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Dinosaurs with Rachel Ignotofsky

Breaking Math Podcast
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In this engaging conversation, Rachel Ignotofski discusses her new book Dinosaurs, exploring the fascination with these ancient creatures, the impact of mass extinctions, and the evolution of life on Earth. She highlights the importance of paleontology, the legacy of Mary Anning, and the artistic choices made in illustrating the book. The discussion also touches on the audience for the book, quirky anecdotes from paleontological history, and the significance of understanding deep time in relation to our current ecosystem.

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Takeaways

  • Most of us fall in love with dinosaurs around the age of six.
  • Dinosaurs and birds evolved together, sharing the Earth.
  • There have been five major mass extinctions in Earth's history.
  • Nature always bounces back after mass extinctions.
  • Paleontology is constantly evolving with new discoveries.
  • Mary Anning was a pioneer in paleontology, often overlooked.
  • Dinosaurs were not just big lizards; they were diverse and complex.
  • The Cambrian explosion marked a significant evolutionary milestone.

Chapters

  • 00:00 The Fascination with Dinosaurs
  • 03:42 Mass Extinctions and Geological Time
  • 06:16 Paleontology and Misconceptions
  • 09:08 Mary Anning: The Mother of Paleontology
  • 11:53 Evolution of Dinosaurs and Marine Reptiles
  • 13:06 The Evolution of Whales
  • 13:42 The Cambrian Explosion and Ancient Creatures
  • 16:12 Favorite Time Periods in Prehistory
  • 18:48 The Book's Audience and Its Appeal
  • 19:03 Anecdotes from the Fossil World
  • 21:53 Art and Illustrations in Science
  • 26:11 The Vastness of Earth History
  • 28:21 Upcoming Events and Future Projects

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Transcript

Introduction and Sponsorship

00:00:00
Speaker
This episode has been sponsored by the Curiosity Box, the world's first subscription for thinkers created by Vsauce, YouTube's most popular science education network with over 23 million fans.
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Speaker
Four times a year, you'll get a box packed with unique limited edition science toys, experiments, and mind-bending collectibles you won't find anywhere else. The Fall 2025 edition is here and it's all about exploring space and time.
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Speaker
You'll find the world's first four-dimensional tape measure, part ruler, part pendulum that measures both distance and seconds. There are Mr. Wiggles' goofy giggle jiggle siphons, silly straws that secretly reveal the physics of fluid dynamics, and yes, there are even slap bracelets that measure cylinders, mark rulers, and maybe prove you're a time traveler. Each box makes learning an adventure, whether you're a lifelong science lover or just curious.
00:00:54
Speaker
Go to curiositybox.com slash breaking math and get 25% off your first box with the code BREAKMATH25. The Curiosity Box. Science isn't just a subject. It's a way of thinking, exploration, and asking questions.
00:01:09
Speaker
Plus, it's a great way to learn and bond with family or friends over some seriously cool science. Dinosaurs are more than just fossils in dusty museums. They're time travelers in our imagination, towering, feathered, roaring, and still teaching us lessons 66 million years later.

