 Well, good afternoon, good afternoon. Welcome to Morrill Hall here and we're glad to see a good turnout for our event this afternoon. I'm Bob Wilhelm. I'm the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and I want to thank you for joining us today for what is the 12th and also the final Nebraska lecture of our N-150 series. So we've been celebrating for the last year the 150th anniversary of the University of Nebraska and as part of our celebration each month we've had one of our Nebraska Chancellor's lectures and so we're pleased to present the 12th and to put a bow on this and to move on now what will be our 151st year when we enter into Charter Week in mid-February. This series, the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series has been a hallmark of the University for many years. It's designed to bring together the university community with the broader Lincoln community and well all of our friends and our partners beyond in the state of Nebraska. We look for this to both celebrate the intellectual work that's taking place at the University of Lincoln, Nebraska and also to enter in some discussion about how it's connected to the world around us. So these presentations have presented many of our faculty and their excellence in interdisciplinary research and creative activity and I have a lot of people to thank. So the lecture series is sponsored by both the University of Nebraska Lincoln Research Council also in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Research and Economic Development and also the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute which we call OLLI and I want to make a special welcome to any of our OLLI members that might be here today. I also want to recognize and thank the Humanities Nebraska and its Executive Director, Chris Sumerich, who's sponsored the N-150 lectures. Also the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed us to expand our lecture series this year with a grant, with some support and with the support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we've been able to create podcasts for each of these lectures, these presentations and they're available now so if people want to take a look but we think that they'll be interesting to people to look back on in future years and also to engage new audiences. So with that I also want to thank and to recognize the University's Research Council. The Research Council is populated by many of our distinguished research faculty around the campus who are involved with many different disciplines at the University and the Council takes the leadership role in developing our program for these Nebraska, the Chancellor's Lectures. So they solicit nominations of faculty, they look at the different opportunities for faculty to present, they consider the accomplishments of our potential speakers and also the lecturer's ability to explain to the audience that we have, our very general audience, to explain their work and so selection then for this Nebraska lecture or to be designated as a Nebraska lecturer is a very high recognition, it's the highest recognition that the Council bestows on an individual faculty member. So we thank them again for all of the good work that they bring to this. I've got to look back at the camera now boy, the lights are really brightly shining on me but I want to say hi back to the back of the camera because I want to welcome everyone that's joining via our live stream and also through Facebook live. So we have a number of different people in the audience but people from afar streaming on the internet and just to say a few different, give you a few details about the format today, we're going to have a very nice introduction, we're going to have the lecture with and then beyond the lecture, Nathan Meyer our Assistant Vice Chancellor of Research will be up here in front to help with a question and answer session so we have some chance to ask some questions and then following our Q&A we'll also have a prize, so this is always my favorite part, I'm in charge of the prize and we have celebrating our N150, we have a very special N150 book and we'll have a random process for that selecting that lucky winner so you have to be present to win so we know you'll want to stay around, enjoy the lecture or the Q&A and then take your chance on the prize. So with that that's the first part of the introduction here, I want to introduce Chancellor Ronnie Green who is going to introduce our speaker. Well thank you very much Bob, it's a pleasure to be back here in Morrill Hall, Susan thank you in your team for hosting the second one of these lectures during the year that we've had here in Elephant Hall so it's great to be here today. It is my pleasure to welcome you to today's Nebraska lecture and I also since this is the last one in our 12 month series want to thank the Nebraska Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is a big deal for us to have had that support for the year to put forth now 12 rather than two Nebraska lectures for that N150 year and to preserve them as Bob talked about and have the opportunity to look back on these. I spent a lot of time on history this year and I would have kind of liked to have had some things like that during the year of studying. As you've seen the lectures this year we've covered a pretty wide landscape. We've talked about everything from school spirit to physics history at the university to the unicameral to today, delving deeply into paleontology. So it's my pleasure to introduce today's lecturer featuring paleontologist Ross Seacord. We're eager to learn from Ross how the museum's fossil collections were compiled here starting with museum director Erwin Barber in the late 19th century and continuing to the present day. He will contrast how paleontology research has changed since then with the advent of new technologies and new methods. He'll also discuss the continuing impact the collections have had on science and the public beyond being a popular tourist attraction as we often give the tours here on campus every school child in Nebraska knows this site on our campus and Archie out front. Ross's research centers around paleogene mammals and problems in paleo climatology and paleo ecology. His focus is on faunal change and paleo ecological change through time and how those changes may have been influenced by climate in particular. Ross is originally from Reno, Nevada. He became interested in paleontology after a visit to the Kimball Natural History Museum in San Francisco when he was seven years old. We won't ask you how many years ago that was Ross, which led him to read lots of books on fossils. He earned his bachelor's degree in geology from the University of Nevada at Reno and his master's in geology and geophysics from the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He attained a