Close your eyes and imagine a paleontologist driving a pickup truck out into the badlands of Wyoming to study the most celebrated dinosaur-bearing rock formation in the US and accompanied only by two dogs. Now answer me truthfully, did the paleontologist look like this?

When I wrote to Dr. Kelli Trujillo asking her for a picture of herself doing fieldwork, she replied, “I only have field photos of me teaching, since I’m almost always in the field alone.” Luckily, her work as a paleontological consultant has led to fossil discoveries that require her to supervise fossil excavation crews, and so she could share the picture above. Pity her pups can’t take pictures of her doing fieldwork, though – maybe they’d do better at getting her smiling (beardless) face in a shot!

Kelli is a vertebrate paleontologist who works on the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation (~155-148 Ma). Beginning in the 1870’s, the Morrison has been THE place to find dinosaurs in the American West, so much so that it was at the center of the legendary “Bone Wars” between rival paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh (Peabody Museum) and Edwin Drinker Cope (Academy of Natural Sciences). Thanks to intense collection over 140+ years, many species of dinosaurs have been described from the Morrison, including fan favorites Stegosaurus (Colorado’s state fossil), Allosaurus (Utah’s state fossil), and lots of sauropods. While its dinosaurs are extremely well-studied, the Morrison Formation itself needs more work.

Kelli’s research includes detailed mapping of Morrison outcrops, analyzing the composition of the sediments in order to better understand the environment in which the many dinosaurs lived and died, and obtaining more radiometric dates from different Morrison outcrops to help figure out just how many of these dinosaur species lived at the same time. She also digs quarries and carefully screenwashes the sediments to collect microvertebrate remains –these small animals of the Morrison, not the dinosaurs, are most useful in reconstructing the paleoenvirnment.

A significant portion of Kelli’s career has been in paleontological education, both in formal and informal settings. As a consultant, she works with developers and construction agencies to ensure that our nation’s paleontological resources are properly collected and preserved. As manager of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum, she has introduced thousands of elementary through high school students to the wonders of dinosaurs and paleontology. She also teaches undergraduates and volunteers to clean sediments off of fossils in the museum’s preparation lab, which is visible to the general public. Each summer, Kelli leads fieldtrips in the Morrison Formation for college students from the University of Wyoming and the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches them how to be field paleontologists and gets them digging in the dirt, discovering new fossils. And, of course, most of them love it!

Anyone setting up a new laboratory in the near future needs to visit the Looy Lab at Berkeley for inspiration. I spent a couple weeks there last summer, and every day, I thought to myself, “When I get to Wyoming, I want a lab just like this!” The Looy Lab is nearly always full (when I was there, they had two profs, four-and-a-half graduate students, and at least four dedicated undergraduates, not to mention scientists from other labs who would drop in for a weekly coffee or to have lunch). Folks collaborate on each other’s research, take group trips to the Synchrotron to get high-resolution 3D images of fossils, and just plain look out for each other. Dr. Cindy Looy makes it a fun place to do science.

Cindy is a plant ecologist who works on really old fossils: ~310-245 million year old ones, to be specific. Forests during this time period looked very different from today because they were composed of giant club mosses, seed ferns, and early conifers. Cindy’s research questions focus on the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history (the Permo-Triassic Extinction, ~252 Ma) and the transition from a world with a large Antarctic ice sheet (Late Carboniferous) to a world without ice (Middle Permian). Got the relevance to the present? Excellent. Cindy’s quest for plant fossils from these time periods has literally taken her to all ends of the earth: from mountains in Russia, to deserts in Niger and South Africa, to badlands in Texas and New Mexico. Cindy’s fossils document the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic Extinction: a single genus of quilworts is dominant all over the world, and it took over five million years for Euramerican plant communities to return to pre-extinction diversity and complexity.

Although Cindy’s expertise is on Carboniferous and Permian conifers (one of her papers describes a new species which she named Lebowskia grandifolia – Jeff Bridges thought that was pretty cool), she is advising students doing graduate research on Devonian liverworts, Permian phytoliths, Cretaceous leaf fossils, pollen in recent lake cores, and even experimental manipulation of living plants. The fact that she can advise on such disparate projects speaks to her abilities as a big-picture scientific thinker.

Forgive me the focus these past couple days on paleobotany, but it was nearly impossible for me to write about Caroline Strömberg yesterday without also writing about Cindy, and now vice versa. So, indulge me in another quick trip down memory lane: Back in the good old days of 2007, the three of us roamed the third floor of Smithsonian, getting our science done, but also causing a ruckus that included daily 4PM banana fights and even a wrestling match on the National Mall (I won because, as Cindy put it, “You were throwing your overweight around”)! Cindy’s roommate was in the IT department, and we formed competing bowling teams. We would sure love it if the Paleochicks Bowling Team picture makes it into the next edition of the Taylor et al. paleobotany textbook, which features photographs of both plant fossils and the scientists who work on them. Anybody got connections?

