Bonus: A "Prehistoric Road Trip" with Emily Graslie
Hosts: Leila McNeill and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Emily Graslie
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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Emily Graslie, science communicator and Chief Curiosity Correspondent at the Field Museum in Chicago, joins Leila and Rebecca to talk about her new PBS show “Prehistoric Road Trip.” The show premieres June 17 on PBS.
Show Notes
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to this special bonus episode of the Lady Science Podcast. I'm Rebeca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: And I'm Leila McNeill, one of the founders and editors in chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And we are super excited to be welcoming one of my favorite science communicators out there to this bonus episode. Emily Graslie is the host of the YouTube channel The Brain Scoop as well as the chief curiosity correspondent at the Field Museum in Chicago, which is a title that continues to be my favorite title ever created.
Rebecca: Emily is a six-time Webby Award nominee and honoree, a member of the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in education, and has been featured on NPR, CBS News, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, and more. So thanks so much for joining us, Emily.
E. Graslie: Thanks so much for having me.
Leila: Just to get us started, if you could talk a little bit about the origin story of The Brain Scoop and how you came to be the Chief Curiosity Correspondent at the Field Museum.
E. Graslie: Yeah. So it wasn't a very linear path in many ways. People ask me a lot how they can become science communicators and what are the classes they need to take and the steps they need to take. And there's really just not one single path towards a science communication or advocacy or any sort of thing.
E. Graslie: So I studied fine art painting in college and graduated with a BFA from the University of Montana in 2011 and got involved in Natural History Museum's research science outreach through a volunteer and internship position at the campus zoological museum, which is called the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum. And this is a little vertebrate research collection on UM's campus that I just fell in love with and really used it as an opportunity to explore a lot of different artistic outlets. And one of them was a blog on Tumblr. This was in 2010, when Tumblr was a little bit different of a platform.
E. Graslie: I started a photography blog documenting the stuff I was doing in this collection and sort of why the collection existed in the first place and who used it and why we had a buncha dead animals in a museum across campus. And from there the blog transformed into a YouTube series called The Brain Scoop, which was created at the end of 2012. And then early 2013, we started posting regular videos about the research and collections work of that small museum.
E. Graslie: And after a couple of months, it somehow got in front of some folks at the Field Museum who saw it as a real asset for the kind of outreach that they aspired to do, and so they created this position for me and offered to bring me on as their first ever chief curiosity correspondent. So that's what I've been doing for the museum for almost seven years now.
Rebecca: And you now have a show on PBS that is gonna premiere on June 17th that is called Prehistoric Road Trip. And so it is delightful, I can tell everyone out there. And can you just talk a little bit about how that then came to be?
E. Graslie: Well, I was approached by some of the executives at Chicago's public broadcast station, WTTW. This was in the summer of 2017. They came to me at the Field Museum and had expressed they were just big fans of the sort of work we were doing online and asked if I'd ever considered wanting to do something on broadcast television. And I hadn't really because, I mean, obviously I said yes, like, "Oh, I'd love to try something like that," but like most people, I don't daydream in my house thinkin' about "Mm, if I was gonna make a TV show, what would I make a TV show on?" I just didn't have an idea of what it would look like.
E. Graslie: But something I'd been thinking a lot about at the time just related to it was this weird coincidence that my family—I come from a long line of farmers and ranchers and general white settler homesteaders to the northern plains in the United States. And I've always thought how interesting it was that the places where my family homesteaded and where my family continues to ranch today is in this really fossil-rich part of the country that has produced such icons as Sue the T. Rex. So Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is the largest T. Rex specimen ever found, was found just about five miles off of my dad's ranch in central South Dakota.
Leila: Wow. That's amazing.
E. Graslie: Yeah. I know. Isn't that weird? I thought it was weird, too. I'd always gone to my dad to ask him, like, "Can we go dig for fossils out there?" And he never really got on board with it because he knew something that I didn't at the time, which is that in order to find a fossil like Sue, you really need to work with area that's already exposed to the elements, so the geography on your property has to be a certain way. You have to have certain exposures.
E. Graslie: Otherwise the alternative is to just take a backhoe and to just pick a spot and start digging, which is wildly destructive and probably not gonna result in any amazing finds, although we do explore a site later in the series that was found in just such a way. The mammoth site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, was discovered when a building contractor was leveling a hill in Hot Springs and struck a mammoth tusk.
