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Episode 117—Steve Brusatte and The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
140 Plays6 years ago
Today I present to you Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World. The entirety of the book is brilliant but the way Steve talks about T-rexes and the Asteroid are some of the most compelling reading you’ll come across. What’s so great about this show is Steve’s passion for his work and the story behind the book, which is part serendipity, but more just how doing your THING, whatever that is over and over and over again SHOWING UP and what good things can come if that happens. It’s what I like to say is BEING IN THE GAME. You can’t be noticed, you can’t be recognized unless you’re putting it out there. I love Steve’s passion and energy and I hope you do too. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, and Stitcher!
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Transcript
Introduction to Brendan's Newsletter
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Speaker
ACNFers, today's episode is brought to you by my amazing monthly newsletter. That's right. Sign up for my reading recommendations list by visiting BrendanOmera.com and entering your email either in the smart bar, which is to say the smart bar, at the top of the page or in the pop-up that'll come up in the middle, about 10 seconds into your sesh.
00:00:25
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On the first of the month, you'll receive a cool photograph I took, four book recommendations, a cool quote or two, links to any writing I might have done that I'm proud of, and links to the past month on the podcast. It's a tasty bit of goodness to start your month. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Overview
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Cue intro riff. What the hell is up, CNFers?
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My goodness does it feel good to be broadcasting up in your brains. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You know. The show where I speak to the best about telling true stories, leaders in narrative journalism, dog film, radio, podcasting, essay, and memoir. They all stop by digital, CNF, pod, HQ to talk about how they go about the work. So you can apply those tools of mastery if you so choose.
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to
Introducing Steve Brusatte and His Work
00:01:28
Speaker
on a paleontological platter, Steve Bursati, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a new history of the lost world. Steve is a paleontologist based in Scotland, and the entirety of his book is brilliant. But the way Steve talks about T-Rexes and the asteroid are some of the most compelling reading you'll come across, period.
00:01:49
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your own work on your host from the mare of a
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What's so great about this episode is Steve's passion for his work and the story behind the book, which is part serendipity, but more just how doing your thing, whatever that is, over and over and over again, showing up
00:02:19
Speaker
And what good things can come if that happens. It's what I like to say is being in the game. You can't be noticed, you can't be recognized unless you're just putting it out there. There's one way to assure that you won't get noticed and that's by hiding in some capacity or another.
00:02:38
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But, you know, if you just routinely and routinely and routinely do the work, you know, at least that's putting the probabilities in your corner versus hiding and putting your head in the sand. I love Steve's passion and energy, and I hope you do too. Here is episode 117. Woo!
00:03:07
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As often is the case, I always love to get somebody's origin story and with respect to your career and your book, it feels like your origin story is very tied to what you're doing now. You're a long time lover of dinosaurs and never unfortunately, a lot of us outgrow it, not yourself excluded, even me excluded. I love it.
00:03:31
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But why didn't you outgrow it the way a lot of other kids do to then pursue it the way you have?
Steve's Dinosaur Fascination Journey
00:03:39
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You know, I asked myself that question quite a bit now because I meet so many young kids that are so enthused about dinosaurs. And when I was really young, I wasn't
00:03:52
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that into dinosaurs. I was not one of those five-year-old kids that knew all the names and could pronounce all the names and spell all the names, but I got into it a little bit later. I was about 14, 15 years old. I was just starting high school, and my youngest brother was a real dinosaur geek, and it was really through him that I got into it. He grew out of it, and I never did, and maybe it's because I came to it a little bit later. You know, I think I found dinosaurs and I found science
00:04:21
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right around that time in my life when I was growing up, going into high school and becoming a teenager and maybe, maybe, maybe that allowed me to approach it with a more mature perspective maybe than a lot of those really, really young kids that just can't get enough of dinosaurs. And what really enthused me about dinosaurs
00:04:45
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when I was in high school was that they were the clues that could help us understand how the earth has changed over time. They were the clues that could help us understand how evolution works. And that's what really psyched me. It wasn't just that dinosaurs were big and scary and they were monsters and they lived a long time ago, but it was that they were the evidence that could help us with this detective story of figuring out how our planet works.
00:05:16
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It's not that they only lived a long time ago. When you read the book and anyone who has any even the most superficial knowledge of evolutionary biology, they lived a long time too, right?
Why Were Dinosaurs So Successful?
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They did. And the dinosaurs
00:05:36
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had an empire and that's how we should think about it and that's the terminology I like to use to try to get the point across and that's why I called the book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs to evoke our feelings of empire, the Roman Empire and so on because dinosaurs, I think a lot of people still have this image of dinosaurs as these
00:05:58
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evolutionary dead ends as these failures, as these creatures, these big lumbering stupid animals that lived millions of years ago in this bygone era that doesn't really have any relevance to today and they were these vestiges of this primeval past.
