We Are Nature

Loss in Lutruwita

• Carnegie Museum of Natural History • Season 2 • Episode 5

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A second serving of bone banter with two of the museum’s veteran vertebrate virtuosos. How are charisma, colonialism, and extinction linked? What is de-extinction, and will cloning mammoths save the tundra? Featuring Matt Lamanna, Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and John Wible, Curator of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Michael Pisano:

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, a second serving of Bone Banter with two of the museum's veteran vertebrate virtuosos.

John Wible:

I'm John Wargel, curator of mammals, and I study everything about mammals, their origin, their evolution, their distribution on the planet today.

Matt Lamanna:

And I'm Matt Lamana, curator of vertebrate paleontology, and I study dinosaurs in particular, and especially dinosaurs from the southern hemisphere continents at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

Michael Pisano:

Last time we talked about how some Cretaceous creatures survived mass extinction. Today we're skipping forward some 65 million years to discuss a much more recent extinction, biodiversity conservation today, and perhaps even de-extinction tomorrow. We're picking up right where we left off last time, starting right now with the collection items that Dr. Weibel brought to share.

SPEAKER_00:

Collection item one and collection item two are presented together for comparison. Both are skulls, and both measure six inches from back to snout. At first glance, you might assume that both skulls belong to the same species, but close inspection of details might lead to a different conclusion. Examine the teeth. While skull A has 46 teeth, skull B has but 42. And while both skulls support sharp canines, only skull B has carnassial teeth. Now that you're looking closely, notice how skull A has a relatively smaller frame case than skull B. Turn the skulls upside down, and you'll see that only one has palatal vacuities. Interesting. Small differences aside, the similarity between these skulls is striking. Can you identify collection items one and two?

Michael Pisano:

What do we have on the table here?

John Wible:

So I have um two skulls here. The one on the right is actually of a of an extinct uh mammal called a thylosine, also known as a Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger, because they had stripes on their bodies. And on the left-hand side is a wolf. I'm sorry, it's not a wolf, it's a fox. It's small. It's actually a red fox. And the reason why we I'm showing these together is that this represents an amazing example of convergence in form. So these are remarkably similar looking skulls when you look at this, these two here. You'd be hard pressed in this view to find features that really distinguish them very much. However, if I flip them over and we look at the other side, we're going to look at the palate on these things. This is where you should go, oh my goodness, these don't look at all similar. So, of course, the first thing that your eyes might go to are these funny holes that are in the back of the palate of the thylocene, which I forgot to point out is a marsupial that was found in Australia and uh and environs historically. Uh there's no such large openings in the palate of this fox. The other thing that's really quite striking is how different the teeth are. So the the teeth here on the thylosine really don't look anything like the teeth on the uh on this fox. So you might imagine that they're not necessarily eating the same thing. And they probably were not eating the same thing. So that's the quick and dirty general overview of what we've got.

Michael Pisano:

Beautiful. Let's fill in the picture of what this organism was like in life, the thylosine.

Matt Lamanna:

Can you kind of talk about, you know, you mentioned Australia and like what they even looked like in terms of like coloration and things like that.

John Wible:

So um, this actually is a juvenile.

Matt Lamanna:

Yeah.

John Wible:

So this is not an adult, and the reason we know that is that there's a tooth in there that that is still forming. Oh wow, very cool. And in fact, you can see in the lower jaw that tooth is coming in. So, as with all marsupials, well, most marsupials, this actually has four molars.

Michael Pisano:

Okay.

John Wible:

And it's so you see these teeth at the back that look like carbon copies of each other. And so there are four there. There are only three here because the fourth has not come in. So in in life, this will be, as an adult, this would be a larger animal. So it's more dog-sized than it is fox-sized. Um, there was quite a bit of sexual dimorphism between males and females. And so the the females were probably like more dingo size, or maybe a little bit smaller than a dingo. And the males might have been a little bit bigger than a dingo. Now, one of the more amazing things about these animals is their gape. Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna bring that up if you didn't see. So, how wide can they open their mouth? They they go through 80 degrees. Oh wow. So, you know, here's 90 degrees, right? So they're opening their mouth about like that.

SPEAKER_03:

That's incredible.

John Wible:

Um, I meant to look up what we might be uh going, but I don't know. 45 degrees? Uh-huh. 60 maybe? I doubt maybe 60. But anyway, so the the predictions in terms of um, and and we also know what they ate because they humans were around.

