Interview with the team’s research leaders, vertebrate paleontologist Tyler Lyson, and paleobotanist Ian Miller
By: Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Sixty-six million years ago, a meteorite larger than Mount Everest slammed into Earth and 75 percent of species went extinct in a geologic blink of an eye, including nonavian dinosaurs. For decades, scientists worked to determine how the planet and living creatures rebounded, yet continued to know very little about the recovery. Until now.
Q: How big a deal is this discovery?
Miller: 66 million years ago, the course of life on Earth changed fundamentally. We were hit by a massive asteroid that wiped out ecosystems across the planet. The time afterward has been shrouded in mystery. We haven’t had a good collection of fossils to really understand the very bottom of the tree of life that leads to the present day. And this incredible discovery is shedding new light on that time period.
Lyson: All modern mammals – including humans – can trace our origins back to those earliest survivors of the impact. Now we have the animal fossils, the plant fossils, and we have an amazing timeline from the first one million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, which just happens to be the origin of the modern world. We found these amazing fossils in one of the most poorly understood intervals of time.
Q: So this is the first time that scientists have been able to piece together a coherent picture of that first million years after the dinosaur extinctions?
Lyson: Yeah, definitely. It’s the first time that we can piece together four key things: the animals, plants, temperature, and then the timeline. We can really look at the recovery of a whole ecosystem for the first time.
Q: The discovery site – Corral Bluffs – is not exactly terra nova for fossil hunters. How were these specimens overlooked?
Miller: Scientists exploring this area 100 years ago commented on the fact that they weren’t finding any fossils.
Lyson: Our first time out at Corral Bluffs, we hiked around for a few days and found basically nothing. I could fit all the fossils I found in one hand.
Q: What changed? What was your Aha! moment?
Lyson: All paleontologists have what we call a search image. We key in on certain rocks or color of rock, certain depositional environments. Vertebrate paleontologists usually look for bone weathering out of the ground. That wasn’t working at Corral Bluffs. I started thinking, “there’s got to be a different way of looking for these fossils.”
Then I had an experience looking for fossils in South Africa. There my colleagues look for a certain type of rock, not for bone. They search for concretions, which is a kind of rock that forms around an organic nucleus. Sometimes that organic nucleus can be bone.
Miller: Tyler came back from south Africa with this idea for a new search image and was like, “I’m going to knock it out of the park. We’re going to find this stuff.” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure, Tyler. That sounds great.” We had some hints we were on the right track, and Tyler had found a couple of really cool things in our museum collections that indicated this might be possible. Putting those pieces together, we went back out to Corral Bluffs in the fall of 2016. That’s when it all kicked off.
Lyson: I had changed my search image from bones to concretions. That’s how we cracked the code and blew it wide open. I split open a concretion and saw a mammal skull smiling back at me. And then I looked around and saw concretions just littering the landscape and was like, “Oh man, here we go.”
Once you have the right search image, you could see fossils everywhere. But if you didn’t have it, you were blind to them.
Sure enough, we found like four or five mammal skulls within a few minutes. That was one of the most remarkable moments in my life.
Q: You realized you’d hit the jackpot?
Lyson: That first week felt like anything was possible, because we just kept on finding one crazy fossil after another. We found a jaw, and then we found a skull, and then we found more skulls, and more skulls. It was a goose-bumps moment for me.
Miller: You could spend a whole career and not find a single skull from that time in Earth’s history. We were finding a skull about every 15 minutes once we figured out what to look for. It happened that quickly.
Q: Then I suppose the fun was over?
Lyson: Right? We just found all these cool fossils. It’s like, now what do we do? That winter, we sat down and hammered out a plan.
We’re all specialists in our own little area. I study reptiles, and here I found all these amazing mammals. One of the first things we needed to do was to identify the mammals. Also, we needed to figure out the age of the rocks, and we needed to figure out where the K-T boundary was at Corral Bluffs. I reached out to a handful of folks that I went to grad school with.
Q: What was their reaction?
Lyson: It came as a shock to a lot of them. In this interval of time, you just don’t find mammals like that, and that complete. They were like, “Where?” And I said, “Near Colorado Springs.” And they were like, “What? That area’s been looked at over and over again.” Usually we think of big discoveries happening in a new area, and this was by no means a new area.
Miller: Scientists are usually really excited to be part of a project that’s going to change the way we think about life on Earth, about the story of how we got to this moment. If you had to choose one million years in Earth’s history that you really want to look at carefully, this would be it.
Lyson: We knew virtually nothing about this interval of time. Here we are finding all these amazing fossils from right smack dab in that critical interval. People were certainly energized by it.
Q: As a team you could then make sense of what you’d found?
Lyson: No one scientist could put this story together – it’s impossible. Everybody worked together to make it happen. There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. We ended up collecting nearly a thousand vertebrate fossils, over 6000 plant fossils, and our colleagues counted over 37,000 pollen grains as part of this study! That just blows me away!
Miller: We documented changes in the landscape after the impact, from a world dominated by palms to a world dominated by a more diverse group of trees. And then we saw the animal species change in lockstep fashion. And then we lined that up with changes in the environment, temperature. Putting all those pieces together, I was like, “Holy cow, is this possible? Is this really true?” It turns out we really were able to paint a picture of the emergence of our modern world – and that’s phenomenal.
Q: What’s next?
Lyson: This recovery pattern we’re seeing at Corral Bluffs is the gold standard for one area, and now it’d be great to see if it’s normal or abnormal.
The exciting thing is that this is not the end of the story. This is the start of something big.
Today, the Democratic Republic of Congo is experiencing the second worst outbreak of Ebola in history, with roughly 1,700 deaths and 2,500 documented cases already.
