Shownotes
The emergence of life on land was one of the most important moments in the grand saga of life’s evolutionary history. Many of the characteristics of our bodies– like our arms, legs, hips, hands, fingers, and necks– can be traced back to adaptations that occurred during the transition from fish to amphibians. But how do we know that? What evidence exists from this time that can help us piece together the sequence of events that led our ancestors out of the water and onto land?
Neil Shubin is a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and an award winning science communicator whose fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic is helping piece together some of the most important transitions in the history of life. He’s the Robert R Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. He’s also the author of several books, including Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, Some Assembly Required, and a new book entitled Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, The Cosmos, and Our Future. His team has discovered several important fossils that have helped biologists better understand how fish evolved into land animals.
Neil Shubin’s Lab at the University of Chicago: https://shubinlab.uchicago.edu/
Neil Shubin’s new book, Ends of the Earth:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/692649/ends-of-the-earth-by-neil-shubin/
Interactive 3D model of Tiktaalik fossil:
https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/tiktaalik-fossil-body
Qikiqtania - fossil fish that returned from land to water
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Transcripts
WildWorld_S2E7_CanadianArctic_NeilShubin_final01
[:[00:00:28] The first four legged animals that appeared on land were amphibians, similar to modern day frogs and salamanders. Flash forward a few hundred million years, and the descendants of those first pioneering amphibians became the familiar four limbed animals alive today, including reptiles, birds, and mammals.
[:[00:01:15] But how do we know that? What evidence exists from this time that can help us piece together the sequence of events that led our ancestors out of the water and onto land?
[:[00:01:43] Scott Solomon: This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon. In this episode, we're traveling north. Very far north. In search of clues about some of the most important moments in the history of life on Earth.
[:[00:02:38] At the northernmost extremes, in the province of Nunavut, there's a cluster of large islands known as the Arctic Archipelago. This is the traditional home of the Inuit people, and this region is really very sparsely populated. It's a harsh place. During the long winters, temperatures regularly plunge to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
[:[00:03:26] He's the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. He's also the author of several books, including Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, Some Assembly Required, and a new book entitled Ends of the Earth, Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos and Our Future.
[:[00:04:19] When this
[:[00:04:37] We were there in the month of July. The reason why we're there in July is because that's kind of the only time you can look for fossils. It gets a little cold and dark starting in August and it's a little wet. In June, so it's really July, and we had set up a small camp with six people. The camp was actually sitting on rocks that are about 375 million years old.
[:[00:05:18] So we were digging into the rock. And it was that year in Ellesmere Island in 2004, it was rainy, it was wet, it was really uncomfortable. In fact, Well, looking back on my field notes, we had very few clear days. Most days either had rain or snow or sleet for half the day, so we didn't work for much of the day.
[:[00:05:58] And we, we went over to look at it and I realized we had found what we were looking for, just in seeing that little fragment and exposed in the rock. Cause what was looking at me was a snout of a fish and not just any fish. What was likely a flat headed fish and that. gave away the fact that we had probably found one of the creatures that's really close to all landliving animals, close to one of the first fish to walk on land.
[:[00:06:42] We didn't just land on that site. The Arctic is a big place. That fossil site was 20 feet long. Okay. So, you know, how do you do that? You know, it took a while, man, it took a lot of risk. And, and also, I mean, and that began a lot of work too. Cause once we removed that from the rock, which we did back in the laboratory, we brought the rocks home and removed it from the rocks in the lab.
[:[00:07:19] So it was a creature right at the cusp of the transition from life in water to life on land. So it was a pretty remarkable time.
[:[00:07:36] And I want to get into the significance of it in a bit, but I thought maybe we could back up a little bit because you've sort of hinted at this idea that you were looking for this for a while. So you make this discovery, this is a fossil that's never been seen by any human being, and yet you were up in this remote location looking for it.
[:[00:08:01] Neil Shubin: Well, I was working with a former graduate student of mine who became one of my longest and dearest professional colleagues, Ted Deschler. And Ted and I were always on the hunt for new places to look to find the earliest creatures to walk on land. And we were trying to think about where in the world could we look that might have these fossils.
[:[00:08:42] So we look for rocks that were formed in the Devonian period and that time period. And then we looked for places in the world that had those Devonian age rocks, but that were formed in ancient rivers and streams, where these creatures likely lived.
