This is a transcript of episode 40.
Alyssa Fjeld (00:24)
Hello, hello and welcome back to another episode of Fossils and Fiction. I’m so excited today to be talking with Travis about our latest guest interview with Saskia from the Jurassic Coast. We’ll also be discussing some really interesting upcoming virtual art exhibits and our fabulous dinner recipes prepared not necessarily on honour of Dungeons Delicious in Dungeon, but definitely it was on my mind when I thought about it.
Travis Holland (00:49)
let’s start with this amazing paper, which we can’t get into in too much detail, but this is our Palaeo Pulse, our sort of interesting paper news update. This paper by David Lovelace and colleagues, perhaps, perhaps, we won’t claim too much, pushes back the origin of dinosaurs.
Alyssa Fjeld (00:53)
Yes.
Yeah, my understanding as a non-dinosaur person reading this paper is that essentially what we’re seeing is the arrival of different dinosaur fossils in Laurasia in a period of time that is earlier than we previously thought they were. It’s almost co-occurring with their appearance in Gondwana. Would that be correct?
Travis Holland (01:29)
Yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely my understanding. So it says that essentially the thinking until now has been that dinosaurs originated in Gondwana in the Southern hemisphere, which is where we are of course, and then spread up North. But if they’re up North in Laurasia before or much closer in time to when they’re found in Gondwana then
where did they actually originate and how did the spread occur? it raises some really interesting questions about the origin and evolution and dispersal of dinosaurs.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:04)
It’s a really interesting paper. It’s been headed by David Lovelace, but there are a number of other amazing authors that have contributed to this, and it was published just recently in January. The title of the paper, if you’re looking it up yourself, is Rethinking Dinosaur Origins. Oldest known equatorial dinosaur-bearing assemblage, mid to late, Carnian Popo Agie Formation, Wyoming, USA. So Wyoming is one of these states that is just known for producing amazing dinosaur fossils.
Looking through the paper itself, I’m seeing that it looks at a cursory glance, like there is not, a lot of this material might be quite fragmentary, but they’re getting really good, the bone, femoral histology plates look really, really nice.
Travis Holland (02:45)
Yeah, I think the dating is quite precise is my thinking. And so that’s kind of more than the quality of the material recovered. It’s the dates. That’s the important thing, but yeah, it’s, fragmentary. It’s kind of not a slam dunk, but it’s interesting and it’s really cool. So we’ll put it in the show notes, I think, and people can take a read for themselves, but it has been getting a bit of press over the last month.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:49)
Yeah.
the bones themselves.
Right.
also a great opportunity for viewers who are dinosaur fans, but maybe have not heard of this group before, to learn a little bit about a group called Silesauridae which is, if you look them up, they are like the puppies of the Triassic. They’re very cute. I was about to say Jurassic and I caught myself. But this is a really, really cute group of small dinosaur forms that you should definitely Google right now because it will put a smile on your face.
Travis Holland (03:32)
Yeah.
There’s a lot of argument I think about whether silesaurs are dinosaurs or not and where they exactly fit. So, and also whether these fossils are silesaurs or not, or whether they’re dinosaur or silesaurs. Yeah. It’s, someone will yell at us. doubt.
Alyssa Fjeld (03:43)
no, I didn’t mean to step in it, jeez.
Alright, well that’s fine, they can yell at me, I don’t know any better. I
plead ignorance and the fact that when I look them up they look like cute little puppy dinosaurs. yeah. But that’s really cool. It’s really neat to see that work getting done.
Travis Holland (03:55)
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Alyssa Fjeld (04:01)
So having introduced this paper a little bit, I guess that kind of leads us to another really interesting person who’s working with Mesozoic formations. One of the most famous Mesozoic formations that we, I guess, would know, that most people would know today, the Jurassic Coast. The person that you spoke to, Saskia, does work with this wonderful UNESCO World Heritage Site. How was the interview?
Travis Holland (04:26)
Yeah, it was great. Saskia is a geologist by training. And so we talked a lot about rocks and fossils and all the good things, the tourism and history of the Jurassic coast, including Mary Anning who is of course a famous, well, she’s, she’s, she’s a famous palaeontologist, but under-recognized in, her time.
and so, yeah, Saskia and I kind of run through, you know, in brief as much as you can, several hundred million years worth of sedimentary deposits and fossils, which is exposed on the Jurassic Coast in the UK. she works there and lives there and is from that area and, and works for the Jurassic Coast trust, which is, you say, well, UNESCO world heritage site and an amazing place. I now have a near the top of my.
to visit places and I really want to do the like full 95 mile coastal walk. So check out all the fossils on the way.
Alyssa Fjeld (05:17)
Yeah,
I’m super jealous of my supervisor who gets to lead field trips there from his position in Sweden. Shout out to James Holmes. So jealous. And if our viewers are curious to learn more about Mary Anning, there’s a fantastic movie that came out recently that talks a little bit about her called Ammonite. There’s also some delightful queer scenes in that movie. You might remember her as being one of the first people to discover different ichthyosaur skeletons, which is super cool.
I also wanted to say that it’s super cool that this is a locally employing… So UNESCO has a policy where when geosites get designated, you have to have a certain level of local employment. You have to employ local people to do the different jobs around tourism and engagement. And I think that’s a really empowering way to treat the people who are the custodians of the fossils. I just think that’s super cool. And it’s really awesome that you got to talk to someone
Travis Holland (05:54)
You
Alyssa Fjeld (06:10)
who’d grown up with all of that. That’s super cool.
Travis Holland (06:13)
so let’s dive into the interview.
Saskia Elliott (06:20)
my name is Saskia Elliott. Online I go by Geo.Sassie and I work for the Jurassic Coast Trust.
Fossils And Fiction (06:28)
And you are a geologist by training, as I understand. What sparked your interest in geology?
Saskia Elliott (06:35)
So I’ve been quite lucky. So I live in Dorset in the UK and to anyone who might know, we’ve got the Jurassic Coast here. So from like age four or five, I’ve been down the coast with my parents, with my mum, sort of giving me a hammer and a bucket and going, off you go, go find some fossils. So it’s kind of naturally been something that drew me, but I didn’t, I’ve got to put my hand up and say I wasn’t ever that kid who went, yes, this is what I want to do as a job.
Fossils And Fiction (06:55)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (07:02)
I mean, I wanted to be a vet at one point, I to be an marine biologist. Like this, this wasn’t like my soul calling However, I’ve always enjoyed science and I’ve always enjoyed being outside and it just sort of naturally slotted together. I mean, I was quite lucky as a kid, we did go on some holidays around Europe and that we saw the Alps. So that’s why I went towards geology, not just fossils, because I just, liked big landscapes and I liked big interesting places with.
