Bad Days in the Field: Stories about fieldwork frustrations
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2018
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we bring you two stories about frustrations in the field, whether it's a failure to find dinosaur fossils or a struggle with a painful medical condition. Part 1: Paleontologist David Evans and his team start to feel defeated after three days of searching fruitlessly for fossils. Part 2: When cave geologist Gabriela Marks Serrato develops fibromyalgia, exploring caves becomes a challenge. David C. Evans holds the Temerty Chair in Vertebrate Palaeontology and oversees dinosaur research at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. David is an Ontario-born researcher who is recognized as an authority on the rich dinosaur fossil record of Canada. As a curator, David helped develop the ROM's dinosaur galleries, and was Lead Curator of the major travelling exhibition Ultimate Dinosaurs. He has been featured on numerous television shows, and most recently, David was co-creator of the HISTORY series Dino Hunt Canada. David’s research focuses on the evolution, ecology and diversity of dinosaurs, and their relationship to environmental changes leading up to the end Cretaceous extinction event. Active in the field, he has participated in expeditions all over the world, including the Africa, Mongolia, and Canada, and has helped discover 10 new dinosaur species in the last five years- including the remarkable horned dinosaur Wendiceratops from southern Alberta, and the wickedly armoured Zuul named after the Ghostbusters movie monster. Gabriela Serrato Marks is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, where she works with stalagmites from Mexico. She fell in love with rocks and the ocean while getting her B.A. in Earth and Oceanographic Science from Bowdoin College. Her current research focuses on archives of past rainfall and climate change. Outside of research, she is interested in issues of diversity and inclusion in STEM, hanging out with her cat, and growing tiny squash in her parents’ garden.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | It felt... |
| 0:08.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:20.0 | Hi everybody. Welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:28.2 | I am your host, Aaron Barker, and this week we're presenting stories about frustrations in the field. |
| 0:35.0 | Our first story is from David Evans. |
| 0:37.0 | It was recorded in September 2017 at the Transact Club in Toronto as part of Science Literacy |
| 0:43.3 | Week. |
| 0:48.3 | It was day three of our South African expedition, and our spirits were remarkably low, |
| 0:58.0 | but we thought we would give Rui Dry another chance. |
| 1:01.0 | Now, three days doesn't sound like very long, but it seemed like I've been over every damn inch of this tiny rocky outcrop at least ten times. |
| 1:10.0 | My supervisor Robert Rice, a self-proclaimed Renaissance paleontologist, and the rest of the |
| 1:16.1 | crew surely felt the same way. |
| 1:18.5 | Now, it's true, our South African colleagues thought we were crazy from mounting an expedition |
| 1:22.4 | to this tiny road cut in the foothills of the Drakensburg Mountains. |
| 1:26.6 | They said, we take geology field schools up |
| 1:28.9 | there all the time, and we've never found anything, but you're more than welcome to try. And nothing's |
... |
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