My goals for this blog are not just to broaden people’s perception of what a paleontologist looks like, but also to show the diversity of research that paleontologists do. Only a fraction of us study dinosaurs; our study organisms may not be as sexy, but the research questions we can answer are! So far, we’ve seen scientists who study fossil leaves, molluscs, human ancestors, and molecules. Now let me introduce you to another kind of microscopic fossil that is crucial to understand when and why grasslands came to cover so much of Earth’s surface and to one of the top American scientist working on these tiny fossils.

Dr. Caroline Strömberg is a pioneer in the study of phytoliths (translated from Greek as “plant stones”), the microscopic pieces of silica that form in some plant cells. Phytoliths record the shape of the plant cells in which they form, and different plant groups have differently shaped cells and thus distinctive phytoliths. Grasses in particular are rich in silica (hence, animals like horses that eat predominantly grasses have really long teeth), and so while grass body fossils are rarely preserved, their phytolith remains are. Thus, by studying phytolith assemblages preserved in fossil soils, it is possible to reconstruct past vegetation and look at the transition from the forest ecosystems of the early Paleogene to the open, grassland ecosystems that are abundant today.

Caroline has done fieldwork in places around the world that are grasslands today, trying to figure out when the transition happened, whether it was synchronous worldwide, and what might have triggered this profound ecological shift. She is also interested in the coevolution of grasses and grazing animals. In her final year of graduate school, Caroline won Best Student Paper awards at the annual meetings of both the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Paleobotanical Section of the Botanical Society of America. (It’s my last week of classes and I don’t have time to fact check, but I’d bet Caroline is the only person to win both of those awards!) On a totally non-related note, I have to mention that Caroline is second author on a Science paper detailing the implications of finding grass phytoliths in dinosaur poop.

Looking for advice on what to do for a postdoc? Let me present the Caroline Strömberg example. By the end of graduate school, Caroline was already widely recognized for her phytolith work. She could easily have kept only that focus and had a very successful career. But, she viewed the postdoc years as a chance to pick up new skill sets and make herself a more complete scientist, so she came to the Smithsonian to work on Cretaceous leaf fossils with Dr. Scott Wing. What a piece of luck for me!

People are often classified as left-brained or right-brained, but what do you call a person who is creative and artistic as well as scientific and logical? I’ve been the beneficiary of fantastic hand-drawn cards, witnessed Caroline put together some really brilliant costumes (no detail is too small), and been part of some hilarious practical jokes. One of my favorites, from the only time that Caroline and I were in the field together: for many years, Scott has been expounding on the why the giant sunglasses they give people after cataract surgery make the best field sunglasses. Well, Caroline and I decided that they were not nearly fashionable enough, and somehow managed to “borrow” Scott’s sunglasses AND find glitter in Worland, Wyoming! Field fashion at its finest.

For most of my early experiences doing fieldwork (research trips, not class fieldtrips), I was the only woman. I am incredibly grateful that I was always treated as “one of the guys” and had the same jobs as everyone else (no extra time on kitchen duty for me!). These were wonderful experiences that convinced me I wanted to pursue graduate work in paleontology and spend as much time doing fieldwork as possible. Nevertheless, self-doubt crept in since I saw so few women over the course of these early trips, and even fewer women leading field crews. So imagine my delight when a female postdoc (later professor) began taking a larger and larger role in one of the major research teams in the Bighorn Basin, where I was doing my PhD fieldwork. It was encouraging to watch her interact with her (mostly male) colleagues, treating them as equals and being treated by them as an equal. And to watch her kick butt collecting samples in the hot Wyoming desert!

Cesca calls herself a geochemist, but I think we can also classify her as a paleontologist because she studies how plant life responded to climate changes in the geologic past. But rather than using fossil leaves, wood, fruits, or pollen, Cesca focuses on plant molecules that are preserved in the rock record: molecular fossils, one might call them. Leaves have a waxy coating that is extremely resistant to decay and is often incorporated into sedimentary rocks. Cesca and her lab group spend their field time digging trenches to collect uncontaminated sediments. They take these back to the lab, use a series of chemicals to isolate the leaf waxes, and then use a mass spectrometer to look at the isotopic composition of the waxes. The isotopic composition can be used to reconstruct changes in climate and vegetation. Recently, Cesca has been studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a geologically abrupt global warming event ~55 million years ago that is the best geologic analog for modern-day global warming. A more complete understanding of the climatic and ecological changes that occurred during the PETM may help us better predict what the coming centuries will bring and how we should focus conservation efforts.

