(upbeat music)
- When we imagine dinosaurs, we think big.
But we need to look at the small details
to understand the complete story.
How you can scientists
reveal the world of dinosaurs
through tiny fossils?
We'll find out today
when we talk with
paleontologist Matt Carrano.
I forgot how much fun these can be.
(upbeat music)
- Wow.
Ooh (laughs).
- Hi, welcome everyone,
thanks for joining us for another episode
of Live from Q?rius
Smithsonian Science How.
So happy to have you here.
Today we have a very special guest.
With us now is curator of
dinosauria and paleontologist
from the the Smithsonian's National Museum
of Natural History, Dr. Matthew Carrano.
Matt, thank you so much
for being here today.
- It's great to be here, thanks.
- Matt, today you're
gonna help us understand
how you study microfossils to
better understand dinosaurs
and the places that they lived in.
But I think to kick off our show,
we should start off at the beginning
with you telling us a little bit
about what you do as a paleontologist
here at the Smithsonian.
- Sure, sure, we'll I'm a paleontologist,
so really all that means
is I study ancient life.
I happen to study dinosaurs,
but paleontologists can study
plants, or clams, or whatever.
And so I'm a curator, so
I care for the collection,
I study what we have in the museum,
and I go and I get new fossils.
- [Maggy] It sounds
like a really cool job.
- [Matt] It's a great job,
and of course we're gonna
talk about it today.
- So before you tell us exactly
how you study those dinosaurs,
I think we should ask our viewers
how they think you do that.
What do you say?
- Yeah,
I'd like to hear.
- All right, viewers,
here's an opportunity
to participate in a live poll
to tell us what you're thinking.
Tell us: scientists study dinosaurs by:
assembling whole skeletons,
comparing to living animals,
collecting fossil fragments,
or recreating ecosystems?
Take a moment to think about it
and put your answer in the window
that appears to the right of your video.
So I think a lot of people took a clue
from out topic today.
- It seems like it.
- And so most of the
responses, we're at 63%,
say that collecting fossil fragments
is how you study dinosaurs.
What do you say?
- That's a good answer,
I think those people are right,
but I think it's a little
bit of a trick question
because the other people are also right.
So we do all these things in paleontology,
and it's actually
important to do all of them
because you'll learn different things
by doing each of those different things.
- And so, has this always been
the way that paleontologists have worked?
Have they always done all of these things?
Or have they traditionally focused on
just collecting fossils maybe?
- A long time, I think in
the history of paleontology,
really collecting was
the most important thing.
And if you can imagine 150, 200 years ago,
being the first people
to find dinosaur fossils,
you just, you don't have any context,
what are these things?
So what you need is you to find them,
you need to find good fossils,
and put them together and
understand what they are.
And so for a long time,
that's really what the focus was.
In fact, when you go to museums today,
you're seeing skeletons, most of the time,
that were collected probably
more than 100 years ago.
- [Maggy] And what do these
whole skeletons tell us?
- They tell us, I think,
the really straightforward thing,
which is what does the animal look like?
But they tell us things in
detail about the animal as well,
that record things about its history,
its evolution, maybe what
it ate, how it moved.
But some of it is really
just simple puzzle,
what's this puzzle look like?
I mean, if you're the
first person to pull up
a stegosaurus, and you don't know
what stegosaurus looks like,
good luck until you find a skeleton,
you're not gonna get it right.
And most of the time we got
it wrong in the beginning.
- So one of those responses
in the poll question
was comparing fossils
to living animals today.
How has that revealed new information?
- That's been important
because as paleontology's moved along,
we've gotten a little more biological
in how we think about things.
We wanna know now about
how the animals live.
We've got two ways of doing that, really.
You can look at things that
are relatives of dinosaurs,
and that would be crocodiles and birds,
and they inherited certain shared features
that we can study today.
Or can you take a view and say,
Well, let's look at an
animal that is similar
in the sense that it's a big
animal, like an elephant.
