Travis (00:26)
there, it’s been a while. As I record this, the last episode of Fossils & Fiction was published in July 2024 and it is currently November, so I figured it was time for an update. You might know that this show was conceived as a research project for me. That project has formally concluded with the publication of a journal article about paleo podcasting in the journal Media International Australia, also in July.
I’ll share a link in the show notes. And back in December, 2023, in episode 26 of this podcast, I did an interview with PhD student, Alyssa Fjeld. I’m excited to announce that Alyssa and I are going to jointly carry forward fossils and fiction into a new phase.
We have been working on a little bit of a rebrand with an amazing paleo artist and also planning and recording all new episodes. I can’t wait to share the new Fossilson fiction with you soon.
In the meantime, I was also fortunate to be invited as a guest on the Common Descent podcast for their Spotlight series. Dave and Will have agreed to let me republish the interview here on this feed and so that will be the remainder of this episode. This interview was recorded back in January and published by Common Descent in July. I’m a patron and a big fan of their show, so make sure you check it out. The new Fossils & Fiction will be back soon but for now I’m leaving you with Common Descent.
Common Descent (01:59)
You’re listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
Hello, Travis. Hello, David. Hello, Will. Hello, Travis. Hello, Will. Hello, David. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Common Descent Podcast. This is a special series called Spotlight 2024 taking place across the year of 2024, where we are sitting down with some of our fellow paleontology podcasters and science communicators to talk about science communication. This episode, we are joined by Travis. Travis, hello. Thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, of course, guys. Huge fan. Did you use the word favorite there? Because I couldn’t be part of that sentence. Top, top dozen or so. Absolutely. Well, for anyone who’s listening that you are not their favorite yet, if you would please introduce yourself here at the top. Yeah, absolutely. My name is Travis, Travis Holland. I’m a senior lecturer in communication here at Charles Sturt University in Australia.
Then I’d like to acknowledge the Wiradjuri people and all First Nations people of the Australian continent. So my research and teaching sort of varies between traditional media studies and science communication work. I like to say I’m a journalist by training. So that’s who I am. I also have a podcast called Fossils and Fiction, which is, I guess, how I came across your radar. It is, that is indeed. That’s how you ended up here on this series.
And please explain, so if any of our listeners are inclined after this discussion to go check out your podcast, which they totally should, what can they expect from Fossils in Fiction? Yeah, so what I’ve really found with my work is I’ve always incorporated sciences, various types of sciences into the work that I’ve been doing, even when it’s been about something else entirely. So was looking at my PhD thesis, which was about like local government politics of all things.
I use these geologic metaphors and literal descriptions of the geology and environment of the areas as the first thing I wrote about before I got into the politics of it. So I’ve always used science as in that way. And so as I’ve been doing this media studies communication work, I kind of went, okay, let’s make that science communication. And being a dinosaur kid, I thought what better than to do dinosaurs, right?
Jurassic Park and Jurassic World were huge for me. I’m a child of the eighties. So, with the revival of the series, Jurassic World, that really became a obsession for me, one of my obsessions since, 2015 again. And so the last couple of years I dive back in, I made this podcast, fossils and fiction, which interviews paleontologists. It asks them questions. It’s really just an excuse to get good people on and ask them things. And they tend to answer when you put a microphone in front of them. So.
Yeah, I’m very fond of saying that the hardest thing with interviewing scientists is getting them to stop talking. Any academic really like you. and they will they will talk. We sure will. So with that sort of structure and background in mind, what do you see as the overall mission or goal of your podcast?
Yeah, so in addition to what I just explained, it really is a research project in and of itself as the main goal, but I sort of have lots of secondary goals to that. in the Australian academic system, we have this type of research, which is formally called a non-traditional research output or NTRO. And that can really be anything that meets the definition of research according to the government agencies that regulate this thing, but isn’t a book.
a book chapter, a conference publication or a journal article, the typical stuff that academics and scientists put out there. So there are some fields in which those things are really common, obviously creative arts and writing, but then like design. And so we do have the infrastructure in place to look at things like podcasts and say, well, this is a creative work potentially, but there’s also some cultural barriers to that acceptance and being a kind of media production academic or journalist by training radio and.
a newspaper journalist, I thought, okay, let’s put this into practice, try and force science communication in this practice oriented approach into the system, into acceptance in the system. So my top line goal is get a research product out there that I can say is a legitimate research product as far as I’m concerned. But in addition to the podcast itself, I’ve then produced some academic papers and other papers and outputs which are around the place and
There’ll be some more published soon. And I’m really keen to put my experience in that area in use in science and in collaboration with others. But then there’s also teaching. you know, being a media production academic, I need to keep on top of technology and trends and keep my production skills sharp. So it just helps to have a regular podcast that I can be producing something on all the time. And I can say to students, yeah, you know, test new ideas, test technologies, and then take it into the.
classroom and say to students, this is what’s happening right now. And I’ve also had students contributing as interns. So if I need a student, if I’ve got a student around who needs a bit of work production experience or whatever it happens to be, I just say, hey, come and come and do some work with me, do some design, do some editing, whatever it is. So there’s all of this sort of stuff. in terms of science communication, I’m really interested in having conversations with people about their research and about their work and getting those things out into the public as well.
