Dr. Yara Haridi

Because then that would pull back the record of mineralizing vertebrates from Middle Ordovician all the way back to the Lake Cambrian.

And it would be my transitional fossil that I was looking for, right?

This is what I pitched to come to UChicago.

And I was like, this is really what I want to do.

The fossils exist somewhere.

Let's go find them.

And so they'd been published on before in the 70s and then again in the 90s.

And they were like a big splash every time because it's a brand new early vertebrate.

We scanned them and I was like, great, this really looks like a tooth.

These really look like little odontodes and a piece of bone.

Wonderful.

We have brand new, really beautiful 3D images.

Gorgeous.

Okay, great.

I dig into the literature some more.

And at that time, even when they originally published them, they thought maybe these are not vertebrates.

And everyone who said it was an arthropod kind of got like brushed aside.

And another paper came out that used paleohistology to prove that they were vertebrates.

And how they did that was they cut up these little fragments and saw the inside of the odontoid.

And they saw these tubules inside the odontoid.