Dr. Jen Bauer
Victoria:
Our guest this week is Dr. Jen Bauer. Dr. Bauer is a research museum collections manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. Her job involves caring for over 2 million fossil specimens from tiny microfossils to large ammonites, interacting with the local community around paleontology, and creating virtual fossils on UM’s online fossil repository, which we have a link to in the description of this episode. She got her Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Biology, her Master of Science in Geology from Ohio University, and her PhD from the University of Tennessee in Geology.
She is interested in understanding the family tree of the ancient relatives of sea stars and sea urchins. Once she knows the family tree, she can ask bigger questions such as how did these animals move around through time? Did they only live in one place or many? Did they like certain habitats more than others?
In her spare time, she curates a website called Time Scavengers, which is also linked in the description where she creates content about geology and paleontology and shares her experiences as a scientist.
This week’s questions were submitted by the listeners through emails and on social media and by students at Bromwell Elementary in Denver, Colorado.
Dr. Bauer. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. I’m excited to chat about my job and research with you all.
Victoria:
Is there anything you’d like to add about what you do, or should we jump into the questions?
Dr. Bauer:
No, I think that was excellent. We can jump into the questions.
Victoria:
(Myah – How do you keep track of 2 million fossils? I would lose count.)
Okay. Awesome. So this first question comes from Myah. How do you keep track of 2 million fossils? I would lose count.
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, that’s a very good question, Myah. So, that we do have a database and a physical card catalog. So information written on small cards that I can look through to figure out what specimens that we have. And we have a digital database that isn’t really finished, so we don’t have quite all of the specimens in it yet, but I’m working on editing that now. So the idea is that we have a digital space to search for very specific specimens. But I don’t know where everything is. So it’s a bit of a mystery every time I go to work.
Victoria:
(Eddie – Why do you have so many fossils?)
This is a good follow-up question to that from Eddie. Why do you have so many fossils?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So we’re a research museum, so we’re not necessarily open to the public. But you can, if you make an appointment with myself or a colleague, you can come and visit and see the specimens that we have. But in many cases, researchers or scholars are coming to look at very specific things that we have.
And these specimens have been collected over hundreds of years by many different people. And the idea is that it holds animals that are specific to our region. So we have a lot of Michigan material that is from the Devonian, which is a major time period that we have a lot of rock outcrop from. So we have very special fossils from that time period that you won’t find at other institutions, such as Devonian corals. So we have a very good coral collection because we had really good coral workers that were working at the university for a long time. And they went out and collected these things and brought them back. And so by making them accessible in our space, other people can come and study the same corals.
So there is a method to collecting all of these things over time, and it’s not really active anymore. So we don’t go out and target specific things to bring back. Unless we’re looking to grow the collection in a very certain way. So things are a little bit more calculated now. So we’re not growing quite on the caliber that we once were.
Victoria:
(Dustin – Where do you store all the fossils?)
Cool. And a good follow-up to that too comes from Dustin. Where do you store all of the fossils?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. So this is another great question, cause it’s hard to imagine. We’re so used to seeing museum specimens on display. But it’s hard to imagine how they live when they’re not on display.
And so I have about, I think over 570 cabinets, and inside each cabinet, there’s 15 to 20 drawers, and in those drawers are boxes, and sometimes there’s many specimens in a box and sometimes it’s just one. So on average, each cabinet has about a thousand specimens in it, maybe more, depending on how small they are or how large they are. So each of them has like a special home in one of these cabinets.
And we keep them organized in a couple of different ways: specimens that have been published on or in the literature in some way are in a special aisle; specimens that maybe we’re on display or we’re talked about in papers that may be not figured are in another part of the collection; and then about 75% is ordered by essentially how it appears in the rock record, so we call that the stratigraphic collection, and there’s a lot of hidden wonders in the stratigraphic collection because it’s not very well organized. So every time you look through a drawer you find lots of really cool specimens.
Victoria:
(Kylan – How many fossils are on display in the museum? How do you choose from the 2 million how many to show?)
