814: Uncovering the Secrets of Ancient Creatures By Studying Fossils and the Fossilization Process - Dr. Sarah Gabbott
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Hi, everyone. This is your People Behind the Science podcast host, Dr. Marie McNeely, and I am excited to have you here with us for episode 814 with our guest, Dr. Sarah Gabbett. Listeners, if you want to learn more about our show, check out past episodes, find our recommended book list and more at

visit us at peoplebehindthescience.com. Now, we have another excellent conversation on the way with Sarah, so I hope you're ready to meet another one of our phenomenal people behind the science.

Every day discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Sarah Gabbett. So, Sarah, welcome to our show today. How are you? I'm very good. Thank you very much. Well, Sarah, we are thrilled to have you with us, and we're looking forward to learning more about you and what you do. But

Perhaps we'll start with a bit of an introduction here. So listeners, Sarah is a professor of paleontology in the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at the University of Leicester. She is also director of Green Circle Nature Regeneration, CIC, a nonprofit organization in the UK, and she's co-author of the recently released book, Discarded.

How Technofossils Will Be Our Ultimate Legacy. Now, Sarah completed her undergraduate degree in geology at the University of Southampton and was awarded her PhD in paleobiology from the University of Leicester. Afterwards, she remained at the University of Leicester as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the faculty there. Now, she has received the President's Award of the Geological Society of London and

the Paleontological Association's Annual Meeting President's Prize, and numerous grant awards to support her research over the years. And Sarah, today we're excited to get to know you as a scientist, of course, but also as a person. So can you tell us what do you like to do when you're not doing science?

So I really enjoy being outdoors. I go walking a lot. I love cycling on my mountain bike. I love birdwatching as well. And yeah, just being outdoors mainly. I also enjoy cooking a lot as well. And sporty activities. I play squash. Well, you've got quite a wide range of hobbies. I don't meet many people who are into birdwatching. How did you get interested in this? It's

Do you know what? I like bird watching because when you first see a bird through a pair of binoculars, it is mind-blowing. They are beautiful creatures. They are dinosaurs, after all. And I think it's just seeing them through binoculars just gave me this kind of completely new view of them and just how beautiful they are. So we have a bird here called a house sparrow. It's a little brown job, right? It's not the most amazing or colourful looking bird, but

But you see it through binoculars and it is a beautiful bird. And so that's why I love birdwatching. And I like the behavior. I like trying to identify them. And of course, the song is amazing.

I think that's wonderful. I think, yeah, finally being able to see things up close can make you appreciate them even more. Well, it's wonderful to hear more about life outside of the work that you do, but let's talk about your work next. You are doing some remarkable research. So how do you describe your work to people who are outside of your specific field or perhaps outside of science altogether? So I'm principally a paleontologist. You can kind of think of that as a biologist or ecologist, but somebody who works on fossils or

all of the creatures that I work on have been dead for millions and millions and millions of years. So we're trying to kind of work out the evolution of life, the ecology of life through time from the very moment it first evolved on the planet all the way through to today. And to do this as a paleontologist, you have to read the fossil record. These are the remains of all these ancient organisms which have been

preserved usually in sediment layers, but sometimes in other types of deposit. And that's basically what I do. But the really cool thing about paleontology that I think makes it different from biology is that we can never know the real answer. You can observe the fossil and from the fossil, you have to then do detective work to try and work out how it ate, what it ate, how did it move, how fast could it move, how did it breed? We

We can't really do direct observations, but we use this kind of whole line of detective work that draws heavily on biology. But nonetheless, it allows you to use your imagination more, I guess, is the really neat thing about paleontology. And you're not

always 100% sure that you're right. But I kind of like that, right? I think that's wonderful. I think it's inspiring just to listen to you talk about your work. You can just tell how passionate you are about it. So we love talking about what motivates scientists or inspires them and perhaps share quotes with our listeners who are looking for a little motivation and inspiration themselves. So Sarah, do you have a favorite quote or a saying or something that just really motivates and inspires you?

I do have a quote. It does speak to my life as a scientist, but it speaks to my whole life. And that is Amelia Earhart. She was a famous American aviator. She came to a rather sad ending, actually. She kind of disappeared trying to fly over the Pacific. Nevertheless, super brave lady. The quote that I love of hers is, the most difficult thing is the decision to act.

The rest is merely tenacity. And I think that is such a brilliant quote. I find making big life decisions really difficult. So I often take ages and ages and ages. But this quote helps me because often there's no right decision or wrong decision. You've just got to get behind the decision that you actually make. And that's where tenacity comes in. And you have to be tenacious to be a scientist today because there's an awful lot of

knockbacks that you may experience. So this quote speaks to me in lots of different ways. That is a wonderful quote. And I think a really good point that you bring up just, I think, as a scientist, there are often these forks in your career path and just in your life in general, and you can't just sit there and contemplate them forever, right? You have to make a decision and move forward one direction or another, and there's not necessarily one right answer in that case.

