Hi, everyone. Thanks for checking out the Safe Travels Podcast. My name is Joey. Today, we are in Eastern Oregon at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, and I have the honor of sitting down with paleontology program manager, doctor Nick Famoso. And in our conversation together, we chat all about the incredible geology behind the John Day Basin as well as the rich paleontology story that exists here at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

Nick, I am honored to speak with you. We're at beautiful John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We have Sheep Rock right behind us. You are the paleontology program manager. So thanks thanks so much for joining me.

Yeah. No. It's great to great to be on here and I'm I'm glad to get to talk to you about our cool fossils and rocks today.

You're originally from Southern Oregon. So what does John Day Fossil Beds mean to you being a a park in your home state?

Sure. Yeah. So I I grew up here, like I'm a native Oregonian, and there wasn't really a whole lot of places to go, especially in the nineties to see fossils as a kid, unless it was out here. Right? There's a museum in Portland, Oregon Museum Of Science And Industry, they had some stuff.

There was a couple of small museums around but it was really here that was the place that had all the fossils that you could see. Right? And that was even, you know, OMSI also has a has a place in the Klarno Unit that they run science camps through and I was a camp counselor up there for a while and a camper before that as were at least a handful of other paleontologists that I know, which is kinda funny and kinda cool all at the same time. But yeah, so this was the place to really go and see fossils for me as a kid. And my mom and I came out here many many times, actually.

Right right where we are, there's a photograph of me when I was eight or 10 years old with sheep rock in the background in the in the orchard that's right right over in this area. And that was kind of funny. When I first started here permanently, my mom sent that photo actually to my supervisor. And they used that as part of a junior ranger day post that particular year that I started. You know, me as a, you know, 10 year old and me as a, you know, newly minted park service employee working over here.

So this this area is really important and there's a lot of really cool fossils that we have within the monument's boundaries, and and in the John Day Basin more broadly. So having this place, it really helps to tell us a lot about what was going on in the environment here in Eastern Oregon over a period of about 50,000,000 years. And so being able to have access to that as a kid, of course, you know, you're a kid, it's all about dinosaurs, right? But I by the time I was in high school I was I was saying, you know what, dinosaurs are kinda lame because I can't compare them to anything that lives today. So I'm I'm a lot happier working on these fossil mammals.

So I around, you know, 15 is when I made the transition away from being as obsessed with dinosaurs as I had been as a kid. Right? But, you know, and that's one of the things I really do love about here is that almost all the groups of animals that we have represented in our fossil record here, even and the plants as well, almost all of them have at least some modern descendant that we can compare it to or at least something that looks similar, something that as we would say is morphologically similar.

So what came first your visits to this national monument or your love for paleontology or did they kind of amplify each other?

The love of paleontology came first. When I was a little kid, think I was like two years old, I got to watch Land Before Time, the original one. Right? The very dark one. And that's when I started just loving dinosaurs and paleontology.

And I mean, and my mom was a really big part of continuing my interest in that. I mean when I was eight years old she took me to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting that was in Albuquerque. And I got to meet all these paleontologists there and I was just in love with the whole thing. Going to all these paleontology museums, she would take me to these places, I get to meet all these people. I've actually found an old autograph book that I had from when I was between eight and 12 years old with all these people's names in it that are either retired or close to retirement now.

And I'm like, I wonder if those people remember me. Right? In fact, and there's one person in there actually who sadly passed away a few years ago. But she was like really influential for me as a young kid and I ended up getting an award in her, named in her honor from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. It was a pre doctoral grant and that was that was really cool for me.

Like, oh, I got this grant and I knew her back when I was like 10 years old, like this is kinda cool. But yeah, you know, and and a lot of my interest in paleo was precipitated by my mom who among many things was a science teacher. And so bringing me out here, actually I John Day Fossil Beds has a horse fossil kit that we mail out to places. And she got training on that when it first came out in the nineties. And she brought me out here and that was one the first times I was here and that kind of and I always loved horses so that was another thing too.

Horses became the thing that pulled me out of the dinosaurs And that and again, that was all kind of related to those experiences that my mom gave me as a kid.

We're gonna talk a lot about horses because very influential in this area. Yeah. Some of the oldest horses that we know of are are from John Day Which is awesome because you can see modern day horses on the landscape today with livestock and it's amazing to see that knowing the the history of this landscape. But as you grew into paleontology and came to John Day, did you always have a dream of of wearing the Arrowhead one day?

You know, the first Park paleontologist Ted Friend and I have a memory of me saying something around the lines of I'm gonna have your job someday. Right? So and and that ended up happening, which is funny. Just I wasn't I wasn't I didn't take over right after he left. It wasn't like I took it from him, know, Highlander style.

Right? But he but yeah, I would say that that was probably a goal at some point was to come out here. I didn't think that I was gonna get this job specifically when I was younger. Paleontology is incredibly hard to get jobs in. There are not a lot of jobs and a lot of people who love fossils and paleontology.

Right? So I just assumed like, oh, you know, I got this internship in 2014. I thought, okay, well that's probably gonna be as about as much as I'm gonna get specifically here. Little did I know two years later I'd end up getting the permanent position here. But yeah, so that was always kind of a thought.

I was like, it would be really cool if I was a paleontologist at John Day. I just never assumed it was gonna happen. The fact that I even wanted to do paleontology in Oregon, was like, yeah, it's like 20% chance I'm gonna get a job in my home state, you know, and it ended up working out really well that it it I was able to get a job doing this here. We're gonna

get into a lot of obviously paleontology and geology in this episode, but I have to start this by saying that I heard that I had ruffled some feathers over saying that petrified forest was the Mecca for paleontology. So I'm looking forward to your case, your argument on why that's not the case.

Absolutely. I will I will be glad to make that argument. My my superintendent is actually the one who pointed that out to me. He's he's he only started here a few months ago and I really enjoy working with him. He's an ecologist by nature and he's like, Nick, I was watching that video of Adam and he said this, do you agree with that?

I was like, no, I do not.

I've always loved that, you know, banter between the parks and fighting for each other's parks and why each one is more special than the other when in reality, all the national parks are special places places to recreate in but also to learn about which, now this this is a fantastic place to learn about and you alluded to this already and this is in my opinion why this is a fantastic place to learn about paleontology and geology because a lot of the animals and species that we're gonna discuss today can still be seen on the landscape throughout North America and the world today. Mhmm. So let's start broad in this conversation to talk just about the general geology of the John Day Basin.

Sure. Yeah. So the geology of this area is pretty complicated. Oregon in general, the Northwest, well really the West Coast, everything West Of The Rockies, the geology is very rarely simple. You know, there's a lot of accreted terrains and things so as right over by a subduction zone which is over by part of it is over by the Cascades all the way over to the coast range and beyond.

You've got that action of the the land coming together and volcanics coming up on that side. Well, because you've got that that margin over there, you're gonna get a lot of accreted things like islands and stuff that are gonna get slammed up against the the continent as it's coming in. So we have a lot of that from the Triassic and the Jurassic, so that's about as connected as we are with Petrified Forest in that way. That's a lot of our basement rock. And it is actually exposed in this county, in Grant County where we are right now, in the Aldrich Mountains, so south of like Dayville and Mount Vernon and John Day.

There's a lot of really awesome sites down there. Most of ours is marine. So that's sort of the underlying rock that we have in this area and if you go up towards Blue Basin you'll see an area called Goose Rock. And Goose Rock is a conglomerate that was which is you know, big chunky rocks. Right?

That's kind of rounded chunky rocks is kind of what characterizes a conglomerate. And that is from the age of dinosaurs, so that is cretaceous in age. And that particular one is at the mouth of a delta, right, so or a estuary, like if you're familiar with marine things. So a river was dumping a lot of stuff into the ocean right at that point. And then over by Painted Hills, we have a different formation that's also present called the Hudspeth Formation.

And that formation has all the marine reptiles and our first published dinosaur fossil is actually from over there, but that's on BLM land. And they're they're a big partner with us too, right? It's the park service and the BLM and we're kind of the two big paleo land management agencies in this part of Oregon. And they have most of the older stuff, but that is the basement here and we do have some of it exposed here in the park. So that's our oldest stuff, right.

And most of the you know, like I said, that's all marine ish sort of environment, what we see there. And then we there's a big hiatus or there's a big gap in time, and then we get into the Klarno formation. The Klarno formation is from a period of time that we refer to as the Eocene, and that's roughly fifty five million years ago is when our those deposits start. And when you look at those rocks, the plants that are also in them in addition to the rocks indicate that it was very wet at that time. So more like a Panamanian jungle.

So we see a lot of lahars which are mud flows that come off the flanks of a volcano. So if a volcano erupts, it puts all that ash and stuff in the air. And if you remember the whole idea of seeding clouds to make it rain, right? Similar concept, right? You get all these little particulates, the condensation sticks on the molecules of the of the ash and then it just starts raining.

And then that rain would turn into mudflows on the side of the volcano and then you get these massive mudflows. Right? We still get these today in volcanoes in Southeast Asia and much wetter places. So that's usually more common in high humidity. So you see all of those make up in the Clarno unit the Palisades.

Right? And that's just layer after layer after layer after layer. And if you look in there you see all these fossil leaves and seeds and nuts and stuff like that. And there's leaves of sycamores and avocado and banana. Right?

There's banana seeds, walnuts. There's hundreds of species of plants that are recognized from that locality. But we know from that time, very wet, very different environment from what we have now. We know that there weren't any mountain ranges at the time. There wasn't a cascades or an ancestral cascades at that point.