Oh, that’s awesome. A good follow-up to that since you mentioned display. Kylan wants to know how many fossils are on display in the museum? How do you choose from the 2 million how many you show?
Dr. Bauer:
Yes. Another really good and difficult question. So there are some specimens that we cannot put on display, and these are the most important ones. Because those are the things that researchers come specifically to look at. So we don’t want them to be on display where maybe they could be damaged depending on the lighting or by mounting them. So those don’t often go on display.
I think the general kind of number is that less than 1% of every collection is on display. So of 2 million fossils, that’s still like an absurd number. So it’s not quite that high. There’re definitely several thousand specimens on display in our public museum. But that also goes between, like we have several collections. So I focus on the things that don’t have spines, so all the shelly creatures. My colleague Adam cares for all of the things that have spines and so vertebrates, like mastodons, mammoth, sharks, whales, and then he also cares for all of our plants. So we have lots of different collections, kind of all in one space.
And typically, what we look for when we’re thinking about display is can people tell what this animal was by looking at the fossil? Cause if it’s a fragment or it’s been cracked, it can be really hard to imagine what the fossil looked like. So we want to make sure that it makes sense to people looking at it. So we try to find things that are visually appealing, so that would grab people in; that look really cool but are also easy to like mount or situate in a way that you can see it very easily. Cause kind of getting stuff ready for display can be pretty tricky.
Victoria:
(Amy – Did you find all 2 million fossils or did other people?)
Awesome. That makes sense. And then one more question about all the 2 million fossils. Amy wants to know, did you find all 2 million fossils or did other people?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. So those have been collected over very long time. And so I think the museum has been around in its current form since the 1920s. So that’s like the oldest loan documentation I can find of people sharing fossils between different institutions. So back then people would collect a lot of stuff and all sorts of different things. So we really been collecting a lot of very cool specimen for a very long time. And every so often you find very famous people’s names or a specimen that you didn’t know was in the collection. And it’s very exciting to rediscover such lost artifacts.
Victoria:
(Tyrell – What’s the biggest fossil you’ve seen?)
(Izzy – What’s the smallest fossil you’ve seen?)
That’s pretty cool. All right. Some other fossil related questions. This is a pair of questions that go together. The first one is from Tyrell: what’s the biggest fossil you’ve seen? And the second question is from Izzy: what’s the smallest fossil you’ve seen?
Dr. Bauer:
So the biggest fossil I’ve seen. So you have to remember that skeletons are held together by fleshy bits that are soft. So we have muscles and tissues that hold together all of our bones. But when we find fossils in the rock record, you’re only seeing these hard parts. So just the bone material or the teeth. So. Even though I’ve seen like big specimens, usually you just see parts of big specimens. So I have seen almost a complete sauropod, so long neck dinosaur. I mounted it in the collection space at the Cincinnati Museum Center. So as they were preparing the fossil and fixing it up, so it could go on display, they had mounted different aspects of it in a very large room. And it was really cool. But usually I just see like a really big leg bone or like a shoulder blade of a mammoth. But those are, you know, pieces of these very large animals.
And for the smallest also. So I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time picking microfossils. So microfossils can be plankton, so very small floaty creatures that live in the ocean; or they can be pollen, so plants spores; or they could even be teeth, just like very small versions of animals. So how you collect this is you could go out to whatever time period you’re interested in, figuring out where you need to go and collect just the kind of sandy sediment that’s around the outcrop. And then when you get back to the lab, you can pick through under a microscope and see what you’ve found.
So I was very interested for a while in thinking about the growth of animals. And I was confused because people have talked about this with the group that I studied for a long time, but they ignore the very, very teeny tiny essentially larval stage of these animals, probably because it’s tiny and nobody wants to pick through, little pieces of sand for long periods of time, but the smallest ones were less than a quarter of a millimeter. So that’s very, very tiny. You could use a paintbrush to pick them out of a group, but essentially smaller than a grain of sand. But it’s really cool when you identify them. And there’s lots of people that do this for a living. And microfossils are very, very important. Can think about climate, environments, all sorts of really big questions.