So maybe there's something
analogous about that
that helps us understand dinosaurs.
- Very cool, so have the
depictions of dinosaurs
over time changed as
they were comparing them
to different animals
or maybe constructing those
skeletons in different ways?
- Oh yeah, it's great
if you can get a chance,
you see the sort of history
of dinosaurs illustration.
It really is like a window
into how people were thinking.
So you can see right, this
is one of the oldest pictures
of a dinosaur from the 1850s,
and you can tell they
were looking at kangaroos.
And a two-legged animal, well, okay,
it's not a person, a
kangaroo is a good model.
But after a little bit
of study they realized,
well, these are really reptiles,
and people got into a little bit of a zone
where they thought, well, they
should look like reptiles,
so now you have these preposterous things
crawling around on the ground,
which, that doesn't work either.
- [Maggy] Dragging their
bellies on the ground.
- Yeah, it just, you
literally, doesn't work.
And then we sort of continually added
to what we know about them,
and now our view of dinosaurs
is that in many ways,
they sort of stood and walked
more like a mammal,
very upright, you know,
very energetic animals.
And so modern depictions
are really reflecting that viewpoint now.
- So these drawings and illustrations
that we see of dinosaurs
walking and moving
in different habitats,
is that actually reflective
of the habitats that
dinosaurs are living in?
Can we learn anything from that?
- Yeah, it's a good question,
because you look at these pictures,
they're all kind of complete in many ways,
but in fact, most of the time
they're not very complete.
And we sometimes have information,
sometimes we don't.
You can look at a lot of
these dinosaurs pictures,
and really, it's like they're
standing in a parking lot,
there's nothing there.
There's no plants, there's
no other animals, really.
That is not how ecosystems work.
Or you get this kind of very artistic,
impressionistic view,
and it's just kind of like
how maybe did it feel,
and that's really what
that kind of art is like.
And they're great for what they do,
but they're not based on the science.
And you know, nowadays,
we try to have all the
pieces of these images
be based on something;
a fossil or an inference
we've made from some piece
of knowledge we have.
So for example, here, if
you took a time machine
back 110 million years ago,
and without moving, on the spot,
this is probably what it
would have looked like.
- [Maggy] So, Washington D.C. perhaps?
- Yep, Washington D.C., you
can go to Laurel, Maryland,
to where those fossils were collected
and you know, kind of a
bayou, swamp environment,
all those animals, we find those fossils.
- So, what kind of
fossils are you collecting
to be able to fill in those gaps
to better understand what
the flora looked like,
in these, the plant life,
in these artists' drawings.
- Well, you know, the
ideal thing of course
is that we just, every time
we go out, it's a jackpot,
we just keep finding skeletons
of all the animals that we wanna study,
but it never works that way,
so we have to target places that preserve
smaller fossils that are giving us
a sample of all these other animals.
It's very hard to find a whole skeleton
of a very small thing,
but you can find pieces of these things
and identify them.
- So that's what we're seeing here
with you in your office,
are these collections of microfossils
which you've also brought here
for us to see today.
- Yes, this is,
these are examples of
those collections, exactly.
- Very cool, so thank you so much
for helping us understand
a little bit more about
the history of paleontology
and some of these small
fossils that you get
to be able to fill in those gaps.
- Sure.
- Matt, let's learn a little bit more
about your work with microfossils.
You collect microfossils as you said
to fill in the gaps,
but I'm really curious about
what studying them and comparing them
actually reveals.
And before you jump into it,
we're gonna ask our viewers again
to start pondering that question.
- All right, that's good.
- All right, we have another live poll
for you to participate in.
Tell us what you think.
Microfossil comparison reveals:
individual dinosaur behaviors,
dinosaur morphologies, change over time,
distributions of dinosaurs?
Take a moment to this about it
and put your answer in the window
that appears to the right of your video.
We're both watching the results come in.
- This is kind of exciting actually.
- I know, it really is.
The bars are changing quite a bit,
but 50% of our viewers, now
45%, but still the majority
think that it shows change over time.