And you mentioned Amelia Earhart, and I think she's, of course, an inspirational figure. And I like talking to scientists to hear a little bit more about these people that they've looked up to over the course of their careers, whether it's these characters that they may never have met personally or these mentors, collaborators and colleagues that they've worked with closely. So do you have particular people that rise to the top of your mind, Sarah, as people who inspired you?

It's interesting, actually, because obviously I'm a lady. And when I started my PhD, there were no female lecturers or faculty, you call them, in where I worked at all. There's not easy mentors in that sense. So I think somebody like Amelia Earhart is somebody who, you know, I really look up to. But there's others beyond my fields. So I once went to a talk by Jane Goodhall, the lady who's worked in Tanzania on chimpanzees.

And she was just utterly captivating and fearless and brave. And she really knew her stuff. She'd come from nowhere to be the best person at what she did on earth. And I loved her enthusiasm. I loved her passion and the fact that she just worked damn hard to get where she was and she'd become the best. And I just left that talk just feeling, I think I was about 19,

You can do anything. I'm not saying she was a mentor because I never met her again, but she was just one of those massively inspiring people to me. Definitely. I think these role models like Jane Goodall can be tremendously powerful. And you've been a bit of a trailblazer yourself. I know paleontology tends to be more of a male dominated field. What has that experience been like for you going through the process, perhaps without a lot of women role models to look up to? Yeah.

It is improving. And all of us lady paleontologists in the UK who are working at universities, we all know each other, right? And we support each other. And that does help. I did some fieldwork in the North American continent. And it was pretty full on fieldwork, camping out for weeks on end, being helicoptered in and so on and so forth. And when I went, I had to get special permission because I was female to undertake this fieldwork. And that was a real eye opener to me.

We're not talking all that long ago, 20 years or so ago. And I nearly didn't get on the field trip. It has been tough, but things are getting better. But I think women...

in science generally, we have every bit as much to give as men. And most of my colleagues are men and nearly all of them are really, really supportive and great. It's just the odd one you come across. They have some problems, but I've been really fortunate. And I did have a colleague in chemistry who was my mentor. And he said something to me that was really important, actually. And this was about me getting my promotion to a professor. And he said to me, Sarah, don't wait until

until they knock on your door. Don't knock on their door and say, I think I'm ready to be promoted. And it was so true because a lot of the time, I feel like women almost overachieve and then feel like, oh, I've just about made it good enough now that I can go and ask for that pay rise or ask for that promotion and so on. But I think women, we just need to be confident in our own abilities and take those setbacks in our stride and just keep going.

Definitely. And I think being an advocate for yourself is really important because sometimes people are just so busy with the work they're doing, they're not even paying attention to the great work that you're doing. So you have to be putting yourself out there as well. Yeah, it's really hard and it's awkward to do. Nobody likes bigging themselves up, but it's just one of those things that on occasion, there is a right time to do that sort of thing. And we need to be bold and do it.

Definitely. Well, Sarah, it's been great to hear a little bit more about these people, these sources of inspiration you've encountered along your career path. But perhaps we could rewind back a little bit and talk about where this all began for you. Can you share with us, how did you first get interested in science and paleontology?

As a kid, I was absolutely fascinated in animals. I had all these encyclopedias and I'd go to the library and I'd read about animals and all that kind of stuff. So I kind of thought, oh, I'd like to do biology. But anyway, I

I went through school and I love science. I kind of enjoyed it and I found it really interesting. And in the UK here, we have these things called A-levels, which are the qualifications that you need to get into university. And we usually take three of them. So this is when you're like 16 to 18 years old. And I decided to do biology and chemistry and physics. And I started doing these A-levels and I can tell you now, oh,

oh my word, physics. I found it so difficult. I couldn't do it. My maths wasn't good enough. I didn't connect with it. I was just not good at it.

And I kind of realized this and I thought, oh, what am I going to do? And I looked around and there was no other A-levels really science ones that you could do. But there was another school down the road and they had this subject called geology and it just kind of fitted in with my timetable. So I went to the library and got a geology book out. So, you know, it's pre-internet now. I didn't really understand what geology was. I thought, oh, it's rocks and that's kind of all on you.

Anyway, I got this book out the library and that was it really. I never looked back. It was about volcanoes and about tectonics and earthquakes and fossils and all this cool stuff and how the earth formed and how it's transformed through time. And I loved it. So I kind of went to this school and sort of cheekily asked, can I come and do geology A-level? Unbelievably, they said yes. I was super lucky. So I kind of dropped physics, thank goodness. And I took up geology. And so my start...

not as a paleontologist, because usually you do geology. It actually all began because I was actually pretty rubbish of physics. I was rubbish at chemistry. I understand. I think sometimes when you make these decisions and take these paths, I think this is a perfect example that you're not stuck on that path. You can't back up and pick something different. And I think...