Fossils And Fiction (07:15)
Yeah.
Saskia Elliott (07:30)
cliffs that towered over you. So I basically drew myself towards that and went, oh, I can be outside studying it and there’s a job in it. Amazing. So yeah, that’s what led me towards it. And when I got to college, which for us is about sort of 16, 17 age, there was a geology course and there was this little guy who got really animated and excited telling me about what geology was. And I went, oh, I might like to try that.
Fossils And Fiction (07:58)
It’s funny that you mentioned marine biology though. That’s like the, like millennial sort of era, you know, dream job. think everybody wanted to do that at some point.
Saskia Elliott (08:08)
Yeah, and like I grew up on the coast as well so like I’m playing in kayaks and little rowing boats and stuff so like the watery part was always there and then I just sort of ooh, maybe I could do science on the water and then discovered that I kind of get seasick so.
Fossils And Fiction (08:23)
might as well stick to the land and the cliffs instead. So you’ve already mentioned the Jurassic Coast, you’re in that part of the world, and now you work for the Jurassic Coast Trust. So what was the, what was the pipeline? What was the pathway to go from, from studying geology to working for the trust?
Saskia Elliott (08:25)
you
convoluted one quite frankly. So I did my bachelor’s in geology and I did that split across two different universities because I started part-time with Birkbeck University London they did distance learning and I was I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to do yet still so I was working on the side and then I picked up and transferred that to the University of Portsmouth to finish my bachelor’s and then because I kind of delayed it a little bit
I graduated in 2020 and there weren’t a lot of jobs in 2020.
so I went, guess now’s the time to do a masters. So I kind of never planned to do a masters, but I stayed on to do when I did it in engineering geology, which I kind of didn’t even have on my radar just a couple of years before. I really enjoyed it. And I ended up again, you can see how the Jurassic Coast comes in. I did my whole dissertation on the landslides of the Jurassic Coast in a particular stretch. And it was all using like GIS and
Fossils And Fiction (09:13)
Hmm
Saskia Elliott (09:37)
sort of landforms and how it all moved. So again, the Jurassic Coast has always been niggling in the background there, but I still hadn’t really made anything of it yet. And I took a first grad role in geotechnical stuff and that all went wrong and I quit in two weeks because it was just not for me. I then took another graduate role, which I’ve really enjoyed. And I did that for a couple of years and I was in contaminated land and I was doing site work, you know.
had a couple of groups of drillers and I’d be there in a hard hat going okay we’ve got to log this like nothing to do with the coast nothing at all but it was sort of building generalized commercial experience because I was engineering geology and I just saw this job come up that combined the fact that so by this point I’ve been starting to do some of my socials for just a hobby on the side again it was what was close to me that was the Jurassic Coast so I’d done lots on the Jurassic Coast
Fossils And Fiction (10:12)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (10:28)
and it kind of combined like the commercial side and the sort of like my love of the Jurassic Coast and it was talking about some sea level rise and landslide stuff I’d already done with my master’s dissertation and it was like this little job wrapped up in a bow that was like my god this is perfect and I’ve been here about just under a year now and it’s great like it’s just go to work to plan
Fossils And Fiction (10:50)
Yeah, fantastic. It’s great
when you see people find a role that really suits them and just animates them. And I can see that the job that you’re doing now does that. But you mentioned the psychom and doing some of that stuff online with your socials. So that’s how we first got connected. I came across your Instagram account, Geo.Sassie. Tell me about that psychom. Why is that aspect of, you know, science work in general important to you?
Saskia Elliott (11:18)
I mean, to me, it started because I’m just super passionate about it and it didn’t take very long of doing it to realise I started looking into the figures of sort of enrollments into geoscience, palaeontology, all that sort thing and they are particularly in the UK and I know the US as well, I must admit I’m not sure about Australia but they’re sort of just declining and going off of a cliff really and I was like this is such an amazing topic and also
so required in the modern world. mean it’s general earth sciences can be used for everything from like know engineering factors sort of thing that I did, it’s water, it’s contamination, it’s you know you can’t interact with the earth and not know how it works. We kind of live on earth so go figure.
Fossils And Fiction (12:02)
Yeah.
Not to mention that it’s useful in knowing how Earth and its environments and living creatures respond to change, right, which is exactly the era we’ve put ourselves into.
Saskia Elliott (12:15)
And hugely, so a lot of the UK as well, for the palaeontology point of view, palaeontology can even be used in sort of the engineering aspects. I know like there’s a particular example that I always love that when they were doing the channel tunnel and things like that, they were looking at some of the fossils to check that they were in the right beds, which I’m not sure if you know the channel tunnel, but it’s the one that goes from the UK to France the train Yeah, it’s like, there’s this, I always love those little hidden secret uses of
Fossils And Fiction (12:32)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (12:43)
palaeontology or geology that people don’t quite know that’d be useful.
Fossils And Fiction (12:47)
But you’re right, that’s a really illustrative example, right? That’s how people know how old rocks are is through these index fossils. And so in the case of when you’re a tunnel, you need to know what level you’re at, what age rocks you’re going through to make sure you’re at the right depth. And there we have it.
Saskia Elliott (13:06)
And even, God forbid, we’ve got the North Sea oil field out near us and I know that that’s in the Kimmeridge clay, which is a rock we get along the Jurassic Coast. And again, they do that by knowing what fossils they’re seeing. There’s other markers as well, but one of the key ones is what fossils are we seeing? Are we in the right layer? So there is the secret uses.
Fossils And Fiction (13:26)
So you’ve mentioned Jurassic Coast and I know that is a name that I think people around the world know. It’s kind of a brand in its own right. But what is it exactly? Does it only cover the Jurassic period?
Saskia Elliott (13:39)
it doesn’t. So the Jurassic Coast, I’ve come to understand that the reason they called it the Jurassic Coast was yes we have Jurassic rocks but it was also not far off after the Jurassic Park series is when they were going for inscription of World Heritage Site so it was an exciting name so it stuck. However it’s officially called the Devon and East Dorset World Heritage Site because it covers that whole coastal stretch and it actually starts in the latest
Fossils And Fiction (13:50)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (14:05)
sort Permian, we’ve got the Permian-Triassic boundary, that’s what tested me here, what, 240 to 250 years ago? Yeah. I’m not a paleontologist. But yeah, so it starts there, we get a whole swath through, so that was like desert conditions back then, then we sort of flood it, we go through to the Jurassic, we’ve got all different seas and everything, and then…
Fossils And Fiction (14:12)
Yeah, I was going to say 240. You probably know better than I do,
Saskia Elliott (14:32)
it goes all the way through as well to the end of the Cretaceous. So we’ve got the whole of the Mesozoic era and it pretty much ends, can’t, I don’t think there’s an exact, like this is the exact year it ends or to the nearest hundred thousand, but it’s, we’ve got a lot of chalk, which is our end point of the Cretaceous. So we’ve got, I would love to call it the Mesozoic coast, but it’s not quite as catchy.