Interview with Rachel Ignatowski

00:01:28
Speaker
Welcome back to Breaking Math. Yes, you are on the right show this week, folks. And I'm your host, Autumn Finaf. And today we're joined by Rachel Ignatowski.
00:01:39
Speaker
She's well known for her book, Women in Science. But today she actually came out with a brand new book, Dinosaurs. And she brings them to life in a way that you've never seen before. And if you've wondered what dinosaurs really look like, the evolution of the earth,
00:02:00
Speaker
or what they can teach us about o ourselves, this conversation is for you. So, Rachel, welcome to Breaking Math, and let's start with the obvious question, why dinosaurs?
00:02:11
Speaker
Rachel, welcome to Breaking Math, and let's start with this obvious question, dinosaurs? Why dinosaurs? I've been doing science communicating for, wow, for the past 10 years now. And my very first book was Women in Science all the way back in 2016. And since then, I've done all sorts of topics about anything that I think is important or interesting. So I've done books about the history of the computer.
00:02:38
Speaker
I've done books all about backyard biology, like what's inside a flower for the elementary school audience. And Now I'm doing this book right here. It's called Dinosaurs Exploring Prehistoric Life and Geological Time.
00:02:50
Speaker
And this book is about a lot more than dinosaurs. We go all the way back to throughout all of Earth's 4.5 billion year long history, where we talk about the creation of the Earth and Moon for cellular life. And we move through geological time.
00:03:04
Speaker
learned about all the different plants and animals that have lived on planet Earth. And why dinosaurs? Well, because dinosaurs are the biggest, baddest, coolest animals, in my opinion, to ever live on Earth. I mean, and we still technically have some today.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yes, yes. My little veiled chameleon skull. All of the birds that you see right now, they actually belong to the theropod dinosaur group. So it's really cool once you start getting into it, learning that not only birds dinosaurs, but birds evolved right there with dinosaurs. Just like there's a mouse and an elephant and they're both mammals and they live today. a bird and a triceratops shared the same space at the same time. Absolutely fascinating. Out of curiosity, ah most of us fall in love with dinosaurs around the age six.
00:03:52
Speaker
But you've tuned that spark into a book for readers of all ages. So what moment actually made you think, why now for this book? don't know if anyone ever falls out of love with dinosaurs. I mean, yeah, like six-year-olds sure love dinosaurs, but I mean, I've met a lot of adults who are dino crazy too. For me, i think in my travels, um just I like to go on what theyre what I like to call like adult field trips.
00:04:22
Speaker
So like just for fun, I'll go visit like Volcanoes National Park and like see a volcano and see what I can learn from that. and and I've been doing a lot of geological tourism where, you know, you do things like you visit the Grand Canyon, you you go out into Utah and you see go to Dinosaur National Park. And I was just so in awe of the fossils that are all around us, the geology that's all around us, and just how old this earth is and how often it has dramatically changed.
00:04:53
Speaker
So I really wanted to tell that story of deep time.

Mass Extinctions and Evolution

00:04:56
Speaker
So in the book, you talk about various mass extinctions. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
00:05:04
Speaker
um Yeah. Some of the timeline for us? I mean, the timeline is really big. So there has been like five major mass extinctions. On our planet, the biggest one is called the Great Dying, and that happened at the end of the Permian period.
00:05:19
Speaker
So it kind of ushered in the Mesozoic era, which is the age of the dinosaurs. And what caused it was the outgassing of volcanoes in Siberia.
00:05:30
Speaker
It caused ah like a long outgassing of CO2 that caused climate change. And it killed off nearly 90 percent of animal species on Earth. And after each extinction event, something really interesting happens. First off, nature always bounces back.
00:05:45
Speaker
It just looks a lot different. And in the absence of competition, this really cool thing happens called adaptive radiation radiation. where, again, like they evolve very rapidly and fill different ecological niches. And when I say rapidly, I mean rapid in the sense of geological time. We're still talking millions of years.
00:06:03
Speaker
So like all these new animal species emerge and then you see new animal groups kind of dominate. So like After the Permian mass extinction, you see like all these like pseudosuchians, which are like the group the crocodiles belong to. And also you start to see dinosaurs, but dinosaurs are actually really puny. And it's these big crocodile pseudosuchian things that are, they're the dominant species. And then the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction happens, which is another mass extinction called by volcano outgassing. And then all of a sudden the ah the dinosaurs really take center stage.
00:06:37
Speaker
And of course, you see it again after the asteroid hits and then the mammals get to rise. Now, they aren't just big lizards, as you stated in there. So the cartoons that you've narrated in this book really bring a lot to life. So whether it's the nuances of colors, feathers, the ecosystem, was there some sort of misconception that we had about them that you might have corrected or that you loved illustrating about this?

