace at which individual learning is possible. If somebody did something 10 years ago and you didn't cite their work, then you didn't do your background research properly. And also the reviewers failed because they didn't notice that they didn't cite previous work.
And like, oh yeah, show the rate of discovery is enormous, but every PhD or most PhDs who are really good at what they do are focusing on a single point. So it's easy to stay up on the research of your single points because it's not that much going on. Like for me, mesisobirds, it's not that much other mesisobirds going on, but there's not that many mesisobirds researchers. And the more broad your interests are, the harder it is to stay current.
So I would almost justify why it's okay to be such a narrow focus. But that's also the reason that we have conferences. You go to conferences to see what's going on and to say current. As it's difficult to sit, set aside time your day to read every scientific paper that comes out.
But with your going to these conferences and just dedicating these few days to just seeing what's going on, to learning. You don't just learn what that topic, what that person is talking about. They're also talking about all the background research that is related to their project. And you see the citations in there.
Usually when I'm in conference, in the margins of my abstract book or whatever, just like a lot of citations of, oh, they cited some people that I didn't know about and you write it down. And then you'd carry your abstract book home and never actually download any of those papers. But I tend to say, but yeah, that's also why now we're moving towards a single scientific language. If you want to, for us to be more easily disseminate science, it all needs to be the same language.
So English is a scientific language, thank goodness. It's a language, it was not a language I spoke. I probably would not be able to be a successful scientist because I'm real shy when it comes to languages, but that was also made it possible for me to live in China for 10 years. Yeah, I know basic Chinese, but like, I've given, even scientific talks in Chinese, but mostly they just laughed at me afterwards because my Chinese is a bad.
But yeah, I was able to be successful also there because again, the scientific language is English. And so everybody, like all the scientists must speak English in order to be successful. So I'm able to communicate with them easily. And yeah, I think there's enormous progress that's being made in little areas that people are focusing on.
But if we look at the overall status of humanity, there's no progress. We are reverting to, we have passed our peak and we are now in the fall of Rome and things are really shitty. And so for all the scientific progress that you were just exfoliant on making sound, like it sounds so significant important, like it's doing us no good. And so at a certain point, we need to step back and be like, if any of this is not helping, then maybe that's not what we should be focusing on right now.
Maybe we should be focusing on some simple basic things to get ourselves in a place where any of the science of the progress will matter because we're still around in 100 years. And yet, yeah. You have to go hunt grants, right? Like it's, yeah, because if we focused on, if we step back and we're like, let's look at these basic things and some of these basic things would be like, let's take care of each other, let's stop putting tons of money into military, let's spread that money around and give people basic free healthcare and like decent wages and let's put money in science and all this, and then my problems will be solved.
But also paleontology is not, it's not exactly the most important, like you're gonna save our planet in science. Now that we're in a six mass extinction, I can be like, like, we need to study mass extinction so we can understand them and understand how organisms respond. The only thing is really our mass extinction is happening on a time scale that is so much smaller than past mass extinction. So I don't know if animals are more prone to extinction because of the greater rate of change.
Right now, things are changing at an extraordinary rate, much faster than they have in past mass extinction. So I'm not quite sure how relevant that information for the past will be, but this is what I'm gonna say in my NSF grants under broader impacts. So that's the thing, it's every dinosaur documentary that I've ever seen, it has to do that grant application twist at the end and this is important because, and it's duplicitous. It's like the real thing is the intrinsic curiosity.
I feel like there are people that love being out in the field or they love being in the museum or they love that being engaged in an intellectual dance with the sublime horror of deep time. Or they, and I guess I'm asking again multiple questions at once, but I think my goal here was to go through the question of your stance on amateur paleontology and what is it about, because it is funny, how many people are just like adult-a-lessent dweeb? And I think maybe that's the thing, it's not the amateur piece of it, it's the rogue piece of it. I don't care, like amateur is for sure, like there is definitely a strong potential for amateur is to contribute to science.