Victoria:
(Tristan – What’s your favorite fossil?)
Awesome. And now another, maybe a difficult follow-up question to that. Tristan wants to know what’s your favorite fossil.
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. When you had sent me these questions, I was able to answer all of them, but this one.
Victoria:
Oh, man.
Dr. Bauer:
I thought about it for a while, and I have like different categories of favorites, I guess.
So my favorite fossil that I think about a lot would be called Cryptoschisma. So this is the animal group that I study. The most common one is pentremites, it looks like a rose bud with nice beautiful pedal structures on it. But Cryptoschismais a weird weird one. It looks like a golf tee with a flower kind of pasted on top. And they were kind of like mud stickers. So they would, they didn’t have roots. They just kind of stuck into the ground, and they have little arms to help them feed in the water. They’re from the Devonian of Spain. They’re very beautiful.
Victoria:
Awesome. Do you have a picture of a reconstruction of one that I can put in the description of the episode?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. Yeah. I can send you one.
Victoria:
(Emily – Do you have any dinosaur fossils?)
Okay, awesome. So you’ll be able to see it in the link, in the description of the episode.
This next question is from Emily. Do you have any dinosaur fossils?
Dr. Bauer:
Yes, we do. So one of the faculty curators that works for the museum, he studies dinosaurs. His name is Dr. Jeff Wilson. Some of his students are studying sauropods; some are studying ancient crocodile like animals; others are studying pterosaurs. So he studies a lot of big animals from a long time ago. So he had recently brought over some pieces. So remember we don’t get the whole sauropod. So they’re kind of laid out on one of our tables in the lab.
But dinosaurs were not very common on this half of the United States. So we don’t have too many.
Victoria:
(Theo – Can sea urchins hurt you with their spikes?)
That makes sense. All right. Let’s get into some questions more about what you study. Theo wants to know, can sea urchins hurt you with their spikes?
Dr. Bauer:
That’s a good question. I meant to look up if any of them have are poisonous, but to my knowledge, sea urchins will not harm you. I wouldn’t recommend stepping on them. I imagine that would hurt. So their skeletons are made up of a calcium carbonate, and when it breaks, it can break into kind of sharp pieces. So there is the potential to be injured, but they’re not going to come after you with their spikes. They’re mostly meant to help move around.
Victoria:
(Elliot – Why are they called sea stars and not star fish?)
Elliot wants to know why are they called sea stars and not star fish?
Dr. Bauer:
So this is just a language kind of issue. So I try to say sea stars because they’re not fish. So starfish is kind of a misnomer. And it’s better, I think, to try to stick to what they actually are. But colloquially people call them starfish or sea stars, either is perfectly acceptable.
Victoria:
(Richie – What do sea stars eat?)
All right. Good to know. Another question about sea stars or starfish. Richie wants to know what do sea stars eat?
Dr. Bauer:
Yes, this is a fun question. So sea stars and sea urchins are actually active predators. So they move around, which is not something that all a kind of various groups would do, but they seek out their food. And sea stars in particular are very interesting because they have a stomach and they can push their stomach out to grab prey and bring it back to them. So you may see them eating small fish or opening clams and trying to eat them. But I highly recommend YouTubing seastar or starfish eating because it’s an extraordinary thing.
Victoria:
(Anabelle – How is climate change affecting sea stars and sea urchins?)
Yeah, that’s awesome. We’ll make sure to get a good YouTube video to put in the description of the episode.
Anabelle wants to know how is climate change affecting sea stars and sea urchins?
Dr. Bauer:
So very good and relevant question, Anabelle. So people have studied sea urchins quite a bit for this reason. And it seems like they are something that people call disaster taxa. So if there’s some sort of catastrophic event, and it really hurts the ecosystem and the animals living in there. Sea urchins are one of the first things to come in there and kind of take over. They tend to live in big kind of colonies which maybe is about how they reproduce. They kind of put their gametes into the water and see how things settle out. So there might end up being many of a single species in an area. It would become a problem probably with overpopulation or taking up space for other animals. So they would actually probably be a problem.