And one of the things I’ve started to do with the podcast is I really like talking to PhD candidates in paleontology. So they often don’t get much of an opportunity to engage with the media. And so I feel like I can give them a kind of soft, but serious introduction to what that can be like to having interviews and conversations and putting it out there. So one of my favorite groups of guests is, is paleontology PhD candidates. I
literally sit them down and say, okay, talk me through your research and then try and put something listenable out there from that conversation. yeah, lots of different goals all over the place, but that’s basically what I try and do with fossils and fiction. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yes. It’s, it’s really fascinating to think, especially alongside the other folks that we’ve been talking to in this series. So many other podcasts, other paleontology podcasts are
done as hobbies or are done as part of someone’s job. You’re doing this podcast as part of your research and teaching. This podcast is semi equivalent, it sounds like, to like a published paper for you. Yeah. If I can convince my university to accept it. Yeah, sure. But as I say, the infrastructure is there and I think it makes sense. I’m out there.
It’s no different to producing a documentary film or a piece of another piece of creative work in that framework for me. So yeah, three seasons in so far and it’s going pretty well. Nice. I admire you using it also as a way to like a proof of concept, you know, that it’s going to be researched, but it’s also proving that this is a viable medium for that type of research.
So the papers that I’ve been writing off the back of this, and I’ve done some of those in collaboration with people like Adele Pentland, who I know you’ve spoken to as well. The papers that I’ve been writing are making that argument exactly that this is a legitimate scientific output. And in terms of thinking through things like open research, open science, like public engagement, you know, I think all of those things are really important and increasingly important. That said.
We also don’t need every single scientist to be off running their own podcast. Like that’s just not going to work. It’s just going to blog up the info sphere. So there’s also things, conversations to be had around how do you, how do you edit and put these things out in a valuable way as well? very neat. Yeah. Another thing that really stands out to me is that your emphasis on other people as the focus of those episodes. Our podcast is very much.
about the content and we’re usually the ones who are doing the talking. have guests on occasionally, but your podcast is built around getting other people to do the talking. And in fact, I think this is, was, think your, your introductory episode to your podcast or somewhere, you make a comment about how you say, hope to not do a lot of talking. Yeah. Which I thought was a very funny way to frame the interviewing format.
What stands out to you as valuable about that format of podcast? Well, I think in terms of paleontology, I’ve always been an enthusiast in the field and I’ve always been interested in the field. The last few years I have also been doing some undergraduate study, but I’m not an expert. So there’s really not much point in me putting together whole episodes around any paleo topics.
I think I need to, in order for it to be a legitimate piece of work, I do need to ask people those questions. And as I said, I’ve used it as a springboard to get people like Adele on, like Tom Jurassic’s another sort of regular collaborator of mine. And this is where the fossils and fiction thing comes in as a lot of Jurassic Park and other film media stuff mixed in there as well.
to bring those people in and ask them really interesting questions and then build this little community around, you know, and connections with people that I could work with in the future maybe, or, but also maybe not. Maybe I’ve just given them a platform to, you know, get their work out there, which I’m really happy to do as a communicator. I don’t need to be communicating necessarily about what I’m doing, although that’s what I’m doing here with you guys, but I don’t need to be doing that on my own.
podcast. My job is to produce and talk to other people as far as I see it. Gotcha. Yeah. And you mentioned Jurassic Park comes up a lot and this is already it has come up a couple of times in this conversation as it so often inevitably does in discussions about paleontology. I also know that one of the ways that I’ve seen or heard you describe the goal of this podcast is
linking the scientific and cultural understanding of paleontology or of dinosaurs. I would love for you to dive into that concept. What is that? What do you what do you mean by linking those two understandings? So when I was putting the podcast proposal together, when I was thinking through what it would entail.
It was obvious to me that coming from the media studies perspective, even as someone interested in science, I couldn’t ignore the cultural products, the media, the film, the things that people really grab onto. I’m also very intrigued about the way that those products, not just Jurassic Park, but there’s a whole bunch in Paleo, the way that those things
convey understandings and get information out into the public. Sometimes they spark an interest that somebody literally turns into a career. They often are launching points for debates about accuracy, know, those kind of inane debates, which I think are beside the point quite often about how this is represented or how that’s represented. But they allow the information to be transferred into the public in a way that other scientific outputs might not do or scientific outputs in general might not do.
including podcasts. so film and things just have this way of breaking through to the public of putting information out there that I think is probably underappreciated in science communication in general. And so if I can bring anything to that field, that’s one aspect to it. But as I was looking into it and thinking through it, I realized, and this is obvious to anyone who’s in and around paleontology, that it is a science which has had arts
and artwork and artists embedded from the very foundation, from the basis of the field, which is quite unlike a lot of science. So right from the start of paleontology, paleo art was a thing, right? And it’s had a huge and influential role on the field and how the field has been understood. So that includes your visual art, but also your sculptures. mean, one of the most celebrated, globally celebrated and influential pieces of paleo art ever.
is the series of sculptures at the Crystal Palace in London. And then there’s been some research projects the last few years, which have also looked at like poetry and paleontology. And this is not just modern people writing poems about paleontology, like where paleontologists have written poems about stuff as they’ve been uncovering it out in the field. And they’ve just like left it in their books or their papers, which I think is really interesting. That was a really cool project that I came across.