It was just these isolated Klarno Volcanoes and pretty much direct line of sight to the ocean from here because we didn't have all that build up, those accretions onto the side of the continent at that point. So you see all of that during the Clarno, so it's flatter relatively speaking because there's no mountain range. And then it's just very wet and warm. The animals that we have are completely different too. There's an alligator that we find from those deposits as well.

So there's all kinds of very different animals during that period of time. You get lake deposits and other sorts of deposits as well during that time. It's very complicated. It's a whole grouping of different environments all happening at the same time. You get ponds, we get lakes, we get mudflows, we get volcanic rock as well.

There's some lava flows and things that are contained in there as well. One of our really important fossil sites is one called the Hancock Mammal Quarry, or just the Hancock Quarry. And that site is really important because it's it's representing a point bar. Right? So you get a stream that's turning and if you're familiar at all with how physics and water works, the outside is faster so things don't fall out, but the inside is slower so bigger items fall out there usually because there's not as much energy there to keep it moving.

And so on that point bar you see all these fossil, like big fossil animals getting deposited in that, in there. And there's animals as big as grizzly bears that are being preserved in there. That's like our Hemep Saladon, which is a carnivorous mammal that isn't related to anything alive today. Right? Right.

So you get a lot of these sort of fluvial fluvial meaning river stream channel the the excuse me, deposits that happened during that time. And then when you move on out of the Clarno formation, you move up into the John Day formation. And the John Day formation is enormous. That is, it goes from 45,000,000 years ago all the way up to 18,000,000 years ago.

Wow.

My the first paleontologist, Ted Fremd, has been wanting to turn it into a group instead of just a formation. And that that's kind of a, you know, it's a geologist thing, right? We we classify things in a specific way, right? And the the biggest well not the biggest, but one of the biggest things is that we typically call things is like a group. So it's a group of formations.

The formation is usually what, it's our like normal level of like what a geologic layer is, we call it a formation. And if there's sub parts to that formation then we call it a member, and if there's sub parts to that it's called a bed, Right? But this formation is so complicated, the John Day is, that I I agree. I think it should be a whole group because it's so complicated. Kinda behind me you can see there's this red these red deposits.

That's part of the Big Basin member. That also is what makes up the Painted Hills. And those layers, pretty much all the John Day formation does have something in common and that is that it's mostly mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones. And that's all size classes, right? You know, sand is the biggest, silt is the smallest, and it goes in between.

And those, all the members that make up that are very incredibly complicated, right? So the Big Basin member is reds and yellows and there's occasional lake bed deposits And so we get a lot of plants actually out of that locality. So the Bridge Creek Flora, if you go up to Fossil High School and collect up there, that's also part of the Big Basin number. So a lot of the plants that we are very well known for are from that period of time and we do notice a big change that it's more of a temperate environment by the time we get to this. So we get that big change, the plants are different, we get fossil soils that are developing that are telling us that it's a different climate, right?

You got a combination, the red soils typically tell you that it's a poorly drained forest and the yellow ones tell you that it's a well drained forest so that means you have standing water in the poorly drained and not so much standing water in the well drained, Right? So you go from having ponds to not really having anything at all. Right? In fact, you even get some deposits of low grade coal called lignite in parts of the big basin member. So all that plant material mixing in with the water that we have and that sort of swampy environment is turning things into, you know, coal essentially.

Right? Not very good coal, but still coal nonetheless. It was so bad that the pioneers that were out here mined it for a little bit and then abandoned it because it's not very useful stuff. And then you move and you know, through all of this you have volcanic eruptions. So there's a few ashes and those ashes are important because we use them to figure out how old things are.

We can talk about that later too. That's a whole another thing in and of itself. But then you move up into the Turtle Cove member, and the Turtle Cove is the green that you see on Sheep Rock, green and tan. And that is where you see an intense amount of volcanism. There's in Sheep Rock itself there, there's probably 16 or 17 ashes alone just in that.

And there's that big brown strip right across the middle of it. That's called the Picture Gorge Ignimbrate, and that is a about a 100 feet thick, that deposit, and that would have come from over at Prineville. There is a which is 90 ish miles away. There's a 50 mile wide caldera that Prineville sits in, basically, called the Crooked River Caldera. And that eruption came from there.

And ignimbrites are superheated clouds of gas. When I worked as a camp counselor we used to call them fiery clouds of death. So it's a superheated gas cloud that's coming out on the environment scorching all the trees and killing whatever animals are here. That was actually a big part of what my dissertation was focused on was trying to understand how communities of animals recovered after an eruption like that, right? Because that that completely changes everything.

You go from your forest to, oh, now that here's a superheated, you know, cloud of gas coming in, burning up everything, and now it's got a 100 feet thick of stuff on top of what was there before. Now make a new environment. Right? So that's that's something that's really interesting about this this rock unit. Then once you get over that, know, the the other members that you see are not quite as dramatic.

They are showing evidence of less open habitats. The animals that are in them and the plants that are in them are kinda telling us that. But it's still at a more temperate, more or less environment. And that would include the Kimberly member, and then we don't have most of these represented in the park. They're on BLM land instead, but there's Haystack Valley, Balm Creek, Johnson Canyon, and Rose Creek.

And we do have Rose Creek up in the park over by 4 E. But most of those other parts are represented on BLM land. Then you get to the basalts. So you have the Columbia River Basalts, which is a flood basalt province. So they're called the Columbia River River Basalts because that's what makes up the Columbia River Gorge.

And it is just these huge thick flows of lava that were coming out of cracks all around Eastern Oregon and Washington and a little bit in Idaho. They were so massive that they even made it all the way to the Oregon Coast. Right, so if you go to Florence you can see some of it exposed over there as well. And these are just massive flows of lava. I think in Picture Gorge there's something like 60 or 70 of the flows represented, like little flows.

Right? But you can see a lot of I may have may have overstated that a little bit but the point is there's a lot of lava flows in there. Right? And you see these little soil horizons between each one of them. So there was a little bit of time, maybe a few hundred years between each flow.

But you know and it wasn't all happening all at the same time. You go over by Prineville area and you get deposits that were co occurring while these flood basalts were were flowing everywhere too, right? So it wasn't happening all at once in one place. And what I always found really interesting when I was learning about flood basalts when I was in graduate school is that the Columbia River basalts that make up so much of the landscape around here is actually one of the smaller flood basalts that's recorded in earth's history. So there's the Siberian Traps during Siberia, but they're from around the end of the Permian, which was a huge mass extinction period of time, which makes these look like a drop in a bucket.

These those were enormous. And then probably the more well known one is the Deccan Traps which are in India and that was around the time of the end of the dinosaurs. About 60 to 65, well, 65 to 70,000,000 years ago probably in that in that range. But they are massive compared to these. These these are actually small enough that they might not even be They're right on the cusp of what's considered a flood basalt.

Right? So you can have all that happening in this environment. So that basically sealed whatever was happening before that, covering it over with this very thick resistive layer protecting all of it. And then you get to the next horizon which is the Maskell formation here. And the Maskell formation shows forests come back, but you see a lot of meadows as well.

And it's kinda moving back and forth and you get actually the first occurrences of elephants during that time here in North America. Not period, like we don't get the very very first ones here, but we do like in our record that's when we see elephants for the first time, elephant ancestors. And yeah, it's a lot of lake beds to at the bottom, which if you think about it makes a lot of sense because the the flood basalts would have been blocking streams to make ponds and lakes and things. And that's actually where our state fossil, the metasequoia, is most common, is around those lakes going all the way back to that Bridge Creek I was talking about earlier. And now we're talking about 16,000,000 years ago.

Right? So the flood basalts are about 16. And between sixteen and ten is this Maskell formation. And you at the bottom, like I was saying, you see a lot of ponds and lakes, and then it transitions into more open habitat, but we never truly get grasslands like you see in the Great Plains during that time. And, you know, it's still kind of forested, and then we have a gap that isn't represented here.

It is represented over by closer to Idaho near Vail in that area over there. There's some ten ten to 8,000,000 year old rock that exists over there that tells us the kind of fits in that gap. But by the time you get to our highest rock layer that we tell the story of here, that's the rattlesnake formation. And the rattlesnake formation is about eight to 5,000,000 years old. And once you look at the fossils in there, you will see that it is incredibly different environment.

There are it's a river basically. You get big cobbles and boulders in certain places, and then otherwise you get other silts and things. And that the environment that's represented by that rock layer is more like what exists today on the landscape. So this sagebrush steppe environment that we see where there's a lot of diversity around a river and not so much away from the river has been in this environment, has been in this part of Oregon I should say, for close to eight million years. Right?

Now not exactly the same mixture of plants and animals obviously over the last eight million years. I mean eight million years ago there was a like 400 pound saber toothed cat that was living out on this landscape that we certainly don't have now. Right? And elephants and short faced running bears and sloths. Right?

So there's a lot of things that aren't on the landscape now that were around then. But then once we get to the end of the rattlesnake formation and those sort of river y deposits that were deposited by that rock layer, we don't really have much else. We do have some Pleistocene rock and that's know, ice age stuff. So we do have very little and we think we only have like two fossils from the ice age in our collections. It just so happened to be stuff that was in like a bank of the river that we dug out.

But yeah, so that's most of what we have and that ice age stuff wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the river. So then that's the other big part of what is so important about our geology here is the, the act of erosion. So that's sort of where, you know, leads us to where we are. And there's a lot of other stuff in there like folding and faulting and twisting and turning and whatnot with the rocks that, know, angle things certain ways and cause little faults in different places and there's landslides and all kinds of stuff. And where we are right now is actually mostly landslide and river deposit.

So it's it's very complicated. There's actually a big hunk of basalt underneath the ranch house over there that only covers I think like two thirds of where the foundation is. Right? So it's just a big chunk of rock that fell off of the basalts and just got stuck there. Right?

