Busted Knees & Pretty Trees
If your idea of a good day includes a worn-out trail, a quiet campsite, or a paddle cutting through still water, then you've found your podcast!
Welcome to Busted Knees & Pretty Trees, a podcast dedicated to the outdoors, conservation, and the adventures that keep us coming back to nature.
Join me as I explore hiking, backpacking, kayaking, camping, outdoor gear, conservation issues, public lands, and the wild places that make life better. Some episodes are trail stories and lessons learned from time spent outside. Others dive into gear, outdoor skills, conservation challenges, and the people working to protect the landscapes we love.
Along the way, I'll occasionally sit down with guests from across the conservation and outdoor recreation community to bring new perspectives and experiences to the conversation.
Whether you're planning your next backpacking trip, researching gear, looking for conservation news, or simply daydreaming about your next adventure, there's something here for you.
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Busted Knees & Pretty Trees
Ep. 71 - The Ground Beneath Our Boots: A Conversation with Professor Benjamin Dattilo
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This week on Busted Knees and Pretty Trees, we’re digging deep — way deep.
We sit down with Professor Benjamin Dattilo for a fascinating conversation about the stories written in stone beneath our boots. From ancient oceans and shifting continents to fossils, formations, and the mind-bending scale of deep time, Professor Dattilo helps us see the outdoors in a completely new way.
If you’ve ever picked up a rock on the trail and wondered where it came from…
If you’ve ever stood on a ridge and thought about how it got there…
Or if you just love learning how the natural world really works —
This episode is for you.
It’s thoughtful. It’s accessible. And yes… we may even sneak in a few rock puns.
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Hello, and welcome to the Busted Knees and Pretty Trees podcast. If you can hear my voice right now, yes, I'm talking to you, the Explorer. Kevin, we appreciate you. I am Travis White. There laughing is Bradley Greer. And there's our tender loving Patty Richardson. Yo, welcome, gents.
unknownHello.
SPEAKER_03I felt like you were about to call Patty something else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like an awesome, awesome person, beautiful heart. Tender loving's pretty good. Tender loving is good. I'll take that. Reminds me of Elvis.
SPEAKER_04All right. Listeners, today's show is a special one for me. I've spent an entire year as the captive audience member for these two gentlemen who went absolutely bonkers for birding. Birds this, birds that. And when little Travy J, always eager to please, presents a dazzling marvel of Mother Earth's own creation that I found in some ladies' landscaping earlier that day. I get bird bullied, pushed from the circle, and further ostracized. Oh man, geez. Travis, no one gives a shit about your Devonian period dirt clumps, dumbass. You gotta stop living in the distant past, man. Those worthless rocks would be a lot cooler if you shoved them up your ass, loser. I've never said that. Not once. Yeah, okay. That's just a small helping of the abuse. Birds burnt birds and dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_02Birds and dinosaurs are a mess. Like they get all the attention.
SPEAKER_04Yes. Anyway, I have Brad and Patty captured today. Joking aside, I know all three of us are excited for the today's show. We have a geology professor. The bullies threw me a bone today. You know, I'm ready to go. There's going to be a lot of chat about rocks, and I'm hoping I can get these two to take and I'm hoping I can get these two to take a little bird out of the brain and put some rocks in there. Our guest today is a professor of geology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He earned a PhD in geology from the University of Cincinnati. His field of research includes North American Paleozoic marine environments, the biology of shelled organisms like brachiopods, stratigraphy, petrology, paleoecology, and many other ologies that may need some explaining. His students find his teaching style to be laid back and engaging. Also cited as a key figure in Fort Wayne's geological and paleontological community. Rumor has it, despite his extreme background in geology, he couldn't spot an artifact or fossil in the field if it was screaming his name. Dr. Benjamin DeTillo, everybody.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the show. I I can tell you got some information from somebody named Chuck.
SPEAKER_04And I went with it knowing maybe the information he gave me isn't quite correct.
SPEAKER_02Well, and and and and and he got that information partly from our Randy guy named Randy Blood, who uh works in petroleum and black shale, black mudstone from the Devonian, as a matter of fact, in New York and Pennsylvania. I think he lives in Philadelphia. No, not that one. Pittsburgh, the ugly one. The ugly one. Sorry, they start with P and they're in a P state. So um, but uh I went uh I I was looking for brachiopods, and uh I wanted to get some from New York because the same age, Devonian in Indiana, they were all silicified, meaning they were replaced by silica and kind of messed up on the inside. And then the ones up in Toledo that are very nearby were all replaced by pyrite, fool's gold, and we're also kind of messed up on the inside. I want some that hadn't been replaced by something new. So I said, Yeah, there's uh there's one from southern Indiana that you got. That's called uh oh, there's another cussing thing. Go ahead. It used to be called Platistrophia Ponderosa from the Ordovician of Madison, that's what Travis held up, and uh Madison, Indiana is the kind of the type area, and that it's found in a range of places in Kentucky, and somebody uh working out of the north of Europe decided to restudy all of the genus of platastrophia. And so for years and years we've known this as Platastrophia Ponderosa. And this guy says, well, it's not actually a platastrophia, which was originally named, I think, in Russia. This is the card collecting part of classifying animals, right? It's sort of like somebody collecting stamps and going, no, it's not that, it's not really, no, you've got it wrong. So they they they look at all these fossils at all these in all these museums, and they decided that the original platystrophia does not match the North American platystrophe. So they have to come up with a new name.
SPEAKER_05Damned Vikings.
SPEAKER_02Not all of North America is Vinland. They call it's from Kentucky, they call it Vinlandostrophia.
SPEAKER_00Vinlandistrophia?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, kind of like so. Every time I have to say Vinlandistrophia Ponderosa, because it's a valid name, and the type species is the Ponderosa species. There's several other species. I could get away with it otherwise, but they named it Vinlandostrophia Ponderosa, the most coolest one, the big one that looks like a giant nut. Yeah. And um, so now I have to use that name when I published. And so every time I say it, I spit. Vinlandistrophia.
SPEAKER_00I'll curse for you.
SPEAKER_02That's bullshit. Yeah, this is bullshit. And and the people that work down and and are familiar with this brachiopod, couldn't you call it like Kentucky Strophia? Yeah. Something like it where it's from. Right. Finland's way the hell up there. I don't know where in Canada somewhere, right? It's just like who cares? This is not Vinland. Is there no rule book? What's going on? There the rule book is they followed the rules, so we have we're stuck with them. And it's sort of like it's it's um yeah, no, you follow the rules or you do some shit thing, right? I mean, and I'm kind of joking that they had to name it something, but they could have called us. They could have said, Hey, what any ideas of what you want to call this? Instead, they use a Viking name. Yeah, I don't like that so much. I don't like it either. It's from here. Let's name it something number, right? Like Travis's brand. It could have been bourbon strophia. I would have been better with that, I wouldn't expect.
SPEAKER_00Oh, bourbon strophia now. Bourbon strophe in Kentucky. Now I'm getting in. That's that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02And as a matter of fact, like if you were going to name it anything by where it occurs, it's pretty much everywhere along the bourbon tour.
unknownOh.
SPEAKER_02That makes so like like like like uh okay, some of the more central things toward Lexington, no, but Bardstown, yeah, right in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_04How many signatures do you think it would take to change?
SPEAKER_02I don't think I the the way the rules are put together, the card collector, the the the the die is cast.
SPEAKER_03I I don't know how to do that make Finland look really bad. So like they did something very evil and change the name.
SPEAKER_02I you know, I I I I don't think it would matter if they were in the Epstein files. Dang. So, you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_07These these these guys aren't in the Epstein files.
SPEAKER_02We we have to agree by the rules, and so we abide by the rules. So all all the best we can do is just spit every time.
SPEAKER_00Oh man. I don't want to say this.
SPEAKER_04So when we have a guest on, we uh kind of like to start um with the ultimate question of why why did you end up in this field? And was it just your curiosity of nature and the wild that brought you there? Or is it good that good oil money?
SPEAKER_02I could never deal with the oil situation. I could never do it. Um I've always been oil adjacent because of what I do, but but never were yeah, I might have gotten like one training gig with an oil company, right? That's about it. So um oh, I was four. I was four years old. Okay. And um I I uh we we lived in this little bitty tiny rock house that was next to a creek in southern Indiana in a town called, of all places, China. Okay, China. I can say I grew up my my first year is I grew up in China, Indiana. China, Indiana. And in China, the creek ran through these Ordovician Rocks, which I don't know, 450 million years old. By the way, if you're a geologist, you don't typically think how old it is. You think what name age, right? Okay, yeah. So, you know, we we say Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian. Well, that covers just about everything in this part of Indiana. If you want to go to Western Indiana, you go up a notch, and that's Mississippian, and you know, every one of those is younger than the next one, than the previous one. Ordovision, oldest, Silurian, uh, Devonian, and then Mississippian, and some Pennsylvanian in Indiana. At any rate, I was in the Ordovician in the Southeast, and I picked up a fossil, and I I saw fossils, you know. I I remember my first fossil, it was a Raphineskina. Raphinescina. It's a it's a brachiopod. And again, if you you know, do people know what brachiopods are? Oh hell no. Nobody knows what a brachiopod really is. But we have specimens, right? That's a different one from the other one you showed me, right? Thank you. Good, because that's a spirafer. So that's a different one. There's the Vinlandistrophia.
