Ben Garrod on conservation and extinction
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Garrod is an obsessive bone collector and wild animal behaviourist. He was destined for a career in medicine but a chance encounter with primatologist Jane Goodall reignited his life long passion for conservation and led to him managing and researching the habituation of wild chimpanzees in Africa. It was a chance to record primate behaviour that had never been seen before and examine how resilient chimps can be to anthropogenic change. Further extraordinary insights into the speed of evolution through the clues in the bones of island monkeys was to follow.
He is a professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia and the presenter of several landmark TV series on animal bones and extinction, such as The Secrets of Bones and most recently, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard. Ben shares his passion for the contrasting insights into conservation and extinction, the value they play, and describes his own extraordinary journey from exploring animal remains washed up on Norfolk beaches to years spend tracking chimps in Uganda to eminent science communicator and public figure.
Producer Adrian Washbourne
Transcript
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| 0:47.3 | Hello, I'm Jim Arkelyley, and this is the Life Scientific. The deal is, I get to talk to some of |
| 0:53.1 | the amazing men and women who are trying to understand our world and to make it a better place, |
| 0:58.6 | and you get to find out what makes them get out of bed in the morning. |
| 1:02.7 | My guest today has had more than a few skeletons in his closet. In fact, his house has been packed |
| 1:08.4 | with hundreds of the things. He's the ultimate bone collector with a passion for finding, |
| 1:13.0 | stripping, cleaning, and mounting them, and that's just in his spare time. Ben Garrett is a biologist, |
| 1:18.8 | conservationist, and a professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of |
| 1:24.6 | East Anglia. He's also an author, broadcaster, and TV presenter. And the glue that ties all these |
| 1:31.0 | disparate threads together, he says, it's his love of teaching and finding the engaging narrative |
| 1:36.4 | to a piece of scientific research. As a primatologist, Ben has spent over a decade observing the |
| 1:42.1 | relationships between animals and humans in a bid to understand the natural world and our place |
| 1:47.4 | within it. And he's a firm believer that getting to know an individual animal can teach you about |
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