PhD in geological sciences from our Big Ten sister university, University of Michigan in 2004. He is a research associate for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Ross has been teaching in our Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences here in the College of Arts and Sciences since 2008 and is happy to be at a university that has both a museum with a collection of fossil mammals and opportunities for field work. Please join me in welcoming Ross Seacord who will present Looking Back and Looking Forward the history of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum. Ross? Well, thank you for that illuminating introduction. Can everybody hear me? I can't see anyone because those lights are really bright, so waving won't help. All right, so I thought it would be fun and interesting to go back and look at how the collections have been built up since our collections here are tremendous and they are a tremendous resource not only for the University of Nebraska but for research that's being done all over the United States and all over the world. And I just wanted to start by giving a nod to some of the other divisions that are in the museum because I'm going to be focusing primarily on vertebrate paleontology today, but we do have huge collections of other things that are quite important in the museum as well and we have an anthropology division with some 40,000 artifacts including things like Egyptian mummies that you have probably never seen. We have a botany collection with over 300,000 specimens that gets a great deal of use, a lot of activity going on there. Sadly, the curator we had, Bob Call, who was looking over the collections there in an emeritus status for many years, passed away recently and unfortunately we don't have another curator yet to fill that role but hopefully we'll get one and Dr. Allen Osborn is curator of anthropology. We have a huge collection of insects in the division of entomology with over 2 million specimens. Rat Radcliffe is curator of those collections and collection manager MJ Paulson looks over the collections. We have a huge collection of parasitology with a lot of active work going on by Dr. Scott Gardner who is curator there and collection manager Gabor Rance and we have a zoology collection with some 44,000 specimens mostly from Nebraska with curator Dr. Robert Zink and collection manager Thomas Lebetts. We have a geology collection too, a fairly small one but an important one that Dr. Matt Jockel is curator of and we have an invertebrate paleontology collection with some 39,000 numbered specimens but if you go through and you start including the specimens that are in vials of microfossils that haven't been given numbers yet it actually goes into the millions so it's a very substantial collection of invertebrate fossils and then we also of course have the vertebrate paleontology collection some million and a half specimens of which I'm curator, collection manager George Corner. We have two full-time preparators Kerry Greenwald and Robert Skolnik and we also have the highway paleontology group including Shane Tucker and Jeremy McMullen with Shane Tucker being the lead of that group. So there's essentially five main collection rooms for the vertebrate paleontology collections and they're arranged by age and so starting with the oldest part of the collection we have the White River Room here that ranges in age from about 37 million to 30 million years ago a relatively small collection of about 40,000 specimens but an important collection. We have the Herickery Hemingford Room that ranges in age between 30 and 16 million years ago which is a substantial collection of fossils of that age. We have the Ogallala Room which is one of the largest components of the collection ranging in age from about 16 million to about five million years ago and a very important part of the collection. We have the Ashfall Room many of you are probably familiar with Ashfall and have been there but you may not know that we have a substantial collection of material from Ashfall that was brought here before there was a building that was built over the collecting areas and that's a very important collection as well and we also have what's called the Elephant Room most of this is ice age fossils but there's some fossils that are a bit older in there some they're actually a lot older in there so it tends to include a lot of large things as well but primarily things that are fairly recent on a geologic time scale one of the larger rooms in the collections and just to give you a little sampling of some of the things that we have in these collection rooms here are a couple of Bronithir Jaws used to be called Titanithirs but they're known as Bronithirs now from the White River Group in Nebraska these were actually collected in 1894 by the Barbour Group here's a skull of a thing called Dinahias which was a giant pig-like animal that was found near Agate Springs by the Barbour Group back in 1908 in the Hemingford Room and an amazing specimen these things were pig-like animals they belong to a family that's extinct now it would have been monstrous for its time the Ogallala Room just a small sampling there that these shelves that are in there house the larger specimens primarily rhinoceroses here's a skull of the running rhinoceros aphalops and here's a drawer I pulled open in one of the one of the carnivore collections and here you can see the quality of some of these specimens is quite outstanding this is a skull of a bone-crushing dog named Alluradon and these are jaws of Alluradon and then jaws of other types of carnivores that were found at the site as well the Ashfall Room contains dozens of rhinoceros specimens and many other specimens as well but this whole shelf here is all rhinoceros skulls and jaws and the skulls are on one shelf and then the jaw that goes with it is right below it here and some of these have skeletons that go along with them as well and just to give you an example of the kind of things we can do with these fossils here you actually have an ontogenetic sequence of the rhinoceros called teleoceros here this would be a newborn essentially this would be a juvenile and here a juvenile or a subadult and then you're getting into an adult and an older individual and a really old individual where the teeth are worn almost all the way down so you can look at the developmental sequence of rhinoceros in this collection which is something that is very difficult to do anywhere and you can't even do with modern rhinoceros is without a great deal of difficulty here is one of the little three-toed horses from there that would have only been about this high and skull here neck vertebral column back limbs that even preserves the tail so there's many important paleontological treasures in the asphalt room another room that that's even smaller