Michael Pisano:

That's right. We even have uh film strip of these things.

Matt Lamanna:

We have films of things. I was gonna say there's a famous bit of footage that shows, I think it may have been the last Thylocene in captivity doing one of its full mouth gapes. That is that is the last one. Amazing to see the the gape of these things.

Michael Pisano:

And then my understanding is they're also nocturnal, right?

John Wible:

They were nocturnal, exactly.

Michael Pisano:

There's kind of this mystery around them, right? Like a dingo is maybe more of a known quantity, right? And it's also got a commensal relationship going back with humans. Exactly. Right. And this is a thing that's out there at night. It's got a funny big wide mouth that shows you all its teeth. Right. Um, my understanding is that the noise they made was a little bit stranger than maybe a canid, a dog.

John Wible:

Right. They don't really bark. There's no arf arf kind of thing.

Matt Lamanna:

Apparently they smelled pretty bad too. Yeah, I don't know where that where I'm getting that from. But they yeah, like they had a very distinct, I'm not smelled bad, but had a distinctive odor, supposedly.

John Wible:

So they they were they were very dog-like looking, but if you watch them move, if you watch these movies that are wonderful to see, they they had a very stiff tail. So if you think of your dog as being happy and it's wagging itself, their tail just sort of trailed behind them and they look very stiff at the back of the body, and it's the the back half of the body where there are stripes.

Matt Lamanna:

Um the rest of the the reason why the another name that people may have heard of them is Tasmanian tiger, they're sometimes referred to Tasmanian wolf, Tasmanian tiger, if that was another you know, nocturnal hunting, kind of scary, a man-eater, right?

Michael Pisano:

An animal with a narrative behind it that uh, you know, people I think want to keep at a distance or spin kind of a fear-based narrative around. Um, and so there is definitely part of this story that's about charisma and knowing an animal versus fearing what you don't know about an animal.

Matt Lamanna:

I remember reading the story of the Thalocene as a kid. I was growing, I grew up in the 80s. Um, and to me, over time, just because it was this absolutely remarkable animal that was, you know, evolutionarily speaking, something like a kangaroo trying to be a wolf, you know, um, this thing that had it is one of the most phenomenal examples of one of the most interesting phenomena in evolution to me, and that's convergence. You know, like different uh, you know, uh organisms from different ancestries evolving similar features because they're doing more or less the same job in the environment. And, you know, so here's an animal that that came from, you know, marsupial ancestors, was a marsupial itself, but yet evolved, as John said, you know, dog-like, wolf-like, um, uh, even tiger-like in some ways, characteristics. Uh, to me, it was the poster child for convergent evolution, um, which was fascinating to me. But it also, when I learned its story, also became the poster child for, you know, it wasn't called that back then, but Anthropocene Extinction for the Sixth Extinction. Um, and so I will go out on a limb here and reveal what a gigantic dork I am. But the first time I ever held a Thalosene skull was in my collaborator's lab in Australia in the in the late uh late 2000s, late 2000s. So I was already very much an adult and I cried because this animal to me is so uh meaningful that way. And and and um I think all the time about I was born in 1975, 1936, the last one. I missed it by what is that, 39 years? Um, and it became to me when I started talking about like teaching uh college students about the history of life when I was in grad school, I would always end on, you know, my class that I taught was Earth and Life Through Time, and I would always end on, you know, the sixth extinction, basically, and be like, look at this thing that I didn't miss by much, that you didn't miss by much, and now look at, you know, say a Sumatran rhino or a giant panda or any of these beautiful animals that are critically endangered. How will you feel to look your grandkids in the eye and say, I could have saved this, but I didn't know what it's like.