Fossils And Fiction (14:54)
No,
there was even something I saw today and it was branded Jurassic Park, right? And I went, that’s not Jurassic Park media. Like it’s just a generic dinosaurs. What are you talking about? But when that brand became so huge, that Jurassic Park brand, it has become synonymous for a lot of people with dinosaurs. And so if it helps get people there and support the work, support the conservation,
and support discoveries, you know, sometimes you have to roll with it.
Saskia Elliott (15:26)
Exactly and like so a lot of you might notice I’ve said that we’ve got a lot of sea environments So a lot of what we get isn’t dinosaurs. There’s been odd little fragments found I think in the Triassic beds when that was desert conditions and we do have quite a few little spots of dinosaur footprints so we have got evidence that it went shallow enough for dinosaurs at some point and Occasional bones, but generally we’re not dinosaurs. We’re like marine reptiles and that sort of thing but
Yeah, if the association gets people through the door, I’m all for it.
Fossils And Fiction (16:01)
So it is a World Heritage Site. What are some of the features that helped get that listing?
Saskia Elliott (16:07)
So there’s five basically, it’s not just the palaeontology, palaeontology is one of them and that sort of encompasses everything from fish fossils to insects to obviously larger vertebrates as well. it’s also, so the one that my little soft spot for is the geomorphology. So we’ve got two things related to that. One is like the overall processes of the coast, which is, know, your wave climate, sort of…
Fossils And Fiction (16:25)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (16:34)
how it all moves as a big scale thing. And then we go down to like small scale geomorphology, which is like, you know, your landslides that we’ve got nice chalk stacks and quite a famous spot is Durdle Door, which has got like this big archway that people go and take lots of photos of. So we’ve got sort of geomorphology side, we’ve got the history of science. that’s, there’s been a lot of study over the years in this area for like different scientists.
who’ve used this in papers all the way back as far as what? Mary Anning times of like the 1800s. And then we’ve got another one as well, which is related to the stratigraphy and structure. So the actual rock record itself and how it’s moved over time. So we have a lot of like alpine related structures.
we are a lot of miles away from the Alps and we’ve got the remnant effects of that here. So that’s one of the features as well. So yeah, it’s a right mixing pot of everything. the reason that this spot is picked up and not other spots nearby is we’ve got this segment through the whole of the coastline. So as all the rocks were deposited, they then were all tilted eastwards just gently.
over time so it means that as you go from one end to the other which is 95 miles long it’s it’s not a short stretch but as you go from one the other… no no do you know what though people have done it there’s like treks that they do that you start one end and go to the other end I salute them I have not done it but like so if you start in the furthest west point you’re at this late Permian Triassic stuff and generally minus a few weird structural things as you walk you slowly walk through every single bit of that time scale
Fossils And Fiction (17:53)
Not a day walk.
Saskia Elliott (18:15)
So it’s really good for international studies. People come along and go, if I can find this fossil here, and they use it as the index fossils, which is quite useful instead of it all being chopped and changed around.
back when they first started discovering stuff, was just as curiosities. They didn’t really, I think most of the stuff I’ve read, people thought that it was just like old beasts that had died, that were just washed in from somewhere else. when they’d find these big ichthyosaurs, or even like the little ammonites, they’d just be like, oh yeah, well we don’t see them around here, but ah, they just washed up from somewhere, I’m sure. they didn’t, like they knew they weren’t from here, and they knew that they were in rock.
but I don’t think they really had the concept of how old stuff was, but it was quite an instrumental site in starting to pull that apart.
Fossils And Fiction (18:57)
Mm-hmm.
Yes. So
some of that scientific history has really been remarkable. And you already mentioned Mary Anning although she was under recognised, if not unrecognised for her contributions, but could you tell us a little bit about those?
Saskia Elliott (19:15)
Yeah, mean, so just a personal, I always find this bizarre because growing up locally, I didn’t realize how internationally recognised she was. I just assumed she was like a bit of a local hero and it was really only since I started doing social media and I saw people from the USA posting about Maryanne and I was like, oh, you know who she is. And it just never twigged to me that she was so internationally recognised, which was a brilliant moment, let me just say.
She didn’t start off as like a fantastic scientist. was fossil finds were able to be sold to people who were coming down on holidays, going to get some sea air. And she was based in Limerie just with her family, just trying to make ends meet. But I mean, the finds that she found over the years were incredible. So I think about age 10 or 11, she found the first ethiosaur and it was…
was huge and she painstakingly with her brothers sort of uncovered it all on the beach and started making a name for herself by then. And she just found find after find. think one of the ones that I always love is she found the Belonites, which like the little ancient squid things that look like a bullet. She sussed the ink sacks from those. They used to grind them up and then remake ink from them, which is just so then if she was like annotating stuff.
She was making it from the fossilised squid ink that’s been remade. was really cool.
Fossils And Fiction (20:36)
Wow. Yeah, that’s a
really cool, really cool little tidbit.
Saskia Elliott (20:42)
Yeah, so a lot of what she did, she would find the fossil, make sketches of it and then sell it on. So there’s loads of like letters and sketches. So she did get quite a name for herself in the scientific community, but wasn’t necessarily as credited for it at the time because the main body that looked after geology and palaeontology in the UK was the Geological Society of London. And they, I think they were founded in the early 1800s. And at that point, no, no women allowed.
So people were respecting her finds. would come along and study, like she found a plesiosaur that was really quite well studied, but they didn’t necessarily credit her because she was just, you know, the local fossil seller. She wasn’t really a respected scientist. Like they knew she knew her stuff. Like, and that is one of the nice things. She wasn’t one of those who wasn’t recognised in her time. No, they knew she knew her stuff. They just didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure to credit her for it.
Fossils And Fiction (21:25)
You
Saskia Elliott (21:40)
I mean I don’t think women were actually allowed into the geological society for another hundred years after they opened.
Fossils And Fiction (21:47)
Yeah, no,
Saskia Elliott (21:47)
we’ve definitely gone past being allowed in for over 100 years now, which is good. I can safely say I’m a member, so that’s nice. But yeah, so she did get credited amongst scientists, but not necessarily in papers and that sort of thing. And I know by the end of her life, she tragically died fairly young. I think she was only sort of 47
Fossils And Fiction (21:52)
Yes.