[:[00:09:06] Neil Shubin: Yeah, that's correct. So we're looking through geological maps. We're looking through scientific papers going online countries, in particular, Canada and the United States and number of others really invest a lot of resources and understanding what their mineral and rock resources are. And so they map these rocks and the Canadian geological survey sent teams over years to make beautiful maps showing where Cretaceous and Triassic and Devonian age rocks were exposed throughout the Canadian Arctic.
[:[00:10:15] So we had the right kinds of rocks throughout the Canadian Arctic. The trick was to find them at the surface and to be able to work on them, to be able to get a team up there, you know, to get the permits up there. It's one thing having the idea. It's another thing making that idea real. So,
[:[00:10:37] But, you know, what, what is the reality of it? Like, how do you even get? To this kind of a place. What is the kind of equipment that you need to bring with you? How many people are on your team that walk me through it?
[:[00:10:53] I mean, the Arctic is a big place. I'm like, where do you begin this? Where do you begin a hunt? Right. I mean, it's actually quite intimidating when you start something like this. So we decided that we wanted, we chose particular areas where we thought the rock was best exposed to the surface. Where we could get in there with helicopters and airplanes where, you know, logistically it was possible to do that where we could set up a camp that had water, you know, that we can, you know, from the street, local streams.
[:[00:11:37] Basic homework to try to figure out where we can put a crew of four to six people for, you know, for four to six weeks where we can have a reasonable camp that is within walking distance. The rocks. Cause you don't have roads. You're, you know, you get flown in by aircraft, either helicopters or, you know, um, fixed wing aircraft and then they go and they're gone for the summer, you know, so they leave you your food and they say goodbye, I'll see you in August.
[:[00:12:26] The prime objective is that everybody returns home safely. That is number one. Everything else is second to that. Everything else is a extreme distant second to that. I commit to the safety of the crew and science is a distant second to that. Obviously. I mean, not even, not even considered. So, you know, safety is number one.
[:[00:13:04] You have to think about food. You have to think about medical care. You have to think about people's needs, psychologically, physically, emotionally, scientifically, all that, you know, a lot goes into preparing a team for this kind of work. But the other, the biggest thing is. Honestly, one of the biggest thing is preparing people not to find fossils.
[:[00:14:02] Takes a lot of patience. Yeah.
[:[00:14:05] Neil Shubin: yeah, and also a lot of like little mental tricks to stay in the game, you know, because you can find fossils at any time, but you might not find anything in the course of a day. Then all of a sudden, boom, you know, you see them right there. So you just have to keep your head in the game and you have to little mental tricks that help a lot.
[:[00:14:40] What what would I see? What does it what does it look like?
[:[00:14:59] That's ice covered. The rocks are red or green or gray Imagine the american southwest With mesas and buttes and red and green rocks Now imagine that with ice. That's kind of what you have in some of these arctic places. It's hard to imagine, but yeah, that sounds really cool. It's a pretty amazing juxtaposition there.
[:[00:15:36] Fortunately, we don't see them too often. But yeah, it's a remarkable landscape. And one of the things to keep in mind when we're talking about these polar landscapes is oftentimes you're the first person to walk in these regions. You know, I mean, it's such a great privilege to be in these incredibly remote areas where, you know, there might have been a A Norwegian crew there a hundred years before, but there's no way they did the hikes you're doing.
[:[00:16:11] Scott Solomon: Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll hear about what a typical day is like in an Arctic field camp.
[:[00:16:34] listening to Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon, and I'm speaking with biologist Neil Shubin about his work searching for fossils of early land animals in the Canadian Arctic.
[:[00:17:02] Neil Shubin: So a typical day, remember a day there in July is 24 hours of sunlight. So the first thing you have to get used to is, you know, dealing with your circadian cycles being kind of messed up. So 24 hours of daylight means, you know, people say, oh, you can work 24 hours, 23 hours.
[:[00:17:40] So what we do is we typically run a 7 to 7 schedule where people show up in the tent. We have a kitchen tent. Everybody has their own personal tents where, you know, you hang out and sleep. They're like small mountaineering tents, four season mountaineering tents. And then we have a kitchen tent, which they claim they should withstand winds of over 60 miles an hour note to self.
