This is a transcript of Episode 44.
Travis (00:24)
two major topics in fossils and fiction today, something that the paleontology world and science communicators and everyone has been talking and ranting about. So we’ll have our go at that as well. And that is Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected the dire wolf. And also we have an interview with Shay Maden from the Gray Fossil site, but let’s start with Colossal. So my understanding of this as a total non-scientist and someone without any genetic
skill at all, let’s put it that way, is that this company, Colossal Biosciences, which is a company focused on de-extinction, as they say, I think they call themselves the de-extinction company. And they’ve had some press for a couple of years now focused on the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, but they now claim to have resurrected the dire wolf,
the dire wolf is an extinct wolf, which is much larger in size, roamed across NorthAmerica was popularized by Game of Thrones, of course. Although, know, given what’s fossils and fiction will include the fantasy stuff here, I think, but maybe not an accurate representation. But what they have actually done here in claiming to have resurrected the dire wolf is they’ve actually just edited the genome of the Gray Wolf
It doesn’t have any dire wolf genetics inside it. It’s edited gray wolf genome or DNA. And in editing that DNA, it has given some expression to those genes that makes it look more like a dire wolf. Am I right, Alyssa?
Alyssa Fjeld (01:53)
boy, what a topic. Yes, so you all might have seen on your feeds recently every paleontologist you know posting pictures of wolf pelts, wolf skulls from the La Brea Tar Pits, their famous wall, and a disclaimer in the text of these talking about Colossal recent discoveries. And this has all been prompted by a Time magazine cover that featured what looked to be a large white wolf claiming that they had made the dire wolf no longer extinct.
And I think the best metaphor I can come up with for what has happened here is that if you can imagine that your darling friend has lost their favorite dog, their favorite dog has passed away. If you then went to a pet store and purchased a different dog from a different line of dogs, say they had a German Shepherd and you purchased a Chihuahua, if you then put little stilts on that Chihuahua and a little wig and you said, look, it’s your dog. Maybe you just want a Chihuahua on stilts, but.
That is not the same thing as what they are telling you you are getting. That is essentially what Colossal as a company are doing with their de-extinction project. Dire wolf DNA is not the same as modern gray wolf DNA. They are species that are related within the family of Canina, but they are not directly related enough for us to ever fully recreate a dire wolf from the genetic material that is available within the gray wolf genome. The gray wolf genome can only ever produce
Whatever possible ancestral traits remain in the DNA in this modern-day gray wolf It’s the exact same reason that we can’t really reverse engineer chickens into t-rexes They simply don’t have that genetic information stored in their bodies De-extinction as a concept and I’m gonna rant a little bit here Is very fun and it’s something that I think a lot of conservationists really wish were real We all wish that we could see the dodo pet the dodo eat the dodo and a lovely stew we all
Travis (03:43)
Kind of the opposite of conservation there, but very Alyssa
Alyssa Fjeld (03:44)
Look, if you have enough…
But if you talk to modern day Mauritians, modern day residents of Madagascar, the question is always where the heck would we even put them? Their native habitat no longer exists and the world that they would have inhabited no longer looks the way that it once did. And this is an even more true situation for animals that have been as long dead as the dire wolf. appear in the late Pleistocene and they are extinct by the Holocene.
These are animals that would have lived in North America and occupied similar ranges to modern day wolves. However, the climate that they would have inhabited and the animals they would have eaten are vastly different from the modern landscape. And the bigger problem here that Colossal is presenting is that they are essentially promising you something that they cannot deliver. And this promise comes with side effects. I think it’s no coincidence that you’re seeing a combination of Brian Lamm, CEO of Colossal’s effort
to buddy up to people in the modern American political system and rollbacks that the Trump administration are imposing on Endangered Species Act. You see this sort of narrative that follows from what many people predicted from Jurassic World, which is that if we could bring back species from extinction, why have the protections on endangered species today? I personally feel that this is an incredibly dangerous attitude that is only going to do harm to our modern ecosystems
much more harm in fact than if we actually did clone that dire wolf and released it into the wilds of North America. Rant done.
Travis (05:15)
It’s become, but yeah, no, that’s all good.
It’s become, there’s been some talk, you know, and I don’t know, it’s hard to say where things come from on the internet nowadays, but there’s been some talk that like the Trump administration is potentially going to roll back some conservation.
rules on the basis of, well, we can now just de-extinct anything that disappears as a result of this. that just seems so bizarre. Like we can’t hunt something into extinction just because we can bring it back. Like this isn’t Star Trek replicator technology.
Alyssa Fjeld (05:47)
not and it’s also it’s a bit ghoulish to paint what they’re doing as the same thing as that. Again it would be like if your wife left you and you started dating a 20 year old that looks a little bit like her. It is not the same thing and if that’s what you want that’s fine. If you want a slightly bigger fluffier wolf go for it. But the problem is when you start giving people the resources and the funding to make these animals you’re
providing funding and resources that are already quite scarce to a company that is not doing what they say they’re doing. Additionally, if you look into the materials that Colossal produces on its own website, you can find this wonderful diagram of gray wolf and dire wolf anatomy that features, like, I’m not a bone scientist, right? I don’t know what all the names of bones are, but I know a wrong name of a bone when I see one. I challenge my audience to find the scapula on their own.
