Chapter 1: Why do we even have teeth?
Oh, hey, it's your neighbor's Wi-Fi network that shows up as New England clam router. Allie Ward, and we are biting up just enough to chew about ancient animal anatomy, particularly little weird teeth. I know you never knew that you needed to know about this, and it's wild. It's fascinating.
I promise you it's like a little corner of the earth in time you'd never otherwise imagine unless you are thisologist or one of their colleagues, paleontologists who study fossilized prehistoric tissue samples. I love this.
Thisologist, an old friend I met on the internet, on Twitter, ye old Twitter, and someone who was always on hand to help identify a bone, who popularized the hashtag Guess the Skull and loves the history of bones. They were born in Morocco. They grew up in Egypt and moved to Canada as a preteen.
then did undergrad in pre-med at the University of Toronto before getting a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology there, studying animal jawbones.
Then they got their PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and as a postdoc at the University of Chicago, has already published several papers, including the 2025 Nature paper, The Origin of Vertebrate Teeth and Evolution of Sensory Exoskeletons, that's like shaking up the fossil world.
And in addition to being a professional paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist, they're also a celebrated science communicator who says that they love finding creative ways to make science accessible, weird, and wonderful for everyone, which this episode does so much. So we're going to get into it in a minute. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who make it possible.
And they send in hilarious and thoughtful questions before we record.
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Chapter 2: What role do ancient tissues play in understanding teeth?
Thank you to everyone out there supporting the show by wearing our merch from ologiesmerch.com. As a reminder, also, we have shorter kid-friendly episodes suitable for all ages and classroom safe. And those are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're available in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, you can subscribe.
And thanks to everyone who leaves reviews of the show and to provide evidence that I do read them all. Thank you to recent reviewer Coco Reads Books, who said that ologies, quote, can make the most obscure, weird topic super interesting. Coco, you have no idea. We're about to do it again. Okay, paleohistology.
It comes from words for old tissues, and the histo in tissues comes from an older Greek word that means web. And I was in Chicago a few months ago for a friend's wedding, and the afternoon before the rehearsal dinner, I romped off to the Field Museum to lurk behind the scenes with this ologist I had been admiring from the internet for years.
I saw drawers of bones, millions of years old skulls, microscopes, and the evidence that changed how we think about what grows in our mouths. So prepare to drop your jaws as we discuss the origins of teeth, why yours hurt sometimes, how they got in your mouth, the long debated rumors of extinct species. How particle accelerators and paleontology worlds collide.
Chapter 3: How do particle accelerators contribute to paleontology?
What tools fossil pickers rely on. Teeny tiny mysteries. Busting age old flim flam. And why you should hug a tree before it kills you. Plus why a catfish might become your overlord. With science communicator, researcher, paleontologist, tooth enthusiast, and researcher of ancient tissues, paleohistologist Dr. Yara Haridi.
First thing I'll have you do is we could say your first and last name and the pronouns you use. So I'm Yara Haridi.
Dr. Haridi. Dr. Yara Haridi. She, her pronouns. When did you defend your PhD?
I was officially awarded to me in January 2022. Yeah.
I followed you on Twitter for years.
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Chapter 4: What tools do paleontologists use to study fossils?
Before. I know.
Yeah, in the before times.
In the before times. I reckon it was Twitter when that's where all the scientists gathered. It was such a beautiful time. It was a beautiful time. Yeah. I got to know your work. And I always love that whenever someone found a raccoon skull under a shed, they would tag you.
Be like, what is this? I did become like a go-to bone and tooth person, which was my goal in the first place. And honestly, that... It's so sad because I used to suggest like social media as a go-to thing all the time for even for like young people, like young people who are trying to get into science because it was such a good resource. You know, I got jobs off of it.
Chapter 5: What are odontodes and how do they relate to teeth?
I got talking head gigs. I got collaborations, like actual science collaborations where someone's like, well, wait, I have the machine that can do this. Yeah. I got friends. I got, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it was a really, really beautiful place. Hopefully science will come together again somewhere else.
Nothing but blue sky. So I am excited to catch up with you because I wanted to have you on for so long. Now, okay, the ology itself. I saw that you have a paper, histological skeletal chronology. That's a possibility. Paleodentology. What are we thinking? What would you say your ology is?
Chapter 6: When did teeth first appear in evolutionary history?
I mean, when people ask me what my main method is, it's paleohistology. So I feel like that would be a really good one. And paleohistology is just the study of ancient tissues. So histology is just literally the study of tissues. And then paleohistology, you just make that ancient.
Old, old.
Yeah, old, old.
We're talking tissues, but we're also talking teeth.
Is a tooth a tissue? So what makes up a tooth are the different tissues we'll be talking about. So like dentine, enamel, those are like words that people have heard from, you know, your toothpaste commercials. Yeah. So those will be the tissues, but the structure as a whole is the tooth.
And take me back. When did you start getting interested in paleontology?
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Chapter 7: How do different animals replace their teeth?
Oh girl, this is like, I feel like it's such an odd story because so many people, especially in paleo, they were dino kids and they knew, they just knew. You know, my husband's that way where he's like, I just knew that this is at least a direction I wanted to go. Not paleo particularly, but like art, for example. Paleo tends to be like that.
where a lot of people have been into it since forever. But I took a couple of wrong turns to even get here. So I grew up in the Middle East. And in the Middle East, you don't really have a dinosaur phase as a kid. It wasn't marketed that way. I'm 1994, so good year. But Jurassic Park was just becoming big. And so it just wasn't as big in the Middle East. And it wasn't a thing.
And I didn't really understand that that could be a career. And so then we immigrated to Canada and I started going to university and really being interested in science.
Chapter 8: What can we learn from studying fossilized teeth?
And, you know, I'm Egyptian. So in our culture, you can be a few things. You can be a doctor. You can be a pharmacist. You can be an engineer or you can be a disappointment. So what I decided to go into a science and try to at least go into being a doctor. So studying for med school and man, I just wasn't enjoying it.
And the parts that I enjoyed were the anatomy, the physiology, how things worked. As I was studying for med school, I volunteered in a paleo lab and I fell in love with paleontology. And yeah, a couple of right turns turned left or a couple of left turns turned right. And I got into paleo. They offered me a master's and I continued from there.
What was it about it? Was it just the age, like the unfathomable age? Was it the structures?
That's a really good question. And I can actually mark the point where it like happened. They had me picking fossils and picking fossils is when you just sit on a microscope and you're like picking little microscopic, like little bones from salamanders or teeth. And that was fun. And I think the shape of fossils is interesting. And I was just kind of mind blown that these were from the Permian.
So they were 280 plus million years old, which breaks your brain if you are not used to those numbers and who is.
Yeah.
But then there was a PhD student in the lab at the time, and he taught me this method called paleohistology and the study of tissues. 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.
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