879: Examining Early Mammals and the Evolution of Modern Mammalian Diversity - Dr. Greg Wilson Mantilla

0:00Hey listeners, this is Dr. Marie McNeely welcoming you to People Behind the Science. I am joined today by our wonderful guest, Dr. Greg Wilson-Montia. And listeners, if you want to learn more about our show, check out some of our past episodes, find our recommended book list and more. You can visit us at peoplebehindthescience.com. And today we have an excellent episode. So get ready to meet another one of our remarkable people behind the science. Every day discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us.

0:34Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

0:53Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am delighted to be speaking with our guest researcher, Dr. Greg Wilson-Montia. So, Greg, welcome to the show today. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining today. And I'm looking forward to learning more about you and the work that you do and your path to get to your current position. But before we get deep into the discussion, let me first take a moment to tell our listeners a little bit more about you and how you got to where you are today. So listeners, Greg is a professor in the Department of Biology,

1:27an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum, and director of the Digg Field School, all at the University of Washington. He is also a research associate at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Greg received his bachelor's degree in human biology from Stanford University and his PhD in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley. Afterwards, Greg received an NSF fellowship to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of Helsinki in Finland. And before moving to the University of Washington,

2:00he was the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And Greg was awarded the Raymond M. Alf Award for Excellence in Paleontological Research and Education from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. And he also received the University of Washington's Bergstrom Award for Art and Science with Ari Rudenko. And Greg, today we're excited to get to know more about you as a scientist, of course, but also get to know you as a person. So can you start by telling us what do you like to do when you're not doing science?

2:31I'd love to play soccer. And as I have gotten older, I've become more of a coach than a player. I have two kids, one who's now 15 and the other who's 13, who both play some soccer. And so I've coached both of them. I really enjoy doing that. I enjoy watching soccer. And I'm also a fan of a lot of different sports. And I also like to generally work out, read books, travel, and watch movies and television shows too. Fantastic. So what have you been watching lately?

3:02Well, we loved Ted Lasso. And we have also watched a number of other shows that relate to sports, like Stick, that's on HBO and on Apple TV. I love it. And you mentioned reading as well. We love talking about books on our show and getting recommendations for all of our listeners out there. So Greg, do you have a book that you've really enjoyed lately, or maybe one of your all-time favorites that you want to share with us and tell us a little bit about? A book that really was impactful for me was The Double Helix by Watson and the story of the

3:34discovery of the structure of DNA. And I really liked that book in large part because it told the story of how science is done from one perspective. And it also talked about interpersonal conflict and the ups and downs of science in a way that I thought was really resonating with me. And there was, of course, some controversies associated with that book that have real meaning to some of the struggles that we have in the scientific community. So I thought it was really impactful in

4:04that sense. Great recommendation. It gives a nice behind-the-scenes view, I think, of life in science. Yeah, it's a short read also. So it's easy for the listeners to jump right into it. Exactly. Excellent recommendation. We will add this to our website for our listeners to find there. And we've talked about life outside of science, but I'd love to talk about your research next. So how do you describe what you do, Greg, to someone who is outside of your field or outside of science altogether? I generally say that I study the evolution of mammals and in particular mammals

4:35that lived during the time of dinosaurs. So trying to understand how we go from this time when mammals were first originating and living alongside dinosaurs for many millions of years, and then that mass extinction event that wipes out all dinosaurs besides birds and leads to this amazing radiation and diversity of mammals that we see today. Very cool. And I think dinosaurs are just so iconic that many people don't even think about the fact that there were mammals at that time. Can you describe what some

5:06of them were like? Yeah, the sort of textbook image of mammals at this time are small, shrew-like creatures, very snouty, perhaps living sort of in the shadows on the ground, maybe feeding on insects. But what's really cool is in the last 20, 30 years, we started to really have a renaissance in the paleontology of these early mammals such that we're now getting these really spectacular specimens. No longer are we just getting small bits and pieces like small teeth and jaws, but we're

