 Yes, they're gone. I'm planning on doing in voice. Well, it's nice. I see some old friends coming here And I see some other people. I don't recognize is anybody coming to second science circle for the first time If you are we certainly welcome you to our sim. All right. I have one o'clock Chantel we ready to get started I appreciate everybody being on time Mike are you recording? Let me know when you're ready to go and This is going to be real informal So feel free to ask questions or comments or if you have something more Stensive you'd like to add or discuss It's okay with me. If you want to take over the mic and voice I know sometimes the text can be limiting, but I am going I am planning on on following the vocal chat So if you want to just do the way we normally do with putting comments and questions into text chat I'll be happy to answer them as best I can. In fact, this is not a long presentation Like that was mentioning to Chantel one of the things I found very interesting The last month is we've had some that have gone 90 minutes and people aren't logging it Which is really good. All right that We've got topics that are capturing the interests of the participants that are here The other comment that I want to make is I want to talk a little bit about the history of the museum before we actually go in and look around and Some of this was already in the write-up that Chantel put on the website, but a number of years ago James Madison University asked Contacted me and said that they were putting up a sim in second life Actually, it's the second time they had tried it and they wanted to play around with some different ideas. They wanted to Have a geology museum on the on the campus of JMU and I said, oh, absolutely That'd be a lot of fun. So I designed it and existed for a while and then the funding I guess got dropped from it and they had to pull the sim and And to be quite honest, I was sad when that decision was made and then I talked with Chantel and Jess and they stepped up to the plate and said well If you want to rebuild some of those exhibits on the second life sim, feel free to do so and they gave me this parcel So I am very grateful to Jess and Chantel and Science Circle for giving me the opportunity To recreate at least one of the exhibits there actually was three in the original museum One was on paleogeography one was on fossils one was on minerals and I recreated the paleogeography one exactly as it existed on the JMU sim the minerals and the fossils one were more difficult to recreate and I thought that I would go on a different theme for this new version that we'll get into So without further ado, let me start on the outside of the museum and Here we go and Originally when I put this together it was going to be a very simple Build and it was just a gray structure and then Chantel said she wanted a few more pictures For the outside and I said oh sure no problems. So the first one that you see here Of course, I think everybody recognizes as the Grand Canyon and I'm gonna be doing more with this Talk to Chantel and Jess this morning The end of this month June 29th. There's gonna be a virtual science fair and I hope to get together with Greg and Greg I do not see on To talk about various sims on the Grand Canyon that I've done. He's done I've done one on second life, but they'll be coming up June 29th All right, then over here you see a globe it's actually a Reconstruction of Pangea As existed about 230 million years ago with Tethys And if you come behind here, and I don't know if we're all gonna fit. I threw up a couple of pictures last summer Last summer I was able to I wonder if I could move this over or disable it first But I can see Yeah, that would be really good We get a copy of the globes Good question Barraghan. I'm not sure who created it. Oh I created So, yeah, I guess I could I don't know who created the textures. That's my only concern Let's talk about that later But I guess I just dropped it on a spear my concern would be the scripts that rotated and the and the textures where they're copyright Anyway, if you can cam behind the globe it shows a picture that I took last summer I was on vacation up in New York and these are some rocks. They took a picture of that are very famous it's the Unconformity between the Ordovish and rocks that are on the right hand side and Salurian rocks are on the left There was a major mountain building event that occurred about 500 million years ago in New York And what happened was a volcanic island arc slammed into the North American continent Create a mountain range the north and west of New York and at the same time Built the black shale layers that are on the That are on the right hand side and convert some of them into slates and then Sea came back in formed the limestone sandstones that are on top of the shales And then they got rotated a second time at least one or one more time when Penji had formed So I felt it was appropriate to put this picture was the globe below the globe is starting to hide it and over here Did we lose voice? I've still got the red dot back. Okay, great. Yeah Bivox has been coming on and off Then the picture right in front of me here shows a trilobite these things that are related to modern-day horseshoe crabs and lobsters I was doing a field trip a couple of years ago in West Virginia and came across this fossil And There's a lot of excitement. This is one of the best fossils that I found over the last couple of years He's about 350 million years ago Ended up donating him and there were about 11 other fossils that I found at this spot all which got donated to the Virginia Museum of Natural History Yeah in some spots Trilobites are very common in other areas. They're very rare. There are some spots like this one I've gone to Kataba mountain that I'll be discussing going there 30 years have yet to find a trilobite What kind did you find? The net you or if I'm