This TED Talk features paleobiologist Lauren Salon, recorded live at TED 2017.

Congratulations. By being here, listening alive, a member of a growing species,

you are one of history's greatest winners, the culmination of a success story,

four billion years in the making.

You are life's 1%.

The losers, the 99% of species who have ever lived are dead,

killed by fire, flood, asteroids, predation, starvation, ice heat, and the cold math of natural selection.

Your ancestors, back to the earliest fishes, overcame all these challenges.

You are here because of golden opportunities made possible by mass extinction.

It's true.

The same is true of your co-winners and relatives, the 34,000 kinds of fishes.

How did we all get so lucky?

Will we continue to win?

I am a fish paleobiologist who uses big data, the fossil record, to study how some species

win and others lose.

The living can't tell us.

They know nothing but winning, so we must speak with the dead.

How do we make dead fish's talk?

Museums contain multitudes of beautiful

fish fossils, but their real beauty emerges when combined with the larger number of ugly,

broken fossils and reduced to ones and zeros. I control a 500 million year database for evolutionary

patterns.

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