Alyssa Fjeld (00:00)
you think that whales are cowards
Travis Holland (00:26)
Welcome to this episode of Fossils and Fiction. We have an interview with a seal expert. Alyssa will introduce all of that. We have some news to chat about,
We have some listener feedback and also it’s Halloween week so we’re going to talk about creepy museums and creepy museum specimens. How are you Alyssa?
Alyssa Fjeld (00:36)
Bye.
You
It’s another rainy day here in Melbourne. I’ve got some secondarily aquatic tetrapods behind me representing the interview that you guys are going to be listening to later from James Rule including his allegations that some cetaceans are cowards.
Travis Holland (00:59)
That came up quite a lot. Cowards might be the word of the interview. Okay, let’s start with this research, which has only come out a couple of days ago as we’re recording. It’s by Andrew Flynn and Steven Brusatte and a team of colleagues about late surviving New Mexican dinosaurs, illustrating that they illuminate, as it says in the title, high end cretaceous diversity and provinciality.
This is some research from New Mexico and it shows that dinosaurs in and around the New Mexico area were actually quite diverse and endemic and doing very well right up until the asteroid impact. So they argue that non-avian dinosaurs were not in decline before this event because previous research from the Eastern side of the Laramidian continent or Eastern side of North America had
really shown that in fact there was some debate about whether dinosaurs were in decline, but it wasn’t necessarily a global trend, although as I understand it, there were also some declines in Southeast Asia, particularly around India. So there has been debate about whether dinosaurs were on their way out before the Cretaceous and Cretaceous impactor at Chicxulub, but this suggests actually no in New Mexico at least.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:09)
Thanks
Travis Holland (02:21)
they were doing pretty well. And so this has received some global coverage and additional researchers said, you know, this shows that, although it shows pretty good evidence that they were doing pretty well, they were in no trouble at that part of the world. There’s a comment by Michael Benton, who’s very renowned at this. said, look, it only looks at one location. It’s not a representation of dinosaur species across North America or all over the world. However,
things were going well in this area. these late surviving dinosaurs in New Mexico, quite exciting, shows that the faunas were diverse, that things were going well in that location. the research was conducted in the
At Naashoibito Member no doubts getting that correct, Naashoibito member in New Mexico, right up to the very latest Cretaceous, somewhere between 66.4 and 66 million years ago, just before or up to the point of the impactor. pretty exciting evidence that goes right up to that point. We love to see evidence of the world’s biggest catastrophe. And here it is and the impact that it had on the world.
My question is, we know very little about what happened in the Southern Hemisphere at that impactor because my understanding is that in Australia, there’s only maybe one point where the End Cretaceous line is actually preserved. The one that shows that, actually shows the ejecta from the meteor because after that period Australia went through,
Alyssa Fjeld (03:45)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (03:53)
there was a lot of erosion across the Australian continent. And so actually we don’t have right up till the end of the Cretaceous here. We have late Cretaceous deposits, but not right up to the end. And so we don’t quite know what happened after the Cretaceous. And there’s this big disjuncture up until you get into the, you know, later into the Pliocene. So yeah, I would love to know what happened in the Southern hemisphere. We don’t know, but.
Alyssa Fjeld (04:19)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (04:19)
Here it is, looks like things were going not too bad for the dinosaurs, at least in New Mexico.
Alyssa Fjeld (04:23)
this is pretty in keeping with what we keep discovering as paleontologists, which is that there is no real straightforward through-line or narrative that nature can give us, and that the real stories are always much more complex than a simple narrative of just, well, the populations were already globally in decline or things like that. There are always little holdouts and pockets even in nature today, which is why we hold out hope that species we haven’t seen in a while might still exist in small pockets out there and haven’t gone fully extinct.
Travis Holland (04:50)
Now you had some interesting, exciting research as well to chat about.
Alyssa Fjeld (04:53)
That’s right. We’re going to take a trip not too far away from New Mexico over to Wyoming. And this is again in the Cretaceous period. This is in the Maastrichtian A recent publication in Science by Paul Serrano and many other affiliated authors documents something that’s very exciting for paleo artists, which is the first evidence of a hooved vertebrate on land, which is the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus Annectans.
Annectans is a subspecies of Edmontosaurus that has been discovered in this formation in Wyoming that they are calling the Lance Formation. But specifically, the part of Wyoming that this comes from was documented all the way back in the early 1900s as being a location that you could retrieve dinosaurs with very special mummification going on. Many of these specimens were donated to museums like the AMNH mummy, which is another
Edmontosaurus and ectans that was dug up during this time period. This team was able to use historical notes to reconstruct data as to where the location of these mummies was coming from and uncovered two new mummies. I’m putting this in quotes because the process of mummification that something like the Egyptians would use is very different from what’s happened here.
the animal is quickly, quickly becoming covered in a thin layer of very fine sediment that’s preserving the skin before it has a chance to rot away. And usually this happens in like an anoxic environment. So it’s really rare to get this kind of preservation. And this really thin layer of clay, which is smaller than a millimeter, like hair sized has preserved in addition to these hooves.