selling it saying it right You know which kind it is or how old it is Yeah, if you could send me a picture of it if you're not sure what it is Maybe I can help you identify it. All right, everybody should be able to get into the museum I know when that we first got this building. It was set only to owner That's good. Everybody's spread out here a little bit. I'm gonna actually start over on this side of the room Black Friday sale Yeah, we'll lock the door I can lock the door until a certain time and then we'll open it up and let everybody stampede it But this is good. There's a good number of people. So I was afraid that we'd have just we'd have too many So anyway that the first floor of the museum is dedicated to what I call paleogeography We're locked in. No, we're not locked in You can always TP out since this is a G so I went to college Geology back in the 1970s early 80s and it was a great time to be at the colleges and universities because late tectonics Is any better? Okay way back Okay, you let me know if it's a problem I can start typing it's just gonna take us a lot longer to go through the museum If I do everything in text All right, so what I was saying was that in them in the 1970s and 80s we understood the basics of continental drift where I should say plate tectonics and Then the question became Where were the continents of the past? You know, we understood I would say in the 1970s that there was a supercontinent We could reconstruct You know where the continents were up to say the last 200 million years But the big question was what was the earth like prior to? panchina was There are always a supercontinent prior to that with some of the questions that we people were asking in the 70s and 80s and when I finished my undergraduate work at Cornell and got my bachelor's I decided to go to the University of Chicago and It was a team it's so maybe I Need to start typing this voice back, right? I guess I'll repeat it So there was a team that was was working on Getting the or trying to figure out where the continents were so they collected as much fossil and rock evidence they could and The leader was dr. Fred Siegler. He was also my evaluator for my graduate work, but Over here. I put a picture of Chris coates Who was and still is a good friend that I met the University of Chicago? Chris was interested in helping Fred come up with the computer graphics Which Fred knew nothing about back in those days. We mostly had Mainframe computers The micro computers weren't coming out yet until the late latter part of the 1980s The lot was still about on mainframe computers and cal comp plotters that sort of thing but the work of Chris coates is shown around the room and They're basically arranged they should be arranged roughly in chronological order here as I recall I've tried to arrange them that way. Yes. I may have missed them up a little bit when I was doing it but if you look in the If you look in the upper left-hand corner, it gives the geologic time period and also the age and millions of years So some of the earliest ones and we've got pretty good data going back to about 600 million years ago showing the supercott in a rodentia over here for the late protozoic Also shows the glacial ice at the South Pole. That's here and then we go through time in And Chris did 20 million year slices for the pelleozoic And then as he got closer to modern day, he went in 10 million year slices So here's the late Cambrian over here. What you're saying is that the That the cotton that the supercott in a rodentia started to split apart and Some of the main Crayton some of the main plates or continents are starting to be established and see the North American also knows Laurentian plate there They've also got Baltica There was a large supercontinent or I should say a group of continents for South America, Africa North America South America Africa and torture in Australia that was still that was still together and located at the South Pole Apologize for bumping anyone as we go along here and then as you go along this wall here You go progressively through time And again, feel free to camp in these individual pictures By the way, Chris was was very nice to give me permission to to use his work here In second life, in fact, he said he always dreamed of having a museum to display his work So I said, well, I'll be happy to take care of that So then we get to the middle order vision, which is about 458 million years ago And then it jumps to the Solarian These by way, these maps have been used extensively by other geologists or the US Geological Survey If you want to try and address sort of any problem in geology, it really helps it put it into a plate tectonic sort of context I know I do a lot with evolution. We're gonna be talking more about that on the second floor And some of the extinction events that have occurred For example, the one at the end of the Permian when I was in college was typically tied into plate tectonics in a map All right, so then we go along further here through geologic time This next one is an early Devonian about 390 million years ago Then we go to the early Carboniferous and as we go through time You should notice that the continents are starting to come together again To form the supercontinent known as Pangea And by the late Carboniferous early Permian You essentially have this supercontinent extending all the way from the the north pole to the south Very similar to Rodinia that we saw at the beginning of these series of slides and When I was going through college I was taught there was this major extinction at the end of the Carboniferous where most paleozoic organisms things like trilobites and Eurypterids and Graptolites They die. Okay, as the oracle extinct as the continents are slammed together So it's these maps are are very useful. Okay for talking about different theories like that And then over here I show The modern current plates