Technological Advancements in Paleontology

00:07:05
Speaker
Well, the interesting thing about this science is that when it comes to like paleontology, the technology is always improving. They're always finding new things and the information is always getting updated. and So I didn't necessarily correct any misconceptions, but I tried to put the most the most like state of the art information that we have, like the most like current information. So there's all this really.
00:07:30
Speaker
new cool technology. So if they can get a really well-preserved fossil that has like example like the the fossil of a feather from one of these dinosaurs and if it's preserved well enough that they could actually look with like a microscope and look at the fossilized cells in that feather and by looking at the organelles in that cell they can know for a fact what color that's feather was.
00:07:54
Speaker
So there are little things like, oh, like we know that micro raptors, which are these like small little feathered, mean little guys, we know we know that they were black like a crow.
00:08:05
Speaker
So when I drew them, I made sure to make them black like a crow. But there's also a lot of stuff that we still don't know. And with that, I had a lot more creative license to kind of do patterns and bright colors. So I really wanted everything to look fun and alive and interacting with each other and you know, eating each other and scared of one another and walking around. But I also wanted to make sure that it was also, even though it's a cartoon, it's also as accurate and as I could get it to. So I worked with a paleontologist, Dr. Thomas Holtz, and fact-checked the whole book to make sure that everything was A-OK, because I'm an artist and cartoonist first and a science communicator second. Now,
00:08:43
Speaker
now You talk about people also that paved the path for paleontology. There were a couple in there. One I found kind of fascinating. Her name was Mary Anning. Do you want to talk about her a little bit?
00:08:57
Speaker
Because oh yeah I noticed that she also had a dog. She did also have a dog. So I first learned about Mary Anning when I was writing my book, Women in Science, way back when. And it's kind of wild that a lot of the things I learned about and a lot of the philosophies of the scientists that I wrote about and women in science have really carried through my work.
00:09:16
Speaker
So then like, you know, 10 years later, I'm writing dinosaur book and I'm like, oh, well, I got to talk about the mother of paleontology, Mary Anning. So Mary Anning, when she was ah just like a teenager, she was helping to feed her family by selling fossils that she found on the beach. So she lived on like the shores of England. And at the time, people didn't really understand that fossils were fossils. They thought of them more as like cool stones or mystical oddities or like just something like a cool souvenir from my beach trip.
00:09:51
Speaker
So she would sell these to make ends meet because she was very, very poor in Victorian England. And after a while, she began taking her own observations. She started placing the fossils together. And she actually found the very first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, which is a marine reptile from...
00:10:12
Speaker
you know, the Mesozoic, and then a bunch of other fossils as well. So at the time, there were a lot of like noblemen and like respected scientists who were also trying to prove that, hey, animals could in fact go extinct.
00:10:28
Speaker
This theory of evolution is informed by the fact that animals can go extinct. And there is a new group of animals, extinct animals that we have discovered called dinosaurs.
00:10:39
Speaker
So um they flocked to her work and actually published her findings in their name. And it hasn't been until pretty recently when we found the original journals that we are able to actually credit Mary Anning for all of the work that she has done in the field of paleontology. So it's really interesting that I got to talk about her in Women in Science and then I get to bring her up a But you also mentioned she had a dog.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, she had a little dog that she would bring with her. She had a dog she would bring with her and it's really cute. So the only reason why I actually mentioned that is because I have my dog and he goes everywhere with me and he looks almost like the dog that you illustrated.
00:11:19
Speaker
ah There's all these paintings of her with her dog. It's really, really cute. She would bring her dog with her because she's just she's just a girl digging for bones. She wants to have her little friend with her like her little puppies while she's going on trips. So I like putting in little fun facts like that because look like you related to it because you have a dog. It's these little things that humanize all these um historical figures that I think are as well as most of the listeners have known. I've put a little picture of Dash in there.
00:11:48
Speaker
In some of the episodes, I'm like, yep, he even has his own Instagram. You mentioned that she also discovered some dinosaur bones as well, right? So, yeah, she...
00:12:01
Speaker
ah She discovered a ton of dinosaur bones. A lot of them were actually marine reptiles. So so marine reptiles, they look that they're not dinosaurs. They're another another group, but they lived alongside the dinosaurs.
00:12:13
Speaker
So, yeah, you know, I'm actually looking at my book right now. And she did a complete ichthyostore skeleton. And she also found a complete paleos... I'm not going to pronounce this right. Pleasosaurus! There we go. Pleasosaurus and the first fossilized pterodactylus. So its she really discovered a lot in the Lyme, yeah, in the Lyme Regis area of England, where...
00:12:40
Speaker
You know, that's what's so interesting about fossils is that sometimes they're very hard to find. And other times, due to erosion and plate tectonics, they're just sticking right right there up out of the ground.