SPEAKER_04There's so many kinds.
SPEAKER_00That's great.
SPEAKER_02Hate that name. Anyway, um, and we didn't record that, did we? Oh, yeah. Yep, we're recording. We were we recorded Vinlandistrophia when we first discussed it. Oh, that's good. Throw it in there somewhere because I think that's a good story. But um, so this this species is really weird, as it turns out, as a kid. I knew it was just a seashell, right? Um, and so, you know, I drew it, I looked at it, I had mom draw it, you know, I got a fossil book. Because, you know, I was just into it. Grandpa says that warp that creek, the moisture must have warped my head. He thought, you know, and grandma thought things like, you know, you could make a you could make a lot of money um as a doctor, blah blah blah blah blah, but no, I was stuck on these rocks. And so, um, as it turns out, that You shattered your father's dream. My my grandfather's my grandfather's hope. Okay. Right. He lost hope in my father. He'd lost hope in my father, but then that was me. My turn to shatter his dream. And so uh what's interesting about this species, this uh kind of brachiopod, it's one of the most common fossils on earth. Go figure a four-year-old. Right. It's it's really restricted in its area to parts of North America. There are similar ones elsewhere, but uh, you know, eastern North America, there's a lot of them. I calculated that under the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, if you just took the parking lot, there would be enough to give four to every man, woman, and child on earth. Wow. If you dug down about a thousand feet. Wow, right, right. Because every layer's got tons of minutes. So it wasn't no miracle that I found this thing. But because it was common, nobody really knew much about it. And they are two thin shells that nest one into another.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02And so when they're closed, there's no room for anything to be in there. There's barely any room, right? So it's like a clam, sort of, except the left and right are in one shell, whereas in a clam, the left shell and the right shell are different shells. That's about it. They have a top and a bottom shell. And so there's no room for these, and there was all kinds of speculations about how they lived, and and I found some specimens that were weird in that they moved around they look like they'd moved around in the dirt, in the in the sediment at the seafloor. And I go, like, if they moved around, something's really weird because everybody's thinking they were just stuck.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02And they have a feeding apparatus that is not as efficient as a clams, but they filter water, but they could never squirt you like a clam can, right? So you're digging for clams, they can squirt pretty high in some cases. But they didn't have a powerful feeding apparatus, so if they got dirt in there, there wasn't much they could do except maybe clap their valves together to clear. And so it was thought like, how did they live usually in mud? You usually find them in mudstone. How did they live in this concavo convex form where there's a concave side to the outside of the shell and a convex side to the outside of the shell? And all kinds of little puzzles about them. And so I just completed uh a paper that got shortlisted like among 14 for the best paper of the year award. Let's go over in London, right? On this same species that I looked at first when I was four. Oh my gosh. So talk about obsessed. That's pretty vacating. I'm just like terribly obsessed. Um, and so my interest is focused on the Ordovician because um, well, I just I just don't move very fast. And there's there's you know, there's so much to do inside the Ordovician, and I was familiar with it, and then I went, I went to school out west in Utah and uh uh Brigham Young University. You could tell at some point I was probably a Mormon. And um, this guy's a Mormon. The mascal is good though. I love the taste of Mescal. At any rate, so do I it's smoky.
SPEAKER_00It's yes, it is good.
SPEAKER_03You know, it is, I think it is interesting, especially like staying in one narrow division, but then also kind of bouncing around because a lot of people make it tunnel vision and they're wild focus area, location.
SPEAKER_02So one of the things as geology students that we do is we have to participate. We it used to be at any rate that there would be this big five-week class in this one of your your last summer or something. Where's your kind of your capstone experience, and you'd go out and you'd make maps and do other field work in geology, right? And so during my field work, the professor who was running that class was actually officially making maps. And he had and it was on the Colorado Plateau just north of the Grand Canyon. And so we're seeing these typical Grand Canyon layers that you'll find in the Grand Canyon. What's missing in the Grand Canyon is the Ordovician. Oh, okay. And the Solurian. There's no Ordovician, no Silurian. We're a little bit north of there. And I was so familiar with the Ordovician at that point that I he they assigned me a square mile. And I was lost. I didn't know what I was doing. All I care about is Ordovician fossils. Right. But I'm walking around trying to figure out how to map a square mile. Do the geologic map of a square mile. And I run onto a hill and I look down and I see classic Ordovician fossils. And I go, What the fuck? Yeah. There's not supposed to be Ordovician out here. I've never seen Ordovician. I think that's Ordovician here. So I load up my backpack with fossils and come back that night and say, I think I found Ordovician and dump the stuff on his table. Now, this guy was known as Mr. Ordovician from further north, right? Yeah. So he was working in western Utah. We were just out not too far from Mesquite, Nevada. And he was working in west central Utah most of his life. And when he saw it, my A was guaranteed. I got an A. Now blew him away? Just blew him away because I had discovered Ordovician in this little area. Well, hell yeah. How because and only because and he said, Nick, I was the only student who could have possibly done it. Oh, well, that's a that's nice. Like obsessions. Yeah, yeah. Huh? I had to do that. To be able to identify them. Yeah, I was able to recognize it immediately and knew where I was. I was obsessed with it already. So, like, you know, fortune favor if you can call this fortune, right? I think favors the prepared, right? If you're not prepared to see something, you won't you don't know something exists, you're unlikely to see it.
SPEAKER_04Yep. I definitely right off the bat, once you find something you're looking for, a fossil or a specific mineral, it's so much easier to find than I've seen. They're everywhere.
SPEAKER_03You sound like me trying to explain to my friend that takes me morale mushroom hunting. That's why I don't see them. I'm not prepared. I don't know what they're doing. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02If you're not prepared to see morales, you won't see them.
SPEAKER_03If you're not once you do see them, the game's over. You see them everywhere.
SPEAKER_02Then you take all of them. Yeah. Hopefully. So um, so that's kind of I I don't know why. I just think it's a personality flaw that I'm obsessed with it. I I I can't tell you, I can't explain other than that's where it started. And I was reluctant to move away from it.
SPEAKER_00I gotta say that that's the that's amazing. I mean, four years old, you pick up this thing. I mean, I've picked up things that I at four and later at later that I've been unbelievably interested in at that moment, but then to I mean, seemingly have devote your kind of career and the failure to develop, right?
SPEAKER_02It's a it's some sort of failure in development.
SPEAKER_00I don't know, because you just on the short list of best paper for brachiopods and these Ornovision.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, but normal people would never have given it a second look, right? Yeah, so it's just this big flat fan shaped thing, yeah, named after Rafanesque, who's oh, he's a hoot, right? In the eighteen hundreds. Was that another episode? That might be another episode. Like we we've I've written several papers about Raphineschemia.
SPEAKER_07Oh, okay. Several papers. Raposchemi.
SPEAKER_02About one brachiopod, and we, you know, somebody found a really weird association with this brachiopod where the dead shells are like big garbage can lids, and these smaller burrowing brachiopods tried to escape after a storm, and the dead shells had been laid over them, concave down. And so then the shells go up and hit those big shells, these little, these little brachiopods crawl up out of the storm deposit, trying to escape, and they're trapped. Because if you got almost no brain, just a few neurons, and you're like a roomba, right? Right? You're thinking like a roomba, you have some basic rules. Up, go up, go up. And so if you're under a dome, going up gets you trapped in the middle of the dome. And this is what we found is a whole bunch of these shells just accumulated in the middle of the dome. And so we serially sliced it. We sliced through this rock that contained these shells that had these shells inside the domes. And they were individual shells. They were not alive anymore. They had just been washed up in the storm and paved the surface and then killed all the other things that would have normally been able to escape. And so there's this story, right, about what's called ecological engineering. Yeah. Which you've heard. Yes. Where this shell is a kind of a negative ecological engineer in this case. And um we named the paper after Rafinesque's curse to Transylvania University.
SPEAKER_00Is that a yeah? Keep going.
SPEAKER_02Raphanesque had taught at Transylvania.
SPEAKER_00Yo.
