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Passion.

Our urge to merge.

What could be more intimate to our souls?

Our passions determine so much of our lives.

They are the wild, explosive energies of all of love and creativity.

And such desire resides at the very center of life.

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With fish, the female deposits her eggs and the male later fertilizes them.

There's no contact between them.

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A hundred million years later, when the lizards have evolved out of their fish and

amphibian ancestors, the passion to merge has deepened considerably.

With mammals and birds, passions reach yet a new crescendo.

Not only are they able to co-mingle as one body, they can become so

profoundly bonded they remain in a relationship their entire lives.

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We are not just similar to animals, we have been shaped by them.

Our passions come from vertebrate evolution.

Even our compassion can be understood as an expansion of what took place hundreds

of millions of years ago in the ocean with the early fish.

Biologists speculate that mutations lead to a mother fish who scared

away predators from her babies.

This behavior was new at that time.

What was more common among fish back then was a mother who ate her young.

With the emergence of the fishes descendants, mammals and

birds, maternal care broadened.

Now the offspring were not just protected from predators, but

were nourished directly by their mother.

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This care even included transmission of survival information of their group and

in some cases, this required years of training.

We see then the caring behavior among vertebrates expanded for

500 million years before the emergence of homosapiens.

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Earlier humans intuited this deepening compassion and

celebrated it with images of the divine feminine.

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>> Scott, welcome, it's so good to see you.

>> Thank you very much, it's nice to be here.

>> You are a remarkable paleontologist, evolutionary biologist,

science educator, but how did you get engaged in paleontology?

>> Wow, the short answer is I never grew up.

I was into dinosaurs at the the age of four and, like a lot of kids, but

then unlike most kids, I didn't grow out of it.

I had a mother who was putting dinosaur books in front of me and

as soon as the fascination got me I just never really let it go.

I thought about doing other things, but really stuck with paleontology and

I went from digging in a sandbox in my backyard to having a planet sized sandbox

to go looking for dinosaurs.

>> Fantastic.

So, when you're looking in that sandbox,

metaphorically, you're looking, as a paleontologist, for bones, for

the fossil record, for a sense of our evolutionary story.

>> Yeah, I mean, when you actually go and

dig up a dinosaur bone there's that ah-ha moment of discovery.

But, in the bigger picture, what we're really after is trying to

reconstruct the ancient world, in this case the world of dinosaurs.

But, as paleontologists, we're trying to reconstruct ancient worlds

throughout the history of life and really that's what it's all about.

It's not just about sticking a skeleton in a museum.

It's about trying to understand the changes that Earth went through over

billions of years.

>> And how do you see this as a story, as a great story?

>> Well I think palaeontology offers us a tremendous window into the great story,

in a sense that the great story is cosmos and life and culture sort of in three

parts and, of course, palaeontology only gets us into that middle part with life.

But palaeontology is the most direct record we have of ancient life as a whole

and it gives us this sense of going from the simple to the complex.

Contrary to popular belief, we have this tremendous record of transitional

forms going from fish to amphibians, for example, from dinosaurs to birds,

from land living deer-like animals to whales and from early Hominids to us.

And therefore, these transitional forms give us a real sense of the flow,

the ebb and flow of the great story as it happened on earth.

>> So in terms of reading the bones, the historians read the record, but

you're reading this fossil record.

Can you give us a feeling for maybe the thresholds of change or

what are you reading there?

>> I like to think of paleontologists as sleuths and

we're constantly looking for clues, and so the bones are our primary record.

But, really that's only part of it, in the sense that we're trying to reinterpret

environments as well as animals and put those environments back together.

So we have records not only of back boned animals that happen to preserve bones,

but also sometimes of insects, of rocks and

the environments that they preserve, of bacteria and fungi and all these other

things that can actually help us to reconstruct entire ancient ecosystems.

And it's really only in the past 20 years that paleontology has moved beyond

sort of this stamp collecting phase of finding something and giving it a name and

instead, moved to this more integrative aspect of the science where we

really are reconstructing ancient worlds.

>> So you need other disciplines to help you with that?

>> Yeah, in fact, paleontology's a wonderful discipline in the sense that it

sits on the cusp of two other major disciplines.

Biology on the one side or life science and geology or earth science on the other

and many paleontologists are trained in the earth sciences, many in the life

sciences and they often work back and forth in different departments.

And so I think, by definition,

paleontologists are sort of jacks of all trades, and interdisciplinary.

>> So how long did the dinosaurs populate the planet?

Give us that feeling of time.

>> Yeah, dinosaurs first appeared about 230 million years ago and the big

ones anyway, all except the birds, were wiped out just over 65 million years ago.

So it's around 160 to 170 million years that dinosaurs were

the dominant animals on the planet.

And it seems like such a long time ago, but the interesting thing is that

Tyrannosaurus Rex, that lived at the very end of the Mesozoic Era,

the age of dinosaurs, is closer to us in time than it is its cousin, Allosaurus,

from the Jurassic period.