What do you say?
- I think most people
have gotten it right.
Unlike last time, this
was not a trick question,
so really that's the
most common thing we use
these types of fossils for.
Each one of the collections
we make of these fossils
is like sampling an ecosystem,
so you're imagining a moment in time,
and by getting more and
more of these fossils,
we can actually look at
how these ecosystems change through time.
- Very cool, so I think it's time
to dive into one of your research sites.
I know that you've
studied somewhere called
The Morrison Formation,
an area with different rock layers.
Can you tell us about that place?
- Yeah, so, I work a
lot in the western U.S.,
this is a great place to look for fossils
'cause the geology's right there.
And in the Bighorn Basin we have
what's called The Morrison Formation.
Its Lake Jurassic has produced many
famous, famous dinosaurs like stegosaurus,
and it's a particular layer of rock.
So from a particular time,
and then above that is another
layer of rock that's later,
called the Cloverly Formation
that's early in the Cretaceous period,
and I study both these.
But the Morrison is the one
I wanted to show you
some things from first.
- And what did you bring to show us?
- Well, you know, the exciting thing
about the Morrison is that even though
people were looking for a hundred years,
there's still many things to find.
And the biggest success for us
was finding a lot of dinosaur eggshell.
And eggshell, while it's not that rare,
finding any amount of it is really rare,
and we found essentially
10,000 pieces of this stuff.
- [Maggy] Now, how can
you tell that's eggshell?
- Well, hopefully you can see
it's actually curved like
eggshell, it's quite thin.
It has particular texture to it,
and so once you sort of
understand what it looks like,
you can spot it.
You just have to sort
of believe me with that,
but you know, if you come with me,
I'll show you how to do that.
And so once we found a
lot of this in one place,
we thought, okay, well, this
is not just one little piece,
there's something there in the rock
that we wanna get at.
So we excavated this huge site.
It's a beautiful place to work,
beautifully colored set of rocks.
And right at the top of these
outcrops was this layer.
And so we pulled out huge
blocks full of eggshell.
- [Maggy] So when you say
there were a lot of eggshells,
we're talking thousands of fragments?
- [Matt] Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
I mean buckets essentially of this stuff.
It's very deceive, it's a very thin layer,
but in that layer, it's
almost like a pavement,
if you can imagine of these crushed eggs.
And the way we look at
them is we will cut them,
and look at them sort of in cross sections
under the microscope,
and that gives us a sense
of how they're structured.
So this very pretty picture here
is showing you the side
view of a slice of eggshell.
And you can see on the bottom
these very kind of vertical crystals
growing from the bottom
and then these horizontal layers above it.
And together, that gives us some clue
that this is probably a
meat-eating dinosaur's egg
as opposed to a different
kind of dinosaur.
- [Maggy] Interesting,
and what's this here?
- [Matt] So this really pretty image
is same kind of thing, eggshell again,
two of them on top of each other,
under what's called
Cathode ray luminescence,
and that just means it's
illuminating particular minerals
that, so here, calcite is orange.
- [Maggy] So calcite is
what eggs are made of?
- [Matt] Yep.
- [Maggy] Even today?
- And it's in our bones and other things.
It also is invovled in fossilization.
The most important thing here, though,
is that vertical orange
stripe in the top left,
which is, it's actually sediment
with calcite filling a pore,
which is like a tunnel
through the eggshell.
And when the animal was,
the baby was in the egg,
that's how gas would have passed
in and out of the egg
so it could breathe.
- So all of this information
that you were able to reveal
with the imaging and with
the fossil fragments,
were you able to determine
what type of animals or
animals were inside these eggs?
- Yeah, we got really lucky,
because normally what I just showed you
is sort of how out far we typically get.
The eggshell gets you kind
of the category of dinosaur.
But once we started to actually excavate,
we were finding these
tiny, tiny little bones,
you can see this tooth here, very pointed,
with serrations on it,
beautiful example of a
predatory dinosaur tooth.