But yeah, so that's that's kind of the long and the short of the geology that we have here.

The biggest thing that you were just alluding to is we wouldn't be able to learn any or all of that if it weren't for the John Day River, which is right behind us, cutting and carving through these layers for us to now see today.

That's right. Yeah. So the the John Day River itself and all of its tributaries. So like over at Painted Hills, you've got Bridge Creek, that's a big part over there. There's a a couple creeks over by the Clarno unit that help to cut that part out, but they're all part of this larger John Day River.

Right? So the actions of the river are incredibly important and we know that it probably started within the last eight million years that that deposit or that that river really started cutting through everything. Here it's the John Day River, but say like over by Prineville, it's the Crooked River which is part of the Deschutes drainage. So that river is important and then there's a bunch of other various rivers in different parts of what we consider the broader fossil beds. But yeah, definitely we wouldn't know any of the stuff that we had here if it wasn't for erosion which here is primarily caused by the river.

When you're talking about the geology, you were mentioning that you find certain fossils from different eras. Are you able to determine that based on the sediment that's on top and below that fossil and in between of it?

Yeah. So when when we come up with the what we call an absolute date, so it's an a number, that is based on those ash layers, those what we call tufts. So any volcanic layer has little crystals in them called zircons. And when they're made in the magma chamber of the volcano, there's a certain percentage of uranium and lead isotopes that are captured in the crystal. So then when it erupts, those little crystals go flying with the ash and then they stay with the ash.

So then we scoop up a bunch of the ash, we send it to a lab, they pluck out all of the little zircon crystals, which are really pretty little things. And then they shoot it with a laser and then that's how they figure that out is by looking at that relationship of uranium and lead and that decays at a regular rate. And so that proportion of one to the other tells you approximately how old it is. So we use the ash layers and those dates that come out of little zircons. And we do a bunch of them, right?

So we do a bunch of zircons so it's not just one that's giving us the date. And so that gives us one layer and then we look at above that, we get another layer out of there, pull a bunch of zircons out. And if the fossils come from between those two ashes, then that's how we get that estimation of, you know, between this date and this date. You can also use the animals to get an idea of how old things are, but that's much broader like, oh well it could be anywhere between you know thirty one and twenty nine million years old, right, which is how we used to describe a lot of this before we got a lot of the those ash beds dated. But yeah, there's no like carbon dating sort of thing.

Carbon dating only works for like 500,000 years. You can't get that information directly out of the bone. You have to really look for those ash layers that are on either side. We can use basalts and other volcanic layers too to get that as well, but

And I imagine you can't just go strictly based off the species unless you have an abundance of species that have already given you those years, right? If you're finding a species for the first time Right. You can't just reference it to a different animal.

Yeah. So that that kinda gets into this idea of something called an index taxon, so an index species. So usually to do that you have to have a an organism that is very widespread and ubiquitous across multiple places. This usually works for marine deposits because you'll get, you know, and going back to the age, dinosaurs something like an ammonite because they'll be everywhere and they'll be in every deposit that you can find and they evolve very quickly. So they change and give you very tight ages on things.

But yeah, so that's, you know, we can use some of those, but most of the animals that we have here we have to compare back to say the Great Plains. And the problem with animals and what we call land mammal ages is that animals don't tend to ubiquitously migrate at the same consistent rate. I mean, of the great examples I use of this is going back to the elephant ancestors coming to North America. Well, there's one period of time called the Barstovian, which type area is in California called Barstow, California. So that's supposed to be the place you go to say, okay, we wanna know what this age looks like, let's go down there.

Well, elephant fossils are not particularly common down there, but that marker bed, or the marker of that period of time is elephants. Right? Elephant ancestors. So that's one of the things that is in the book. It's like, you know, generally speaking, this is one of the animals that marks the beginning of this, except for in this area.

I mean, we have a ton of that here as well. There's a little mouse deer that we have here, and it's supposed to only be around during a very specific period of time. But in the in the biostratigraphy book, the book that tells us about all these ages and sweets of time that these animals live together, it says specifically, at least from this day to this day, everywhere in North America except for in the John Day Basin, where it persists for longer. Right? So it can make it really complicated to use those animals because you might find something or you might not have had all the data.

Right? As we find more stuff, there used to be a thing called a cat gap. I mean we still use, we still refer to that but that cat gap keeps getting smaller and smaller as we find more fossils because eventually, the more you look, the more stuff you're gonna find. So then that fills in this gap. It just means they're not super common.

But that gap used to be like ten, fifteen million years and it's slowly shrunk to like five million years. You know, it's just a matter of finding things.

I've driven through Barstow, California many times in my life and I cannot imagine an elephant thing in a

Oh, sure.

In in that region of the country. But you talked obviously a a ton about the geology and many of the events that have shaped the rock layers behind us. A lot of which you described, described, you you know, know, are are are violent geologic formations, volcanic eruptions. We didn't touch as much on it, but tectonic activity, faulting, all of that occurring in this area. One thing I find particularly interesting about all of that and this area specifically when we talk about violent geologic processes like that, they're sometimes, if not often, accompanied by mass extinction events which isn't the case here, correct?

Right. There's never been a case of mass extinction despite all that violence.

Well, it it really depends on how you define a mass extinction. Right? So typically what we see here in this region is what are called like local or regional extirpations. So where species will locally go extinct, but they're not extinct globally or continental wide, right? So that's where that source populations come in and this is a really big factor with volcanic eruptions.

So you get a big volcanic eruption, kills off a lot of stuff like that ignimbrite. Well, it only killed off, say, like, few 100 square kilometers, something like that. There's still a population in Washington. Well, the Washington or Idaho things start wandering back in this area as they're migrating and they're like, oh, well, our cousins that lived here are gone now, but hey, there's still food here for us to eat, so we're just gonna move in and do stuff. Right?

So that is what typically happens in those sorts of situations, particularly here with a lot of those sort of environmental shifts because they're not big dramatic things and a lot of the species that lived here are able to adapt to the changes that were happening at the time. They were gradual changes and even with like big explosive bad things that kill off everything locally, say if it was like if the flood basalts were bigger and say if it went through a coal seam or something like that and produced a lot more bad stuff that was coming out of the ground when it was erupting, yeah, it could have caused global change, but it wasn't big enough to really cause a big global change. We do see some change in the environment because of the Columbia River Basalts, but we don't see like what we saw with the Siberian traps or something like that, where there was a big punctuated extinction event. Same with the Deccan Traps. Right?

And, you know, there's also a a meteorite that impacted on the other side of the earth at that same time. Right? But yeah, we just don't see that sort of thing here. We see a lot of local extirpations and things migrating around. Now global continent wide things, yes, we do see those in our fossil record like a lot of the animals from the Clarno formation don't make it much further beyond the Clarno formation but it was also because a lot of the habitats that they that they were living in went away and they started getting out competed by other animals because they were just better at what they were doing than those animals were.

Right? And that's harder to track in the fossil record. So a lot of that stuff just kind of looks like mysterious things, but it's really hard to test for animal versus animal interaction. Particularly when it's like, oh, I am a horse and I'm better at eating this type of food than that oredont, which is like a sheep camel piggy thing. Right?

I'm better I'm better at eating this kind of grass than those things are, so I'm gonna, you know, win the race. There's you don't see it directly like that. There's no direct evidence of something like that. So that's a lot harder to prove scientifically, but that was probably part of what was going on.

When we think about paleontology, we oftentimes think about exactly what we're talking about is things in the past, dead things. Mhmm. But I think maybe maybe it's not lesser told, but a really important part of paleontology is what we learn about past ecosystems, how they rose, and also, if not more importantly, how they collapsed helps us inform how ecosystems are gonna respond to

Yep.

Climates that are occurring today or in the future. Is John Day Fossil Beds, is this a a good region to tell those similar type of stories today to to showcase horses thrived in these environments, when this ecosystem came in, they struggled, etcetera?

Yeah. No, I think that that's absolutely the case here. There's a I mean, horses are a great example of that. But the other thing that the fossil record shows is that as our species evolved, you know, they they had a, you know, older horses had a, maybe a broader range of habitats that they could live in. And now, they're limited to just one or two tracks.

Right? That's not to say that horses can't then evolve those traits to be able to be better handling other things. Right? I'm just using horses as a as a specific example here. But so that's part of it.

Right? We can see how animals, like the niches that they used to live in, the roles that they used to have in the environment, and what they have now, and how that's gotten narrower through time. Or we also see, this is one thing I always like to to point out too, is that the animals that tend to do really well are the generalists. Right? So things like coyotes and raccoons.

Right? They do really well because they eat everything. Right? And a specialist, like say a saber toothed cat, they're not really around anymore. Right?

They're not they're specializing on specific types of food and when that food went away. Sloths are another example of that. A lot of the sloths, particularly in the South Southwest have been shown to have been part of Joshua Tree's, you know, life cycles. Right? Well, there's not you know, eventually Joshua Tree's didn't become as ubiquitous as they were.

Sloths had a hard time getting around and had other factors that were involved and what made them go extinct and well, now that's a vector for seed dispersal that isn't there for Joshua trees anymore. That used to be. Right? So there's a lot of problems like that that we think about. But specifically getting back to how things respond to particular events, right, like that ignimbrite.

There's not an ignimbrite that big that's occurred in human history, you know, that we've seen. So looking at to the fossil record can tell us, alright, well if we ever get an eruption that large, right, if we ever have that happen again on the continent, what can we learn about the ecosystem? Or is there even a way to learn about how the ecosystem recovered after that? And that is something that we can specifically answer here with the fossil beds with our rock record. And that was part of what my dissertation actually was focused on, was trying to understand how those groups of animals recovered.