Also the details of a fleshy crest over the neck and trunk, as well as interdigitating spike rows over the hips and tail. So this pointy, fleshy, hooved creature is a better picture of the Edmontosaurus that many of us know and love. How fun is that?
Travis Holland (06:39)
Yeah, that’s pretty exciting. have
seen some artwork actually showing that instead of just the comb kind of on the head that, you know, you might extend it all the way down the back and those kinds of things. So it’s always really exciting when you get a fossil that is not just bones, right? That it gives you something extra that you can see this is what this animal actually might’ve looked more looked like in life.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:03)
Absolutely, it’s exciting. I think it helps us with the problems of things like shrink wrapping as well, where we might not always know how loosely the skin sat on top of the other features of the animal. I love the cresty boys. They’re my favorite category of dinosaur, cresty honky boys. So I’m just happy to know that he also has little hooves on his little feets. How cute is that?
Travis Holland (07:25)
I mean, I wouldn’t call them little hooves, right? These are big
animals. These are very big animals. But nonetheless.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:30)
Okay, well, that’s fair.
Yeah, so we’ve got a mummy this Halloween. That’s pretty exciting. I think that’s also pretty in keeping with our spooky Halloween spooktacular. You can’t use spooky twice.
Travis Holland (07:42)
No,
you can’t, but you did. whatever.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:45)
Woo!
Travis Holland (07:45)
Okay. Something, particularly spooky, maybe if you’re a fish is seals. That was a very poor transition, but here we are.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:52)
Yes.
Seals! What a creature! They don’t look spooky on the outside, but a lot of the times if you pop their mouths open, especially leopard seals and crab eater seals, you can definitely see that these guys were descended from carnivorous ancestors. Seals, what’s their deals? We’ve got paleontologist Dr. James Rule to tell us more about them. James is a member of our lab, which was very convenient for me, so this interview actually took place in our office.
And James is just an awful lot of fun to talk about. He’s had experience both getting a PhD in Melbourne, working with the Melbourne Museum, as well as doing his postdoc in the UK where he was with the National Museum of History in London. And James has done everything from turtles to seals, but we mostly focus on the deals with seals in this episode.
Alyssa Fjeld (08:40)
We’re here with James Rule PhD and current postdoc in the ⁓ Evans Evo Morph Lab. James, how are you today? I’m good, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show, Alyssa. Absolutely, yeah.
If you’ve never met James before, James is a classic member of the Evans Lab. He’s also done some tremendous work with some of the other students here. So you can see our friend, Lockie, in the background if you’re watching at home. Lockie is also studying an animal group called secondary aquatic tetrapods. And that’s a fun word that some people in our audience may be familiar with in connection to whales. But could you tell us a little bit more about what these animals are? So essentially, are
First of all, what is a tetrapod? Let’s start there. Tetrapod is an animal with a backbone and four limbs, essentially. So we’re tetrapods. And originally though, our ancestors used to be fish. So in a phylogenetic sense, we’re also all fish. Thank goodness. We won’t get into that. But at some point, the fish got tired of the water. They grew some limbs, or evolved some limbs. They left the water. And then they evolved into all the diverse forms like reptiles, birds, and mammals.
a secondarily aquatic tetrapod is in a group of animals that went, no, we made a mistake, we have to go back. And then they went back into the water. So these are things like turtles, whales, seals, which is what I study. What else? Lots of marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, all the extinct ones, penguins. So basically, you know, anything that used to be on land and then transitioned to
back into the water because they realize they had it quite good. Absolutely. mean, there’s no taxes under the sea as the Little Mermaid probably pointed out. I didn’t watch it. I’ve watched it. I don’t know why I said that. So people are broadly familiar with some of these trajectories, I think. But what is unique about seals? How have seals made that transition work for them? So seals are the best ones. That’s what’s unique about them. Yellows, they’re rubbish. Seals, they’re absolutely great.
But seals, the reason why seals are great is ⁓ because they are amphibious. So they are adapted to life on land and underwater. So some people might think that because seals still can walk or wriggle on land and retain some ties to land that they’re going to, they’re on land at the moment but eventually they’re going to become fully aquatic like whales. And that is probably not true at all because seals have a lot of adaptations.
specifically for life on land and underwater. And in a lot of ways, being an amphibious mammal is harder than being a fully aquatic mammal. Because you have to balance two completely different environments. So I like to say that whales, evolutionarily speaking, are cowards. They gave up their life on land, fully committed to underwater, they got rid of their legs, they got rid of like all this stuff, because it was easy.
An animal that lives in air and underwater is not easy and seals do a terrific job of balancing both, even though if you look at the ones on land, they look a little bit hopeless. They’re actually pretty good, all things considered. So my familiarity with your work is a bit limited, but I think there’s a specific anatomical feature that probably demonstrates that really well for seals, which would be the ear. Would that be correct? Yes. So that’s one of the main things I’m studying at the moment.