John Wible:

And uh talk about Australia. So Australia was this um continent that split off from Antarctica and the rest of Gondwana at some point historically. And the fauna, the mammal fauna that got into Australia before it split off was really dominated by animals today that we would call marsupials or marsupial relatives. Uh so today here in in western Pennsylvania, we do have marsupials. We have the Virginia opossum. Uh we're very lucky to have that, but the bulk of the diversity of living marsupials are either in Australia or in South America. Um, most mainly in Australia. So they're there, that's where the the vast, um the largest number of species would be in Australia. So historically, this animal was the well, it wasn't the top predator, but towards the end of the time when humans are starting to get in there, it was the top predator. There was a marsupial lion that was lion-size, that was the top predator, um, but they were knocked out as by a lot of the large fauna around the world, probably as a result of humans. Um here we are. So let's say we're about 3,000 years ago in Australia. Um there were Thylacenes. Uh they would have been the top predator. Uh they were actually in New Guinea as well. They were not just in Australia, and they were also in a large island that sticks off the southern border of Australia, that's an Australian state called Tasmania, about the size of West Virginia. Then what happened is now humans had already gotten to Australia. So there are a concept of two major waves of migration to Australia. There's one about 50,000 years ago, and then there's one that's more in the neighborhood of about 3,000 years ago. And the ones that were 3,000 years ago brought dogs with them. Dingoes, exactly. They brought dingoes with them. And so it's it the concept is that historically the dingos were seen as the culprits for the demise of the thyrocine on mainland Australia. And our views today are quite different on this. Um, it's it's again, we don't think there's one size fits all for everything. Certainly the dingoes were a contributing factor, humans were a factor. Um, but another big factor was actually climate change. Yeah, so so it turns out that um most people are familiar with the this um Pacific current called the El Nino current. And what happens is that the El Nino years make it very wet in the United States and North and South America, but they make it very dry in Australia. So it changes the air currents and ocean currents. Um there is some predictions that showed that during this time period, this 3,000-year time period, there were severe droughts in Australia. So that scene is a contributing factor. So the thylines, thylosines were actually quite diverse. There wasn't just one kind of thylosene, there were quite a number of different kinds of thylosines. But ultimately, by about 3,000 years ago, they were gone from mainland Australia and New Guinea. So their one refuge was in Tasmania. So now we have to go and look a little bit about Tasmania and what we know about Tasmania. So Tasmania was first uh discovered by Europeans in 1642.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

John Wible:

A guy by the name of Abel Tasman, who was a Dutch explorer. And it was actually named for the owner of the ship company that was Van Diemen's Land, doesn't it? It was Van Diemen's Land.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, Van Diemen's Land. Which is wonderful.

John Wible:

Actually, it was Anthony Van Diemen's Land. And it got shortened to Van Diemen's Land. So Anthony's Van Diemen Land. I mean, what a what a mouthful. When it was found, they didn't know it was an island. They actually, so it was just land. So they thought it was probably just part of Australia. And it wasn't for 150 years that somebody actually sailed around it and discovered that it was an island. Now it didn't get a name change to Tasmania until like the 1850s. Okay. And that was that was the Australian government or actually the British government that affected that change. So the first the first colonies in Tasmania date to 1803. And as with Australia, the major make of those colonies were convicts. So there was a heavy convict population that were the early colonists on Tasmania. And then by just within 20 years of the original colonies, there were about 12,000 people in Tasmania and 200,000 sheep.

Michael Pisano:

An important part of the story.

John Wible:

And that's an incredibly important part of the story.

Michael Pisano:

Before we get to that, can I quickly ask you what? So we're looking at the teeth right now, and I wonder what we know about their diet. Uh, because I think that there was a thought that perhaps they were eating sheep, but what do you actually think they were eating?

John Wible:

So, in terms of but people have done like um uh analyses that they look at the strength of the jaw and this and that, and there's no way that these things could have been eating sheep. They just they were solitary hunters. The dingoes were pack hunters, yeah. So the dingoes were going over, going after larger things than them because they were a pack hunter. The thylacenes were actually going for much smaller prey. And so, how this goes back to the to the story is that um you know very quickly the population went, the human population expanded, and the number of sheep farms expanded, and there was an incredible uh pressure first on the aboriginal population. So in the um 1820s and then into the early 1830s, there was something that became known as the Black War, where um the British colonists actually nearly totally wiped out the Aboriginal population. Uh, there are very few that were left at the end of that war. So we go back in terms of estimates of population size. So the first Europeans come in in 1803, the estimation of the Aboriginal population at that time was about 5,000. Similar estimates for the Philocene were about 5,000 at that time.

