There is a branch of science which is, in a sense, time travel — and it’s on a scale that challenges the limits of our imagination. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
“The science of paleontology involves looking for fossils and describing them and studying them. And fossils are known back to 3.5 billion years, so this is an immense timescape to work in.”
Michael Novacek is Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.
“It’s almost, in some ways, parallel to being an explorer in space where we have these immense dimensions of place that are hard to conceive of. I love working in the field; I love digging up bones. I always have. Beyond that, there’s an aesthetic and a scientific meaning to paleontology that I think is quite profound. The exploration of time is both an intellectual and emotional experience. You come to certain terms with the ephemeral nature of life. And that tangibility, based on the evidence you collect, really does have an impact on me. And although I can’t conceive, in many ways, what it means to be a creature 80 million years ago, I at least have a sense of the relative change from one stage to another — the change from one empire of life, of the dinosaur age to the age dominated by mammals. That those chapters have beginnings and endings. I’m grateful for that sense of time and the wonder it brings. That you dig something up and it is actually 80 million years old. It’s very remote from our experience yet it has such a tangibility to me when I’m out there in the field.”
Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.