Betül Kaçar

It totally depends on what you want to do with your tree.

If you want to understand certain...

past events, whether an organism exchanged a certain DNA with another one along the course of evolution, you can build your tree accordingly.

If you rather use the tree to reconstruct or resurrect ancient DNA, which is what we do, then in our case, for instance, we do both gene, protein, and species because we want to compare the tree that we create using these different information.

Yeah, so dinosaurs or all these mammals, at least for us, is...

The exciting thing already happened by the time we hit to larger organisms or to eukaryotes.

The fun stuff is what people think is boring, I think.

The phase that's, well, there's two different times in the geologic history.

One is the first life, past origin of life.

How did first life look like?

And the second is why do we think that over certain periods of geologic time, no significant innovation happened to the degree of leaving no record behind?

So I will tell you the more interesting things for us.

One is the origin of life or what happened following the emergence of life.

How did the first cells look like?

And then pretty much anything that we think shaped the environment and was shaped by the environment in a way that impacted the entire planet that enabled you and I to have this conversation.

We have very little understanding of the biological innovations that took place in the past of this planet.

We work with a very limited set of, I don't want to even say data because they are fossil records.

So let's say imprints, either that comes from the rock and the rock record itself.

Or what I just described, these trees that we create and whatever we can infer about the past.

So we have two distinct ways that comes from geology and biology, and they each have their limitations.