And that is because seals have a superpower and they are the only mammals with amphibious hearing. So they can hear in air and underwater. I think this is a great example of how they’re doing both. because whales can’t even do that. If a whale, yeah, whales are cowards. If a whale is on land, it is deaf. That is the least of its problems. But one of its problems is it cannot hear anything. So because they’re in order to hear underwater, has to completely change its ears.
to adapt to hearing underwater sounds. And that’s because air is less dense than water, and so sound behaves differently between air and water. But there is a lot of behavioral and experimental evidence that pinnipeds which is the scientific name for seals, can hear in both media. some of them can hear underwater just as well as they can hear in air. So their underwater hearing abilities are remarkable.
and it’s meant to be impossible and we don’t really understand how they do this or how it evolved and that’s sort of what my research is currently looking into. So you’re exploring the seal secrets, the sealcrets if you will, now that’s horrible. Yes, the sealcrets. And does that vary in species that have very deep diving ranges or is that something that you see consistently across all seal groups? Well depends on the group that you are, so the ones that are
better adapted for underwater, which are the true seals or the earless seals. The scientific name is the phocids So they’re the ones that don’t have any external ear pinnae, which are what we call the flappy things on the sides of our head. And they’ve got a lot of adaptations for underwater life. So they can swim very well. They usually undulate their whole bodies and use their hind limbs and a little bit of their forelimbs. But they can hear the best underwater.
The fur seals and sea lions, which are the ones with ears and the ones that can still awkwardly walk on land, they can’t hear as well underwater, but they do most of their vocalizing on beaches in ⁓ harems. So it makes a lot more sense is because they’re doing all the talking in air and true seals are doing all the talking underwater. Right.
modern seals, I’m guessing that marine noise, which is this concept that I was unaware of.
for the last couple of years, but things like boats and trawlers and man-made things making noise in the ocean, is that disruptive for the seals that are primarily in water, the phocids? Probably. So underwater noise pollution is a pretty big problem. And the reason for that is that sounds travel further underwater. Sounds are louder and faster underwater. So say if I clap like this, is at a particular volume.
If I could make a clap like this underwater, it would sound a lot louder. And so if you have a boat or you have some sort of underwater construction, some sort of human-made noise occurs underwater. It tends to be quite loud. And so this can mess with the hearing of marine mammals in particular. So whales…
dugongs, sea cows and pinnipeds, that we think that their hearing ⁓ gets disrupted by this. And this can range from just disturbing them from their everyday life. if we were talking right now around the construction site yeah, you would struggle to hear me. So that’s one of the problems is like human made noise, masks, the noises that are biologically meaningful to marine mammals.
But the other thing is if it’s loud enough, it can actually damage your ears sometimes Yikes well, I guess one of the questions to fall on from that is Well, you mentioned a couple of different groups there ⁓ sea cows, dugongs. What is a seal? What is a cetacean? Where are the lines drawn and how do animals like? Walruses kind of fit into that all right, so
A whale essentially is a coward, yeah, a coward, a coward. But there’s two groups of whales. There’s the toothed whales, which is stuff like the dolphins, killer whales, sperm whales. And then there’s the baleen whales, which are the ones that look like they’ve got the big hair in their mouth and the big mouths. And so those two main groups, and they evolved from the ardeodactyls, I’m pretty sure. So as weird as it sounds, they used to be hoofed.
Right and they still technically are part of that group But now they don’t even have their hind limbs. So they’ve completely lost everything So that’s one group of marine mammals the others I don’t know too much about dugongs and sea cows and the Stella’s sea cow rest in peace. Yep, they are all cirenians so they’re another group and they’re mostly herbivores
And they’ve also completely cut themselves off from land and they usually graze on like vegetation, underwater vegetation. Right. Yeah. And so pinnipeds, which are fur seals, sea lions, true seals and the walrus are the third group of marine mammals. And they are from the group the carnivora, which is the same group that bears, dogs, cats, weasels, hyenas are all from. And they are the result of a single
underwater transition and basically they explode into all the different groups of pinnipeds we have today. Wow, that’s quite a wide range of diversity. yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess my next curious question would be, what’s your favorite seal? What is the best seal? Those might be different answers.
Yeah, those are two different questions. My favorite seal, I feel like I have to say it is the Ross seal. I mean, this is my favorite seal. Once at a conference, I said a different seal and one of my close colleagues came up to me and he was like, James, that was the wrong seal. That is not your favorite seal. Your favorite seal is the Ross seal. I was like, yes, I know, Lennon, but I had to pretend for this talk and it was something else.
So the Ross seal is, and that is because they have basically, we don’t know anything about them. They live in Antarctica. And so they’ve got extremely big eyes. They’re really goofy looking. They make these sort of really weird space alien noises underwater. So they have really weird high pitched songs. Don’t sound like any animal alive on earth. Like it sounds like they come from space. And we don’t even know where they live.