[:[00:18:17] So when I see everybody in the morning at 7am, I either radio the base or text the base. There's a Canadian base that's a couple hundred miles away that sort of manages these things. I text them, say, it's morning. We're all fine. I see all the crew. Everybody has their breakfast of choice. And we discuss the morning.
[:[00:18:57] And a typical day will mean walking over rocks, looking for fossils. eroding out of them. And, you know, in a typical day, you might see, you know, you might see scales, you might see teeth, you might see, you know, you might see some bones, that keeps you interested. And then there'll be about a day of, you know, you have a day of looking for fossils, then by seven o'clock, everybody's back.
[:[00:19:32] music: you know,
[:[00:19:35] I don't push it too much. I don't ask people to do extraordinary hours or extraordinary physical things because it's hard enough to be there. And yet one thing I tell people when you're in a place like this, you might be days from medical care. You might be a week from medical care, right? So even like if I sprained my ankle.
[:[00:20:12] And so, you know, the littlest injury can be a major setback for the entire crew and the littlest injuries are typically the injuries that will happen in camp. So we're very mindful of, you know, kitchen fires and kitchen hygiene and cuts with kitchen knives. It's kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. Cause there's a lot of stuff that happened there, or just, you know, walking around camp, you can sprain your ankle.
[:[00:20:50] Exactly,
[:[00:21:00] Neil Shubin: You have to worry about them and worry about them. I do. We've had, we had a bear come into camp in 2004 after we found the first Tiktaalik.
[:[00:21:27] Thank goodness. But you know, in looking at a lot of the literature, it turns out that the safest thing to bring in bear country is actually bear spray. So usually carry a can of bear spray. Mindful of bears when we walk along the coast, as we did this year and previous years. So, I mean, sometimes you're working on the margin of a fjord that's like a, you know, where you have a cliff, a bedrock cliff, and you want to look at that bedrock cliff because you think there may be fossils in it.
[:[00:22:09] Scott Solomon: So let's go back to talking about Tiktaalik because this was such a landmark discovery and, and, you know, it's become a famous, uh, fossil and you described it a little bit. You mentioned it had a flat head and you talked a little bit about the fins and the structure of the fins. So just to back up a little bit, you know, we're talking about one of the animals that made this transition from life in the water to life.
[:[00:22:46] Neil Shubin: Right. So you put it right. It's not just Tiktaalik. There's a whole group of these kinds of fossils that are really at the cusp of the transition from life in water to life on land.
[:[00:23:17] Walking and feeding in water is very different from walking and feeding on land. You know, moving about in water, you can bend your back and swim. You can do all kinds of swimming behaviors. You can walk too. There are a lot of creatures that walk on the water bottom. Land is really walking or slithering, right?
[:[00:23:51] It's really all about biting on land. You know, so suction feeding is kind of not the thing. Except in very, very special cases. So, you know, you can think about the skeletal system has to deal with all kinds of changes. Living in water, you're not dealing with gravity as much. You can be neutrally buoyant.
[:[00:24:22] And animals have evolved a variety of mechanisms to breathe air and not the least of which is lungs. And there are a variety of other adaptations as well. Sensory adaptations, the sensory environment and water is very different from the sensory environment and land and air. They, the food resources, the ecology living, you know, in terms of your interactions with other creatures are different in water and land.
[:[00:25:05] Lungs, lungs predate the transition from life on land by eons. That is, all these fish had lungs, and the lungs originally were, arose in aquatic organisms, in fish. Because, you know, the oxygen content of water can vary, particularly fresh waters and lungs evolved as an accessory respiratory organ. And we see that today.
[:[00:25:39] Scott Solomon: Yeah, it's so cool to think about. Yeah, I mean, it's
[:[00:25:44] Well.
[:[00:26:04] But of course, no, it's, it's whatever is useful for the moment, for the environment that you're in. It just so happens to become useful in a different way in the future. Right.
[:[00:26:21] And that's really true with many of these great transitions in the history of life. If you look at feathers and flight, feathers evolve well before the origin of flight. Right? They evolved for other reasons. I mean, so a lot of these inventions that we associate with these great revolutions in the history of life, they predate, they evolved in a different context.