- [Maggy] That looks
like meat-eating tooth.
- Yep, and that is probably
a millimeter or two across.
And here's an example, you can see
we found quite a few
of these little bones.
They don't look like a
lot, under the microscope
is really where you get the information.
- As a non paleontologist,
I would not know
that those were fossils.
- No, and in fact, it took a lot of work
to really understand
this, they're so small.
The key, though, was finding this piece,
and this piece was,
it's the tip of a snout of a dinosaur.
- [Maggy] Oh, it's tiny.
- Yeah, again, doesn't look like too much,
but once we got her into the microscope,
we had an artist do a
drawing of it up close,
and we could see that the tooth, the bone,
has five teeth in it.
On the bottom there of that drawing,
you can see a few of them sticking out.
And he also was able to do
kind of a digital sculpture of that,
and again, as it comes
around to the other side,
- [Maggy] Ah, now I can see it.
- You'll see these pointy little teeth.
And because it has five teeth,
this is the important thing.
In the Morrison Formation,
there's only one dinosaur that
has five teeth in this bone,
and that dinosaur is Allosaurus.
And Allosaurus, thankfully
is a meat-eating dinosaur,
so that works.
So this tells us these
are baby Allosaurus bones,
and this is an Allosaurus nest.
- [Maggy] Wow, how interesting.
I mean, I've seen the Allosaurus before,
but I never really think of it as a baby
or even think about its nest site.
- Yeah, I mean, and all
dinosaurs have to be babies,
and actually the biggest dinosaur eggs
are only about this big,
and these are even smaller.
So, you know, this
animal to be 30 feet long
and a couple tons.
- That's a really cool example
of how tiny fossils are revealing
some new information about dinosaurs.
Do you have another example
that you can share with us?
- Well, from the same site,
that what we turned out for us
it was really even more exciting than that
if you can imagine
was the layer that buried the eggs
was also full of fossils.
These fossils were microfossils,
really small things.
And in amongst these microfossils
we got super lucky,
and we found a skeleton.
And this skeleton is of a reptile.
And you can sort of see the backbone here.
- [Maggy] Oh, absolutely.
- [Matt] And here's
the head of the animal.
And the teeth are closed,
the jaws are shut.
- [Maggy] Ah, there it is.
- [Matt] But it's actually
a relative of lizards.
Not a lizard itself,
it's called a Rhynchosaur,
and today, Rhynchosaurs
are only in New Zealand.
The Tuatara is the last
Rhynchosaur in the world.
But back in the Jurassic,
they were super common,
and lizards weren't.
So over time, the lizards
have kind of taken over.
And finding these animals here
is part of understanding
how that happened.
- Very cool, so even now,
like the Rhynchosaur that lives now
in a place where they,
I mean, the only place in the world
you can actually find relatives of it
from millions of years ago.
- And you know, if you had gone back
151 years,
- Here in the U.S.
- You would have seen
them everywhere on earth.
- Very cool, so these are cool examples,
but I'm still having trouble understanding
how they fill all of those gaps
in understanding the
complete ecosystem picture.
- Yeah, I mean, these are
really kind of the highlights.
It's not really about
ecosystem in this sense,
but in a different set of rocks,
again the Cloverly Formation,
this is above the Morrison,
and then even above that,
the Judith River in Montana,
Lake Cretaceous.
In these places, we have
really extensive collections.
Again, you can see how
pretty some of this stuff is,
it's just really beautiful places to work,
although it's really hot.
In the Cloverly Formation
we have this environment
that from the rocks we understood,
meant it was quite variable.
There were lakes and
streams and flood plains
and all these different
places animals could live,
but we just had a few dinosaurs.
And I knew that if we went
and looked for these microfossils,
we could potentially really fill in
the story of these environments.
So we spent six or seven
years out in the field
finding all the places we could
where this rock was at the surface
and we could look at it,
and we ended up collecting
many thousands of microfossils
from the Cloverly.