So the great thing about dinosaurs is that they offer this tremendous vehicle to sort

of inject us into the flow of deep time.

>> This end of the dinosaur era, 65 million years ago,

we call it an extinction moment and do we now know how that was caused?

Was is the asteroid?

The Yucatan?

What's the latest theory?

>> There is still much debate over what killed off the dinosaurs.

It is almost a certainty now that a giant asteroid about ten kilometers across

slammed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Threw up a big cloud of gas and dust which enveloped the planet.

Blocked out sunlight for some indefinite period, stopping plants being able to

grow, therefore killing off herbivores and killing off carnivores.

If you were much bigger than about that,

you didn't survive on land through that major extinction event.

Having said that, there are other ideas out there.

There's this huge amount of volcanic activity that happens in India

called the Deccan Traps at right around the same time.

And the events of the vulcanism and the asteroid impact may be connected

we still haven't got the final word on that yet but

clearly there was a huge rock that hit the planet and threw it into cataclysm,

killing off on the order of sort of 60% of all the species around at that time.

>> Scott, there's been a number of mass extinctions, maybe six, and can you tell

us what caused them and what effect have they had on the history of life?

>> When it comes to mass extinctions,

we know about five that have happened in the past half billion years or so.

Before that we don't really have much of a record of complex life,

because there wasn't much complex life before that and

there weren't things that really fossilized.

But in that last 500 million years or

so there have been about five major mass extinctions which have wiped out

at least half of the living species on earth at that time.

These are basically biological bottle necks so that everything that survives has

to go through this extinction bottle neck and everything alive on earth today

is a direct descendant of the survivors of each of those mass extinction events.

So the last one was the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

That's the fifth one and we are now in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.

This time around,

humans are the asteroid colliding with the planet that this extinction.

It's the first time it's driven by a single species, i.e., us.

Now that's an echo evolutionary experiment that

hasn't been run since the dinosaurs went extinct.

And we have to remember that we live in this inter-dependent web.

Now if we start pulling out all these threads in the web, things are going to

start to collapse and indeed that's all ready happening in some ecosystems.

So we need to learn from the dinosaurs.

We know that it take the earth, or at least the biosphere on the order

of five to ten million years recover from one of this mass death events.

So we have a chance to turn that around but

we need to act right now in order to do it.

Dinosaurs can help us understand not only things like mass extinctions but

global warming.

They lived in a time of global warming that

far exceeds the dire predictions of the present day.

North America throughout much of the Mesozoic was split into two line masses.

I mean, because of flooding by sea levels.

>> Can you give us a feel for how dinosaurs evolved, and what did they eat,

and did they change in size radically or rapidly?

Give us a sense of this millions of years of their evolution,

just a few of the periods.

>> Yeah, dinosaurs are known for being giants, and

most lineages of dinosaurs evolved giant forms,

things that completely blow away animals that live on land today.

I mean, 100-foot long, long-necked brontosaur type animals and

5,000 kilogram tyrannosaurs and things like that.

They started out, though, much more humbly and about sort of three feet tall,

little carnivores running around on their hind legs and it wasn't until

another extinction event wiped out a lot of the animals alive at that time.

That the dinosaurs that survived this extinction looked around and

saw all this ecological space and

then they exploded into it, evolving a lot of truly giant forms.

So from there, there's many herbivores, many carnivores,

some evolved feathers, and eventually, lead to the evolution of birds.

And it's to the point now where we really can't even separate dinosaurs and

birds, once we get down to that branching point.

Sometimes we find these things and we call them birds and

they turn out to be dinosaurs and vice versa.

So they truly did evolve,

lots of meat eating animals, lot's of plant eating animals.

And it looks like there was a number of omnivores eating plants and

meat, large bodied and small bodied.

So they were the dominant large bodied animals on land for

about 160 million years.

Mammals were there the whole time, didn't get much bigger than about that.

So the dinosaurs may have helped to keep them down, so to speak.

>> And what did the land look like?

And what were the trees and vegetation?

What were they eating if they were herbivores?

>> Dinosaurs lived in a hothouse world where there

many of the biomes that we know today didn't exist.

Grasslands weren't there.

Tropical rainforest weren't there.

Thunder wasn't there.

What was there?

We're not even sure, we're just beginning to reconstruct

the biomes that existed when the dinosaurs were around.

So we're piecing it together through finding fossil plants

in different places all over the world, the evolution of flowering plants,

the appearance of flowering plants occurred.

During the last period of the Mesozoic era, the crustaceous,

so Stegosaurus or Allosaurus never saw a flower.

Tyrannasorous rex and Triceratops did.

So flowers and dinosaurs co-evolved so now flowering plants

make up the vast bulk of all plants today throughout most of the Mesozoic era,

the age of dinosaurs, they weren't even around.

>> And more than nicely speaks of that moment when flowers

emerged around the world with this magic of color and so on.

And Richard Prum at Yale has been talking about birds and

reptiles having feathers, right?