00:06:14
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But that's not really true. Dinosaurs did live a long time ago, of course, but they dominated the world for over 150 million years. They were some of the most successful animals that have ever lived on Earth, some of the most successful creatures that evolution has ever produced. Dinosaurs lived all around the world. They evolved into all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some of them became the biggest animals that have ever lived on land, these long-neck dinosaurs that were as big
00:06:41
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as bullying 737 aircraft. Other ones were burrowers and fast runners and tree climbers. And then some of them evolved feathers and wings and became the birds of today. So to me, dinosaurs are the greatest success story, or at least one of the greatest success stories in the history of our planet.
00:06:59
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And we can debate about that back and forth and we can say, well, of course, you know, we humans have evolved intelligence and consciousness and we've built cities and we've gone to outer space. And that's all true, of course. But humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years. We have come nowhere close to enjoying that same sustained amount of evolutionary success that the dinosaurs had.
00:07:23
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Yeah, if you were to somehow like plot that on like a ruler or something, it would be like the dinosaurs would be like a meter stick and then humans would be a fraction of a millimeter or something in terms of like to give the scope of time. I know the math isn't exactly right, but I think that's a visual that kind of starts to at least tap the nail on the and hammer that point home a little bit.
00:07:48
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Yeah, it does, and there's all kinds of analogies like these, and we see a lot of them, and we use a lot of them in kids' books, and we use a lot of them when we're talking to kids, and one of them is you can stick out your arm, and the reign of the dinosaurs is, I don't know, I'd have to do the mouth off the top of my head, but it's a good chunk of your arm, but not the entire arm, because the Earth is four and a half billion years old. So the 150 million years of dinosaurs is, although it was a very long time,
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still is only a small percentage of the entire history of the Earth, but if you held your arm out and
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did this comparison, the reign of humans would be that little bit at the end of your fingernail that you pick off or you cut off. So that maybe helps put into perspective these vast reaches of deep time. But I think ultimately it's just so hard for us as humans to really comprehend what it means millions, billions of years ago. It's so out of the norm of our experience. And even as scientists, every day,
00:08:51
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talking in millions of years and billions of years, and I just throw these numbers around. But you know what? I mean, I don't really understand it. I don't really feel what it is like to have been around for hundreds of millions of years. And ultimately, I do think that's one of the awesome things about dinosaurs. It gives dinosaurs some of their majesty and it makes dinosaurs just so interesting to think about.
00:09:14
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And who are some of the, and you write about this in the book, but who are some of the people as a teenager who were doing the research, who inspired you, and what were you doing to reach out to them, and how did they inspire you to then kind of follow in their footsteps?
Mentorship in Paleontology
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These are some of the funny stories I tell in the book, and I think they're a little bit self-effacing some of these stories because I did some really weird things when I was a teenager, like many teenagers do. And although I was really, really shy as far as making friends in school and talking to girls and those kind of things at that age, I was incredibly
00:09:54
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audacious and brazen to the point of stupidity when it came to just reaching out to scientists, mostly on the internet, sometimes even over the phone, the people I was reading about, the authors of the books I was reading, the people I saw in the news discovering new dinosaurs. And this was right around the time that our family, I grew up in central Illinois, and it was right around the time that our family
00:10:18
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got the internet, and that just opened up a whole new world to me. So I reached out, I emailed a lot of scientists. Probably the weirdest thing that I did was a cold call, a scientist named Walter Alvarez, a very eminent geologist, the guy who came up with the idea that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. And I just called him up one day when I was 15 years old. I called up his office in California.
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I got his phone number from his faculty webpage, gave him a ring, he picked up the phone, oh my goodness, you know, I couldn't believe it. And I asked him about where it was that he found this evidence, this tiny layer in the rock full of this weird element called iridium, this very rare on Earth, very common in outer space, deposited right at that instant the dinosaurs died, the chemical fingerprint of this asteroid.
00:11:12
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he discovered in the late 70s. I asked him where I could go to find this, and he gave me directions, even told me the trains I could take if I were able to get to Italy one day, to get to this gorge in the mountains where he found this layer of rock. Looking back on it, I can scarcely believe it's even the same person. It's that very unusual
00:11:35
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kids. So I don't even know what anybody made of me back then, but because of those kind of experiences, because so many people like Walter Alvarez were so nice to me and just so generous with their time and so helpful.
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They didn't hang up the phone. They could have hung up the phone. They didn't ignore my emails. They were just so open. And that really showed me at that young age how important that is. So I try. I try my best nowadays when anybody emails me or even cold calls me to respond to people, to chat with people, especially younger people. And hopefully that sort of engagement can
00:12:16
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can enthuse young people and get them interested in science. And so, you know, I love going into schools. I love doing book festivals and book readings and going to bookshops and those sorts of things. And that's just been one of the most fun aspects of writing this book is just, you know, the opportunity that it's given me to meet a bunch of people and show people all this exciting new work on dinosaurs.