Saskia Elliott (22:08)
breast cancer unfortunately just you know really run-of-the-mill but her finds were as you know they could be cyclic with landslides and stuff so were drying up towards the end and I know the scientific community tried to help support her with little grants and stuff but she was she was never rich off of it and she was never hugely sort of recognised in the wider community but she was recognised and she did make a living off of it somehow so it’s a positive story that she is at least
was at least known for it when she was alive.
Fossils And Fiction (22:36)
And even for that international recognition that she receives now, still a local hero. And it’s important to have those recognizable figures in local communities to inspire people, I think.
Saskia Elliott (22:49)
Yeah, and she’s it. So I know a couple of years ago there was Mary Ann in Rocks campaign and they campaigned to get this statue built on the front of Lyme Regis as if she’s an incredible statue. It’s beautiful work and she’s just striding out. She’s got like little ammonites on the floor around her, a little dog at her feet and she’s striding out as if she’s about to go fossil hunting. It’s I was there on the opening day and it was sort of like it choked me up on the day. It was fantastic. But she’s really sort of recognised like
her graveyard in local town you quite often see little ammonites just left on the grave where people almost do it like a little little offering to her it’s it’s it’s quite lovely and there’s like there’s an aning road and even the sort of lampposts in line where you just have got ammonites carved into them sort of thing it’s yeah it’s it’s nuts it’s definitely like you
Fossils And Fiction (23:36)
I’ve seen those, yeah.
Saskia Elliott (23:41)
someone was going to come to the Jurassic Coast and they only had a day to spend it would be like go to Lyme Regis you’ll soak it up.
Fossils And Fiction (23:47)
Soak up that cultural and scientific history, absolutely. Yeah.
Saskia Elliott (23:49)
Yeah. Well,
and still to this day, we still have a lot of collectors who go out, and that is their job. They go out, they find fossils, and then they come back and sell it in their little shops. it’s sort of the legacy and the cultural thing is still going. And they are often some of the most knowledgeable people about the coastline. They certainly know more than I do about the fossils. But yeah, there’s absolute, so many shops down line, Regis, of…
fossils, minerals and they sometimes run little walks and stuff like that as well. it’s the whole community feels very attached to it, which is lovely.
Fossils And Fiction (24:18)
Now, you mentioned that the whole that the Jurassic Coast extends for 95 miles. So obviously there’s quite a few local communities and towns around there. What is the relationship between the sort of fossil collectors and perhaps those coming from outside? Has that always been a solid relationship with the local communities or what’s that relationship been like, do you think?
Saskia Elliott (24:38)
I think as long as people respect the codes, so we, there’s a fossil collecting code of the Dressick coast in different places. some places you can collect and so long as it’s on the floor, you can just grab it. Other places it’s like, no, this is privately owned. You can’t take stuff from here. So generally, as long as people who come in and follow the rules, it’s quite a nice relationship. Everyone’s just like,
I’ve been down the coast myself and I’ve spoken to people who’ve come over from other countries and it’s quite a nice vibe. People come up and they’re like, I think I’ve found this. And I don’t necessarily say what I do for a job. I’m like, yeah, that’s definitely an Ammonite, well done. And like, it’s quite a collaborative feel. It’s really lovely. But there is also the thing that some people do make a living off of this. So they obviously want to protect their living. So I know they wouldn’t necessarily want to like, if they found
an amazing find, they’re not necessarily going to feel great if, I don’t know, a random person has come over on holiday and goes, yeah I want that, that’s not how it works. But yeah, it’s quite a community feel. I’d say around Charmoth and Lyme Regis is your main hub, so for context, Charmoth is another town that’s just a few miles away from Lyme Regis and it’s the main cliff in between those two towns that has a lot of the most sort of…
typical Jurassic Coast finds that you sort of see on the internet. But there’s lots of other places that have incredible fossils as well and lots of local collectors who, you know, they’ve always walked their dog there so they step out their front door and they go, yeah I found a particular type of shell that we only find here and so each person is often attached to whatever they’re closest to. So I have quite an affinity to the eastern end of Jurassic Coast because that’s where I’ve grown up.
Fossils And Fiction (25:57)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (26:22)
I quite like the fossils from that end but that’s more because that’s what I grew up seeing the most that someone from East Devon who’s the other end probably really enjoy the fossils that they see and they like all the sort of the ones found in the desert stuff and that you get stuff from the Cretaceous around a town called Beer let me just say brilliant town name so
Fossils And Fiction (26:42)
Sounds like an Australian town name.
Saskia Elliott (26:44)
It’s
great. It’s beautiful little town. And even they’ve got their own little museum on the front. Lots of the towns have their own little museums and the one in Beer is just fantastic. Run by some incredible characters. They’re lovely. But they have a lot of chalk related fossils. quite often they’ll be more attached to that. So it just depends on where the little hub is as to what people have the biggest affinity to. But the main hub is around Lyme Regis and Charmouth That’s where people sort of…
gravitate towards and there’s so many spots that you can go that are still quiet which those are the ones I tend to go to most.
Fossils And Fiction (27:17)
Well, if I ever get up there, you’ll have to show me some of those, some of those quiet spots. think, yeah.
Saskia Elliott (27:20)
Oh, I sleep.
I’m out there every excuse I I mean, I’m already planning to take a group of friends out on Sunday this week, and we’re going to go down looking for ammonites. I haven’t told them because they’re not used to fossil hunting. But if they’re lucky, there can be bits of ichthyosaur. But I’m not going to tell them and get their hopes up.
Fossils And Fiction (27:37)
No, you don’t want to get them too excited.
Saskia Elliott (27:38)
I have very poor luck finding bony material. I come away with lots of ammonites. There’s endless ammonites.
Fossils And Fiction (27:41)
Mm-hmm.
I know you love rocks, you’re a geologist first. tell me, some of your social posts are about beautiful rocks that you’ve found and the history of them and how they’re formed. Is there any that particularly jump out from the coast or from your local area that you want to talk about? What’s unique? What rocks are great from your area?
Saskia Elliott (28:00)
Okay.
I mean a lot of it is sort of tied in with the fossil you think so there’s a beautiful stone that we have locally called the Purbeck marble but it’s it’s basically a limestone it’s not a marble it’s just called a marble because it’s this is my geologist moment actually it’s a limestone not a marble but it’s because it takes a polish that they call it a marble but it’s all these like oscillated different shells and everything and as it takes a shine it is stunning of just packed full of shells
and you sometimes find it in local shops carved into a bowl or something like that. So that’s probably one of my favorites on the coast just because it’s visually gorgeous. But I also, I like the sparkly things. This is also what drew me to geology. So there’s a couple of different places that you can find either amazing sort of pyrite chunks. So I quite like those. And also lots of different sort of calcite structures because we’re all sedimentary the whole way up and down.