SPEAKER_02So Transylvania is a little school where Mary Todd Lincoln went to school in Lexington, Kentucky. Okay. So at the time it was actually on its way way up, right? Well, he Rafinesque was teaching there, and apparently he stooped the president's wife. Oh, hey, baby, that's not gonna get you anywhere. And so then he got kicked out. Like he came back from a field season and his entire lab had been converted to dormitory. That's what big F you. That's what happens. Like if you sleep with the president's wife. And so he got kicked out. And then, like, three years later, the the very same president died at sea of some kind of sickness, and the campus burned out. Oh my god. So conveniently, just after that, of course, Rafinesque takes credit and says that he had cursed it on his way out. The curse of the city. You know, he'd stood on the hills above Lexington or something like this, and stretched his hand out and said, I curse you, whatever he said. He's full of crap. Right. He's he's he's full of crap, but he's making it up after the fact, and it, you know, impressive story. Yeah. Well, Transylvania University had a series of bad things, including Bram Stoker, happened to it. Right? Yeah, they became a laughing stock after Dracula was written. Is this for whatever this this school became a laugh? Oh, wait, what? The school became a laughing stock because it was named Transylvania.
SPEAKER_04Ah, okay.
SPEAKER_02Dang. Yeah, and and they just had a series of bad, bad, bad years. And Raphinesque had already been buried, and so they said, this is because of his curse. Yeah. Yeah. So they dug him up. This gets deeper. They found him, dug him up, and put him under the administration building. And as we know, there's a lot of dead people in administration buildings, and not so often under them. So did they bury the we visited his tomb under the administration building, but wait, there's more. He was in a serial grave. They dug up the wrong person.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02Because the record was that his skull had been cut to uh to for an autopsy. Had been the cap had been cut off. Right. And the skull they buried was intact. Oh my God. So the the body they buried under the administration building is actually some lady.
SPEAKER_00Oh my lord. Let it be known that when I pass away, I want to curse something before I roll. I want to live a legacy of curse.
SPEAKER_02So we figured, okay, these shells are like the administration building. No, they're like Raphanesque's tomb where there's a series of them all buried underneath the shell. Yeah. His original tomb. So we got we got a kick out of this. We wanted to put like little quotes from his life, but the journal editor decided that we couldn't do that. Um, but we just sort of paralleled it and and and talked about all these different things and called it the curse of Raphaneskina.
SPEAKER_00That's sweet. That's the paper. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that's the previous paper. The the more recent paper is better. Um, so this one is just fun.
unknownHell no.
SPEAKER_02The more recent the more recent paper says this is how they lived and this is why, and it's kind of not what people expect.
SPEAKER_00So I'm curious, Ben. What should I refer to you? A doctor?
SPEAKER_02Is that because I feel like you can call me Ben, you can call me Dr. Dotillo. I was going by Dr. D, and then I realized that that's ambiguous and kind of inuantible of some sort. Yeah, and Dr. Big T would even be worse. All right. I'm not gonna do that. All right. I I'll go by Ben.
SPEAKER_00I just have to get used to that.
SPEAKER_02Uh but I Yeah, you just call me Ben. It's fine. Okay. It's just fine. I mean, like uh the students here at this university call me Dr. DeTillo. Okay. Um, at previous places I've been, they'll call me Ben. Grad students in other universities call me Ben. Yeah. But you know, there's different cultures in different universities. And the only time I really force somebody to call me doctor is if they're insisting that I call them doctor.
SPEAKER_00CS.
SPEAKER_02Okay. You want it. I just like it's not I it's not it's not why I'm here, right? I'm not here for the title. Right.
SPEAKER_00So um well, let me ask you a question. What I what I am interested about is because when I think geology, when I think paleontology, uh all the different, once again, ontologies, I think a lot of field work. But what I'm what we've talked about so far is more the papers, the scientific journals that you've written and you have re written approximately find the fossils in the field. Yeah, find the fossils in the field. So would you are you somebody that would rather spend more time in the field doing like that like going back and reliving the moment that you found you know blew your professor's mind away and got the A? Or are you finding more happiness or kind of relive that?
SPEAKER_02I was a young man. Oh you know, I like being a young man if I had my strength and kind of like status of now. Right. But I wouldn't want to be a young man as a young man, right? Yeah, respect. You know, so like youth is wasted on the people who don't get any respect.
SPEAKER_00Agreed. But do you find like with all the papers that you are writing, and we were talking off air about you going into the emer emerit emeritus status status where you'll be spending a lot more time doing it?
SPEAKER_02Like I got four years and six months. I'll count it down four years. Not that I'm counting. Not that I'm counting.
SPEAKER_00I can't already count my mind down. Uh, but where do you I guess what I'm trying to say is like, where would you rather be spending your time out in the field doing the field work, the grunt work, or or getting that getting those journals out there and educating in a way. Paper writing is something that makes me fall asleep.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So the actual writing, the actual putting together, I like drafting the figures because it's the only art I get in. Um, but you know, because I I like drawing and things like that. And so when I make the pictures for the paper and put the photographs together, that's kind of fun. But then I gotta write, and then you get reviewers. Right now I'm I'm trying to finish a paper about crinoids, which are a totally different thing. You could call them starfish on a stick. Um, I'm I'm having a great deal of difficulty with that. The people who work on crinoids are a little pickier, there's more of them. And reviewer twos are bad. You've heard of reviewer two.
SPEAKER_05No.
SPEAKER_02Well, um reviewer two must die is a group. So what they do is when you submit your paper, it has to be reviewed, right? Right. And there's usually two reviewers. And they will rank them, the good reviewer is always reviewer one, the one that says nice things. And then if somebody says nasty things, it's reviewer two, or if somebody has more details. Right? So currently, uh, it's the third round for the paper. Committed, reviewer two said this stinks. Rejected. Submitted, reviewer two says this stinks. Different reviewer two. Rejected, right? This time we got it right, we think we got it right. I show this to students who whine about having a little red mark on their stuff, right? It's like it's actually uh and and what I notice about people who are not in the sciences who who are kind of doing quack science is they get all whiny about being criticized. Like, well, there's obvious why you're not in real science because you wouldn't make it. Yeah. Yeah. There's all kinds of criticisms in this business, and it gets old. So, to your question, I would rather be out in the field. Like, so so uh I I picked up this summer job and uh I took off fall in order to do the summer job more intensely. Where I'm out just uh driving around in a truck with a mapping partner that they pair me up with. She and I are just driving around in the truck.
SPEAKER_05We uh see a rock, we say, Ah, a rock, and we stop.
SPEAKER_02We go out and we look at the rock and we pound on the rock and we examine the rock and we say we might smile and say, I know what this rock is. And then we, you know, and now now really it's not a rock the way you'd think a chunk. It's a piece of rock of the earth, the bedrock, sticking out, right? That's what we're really looking for. Yeah, like a road cutout, like a road cut, uh, like a stream bank that's been eroded, right? So when it erodes into the earth, you got this scar in the earth, you've gone through the soil, and you can see the actual rock. Doesn't happen often here. You gotta go to quarries or or this uh the deep wabash, right? Which was scoured out a bit ago. And um, and then we have you know our surveying tools, a GPS unit, you know, a little hockey puck that you put on this big stick, and we we mark where it is, we take notes about what it is, and we get all these data points together. And eventually then we map um these specialists that work on the computers make maps of this. This is the there's always the lab and write-up guys. I like if I go in the field, I gotta do more writing.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, this is just part of it. If you don't, then it hasn't been done, nobody knows about it, and then like I'm just out having fun. So, so you know, I'm so uh I'll probably spend the next 10 years mapping all the east half of the state one piece at a time, and um that'll get me through retirement, maybe get enough money to spend in addition to whatever's left of Social Security and Well, yeah, my savings. And so um probably better than teaching at the high school because I'd cuss to especially the Catholic one. Yeah, I I'm just not I'm I'm I don't mind teaching at a Catholic school. I'm just afraid I'm gonna say the F-word too many.
SPEAKER_00I understand that.
SPEAKER_02So um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well uh just I I'm just I'm just curious because I guess the story that you have when you were four, and just I imagine that finding the brachiopod and just being kind of in awe at that, so much in awe that you were that you've carried this on until your retirement life. But is there anything now after spending 19 years educating, uh graduating in 2004 or 1994, and and just kind of being more part of that many years. 94.
SPEAKER_02How old my daughter's 24.
SPEAKER_00She's born in 2001. I think you started if as far as I understand it, you started educating in 2007. 2007 here.
SPEAKER_02Here, yes. Nice. So that's just here. Before then, I was teaching in eastern Kentucky for a couple of years, and before then I was teaching in Las Vegas. Dang well, and before then, I was teaching in Utah, but also working environmental quality, same as Indiana I Dem, but for right.
SPEAKER_00So, do you find anything that is still just awe-inspiring to you when you're out in the field, when you're surveying land or mapping or educating or putting together your papers or something that just still blows your mind?