Travis (06:34)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (06:38)
from their own bodies or their own wolf diagrams? Or the patella that is mysteriously said to be located on the back of the knee of the animal? Like are these the people that really deserve funding and attention and access to this finite resource of dire wolf DNA over actual researchers who have put years of their life into understanding these animals?
Travis (06:59)
This is the same company that just a little while ago announced a wooly mouse, which essentially was the same thing, right? That they had gene edited some mice to express a longer coat and sort of claimed that this somehow proved that they were on track to resurrect a wooly mammoth, right? I mean, you could take an elephant and turn on a wooly coat gene somehow, but that’s not going to produce a wooly mammoth. It’s going to produce a hairy elephant.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:25)
think it’s a consequence of how paleontology is a system that is built on a series of ifs and understandings. There’s so much that goes into conceptualizing extinction, an animal that no longer exists, the genetic information that remains in modern animals. And I think to some people, it can feel very plausible. We’ve had how many decades of fiction that present these ideas, and then it’s, I don’t know, it’s a bit like people who have.
bought into different narratives about the creation of genetic cures or genetically modified organisms. There’s a lot of science that goes into these things and a lot of research and a lot of thinking and a lot of systems that build on themselves in order to get to the point where we can make, for example, glow in the dark cancer detection, genetically modified, whatever treatments. And I think that these people that promise a simple, straightforward shortcut to these things that we all really want.
are charlatans that are preying on our best intentions. And I want better for you, my lovely audience, than that.
Travis (08:25)
To get a little bit Alan Grant about this, the truth is in the rocks, right? Not these creatures, not these genetically modified creatures. The truth of that history is buried in the rock.
Alyssa Fjeld (08:40)
And besides guys, come on, if dinosaurs could be brought back, Jake Kotevski has a genetics degree. He would already be resurrecting them. We’re all nuts in the paleofield. We would do it ourselves if we could.
Travis (08:48)
You
Yeah, this is the thing. To put another spin on this Colossal Biosciences kind of perspective, you could say that it is a triumph of marketing, right? And as someone in a kind of adjacent field, just to be very clear, communication and media folk do not see ourselves as marketers and they’re adjacent but different fields. But…
As a triumph of marketing, think they’ve done a very good job at drawing attention to the idea of de-extinction. They’ve done a very good job at giving opportunities for scientists around the world to actually speak about the science. You know, I think you wouldn’t have seen people popping up on the ABC or other television networks all around the world and radio and podcasts for that matter this week talking about de-extinction and talking about the true science of animals like the dire wolf.
if it hadn’t been for Colossal Biosciences And this is a point I’ve always made about fiction is that it does open those conversations. The challenge is, as you say, when it draws so much attention scientifically, when it draws funding away, when it confuses the public by making claims that really aren’t true or aren’t supportable, you cannot say that you’ve de-extincted an animal that didn’t exist in the…
Alyssa Fjeld (09:43)
True.
Travis (10:06)
didn’t exist in the first place, right? Like the creation of this hybrid wolf, it’s the creation of a new organism. It’s not the, not the resurrection of the dire wolf. So from that perspective, they’ve done a good job. They’ve done a, I mean, any company would love to get the kind of attention, the global splash of attention that Colossal gets from the dire wolf announcement, from the wooly, wooly mouse announcement, from the thylacine announcement, you know,
Alyssa Fjeld (10:15)
Yeah. And this is.
Travis (10:34)
And it remains to be seen what they can do with the thylacine because there’s talk that potentially it’ll involve inserting a thylacine embryo into a Dunnart. But this approach makes me think that perhaps what they’re going to end up doing with the thylacine is actually just modifying a Dunnart. And again, that’s not the same thing.
Alyssa Fjeld (10:53)
It’s common in science, I think, to see these sorts of incidents where you have companies or individual researchers that can see the next leap in the field. De-extinction is something that I hope will become possible in my lifetime to some extent. For animals where we do have complete DNA sequences, I don’t know anything about genetics. Genetics people, please don’t come for me in the comments, but.
It’s something that I think we can see so clearly and want so much to be true. Like all of us would love to have that moment where we are standing in front of our study animals saying:
But I think when we trust people to give us that answer without all of the labor that goes into it, it’s something that they’re betraying the good faith that you’re putting in them. And that good faith should go to the people who are doing the hard work.
I suppose if any of our listeners have conservation groups that are working towards maintaining small endangered species that we have alive on our planet today, any kind of, maybe not de-extinction exactly, but conservation efforts that are dedicated to those kinds of causes, please shout them out so that we can get some time and attention to the real people who are doing this sort of thing.
Travis (11:58)
It’s better to save the koala that we have than have to try and de-extinct it in several decades.
Alyssa Fjeld (12:03)
That’s right! We have no
idea how much… We have no idea how much Chlamydia the Dire Wolves could have. It’s a finite amount with the koalas!
Travis (12:07)
you
You didn’t have to take it to STDs, come on.
Alyssa Fjeld (12:12)
Fine, okay, we have no idea how much eucalypt the direwolves would consume. Probably not as much.