As a geologist, I do sometimes lament that there’s not enough hard rock geology, but it’s fine. We’ve still got sparkly things, that’s all I need. there’s also a whole spot that has, like, it really dried out for a while and we had an environment of gypsum and you get, I’ve got a lovely chunk in my front garden that’s just this giant orange square. It’s really pretty.
Fossils And Fiction (29:12)
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (29:19)
in our local area, can almost, I joke that you can tell the underlying geology by looking at the local buildings, because obviously in the UK, a lot of our buildings are quite old, they’ve been there for a long, time. So they wouldn’t have imported stone from, you know, 200 miles away, that wouldn’t have made any sense. So they just pick what’s in the local quarry. And there’s a brilliant place called Portland, which is, there’s a lot of quarrying history there, and they get these amazingly huge ammonites.
and I always think it’s bit funny. So the name of these ammonites are like Titanites giganteus, which is just really driving home the point they’re big. yeah, yeah. The Victorians were like, we want you to know this is the biggest ammonite we can find. But you find them set into the walls of buildings. so you walk along and just a local house will have like made of this gray stone and then suddenly this
Fossils And Fiction (29:56)
how big they are. gotta say it three times.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Saskia Elliott (30:13)
massive ammonite just set into like under the window or something. It’s really cool. even find like bits of fossilised wood just randomly in a wall. Like it’s intentional.
Fossils And Fiction (30:23)
Yeah. And it, you know, it’s important to, as you build and as you plan things to, to make it represent the place that it is, you know, to make it live within the landscape, I think. So what are some of the challenges of protecting the Jurassic coast as a heritage site? Because obviously it’s actively eroding, right? It’s a coastline. What is that a challenge? What do you do about that?
Saskia Elliott (30:39)
Yeah.
Well, and this is the thing, so the geomorphology attribute, is obviously the natural processes, but also people live on the coast. So from the World Heritage point of view, if there were no people, you obviously would just go, yeah, let it erode, let it do its thing. But then people live there and have their houses there and their businesses there. So one of the major challenges for the Jurassic Coast is how do you balance people visiting it and living by it without
actually impacting the coastline itself. So it’s which bits can you afford to compromise on and which bits can you give up without impacting the integrity of the whole coast, but also making sure that the local people, you know, have protected where they need to. And I won’t go into the full policy side of it, but there’s a lot of sort of plans in place. We’ve got like shoreline management plans that say this is where we’re going to defend and this is where we can’t afford to defend and things like that. But it’s…
got that aspect, you’ve got like the fossil collection codes that make sure we don’t just randomly dig into the cliff, which obviously would not be ideal. There are cases where that does occur which is not ideal and it can leave quite an impact to everyone else walking past, so we try and avoid that where we can and normally the sort rule of thumb, which just saying you should always look it up before you go, but generally the rule of thumb on the coast is if you can sort of pick it up in your hands and it’s loose on the beach…
fair do’s but never should be hacking at the bedrock and never should be hacking at the cliffs or you know if it’s a massive boulder probably leave that too.
Fossils And Fiction (32:14)
Yeah, because it’s going to be individually dangerous, but also dangerous for other people later on, as well as the overall integrity of the site.
Saskia Elliott (32:22)
Yeah exactly and I mean I have seen it myself you’ll go down the coast and we there are fossil wardens and people who patrol particularly on the high seasons to make sure people don’t damage the site because we want to encourage people to take stuff like that’s that’s the whole point that’s how you engage people but to do it carefully and I’ve seen parents with their kids climbing up on the toe of the landslide getting to the base of cliff and then just encouraging their kids like
hack at it, it’s like, oh my gosh, can you not see that that is unstable? Like, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah, the reason there’s fossils on the beach is because they came from up there. But I mean, you you’ve to be pretty unlucky for it to fall on your head, but it does happen and encourage everyone to exercise caution and not sit under the cliff hacking at it. That’s not sensible.
Fossils And Fiction (32:52)
It fell recently.
Yeah.
Which is a pretty good rule in general is, you know, enjoy life, but just be cautious as you need to.
Saskia Elliott (33:16)
Yeah.
Yeah. And like, again, we get a lot of, because we are everyone along the coast, obviously, coastal communities. So every, every time there’s a landslide, that’s someone’s land that is falling away. A lot of it is owned by big landowners that are like country estates or like the National Trust, which is sort of who looks after a lot of our natural spaces. But yeah, sometimes it is private property and it’s someone’s garden that’s going down the hill. that’s…
you have to bear that in mind when then people are flocking to the bottom like yay fossils it’s like it’s also someone’s house yeah yeah and there’s there’s been there’s so for example there was somewhere in a town called Kimmeridge which beautiful area again another little fossil museum there that’s fantastic and they had this tower that was quite close to the edge of the cliff and there was a whole campaign that they moved this tower back from the cliff brick by brick and rebuilt it
Fossils And Fiction (33:52)
Yeah, which is now much closer to the cliff.
Saskia Elliott (34:13)
because they knew the cliff was going to erode it away. So yeah, we know it’s going to happen. And sometimes you can do things like that and preserve a historical tower by just picking it up and literally moving it. Quite a long process. Can’t do that with everything,
Fossils And Fiction (34:25)
Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like a fascinating site to work at and obviously you have so much passion about it. Thank you for sharing that passion with us. If people want to look up your individual sci-com work,
Saskia Elliott (34:36)
Yes, so I do my sci-comm stuff under the name of Geo.Sassie on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. I’m just starting to branch into longer YouTube videos where I hope to do some like come fossil hunting with me type things. So this is me committing to that because now I’ve said it and I’ve recorded it. I must do it.
Alyssa Fjeld (34:57)
That was an awesome interview. I’m so excited for our listeners to tell us how they feel about Saskia’s awesome Jurassic Coast adventures.
Travis Holland (35:05)
Absolutely, me too. And thanks again, Saskia, for reaching out to us. There’ll be more info in the show notes.
Alyssa Fjeld (35:11)
And hopefully we’ll have some follow on interviews from other people who work in these formations in the future. But for now, what I’d like to do is scoot on over to the results of our mascot naming poll.
To refresh our listeners on the top three choices from our last episode, we had a suggestion that combined two different suggestions from two different people. The first was Dave for the Trilobite from Astrid O’Connor on Instagram and various other platforms as PalaeoAstrid.
and Craig from Goose Buster. I love the rhyming. I like the word Craig. It feels very solid.
Travis Holland (35:46)
I like that you say Craig and not Craig.
Alyssa Fjeld (35:50)
One of my supervisors is named Craig, so I’ve had to talk myself out of it, and now that I’ve started doing it, it’s just more fun. It has a good mouthfeel.