Michael Pisano:

For most of the time people lived there, Lutruita was connected to mainland Australia. Rising sea levels turned it into an island around 6,000 BCE, and genetic studies suggest that the Palawa were isolated for 8,000 years before European colonization. It's hard to conceive of 8,000 years, much less 40,000 years. The Pala's ancestors lived on Lutruita for at least 1,500 generations. They weathered two ice ages there. We know that they used fire to manage the land. We know that they made tools for many materials, including glass made in a meteorite impact. We know that Lutrovita had many cultures, each with their own myths and traditions and ways of relating to the land. If you want to learn more about the Palawa and Lutruita's history, we'll leave some links in the episode description.

John Wible:

So now we're gonna, you know, we're gonna change the total layout of the land in terms of the having all these sheep farms and farmers that are gonna be. Protective of their livelihood. And the thyosene started getting a bad rap as being something that you didn't want to have around. They likened it to a wolf. And so that there was a very active culling of thylosines. So initially there were bounties that were put on the thylosenes just by the farming, farming population. But in 1890, the Tasmanian government actually put a bounty on. So we start with 5,000, right? And by 1890, we're putting a bounty on, and they know that they paid out the bounty to over 2,000. So the numbers started really dwindling over time. And I I I hate to say it as a as a scientist, but the scientists actually have some culpability in this whole story. So if you go back and you read the entries about the Thylocene in the scientific literature, they are portrayed as wolf-like predators. And so they're sort of feeding into the hysteria that the sheep farmers and other farmers are having about these animals. And there was a very active um collecting uh effort on thylosen, as there was with everything during this time period. So there are thylosenes in about 115 institutions worldwide. We at the Carnegie have a single specimen that we know very little about. We got it from a donor in the early days of the museum. And it's just the it's just the bones. We have no skin associated with it. We don't even we just know it's from Tasmania. We have no additional information about it. Um but there are many museums, had many more, and when you count up what's in museums today, there's close to about 500.

Matt Lamanna:

Out of an original population of something like 5,000.

John Wible:

Yeah, so I mean, think about it. We we are we're giving 2,000 plus out as a bounty. We've got 500 that are ending up in scientific institutions like ours here, and so it was just not a sustainable thing.

Michael Pisano:

No, clearly. And so can you talk about the kind of final chapter of the science?

John Wible:

Right, so so it it became very clear, I think, to both the scientific community and to the world community that their numbers were dwindling. Um, they did try to keep them in zoos. Uh even in the West, they tried to keep them in zoos, but they were not very successful at that. So the last one, a female, died on September 7th, 1936. And that's actually a holiday in Australia. It's National Threatened Species Day.

Michael Pisano:

Um I wonder, though, kind of what lessons about biodiversity conservation you what did you take away from the thylosine story?

John Wible:

Well, one of the scary things to me about the thylosine story is that there is this very active effort to bring the thylosine back. So um there are several groups that are working on the genome of the thylosine. So in addition to um having bones at some museums, there are uh pouch young specimens, so juvenile specimens that are contained in alcohol. And they've been extracting DNA out of these specimens. And uh you see publications all the time are coming out about this. There's just a recent one from the Swedish group that extracted RNA, right?

Michael Pisano:

That got RNA out.

John Wible:

But the the very active thylosene restoration group is at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and um their goal is to bring the thylosine back. They're working with a uh a GenTe company in, I believe it's in Texas called Colossal. Colossal, yeah. They're also working on the colour. Who's also working on the merit. Yeah, exactly.

Matt Lamanna:

Yeah, and this is this is these are well-funded efforts. Yeah, yeah.

John Wible:

And and so to me, I mean, sure, I'd love to see a thylosine again, but I I would have thought that we'd learned some lessons about messing with the environment and bringing and bringing species to places where they weren't indigenous to begin with. So we've got the lantern fly here right now. We've got all these invasive plants. I mean, all these introduced species that change the dynamics of where you are.

SPEAKER_03:

Right.

John Wible:

Um, and so the thought of bringing the thyosine back, just you know, that they're spending a lot of money in this effort. And I've read all these comments online where it's like, wouldn't that money be better spent on trying to save things that are having problems rather than bringing back something? Um, so I I mean, I again I'd love to I'd be tickled pink to see a thylosine in life. Right. Um, but I don't think I that the effort is worth it to me given the circumstances right now. Sure.

Michael Pisano:

What do you think? I would widen this up to de-extinction in general.

