Scott Evans
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
For billions of years, the Earth's system was dominated by microbes, by things you needed a microscope to see that were mostly single-celled.
And this is the first time we really get things that are big enough to see.
And so to understand that transition, this is really the key record at where we go from those microbes to big, abundant life that can do a whole bunch of different things.
Yeah, it's very remote.
So for this trip, we drove 14 hours from Whitehorse to a helicopter pad.
Helicopter takes us about 30, 40 minutes to the side of a hill, drops us off and says, I'll see you in a week.
yeah the landscape the landscape is is mountains we camp above the tree line we use snow to keep our drinks and cheese and meat cold and that's where we get our drinking water from and the nice thing about being above the tree line is that that means there's just a whole lot of rock out there which is really good for the work we do just walking as much as you can over as much rock as you can looking for these really subtle fossils
As far as we know, we were here for only five days.
You know, it's expensive to get a helicopter out there and you can only be there for so long.
But in that five days, we found 100 fossils.
We found six species that had never been described from North America and probably some brand new species that we need to go back and find more to be able to describe.
So these are ocean rocks.
And in fact, the rocks where we found these fossils are pretty deep parts of the ocean, maybe even below the photic zone, the depth where sunlight reaches.
And we also know that the continent was probably closer to the equator.
So maybe a more tropical, definitely a more tropical location than today.
It's a strange ecosystem, and these are animals, so they are some of our earliest relatives, but they look very different from any of the animals that are around today.
We know, for instance, that some of them could move around, and that's a very animal trait.