Travis (12:17)
The reason I mentioned the koala though is that there was some evidence this week that over 2 million hectares of koala habitat has been bulldozed since 2011. you know, this is the thing. Australia is not doing a good job at protecting these creatures. And to put all the attention onto a kind of romanticized version of
of a creature like the thylacine and say, let’s bring that back instead. That’s perhaps not the way to go when we could actually be protecting the dunnart, the koala, the bandicoot, the echidna, the platypus, know, any of these, which are already really charismatic, which are already really important to our identity. And that’s just Australia. mean, the rest of the world has the same problems, you know.
Alyssa Fjeld (13:02)
We’re all facing
challenges with climate disasters and Australia fires destroy how many hectares of koala, kangaroo, numbat habitat every single year. And this year, it’s a hot, dry year. We have no idea what we might lose. We have no idea how much conservation remains to be done. And yeah, I think that’s an absolutely amazing point. You should definitely care for the animals in your own backyard before.
focusing on alchemically recreating the ones that aren’t here anymore.
Travis (13:37)
We might move on from that one and I’ll introduce our interview for the week. If you’re a fan of the Common Descent podcast, you’ll no doubt have heard of the Gray Fossil Site. The Gray Fossil Site is in Eastern Tennessee. Your part of the world, Alyssa.
Alyssa Fjeld (13:54)
Yes, I have our mascot right here, the American Opossum. I personally love the Great Fossil site. It is just a few hours north of where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And I know some really fantastic people that have spent time volunteering at this site. It is absolutely as great as any of the UNESCO World Heritage sites you could think of. It’s worth a visit if you are ever in that part of the woods.
Travis (14:16)
So the site was discovered during road construction in 2000. Excavations there have unearthed fossils of 200 different species. It’s like this treasure trove of paleontology. There’s tapirs, rhinoceroses, alligators, mastodons, there’s red pandas, there’s turtles, there’s all sorts of creatures.
It offers a really rare glimpse into the biodiversity of the early Pliocene in that part of the US, which gives it a really unique window onto the planet’s past. So I sat down with Shay Maden from the Gray Fossil Sight and Museum. Shay also studied at East Tennessee State University, which has a close affiliation with Gray. So thanks to Shay for joining us and thanks to David from Common Descent for putting me in touch with Shay. Here’s the interview.
Travis (15:04)
Shay, how would you describe it for someone who hasn’t heard of Gray Fossil Site?
Shay Maden (15:09)
So in very broad terms, it is a little oasis in the fossiliferous wasteland of the eastern United States. We do not have a great fossil record from the east. We don’t have a great fossil record, particularly of the Cenozoic, prior to the Ice Age. So the fossil site itself dates to the early Pliocene. So it’s between 4.9 and 4.5 million years of age. And it is a…
lacustrine fill. So it’s a sinkhole essentially that plugged up filled with water and within the lake or pond that resulted we have uncovered an absolutely spectacular, very complete assemblage of everything from algae and fungal spores to very small animals all the way up to large animals like rhinos and mastodons.
Travis (15:55)
So you get this kind of complete environment unfolding there in the fossil record, which sounds great and some fantastic fossils which we’ll get to as we move on. But tell me a bit about your current role and how you got there. Did you sort of have a lifelong interest in fossils and evolution or did you take a bit of a different path?
Shay Maden (16:11)
So I had always been interested in science as a kid. My first big love was bugs. Like even from a very young age, I was roaming around and making notes, very scientific observations on the bugs in my yard. I actually did not get into paleontology until a little late. I wasn’t a dinosaur kid. In high school in Tennessee, you are required to complete 40 hours of volunteer service in order to graduate high school. So during my sophomore year, I suppose, 10th grade,
Travis (16:17)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (16:36)
I was looking at volunteer opportunities. found the Gray Fossil Site. I started volunteering there and within I think about six months had completely shifted my college plans away from marine biology, which was my initial plan to paleontology. So I got my undergraduate degrees at East Tennessee State University, which is the university that sort of doesn’t own but manages the fossil site. And later went on to get my master’s through East Tennessee State University as well.
And for the past two years, I’ve been serving as an AmeriCorps service member working in the collections range, mostly working with microfossils, rehousing them, identifying them, organizing them, that sort of
Travis (17:14)
Tell me a bit about what visitors see when they come to the site or to the museum that’s associated with it. What’s the setup?
Shay Maden (17:21)
So we actually have two institutions basically in the same building. So we also partner with a children’s museum, a STEM based education facility. So they have a lot of material, but we do have a hall with the typical fossil site thing. You’ve got mounted skeletons, we’ve got multiple cases with different themes showing off some of our actual fossils and a couple of cases on 3D replicas. We also have…
a set up upstairs where our lab and our collections range are where people can see into those spaces and watch people, you know, working, moving specimens around, get a look at some of the behind the scenes side of things.
Travis (17:54)
So Gray is known then for this huge assemblage of fossils from that sort of Pliocene period. What’s the most surprising or unexpected discovery that you know of there?
Shay Maden (18:03)
As far as things that have come out recently, one spectacular one was this giant flying squirrel, Maya pederista. So this was actually only the third record from the states. There was only one tooth, I believe, that was recovered from Florida. We do have oftentimes a lot of faunal overlap with sites in Florida just because
Travis (18:08)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (18:19)
Florida has a really good fossil record, especially from sort of the later Cenozoic and not necessarily due to climatic similarities, more so just that’s the only other place on the Eastern seaboard where we’re getting these fossils. So there was a previous record that paper on the single lower tooth from Gray was published a couple of weeks ago. And the day after the paper was published, we found another tooth, which was an upper. So that’s actually the first upper molar recorded for this genus anywhere.