And there’s some other work looking at paleontology and video games and comics and all sorts of creative work. So, you know, think producing podcasts really fits into that milieu and, talking about film, whatever type of film I’ve done interviews specifically about the land before time as well. And I always raised Gertie the dinosaur and all these other things. These are, these are films that for, for good or for worse.
put information out there and spark public conversations about the science. Yeah. I think that’s a really valuable perspective to have that if you are communicating paleontology in any sort of respect. I think that as you put it, this is perhaps obvious, but perhaps simultaneously underappreciated that if you’re communicating paleontology, you can’t ignore the fact that there is this whole artistic and
popular media side to the way that this field of science is received and interpreted by people in general. A lot of people within the science can often be seen and have the habit of kind of dismissing those things because they aren’t scientific and are often very much unscientific in their portrayal. And so they kind of just go, yeah, whatever.
video games, blah, But it is, you’re ignoring the version that most people see most often. That is their most common interaction with dinosaurs and paleontology is those, you know, quote unquote casual portrayals, those non-scientific portrayals. So ignoring them, I like the way you’re approaching that. You’re doing yourself a disservice when you write those off or ignore those. Yeah, so I…
For me, I think it’s just about trying to link the two sides together as much as possible. And as I said, I feel like being from a media studies perspective, like literally I became known in Australia for a little while as like a Simpsons expert. Weirdly, I wrote this piece. I wrote this piece in the conversation about the Simpsons and Matt Groening happened to be visiting Sydney at the same time. so it went kind of mildly viral, particularly in Australia, but
but not only. then as a result of that, anytime there was news about the Simpsons, people were ringing me up. So coming from that media studies perspective, I see the focus on audiences as really important. I think that’s something that maybe not all the sciences get, and even the science communicators quite often don’t get. So, there’s a quote that I go back to, there’s this
2003 paper in the journal Public Understanding of Science, which sort of says this is the modern definition of science communication. And aside from the actual definition, which is probably pretty self-explanatory nowadays, it also says that science communication is not simply about encouraging scientists to talk more about their work and not an offshoot of the discipline of communications. So I found that quite challenging as someone coming from the communication discipline.
But most of those working in science communication come from the science side of the discipline. And so the way that people in my discipline, we are trained to think about audiences and production oriented communication and it’s multi-platform communication. So I think it means that we come to the field of science communication with skills that might be missing from other maybe educational approaches to sci-com, even practice based approaches to sci-com if they’re not kind of reflective.
And so for me, moving into that field in what I hope, I hope is a careful and reflective way. And I hope I haven’t upset anybody. Some of the things I said, but I feel like I’m doing that in conversation with science and with the paleo experts where possible. I’m doing that collaboratively and I’m doing that respectfully, but I’m also saying, look, I do think given the public interest, particularly in this field, this is something we can bring to it.
from the communication media studies perspective that maybe has been a little bit absent. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that has come up in other parts of this series, but also on our podcast before that it is, it’s very exciting to see. We talk a lot about how our science, the field of paleontology is becoming more and more interdisciplinary over time. It’s also really exciting to see the ways in which science communication in paleontology.
is bringing in people from different areas, people with different backgrounds. whenever I think that there is very easy to get the impression that the obviously the best way would be to be an expert and then go in and do science communication. But as a person who started as an expert in the field and then went into doing journalism and then went into podcasting, you learn a lot that you were wrong about. Yeah. In your perspective.
scientists is not the ideal training every time for science communication. You have to be understanding of where you’re coming from. The skills that I ended up making me a good educator and a good, you know, gauger of an audience and whatnot. I didn’t learn in my master’s classes. Right. I didn’t learn while getting my degree. I learned them while doing the job of a communicator and an educator and
had to learn those seals separate from the science info. I had to have an editor when I started as a journalist, an editor correct me and say, hey, this thing that you think is the most exciting part of this news is not, nobody’s going to care about that. need to, you need to change focus on what our audience is interested in. But it’s also the flip side of that is we quite often see misinformation. We see science getting misinterpreted by journalists who don’t have that training. So the flip side.
Obviously is that we also need more science literacy in communicators. So it’s not just, it’s absolutely not a one way argument. Yeah. That’s always been one of the biggest things that stands out to me about the distinction between education and being an expert on the topic is that very often there is a disconnect in either side, fully understanding what it takes to do the other job that
You often have people communicating that don’t fully understand what the experts are doing or trying to say and experts who do not fully appreciate what it takes to be a good communicator. know, that lots of people come into it thinking if you have the knowledge, then of course you’ll be able to explain it in a way that an audience will want to hear and then go and give an utterly dull or boring presentation because they don’t actually know how to be an engaging communicator.
So there’s definitely a block there between both sides understanding each other. Yeah. I’ve been working in universities for 10 years now. And although it’s all been in Australia, I try to watch what’s happening overseas. One thing I’ve seen in the Australian system that is concerning for me is that most degree programs sort of only include subjects within their broad discipline areas now. And so you don’t get
really what I would call cross-disciplinary. You know, you might get geologists doing zoology or vice versa, but that’s not kind of cross-disciplinary in the sense that I would think about it. And so even when science communications offer communication or media specific training and subjects, you won’t find communication students sitting in that same space with them and collaborating and working together and vice versa for that matter.
In communication in my field, we will talk a lot about how special topics like science are covered. And we might have specific things on specific modules on how to cover science or how to cover politics. And we struggle to get the scientists in the room for exactly the same reason. The students just aren’t sitting there with that mindset. So there are very few formal courses in science communication. Personally, I’d love to see a lot more. I’d love to see more individual units or subjects.
or whole degree programs offered in the space that are built to be interdisciplinary from the ground up and not just science communication, but science and art and even science and politics and all of these things, science and politics. mean, look where we are with climate change and a whole bunch of other issues that just feel totally intractable. And it’s because there’s very little understanding from either side. There’s very little understanding probably from the science.