SPEAKER_02The full thing, I've been so focused on the Ordovician, and I it's very like detail oriented, like very serious stamp collecting with a magnifying glass kind of Yeah. It's just really focused in. Well, the mapping requires that move along, let's go. We gotta get this whole area done, right? Right. We're we're counting our work area in degrees of latitude and longitude. You know, more than one. So it's a pretty big area. It went all the way from Louisville to Seymour to um the eastern end of a line that goes through Vernon. Vernon. You've never heard of that place. That's a town in Indiana. Oh yeah. And so um um this is a big chunk, right? And it's got some metropolitan areas and and a lot of farmland, right? So it's also got a lot of different age rocks, so I had to learn the Devonian really well. So I'd I'd spent years here learning the Silurian, and so every place you go, you learn more stuff. When I was in Vegas, I I I always went cheap. I didn't want to have to go to really rich people for money, and I didn't want to have to write a grant. Retrospect the last few weeks of revelations. I'm glad I didn't go to really rich people.
SPEAKER_07You could have ended up in some weird places.
SPEAKER_02Uh, there's been some dinosaur paleontologists who are eating crow right now. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. And so, like, I I I never really wanted to take a lot of money from people. I just want to do it, so I just do local work. So, out of Vegas, I um started going out um every Friday and uh would look at the rocks in the uh Arrow Canyon range off of a highway that goes north there. And I discovered that the rocks that I thought were Ordovician were Cambrian eventually. Okay. So I moved a boundary a hundred meters and uh discovered some of the oldest reefs. In uh in that area, in this in America, in the world, like some of them, like there's a whole set of reefs of this age that have now been found more in China, etc. etc.
SPEAKER_04So you're redrawing the boundaries of what we thought we knew was unfortunate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, so in the West it's really easy. In the east, it's not so easy. In the west, the last person that looked at these was 1967. He had a bunch of students, he was distracted and he was covering miles and miles of rock.
SPEAKER_04Is it because of the plant life over here? Is it because of the plant life over here that makes it more difficult to for those features to come to the sea?
SPEAKER_02Like I can go to an outcrop here and meet somebody I know about. Yeah. Uh uh down in Madison, there's a famous road cut that I work, and so we're mapping through Madison, Indiana. And uh one day I'm going back to mom's house, and mom died last last semester, so it was lucky I was mapping down there, so I got to take night shift. Kind of hard on field work, but I did it anyway. And um going back to mom's house, I meet somebody who's sitting there on that outcrop working with some students. So I meet a new person. So, like you look at one set of rocks in the east, and there's been 50 people look at it at least, right? 50 people. I you're you have to work hard, right? And this is why the brachiopod meant it meant looking hard where people had had ignored it, right? But here out in the w or there out in the west, you go out, you make a basic observation, and you're the first one to have made it.
unknownDang.
SPEAKER_02And and so it's easier in some ways, similar to in 1980 something, I discovered the first Ordovician in a whole area, right? In a whole region, because I was looking, right? And nobody else had really gone through the land. Like there's vast amounts of land out there. Oh, I bet. And so in the West, you're much more likely. But I've seen things in the last few years that I just never looked at, and I'm kind of really happy to do that and just learned more stuff.
SPEAKER_04Have you um embraced technology like lidar and all that to well I'm more discoveries?
SPEAKER_02We have we are using LIDAR that is taken like uh by the United States Geological Survey, various sorts. So uh Indiana has some really good LIDAR now, and as you know, because you know Chuck, um that's where you got that, right? So I have uh you know I'm doing Clifty Falls right now, printed at 3D.
SPEAKER_04Oh, cool, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So there's Clifty Falls at uh one to what is it? One to twenty four hundred.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02And it's covering the table back here. This is one of several tiles and it I'm running out of space on the table for the entire Clifty Falls Canyon. And for those who don't know, Clifty Falls is a state park down. Yep. Beautiful. So um I'm using that. I'm I'm getting familiar. I just I had to print it in it because kill. Because you can now. Because I can. And you know, it induced me to learn the stuff. So we have new tech. It used to be people would have to use it, it was kind of harder to map back in the day, but now you could actually see the rocks sticking out on this very fine lidar. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Damn, like making everything just making it really easy. That that's it. Are you excited about that? Is that exciting?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I'm very I'm I'm like like the printer's running constantly. The next is gonna be like I don't know, McCormick's Creek or something like that.
SPEAKER_00So on the s I guess on the surface, if I will, Indiana just uh to me, maybe somebody that's out outside of the sphere, it's maybe not uh as geologically interesting as some of the things that we've backed back through out in the West and the mountain ranges and things along those lines. But from somebody of your pedigree, can you just kind of for our listeners from the Midwest, just explain a little bit about what you think makes this area, uh specifically Indiana, kind of geologically important or fun? Well, are we talking all of Indiana? Are we talking Fort Wayne? Uh no. Well, I guess we could go with even southern Indiana if that's if that's where you want to go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we'll talk the whole damn problem. I mean, the the whole problem.
SPEAKER_01We can uh talk about where I found the question is just sick and wrong. Is it? It's just sick and wrong. It's just a sick and wrong question. What is that?
SPEAKER_04Where's that? That was found um near Hamilton Lake.
SPEAKER_02Okay, now I gotta look up where Han Hamilton Lake is. It's five south of Bloomington. Okay, that makes sense. That is a big ass geode. Geodes are there.
SPEAKER_04I found a few pieces of it.
SPEAKER_02And it's all the question is what was it before it was geodized?
SPEAKER_04I was wondering if it was some sort of like a just a cluster of crinoids that got stuck together, but at first I thought it was um could be a crinoid stem.
SPEAKER_02So the geodized crinoids get kind of inflated and way bigger than they were. It's a weird preservation. And that looks like a geodized something. What is it? I thought it was uh some piece of a crinoid. Yeah, that could be. Yeah. I mean crinoids are often geodized and they they expand a little bit.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I found that kind of stuff down there.
SPEAKER_02I thought that was pretty much you got all kinds of things in Indiana. Again, like you've got the problem is there's just so much material. If you start in the Ordovician, it is the most easily fossiliferous. I think it's world famous. It is world famous for being extremely rich in fossils. Okay. So that you never want to take students to southeastern Indiana first.
SPEAKER_04Uh, because it's just before your dinner.
SPEAKER_02They'll be spoiled. Right? So they won't like anything else you show them. Okay. Because every little rock you pick up, it's something, it's got fossils in it.
unknownHuh.
SPEAKER_02I said, if you can't find a brachiopod here, there is something seriously wrong with you, kids. Yeah, go home. Go home. You're getting no, I just I'm not gonna make any judgments. There's something wrong with you, young man. That boy ain't right, right? It's just like there's something wrong. So, um, so that's world famous.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_02World famous. Then if you take you go up into the Silurian, all right, there's another really fossiliferous unit down south called the Waldron Shale that runs all the way to Nashville, Tennessee. It just has also has just this beautiful fall out of the rock kind of fossils.
SPEAKER_04Like trilobites and stuff down there?
SPEAKER_02It's got trilobites, it's mostly like crinoids and uh weird stuff that's related to crinoids. These worlds are different. You know, when you go back before the dinosaurs, you're looking on the seafloor. I don't know how anybody could think that it looks like a modern seafloor, because not a single thing looks like what you find in the modern, except maybe pearl oysters, right? They're there. Uh, but if you go uh up here in the in the Silurian, most of the much of the rock, sort of down in the Wabash Valley, toward Huntington, etc., is Silurian. You go past Huntington, uh Hanging Rock is a famous one. Yes, sir. Hanging Rock is a reef.
SPEAKER_00I did not know that.
SPEAKER_02So so Hanging Rock is a Silurian reef. Wow. On a way to Hanging Rock off of 24, I think you will see a road cut with a big, big uh shoulder where you can pull off. That road cut goes right through the middle of a Silurian reef. Oh on 24, I think between Huntington and Le Gros or something like that, and you will see on the right, on the going that way, not coming back, it's gonna be on the left. Um, you're gonna go right through a reef. And if you look at it from the air, you can actually see a bullseye pattern in the soil where that reef is, and it cuts just almost to the center of that bullseye. Make like a mound. So it makes a series of mounds that are next that are surrounding each other. Oh, they're just struggling on top of each other. Yeah, and then got shaved off. Okay.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I can't wait the next time I'm going through there with somebody in my car, and I can say it's a little bit. Just pull off where it looks rockiest.
SPEAKER_02You can find fossils. That's awesome. First time I was here, I walked to the very edge of it. I was we reached down and picked up in a full assemblage of worm teeth, which is rare to do, right? Usually you see the worm teeth kind of scattered. They're little black claw-like things. And uh so I picked that up and I'm like, well, that's cool. It was cold AF. That day was awful cold. I send a picture of it to a guy in Sweden who studies these things, and he's like, next day he has the paper describing it. Finished. He said, fill out this locality stuff, and etc. Like, like these guys who describe the same thing, same sorts of things over and over again. They have a form. And and we had it published within no time at all. I I take forever to publish that. I kind of envy this. Um but at any rate, so we've got coral reefs, and it was one of the first places where we figured out that they were reefs.
unknownWhat?
