Kelsie Abrams from the Burke Museum
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 521st episode, we've got an interview with Kelsey Abrams from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Washington. Yes, and we also have Dinosaur of the Day Yutadon and Iguanodontion from the Jurassic.

and our fun fact that Komodo dragons could help explain why there is a weirdly low population of herbivorous dinosaurs in the fossil record.

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And now on to our interview with Kelsey Abrams from the Burke Museum. But as always, we have an extended version of this interview for our patrons. So if you'd like to check that out, you can head over to patreon.com slash inodino or check out your premium content feed if you've set that up. And there'll be a timestamp in that extended interview so you can jump to the end of the interview and pick up where the interview leaves off.

We are joined this week by Kelsey Abrams, who's the paleontology fossil lab manager at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Washington. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

I think it's so cool that you go on digs and you also prep fossils. So it feels like, for me, I think farm to table. It's not quite like that. Field to table? Prep table? Yeah. Yeah, because you still have a table in the prep lab, right? I do. I do. Yeah. I'm lucky that I get to have my hands in kind of all the different pots of paleontology from...

finding the fossil to getting it out of the ground to getting it out of the rock to getting it to the researcher and then getting to have a little bit of a handle on the research that's going on with that specimen. So I'm really lucky to be in a part of paleontology where I'm in all of paleontology. Yeah, that's so cool. Did you start in the field or did you start in the lab or?

Yeah, how did you...

who went to a paleontology internship. Again, I know what the difference between archaeology and paleontology, but I was interested in this paleo program. So I threw my hat in and I got a field internship in 2010. And I showed up to the museum and I said, yeah, I like dinosaurs like Brontosaurus, Demetrodon, Pterodactyl. They're great. And then everyone stared at me and went, you're an archaeologist. What are you doing here? And I

I learned how to dig up Jurassic dinosaurs that summer and fell in love and immediately returned to college and ran to my undergrad advisor and said, I need an earth science minor or something. I have to go into paleo now. So I got hooked by the field, but there was a small lab component that kind of

put a little seed in my brain that said you can work in air-conditioned settings with headphones and playing with fossils. So, a little bit of both, but mostly field. Nice. What Jurassic dinosaur did you find? Or what's, maybe what formation or state or whatever were you at? Oh,

I was in my home state of Wyoming, and we were working on the Morrison Formation, which is the famous Jurassic Formation in the United States where the Bone Wars occurred with Copenmarsh. And it's one of the most fossiliferous units in the entire country. And it's just...

world famous for the number of dinosaurs that can come out of the ground. And the density of these bone beds is absolutely incredible. There's more bones than rock in half of the Morrison Formation, if you ask my opinion. So the first dinosaurs that I got to spend time digging up were...

coincidentally now my favorite dinosaurs which are allosaurus chimaerasaurus apatosaurus stegosaurus and i think they're the coolest dinosaurs to the point that i've got allosaurus tattooed on my arm nice and then i've got diplodocus on the other side oh is that the uh the skull you've got yeah very cool cool

Now, I want to go back to when you were a kid in Wyoming because I didn't realize you grew up in Wyoming. Not a lot of people do grow up in Wyoming and it might not sound super exciting unless you're a paleontology person because that's like one of the best places to be for paleontology. How old were you when you realized that like Wyoming is such an awesome place to be for dinosaurs and things? Unfortunately, I didn't realize that Wyoming was such an epicenter of dinosaur paleontology until I was an adult.

I didn't recognize how amazing it was as a child, even when I was walking around in the field next to my house, picking up rocks with my grandpa, and he's telling me every rock is a dinosaur bone. It wasn't. They were all Jurassic squids that we were picking up, but I didn't. It was amazing. You know, I was raised to look at the ground and pick up stuff off the ground and told that everything was a dinosaur bone.

And it wasn't until I was in college and grad school and learning about paleontology and the history of paleontology that I realized that Wyoming was a big deal for dinosaurs. But as a child, they were everywhere and they were at

at the museums and on t-shirts and at every college and every tiny town in Wyoming has a dinosaur museum. Most of them are free, so it's a good place to take your kids if you're bored. And so I got exposed to a lot of local dinosaur culture and dinosaur discoveries, including in my hometown of Casper, we have the Tate Geological Museum. Oh yeah, we've been there. And so I got to go there a lot. And I actually...

under J.P. Cavagelli for a time because if you have a great fossil prepared in your hometown, you better go bug them. And so I was exposed to a lot of dinosaurs as a kid, but I didn't really figure out that Wyoming was a hot spot for dinosaurs until college. Gotcha. I was going to say, you're hearing that there's dinosaur bones around you, there's all these museums and everything, but you still went to anthropology first. Yeah.

I did. I did. I loved ancient Egyptian and Roman archaeology. That is super interesting. It is. And there's more. One of the nice things about archaeology is there's a lot more information. With paleontology, you're really working with scraps to try to piece things together. But with archaeology, you can find a lot more and sort of piece together a better view of the ecosystem and the people and everything. I was just thinking it's scraps with dinosaurs, but it's big.

big scraps. They are big scraps. And then with archaeology, it's little scraps, but you know more. Yeah. It is. More little scraps. It is little scraps versus big scraps. But I think that I have an advantage as a paleontologist and especially a field worker or preparator with an archaeology background in addition to my paleo background, because I'm aware of the difference between an archaeological excavation and a paleontological excavation.

Both of them are a single data point that you get one chance to go capture all the information possible from that site. If you don't capture that data when you're excavating it, you don't have a chance to go back and recover that data if you blew through it. And

The approach to digging up dinosaurs because they're big scraps is very different than the approach to digging up small scraps. You know, archaeologists bring up the grid square and they're going centimeter by centimeter through the soil and they're looking at soil horizons and they're keeping things flat and they are documenting out the wazoo. And paleontologists...