Not only is Cesca an incredible scientist, she is also a wonderful mentor, both in formal and informal settings. She genuinely cares about the welfare of everyone around her. My favorite memory of this: generally on Friday nights, all the paleontologists working in the southern Bighorn Basin meet up in Worland for a “night on the town.” One night, we were in the karaoke bar when an incredibly stoned local started getting a little too friendly on the dance floor with one of the female students. Cesca immediately came over, got in the guy’s face, and challenged him to a dance-off. I was hoping it would go all Zoolander, but as Cesca was just starting to bust out her moves, he slunk away. And that is quintessential Cesca, doing whatever it takes to ensure the safety of those in her charge.

You can learn more about Cesca at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/cesca.mcinerney

A short movie on Cesca’s work in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9bfVKkqIoA

If it were up to me, NPR would have Dr. Holly Dunsworth on speed-dial to comment about all exciting new discoveries in the world of paleontology, like they do Neil deGrasse Tyson for every eclipse, supermoon, or similarly stimulating astronomical phenomenon. Heck, while I’m ruling the world, I’d make FOX give her a biologically oriented popular science show that airs Sunday evening before the more physically oriented Cosmos. Because Holly is the antithesis of an “ivory tower” academic. She is incredibly funny, articulate, and intelligent, all of which make her one of the great scientific communicators – if you need independent confirmation, check out her essay for NPR’s “this i believe series” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90311455).

Holly is a biological anthropologist whose research focuses on how humans came to be humans. She uses a combination of paleontology, genetics, and studies of live apes to answer questions like: When did our ancestors lose their tails? Why are human babies so helpless for so long? Why don’t we have hips that make it easier to give birth? When did we learn how to throw a curve ball?

Holly’s main field site is Rusinga Island, Kenya, where volcanic deposits preserve an ecosystem 18 – 20 million years old. Nearly all parts of the ecosystem are preserved, including fossil tree stumps in life position, leaves, grasshoppers and other insects, and all sorts of vertebrates, including an unassuming mammal called Proconsul. Proconsul is one of your earliest hominoid ancestors, found near the beginning of the ape radiation. Holly has studied Proconsul anatomy, particularly its feet, and used its bone structure to make inferences about behavior. Now, she and her collaborators spend their summers looking for new fossils on Rusinga Island so that they can more completely reconstruct the paleoenvironment in which Proconsul lived and better understand how evolution occurred in our hominoid ancestors. To learn more about this work, and especially to see pictures of Proconsul and Rusinga, check out Holly’s blog on “The Ape in the Trees” at http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-ape-in-trees.html.

For more information on Dr. Holly Dunsworth, please visit: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/soc/dunsworth.html

You can see what a wonderful science writer she is by checking out her contributions to the evolutionary biology blog, The Mermaid’s Tale: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2012/05/braindrops-on-noses.html

And, you can even watch her lecture for the Leakey Foundation and the California Academy of Sciences. (I stole the title of this post from the title of her lecture.) Never have so many rock ‘n roll album covers appeared in a scientific talk! http://fora.tv/2012/11/29/Your_Genome_is_Showing_Human_Origins_Gets_Personal

My senior year of college, when I was agonizing over which graduate school to attend, Dr. Scott Wing gave me a wonderful piece of advice that I now pass on to any student who comes to me for help. He said that while being advised by world-class scientist at a highly ranked university is important, it is perhaps more essential to have a great set of peers. (Scott would know – look at all the rock stars that came out of Yale in the late 70s and early 80s.) So based on a gut feeling from my prospective student visit and an email from a highly touted recruit who was finishing her Master’s at the University of Cincinnati and had just settled on Penn State for her PhD, I decided to also go to Penn State. And thus began the friendship that has influenced my life more than any other. Since that first year in graduate school, we’ve pushed each other to be better scientists, not to mention better human beings. But unlike many sibling relationships, there has never been competition between us. That’s who Jocelyn is – that’s the environment she creates around herself.