E. Graslie: And I'm getting a little sidetracked, but anyway, they found a mammoth tusk, and they were like, "We should probably get this outta the ground and keep going." And two summers later they still hadn't stopped finding more and more mammoth fossils. And that was in 1974, and they've been digging every summer ever since.
E. Graslie: Yeah. So I really wanted to explore this phenomenon. Why do you have a place like western South Dakota—how is it possible for an area like that to have fossils of dinosaurs, which are 66 million years old, and fossils of mammoths, which are 100,000 years old, and fossils of early mammals in Badlands that are 40 or 30 million years old? How is it possible? How do you get so many different chapters of Earth's history preserved in such a small area of geographic space? You can drive to all of these regions within two and a half hours. How do you do that? How is that possible?
E. Graslie: And so that was really what I've been thinking about a lot because it's how I use my time. And when this executive from TTW asked if I'd ever thought about doing a TV show, I suggested this idea, which is let's do a road trip through deep time and try to rediscover more about the history of the place that I'm from. And we took this idea to PBS. TTW was like, "Awesome. This sounds great. Glad we asked. We think this is a cool idea for a show."
E. Graslie: So the way that public television stations and markets work is that you can have independently produced content that only goes to your local PBS market, so we were gonna make this show for Chicago markets and for South Dakota and Wyoming markets. And it was gonna be an hour-long program just focused on western South Dakota, but we thought maybe it might have a bigger appeal, so we flew to, essentially, the suburbs of DC, where PBS is headquartered, and pitched this hour-long show for national distribution as a PBS program.
E. Graslie: And after I did my little five-minute pitch, they were so funny. They were very polite. They were like, "We don't have any problem with the program topic, but we think if this is gonna be a national show, you have to visit some sites outside of South Dakota, and an hour isn't gonna be enough, so you're gonna need a three-hour long program." And then they were like, "So just revise your proposal and send it back to us and then get goin'."
E. Graslie: I walked in and out of that room within 35 minutes. I flew all the way to PBS to pitch this show, and in and out in a half an hour. And the person I had traveled there with, this lovely man named Dan Soles who's no longer with TTW, he just looked at me while we got on that elevator. And he was like, "In my 20 years of doing this, that's never happened."
E. Graslie: We were totally expecting them to give us some positive feedback and maybe ask for revisions and try pitching it again in a few months. No. It was like, "Get going. We need this show to happen." So that was in January of 2018, and by that fall I had hired my co-producer, and we went on a scouting trip to see if this would even be possible. And from essentially that time of September 2018 until now, it's been nonstop working on the show. So it's a really long-winded answer to your question about how this all came together.
Leila: No, that's great, though, 'cause I wondering about the road trip aspect of it. And that's one of my favorite things about the show. And one of the other things I really like about the show is that you're not afraid to delve into topics that might seem kind of boring at first. Right out of the gate, you're talking about fossilized bacteria, which is not something people think about very much. Can you talk a little bit about communicating aspects of science that maybe aren't obviously, quote-unquote, "cool"?
E. Graslie: Well, I think that's an interesting question because that's just not how my brain works. You don't have to try very hard to get me to think something is interesting. I'm one of those kids that absolutely loved that show How It's Made or How Things Work. I would watch an hour-long documentary about how they make Styrofoam packing peanuts. I just am fascinated by the mechanisms of the world.
E. Graslie: And so my co-producer and I, it was on our scouting trip. We essentially needed to visit a huge number of sites that we hoped to film at, and we had about a week on the road. And we were driving literally 3,000 miles in a week, and so we were on the road all day, every day, trying to meet with potential filming partners that we would come back to the next year. And it was on one of our last stops where we were trying to figure out where we wanted to start the show. We wanted to start it as far back in the geologic record as possible because we wanted to show and celebrate the widest range of geologic time.
E. Graslie: So we knew the youngest site. We knew the Mammoth Hot Springs site is only 100,000 years old, and that's really not very old in the geologic time sense. But we knew that was the last stop, so what was our first stop gonna be? And initially we thought about places like Mount Rushmore, right, which is this iconic site in western South Dakota, but the more digging we did—and the reason I wanted to do Mount Rushmore is because of this interesting fact that the faces that are carved out of that granite core. The rock itself is over two billion years old, and it's so hard and so dense that the erosional rate of that granite is about one inch per 10,000 years of time. That's the erosional rate.