But this is a giant flying squirrel that is about the size, dimensions as far as length and kind of height of probably a small house cat. Weighs a little less because it is a flying squirrel. Similar to the modern giant flying squirrels in the genus Petaurista that you find in Southeast Asia.
Travis (19:00)
So that’s exciting. It starts to tell us a bit about the kind of evolution of these species and the evolution of ecosystems in that eastern part of the United States. What do you think that Gray is contributing to that knowledge? What are we learning about that kind of history?
Shay Maden (19:14)
Well, one of the big things and something that ties in very nicely with the flying squirrel is that as you go through the Cenozoic, obviously, especially as we’re getting through to the later Cenozoic, we’re seeing this trend of drying, aridification, opening of environments. it was assumed that that was basically a global phenomenon. And what we see at Gray, whereas most of these other Pliocene sites, other similarly aged sites in, you know, the central United States out West, most of them are preserving, you know, a
Travis (19:32)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (19:41)
grassland to savanna to maybe scrub forest type of environment. But Gray is a closed forest. As far as the floral evidence that we’re getting, the abundance of broadleaf trees, the final evidence in the form of one that abundance of browsing animals, animals that are eating leaves rather than animals that are focusing on grasses. And we have
Travis (20:01)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (20:03)
I believe three different species of flying squirrels documented from the site, or least three different morphotypes of flying squirrels. So you’re not going to get flying squirrels unless you have trees that are close enough together for flying squirrels to jump between. all of this is telling us that one, know, conditions, at least in the United States and probably globally, we’re not homogenous. We’re not necessarily grassland dominated throughout all the way up until, you know, the end of the last glacial maximum. We are seeing some variety in.
Travis (20:10)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (20:30)
types of ground cover, types of landscape cover. As far as other things that is teaching us, I think a big one is just filling in a missing piece in the lineage of a lot of different species. So for example, we have some of the oldest deer fossils from North America, which is pretty much right after they have entered North America. It seems like they dispersed very quickly and we’ve got the two oldest records of deer from North America being from, again, Florida and then our site.
We’ve got some of the last rhinos in North America, rhinos which evolved in North America. We essentially have, if not the latest, then almost the latest records of North American rhinos. So just kind of extending temporal ranges for some species, definitely extending the geographic range for some species. Going back to unexpected finds, there’s a lot of things that have cropped up and they were early discoveries, so they seem kind of commonplace to me at this point.
having been at the site for as long as I have, but things like Gila monsters. So Gila dermatids, beaded lizards, which today are found in the American Southwest. We have osteoderms, the little teeny tiny skin bones, nothing else yet, but we have osteoderms that show us that we had beaded lizards in this environment. That was one of the early indicators that Gray was preserving an ecosystem that was definitely not the same as the modern day and looking at a climate that was definitely warmer and probably wetter than the modern day.
And that’s been corroborated by various forms of evidence from isotopes to, you know, mess aware and crown height analysis and things like
Travis (21:57)
Do you think it’s important for, you know, I gather Gray is quite a small town, right? And there are some other cities nearby, but do you think it’s important for communities like, like smaller communities and things to have their own kind of pre-history that they can call their own, that they can turn into a museum and sort of celebrate and recognise?
Shay Maden (22:16)
Absolutely, I mean it’s a thing that people are, even if they don’t necessarily recognise the significance of it, most of the locals are just thrilled that there is this fossil site. The other great thing about the museum is that it’s built on the site, so the actual excavation is going on right outside. During the summer when we’re digging, people can come out and walk up to the pit and see what’s being dug up and you know, our workers will hold up various little things that they’ve found. No, it’s very, very valuable I think to have something that…
Travis (22:27)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (22:42)
It transcends virtually any barrier that you could think of between people. doesn’t matter, especially in this day and age. Doesn’t matter your politics, doesn’t matter your age, doesn’t matter even really your views on the somewhat contentious subject of fossils themselves and geologic time. But it’s cool. People like to see bones and it’s something that everybody, especially the locals, I I grew up maybe 15 minutes away from the site and I was thrilled as a kid to be able to go there and
say that, know, Tennessee has this site. So it’s definitely something the locals enjoy and that’s something that we, as the museum staff try to facilitate, is making people feel like it’s theirs, it’s your natural history, all of this belongs to the state of Tennessee, and it’s our pleasure to be able to curate these things and show them off.
Travis (23:25)
the site is relatively young compared to some other sort of famous fossil deposits. And yet it gives us this really amazing insight into past life. What makes that period so interesting, do you think?
Shay Maden (23:37)
Well, sitting at the Pliocene again, we’re about five million years old is the benchmark we like to use. We don’t have precise dates on that, I should say, because we’re in that weird spot where we don’t have any of the isotopes that we would need for dating at that time. We’re too old for carbon dating. We’re too young for a lot of other isotopic dating. So this is based off of just relative dating using their small mammals. That’s why it’s an age range. In this time period, you’re really starting to see this transition towards a more modern fauna.