Matt Lamanna:

I think I'm kind of like John. I I have sort of mixed feelings about it. I mean, for like a, you know, I would love to see a thylosine in the flesh. I would love to see a you know woolly mammoth in the flesh, I guess. But I also don't know enough about the science to know are these really these animals per se, or are they the closest we can do? You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah, but like, you know, they're gonna be hybrids. Exactly. To use a stupid example, but one that people will be familiar with, you know, in Jurassic Park, the yeah, the dinosaurs are mixed with frog DNA to fill in the gaps. And so they, you know, they use that as a plot device in some of the movies and things like that. But um, you know, but but to me, I I'm with John. I mean, I I um I'm not really against the extinction, so to speak. I mean, I I think it's it's you know, it's interesting and cool and it we might learn new things about these animals. Um uh and it would be, you know, I would say a pleasure again to see one in the flesh. But I totally agree that, you know, uh hopefully the two aren't mutually exclusive. You know, hopefully, hopefully there's enough resources out there to protect animals that are, you know, that are in danger and maybe do this. But you know, given one or the other, I would go, I would go with with saving what we've got.

Michael Pisano:

Aside from going you know, fully into genetic sci-fi territory and bringing extinct animals back uh and then figuring out what to do with them next, um, I wonder what kinds of action you would each like to see in the next chapter of conserving biodiversity on the planet.

Matt Lamanna:

Well, I mean, again, I'm not a conservation biologist, I'm a paleontologist. I mean, of course, emotionally, viscerally, like I want to see, you know, in you know, animals that are critically endangered and threatened, things like that, hopefully bounce back. I mean, we definitely, I think one thing that's important to remember is that with concerted effort, you can sometimes do this. I mean, there are there are there are you know stories of victories, you know, spread throughout conservation biology with animals that were thought to be too far gone. Um, you know, so I would say take what we've learned from those stories and continue to do more of the same. I think another critical thing, and the to the extent again I know about it, again, dinosaurs, um, is uh is it's important, it seems to be important to have um, you know, I mean, it's one thing to to you know to preserve, you know, to maintain populations in zoos and things like that, but it's another thing entirely if you want to, you know, successfully rewild, you know, you need to have adequate habitat habitat for these things to to live in. And I think oftentimes contiguous habitat spaces rather than these little fragments that we often get. And so, you know, I mean, I guess in my ideal world, you know, we we enact or continue to enact policies that you know that that make those kinds of nature reserves a reality.

unknown:

Excellent.

John Wible:

So for mammals, I mean, there's uh been a lot of stuff done in the state of Pennsylvania in terms of reintroduction of species that were no longer around. So we have the example of the river otter that was brought back. Uh, they're actually talking about bringing the marten back. Uh the fissure was brought back. And so you almost have to look on these as a case-by-case basis. You know, do you have the suitable habitats for them? Do you have the populations that you can pull from to reintroduce them? Um, you know, I don't think there's one size that's going to fit on all this story at all.

Michael Pisano:

Certainly not. Um, and you know, I think you just mentioned the term the Anthropocene extinction or the sixth extinction six X. Um, you know, it's commonly accepted that we're losing biodiversity at a rate now that is comparable with those past big mass extinctions like the dinosaur uh event. Um and in that context, I have often heard this phrase that I have kind of a bone to pick with. The idea that this time, you know, in this extinction event, humans are that destroyed. Humans are the super volcano. And um, yeah, I guess I just wonder what your reaction to that sentiment is.

Matt Lamanna:

Well, I mean, I definitely get the analogy. You know, I mean, we are uh seemingly the predominant force, you know. We not, you know, not people going out and hunting per se, usually, but the you know, but but but human activity is is the you know is seemingly the driver of of you know of of the sixth extinction, or at least a major driver, if not, if not the driver. That's not controversial. I feel okay. Okay, all right. Yeah, yes. I mean, I guess, I guess what I would say is, you know, I I I like that in the sense that it if you give agency to humans as the causal factor, that also means that you flip that on its head and say that we can do something about it too. And I think that what's really crucially important in talking about Anthropocene issues, especially the the dark side, you know, the darker issues such as you know, the sixth extinction or the extinction that we're in now, is you have to, you can't put your head in the sand, you know, bury your head in the sand, pretend if I don't think about it, it's gonna go away. Um, you know, you need to stay optimistic, to stay empowered, to, you know, to feel like you can do something about it, because nobody's gonna benefit if we if we all just throw our hands up in the air and say, oh, we're done, you know, we're toast, that's it. You know what I mean? Like, let's just give up and go party, drink margaritas or something. Um, it doesn't sound so bad. No, but um, exactly. But um, but the point being that like, you know, I think optimism uh in the face of the sixth extinction is important, you know, recognizing the victories again. You know, you could go down the list, California Condor, whooping crane, you know, whatever. Um uh that that you know have shown us that when we put our minds to it, we can make a difference. Absolutely.