- Now, seeing some of these microfossils
that you've brought here today,
and I know I'm not a paleontologist,
but I'm really curious as to how
you actually find these.
- Well, the finding of them
isn't that different from finding
a regular fossil bone like this,
where you're walking around,
you're looking on the ground.
But the trick is of course
you're looking on the ground
for something that's a lot smaller
than a typical dinosaur bone.
But you'll find them.
You'll find little teeth and
little bits of turtle shell,
and when you get enough
of them in one place,
you start to suspect that,
okay, there's something here in the layer
that I'm interested in.
Once we know that, we'll go
in, we'll identify the layer.
And we just collect the rock layer.
I mean, this is us with just bags of dirt.
We don't collect the
fossil out of the rock yet.
We take all of this dirt with us,
usually a couple tons.
- [Maggy] That sounds like good exercise.
- It is very good exercise,
and we do weigh it,
so we actually know how much we collect.
We used to wash it in the field,
get rid of the extra sediment
with kind of a sieve,
but we realized we were washing away
some of the fossils when we did that,
so nowadays, we do all of that in the lab.
We just bring back the dirt,
we don't do anything in the field,
and we take care of it all here.
- Matt, you actually
showed me that process,
the lab process of
extracting the microfossils
from the rock, which you've called matrix,
which I see a piece here that
that I recognize that.
- Yep, we got a piece
right here.
- I think we should show
our viewers how you do that.
- Excellent.
- All right, let's have a look.
So Matt, you're showing us
how we get tiny fossils
out of pieces of rock.
Where do you start?
- Well, we start with this,
which we call matrix.
And this is a rock that's about
75 or 80 million years old
that we collected in Montana last summer.
And this is kind of the
treasure piece for us
because we can already see
these very tiny black
spots all throughout.
Those represent fossils
and pieces of fossils.
- [Maggy] Wow, so all of these right here.
- Exactly.
- How can you get 'em out of there?
- So the trick is to turn the rock
back into the sediment that it started as,
and the easiest way to do that
is just to dissolve it in water.
- Wow, that's pretty easy.
So this right here is
just the dissolved rock?
- Yeah, take a look and you'll see.
- [Maggy] Oh yeah.
- [Matt] Not that different,
of course it's a lot less solid,
and you can see,
- [Maggy] You can still see
all the black flecks,
which might have fossils.
- Yeah, so probably most
of those are fossils
and the next step will
be to load that into
a set of sieves.
Give it a quick wash just to clear out
some of the first level of sediment,
and then we'll get it ready for dunking
where we do the longer term soaking.
- So this is dunking?
- This is dunking, and we have
a nice little machine here
that will hold these trays.
And as you can see, it'll
submerge pretty well.
- [Maggy] So what's the
advantage of going a little slow
with the dunking process?
- [Matt] Well, the advantage for us
is that the water doesn't move so fast
that it actually grinds the fossils
against one another in the scree.
- [Maggy] So how long
will these be dunked for?
- This'll take a few days,
not actually that long.
- We don't have to sit here
for a couple days while it runs, do we?
- No, fortunately we've
got one that's already dry
that we can take a look at.
So these are now dried, these sieves,
and it's time to take a look
at what fossils we have.
- What's in there.
- We can take a look here in the top,
some of the dark brown elements.
Here's a scale of a
garfish, right on the top.
- [Maggy] Oh, right there.
It looks like there might be
another one right next to it?
- Yep, you've got one right there
and all told, there's probably
a couple dozen fossils in this tray.
If, however, we take a look
below at the smaller sieve,
you can see a lot of really
small black spots.
- Oh, wow.
- [Matt] Most of those are
gonna be fossil material.
- [Maggy] Really, now
you're gonna have to have
a microscope to be able
to see those, right?
- Yes, it's impossible
for me to look at them
just with my bare eyes,
so we're gonna need to bag these up
and take them out to the microscopes.
- Awesome.
Matt, it was really
cool to be in your lab,
to be able to see that.