5:40getting more complete skeletons from famous beds like the beds in China that have produced the feathered dinosaurs. And with those more complete specimens, we're starting to see that mammals actually had a much greater diversity during the age of dinosaurs than we thought. They were doing a lot of different things. Some were diggers, some were gliding mammals, some were climbing in trees, and some were even feeding on small dinosaurs. But most of them, for the most part, were under the size of about five

6:11kilograms. So no larger really than a house cat, so to speak. That's awesome. And I think it must be really exciting to be uncovering the story of this prehistoric mammals. But I know there are challenges in science that often require you to stay motivated and be persistent. So do you have a favorite quote or a saying or something that really motivates and inspires you every day? There's so many. One that I remember hearing as a kid was from a friend of mine told me that where there's a will, there's a way. And I kept that in the back of my head throughout my childhood and into my young adult life and to the

6:46present, really. And it has a lot of different layers to it, I think, in terms of persistence and creativity as well and coming up with solutions to problems that you encounter. And it also gives you some feeling of hope that if you put the time in, if you're persistent, then you can make progress. I love that. And I think that quote has many applications, both within and outside of science in your general life as well. Yeah, exactly. Well, wonderful to hear about this motivating quote. And I think the people that you work with can be

7:18very motivating as well, particularly in science, where there's trainees, there's some of these mentors and colleagues that you work with as well. So do you have people that you've looked up to throughout the course of your career or people who have inspired you and helped you get to where you are today? I think I have quite a number of them and they come in different stages of my career. Certainly my PhD advisor, Bill Clemens, was a paleontologist who focused on mammals just like me and also focused on the mass extinction event that wipes out dinosaurs except birds. And he was just a really

7:52calming guide through the process of getting my PhD and really becoming a thoughtful scientist. He was someone who really deeply appreciated his subject. He thought deeply about it. He read deeply and widely. And the word cogitate is something that comes to mind when I think of him as someone who really chewed on ideas and was very careful and conservative about the way that he made statements and explored topics. So I've always tried to keep him in mind. I actually, I always give a gift to my students when

8:28they're completing their PhDs. And he had some impact on some of my PhD students. And one of them in particular, I decided that I was going to send away some images to this company to make a bobblehead of Bill Clemens. Oh, that's awesome. So I made two copies, one for her and then one for me. And I keep that bobblehead on my bookshelf in my office that I'm sitting in right now. So it really is something that's sort of looking over my shoulder and reminding me to really take my time with my work and with my studies and try to explore things

8:58deeply. I absolutely love that, Greg. You can ask him questions too, and he can sort of yes or no bobble at you, right? Yes. Well, it sounds like Bill was a tremendous influence on you during this relatively early stage of your career. But perhaps we could rewind back even further. Can you share with us what first got you interested in this area of paleontology or maybe in science more generally? To be honest, I would say I'm probably non-traditional in the sense you talk to many paleontologists today and they cite being young three and four-year-old kids who wanted to be

9:33paleontologists and played with dinosaurs and knew every dinosaur name, etc. I just wasn't like that. I remember being exposed very briefly. My dad had a collection of trilobites from Indiana that he kept glued on a board. And I remember that. My older brother was doing a project where my dad brought that out. But that was the briefest of exposures to paleontology. I went to the Field Museum as a young boy once. That was the first museum I went to. And I can remember being in the parking lot. And I then remember being in the building. But I don't remember much about the influence or impact

10:08that it had on me in terms of paleontology. I was really, as a kid, a very outdoors kid, played a lot in nature with animals. And I would collect things like butterflies and tree frogs and that sort of thing. And the other major thing in my life for most of my life up until probably 25 or 30 was dreaming about soccer, wanting to be a soccer player and pursuing that. And with that came the idea that I wanted to go to college and play soccer. And I wanted to get good grades so that I

10:40could get a scholarship somewhere and be able to play because soccer in the United States isn't as well supported for athletic scholarships. So I was quite studious and interested in sciences. But I wouldn't say that I was one of these kids that knew right away to go into science or in paleontology. Getting into college, I went to Stanford University. I played soccer there. And I also was sort of bouncing around a little bit, but was really kind of on a pre-med track and got into genetics. And I