Travis Holland (35:51)
you
The second option was Tang and Tor and this also came from PalaeoAstrid So that’s a play on Estaingia, the species of trilobite and then Tor from Australovenator as well. yeah, that’s good option too.
Alyssa Fjeld (36:12)
Yeah,
Option 2 reminded me of the way mascots were named in like hokey 90s shows. Like, I don’t know if you remember this, but like around the time that Power Rangers got brought out, they made another show that was also based on like a Tokusatsu series. And they had like this little furry guy that hung out with everyone and its name was like Tang. It was like an abbreviation of its longer, kookier name. So that’s what it reminded me of. It’s like Alf.
Travis Holland (36:39)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (36:40)
showing that I’m ancient. Moving on, we also had a suggestion from Jimmy Waldron from Dinosaurs Will Always Be Awesome. His suggestion was Scratch for the Australovenator very onomatopoeic, or not onomatopoeic, but indicative of action, and Skitters for the Trilobite. Absolutely fantastic.
Travis Holland (37:01)
think
Jimmy ran a bit of a campaign on his Instagram for people to vote for these, which we always appreciate. And given he’s a friend of Conan, as he told me when I interviewed him on a previous episode, that was always going to work out in favor for Jimmy.
Alyssa Fjeld (37:16)
I mean he was crowd sourcing and then we crowd sourced and he was part of our crowd sourcing so we’ve crowd sourced twice which is quite a feat. Alright so the winner is… Yeah it’s Jimmy’s suggestion from dinosaurs will always be awesome. You guys love Scratch and Skitters I can’t blame you it’s very cute it’s super alliterative.
Travis Holland (37:27)
And then there’s that drum roll.
Yeah, so going forward, our mascots are named Scratch and Skitters. Thanks, Jimmy.
Alyssa Fjeld (37:45)
Thank you, Jimmy. And just as a little bit of no hard feelings to the runners up, I’ve decided to name these two fabulous stuffed toys behind me based on the suggestions we got. So everybody, this mudabuttasaurus is going to be Craig, and the TRX is going to be Dave. There we go.
Travis Holland (38:05)
Okay,
there we go. We have a Craig and Dave in any case. So Goosebusters come through and PalaeoAstrid’s also got one in , or Astrid O’Connor. So yeah. And thanks to everyone who voted and engaged in that was really fun. And we’re really happy to have named those fantastic creatures that were designed by Zev Landes for us.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:24)
Yes, huge shout out to Zev for doing that work. He really brought not just the mascots to life, but a little piece of the podcast. It’s very sweet. And I will be talking to Zev shortly on my field visit coming up next week. Well, it’ll be the week that this releases, but time is a myth.
Travis Holland (38:42)
Yeah.
Which we will come back to in a future episode and we’re going to get all the goss, but it’s Dinosaur Dreaming which a bunch of people might’ve already heard of. If you want to look it up in the meantime, feel free. Uh, but you’ll, you’ll give us all the goss in a future episode. I’m sure.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:58)
Absolutely. We’ve got a couple of other podcasters coming, so you’ll be hearing about it from all sides. It’ll be really cool. I’m not going to say that’s usually the case, but I’ve heard some fantastic tales told around a campfire at this dig. So for now, what I would like to do, speaking of current events, I don’t know if you are an anime fan. You can judge by the everything about me that I am.
Travis Holland (39:03)
They’re going to be more talking than dinosaur digging, I think.
somewhat.
Alyssa Fjeld (39:24)
I love the show Delicious in Dungeon. It’s also known as Danjon Meshi. The title is a play on D&D. It’s an anime released by Trigger Studio. It’s all about a dungeon ecosystem where the party eats monsters to save money and build their strength. I’ve never seen a manticore look more delicious and it inspired me to do something unhinged, which is to prepare for you a feast.
Travis Holland (39:40)
Right.
Alyssa Fjeld (39:53)
of different beasts through time. And I would like you to tell me out of this four course meal, which one you think would be the most delicious and whether these recipes could be improved on.
Travis Holland (40:01)
Okay.
Can I just, can I, can I touch on your turn of phrase there? Please tell me that you came up with that on the spot. A feast of beasts through time.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:12)
little bit. I’m also not going to lie and say that I’m thinking about the Feast of a Thousand Beasts from Futurama.
Travis Holland (40:17)
We love our intertextual references here.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:21)
We are nothing if not all nerds of the same cut.
I think they actually kick you out of the Evans lab if you don’t like Matt Groening.
Travis Holland (40:27)
Yeah,
that’s what, you know, I would fit right in there except I can’t do math. So, now you just told everybody.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:32)
It’s okay, neither can I. They just haven’t figured it out yet. Okay.
starting out, have, I’m going to just briefly discuss our tasting menu. We’re gonna start with an appetizer that I call Pyramidalis Paella. It is Cambrian animals in a paella de marisco, which is a seafood based Spanish dish. Normally this would not be an appetizer, but we’re a fancy restaurant, right? Little portion. The second course, yeah.
Travis Holland (40:47)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Like tapas? Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:07)
The first course is going to be the biggest ever surf and turf. So we’re going to take the two largest animals that could count as an approximate lobster and an approximate cow and serve those up. The second course is going to be the first ever holiday dinner. It’s going to be featuring genyornis and an Osage orange plude. And for dessert, we will be eating creatures extinct, candied, Ediacaran fauna.
Travis Holland (41:12)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:35)
So traditionally, as you may know, a paella contains so many ingredients, and most of them are not things that we could make from things that were alive during the Cambrian. There’s no olive oil, there’s no roasted red peppers. However, I think we can substitute in quite a lot of things to get this pretty close, right? So instead of your Spanish rice that’s kind of crisped up, I think you would have the little moss animals. You’d have the little Bryozoans.
Travis Holland (41:54)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (42:02)
Today you can find bryozoans and other moth animals in freshwater ponds. I’d discourage you from looking up images of them while this episode is going. The modern ones are a little softer than the ones that I’m imagining for this. So the bryozoans that we have in the Cambrian, that’s a recent finding. We’re really excited about them. You could dice those up. That’d be like a nice rice substitute. Then you could have your lingula and your other
small mollusky things in your paella. So pyramidalis is not necessarily a bivalve the way we would think about them, but you could maybe, you could maybe include it. There’s a little meat on that animal. And then what we would do instead of having like…
different types of squid. You could have nectocaris. Nectocaris is an early animal, despite having a similar last name to anomalocaris it’s not actually likely to be an arthropod. It’s actually more likely to be a cephalopod precursor. It’s a soft bodied animal. I think it looks delicious. And then instead of having your shrimps or your prawns, obviously we’re going to be eating anomalocaris mandibles. Obviously. The original shrimp.