00:12:41
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uh... part of the the book that i think take away that i got from it and it's kind of an undercurrent of it not something that's uh... super explicit is that you're you not only paid homage to your the the mentors and people who influenced you about also your own peers there i mean there's dozens and dozens of people's of your your friends and peers research that you site throughout the whole thing so you get a sense of how vibrant the entire
00:13:10
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paleontological community is. Give us a sense of what that community is like and why it was important for you to write about it in such a way that shows that this is actually a big global effort to educate the public on these wonderful animals.
Global Paleontology Community
00:13:30
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Yeah, when I sat down to write the book, like any time you sit down and try to think about how to write something, there were a lot of different ways that I was thinking about how to tell the story. What I wanted to do in the book is tell the story of dinosaurs, of their history, their evolution, their origin story, and how they rose up to dominance, and how some of them became really big, and other ones grew feathers and became birds, and how the rest of them went extinct.
00:13:57
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The story arc is the story arc of nature. I didn't have to write it. It was already there. But in telling that story, I thought a creative way to do it and a good way to do it is to also tell the story of how we are learning about dinosaurs, how we know what we know, and especially how we've learned so much over the last decade or two. And we have. It's an incredible time. It's the best time.
00:14:21
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Really, in the whole history of paleontology, people are finding more dinosaurs now than ever before. Right now, somebody somewhere around the world is discovering a new species of dinosaur, on average, once a week, which is a crazy number, 50-some new species a year. It sounds like it's some kind of fake news nonsense, but I assure you, it's true, and it's been going on for about a decade. And that's because there are so many young people going out looking for dinosaurs
00:14:49
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The field has expanded, is diversified incredibly. It used to be a real niche field. It used to be restricted, really, to only a few countries. And it was mostly the same sorts of people that would study paleontology. But now the field is diversified. There are many young women in the field. There are many people from across the world, from developing countries, China, Argentina, Brazil, as these enormous countries are opening up and building new museums and new universities and training young scientists.
00:15:19
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this has led to this explosion of new discoveries. And so I wanted to try to convey that excitement in the book, and I wanted to try to tell stories of some of the people that I really admire, that I really respect, people that have mentored me, but also people of my generation, people who I've worked with or people whose work I think has really discovered amazing new things about dinosaurs. And in doing so, I tried to pick a diverse cast of characters
00:15:47
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to tell that story. So scientists from around the world
00:15:53
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And I think in general, the reception to that has been good. Some people have, some online reviewers have said that the personal stories are too much and it's too much of a story of people and not of dinosaurs. But that is how I chose to write it because I thought ultimately it's a story that needs to be told and telling that personal side of things as a way to enliven it and to show people
00:16:18
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how we know what we know and the people behind the science and to show that it's not just all these old bearded guys and lab coats and posh universities that are doing all the work. It's people, interesting people, young people all over the world. And that is why the field is going to continue
00:16:37
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to be very exciting. There's going to continue to be a lot of new discoveries because this pace is not slowing down because so many young people continue to go into the field and the field is still diversifying.
00:16:50
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And that's why the future of paleontology is very, very bright. We're nowhere near exhausting all of the fossil discoveries that are out there. There is still a lot left to be found. So for younger people who are reading the book or maybe listening here, although these animals we're studying have been dead for millions of years, we are really just getting started as far as learning about what these things were like.
00:17:14
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Yeah, because I think the average person, and I would want myself in there, felt or feels that paleontology was kind of static.
Discovering New Dinosaur Species
00:17:24
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What's been discovered is all that will be discovered. So I know that's very sort of naive, but that's
00:17:32
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kind of the feeling I had and after like reading this book you realize that it's every bit as vibrant and golden as as you say it is given that 50 new species are being discovered a year which is it is absolutely mind-blowing that it's every bit as vibrant if not the most vibrant it's ever been and and given that
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What are some of the morphological things that you're seeing in the bones here that are signifying that they are in fact new species and not just variants on the ones that have already been discovered? Yeah, that's a great question. And so much of what we do as dinosaur researchers, it's based on the fossils. And, you know, it's maybe a little bit cliched or a little bit trite to say it, but I like making the comparison with detectives, with
00:18:23
Speaker
investigators that are out trying to understand crime scenes and catch criminals. For detectives that are investigating a murder, let's say, if they want to understand what happened and why and who did it and all of that, they have to find the crime scene and they have to look for clues, hair and fingerprints and other clues that can help tell the story. And for us, we want to understand how dinosaurs evolved, how they changed over time.
00:18:49
Speaker
what that tells us about how the earth has changed over time. And so for us, our clues are the fossils themselves, the bones, the teeth, the footprints, the eggs, the bits of the dinosaurs themselves, their bodies, or the things that they left behind. And for us, each fossil is something that can tell a story. So we're always out looking for new fossils. They are the currency of our field.