of the world that are used that we use by the paleogeographic research team And scissor g is asking there was a great permanent extinction too, right? Yeah, that's what I just mentioned In fact, I was talking with Chantel before there were actually five main extinctions that occurred throughout from about 600 million years ago to the present There was one at the end of the automation about 500 million years ago There was one At the end of the Permian, of course, we're all familiar with the one at the end of the Cretaceous The wiped out the dinosaurs. There was one in the Triassic and I'm missing one. I forget which one that is Um And that's a good question tagline There's a book that my son got me for I think it was my birthday called the sixth extinction And if that's a topic that you're interested in I highly recommend that book Because the author goes through the evidence At her concern that we are headed for a sixth extinction All right, and then what I've done is I put a couple of other maps around this room as well so here's another one that A paleogeographic map I believe this is for the late Ordovician Um Yeah, the sixth extinction can somebody google it for me um, and Put maybe the amazon link um into local Yeah, that's that's the argument that's been made of course Matt major mass extinction events um Have multiple causes behind it and um It you know some of it could be extinctions. Thank you um, or Um, it could be a result of an extraterrestrial impact. Of course, that's what? Um, everyone is promoting for the the dinosaur extinction Um, it could be a result of of other factors as well Want to get into later All right, or he's already read it terrific ory. Did you like the book? I mean, it's what I like is it gives a good historical content My main concern with the sixth extinction is that a lot of it deals with anecdotal evidence Um, but it there are some really good stories about The main question has an end Well, I don't want to tell you that because then you won't read the book We'll have to wait around and see right and um Oh, I'm giving I'm getting off key here All right, um, I was going to say more about uh off track I was going to say more about this map here One of the things that chris has been working on is trying to refine his Paleo geographic maps put more detail Behind them, uh, the colors represent elevations. So the dark brown represent mountains The green areas represent low lens The light blue represent shallow seas and the dark blue represents deep ocean basins So, um, in addition to be more colorful, it's it's giving us more information about what the landmasses were like Here's one for the lake retaceous that chris did And on here if you look closely, he's also put the location of the, um Put the location of the crater, okay That was produced when the when the meteor or whatever it was struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs All right. So, um, also on here you see my contact information Feel free to email me. I've listed that up there contact me in second life um The research that I've been working on has mainly dealt with, um uh paleo geography and uh paleo longitudes One of the things that I was interested in as a graduate student is Trying to make these maps more quantitative And if you look at just about every map that I've shown you There are no latitude and longitude grids that are on here Latitude we can get at with, uh paleo Magnetic data, but the paleo longitudes are more difficult Uh taglines asking how likely is it that there have been landmasses above sea level that are not included these maps? um That's a good question tagline And I'm not exactly sure what you're asking um Trying to come up with um elevations Is a tricky business I know that there's been some research on this at the university in new hampshire There were geologists that tried to measure the elevation of for example the rockies by measuring um The vesicles the air pockets in basalts and they got some rough information about it But a lot of this is very qualitative And what i'm going to be discussing next is some quantitative means to try and Um determine the location of the continents of the past So what I did was for my uh graduate school work. I tried to determine What the longitudes were based on uh, basically measuring the differences or how Similar faunas were between two areas and the idea was that the further apart that were further apart they would be the um The less the similarity between two faunas were in terms of the number of species that it contained And when we go upstairs, I'll show you some more of that All right, but as we go How do you define laudatouji a very good point? uh scissor g Well, of course today We use the primaridian which is located in grad jinglen, right? So what I did with my graduate school work was I said we're going to use the apollonian plate Which has most of england on it as our zero point and then we're going to measure everything relative to that so um I came up with relative paleo laudatous And that's something that I wrestled with in my dissertation Also some science papers that I've published is that we don't know exactly where that is relative to modern day So the zero point may have drifted around is apollonian move But at least that's better than saying well, we think that uh, north america was somewhere to the west of Of england or that sweden was somewhere to the east of england Get the point that I'm making we're trying to refine these estimates All right, the maps that you see on this wall here Um show uh more recent time periods So now we see penjiya and as we go through the mesozoic and the senozoic um We notice that penjiya starts drifting apart and the continents start Splitting apart until we finally get to more modern day Representation of the continents And that's shown over here. I believe we have a modern map Yes on this one the third one from the end Right