SPEAKER_02And so it's a major discover area. It's the Wabash, Wabash Reef was the one where somebody looked at it and go, the fuck? And this is along a railroad cut uh near Wabash, you know where the railroad goes through, and it goes through some hills and there's some big cuts. Those are world famous. That is unbelievable. And uh, we're sitting on reefs here. Uh so uh looked at the cores that were drilled to make the sewer system, uh, and uh they go through a lot of reef material.
SPEAKER_03Hold on, like the most recently done sewer project.
SPEAKER_02Sewer system the first uh storm drainage. Yeah. So uh we just retrieved some of those cores for our overburgeoning core facility down in Bloomington.
SPEAKER_03That's a good idea. I didn't even think about that being kind of a side benefit of projects like that.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. Side benefit is you learn about the geologic history of a place.
SPEAKER_04What uh can you find along the banks of the Maumee here? Other than that, well, you can find some nice artifacts for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I don't know anything about artifacts. I'm people yeah. Well, let's talk, let's talk minerals. Yeah, I'm let's talk no birds. Yep, I'm out. No dinosaurs, because we're talking Indiana, there's not any rock. So the only way there could be dinosaurs in Indiana, which is an interesting problem.
SPEAKER_03I I never heard this. Like there's there was in this piece of land historically, it's not believed there were dinosaurs here. No, no, no, you got it all wrong. Okay, gotcha.
SPEAKER_02There's no rocks of the right age preserved that we could have dinosaurs. Dinosaurs surely lived here.
SPEAKER_03Okay, that makes more sense.
SPEAKER_02They walked all over here, but the dinosaurs from this region we don't actually know much about. Because any of the rocks, the sediments that they would have fallen in and gotten buried in, they've been stripped off. Oh. If they were ever deposited.
SPEAKER_03The nearest from like what's just erosion.
SPEAKER_02Okay, right? It's just like this was this land's been high enough for long enough that it's not kept any of the younger sediments than the Pennsylvania. So if you gotta if you want dinosaurs, you gotta Pennsylvania Permian, Permian's the big extinction before the dinosaurs, then there's a Triassic, which doesn't mean three-tailed dinosaurs, but might as well from the sound. The Jurassic, which, you know, a Jurassic Park contained Cretaceous, the next age dinosaurs, mostly hardly any Jurassic dinosaurs. And the end of the Cretaceous, you've got the picture of T-Rex looking in the sky and going, that can't be good. Uh-oh. And you know, boom. And and um the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The closest Cretaceous is maybe if you go down the Mississippi River. The Cretaceous Sea kind of flapped up onto the land there, and you can see a little Cretaceous as you go further down, like I think around Tennessee. And um there's a little Jurassic, I think, in the middle of Michigan. I think uh in some places you have to drill through like 400 you have to auger through 400 feet of loose sediment before you hit bedrock. That loose sediment is all mostly of glacial age. And underneath it there might be something between the dinosaurs and the glaciers. Right? Occasionally you might run into that. And sometimes in the holes in the bedrock, you'll see stuff that's just preglacial. We have one occurrence at Pipe Creek near Gas City, Indiana, of critters from before the glaciers. And the only other place where that age is preserved with fossils um is in Tennessee. Oh the gray fossil site in Tennessee. And the only reason it's preserved is because there was a cave system that sort of collected these sediments and then protected them from getting scraped off by the glaciers. And at the top of this cave system you can see the striations, the scratches made by glaciers going across. Damn, that is the glaciers just shave everything off. They formed those just massive grooves, like stone. Not as not as cool as Kelly's Island. But yes. Um thin striations on a flat surface, and you can see sort of chatter, yeah, where stuff was dragged across. It's really quite impressive. Yeah. And and after that, you have glacial sediments.
SPEAKER_00When we're talking these ages, I'm uh obviously a novice, but what what are the like what what are we refer what what age ranges are are we are we talking about? I have to look that up. Okay. I'm just curious.
SPEAKER_02Anybody who wants to know the age ranges, geologists usually use the the names. Right. Right? So I've been barking out names that people are probably not familiar with. Yeah. But I have to look up the actual ages. Hey, that's okay.
SPEAKER_00I don't want I don't need I don't what want you to go outside of your comfort zone. I'm just curious, I mean, because because I I it Well, I mean, I know the history of this is so innocent.
SPEAKER_02This is if you go to stratigraphy.
SPEAKER_03I mean, it's so old that it's beyond we can't comprehend.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's it's incomprehensible from from uh like thinking about it kind of thing. Yeah, but you can throw out numbers. If you can talk about the deficit, you can talk about the age.
SPEAKER_04I tell you though, those cross-section drawings uh really help in geology.
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely. But if you go to stratigraphy.org, there's a there's a chart, and the chart says like the top of the Ordovician is 443 million years old.
SPEAKER_00443 million.
SPEAKER_02443 million, right? So we do our timeline. We do a timeline on let's see, let's do the end of the dinosaurs. The beginning of the dinosaurs is 250 million or 252 million. Okay. And the end of the dinosaurs is 66 million. Now, what's interesting is stegosaurus is down there in the Jurassic. Right. And think about you had a question in here about smallness, right? Right. Stegosaurus is down in the There you go, you got it. Stegosaurus is down in the Jurassic, and I can't remember at which age in the Jurassic. Probably middle somewhere. And T-Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex, is about 66, is when that ended, right? So at the bitter end. And and so, like, I I put I put uh Stegosaurus around 165 or something like that. And so if you put and don't quote me on that, I'm not a dinosaur person, and they'll just be they'll go all reviewer two on me.
SPEAKER_03Um I can't wait to start using that.
SPEAKER_02So um reviewer two must die.
SPEAKER_03Um mine's always uh I don't have the same decimal places across multiple charts.
SPEAKER_02The best way of describing how long the dinosaurs have been here, had been here, is it is more it is it is more realistic to put a cell phone in T-Rex's hands than it is to put him next to Stegosaurus. Wow, wow. So T-Rex is closer to our time than it is to Stegosaurus' time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So this rock you're digging 480 feet below the No, it's 450, 440 million years old.
SPEAKER_02And then when we when we drill, when we drill, we probably hit the Devonian here. So that's 358 million years old or so. Um, so that's Mississippian. You got down there. Go up to the next colour. There you go. Stop there, stop. There you go. So you got upper, middle, lower Devonian. Um we might have some Franian, which would be 372 to 382. Uh, and then there's certainly down to the I think Iphelian, maybe the MCN. And then there's a gap, and then we get into maybe Wenlock or something like that in the uh Silurian. And then we'll hit the Ordovician. There's some Hernantian in Indiana, uh, but mostly that's missing. So the other thing is that the the geologic record is full of gaps no matter where you go. Right. Yeah. So you think of you think of um that deposit I told you about in Pipe Creek in a sinkhole, right? Yeah. So below that is the Silurian. And you know, so the deposit is oligosine, so that's all the way to the left. And I would go, uh actually, I think it's Miocene, Pliocene. So let's say it's six million years old, right?
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_02And then the nearest rock underneath it is Silurian. I'm gonna go with ah, it might be in the Gorstean or the Horme Homerian. So it's 426 million years old.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, for the list.
SPEAKER_02And so you've got 420 million years between the one deposit and the next deposit down.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_04Damn. Wow.
SPEAKER_02And then on top of it is. Well, I mean, they're different thicknesses in different places, right? So you go 200 foot deep quarry, and you don't get into the Ordovician in Pipe Creek. It's all in the Solurian. Wow. Um, and so it depends on where you're at, like, right? And and if we could open up a Grand Canyon, there'd be at least a Grand Canyon's worth of rock below us to look at.
SPEAKER_03Um for the listeners, if you go to Stadiography.org.
SPEAKER_02Stratigraphy. Stratigraphy. Statiography. Yeah, there's a it's a really chart.
SPEAKER_04It's a really cool chart.
SPEAKER_02It's a really cool chart. And if you open it up on your cell phone, it's interactive to where you can stretch pieces out and stuff. So you can do that. And yes, if you click on it, it'll tell you shit. And if you if you put those uh uh you see those little golden spikes, yeah. So you can mark that, and that is there's a way to the spike just says it's been marked. Oh, okay, right? And and there is literally some spike somewhere on an outcrop somewhere in the world for each of these. So wherever there's a spike. Now, if you look in the really old rock, the pink on the right, you can see its clocks, and the numbers are really even. You see that? How even the numbers are. Yeah, they're all nice round, even numbers. The reason for that is is we run out of fossils at the base of the Cambrian, which is in the the base of the next column over. There's no more really easy fossils to find below the Toronto. Now you got me Terranuevan Fortunian. So below about 538 plus or minus 0.06.
SPEAKER_03I do love the plus or minuses. Because they are very simple.