I even looked at modern records, so I looked at Mount Saint Helens and Mount Lassen with their mammal records. And what was clear was that the bigger the eruption, the longer it takes for the ecosystem to recover. And it tends to go more in an open habitat direction first, and then maybe if you're lucky you'll start getting closed habitats coming in again. Right? But it does take a while for the ecosystem to be livable again, depending on how big the eruption is.

So a little eruption, which Mount Saint Helens is technically a little eruption, I know a lot of people in Northwest would probably disagree with that statement. But when you look at the sum total of volcanic eruptions that have occurred throughout Earth's history, that was nothing. That was a quarter of an inch of ash. A lot of the ashes we have here are well over an inch. Right?

Maybe even, you know, three inches thick in some places, maybe even thicker. And then you get the Edignimbright, 100 feet, right, like that. Not just one order of magnitude different in size, right, that's a big thing. But that's the beauty of the fossil record is that you are able to go and see events that haven't happened in recorded human history, and you have an opportunity to learn about what happened to the animals that lived there at that time. Because if it happened once, it might happen again, you know.

And of course, the environmental conditions that we have today are not necessarily the same as they were. Right? I mean, especially that's the case with like it go way way way back in time when you have all kinds of like stromatolites and things which are these algal mats and things like 500,000,000 years ago, right, a totally different like oxygen content in the air, right, so you're not necessarily gonna get that or banded iron formations again, but it still can be helpful to inform how different groups of animals changed through time given certain environmental changes like an eruption or meteorite impact or something like that.

Can you clarify when you're mentioning how ecosystems recover after a massive eruption you said it goes from an open ecosystem to a closed ecosystem. Can you clarify what you mean by that?

Sure. So open habitat means something like a grassland like we're in today, there's not a lot of trees. And and a closed habitat is where you have like the extreme is like a rainforest. Right? So you go from a pretty low tree to no tree environment to allowing for more trees to come back.

Right? Of course, that's gonna vary. There's a lot of calculus that's involved with how all of that comes back in the exact ways and patterns. But yeah, generally speaking when I'm talking about open versus closed, I mean like, on the extremes of grassland versus a forest.

As we talked about, we are in the John Day Basin, and there's three units that make up John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We've touched on each of them a little bit and their importance, but, you know, folks might get the idea that these units are next to each other when they come to John Day, and that is not the case. You know, they're basically an hour to an hour and a half drive in between each one of them. Why though are those three areas in particular protected by the National Park Service?

Well, that's that's a a long story in particular. So and that goes back to Thomas Condon, really. So Thomas Condon, 1860 five, comes out to this area because so he was a minister up in The Dalles. And he was at a military base up there, and there was military road going from The Dalles all the way to Canyon City. There was gold discovered there.

If you're familiar with John Day at all, you know that there's a lot of gold history there. There's a a cool Chinese apothecary that's still there called Kommuchang that was from that period of time. It was a bustling community and it actually had one of the largest Chinatowns in the whole of Oregon, probably the West Coast, right, at at one point. It was it was pretty big. So the military needed to protect all those assets that were coming in and out of that area and the soldiers, right, because they were riding horses, they'd have to stop and camp periodically.

And over by Bridge Creek, over by Painted Hills, there were fossils found there by some of the soldiers. And Condon was really big into fossils. Right? He had been since he was a kid in Ireland. Right?

Brought a fossil collection with him from Ireland, New York, and then New York all the way over to Oregon. Right? Remember there wasn't a Panama Canal at that time, so it was a long trip to get around. But so Condon discovers fossils, well, doesn't discover discover fossils, but he brings it to light to the scientific community. He's sending fossils to Yale, to OC Marsh over there who ended up keeping all the fossils, which was not, I don't think, Condon's intention.

But they ended up all staying over there in Yale so that Marsh could write about it. Marsh even wrote to like Darwin about fossils here. You know, right? Not specifically John Day based in fossil, but the fossil horses. And the ones from here were some of the important ones in the story that he was telling to Darwin.

Right? But so the fossil beds then became on or got onto the everyone's radar out here. Oh, there's fossils in Oregon. We got all kinds of people coming out here collecting and yada yada yada. So that became what got a lot of other people interested.

And at one point, John C. Muriam, who's also well known in other park service units, particularly here in the in the West Coast, became interested in this area and had actually advocated for this place to initially become state parks. He said like, well, this needs to be public land in some way because these fossils are important enough that there there should be some sort of protections over it. And that was in the that didn't happen now here until the thirties. Right?

So the states under the what's now called Oregon Department of Transportation, I think it was the highway department back then, they they created all these roadside parks. And so that's what initially created this unit, Sheep Rock unit that we're in now. It was called the Thomas Condon John Day Fossilbed State Park. And then the Painted Hills unit was a separate state park that was set aside. And the Clarno unit was basically just Palisades, but it was a separate unit called Clarno State Park.

And the process of turning those into state parks started in the thirties and ended in probably the late fifties, early sixties. And then that's when people started advocating for this becoming a national monument. So there was a professor from University of Oregon and University of Washington that actually wrote letters of support to say, well, this place is important enough. It should be a National Park Service unit or federally managed land. And a lot of the land that was here was already BLM land that, you know, the current boundaries of the park was mostly state park, but then some BLM land.

And then there were some private pieces that were put in there as well as potentials. And that was, you know, what ended up happening. It took a while, took about a decade or so for the legislation to finally pass. And then, you know, then we became state parks. And or then we went from state parks, I should say, to national parks.

And that was in between '74 and '75. The legislation was passed in '74, and we didn't actually become a park. Like, everything didn't come into our possession that we currently have until '75. And then there was another bill in like '78 that did a little boundary adjustment to give us the current boundaries that we have now. But one thing that's interesting about our property is that, you know, we we do have such a patchwork.

It was originally a patchwork, right, and of landowners and, you know, we didn't take anything. There's nothing being taken by force or anything like that. It was all willing people organizations and believe me, reading back through the administrative history, the state of Oregon was kinda reluctant at first about transferring the land to the to the federal government. But eventually, they they got everyone got on board from the state and you know, we've got this beautiful 14,000 acre park that we manage now.

So if a visitor is coming here, how would you portray each unit to that visitor and their importance for geology and paleontology?

Sure. Well, the Klarno unit is, you know, our smallest unit, but it's the one that has the oldest rocks. Right? So that's our tropical jungle sort of environment, you know, Panamanian jungle, that's the Klarno unit. You can see guaranteed fossils when you're walking on some of the trails over there.

Fossil plants, but you can see them when you're walking around there. That one's also got these really beautiful towering cliffs. That's what makes up the Palisades themselves. And so that's that's kind of the the big draw for the Conner unit. It's the oldest and it's that tropical environment or subtropical environment.

Painted Hills, that's where you're gonna go if you wanna see the the red and yellow banding. And that's our temperate environment. Right? So and it's pretty much just that narrow band. There's a little bit of Clarno formation there, just like there's a little bit of the Big Basin member of the John Day up in the Clarno unit.

Not a lot, you can't really see it unless you know what you're looking for up in Clarno. But if you're over in Painted Hills and you go to Painted Cove, which is a really popular trail, all the pink rock that's along that trail on the backside, that's all volcanic rock from the Klarno formation. And then you also see a little bit of that ignimbride I mentioned earlier from the the Turtle Cove, right at the top of Carrol Rim. So you see a little bit, it straddles the, you know, the sort of this older temperate environment that we see there, but mostly the big part of that story is those temperate rainforests that are moving around. And you get here and everything basically except for the Clarno unit is exposed here, right?

And and then you also got that Cretaceous rock, right? So you've got Goose Rock and then you get a little bit of the Big Basin temperate stuff, and then you get all the volcanic activity. So there's a lot of volcanic activity that's preserved here in the Sheep Rock unit. And then when you get South Of Picture Gorge, right, that's another thing that we do have is the basalts. Right?

So you see the basalts here. You can see them in all the other units too, but they're not in the park quite like they are here in Picture Gorge. And then South Of The Gorge is where you get those more recent rocks, so the masculine and rattlesnake, so you can see all that here. So we have a this is the unit with the longest range of time and the highest diversity of geology that you'll get that you're gonna see here in the park. This is also the unit that has the visitor center and her longest trail, which will hopefully we'll we'll get that repaired soon.

We we're planning to get that done soon. And then we also have the ranch house here. So if you wanna see a a historic ranch house from, you know, the early twentieth century. That's what we've got represented here. We're we're actually where we are right now.

So there's a lot more diversity of stuff to see and do here in the Sheep Rock unit, but you know, Painted Hills and Clarno are both really cool in their own rights, just in different ways.

How about the diversity in fossils between the units?

Sure. Yeah. So the Clarno unit fossil wise, that's where you've got nuts, seeds, wood, leaves, and weird vertebrate fossils that are from that age of mammals, right? Or from that older age of mammals from the from the Eocene, that oldest deposit. So that's mostly what you see over there.

There's a couple of spots where you're gonna get some of those temperate leaves exposed on the on the north end of the of that unidol of the park. Painted Hills, that's where you would find the area around or like in Painted Hills itself, fossils that have been recovered from there are mostly temperate leaves and some vertebrate fossils that have been found in that unit of the park. And then the area adjacent to that, you find way way more of the plants and animals. And then on your way from Pitchell up to Painted Hills, that's where you're gonna be driving through all those dinosaur aged deposits. Right?

And then this unit is gonna be the the Sheep Rock unit is gonna be that transition from the the temperate environment animals all the way up through the the rattlesnake. So you're gonna see saber tooth cats of all different ilks. There's two different families that you're gonna see in there. Eventually, there's elephant fossils that are in here and gosh. Yeah.