I don't want to call it sloppy, but we go a little bit faster. We don't pull out the meter by meter grid squares all the time. We don't go centimeter by centimeter. And so the data capture is very different. And as a fossil preparator, it's supposed to be my expertise to understand what are all the different types of data and information that you can get out of a specimen or a site.

And what are all the different ways that in collecting that data, are you going to impact it or change it or manipulate it or influence the long-term stability and use of a specimen in collections and research?

And so having that ARC-y background, I think, makes me a little more specialized in understanding how to excavate a site and how to clean a fossil because I take a little more of an ARC-y route, which is a lot more slow and tedious and time-consuming and might frustrate some of my coworkers. But I like to take a very slow, careful approach. I want to make sure that I don't mess anything up and that I don't lose any data and that I'm not responsible for some scientist in 100 years being unable to conclude what

some amazing study because I dumped the wrong clue on a fossil or I didn't collect some soil sample that they needed. So I like to try and think about all the different ways that information is used or could be used or could be important or relevant, even if we don't have some way to process or understand some information

sediment or some bit of information of a bone right now, that doesn't mean we can't figure out some cool use for that sediment or that fossil in 100 years. So I prefer to take a little bit more of an archaeological perspective to a dig site and go slower, more careful, do more mapping, more documentation, because I'm more interested in the collection of data and information and how you do that ethically and correctly than I am with just getting the big scraps out real fast. Yeah, I think that's

really indicative too of how, because paleontology has now been around for a couple of hundred years and being able to think that far forward, um,

because I've been doing a lot of research lately about stuff that happened in the 1800s and early 1900s. And I don't think they were considering people today looking at their work and being able to draw new conclusions. Using dynamite to just blow up the thing and get to as many bones as fast as humanly possible. Even the way they prepared things back then, sometimes they have to be undone now and that can cause a little bit of damage. Yeah.

Whatever glue, whatever the strongest glue you have lying around, just slap that on there, get it back together, even if it's not quite right. And there's a couple of fossils that they put so much plaster in, I think you just can't. And then so we'll never be able to see the full bones. Yeah, you CT scan it to try to piece together like, oh, I think that part's real bone and that part's plaster. But yeah. Oh, it's a nightmare. And 100%, they did not 100 years ago when they were covering everything in plaster and paint and shellac.

and drilling holes through the bone to put rods in. They weren't thinking that we were going to have CT scanning in 100 years to figure out what they were faking and what nonsense they were getting into when they were making these big skeletal mounts. And now...

The time and money it takes to conserve some of these fossils from 100 years ago is astronomical. In the long-term financial stability of a museum, if every 50 to 100 years you're spending a ton of money to fix a fossil, that's not a good way of running things. Maybe you should spend the money and the time to prep something once and then never again. Because a significant component of many preparators' jobs now is identifying what old stuff they glopped onto fossils

Because you were told you need to take that gloppy stuff off so we can use that fossil. But I don't know what that is and if it's going to kill me or give me cancer to take it off. They put all sorts of things. So half of my job is learning how to identify old goo on fossils. And so I can figure out how to take it off safely and then trying to figure out how do I get it off the fossil without mangling the fossil in the process. And so the use of historical products is important.

a massive problem in museums nowadays because fossils from 100 years ago are falling apart in cases and falling off of their 100-year-old mounted metal structures and we're discovering, oh, half of that plesiosaur plipper was actually plaster that was painted. It

It takes a lot of time and money to fix these fossils, but a lot of these fossils are really important and need to be fixed and taken care of. And then there's also the health and safety component of I have to now figure out what this is so I can safely remove it. So moving forward, I don't want someone in 100 years to be cursing at me going, oh, what did they put on this? Now I have to get that off. Am I going to die if I take this off? It's a big concern. And so I do think a lot about materials and their long-term stability.

When you're figuring out what the goop is, is it more of a chemical figuring out or is it like sometimes they have a note? There's probably no notes of this is what I put on this fossil. Oh, man, you're just like bringing up all the triggering points right now. Documentation is another thing that historically wasn't done very well when it comes to fossil preparation. They didn't think it was important enough.

And so they didn't take notes. And then there was also a historical, I want to call it a historical legacy of treating fossil preparators like lowbrow, uneducated technicians. And so if you don't think they're important or knowledgeable, you don't take notes and you don't retain the records of what they're doing. And so there are no notes to refer to to figure out what people are doing to fossils 100 years ago.

That's something that's changing in the modern fossil preparation landscape is now people are recognizing that you need to have documentation. We document every fossil treatment, mechanical, chemical, whatever, to our fossils. We have paperwork that gets scanned, that gets put in our database so that in 100 years they can refer to notes and say, Kelsey put Paraloid B72 on that fossil. I know how to get that off. But

But there are no records for 100 years ago. So the way that I have to identify adhesives is usually I message someone smarter than me who's been doing this for a while to get some tips. And then I have a little toolkit of just kind of mad science objects. So one way to identify adhesives is a toothbrush and water. If it foams, it's probably Elmer's glue. Another way is run around with a black light. If it fluoresces orange, it's probably shellac.

Another way is, is it flaky and coming off the surface and kind of orange and papery? That's probably glyptol. So you learn some tips and tricks to quickly identify things so that I don't have to like scrape up a sample and spend money at a lab to have them analyze it or something like that. It's,

toothbrush and black light for the most part. That's not that different from what you might have at a dig site. Well, at least the toothbrush. Yeah, you can use a fluorescent light occasionally, depending. Yeah. Similar tools to the ones in the quarry. I'm just doing it to figure out what they dumped on it.