SPEAKER_02Uh or 635, sorry, is marked with a spike. So that's actually a spot on the earth where they marked it. But the rest of them, they said, well, thousands a good number. And so if they if they date the rock there below that, then then they just decide the date first, and then they figure out whether the rock falls in it or not, right? Whereas on the other side, with spikes, we know the rock is the age, we have to find the date from the rock. And this has developed over a period of 200 years or so. Since the early 1800s. More than 200 years.
SPEAKER_00When you study this, Doctor, or Ben, when you study this, does it do you have a sense of like life feeling small, like we feel small? Or do you think that's a good idea? Well, when you talk about what's happening with coyotes and bears and shit like that, humans water issues.
SPEAKER_02Looking, so just example in the Ordovicians, somewhere, somewhere, um, and I work almost strictly in the Cadian right now, uh, in Utah, it was in the Trimid Ocean. Um, when you work in just that interval, there is a period there where in this region of Indiana, especially southern India, where you can see it, but across the region, brachypods started moving in from elsewhere. There was some kind of environmental change. And so from the lower part of these rocks to the upper part of these rocks, this little raffinaskina that I love so much just kind of disappears or it gets over inundated with other critters. Right? And so these critters come in and out, and we're talking about like um we're looking at 10 million years max, right? Less than 10 million years time. The world is constantly changing with things going back. And forth. And when I talk to ecology students about modern ecology and bears becoming dependent on food or whatnot, um, I have a slightly different philosophy of and I think of the fish in Florida, right? Okay. You think about all of the foreign fish that have been introduced to Florida by dumping aquariums. There's a YouTuber that goes out and fishes exotic fish out of sewers in Florida. Wow. Literally out of the sewers in Florida.
SPEAKER_03Does he eat them?
SPEAKER_02No, he keeps them. Right? You don't have to go buy fish because every fish from everywhere in the world that lives in the tropics lives somewhere in the sewers of Florida.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I went, we went down to the um to a group of students down to the big swamp down there. The Everglades, right? We went to the Everglades Visitor Center, and I look in the water. That's Amazonian. That's Amazonian. That's African. That's, you know, they're full of fish from somewhere else.
SPEAKER_04It's a python.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's there's all kinds, and every lizard I identify in Florida is from a pet. Oh, yeah. It was a pet. And so um the philosophy there that I start with is you ain't doing shit about this. This is not changing. You are not going to be able to get rid of these. Because the entire ecosystem has been flooded by invaders. Just as in the Ordovician, entire ecosystem was flooded by invaders. And the overall diversity went way up because these things from other places came in and they didn't all go extinct, right? And so the perspective it gives me is think about the species that have become dependent on humans over a long period of time that used to have wild ancestors, right? Dogs.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, just because their contribution to civilization.
SPEAKER_02We've extincted cattle in the uh in the wild. But we still have cattle, right? We don't call them our rocks or whatever, however you pronounce that anymore. And then there's all the ones that we don't like, right? Rats, mice, cockroaches. Where would these things be without us, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then there's entire bird groups, right? You talk about bird uh bears not hibernating. What about geese that don't migrate?
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I swore I wouldn't talk about dam birds or dam birds or it's amazing how that goes. It just like eventually you end up on a dam bird. So the geese don't migrate anymore. We we're creating a new species of geese, basically, right? Right. So thinking about this, there's a forward-looking kind of ecology. It's like the the ecology of cities and the ecology of humans is something that we're we're just gonna we've created it. Once you move things around, it's there. Now what are we gonna do moving forward? Yeah. Rather than kind of, I do believe in conservation to a point, but freaking out about spilled milk at this point might not be our best way forward. How about engendering more biodiversity, making it better with what we've got, and yeah, preventing bullshit from moving into the country and eating everything and right? And you know, but we've always had animals moving around, whether by natural or human means. And so there's a philosophical stand that you take is that this is the new, you know, in two million years, what's the fish population of uh North American streams gonna look like? Right. It's gonna be freaky. Yeah, we're gonna have some freaky additions, we're gonna have a lot more variety.
SPEAKER_03Patrick's head swimming around on a fish.
SPEAKER_00Let's hope so. We just uh That would be a bit too freaky for me. We did an interview not that long ago with a gentleman named Matt Herbert from the Nature Conservancy, who's doing some restoration, a lot of restoration work up in northern Michigan and all around Michigan, really, uh trying to because the white fish are already being decimated in Lake Michigan or have been being decimated since the lumber industry.
SPEAKER_04So he's not only built the uh the mussels invasive?
SPEAKER_00Well the zebra mussels. They there, I mean, he was explaining quite a bit where now he's building reef structures in the actual Lake Michigan off the coast, but then also going up the river to start building estuaries and habitat so the fish can start learning how to where they need to be upstream and then go downstream the way they could they historically do. But you're I mean, just I'm just adding to your anecdote of this, you're you're entirely correct. The the fish population in the streams could be a thousand percent different than what we expect them to be now. Exactly. And just one more point to that. I I I was a history major, and one of I remember one of my professors at PFW said uh that like everybody was kind of panicking around the 9-11 area era and later on, and it was kind of interesting when we were talking to him, and he was like, Listen, you're living through history right now. Like it's it's better to document it and to be educated of what's going on right now because in 40 years, 50 years, 100 years, people this is the history. So I think that what you're saying is is is interesting. It's better to not really cry over the spilled milk as opposed to learn how that milk made it onto the ground and kind of rebuild from there, understand from there.
SPEAKER_02And it's not my field, but you know, there are people who are looking at urban ecology as new ecological systems, right? And we see new ecological systems all throughout the history of the earth. Like, like my life is spent in the Ordovician, like I live there, right? My head is in there. There were no fishes. Right, yeah. There were no fishes, it was a long time ago. Uh the the nearest fishes were in Colorado that I know of, right? And um those fishes were living in a kind of freshwater system, as far as we can tell. Uh in Indiana, it was uh kind of a shallow moraine. There's no environment like that. Right. Shallow moraine for miles and miles and miles where you could probably wade for 200 miles. Yeah, wow. Right? Uh where your boat had to have a flat bottom instead of a deep keel.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. Where where the water's calmer, shallower. Possibly a lot calmer, and and you know, we think maybe it got as much as 30 meters deep. Okay. Right? Which is reasonably deep, but it ain't deep. Right. It's not like ocean deep.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_02Because we got the entire continents that are covered by sea. Right. You got your entire con, and this is this has to do with times when the seafloor was higher, and the contins were a little lower, and you just balance the water between the two. And um, and that happens, you know, the seafloor rises, the continents fall, if the seafloor falls, the continents rise, and we have d dry times and wet times on the continent. And the history of geology on the continents is when it was wet, and then when it's dry, you don't have anything.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Dinosaurs are mostly a dry time, and so it's actually kind of rare to find dinosaurs because of it has to be next to a mountain or something where all the sediments piling up real thick. Right. If you go out west, there were already mountains being built, and sediments were depositing deeply.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Damn. So I I just I just like to lay into these questions because I prepare them. Travis helped me on this round, but I I just I just want to make sure we get to some of these because I'm just curious. Yeah. Uh, but as professor and a professor for many, many years, I imagine that like you kind of alluded to before, why do we have to learn about this sort of thing?
SPEAKER_03What what is something that you're just trying to throw that in at some point?
SPEAKER_00What's the one? Why do we have to learn the practical use for this knowledge? I've been that student before. Well, not necessarily the practical practical use, but from your side, what is something that you just kind of feel like you really hope to imprint upon your students?
SPEAKER_02Well, so most of the classes I teach in geology are just sort of your basic background classes now. We don't have a major anymore at the school, and that the geology departments have been shut down numerous places. Um I won't even get into why I think that's happening because I get angry. But um, you know, so if you're not training people to go into oil, to go into mining, and to manage groundwater, which is probably the biggest one nowadays, has been groundwater, to manage landslides or to predict landslides, right? That's what our mapping is doing is either groundwater quality or landslides. Um there's all kinds of practical things, right? And also in Indiana, of course, it's where do we get our um aggregates to build roads, which things are good for building roads, which things are crap rock for building roads, what can you make cement out of? What can you not make cement out of? Um, you know, where can you get water? What's the water quality gonna be like depending on which rock you're going through? You know, once we we were mapping and some guy's real angry, comes out of his house and looks at us, looks at the truck, Indiana Geological and Water Survey, and starts like, my water's poison, isn't it? And we're like, we're the geological side, we're not doing the water side, but we're looking at, and you know, I I I I was not prepared for this, I just had to deal with this, right? We're looking at this black rock in the south that they call slate, but it's a black shale, it's a very, very organic, rich, and pyritic. It has pyrite in it, iron sulfide in it, right? And had I to do it again, I said, Does your water taste like shit? Because this rock will make your water taste like shit.
SPEAKER_00Right?