is the holotype room but a very important room so we have about 300 fossil holotypes so when somebody goes out and finds a fossil and studies it and determine that it belongs to a species that hasn't been named so you have a new species you need to have a representative specimen and that's what a holotype is and so we have about 300 of these holotypes the most iconic of which would be this skull of barberophilus these are the saber like canines and the lower jaw and this big flange on the lower jaw to protect these these canines and there it is put together it was a cat like animal but it didn't belong to cats it's actually now placed in its own family barberophilidae so it's an example of evolutionary convergence where you arrive at the same form independently in different lineages as they adapt to similar environments and the holotypes range in size from little tiny things like this rodent jaw to this skull here of a four tusk elephant named compatherium osbornii that was named by barbora and i also want to remind people that our museum is not just moral hall we also have specimens that are part of the museum at ashfall which many of you are familiar with and out at trailside museum and so these are the battling mammoths at trailside which which is is an amazing find in itself these things were locked together in depth and also so i've shown you a lot of really large kind of showy specimens but a big part of the collection and and maybe even the most important part of the collection in some ways are small things and we have lots of small things in the collection like for example here's a drawer in the elephant room that is each one of these vials has a little jaw of a bowl in it this thing called my crotus or a teeth of it and here's a box with probably two or three thousand isolated squirrel teeth that haven't been cataloged so lots of small stuff in the collections as well and so i'll pose this question why are our paleontology collection so important and i think the answer to that the simple answer is fossils are the basis for the evolutionary history of life on this planet so darwin was able to come up with the theory of natural selection and evolution and how it how it explained evolution that had been observed without really knowing much at all about the fossil record but without the fossil record you would really have no idea it would be total guesswork as to what came before you and how evolution actually operated in practice and so the fossil record is extremely important because it tells us what actually happened in the past and how various organisms have evolved and the record that we have here in nebraska samples a fairly narrow interval of time as the overall time scale goes but we have an especially strong collection between the ages of about 23 million years ago to five million years ago and and certainly the the best or the second best collection sampling things of that age that's that's known anywhere in north america so we have the best record of evolution over this interval of time in north america of anywhere rivaled only by the american museum of natural history and the reason they have a great collection is because they came to nebraska to collect fossils here so those fossils are all now most of them are from nebraska that the large bulk of the best specimens actually came right from nebraska and so we have a lot of specimens in the in the collection and people ask sometimes why do you need so many specimens and the answer to that is that we need a lot of specimens so that we can understand the variability in different species and different organisms different taxonomic groups and for example here these are all the same bone from the same rhinoceros from a quarry site these are what are called fourth metacarpals in us that would be a hand bone and here you have over 30 individuals represented by metacarpals in that drawer but it tells us what the variability is in this species and that's important partly just to know what a species is we study modern variability to learn how much variability there is in modern mammals and from that we can we can begin to parse out what a species was in the past and how much variability you had in those this is a drawer here all of these jaws are from one locality and they're all from a little tiny pronghorn about that big called maricatus and that tells us what the variability looked like in this species of maricatus so we do need a lot of fossils and to use an analogy here you could think of a fossil collection as analogous to a library and here we have a very grand library this is trinity college in dublin ireland with each specimen telling a story about the evolution of ancient life and for example when you look at a drawer like this each one of these specimen has its own story each one of these specimens contributes something to our understanding of these species and people will come and look at these specimens and different scientists come and look at them and they'll see different things and they'll make different interpretations so these are not just this is not just a static collection of fossils but a collection that gets continually used and reinterpreted and we always need to go back to these collections when we're trying to figure out evolutionary trees and things like that to go back to the basic data and often we reinterpret it so this brings me to how did such an amazing and important collection of fossils come to be it didn't just fall out of the sky it represents years and years of very hard painstaking work and starting from from back in 1869 when the university was founded and chartered um here's a here's a view of what Lincoln looked like back then in 1871 and I think it's always fun to look back and see images like this because things are so much different than than they are now so when the university started there was just one building here called university hall and this is only two years after it was chartered and so everything initially was in university hall um in 1871 the board of regents earmarked a thousand dollars which was a lot of money at the time which was four percent of the total university budget for the establishment of a museum or what they call the cabinet in those days and professor Owie here was the first to manage the collection of natural science specimens when it started out it was primarily just specimens of modern things that were being used for coursework like we still do today in 1885 Lewis Hicks replaced Owie as director and in 1888 the museum collection was moved into old Nebraska hall this this building was raised in 1961 and like a lot of these early buildings they were poorly constructed and there were lots of problems with them and and they had to be taken down a lot of them couldn't be renovated and capped so out of the original collections this horse skeleton