Michael Pisano:

You kind of hit exactly on what I take umbrage with, with really just the literal uh phrasing of, you know, this time humans are the asteroid, is that an asteroid can't really be regenerative, right? I mean, except in the sense that sure, of the you know, from the ashes of the volcano eruption, eventually, yes, the carbon will nurture new life and all that. But no, I mean we just have agency, so I really appreciate you putting it that way. And it's like the same as when you know what people call human a virus, right? It's like that's just a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. It's a little defeatist, and I think it also says to me, and maybe this is a stretch that you know it's it's human nature that we are extractive, it's human nature that every person is, you know, a bad uh impact on the environment, where in reality it's not everybody, right? By a long shot, it's actually a minority of people doing very large, you know, industrial or militaristic or whatever. That's that's a whole other political side.

John Wible:

So I mean almost all animals interact or impact their environment in some way, shape, or form. But humans, obviously, en masse do it in a much greater magnitude than do individual animals.

Matt Lamanna:

But our we're a big energy-intensive organism and there are a lot of us.

John Wible:

And yet you would think that the collective we should be able to come to some uh you know agreement of how we want the future to look. And therefore, we should be able to work together to affect that future. So we change is going to be inevitable, but can we direct the change into places that are gonna save species or save environments or whatever? And yet it seems like we have a hard time talking to each other about simpler things than that. So I'm true, you know.

Michael Pisano:

Well, so I do I do really appreciate you bringing up the idea of kind of an orienting vision of a future that has seen some bigger successes, and so maybe that's what we can close out on today. I I do wonder what you imagine a hundred years from now, 50 years from now. What are some of the components of that, you know, let's call it utopian vision?

Matt Lamanna:

I want to ride a woolly mammoth to to work. Who doesn't? Yeah. Um I mean again, I I I would say that, you know, uh I'll stop short of of utopia. I mean, that that's uh that would be incredible. But um, you know, just saying that again, we've we've learned from our past mistakes and and you know, I mean, we can't, we we will not be able to save everything because some things are already extinct. Um, but you know, hopefully we'll live in a world where people are more apt to cooperate with each other to, you know, to to mitigate the damage that we've you know that we've caused. I mean, I think that without getting, well, I will get philosophical again. I think somebody once said, and I don't remember who said this, but I it it's a quote that resonated with me a long time ago. And it's something to the effect of you know, no species in the history of the planet has been capable of such horrific acts and such beautiful acts. You know what I mean? And I think that you know, hopefully we'll lean into the beautiful side and and do what we can to kind of fix this.

Michael Pisano:

I'd love to live up to that.

Matt Lamanna:

Yeah.

John Wible:

I don't think I have anything to add to that.

Michael Pisano:

That's well said. And when it's well said, that can be plenty.

Matt Lamanna:

You know, it's never too late. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, it doesn't, there is no finite end date. You know what I mean?

Michael Pisano:

It's no, and I think harm reduction is a very valid approach to take, right? It doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to bemoan that we couldn't save everything. We should save what we can, though. And that's people, that's places, that's non-humans, that's the whole thing.

Matt Lamanna:

It's just like life. You celebrate the victories and try to learn from them but the defeats, you know.

Michael Pisano:

Alleviate a little suffering if you can. It's a pretty it's a pretty cool mission. So thank you both so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time and getting to see these amazing uh parts of the Carnegie's collections.

Matt Lamanna:

Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks very much, Michael. It's been a real pleasure.

Michael Pisano:

250,000 thanks to John and Matt for inviting us into the Carnegie's Mammal Invertebrate Paleontology collections, and to the many items therein for lessons in robustness, resilience, and wonder. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Slum McCrae. It's recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music. Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items, and Garrick Schmidt and Michael Pizzano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.