SPEAKER_02Like literally, it'll put tons of sulfur into the water.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Any water that gets near what's called the New Albany shale, and it's not smooth like that. It's it's it's layered material. Any water that gets goes through it, goes near it, it tastes like shit. Uh it's picking up awful pyrite from the pyrite. The pyrite is just not good. This is what so the more pyrite that's in the rock, the more your water's gonna come out of the faucet in your well. Hit the sink, rust out immediately, and smell like sulfur. Yeah, gross. Because the iron oxidizes immediately, because there's no oxygen in that water. It oxidizes immediately on hitting oxygen, and then it releases sulfuric acid.
SPEAKER_00That's not great.
SPEAKER_02Or hydrogen sulfide, both of which are not great. Right? So, um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00One more for you. I I I have one more for you. Uh no, that was just the practical stuff.
SPEAKER_02That's not what I want people to go home with. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, what I want them to go home with is a sense of geologic time. Yes, okay. And so the sense is like we walk on the sidewalk and we measure 450 meters. That's the whole age of the earth. And we go, where's this is where the dinosaurs are. This is this, this is that. So if you do it at 10,000 years equals a millimeter, the edge of the earth fits in 450 millimeter meters, half a kilometer. Wow.
SPEAKER_00Holy space.
SPEAKER_02The big sidewalk on campus, the big sidewalk on campus. Wow. We start conveniently at the clock tower near the engineering building, and go past the Mastodon and go into between the music building and the gym building, right? Yeah. And I take a dime, stick it in the crack of the sidewalk, and say, This is recorded human history. Sideways, not across. Not long ways, short ways through the dime. That's all of recorded human history. The pyramids fit in there real neatly. Like everything you've ever heard about in ancient history is in there, and a little bit of not recorded human history, right?
SPEAKER_04If you want to feel insignificant, that's a good way to do it.
SPEAKER_02And that is a good way to feel pretty insignificant. And Mark Twain made a few jokes about that, right? He said, like, if the age of the earth is like the Eiffel Tower, then the age of man is like the skin of paint on the top, tippy top of the Eiffel Tower. Wow. And obviously the tower was built to hold up that skin of paint.
SPEAKER_00You know, I don't choose to look at that negatively. I don't think that that drowns me. I'm excited to be here in ego.
SPEAKER_02I I don't, I I this is this is personally where I'm at. Like, this is not a negative. You're part of something fast. That's what I'm much faster than you are.
SPEAKER_03And you know, what um how many times did it get close to us being here and completely start over?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, how many times? That's an interesting question, too, because somebody has solved using geologic time and the fossil record, somebody's come up with an elegant solution. Oh, nice. To the paradox of why we haven't met other civilizations from other planets.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, that's that's a three-parter.
SPEAKER_02Here's the here's the elegant solution. Think about all of geologic time. Despite some stories that have come out, I think they're bullshit, the Silurian hypothesis, you know, from the not the Silurian period, but from the Silurian civilization, which I don't even know what that is. Um if you look at all the geologic record, you can see that things got reset. There were mass extinctions over and over again, and there are many times for many groups to develop whatever. And we developed smart, whales are smart, elephants are smart, but there's only one civilization that's developed, and we can be pretty certain of this from the fossil record.
SPEAKER_05So if in 450 4.5 billion years, right, we haven't developed multiple advanced civilizations, then they're rare.
SPEAKER_02It might have just been a chance. It might have been just like some random fluke thing that these monkeys come out of the trees and decide to have ideas. Make guns. Make guns.
SPEAKER_04These monkeys got ideas.
SPEAKER_02Damn. Yeah. That's I've so so like this is the most elegant solution to the paradox that I've ever heard. Because it's like takes facts. Well, we have a case study, we have several resets, we have several groups of vertebrates that develop, we have several other animals that develop of all the different animals that evolved. How many of them birds are smart, right? But how many of them had the combination of really smart and hands or something like this to manipulate the world? Because that's part of it, right? It's not just being smart. Lord knows whales may have a deeper spiritual life than us. I don't know, it's not gonna hurt my feelings.
SPEAKER_04Raccoons almost had it.
SPEAKER_02Um raccoons, I mean, so like, and and maybe in the future, but maybe if we disappear, it will never happen again.
SPEAKER_00Damn, that is that makes me feel more lucky. I'm sitting on the positive side of this. I feel like I'm here and I'm happy that that we all four got smart enough with our hands and our brains to be able to sit and record this in one little blip moment of the earth's history.
SPEAKER_04I do see that's cool. There um I watched a video about um there's they were talking about crabs and how they are there are species of crabs that look very similar, but they they evolved from completely different family trees just because that's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_02Intelligent, civilized organisms. The closest we come is ants, which don't do it the way we do it at all.
SPEAKER_05Crabs is one of those interesting things where you can say nature just wants to make a crab.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it'll make it out of anything. So so the other lesson in paleontology is crocodiles are not the real crocodiles. They aren't the first crocodiles. First crocodiles were the eightosaurs who lived in the Mesozoic with the dinosaurs, and they were better crocodiles than the modern crocodiles. Better, like more evolved? Well, they had nostrils up in the top of their heads, like whales, right? So they're better for water. And so um there's this repeated evolution of things, of the same thing, over and over and over again. And you could say that kangaroos are just deer, they just have a boing-boing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. Their back legs are just huge, right?
SPEAKER_02And you also look in Australia, there was a kind of a wolf or dog thing. There was and they're they're not related at all. At all. Not even in the least. Is that one of them? No, the dingo is a real dog. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Talking about It's like a tiger something, right? Um Tasmanian tango.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Right? And we had a Tasmanian we had an Australian lion that was a pouched animal, clearly not related to lions. In South America, we had a saber-tooth that was a pouch uh animal. Wow. Clearly not related to lions. We had something like a horse in South America before uh South America joined with North America.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It wasn't a horse at all, right?
SPEAKER_04Are possums uh and kangaroos even remotely related? Yes.
SPEAKER_02Well, so that's an interesting story that I tell as well. It used to be South America was connected to Antarctica and Australia was connected to Antarctica. So between those three, marsupials rose. That's where they're from. South America broke off earlier, then Australia broke off. Australia broke off. When those both broke off, then there's a circumpolar current that kills Antarctica, basically isolates it and freezes it, right? The water just keeps going around and around and around, getting colder, colder, and colder. And that freezes Antarctica. Before then, it was a pretty thriving place. And so, um, you know, the other thing is the world's a very different place from what it was. And which is another thing coming back to bears eating trash, whatever. Like, yeah. They'll they'll go back and forth on this, right? Yeah. Uh we lost an entire continent. Well, except penguins. Don't tell penguins I said that.
SPEAKER_04Imagine you're not even close to really knowing what's underneath all that ice.
SPEAKER_02Well, not we pecked around the edges, we got all kinds of fossils from there. Yeah. Just pecking around the edges. Um yeah, what's underneath the ice is like there's some remote sensing, there's some drilling. Yeah. We roughly know where everything is, but we don't, you know, it's hard to collect a dinosaur from right under the middle.
SPEAKER_04I imagine it's expensive. I think so.
SPEAKER_02I only know a f you know, I know a few people that have been there. I've never been there. I am not one of these adventurous guys, and I've never gone to Epstein to ask for the Peter.
SPEAKER_00Do you feel like uh we we could benefit we could benefit more from knowing more of our geology, of our paleontology? Is there a benefit in all of this?
SPEAKER_02I mean, there there has been benefits in direct application to paleontology in the past. It's how we figured out the age of the earth, it's how we still find oil to a degree. Um we've spent 200 years learning about the age of the earth, etc. Paleontology at this point might be more of an interest, a human interest thing, and the question of benefit becomes a philosophical question. All right. Obviously, we eat first, but then we enjoy story time.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right? Yeah. And so, to my in my opinion, there's an enrichment that comes along with who we are in our time and what we are, and what kind of beast we are. And if football's worth having, then paleontology is worth having. Damn right. Yes, it entertains a ton of kids. Like, I don't know anybody done like dinosaurs. Oh, okay. Except me. I don't really like dinosaurs because they're like birds. It's just too many people like them.
SPEAKER_04My family loved me over Christmas time because I took all the children to cut geodes or to crack geodes open, and they had the time of their life.
SPEAKER_02And children love this stuff, and it's kind of discovering about the planet you live on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. If you don't know where you came from, you don't know where you can go, kind of a deal.
SPEAKER_02And and then there's also like how bad it can get.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Right. Right. An entire continent can be lost. Australia uh or uh Antarctica. Not only doesn't have bears, it doesn't have anything out. Don't tell the penguins that.
SPEAKER_04It makes you grateful for the stability we have right now.
SPEAKER_02And and we live in time, you know, that that any moment there could be a rock coming in the sky, as T-Rex said, that can't be good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And um and and also that environmental problems can go really bad. Yep. So the extinct the greatest extinction before the dinosaurs might have had to do with warming and stagnation of the oceans. Because if you warm up the surface too much, you stop circulating. Yep. It's killing the oxygen and that kills the oxygen. That makes yeah. I mean So so what we do is we understand the Earth system from a point of view of a different Earth system. Because the continents have been in different places, the oceans have circulated differently. And so the important thing for us looking forward is to look backwards and see what can happen.