For more information about Dr. Cindy Looy, visit: http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/looy/index.html

Today’s scientist demonstrates just how much you can accomplish by returning to one main field area every year for fifteen years. Dr. Karen Samonds is a vertebrate paleontologist who studies the amazingly bizarre animals of Madagascar. If it’s not already near the top of your ecotourism hit list, Madagascar should be because most of its plants and animals are not found anywhere else in the world! In scientific terms, we call that endemic. It is also a hotspot of biodiversity – scientists from the Missouri Botanical Garden estimate that the (relatively) tiny island of Madagascar has almost half the number of plant species as the entire African continent. As for the animals, do a quick Google image search on lemurs? Can you possibly get any cuter?

Karen’s research centers on the origin and evolutionary history of these diverse and endemic animal communities. Madagascar is ~250 miles to the east of the southern African coast, and it has been isolated for at least 80 million years. Most of the animal groups that inhabit Madagascar today are thought to have arrived while it was isolated. When and how did they arrive? Where did they come from? What did the original colonists look like, and how much has evolution changed them over the millions of years since they arrived? These questions have remained largely unanswered because there is a 65 million year gap in the fossil record surrounding the time when scientists think that modern groups arrived. Karen and her colleagues journey to remote areas of Madagascar, searching for new outcrops and fossils. So far, they have discovered localities that are 30-50 million years old, allowing them to gradually fill in the gap in Madagascar’s fossil record!

One of the things that impressed me most about Karen is that she and some scientific collaborators founded an NGO to promote conservation, education, development, and also scientific research in and around Tsinjoarivo, Madagascar. In addition to encouraging scientific research (including field censuses of modern lemurs), the Sadabe NGO has organized dental and women’s health clinics, reforestation programs, an annual primatology field school, training of locals in scientific data collection, and creation of ecotourism brochures. Most impressively, in 2005, they partnered with the Madagascar Ankizy Fund to build an elementary school that teaches over 200 students each year. So many of us field scientists travel to places like Madagascar, do research, wish we could do something to help the locals, but then return home and go back to our usual American lives of research, teaching, families, and hobbies. I greatly admire Karen for being both a humanitarian and a scientist!

For more information on Dr. Karen Samonds, please visit:

http://www.bios.niu.edu/samonds/samonds.shtml

http://www.sadabe.org/Samonds/Index.html

For more information on the Sadabe NGO, visit: http://www.sadabe.org

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/

As an ex-pat, I have a pretty simple life here. Most weekday mornings I wake up around 7, make a simple breakfast and some tea, do a little computer work or reading and then leave about 8:15 to walk the 20 minutes to the museum. I have a research room at the museum that I am share with an American paleontologist who specializes on fossil horses. I spend my days going through the rocks we’ve found in the field, identifying and describing the different types of leaves, and photographing as many specimens as time allows. I promise a future blog on the actual research that I’m doing here, lest you all think I come here just to escape American life.

The museum is freezing, so generally for lunchtime I sit in the courtyard and make a sandwich. My favorite creation is avocado, mango, cheese, and mustard on a fresh-baked Big, crunchy white rolls. Other days I’ll alternate with peanut butter/honey/banana, tuna, or sardines. Or, on the rare occasion that usually coincides with visits of other visiting scientists, I’ll go to one of the restaurants near the museum. After lunch, I work until about 3:30 and then take a tea break at the museum cafeteria (the Ardi – the name Lucy was already taken by the tourist trap restaurant next door). Then, we get kicked out at 5:30, at which point I either meet friends or go home and cook dinner, using ingredients from my pantry (see picture).

The canned goods are purchased from small shops, the produce from street vendors, and the bread from the local bakery. I’m sure none of the produce is organic, but it’s fresh and local and tastes so much better than American fruits and veggies. In the US, when I make ful, I have to use tomato paste in addition to tomatoes, because American grocery-store tomatoes barely have any flavor. Here, the tomatoes are bright red, juicy, and full of flavor (and note that I don’t even like tomatoes), so quite perfect for any tomato-based dish. I know I’m not the first person to recognize the following, but it never fails to amaze me that America has been the most powerful nation in the world for the last 50+ years, and yet much of the food we eat is crap flavor compared with what you get in the “developing” countries. True, we do have farmer’s markets and Whole Foods, but it’s tricky for me to afford that regularly on Miami University assistant professor’s salary.

Weekends are relaxation time. Saturday morning I do some laundry and food shopping, and then make my way to the Hilton by 2PM for Hash, which is what makes my time in Addis so enjoyable: a couple hours of clean air, exercise, and delightful company, followed by beer, dinner, and dancing. It’s a wonderful opportunity to meet many amazing people (see previous ode to hashing). Sunday is back to the museum, maximizing the most of my short month here, but I let myself have a slightly slower pace of work on Sunday.

My mom asked for more pictures, so here are a few scenes from my daily life. I live in a clean, quiet guest house with my own bedroom and bathroom, and I share a kitchen with the other inhabitants. Today I bought a jump rope (running in Addis outside of Hash has not suited me), so starting tomorrow I will be the crazy ferengi jumping rope in the courtyard!