Those pivots can be really critical to finding a career that you enjoy that's a good fit for you. Yeah. And there's me, right? I've just said that my favorite quote is about tenacity and there I am dropping physics. But anyway, that was the decision part. Maybe the hardest thing is the decision to act. Absolutely. So it sounds like geology then captivated you already when you were in high school. What were then some of these key moments along your career path that really helped you get to where you are today, Sarah? Yeah.

I was super lucky because my PhD that I applied for and I managed to get was to study something called a Lagerstätten, which is a German word. And it basically means a fossil deposit that has amazing preservation. So rather than the fossils being, you know, bones and shells and teeth, all the hard mineralized parts of animals, we get all that stuff there.

But we also get soft tissue, all the stuff that usually rots away. So things like eyes, muscles and organs and skin and all this kind of stuff. So this deposit was newly discovered. I didn't discover it. It was discovered by Dr. Johannes Teron.

a South African geologist, and he wanted somebody to study this. So this was this PhD that I applied for. So I was very lucky because there was this new deposit and it's in a period of time called the Ordovician. So

It was about 440 odd million years ago when this deposit was laid down. And there was a bit of luck there, right? Because it was just a really cool thing to be working on and nobody had worked on it before. So that certainly helped me. And I was also very fortunate. I did lots of field work out there as a PhD student, weeks and weeks and weeks of digging in the shales and splitting open the shales with a hammer and a chisel and then

when you open up that shale with a hammer and a chisel, you know, you can imagine it kind of splits open. That's an ancient seafloor that nobody else has ever seen. And that's a massive thrill. Even usually there's no fossil there. You can sit for days and not find any fossils. Nevertheless, right, you are looking at ancient seafloor. And when you do find a fossil, nobody has ever seen that fossil before. And unfortunately,

I think that's just such a thrill. And that's why paleontology is so cool, because you just make new discoveries. As long as you put in the hours looking for the fossils, you're going to see stuff that nobody else has seen before. So I think that's incredible. And to me, that was really inspiring. And what's not to like sitting in the sun in South Africa, surrounded by mountains and baboons and amazing birds, splitting shale and looking at a seafloor that's 444 million years old. So...

Very nice. I love this story. And I know your PhD work was done through the University of Leicester. And once you joined the University of Leicester, you stayed on for your postdoc and then ultimately joined the faculty there. Can you talk a little bit about the environment and why this university was such a good fit for you? Yeah, they couldn't get rid of me. So I was in the

geology department and there was a lot of paleontologists there. So as well as myself, there were another two or three people studying paleontology at the same time. And that always helps because you can always chat to your fellow PhD students about what you're doing and so on and so forth. But one of the really cool things about Leicester is that at the time, it had a scanning electron microscope. And back in the day, these weren't all that common. And

And it was a really, really super duper good one. I was trained on it and I spent many, many hours looking at the fossils that I discovered on this bit of kit. And this bit of kit allows you to firstly see things in really high magnification, which helps you, you know, if you're looking at muscles and organs that are really incredibly well preserved, seeing them in high magnification really helps. And the other really cool thing about this bit of kit was that I could analyze

analyze the chemistry of these tissues and say how they had become fossils in the first place. So I stayed at Leicester partly because of that. It's a really nice city. I enjoyed the university. I had a boyfriend, all that stuff. So that's why I stayed.

Wonderful. And I think you've been able to develop your own independent research program there at Leicester and you're doing remarkable and exciting work. I think just hearing you talk about it is so thrilling, the idea of making these new discoveries. So can you give us a high level description, Sarah, of a project that you are working on right now or that you've completed recently that you were just really excited about? Sure. So I guess the one that springs to mind is the one that I've just completed, which is

So 25 years ago, I was splitting shale in South Africa and I found a section of this really weird looking fossil. It was only a little piece of it. And I had to go back to the kind of cliff face and work out where this tiny little piece of rock had come from. So that took days by matching up the sort of stripes in the sediment. So I did that.

And then three days after that, we managed to dig out this incredible fossil. It's about half a metre long and about 15 centimetres across. And it was clearly segmented. So it had 46 identical segments and these really weird structures all up and down the body. And it

Honestly, it looked like absolutely nothing I'd ever, ever seen before. We eventually got it back to the UK and I started to work on her. And I call it her because when you find a fossil and you don't know what that is, you call it an affectionate name. And I called it Sue after my mum. And I really was scratching my head. So I gave a couple of conference talks about this fossil.