[:[00:26:58] And, uh, if you look at them, and particularly in Tiktaalik, these bones are set up to really support the animal. You can see on them muscle crests, like giant crests. that would hold these muscles that would support the body. In fact, if you look at the, what we call the ventral surface, the one that faces towards the ground, it has huge crests.
[:[00:27:33] Right. And you know, all these are set up because the, the appendage, the arm, in this case, the arm bone equivalent, tick tolic. And these fins are set up to support the animal, to hold it up, to prop it up. And that's because it was coming
[:[00:27:51] Neil Shubin: itself up?
[:[00:28:13] So it's not like water or land, right? That they're sometimes there are these intermediate. in ecologies. And then I think the shallows and the mudflats fit that intermediate place. And the benthos as well, where they walk on the bottom. So where does the name Tiktaalik come from? Right. So back in 2004, after we found this creature, we knew we had to give it a name because it's a new taxon.
[:[00:28:55] And so, yeah, that, that, that's the name that stuck.
[:[00:29:03] Neil Shubin: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we wanted to engage them. As much as possible in this and I think the naming project was just a fabulous way to do it.
[:[00:29:33] And you know, there's a school there, the um, um, mech school, and it's a one room schoolhouse. And we, we gave them, it was, you know, as soon as we had to tell him, we sent them a cast of the fossil. We sent them information around it. Oh, that's great.
[:[00:29:48] Were they, you know, like, yeah.
[:[00:30:13] Scott Solomon: This is Wild World. After the break, I'll ask Neil about the first fossil he ever found.
[:[00:30:53] back. My guest is biologist and author Neil Shubin, who does fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic.
[:[00:31:41] Neil Shubin: replica.
[:[00:32:09] Scanner, you can sometimes see the histology of the bone tissue itself. You can see the layers that the original bone tissue is laid down. You can see vascular structures inside the bone.
[:[00:32:24] Neil Shubin: you can high energy CT scanner or a high energy synchotron x ray, you can actually see.
[:[00:32:45] And in fact, all these things are now online, you know, the 3d files are online. So if you want to print out a Tiktaalik head, you can do it. You can do it in any color and any size. So,
[:[00:32:58] Neil Shubin: Yeah,
[:[00:33:02] So one of the other ways that Tiktaalik has become famous is as a meme. So I'm wondering, do you have a favorite Tiktaalik meme?
[:[00:33:14] Scott Solomon: Sure, yeah, yeah, something like that, right?
[:[00:33:17] Oh yeah, you know, like, leave the fish in the water with this damn fish. Particularly during COVID, people were like, really busting on Tiktaalik, you know? Really, why? Well, because they're blaming it for all the ills in the world for
[:[00:33:31] Neil Shubin: Yeah. Just for humanity. Right. You know, we wouldn't be in this pickle if it wasn't for this stupid fish.
[:[00:33:55] Whoa. Somebody made a Tiktaalik in Minecraft and had one. So that to me, to him was incredible importance. And so that's what stuck. That's when you know it's made it. Tiktaalik has truly made it. When your son comes to you with a Tiktaalik. Yeah, in Minecraft
[:[00:34:17] to Ellesmere Island and other sites in the Canadian Arctic since then, and you've made other discoveries. So tell me about some of the other things that your team has found since Tiktaalik.
[:[00:34:47] But the thing about that one is it's actually derived in being aquatic. It's not primitively aquatic. And we know that by when we put it on the evolutionary tree, it's actually more derived than some of these other creatures. And so it's a creature, it's a tectonic like creature that sort of made a U turn.
[:[00:35:13] Scott Solomon: with the internet meme, when people say, you know, go back in the water, Kikitania is what happened.
[:[00:35:22] Neil Shubin: did
[:[00:35:23] Neil Shubin: We've been able to scan every bone of Tiktaalik pretty much, not every bone, pretty much everything up. to the tail and, uh, really have a 3d reconstruction now, which is really beautiful. We can look at each joint and so forth. We made a very big discovery this summer.
[:[00:35:56] That was an incredible privilege to work there for a few summers, Austral summers.
[:[00:36:10] Neil Shubin: the book is about science in general.