Like we know they are in Antarctica. We have a sort of broad idea of where they’re distributed. But if someone went down to Antarctica, it’s like, today I’m going to find a Ross seal. It might be a bit difficult. Whereas the other seals that are in the Antarctic, we have a pretty good idea of where they live and where they can be found. And we know stuff about their abundance and locomotion, but the Ross seal is very cryptic. So that’s why that’s my favorite seal. ⁓
What is the best seal is probably the crab eater seal. Oh, very good. Yes. Yeah. So the ones with the really weird funky teeth that look like a bunch of combs and they’re got teeth adapted for straining out krill, not crabs. So people like to say, why is it called a crab eater seal? Like how silly scientists don’t know what it is. And that’s because I’m pretty sure is a mistranslation of the original German description and name for the crab eater seal.
I thought maybe it’d been one of those doomed expeditions to the Arctic where you had a non-scientist just observe an animal and go, yeah, that seems right. No, no, no. It’s just lost in translation. And so the reason why they are the best ones though is because after humans and livestock, they are the most abundant mammal on the planet in terms of biomass.
Really? Yes. There is either, I can’t remember the precise number. I think the estimates are there are either 7 million of them or 70 million of them. I might have to double check those numbers, but that is the order of magnitude of like how many there are. And even the lowest estimates are like beat every single level of a wild mammal by miles.
I mean you always hear about whales are doing so poorly with climate change, so many seal species are threatened and endangered, and then I suppose these guys are just going, we’re fine. Yes. Well, one of the reasons why we think they’re doing so well is a long time ago back when whaling was a thing, lot of countries went down and they got rid of all of the baleen whales, hunted a lot of them to almost extinction, and when they did that, there were less whales to compete for feeding on krill.
And so scientists think the reason why there are so many crab eater seals now is not because that’s a natural population level, they think it’s artificial because they very quickly filled in the gap left behind all these bailing whales that used to be in Antarctica. That’s fascinating and it goes to show that teeth are another very important component of this animal when you’re looking at the fossil record. My understanding as a non-vertebrate person is that there are some pieces that are more diagnostic than others, more useful if you find them.
And with seals, I’m guessing that’s teeth and ear bones. Is there any other part that you tend to look for that’s fairly diagnostic with these animals? Just those are pretty much it. I the ear bone for me is, reckon, one of the most informative parts. But to be honest, just the skull in general. And so pinnipeds actually have an extremely poor fossil record, especially the true seals. There’s a lot of isolated post-crania, which are not very informative at all.
And so the skulls are actually extremely rare. And so when we do find them, they give us a lot of information. to be honest, you can probably say that about almost any big mammal group. Possibly so. But I think this does bring us to ⁓ what might be the worst seal you’ve encountered. right. I was telling Alyssa before that I actually had to look this up. That is how little I care for this seal. So it’s a fossil seal.
It is called Pontophoca jutlandica What a name. That’s the holotype. That is a rock. So it is literally, here it is, half a femur With all the important bits missing. And that’s a type specimen. That’s the worst seal. That’s barely a seal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is one of those things where a lot of
fossil material back when pinniped fossils were a lot rarer. We didn’t have many of them. And so if you did find a fossil, you stuck a name to it. And so a lot of fossil tree seals have historically been named off extremely poor type specimens that don’t tell you much. And it’s not to say that, a humerus or a femur of a pinniped can’t be taxonomically informative, but most of the time they’re not. So do you find that this is a relic of
the way that these accessions have been done around the world or is this something that’s more localized to different points in time and different geographical locations? Like was this happening just in Australia? Was it happening in the UK? This was mostly happening in Europe at the beginning. So all of the fossil seals back in history, most of the fossil penipence that we knew about were from Europe and that’s just because that’s where Western scientists were working. And then
As we started, know, science progress, a lot more pinnipeds became known from elsewhere in the world, particularly the United States. There is actually an incredible fossil record of pinnipeds from the United States. It’s the one thing we’re doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s great. And a lot of good material as well. But by the time science got up to that stage, is starting to be around the 1970s and the 1990s, we already had all these taxa in Europe.
named after isolated limb bones, essentially. Sometimes not even the whole limb bone, as I just showed you. Incredible. And so this practice has been carried forward by some scientists into the 21st century, and other scientists have moved on to more complete material. So it’s sort of like a shifting baseline at the moment of what is good enough to be a type specimen of a fossil pinnabit is quite a controversial topic.
and something we’re still sort of working out, but it’s one of my opinion, but it is not isolated limb bones and now that we have better material available we should try naming fossil seal species off, you know, skulls or complete skeletons or partial post cranial skeletons. That have slightly more information. Yes, yeah just a little bit.
And my understanding as well is that we find seal fossils here in Australia and in New Zealand that are adding to that record as well. Yes. Yeah. So Australia doesn’t have a fantastic record of fossil pinnipeds. So I did my PhD on fossil pinnipeds from Australia and New Zealand. And when I started my PhD, I think there was a grand total of two specimens have been described in the literature.