that's in the camel gallery right around the corner there still goes back to the 1800s it was part of their teaching materials and so things really began to change when Irwin Barbour was hired in 1891 as the new director of the state museum so Barbour actually had experience collecting fossils and he knew about the wealth of the fossil fields in Nebraska and in the Rocky Mountains he'd been out with that with a man who became his mentor OC Marsh who was at Yale University and became a student of Marsh's at Yale University but before I get to that I just wanted to show you this picture of the geology department in 1901 because Barbour was chair of the geology department he was the first chair this is his sister here Kerry Barbour and so we started from very humble beginnings he was also the leader of the geological survey in Nebraska too I also want to mention Charles Bessie here a contemporary of Barbour's who was a professor of botany from 1884 to 1915 although he wasn't collecting for the museum at the time he was the first person to actually start making a collection of plants from Nebraska which later on turned out to be really important and became part of the botany division in the museum now and he was a renowned scholar of his time in the late 19th century and early 1900s as many of you know so here's a picture of Barbour when he was a student at Yale working under OC Marsh and Marsh is not in this picture here's the skull of a Brontother you will see more of those as we move along so this is 1888 and here's a picture of Yale scientific expedition in 1871 so this was real wild west stuff I mean we see these old movies and people out in the west doing various things but you never see a movie where they're out collecting fossils but actually they were and there was kind of a gold rush going on of fossil collecting at this time and Marsh is famous for what's known as the bone wars where he was in competition with a man named cope and others to get the best fossils and to get them quickly and to name them and and and put them up in museum exhibits and so he was working for the geological survey for a while and you can see in this expedition here they are armed to the teeth this man over here actually later became a physician and taught at Yale for 30 years so not what physicians generally look like today okay so Barbour began his field work in Nebraska in 1891 and 1892 but he had no money to do that and so initially he was paying for it out of his pocket and fortunately there was Charles Morrill who was one of the who was on the board of regents for the University of Nebraska and actually had been out in the field with OC March as well and knew about the fossil resources of Nebraska and elsewhere so he was very keen to support Barbour in his efforts and he funded Barbour's expeditions for many years so he was a key person there's a long history interesting history with Morrill that I won't go into but you can find more about it online if you look here's one of the Morrill expeditions this is Barbour here and this is his sister Kerry Barbour here wearing a dress in the field as she often did at least in all the photos I found she is and so they were out beginning to collect fossils there so these were really hard one specimens an awful lot of work went into getting these fossils and today of course we have trucks and things we can bring out there it's still a lot of work to collect fossils but then of course they were they were hauling fossils with horses and wagons and here's a picture from the area around Burge so there's a famous quarry site called the Burge quarry I'm assuming that's what they have here with 2400 pounds of fossils that they're going to be hauling back to Lincoln and here's another one dragging an elephant pelvis up a ravine in 1913 and one of the first things that Barbour noticed when he started working in the field this is in 1892 right after he was hired at the University of Nebraska as the director were these these interesting corkscrew shapes that that are fossils and he realized they were fossils he thought they were tree roots he thought they were part of some sort of tropical tree and he actually hung on to that idea for quite a while but now we know that they're actually beaver burrows type of extinct beaver because a beaver has been found inside of them and you can see here that you've got the spiral shape here part of the burrow and then these are various chambers chamber down here and passages leading to other areas so very interesting and they're actually pretty common in western Nebraska at about 20 million years of age in the rocks here somebody excavating one of these they're called demon elix they were called the devil's corkscrew and literally that's what this means in latin and in 1906 Carnegie Museum discovered a rich bone bed near agate springs that was in the same area so there were a lot of museums that were coming to Nebraska to try to collect fossils that knew of the of the rich fossil resources here and this was discovered in 1905 and is really important and you can see just how rich this bone bed was this is a piece of it that's been prepared but that's a rhinoceros skull another rhinoceros skull and jaw here another one here these are all bones of a small rhinoceros called monoceros that lived in Nebraska about 20 million years ago so very rich find there a year later barbore developed a quarry site in actually the same bed but on another hill that's called university hill to get a sample of what was there and we got a lot of great specimens from this site not quite as rich as what you have at Carnegie Hill but you can see here's part of a jaw and lots of lots of bones and we got the skull of Dinohias that large pig like animal I showed you earlier actually came from this bone bed as well so a lot of important specimens and so these specimens were all being brought back to the University of Nebraska and you think of it being a lot of work collecting these specimens but a huge amount of work maybe even more work and labor hours goes into preparing specimens and here's Kerry Barbore Barbore's sister who was a preparator here and one of the earliest paleontologists here she's preparing part of a dinosaur femur one that we have out front now and here she's preparing one of the brontothera jaws that was brought back so the collection space was really small so this is the old Nebraska Hall circa about 1900 and there wasn't a lot of space for fossils you can see there's a bunch of these demonelics corkscrew kind of fossils that were collected here and various other things that were there but space was quite limited here circa 1915 they're mounting the tusks of a Colombian mammoth in what space they had so as they started to build up the collections Barbore didn't really have a place to put all these collections and fortunately