11:12was very interested in genetics. It's now a very different field from what it was when I was studying in the early 90s. But I got into genetics and human origins. So a paleoanthropology course. And those two fields, human genetics and human origins, were just starting to merge a little bit. And scientists like Luca Cavalli-Sportza and Joanna Mountain were people at Stanford who were starting to look at the origins of humans or deep history through blood markers and genetics and

11:43proteins and things like that. And that really started to interest me a little bit in the deep past in a way that I'd never really thought about. And that was the earliest seed of paleontology for me. And at the same time, I mentioned my older brother, who's four years older than me. He was just getting into graduate school. And he is, in fact, a paleontologist today. And he was just getting into paleontology, dinosaur paleontology. And he was kind of telling me about it. And it sort of led me down this path of exploration, which I wasn't always convinced that this was the path that I was

12:17meant for, that I was going to go down. I had some uncertainties about it, all the way up to the point of getting into graduate school at Berkeley and not knowing whether I was actually going to go. Oh, no. Yeah. I ended up going, of course. And my first semester, I felt quite a bit like an imposter with a lot of people around me who were, as I described, these dinosaur paleontology fanatics from age three or four. And I just didn't feel like I quite fit in. So I had a pretty important

12:48conversation with my advisor at that time, with Bill Clemens. And it was the end of my first semester. And I went into his office fully intending to drop out, to quit. And I had this conversation where he was calmly smoking a pipe and listening to me talk about my uncertainties. And he waited and listened to my whole spiel. At the end of which, he said, I understand. And I want you to consider coming out to the field to do some field work with me this summer. And if you don't like it, then at the end of the summer, I will write you a recommendation to go on to do

13:23whatever you want, whether it's to be in science education or whatever. I was considering science education. And it was the most releasing of stress conversation that I could have possibly had at that moment. And it led me to go into the field with him into, this is the Hell Creek area of Northeastern Montana, which I go to every year since then, every summer. And it was this outdoor classroom, this opportunity to just really one-on-one have this experience where I was able

13:55to test hypotheses and collect data, think about things on the outcrop with my advisor and discuss big questions about how the earth changed, how our history goes from being a dinosaur-dominated setting to one that mammals can begin to flourish. And it was really captivating and exhilarating in a way that was very different from any experience that I'd had before that. And it really made me feel like this is something that I could do and be stimulated for a very long time for the rest of my

14:25life. And after that, I was highly motivated as a student and really self-driven and continued on through graduate school and postdoc in Finland and then a job opportunity at the Denver Museum that got me started as a curator there. And all along this path, I was in a relationship with another paleontologist who then was starting to go on the job market and found herself looking for jobs and found a job at the University of Washington, which I was lucky enough to also get a job here. And that's

14:58where I've been since the end of 2007. Phenomenal. Well, it sounds like Bill knew that the field experience would completely change your perspective. Yeah, I think he knew something. He had a lot of years of mentoring behind him at that point where he knew that each individual that you mentor, it's, I think, really important to try to understand what makes them tick. And I think he was trying to do that and trying to motivate me in a way that would tap into my own passions. Oh, absolutely. And you mentioned that your older brother is also in paleontology. Was there pressure for you,

15:31this feeling of expectation or following in your brother's footsteps? Not really. I think I'm going to go back to soccer again. We had both been soccer players growing up and he was three or four years older than me and always on that pathway of achieving, playing on such and such team and doing this well and that well. So I had always had this bit of a relationship where I was able to handle some of those pressures of having an older brother in one that's quite successful. So I was pretty used to

16:02it. I did, I think, subconsciously choose to work on mammals, the opposite end of the size spectrum from him. He worked on sauropod dinosaurs, the largest dinosaurs that have ever lived, largest industrial animals that have ever lived. So we were on the opposite sides of the size spectrum. So we did partition our niches, so to speak. And you mentioned that your first position after your postdoc was working as a curator there at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Can you talk a little bit about what this was like for you transitioning from an academic postdoc kind of position to this museum curator kind of position?