sciences on how politics operates and vice versa. absolutely. You know, so I think there’s that’s probably one way to ensure that we have both journalists and other communicators with the appropriate science backgrounds to report on science and tech, but also that we have the scientists with the skills, really skillful and nuanced approaches to producing media content without having to learn it from the ground up. you know, if I was to write my own sort of job description, I would love to say
Okay. At the moment I’m a lecturer in communication in the school of communication and information studies, but I would love to be a lecturer in communication to do my literal job in a school of science. Like that would be really interesting work, think. Yes. And, and vice versa. yeah. I think it is very telling how many, if you listen through this whole series of interviews, how many of the people that we talk to who are doing paleontology podcasts are people who
are scientists who wanted there to be something like this, and that had to make it because it didn’t exist because and that isn’t something that they’re doing as part of a degree program or as part of their education. It’s something we are included in that. It’s something that we often have to strike out on our own and do because it isn’t part of that formal system. Yeah. I mean, I don’t have much more to say about that. I’ve said a lot. So but yeah, you’re absolutely right. sure. Well,
I would love to sort of come off of that and talk a bit more. I am fascinated and I’m sure a lot of our listeners are fascinated at the idea of we’ve we talk on our podcast all the time about what research in science looks like. You are doing research in science communication. What does what does sci-com research look like? Interestingly to me, sci-com research is not very different to usual media studies research. Right. So.
In media studies, we quite often take the media product as the thing that we’re researching, just in the same way you might pick up a fossil and that’s the thing you’re drawing data from. And so we analyze, you know, a series of media products and that’s kind of one of the things I’ve been doing. So the paper I’m expecting to have out soon, I’ve called a Extended Mixed Methods approach and it combines my reflective experience doing the podcast with
insights from people I interviewed on my podcast. And then I also did another analysis of 24 paleo podcasts and they showed some really interesting things. So, but I approached those podcasts as if they were sort of independent media objects and then just analyze them as a, as a group. So I looked at everything from like the logos and the design choices to the titles and who the hosts were and things that again, perhaps
had been considered at an individual level, but at a field level hadn’t really been thought about maybe, or nobody had really put together in any sort of systematic way. Like for example, of the 24 podcasts, like 11 of them had fossils on their logos, eight had dinosaurs, and then there were a few humans. The words paleo and dinosaur came up a lot, as well as Jurassic, which is kind of a sampling bias thing, but.
And most of the hosts were scientists, right? Now that’s an interesting finding to say, okay, in paleo podcasting, most of the hosts are still scientists. Then there’s a few, which are kind of science enthusiasts or communicators like Garrett and Sabrina from, from I Know Dino. And every now and then you get a kind of mixed team like Dave Hone and Izzy Lawrence on their podcast. So yeah, looking at that systematically is, the kind of work we do in, in media studies.
in my Simpsons research, like I literally sat down and count the occurrence of, what I called national symbols in the first 10 seasons of the Simpsons, right? So I watched 10 seasons of the show and did a, what we call a content analysis, which is how many times does this thing occur? in retrospect now doing some undergrad study in paleontology, it’s not all that different from doing like a phylogenetic analysis of, the little characteristics of this bone or whatever it happens to be. So yeah.
That’s exactly what I was just thinking is you’re looking for the trends that might not have been noticed just because no one’s looked at it all together at the same time to go, well, actually, all of these that have this feature also have this and all of these that have this feature also have this and isn’t that interesting? And I’m also struck by the fact that you’re looking at in an analytical way, a lot of the stuff that we in this series of interviews.
are looking at and discussing in a very casual way. It’s been very interesting for us to get to sit down with a lot of these other podcasters and say, hey, in your podcast, you do this. And that’s different from our podcaster. That’s the same from the way we do this podcast and coming at it from just, that’s an interesting difference or, know, how does that feel versus this other alternative? And you’re looking at that exact same sort of thing, but from a very analytical, like,
Here are the numbers, here are the trends. Those differences aren’t just curiosities. They’re not just about personal preference. There is actually potentially pattern to be seen here. I guess, and like any scientific question, comes from, hmm, that’s interesting, right? Why is that happening? Let’s see if I can figure out what that’s about. Yeah. Is there a consistent cause and effect or actual relationship between the features that
might give us more insights into it. then the next step of that, which is kind of classical media studies is saying, well, what does the audience understand from that? Which is much harder to measure. You you almost sometimes need population level measurements, but the most straightforward thing is run a survey of somebody’s audience and say, what do you think about this? Why do you, why do you listen? What do you get from this? Those kinds of things are, are pretty basic in the way we sort of do communication research generally. Yeah.
Cool. So you in your research on the Simpsons, you had to, I’m sure this was a twist your arm sort of thing. Sit down and watch 10 seasons of the Simpsons. I know what a chore. Do you find yourself also just listening to a bunch of these other podcasts as part of that research? Do you sort of sit down and immerse yourself in that? Or is it, are you looking more from the sort of the top level? Here’s sort of the structure.
I listened to a lot of the podcasts as it is. So I listened to you. I’ve listened to yourselves for a few years and to I know Dino and to adult penlands podcast and Dave and Izzy and a bunch of those sort of podcasts as well. I’m a huge podcast listener and I, in many ways, one thing that I’ve done with my career is I’ve kind of gone, you know, I could do stuff that’s just like.
out there that’s trendy that the institution wants me to do, but I’m going to do stuff that I’m interested in. And so that’s kind of why I went with, let’s look at paleontology. And also I did some space studies work for a while and looked at the role of television in the moon in human space flight. So that was kind of a lot of fun as well. That’s cool. That’s really cool. Yeah. Well, this is what I love about actually communication that I think a lot of people don’t get is as a communication researcher.
There’s not a field that I can’t look at and say there’s media involvement there. Let me, let me do some analysis of what’s happening in that media space. Well, cause communications kind of core to human society and existence. Look, I always say that I literally, I used to be the program director here for our undergraduate program. And I would stand up in front of our undergraduates as they came in the room. And I said, you will get people not understanding why you’re doing this. But if humans didn’t communicate.
