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Thoughts from VERY Dead Animals

2018-02-16 · documentary visit · Hank, Kallie Moore · 3:56 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature · mode: Documentary visit · tags: on location, guest or collab, self promotion

Hank tours the University of Montana Paleontology Center collections with Eons host Kallie Moore (mammoth toes, horse bones, tiny saber-toothed deer, coprolites, a 2.75-billion-year-old bacterial mat) and reflects that she sees past the bones to living animals in their ancient ecosystems.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Arriving at the University of Montana; meeting Kallie of Eons and Tuna of SciShow

  • ★★ Hank visits the University of Montana Paleontology Center collections room with Kallie of Eons and Tuna, who makes SciShow most days. — 00:00:12 · Eons, SciShow

00:00:27 — Collections tour: mammoth toes, horses, the 10,000-year fossil cutoff, saber-toothed deer, sponge, poop, bacterial mat

  • ★★ Kallie Moore: Kallie says the mammoth toe tips, lighter than Hank expected, are only thousands of years old, so there has been less time for mineralization. — 00:01:01
  • ★★ Kallie Moore: Kallie says today's horses in the region were imported from Europe, while the original horses started here and then left or died out. — 00:01:13 · Europe
  • ★★★ Kallie Moore: Kallie says the 10,000-year cutoff for a fossil is completely arbitrary; much charismatic megafauna was extinct by then, but mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago on High Arctic islands. — 00:01:22
  • ★★ Hank notes that mammoths were still living in the Arctic when the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being built. — 00:01:39
  • ★★ Hank marvels that everything in the collection was once living and breathing, with cells and blood; saber-toothed kittens must have been stupid cute. (playful) — 00:02:00
  • ★ Kallie Moore: Kallie shows a favorite specimen, a fossil with a striking internal pattern that is either a sponge or a hydrozoan. (hedged) — 00:02:28
  • ★ Kallie Moore: Kallie says the collection has fossil poop, though probably no Triassic poop, and some amazing soft-body preservation. (hedged) — 00:02:38
  • ★★ Kallie Moore: Kallie says the collection's oldest specimen is a bacterial mat from Australia, about 2.75 billion years old: this is what life was. (hedged) — 00:03:13 · Australia

00:03:25 — Eons and how Kallie sees past the bones to living animals in their ecosystems

  • ★★ Hank says that a few months ago he, Kallie and his friend Blake started Eons, a YouTube show telling the story of all life on Earth. — 00:03:25 · Eons
  • ★★★ Hank realized the museum is different for Kallie: spending so much time with the objects, she sees past the bones to the organisms living in their ecosystems in the deep past, and it shows when she talks. — 00:03:31

00:03:48 — Thanks to Kallie, check out Eons; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank thanks Kallie for the tour and says Eons is fascinating, weird and amazing. — 00:03:48 · Eons

Humor (significant)

  • Hank calls the toe bones bits of mammal, then corrects himself to mammoth. — 00:00:49

    “These are all bits of mammal. Mammoth, I mean”

  • Kallie suggests the tiny antlered creature may have had saber teeth, like a musk deer. — 00:01:53

    “like tiny saber-tooth chihuahua deer.”

  • Hank teases Kallie for not knowing where the turds are; she grabs the wrong specimen. — 00:02:47

    “That's not turds. Turtle turtle!”

  • Shown a terrible-looking soft-bodied fossil, they compare it to an animal. — 00:02:57

    “it's like more like a hell warthog.”

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Fossil · Kallie Moore

Also: People: Tuna

Projects: Eons

Organizations: University of Montana

Concepts: Coprolite · Mammoth · Megafauna · Microbial mat · sponge

Places: Arctic · Australia · Egyptian pyramids · Europe

Only in the description or credits: Blake (staff, mentioned from 2012) · SciShow

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