So oftentimes the formula, egg gray, is that the genus is a living genus. So for example, most of our rodents, virtually all of our reptiles and amphibians are living genera, but new species. So you’re really seeing this transition between sort of the weird stuff that’s going on as you go back into the myosin. You’ve got a few oddball holdovers from that, but you’re really starting to see sort of the shape of a modern ecosystem emerging. have, for example, our carnivores.
We have pretty much the same size and type of carnivores that we would have had in this part of North America today prior to human alteration of these landscapes. I think that’s really it. And also the fact that as you’re looking at the Pliocene, again, it’s been generally assumed that most habitats were moving towards being more open, being more grass dominated. And we have the polar opposite of this. mean, some of these plants, especially some of our compression fossils of leaves,
Travis (24:38)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (24:56)
you could say that these were from the Eocene of Oregon. And if you didn’t know better, would think that makes sense. So it’s a very lush environment, contrasts really sharply with a lot of the other, at least prominent sort of Pliocene age sites.
Travis (25:10)
So you mentioned that it’s kind of in the cusp of modern ecosystems emerging. And so if you travel back, you probably would be able to look around and say, I recognise that creature, right? But if you personally could travel back to the height of the fossil site during its heyday, during the period that’s sort of important, around 4 and 1 to 5 million years, what specific thing would you like to see? What would you most like to observe if you got there?
Shay Maden (25:21)
yeah.
Well, if we’re talking about, if I can see anything, I just want to see what the deposit looks like, because this has been something that myself and my coworkers, my husband’s also a paleontologist, and we talk about this all the time. We know that the site began as a karst feature, so a feature that’s related to dissolution of limestone. So it started as a big cave. The roof of that cave collapsed in and formed a sinkhole, and then it plugged and was a standing body of water with some access.
It doesn’t appear that it was acting as a natural trap because we don’t see sort of the older and weaker or younger and less fit animals. have a pretty even distribution with our larger animals, with our tapirs and things like that. I just want to see if this thing had a ton of access to sunlight. Was it partially within a cave mouth? Was this partly underground?
We have no body fossils from aquatic plants and no pollen from aquatic plants. We have, in the sediments, actually have boulders. And in a lot of cases, as we cut down beside the boulder through these just clay-rich sediments that the actual fossils are coming out of, you can see that the layers are deformed underneath them. So it appears that at least at some parts of the site, there was a steep rim that
Travis (26:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (26:46)
boulders
were occasionally falling off of and disrupting the sediments beneath. But what the site looked like is something that we talk about all the time. So that would settle a lot of bets if we could actually get a picture of what it looked like in its heyday. Faunally, I think my favorite would probably be our camel. This is something that I worked on in undergrad. have material from probably two different species of camel.
Travis (27:08)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (27:09)
The one that I did most of my work on appears to be a Lamini camel, so more closely related to llamas and guanacos than it is to the modern day Bactrian and Dromedary camels, but it is quite large. It is not a giant camel, though we might have material from a giant camel. But this is an animal that probably would have been at least eight and a half feet tall at the head. So really large, really impressive, sort of out of place in a forest ecosystem. So.
Travis (27:35)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (27:35)
That would be something I would love to see. We don’t find a lot of it, so it doesn’t seem like they were frequent visitors around the sinkhole, but we have enough that we have several individuals. So were these forest dwelling camels or are they living in a grassland or sort of a mixed forest nearby and they’re just coming to the sinkhole for water? That would be something I would love to see.
Travis (27:53)
Yeah, it’s really challenging sometimes when there is a creature like a camel, which nowadays we think of in primarily arid environments, and then you find it kind of out of place and you have to readjust your parameters for where these could live. know, think David and Will on Common Descent made this same kind of observation about woolly rhinos, Today we expect rhinos to be in a certain location, but actually…
Wooly rhinos and the evolutionary history of rhinos suggests that they were living in all sorts of environments that are not the kind of savanna-based environment and sometimes forests that we see nowadays. So similar thing with the camels maybe.
Shay Maden (28:24)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
For sure, same thing with our mastodon. We have several mastodons. One is a mostly complete skeleton that we’ve been excavating since 2015, or preparing since 2015. It was excavated by 2015. And you would think, first off, you’re thinking proboscidean and elephant-like animal, we’re associating them again with Africa. But this is an animal that is living in a particularly, dense forest.
And not only that, but it doesn’t really look like an animal that should be roaming around in the forest. It’s huge. Looking at an animal that’s probably about 11 feet high at the shoulder and has 13 foot long tusks. So I suppose you don’t really need to maneuver between trees when you’re that scale. can just go wherever you want pretty easily. yep, finally, Gray continues to surprise us in those ways. Things like our rhino, which is a new species, Teleoceras aepysoma.
It’s a barrel-bodied rhino, very common at other Pliocene and slightly older sites in North America. And ours is a long-legged teleoceros. So most teleoceros are shaped like wiener dogs, so they’ve got very, very stubby legs, very, very broad chest. They wouldn’t have been more than maybe a foot off of the ground when they actually had soft tissues on. But ours has lengthened its limbs and looks a little bit more like a normal rhino.
just to be weird. And gray always has to have its own strange flavor of whatever animals we find.