[:[00:36:29] And my story is actually only a small part. Of polar science. Obviously, there's glaciology. There's meteoritics. There's the South Pole telescope. There's glaciology understanding the future of climate change. There's understanding microbes under the ice. There's really there's understanding animal adaptations.
[:[00:37:09] Antarctic is harder in a lot of ways. Really? It's windier, it's colder, it's drier. We were at altitude. Each day was a bit of a, you know, struggle getting out and sleeping back at minus ten degrees. You know, you, you think you're cold now, right? I mean, imagine being, camping out and that stuff. And, uh, you know, what struck me is sublime actually about all that was there's mountains are poking through the Antarctic ice.
[:[00:37:50] And at the top of these mountains surrounded by ice. In the coldest continent on the planet are ancient rivers and streams filled with tropical fish. . I mean, tell me. And sharks incredible. Tell me that juxtaposition between present and past doesn't blow you away, right? Absolutely. And so that in a nutshell captures like the beauty of geology, right?
[:[00:38:26] It's pretty, pretty amazing stuff. That is amazing.
[:[00:38:37] Neil Shubin: probably, which is very far
[:[00:38:44] It was, it was incredible. You
[:[00:39:02] music: Yeah.
[:[00:39:05] And I'm sure the people you're with felt that. And that's why I wanted to write that book because it really changed the way I see the world, but it also changed the way I see myself in the world. Right. And like, like climate change is real and the choices I make affect these beautiful regions and changes these regions affects us.
[:[00:39:38] Scott Solomon: Well, I wanted to ask you about some of the other work that you do because, you know, fossils are only part of what you use as a tool for studying these big evolutionary transitions that we've been talking about.
[:[00:40:07] Neil Shubin: No. So I mean, my laboratory is, we're interested in the great transitions in the history of life and the polar research that we do, the, you know, fossil research is a big part of that because it shows us extinct forms that are no longer around, right? And we, we see these anatomies that would be invisible to us if we didn't have the fossil record.
[:[00:40:52] So what we do is we do quite a bit of genomic and embryological comparisons of embryos and DNA and tissues and so forth between fish. And live animals who are alive today. We can ask the question. How does the DNA of a fish differ from the DNA of an amphibian or a mammal or what have you? And the answer is not much.
[:[00:41:36] You
[:[00:41:48] Neil Shubin: Yeah. And we can do that with great precision now because we can modify the DNA. We know you can extract the DNA, you can compare it, but also you can modify it. You can use gene editing techniques to ask the question, like, what are these genes doing?
[:[00:42:18] And then on the, you can say the same thing about the DNA and embryological side is that, you know, the DNA technology has gotten powerful. The computational techniques have gotten powerful and the ways we can image all this stuff, you know, using microscopes has gotten powerful. So it's like, yeah, where do I begin?
[:[00:42:34] Scott Solomon: It
[:[00:42:35] Scott Solomon: So, going back to fossils for a minute, do you remember the first fossil you ever found?
[:[00:42:58] That feels
[:[00:43:11] Neil Shubin: be the whole skeleton, but it turned out to be bits and pieces. But I was actually not, I mean, if you were on those expeditions in those early days, you wouldn't have picked me for being a very good field paleontologist.
[:[00:43:42] And I learned from really good people and learned from my mistakes and kind of about growing into it, that's kind of what I did, you know, and looking back on it, but I wasn't overly, you would have been like, no, you, you would have anything important in the, in the ground, you would have kept me away from, I would have broken it.
[:[00:44:03] Neil Shubin: I grew up in suburban Philadelphia and I loved science. I loved astronomy. I loved archeology. I liked physics and chemistry and all that stuff. I mean, I liked the sciences, you know, and particularly like the natural sciences, you know, I liked Natural History.
[:[00:44:26] Scott Solomon: you find a Triceratops, then that wasn't necessarily that, you know, the thing you dreamt of as a kid.
[:[00:44:55] You mean they pay people to go around the world and find fossils that tell us about the history of life? I'm like, yeah, sign me up for that. And so I figured, well, I may not get a job in that cause there are not a lot of jobs, but maybe if I go to graduate school, at least I'll spend five or whatever year is doing what I like.
[:[00:45:14] Scott Solomon: Wow. So, would 8 year old Neil be excited about what you're doing now?
