I want to acknowledge something about
the sort of science that I do.
When most people think science, they think
something like this.
They think lab coat and gloves and expensive instrumentation, pipetting, you know.
Controlled experimentation.
As great as that is, as many wonderful things as you can learn
with a controlled experiment, let me just
say that in some fields of science,
it's a little bit more like this. Most people
don't think of science as having
anything to do with going Vegas, going to
Vegas and hitting, you know, the craps
tables. But it is true that some kinds of
science are like that and I say welcome
to the wonderful world of paleontology. Because no matter how prepared you are,
no matter how ambitious you may be, no
matter how badly you want to find that
amazing fossil , you might but more, more
likely you won't. This is March of last
year and I was hiking through this field
of boulders with my crew and we were on
our way somewhere else. And I said hey
listen as you're hiking be sure and keep
your eyes peeled for fossils. We've never
really looked at these rocks and you can
find fossils in the sandstone. These are
sandstone boulders. And I said if you
want to look for something like, and I
looked around for the nearest scrap of
bone sticking out of a sandstone boulder.
I said "Something like this" and I went wait a
minute and I leaned into those and the
undergrads who are with me tell me that
I cannot repeat what I said to you next,
because as I looked into this tiny,
tiny fossil on a boulder. What I saw was
this. Here it is getting out of the
boulder. Here's the close up for you. This
is the top of a primate skull and so
what we have here are the two eye
sockets. This is where the nose starts
this is the beginning of the brain case. And tantalizing, right? It's just the tip
of the iceberg and I was like, "Oh, the
rest of the skull is in there!" and was
high-fiving Sarah Wilson, who's here in
the audience, I was like "High-five. I am as
cool as your grandpa." And, and our
somewhat taciturn preparator who's from
Germany said, well I'm not so sure. And I
said what do you mean? Look at the skull.
And he said, sometimes they fall apart in
the sandstones. And I was like, oh don't
be so negative. We're going to get this
back to the lab. We're going to prep it out.
It's going to be the best possible
anybody's ever found. I could probably
just retire now because I'll never find
anything that cool again. Well, it was
good luck to find it but if they say the
Paleo God giveth and the Paleo Gods taketh
away.  I'll tell you what, I'll take
this even though it is just the front of
a skull. Sebastian was right. Everything
else was missing. What you see here is
the forehead, the front of the brain case. These are the eye sockets, the orbits and
I know it's a primate based on its
anatomy. Oh, but I don't have any teeth
and I won't know what species this is
until I find some teeth from the same
sorts of areas. So here's what you need
to find fossils. There's no escaping the
fact that you have to have some measure
of good luck, number one. Of course it
helps to have some training, it helps to
be persistent, it helps maybe even more
to have some money. But as in other
fields of science, you need giant
shoulders to stand on, and I have a
picture of John Andrew Wilson here
because these are the giant shoulders
that I stand on in my paleontological
fieldwork. And it was in the 1940s that
he came to the University of Texas as a
young geology professor. And he, among
other things, he founded UT's vertebrate
paleontology lab. This is the most
important paleontological repository of
record, in the state of Texas. This is where all of my fossils that I find in my
fieldwork are curated. And if you're
wondering why there are so many great
eocene aged fossils in this part of
Texas the answer is of course, geology.
Hooray for geology. The Big Bend is
absolutely filled with ancient volcanoes.
This period of rocky mountain building
towards the end, what you see is a whole
bunch of volcanoes popping up. So
essentially, all
over this Basin, you've got volcanoes and
the volcanoes really start in the middle
eocene. And here's the great thing about
volcanoes some of you more savvy geology
informed people are no doubt thinking. I
don't think that hot lava is a great way
to preserve fossils. And you're right. But
if there's one thing that volcanoes are
really good at doing it's burying stuff.
volcanoes produce tons, upon tons, upon
tons of sediment. And this sediment, right, it's rusted out as ash and rock
fragments and things like that. Here's an
eruption happening. And all of this
sediment, mainly ash, is going to be
redistributed by rivers. It has to go
somewhere and you have a great big
flurry of this stuff coming down a river
valleys, called a lahar, so here's some
poor house I think in Chile that got
buried by a lahar, but you have this
great combination of a sedimentary basin
that wants to trap sediment and a source
of volcanoes and eocene that are
providing the sediment and it's that
material that all of the fossils are
preserved in.