But the thing is, like these people who put ideas out on a blog don't know what it actually means to do research and get your paper, your ideas through the scientific process of peer review and how much time it actually takes to write a manuscript, a real manuscript and format it and create publication quality figures. And then have your peers say whether or not this is acceptable research before you cough over $1,500 and it finally becomes part of the scientific literature, because the idea is I have that I could not get published because you do not have enough information to support it. And with an internet and the blog, you can just say whatever you want. And that's fine, I don't care.
You can say that the Democrats are eating babies or whatever you want on the internet. I don't care, but what people need to recognize is there is a difference between something that has gone to peer review and something that is just somebody's ideas on a blog that is not equal. And if people understand that, then that's fine. But a lot of people don't understand this distinction.
And they're in lies, the problem, whatever. Anyways, and then the second problem is that a lot of these people are very nasty. Even beyond academic standards. Yes, like in academia, like I said, there's a lot of people are really mean, but there's a whole new level of just nastiness because they're hiding behind their computer screens.
They don't have to see each other at conferences. They don't have to play nice because you have to play nice because other people are the people who are gonna review your papers. And they're gonna be mean even if you're not mean to them. But if you're mean to them, they're gonna be really mean.
And they're gonna review your NSF prints. That's also a panel of your peers. So it's yeah, so these people are able to just bring a whole new level of vitriol. And yeah, yeah.
So it's just I completely avoid the internet. I use it for work and I use it to occasionally buy things, but I don't spend time on the internet for pleasure, except on Instagram where I do spend about 30 minutes a day and watching videos of overweight records and like young people hurting themselves. And that's my serotonin booster, like that in the kickboxing as you mentioned. And just to answer that part of the question, kickboxing is a very recent thing.
I only started it like nine months ago, nine and a half months ago. Before that, before I got into failure, I did Kung Fu as a high school. I was really into Kung Fu. I loved it.
And then I I sought once I went to college, never did any Kung Fu in China. That's one of my deep regrets that I didn't just come to Kung Master while I was there. And then just recently, just getting old, like I turned 40 a couple weeks ago or a month ago shoot. So yeah, anyways, when you get old things start to hurt and things start to fall apart.
And so you have to like, you have to start working out, not just because you want to be fit, but because if you don't, things will rapidly deteriorate. But yeah, I started kickboxing and I loved it. And it is extremely therapeutic. I deal with a lot of BS in work.
So I love just getting that all out on the bag. I actually got Boxster Knuckle. I don't know if you can tell it was good stuff. Yeah, as gross as that.
And yeah, and I love it. And it's also a serotonin booster. And I think with extreme pressures of being the dinosaur curator at a major museum, like a field museum, it's like a life saver for me. So I definitely lose my mind if I didn't have my kickboxing.
Why did you be a really angry person? And I'd probably get a fight with somebody on the street and get killed because it's Chicago. So I wouldn't lose my mind, but definitely that would happen. Yeah, so that's, and that's, I feel like we've made it over the continental divide under the leeward slope of this, which is that, oh my God, the thing that always did it for me with paleontology, it turned out wasn't even, if I could go back in time and like stress this point to my younger self, I would, like the thing I loved most about it, the thing that I clung to in the rest of the year when I was not in the field, when I was in high school, you know, in this crap, like was just being outside in a remote location.
And like I look back at that, the happiest moments of my life when I was like in the badlands somewhere. And the most miserable moments of my life or when I was sitting in front of a computer for 14 hours a day. And so, Well, then you know, that's what a paleontologist mostly does. If you're like a paleontologist at a national monument or park or something, then you're out a lot.
But most of you are a professor or curator, like it's mostly hunched in front of a computer. But there's all different types of paleontologists. There's paleontologists who are out in the field all the time. They love it, they're so good at it, but they don't publish very much.
And then on the other extreme, there are paleontologists who do zero field work and maybe they just do a lot of loud work, but they're always indoors. And I'm definitely like, if I was gonna say, what is my strength in paleontology? It's like taking data and connecting the points and making sure, extracting a story from this information. And so I'm like a publishing machine.