[:[00:45:38] It's a great privilege to do that. I never lose sight of that, honestly. And, and to learn a lot from the landscape, to learn a lot from the people, learn a lot about myself and the process. Yeah, I feel like an 8 year old a lot, to be quite honest. Then when we find something, oh, I'm a 7 year old, a 6 year old.
[:[00:45:56] Scott Solomon: What's, what's the way that you would celebrate? So if you find a big thing, right? There's this famous story of discovering Lucy and they were playing Lucy in the sky with diamonds in the camp. What's your field song? If, if you make a big discovery?
[:[00:46:08] Neil Shubin: Oh, I make a great dinner. Yeah. Oh yeah. I bring good meal. Yeah. I, good meal. I bring, uh, lots of great food and we, we have a, we have a feas.
[:[00:46:22] Neil Shubin: Like a etouffee or a gumbo. You're in, you're down in Houston.
[:[00:46:49] to keep them down there. No, we do. I mean, we do. I'll make pizzas. I'll make, we do all kinds of different chilies, green chilies, white chilies, red chilies. We do Indian cuisine, Vindaloo or anything spicy. People like Vindaloo, super hot Vindaloo. I'll do that. Oh yeah. Yeah. We'll do all kinds of cuisine. It just depends on the crew, really.
[:[00:47:52] Scott Solomon: for a reason, right?
[:[00:48:18] I mean, it's a
[:[00:48:38] music: yeah,
[:[00:48:42] You're
[:[00:48:43] Neil Shubin: You're
[:[00:49:19] This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon, and I'm speaking with biologist and author Neil Shubin. His new book, Inns of the Earth, is about scientific exploration in the world's polar regions.
[:[00:49:47] Neil Shubin: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the advice depends what level they're in, if they're in, like, college or, or something like that, I would say, you know, the most important thing for me in becoming a scientist was having a really broad based liberal arts education.
[:[00:50:18] Wow. Okay. Right. And why? Because I had a teacher who really went deeply into the critical analysis of books. And then we had to write every week and we had to write very carefully with word choices that made sense and semantics that made sense that were really critical. And it was really that exercise that I've carried with me in a lot of what I do.
[:[00:51:02] They think, Oh, everybody else understands. I'm so stupid. I don't, I think it's really an important skill to have to ask. Be comfortable asking questions because that's the best way to learn. And yeah, ask questions, get a liberal arts education, science, math, literature, learn how to write, learn how to do math, learn how to critically think and read, get some experience in a museum.
[:[00:51:40] Scott Solomon: I love that. I mean, well, of course, as a professor, I, you know, a big fan of telling people to keep an open mind and to ask questions.
[:[00:51:53] Neil Shubin: Yeah. Don't people, I mean, yeah. They filter, we filter ourselves too much and yeah, not being scared to ask the basic questions because sometimes the basic questions are the ones that throw the professor off the most.
[:[00:52:13] Scott Solomon: is huge.
[:[00:52:16] Scott Solomon: So, you were talking a bit ago about the importance of, of writing and learning to write in your own education, and you've now written, like, four books, I think, for the general public.
[:[00:52:33] Neil Shubin: Yeah, hugely, because it, it forces me to always ask the question, why is this important? Why does this matter? Why am I interested in it? Because I'm sitting there writing and there's a reason why. And it really kind of, meaning plumbing my own connection to the material.
[:[00:53:13] You know, and even when I'm writing about science, I really feel I'm connecting with something deep in me, but importantly, it's not just connecting with me. It's trying to connect with other people who might come to this material, you know, with different backgrounds, different priorities and all that sort of stuff.
[:[00:53:54] So we it's the way we organize facts and and to have it within a story that can Kind of a source of recollection for people. So now there's a lot there, right? And, you know, if I thought about all these things as I, it was writing, I probably wouldn't write. I'd be so, I'd have writer's block. I certainly write and then I edit myself to those things.
[:[00:54:16] Scott Solomon: But okay, you know, most scientists aren't trained in how to write for a general audience. It's a very different kind of writing. As you say, you're really telling stories. And that's not how most of us are trained to write in, you know, in graduate school and whatnot. So how did you learn how to write in that fashion?