I can see how it'd be really
addicting finding fossils,
even just in the lab.
I mean, I myself found a couple.
- You did.
- Fish scales, I have
to give myself credit.
- It was, it was very impressive, yes,
and it is addictive.
You really have to kind of watch yourself
or you'll spend all day.
- There has to be a huge team
working on this with you
because it's, all of the
sediment that you have
and all of the fossils
that come out of it.
- Yeah, there's probably at least
a dozen people invovled.
We have students and interns,
and a lot of volunteers help us out,
and a lot of different
with different expertise
here at the museum.
- So let's get back to your research
at the Cloverly Formation.
What did you find
after you actually
extracted the microfossils
from the sediment that you found there?
- Well, you know, each site produces
thousands and thousands of these fossils.
And so this tray, for example,
probably has 1100 fossils in it.
It's one particular site,
and by example, you'll find tiny fragments
of just all sorts of animals.
So this example, these are
armor from a crocodile,
this is a jawbone of
a very tiny amphibian,
and there's also just many
different kinds of fishes,
freshwater sharks and other kinds of fish.
And all told, we end up with something
like 50 or 55 species,
whereas before we had fewer than a dozen.
- Do you have any other examples
from that research site
that you can show us here?
- Well, one really nice example
is this fossil here,
and this is a lungfish,
and lungfishes have, they don't have teeth
in the sense that we do,
but they have tooth plates,
and they eat invertebrates and things,
they kind of mash them up
with these tooth plates.
- [Maggy] So we're looking
at the tooth plate here.
- Mm-hm, so here's a closeup you can see,
and there's a couple
different kinds of lungfishes
in the Cloverly.
What's interesting is that lungfishes
don't live in North America anymore,
they went extinct right after
this formation; they're gone.
Today they live in places
like Australia, South America,
and so the story of them
kind of also petering out
and going extinct is very
important in this formation
because they're the last ones.
- So what can you say overall
about your research findings
at the Cloverly Foundation?
You found fish, you found crocodilians,
amphibians, what does that mean?
- Well you know, it's nice
to have this fuller picture,
that's really kind of cool,
but having so many fossils
allows us to actually look
at the numbers of things.
And we can look at how
many species we have,
and on the top you can see
what's really interesting to me
is that dinosaurs are just a quarter
of the species in this environment.
Most things are fishes and
crocodiles and stuff like this.
And similarly, if we
just count the specimens,
dinosaurs are just a little more
than a 10th of the specimens.
So dinosaurs are not the
most important things here.
The most important things
right little animals, right.
And yeah, if you went on
a trip and took a safari,
and you counted everything you saw,
most things are gonna be
bugs and lizards and things,
not rhinos and lions.
- So really you're painting
the picture with accurate data
that shows that mammals
and reptiles and amphibians
are present in these dinosaur ecosystems,
and actually how many of them were there.
- Yeah, I think the perspective
we would have had a 100 years ago
is just the dinosaur with nothing else,
and now really the dinosaur needs to be
just a little piece of this big picture.
- Thank you for helping
us better understand
a little bit about your
research in microfossils.
Now we have a lot of student questions
we're gonna try to get
to as many as we can.
- Great.
- Ready to dive in?
- Absolutely.
- All right, Mrs. Rhodes'
class sent a question.
What was the first fossil
dinosaur you found?
- So, the first fossil dinosaur I found
was a piece of a duck-bill dinosaur,
and this was in Wyoming in about 1993.
And I was on a trip with a
bunch of graduate students,
I was a college student at the time.
But it was, you know, and
it wasn't a very important
fossil scientifically,
but it didn't really matter,
you know, it was like I actually found it.
- It would be very exciting.
Mrs. Quintanilla's class asks,
how deep do you have
to dig to get fossils?
- Mm, so you know, that's
a really good question
because I think there is
a lot of digging involved,
but it's not like digging a mine.
We don't ever dig until you
see something on the surface.
So if you just started digging holes,
you'd never get anywhere.