00:19:14
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you know, so many paleontologists will go to incredible lengths to find fossils. Stupid lengths sometimes. I've known people that have driven through war zones on the hunt for fossils. I would not advocate that at all. That's ridiculous. But I know people that have done it because that desire to find more clues is such a magnetic pull for us. And it's ultimately those clues, those bones, that help us tell which species were around. And they help us tell
00:19:44
Speaker
which species were related to each other and how they all fit on a family tree. And so it's through comparing the bones that we can tell whether we have one species or many species. So if somebody finds a new fossil, let's say we go out to the Isle of Skye here in Scotland, where I live and work now. And we do this every year with my students at the University of Edinburgh. And we do find new fossils. We do. Sometimes we find
00:20:10
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skeletons. That's very rare that we find decent skeletons with a lot of bones together, but most of the time we find one bone here, one bone there,
00:20:20
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And so we have to try to decipher those clues. And usually if you only have one bone, it's not going to tell you very much. Maybe it will tell you generally what type of dinosaur you had, a meat eater or a plant eater. It might tell you generally how big it was, but it's going to be very hard to pin down a species based on one bone. But the more you find, the more you have to compare with. And so if you find
00:20:41
Speaker
A few bones, let's say, you can start to really study those bones in detail, to measure them, to photograph them, to note what features they have, how big they are, the shapes they have, what the muscle attachments are like, all these sorts of things. And you can make comparisons to all the other dinosaurs that have been found. And then if you see that your new fossil has differences, that's a sign that it's a new species. If it has features that no other dinosaur fossils
00:21:10
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ever found before have.
00:21:13
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So that's a sign it's a new species. Now, of course, those differences could be caused by something else. Maybe you found a male version of a dinosaur that was previously known as a female, or maybe you found a teenage version of a dinosaur that was previously only known from adult skeletons. So you do have to be careful. But it comes down to really studying the hell out of the nuances of the bones. And although paleontology has this image of being a very romantic field and this field full of adventure, and it is
00:21:42
Speaker
during parts of our time when we're out in the desert and we're out looking for new fossils or going through war zones for those idiots that do that, most of the time we're sitting around in our offices, in our labs, staring at bones, lots and lots and lots of bones and scrutinizing bones and photographing bones and comparing the bones we have to other bones and to pictures of bones in published papers and books.
00:22:07
Speaker
The bones are the clues for us. And that's maybe the side of paleontology that a lot of people don't realize. It's just how much intimate time you have to spend studying bones. Well, that's just like a lot of people I talk about who write books and make films. There's the shiny sort of prestigious part about it, which is finishing the product, seeing it in the cover, on the bookshelves, or in the theater.
00:22:37
Speaker
uh but then there's the grind of it you know the real nitty gritty work of getting through the writing of the book the producing of the film or the radio show or the podcast and in your case part of like sort of the ugly just boots on the groundwork is just meticulously studying these bones and that's kind of the maybe the unsung part of your work or probably in
00:22:59
Speaker
encapsulates probably 90% of what you do but we see that 10% which is the book and maybe your lectures but a lot of it's gotta be some of that mundane stuff of just holding it in your hand or looking at pictures over and over again.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. It's true, I think, of pretty much any field. I'm sure it's true of what you're going to do after we talk here as far as editing this down and putting it into a package that you can release and it looks nice and sounds nice and stuff. And when people don't see that, it's definitely the same with writing a book. And as far as science goes, there is a lot of grunt work. And there's just a lot of
00:23:39
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of thinking and a lot of reading and a lot of talking with your students and your colleagues.
00:23:45
Speaker
that's where the ideas come from. And that's why it's hard sometimes, the higher up you go kind of on the academic faculty and the more your time is stretched between lots of different things, it can get a bit harder sometimes to do that necessary work, that sort of meditation work of sitting with the bones and thinking about the bones. And so for those of us who are lucky enough to have faculty jobs and they're very hard to get these days,
00:24:13
Speaker
We divide our time between so many things and going out and finding new fossils is only a small part of what we do. Maybe one month out of the year I'm out looking for fossils. It used to be a lot more when I was younger, when I was a student, when I didn't have so many responsibilities, but now I run a lab and I teach several undergraduate courses and I run a master's program and I have a lot of PhD students and postdocs that work with me and I serve on university committees.
00:24:42
Speaker
And I write grants and I do outreach public lectures and science writing and all these things. So they all take up a little bit of my time. And, you know, which is great, which is actually something I love about the job is that it's something new every day and we get to experience so many different things.
00:25:00
Speaker
But it does sometimes take away that ability to just escape for a little bit and really think deeply about these fossils that we're finding. But that's one reason why we build our labs and we try to recruit great students and great postdocs to help us out and to do their own work and to grow as scientists. And that's been probably the most fulfilling thing for me over the last five and a half years or so as I've started up my lab here in Scotland is seeing
00:25:30
Speaker
some of the new generation come through and study their own things and ask their own questions and start to build their own careers and they're the people that are going to be moving this field forward. You mentioned so many of those tasks that you're a part of.
Academic Life: Balancing Roles
00:25:51
Speaker
What systems do you have in place to keep all of that straight?