syzurgy Yeah, or that's a separate issue that you bring up. Um If you want to get latitude You can use periomagnetic information. You can collect iron particles that are in the rock And you can measure their orientation and you can get the latitude of a plate in the past and also how much it's rotated Uh, you know physicists pretty much argue that yeah, there are magnetic shifts Uh around the rotational point of the earth But if you average it out certainly over a million or two million years that the Magnetic pole of the earth averages out to the rotational axis of the earth So that is not a major concern among geophysic No, we're near as much as what I wrestled with with trying to define a zero point for longitude All right, and then Over here these last two maps I'll edit them I can point to them You know, it's sort of fun meteorologists try and predict what the weather is a week in advance And we can easily find out if they're right or wrong geologists and plate tectonic geophysic predict 250 million 500 million years in the future So we never have to worry about being proved wrong because no one's going to be around We're certainly none of us to to say yes or no But this is based on the eye on on current plate movements The second from the right one We assume that Africa is going to continue to move to the north and slam into Europe and eventually Wipe out the Mediterranean Sea And this last one over here assumes that there's a 500 million year That we got 500 million year cycle to the formation of supercontinents And that eventually uh, maybe in 250 million years or so, uh, all the continents will come back together All right rad run as how can the all the continents be balanced on one side of the earth should not the ocean distribute uniformly around the globe Well, that's based on You know where the continents or locators is controlled by the forces that move them And geophysicists are still arguing over that um We originally thought that was convective cells that were driving the continents But I talked to a volcanologist about a month ago and he said no it's subduction That it's the weight of the sea floor that's attached to the continents that pulls it back into the earth so Even an understanding of what drives the plates is being debated now um And where they're going to hand up is just uh, you know, where those forces You know eventually lead them to We're at the pillars of Hercules closed in the past and they'll close again um and Uh scissor g you're going to have to tell me where we're the pillars of Hercules Scissor g They're at the interest of the Mediterranean. Yeah, eventually what's going to happen is Africa is moving to the north and Europe is moving to the south So they're going to slam together and eventually what's going to happen is the Straits of Gibraltar the Mediterranean sea are going to close And turn into the Mediterranean out in range um, just like Tethys sea did When india slammed into asia now formed the Himalayan mountains um, and we have a question up here about Can land masses be subducted out of sight and the answer that is no The density of granite which makes up most of the land masses is only 2.67 It's too light. You can't ram them into The Can't ram them into the subduction zones. It just doesn't work. The only thing you can subduct is heavier sea floor Material that has a density of around 2.83 somewhere in there Is the minute let's see we got some other great questions coming here um Is the mid-atlantic rift the main engine of drift? And I used to think it was but there are other geologists that are saying that there are other ways of doing it So when I was in college, I was taught that at the mid ocean Ridge sea floor material separates and pushes the continents apart All right, and I'm trying to show that with my hands And I realized that you don't see anything when I'm doing with my hands um Another way of driving the plates is that as see for materials being created pools It becomes denser and it's pulled back down into the ventures and some geologists now saying that All of those plates as they become denser Is what is the main driving mechanism for the continents of the plates? Will plates fuse or split apart they can do both all right? um Good example of plate of a plate splitting apart is in ethiopia today you can look at a modern day Dying main map you can see where the northeast part of africa is actually splitting apart. It's like a big zipper Plates confuse together. Well. I already mentioned india is slammed into asia producing the Himalayan mountains So that's already happened and there are suspects that Suspicions that could happen in other places All right, um, I put this panel up here um, it shows a lot of the geologic evidence for Our understanding of plate tiktoks. This is the sort of uh evidence that uh, uh, Fred Siegler used to and and chris cotees used to put these together and what I use routine in my class For example, uh, you notice in northern england and they've got metamorphic rocks for the devonian So what does that tell you? Well metamorphic rocks formed by very high pressures and temperatures So it suggests that northern england slammed into something and that something was most likely the north american continent um And so i'm saying that it's sort of like a big detective story And it's really through working together. This is what I love about the science circle Is the way that we share data on a global basis. There are just some problems that have to be solved globally And or yes, so is the tectonics driven by an external body gravity or ocean water weight Um, it's the weight of the plates Okay, we we now know the surface of the earth is made up of crust and the upper part of the mantle And that's created in the middle of the Atlantic ocean like the mid ocean Uh ridge and then it's destroyed in in the deep trenches area. I don't believe the ocean water really adds that much to