The Evolution of Whales

00:12:51
Speaker
And all you have to do is kind of ah kind of click open some shale. And it's like the pages of a book unfold in the fossils right there. So she was able to really find a lot. And her note keeping and the way that she arranged them, she she discovered full skeletons that way.
00:13:06
Speaker
fascinating. So we we're as I was going through the book, I noticed that some animals and reptiles have evolved from land to water or water to land.
00:13:21
Speaker
Now, I saw it there was the evolution of the blue whale. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how whales evolved over time? Because I found that to be really interesting. Yeah. So um this is all the way, this is long after the dinosaurs.
00:13:38
Speaker
There were like these sort of like, these sort of like, wolf-like looking animals. I believe they're called, i don't actually know off the top of my head their name. I think it's called Pachycetus.
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah. So Pachycetus kind of um is a long distant ancestor to the blue whale. So over the course of a couple million years during the Cenozoic era, 105,
00:14:03
Speaker
one oh five The um animals from the land, they, for many different reasons, like they just wanted like a snack. They wanted to escape predators. They started spending more times in the water.
00:14:16
Speaker
And eventually, like the evolutionary pressures caused them to lose their back legs, to develop tails, to have them their nose. Snouts kind of move up towards the top of their head.
00:14:29
Speaker
And um it it the it's actually really quick in the span of geological time, you start getting true whales. And you can really see how it's almost like and the the book Animorphs. It kind of looks like Animorphs. There's so many transitional species that look really strange to us from one to another. And what's really interesting is that you see the same thing happen with marine reptiles all the way back in the Mesozoic world.
00:14:53
Speaker
There's all these ecological pressures to escape all this competition on land and go back into the water. And you'll actually see animals that really resemble dolphins that have no relationship to dolphins at all during the Mesozoic period. So, it I mean, era. So it's really, really cool. Okay. Like, I found that to be super exciting.
00:15:12
Speaker
Now, we also have some very similar looking creatures to today, right? so One of them was a seven-foot-long jumbo shrimp. A seven-foot-long jumbo shrimp. Oh, yeah. And it made me think of Costco recalls.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, jumbo shrimp. We kind of called it that as ah as a big joke. um the Yeah, there was all these really strange-looking arthropods during the Cambrian period. So this is like over 500 million years ago.
00:15:44
Speaker
But there's all these like really strange-looking... crustacean-like animals. And honestly, like they were like kind of the kings of the ocean. They didn't really get that big, not dinosaur big, but they got bigger than we would be comfortable with.
00:15:59
Speaker
And they kind of, there's all these sort of like animals that are like, what's interesting about the Cambrian explosion is that for the first time, there's enough calcium in the water for animals to build shells.
00:16:10
Speaker
So you start seeing a lot of really interesting predation. So you have animals that pinch and squirt swim fast and eat one another. And so it's a big arms race to sort of start hunting one another, which is why the Cambrian explosion is so exciting.
00:16:24
Speaker
But yeah, jumbo shrimp. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't mind eating it. Go back in time and eat a jumbo shrimp. It's like 30 bucks for a dinner on the shore sometimes for something quick and easy for dinner. But for that, that'd be wicked cheap.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, why not? Yeah, just got to have a time machine and go back 500 million years ago and get it. I wonder, though, I wonder how hot it would be back then. It's probably pretty warm.
00:16:53
Speaker
Yeah, know you just thinking. A Caribbean shrimp cruised. Yes. Perfect for that. Now, is there a favorite time period as you were researching the book for this that you found or any weird fun facts that you want to share? Is it is it silly to say the Jurassic period? I feel like that's everyone's favorite. But I mean, I really loved it I mean, the Jurassic, ah the Jurassic.
00:17:19
Speaker
period it has some of my favorite fossil beds that I personally got to visit. If you're ever in Utah, you can go to the Dinosaur National Park and you could see a ton of Jurassic creatures there. They have the carnivore death pit, which is like a big mystery where all these allosaurus all died at the same time in the same place. And we don't really know why that happened.
00:17:39
Speaker
You could also, what I love about the Jurassic period is that in the forests that are now in the United States, there would be like over 20 different species of sauropods living at the same time in the same place. And sauropods are the big long neck dinosaurs, like little foot.
00:17:56
Speaker
And they would all be eating different types of leaves because they all evolve different habits. So they don't compete directly with one another. And I just think how wild would it be to be in a forest with all of those different long necks at the same time? Absolutely. I think those are really cool.
00:18:12
Speaker
Especially if you can if you think of a lot of the trees, even on the West Coast of the United States, on how tall they are. Think about the evolution, even, of how big these animal or these dinosaurs were.
00:18:25
Speaker
That's really interesting that you said that, because at the same time that the sauropods were all walking around, there were ginkgo trees. And ginkgos are around today. Those are living fossils. So there are some plants that you can see that were ah that survived the asteroid impact and live today as well. So you could really feel what it felt like.
00:18:43
Speaker
that's That's what I was thinking about. Like, right as you said that, I'm like, oh, that one question that I know a lot of folks always have for the audience.