I sent pictures to all the world's leading experts in all the different animals and fossils that I could think of, and nobody had the answer. So I knew it was something really special and something very difficult to interpret as well. Obviously, I didn't work 25 years constantly on this fossil. I'd do a couple of weeks and then I'd get really frustrated and then I'd leave it a bit. Anyway, so 25 years later,

I had this kind of epiphany moment when I suddenly realized the reason it's so difficult to interpret this fossil is because, you know, usually when you get fossils, it's the outside that you see, the carapace or the shell or the outside of the animal. Whereas what happened in this case, in Sue's case, is the outside had kind of gone, but everything inside had collapsed. So if you imagine a body and then it

decays and it collapses in on itself, but everything was still there. So muscles and the gut and the organs and the tendons. So all the stuff that you usually don't get, I did have, and all the stuff that you usually get preserved in a fossil had gone. And so once that kind of fell into place, I could then start comparing her to

animals around today and also ancient fossils and do this thing, comparative morphology, which is where we compare the anatomy to try and work out where something sits on this tree of life. So that's a project that's been going on a long time. And literally a couple of months ago, this was published. So it's been a long time coming. But the really cool thing is not only did I describe the fossil, which was a lot of hard work, but

But it's a new species. It's a new genera, in fact. So you get to name things when they're new, which is great. And I've officially named the fossil Kirbos Susanay. So Susanay after my mum, Susan. So that's amazing. I'm super proud of that.

Because it was so difficult and it took me so long. I think this epiphany moment that you described is like the eureka moment that every scientist dreams of. Do you remember the circumstances surrounding where you were and what led to this moment? Yeah, sure.

I'd like to say that I've been laboring away in a dark room for hours and it came to me. But no, I was just chatting to a colleague. He's called Tom Harvey. And I was just moaning again, like, oh, I still can't understand this fossil. And he said something like, sometimes you get those bits in arthropods. So arthropods are the group to which Sue belongs. They kind of make up about 85% of life on the planet. So this is things like spiders and mites and shrimps, crustaceans,

insects, all these things. He said, yeah, you get the sort of scaffolding of the inside of the carapace. It's quite hard. It's quite tough. And I suddenly thought, that's what it is. That's what I've got. Not just the scaffolding, but everything else as well, the muscles and the tendons and the gut. And it was talking. That's why we should all talk about what we do, because somebody else will have an idea and really help you out, give you that spark of inspiration.

Well, I think this is a remarkable story and also lovely that you were able to name this new species, this new genera, after your mom. How did she respond or react when she heard the news?

When I first told her all that time ago, I think she was kind of chuffed. She was quite pleased. Although obviously she was joking around saying, oh, so you're naming a really old fossil after me. So I was sort of saying, oh no, mum, it's exceptionally well preserved because she is, because she's got all her body parts still completely preserved. But you know, one of the things that inspired me actually, and I'm joking around, but actually this is very serious, is that my mum is quite old now. And unfortunately she's not been all that well. So

So she said to me, she said, Sarah, if you're going to name this fossil after me, you better get on and do it. Otherwise, I'm going to be in the ground myself kind of thing. And she was joking, but I kind of thought, actually, I'm going to do this now. It inspired me and it made me prioritize this particular fossil. You know, sometimes there's those projects that they always get shunted to the back because you know they're really difficult to do. That was Sue, but I prioritized her because I wanted to finish it.

for my mom. You mentioned 25 years in the making. I think this is such an exciting discovery. How do you even go about trying to celebrate or process this victory after such a long time coming? I went out and bought a bottle of champagne and sat in my garden with some friends and drank it. Well, I'm glad you were able to take a moment and celebrate. And I'm glad you were able to finally bring this discovery to light after thinking about it and mulling it over for so long. And I think this is just part of the process in science where it's

sometimes you just encounter these tough problems that you need to shelve for a little while, move on to other things and come back to. Yeah, I think a lot of processing goes on in your brain when you're not deliberately thinking about something. So sometimes you just have to, you know, do you ever wake up in the morning and you've been thinking about something the night before problem or something like that and you wake up and, oh, yes, that's the answer.

I think that was happening to me over 25 years. Young scientists now, they're told publish or die. You must publish, you must publish, you must publish. And it's sad that to some extent it's true. There's an awful lot of pressure on early career scientists to just pump out publications all the time.

And sometimes that just is not possible. Sometimes science takes an awful lot of time and sometimes it needs an awful lot of time as well for you to develop your ideas and push out the right story and the best story that you can. I just think it's a shame sometimes that there's so much pressure on young scientists these days to get everything done so quickly. I'm not saying they shouldn't because, you know, people's jobs are on the line. I'm just saying it's changed. I

I was lucky 25 years ago, there wasn't this desperation that people should publish really quickly.

Definitely. I think some of these pressures can hamper the creative process in science that's necessary to, like you said, put these pieces together and kind of formulate these stories and ideas. And I think there are, besides the time pressures, a lot of challenges in science. I think this story just highlighted some of them, but there are those days where it just feels like everything is going wrong. So Sarah, do you have an example where you really were struggling with something or perhaps you had a major failure? And if so, could you talk us through it and how you got through it?

There's quite a few to pick from. I've had papers rejected. I've had grants rejected. And when I was a postdoc, I was looking for a position, a job, and I went for interviews and I didn't get them right. So a very straightforward level, you do get these knockbacks and it's really tough. I think that's where the tenacity thing comes in, right? Just let yourself get annoyed and get angry and be upset.