16:38It was a challenge. I was basically put into a position where I was mentoring. I had a team of volunteers from the museum. I was also teaching some adult classes, leading groups in the field. So I was quickly transitioning to being someone who had a lot of freedom as a graduate student and a postdoc. And I had a lot of time that I could expand into and do my work at the pace that I wanted and work the hours that I wanted to one that had a more fragmented daily schedule and one that

17:10had multiple draws from different parts of the museum, from exhibits to education to outreach and so on. So, yeah, I was learning to balance my time in a way that I hadn't before. And it was an amazing time and a great growth experience for me. Very cool. And going back to your postdoc experience, you mentioned you went to Helsinki. What was that experience like traveling to a new country and settling in there to do research? It was interesting. I got this postdoc. It was awarded to me pretty much immediately after I

17:42finished my PhD. And I finished in October. And so I was excited and eager to get started. And so I asked my postdoc advisor if I could start in December. I said I could fly December 17th or something like this. He said, that's the absolute worst time to come to Finland. I was going to say. It's quite dark. I did end up going then because I had gotten the job at the Denver Museum and I had a shortened postdoc. So I had to squeeze as much of it in as I could. So I went in in December and the campus

18:16that I worked on at the University of Helsinki was about 20 minutes outside of Helsinki itself as an area, the Biotechnology Institute that was built on farmland and very isolating place on top of it being very dark. And it actually was a winter without much snow. So the light you get from reflecting off the snow wasn't even there. So the sun would come up maybe just a peek over the horizon around 10 o'clock and then dip down back at around three. So there wasn't a lot of sunlight. I didn't know many people there. It was challenging. I stayed in an apartment building that was quite empty.

18:51And one woman came as a visiting scientist and moved in several doors down from me and she was supposed to stay for six months and left after two weeks. It was a little bit grim in terms of that environment, but I really enjoyed the people that I worked with. Yuka Yurnval was my postdoc advisor and he's just one of the most brilliant scientists that I know. And I really enjoyed the intellectual opportunities that he gave me and another postdoc that was there from Australia, Alistair Evans.

19:22We had a really fun group together. So we sort of bonded under that more austere environment. Well, this sounds like a very different cultural experience, we'll say, than perhaps what you are used to. Yes, exactly. Well, it sounds like you found a great fit there though at the University of Washington where you are now. So I'd love to chat a little bit more about your various different roles that you have there at the University of Washington and perhaps what you're working on at the moment. So is there a project that you are particularly excited about that you'd like to share with us?

19:52I'm working on something we're about to submit and I've been working on it for a very long time. And the truth is all of the work that's gone into this stretches all the way back to my advisor, really. I've been focused on this area in Northeastern Montana that I mentioned that I went as a graduate student. I've been focused on it since 1998 and it is this model system really for understanding the mass extinction event in a terrestrial setting. It's the best place in the world to look at the

20:22million or so years leading up to this asteroid impact and the millionaire years or so after this asteroid impact where there's this recovery and radiation of mammals. It's like our lab rat or a fruit fly that we have to be able to look at this major event that changed our fate. So since my advisor started working there in 1972, he systematically collected vertebrate fossils and collaborators collected plant fossils and invertebrate fossils and geological data. So there's been this

20:55mountain of data that's been building and I've since 1998 continued to contribute to that and really precise dating of the different rock layers such that we have very high resolution window into this turning point in our evolutionary history. So there have been various studies that have looked at the mass extinction event from the perspective of one group, one taxonomic group. I've done it for mammals, colleagues of mine have done it for turtles or lizards or dinosaurs or whatnot, independently

21:29looked at the changes. But the truth is that ecosystems, all these groups of animals are interconnected through ecosystems. And no one had really looked at the changes that were taking place in a holistic fashion to understand what caused this complete collapse of the ecosystem. Was it the volcanism that was going on in India? That's the second largest episode of flood basalt volcanism in Earth history that was happening in the 100,000 to 300,000, 500,000 years before the