E. Graslie: So there are human faces carved into that mountain. It is going to be two million years before George Washington's nose erodes off. Two million years. There will be new sentient beings inhabiting the planet, and there will be octopuses that have overtaken land, and now they're colonizing our western South Dakota. And can you imagine? They're gonna come to where Mount Rushmore is today, and it's gonna be George Washington's face with no nose on it 'cause then it'll look like Voldemort. This is the legacy we are leaving behind as a human species.
Rebecca: It's like there's various people who talk about like, "What do we do for future civilizations to explain this is a dangerous place because we have buried radioactive waste or something there?" And that is very difficult.
E. Graslie: Yeah. You're gonna have these four white dudes with half-eroded faces, but you'll still be able to tell that they're humanoid. So we thought about a place like Mount Rushmore, but for any number of reasons, it just wasn't a good fit for the show. When you dig into the history of a national monument, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore had connections with the KKK. I mean, this is not a place I wanna celebrate.
E. Graslie: And so instead we picked a site nearby. It's the same granite, and so we talk about the resilience of rock itself. And it's because of the formation of the Black Hills in western South Dakota that contributes to the geologic diversity of that area. So it was pretty important that we find somewhere in the hills, but then we wanted to find what's the first evidence of life in this area. And that's when we found out about the stromatolites, and the funny thing about stromatolites is that they elicit a response from geologists that's really funny because you say stromatolite, and everybody gets excited, especially geologists. If you're like, "Oh, there's stromatolites there," and everyone's goin', "What? Oh, really?"
E. Graslie: Everybody universally thinks stromatolites are cool once they know what they represent, right? And so to find a stromatolite site that was within the scope of where we wanted to film was amazing to us. We were so excited. And hopefully you watch the show and you understand now just how amazing stromatolites are, but essentially we're looking at the fossil evidence of some of the earliest life that lived on the planet. Our oldest possible common ancestor in fossil form, at least the traces of it.
E. Graslie: And it's because of the cyanobacteria that was living in these early ancient oceans that we have the oxygen-rich environment and atmosphere that we breathe today. So it's a way to make a link between us as fully realized, sentient species and make a connection that is so far back in time that it's unfathomable. How incredible is it that this is a site within the area where we wanted to film? So we were just super excited about including that in the series.
Rebecca: That's frickin' amazing.
E. Graslie: I don't know. Once you explain to people what a stromatolite is or why it's important to care about fossil bacteria, I don't know of anybody who's like, "Nah, I know of something cooler." I think everybody can get on board with that.
Rebecca: So something I noticed while watching the first episode of Prehistoric Road Trip is that I believe most of the experts that you talk to are women. And so I was sort of wondering if that was something that you thought about and in general how you think about experts you decide to bring on, say, The Brain Scoop or in a TV series like this.
E. Graslie: Yeah. It's an interesting question. So I've been working in the science communication space for almost 10 years, and the creation of our YouTube series in itself was in a way a response to the lack of women I saw in popularized science roles in the media, right? When I started this in late 2012, I was one of the first women to host and create a science channel on YouTube. It probably doesn't seem like that long ago, but it was eight years ago, and it was a long time ago.
E. Graslie: And there is thankfully so many more creators and especially so many more people of color in these spaces, but still representation in science media is a topic that I care deeply about because representation isn't an accident, right? You watched the program, and you saw and felt compelled to point out the number of women, which is surprising, I guess, in some ways because of how few women there are in the geosciences. I don't have an up to date number, but the last I read, the percentage is 14% of people in geosciences are women. It's one of the most male scientific fields. It's also the whitest scientific field.
E. Graslie: Those are important things to acknowledge because there's reasons for that. If you're looking at representation in a program, not just our program, but any, and you see disproportionately more white people or more men or whatever, you have to ask what's going on here. Is this a product of the production team and who they picked, or is this more symptomatic of the field of science itself? And in our case it's more symptomatic of the field of science when it comes to racial diversity, but we did work hard to find women who are doing amazing work in these spaces.