But then after that period of time, you just have to scrape yourself off the floor if you can and crack back onto it and get back on with your work. So that's one thing. In terms of setbacks scientifically, I think it's happened so many times. And one example would be this happens quite a lot where I do experiments quite a lot. So I decay and

and rot dead animals to see how their tissues transform through time. And that helps me then to understand the fossils and their anatomy much better because all fossils, all of them have undergone some degree of decay. That's why I do these rather smelly, rotting, horrible experiments. You're really selling your lab, Sarah. I know, the glamour, the glamour of my job, right? So often you'll set an experiment up

An example would be you're going to rot something and you think it's going to take four weeks. So everything's set up and you're going to sample every three days or every four days because you think it's going to take four weeks. And then, of course, nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. Or it goes the other way around. You think it's going to take eight weeks for something to rot and for you to get some really good data. And it happens all...

within, I don't know, a week and you've missed loads of the really important stuff. And this happens all the time in science. And this is why I always tell my PhD students, no matter what, I know you want to get on with it. I know you want to work and just crack on with stuff, but always, always run a pilot experiment because then you'll know what's going to go right, what's going to go wrong, and you haven't...

wasted all that time and you haven't set everything up. So doing little pilot experiments is what I've learned the very, very hard way. It's a really important thing to do before you do any experiment. Absolutely. I think just that little bit of pre-work can save you a ton of pain down the line. Absolutely. Really great advice. So we talked about one of your big successes, but I love sharing these success stories with listeners because I think these are the most exciting moments in science. So

Do you have another success, whether it was one of these big ones or even just a small but particularly meaningful victory that you'd like to tell us more about, Sarah? There's quite a nice story. So one of the areas that I work on outside of South Africa is a very early vertebrate evolution. So this is in animals before the skeleton, the backbone had evolved. Our deep, deep ancestors are kind of like eel shaped fish like creatures.

organisms, they have fins, they have eyes, they have really interesting mouth parts. And one of the things I got really interested in was the evolution of the vertebrae eye. We know that

The most primitive living vertebrates around today are hagfishes and lampreys. The lamprey has quite a good eye. So these are called vampire fish in the States because they kind of latch on to other fish with their big oral sucker and then gradually suck the blood out of the fish. Hagfish, also some of the most primitive living vertebrates, they're equally kind of disgusting really. Yeah.

These are the ones that produce a lot of slime as anti-predator device. So they live in the deep sea. And if something comes and eats it, they can produce all this slime and it basically chokes or gags the thing that's trying to eat it. Then they also slither up other fish's bottoms and eat them from the inside.

So they're not terribly nice ancestors of ours. So this is the hagfish and the lamprey. Now, the lamprey has quite a well-developed eye. It could definitely form images, right? So it has a lens and it has a retina and its retina, it's black because it has these structures called melanosomes, which absorb light and stop the light from pinging around in your eyeball. You have the same thing. You're a vertebrate. You have the same kind of thing.

The hagfish that are living at the moment are blind, completely blind. They have these weird ghost-like circular structures where their eyes should be, but they're completely blind and they have no lens and they have no retina.

So it used to be thought the kind of longstanding theory of eye evolution in primitive vertebrates from the things that are like vertebrates but are invertebrates through to the vertebrates was that there was this sort of slow accumulation of various eye-like structures. So first of all, a little pigment and then a little cup. And that hagfish were this amazing missing link between things that couldn't see and things that could see.

But I started to look at some fossil hagfish that were 300 million years old. And when I looked with this scanning electron microscope, so I was able to see in super high magnification, I found a retina. And I found that this retina was absolutely packed full of melanosomes, which are these structures that you have in your retina, which contain the pigment melanin and stop the light from bouncing around.

So I was kind of able to overturn this theory that there was this evolution from just one pigment cell through to something that was blind but had half an eye sort of thing to something that had a full eye. So that was really neat. The bad thing was it raised more questions. So really, how did the eye...

evolve? If it didn't go through these kind of piecemeal changes evolutionarily, how did it evolve? But it's better to know what you don't know than think you know something that's right and it turns out it's wrong, if that makes sense. Well, I think these kind of paradigm shifts in a field can be met with resistance sometimes. Did you experience this or was this something people were able to accept once they saw the evidence you presented?

So the paleontologists were kind of, yeah, that makes sense and behind me, but there was quite a bit more resistance from some biologists. I think just because understandable, it had been a long held view. And also biologists have the luxury, if you like, of being able to dissect a recently deceased organism and see these structures literally as they are in the living organism. Whereas we know as paleontologists that the fossils that we get, they're not pervading

perfect facsimiles of the living organism because this process of fossilization has kind of filtered and changed what was there. So that's part of the reason that I do these rotting experiments because I'm trying to say, okay, how long do mussels last after death and what do they look like in their variously decayed states? Then I can go back to the fossil and compare it to something that's been decayed. And

And I've done this with eyes, of course, because I was interested in eye evolution. So I've rotted various types of primitive vertebrate eyes to see what they look like and what they would look like as fossils. And so that's why I'm pretty confident that the fossil hagfish really did have a retina and was able to form some kind of image with its eye.