Charles Morrill was still a big fan of the paleontology collections that were being made he'd been funding them he'd been lobbying the state legislature for years trying to get money to build a decent building because most of the buildings were inadequate that they had on campus and in 1925 he was successful in getting the funding to build Morrill Hall and this is probably 1926 here where they started building it and so here's Barbore and Morrill standing on the steps of what would be Morrill Hall sporting some straw hats so that was a critical point when they got the money to build Morrill Hall and then they could actually put together the exhibit museum that we have today so Barbore was passionate about fossil elephants now if we look around the room here we loosely call these elephants but there's actually four different families of what we call Probesidians which is the group the order that includes elephants and only the mammoths and the modern elephants are in the elephant family the rest of these are in their own families so this is a very unique kind of a collection that we have here it's the best collection of mounted elephants I will call them that we have anywhere in North America and probably anywhere in the world we've got we've got mammoths we've got the four tusk gompatheers we've got a mastodon over here we've got a stega mastodon over here stega mastodon each in their own families passionate about elephants and he'd collected a lot of elephant material and a lot of large things here they're preparing a mammoth tusk these are the limb bones of gompatheurium osborni part of that holotype I showed you earlier and so here's elephant hall in 1931 you can see it looks a bit different than it did today they didn't have all the mounts up yet but they were starting to put together the heads of some of these these elephants and here they are mounting archie in 1933 in the same position that it's in today so you may not think much about you know all the work that goes into mounting one of these skeletons but this gives you some idea you have to build a scaffolding you have to build iron supports it's a heck of a lot of work and labor hours that goes into doing this and so barbora was able to fulfill his vision of having an exhibit of mounted elephants of various types that we have now in moral hall and here's this is the mount of a mastodon americanum the one that's right behind me here now and you can see they actually put it together in another room and then moved it here so they didn't build all these things in place and here's edwin colbert putting together a modern elephant skeleton and something that really helped to to build up the collections was the works project administration program that was started during the great depression this was was part of of roosevelt's new deal and it brought in money that could be used to help people like in Nebraska for example farmers and other other people that were really struggling to at least be able to make some money so it employed quite a few people and barbora was able to take advantage of that and so we employed large crews for the university to go out and collect fossils and they did collect a lot of fossils so this is the the wpa crew at the rushville dig site circa 1938 here's another view and here you can see there's a couple of elephant tusks numerous elephants came out of this quarry site and so here's bertrand schultz and schultz played an important role in the museum he was a student of barbora's and this is back in 1928 when he was still a student of barbora's working on a mammoth tusk and here he is working on what's called the the reagan mammoth in 1930 but he also later on became barbora's right-hand man and was managing these wpa crews so he was responsible for a lot of that as well and then in 1941 he succeeded barbora as the next museum director so we had two museum directors that were verbal paleontologists over the course of of some approximately 70 years they were working as director the directors of the museum and also wearing the hat that now curator vertebrate paleontology would wear so they were the ones that were directing a lot of the fossil collecting that was going on and schultz continued to build the collections here's a picture of him some years later he was director until 1973 and here's a Henry writer mounting a rhinoceros this is the one that's around the corner in the horse gallery and it's still there now so moral hall provided exhibit space for for several of the more complete and spectacular specimens for many of those that were being brought back but there was never enough space in moral hall for storage of the entire vertebrate paleontology collection so following through on history here in the 1970s two curators of vertebrate paleontology were hired who many of you know so bob huntt was hired in 1973 and michael worries was hired in 1975 and of course they both continued to build the collections and to take advantage of the collections by doing research on the collections that we already had here and mike's best known of course for ash ball and this is a photo of what he discovered there in 1971 which turned out to be the jaw of a small rhinoceros and when he dug in the head was actually there too so it was the skull and then he found the the neck vertebrae and followed that back and and the whole skeleton was there but it wasn't until 1977 when he returned to investigate further and when he went back and started excavating the area he discovered that there were multiple skeletons and he was able to get funding to be able to develop the site which today of course is known as ash fall fossil beds state historic park certainly one of the greatest fossil discoveries ever made in north america and in the world fossils of this quality are extremely rare preserved in three dimensions entire skeletons and articulation of many different types of animals there's a horse here there's five different species of of horses from ash fall and a rhinoceros here and there are smaller things from there as well i'm not going to say much more about that i think most of you know about it it could be a separate lecture but certainly an amazing and important part of our collections so a few years later bob hunt was was working at an agate they decided to go out there and to try to reopen some of the carnage quarry sites to see if they would be productive and in particular bob had been studying a type of carnivore that are called bear dogs because they look a little bit like a bear and a little bit like a dog so people call them bear dogs but they're actually placed in their own family the amphiciana day um and he went back to a site where somebody had found a skull of one of these bear dogs because you don't find them in the bone beds and on carnage hill and they were able to relocate it and lo and behold