- Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Crossroads of Ideas: Can You Dig It? I'm Will Cushman, a science writer for University Communications within the UW-Madison Office of Strategic Communication. Today's event marks 2024's second installment of the Crossroads of Ideas program series. Crossroads of Ideas is a collaboration between the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery's Illuminating Discovery Hub, UW-Madison, and the Morgridge Institute for Research.

Before I say more about this evening's event, we will take a moment to acknowledge the land that we occupy here at the Discovery Building. The University of Wisconsin-Madison occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Teejop since time immemorial. In an 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory. Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal and state governments tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin. This history of colonization informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation. Today, UW-Madison and all of its presenting organizations respect the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation and the 11 other First Nations of Wisconsin.

Tonight, we are very excited to host Kallie Moore, who is this spring's Sharon Dunwoody Science Journalist in Residence. The UW-Madison Science Journalist in Residence program was founded in 1986 and is hosted by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Office of Strategic Communication. We're grateful to all the partners who made tonight's program possible.

Speaking of tonight's program, since 2017, Kallie has been a co-host and content consultant for the PBS Digital Studios channel Eons. The paleontology-focused channel features deeply researched, short episodes that investigate scientific questions about life on Earth. From the dawn of living organisms through the age of dinosaurs, all the way to the end of the most recent Ice Age. Eons currently has nearly 3 million subscribers on YouTube.

In her role at Eons, Kallie has explored so many fascinating questions. Questions like, why did giraffes' necks become so long? How did bats gain the ability to fly? And when did humans stop being naked and start wearing clothes? In addition to sharing evolutionary tales on Eons, Kallie serves as collections manager or fossil librarian of the paleontology collection of the University of Montana.

Her debut children's book, Tales of the Prehistoric World, was released in the fall of 2022. As a tiny bit of an Eons super-fan myself, I am personally thrilled to have Kallie on campus this week to share her expertise, both with students in the journalism school and with everyone gathered here tonight. 

Spending time with her this week, I've been able to witness how Kallie's energy and enthusiasm for fossils, paleontology, and science in general draws people in. It's no wonder that she's built a successful career connecting people to science through the art of storytelling. This evening, Kallie will be offering a behind-the-scenes look at the production of Eons and describing her winning approach to science communication. Please join me in welcoming Kallie Moore.

[audience applauding]

- Okay, so I host Eons, yeah. How many of you, just show of hands, know Eons? Oh, yeah, keep your hands raised. How many of you have watched an actual full episode and haven't just heard of it? Nice; how many of you have watched at least five episodes? Yeah! Okay, good. All right, so most of you are familiar with Eons. I love it. For those of you that are not familiar with Eons, you're gonna get a very in-depth look for it tonight. 

So this is how the talk is gonna go. I'm gonna start with what is science communication, just a brief description. Then we're gonna go into my, kind of, personal science communication journey and experience very briefly. And then we'll get into the behind-the-scenes look of Eons. I'm gonna give you some tips for creating effective science communication, and then we're gonna get into some tricky topics and how to navigate them.

So let's get started with science communication, AKA SciComm. And for any students out there that are looking to get into science communication, I highly encourage you to check out this little workbook by Eva Amsen. It's, like, less than $10, and it's, like, a workbook to help you translate your science into science communication. But she has a really great definition of what SciComm is. And it's basically any form of communication about science, scientists, and scientific research to an audience of people outside that field of science, excluding academic communication to other scientists. 

So when I go into a classroom and talk about dinosaurs, that's science communication. When I talk about dinosaurs to invertebrate paleontologists, that is not science communication. So I'm still talking to paleontologists about paleontology. So there is a line to be drawn on what counts as science communication and what is just me communicating science to other professionals.

So how do you SciComm? There's basically three different ways. You can talk about it. That's my preferred method. You can write about it, and you can actually create about it. And I don't think a lot of people think about the creating side of science communication. So talking is doing videos, social media, podcasts, demonstrations, demos, tours, those sorts of things. Writing, blog, PopSci. You can write a book. Also, social media has a lot of writing into it, and consulting.

Creating, though, is kind of fun, and I like to think about this because art is very important in paleontology. Paleo art, that helps people recognize the ancient past and see the animals of what they might have looked like, based on our best scientific hypotheses. So this is a shark called Helicoprion, and it was made by Staab Studios based on artwork from paleo artist Ray Troll. And it's a very cool. . . It's called the buzzsaw shark 'cause its lower jaw and the teeth kind of look like a buzzsaw, right?