Creating the Dinosaur Book

00:18:54
Speaker
Who was the book written for? Oh, that's a really good question. So this book is written for, honestly, it's like an all ages book. So like I try to make it like a four quadrant, you know, like a four quadrant movie. I'm trying to make a four quadrant book.
00:19:06
Speaker
This is written at the middle grade level so it can age up to adults and it could also age down to, um I would say, like upper elementary, like fourth and fifth graders. But honestly, like you don't even have to read a word of this book to get something out of it. You could just look at the pictures and see the movement through geological time.
00:19:26
Speaker
So it's really, really exciting to um kind of see how much Earth has changed with its plants and animals and just to see that visually with each turn of the page.
00:19:40
Speaker
So, yeah, I think that this book is really for everyone, but I think adults, middle graders and upper elementary schoolers. So I guess everyone. What I'm saying is everyone. It's everybody's book. Hear that, listener. You're the audience. Exactly. Were there any quirky stories or anecdotes that you saw during or that you found during your man time researching this book? Yeah, there was a lot. I mean, especially in the stories of discovery. In this book, we talk about a lot of, like, with each period, we try to highlight a different story of, like, how things got discovered or maybe something interesting in the fossil bed.
00:20:17
Speaker
So one of my favorite stories is actually from the Triassic. It's in um this area, this formation called the Ishigolasto Formation in Argentina.
00:20:27
Speaker
Since longer than anyone really even knows that, People have been finding fossils there because they're just sticking up out of the ground. But um the very first, I mean, we have found earlier ones since then, but the very first, like what we call like a true dinosaur, like the first time that one of those got discovered and it was a really big deal, it was actually in Argentina.
00:20:49
Speaker
So this goes back to the Triassic. This is one of the earliest true dinosaurs. And the way that they found it is that they got led by their gaucho cowboy guide, whose last name was Herrera.
00:21:00
Speaker
And so they named the dinosaur the Hererasaurus, which I thought was really cute and cool. So like all the names of dinosaurs, they all have like these special little stories behind them.
00:21:11
Speaker
It's kind of like um how one of the very um earliest, I'm trying to remember the name of it. the Oh man, I'm totally blanking on the name. There's so many Latin names in this book that you have to remember. There were, and I'm like, okay, how in depth do we want to go with each one of these different names?
00:21:30
Speaker
No, I totally get it. ah So there's this really, let me look. What is her name? And it is a her. Australopithecus. Woo, woo, woo.
00:21:42
Speaker
Australopithecus. So here's a really cool story for a naming. Australopithecus, which is like one of the, like, it's like far off ancient ancestor that humans are related to.
00:21:55
Speaker
It's kind of like sort of ah very old evolution, like the Neogene period. When that was discovered, it was discovered in like a campsite in Africa. And all of the people, all the paleontologists working on it were listening to the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. So then they nicknamed the fossil Lucy.
00:22:14
Speaker
And now we all know that it became a very famous fossil that toured all over the world. So ah it's really interesting to find out how fossils kind of get their names and like the people who discovered them, why they're naming it a certain way. So there's a lot of cool stories like that. in the Absolutely. I found some of them to be really, really, really cute, but I want to leave those out for a lot of the readers and listeners or viewers and viewers.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah. Well, here, I have a question for you. Was there a favorite part of the book that you really liked or any illustration that you thought was fun? I thought a couple of them were really, really cute.
00:22:50
Speaker
So... The the ah little creature that you have on the front cover is actually my excitement for the whole book. I love that. could I love that. And he's like, hello.
00:23:00
Speaker