Well, Sarah, this is absolutely fascinating. And I like the intersection with neuroscience as well, which is what I'm most excited about. So I think that is remarkable. And I think being able to make these exciting discoveries can motivate you to work even harder. But we try to encourage our listeners to take a break to enjoy the moment of success and also to just broaden their mind, take a step back and get out there and read.

in different areas. So we love getting book recommendations from everybody that we have on the show. So Sarah, do you have a favorite book that you'd like to recommend for our listeners today, whether it's related to science or completely outside of science?

I love reading. I read every night. I go to bed early and I read for an hour. And I just find it really helps me to unwind. And I don't read science before going to sleep. I just read fiction. Favourite books. Oh, that's so difficult. But I'll tell you the last one that I read that I really enjoyed. And that's The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. And it's just a great read. It's about a family from the States who go to the Congo.

in the 1950s and all of their experiences in Africa. And because I've worked a lot in Africa, it really resonated with me. And also, it's a pretty much all-female cast in the book. And I really enjoyed understanding all these different voices and perspectives on Africa. So I think that's a great read.

I second that recommendation. Listeners, if you haven't picked up the Poisonwood Bible, definitely add this to your reading list, Barbara Kingsolver. And we mentioned earlier in our introduction, Sarah, that you are an author yourself. So I'd love to ask you about your book that just came out, Discarded. Can you talk a little bit more about how this project came about? It's not maybe as directly related to the fossil work that we've been talking about today.

Yeah. As a paleontologist, the particular field that I do most of is something called taphonomy. So tapho meaning grave in Greek and onomy, well, that's everything's onomy at the end, right? So it's like the science of death and dying. But in paleontology, what it is, is how things get fossilized. How do fossils form? What

what transformations take place. I've spent a big career doing this. And then I started to work as a volunteer for a local not-for-profit called Green Circle Nature Regeneration. And

Among lots of other things, we basically clear out the local rivers of rubbish. And there is a lot of rubbish. And I'm not just talking plastic bottles and crisp packets and food wrappers. I'm talking everything you can imagine. TVs, sofas, chairs, plugs, cameras, mobile phones, lots of digital waste, lots of textile waste. You name it, it's all garbage.

it's in these rivers. And it's appalling, right? It's being chucked in by people who should know better and should be putting things in the dustbin. And a lot of this stuff is then washed into the river and then it ends out on the flood plains when the river floods. So when the waters recede again, you just get this mass of humanity's discarded items. It's disgusting. And this is happening all over the world. And I kind of got thinking, I wonder how

how this is going to fossilize. I wonder how our stuff is going to fossilize. What's going to go and what's going to stay and how is it going to look after not just hundreds of years but thousands and millions of years. So I

I teamed up with Jan Zelizevic, who is an amazing geologist. So together we wrote this book. And what it tries to do is to think about different materials and objects that we've made that are new. So we do plastic. We do fast food. So we talk a lot about chickens. We do digital waste analysis.

We have a chapter on wood. We have a chapter on all these nasty forever chemicals and things like that. And we kind of take the reader through a journey where we discuss what these materials are made of. But then we use the fossil record as an analogy and we're able to try and predict what's

what will be left in millions of years of humanity. What will it tell a future civilization, say it comes across this layer of stuff in a cliff, or maybe it's aliens coming to the planet for the first time and they find all these fossils. So basically that is what the book is about. So it kind of sounds a bit crazy for a paleontologist to be writing about all this, but actually it kind of does make sense as well.

I think it's an interesting lens to sort of view our current consumer habits, right, as well. Yeah. To think about what the far future is going to look like for these objects that we're purchasing today. Yeah, for sure. One thing I will say is that it was a lot of fun to write in trying to predict how things are going to transform and change and what they will tell future civilizations about us. But

When I was researching the book, just some of the numbers of things that we make each year as humans just blew my mind. We're talking 22 billion pairs of shoes every single year. The numbers across everything, 75 billion chickens every single year are slaughtered so that they can be eaten. The

fossilization is a game of luck in a way and numbers and so for sure a lot of this stuff that we're making is going to become fossilized for some future civilization to discover

Sarah, I think this is really interesting. And I think the sort of issues that you highlighted in this book are relevant around the world, like you said, and we talked about how your research has also brought you to different destinations around the world, particularly your work in Africa, which I think is remarkable to have these opportunities to travel, to see different places, and just to think about how life is in other places around the world. And I think the

these travel opportunities are something people don't necessarily realize is part of science, because not only are you maybe doing fieldwork, but also just going to conferences and working with collaborators around the globe. So do you have a favorite place, Sarah, that you've traveled for science? Just to say before I answer that, when I was growing up, we never went aboard. I just went to my grandparents for holiday, which was a sort of seaside town in the northwest of England. And