So since you started, you still continue to go on digs. Where are you going on digs these days? Do you go back to Wyoming or are you going elsewhere? I do get to go run digs every year, which is really exciting because I think that as a fossil preparator, my understanding of how to extract fossils from rock is a little more specialized than some other field workers. And then I also bring to the field my knowledge of how to extract fossils from rock.

knowledge of materials. So different ways to jacket a rock, different adhesives and how they react in the field and in weather, different weather conditions, etc. So I take my materials knowledge and my geoscience knowledge back to the field. And I think that's very helpful in the field. The other component is

In the lab, I get to deal with stuff that was collected in the field. So I see good fossil jacket construction. I see use of adhesives that didn't work out real well. And I can go take that back to the field and inform our field workers, hey, maybe don't use X, Y, and Z on the fossil because that causes issues in the fossil prep lab. Or teach them how to create a more stable fossil jacket so that things don't shatter or that I can open it easily without sawing into a bone.

I can do a lot of education in the fields to make sure that it's collected properly and makes my life easy when it comes to the lab. Not only does it just make my life easier, it makes the entire process of paleo much better, right? If you smash a fossil in the field, there's only so much I can do to it. And there's only so much utility that the researcher has once it goes through that entire process. So collecting it correctly and perfectly the start is absolutely critical. And so that's a

very important to me. I don't want to deal with shattered fossils if I know that it was perfect at one point and I can teach people how to do that correctly. And I love field work too, because I get to find the fossil in addition to prepping it out later.

So we do a couple different digs at the Burke Museum. The digs that we do are usually dependent on the curator and their research and their research interests. So we have two curators at the Burke Museum, two vertebrate curators. We've got Dr. Christian Sidor and Dr. Greg Wilson-Mentia. And Dr. Christian Sidor works on Permo-Triassic animals, so animals from 250 million years to about 200 million years ago. And he looks at animals all around the world.

all around the world. The ones that he looks at in the United States are in Arizona at Petrified Forest National Park. So we go out there once a year. And I'm actually leaving for Petrified Forest September 1st.

to go spend two weeks at our quarry working on our Triassic quarry that we have out there. And we pull out every kind of animal that you've never heard of from that quarry. So that's really exciting. All the Triassic weirdos. Lots of Triassic weirdos. And most of the animals coming out of our quarry are new species. Oh, cool. So we're working slowly on that. And then because of Greg Wilson's research, he looks at Cretaceous mammals.

and Cretaceous mammals going across extinction boundaries, primarily the Cretaceous extinction event. So he runs the Hell Creek Project out of Montana. And for a couple of weeks every year, if not two months, huge field crews are out in Montana collecting dinosaur bones from the Hell Creek Formation.

And where else do we go? We got to go to Kansas this year and last year to work in the Niobrara chalk. Christian Sidor is interested in expanding our Cretaceous chalk collection at the Burke Museum for teaching utility for students. And then just to represent more cool fossils from the United States. So we got to go to Kansas and collect a Mosasaur this past summer. And so I've got a good opportunity to travel to a lot of different states across the country to go work and fieldwork collecting back for museum, for Burke collections.

Nice. Yeah. Did you happen to be in the Hell Creek when that Tyrannosaurus Rex skull was discovered? Which Tyrannosaurus Rex skull? Oh, geez. I guess any. Yeah. So the Burke Museum is lucky to have the best T. rex skull in the entire world. And that's not just like, oh, I work there. I'm going to brag and beef up our cool skull. Like, no, that's not true.

That's a fact. We have the best T-Rex skull in the whole world. And so we have the Tufts love Tyrannosaurus Rex. Not a ton of the skeleton is represented by the animal, but we have every single skull bone. Most of them were in place. There's almost no deformation to the skull. It's the most beautiful, characteristic, smooth, chocolatey color that you get out of the Hell Creek Formation. Only one tooth had actually fallen out of the skull. Just a stunning, stunning, stunning skull. That was a big, ooh, she's pretty, but

But she was all done and dug out by the time I was hired by the Burke Museum. So the skull was in preparation when I was hired. And it was being worked on by our Hell Creek fossil preparator, Michael Holland. So Michael was preparing the skull and it's beautiful and it's on display now at the Burke Museum on permanent exhibit. But the dig was all done when I had gotten there. I have got to go to the site where they found the Tufts Love T-Rex to kind of poke around and see if anything extra was coming out. And nothing extra was coming out. But I've not got to dig up a T-Rex skull yet.

What have you gotten to dig up? I have got to dig up an allosaurus skull, an allosaurus bodies, tons of diphidocids from the Morrison Formation, mosasaurs from the Cretaceous Chalk of Kansas and South Dakota, duck-billed dinosaurs, triceratops skulls,

Oh, my Triassic quarry would obviously be my favorite quarry because those are the animals that I get to prepare. So Michael Holland being our Hell Creek fossil preparator, he gets to work on all of our dinosaurs, which is cool. And I get to look over his shoulder and say, that's a really cool Pachycephalosaurus, Michael. But I don't work on the dinosaurs. I just dig them up and then manage the prep in the lab. So I get to dig up the Triassic fossils. And those are the ones that I get to prepare. And those are the ones that Christian Sidor and I work on and the ones that he is publishing with his students and then with the Park Paleontologists.

So we have a quarry called K Quarry at Petrified Forest that we work every year. And the animals that come out of it are the most fun things to dig up because most of their bones are super tiny. So I'm not lugging out a six foot, you know, sauropod femur that weighs 400 pounds and I don't have to hike it like a mile and then hope that me and like five people can lift it into a truck.

