Paleo Nerds

The nerds talk Utahraptors with Utah State Paleontologist Jim Kirkland.

Author Peter Brannen just happened to be driving through Kansas so Ray flagged him down to ask him about The Ends of the World, his recent book on mass extinctions, a fitting end to Season 3 of Paleo Nerds! 

Dr. Dean Lomax sold his Star Wars collection to fund his paleontology dreams. While some may gasp, his investment certainly paid off - his book Locked in Time has already come up a few times on the show already!

The Natural Trap Cave is a sinkhole death trap that contains a pile of fallen mammals that spans over 100,000 years and Julie Meachen has been studying this pile of bones since 2014.

While installing his Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline exhibit at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, Ray had a chance to sit down with Kent Gibson who lent a very small fraction of his massive collection of coastal fossils to Ray's exhibit.

Greg Erickson is a very well-rounded paleontologist: he's studied Super Crocs, arctic duckbills and even "dated" (well, aged...) the prehistoric celebrity Sue.

This episode of Paleo Nerds is truly out of this world! The Nerds talk to Kenneth Williford, Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission. Blast off to the martian past!

Brian Skerry has logged over 10,000 hours underwater, capturing powerful images for National Geographic and has recently teamed up with James Cameron to continue bringing the captivating stories of the world's oceans to those of us stuck on land.

Youtube star Cameron Muskelly joins the Nerds to talk about the geologic treasures of Georgia and the southern United States. Cam is a paleo encyclopedia, so you're sure to learn something new!

Coprolites (or fossil poop to the layman) have come up repeatedly on the show so we are thrilled to finally have the Queen of Coprolites herself on the show! Karen Chin can interpret entire lifestyles from a thin slice of paleo dung.

What had giant cheeks, protruding canines, dainty hooves and a giant, ridged back? The Hell Pig is almost like Frankenstein's monster, and Scott Foss tells us all about how these creatures utilized this unique combo of features to be the "T. rex of the Tertiary."

The Nerds return to the La Brea tar pits, this time to talk carnivores with Mairin Balisi! She studies what the dogs of the tar pits ate throughout their life and discusses dog evolution. 

Anyone familiar with Ray's art knows that fish are a focal point and salmon are central, so it's shocking that it's taken so long to have a salmon expert on the show! We're talking spike tooth salmon with Jerry Smith - Dive in!

Ashley Hall has been obsessed with dinosaurs since she was a kid and now she spends her days educating the public at the Museum of the Rockies. She makes fossils fun!

Seeing dinosaurs on the silver screen made Bill Stout a Paleo Nerd, so it's only fitting that he started his art career illustrating movie posters. His work spans from comic books to murals and has brought him all the way to Antarctica.

Ravens and crows have their own form of complex communication amongst themselves, and John Marzluff has studied how these birds pass information on an individual and even generational level.  Ray gets to ask questions about his own raven experiment!

ReBecca Hunt-Foster is the Park Paleontologist at the Dinosaur National Monument. Yes, she has the iconic park ranger hat, but she spends her time tracing the footsteps of the dinos that walked Utah in the Late Jurassic.

Dr. Bob Bakker is widely known as the "Dinosaur Heretic". Over his long career, he has revolutionized our understanding of dinosaur behavior and overturned many outdated concepts.  Get an insight into the mind of this bold maverick and expansive thinker in our season two finale.

Sam Ohu Gon III, trilobite expert and Senior Scientist & Cultural Advisor for the Nature Conservancy of Hawaiʻi. Sam looks to traditional Hawaiian cultural history as an example for a sustainable future.

Imagine time traveling back to the Western Interior Seaway AKA "Hell's Aquarium."  It's a fitting nickname for the shallow marine environment, full of fish with teeth so big they ate differently than modern fish.

Don Prothero has written 48 books and counting! And he has repeatedly gone to bat for science, using the facts of the fossil record to disprove creationist beliefs.

Grant Zazula is a Paleo Nerd! His interest in archaeology is what attracted him to the Pleistocene and now he studies in the mighty Yukon, managing thousands of fossils that are byproducts of the mining industry.

Connie Soja has extensively studied the paleontology of the Alexander terrane, a gigantic crustal fragment that underlies Ray's backyard of Southeast Alaska. In fact, she's reconstructed ancient environments around the globe!

JP Hodnett is a Paleo Nerd. But that's a given! He's a shark (and sauropod and cat) expert, so the Nerds get to go off the deep end, diving into incredible finds at Mammoth Cave and JP's day job at Dinosaur Park.

Emily Lindsey is a paleoecologist who's been fascinated with giant ground sloths since the beginning of her career. She is now a curator and excavation director at the La Brea Tar Pits in LA!