they discovered that actually these things had been coming out of a den complex and so these are actually two burrows here two infills maybe a little hard to see but one there and one there and when they started excavating these den sites they found more bones bones of these amphicianids and of other carnivores as well in these dens so it was a den complex that was uh that was very close to these bone beds and these these carnivores were probably taking advantage of it so that was another great discovery and if you want to know more about it it was actually just published uh in 2018 um Bob and Rob Skolnik um and Joshua Kaufman published this monograph on it just two years ago the collections also benefited greatly from the highway paleontology program so Nebraska's pretty unusual in actually recognizing the value of the fossils it has in this state in a 1960 they set up this program to fund people to to go out and at construction sites where they were building roads and to prospect for fossils to look for fossils just about anywhere you dig a road in Nebraska you're going to find fossils it's really that rich and they've collected a lot of material including uh a plesiosaur skeleton and many other things so it started in 1960 a long list of people here that led the paleontology program Bob Isley, Claire, Usain, King Richie, Kenneth Quinn, George Corner who's shown here, um Bruce Bailey who's shown here and then most recently Shane Tucker who many of you know and so Shane leads the group now and Jeremy McMullen is the assistant uh paleontologist in the program and they're out every summer finding more fossils for our collections so they've added thousands together the highway paleontology program has added thousands of fossils to our collections and they continue to and we employ two full-time preparators and they're always busy um I'm out collecting new fossils as well so they're working on new material that's coming in as well as trying to work on the backlog of material and to preserve the material that we have in the collections already because a lot of that after a few decades needs more attention so Rob Skolnik here one of our preparators and Kerry Herbal the other preparator here Kerry is actually working on the skull of a Bronta deer that came up out of the basement that was in one of those jackets over in the new fourth floor uh lab that we have upstairs the visible lab so people can watch us prepare fossils and George Corner the collection manager is also a critical part of the staff to keep this whole thing run I only have a 15 percent appointment in the museum so could not function without George and it's kind of fun just to compare how things have changed so here's Kerry Barbora back in 1895 with a mallet and a chisel working on a Bronta deer jaw and here's Kerry Herbal recently working on a Bronta deer skull using more modern methods we have these nice little air scribes now various types that help and so the science of preparation has improved quite a bit especially in molding and casting and other types of methods and and and how to better preserve fossils and so some of the things that are happening now that are interesting and that that maybe Barbora would have not envisioned back in the day like for example here this is a skeleton of a musk deer from Ashfall and I had a student do this as a project this is by far the best known skeleton of this particular type of musk deer musk deer just live in Asia today there are small little little servids in the deer family actually no I'm sorry they're in their own family and they're small little ardeodactyls the the so-called eventode undulates but here's the head and the neck part of the spinal column there the tail and we didn't want to take this out of the jacket because a lot of it was in articulation so we employed a method that's being used fairly commonly these days and we took it to the Omaha Medical Center and CT scanned it and this is this is their scanner that's used for humans but it actually works quite well for some fossils as well and this actually represents a couple of months of work going through and isolating each one of these bones and coloring it differently that my master student here Kat Chen did as part of her master's project and once you've got these 3D images you can you can move them around in three dimensions and like here we're looking at the top of the skull which you would not be able to see with it lying in the jacket you can put the bones back together here's the skull in the lower jaw the neck vertebrae and so on that's a powerful method and recently in 2008 our crew we've been collecting in Wyoming and deposits that are a bit older than what we find in Nebraska so we're filling in some of the older record from there and we discovered a skull and partial skeleton of a primate so this is going back about 50 million years when when it was tropical in North America and these things are most closely related to living lemurs today that live on Madagascar and so this is a just an example of a lemur they aren't lemurs in themselves but lemurs probably evolved from the primates that we find today in the Eocene they were dispersed in North America and across the old world as well the eye would have been here teeth there and with this we've got various skeletal elements and this is is the hind foot here and so this is the the best known specimen of a hind foot of this particular type of primate called Smilodectes when it comes to smaller material hospital scanners aren't really powerful enough to get good images of but a lot of universities are starting to get micro CT scanners for research unfortunately we don't have one yet in Nebraska so I took this to Duke where I have a colleague who works on these and and you can see that that it's quite powerful that so here's oops here's the foot and then through the CT scan here you can see the matrix and how well the bones stand out and then you can rotate that and look at it in different dimensions you can come in the matrix is not as dense as the bone you can remove the matrix and there's other things you can do too to clean this up but then you can actually isolate the bones and have a digital record of exactly how those bones were found how they were articulated which is very powerful so if you want to go through and then remove the bones and study them individually you have a you have a digital record of of how they were found this is the top of the skull colors are a little bit bright here but but the yellow is the bone and then the red is the matrix and if we remove the matrix then you can see you can actually see the teeth and the lower jaw and all the things that are obscured by the matrix you can also see that there's many cracks in the skull so it's not held together very well it's being held together by the matrix same thing here looking