Oh, hey, it's your neighbor's Wi-Fi network that shows up as New England clam router,

Allie Ward, and we are biting up just enough to chew about ancient animal anatomy, particularly

little weird teeth. I know you never knew that you needed to know about this, and it's wild,

it's fascinating, I promise you, it's like a little corner of the earth in time you'd never

otherwise imagine, unless you are this

ologist or one of their colleagues, paleontologists who study fossilized prehistoric tissue samples.

I love this. This ologist, an old friend, I met on the internet on Twitter, ye old Twitter,

and someone who was always on hand to help identify a bone who popularized the hashtag guess the skull and loves the history of bones.

They were born in Morocco. They grew up in Egypt and moved to Canada as a preteen, then did undergrad in premed at the University of Toronto before getting a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology there, studying animal

jawbones. Then they got their PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin and as a postdoc at the

University of Chicago has already published several papers, including the 2025 Nature Paper,

the origin of vertebrate teeth and evolution of sensory exoskeletons that's like shaking up the

fossil world. And in addition to being a professional paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist,

there are also a celebrated science communicator who says that they love finding creative

ways to make science accessible, weird, and wonderful for everyone, which this episode does so

much. So we're going to get into it in a minute, but first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who make it possible, and they send in hilarious and thoughtful questions before we record. Thank you to everyone out there supporting the show by wearing our merch from ologiesmerch.com. As a reminder, also we have a shorter kid-friendly episodes suitable for all ages and classroom

safe. And those are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're available in their own feed,

wherever you get podcasts, you can subscribe. And thanks to everyone who leaves reviews of the show

and to provide evidence that I do read them all. Thank you to recent reviewer Coco reads books,

who said that ologies, quote, can make the most obscure, weird topic super interesting.

Coco, you have no idea. We're about to do it again. Okay, paleo histology. It comes from

words for old tissues, and the histo in tissues comes from an older Greek word that means web. And I was in Chicago a few

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