Instead, I'm carrying like at biggest, like a grapefruit sized jacket because all the bones are really, really, really tiny in this quarry. And we get everything from drapanosaurs, which are my favorite. They look like a chameleon with a bird head with a giant claw.

like one giant claw and then four normal claws and then a claw on the end of their tail the last vertebra on their tail is modified into a claw they're completely bizarre and we probably have at least two in this quarry so we get the weird japanosaurs we get coelacanths freshwater coelacanths we get

We get, might have a turtle, a Triassic turtle. It took us a while to recognize it because what does a Triassic turtle look like? We get animals called chuvosaurids, which are little two-legged, beaked, herbivorous crocodile relatives that

Phytosaurs, giant other crocodile-looking things that aren't crocodiles with blowholes on the top of their heads. Giant amphibians that we call toilet bowl heads because their heads are the size and the shape of a toilet bowl. Those are just the things I can think of off the top of my head that come out of that quarry. But the Triassic stuff is the most fun to dig up because I get to prepare it. I get to see the research that comes out on it. And then when we're in the quarry, it's just like the biggest...

guessing mystery game because half of the time we can't even identify what bone it is let alone who it goes to which is mind-boggling because as a paleontologist you think oh yeah you can hand me any bone and I can tell you that's a tibia that's a humerus that's a blah blah blah blah blah and that probably belongs to a mammal or a reptile we can get it pretty close to an identification but

And then we pull something out of this quarry. And Christian's like, I think this is a Japanosaur pectoral girdle. And I go, I don't know. That's like a turtle rib. And then someone else goes, that's a coelacanth skull bone. And then we'll get 40 different answers and 40 different animals for one bone. And all of us are sitting there going, you know, these are world experts on these animals. And we're all going, I don't know what that is. And it takes us like three years to figure it out. So it's

a real fun adventure and mystery game at this quarry. The Triassic is the weirdest. It's the best, too. It is. Did you say if you found any dinosaurs in that area? We do have dinosaurs in that quarry as well. I forgot to mention those because...

In terms of other weirdos, they're whatever. We have, I don't know if it's Coelophysis proper, but we do have Coelophysioids in our quarry. Last year, we found a really beautiful humerus that's probably five inches long, a complete beautiful Coelophysid humerus. And then last year, I've worked that quarry, I think four or five years now. I found my first Coelophysis teeth or Coelophysoid teeth. And it wasn't just like,

After several years, I found one. I found like six or seven last year, which was really, really cool. It is. So we do have a psilocybin in our quarry. We have another dinosaur called Chindesaurus. Oh, yeah. I think that's a theropod, but don't.

on that one either. I probably should Google it. I'm sure you will figure out what it is for me. But we do have a Chindesaurus as well. And then we have an animal called Silvosaurus, which a year ago was not a dinosaur. And I believe as of this year, it is a dinosaur again. So some of the animals we get kind of flip-flop back and forth between a reptile and dinosaur, depending on the year and the publication. But we do have some dinosaurs in the quarry right now. Nice. Yeah. I mean, that's how the Triassic is too, because it's like...

Is that a dinosaur? What really is a dinosaur anyway? That sounds really cool. Yeah, I think that would be the one I would be the most excited about to finding these new strange animals that have been overlooked for so long. It also sounds like it lends itself well to your attention to detail at dig sites when you're dealing with such smaller bones in these areas.

have an eye for tiny things, not big things. So if we're out prospecting, I will walk past like a four foot skull, but I will come running up to Christian and say, look, I found a millimeter long fish tooth. So,

find all the tiny things in the quarry and I really enjoy that because again it is attention to detail it's me going a lot slower than everyone else because I'm taking the archaeology approach to excavation while everyone else is just shoveling out huge boulders of rock and so I joke with Christian when we're in Petrified Forest that I am a human screen washer and

because he'll be taking out blocks of rock and I'm moving a sand grain at a time telling him, look, I found a microtooth or I found a tiny tooth. He's like, we find that when we screenwash. Like, why are you pulling out microscopic fish teeth? And I'm like, because I can find them. So I do put my face right up to the rock and I pick out every tiny little fossil I can find because these animals are tiny. You know, half these animals, the skeletal elements, once they fall apart are just microscopic elements.

We've never positively identified the finger bones of our chauvasaurid, which we're actively working on. I could talk about that animal more because that's also been six years of my life. And that'll be a really cool publication when it finally comes out. But we don't have the fingers of this animal. It's like a maybe max six foot long animal. And it's bipedal. But the arms on this chauvasaurid make a T-Rex arms look huge.

like a gorilla's. The arms are so minuscule and tiny and stubby that we don't really know what the hand looks like. And the finger bones could be like a millimeter long. We don't even know if we have a finger bone for these critters, but they would be tidy when I want to find one. Are you involved in the research for it at all? Yes. So that is another really exciting component about my job as a fossil preparator

If you're lucky, you have a really good working relationship with the researcher who is actively working on the project that you are working on. And you're supposed to work in synchronicity with the researcher so that I am working to make sure that they can have the best publication possible by making sure that Fossil is perfect.

Perfect for them and I don't ruin anything that they're gonna need, you know, we're communicating back and forth I'm saying do you need to do isotopic work on this specimen because that's gonna inform my decisions I'm not gonna put glue on it, right that'll change the isotopic signatures so I work real closely with Christian and worth his students who are working on the animals from these triassic deposits and

And the researcher who's working currently on describing the Shoevus lorid from our quarry, because it is a new genus and species, is a PhD student working for Christian, Elliot Armour-Smith. And so I work real closely with Christian on a lot of his research projects, but I also talk with Elliot multiple times a week. And I've known Elliot for now for five years because we've been working on this animal.