Travis Holland (43:08)
Okay.
Why not? The little shrimpy boys.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:13)
Exactly as the song tells us.
Following on from this, we will be enjoying the biggest ever surf and turf.
Travis Holland (43:20)
Okay.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:20)
Traditionally, the surf component of a surf and turf.
Travis Holland (43:21)
I’m going
to interrupt you before you keep going. I think what we need to do is release, is put out a Kickstarter campaign to turn this into a recipe book. I think that would be great. Let’s do that. Yeah. We can have an extinct animal recipe book.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:28)
Yeah, absolutely. If Delicious and Dungeon can have a recipe book, I can have a recipe book.
every time I’m in the field, I’m hungry because I’m working hard and I’m thinking about my study animals and I’m thinking about how much I want to eat them. Like a Brontothere to me has never been tastier than a day in the field. And so I think about this a lot.
Travis Holland (43:47)
Mm-hmm.
Is that a Brontothere like the
the rhino thing? that? Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:56)
Yeah, like
I think it would be a little greasy, but like bison is delicious in burgers. Obviously a brontothere burger would be pretty good. I think you could do some stuff with oreodonts. I think this is also the fact that I’m a little bit Scandinavian and there’s a part of me deep down that covets to taste as many different animals in my lifetime as possible. Anyway, we’re moving on to the surf and turf course.
Travis Holland (44:03)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:24)
Obviously in a traditional surf and turf your surf would be like a lobster, but if we were to reach through all of the expanses of time, not just limiting ourselves to a single period, we would eat the Eurypterids, right? That is the biggest lobster there’s ever been. The sea scorp- well, yeah, because they’re not necessarily chelicerates but people eat scorpions. Scorpions are tasty.
Travis Holland (44:37)
The sea scorpions, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:47)
So you get a nice big Jaekelopterus This is a species of sea scorpion that was over five feet long. Some estimates put it closer to eight feet, but it’s a little bit like Perucetus right? Everybody’s got their different estimates. It’s a meaty looking animal. There’s quite a lot of body within it. I think that that would be pretty meaty. I think that would be pretty good. I think you could just spin that lightly and it would be delicious.
Travis Holland (45:09)
Okay.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:10)
Now, for the turf part, I think I need your help because in my mind, if we’re eating the biggest cow adjacent creature, the direct analog would be like an auroch right? Like the big cow fellows. But like, should it be a sauropod?
Travis Holland (45:24)
It’s almost too easy.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:29)
Like would that meat be
red enough to count as a cow substitute?
Travis Holland (45:33)
Would it be like beef or would it be more like, I don’t know, crocodile meat, which is almost a white meat or, or, or chicken.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:42)
I imagine it would be closer to like crocodile meat. Like in my head, they’re not quite… Like theropods in my head are the only ones that taste exactly like chicken. Now I’m thinking about T-Rex drumsticks.
Travis Holland (45:54)
What about, okay, let’s go for another mammal. We talked previously about spearing a diprotodon.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:58)
Yeah.
That’s a good idea. Like, I would never eat a wombat because they’re far too cute and they have little faces that look like they’re smiling. But diprotodon doesn’t look friendly to me. That’s not a friend-shaped animal. That’s an eating animal. That’s a challenge.
Travis Holland (46:10)
Mm-hmm.
No,
I have to say, I put this on my Instagram, but I was out in the bush recently and I saw a wombat and previously, I know, I now know people will say diprotonons aren’t actually wombats, yada yada. That’s fine. But also, that’s how they’re often described. And I think it kind of makes sense when you see them, you know, they kind of.
look the same, right? They’re just much larger. Anyway, I saw this wombat that I swear this wombat was a hundred kilos. It was so big. Like it was just monstrously large. And I really was trying to get a good photo without disturbing it and upsetting it. And it just kind of kept looking at me like it wasn’t, you know, it was just watching me. It wasn’t disturbed by me at all, but I also felt like it was
it could have just charged and done some real damage if it felt like it. And in that moment I thought, yeah, this might be, might be what it’s like staring down a diprotodon because this was a big wombat. Like it was huge. So anyway, I reckon a diprotodon steak would be go-to.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:24)
that’s a perfectly good idea. Let’s say that the turf component of the biggest ever surf and turf is a delicious little cut of diprotodon. I think it would take a little bit of trial and error to find the silkiest, smoothest, nicest cut. We should ask Hazel Richards which part is the steak part. But moving on from that, we’re going to have our first ever holiday dinner. I had this in mind because one of our
Travis Holland (47:42)
Okay.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:49)
upcoming interviewees talks about genyornis which is a large, extinct group of large of megafauna. So they are often called the giga goose. They are like rattites They’re a large bird that is goose adjacent in its appearance. And I think it would be absolutely delicious. Big delicious goose monster is what I’ve written in my notes. They also make eggs.
So if we were trying to keep other dishes kind of limited to what would have been available during the time period, right? Genyornis we’re talking about a period that is quite a bit earlier than now, but old enough that we have different things like eggs, we have early tubers and different types of land plants that we as people today enjoy. two of the ingredients that I’d like to highlight that I believe would have been co-occurrent with genyornis that would be
again, I think delicious would be Osage oranges or crab apples and Magnolias, so you could use the Magnolia petals from these early Blooming trees as kind of like I don’t know if you can actually eat them, but they smell amazing. You could put them on top of this pudding Osage oranges or crab apples are actually a really fascinating fruit. There’s so much to say about them. I encourage you to look them up, but they are they’re not actually
Travis Holland (49:00)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (49:09)
apples at all. They’re like their own category of fruit and they played a really important role in the evolution of different animal groups. So this dinner is more like this part of the dinner is educational but it also does contain a delicious giant goose and Christmas food which you can never have too much food.
the final course is called not bugs alive, but just creatures alive. So this is my, this is like when I become an old professor and I go slightly off the deep end, this is like going to be my white whale. I’m convinced you can eat the Ediacaran animals. Scott Evans says that they were flexible, they were full of collagen. All of the material assessments he’s done on breaking and tearing to me suggests this was an elastic animal.
Travis Holland (49:32)
Okay.
OK.
Alyssa Fjeld (49:55)
with a gummy treat composition, especially when we look at Dickinsonia costata I think the consistency would be somewhere between like a really stale Haribo gummy and like a Polly Pocket shirt, like those rubbery little doll clothes with like possibly some goo inside.
Travis Holland (50:14)
Is it going to be like just eating a worm? Like an earthworm?
Alyssa Fjeld (50:16)
I think it would be like
a lifesaver gummy, like kind of tough on the outside but then you kind of bite enough, like a boba tea. Like a really stale boba.
