I’m in a car with Jun Ebersol, a paleontologist based at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, and on a recent morning we made our way to South Alabama to look for fossils.
“It’s a really remarkable area down there from a fossil standpoint,” Ebersol said.
Alabama is known for its biodiversity. According to Ebersol, the state’s been biodiverse for millions of years, meaning Alabama’s fossils are diverse as well.
But this is not the paleontology of movies and television, with massive dinosaur bones. Instead, Ebersol uses smaller, less glamorous fossils to understand how a changing climate in the past might offer clues for life today.
In the field
On the day I joined the excursion, Ebersol said the goal was to find biostratigraphic samples or various dirt and rocks.
“When you have marine sediments, you can actually date them by the planktons that actually make up the soil,” Ebersol said. “So we're going to be digging in a really soft limestone where it's almost 99.9% made up of plankton skeletons.”
That mission took Ebersol’s team through roughly five miles of the woods, using pickaxes and shovels to collect dirt and rocks along the way.
It’s a lot of walking, followed by a lot of digging and a lot of finding nothing.
And when you do find a fossil, it doesn’t necessarily look like much to the untrained eye. Ebersol showed me what looks like a rock the size and shape of a communion wafer. He explained it was a lepidocyclina, a single celled organism from more than 30 million years ago.
Ebersol said he’ll use everything we collected to date various rock structures to their respective geological eras. That means if anyone comes across similar structures in the future, they’ll be easier to identify.
The tiny organisms in paleontology are important, Ebersol said, because, unlike a dinosaur fossil, they offer the clues he’s searching for.
“Dinosaurs, they died out 66 million years ago. And so there's nothing dinosaurs could tell us about the world today. They're a type of animal that is just now gone,” Ebersol said. “I'm more interested in using the fossil record to forecast the future.”
According to Ebersol, that is what the field of paleontology is all about – looking at how changing environmental conditions impacted animals millions of years ago and looking ahead to how changes could impact similar species today.
Finding clues in the lab
Ebersol has examined fish from more than 30 million years ago to understand how they reacted to dropping water temperatures when Alabama entered an ice age.
“It's basically telling us how these fish populations can adapt to sudden climate changes. Now, does that sound familiar? Like what is happening today?” Ebersol said. “Can we use this data to help forecast what's going to happen with a few degrees difference in water temperature?”
Another project consists of sorting through 30,000 pounds of dirt dating back around 15,000 years.
One of Ebersol’s student interns, Violet Morin, spearheads the project. It uses fossils of small, ancient mammals, like mice.
“We're really excited to, in the future, be able to sequence the genomes and see how those temperature changes affected them,” Morin said.
Another of Ebersol’s student interns, Madison Dorsey, is working on a project classifying a particular species of shark’s teeth through their lifespan. It means working with about a hundred shark jaws, many of them with flesh attached.
“I had to basically, very scientifically, put them in water and microwave them so that I could take all the flesh off,” Dorsey said.
The messy tasks will fill in gaps in existing records painting a more complete picture of how the species changed in response to its environment,
“Mother Nature has run these experiments before in the past, and so what can we learn about the past to tell us about what's happening now?” Ebersol said.
Ebersole says whether by collecting fossilized plankton, cleaning shark jaws or sifting through ice age dirt, a paleontologist's job is to dig through the past to figure out the future.