this process Uh ocean water is important In the fact that it takes it's subducted it goes down with the plate And when water gets inside the earth It's it's very interesting. It lowers the melting point of rocks Which helps uh melt the rocks at the base of the the continents and that's what creates the volcanoes So or to answer your question. I think water and ocean water is important Or sort of creating magma, but I don't think it uh is involved in actually surviving the plates Guys are asking some really great questions. Keep them up And i'll be happy to stop So how would that work for a place like a jovian moon like such as Europa? Good question um We are only starting to learn About plate tectonics on other planets. For example, um mars is the one Mars is the one that's been studied the most Um, and what we found is that mars is about half the size of the earth So it cooled off and probably does not have any plate tectonic cycle to it Um There the rocks are water eyes too. Yeah, so obviously there's water on Robots. I found this water on ganymede. Um, one of the things we'd like to know It just basics, you know, are there quakes on other planets? And some of you may know we just landed a rover on mars And sunk a seismograph into the mars to find if there's quakes there Uh, we have put seismographs on the moon. Interestingly enough, there are moon quakes and some of them get really Uh powerful up to mag sixes Uh, I know one astronomer that told me if astronauts had been on the moon when a mag six went off But the low gravity they would have achieved escape velocity and the quake would have been able to shoot that astronaut off in outer space as tectonic movement dependent on a molten core Um Bergen, I think it is again, but I'm following sort of traditional models of uh, you know of geophysics like I said, there's some debate among other geologists that I've talked to All right. Uh, so we're on this board. It shows, um Some of the contributors to the paleo geographic map project One other thing that we're doing is Yeah, the internal heat of the earth may be a rover. I I think that's unlikely, but like I said, it's still being discussed among geophysicists Mike's asking and ice would have a global ocean under the ice Uh, what the rock is doing it would be hard to say there may even be a second layer to different form of ice All right, um Uh, any other questions before we go to the second floor because this is about where I thought we'd be Take about a half an hour down here and then another half hour going upstairs Look at this map of ocean currents is there? No curl of oceans All right, let's talk about the let me zoom in on the modern day map Those circles are called gyres And I've labeled there's three of them in the northern Uh, northern atlantic and there's just one in the antarctic and no, there are other gyres I just haven't put them on here on the map And notice that the reason why there are fewer gyres that are present in the southern hemisphere Is because there's an opening between the landmass between the southern tip of south america and antarctic Other wars to flow through it So one of the activities I like giving to my students is here's a map of the world What would the gyres and oceanic circulation look at look like? Interest discover a plant without a mole core with play movement. Yeah, I agree. There's there's a lot more interesting research Be done. I think with plate tectonics and other continents and there's a professor of virginia tech That uh is asking those sort of questions Hey, would everybody um Head upstairs on the steps You can talk a little bit more about plate tectonics And some of the research that I've been doing But again, uh continue to sort of feed in your Questions All right, so one of the things that I was talking with shantel about this morning and jess is um The idea of ideographic versus an over-the-thetic paleontology and originally I was going to um I was going to devote this to um Minerals and and fossils up here, but we had that excellent panel discussion a couple of weeks ago when we talked about um Current problems that are being faced in our disciplines So I decided to dedicate the second floor of this uh museum to We're up what I think are the cutting research topics that are going on And I think I'd start off by talking about ideographic versus non-mathetic ideographic means That you go out and you basically just do some field trips and you describe maybe the rocks you find or the fossils you find or plants or whatever and You know you publish those maybe you come up with a new species of fossils and for a while for many years Okay, this is the way the geology and paleontology was done And then it gets really boring. You know you go these talks and okay It's another new species of brachypods that really We really need to cloud our brains with anymore but um in the 1980s Uh, there were a number of paleontologists particularly steve gould at harvard comshoff at chicago jackson caskey at chicago and davreau And they started to come up with another concept called non-mathetic paleontology And I think this approach is very appropriate to what we're trying to do here at science circle Where you go out you collect information, but then you try and tie it into a more broader context or more broader problems and uh And gould in 1980 and uh, then re quoted for therian 2012 says Uh, geology and paleontology tries to extract almost wall-like characteristics Um, and I may some of you may have heard me tell the story and where's mike shore Uh, when I was in graduate school. I remember uh, tom shaw came into the lunch room There we go, Mike came into the lunch room and he started yelling at graduate students and he said I want to know something He goes I want to know why there are no gas laws in geology and paleontology The chemists have them and I want one of you guys to put together some gas laws for me And his