00:25:57
Speaker
The only system I really have in place is just a small diary where I write down everything I need to do every day. You know, I don't have any kind of fancy computer system. I don't use any of the Microsoft calendar or any of these things. I certainly don't have a
00:26:16
Speaker
secretary or a personal assistant or anything ridiculous like that the only way I can make sense of it is to write it down myself and and hope that I remember everything and so you know it works most of the time I think but it is just you know what one of those kind of under
00:26:39
Speaker
realized aspects of being a researcher, being a university academic. I think a lot of people see us as, you know, we teach a few classes and then we just sit around in our offices and think all day or work on some esoteric research, you know, but not really. We are really scrapped for time most of the time when we're dividing our time between lots of different things, but most of us love it. Most of us love what we do because to have
00:27:05
Speaker
these jobs where we are able to teach, where we are able to mentor students, where we are able to run a lab, build a lab, start asking questions, doing experiments, going out, having the freedom to discover new things about the world, whether it's ourselves or our students. That is a really amazing thing and we are so privileged
00:27:27
Speaker
to be able to do that. And maybe the best part of my job is no matter what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, whether it's a day full of teaching or it's a day of doing fieldwork or a day of working in the lab, I always have the opportunity or the possibility to discover something new, to learn something new about the world, about evolution, about the history of the earth, about the way the world works.
00:27:53
Speaker
Some days I discover entirely new species, whether we go out and find them ourselves, or maybe it's the day that I'm working in the lab scrutinizing the bones, thinking about the bones, comparing the bones, and then there's that eureka moment that, oh my goodness, what we have here is something new. This is a dinosaur that's 100 million years old that nobody else has seen before, and I'm the first person to realize that this is a species, the first person to understand that this species lived on Earth. That is just an awesome
00:28:23
Speaker
sort of feeling. And it's hard to describe, and I know I'm kind of blabbering on about it a little bit, but that's just a wonderful aspect of our jobs, that discovery aspect. And for most of us, even if we're senior professors or academics, even if we're overburdened by so many different tasks, we still love what we do and we still love to have those opportunities to discover totally new things.
00:28:48
Speaker
What was that moment like when you decided that this was the book you wanted to write?
Writing a Book on Dinosaurs
00:28:54
Speaker
And then how did you fold that into your schedule so you were making progress on this? Well, I think most readers or listeners would probably find these stories to be quite boring, really. But since this is a, you know, creative nonfiction podcast, I think it's a good time to talk about the realities of how a
00:29:14
Speaker
book like this actually comes together. There's a lot. I don't know how most people see book writing. I don't know. You go to the bookstore and you see all these books there and I don't know if most people think that
00:29:27
Speaker
There's all these authors that just come up with ideas and write up a manuscript and send it to a publisher and then the publisher sends them a seven-figure paycheck. I don't know if that's what people think. That's certainly not the reality of it and I think this book and most books are things that come together over many years and they involve many people. They involve good timing and they involve luck and they involve the great work of agents and editors and copy editors and publicists and marketing and sales folks.
00:29:56
Speaker
So, for this book, I've been interested in writing for a long time. When I was younger, when I was in high school and college, I worked for my hometown newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois.
00:30:06
Speaker
daily times and a small newspaper at a circulation of a few thousand, but it was a very exciting place to work. I worked in the newsroom. I learned a lot about writing, about working with editors, about writing to deadline, about sources and interviewing people. And it was really intoxicating. And if I didn't go into science, I surely would have gone into some field of journalism. And so, you know, learning a lot about the
00:30:32
Speaker
the business of writing and the craft of writing at a young age, it's just always made me want to write. And I've written some books here and there. I've written some kids books on dinosaurs and I've written a textbook and I've written a lot of scientific papers, the sort of highly technical research papers that we write to communicate with other scientists when we find something new.
00:30:53
Speaker
But I always had in the back of my mind for the last decade or so that at some point I wanted to try to do a popular science book for adults because there are so many books on dinosaurs for kids, including the handful of ones that I've written. But it just doesn't seem like there's much for adults out there, which is a little bit weird because there are so many books for adults about astrophysics and about astronomy.
00:31:21
Speaker
and those sorts of fields of science. And some of those books, Stephen Hawking's books, and Carl Sagan's books, and Brian Greene's books, and these things have been enormous sellers. Now Neil deGrasse Tyson's books.
00:31:32
Speaker
And so, for whatever reason, even though dinosaurs are so popular, and dinosaurs are in the news all the time, and movies about dinosaurs, Jurassic Park and Jurassic World make billions of dollars, there just didn't really seem to be much for adults out there. There used to be. There were some great books in the 80s and in the early to mid 90s, books that really inspired me when I read them as a teenager.