at the skull from the bottom you can't really see it very well in this image but there's actually a couple of teeth that are floating up inside the brain case and another thing that was interesting I CT scanned this little tiny skull here that I found in 2017 in deposits in Wyoming as well and this belonged to an extinct family which is most closely related to pangolins today and this is a pangolin if you're not familiar with them they are some of the oddest mammals that are alive today they have scales on them they eat ants and termites some of them burrow some of them live in trees and it's kind of analogous to an armadillo so these are are unusual critters you can't really see this very well but there's actually only three teeth in each quadrant which is quite unusual in mammals so they've lost most of their teeth which is something that both of these groups do as well but what's interesting here so if we if we take a close-up of the skull you can see that when you see these teeth here and you remove the bone they have this curved shape and they also if you look at this big tooth here it has no root a very unusual condition except for things like rodents that have teeth that grow throughout their lives so by doing that actually you can see that these teeth are ever-growing teeth which is something that wasn't known about these animals which kind of explains how you can get biologists having three teeth they just keep growing throughout your life as they wear down with us we only have two sets of course and by the time you get to your adult teeth you better take good care of them if you don't want to be wearing dentures and so if you thought you were going to get away without seeing a few numbers you almost did but I'm just going to talk a little bit briefly here about some other work that we've done with the collections this was work that one of my students did using stable isotopes which is something we've been applying to a number of different things and these are fossils from the White River formation or the White River group in western Nebraska and what it's showing you this line right here represents where you get into the more densely forested parts of the ecosystem and up here you're getting open vegetation and so this is latest eocene going back about 35 36 million and then this is early a legacy about a million to two million years later and what we see here's this giant brana there these were the largest things that lived at the time they're related to rhinoceroses we have one mounted over on the west side of moral hall and what we see is that the things that we're living in the most densely I will the most heavily forested denser parts of the vegetation here probably the wetter types of the environment were things that actually went extinct as we go across this boundary so there's a little bit of cooling that takes place but this is evidence that there was a big change to more arid conditions and there's other proxy evidence that shows that as well as we go from the eocene into the oligocene we're losing all these things which we're living in the undergrowth and also interesting too is that these brana there's were feeding in the forests which is not the way that they're usually interpreted they've been interpreted traditionally as having lived out in the open because they're so darn big people thought they were probably living in the open another one of these isotope studies that was done by another student Kitas as part of his thesis here here we're showing now here we're looking in the myocene so this is much younger we're going back to around 10 million 7 to 10 million years here and from this we can see that this particular fauna called Pratt slide is actually sampling a more forested part of the ecosystem whereas these faunas here north shore and Cambridge are living up in a more open area probably a savanna like habitat and some of these animals like this horse here and this horse here is actually feeding on vegetation which is fairly water stressed in pretty dry environments so mostly you have a savanna like environment but yet there's areas like this where you do have a little bit of forest left but it turns out when I spoke with Mike Voorhees after he saw this he goes oh you know Pratt slide I think that formed in a valley it's actually a valley fill which may explain why it looks so different you had denser vegetation in this ancient paleo valley and then moving up we had the spread of what are called c4 grasses which make up about half of the grasses that we have in Nebraska today so they're important part of our ecosystem today about six and a half million years ago they took hold and they started to spread out and this is right after they spread out back in what's called the Pliacy and so here you can see ranging from about four and a half million to about three and a half million years ago and this is interesting because if you're going above this boundary here in this yellow line it means that they're eating these c4 grasses that are around now so they're eating grasses instead of leaves whereas some things would have been eating leaves earlier like camels like here's a giant camel called Gigantic Camelus we have a mount of one in the camel gallery it was a c4 feeder it turned into a grazer whereas most of the early camels were browsers eating broad leaves even this probesidium here this elephant stego mastodon which is this beastie right here behind me also turns out to be a grazer eating grasses at this point as these other two camels are and many of the horses are so here we're sampling a big transition in the environment and we can get at that with stable isotopes and I will just conclude by very briefly just saying a couple of words partly because Barbora was so fascinated with elephants this is part of a project that I've been involved in for quite a few years now working on the the bushing mastodon which is a mastodon from that was found in Indiana that Dan Fisher has been working on for probably 25 years now at the University of Michigan I did the oxygen isotopes on it quite a few years ago and it's amazing if you serially sample the tusks in other words you go through and you take a series of samples from the tusk along the growth line you get this pattern here and each one of these represents a year so you can actually see these are oxygen isotopes when they're positive it's warm season so that's summertime when they're negative it's cool season so summer winter summer winter summer winter you can see the years go by within this this mammoth I mean sorry this mastodon and this is a sample from from when it was an adolescent and this is a sample from when it was an adult so we can sample about 32 years in this particular mastodon of growth and it died right there so we know that the season of death was in late spring early summer we