comments those days really struck with me Um, because it's true. I mean basically whether you're talking about chemistry We are dealing with the random movement of gases or whether you're talking about fossil organisms with larvae in an ocean That are randomly distributed about There should be more overarching arching Laws okay that describe okay the movement of whether it's gas particles or larvae That eventually controls fossils and that's something that has really been driven driving me and You know in some of the research that I've done And scissor g says that looks like a Dynamological law or does originate from some more general theory or can it lead to such a thing? Well, that's something that I've been been looking into Uh, the clam law, right? Okay, if you look at some of the other, um Other slides that I have here Uh, one of the things that I started doing Uh and collecting in my well in my Graduate school work. I just started collecting data on fossil clams from um The western interior from wyoming and colorado and so on and and I wanted to come up with these laws But we didn't have the technology. We didn't have the internet Um, we didn't have the databases that we have now Uh, I remember getting together at a conference with uh, Dick von Bach at Chicago and I said to him Dick you were you were one of my evaluators I just didn't have the technology to do what I wanted in the 80s, but I certainly could do it today. This was like 2005 So he said sure go ahead and do it. So I ended up, uh, putting together large amounts of data on modern clam And based on modern clam distributions I started to look at the at how Similarities in faunas between two areas is controlled by the distance and I came up with using Way that physics guys work. I plod up these graphs and came up with some simple formulas and some of them I've shown here um Going the relationship between similarity and distance and then I inverted I said i'm going to measure how similar fossils are in the past and use them to get distance And I was able to come up in 2011 with this paleo geographic map that was published Good question. Can you generalize that the other species? That's something I haven't looked at yet, but I was interested in um And it really has to do with a couple of things, you know, what is this law based on well Part of it is controlled by how long larvae stay in the water column That's controlled by the biology, right? So if larvae are what are called lessotrophic that is they have an egg sac That's going to limit them the you know the critters they eat with the egg sac and then they have no choice They either die or they sell out they become adults Some plankton though can feed on other plankton, which means they can stay in the water column for a longer period of time And then the other thing is not so matter the type of species, but the speed of the currents, right? So the faster the currents are moving That's going to control how far they can distribute so This law is really defined by the behavior of the plankton and also current systems And it seems like the current systems are a constant and the larvae may that be as well So it's something that I would want to look into in more detail But yeah, that would be an interesting thing to look at is whether other organisms follow this law and not an origin, quadriday theory for evolutionary biology I'm not so much looking for this is more for spatial relationships rather than temporal or evolutionary ones So I'm looking at In terms of distance how that controls how stable the fossils are And if the plates, you see there's a reason for why I picked the the or division All the continents are along at the equator Which means that if I know distance Then I can convert that into latitudes, right? If the plates were at different latitudes, then I've got a problem All right, because now I've got to worry about the spacing in terms of both latitudes And latitudes so would have made the problem a lot more would have been much more difficult Any other questions? All right on this panel what I did was I listed Some of the people that I think some of these names you're going to recognize Uh, people that are doing some amazing work in paleontology We were fortunate a couple weeks ago to get Shu Haizal on Second Life Science Circle He's just doing amazing work here on the evolution of organisms in the late Precambrian And he did a fantastic job summarizing his work that was there Somebody I'd like to get a sterling nest, but I don't know how he feels about Second Life But he um and Michelle are doing some terrific work on the evolution of early dinosaurs Maybe we could get Shu Haizal to talk sterling in and come on for a lecture because that would be really cool Here I've heard him speak in real life And he's has some great presentations And then of course we all recognize Dr. Alex Haiz things for his work on titanibola And his implications for global climate change But that's something I've been giving a lot more thought to is um Can paleontologists be environmental scientists Alex would absolutely say yes And I'm starting to notice other paleontologists like, um, Alicia Stigl at Ohio State University um, and Rowan Locke Wood at William and Mary Okay, that are starting to look at can we look at environmental issues both in deep time Alicia Stigl is looking at the whole issue of invasive speech And you've probably heard this story in modern day where there there's certain species that attach themselves to ships And get put into different ecosystems and end up almost wiping them out because there's such nasty predators Um, Alicia is saying the same thing happened in the geologic past Where invasive species not due to ships or anything but just due to uh, ancient dispersal Okay, um, can have a drastic effect on ecosystems Yes, we did have a presentation on titanibola Aaron Yeah, and it's also cool to look see the links between