Welcome listener to the 231st premium chapter of the QAA podcast, the Mudfossil PhD episode.

As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky.

Julian Fields and Travis View.

For years now, Roger Spur had been a faceless voice.

His hands gesturing in a monitor, pointing with a bird's feather to some

geological feature on Google Maps, or clutching a rock he believed to be the organ of a giant.

But recently, for the first time ever, he started revealing his face in his YouTube videos.

Roger is a friendly looking man who appears to be in his 60s,

clean shaven with large ears, light eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, and a thinning head of bronze-patched gray hair.

He could easily be a member of my family, or perhaps in 20 or 30 years, a version of myself.

It was disarming. I had half expected him to display some unusual feature that might make

material the quirks of his mind. A man obsessed with the hidden lives of sediment. Here a dragon's

maw, there a giant's toe, traces of ancient biblical battles, great apocalypses congealed in rock.

It was strange to find myself confronted with a touchingly ordinary man. Whatever warp of the

mind had caused Roger Spur to become the founder and singular force behind Mudfossil University,

surely it was absent-mindedly placed there by a god we shared. And in recent days I had felt like

one of Roger's mud-bound giants coagulated and dispersed, pressed thin, subjugated by the past.

What had drawn me to scrutinize Roger once more, cutting clips of his videos, preparing a

third episode about this strange man and his obsessions, and would either of us find what we

were looking for. Now, for those who are unfamiliar, Mudfossil University is a YouTube channel showcasing

the loose and sprawling lessons of some say Professor Roger Spur. There you can, in his words,

learn about the true nature of rocks, even the ones in space, recent DNA verified mud fossils

...