Dr. Yara Haridi

So when someone tells you the fossil record is a problem, this is it.

Yeah.

We use dental tools all the time and dental putty to like make molds and stuff.

Uh, yeah, I'm friends with a lot of dentists.

I bet.

So I just opened another vial and poured in another bunch of scrap.

But this one's supposedly from a different species.

And so you can kind of tell because the shape of the odontodes is different.

They're more elongate.

They kind of look like little rice grains, except smaller than rice grains.

They're all over North America.

It's a good question.

We don't get many articulated specimens, so specimens that are still together and in life form.

And so it's really hard to estimate.

There is one partially articulated head, which is only a couple of centimeters wide.

Then there's another one that's like quite a bit bigger.

So we don't know if what we're catching is a baby and an adult.

We're really unsure.

It's very hard to estimate what these earliest, earliest ones looked like.

How many people in the world do this?