It's just the number like just in the Green Turtle Cove Rocks, there's 80, like 89 species of animal that are known just from that unit alone. Right? And you'll see all of them, not all of them, but you'll see the vast majority of the cool fossils that we have and and that have been collected before we were even a monument on display in the visitor center and a lot of the ones that are from other museums we've made replicas of. But yeah, it's just a really high diversity here and you'll see all different kinds of animals. There's fossil grasshopper nests that we've found here in this unit of the park and only this unit of the park.

There are a lot of trackways that are also present in both places, meaning Klarno in here. So it's just a huge diversity of stuff. And I even forgot to mention up in the Klarno unit, there's fungus that's preserved in the wood, the fossil wood that's up there. Right? I mean, it's just intense how much stuff that we get preserved and how much variety we have.

There's plants and animal fossils found in all three units of the park and wood that can be found in mostly the Carnot Unit, but also over in the Painted Hills unit, there's some wood that's been found over there too. And all kinds of animals and we get traces of animals in not so much Painted Hills, but definitely in both Clarno and Sheep Rock.

Since we're talking, you know, fifty, forty five million years ago to today, in the fossil record here, are you able to see a horse from 40,000,000 years ago and then a horse from 20,000,000 years ago and and see evolutionary traits between those two species of horse?

Yeah, absolutely. So we have fossil horses in every horizon that we have in the park that has vertebrate fossils in it. So the oldest ones are about 44,000,000 years old and then we have them all the way up into the seven six million year old rocks in the rattlesnake. So we can see that change in horses through that whole time. So going from these small multi toed animals that were hiding among bushes to the more majestic single toed plains, grasslands, running animal that we think of today.

So we see we can see all of that here in our record.

Amazing. Mhmm. And are you able to determine why it evolved the way it did because of the environment and the records that are laid here?

I mean, our fossils are informative to that. You know, you have to to really get at that answer in full depth, you have to look continent wide to see because it is a continent wide evolutionary and maybe even globally pattern that we're seeing. But it does, you know, what happens in the plains also tracks here really well. So we're seeing, you know, in general we go from warmer wetter environments in the older rocks to drier more open habitats that we're seeing today. Right?

And there is a general trend towards that with most through most of the evolution of the horse. Right? So where they're bushy hiding things, here it was subtropical jungle. Right? And that's also true wherever you find those horses at that period of time, it was much more what I referred to before as closed habitat.

Right? And you know, the big story that we see with horses across the whole continent is about sixteen million years ago, there's a spreading of grasslands. And so that's a big point where horses make a big shift towards from, I should say, living in closed forest environments to living in open grassy places. And you see all those open habitat adaptations in the horses, you also see them in a lot of the carnivorous animals as well. So there's a lot of adaptations that are happening across multiple groups of animals that are showing that transition from being better for living in forested closed places, to living in more open places where it's easier to see you.

And I think another good species that exemplifies this evolution is there used to be very niche level dogs that existed Yeah. In this area, which similar to the horse, we see them on the landscape today with livestock, but also horse or you see dogs around the landscape as well, herding dogs and of course, know, most of us live with dogs nowadays too. So has it been interesting to you since you've been at this park to see the roles dogs played as wild animals in the ecosystem?

Yeah. You know, and what's interesting, I had a student back in 2017 did an internship with me and she was interested in looking at that specifically. And she was comparing the tooth morphology, the tooth shapes of the dogs, the canids that we had in the Turtle Cove Rocks. And she was noticing that there I mean, there's a high diversity. There's like 10 co occurring species, right?

What were they all doing? Well, turns out that a lot of the roles that they seem to be filling are being filled by weasels today. So you're seeing this because there weren't really weasels, right? And then weasels come in and they're better at it, so then the dogs don't really explore that world anymore. Right?

So that to me was this really cool like, wow, that's this really cool pattern that we're seeing here where, you know, dogs were doing all of these jobs and then something was a little better at it than they were and those dog species that were doing it stopped doing it. Right? And they went extinct and then dogs just kinda stayed doing more their general thing like they do today and then diversified in different ways. But that also isn't surprising when you think about modern dogs, domesticated dogs, and how we've kind of forced them into all these different directions. It's like, well yeah, they have the traits for all of those things.

So it makes a lot of sense that you'd be able to pull out those particular traits in those animals because their ancestors were had the had the genetic data to explore all those different directions naturally. That's so cool.

Yeah. Earlier you had mentioned that the superintendent here is an ecologist, he's by trade. How important is it for you as a paleontologist to work with other disciplines within science like ecologists, you're a geologist by trade, but other interdisciplinary sciences to be able to tell these stories. You were just talking about, you know, discovering dogs and their different roles and niches, but a lot of what you're just describing was, you know, their former ecology on this landscape. How important is it to collaborate with folks in other sciences?

Yeah. I mean, collaborating with other disciplines of science is necessary in paleontology. You can't really do what we do if we just live in a vacuum. Right? I mean, even the the bread and butter of many paleontologists is what's called systematic paleontology, which is describing something.

Right? You get a fossil and you say, okay, what does it look like? And what is it? Right? I mean that's great.

Right? And you can learn a lot from doing that part. But if that's all that you do as a paleontologist, well you're not answering ecological questions that you have the ability to do. Right? So I I studied a lot of paleoecology in my career, so I needed to look at ecology papers and see what modern ecologists were doing, talk to modern ecologists, go to biology meetings to learn about their processes and what they were doing.

And even as a geologist, there's different disciplines of geology, right? Like mostly I was studying stratigraphy and sedimentation, but obviously if you're gonna work in this environment you gotta know a lot about volcanics, right? So I was having meetings in graduate school with volcanologists being like, tell me about how this stuff works. So I I talked with a lot of physical volcanologists to learn about what goes into the different eruptions, like what kind, like what are the characteristics of them, You know, temperatures and flow patterns and all kinds of things like that. What do they leave behind?

You know, so then I've been working with a lot of volcanologists. I actually just had a colleague of mine from grad school reach out to me and ask me for a couple of slides regarding this exact question, right, with volcanics and how animals recover from them for a presentation that she's doing at her university, right? So I mean I still have those partnerships ten years later, right? But it's really important and even like the ages of the the ash, right? That was done by a geochemist, right?

I don't know how to do that. We paid the lab in Boise State to do that, right? And then we get all this cool data and then we're able to do stuff like that, right? So even the the CTing scans that we've done, right? The CT scans that I've done of some of our fossils, I had to drive to the lab and have them scan it for me, right?

Or specimens that were down at UC Berkeley's collection. I had a colleague down there who has a CT scan and his CT scanner in his lab scanned a bunch of these fossils for me that were down in their collection. Right? So collaborating with the CT techs, collaborating with the modern biologists that are working on biological questions that could be moved back into the past. Even museum collections, right?

I work with museum collections mostly mostly fossil collections, but I also work with modern biology collections. So you can't really know a lot about what's happening in the past if you don't understand what modern biological systems are doing too. Right? So you gotta compare them. You can't And you can't really look at the modern ones without really looking at the past ones either.

Right? So being able to do that connection and that back and forth is really important. Right? And even like I've got colleagues who work on how animals move, so that's more of a physics question, like a bioengineering or a biological physics y sort of question than it is what a lot of other people do. I mean that same colleague I was talking about at Berkeley has done stuff where he's CT scanned skulls and looked at how stress impacts a different carnivorous mammals skulls and jaws to figure out how exactly they were biting things, right.

Like what sort of stresses their skulls could take. So there's all kinds of different directions that you can take with paleontology that isn't just, you know, here I'm gonna describe a fossil. Right? I mean there's a lot of that that is I mean it's a very important part of what we do, but there are so many different directions that you can go depending on what your personal interest is.

That makes sense. Yeah. We talked about dogs, we talked about horses. There also were rhinos and camels on this landscape. Mhmm.

What was their perceived role in the ecosystem here?

Well, the the rhinos were the largest herbivore that we had on the landscape up until you get the arrival of the elephant ancestors sixteen million years ago. So they were the the largest mammal well, largest herbivorous mammal that we had at the time. And they were it's kinda hard to tell exactly what they were doing. They probably were eating whatever they could eat. But they were mostly a land dwelling rhino as far as I can tell.

The camels, that was actually Camels are really interesting too because camels seem to originate in North America, which makes a lot of sense because people forget that, you know, llamas and alpacas and stuff like that that are in South America, those are camels too. And like that was one of the things that struck me when I was first learning about it. Was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense that they're they're camels. Right? Because you get camels in Asia and, you know, Africa and whatnot in Eurasia.

And then you get them in South America, but then you don't have anything in North America. How'd they get there? Right? Well, they started in North America and they spread out to the different continents that way. And you know, a lot of these large herbivores are doing things, you know, they're just browsing animals.

So most of them are browsers, some of them are grazers. Grazers are eating grasses like what we're sitting in. Browsers are eating more bush and trees sort of plants. And so they're all having these slightly different roles. There's some research by one of my former lab mates at University of Oregon that was looking at the isotopes.

Actually, that's another place where we collaborate with, actually, in that case, anthropologists and geochemistry sort of people to look at the differences in the oxygen isotopes, which tell you about where the animals are getting their water sources from, if they're drinking it from water that's raining, or if they're getting it from the plants that they're eating. Or carbon, which tells you a little bit about whether they're living in a closed habitat or an open habitat because the plants change the carbon differently when they incorporate it into their bodies, or plants and bodies. Right? It's technically it's the plant's body. Right?