So some of the fossil is right there,
and then depending on how big it is,
that's how deep it goes.
Every now and then you get unlucky
and the fossil goes in that way,
and you have to dig a lot,
but usually, it's a
few feet, it's not bad.
- Sheldon Elementary asks how are T-rexes
able to balance themselves on two feet?
- This is a good question.
There's actually scientific research
about what happens to a T-rex if he falls.
- [Maggy] Oh no.
- It turns out, it turns out nothing too.
Yeah, so T-rex has a very
strong set of muscles,
the hip and the upper legs
because it's incredibly important
for this animal to stand and not fall.
And once you're a certain size,
falling is always bad,
and T-rex is way above that size.
So it's a very complicated
set of bones and muscles
that really take care of that for it.
- This one's from Mrs. Miller's class.
How does a dinosaur hatch out of its egg,
is it different for every dinosaur?
- Ah, so Mrs. Miller's class,
you've asked a question that
we don't know the answer to.
Nobody knows what the method was
for dinosaurs to get out of their eggs.
All I can tell you is
they must have had a way,
or they wouldn't have lasted very long.
- All right, how long does it take
to find all of the fossil
parts for one dinosaur?
- If you're lucky and you find a skeleton,
then it's just a question
of actually digging it out.
And digging out a big
skeleton can take weeks,
maybe a couple of months
if it's really big.
If you don't have a connected
skeleton in the ground
and you have to go out
and keep finding pieces,
there are a lot of dinosaurs,
I would say most dinosaurs
we don't have all the pieces for them yet.
- This one's from Josh.
Is oil more valuable than fossils?
- Is oil more valuable than fossils?
It all depends on what
you want to do with it.
So if you need to drive
to the grocery store,
then oil is more valuable than a fossil.
If you wanna learn about ancient life,
then dinosaurs are more valuable than oil.
- Great response.
Matt, can you tell us a little bit
about how you became
interested in paleontology?
- Sure, well, I got interested
the way everybody gets interested,
which is I would just, I was kid
who just thought they were amazing.
And in fact, when I was in second grade,
I, this book, I noticed my friend,
Mike Devlin, who I haven't
talked to in 25 or 30 years,
maybe he's out there,
thank you, Mike, by the way, if you are.
Reading this book and I just
saw some of these pictures,
I couldn't get enough of this,
and these were totally fascinating to me.
And I just, I never kind of gave it up.
Most people find something
else that interests them,
they sort of give up on the dinosaurs.
And I just never found anything else
that was as interesting.
I had a museum nearby that I could go to,
I had a great library I could go to,
and so all that kind of kept me
finding new things and new stuff to learn.
- [Maggy] And now here you
are at the Smithsonian,
having fun in our fossil collections.
- [Matt] Yeah, it's kind
of amazing even to myself
that here I am, all the,
I didn't imagine that in second grade.
- Matt, it's been so fascinating
hearing about your work,
hearing more about dinosaurs
and the microfossils that you study
to better understand the
ecosystems in which they live.
Thank you so much for being here today.
- Thank you, this has really been great.
- Can you tell our viewers
where they can learn more?
- Yeah, so, online, if
you wanna go online,
you can visit the Paleobiology Database,
you can look up anything
you want about any animal.
You could also visit our own website,
what's called Dinosaurs In Our Backyard,
and it's all about the
dinosaurs in the D.C. area.
But you know, where you live,
there are probably fossils,
so see what's there.
You know, you can just
get out in the world
and look for stuff.
Might not be dinosaurs, might be Crinoids,
might be Trilobites, who knows,
but just get out and handle things.
Go to the library, go
to a museum if you can,
just get yourself kind of
connected to the actual stuff.
- Thank you so much Matt.
Thank you so much for tuning in
and thanks for sending in
all of your wonderful student questions.
If you missed part of this broadcast
or want to see it again,
it'll be archived later this evening
at qrius.si.edu.
Thanks again so much for joining us
and hope to see you next
time on Science How.
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