You can also perform science communication. So this picture here is from a body theater, prehistoric body theater where they're actually acting out, with their bodies, the end of the Cretaceous, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and then the rebirth of life after. Then there's also music. So Ray Troll, again, this paleo artist, he has a band, the Ratfish Wranglers, and they got together with another guy, Russell Wodehouse, and they created an album of fossil music. It is the most adorable thing ever. So many different types of music on this album, including a song where they teach you the geologic timescale. So if any of you are having trouble remembering the geologic timescale, I highly encourage downloading this album. So these are kind of the ways that you can do science communication.

So how did I end up here today as a science communicator? Well, it all started in college. I was a big nerd, and I was the assistant curator of our campus museum. I was the president of the Earth Science Club, and we did a lot. 
We were a very active club when I was president. I was a field assistant for the St. Louis Science Museum, taking the general public out to eastern Montana to collect dinosaur bones and learn about the ancient past there, as well as a summer intern at Ashfall Fossil Beds where I answered questions to the general public, I gave geology tours, and that sort of thing.

In 2008, I was hired as the collections manager of the University of Montana Paleontology Center, which I'll touch on in just a second. In 2016, I started consulting. I worked for Disney in Animal Kingdom Park to help renovate their dinosaur ride. My name's on a plaque. If you go, take a picture of it, tag me on Instagram, love seeing it. And I also worked on a couple of TV pitches. They didn't get picked up, but I thought my part of the pitches were really great, so maybe someday. 

In 2017, Eons was launched, and we will definitely go into that in a lot more detail. And then 2022, my book came out, my children's book, Tales of the Prehistoric World. And most recently, I became an executive producer on Why Dinosaurs?, a documentary about the dinosaurs and the people that love them. And this, we are in the distribution phase. We're trying to find a distributor for this amazing documentary. So hopefully, you all will be able to see it in person at some point soon. You might be able to catch a screening somewhere at a paleontological museum, either here in the US or in the UK if you happen to find yourself there this summer.

So here is my building. [sighs] This is a scene from Why Dinosaurs?, and I find this building to be very ugly. Some people like it; I do not. But it looks very magical with this picture, the drone image with it all being snowy and stuff. But this is where I spend most of my time, is down in a basement collection. This is our space saver, and all those cases that you can see house our massive collection. It's a pretty good-size collection. The collection spans over 2 billion years, and over 20 different countries are represented. It is slow, but it doesn't need to be fast, holding our priceless collection of fossils. As my colleague, physics colleague in the same basement always says, "How's your priceless collection doing today?" But anyways, these two stacks move back and forth, and this is where I spend most of my time, windowless basement.

But the other part of my job is outreach. I do a lot of outreach, including fossil IDs, lots of fossil IDs. Or actually, should I say, soul-crushing descriptions of what is not a fossil that you have. Very rarely do they actually bring in fossils. If I had a dollar for every dinosaur egg that I said, "No, it is a rock," I wouldn't have to do much work anymore. This little kid here, though, had fossils, so I'm identifying all of his fossils for him. But I do a lot of fossil identifications either in person or through email.

The other thing I do is a lot of guided tours. We don't have a natural history museum or a paleo museum on campus, but we do have a small atrium in the first floor of our building that does have some display cases, including a T-Rex skull that you can kind of see over there on the right. And so I do a lot of K through 12 tours, including the general public, groups from campus, visitors through the summer that are just passing through Missoula. They come by, and we talk about the evolution of life for about an hour.

My preferred form of science communication is public lectures. I literally can talk about anything if it's related to paleontology. And this is from a public lecture that I just gave at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, for their Valentine's Day event, and it was called "Fornicating Fossils." So let your mind run with imagination on what that talk included. I also do a lot of, like, fossil show-and-tells, and I go into the classrooms, and I consider this, again, public lectures.

This one here, I was invited to a local elementary school book fair where they were selling my book, and I have a set of fossil casts that go with some of the stories from my book. So I sat down, we read the story, and then we went through the fossils that went with the story, and it was a really fun time. I love this elementary school. They always invite me for their book fair.