Thankfully, she’s doing fieldwork in Morocco right now, hopefully far away from the nearest computer and can’t smack me for embarrassing her. However, I’m not the only person who has benefited from the noncompetitive, intellectual setting that Jocelyn generates. Before coming to AMNH, Jocelyn was a postdoc at the Smithsonian. I learned from several graduate students that any time they had to make a major decision, they would think, “What would Jocelyn do?”

The succinct answer to what kind of science she does is the title of one of her scientific talks: “Clams, catastrophes, and climate change.” Jocelyn is a paleoecologist and paleoclimatologist who studies the effects of environmental perturbations on shallow ocean life. She does this by collecting bulk sediment samples from fossil-rich rocks that were deposited in the shallow ocean, taking them back to the lab, and carefully identifying every single shell in the sample. Jocelyn also collects tiny samples from large, well-preserved bivalve (clams and their relatives) shells to analyze oxygen isotopes and thereby reconstruct climate. She’s currently using some really cutting-edge quantitative analyses to study marine ecosystem responses to the end Cretaceous meteorite impact (dead dinosaurs) and Paleogene (hothouse Earth ~65-34 Ma) climate changes. Most of Jocelyn’s fieldwork for this project was done in the southeastern US, where she braved wild boars, leeches, and really hot and humid weather.

Recently, Jocelyn started working in Africa, trying to piece together a record of mollusc diversity and community structure. A common theme in paleontology is that Africa is understudied (see previous blog), and so she truly is on a quest of discovery. And look how happy it makes her:

For more information on Dr. Jocelyn Sessa, visit http://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/master-of-arts-in-teaching/faculty-staff-profiles/jocelyn-a.-sessa

There was never any question of who would be the first scientist in my blog. Call me biased, but if you spoke the phrase “successful field paleobotanist” and asked me what immediately came to mind, it would be the woman in the photograph above. Dr. Bonnie Jacobs is precisely what a successful field paleontologist looks like: 5’2” of intelligence, determination, toughness, and spunk!

Africa is an extremely challenging place to do field research. It’s super expensive, logistics and local bureaucracies are intimidating, and conditions can be downright dangerous (large and scary animals; microscopic yet scary things that make you really, really sick; unstable governments and coups). Until recently, Bonnie was the only American scientist working on African plant macrofossils (fossils you can see without having to use a microscope: e.g., leaves, fruits, seeds, wood). Funny story how that came to be. For her PhD, Bonnie investigated past vegetation and climate change in the southwestern US by studying 42,000 year-old fossil pollen. But, she ended up doing a lot of her microscope work at the National Museums of Kenya, where her husband had taken a job. After Bonnie completed her PhD, she applied for two grants: one, a continuation of her graduate research, and the second, to work on plant macrofossils from the Tugen Hills in Kenya. To her surprise, Bonnie was awarded the latter, despite never having worked on macrofossils or on African fossils. And thus began an admirable field career!

Bonnie studies macrofossils from the last ~50 million years in sub-Saharan Africa. She is best known for her work using leaf fossils to interpret past climate. However, she has also done incredible work on the biogeography and evolution of African forest ecosystems. Bonnie’s work is important because humans are causing tremendous changes to Earth’s climate – by studying fossils from warm intervals in Earth’s history, we can better predict how Earth’s climate and ecosystems, particularly those diverse and vulnerable ones in the African tropics, might respond to present-day global warming.

With 30+ years of African fieldwork, Bonnie has some of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard. I’m only going to give the barebones skeleton of my two favorites, because I hope that Bonnie will one day write a best-selling memoir (nudge, nudge). The first is a near-death encounter with a large, terrifying animal that kills more people in Africa each year than any other. Not crocodiles, not lions, but hippos! Bonnie once unknowingly placed her tent between a hippo and its favorite food supply while doing fieldwork in Kenya. I can’t imagine what must have been going through her head as she lay in the dark, listening to the hippo get closer and closer. The second story is from when Bonnie and her husband were living in Nairobi. A coup had broken out, and one day fighting erupted around their house. Bonnie described barricading themselves in their house, taking cover under furniture, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. After several nerve-wracking hours, the shooting stopped. Bonnie and her husband fled their house and escaped to the house of their bosses, Richard and Maeve. How’s this for paleo street cred: A coup erupted, there was fighting all around our house, so we escaped and took shelter at the Leakeys’.

For more information about Dr. Bonnie Jacobs, visit:

http://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/EarthSciences/People/Faculty/B%20Jacobs

http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/author/bonnie-f-jacobs/