BSCS Science Learning has developed a free resource to educate the public about Ebola. The website—Understanding Ebola Virus Disease—includes an interactive model that allows teachers, students, and community members to actively explore the factors that influence a disease’s spread and mortality rate.
BSCS Science Educator Dr. Mark Bloom elaborates on the implications of Ebola and this resource in an interview below.
Why is studying diseases like Ebola important for us, the general public, in today’s world?
Viruses are all around us, and with world travel becoming more evermore commonplace, it is becoming easier for an infection to spread from one country to another. Understanding individual viral diseases helps us better appreciate which diseases pose the greater threats, allowing us to allocate health resources accordingly. Until the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015, previous outbreaks were relatively small and self-contained. This meant the development of vaccines and medicines to treat Ebola proceeded slowly. Now, with hindsight, we can see it would have been better, both from an economic as well as a humanitarian perspective, to have taken the threat more seriously. The most recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has, as of July 2019, led to over 1,700 deaths.
What makes Understanding Ebola Virus Disease a great resource?
The virus model allows the user to explore important factors that contribute to the spread of Ebola infection and discover how these factors can interact to produce an epidemic. The model is a means of self-discovery. Instead of just providing descriptions and statistics about Ebola, users can ask and answer their own questions about how the disease spreads. While the model focuses on Ebola virus disease, the same factors apply to many other viral infections, including ones that are common in the United States.
What does the interactive offer the classroom teacher or informal education instructor, and how might an instructor best use it?
Naturally, the resource lends itself to teaching about viruses and the spread of disease. However, it also connects to concepts related to mathematics, evolution, and the social sciences. For instructors interested in the Next Generation Science Standards, they will find the resource addresses selected disciplinary core ideas, science practices, and crosscutting concepts.
In what ways is the resource user-friendly?
Following a brief introduction, the resource guides the user through the use of the virus infection model. Definitions for each term used in the model are provided and can be conveniently accessed when using the model. The infection model is introduced in two stages to make it easier to follow. In the first stage, the user manipulates three factors that relate to the biology of the Ebola virus. After exploring how these virus characteristics influence the spread of the disease, the user proceeds to the second stage, where they explore three factors that relate to the medical community’s response to the infection. Finally, to put it all together, the user manipulates all of the factors at once to investigate questions of their own. After exploring the virus infection model, the user can view a dynamic map that illustrates how and where the disease spread over time. The resource also features interactive maps that relate population density and Ebola Treatment Units to the spread and eventual decline of the outbreak.
What might surprise the general public about Ebola?
People are afraid of Ebola virus because the probability of dying from infection is high (from 25 to 90 percent in past outbreaks). It is surprising to people that Ebola is less infectious than many other viruses. It is not transmitted through the air or from casual contact. Measles, for example, is much more easily spread than Ebola virus. In September 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan contracted an Ebola infection in Liberia and then traveled to Dallas, Texas. He came down with symptoms and lived with his partner and five children for several days without passing the infection on to his family. He was the first person to die from an Ebola infection in the United States.
Meet Iwona Jadamiec, a 7th grade life science teacher and A Medical Mystery field-test participant.
Why did you become a teacher, and where are you now?
During freshman year at Clifton High School, my German teacher Frau Podesta assigned a research project on a German artist and asked us to present it to the class. I was very nervous and doubted myself, but ultimately, I nailed it! At the end of the presentation, she asked me if I ever considered becoming a teacher. My response was “No” because I thought I was too shy and quiet to be a teacher. Frau Podesta encouraged me to consider it because she thought I had potential to succeed in the field of education. From that day on, her words have been engraved in my mind. I started at Montclair State University in Fall 2011 majoring in biology, as I always had a love for science. As I was completing my undergraduate degree, the opportunity to teach at my local church came up. Listening to Frau Podesta’s advice, I gave it a try. I began teaching religious education, and I fell in love with it. I graduated from Montclair in May 2015 with a Bachelor of Biology and went straight for my Master of Education. I graduated with my master’s degree in May 2017 and did my student teaching at Colombia High School (Maplewood, New Jersey). I currently teach 7th-grade life science at Eric Smith Middle School (Ramsey, New Jersey). Frau Podesta’s words almost ten years ago changed my life, and I would not be where I am today if it was not for her! Her approach to education and rapport with all her students was truly magnificent. Every day, like her, I greet my students at the door, smiling and ready to educate with creative lessons. I became a teacher to hopefully be a role model for my students as she was to me.
How did you become familiar with BSCS Science Learning?
I became a member of the BSCS family by accident and it has been one of the greatest experiences for which I am very grateful. A coworker from my department was initially enrolled in the BSCS 3DMSS (A Medical Mystery) professional development and was moving up to teach physics at the high school. They asked if I would like to take over where she left off, and I did.
What would you say to a teacher who is considering whether or not participate in the online professional learning institutes associated with A Medical Mystery?
I would recommend taking the online professional learning classes as it really prepared me to begin the unit. I became familiar with the material and STeLLA® strategies BSCS has designed specifically for this unit. I believe both of these contributed to not only my success, but also the success of my students due to my new-found confidence to guide them. I also truly valued the ability to share and reflect my ideas during my professional learning with my cohort. The opportunity to receive feedback and hear other ideas and experiences further helped strengthen my understanding and preparation.
What is one educational resource or tool that you love and cannot live without?
I love using the HHMI Biointeractive as a resource in my classroom. They are great to use as inspiration for lessons. I often use their videos as phenomena for a lesson.
What excites you most about the future of science education?
I am very excited about the future of science education as it is moving from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom. Science education is currently based on inquiry, where students learn essential skills they can take outside of the science classroom. Skills such as the ability to conduct an investigation to gather data and use as evidence to support a claim. The ability to develop and use models to describe phenomena. These and many other skill sets are what science education should be about, and A Medical Mystery does just that.