And I am lucky because Elliot knows so much more about these animals and the different parts of these animals and identifying these animals than I probably will ever know. But I spent 100 hours on a microscope staring at the ulna of this animal. Elliot, who knows everything about the ulna, spent an hour. I'm going to see and notice features on there that he might not. And

And as I'm preparing and uncovering it, I'm noticing features that he might not. And so we go back and forth quite often discussing features that we see. Are they real? Is that calcite? Is that taphonomic alteration? Is that an actual feature? And it makes the science more robust and it makes his conclusions a lot more accurate because you have multiple people looking at the specimen. I think that's a really good example of how we come across this a lot.

More so in recent years in paleontology, I think, where you've got people from different fields coming in or different specializations, and then being able to work together, you get so much more out of it. Yeah, the holistic approach, I think, is much more appropriate to take towards fossil paleontology. And it's like, when I talk about bringing in my archaeology background, it's a different perspective that can lend itself to improving the different ways that we approach paleontology. And

I really liked the movement in the last couple of decades to introduce other researchers from other fields and have them contribute to paleontology. As a fossil preparator and conservator, half of the materials that I'm using I stole from archaeologists and art conservators because they're coming up with techniques to keep a 500-year-old painting beautiful and around for 500 more years. And I'm going, "Ooh, I will use that glue. That's good. Thank you."

And so using perspectives from other fields isn't completely valid and very useful because I don't have to spend the money and time to develop that method now. And I don't have to go get that degree. I can have some doctor come in and tell me about cancer growth in the tibia of humans and how that's going to relate to this cancerous growth on our triceratops tibia. That was a really cool paper a few years ago, not by us. But...

I really do like that they bring in outside scientists and perspectives and that it really does make the research more robust and interesting.

just better. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's one of those things that you also don't appreciate until you're looking at fossils, because when you see like a skeletal reconstruction of a dinosaur and it has like the ones highlighted in white that we found and the ones in gray that we haven't found, you think like, okay, well, we know those bones really well, or, you know, just a hundred percent. And then the other bones, we don't know at all. But what you don't realize is just the condition of those bones varies so much from

you know, splintered mess that's missing half of the details on it. It's all deformed. It's got beetle burrow holes in it and everything under the sun to like actually pristine. And like you were saying, unless you're preparing the thing and you're really looking at it very closely, it's easy to misinterpret one of those bumps or one of those holes as something important to the animal versus something that just happened while it was being fossilized or decaying.

A hundred percent. Yeah, I have to have a really good eye on the different textures of bone, the different kinds of bone, how bone forms, bone microstructure to help inform what I'm doing when I'm preparing the fossil and having an understanding of what it's doing in the rock. And the other component to that is

Because I'm the one tasked with the responsibility of removing the rock from the fossil, I better know 100% what is rock and what is fossil. And that can be a big challenge to most people first coming into paleontology in the field and in the lab is learning how to identify the difference between the two. But beyond that, like the more basic, easy to

to tell the difference between the two type things, like if the rock pops off and it's got a very specific color that's different than the fossil, there are instances of preservation where it is almost impossible.

to tell the difference between the rock and the fossil. And that's where I come in. That is my specialty, that the researcher themselves might not be able to tell what is fossil and what is actual rock. And usually the cases that are the most tricky for identifying an actual feature versus rock that's been sculpted are when you get calcite and crustaceans on fossils.

And so the calcite does not pop off of the fossil. It is attached to that fossil. Most traditional techniques that would vibrate and pop that rock off or that calcite off, they won't work. So you have to scrape down through calcite until you are on that surface of the bone without scraping through the surface of the bone.

When you're scraping calcite, calcite powder's white and your tools leave marks. So you're leaving shiny marks from your tools on that calcite that reflect off your lights that make it hard to see where you're at. And the calcite is smooth and clear. And you might think that is the surface of the bone that you are sculpting. And you're not. You're on calcite. And so there is a huge array of tips or tricks that I employ to see what I am working on. Because the

The last thing I want to do is sculpt calcite and think that is the feature because the researcher is going to have no idea that that is not an actual feature. That is calcite because I am struggling to tell if that is calcite or bone. And if I'm struggling, they're going to have no idea. I think about that a lot when I'm working on these fossils. I don't want to, I'm not an artist in the sense that I am sculpting or fabricating a fossil. I want to represent that fossil in its 100% authentic form.

of itself. I don't want to give a modified or creatively sculpted fossil to a researcher. So telling the difference between the bone and the rock can be a huge challenge and a

It's a big responsibility to make sure I do that right and accurately because that's going to be published on and I don't want to be responsible for bad publication. Yeah, that's really interesting because we were talking about telling the difference between bone and fossil on older stuff where people have intentionally added plaster and things to it. And now we're talking about telling the difference between bone and fossil where it's, you know, going the other way for removal. Yeah.

I want to ask, I know you said you don't normally work on dinosaur fossils for the preparation, but since you are at the Burke Museum, did you have anything to do with the Seuchasaurus Rex? I did not. So the Seuchasaurus was collected and prepared before I was hired.

But I did get to paint a cast of it. And that's all I can really say is I got to paint a cast of it. And I do get to go look at it and see it and touch it every day if I wanted to. But it's nearby. But I did not get to work on the Sushis Loris.

I've got a bigger appreciation. We just recently read a children's book about like the whole process of the Sushisaurus. So I've got like a, I feel like I've got a better appreciation for that particular fossil and the naming and becoming the state. Is it the state fossil or the state dinosaur? State dinosaur. State dinosaur. Yes.

I'm glad it's at least the state dinosaur, not the state fossil, because there's got to be way better fossils in Washington. Correct. Yeah. For a state dinosaur, it's fine. The funny thing about it being our state dinosaur is it's literally the only chunk of a dinosaur ever found in the whole of Washington. So I guess we can't complain. So we have no other options. But our state fossil is the Columbian mammoth. Oh, nice. I also, I feel like...

