Beth Shapiro

You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really.

I noticed that recently I was flying over Europe and you can see the old trellises from old, you know, I don't know how old, but it's just so cool how we can see remnants of civilizations and just makes you think, what happened?

This is some of the coolest mysteries.

That's what's so cool about working in ancient DNA, too, is we can just go to places, get DNA from stuff and learn something that we never knew before.

It's fun.

All of us working in ancient DNA, we are constantly answering the same question from the media, which is, when are we going to bring dinosaurs back to life?

Yeah.

And people say, people actually say that my field was spawned by Jurassic Park.

The whole idea that we could get DNA stuff, that's not true.

It was actually the other way around.

And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he

He credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group, which was the first group to show that you could get DNA in something after it died.

That was actually from a quagga, which is a type of zebra.

What a cool name.

Yeah, right.

Well, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the quagga.

Ooh, even better.

Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kind of bad for the microphone, probably gross.

Quagga.

I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?