Travis (29:47)
Yeah, that sounds awesome. the mastodon as well, you know, probably stretching my elephant knowledge here, but I gather that the Asian elephants, which are the kind of forest dwelling elephants nowadays are a bit smaller, right, compared to the African plains elephants. So, yeah, so exactly the same question. How do you get such a big kind of Proboscidean what wandering around the forest would be?
Shay Maden (30:01)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
for sure.
Travis (30:10)
would be fascinating to see.
tell me about some of the other taxa that you find at the site.
Shay Maden (30:14)
Well, I will say our sort of mascot animals are one, tapirs. So tapirs are relatives of horses and rhinos. Today you find them in South America and there’s one species over in Malaysia. But they’re sort of short, chunky, pig-like, almost animals that are herbivorous. They have a little tiny trunk that they use to manipulate food items. And we actually have more tapir fossils than any facility anywhere has even modern tapir skeletons.
So we have cabinets on cabinets on cabinets of tapir fossils. I think at the last count, the minimum number of individuals we had is about 166, 167. So it’s a lot of tapirs and it makes perfect sense. We have this forested environment, tapirs are browsers. They eat predominantly soft plant material. So that would have been abundant and tapirs spend a lot of time in water. So obviously they were coming down to the sinkhole pond, spending a lot of time there and occasionally dying in there.
usually floating around and falling apart. So we find them in bits, but we do have some really nice specimens. The one, in fact, the exhibit that we just set up today is an articulated baby tapir. So she would have been about knee high, but she’s preserved in essentially life position with her front limbs in place, her ribs in place, her skull absolutely beautifully preserved.
Travis (31:12)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that’s one of those moments in paleontology
where it’s like, it’s so cool to see this and then so sad, but also so cool.
Shay Maden (31:36)
Yes,
we had a comment from one of the museum guides essentially saying something about a baby skeleton being a little morbid and it’s like, well, it’s paleontology, everything’s dead. You’ve got to kind of deal with it at some point. Yes. And then the other animal that we’re well known for is our red panda. So this is actually the second record of red pandas from North America. Previously, the only record was a single tooth.
Travis (31:47)
Yeah, it all had to die at some point.
Shay Maden (32:02)
from Washington state, so all the way up in the other corner of the country. But we found, initially, we found that same tooth, the same tooth in the mouth, and we’re able to say that this was distinct. So it’s a new species and genus, Pristinilorus pristili. But since then, we’ve found two nearly complete skeletons, which our preparator has pioneered new methods in using various fillers to put these things together. He likes to brag about.
Some pieces of our female red panda, her name’s Scarlet, some pieces of her skull were, I believe he said, less than two millimeters thick, and he was still able to assemble them all. So we have beautiful, beautiful crania for both of them. And I think Scarlet is about 98 % complete. She’s missing, I think, a couple of toes and a couple of tail vertebrae. But this is an animal that is a little bit larger than the modern red panda and probably more omnivorous and more similar.
Travis (32:34)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (32:51)
Were similar to a raccoon ecologically than they are to the highly specialized bamboo eating modern day red pandas.
Travis (32:58)
I love the name Scarlet for the red panda. think that’s really nice. It seems like a lot of Australian fossil sites, they tend to give these nicknames to particular creatures and some people seem to raise an eyebrow at that. So I love that you do that as well.
Shay Maden (33:11)
yeah, anything that gets enough attention and especially anything that’s sitting around in the lab being worked on for long enough has a name. All of our relatively complete rhinos have names and I think the three good pandas have names. Not a lot else though. Like the mastodon that’s been in works for 10 years doesn’t really have a name. We just kind of refer to him by specimen number which seems a little rude but I don’t know.
Travis (33:27)
Mm-hmm.
You’ll have to get Common Descent to run a naming competition or something.
Shay Maden (33:37)
We need it for, especially for this baby tapir, it’s like this is on display, the visitors can see it. We should have, at least for the guides, we should have a silly nickname for her.
Travis (33:45)
Yeah.
I highly encourage silly nicknames. I think it’s really important. Look, can I touch on Common Descent? I think they’ve really brought some attention to the Gray Fossil site, maybe that might not have been there otherwise. Do you think that’s been important to recognition and understanding of the site?
Shay Maden (34:01)
Absolutely, I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that for the preservation for the abundance of fossils that we have, Gray should be a more commonplace name, maybe not a household name, but certainly one that most paleontologists, most fossil enthusiasts should be familiar with as much as La Brea. This is the La Brea of the East, but we get articulated skeletons. So any push that we can have, any way that word of mouth or otherwise that…
Travis (34:18)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (34:25)
information about the site, especially done well, as Will and David do, especially introducing it to people who are already interested in this type of thing. We’ve had people come in who were locals that knew about the site, but didn’t really know what it was and thought it was maybe like a tourist trap kind of thing, who heard about it on Common Descent and then paid us a visit and, you know, had a real good time and learned a lot. So absolutely, you know, anyone that’s getting the word out.
especially to people who care about this kind of thing, is very valuable to us. More feet in the door and further transmission of information about the site.
Travis (34:58)
Yeah, think that moment can be really helpful to have your kind of built-in champions there, right? And I know, I don’t know which one, but I know one of them spent some time working at the site as well, And, they both did, right.
Shay Maden (35:09)
both of them did, yeah. They’re
both former master’s from the program at ETSU.