But so there's obviously some species that are better at living in a water stressed environment and some species that are better at living in a water abundant sort of environment, and ones that seem to prefer living in more open habitats, and ones that prefer to live in more closed habitats. Right? So like our mouse deer seem to like the closed habitats a little bit more, but the isotopic data gets a lot more nuanced of exactly what they're doing. To the point of just being able to see like, yeah, they were doing different things on the environment, but being able to pull exactly what they were doing, we need to do a little bit more work to really answer that question specifically. For all those animals, the camels, the rhinos, the mouse, deer, the horse, all of them.

What's a species here that's been discovered that really stands out to you and you know, you either find mind boggling, interesting or has answered questions globally for a paleontologist?

Well for that last part, global questions, I would say probably the horses are the ones that have really like done that. Then I mean I've I've loved horses since I was a kid, so I tend to focus on that. But this this became an interesting conversation that we had when we were developing the National Fossil Day logo for last year, which was focused on us because it was our fiftieth anniversary. And there have been three lead paleontologists here, and we had three completely different ideas for what we wanted to do. I wanted horses, my immediate predecessor Josh wanted dogs, and Ted, the first paleontologist wanted the Echemoe Chautala, which is a primate.

Right? And the one of the last primates in North America, which we have here in the park, actually from up there on Sheep Rock.

Oh,

wow. So so that was really funny because we all had completely different answers. And and when we were actually developing the the logo more recently, we decided, you know what is really telling about what we have here is that we're a landscape. Right? So we had a dog, we had a horse, we had a false saber tooth cat, we had a tree with some hackberry seeds because we have those in our record, with a primate sitting on it.

And then there was a grasshopper on it because we had the grasshopper eggs that we had discovered just a few years ago. And there was a volcano in the background erupting. Mhmm. Right? And there was a rhino in the back and a stream running through it.

Right? All of those things were so it was like, what do you pick? Right? Because there are so many things. But I think that, like for me personally, the most exciting thing I ever published on is the Grasshopper Nest.

Right? That was probably one of the coolest things I've ever gotten the chance to be a part of, to describe. I didn't find it and I wasn't the lead author on the paper, but I was helping shepherd it through all of that. And that was just so cool to go from, you know, I started the process with that being like, don't know what these actually are. We've always said these are ant eggs, but what exactly are they?

Right? So I got a CT scanned. I started looking at a paper that was describing insect eggs. I'm like, oh, well, if they're ants then they should look like ant eggs. And then I looked it up and they don't look anything like ant eggs.

So I'm like, what is this? And it turned out that grasshoppers seemed to fit and I was like, oh, wait a minute. They lay their eggs underground, don't they? Some of them do. And then so that was like this whole discovery process for me of like learning more about how that happened.

Right? Now my colleague from Berkeley did all the hard work of actually justifying my cool idea. Right? And the CT scan really helped to verify and answer a lot of questions about them too. But I think personally, that was the most exciting thing I've ever had a chance to to work with, was was those.

The fossil tracks were also really cool. A lot of the body fossils of different kinds of animals are really cool. I mean, I'm working on describing a fossil hedgehog, a new species of fossil hedgehog right now that isn't from the park's boundaries, but is from the region here, not too far away from here. But, you know, the fact that we even had hedgehogs here, that's really cool. You know, the the animal that I referred to as a hyena pig that we described in 2019 from the from the Klarno unit, that was also really cool.

It was like, wow, there's this big animal that had hooves and it was carnivorous? That's crazy. Right? So I mean, there's just it's hard to pick just one, right? It's like, they're all my babies and I can't really decide which one's my favorite, right?

But you know, it's just I think probably to sum it back to this is probably gonna be kind of a lame answer, but I think it's the diversity of how many things we have that is really the most spectacular about here. Right? And you know, to poke a little bit at all the other parks here, we do have an exhibit up in the visitor center that shows our time range. Right? And it shows like 55,000,000 years ago to 5,000,000 years ago with a little bit missing at around 10,000,000 years, that's our range.

And then we put all these other parks that are paleo focused to show their teeny tiny ranges up there, right. Like Florissant Fossil Beds is a little bit in there. Badlands has a little bit more and we didn't include into the Cretaceous stuff, so I'm sorry we didn't include their like age of dinosaur stuff in there. But their age of mammals is probably one of the larger ones in in the park service, but it's not quite as large as ours. Right?

Peregrine fossil beds is like is actually beyond what we have, but you know, not by much. It's close. And Agate Fossil Beds is on there too and it's a tiny little chunk in there. Fossil Butte is a little bit of a longer one too, but and it goes older than what we have by a little bit, I think. But that is one of the cool things about here is that we're kind of a Rosetta Stone keystone for other places to compare back to because we have all these dates and we have all these fossils.

Right? And that I think is is is really what makes this place significant is our long time, our high diversity of fossils, high number of fossils, and we've got probably forty, fifty thousand fossils in the museum collection as it is right now. And that's, you know, and it's not just the ones that we have in our collections, but it's that sort of keystone bit or not maybe not keystone is the right word there, but more of this like Rosetta Stone comparativeness. That's really what makes us so valuable as a scientific unit. Right?

And why it was so hard to pick just one thing. It's like, well, we've got seven different periods of time that we're talking about. Right? How do you pick just one of those? Right?

I mean, everyone's got their favorites. Right? But, you know, what is really significant about here is that we can look at all of that time all in one spot, and then we can compare to everyone else. Right? Like when we were making the logos, was like, well what do we do that doesn't make it sound like we're just replicating what they have at Hagerman, or at Badlands, or at Agate or at this, you know, or at Fossil Butte.

It's like, oh, we gotta pick something. Right? And it was hard to pick something that was unique because we do overlap with so many places.

You mentioned the museum. The museum is phenomenal on the side of the visitor center. But another thing I think this park, for the visitor experience, does really well is the paleo art that is on display inside of the museum and in the the National Monument movie that's on display inside the visitor center as well. So what is your relationship with paleo artists and how are you able to paint such a good picture? And one of the big questions I have just about fossils in general, you know, we're able to reconstruct their skeleton, but how do you determine what their skin is like?

Yeah. So I've gotten the pleasure of working with a couple of paleo artists, not the ones who made the murals, that was that was before my time. But generally, the process of how you work with a paleo artist is you talk to them about a concept and you know, you you say like scientifically why something should be the way that it what you're envisioning. Right? Like so the Grasshopper exhibit, there's a piece of art that I had commissioned for that exhibit that we put up in the visitor center.

And that process was I went to the artist and I said, hey, I I want something like this. This is kinda what I'm envisioning. Do you think you could do that? And he's like, yeah, I think I can. I'll do a line drawing, you know, get a rough sketch of what we're talking about, and see if we're kinda going in the right direction.

Sends me that, yep, this is great, or no, I need to adjust this as this. Okay, fine. Move forward with that. Then he does a more detailed line drawing before he colors it in and says, alright, this is the point. Like, is there anything that you really want me to change?

And they're like, okay, yeah, can you do this different over here? Like, can you make the end of the animal look a little bit more like this? Like okay, good. And then we'll discuss like how do you wanna colorize it. Right?

Because how do you prove what colors an animal was, right? It's like well, we, you know, and like for that one, we had the belief based on the the shape of the nest that it was similar to a modern rice grasshopper. So I said, if you could make the animal look like a modern rice grasshopper and maybe have some similar color patterns to those, I think that that would be real spot on. But put it in a temperate environment if you can, like the background look like a forest environment and it was probably laying these eggs next to a river. So if you can get like the river sort of in there that to imply that it was a wet environment.

And he was like, yeah, that'd be great. I'll do that. And he did it, gave me the first draft. We made a couple of changes, and then we, you know, went back and forth a couple more times. And then he gave me a final product and I was like, this is great.

This is exactly what I was imagining. So that's usually how that process works is there's a lot of back and forth. I also worked with that same artist on a on a separate project that he was doing, making a sculpture of of a horse. And we had a lot of back and forth. That was before he was even like working with the park.

Right? And then eventually we brought him on as an artist in residence to also do a sculpture of one of our smallest dogs. So there's actually a bronze up in the the visitor center that he also did that has this beautiful little it's called Sinarchtoides. It's this little tiny dog with these giant ears. Right?

And it's incredibly cute. It's never been done in a three-dimensional sculpture like that ever before. And it's probably one of the cutest things that we have in the park. So that was a really cool opportunity to do, was to work with him on that and be like, well, how do you like this? I was like, well, you know, like this is a tempered environment so if you could make it more like fluffy, which is hard to do when you're like doing something in clay.

Right? But he was able to do that and I was like try to make the claws a little bit longer because we think it was like crawling up in trees. So it might have needed to have like more grippy claws. Right? So it was this whole back and forth on how to do that.

And I think it's a lot of fun, like you get to share papers and talk about theories and hypotheses about why things are a particular way. And there's also the places where it's like, yeah, you know, you can do whatever you want with that. Right. Like the colorization, it's like, well, you know, you know, we don't really have a lot of justification for going one way or the other, but it would probably make sense if you colored it like this. Right?

It's like we were when we were working on the Grasshopper, he asked me about colors and I was like, well, you know, maybe go in that direction but you can kinda heavily push it towards green and yellow, I'd really like that. And if you don't know, University of Oregon's colors are green and yellow. So that was part of the reason why because I'm an alum of that program. I'm like, oh, this would be a way I could get some green and yellow in there. Right?

So that's that was a, you know there's some creative license that the artist has and that I have as a as a scientist too. Or like, you know, the question of like I'm I'm working on a project with Hagerman Fossilbuds right now as well, and we're coming up with these silhouettes. And it's like, well, we don't we can't find a silhouette exactly made for this exact species. It's like, well, in its silhouette, don't really know which one it is. So I mean, as long as it has these general proportions and yada yada yada, that works for me.