We wouldn’t be humanity. We wouldn’t have the civilization that we have. Like communication is actually fundamental, perhaps more than a single other thing in my view to why humans are who we are, what we are, what we do in many ways. And you can roll cooperation into that as well. But so that was something I always used to put in front of my students and say, this is actually a really foundational thing in an influential thing in, culture and society. it’s, it’s.
Absolutely worth studying and paying attention to, but we get lumped in over here with humanities and kind of get laughed at, right. And that’s, know, why we, why we get misinformation running. Yeah. Well, and I, it’s one of those where, because it’s so common and all encompassing, I’m sure for a of people, it’s like, you just talk, like just, isn’t that like, what is there to study? You just talk, right. And so, well.
Yes and no, there’s a lot more to it than that. And then there’s spin-offs, like there’s linguistics and you know, there’s all these other things as well. which, which, you know, I nerd out for, but I kind of couldn’t tell you the basics of. yeah. Yeah. All these fields are really interesting. And when the more you work cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, you’ve, the more you see these connections that you perhaps never expected to be there. Yeah.
Well, and we were talking just a little bit earlier, and this has come up in other episodes of this series talking with other podcasters, the notion of paleontology specifically having this sort of massive component that is its place in pop culture and media. It is a science with a fan base, which feels distinct. And I bring this up.
I come back, I’m coming back around to this specifically because I’m curious to get your perspective on this as someone coming at this from that media and communications perspective, that from my perhaps very biased perspective, being a paleontologist, this seems like a science that deals with popularity and common perception more than most sciences.
It raises and if if this is true, it raises that question of what is it about paleontology that makes it so well suited to media representation and movies, pop culture and all of that stuff. Yeah, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Well, it’s over a billion dollar question, I think, as of 2015. Yeah, well, every what the average Jurassic Park.
film has all made a billion dollars each. So it’s a billion dollar franchise. So, literally, yeah. It’s, I think there’s a whole bunch of answers to that. The, the human psyche has this kind of, simultaneous fascination and terror with big things that can eat you, right? That kind of predator instinct. And I think that’s, that’s probably fairly well understood. So I think, but I think that’s one thing that’s driving a lot of this cultural fascination with dinosaurs.
in particular, but we also see it with other animals that are kind of seen to be, you know, prehistoric in some ways like sharks and crocodiles here in Australia. We have a lot, a lot of talk about crocodiles and sharks. Every time there’s an attack, I shouldn’t even say attack. Every time there’s an encounter, you know, between a human and a crocodile or a shark, it like his national news and the goes viral and it’s like, okay, but still literally
many more people are killed by mosquitoes and in the U S by guns. you know, the fascination with those animals that can take us out of our place on the food chain is deeply ingrained in humanity and in culture. That’s one of the reasons I don’t give every time someone asks why I love crocodiles, but that is one of my top reasons as a kid was when I learned that like, yeah, for ins with certain species, we are still on the menu for them that
blew my mind because I didn’t know of any other animal where we were, we actually had to worry about them pursuing us. that was enough for me to go, that’s pretty awesome in a dark way. And so think absolutely that’s where for me, that’s where I would put the foundation of this is why dinosaurs are fascinate people and drive these billion dollar film industries. The other thing is because I think of that long
historical connection with, with art. And so the longer two fields work hand in hand, the stronger and deeper those connections become. might be apocryphal. And so if it is, I’m sorry for repeating it on your podcast, but I even heard something a little while ago that the kind of origin of, of video or simulated biomechanics studies on dinosaurs was the kind of
frame they used for the Tyrannosaurus Rex running in Jurassic Park. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Cause animators, the thing that animators have always done is, worked out how animals can move because if it looks, you can play it off and make it comedic or comical for, for specific reasons. But in general, you, if you’re animating a human or an animal, you want it to move in a natural way. And so when they were animating the Tyrannosaurus in that full body,
shot, they had to do it in a way that it looked like it could be moving at that sort of pace. so, yeah, as I say, could be apocryphal. I might have to look into it a bit more, but the story that this became the kind of origin of using wireframes to figure out how dinosaurs walked is really interesting. do seem to remember this might also be apocryphal, but I do sort of remember
There’s the scene with the T-Rex chasing the Jeep and in the movie they say the T-Rex can run 30 miles an hour. And of course there’s all sorts of scientific discussion that has been had around how fast T-Rex goes. But I remember seeing a thing someone did online where they looked at the T-Rex in that scene and said, how fast is it actually moving? Can we calculate it? And the speed it’s moving is darn close to what more recent scientific estimates have been for how fast that animal might move.
because the animators had to come up with something that looked and felt realistic. Yeah. And in doing so, again, I don’t know, you know, this this this is sort of my vague memory of the circumstance. But you get an insight into it that is unique to that methodology. I know I’ve heard it mentioned before that they they made, so to speak, breakthroughs in that that kind of modeling and understanding of the biomechanics that that like
That was some of the first time, you know, cause it was some of the first time that tech was used that way in a movie. And so it was the first time that was used on those organisms. There’s a kind of recency bias there. a, yeah, when this is a breakthrough, you suddenly everyone goes, we can do this now. Let’s, see how this works. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I do like that you made the point about that close relationship between this science and art. And I think the fact that
So many breakthroughs in animation. Yeah in the history of movies, whether it’s stop motion or it’s CGI have involved dinosaur movies. Yep. And some of the dinosaurs have been in in film for about as long as there has been films. Yeah. Yeah. Dinosaurs have always been tightly connected to pop culture and media. And it’s in large part, I assume, just because you can’t actually go see.