22:02asteroid impact? Or was it simply just the asteroid impact? So what we started to do was to look at different intervals of time leading up to this mass extinction point and looking at the communities or the ecosystems and sort of assembling what that food web for each of those windows of time would have looked like. What animals ate what and what animals ate them and the various connections. So we built this huge food web diagram. If I could show you a picture, it would be individual organisms and lines

22:38going to them and away from them like a murder board that you'd see in some detective story. So we built this set of food webs and they're different in the different intervals leading up to this mass extinction event in the last 1 million years. Then working with food web modelers, Peter Rupin-Rines is a scientist from the California Academy of Sciences who we worked with and he's developed programs to simulate food webs and perturbations to those food webs. So what happens if you remove 10% of the primary productivity

23:12from a food web? What is the cascading impact on the herbivores to the carnivores, etc. that lead to extinction? So how much more extinction do you get with each different food web that you look at? So we simulated these three different time intervals leading up to the mass extinction event and we tested how well they resist extinction if you start to remove primary productivity. If you incrementally increase the amount that you remove from the system to see when that food web completely

23:46collapses. This was a way to simulate how robust these ecosystems were to the changes that were taking place, to the volcanism that was happening in India and then ultimately to this asteroid impact. And what we expected was that when you start getting this volcanism in India, you're going to start weakening or making more vulnerable those last ecosystems to that asteroid impact. So we thought it would almost be like a

24:16one-two punch. And this is something that I have often talked about in some of the papers that I've written about mammals. What we found was completely opposite. It turned out that this last interval, this last ecosystem, the one that had been impacted or affected by the volcanism and the climate change associated with the volcanism actually became more resistant to secondary extinction. It was more robust in a way that we didn't expect at all. And it was at least as robust as prior ecosystems. So it wasn't

24:51more vulnerable and it seems as though that the volcanism and the climate change associated with it may not have had as detrimental impact on these ecosystems leading up to the mass extinction event as I had thought. And it seems that the asteroid impact may have been the sole culprit of the mass extinction event at the KPG boundary, which is a change in the way that I had thought about things. This is fascinating. And I love these stories of these projects that go contrary to what you were

25:21expecting, but in a really almost more interesting way than you could have imagined originally. I go back to what I was mentioning before about my advisor and really having to dig deep into the results of the analysis and go beyond just the simple first pass at the results and really think about what it means and whether we got it right or whether there were some biases that we had incorporated into the study that we really need to take more closely about or whether we need to go back and collect more data or do secondary analyses. And yeah, it really tests you, I think, as a scientist.

25:53Definitely. And I can imagine there's some challenges with trying to build this picture, the systems level picture of putting all of these different puzzle pieces together for events that happened millions of years ago. I think it's not easy. And there's just so many challenges in science, and oftentimes they all coagulate at one time where it feels like everything's going wrong. So do you have an example of one of these difficult periods in your career, even just a major challenge or a major failure that you struggled with that you could tell us about today and maybe talk us through

26:25how you got through a tough time? I don't know if I have a single episode or a story that really fits that description. I do think that almost every project that I've had, and I think many scientists might feel the same way, has had its twists and turns and challenges. And I think they oftentimes come down to challenges, those interpersonal dynamics, difficulties working with someone or managing a large group or getting

26:55a large group to get on the same page or have the same level of motivation that you do or being at odds with someone in the way that they interpret things or the way that they do things. There's that interpersonal side. And then there's the logistical side that I encounter a lot. The fieldwork that we do is really the lifeblood of paleontology. It's where new insights come from. We have many museums with expansive collections of fossils that we can continue to study. And I will continue to do that,

27:26but really going out to new places and looking at new rocks and finding fossils, et cetera, is really where we will have our biggest breakthroughs. And that is a big challenge. Just the logistics of fieldwork is a big challenge, whether it's getting governmental permissions to work in a foreign country or in our own country, working with the locals in those areas that we do fieldwork, getting to know them and understand them and not feel as though we're just coming in and taking fossils away from them or taking