Right? So there's usually a range of flexibility on when what you're doing with the artist. Because I mean, you know, artist is creative, right, by nature. And so you wanna make sure that you as the scientist aren't stifling everything that they're saying, and that you're really just commenting on content. Right?

Is there anything about what you produced in your piece of art that is scientifically wrong giving the information that we have now? And I think that's true with writing, you know, science communication, whatever. It's it's always the the the thing I try to do is make sure that I am not stifling the artist that's putting it together, whether it's in word or in physical format or you know, three-dimensional art, two dimensional art, whatever. My goal is to give them whatever liberties they need and that they're allowed. And then pulling things back if someone's going like way off the deep end, right?

Like you're not gonna paint your your false saber toothed cat like polka dots, right? Like green and pink polka dots. Right? That's not okay. I've never had anyone suggest that.

But I'm just saying like, there's there's a limit. Right? You don't wanna go you wanna make something that looks realistic. And you also wanna have a conversation with the artist and ask them what exactly they're going for. Right?

Like, what is the point? Who is the intended artist? Or intended audience, I should say. Right? I did a couple like, the art for the the logo, and then we did another piece of commissioned by the the national office for the fiftieth anniversary of the park.

And for like that one, I was like, hey, can we do something in a somewhat forested environment that has a dog and a mole looking thing and a hedgehog looking thing in it because I was inspired by all these new papers that we have coming out this year and those were sort of the major themes were insectivores, things that eat insects and dogs and some plants. So I'm like, okay, if we can put that all together into this sort of painting, that'd be really cool. So the artist worked that up too and it was a a pretty cool thing that we were able to get for that too.

Oftentimes when we're talking about paleontology and fossils, think of these large put together skeletons. But one of the most important parts of fossils are teeth. Mhmm. Can you talk about why teeth are are so important for paleontologists?

Right. I mean, especially for especially for mammal paleontologists, teeth are so important. The the fossil record of Oregon is almost entirely made up of just bits and pieces. Right? We rarely get anything complete or articulated.

And when we do, it's I think the best I've ever seen is like 70% of an animal. Right? But the teeth are so important because that is that interaction between the animal and the environment with where it's getting its energy from, where it's getting its food from, right? And so animals have such a specialized like mammals particularly are so specialized in what they eat that we can tell differences between all different kinds of species based on just that and every different strategy that an animal might have for feeding on whatever kind of food stuff you can think of. Right?

Of course mammals start off with having like insect eating teeth, so it starts off with that pattern and then goes nuts from there. Right? But yeah, we can learn so much. Like it's even the difference between an animal that browses on brush and trees to an animal that eats grass, their teeth are incredibly different because of the amount of nasty gritty stuff that the animals that eat grass have to deal with from the ground, from the grass itself, or whatever. They have completely different teeth.

They're usually flatter and taller crowned teeth than animals that eat brush and trees and things like that, right, fruits. So even just that sort of nuance difference, I mean, I I feel like most people would feel like that's a real nuance difference between those two things. But to a paleontologist like me, that is a totally different world that you're living in. Right? So I have oftentimes pull myself back into reality and be like, okay, what do what do people actually think?

You know, like, what was I like when I was in high school about understanding the differences between these things? But even just like, you know, a lot of people don't even realize the difference between your your cat. Like if you have a cat at home and a dog at home, they are adapted to eat completely different food. Right? Cats are adapted mostly to eat meat and dogs are adapted to eat whatever they feel like.

Right? Which is why oftentimes, like my dog does this, she gets into the trash and she eats whatever she can find. Right? And that's why dogs are really good at bones, but cats are not as good with hard bones and things like that. So, and then even specialized things like saber teeth.

Right? Those are usually only in very specific types of animals and they usually specialize on specific prey types. Right? So being able to tell that sort of difference helps us a lot. And we oftentimes have to look at the modern record to be able to really get at that.

But looking at those teeth can tell us a lot about their diet. And oftentimes with mammals, and we also see this with modern animals, that can be enough to really distinguish a difference between families and species and genera and all kinds of different levels of taxonomic understanding. I mean even the difference between a mammoth and a mastodon, right, mammoth teeth are flat on the chewing surface. Mastodon teeth are pokey, right. So you can tell on a very basic level whether you've got a mastodon tooth or a mammoth tooth just by that feature alone, right.

And then the specific species, like there's little differences, like in kinda going back to the hedgehog. My hedgehog that I'm just I'm describing a whole new genus and the reason why I'm doing that is because the teeth are so drastically different. Mhmm. And that is the primary reason why. The up one of the upper teeth looks different from any other hedgehog I've ever seen.

I've talked to people from Spain and other parts of The United States who've been looking at hedgehogs longer than I have, and they're all like, I have no idea what this is. This is so weird. Right? So that's enough to say, alright, it's a new thing. And then there's another version of it that's down further south on BLM land closer to Prineville, and it has a little ridge on the outside of the tooth, on the close to where the the gums would be, that the other one that's from up here doesn't have.

And that's enough to say, yeah, that's probably a new species. Probably two different species. Right?

And,

know, to me who's been looking at it for twenty plus years, I can see like, yeah, I know that makes a lot of that makes a lot of difference. Right? And of course, most people will be like, whatever. It's a it's a hedgehog. Who cares?

Right? But, you know, that's enough to really tell tell those differences. And that's oftentimes how nuanced the differences can be with these animals. And there's other aspects of of these animals that we look at too. It's not just the teeth, right?

We look at the rest of the body. I've got a former student of mine too who's describing an entire skeleton that we have of one of our our fossil dogs and it's the first one of that entire like lineage of dogs that's ever been described in as much detail as we have. Right? And that and you can learn a lot from the rest of the body, but what makes that so hard is if you just find like an isolated vertebra. And you don't really know what it is because like if it's a if it's an herbivore, it could be any of 20 different things.

Right? But those teeth are so characteristic and they evolve so quickly because, you know, your diet can change super quick throughout, you know, few hundred years even. Like even the fact that like with, you know, people talk about how people are are less likely to have wisdom teeth now than they used to, right? That sort of, like the loss of the third molar can also mean the difference between species a and species b. Right?

And that's also where I kinda also I'm I'm So this is a debate with teeth between lumpers and splitters. Right? Between It's all paleontology and describing species. Some people are like slight the most slightest variation, it's a new species. And other people are like, nah.

All these things are the same. I'm a lumper more so, and that's driven from me looking at a lot of modern species and looking at variation and things. Looking at how wear in fact impacts the teeth as well. Because even a tooth from an like a baby, like unworn tooth, like it just erupted, to your 70 year old, your tooth are not gonna look the same. Right?

And that is definitely true with horses. Horses change throughout their entire life of that tooth, the patterns modify through that time as they wear down through their tooth. And horse teeth are literally like, modern teeth are close to like, you know, seven inches long. Right? Like that are that are up there in in the animal's mouth.

And it's it's like there's a lot of room for change in there. And some people could could, if they found it worn at different phases, would say, oh, well you've got five different species there. In fact, well, in that case, it's actually all one species. Right? So that's that's a lot of what I I look at.

I look at a lot of like combinations of these things and I say, we probably don't have as many species as as we think we do in the fossil record. But we also have to remember that a fossil species is not the same thing as a modern species. You can't take two fossils, put them in a box and see if they make more fossils, right, like you can with a modern animal, right? So we don't really know breeding patterns and other things, and we're looking at millions of years of time and, you know, and combination of all these things together. So we have to we have to remember that, you know, Tyrannosaurus rex is a fossil species, and there's maybe, you know, 16 individuals.

Well, they might all be from slightly different periods of time and they may not have Those individuals may not have all lived at the same time within like say a million year time span. Right? So there's slices of that T Rex lineage over, you know, a a sort of small period of time. Right? And now that I've been talking about dinosaurs, you're gonna get way more people interested in what I'm talking about.

Right? You know, it's teeth are really important and and there's pluses and minuses. Right? We talked about that nuance difference, but there's also a possibility of being too nuanced. Right?

And cutting that line. Right? Because these species and things are made by people. Right? It's our way of trying to interpret science and trying to interpret the world.

And we try to do that as best as we can, and that oftentimes involves putting things in the boxes that don't necessarily match the gradational nature of how nature really is. Right? I mean, the fact that we can even cross breed things like a lion and a tiger, that would never happen in nature. Right. Right?

So just by the fact that they live in different places, they would never mix. But because we have made them mix, well, turns out they actually could make babies. Not babies that could make more babies, but, you know, then that calls into question like, well, what exactly is a species? Right? That was one of my lab mates that was in grad school, that was like one of her big questions as part of her comprehensive exam was what is a species?

And why is it hard to figure out what it is? Right? So I say that as a way of of saying this is a question that scientists are still answering. Right? And it's an evolving question or it is that too.

It's an evolving question and an evolving answer, right? And that's part of what makes science beautiful, is that we talk about what we know about given the data that we have right now. Fascinating. And we just go on from there and yeah, our answer might change and it's not because we're, you know, we made a bad decision, it's because we got new data. And you know, what makes a good scientist is our ability to look at data and say, wow, now we can change our opinion.

Right? We thought that this species was this and now we know that it's actually this. Right? And that does happen all the time and I'm on a paper right now where we're taking some giant messes of animals and saying, you know what? We've been we've been describing these wrong all all this time.

There's actually not as many of these things as we thought there were, you know. But that doesn't mean that all the work that was done before was bad because they were describing what they saw. Right? You describe what you see, and then you interpret the data that you have, and then you find more data, and you realize, wow, actually, yeah, there's two end members that were living at the same time, but we found everything in between. So now it's like, okay, well, maybe it's just variation and not two completely different end members.

