[Music]
CONRAD: My name is Conrad Labandeira and I'm a paleoecologist
at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Right now we're in the Karoo Basin here in South Africa.
The goal for today is to collect fossils to really understand the Permian-Triassic
extinction and the events that occurred before it and after it.
The end-Permian crisis is one of the most amazing parts
in the history of life because it represents
the most serious challenge to the continuation of life on this planet.
So we're trying to reconstruct what this community of life
looked like and we're trying to reconstruct the food web.
The plants, the insects that ate the plants,
the vertebrates that ate the insects
and eventually we're going to compare this food web
with the food web that came after
and see how ecosystems have changed with time.
And so in many ways, it's kind of like what a detective does.
We look for clues and evidence
and then we try to come up with an understanding
of what this evidence signifies.
And that to me is really what we do.
That's my job and it is the best job in the world.
ROSE: I'm Rose Prevec and I'm a paleobotanist.
I study the plants particularly, not so much the animals.
And together with Dr. Labandeira, we try to look at how insects
fit into this picture by looking at the damage
on the leaves.
CONRAD: Oh, look at this!
ROSE: Ah, beautiful margin feeding
and it's got a slightly jaggedy edge
where the insect perhaps avoided some of the tougher material of the leaf.
CONRAD: Insect-feeding behavior established in the past continues today.
Here we have margin feeding.
And this kind of damage is very informative
because it says something about how insects
and the plants are relating to one another.
And what we have here is something that's happening in the here and now.
But what I look at in the fossil record
is something that's happening in the deep past.
Gosh there must be about 50 leaves in this thing.
ROSE: This is the most fun that you can have.
That's awesome. Every time you open the rock,
that's something no one has ever seen before.
CONRAD: When you find that evidence,
it's a thrilling event because all your patience,
all your perseverance becomes rewarded.
(on-camera): Oh, fantastic.
That's really a minor part of it.
The major part is what comes after.
We take that evidence back to the lab
and then analyze it so that we can understand
the patterns in which the insect herbivores
are feeding on the plant hosts.
So here's the margin of the leaf, the cut,
the end of the cut,
and the margin of the leaf resumes again.
ROSE: 1B
CONRAD: Uh-huh
ROSE: 1A
CONRAD: We're recording all of the plant species
into a database and we're also documenting
kinds of damage by insect herbivores
on these plants.
And in this particular site one of the unique results
that we observe is very little plant diversity
but highly elevated insect consumption
of those plants both in terms of the diversity
of plant damage and in the frequency of plant damage.
So in order to really understand that further,
one of the avenues of research that we would like to investigate
is to see whether or not this phenomenon
is more common throughout the fossil record
in major crises in the history of land life.
And that has implications for what's happening today
in terms of global climatic change.
So in my view, these are very interesting questions.
And they provide answers to things
that I think a lot of us want to know,
but haven't been able to address.