00:31:52
Speaker
but there hadn't been much recently. And so I thought, okay, it'd be fun to do that someday, but I didn't really have any kind of plan. I didn't really sit down and start writing anything. And I didn't even really know how that whole process worked about how you could get to that stage where you're writing a book. And so it was really through dumb luck that the process on this book kicked into gear because I had done some research with a bunch of colleagues
00:32:20
Speaker
around the world, we did a study about the dinosaur extinction. We presented some new data that made this argument that dinosaurs were doing very, very well. They were very, very diverse. They were still evolving really fast right up until the moment this asteroid fell out of the sky and knocked them out. And so we wrote a paper on this and the university here and University of Edinburgh put together a press release just to help announce that study to science journalists because it was about the dinosaur extinction. We thought it had a
00:32:49
Speaker
a bit of interest out there. It could get a bit of interest out there. And so they put out the press release, and some journalists did pick it up, especially here in the UK. And I did a few interviews here and there, and I did something on BBC Radio. And that radio program was broadcast in the US. I think it might have been on NPR that it was put on, or maybe it was put on BBC America or something like that. I'm not totally sure. But in New York,
00:33:19
Speaker
An agent was listening, an agent named Jane von Maron, who had just become an agent. She was an editor for many, many years and then switched careers to go to the other side of the publishing business.
00:33:33
Speaker
and she was in the process of trying to recruit new clients and she heard this interview and she thought this story about the dinosaur extinction was an interesting story and I guess she thought that I presented it well and I was speaking about it well and passionately and articulately or at least that's what she told me and so she got in touch she just sent an email and just
00:33:55
Speaker
randomly said, Hey, I'm a literary agent, I'm just starting up. You know, have you ever thought about writing a book? And that is what really kicked it in into gear. And I said, Well, yeah, I've written a few books for kids. And I thought about doing an adult book, but I've never really taken it very far. And she said, Well, you should really think about it. And I said, Okay, well, what do I need to know? And then she explained the process, how it works, how you have to write up a proposal, how these proposals are quite detailed, and you need
00:34:21
Speaker
an outline for the whole book and you need a sample chapter and you need a marketing plan and all sorts of things. And then how an agent can take that proposal and take it to editors and then editors can bid on it if they like it. And so I knew nothing. I had no idea about any of that stuff. But I basically lucked into an agent because Jane heard me on the radio. So I didn't have to go through that whole process of trying to find an agent, which I know is
00:34:47
Speaker
often the most torturous thing for a lot of writers. So I feel almost fraudulent in a way that I somehow cheated the system by this incredible agent falling into my lap. And she is an incredible agent. There are lots of agents out there, but Jane is amazing. I mean, her experience in publishing is vast. She has worked on so many books as an editor and now as an agent. She knows the industry so well. And we put together this proposal.
00:35:16
Speaker
We pitched this idea of a book telling the story of dinosaur history and then weaving in some of my own stories of discovering dinosaurs and doing fieldwork and working with these amazing colleagues. And we put it out to some editors and some were interested. Quite a bit, of course, said no. And then we latched up with a great young editor named Peter Hubbard
00:35:43
Speaker
at William Morrow, which is one of the imprints of HarperCollins. Peter is about my age or so, more or less. He just was really interested in the idea. He thought the same way we did that there hadn't been a dinosaur book for adults. It popped
00:36:03
Speaker
kind of science mass market dinosaur book for quite a while. He thought there was a great opportunity. He also happened to be an alum of the University of Chicago, and I was too. We didn't go to school together, but that's another thing. That little connection, just that kind of alumni link, I think
00:36:22
Speaker
might have motivated him and me a little bit more. We couldn't have planned it, but there it was. And so we signed the contract with Peter and William Morrow, and then got to work on the book. And he gave me feedback when I was writing early on. And then we got to a point where he pretty much told me to just go for it. And I wrote when I could. I would write during those times of the year when I wasn't
00:36:50
Speaker
teaching a lot, basically, because although I do lots of different things in my job, the one thing that really pins me down to having to be here at the university and busy during most of the day
00:37:03
Speaker
is when I'm teaching, when I'm lecturing and doing labs and practicals and then grading and doing exams and all of that. So I would avoid the times that I was teaching and the times of the year when I didn't have such a heavy teaching schedule, I would make time to write. And it took about a year and a half to do it to produce the full draft and send it off to Peter. And he worked editorial magic on it. He didn't shred it up. I thought he might shred it up and kind of mark up every single page and nitpick on every word, but that's not the type of editor that he was.
00:37:33
Speaker
Which has actually taught me something really important about how I should maybe work with my students when I'm editing their work You know instead he really focused on the big picture He was not shy about telling me where I was being a little bit ridiculous or a little bit too self-indulgent There were you know a few places where he said look you just got to scrap this whole thing I know you've written ten pages on this, but it's just not working and
00:37:55
Speaker
And so we just got on well. We seemed to click. I took his advice basically almost all the time. And then we have the final book. And then it really became an issue of marketing and publicity and sales. And there's an incredible team at HarperCollins.
00:38:16
Speaker
Maureen Cole, who helped arrange the interview with you, is an amazing publicist. She got a couple of spots from me on NPR and helped with getting a TV spot and got the book into the hands of the right people, so it was reviewed at the New York Times and the Washington Post and other places.