28:00their resources away, but actually making it a mutually beneficial experience. Navigating those issues are challenging and there's never one solution that once you figure it out works every time. It seems that every different instance is a new scenario that requires careful thought and careful planning and teamwork to navigate. And sometimes you end up failing. In the process of this conversation, I did think about several cases of failing where we had put a lot of funding into fieldwork

28:35and places like Ethiopia or India. These places requires a lot of travel and a lot of conversations with officials and so on to get permissions and collaborations with local institutions. And then you have to go find fossils in a place where maybe fossils hadn't been found before. In some of these examples, we have found fantastic fossils and started to excavate them. And at the last moment, locals or government officials or something have come in and stopped us and said, no, you can't collect that. You're going to have to leave that in the ground or you're going to have

29:07to come back next year and talk with this official or that official. And it is very frustrating. It's like I can imagine in soccer scoring a goal and then getting the goal called back. It's just overturning a great success. And I think in my younger days, I didn't have the patience to be able to calmly handle those sorts of situations. As I've gotten older, I've gotten a little bit more calm and patient. But still, it's frustrating when things don't work out, even though you feel like you have almost all of the steps down perfectly to success. So that's a tough thing that I've

29:40encountered and many paleontologists that I know I've encountered multiple times. Well, Greg, I'm really glad you mentioned this example, because I think you're absolutely right. Sometimes things are just beyond your control, right? You've done everything you can. You've prepared in every way you can. You've tried to check all the boxes, cross all your T's, dot all your I's. But sometimes these things just pop up and there's nothing you can do. But be patient, be persistent or even just have multiple projects going on at one time so you can sort of pivot to do something different. For sure. And sometimes you have to walk away and realize that you're not

30:11going to win them all. You can try to do everything you can in your means. And sometimes it still doesn't completely work out. But you should walk away having learned something. And certainly in those cases, I have learned things that have benefited me later down the road. Very good. Well, I appreciate you sharing some of the difficulties and the challenges that you face in science. I think it's so important to talk about those, but it's so important to highlight the successes as well, because oftentimes you put so much time and effort and energy into these projects that when it finally comes to fruition, you definitely need to take a moment to celebrate.

30:43So do you have a favorite success story that you'd like to share with us, whether it was a big win or even just a small one recently? I just had a paper that came out with some co-authors and it was a paper describing a new mammal fossil from Baja California and Mexico. And this fossil is about a 75 million year old mammal. And it's one of the most complete mammals known from this time period in North America. We discovered this back in 2009, so a long time ago. And I started the project in Baja California

31:19because it was one of those areas that there had been little hints that it could produce something interesting. And I learned about it when I was a graduate student. And I wrote a grant when I was a graduate student and started the project just after I finished my PhD and before I went to Finland, actually. So it was a long project in the making to finally come to fruition in this publication that has came out in 2026. And it was one of those projects that I talked about some challenges and some turmoil and interpersonal dynamics. And the colleague friend of mine who actually found the

31:55fossil also passed away unexpectedly at a young age. And he was someone who meant a lot to me. So it was kind of a project that I had some difficulty finishing it, frankly, because of these other aspects, the interpersonal dynamics. I had some difficulties with collaborators and the difficulty of the fact that it was so closely tied to a friend of mine who had passed away that I sat on this project for a long time and never completed the study, the manuscript on it. And so finally, last year on sabbatical, I sat down and just decided that this was something that I was going to focus on, that I was just

32:30going to get it done. So I managed that and I submitted this paper last year and it finally got published and has had some wonderful responses from people and brought me into contact, for example, with my friend who passed away. His relatives have reached out to me. We're quite grateful because we named the species Simolodon glissosi and his last name was glissosa. So they were very grateful to have him commemorated in this way. So that was a success that really felt great for very personal reasons.