Wow. And all the rest were described by myself and my team during my PhD. From places like Beaumaris Portland, and Hamilton were the main three areas. So they all in Victoria and all my scenes who Ply have seen age sites. However, the main topic of my PhD was a fossil seal from New Zealand. It came from a place called Taranaki on the North Island. So it’s about three million years old.
And when we described that, it was the first southern occurrence of monk seals. So we called it Eomonachus which basically means early monk seal. Yeah. And so today, monk seals are only known from the Mediterranean and Hawaii. And they used to be in the Caribbean before they were hunted to extinction. So they’re a very northern species. And because monk seals, which were the sort of like
early diverging groups of the southern group of tree seals. We thought the southern group of tree seals, which includes all the elephant seals and all the Antarctic seals, evolved in the Northern Hemisphere. Right. Because all the fossils were in Europe, all the were in the Northern Hemisphere, monk seals are in the Northern Hemisphere, therefore these groups evolved in the Northern Hemisphere. And then right up until the very end of geological history, then they very quickly dispersed south.
got to their current distribution. the scientific explanation that is the equivalent of, then a wizard did it. Yes, and then a wizard did it. Exactly. And so when we described Eomonachus that completely disrupted that story because that was one of these northern seals, but they’re in New Zealand, which is not the Northern Hemisphere. And we also had two ear bones from Victoria.
So I think one from Hamilton and one from Beaumaris, which were also Monk seals Well, the interesting thing about finding these ear bones, especially at Beaumaris, is that the iron concretions at that site and the ear bones themselves, which are often quite like black and iron rich are, I don’t know how on earth you guys tell them apart from the surrounding material that you find them in. It’s just a combination of, think, knowing what you’re looking for, getting your eye in and like
Um, so like a very long time ago, I used, when I used to do a lot more field work than I do now. Um, we used to go down to Beaumaris, um, with me, Ben and some other collectors. Um, and one day I was talking to Ben while we’re down on site and he was complaining about, I haven’t found a whale ear bone in like so long. Oh, oh my God. Like I’m really got a whale ear bone drought. I just looked at his foot and went, Oh, look, there’s one. Absolutely hated that.
And so literally just sometimes it’s luck, sometimes it’s experience and it’s a little combination of both. Right. And for listeners who may have missed our Ben Francischelli episode, what are you doing? He’s hilarious. Go have a listen. But Beaumaris and a lot of these beach deposits in Australia can be quite difficult to work with in general because of the tides, the cliffs, the general discombobulation of the things that you find.
tremendous work. I think it’s, it’s, think this is kind of in line with what I’ve heard about the story of other secondary aquatic tetrapods is that the more material we find in Australia and New Zealand, the more it kind of revises and gives earlier estimates for these points of divergence. Yes. Yeah. I like to say that my unofficial research theme is tackling Northern hemisphere research bias. So a lot of early palaeontology on marine animals was done in the Northern hemisphere.
And now again to the stage where important finds are showing up from South America, Australasia, South Africa, and we’re sort of realizing, wait, actually all these animals where we didn’t know where they evolved or that we thought evolved in the Northern Hemisphere, turns out maybe that’s not the case. And all it takes is like one fossil to sort of disrupt those narratives. Right, absolutely. And I mean, we’re talking about a couple of intersecting factors here as well. You’ve got the bias towards the Northern
the northern half of the globe more generally, but it’s also what gets deposited in their museums and what gets looked at out of that collection. James has done work both here in Australia and in the UK with some of the really beautiful museums over there. And you’ve worked with collections pretty extensively is my understanding.
What are some things that you can tell us about what it’s like to work as a researcher with museum collections and how does this kind of collection bias, what ends up in these collections, how does that impact the narrative as well? So I think it’s mostly to do with expertise is one thing. just having experts at the way.
the place where your museum is located. So there’s a lot more funding for science in places like Europe and in the United States. There’s a lot more scientists. There’s a lot more variety of experts in those places. Whereas in other parts of the globe, that may not be the case. And so you could have really important fossils seeing these museums, but because there’s no seal experts ⁓ or sea cow expert or something, then no one’s going to know about it.
Right, and if you’re collecting this material but you yourself don’t really understand what it is or it’s donated to the museum in absence of one of these experts, what happens to that material? Does it just kind of end up in the back of a collections drawer to be looked at at a future date? Yeah, pretty much. It usually just sits in the collection waiting for the right person to come to the museum and see it and go, aha, I know what that is.
And that’s been something that’s happened a couple of times here with recent PhDs, especially in our lab. ⁓ I think you’ve had some great success with that. So has like Adele, Jake, all friends of the podcast. But how are museums as institutions generally kind of doing these days? My understanding is that a lot of museums will partner with local universities or academic positions, but we all know that academia is kind of.
not doing great in general in a lot of places, how are museums doing? It depends on the museum and where you are, I guess. So I think right now we’re into this sort of world after the COVID pandemic started where a lot of places were financially impacted by it, and a lot of institutions are becoming affected by a lot of cuts.