know that it died from being in combat with another mastodon because it's got a big hole in the side of its head which is just the right size for a mastodon tusk and so they were in in in must and they were battling like the battling mammoths that we have here now mastodons are 20 million years removed and more primitive than modern elephants are so the mammoths that we have the battling mammoths this shows that that they were all doing very similar behaviors and I won't say much about it but we're hoping to have this published in another week or two but some other people came in and they did strontium isotopes stable strontium isotopes on it and they can tell us something about where these animals lived and how they moved around and what we're getting from the strontium isotopes we find that in the summertime this particular individual when it was an adult went to Indiana where you had breeding grounds and probably competed with the other males and then the other times of the year it went up into Minnesota so it was going back and forth between these different places which is pretty amazing that you can get at that kind of information I don't think Barbour would have ever imagined you could do that that you could figure out who is migrating and who's not and say something about the behavior of elephants that have been long extinct okay and I'll just conclude with a picture of our field crew from 2019 out in the wind river basin here these badlands in the background are where they shot I'm blanking on the name of the movie Starship Troopers which some of you may have seen a long time ago they actually in doing so they destroyed the best fossil locality there unfortunately but this is called Hellsath acre up in Wyoming and there's a lot of people that that that I'm grateful to and the museum is grateful to for all the work that's been done special gratitude for George corner for his help with the museum archives he's probably the most knowledgeable person about the history of the museum if you want to talk to somebody about it and all those who contributed to the builders exhibit that we had upstairs recently and the museum is grateful to the thousands of people who have helped to collect and prepare fossils over the last 130 years so including students staff volunteers many many people have contributed to the collections that we have now we're also indebted to many of the donors who have supported graduate students and fieldwork and other things at the museum including the Hubbard Foundation, F.B. Meek, Mylon Stout, Lauren Tue, E.F. Schram without their support a lot of this wouldn't have been possible and we're also grateful to the UNL libraries for the scanning they did for some of these images and that's all I have to say so thanks so thank you Ross for that informative presentation it's now my pleasure to moderate a question and answer session so everyone in the room if you have a question you're dying to know about vertebrate paleontology in the at the University of Nebraska or throughout the state now's your chance so we'll have a second microphone if you have a question you'd like to answer please use the microphone we'll run raise your hand and we'll run one over to you that way the folks who are joining us online can hear today so who wants to start it off nobody come on so so Ross you're using these micro CTs and CTs to scan these have you done anything with 3d printing to make replicas no we haven't but yeah it's quite easy to go you can build 3d models from these CT scans and a lot of my colleagues are doing that in other words you can you can scan like for example you can go in you can scan one of these jaws you get a 3d model you can print it but you can also use it for analysis and there's algorithms now you can go through and you can digitize points on this 3d model run it through an algorithm and it'll tell you what kind of diet the thing was eating so there's many many uses for these scans good question so Ross how many specimens are added to the collection annually now in contemporary times not nearly as many as they as they used to add I think we're adding at the rate of maybe 300 to 500 a year the last few years um the collecting I'm doing is pretty targeted and they're generally smaller crews um you know it depends on how you catalog them too some things go into miscellaneous collections and how identifiable they are but yeah so the the rate has slowed down quite a bit from what it was other questions for Ross from the audience Ross the long the long period of collections and curating and so on you've all stated or alluded to both I think but these are ultimately for research uses other than some things that are on display I just wonder if you comment on the research uses that these collections and you under like from far and away and sure um yeah for example last year we had a group come in from the Chinese Academy this group that does vertebrate paleontology in China and which was quite fun they came in they were very respectful they brought with them scanners laser scanners like a $40,000 handheld laser scanner and they went through and they scanned some of our more important specimens so that they could take those back build models of them do 3d prints of them to be able to compare them with what they're finding in China now because China is pretty far behind the curve compared to we are in North America for doing that kind of thing as just one example some international use we get regular use of people coming in usually they want to study a particular group of organisms our particular you know like a particular family of mammals or whatever it may be that they're working on we've had quite a few people come in to look at our plesiosaur material these marine reptiles um so a variety of uses uh there's been a group over the years that's come in trying to figure out paleoecology using a lot of our material measuring the crown height of teeth uh I don't know if you know Christine Janice and her group have done a lot of work with the collections um so they're they're widely used for research pardon me yeah I mean primarily in North America but we do get international people coming in to sometimes to examine the material I probably have time for one last question if anyone has one going once going twice we'll turn it back over to Chancellor Green. Well Brauls thank you very much for a wonderful lecture and a wonderful walk through history of the museum and the collection here would you join me and give him a big round of applause and we have a tradition of those who give the Nebraska lectures of having a memento for you to remember that and remember putting it together and presenting and it's a framed print of the the poster for the lecture today so we present you with that and again wonderful lecture and thank you very much well thank you I appreciate it