33:04So I've been very happy to celebrate it and see that it's coming out and getting good reception. Absolutely. Well, congratulations to you and the team that worked on this, of course, on the success here. And my apologies for your loss. I know it's so difficult when you lose something that you've worked closely with or care about deeply and you have to pick up the pieces and move it on for them. And I think it sounds like you've done this in a beautiful way. And I love that you were able to name this species after him. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. And I think this species is particularly cool as well. We mentioned it's a small kind of

33:36prehistoric mammal, but it likely helped mammals survive mass extinction. I think that's an interesting part of the story. Can you tell us a little bit more detail about this? This mammal is part of a lineage that is, perhaps in terms of longevity, the longest lived lineage of mammals. It arose in the middle of the Jurassic and extended up until about 35 million years ago. So it lived during the time of dinosaurs and uniquely among mammals was very successful. During the time of dinosaurs, it had sort of figured out how to be successful while dinosaurs were in

34:13their heyday. And it was sort of a rodent before rodents even evolved. It's not closely related to rodents, but very similar in some features. And in particular, their teeth and the way that they chew allowed them to exploit plant foods. So they started to feed on things like fruits. And eventually, some of the members of this lineage specialized on eating a purely a riverous diet that probably included leaves and seeds and so on. So this mammal group also explored different parts of

34:47the environment. So some of them were probably just ground dwelling. Others had adaptations in their skeleton that tell us that they probably were climbing trees. And then others suggest that they were diggers. So they were really exploring the evolutionary and ecological space, so to speak, well before the group that you and I belong to ever really radiated into that space. And so this lineage goes on to survive the mass extinction and does fairly well in the early parts of the post-extinction,

35:22but eventually gets out-competed by the groups that come along that include primates and rodents that just seem to have done it a little bit better than these multi-tuberculates did it. But really a major success story of mammal evolution. And they did it during the time when dinosaurs were really at the height of their expansion. Well, this is fascinating, Greg. It sounds like a really cool project. And I think throughout our conversation, we've touched on some of the opportunities that you've had to travel not

35:53only around the US, but around the world for the research that you do. And I think this is definitely a perk of careers in science, right? You get to do quite a bit of travel. So do you have a favorite place that you can point to that your science has taken you? You're absolutely right. I've been super lucky and I think I've arranged for it this way to travel a lot. And I've been to a variety of places. And when I go to those places, I'm able to get off the tourist path, so to speak, and be a little bit more embedded in the culture and the smaller off

36:26the beaten path villages and so on, and spend a little more extensive time in those places and work with people from these countries and from these parts of the world and see different perspectives and learn new things and appreciate different ways of thinking about things and doing things. And to pick a favorite is so hard, but I guess I would say for personal growth reasons, the first place that I went on one of these expeditions was Niger. And this was just before

36:56I started graduate school. I took a semester, my first semester, I actually didn't enter graduate school until the second semester. That first semester, I went with Paul Serino, who was my brother's PhD advisor, who is at the University of Chicago. And I accompanied him on a expedition to Niger. And the work was in the Sahara Desert. And it's crazy to think about it. Now, it was a four month expedition. I never could do that much time away from first my family, but second, just all of the

37:30things that come with being employed. I couldn't manage that. And so it was out of time for me. I was, I think, about 24. And I was reading a lot of interesting travel books, like on the road, Kerouac and things like that, that were kind of helping me to push my boundaries. And I was scientifically inspired by the idea of looking for these lost kingdoms of dinosaurs that had never been touched by scientists in the Sahara Desert and finding these great troves of fossils. But also,

38:04we were in the middle of the Sahara Desert and we were surviving on our own. We had some Tuareg guides with us, but we were setting up our own camps, bringing in our own water without forklifts or heavy cranes or backhoes or anything, pulling one ton fossils out of the ground and putting in the back of trucks and driving them six hours out of the desert back to the nearest town of Agadez and dealing with all sorts of different adventures that were really invigorating. And I can remember different music

38:37from that trip. And it always brings me back to that. I can remember different smells, different stories and jokes and so on that are very much emblazoned in my memory and really set me off on a course of field work for many of my projects. So, it's really a trip that had a large impact on me. Well, that sounds absolutely amazing. And what a way to start. I think that's a tough act to follow, right? Yes, it was. I didn't realize quite what normal field work would take after.