And it was only through doing science, only through doing geology and paleontology that I got to travel. So that was definitely one of the appealing things. I love doing fieldwork in South Africa, but I think the standout has been doing fieldwork in China. I've been there many, many times. And fortunately, we go to a city called Kunming, which is in Yunnan province in the southwest. And

And it happens to have, I mean, China has amazing food, but the food down there is just amazing. So it's a real kind of assault on your taste buds. It's really spicy and it's just, oh, delicious. But I'm really lucky as well because most of the field work is in rural China. So you kind of see the big city life and

And then you travel to rural China and honestly, it could be a completely different world. It's completely different. But seeing the way that people live in rural China and that juxtaposition of that to the city life is just really mind-blowing. And I've really, really enjoyed it. And also China is now opened up. But when I first started going, it was still quite a closed place. I felt really privileged to be able to go there and see it firsthand. Yeah.

when quite a lot of people was a sort of hidden place almost. Yeah.

Definitely. And you mentioned the food as one of the highlights and also that you like to cook earlier in our conversation. Have you tried to recreate any of these Yunnan recipes? Yeah, I do try. So I always go and buy some of the ingredients like obviously prickly ash, which is Sichuan peppers and the mushrooms in Yunnan because it's the area in China that has really amazing changes in altitude. So it goes right from the steamy tropical jungles bordering Laos all the way up to the Himalaya. So they have a

amazing mushrooms, which we can't actually get in the UK. I do try, but it's one of those things where you never quite capture the flavor. But I did discover Gochugang recently in an Asian supermarket here in Leicester and kimchi. And I've never looked back. So now I'm really into Korean food, which is kind of easier to mimic.

I love that. And I think that's remarkable. And were you able to make any, I guess, exciting discoveries while you were doing fieldwork in China that were particularly memorable? No. I'll tell you why. The

The fossils that we study in China are about 517 million years old, and they're from a deposit called the Qianjiang. And it's the first deposit that records complex ecosystems on the planet, right? So it's a super, super interesting and really important deposit.

There's one that's a bit younger in Canada called the Burgess Shale, which some of your listeners might be familiar with. But it's that kind of stuff. So it's all this amazing complexity in the immediate aftermath of this Cambrian radiation, we call it, where all of a sudden you seem to get...

amazing diversity and disparity of life. And the reason I haven't made any discoveries is because what happens out there is the farmers are paid to dig for fossils. And the more exciting the fossil they find, the more they get paid. So there are a lot...

of people digging for fossils and discovering them. And so when you go there, you try, obviously, but there's an army of people finding these fossils. So I haven't discovered anything exciting there myself, which is a shame, right? Because part of the story is doing it for yourself as well.

Definitely. Well, this still sounds like an amazing experience being able to go to this faraway part of the world and do science and get to experience the culture while you're there. And I think it maybe changes some of the stereotypes that people may have about what life as a scientist is like, or maybe what scientists themselves are like, because I think there are these ways that scientists are often portrayed in the media that are just not true to life, this kind of lone person in their lab coat working long hours. And I think so many people that I've met in science are these just amazing, creative

funny individuals with lots of different hobbies and interests. So do you have a story or an example, Sarah, of maybe the human side of science, whether it's a quirky tradition or just a fun or funny memory that you could share with us that goes against these stereotypes people may still have?

Science isn't lone working. I mean, it can be if you want, but it's much more fun if you're working with people. I had a PhD student called Thomas Clements and me and him got on fabulously well. He was a great scientist. I say was, he still is a great scientist. He's now working in Germany. And we flew out to Chicago and this was one of those where we were actually working in a museum, but we did some field work as well. And from Chicago, we drove for hours and

hours and hours into deepest, darkest Illinois. And it was really, really different for us

We went to a local farmer who was known to have all these nodules. We were interested in these nodules that are 300 million years old, and they contain amazing fossils, really amazing fossils. And these nodules were on this farmer's land. Anyway, so we went to the farmer, and it was three brothers who lived in this house, like in the middle of nowhere. And I'm from the UK, right? And the

We don't see guns. I've never seen a gun in my life and I've never held a gun and so on. So we went into this house. There were guns everywhere. Is it rifles? I don't know, you know, for hunting and stuff. Yeah, the long ones. Yeah, the long ones. And there were cabinets and cabinets and there were all these heads on the walls of all the various animals that they'd hunted and stuff. And it was just amazing.

So then I said to them, I've never seen a gun before. I've never even held a gun. And obviously, right, they looked at me just so shocked because this was part of their life, right? Because of where they live. And for the next three hours, they got every single gun out of every single cabinet.

