This TED Talk features paleobiologist Lauren Salon, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.

Paleontology, a science geared towards small children, focused on digging up dinosaurs while supporting a Jurassic Park costume.

Skulls are popped out of the ground and put on display for public gawking.

The relevance of this beyond clickbait coloring books and monster movies is unknown.

No, wait.

That's not paleontology at all.

Paleontology is nothing less than the study of past life, all past life, from ancestors to alien forms.

It involves fundamental questions like, who are we, and how did we get here, using the broadest possible definition of we,

life itself? Dinosaurs, a category of birds, are just a small percentage of that. Yet they get

the most media attention. Anyway, most of us paleontologists consider dinosaurs to be a gateway drug.

There is so much cooler stuff in the fossil record, and we know so much about it.

Let's go on a brief dinosaur-free tour of the last four billion years. First up, genetic material, viruses basically,

started producing proteins and wrecking their environment. The earth was infected with life.

Some of these new bacteria learned how to eat sunshine, producing oxygen, pulling in carbon from the air,

and destroying the iron food of other microbes by turning it into rust.

This went on for billions of years.

Some bacteria consumed other bacteria, gaining their power to turn oxygen into energy, becoming the precursors

of animals and plants. But as a result, there were climate shocks, from hot to cold and back

again, which ended up turning the earth into a snowball covered with glaciers. The technical

term for this time period is snowball Earth.

700, 800 million years ago. Anyway, microbes banded together, creating multicellular life.

600 million years ago, geometric colonies appeared, sucking microbes from the water.

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