So in Australia and New Zealand, we do see that happening a little bit. And I’d say in other parts of the world as well, where this sort of like post-COVID world, not sure if it is a post-COVID world yet, but this post-COVID world, things, priorities of like governments and all the institutions that fund these museums have changed.
And, you know, unfortunately, sometimes it can feel like we live in a world that doesn’t value science as much as it probably should. And so they go, OK, what isn’t producing money? business. OK, we’ll cut that. That that makes a lot of sense. That certainly does sound like living in the modern world in a capitalist society. And I my understanding from having briefly worked with museums as well is that each institution has kind of its own set of
rules by which it kind of deals with academic research as well. So some institutes are a lot more lenient when it comes to things like listing the location where you found material. That’s something that a lot of vertebrate research in the US will, it’s under a little bit more wraps. It’s a little bit more of a closely guarded secret. ⁓ Have you run into things like that before where the policies of a museum have made it difficult for you to publish the work that you’d like to publish?
it really depends on the museum. It also depends on the policies of the staff members at the museum as well. So some museums, for example, have strict rules about 3D data on their specimens. And some museums do not care at all. Yes. So there’s a little bit of that.
In terms of the locations where fossils are found, it really depends on the context. If your museum is located in a place that has lots of fossil poaching, then maybe you don’t want to publish that information. Some museums, regardless, just prefer you be a bit vague about what a location is or would prefer that inquiries go through them to figure out where a site is. But usually, it is okay.
Yeah, so I guess the moral of that lesson is just check what the institutions have listed and talk to a curator if you don’t know what to do. Yes, yeah, exactly. And as someone who’s recently done their PhD, who’s doing the postdoc, who’s I would say relatively, if not quite successful at what you’re doing, do you have any advice for the listeners in our audience who are maybe thinking about doing palaeontology, working in museum spaces, that kind of thing?
It’s a broad question. ⁓ I guess maybe be a bit flexible is probably very important and be open to learning as much as possible. getting lots of experience and lots of different skill sets really helps. So a good example is say a science like physics or chemistry that might not be intuitive that has anything to do with palaeontology, but a lot of
paleontological studies could use chemistry or could use physics. So I think being open to being multidisciplinary is quite good. Learning different skills and abilities is quite good. I think another key part as well is be really good at communicating and writing really helps as well.
Because one of challenges we face as scientists is sometimes it feels like we can live in a bubble, so I’m sure you know. And it’s really hard to break out that bubble. And if you just learn the technical jargon and that’s all you save, then you’re never going to meet people who aren’t scientists halfway. And they’re not really going to understand the point of what you’re doing. And because a lot of funding and a lot of museums are public institutions, we sort of have an obligation to make our science accessible to you.
the people that support us. I’ve been encouraging students more and more lately to think about science communication as something that will be part of their careers as scientists going forward in addition to networking and unfortunately doing statistics. Statistics is a big one. Don’t be scared of math. I’m scared of math. Don’t be scared of math. Computers can do it now for you. Don’t be scared of math. Don’t be scared of math. Enjoy the crab eater seal.
Don’t describe specimens based off of broken sad femurs. Yes. Well, those all sound like great lessons to take away from our chat today, James. ⁓ Is there anything that you’d like to add or any way that you’d like our listeners to get in contact with you if they have further seal related questions? So I am on social media. I used to be on Twitter, you know, Twitter. I do have a blue sky and a Instagram.
What is my handle? My handle is, I really should know that, I? @palaeo_jrule. And that’s paleo with an A before E. So if you like seeing some cute seals, I highly recommend also Simpsons jokes. Every presentation James has ever made is hilarious and very cute. And yeah, definitely check out his social media if you want to learn more about good science communication, museum research, and seals.
James, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Alyssa.
Travis Holland (35:20)
Alyssa, I really enjoyed that interview with James. I learned a lot more about seals and we talked about them being potentially a little creepy at the start there. I watched Happy Feet again recently, which I really loved when it first came out.
And there are actually some really frightening moments in that movie with seals. There’s a leopard seal which sort of chases down the penguins. And also then they kind of wander through the elephant seal colony. And although the elephant seals are quite amiable, they’re huge and they’re kind of grumpy and they’re like the guys you find at an outback Australian pub, even with this kind of broad Australian accent to them.
Alyssa Fjeld (36:01)
I’ve been frightened of seals since I found out about Seal Finger, which I was one of those kids that had like the compendiums of horrible diseases books and that probably didn’t do anything bad to me. one of the things that it lists in there is back in the day when you had seal people, like people who’d go out and collect seal furs, sometimes these people would get bitten by the seals and seals are gross. They smell really bad and their mouths are full of bacteria.
And when someone is bitten by a seal, sometimes bacteria that we don’t necessarily have the means to treat will set in. And this was called getting seal finger. The finger or whatever bitten part would get red and really swollen and doctors would have a really hard time treating it. So that is like the one fact I’ve retained about seals this entire time.