Travis (35:14)
Yeah, okay.
ETSU as well, I guess it’s important to have a local university buying into and supporting this work too.
Shay Maden (35:21)
Absolutely. Most of our funding comes from the state, which is wonderful and we’re very appreciative and it makes running things a whole lot easier. But yeah, having support from ETSU has been, especially in research endeavors has been phenomenal. I mean, we have a micro CT scanner that is technically belongs to the biology department, but we’re able to use that for scanning some of our fossils, which has been very, very useful or scanning.
Travis (35:24)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (35:45)
modern wet specimens to look at soft tissue anatomy, look inside of concretions and other things that we’re too afraid to bust into with excavation tools. In fact, we were able to use, think, some of the mass spectrometry tools on some of our sediments, things that are part of the chemistry department and all, and also just having occasionally input from other people that are part of the ETSU academic family. We have some pretty strong ties with the biology department.
with the archeology department as well.
Travis (36:12)
Yeah, I think that’s really important to have that institutional support building up around important sites and cultural, you know, memory institutions is really important as well. So I think that can be important and helpful. Is there any, is there an underrated perhaps exhibit or specimen that you know that you think most people maybe miss when they come, but you think they really should see?
Shay Maden (36:35)
Well, I would have to plug my personal favorites, which are the fish. That’s what I studied for my masters and I’ve been doing freshwater fish paleontology for somehow like five years now. We don’t have a ton of fish on display because they are tiny. All of the bones usually show up due to the way we excavate and due to the way that we screen, which is usually how we get all of our microfossils, is that all of the excavated sediment is then wet screened and then the concentrate is picked through, fossils removed.
and then they’re sent off to be ID’d. So most of these fossils are just a few millimeters in any dimension. But I will put in a plug for the use of 3D printing here. We do have a display downstairs with some of our microfauna that have been 3D printed, blown up in scale. So there’s a fish vertebra, there’s a seed of a new species of passionflower that’s found at the site, a jaw of one of our shrews, things like that. I don’t think they look quite as exciting.
Travis (37:02)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (37:29)
to the eye because they’re not real fossils, of course, but they’re not fakes. They’re replicas of real things. I think those could stand to get a little more love.
my experience in working with fish has been that you go to a site, you tell them that you study fish and they generally are like, yeah, we have some of those. Would you want to take a look at them? Because nobody’s looking at these.
Travis (37:44)
Yeah. Nobody looks at
the fish, but yeah, they’re really important and they tell a lot. And I guess also fish are preserved more, right? Would that be the case?
Shay Maden (37:52)
Absolutely.
It depends. At Gray, we have a lot of fish fossils, and that’s because they’re living in the sinkhole. They preserve, depending on the conditions, in marine settings, I think they might get off a little easier, especially if you’re talking about a pretty low energy setting. But the typical scenario with fish after death is that if it’s sufficiently warm enough, I think like 16 Celsius or above, they float due to bacterial gas production in the gut cavity.
Travis (38:02)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (38:23)
And then they just basically fall apart because the parts that you want of the fish that are diagnostic are your skull bones and fish skulls, except for the bones that house the brain. They are not fused at all. They’re just little plate-like bones stuck together with little pieces of connective tissue. So during decay, they all fall apart. They usually get scavenged really badly. At Gray, we do find articulated fish, which is unusual. And that tells us some pretty interesting things about conditions within the sinkhole.
Travis (38:33)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (38:47)
For the most part, we find isolated, disarticulated, very fragmentary remains just because of partly the way we’re excavating and processing the sediment, but also because they’re just not super well suited to holding up for long periods of geologic time. But they certainly are abundant. And if you like fish vertebrae, those are going to hold up no matter what. Probably not perfect, but if you get nothing else, you will get vertebrae.
Travis (39:11)
Yeah, yeah, because they’ll break apart and sink, right?
Shay Maden (39:14)
sturdy and robust compared to the little potato chip-like bones that make up the rest of the skeleton.
Travis (39:18)
Yep.
Shay Maden (39:19)
But also we have new exhibits coming in. So those would be things that I would, if anybody is thinking of visiting, would direct them to check out the new exhibits on our ungulates, our articulated baby tapir, and our incredible abundance of turtle species that we have at the site.
Travis (39:37)
Yeah, turtles are something I’ve heard mentioned quite a lot. And of course that baby tapir. So that’s just been up recently in public display.
Shay Maden (39:45)
Yeah, so the turtles are not up yet, but we will hopefully have them by next week in the case. The baby tapir, we literally put the glass on the case at about 4:45 today. So she is brand new and I don’t think any visitors actually got to see her today. That was a staff only reveal, but those are good to go for future visitors.
Travis (40:02)
Yeah.
we are recording this in the first week of April. exciting things happening in Gray Fossil Site in April,2025. So make sure you get along from here on out.
Shay, do you see your career, which I gather is still at a relatively early stage, do you see Gray as a launching site or do you want to spend a long time there and be part of the community and the facility ongoing?
Shay Maden (40:30)
It’s been, I’ve often thought of it as a nest that I would like to return to. I mean, it’s where I discovered the love that I have for fossils, which is just an extension of being nearly pathologically obsessed with animals. There’s more dead animals than there are living animals. So there’s so much work to be done. Again, we’re only a 25 year old site. The site was only discovered in 2000. So there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done there. I’m not sure at this juncture if I’m going to look into
Travis (40:34)
Mm-hmm.
