Alie Ward

Oh, hey, it's your neighbor's Wi-Fi network that shows up as New England clam router.

Allie Ward, and we are biting up just enough to chew about ancient animal anatomy, particularly little weird teeth.

I know you never knew that you needed to know about this, and it's wild.

It's fascinating.

I promise you it's like a little corner of the earth in time you'd never otherwise imagine unless you are thisologist or one of their colleagues, paleontologists who study fossilized prehistoric tissue samples.

I love this.

Thisologist, an old friend I met on the internet, on Twitter, ye old Twitter, and someone who was always on hand to help identify a bone, who popularized the hashtag Guess the Skull and loves the history of bones.

They were born in Morocco.

They grew up in Egypt and moved to Canada as a preteen.

then did undergrad in pre-med at the University of Toronto before getting a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology there, studying animal jawbones.

Then they got their PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and as a postdoc at the University of Chicago, has already published several papers, including the 2025 Nature paper, The Origin of Vertebrate Teeth and Evolution of Sensory Exoskeletons, that's like shaking up the fossil world.

And in addition to being a professional paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist, they're also a celebrated science communicator who says that they love finding creative ways to make science accessible, weird, and wonderful for everyone, which this episode does so much.

So we're going to get into it in a minute.

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