Travis Holland (36:46)
It’s
kind of a bit of karma really for going out and hunting hunting down seals.
Alyssa Fjeld (36:51)
Yeah, they’re way too cute. Like this was always gonna be a curse job. You know what I mean? Like this is what you get.
Travis Holland (36:56)
Yeah.
So sticking with the creepy theme, let’s talk about creepy museums and creepy fossils and things like that. I’m going to start with one which you brought to my attention. I didn’t realize this was a Melbourne invention, but I had seen it going around in 2016 when it was first created. This is a, a creation.
a fictional creation which is on display in Melbourne called Graham. And Graham is a human being that is designed to survive a car accident or as if we had evolved to to survive a car accident. It’s a piece of work by
Melbourne based artist, Patricia Piccinini with help from Christian Kenfield, a trauma surgeon at the Royal Melbourne hospital and David Logan, a crash investigator at Monash University. And yeah, it’s this, this human character that’s evolved or been evolved to, you know, conditions where I guess car crashes or surviving car crashes is an evolutionary pressure. so Graham has
A supersized skull that also leans forward over the top of his eyes and nose to protect his brain and face. He has no neck because obviously the neck is a major point of failure or weakness in the human body. His knees can bend in every direction. He has additional padding, including fat and extra nipples between ribs to protect.
the ribs. So Graham is truly a horrifying version of what humanity needs to survive a car accident. And I’ll share a link to images of Graham if people have not come across him in our show notes. And now over to you, over to you from examples of creepy fossils and museum stuff.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:49)
Graham, don’t, I, when I first started volunteering with Melbourne Museum, one of my friends who’s in the PhD with me actually dared me to go down there and meet him. And ever since then, he keeps daring me to go back. And it’s like, I don’t like hanging out with Graham, I’m sorry.
Travis Holland (39:03)
you
Alyssa Fjeld (39:04)
So one of the creepiest exhibits that I’ve seen was not one that I got to see in person, but I heard about it through Astrid, friend of the show, who recently went on a European vacation, including parts of Paris, France. And at one of the museums that they visited, I’ll put a link into this for the show, but there’s an exhibit that is the hall of, you know, all good old timey museums have like a hall of skeletons, right? And this says it’s hall of skeletons, but for some reason,
The way that they’ve chosen to arrange these skeletons is so that they all face in the same direction, like forward towards like a series of like human skeletons, like at the front. And like, I cannot imagine being the janitor there, you know?
They’re all on the floor and they face in the same direction as if it’s a skeleton army obeying their lich king. Truly, truly an experience I would think to stand like at the front of that. It made me uncomfortable just looking at it.
Travis Holland (39:54)
⁓
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I’m going to talk about now another sculpture and this is a 11 meter long model of a giant squid that’s at the South Australian Museum. Now the thing that really makes this is because it’s A full sized giant squid, it’s huge. And…
They have installed the squid in a former lift shaft. So you can see it across all four floors and walk around it from top to bottom and, or from bottom to top even. And from the bottom, you get just the bottom of the tentacles kind of creepily dangling down from above in this lift shaft. And then as you go up, the tentacles get kind of thicker and whatnot until you get to the…
second floor from the top, which is then the body of the squid and you get to look at its eye. And then on the top floor, you can stand above it and look down the lift shaft. you know, if you even have a bit of a sense of a fear of heights, this one’s a bit creepy, but it feels like this like tank, this ocean tank that the squid’s existing in. And it’s a really effective display, but also creepy as hell. So next time you’re at the South Australian Museum, I suggest checking that one out.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:14)
I will tell you guys a story about the museum that I visited while I was, so I used to live in Japan. I was an English teacher, but I also taught geology. And as part of that, I got to go on this lovely tour of a museum in the middle of nowhere called Itoigawa. it is essentially a really cool place in the earth’s crust where it used to be pulling apart. So you get unique rocks and minerals.
And what I didn’t know when I went into this is one that, this was when I was like 24. I didn’t know very much about the paleontology side of things then. And I had never seen nipponite ammonites, which if you’ve never seen them, they are ammonites that do not have a nice neatly coiled shell. Their shells are asymmetrical and really squiggly and quite strange.
And I didn’t have the Japanese in this discipline to read the exhibit. So I was walking through this museum. It’s a really cool museum. And the last room is just a wall of these guys and are mixed with other invertebrates. And I wasn’t prepared to see that with no readable explanation. I was trying to participate in activities while Google lensing the captions. Like, This is fake, right?
way this is a why is it so big because some of these are like they’re quite large
Travis Holland (42:23)
You
Yeah.
So what
is going on with them? You’re trilobite expert. What is going on with these nipponites
Alyssa Fjeld (42:32)
you
No one knows actually. It used to be theorized that it was a buoyancy thing, but recent functional mechanical tests have revealed that that might not necessarily be the answer. So it’s something that actually a lot of fish people are very interested in as well. Matt McGee at Monash corrected me when I said something about buoyancy last time. He was saying, we don’t actually know the evidence for why they did this is not totally clear. It could have something to do with burrowing. It could have something to do with
Being able to eject water from their shells, we don’t know, but I don’t like them.