Climate change is certainly affecting the amount of habitats they can live in. But they don’t have as extreme temperature sensitivity. They do have very strict salinity rules: so the amount of salt that’s in the body of water. So they always live in marine or ocean environments. They do not live in freshwater environments. So, depending on what goes on in the future, if salinity starts to be affected, then the echinoderm like sea stars or sea urchins will have a lot of trouble. If you look in like tidal areas, maybe you’ll see some close to the beach. But what sea stars do is essentially hold their breath if they’re in a tidal area. So they’ll suck in a bunch of sea water and just wait for the tide to come back so that they can be carried back out to the ocean. It’s pretty interesting.
Victoria:
(Linzi – How did you get interested in sea urchins and sea stars?)
Whoa. I didn’t know they could do that. That’s awesome. Okay.
This next question is from Linzi. How did you get interested in sea urchins and sea stars?
Dr. Bauer:
So I actually was not interested in them at first. I was interested in brachiopods. They’re a good group of animals to ask detailed questions about, because they’re very common in the rock record. They look kind of like clams that they’re very different. They’ve got two shells in that regard though. So after I did my masters project on brachiopods, I realized that I was more interested in evolution and thinking about how things are related to one another. And the group that I worked on mattered a lot less. So there’s not a lot of people that work on thinking about evolution on the timescales of hundreds of millions of years with groups that are not alive today. So I didn’t have a lot of options for groups to change to. So echinoderm just kind of happened into my life. But there are really diverse and exciting groups. So I’m definitely happy that I made the shift.
Victoria:
(Jane – How far back do you go when looking at their family tree? Millions of years? Thousands of years?)
And a good follow-up to that comes from Jane. How far back do you go and looking at the family tree? Millions of years? Thousands of years?
Dr. Bauer:
So it’s actually hundreds of millions of years. So the group that I focus on the most are called the blastoids. Blastoids simply means bud-like: all of their tightly sutured bodies look like little rose buds. And they lived from about 400, 450 to 250 million years ago. So that’s kind of the timeframe that I’m working in, a timescale that I’m working on. So it’s a long time ago, but that also means that there really isn’t a right or wrong answer. We’re just asking questions and trying to get information to help us better understand the group. So there’s a lot less pressure when you’re working so long ago.
Victoria:
(Max – How do you figure out what the family tree looks like?)
That’s good. Okay. Max wants to know, how do you figure out what the family tree looks like?
Dr. Bauer:
This is a complicated question, Max. So I’ll try to explain it pretty easily.
So what I do is I look at specimens. I take information on what we know about how their bodies grow, and how they’re related to other groups of animals. And I pick out specific characteristics. So like we have two eyes, we have nose, you’ve got two ears, 10 fingers. So I find similar characteristics on these blastoids. And then I can construct kind of like a character matrix. And this is just a table and I have information about what each specimen has in terms of its features.
And then I can use a computer program. And I can pick a model, and the model that I pick will take the data that I input and it will look at all of the different possibilities and see the potential probabilities over all the information that I give it. And then it exports or gives me back a specific answer. Usually it’s a couple answers or thousands of answers, so I can summarize it or I can look through each of them individually.
But the idea is this is my way of trying to reconstruct something that lived long, long ago. So it’s just one hypothesis of all of the possibilities. So there’s never an exact answer when we’re looking for this stuff, but there are ways that we can make it better. We can try different models and compare them and see maybe depending on the type of information we input, we might get a different answer. So there’s a lot of reliance on computers to help with some of the actual data crunching.
Victoria:
That’s good. That would be hard to do without the computers.
Dr. Bauer:
It would.
Victoria:
(Stasia – Where do sea urchins and sea stars live? Is that where they always lived?)
