Matt Kielty

Oh, I didn't know that.

That's cute.

And Gould says after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions.

So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology.

The study of fossils.

But that actually became kind of a problem for him.

Because paleontology was not really seen as like a real science.

You don't really get to answer big fun questions in paleontology.

You kind of look at a lot of fossils.

You described it as stamp collecting.

This is the problem that Gould was attempting to confront.

If we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to important questions.

So in 1967, Gould gets his PhD.

And he's immediately hired at Harvard.

And then one day... This guy, Tom Schaaf, he's a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

Called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research and he'd been wondering... If they could do anything really cool, basically, with computers and the fossil record.

And Gould's like, oh, that could be something.

So the fossil record, it's like everything we humans know about what existed before us.

It's what allowed us to start thinking about evolution.

It kind of became the foundation for Darwin.