>> Right, so

I remember being in a scientific meeting a number of years ago where people were

postulating that birds came directly from dinosaurs and the paleontologist said

I will not accept that idea until somebody shows me a dinosaur with feathers.

Sure enough about three months later,

somebody discovered a dinosaur fossil with feathers.

And now we have over a dozen feathered dinosaurs and

most of these have been found in an amazing site called Liaoning in China.

But it allows to say with some degree of certainty that many of the meat eating

dinosaurs that include the raptor dinosaurs, that include Tyrannosaurus Rex,

that include ostrich like dinosaurs had feathers.

>> You've talked about this evolution process is co-evolution.

Give us a feel for co-evolution of organisms but also ecosystems I presumed.

What is co-evolution?

>> Co-evolution is changing the one entity,

one biological entity affecting change in another biological entity.

So for example there's predator and prey.

A coyote and a rabbit.

If the rabbit evolves to be slightly faster forms.

In other words, if the faster rabbits tend to survive more than the slower rabbits

well all of a sudden the coyote is going to be getting faster to keep matching, and

so they're evolving together.

Pollinators and plants are another great example,

whether it's butterflies, bats, bees, all these different kinds of pollinators

interact with the plants such that the flowers are a siren song to animals.

These flowers, for example, that are bright red are targeting what humming

birds can see and they're pulling them in to do the job that the plant wants.

To spread around their genes and basically create more plants.

So there's all these different forms of evolution that involve the interplay of

different organisms and one can even make strong argument that all evolution

is co-evolution, it's all interdependent.

We tend to think of cause and

effect as A causing B, which in turn has an effect on C.

But that's really not how biology how life works when it changes.

It's much more of a grass roots pull themselves up by the bootstraps thing

where one thing changes another thing reacts and another thing reacts.

Whole ecosystems influence each other.

So anytime an entity changes it has affects that cascade throughout that

ecosystem.

>> And perhaps co-evolution has some implications for

us as humans evolving into the future as well.

Can you say anything about that?

>> A lot of people like to think that evolution has stopped.

That that was something that happened a long time ago.

But it hasn't, evolution is still going on all the time.

We are influencing it everyday in the decisions that we make and

behaviors that we undertake.

And so, the decisions we make today will influence evolution on the planet for

millions of years to come.

And one of the great things about the epic of evolution is that it

injects you into this sense of verticality.

We tend to live at this moment in time called the present.

>> Scott, this word evolution that you've used a lot and

clearly it applies to the life systems that you've described to us and

even the geological systems of Earth's emergence and we take it back into

the emergence of the cosmos and the human at the end of this huge process.

So how do you understand the importance of the word evolution?

>> The word evolution is a problematic ones, there's a lot of argument around

this word and for most people evolution refers to the evolution of life but

I think it's important to expand the notion of evolution to refer to

the history of the universe.

That's how I like to define the term.

So it is cosmos, it is life and it is culture.

It's our story.

And why do I think that that's important?

Because this story is critical to our future, and by linking these things,

it shows that it's part of a single continuum.

So for example, most people think of evolution as the development of new forms.

It's what we would call diversification.

But if we look at the great story, the history of the universe,

we see an equal and opposite force, some people call unification.

So we have lots of atoms that form molecules,

molecules that form cells, and cells that form organisms.

So we have this emergence into some new form which is radically different.

That says another level of complexity and that's what we see in evolution.

We start with the simplest things basically radiation, and

then we get matter, and then galaxies.

And then, all these different things and finally including life in there.

And by showing that this is a continuum, it injects us,

humans, not only into the story of life but into the story of the universe and

I think that's the whole point of this great story is to see ourselves as

part of this grand narrative to inject a sense of meaning and

purpose into our lives that isn't there for a lot of people.

>> And would you say, as well, this story with both extinctions and

the new forms of life emerging?

For example, in the dinosaur extinction, isn't it the case that after that,

the mammalian forms of life were able to emerge?

Does that give us a sense that the creative and

more destructive processes are constantly intertwined?

What can we learn from that?

>> Yeah.

Over 99% of all species that have every exist are now extinct.

So extinction is one of the motors of evolution.

Things have to die out before new things can evolve.

People often talk about the extinction of the dinosaurs as opening the door for

mammals to become the dominant life forms ultimately leading to us.

And to my mind, this is true but trivial in the sense that mammals co-evolved with

dinosaurs for 160 million years, as did plants, as did insects, as did bacteria.

So it's not just the death of the dinosaurs that we have to thank,

it's the lives of the dinosaurs.

And we could make that same argument for

any major group of organisms in the history of life.

And so, I think that one of the key points here is that everything is intertwined and

whether it's an extinction or whether it's just this background of evolutionary

change overtime, all these things are intertwined.

And therefore the things that we do today are having this cascading

effect throughout the biosphere and we need to recognize that,

and channel our energy so that we can save as much as we can.

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The Passion of Animals (Scott Sampson)

Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action

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