It was that. And the other one was Mary Anning and her dog because I'm always with Dash and sometimes he will pop up on my Instagram or my other stories.
00:23:13
Speaker
and I'm like... He's spotted just like my boy. That and i also what I love. So for folks who actually don't know a lot about me behind the scenes and some of my personal stuff is that I used to tattoo for a while.
00:23:28
Speaker
and Wow. Yeah. So while I was teaching and going to school, I was tattooing and piercing. ah sir So alternate lifestyle, shifting to professor and engineer.
00:23:40
Speaker
after and show host and i love the use of color in the book and the style that you use especially for the brush and like the stippling effects that you have for the narration and the illustration for each little dot so I always find someone's choice for color palettes to be exciting when I see a combination of something that I wouldn't have chosen Like I would go bright and vivid, but your cover itself is this beautiful blue hue of a navy and teal and light blue.
00:24:16
Speaker
So that stuff is where I appreciate the tiny little nuances or the gold glitter in your cover. Oh, thank you so much. All of the textures you see, um I do all of those by hand and then I scan them into Photoshop and I like to remove the background by getting them into channels.
00:24:36
Speaker
So then I pixel lock them and color them that way. So um I don't like using Photoshop brushes or anything like that. I only i i literally use Photoshop like MS Paint.
00:24:47
Speaker
And whenever I want to use a texture, it's a real texture that I've actually painted. And then I bring that in and use it that way. My goodness. So all of the details have been done by hand, just about.
00:24:58
Speaker
ah All of the textures and stuff that you see have been done by hand, but um a lot of the fonts are all hand drawn. ended up actually creating my own font for the book for all the Latin names because it was getting too hard to write all of those by hand.
00:25:11
Speaker
My goodness, I would have done that. i I have done it in the past for books, and it hurt my arm too much. So I designed a font. I programmed a font, and the font had a lot of... um And then I would go in and I would modify the font to make sure that um it had some um ah special touches for each one so it didn't look like a font.
00:25:32
Speaker
So um I designed and programmed that to help out because... So many Latin, there's too much Latin words in it. I know. i was going through it and like, I automatically assume that you created your own font for it.
00:25:46
Speaker
So like each hand letter. and so, oh my gosh. So all of all of the large fonts, those are all done by hand. And then the sort of like labeling and then like ah tiny ones, those are is a font that I designed that also...
00:26:03
Speaker
It was a hand-on font that I i drew the letters and then I turned it into a font, which is really easy to do nowadays. I procreate and I made a custom stippling one for all the artwork.
00:26:15
Speaker
So it's really much a... I've never used procreate. i use Again, I use Photoshop like MS Paint and I don't know why, but that's just how I've been doing it all these years. So I am like very... But it allows me to kind of have my artwork...
00:26:29
Speaker
stay unique to my hand and all the happy accidents that it does, you know? Yep. Yep. Like, I haven't used all of the Adobe Illustrator stuff. So you and I are polar opposite for this. The Adobe Suite, it's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. And stay up on the technology is a lot, too. You know, it's wild.
00:26:49
Speaker
Everything changes, like, every six months. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, going back to the science side of stuff, is there any interesting facts or information that you want folks to take away from this conversation today? Well, what I love about this book is that it's not just a story about dinosaurs. It's about all of Earth history. And my biggest hope that that people take away from this is that You know, just like looking into the vastness of space and contemplating infinity where you can feel very small, you can feel the same way when learning about deep time. And I actually see that as a big positive. I think by seeing just how old our Earth is, how much it has changed, we can feel more precious about this moment in Earth history that we all share right now.