the organisms, you have to invent new stuff. have to imagine it. So it has always had to be connected with that art because they’re, they’re gone. So you can’t go see them in a zoo or go catch one. You have to create the image. Yeah. No, no amount of creative editing is going to make it look like that T-Rex is chasing the Jeep. It has to be created like, whereas you could do that with a, a lion or whatever it happens to be. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So just to
Just to close it off, think that that long history of connection between the science and the art is one of the reasons that it still drives this pop culture industry today, as well as that deep cultural understanding and fascination with horror, basically the horror of something that can eat you. These monsters, quote unquote, that actually existed, you that are as impressive as anything from a Greek myth, but
genuinely walk the planet at one time. I think it probably also helps that these are things that you can physically collect. Yeah. Which is another thing humans like to do that you get to combine all of that fascination with the fact that yeah, you could go out into the badlands or your backyard or whatever and get some for yourself. Yeah. I mean, that’s why, that’s why Pokemon works so well. People love collecting stuff, right? So, know, I started getting into birding recently for exactly the same reason. there’s a birding that
Pokemon for grownups. It’s how many can you see collect and take photos of. I’ve heard dinosaurs referred to as, you know, people add, why do kids like dinosaurs so much? And I’ve heard it from multiple sources referred to as a lot of kids first experience with lore with a deep lore. There’s a bunch of names to learn. There’s a bunch. There’s a history here. There’s a story to it. You get to dive into it the same way that we enjoy diving into.
Pokemon or the Jurassic Park franchise or the rings. Those things that have just a glut of information that you can really sink your teeth into. Another kind of offshoot of, of media studies is fan studies and, and that specifically looks at fandoms and how people get obsessed with things. Yeah. And one of the theories that that flows around there is that fandoms really work precisely because of that, like mastery aspect of it that, that.
as a fandom, you can get into this kind of in-group if you collect more of these little arcane facts and lore about things and that the challenge and the puzzle of putting things together and putting pieces of clues and lore and whatever together kind of drives fandoms to build their own little tribes, their own little communities. So I think that’s absolutely a legitimate way of thinking about why is this field popular?
jumping back into kind of the sixties, right? Dinosaurs were really popular in the first half of last century. And then they kind of died off a little bit. And one of the reasons they, as a science, it kind of became less sexy was the ascendancy of space science. And this is my other, one of my other kind of science obsessions is space science. And the ascendancy of space science and the space race and everything else drove this kind of high tech.
interest and people were interested in that. And it wasn’t until the nineties, and I won’t say the, I won’t say the cursed words, but it wasn’t until the nineties when, when you came back into that, into the, into the public interest, right as the space era kind of, dipped again, right after the, after the moon landings ceased. And, yeah. So the connection even between those fields is really interesting to think about and the way they have kind of.
ebbed and floating in culture. But the point I was actually going to make is you can’t collect space facts in the same way. mean, how are you going to come up with all these like, you’re to start remembering the arcane names of all the exoplanets that have been discovered out there by the various telescopes. Like that doesn’t, that doesn’t happen in the same way. And the kind of tangible intangibility of paleontology is one of the things that holds it in culture. Yeah.
And I like your comparison with mastery because that immediately elicited the idea of when both me as a little kid and experiencing it with like children at the museum of when you learn a new dinosaur and you go, I didn’t know that existed. Now I have this new name to to tell people about and go, actually, the largest one now is. Yes. And I know for me, just speaking very anecdotally, that’s one of the things that.
that got me really into it as a kid is just the, that knowing a, but I, you, when I was younger, I used to pride myself in how many scientific names I knew off the top of my head. was just knowing a bunch of information about this thing, you know, along with memorizing Pokemon and learning the names of all the Thomas, the Trank Engine characters by their number, like all that sort of a fan knowledge. And they use that skill to memorize what episode you
touched on a particular topic in exactly. know, it’s very funny because I don’t always think about it a bunch. I was having a conversation with someone not too long ago where I was like, yeah, I did know the numbers and the names of all the Thomas the Tank Engine characters. I this is a thing I’ve been doing forever. Yep. This is just a habit that I’ve been into ever since I was a tiny little kid. It is not at all surprising that I’m doing that still to this day with the podcast.
So I’ve got one question for you guys and that is when are you coming to Australia? We get this question a lot. Yep. Actually, we have a we were saying this before. I don’t know if our Australian listener base is vast, but they are vocal. Yes. And so we hear this a lot. We’d love to come to. I so want to go back to Australia. I very much enjoyed the time I got to go and I’ve wanted to go back.
I love where I am in central west, New South Wales, in a town called Bathurst, which is very famous for a car race. So if that’s something you’re interested in, out here. But if you want to see dinosaurs, you have to get to Queensland. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the place. And then there’s Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils down in South Australia. Yeah. We have to make a podcast trip eventually.
Every day, every year we put it off, becomes a bigger. Yeah. We’re now at this point, we’re going to be there for six months. Yes. And we’re going to have to talk to every Australian that there is. There’s only 25 million of us. won’t be. All right. Okay. We can manage it. I think we could. We’ll do it in groups. We’ll get a bunch of them together. Make it great. Follow through. Yeah. Can we, can we line up?
all of the Australians like at the end of a little league game. Yeah, yeah. And we’ll just high fives down the row. There’s an episode of The Simpsons where the where Australians line up across across the continent to spell out happy birthday to Monty Burns and he couldn’t even be bothered to turn his head to look. A lot of those people died because they were standing in the middle of the desert. If Australians want to get together.
and just spell out the words, Hello Will and Hello Dave. Will Look. Yes. We will turn our heads. we will. Unless it’s like a crocodile. I’ll say what we can do. that’s, yeah, no, if there’s a cool snake in the other direction, then I’m so sorry. There’s plenty of cool snakes and crocodiles down there. Yeah, that’s that has always been like ever since I was little and people would ask like, where do you want to go or what’s your favorite place? I’d be like Australia, because they’ve got the best versions of all the animals that I’m interested in.