Alright. Stasia wants to know where do sea urchins and sea stars live? Is that where they’ve always lived?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah. So I kind of touched on this a little bit before. So they all live in the ocean, so they need that salt water to live. They can’t really do very well without it. Some live in kind of like close to the shore, but they still get the influence of the ocean. So they’re living kind of on the fringe.
But that hasn’t really changed through time. Some groups expanse: the snails live everywhere, they live in trees, they live in rivers, they live in the ocean, they don’t really care. But echinoderm they care a lot. Depending on what the oceans used to look like, they would live in different places. So the world has changed a lot in the last 500 million years. So they move with the continents as they’ve kind of shifted through time. But they’ve always been in the oceans.
Victoria:
(Kayla – Do you look at DNA of sea urchins?)
Awesome. The next question comes from Kayla. Do you look at DNA of sea urchins?
Dr. Bauer:
So I do not look at DNA, so I only look at morphology: so the shapes that we can see on the animals. I do have a friend who studies specifically the DNA of sea urchins. I think it’s called like paleogenomics. So he takes information from the genomes and the DNA of sea urchins that are alive today. And you can use that information with the morphological information to ask questions with like a combined approach. So there are lots of ways to do that. I do not do them though.
Victoria:
(Rex – What is your favorite sea urchin? What is your favorite sea star?)
That’s cool. Okay. This next question is from Rex. This is kind of a fun one, I think. What is your favorite sea urchin? And what is your favorite sea star?
Dr. Bauer:
Yes, this was a good question. So for sea urchins, I would have to say Spatangoida. So these are a type of heart urchin, they look like little hearts and they’re just so cute. They have like this little butt almost. It gets me every time I open a drawer and I see them in it. They’re just, they’re very adorable. They burrow. So they have like this irregular heart shape because that’s like the direction which they move and you want your butt to be not where you’re feeding. So it’s got a little bud at the end and it kind of wiggles through the sand and eats sediment and gets its nutrients. They’re very cute.
Sea star is a bit trickier because they fall apart almost immediately after they die. And they’re made up of millions of pieces. So if you ever go to the beach, pick up some sand a lot of it will be pieces of echinoderm that have rapidly fallen apart after they’ve died.
And there are some very beautiful examples of sea stars being buried alive which is a little bit morbid, but in those instances, we get to see the entire skeleton and how it was put together. And the information that we can get from that is just so astounding. We have some really pretty ones from the Devonian of Michigan that I could also send you some pictures of. It’s so rare when you find them all together. All of them are my favorite when you find them complete.
Victoria:
(Ann – How did you make a website?)
Awesome. Yeah, we’ll put those pictures in the description of the episode.
Okay. Switching gears a little bit. Ann wants to know, how did you make your website?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, so I use Word Press, and you need to have somewhere to host your website and also do like the editing for the domain name and stuff. So there’s like a couple of different pieces to starting up a website, but there’s lots of templates and lots of free platforms to do this now. And knowing a little bit of HTML never hurts. but you can just Google, how do I do this in HTML and it will tell you. The internet is very good and HTML is one of those kinds of easy languages.
But I think it’s important to have, like if someone Googles me, my website will come up and then they know how to contact me. Cause sometimes you want to know something or you read something in a paper or you hear someone’s name, but then if you can’t find them to follow up, it can be very frustrating. And then maybe you don’t learn that information.
Victoria:
(Sophie – Do you have any pets?)
Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, switching gears. We got some more questions about you. Sophie wants to know. Do you have any pets?
Dr. Bauer:
I do. I have three cats. One is 11, another is six, and then we have a young kitten who just turned one.
Victoria:
Cute.
Dr. Bauer:
They’re very cute.
Victoria:
Oh, my cat is 11 too.
Dr. Bauer:
Aw…
Victoria:
(Riley – Did you always want to be a paleontologist?)
Okay, next question. Riley wants to know, did you always want to be a paleontologist?