Shay Maden (40:58)
potentially higher education, look into a PhD. But my goal would be to return back to Gray just because I feel like, know, one, sunk time. So I’ve been there a long time, might as well keep it up. But it is very special to me and I feel like I can contribute with the knowledge that I’ve gained. So whether that ends up with me potentially getting a longer term position at the museum in the next few years or taking off doing something else and bringing back new skills eventually, it’s
I will never be free of Gray. It is not a tar pit, it kind of acts like one in that way. It’s hard to get away.
Travis (41:31)
It sounds like you have a real passion for the site and I think as well as what it can contribute to the community and also the fascinating finds that come out. So thank you for sharing that passion with me today.
Shay Maden (41:42)
My pleasure.
Travis (41:43)
following on from that interview with Shay, where we learned all about the Gray Fossil site, first thing I want to note is that Eons scooped us, Alyssa. Eons just recently had an episode all about the Gray Fossil site this week as we were recording. And I was a little bit frustrated because I’ve had that interview with Shay in the bag. so I
Alyssa Fjeld (41:55)
Yeah
Travis (42:02)
I want to point out I wasn’t trying to copy Aeons on this occasion, even though we’ve had that going on in the past. But we had a comment a couple of weeks ago on the Dinotopia episode. This was over on our YouTube channel. The comments was from Alex McCauley and Alex said, thank you so much for profiling Dinotopia. This was such a formative book series for me as a teen two very different recent pieces of media, which fit into the niche of dinosaur pastoral fantasy.
Paleo Pines. don’t know if you’ve come across Paleo Pines. I’ve loved it. I’ve played it. It’s great fun. It’s a cute cartoony farming simulator with dinosaurs. What could be better? And also a World of Dinosaurs blog by CM Koseman and Simon Roy. So those are recommended by Alex McCauley and we’ll put some links to those in the show notes. And I also want to give a very quick shout out to
an amazing YouTube series, which is just starting to release its series two, and that is Dinosauria which is this beautifully animated YouTube series. The first one was absolutely fantastic. And the second one has just started to be released. So they’re my shout outs for the week. And you want to talk about pint of science.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:10)
That’s right. First of all, I didn’t know Dinosauria was doing more stuff. Now I’m very excited. Weak kneed. Dinosauria is an independent creator who does these highly stylized animations of dinosaurs that are just, there’s no way to be upset when you’re watching it. It is the best vibe in the world. But yes, so I am presenting this year at an event called Pint of Science in Australia.
Travis (43:15)
Ha
Alyssa Fjeld (43:32)
Pint of Science is an event that is largely volunteer based and is probably happening in your backyard if you live in one of the major cities in Australia. This is an event that usually spans three days and involves presentations from a wide variety of practicing scientists in a variety of fields. If there are paleontologists in your town that have signed up to present, you can find out on the Pint of Science website and you can come along. Usually these events are held, surprise, surprise, where you can get a pint of beer.
you can enjoy a presentation from one of your favorite researchers while having a drink in a much more relaxed environment where you can also have a chat with them before and after. So it’s a good opportunity to come along, learn more about what people do. I will be presenting on Wednesday, May 19th at the Carlton Brew House. It is a random Wednesday in May. If your winter depression is setting in, come and see me.
I will be presenting with Dr. James Rule who is a seal researcher who is far funnier than I am, so you should really come see his Simpsons references, and a different researcher who is named Lu-Seal, which is gonna be very fun for me. I will definitely be calling her Lu-Seal. If you’ve seen Arrested Development, that joke will be funny.
Travis (44:40)
in the banana stand.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:41)
Yes, yes. I will also, so my presentation, I made the mistake of submitting my expression of interest right after we recorded this podcast and before I had lunch. So if you enjoy me ranting about what animals I would eat, 30 minutes of that coming your way.
Travis (44:55)
Yeah, so if you didn’t get enough of Alyssa’s previous conversations about wanting to eat various prehistoric animals on this podcast, then 30 minutes of it at Pint of Science on the 19th of May sounds like a great night.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:08)
That’s right, and if you come along and you say you’re a listener of the podcast, there might or might not be a sticker in it for you. So let me bribe you into coming to our show.
Travis (45:16)
sounds like an absolute plan and a good night. So we will make sure details of that are in the show notes.
as well. I also want to mention if you don’t get enough of our voices on audio podcasts, you can actually access video versions of this podcast every week on Spotify and YouTube as well. So that would be great if you want to look into our eyes as we we regale you or rant or whatever it happens to be in a given week that is available. You can just look for Fossils and Fiction, go to our website and all the links are there as well.
A reminder, we have merch available. have stickers, We have that beautiful little yellow beanie with skitters on it, of course, featuring the wonderful artwork by our friends, Zev Landes So, Zev, who designed our artwork, we’ve put it on some of that material that you can purchase through our shop. So please access that and follow us on your favorite podcasting platform. Give a like rating review. All of those help grow the podcast.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:14)
Thank you to all of our listeners as always. Shout out to my friends and family who support the podcast and to everyone who buys merch. You guys are not only looking cool as heck, you are supporting us directly So thank you so much to all of you.