I love to write papers and I do a lot of that. So I only spend four weeks in the field every year. And I enjoy it much more when I'm tagging along as a part of somebody else's team. Being in charge sucks.
So you say you like being out there, but I'd like to see you leading a team and see if you still like it. Because for example, I was out in Hell Creek for two weeks. Working this really amazing microcyte where we found so many new species, a lot of cool stuff, like really rich microcyte. And as we were finishing taking down camp and we're about to go into town, little town, Ico Laka for the dinosaurs' digg before we leave and go back to Chicago.
And I look around and I'm like, this place is beautiful. But I did not appreciate it until I was saying goodbye to it because I was too busy worrying about all the details and literally working three times as hard as anyone on my team. Because at a certain point, it is easier to do the work yourself than it is to constantly be nagging people. But it is not enjoyable being, yeah, basically once you reach yourator status, it's not, it's like, it's all the joy is gone.
You're just working all the time and just pressure and stress. Sorry. So you do actually have a question about rich-family entries. That was the Roy Chapman Andrews thing too, wasn't it?
That started out sweeping the floors. And I am an H and then ended up the curator and was like, God damn it, how did I end up in this? Yeah. OK, so.
So let's talk science now. I'm getting more depressed than I'm going to. I'm going to put my rest on your podcast. Please don't, please don't.
A little exaggerated. Now that I have a sense for you as a person, thank you. OK, one of this is for the record. This is how all the paleontology conversations go on the show.
It's just more like. It's not special. Oh, you're very special because you get the one to tell me about this thing, which first of all, you said you wanted to talk about working in China and how awesome it is. And I just wanted to make a note that in your book, I really appreciated you taking the more global perspective on the history of geology.
It's important. And how you talk about Chinese philosopher Shen Kuo, being the first to use fossil evidence to understand the climate's changed over time, which I felt terrible, not knowing until the age of 39. Yeah. So it actually, I recently also learned that Native Americans also looked at fossils and recognized that climate's changed.
So that's a really cool bit. I would like to stick in there. I also, when I wrote the book, there was a lot more in there that the editor was like, all right, we're going to cut this down. This is way too much text for every page.
So also Leonardo da Vinci study fossils and also recognize that they indicated climate change. So when we think about like Doruen, it's no, this is just a single, this is the most recent chain of discovery in Europe. And that is not. So it's not that this is when we discovered evolution.
It's like lots of people have known about evolution, but then we like burned the library of Alexandria or whatever. We've been like destroying knowledge and like going through very dark ages. So yeah, and people forget about past knowledge, but also just fun fact. So I happened to be for whatever reason on the Wikipedia page for Shen Kuo.
And I saw that exact picture in there. And I realized that because I'm not the illustrator, but that is not Shen Kuo. That is Shen Kuo as a minister. And so I did write the editors.
And I was like, if you're going to sell this book in China, please fix that. Oh. Oh. OK.
Yeah, funny. Yeah. OK, yeah, that's here's another choose you're an adventure. I do for sure want to ask you about this in particular, because the fact that we have not one origin of dinosaur flight, but numerous origins of dinosaur flight is something that was completely occluded to anyone's understanding at the time that I think most people listening to this show grew up and cared about this stuff.
Well, we just, there was no evidence then. Like all the evidence for multiple origins of flight is recent and really the most important piece of information that really led us to this hypothesis, because it's still just a hypothesis. Right now it's a big debate. Single origin or multiple origins.
Or like a couple origins and more versus many origins, because I'll get into it. But yeah, really the way we realized it was really with, in 2015 with the discovery of a dinosaur called E.C., which in Chinese means strange wing. It's a scan story after rigid. When I describe it to people, yes, scan story after rigid A.
I didn't come up with that name, but it's my favorite group of dinosaurs. Those were just multiple after their. Yeah. So this is a scan story after a today.
And they, so let me back up. This is a new group of dinosaurs that was only discovered in 2002. And when the first specimens were found, they were juvenile specimens. So they weren't pretty well preserved, because if it's gentle, it deposits, it's a lager-stuffed in.