00:38:35
Speaker
And that was really key to getting the word out. So without Maureen and without that really expert publicity side of things, maybe regardless of whether the book was good or bad, people would have never heard of it. So that was key. And then there was a great marketing staff as well.
00:38:52
Speaker
Emilia was great at marketing at HarperCollins and the sales staff was incredible and they put out a few advertisements as well that were really timed around Father's Day. And so those kind of things really really really helped and that got just a lot of people to know about the book and to start talking about the book.
00:39:10
Speaker
Then the weirdest thing of all happened as the month of June was winding down. I was going back to the US to see my family. I landed in Chicago at O'Hare and just checked my phone and saw that the book had gone up to number 80-something on Amazon. What is going on here? I just did a quick little web search and I saw that
00:39:35
Speaker
a few hours before Newt Gingrich had written a review on FoxNews.com. Totally unexpected. I knew Newt Gingrich was a big dinosaur enthusiast, but out of the blue, that just came. We didn't know about it. We had no idea. That just hit.
00:39:53
Speaker
sold a lot of books. Newt sold a lot of books. And although my politics don't align very closely with Newt's politics, let's say, I'm really appreciative of what he did. And he wrote a great review and he helped bring the book to an audience that probably by and large wouldn't have really heard of it without that review. So I know that this is a long answer to that, but hopefully this is kind of given a little bit of an honest insight into the process of how this all works. Because yes, the book is
00:40:24
Speaker
a best seller. It got on the New York Times list. This is like amazing, you know, and I know it sounds like it's gloating. I hope it doesn't sound that way, but it was, you know, we had a
00:40:33
Speaker
you know, a goal. Peter Hubbard, my editor, you know, put a goal and said, you know, I think we can get on the New York Times science list for the month of July and everything just clicked and everybody worked so hard to do it. And, you know, now when the paperback comes out, I'm sure it'll say, you know, New York Times bestseller on the cover, which will be awesome. But there's so much that goes into that. It doesn't just happen. And it doesn't just happen because the book is good. I mean, I think the book is good. I'm happy with the book. There's some things I would change. There's
00:41:00
Speaker
Of course, plenty of things that reviewers and other critics say online, some of which are good points and some of which are kind of nonsensical. But so much of it just, you know, of getting any book, much less a bestseller just comes down to
00:41:15
Speaker
working with good people and it was a huge team effort. It comes down to the timing. It comes down to having luck fall your way. It comes down to having NPR not bump me on those days because there was nothing bigger in the news cycle. I don't know, a presidential tweet could have upended that. So little things like that really, really matter. And I hope that's something that maybe can
00:41:44
Speaker
provide some insight into other folks that are writing books or thinking about writing books. These are all things I knew nothing about before I started and I know I've been incredibly lucky and so many things have broken our way.
00:41:55
Speaker
with this book and it's just been such a blast. It's been so much fun. You know, it's kind of dying down now because the book came out in late April and now we're at the end of the summer and, you know, it's of course now gone way down on Amazon. It's not number 80 or whatever it was when Newt did his review. It is much farther down. But it's been just such an incredible experience and something I never really
00:42:17
Speaker
thought I would ever get to do and now of course I want to do it again and write another book and now I have to come up with something and I know really honestly realistically that probably all those same bits of good luck won't break my way so you know this this has really been you know just just I think one of those one in a million things and it's it's it's just been really cool and I'm very grateful to everybody that's helped with it and
00:42:46
Speaker
Both people, you know, the people that have helped with the book by editor agent and everybody, but also all the people whose stories I tell in the book, all of my colleagues, my friends, my students, my mentors, scientists from the preceding generation, the people like Walter Alvarez, you know, that I deeply respect. It's really their research, their discoveries and their
00:43:05
Speaker
amazing personalities that I think make the book have the material so that it's an interesting read. My name's on the cover of this thing, but it really is the story of lots of people.
The Thrill of Fossil Discovery
00:43:20
Speaker
And as we're wrapping up here, I think a great place to maybe end our conversation and let you get to dinner is maybe taking us to a dig and that moment of discovery when someone brushes aside the dirt and sees a bone that could be a new species. Take us to that, you're so passionate about it. So what is that moment like at the dig when someone discovers something?
00:43:47
Speaker
The moment is indescribable, but I'll try to describe it. So first of all, to even find a fossil, you have to go out and look for a fossil, of course. Sometimes people happen upon a fossil. A construction worker that's laying the foundation for a building, or a hiker that's out for a walk, or a farmer out plowing his or her field might just stumble upon something. But as a scientist, kind of a professional scientist, we plan
00:44:15
Speaker
our expedition. So we have to choose places to go and that means doing our homework. It means trying to find places that have rocks of the right age and the right type.