The sharks, the spider, the sharks, best spiders, best crocs, best snakes, best bird like, you know, it’s just if you had a ring of tan, the cassowary, the cassowary is my favorite. I love it. It’s a dinosaur. I like this. yeah. It’s just and they’re pretty and cool. Yeah, they’re awesome. So it’s yeah, just love the wildlife. Now, Travis, I know that.
It’s very interesting. It’s funny. We find ourselves talking about this quite a bit. The challenge that comes with doing science communication for a global audience. know, we have both done, we both come from museum experience. We are very familiar with the science communication for the people who are right in front of you. The podcast is really the first time for either of us that we have ever been communicating to an audience that is literally all over the planet. And
Australia comes up a bunch when we start to talk about that, because not only do we have a very vocal contingent of people in Australia who are fans of ours and who are very gracious and kind supporters, but we often find ourselves thinking of ways to connect with and appreciate people in different parts of the world. This comes up, especially when we talk about things like our live streams. do live streams.
every now and then for the podcast. And because we have to do them at times that are convenient for us over here in North America, it means that the people who get left out of the live stream experience more often than everybody else are the people in Australia. Yep. Very sadly. And so there is this extra bit of cultural mindfulness that has come with being a communicator with an audience that is so widely
spread out. was like early on we had to learn to remind ourselves and I think it was because someone asked us finally because we’d be like yeah and you know in where we live here are the common animals or whatnot and people are like yeah what does that mean where are you? Yeah where do you live? What does that mean? What does that mean where you live? And we’re like right yeah because not everyone who’s listening to us is in Tennessee so we need to actually explain what Tennessee means and what what that
information that gives you about this area of the US and whatnot. On a very basic level, even lining up this interview today, I suddenly thought, did you guys actually have the right time zone lined up? Because we’re on daylight savings time. And I thought maybe you didn’t realize that because it’s not summer there, right? So you might not just have thought daylight savings, but then also it goes the other way. I went, yeah, Tennessee’s on central time.
And then I realized, no, the part of Tennessee that you’re in is some of it. This exact thing has tripped up a specific Australian listener of ours. exact thing came up not too long ago with one of our live streams. Yep. This was serpentine. Shout out to serpentine who had that same exactly. Wait, what? I’ve got the time yet because our state straddles multiple time zones. That was why I missed my first online therapist meeting because we both showed up and are like,
You said this time, like, yes, I was there. It’s like, where in Tennessee are you? And that’s when I learned we span two time zones. I didn’t know that until then. Well, you know, being down here, we know very little about Tennessee, I have to say. But what’s interesting about communicating between Australia and America and the UK, I guess you can throw Canada and New Zealand into this. We’re all kind of.
English speaking and roughly share the same cultural references. That is we all share the American cultural references for a start. And then every now and then we have our own sort of local stuff. quite often we talk about global communication. I’m actually teaching a subject called global communication this session. I’ve been thinking about how do I get the students into this mindset? Because we say global communication and we go, let’s talk about the UK, talk about American, talk about
you know, the other stuff, the other places that speak English basically. And that’s very easy to do. But then you’ve actually got to go, well, no, there’s a whole bunch of other places that we’re still excluding here. We haven’t thought about Africa. We haven’t thought about Asia, Russia, South America in any of those conversations at this point. how do we, how do we match those people up? And then even within global communication for me,
First Nations culture is really important here and it’s becoming increasingly prominent part of our cultural life, not withstanding certain political developments, but with First Nations culture, those peoples have their own identities and perspectives that don’t rely on the Australian nation. So how do we incorporate that into understandings of what we think global is? Because just looking at a map of Australia doesn’t do it, doesn’t cut it.
there. So that’s also something I, you know, I’ve been thinking about, I don’t have any, I don’t have any good answers. You know, the approach that I’m taking for my students is, is I’m showing films and documentaries in language, obviously with subtitles from, from Korea and China and Africa and India and various other places. But I don’t have any good answers on how we overcome that kind of inbuilt cultural bias of saying, okay, this is the globe, but
Aside from that, these guys still speak English and most of them are probably white. Mm hmm. Yeah. That’s before we get to gender, right? Like I, I kind of went into my podcast thinking I’m going to aim for a gender splitting guests. So to make sure I had at least rough gender split very quickly, I found I was defaulting back to, asking a particular type of person on, you know, people that are basically similar to myself and
That’s hard thing to break out of. You can only do it if you think carefully and reflectively about how you approach these things. Paleontology is having that reckoning. I’m doing some work with a colleague on how we think about, there’s this notion of scientific colonialism where wealthy nations go, research teams from wealthy nations go into other nations and pick up their fossil heritage and take it home, right?
Everyone can bring to mind those examples. But I think within Australia, we also need to think about how that’s playing out here. if the, not to pick on them specifically, but like the Queensland Museum or the Australian Museum in Sydney, go to the outback and pick up a fossil and take it back 800 Ks or a thousand Ks from its embedded natural landscape. And
First Nations people from that region have a story about it. That’s still scientific colonialism. How do we deal with that without expecting that we’re going to have a hundred natural history museums all over the country as well? And that happened from the start of paleontology here in Australia. were, aside from the fact that it was always British scientists coming and taking the fossils, they were very specifically coming into places where First Nations people knew there were fossils.