paleontology biology geology and geophysics In fact, that's one of the things I like about science circle is that we can come together and Have sort of this interdisciplinary discussion. All right. Um, some of you may know that I'm working on a A app to identify fossils and then use that for evolutionary studies or or further geological studies But basically as we all know, um, it all starts with careful field work. Here's a nice picture that I took of I believe this is the or division rocks that are in virginia And um, these panels start to summarize some of the work That I've done, um With refining the the bio stratigraphy the for the extinction at the end of the late or division Using my voice is getting to dry. We're almost done here. Uh, so, um, I went through This book didn't drink the sea water now. Um, when I was last time I was at the smithsonian institution I um, I was given this book on teaching paleontology in the 21st century And I went through it and for this exhibit and listed some of the topics that Geologists and paleontologists and biologists are looking at these days Thaophonomy is the study of how organisms decompose how they get preserved or how they don't Ontogeny is how organisms go through different life stages Population variation is the typical Work that's done prior to doing evolutionary studies to see how populations can change and develop new species uh, paleontology is a relationship to organisms to their ancient environments And functional morphology is how organisms, um Can adapt or not adapt to their environment, right? It was a famous book that gul published ontogeny and phylogeny in there He reviews a lot of the older theories that, um, that biologists were looking at And basically argues that the way that evolution occurs is through neotony That the juveniles tend to compute adults and win out And those are the ones that eventually go on to create new species So here's a little teaser, um Yesterday when I was out in the mountains of virginia and I was telling shantel about this So I've been collecting data um on the Ordovician And one of the things that I've been talking to Jess about is coming back in the fall and doing a presentation on just that topic And Aaron asked, do you think maybe life will find a way and dinosaurs will walk the earth again? Not through this question that john haven't um well The one of the principles of evolution is that when organisms go extinct, um, they tend Not to evolve again And as much as with some of us would like to see dinosaurs coming back Um In terms of it happening naturally that's highly unlikely. There are a number of people who are working on A reverse engineering birds and trying to bring them back that way You know one of the things that that I always thought was possible is there's a lot of a genetic information in our genes And Not all of it is expressed for modern day purposes um That birds may indeed have all the dinosaur information of these just uh the proteins just don't turn them on So for example, if you put the right Uh protein when say the tail is developing the right hormone you could get a bird with a longer tail Or you could have a trade expressed like teeth and birds instead of a beak Where you could convert the feathers in a bird to scale or just leave the feathers there We know some dinosaurs had feathers as well as scales um So there are some people that are saying if you want to bring dinosaurs back that would be the way to do it Yeah, the Jurassic Park model is not going to work. Most scientists agree with that now um You know, they're saying you'd have to do it a different way Yeah, it was a Jurassic Park is a totally different model Okay in Jurassic Park the idea was that a mosquito Okay would bite a um a dinosaur extract some of the blood You get the DNA from that and then put that in say a mire an animal and somehow recreated dinosaur And when paleontologists looked at that they said, ah It's just not going to work. I mean they tried over and over again No surgery is asking you don't need to extract the whole DNA strand You need Well, not all DNA It contains the information you need for different characteristics, right? Right, and I forget what it is in humans. I mean and even Some of the DNA creates characteristics like for an appendix what you know There's obviously a gene that creates an appendix in every one of us and Why I mean the appendix is not used for anything today was probably used for something in the past So I agree But the question is you need certain key DNA strands And that's always been the concern is getting the right amount of DNA Okay to produce the characteristics that you want even in looking at my own organisms They tried mammoths that are frozen in Siberia and even then, okay um That um, you know the the DNA actually was only 3 percent Uh complete Okay, thanks scissor g Says it repopulates our gut microbes when our immune systems attack I knew there would be somebody here that knew more about anatomy than I did All right. We're about an hour. I'm glad we I like to keep it to an hour because I know we've got other things to do in real life Oh, the second globe outside mic is just um Uh a globe of the uh modern day earth Thanks tagline All right chintel do you want to talk about what's coming up? Because I know you've been sending out notices. I know june 29th is the Second life science fair With the presentations Thanks, mike Appreciate all of you guys coming. No, I mean not all life is going to be killed out by mass extinction events But there are some times that it came close. You look at the terminal permean one or the terminal cretaceous the carbidiferous There are estimates 75 to 99 of all species were wiped out All right, so I think we'll wrap it up at this point and uh look forward to seeing you for the For the science fair and other future science circle presentations The uh certainly cockroaches uh or it's june 29th