SPEAKER_00Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and how to deal with it.
SPEAKER_00So Yeah, and I guess I would add to that too, is just throughout this conversation with you, and I guess the one question that I was most interested in asking is like when when I think of geology, when I think of anything along the lines of rock hounding like Travis does, I I tend to think the T I tend to think the Tetons, or I think out west, where I can see these geological functions or features that are prominent in Earth on the Earth, and you drive up to this mountain and you're like, oh my gosh, in such awe. But uh one of the big kind of things we like about what we do at this podcast is really just encouraging people to get outside to understand the environment around you, ask questions, uh, do some research, things along those lines. And I I think it's interesting, and I'm excited for this interview because now I can walk around outside and I can I can see I can imagine what's underneath my feet, and it makes me excited to be outside. Like maybe I'll go start walking. You gotta go 400 feet beneath your feet. Sure, sure. That's that's right. Well, and even going down to Hanging Rock and Salomony and knowing now what that is, the reef structure, that's that's just another aspect of enjoying and understanding the things that are around us. It's a beautiful world that we live in. You just gotta talk to the right people, ask the right questions, and then and then open up your eyes and take a peek.
SPEAKER_04What is your uh opinion on the proper procurement of fossils and artifacts that you find in the environment?
SPEAKER_02But what do you mean by proper? Don't get shot by the property owner.
SPEAKER_04That's what I'm looking for. Number one.
SPEAKER_02Like generally, as a rule, you need to ask the property owner.
SPEAKER_05Two is if you're not on federal land, it's probably okay to collect.
SPEAKER_02Um federal land has its own rules, and each service that owns that runs land has its own procedures. Forest service has procedures, um parks, National Park Service has procedures, and not a lot of those here. And um state parks also have their rules. But most other land in Indiana, I would have to say that when it comes to elephants, for example, okay, don't be afraid if you dig up a mastodon. So so you know, there's heavy equipment operators who just are scared to death of antiquities rules which apply to human stuff. And I am not even commenting on that. I don't know anything about it. Technically, I I know something, but I'm not in a position to talk about it.
SPEAKER_04Well, they have to shut down construction at that point.
SPEAKER_02So if you find an yeah, it gets I don't know, it gets bad. The the rules are extremely strict on human remains and human artifacts, etc. But I don't even know how strict. I don't know what has to be done.
SPEAKER_05But if you're running into a mastodon, what I tell people is give us a call, give the state museum a call.
SPEAKER_02Nobody has the authority to stop you on private property if you run into a mastodon or a mammoth. Technically, you could keep it. That's the law. The law is you can have it. You can have yourself a tusk or whatever. You want it to stay together and somebody else to see it, you might bring in professionals. State Museum has that. I I I can get you hooked up. If it's gonna stop your job, rather than re-bury it and hide it, which happens all the time, right? Rather than rebury it and hide it, if that's the choice, if if that much money's riding on this job getting done right now, scoop it up in as big a chunks as you can and put it off to the side, call us, right? Because rather than hiding it away, maybe you've got something that's really cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'd rather have like broken pieces of it than nothing at all.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And and we have approximately where it's from, it's better than an exact, precise dig. I get this, right? I've just been working with this my whole life. I got like like cost thousands and thousands of dollars a day for delays. And so, like, just scoop it up and put it to the side. And this is what happened in the quarry in in Pipe Creek. Somebody knew what they were talking about.
SPEAKER_05They wanted to hide it because they didn't know.
SPEAKER_02They thought they'd just get in trouble, but these are pre-human, you know, and so now we have preserved, kind of mangled, but preserved just this incredible trove of fossils that's gonna take years to go through. And most of the time when we run into these fossils, the people are doing it are so scared of the more draconian laws that don't apply to fossils uh here, not on federal land, that we lose data because of fear. And so that would be my biggest message to people digging.
SPEAKER_04People who are just in that business, just is there any open source um like uh your phone you can download Merlin, and they have uh any bird you can listen to, and it'll record that location where it was heard and it'll add it to a database?
SPEAKER_02We don't have a database for fossils, I don't think.
SPEAKER_05We have curated like fossil guides that are online.
SPEAKER_02Uh but we don't have um sort of uh, you know, uh uh an identification or reporting system for fossils that's that public.
SPEAKER_04Do you think that that would be something that would be useful?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I it might be. Uh the you know, there's way more people that do birds. Right. We have a network of um of fossil clubs, and the fossil clubs is our principal training. Uh the probably the premier club is the one in Cincinnati called the Dry Dredgers. Uh here there's the Three Rivers Gem and Mineral Society, which, you know, provides some training, and I'm always willing to help with somebody in that society who's trying to learn more fossils. And so I've worked with the dry dredgers all my life, all my adult life. And the dry dredgers, you know, kind of recognize me. There's the Kentucky Paleontological Society. I go to speak for them, and on their Facebook, I'm like group expert, you know, and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_04I have some runs to get cut by them. Uh so I'm gonna go to the Three Rivers people, yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna go in there. So maybe sign up.
SPEAKER_02I would go ahead and just contact them if you're a fossil collector and get get engaged with them. They're not focused on fossils like the dry drudgers are. So there's other groups that are more fossil focused. Uh so it's a different kind of ethic and a different kind of way of interacting with the world. Um, but it's it's good. Yeah. So works.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and uh it would help to have some knowledge about these cool things that I find.
SPEAKER_02And so the nice thing about the amateur clubs is that they will bring you up from kid to local expert, right? So some of these amateur clubs they have better experts than me in some things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
unknownDamn.
SPEAKER_02How could that be? Well, stamp collectors, you know, like if you get focused on one thing, there's a guy at the uh the who was specializing in worm teeth, and this expert in in Sweden, this guy's in the dry dredgers, and and he was always like, No, I'm no good, I'm just an amateur. It's like, oh my god, you're better than everybody else's except maybe him, right? You know, and if you're so afraid of being an amateur, just prepare what you got, give it to him, and he'll finish it. Whatever, right? So these guys have like massive amounts of knowledge because it's their hobby, and they're not constantly answering questions like, why do I have to learn this?
SPEAKER_00Well, Dr. DeTillo, uh, we are nearing into about an hour and a half recorded time, so we do want to kind of let you go here in a bit. But uh, Travi, do you have any other questions?
SPEAKER_04Um, I had one more, and I kind of forgot how it goes, but I think it's um how how does a turtle breathe under water?
SPEAKER_02What's that got to do with me? I have no idea.
SPEAKER_04Through its ass. Yes. Through its ass.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Chuck. Thanks, Chuck. So I apparently I had this conversation with Chuck. I don't know. This is just one of those interesting things. They were saving people who had bad COVID lung problems by injecting highly oxygenated water as an enema kind of thing. Huh. Not water, it might have been another liquid. I don't know. But basically, like, I'm not the medicine person. And basically, there's a lot of things, uh, there's a lot of blood vessels in your digestive system that are really close to this inner surface. That's the outer surface, really, like the inside of your butt's the outside. Yeah. Um, so um this the skin's really thin. There's a lot of capillaries in there, and that makes this big area for gas exchange. It can always be used for gas exchange, and just ask the party guys how you use it. Yeah, right. And and and you know, that your rapid drunk is from the same process. And so turtles breathing underwater in part just sort of like uh butt breathe. That makes sense. That's a major fact.
SPEAKER_04I thought it was some kind of inside joke.
SPEAKER_02Uh it is an inside joke, but it's also like a fact.
SPEAKER_00It's about two can be the same thing, Travis.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. You know, you can have a joke that's real, really a fact. And this is one like butt breathing.
SPEAKER_00Well, on that's a perfect way to go out. Uh Dr. DeTillo, thank you very, very, very much for spending your evening with us. I have a lot to consider. I have a 10-year-old at home, and I am itching at the bits to get home and just lay down all this information. I think we might walk my street and be like, this is this is Earth's history right here. So good luck. Uh, thank you very much for spending your evening with us. Mucho appreciado for having a geologist, a paleontologist, and all of these other ontologists on. It was extremely and just extremely informative. I understand why your students love you so damn much. I said that. Well, that's what that's what the word around the block is.
SPEAKER_04But uh, go through and look at your internet professor.
SPEAKER_00We'll let that part get out. Uh we won't. We will. But thank you very much, guys. I think it's here. If you guys want to follow us, uh busted pretty at Blue Sky, Busted Knees and Pretty Trees on Instagram, or our website, bustedpretty.com. Uh leave us a note, leave us a message. You'll see some more information about Dr. Totillo on there. Thank you, guys.
SPEAKER_04Yep, thank you all for listening. Thanks a lot, Dr. Totillo, and uh keep on sponsoring. Thanks for having me.
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