Travis Holland (50:22)
Okay.
Right.
Alyssa Fjeld (50:30)
The tagline I’ve attributed to this dish is, we may not know if they’re plants or animals, but I am certain I want to eat them.
And I think it would be delicious like candied with a bit of sugar, a little lime, a little cranberry, a little ginger, you know, kind of hide whatever the taste of the early seas would have been because I don’t think that would have actually been nice.
Travis Holland (50:48)
Yeah, okay, okay. So you… I can just keep thinking of the boba tea thing now and I feel like you could just chop them up and put them in a tea.
Alyssa Fjeld (50:50)
So bon appetit, what do you reckon?
Travis Holland (51:00)
I think I’m somebody who you can look at and guess their diet and it’s not vegan. So all of this suits me because it’s all, it’s all meat. is the real question for you though. You said you’re Scandinavian. I’m I think a quarter German or something. So my, my question is how do I make beer out of ancient ingredients?
Is there, I guess yeast has been around for a long time, right?
Alyssa Fjeld (51:24)
you might not be… yeah, like fermentation as a thing occurs naturally in rotting fruits. Like we know that there are pigeons in New Zealand that get drunk on purpose and they’re getting so fat they can’t… actually I have a coaster of one around here. I mean it’s called… it’s not the Tui, it’s one of the other ones. I apologise to our New Zealand listeners, but…
Travis Holland (51:30)
Mm-hmm.
you
Alyssa Fjeld (51:45)
Hops aren’t as, I think hops occur naturally, but we would have cultivated them. Hang on, are hops a grass? What are hops? They are flowers, so we have to at least be in the cenozoic, no, the late mesozoic, late cretaceous, right? So you could,
Travis Holland (52:01)
No, they’re cretaceous, late cretaceous.
Alyssa Fjeld (52:08)
Let me first see them. I don’t care about the history of what we did to them. I care about their history history.
Travis Holland (52:13)
Yeah, so if you could figure out how to cultivate a yeast or something that would cause a fermentation and you could get some hops, you can get some lovely natural spring water. I think you can make some beer, right?
Alyssa Fjeld (52:26)
Yeah. So it looks like the first recorded instance of it in human history is relatively recent, but it’s also, I’m seeing an article talking about how they’ve been in use for millennia. I reckon that would have been around during the Cenozoic. You could totally have had like your Brontothere burger and a delicious glass of, picked every hop in this field and there’s so little that it was barely enough to get me this one jug, but it’s a really good jug.
Travis Holland (52:52)
Mm-hmm.
But okay, okay, so you keep talking about the brontothere burger, but that wasn’t even on the menu.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:00)
It wasn’t. I think you could just like ditch the fancy restaurant and go to the Brontothere burger site. Like now I want the Brontothere burger. I think I’m just hungry.
Travis Holland (53:09)
Yeah. Okay. well we are recording this just before lunchtime. I want to see you rock up to the nearest drive-through and say, can I have a Brontothere burger, please? See what their reaction is.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:13)
So.
I put my foot in it so often when I speak that I 100 % see that being possible.
Travis Holland (53:24)
Yeah. Especially now that I’ve put it in your head, right? You’re going to go to order a burger and that’s going to be, that’s going to be there. Okay. So I’m going to go back to the actual task here because I think we’re both liable to easily get distracted. the look, surf and turf for me. mean, although I proposed the diprotodon on steak, think, you know, a big, big hunk of red meat.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:27)
yeah.
you
Travis Holland (53:47)
with some seafood on top. Sounds great.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:50)
It just kind of, it feels like you’ve conquered a real opponent, eating a giant animal. I 100 % get why our ancestors did that. So yeah, great, awesome, surf and turf is the winner.
Travis Holland (54:02)
That sounds great.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:04)
I’m not even going to say there were
sides for that because no way would you have room.
Travis Holland (54:08)
No, no, no, no. It’s like one of those eating competitions where it’s like a three kilo steak or something.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:13)
Great, awesome. Thank you for indulging my delusions, let’s say.
Travis Holland (54:21)
That’s one way to look at it, yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:23)
And then one other thing that I wanted to point out just before we wrap this episode up is a quick shout out to a virtual palaeo art gallery that is being organized by our friend Karim Zanaty
Travis Holland (54:37)
to facilitate the disambiguation. Yep.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:36)
it’s @k_zanaty on Instagram.
They are an absolutely fantastic person. They are so kind. They are so encouraging. And they have organized this awesome little virtual gallery. It’s done through something called Gather Town, I believe, is the initial event. By the time this episode comes out, it’ll be too late for you to make the initial opening, but the full gallery will be available for people who wish to view it from February 8th.
You need to get in contact with @k_zanaty or visit his Instagram page or the Blue Sky organizing that he’s been doing in order to get more information about how you can attend and see the different pieces. There are some absolutely fantastic artists that are participating. We’ve got Astrid O’Connor, of course, doing their amazing blender mock-ups. We’ve got Amanda Perry, who does great 2D art. And I assume all of the other things because what does she not do?
Her makeup’s always great. I’m so envious. We’ve also got James Pascoe, who does different dioramas and 3D models in real life in little mock-ups that he paints as well. They look awesome. And I also did one contribution. Please don’t go look for it. It’s a really bad poem. It’s there. You can see it. I’ve never done anything like that.
Travis Holland (55:47)
So yes, the virtual palaeoart exhibit, we will have some details in the show notes. Please look it up and check out this fantastic art, including Alyssa’s poem.
Alyssa Fjeld (55:57)
It’s really
cool to support all of these artists and it’s just great that we’re seeing this kind of community from the palaeo art space. It’s really encouraging, especially in the age of AI and buying illustrations from people who maybe don’t always have the same enthusiasm and passion as we do. So it’s good to see the artists coming together. It’s really nice.
Travis Holland (56:19)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m always happy to support artists and creativity and bring it together with Palaeo and Palaeo Storytelling as much as we can. That’s kind of become the purpose of this podcast, which is fun.
Alyssa Fjeld (56:28)
Yeah.
It’s good. I like having a purpose. It removes a lot of the thinking that I do at night when I lie down in bed in the existential crisis.
Travis Holland (56:40)
The podcast is not your therapy, Alyssa.
Alyssa Fjeld (56:42)
Not yet. Well, I did
tell my therapist about the menu and she did nod thoughtfully. Shout out to Kylie. I hope she doesn’t listen to this.
Travis Holland (56:50)
We’ll see.
Alyssa Fjeld (56:51)
Anyway, thank you so much for listening everyone and thank you so much for doing that awesome interview, Travis and Saskia. Looking forward to seeing you all again next time. Hopefully we’ll have some really cool interviews lined up for you guys in the coming months.