Travis Holland (43:08)
Fair enough. Fair enough.
I’m going to now enter into this a suggestion from the National Army Museum in London. Now, this is frostbitten fingertips. So they come from a soldier, Major Michael Bronco Lane, who was a soldier who lost his fingers and toes while climbing Mount Everest in the 1970s. And so at the National Army Museum in London,
Apparently you can see his fingers that have been severely frostbitten and preserved on display.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:38)
Imagine if that’s all that’s left of you in like 30
Travis Holland (43:42)
your fingers, yeah. I mean, that’s what a partial fossil find. Like you and James were talking about the broken femur being collected for certain pinnipeds. So just like one sliver of bone sometimes is all we have to go off.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:51)
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s, I think perhaps the spookiest thing of all is not understanding how much of ourselves we will eventually leave behind for future paleontologists and archaeologists.
Travis Holland (44:08)
I always wondered with modern, cemeteries, obviously there’s a lot to come in terms of, know, if you’re not disturbed by future human development or by natural disaster or just geological processes, that’s one thing. But the way that we as humans dig a hole into the ground, that’s quite deep and put whole bodies in there. I’m.
feel like that’s got to be a relatively good way to preserve a whole bunch of human skeletons into the fossil record.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:38)
So before I was interested in paleontology, I was really keen on becoming a forensic scientist because if you’ve never heard of it, the university that is the sister university of the one I went to has something called the body farm where they study different types of decomposition. Turns out I have a sensitive sense of smell, so this did not work out for me. But one of the things that I looked into was
how does the body kind of break down under different conditions? And what you learn is that people who opt for things like natural burials where there’s no formaldehyde or embalming fluid used, their bodies will break down in a predictable series, leaving behind the skeleton. But if you have any embalming fluid put in you, which was a convention that became popular after the death of Abraham Lincoln, which allowed people to bring his body on tour for the various peoples to see.
At least in the US, that’s how embalming got really popular and bodies that were preserved using embalming fluid are dissolved in the acid that is both produced by the embalming fluid as well as the bacterial activity interacting with the embalming fluid. So eventually you just have
Travis Holland (45:37)
Right.
Okay, so not preserving
really well. There we go. This is why I need an expert on this show.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:45)
if you’re a forensic body decomposition studier, right, two eyes, we’ll interview you.
Travis Holland (45:51)
It’s like that old joke about, what is the period of time in which something shifts from being archeology to paleontology or shifts from being grave robbing to archeology in the first place?
Alyssa Fjeld (46:03)
Well, hopefully we’ll get some more answers about the boundaries between archeology and paleontology with one of our upcoming guests in November. And until then, I suppose I will leave you guys with the spookiest mystery of all, which is which seal is the spookiest to you personally? Do you think that whales are cowards or do you think that they are the noble and majestic cousin of seals?
I don’t know what your opinions are. You’ll have to tell me.
Travis Holland (46:28)
Look, before we go, I just want to mention we’ve had some comments. Some of these have been floating around for a long time and for whatever reason they’ve only surfaced to me, but our Zev Landes interview from a few months back, there was a great comment on YouTube from Luke Mitchell going by Dino Manx on YouTube who said he absolutely loved the interview with Zev.
Thank you for bringing him on. His art and style is very distinctive. Huge fan of his and his work. So thank you, Luke. And also we actually have reviews, which, you know, there are people out there randomly listening to us who aren’t just family and friends, which is fantastic. So if you’re one of those people and you like the show and you’re going to leave us a five-star review, please do that. If you don’t want to leave a five-star review,
please don’t do that. But if you want to leave a five-star review, then I’m going to read it out on the show when I eventually get around to it. So we have one review from a user going by aka space. And that is, if you are passionate about paleontology, you will love this. Great guests, great hosts, engaging, full of knowledge and enthusiasm. So thank you so much for that message. And another review, which is also a five-star rating.
saying, so refreshing to hear about Australian paleontology by people who are clearly passionate about the subject. Love it. And that was by DringWR. D-R-I-N-G-W-R. So thank you.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:51)
Thank
you guys! That’s really sweet! Yeah, we try to keep it fun and interesting and yeah, think both of us genuinely really care about, you know, paleontology in general, but especially the exciting stuff that’s going on here. It’s a really cool time to be a paleontologist down under.
Travis Holland (48:07)
Your Australian ocker accent is coming along really well, Alyssa. Thanks.
Alyssa Fjeld (48:12)
I’ve been banned from using it in friend circles, so…
Travis Holland (48:15)
And rightly so, and rightly so, let me say, but we’ll put it on the internet for everyone to hear.
Alyssa Fjeld (48:22)
Thanks guys. Thanks for supporting the podcast and for letting me say words bad.