And I had to hold all these guns. I didn't know what I was doing. They were unloaded. But they had like a .357 Magnum from the films and everything. It was a lot of fun, but it was a lot of guns as well. And eventually, eventually, we went out back into sheds because we'd had a lot of fun and we laughed a lot about my incompetency with guns. They just said...

to help yourself. And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of these nodules containing fossils. So it was good fun. I think that's amazing. I think just the cultural exchange, I think, is something that you get to experience as a scientist doing fieldwork. I've driven that drive from, I'm in St. Louis, up to Chicago, and there's a lot of farms, a lot of corn and soybean that you see along the way. So I know exactly about what you're talking about. Yeah, it was such a privilege to meet these guys. And one thing I would say is that I do a lot of lab work

But being in the field is my joy. And the really cool thing is when you go on holiday, you're a tourist. When you are in the field and working with the local people, which is what I always try to do, you're not a tourist then. You are working with people who live there. And the thing that you experience is way richer and deeper and more meaningful. And what

one thing I've learned is that everywhere I go from China to the middle of nowhere in Illinois to the middle of Africa, people are the same. People like to have a laugh and they like to help you. And that's just lovely that humanity...

amongst all this bad news that we keep getting all the time, at the end of the day, most people I've ever, ever met all across the world have only ever wanted to help me out. I think that's remarkable. And I think important lessons for everybody out there that even though you may live a very different life from somebody else, you can still get along and work together to help each other out.

I think you're doing amazing work, Sarah, across the board here. But I know oftentimes there are limitations, whether it's funding or technology or time or just the feasibility of the projects you'd like to do. So if we took away the barriers that normally hold you back, do you have a dream project that you would want to tackle first?

In terms of fieldwork, I would absolutely love to go and do fieldwork in Antarctica. It's somewhere I've never been and I've always been drawn to Antarctica. So if one of your listeners there wants to fund me to go to Antarctica, please get in touch because it's very expensive. In terms of projects, I have recently started to become involved in researching plastic pollution. I

And the reason is that when we look at fossils and this aspect called toponomy, which is how fossilization occurs...

We're constantly thinking about the cradle to grave journey of an organism. So how did it die? And what happened to it after death? Was it transported by a river? How was it buried? Once it was buried, what conditions did it come across? And how did it turn into a fossil? I am fascinated by how these ideas and concepts can be applied now to modern ideologies.

items, just say a water bottle or the plastic backing of your mobile phone, to predict how long these materials are going to last, in what conditions are they going to last the longest, where are they going to break down and so on and so forth. So if I was completely unconstrained, I would like a whole bunch

bunch of time I would like to do experiments across the world in different environments but very carefully constrained and regulated experiments to try and understand the longevity and the rate of breakdown of plastic in different environments that's what I would do because

Because I think that would be useful to know. And I would do it for different types of plastics so that we can try and predict this type of plastic is a really nasty one. It breaks down very quickly into microplastics. It releases its additives. It's toxic.

So I'd like to apply my paleontological understanding to a real world problem. Well, Sarah, I think these are fascinating dream projects. I love the idea of this fieldwork in Antarctica and just better understanding the breakdown and the ultimate end product or process for the plastics that we're using in our everyday lives.

So thank you for dreaming big with us on the show. And to wrap up our conversation today, I'd love to talk a little bit about advice. So for our listeners out there who might be on their own journeys through science or otherwise, do you have a piece of advice that somebody gave you at some point that really helped you that you can pay forward today?

have confidence in yourself and have a voice. When I was younger, all the way through my 20s even, I wouldn't speak up. I wasn't brave. I was brave. I was working really hard in that sense, but I didn't speak up because I was worried about what people would think about what I was going to say. And age has given me a thicker skin for sure, but also the wisdom to know that

It's okay to get things wrong. It's okay not to say something that everybody is going to agree with. Be authentic, be yourself and be brave and speak up, have a voice, be confident. And if you do all these things, other people, they will listen to you. They will not dismiss you. Too easy to be dismissed unless you have a voice. That's, I think, my best bit of advice.

You're going to have to work hard to be a scientist. You're going to have to take knockbacks, all this usual kind of stuff, but have confidence in yourself. Well, Sarah, I love that advice. So thank you so much for sharing it with our listeners today. And to wrap up, is there any other last piece of advice or maybe a last note of inspiration that you'd like to leave everybody with?

The most important thing for scientists and people who are thinking about a science career, whatever, right? Stay curious. That is the most important thing. Being curious, asking questions was kind of how I got into science, but I'm still asking them all the time now, as are my colleagues. And stay curious. Keep asking questions.

Even if you think they're stupid, they're probably not stupid questions. Stay curious. That's the best bit of advice I can give. Well, what a fantastic note to end on, Sarah. If you've intrigued our listeners out there and they want to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, what is the best way for them to learn more or to get in touch with you? They can go onto the University of Leicester website and they can find me there.

There is a couple of articles, barely recently, in magazines like The New Scientist and The Conversation that have written about various aspects of my work, particularly about this new fossil that I found and also about the book Discarded.

so they can look at that sort of aspect as well. Wonderful. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for sharing those resources. And thank you so much for sharing part of your story with all of us today. You're very welcome. Thanks for your interest. Well, it was a pleasure to chat with you. Listeners, wonderful to have you here with us as well. We hope you join us again next time for another episode of People Behind the Science.