And first nations people asked them not to go into those caves. there’s some caves nearby to me on the same, more adury country and very specifically asked them not to go into those caves. But the flip side of that is the animals and fossils that were found in those caves put Australian paleontology or Australian prehistory on the map globally. Cause they went back to England and Richard Owen named them. And you know, we got diproton on and thylacoleo. So what do you do? Yeah.
This is very much an extension of that sort of mindfulness that we were talking about. And it is a real challenge in science and in science communication, being aware of, you know, in science, we talk so much about biases and usually often we’re talking about biases and the data biases in the methodology, but the biases in who does science and who talks about science and who has access.
to participate in science or listen to science, who can listen to a podcast? Yes. Who speaks the language that we’re speaking? Who understands the words that we’re using when we’re talking about this stuff? And how do we, when communicating science, be mindful of the ways that even just the information that we’re portraying is itself skewed heavily towards certain parts of the world or certain
methods or certain groups of scientists or certain interpretations about that data. And I will echo Travis, what you said. I also don’t have an easy answer to how we make that work in a way that is perfectly accessible and as mindful as it could be. Well, and I think, you you mentioned how easy it is to fall into, you know, accidentally playing to a trope.
or playing to a one demographic whilst forgetting or ignoring the other. That was definitely one of the most important, like the lessons that I’m still learning it. But initially had to have my eyes open to is just how easy that is. That until you really step back and look, it’s very be quite easy to fall into the mindset of like, well, I’m doing my best. So surely I’m doing all right. It’s like.
you might be putting effort, but there’s probably a bunch of things that you’ve just never had practiced in considering. then we’ll get a comment from a listener and they’ll be like, hey, just so you know, the way you talked about this was leaning a little this way. Or that phrase, that phrase you may not know this, but that phrase you used, you’ve never had to think about it before, but that’s a problematic thing to say. And then from there on out, you aim to try to keep that in mind, but there’s
There’s a million of those that you could be accidentally stumbling upon and around. There’s also examples that like something that’s offensive in the US, for example, doesn’t have the same cultural context here. so you might see it, you might see it used. then particularly if it’s online on threads or Twitter or whatever social platform is in use this week.
you’ll see someone make a comment that within their culture doesn’t have the same cultural baggage, the cross, the global communication nature of these platforms really sets it off and sets up a clash. So yeah, these things are challenging. I don’t think you can, in science and in communication, I don’t think you can ever expect to solve any of these problems, but if you work towards it mindfully, respectfully, and reflectively,
if you own up when you make a mistake and, you know, think all of that’s important and, that’s really all we can do and always try to be better in what we’re trying to do. So absolutely. Yeah. Always aim to be open to improvement. And, I’d like you saying self reflection. Let’s see it. You just have to be as mindful as you can. And when you miss something, listen when you’re told so. Well, and is one of the nice things about having a community.
within the science communications sphere that you’re in. Travis, on your podcast, for example, you’re talking to other people, inviting them on to give their perspectives. This series is an example of us talking to a bunch of people about their science communication. We have communication with our audience through Discord, through social media, which provides a lot of opportunities for people to provide feedback, let us know, you know, simple things like
if we said a thing wrong, yeah, we got a piece of information wrong or we missed something important or every now and then it is something like, hey, when you’re talking about First Nations people or various communities, we have had people, Australian listeners reach out to us and say, hey, here is the terminology to use when you are talking about certain communities. And right now I’m being very cautious because I don’t remember what they all were. So I’m trying not to say the wrong terms.
But that is a very helpful thing to be able to have. Yeah, absolutely. Travis, thank you so much for joining us for this discussion. This has been a great chat. Absolutely. I’ve really enjoyed it. You guys are fantastic. I joined as a Patreon a little while ago and I encourage anyone to do that. I noticed that. I saw when it happened. It did not escape my notice. Yes, we chose correctly to interview this person.
Before we wrap things up, please do take a moment to let our listeners know where they can find you. And if you have anything else to shout out, now’s a great time. Yeah. If anybody wants to look up my podcast, it’s just Fossils and Fiction. FossilsFiction.co is the website address and all the various socials link from there. I’d love to love people to have a listen and also
I have a fairly standing open call for guests if anyone feels like they have a story to tell. I’d love to hear it. Nice. Awesome. We will get a link to put down in the episode description as well so people can follow it there and people totally should. Absolutely. Check out Fossils in Fiction to hear various stories in the realm of paleontology. Thanks guys. Also listeners, as a reminder, this interview is part of a whole series Spotlight 2024.
of which there are several other episodes either already released or coming out soon. So keep your ears out and check out those other episodes if you haven’t already. We’ve been having a whole lot of fun sitting down for conversations like this with our fellow science communicators. Travis, thanks again and also best of luck with the podcast and with your ongoing research. It sounds like it’s part of a really exciting series of projects. 100%. Yeah, yeah, that’s
The next thing I’m working on with a friend, I just sent the proposal yesterday is called the digital burda. So we’re thinking about the digital infrastructure that’s kind of sprung up around birding the apps and the websites and the podcasts and things now. yeah. Nice. Very cool. And now that we have officially done a podcast collaboration and we are
Close personal pals. We assume that your couch is open to us when we eventually come down to Australia to visit. you want to come and watch a race? come on down. Fantastic. You heard it here, folks. We’ll be down someday. Someday we will be down there and we’ll say hi to all our Australian fans. And that’s it for us. Let’s get out of here. Thanks again, Travis. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the Common Descend Podcast. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and check our WordPress blog for pictures and links after each episode. Huge thanks to our patrons, whose support helps keep this podcast running and who get access to bonus goodies on Patreon. The song you’re hearing is called On the Origin of Species by ProtoDome, which we found at ocremix.org. Thanks again for listening, we hope you’ll join us next time.