But you can imagine that if you find, you know, something that looks like a tiger and something that looks like a lion living at the same time that, you know, maybe they're not related. But then if you start seeing a bunch of hybrid crosses, oh, well, maybe this is more of a range than we thought there were.

Everything you're describing just kinda sounds like the process of life. We we I don't wanna say make mistakes, but we do certain things a certain way and we learn that there's a a better way or maybe we learn that we're wrong and we adapt to that and Mhmm. Make different inferences and choices in life. So Yeah. It all makes sense.

Yep. Exactly.

Because of the vast fossil record that's here at John Day, are there, you know, full articulations of species here that are used as as holotypes across across the world?

Sure. Yeah. So we do have a few holotype specimens that are in our collections. One of them is the primate I mentioned before. There's a that's been described as a unique species that is originally known from here.

And I've been working with a colleague of mine up at the up in Washington who also found a specimen of the same genus, at least, as what we have here at the fossil beds. And so she's been asking me for photographs and all kinds of stuff to compare to to see if what I have here is the same thing as what she has. Right? So we do that a lot. We have we have several.

There's a lot of small animals. We have a lot of rodents that are in our fossil rodents that are in our type cabinet, as well as the the primate. There's probably a few other things in there too. I mean, the the grasshopper nest is technically a type specimen as well, so that's one of the ones that we use. And the hedgehogs will be hedgehog, I should say, will be.

But yeah, so we do have quite a few of them, and most of the time people just look at the original paper that came out describing it. But people will ask, as in the case of our primate, the Echamora Shashala, that they'll ask for additional evidence. Right? They'll say, can you give me photos? Or I had another colleague who wanted to get a CT scan so that we could potentially look at the insides of that specimen.

So that's been done up in up at the labs up in Friday Harbor. And, you know, we we have all these specimens that we look at in that way. And what's important to know about those specimens is that when they've been named as a holotype for a species, it will forever, until the end of our civilization, be known as that species. Right? Even if someone says, oh, that species doesn't exist, it still will be known as the holotype of that species.

Right? I mean another example of this is like Brontosaurus. Right? For a long time, that dinosaur was a thing. Right?

And then we realized that, the type specimen had the skull of a completely different type of dinosaur stuck onto the top onto the head. Right? So it was a Camarasaur skull. And we're like, okay, well maybe that doesn't exist. It was a body of an apatosaur, you know, what we thought was a body of an apatosaur and the head of a kimarasaur, and we were making a brontosaurus.

Right? Well, turns out that it wasn't a body of an apatosaur, there were different parts of it were actually unique to a different species. So recently, brontosaurus came back. Right? So that's part of the reason why you don't just like throw the baby out with the bathwater in that case when you're saying, oh, that species doesn't exist.

Cause it's possible that it can come back. Another good example that was just in the news very recently was Nanotyrannus. Right? So Nanotyrannus is this, we thought was a, at one point was a little tiny species of Tyrannosaurus, different from Tyrannosaurus rex. And then for a long time we said no.

That's a juvenile of this. Right? But now, they went back and some people went back and re looked at that type specimen and realized, no, actually, there's evidence here that suggests that this is an adult. It's not a baby. Right?

So that's part of the reason why you keep that name in there because you might be able to go back in and say, actually, we were wrong. Right? We got new data, we got new evidence, and now it supports this completely different interpretation. Or going back to an old interpretation that we used to have. Right?

Instead of just saying, oh yeah, well that's that's just gone and dead. Right? And it it and it is, we don't accept it as a name anymore, but it's still there, and we can still go back to it, and we still recognize the importance of that specimen as being good enough to name a species on. Not all of them are very good. Some of them are just like a tooth.

Then it's the scrappiest tooth I've ever seen, or it's a baby tooth. There's actually one of the horses from here that is literally a baby tooth, and that's all that it is. And I'm like, how do you name a species on a baby tooth? That's ridiculous. But yeah.

So we do have a lot that are in our collections. There's also hundreds more that are in all different collections across the country. There's at least 16 different museums that have holotype specimens from the John Day well, not holotype specimens, but specimens from the John Day Basin. And many of them have holotypes. Whether it's plants or animals, they all got something.

Right? They prob most of them probably have at least one from the John Day Basin of those 16. So it's just it's really cool that we're able to get all this out. And of course, a lot of the ones that are coming out now are small animals because traditionally, we tended to ignore the small animals and we'd only focus on the big things. So now, there's a big flux of all these small critters that are coming out.

But, you know, we've got we've got a lot of them out there, we've got a lot of them here, and there's still a lot more to be found.

And smaller critters, I believe, can give you an even better idea of what this environment was like in the larger mammals. Exactly.

You know, because they they generally can't move very far. So their home range is a lot more limited and so they're more tied to the local environment than say like a horse or a rhino that can migrate states away. Right? I mean, we we're humans will probably be an awful index. Well, we'll be a great index species because we're so ubiquitous across the world.

And so finding like remains of humans is like, oh yeah, okay. Well, they're everywhere, so we know we know what period of time we're talking about now. But you know, we're that that doesn't really mean that we're very good at telling what the environment was like where where we lived. Right? Elephants are also awful about that, right, for the most part.

But yeah, There there's so many cool things that you can learn from the little critters that you can't learn from the big ones.

This has been a fantastic conversation and I can't stress enough to people about how beautiful the three units are here at John Day and how unique and special they are. I I want people to not be dissuaded by the fact that it's a a national monument versus a national park. That's right. I think that's a maybe a a silly thing we can get hung up on sometimes because this place, you gives you that same exact feel and the same exact stories Mhmm. As a capital p national park would be.

Mhmm. It's it's phenomenal. But I wanna give you one last chance as we wrap this podcast up as a rebuttal to why John Day is the Mecca as opposed to Petrified Forest for paleontology.

Sure. Maybe maybe the pref the preference here would be that say Petrified Forest is the Mecca for Triassic paleontology, right? And we're more of a mecca for Cenozoic paleontology, right? But again, you know, we, you know, we have such a long continuous record with such a good fossil record. You know, so our fossils themselves are they speak for themselves.

Right? So in some ways, they do. In other words, they don't. That's part of what my job is. But we do that really well here.

We've got really good fossils here and our lab that we have here is is excellent for what we do. And you know, we have this really nice facility for doing a lot of things. And I will say that we do actually get a lot of international interest in the research collections. I mean, don't get, you know, tons of people coming here all the time because it's kinda hard to get here, especially if you're coming from out of the country. But we do have a lot of researchers who are interested in our collections, and if they can't utilize them here, they utilize them in places that are easier to get to, like University of Oregon, or Washington, or Berkeley.

Their collections are more accessible. But, you know, for us here, right, you know, we're we're a little we're we're a driving park. Right? You gotta get to us by driving, so you have to be on a road trip. And there's not really a lot of places between here and there, so you have to choose to go on Highway 26 to see us.

But, you know, so we're a little hard to get to, but we're we're really have some really spectacular views, and we have some really spectacular night skies, and we have a really amazing fossil record that we are continuing to add to pretty much every year. And we have these great resources, we have all kinds of data for people to use, and we really try to to get people to find some way of connecting to this place. Right? Whether it's you have an interest in scientific interest in the paleontology, scientific interest in the geology, you wanna do art, you're interested in non fossil things, right? We have all kinds of stuff here for people.

There's a lot of modern biology happening here, right? Which is also great because we can do that continuation story too, right? So that's our that's our eighth assemblage that we talk about is the modern landscape, and it ties directly into what we have here. So I would think that that's part of the reason why we're so important is because we have such a long range, and we have a lot of resources, especially for a small place like we are, right? We are a small national park service unit, but we are a mighty park service unit, right?

Small team, but we do a lot. And we really rely on our partnership, so I mean, I give I give the people at Petrified Forest And Badlands And Dinosaur National Monuments a lot of a lot of flack of a lot of things. But, know, we we work with our colleagues at the other National Park Service units as best as we can, right? I mean, helping out Hagerman, helping out all kinds of other parks, Florissant, everyone else, like we're all we're all a team and we try to work together and you park service is small enough that you're not gonna have every parks that has fossils isn't gonna have a paleontologist. Right?

So we're gonna have to just come together and work together. So it's that teamwork part and that's one of the things that we're really good at here at John Day. I'm not saying that everyone else isn't, just that that's one of the things that we've had to be really good at because we can't tell our story if we don't partner with the BLM, if we don't collaborate with these other museums, you know. So that's that's a lot of what's really helpful and useful for us here and why I think that we are sort of Mecca of places, right, is because of that wonderful fossil record and our ability to collaborate with as many people as we possibly can. I think that really leads us in that direction because we do get folks coming here and wanting to see what we have.

Nick, you do phenomenal work both on geology and paleontology, and I'm very jealous of your view here at Sheep Rock. It's a remarkable park. And thank you for all the amazing scientific communication that you do as well. Certainly engaging the community and people that come here. I'm a big believer that context makes every place, including a place like John Day, more special.

You understand what's come before us, what the future holds, and and, you know, dig the landscape on how it looks today and how we got to this point. And you're a big part of why we know all of that. Thank you very much.

No problem. Thank you for coming out and spending a little bit of time with me out in our our beautiful landscape. I'm glad that it's it was a nice day.

Yeah. We got lucky.

We did. Yeah. Very good.

Well, Nick, thank you.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks for checking out this edition of the Safe Travels Podcast. I really hope you enjoyed it. Doctor Nick Famoso is absolutely fantastic and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument will blow you away. It's paleontology and geology is world class. So if you like this type of content, it'd mean a whole lot to me if you followed or subscribed on whichever platform you're watching or listening on as it really does help out our podcast.

And until next time, safe travels.