00:44:25
Speaker
to yield, potentially yield, dinosaur bones. So we have to find those places in the world where there are rocks that were deposited during the Mesozoic era, that period of time between about 250 and 66 million years ago that dinosaurs lived in. And these have to be rocks that were formed on land and the source of environments dinosaurs did live in. And they have to be exposed on the surface of the earth now so we can go and find them. So there's a checklist there. You just have to really think it through.
00:44:52
Speaker
You just don't go out to a random place and put your shovel in the dirt and start digging. But once you do that, it's really a matter of patience and luck because you go out to these places and you just start walking around and looking and it's not any more sophisticated than that. We don't have any radar or any sonar that we shoot into the rocks to see if there are fossils inside. That doesn't work because
00:45:18
Speaker
Dinosaur bones are rocks. They're bones that have turned into rocks over vast stretches of time. So we can't really use sonar or anything to tell the difference between them and the rocks that they're in. So we have to walk around looking for any scraps of bone or any other fossils that are there.
00:45:37
Speaker
And if we find something, then we dig deeper into the rock and hope that maybe there's a complete bone or if we're really lucky, a complete skeleton. So that means that sometimes we don't find anything. Sometimes we go for days without seeing anything. And it really is a matter of having, you know, good eyes and good experience to know what to look for, but also just patience and luck.
00:46:00
Speaker
And then when you do find something though, then things change really quick. Because a lot of times your emotion when you're out looking for fossils is you're excited, but then you start to get a little bit bored as you're not seeing anything. And some people are better at dealing with that boredom than others, but I get quite impatient pretty quickly. So I start to daydream sometimes when I should probably really be focusing more on looking at the rocks. But when there is that moment that you do see something,
00:46:29
Speaker
It's this big emotional switch because now all of a sudden you've found something and then you get really excited about looking further and seeing what that thing is. And the amazing thing that you really feel when you think about it is that you are the first person to ever see this, to ever see this bone, this tooth, this footprint, this clue from a world of tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. And that is,
00:46:57
Speaker
an emotional sort of moment that is just hard to put into words. I think it's like trying to describe what love is or something like that. You know, how many millions of songs and poems and books have been written to try to describe love.
00:47:13
Speaker
And you could do the same if you wanted to try to describe this moment. But it is really an incredible thing. I don't know if that's verbalized it very well, but it is a real buzz when you do find something. And now as I'm getting kind of, you know, although I'm not too old yet, I hope, I'm losing my hair, but I'm not that old yet. I'm just in my mid thirties.
00:47:40
Speaker
I'm kind of shifting into more of a senior role in my career and running a lab and teaching a lot of students. So the really awesome feeling, more than anything now, is not when I find something, but when one of my students does. And in fact, my students find pretty much all of the good stuff nowadays. All these new dinosaur footprints and bones that we've been finding on the Iowa sky have largely been made by students. And that's a really neat thing.
00:48:03
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, there's so much great stuff in the book of all the technological advances that have come to help scan these bones to elucidate us on the vast intelligence of these animals, the age, the size, their locomotion, and speed. I encourage anyone to go get it to learn so much more about the breadth of your research.
00:48:28
Speaker
Where can people find you online, Steve, so they might be able to connect with you and get more familiar with your work? I think I'm hard to avoid online these days. There have been so many interviews and other things. I'm the only person in the world with my name. I have a really unusual last name.
00:48:47
Speaker
Italian name has been changed over time, the spelling and all that. So if you put my name into Google, it's totally unavoidable. You'll find me. You'll see my university page. You'll see my research website and that has my email and my Twitter and everything. And, you know, I use Twitter to communicate with people to talk about new discoveries, you know, to talk about my
00:49:07
Speaker
students' work and my colleagues' work. And that's probably the best thing to do really for people who are interested in dinosaurs and want to learn more and want to keep a pulse on the latest advances and discoveries is follow me on Twitter and follow some of my colleagues on Twitter. Great. And you pronounce your last name as it, Broussat.
00:49:25
Speaker
It's Bruce Soddy, so that's where we're getting down into this bizarre name evolution over time. It's a weird name, but yeah. Fantastic. Well, Steve, thank you so much for carving out the time to talk about your wonderful book and your research. Whenever your next pop science dinosaur book comes out, we'll have to reconnect and have you back on the show. So this is a lot of fun.
00:49:50
Speaker
Yeah, and keep up the great world be there next time if there is a next time you never know You know in this sort of industry, but I hope I get another chance to write something and I'll be back on to talk about it I sure as hell. Hope so. All right. Thanks a lot Steve. Take care. All right, thanks. Cheers. Bye Could it be that it's already over that was fun
00:50:16
Speaker
Be sure to head over to BrendanOmero.com and sign up for that newsletter. Yeah, that one. And for show notes to 117 episodes of the podcast. Got some energy. Consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts or rating ratings are like super quick.
00:50:39
Speaker
and, you know, follow the show on twitter at cnfpod at friend and omer on twitter Facebook is creative nonfiction podcast you know the drill I think that'll do it let the rock and roll take you away if you can't do interview see ya