Dr. Bauer:
No. So I did not know that that was a career path. I started out undergraduate as a biology major. I was just generally interested in life and nature and how things work. And so I just decided to do an undergraduate in biology. And then my last year, the spring semester of course, the last moment I took an upper level biology course. That was paleontology. It was cross-listed between departments. And it was so fun.
The second day of class, I went to the professor and I was like, how do I become you? How do I become a paleontologist? And he offered me a job, which was very generous. And I worked in his lab, and I stayed around for an extra year to get a minor and do some intro to geology courses, so that I wouldn’t be so far behind if I was able to get into a master’s program. And he definitely paved the way for me. So I had no idea what I was doing, and I had no idea how move forward. But he kind of guided me. He gave me projects. He also gave me flexibility. He just would give me like a connect-a-set and some tools. And he said, here’s the end result that we should try to get to and figure out how to get there. So it was just like a giant puzzle. And I was like, this is awesome. So I would just sit there and I was like soldering and I was playing with a force gauge and doing all these crazy things, even had me drawing for a while. And I’m not very artistic. But all of those are really good experience and he helped me find graduate programs that would be good for me. And I didn’t have it very good GPA cause I had kind of a hard time adjusting to college at first. So having someone who was able to vouch for my abilities as a researcher was really important for me to kind of move on cause it can be very difficult when you don’t have, you know, good GPA to back it up.
Victoria:
But it’s great to know that that’s still possible and you can still have a wonderful career.
Dr. Bauer:
Yes, it’s definitely possible.
Victoria:
(Kiera – What is your favorite thing about being a paleontologist?)
Another thing about being a paleontologist, Kiera wants to know what is your favorite thing about being a paleontologist?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, so I kind of touched on this before, but I think my favorite thing and possibly the coolest thing is that everything is just continually changing. So we have data. These are the fossil specimens and they have sat in museums for hundreds and hundreds of years, and we’re still using them to ask sometimes the same question, but in different ways or with different technology. And sometimes we get the same answer, but sometimes we learn something completely different. And I think that that is the coolest thing is that you can publish something and you can be like, I’m pretty sure this is it. And then three years later it could be like, I was totally wrong. I can’t believe it. How did I miss this? But like, it’s just because you start thinking about things in different ways and that’s like perfectly okay, because the fossils can’t tell us what happened. So we have to kind of act as super sleuths and figure out what happened hundreds of millions of years ago. So it’s like being a detective for a very long time.
Victoria:
(Sheamus – Who is your favorite paleontologist, alive or dead?)
That’s awesome. Sheamus wants to know who is your favorite paleontologist, alive or dead?
Dr. Bauer:
This was a very difficult question for me, so I thought about it a lot. So Mary Anning is kind of like the common go to – she was a pioneer for women in paleontology. There was a book not too long ago, written on Dorothea Bate, which was really great. Another pioneer, someone who just fought and fought and fought and did field work in like dresses and it’s outrageous to think about what they had to go through.
But I think my answer is instead going to be a persona. So it’s not an individual, but it’s a type of person. So I think a lot of people can fall into this category, but someone who really loves to share knowledge and will stop whatever they’re doing to just explain something to you, whoever you may be, maybe you’re on a plane, you’re on the sidewalk, you’re at the bus station. Learning in weird places is one of my favorite things.
And then someone who asks really interesting questions. So questions that take time to think about, or that maybe you didn’t want to think about because they’re difficult. So people who think in creative ways is just, they’re so much fun to interact with.
And then the last factor would be someone who’s fun. So a lot of times people will be great scientists, but they’re impossible to interact with. And finding people who love what they do, they want other people to love what they do, they ask these creative and innovative questions, and then you actually want to be around them a lot.
I think those are the three ingredients that make my favorite paleontologist.
Victoria:
That’s awesome. I think those three ingredients also make really interesting people to talk to on the podcast.
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Victoria:
(Kayla – If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?)
All right. This is another fun question. This one’s from Kayla. If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
Dr. Bauer:
So I’ve been very fortunate in my graduate work, traveled to some really cool places already. And I picked two places that I’ve already been to, which is kind of sad, but it’s because I loved it so much when I went.