39:08All the comforts and luxuries, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, it sounds like this has been a phenomenal experience for you. And I love to hear that you've been able to go to all of these different places for the work that you do. I think it's a wonderful aspect of science. And I think you're answering some big questions about just sort of the history of life on Earth so many millions of years ago. And I know there are a lot of challenges that go along with it. We've touched on some of them today, but even just funding, staff, technology, and just the feasibility of the kinds of experiments you would like to do make it impossible. But if we took away

39:41the barriers and you could do absolutely anything, what is the one research question that you would want to answer most? I think the things that I'm so interested in have two major components to them. One is this mass extinction event. And we are really pushing the limits of understanding how much the fossil record can tell us and how much detail we can get out of the fossil record. We're literally, pardon the pun, pulling blood from a stone. It's that difficult to get more out of the fossil record to really

40:14understand at ecologically relevant scales what's happening on this terrible sequence of events that happened over the course of a day and then the thousands of years after it and what transpired. There's that aspect that I'm really interested in. So that's why I've dedicated decades of my career and field time to northeastern Montana, this one place where I think we can really drill down and get as much detail as possible. And the other major question that I'm really interested in is during

40:44the age of dinosaurs, the continents were not in the form that we know of them today. I think many of us have heard of Pangea and this conglomeration of all of the land masses together as one super continent. And as that broke apart, it broke apart in a certain pattern over the course of the Mesozoic that separated the southern continents and add India into that southern continent mix from the northern continents. So what we know really well about the age of dinosaurs is largely from the

41:15northern continents. And that is a perhaps biased viewpoint. These are two different theaters of evolution. The northern land mass and the southern land mass are two different theaters of evolution. And we really don't have much of a clue about what's happened on the southern theater of evolution. So places like Niger that I went to and places like Colombia and Bolivia and Peru, which I'll be going to soon. These are places that I've been really interested in getting to know the fossil record and

41:47building the fossil record so that we can have a more complete, comprehensive view of how all terrestrial vertebrates were evolving. But really, from my perspective, what I'm most interested in is the story of mammal evolution, which is our story and how it was proceeding during the age of dinosaurs. And really, the veil has been thrown over the southern land masses such that we don't have a very good idea. But the couple of hints that we've gotten from people who have found fossils in

42:17these southern land masses tells us that there's something very different that's happening and that could really break open the story in a new way that leaves me very excited about pursuing fieldwork there. Oh, wonderful. Well, Greg, these are fantastic questions. And I love this idea of geographically completing the picture of the story of mammal evolution. So wonderful questions you've given me and our listeners a lot to think about today. And I'd love to wrap up our conversation by talking about advice. So for our listeners out there who might be at a crossroads,

42:49do you have a piece of advice that somebody gave you at some point that really helped you that may help them as well? I don't know if I have a particular adage or piece of advice, except that I think it's important to really stop and think about what you really like to do and what makes you happy and find ways to pursue it. And there are many different avenues to get there. People sometimes think of paleontology and they think of curator or professor, but there are all kinds of different

43:22ways to be involved in paleontology or whatever it is that gets you excited. And I think continuing to pursue it, if it's really something that you're passionate about, finding ways to be involved at whatever level you can be involved and follow that passion. If a passionate person comes up to me and wants to be involved in the work that I'm doing, I'm always excited to incorporate them and find ways of helping them get where they want to be if they're truly passionate about it. And I'll also pair that passion with the hard work that goes into learning about it and exploring the subject.

43:57Well, I love that message, Greg. And I think it is so important to let people know that they can engage in science or other areas, even if it's not their main nine to five job every day. So I think that's a wonderful note for us to end on. If our listeners are curious and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do, Greg, what is the best way for them to get more information? Yeah, I have a lab webpage. You could probably Google that and look up Greg Wilson Montilla. And I'm at the University of Washington and the Burke Museum and you'd be able to find me there.

44:28Excellent. Well, listeners, definitely take a moment to check out Greg's website. And Greg, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you today. Thank you so much for sharing a piece of your story. Thank you very much as well. Well, it's been wonderful to have you with us, listeners. Always good to have you here as well. We hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of People Behind the Science.

44:54We'll see you next time. Bye! Hello! Bye!