Good morning John I'm headed to the University of Montana. You can see it down there. To see a cool thing. That's where I'm going.
Okay, hi I made it. This is Kallie you may know her from youtube.com/eons. This is Tuna.
He makes Scishow, most days.
You got your name on the door. "I do!"
So where are we? Kallie: We are in the University of Montana paleontology Center collections room.
Hank: And this is the collections room, It's back there
I mean, I'm looking at this table and like at least half of the things are not fossils
Kallie: You keep the fossils in the cases.
Okay, what's your biggest fossil ?
Callie: Probably that jaw upstairs. Hank: That jaw upstairs that you can't fit anywhere else?
It doesn't fit anywhere else, but in that case upstairs. Look at it go!
Obviously I try to keep the heavier stuff on the lower level. Let's see this one. These are all bits of mammal. Mammoth, I mean
I mean, they are mammals. These are like tips of toes. Oh, it's lighter way lighter than I expected
Yeah So this is all like in the thousands of years old.
Does that make it lighter?
It does. It
There's less time for the mineralization process to occur. These are horse bits, a bunch of horse bits.
The horses we have here now were imported yeah from Europe
Yeah, we did have horses once. Yes, and the OG horses horses started here. Yeah, then left, or died
So the weird cutoff date for a fossil is ten thousand years right. It's completely arbitrary
It's just like "uh, ten thousand!" A lot of the big charismatic megafauna was extinct by about ten thousand years ago
however
Mammoths hung on until about four thousand years ago in High Arctic islands
So that means when the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being built there were still mammoths hanging out in the Arctic Circle.
This is so cute yeah, that's a little antler! Was it a baby
Or was it just really little and cute? It was just a little dude. I think it might have been saberteeth
like tiny saber-tooth chihuahua deer. I can't even imagine. There's so much cute stuff
all this stuff was living, breathing, had cells and blood. You never think about like saber-toothed kittens
They had to have been - yeah, right? - just, like,
Stupid cute. There's little teeth and they're teeth of... isolated teeth of rodents. How is that different from just sand?
Microscopes.
my favorite specimen,
your favorite specimen in the whole collection
Up there. Top 5. so on the outside, you can tell that that's a fossil, but when you cut it open
It's just look at the pattern. It's just it's either a sponge or a hadrozoan
Oh, okay, so it's like a soft thing mm-hmm, but it had an internal structure
Do you have any poop? Do we have poop? Yes, we have poop. No Triassic poop
Oh, I can't believe you don't know where the turds are. I know and I just got them out the other day.
That's not turds. Turtle turtle!
Hey, I got my poop! We have some really amazing soft body preservation. What is that thing? That's
Terrible it's like more like a hell warthog. Which sounds worse. the top part was
What was eroding out you can it has lichen still on it. And then you asked me about oldest specimen - Is it
bacterial mat. It is! Yeaah, so cool!
from Australia of course and it's like
2.75 billions, this is what life was so weird to think about what earth was like when it was just a
Just a baby. Yeah.
A few months ago, Kallie, my friend Blake and I started a YouTube show called Eons, which is basically the story of all life on Earth
But walking around this museum with Kallie, I realized it's different for her because she spends so much time with these objects
I got to see her see past the bones into the animals and organisms as they lived in their ecosystems in the deep past
And I think that really comes out when she's talking about this stuff
Thanks so much to Kallie for the tour, and if you want to check out Eons,
I promise it is fascinating and weird and amazing. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.