E. Graslie: And to that end, it wasn't actually hard at all. I mean, the women that you see in episode one are the best people to talk with about the things that we included in the episode. So it wasn't even that there were male counterparts and we just preferentially picked women. There's just a lot of, frankly, badass women doing awesome geoscience work in this part of the country, and we wanted to celebrate that. But I recognize it's not something you would expect to see in a program about paleontology just because of the nature of the lack of diversity in the series in general.
E. Graslie: But I think another step that the show takes is to show that there are a lot of ways to be involved in the sciences and that you don't have to be a PhD-credentialed researcher with the PI status in a senior lab in order to make meaningful contributions to science. And so we talk with private landowners. We talked with a girl who found an amazing fossil skull in Badlands National Park when she was seven years old.
Leila: Oh, I always wanted to be one of those kids!
E. Graslie: I know. And so she's a teenager now. This was 10 years ago. We tracked her down. I found out about this discovery from 2010, and I was like, "Kylie Ferguson, where is she now?" And so we found her family. We went through Badlands press release records with the park personnel to try and figure out contact information for this girl to see if this thing still mattered to her.
E. Graslie: And her whole family flew out from Florida after they found out that we wanted to interview her again. And it was just such a big deal for them, and she still cares a lot about this discovery she helped make happen. So when we talk about—when we wanna share our platform with experts, you really need to broaden the definition of what an expert looks like in general. And that's one thing that we did very deliberately with our program.
Leila: In Prehistoric Road Trip, you get to travel to some pretty spectacular places and some that you've already mentioned. Was there a place you visited that was your favorite, or did you have a favorite experience in the field?
E. Graslie: I had plenty of amazing experiences in the field. We were on the road for about nine weeks total and really just got to go to some awesome places that we obviously wouldn't have been able to get access to otherwise. But I think the most meaningful multiple sites we went to were with the members of the tribal communities that invited us to join them on digs, and especially in the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota.
E. Graslie: There's a great little institute called the Standing Rock Institute of Natural History which was founded—I can't exactly remember the year, but within the last 15 years or so with the goal of wanting to find and protect and educate their community members about the paleontological resources that can be found in their reservation. And their fossil preparator, Ben Eagle, invited our crew out to probably the most remote site we went to. I think we drove for two and a half or three hours out of Fort Yates, North Dakota, which is the town we had been staying in. Just on dirt roads.
E. Graslie: I had no idea where we were, and that was probably for the best because it's a site that they're very protective of because of the amount of looting and the fossil poaching that is especially prevalent in places like reservations where it's a lot more difficult for them to document and track the fossil resources just because of the sheer amount of land in those parts of the country.
E. Graslie: And so Ben took us to a site that they hadn't brought a lot of paleontologists to just because they hadn't received a whole lot of interest from outside of the community to look at this fossil site. But it was absolutely mind-blowing. Just the abundance of fossil material eroding out of this area. We spent an entire day sort of walking around, and you couldn't take a step without stepping on a fossil fragment. And it was pretty amazing.
E. Graslie: And I think what was so meaningful about that to me was just the product of working to build trust in this way. It was something that takes a lot of time. And that's true with any of our filming partners. It's pretty intrusive to call somebody up and say, "I got a film crew of seven people, and I wanna follow you around for a day. Are you up for it?" That's a commitment, and so you have to spend a lotta time building these relationships and partnerships.
E. Graslie: And then Ben took us to this site that very few people had seen, and in addition to that, he was willing to let us film there and to help them share their story about how as a community and as indigenous people, they want to support paleontology in their tribe. They want to use these resources to educate members of their community, and it's incredibly hard for them to do so because they're battling against over 100 years of systemic academic racism. So it was just meaningful for us to be out there and be a part of some positive change.
Leila: Well, thank you, Emily, for sharing your experiences and making this show, and thank you for being on our show today. And for everyone listening, Prehistoric Road Trip premieres on Wednesdays, June 17th through July first on PBS, so be sure that you tune in. And thanks again, Emily. We appreciate you being on the show.
Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much.
E. Graslie: Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Image credit: Como Bluff, Wyoming, a famous dinosaur dig site featured on “Prehistoric Road Trip.” Photo by Stuartplotkin (Wikimedia Commons | CC SA-BY 4.0)