Because we met through Marissa from Ancient Odysseys, and you've got your background in archaeology, and you work in paleontology, and that just seems like the perfect fit for Ancient Odysseys. Because they do both. They do both, yeah.

It really does. Yeah. So I met Marisa. She is a volunteer in my lab. So I actually met her, I think, at my previous job in South Dakota. They ran a paleo program through South Dakota. And so Marisa had come in through that lab. And then I got hired at the Burke Museum where Marisa, she's in Seattle. And so she continued to volunteer in the lab. And so early in the pandemic, I want to say in 2020, she had started to move forward with Ancient Odysseys. And she consults with me heavily, as well as with the curators at the Burke

Museum. So anytime she's looking at a new paleontology opportunity, she comes to us and she says, here's this company, here's this person, what do you know? And I give her the tea and Christian and Greg give her the tea and we help inform and work with her on those types of decisions and those partnerships that she works for. And like small bragging right, if you go to her website, there's lots of videos of me talking about fossil preparation and paleontology. So I'm kind of like her little

science helper and fingers crossed please manifest for me next year I might be a host of a gorgonopsid dig in South Africa oh yeah she wasn't able to get that one off the ground this year unfortunately because apparently people don't like gorgonopsids they're pretty cool which is

They're my favorite thing in the world. So I talked a lot about Triassic stuff, but the promo part of Christian Cedar's work is Gorgonopsids. And we've had a billion Gorgonopsid papers come out this year. I literally just shipped off a dino Gorgon to the Field Museum yesterday that I spent getting packaged. So the Gorgons are the coolest thing ever. And that's part of the reason she had fishtailed off of Bruce Rubage with me, because Bruce was going to run the Gorgon dig and...

I wanted to sell a kidney to go dig with Bruce Rubidge on a Gorgon. So next year, maybe I'll get to be a host if,

things continue the way that we're hoping that I'll get to go on the scale Gorgon dig and be like the little scientist host on the Gorgon dig. So I love working with Marisa. I really want to promote her company and what she's doing because I think it's amazing opportunity to get citizen scientists on a lot of these digs that no one would ever have opportunity to do. And then she also helps promote fossil preparation and my ability to go to South Africa and dig up a Gorgon. Yeah.

So I like working with Marisa and she's got a really good partnership with the Brook Museum as well. So Ancient Odysseys is working with the museum to provide digs that would fund different aspects of the Palaeum department and then support staff research. So we...

Love Marisa and we love what Anxia Odysseus is doing. So I yeah, anytime she sends me something, I love it because I'll also send her things. Nice. That's great. That's too bad about the South African trip because we had talked to Bruce earlier and that was a few months ago. So it sounds like things have changed.

Yeah, I don't think they got enough spots, so I don't think it got off the ground. Well, hopefully next year. It is. The tricky thing about South Africa is it's very far from a lot of, at least our audience, and I think a lot of dinosaur enthusiasts generally...

Because it's way down there. Yeah. You know, her hominid dig in Africa sold out. But that one I'm not surprised by. Like you used to be able to count on two hands how many people got the opportunity to dig up a hominid in Africa. And now Maurice is just casually like, yeah, you can come on one of my hominid digs. So that sold out. But the Gorgons, I think we need to do a little more promotion on the Gorgons and get Gorgons out and get the public more excited about

these ancient beasts that are way cooler than anything else. Yeah, what do we usually describe them as? Like saber-toothed wolves or saber-toothed dogs? Is that like the colloquial...

Corganopsid name? Arjun Mann, who's the curator of early vertebrates and amphibians at the Field Museum, calls them big saber-toothed dogs. Yeah. And I argue that I think they look like cats just based off the nose, but I'm also a cat person, so I could be full of it when I'm like, no, they're a cat. They have kind of a long snout on them for a cat. Oh, I don't have any sitting around me right now. Yeah, they do have a very long, almost like a hatchet-shaped head. Yeah. Just long.

The one that I shipped, the dino gorgon that I shipped off yesterday, the canine is, I don't know.

I don't know, three or four inches long. And we've in our collections right now. And that was a fun story. We have two specimens, one 100% identified. The other one, we just were just us based on the size. But we have Inostroncevia africanus, which is the African version of Inostroncevia, which is one of the largest gorgonopsids ever known. And typically it was only known from Russia and Siberia. But then a year or two ago, Christian Kammerer published a

and presented on, hey, I found an African in Nostra Ansevia. And then my Christian came running back and went,

we have one. I just didn't know what it was. And he ran to collections and he gets this chunk of bone and he goes, can you make sure that, can you prep right here and see like, is that the fourth tooth socket? And so I ran over and I started prepping around and I went, that's an alveoli. That is a fourth tooth socket. And then we CT scanned it just so no one could argue with us, just to be sure. But it had the four tooth sockets, which is a nostroncevia. And we were able to go, we have one.

And ours is, I think it was older than the other Christians. So we didn't get to publish on it first, but we got to say ours is older than yours. Now we have two African Inostra and Sevia. And then we have a second specimen in our collection that has this canine. I have a bunch of photos of me with it. The canine's probably five or six inches long. It's bigger than a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth. And that one we're pretty sure is also Inostra and Sevia africanus, but it's not 100%. But based on size, it totally is. Nice. That's really cool.

Do you have any advice for people who want to, you know, dip their toes or get first involved in paleontology, whether that's in the field or maybe preparing? Is there a way that they can help out at the museum? Absolutely. I highly encourage everyone to find the local museum and try and volunteer for it in the first place. There are lots of amazing opportunities to dig, but a lot of those require experience.

money to get your foot in the door and not always have an opportunity to, or the ability to do that, to pay entry into an opportunity like that. But volunteering allows for you to no cost entry into paleontology. And at the Burke Museum, I have 46 volunteers in my fossil prep lab. And so that is a, it's an army of people who are all highly trained and get to work on our dinosaurs and on our Triassic and even our Permian animals.