So I think it was 2014. I went to Estonia for a conference, which is kind of a weird place. It’s in the Baltic sea kind of in the corner. It’s a small country. Oh my gosh. It was so beautiful. And the rocks there, I can’t even describe them. It’s so amazing. It’s early Paleozoic, they have Cambrian through Devonian, and it’s the outcrops are spectacular. There was one instance in particular, we were at an outcrop that was on a beach. It was Cambrian I like sat down on the beach and I found this gigantic trial by, and I was just like, can I live here? Like, this is so amazing as beautiful. The sun is up so long because they’re so far North. Yeah, it was such a great time.
And then I second place would be going back to Spain. I went a couple years later for another conference. That’s usually how people kind of do their traveling. They get funding to go to conferences and then stick around to do some field work. But for this reason, there’s a paleontologist in Spain that studies echinoderm. He is the most fantastic field geologists that I’ve ever been out with. And learning from him was really fun and just watching him work. So I would just like to tag along and watch him crack open rocks and discovered new things.
Victoria:
(Charlie – How many years of school did you do?)
Fun. Both of those sound incredible. Alright, we will end with a school related question. Charlie wants to know how many years of school did you do?
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, so it had to do a little math on this one. So I graduated with my final degree in 2018. So that was two years ago. And I was 29 years old. So I was in school for a very, very long time. So after high school, I took five years for my bachelor’s, another two years for my masters, and then another four years for my PhD. I would like to say like I was employed by the universities for those. So, even though I was in school, I was also working mostly part time for the university. So I also didn’t have to pay for school Cause since I was employed, they paid for me to go to school.
And you don’t need a PhD to do a lot of the stuff that you want to do. So don’t feel like if you want to be a paleontologist or scientists that you got to get through 29 years of schooling, like some of us have done. There are many paths to becoming a scientist, and just know that PhD’s can close a lot of opportunities for you because you end up being very specialized. And some people don’t want people that are that narrowly focused.
Victoria:
All right. Well that is all of our questions. Do you have any last comments or questions of your own to ask the listeners?
Dr. Bauer:
Ooh, questions of my own. I didn’t know. I should prepare any. Yeah. I would like to ask your listeners if they have a favorite fossil. Is it a dinosaur? And if it is, you should look up other non-dinosaur fossils. So many people just, dinosaurs are such a good intro to paleontology, but you should see the fossil sea stars and sea urchins and all of these other different types of animals, fossil worms, who would think about that? They exist though. Usually they’re a little ugly, but, yeah. So take the time and maybe you can somehow comment to Victoria about what your new favorite fossil is.
Victoria:
All right. Yeah. We’ll post some pictures in the description and we’ll post even more links on the transcript of this episode available on the website. And then if you have a new favorite fossil reach out on social media or on email, and I’ll make sure that I send that information back over to Dr. Bauer.
Dr. Bauer:
Awesome. Thank you.
Victoria:
Alright, thank you so much for joining us. I learned a lot. I hope the listeners did too.
Dr. Bauer:
Yeah, me too. That was a lot of fun. Thank you. And thank you for such good questions.
Victoria:
Thank you so much for joining us on Ask A Scientist. I hope you learned something and enjoyed meeting Dr. Bauer. If you have something you would like to ask a scientist, you can send in your questions to askascientistpod@gmail.com. You can also submit questions and follow the podcast on social media, Twitter @_askascientist, Instagram @askascientistpod, and Facebook @askascientistpod. You can also visit the website at http://www.askascientistpod.com/.
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Thanks Dr. Bauer for talking to us today and thanks to the listeners and the students at Bromwell Elementary for writing and submitting the questions. Thank you to Anchor for hosting the podcast, and a special thanks to Webberized for making this podcast possible. And thank you to our new production assistant Wanyue Wang. She did the episode transcription and links to more information that is available on our website. The theme music was written and performed by Joe Crystal. Thanks for listening.
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