Importance of Understanding Earth's History

00:27:37
Speaker
Modern humans only emerged 300,000 years span of...
00:27:41
Speaker
um in the span of the billions of years that make up Earth history, it is not a very long time. And it's also, it hasn't been the very long time since we had the same ecosystem here on Earth. Like for the majority of Earth history, Earth doesn't have ice caps. Grasslands are something that only emerged during this Cenozoic era.
00:28:06
Speaker
The dinosaurs did not have grasslands. You know, all of this is like really important for us to preserve. And it's also a I think it's really good to also just kind of take a step back and go, okay, like feeling the vastness of space and time. It's a healthy feeling, I think. Absolutely.
00:28:26
Speaker
um Out of curiosity, where will we find you in the next few weeks? Because I know folks are always looking and wanting to know, where Where can we get a signed copy of the book or any of your other books that you have available?
00:28:42
Speaker
Okay. The best place to see where I'm on tour, because I'm going all over. I'm going to New York, New Jersey, Cincinnati, Chicago, Dallas. The best place to see where I am on my tour stop is to just go on my Instagram and I post all the public events there because we're doing a lot of private events at schools that are just for the students, but we're doing ah a bunch of public events at museums as well. So go to Rachel Ignatowski on Instagram and that's probably the best place to find out where I am if you want to come to a book event about dinosaurs. Super exciting.
00:29:17
Speaker
Now, Rachel, is there anything new and exciting that you also have yeah coming up? I know that you're probably working on another project already for the timeline.

Upcoming Projects

00:29:27
Speaker
I'm working on a lot of secret stuff right now, but the stuff that I can't announce, I just turned all in.
00:29:33
Speaker
We actually have a dinosaur's sticker book coming out and a dinosaur's coloring book coming out. And I love coloring. i think it'll be fun to color in all these different ancient prehistoric extinct ecosystems.
00:29:46
Speaker
So please stay tuned. And those all come out in March. Super exciting. Now, thank you so much for coming on the show. And it was a pleasure having you. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
00:29:57
Speaker
Dinosaurs might be long gone, but thanks to Rachel, they make us feel alive again. They're colorful, complex, and strangely familiar. Dinosaurs is out now, and whether you're six or 60, it rekindle your sense of wonder. So thanks again, Rachel, for taking us back in time and for showing us how art and science can bring the past and the present.
00:30:21
Speaker
And as always, stay curious.