And that's a way that I can give back to the community and that they can get experience. But also half of my volunteers are students or are other people in the community who want to make fossil preparation their actual career. There is a history of people getting internships and then becoming a full-time fossil preparator without a paleo degree. So that is one of the routes into fossil preparation, at least historically. So the preparators that I have in my lab are all volunteers and

But they are working on stuff that's getting researched. I have volunteers that have been trained and they do so well that they're working on holotype specimens for Christian Sidor's students. And they're a volunteer. They're a coffee barista in their daytime job. And then they come into the lab and they go, I'm working on a holotype cyanodon from Africa. And I'm like, yes. So volunteering is...

Is it a wonderful way to get your hands into paleontology and get experience with different aspects of paleontology from the field to the prep to working in collections to cataloging? Usually you have an opportunity to, depending on what museum is nearby you, to volunteer in all different kinds of departments or positions in the museum to get an idea of what you want to do. And just because you're a volunteer doesn't mean you're not incredibly valuable to the team. Again, our volunteers...

We couldn't do anything without them. We could not get the amount of stuff process that we do without them. The amount of research that's done without them. Our storage spaces would be so full of fossil jackets if I did not have an army of people to prepare these things. So volunteering is an incredible way to get people

exposed to fossils, to the fields, to fossil prep, but also contribute to science in a meaningful manner. So I think if you're interested in paleontology, the first thing to do is find the local museums, get on their website, find the staff, email spam all of this staff and say, I am so interested in this. Here's a little bit about me and my hobbies and my background, and I would love to volunteer for you. And hopefully they'd be able to take you on. And yeah, I think volunteering is just the best gateway into paleontology.

Nice. For our listeners then, where's the best place for them to go and find out more about you and your work online? To follow me and some of the adventures that we have in the fossil lab and in the field, you can follow me on Instagram at pinup underscore paleontologist. And you can follow our shenanigans as well on the Burke Museum's official Instagram and Facebook pages.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a really fun conversation. And now I have a bigger appreciation for the petrified national forest. And I want to learn more about these interesting Triassic weirdos with their hook tails and everything. Oh, yeah. The longer we do this, the more I get interested in the Triassic. Yeah.

That is my whole goal in life. Make everyone want the Triassic and the Permian and forget the Cretaceous dinosaurs. I don't know about that. Yeah, I don't know about forget. As I wear my T-Rex shirt. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Yes, thank you.

Thank you so much, Kelsey, for the fantastic interview. It's really cool hearing about all the ways you can get involved with paleontology, even if you're in a state that doesn't necessarily have any or maybe just one small dinosaur discovery to speak of. Yes. There's always ways to get involved. And I love learning about prepping fossils. We'll get into our Dinosaur of the Day eutodon in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Eutodon, which was a request from Tyrant King via our Patreon and Discord. So thanks. Eutodon was an Iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in the late Jurassic in what is now Utah in the US. It was found in the Morrison Formation. Let's see where that name comes from. Yes, the genus name means Ute Tooth, and it's named for indigenous people of Utah and Colorado. If you want the full name, the type species is Eutodon afonocetes, and that species name means hidden in plain sight.

It looked similar to Camptosaurus. It had a rounded back, a bulky body, walked on two legs, had a long tail, as well as a long head and short arms. And it could walk on all fours or two legs. It had fused wrists. It's estimated to grow up to 20 feet or 6 meters long and weigh up to 880 pounds or 400 kilograms. Although there's a smaller estimate that it was only a little over 8 feet long or 2.5 meters long. The holotype is a partial skeleton.

It was named in 2011 by Andrew McDonald. There's some debate, though, over its classification. Originally, O.C. Marsh assigned the specimen that's now eutodon to Camptosaurus medius in 1894, and Charles Gilmore confirmed it in 1925. The partial skeleton was found in 1923 at Dinosaur National Monument, which Gilmore briefly described in 1925 and referred to Camptosaurus medius.

In that description, Gilmore wrote that the skeleton was in a large block of sandstone and the limb and hip bones were, quote, more or less disarranged. I'm guessing on the more disarranged.

He also wrote, quote, Keeping it real.

Then in 1980, Camptosaurus medius was synonymized with Camptosaurus disbar. Oh, so it got even more synonymized. Yes. Less unique. Then in 2008, Carpenter and Wilson fully described the skeleton that Gilmore had described and designated it the holotype of Camptosaurus aphonocetes.

And they referred all specimens of Camptosaurus that were found in Dinosaur National Monument to this species. And all of those specimens were found between 1909 and 1923. This included a brain case. In 2011, McDonald's found enough differences to rename it from Camptosaurus afanocetes to eutodon. So McDonald referred all those fossils to eutodon based on a unique feature in a brain case. There's a piece sticking out further in the back. Some other fossils included part of a right leg and foot.

And other bones were found in a block as a mix of bones from a couple Camarasaurus and an ornithopod. The brain case was in that mix, while the right hindlimb was from a different set of bones found. A lot of piecing things together. In 2015, Carpenter and Lamanna argued that the brain case and the right hindlimb were not from the same individual and found the brain case to actually be Dryosaurus, a late Jurassic ornithopod.

Based on the remaining fossils, the hind limb as well as a partial skeleton and the specimens found in Dinosaur National Monument, they found that eutodon was the same as Camptosaurus and eutodon wasn't valid, so they synonymized them. They said that what made eutodon unique was actually damage to the fossil. Oh, so what other people said was unique.