[:[00:54:58] But one of the things that I kept on repeating to myself is as a scientist, I was in a world of rules of writing. There are rules clear cut. Here's a introduction. There's an abstract introduction results, material methods, and on and on and on. And there's actually rules. There was a formula. It was like a dance with they had specific steps.
[:[00:55:42] And it felt very liberating, honestly. And so that I try to capture that feeling when I'm ever, I'm writing something new, like for the new book into the I was definitely doing that, touching that piece again, and When it works, it's really fun. The problem is it doesn't work every day. So you gotta, you gotta be disciplined about it.
[:[00:56:10] Neil Shubin: No, I mean, I have a very rigid style. And that is, I, I have to write in the morning. If I don't write in the morning, it's done for the day. Yeah. And I could write for any length of time.
[:[00:56:41] If you're writing something that's kind of you're really into and it's really exciting, take it far, but don't finish it off. Start the next day with that. Always start pumped about something. So you have to play this little game with yourself sometimes. I don't tap the well dry, as you would say. I would sort of like leave it.
[:[00:57:16] Now, that has a risk because I can edit that. And I'm like, it gets me pumped because it's good, but I can edit it and realize and think, wow, I thought it was good yesterday, but it really sucks now. So it could go either way on you, but you know, it's a process, you know, not every day is going to be great.
[:[00:57:35] Scott Solomon: forgiving with yourself too. Do you feel like doing this kind of public science communication helps you with your science? Oh, absolutely.
[:[00:57:51] Why is it important? What matters to people? You know, if I'm in my own little bubble in the lab or in the tent in the field, I won't be touching that. I won't be connected to that, right? So, yeah, I mean, it's, you have to do that. And you know, and it's, uh, it helps me learn, you know, it helps me grow.
[:[00:58:24] Well,
[:[00:58:53] They communicate all walks of life. They communicate to four year old kids. They communicate to their parents. They communicate to teenagers. They communicate to trustees. They communicate to business people. They communicate to political leaders. Everything. They are, you know, scientific communication in a box at all levels.
[:[00:59:34] Yeah. Because that's what they do. And, you know, there's nothing for me. Yeah. I hated school. Like being so field trips to museums were like perfect because we didn't go to classes, but I learned more in those than I did in my classes. Yeah. You know, and so it's no mystery. I went into the field and no mystery.
[:[01:00:14] You know, it's like, and the first question people always ask, is it real? You know, and if it is real, it's even better. Right. Cause it's an object, right. It's not this abstraction. So there's something tangible, something physical about it. And yeah, it really, and the kind of. Experiences you have in a good museum, you keep for life, right?
[:[01:00:36] Scott Solomon: It's the communication and the education, but it's also the inspiration, right? It's all in wonder. Yeah, exactly. Makes you want to know more. So what advice would you give to maybe scientists who are considering doing science communication, whether it's writing for the public or, you know, working with the museum, like what advice do you give to people who want to get into public science communication?
[:[01:01:31] So really, I mean, I think, you know, developing your own voice, which means, which means, I think, starts with tapping into your own excitement, your own wonder, your own awe, then you can bring it to other people. You know, no, that's, that's how I am. I'm not going to tell other people, but I think how to behave.
[:[01:01:55] Scott Solomon: So when is your next expedition? Anyplace that you haven't been? Hopefully this
[:[01:02:04] You know, we're, we're right now we're thinking about, so we, Wrapped up a Devonian expedition this past July really stoked about that working on the science from that I mean, it's like still a glow from the from the discovery But we're shifting gears a little bit and going into earlier rocks looking for early vertebrates, you know, there's about a hundred million years older So wow, yes stay tuned.
[:[01:02:30] Scott Solomon: Well, Neil Shubin, thank you so much for sharing a little bit about the work that you do and have done both in the Arctic and in Antarctica and other parts of the world and really excited for your new book and yeah, it's just been a pleasure to talk to you.
[:[01:02:46] Neil Shubin: it.
[:[01:03:12] com. If you enjoyed this episode, Please consider leaving a rating or review on your podcast platform. You can subscribe and follow us on social media to get updates about new episodes and to see pictures of our guests and the amazing places they work. This episode of Wild World was produced by 3Wire Creative.
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