Dr. Yara Haridi

And I didn't understand what that meant at the time, because what do you mean tissues survived in these 280 million plus year old fossils?

And so we cut them up and you can see under the microscope the bone tissue.

You can start asking questions.

different questions, like how old is this animal?

How did it grow?

How fast does it grow?

What are the blood vessels like?

Same thing with teeth.

Does it replace its teeth?

How does it grow its teeth?

All that was still preserved.

And at that point, it went from like mind blown to like shattered, like gone.

Because that was crazy.

You can see cell spaces.

You can see lines where like, you know, this animal had a hard winter.

All that was recorded in the fossils.

And at that point, I was like, oh, wait, this might be a real science.

might be a real actual thing well before that everyone's just photographing externally like these fossils and it's not that that isn't science of course it is but it just wasn't as it didn't tickle that little part of my brain of like we can go deeper we can see how this animal ticked what did its blood vessels do what did its cells do yeah

And that's fair because that's the vast majority of fossils.

That's like 99.9% of fossils are actually teeth because enamel is the hardest vertebrate tissue.