It was just damage. Yes. They also argued that other features McDonald said were unique to Eutodon were missing or artifacts of different perspectives of photographs. But they did say there were still some unique characters, so it went back to being the species Camptosaurus afanocetes. So Eutodon became Camptosaurus again. But within a different species. It wasn't fully synonymized at this point, just in the same genus. Yes.

This species of dinosaur lived in an area with rivers and wetlands and a salt lake. And other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the sauropods Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, iguanodons like Dryosaurus and Camptosaurus, Stegosaurus, and theropods like Allosaurus and Torvosaurus. Other animals that lived around the same time and place include frogs, snails, turtles, lizards, crocodilomorphs, pterosaurs, and early mammals.

It sounds like we'll have to wait a little longer to see if Utodon gets revised or not. Or I should say revived. Because there's a little bit of lumping and splitting and room for interpretation when you have unique features. But how many unique features do you need to make it its own genus? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? And so that reminded me of... I guess...

And our fun fact of the day is that Komodo dragons could help explain why there is a weirdly low population of herbivorous dinosaurs in the fossil record.

I've had this on my fun fact list for a little while because back when we interviewed Phil Curry, he mentioned that he saw a few Komodo dragons eat an entire pig, including the hair, in just 20 minutes. Whoa. Yeah. As he put it, there was nothing left but smell at the end. And if dinosaurs did this, there would be nothing left to fossilize.

Phil Curry used this as a possible explanation for why we don't always find many herbivorous dinosaurs in the fossil record, and by that I mean by count, not number of species. In modern ecosystems, there are usually something like 20 times as many herbivores as there are carnivores by population.

And in some dinosaur ecosystems, there are even numbers or sometimes there are even more carnivores than herbivores, which seems completely backwards from what you would expect. It is amazing that Komodo dragons can completely devour an entire animal.

Komodo dragons have much smaller teeth than all but the smallest carnivorous dinosaurs. The largest teeth only reach about one inch or two and a half centimeters long. I found that number reported a lot of places, but I think that might include the root of the teeth because the pictures I could see showing the actual anatomy of a Komodo dragon tooth shows only about five millimeters or less than a quarter inch of actual sharp serrated tooth. Oh,

Oh, which is very, very small. Five millimeter tooth on an animal that's like approaching 10 feet long. Yes. So they have other ways of devouring their food. Yeah. It's not the size of the teeth in the mouth, but the ambition of the eater. I don't know. You tried. Yeah.

I usually give the amount of tooth that is above the gums, but Komodo dragon teeth are so small they are almost completely covered by gums. Some of the teeth are completely covered by gums. I still haven't seen a satisfying reason for why they have such thick gums. If anyone knows, send us a message at bit.ly slash dino questions because it's a dino question that I have. Maybe not a dino question, but a reptile question.

Komodo dragon teeth are zippidant, like a lot of carnivorous dinosaurs. They're curved and serrated, and they're thin from side to side like a knife. They do the puncture and pull sort of ripping motion like a lot of dinosaurs that have those teeth probably did.

But Komodo dragons have another neat trick, and that's why I'm finally doing this as my fun fact. There was an article published earlier this year in Nature Ecology and Evolution by Aaron LeBlanc and others, and what they found is that Komodo dragon teeth appear to be iron-coated.

And that's not an analogy. The title of the paper literally starts with iron coated Komodo dragon teeth, which is a little bit absurd. The iron is mostly in the tooth tips and on the serrations. So it seems like it's reinforcing the places that would get the most wear.

It's not obviously like a complete iron plating like you would see on something that's manufactured. It's just a higher amount of iron in the chemistry of the tooth. They did find that there's some iron in other lizards and crocodilians, but there was more of it in the Komodo dragon and in the closer related species to Komodo dragons.

The iron amounts are too low to detect in dinosaur teeth fossils, at least so far. I'm hoping that someone figures out a way to see if there was this same sort of iron in those teeth, especially the ones that have the really similar zephydon teeth. And who knows, maybe that is a factor in how dinosaurs managed to devour so many things. Maybe. But even without iron in the teeth...

It seems like if Komodo dragons can completely devour a pig, leaving nothing in about 20 minutes, a T-Rex should be able to do a lot more. Yeah.

than that because we know that they could probably just smash bones to bits too and maybe in less time yeah it also wouldn't have to be just one animal species eating the whole carcass like with komodo dragons if we're just talking about whether or not the animal makes it into the fossil record in most modern settings dead animals go through phases with different animals eating them it's not just one animal start to finish that eats the entire things

Obviously, sometimes there are like Komodo dragons, you see with crocodiles, you see in other cases, especially with smaller animals where there's a big disparity in size between the predator and the prey. But I'm thinking of time lapses of animals going through phases of being eaten. Like you have, you know, a lion and then you have a hyena and then there's vultures or whatever. And at the end of it, sometimes there's literally nothing left. Mm hmm.

So you can imagine if there are huge bone crushing predators in the area, it's likely that an entire animal, skeleton and all, would be destroyed before there's a chance for anything to fossilize. And then looking in the fossil record these millions of years later, we're like, why are there so few herbivores? It could just be that they all got eaten, just like we say the same thing about baby dinosaurs. Could be that there are so few baby dinosaurs in the fossil record because they just get gobbled up.

That's too bad. I'd like to know more about the baby dinosaurs. We find them once in a while. Yeah. Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Don't forget our next episode is our first book club episode. So grab your copy of Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior by David Hohn, published by Princeton University Press, which is our sponsor for the episode. We'll be discussing the book in depth. It'll be a lot of fun.

If you haven't grabbed your copy yet, you can use our link in our show notes to go to Princeton University Press and use the discount code PUP30 to get 30% off. Thanks again, and until next time. ♪ Walk on my dinosaur ♪

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