So now let's get into Eons. So we have the best URL, I think, youtube.com/eons. It's so easy, short, sweet. And basically, join hosts Kallie Moore, Michelle Barboza-Ramirez, and Blake de Pastino as they take you on a journey through the history of life on Earth. From the dawn of life in the Archaean Eon through the Mesozoic Era, the so-called Age of Dinosaurs, right up to the end of the most Ice Age. I see where you got your intro from. [laughs] But you can find us anywhere you can get YouTube.

Now, YouTube is kind of a partnership between PBS Digital Studios and Complexly. Complexly is a production company based out of Missoula, Montana, started by Hank and John Green. This is the production company that has brought you classics like SciShow and Crash Course, and Bizarre Beasts. We launched in 2017, and we actually are the only Complexly show that has launched at VidCon. VidCon is like a YouTube convention, basically. I think it's morphed more into, like, social media-a-con. But in the old days, back in 2017, it was mostly YouTube. So we launched at the Anaheim Convention Center in front of almost 7,000 people. It was a lot. And then the following week, we officially launched on YouTube.

As of the end of February, we have made 234 episodes. We have 2.89 million subscribers. We have 650 million lifetime views, which equals to about 47.1 million hours watched. So a lot of people have spent a lot of time with our channel, which is great. So when we look at YouTube specifically, 'cause we make content for a lot of different platforms. In 2023, we had about 163 million views, 6.8 million hours watched, and we netted about 400,000 subscribers.

And if we break that down between Eons Prime, that's our long-form content, that's what we've refer to it as, and YouTube Shorts, which is short-form content, we had 27 uploads on long-form, 71.5 million views, and we netted 241,000 subscribers from the YouTube side. From Shorts, we uploaded 77 YouTube Shorts, and they had 92.3 million views. So we actually had more views on our Shorts than we did for our long-form content, which is kind of interesting, and it netted us about 114,000 subscribers. And this is fairly average, year on year. 

So last year looked very similar to this year's numbers, so we're staying pretty consistent. We also posted 72 TikToks. And here's our TikTok numbers too, in case you were wondering. We have over 365,000 followers and over 7 million likes on TikTok. We added a new host, Gabriel Santos, who is in the upper right-hand corner over there. And he will start releasing episodes with us with season seven, which will start probably in the summer. And then our best-performing video of last year was "The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart," and it already has 17 million views. People were really stoked to learn about the Wallace line, so if you don't know what it is, check out the episode.

Now, this is not a YouTube channel that's made in somebody's basement. It is made in a basement, but the basement of an old funeral home. So I feel like we've come full circle. We're talking about really, really dead, ancient life in a building that used to hold modern, dead humans. So it's real fun, and it's in the basement. So the basement has been converted into studio spaces. We have five studios and one podcast studio. But this is the team, especially all the names over here are the team that makes Eons happen. So I'm not just hanging out with a friend with an iPhone and a little box light. This is a well-funded, well-staffed operation.

So this is how an episode gets made. The topic is either pitched by us. We'll find a writer that we like, somebody that works on geology, for example, we have a geology writer, and we will be like, "Hey, we got this idea. Can you pitch it to us?" And so the pitch will consist about 250 words, kind of give an overview, kinda like the elevator pitch of the episode, as well as a list of sources. Writers can also pitch us as well. Some of our long-term writers will pitch us ideas when they strike. A script can take anywhere from two to three weeks to develop, and our content team works very closely with most of the writers to develop these scripts because Eons is a storytelling channel. 

We don't do explainer videos. We don't do listicles; we don't do things like that. We tell stories, and so we wanna make sure that these scripts have the Eons vibe throughout them. Our scripts are about 1,600 to 1,800 words, and that translates to about seven to ten minutes on a YouTube video. From there, the script is done, a table read. So we actually have the host either through Zoom or come into the office and read through it to make sure the script is readable. Scripts are very different when you're just reading on paper versus reading it out loud. So we make sure that there's not, like, five commas in a sentence or something like that.

Then it comes to me for fact-checking. So I fact-check everything that Eons writes. So that's including YouTube scripts, Shorts, TikToks, actually, Shorts and TikToks are the same thing, and our podcast, so I check all of those. And that can take me up to, like, two days, depending on how much time I have available. But the basics of these scripts are one to two ideas per script, you don't wanna overload people, and you wanna be counterintuitive. Obvious answers to questions make for boring scripts. We don't want that; we want a twist, right?

So a really good example of this is actually just last week. I had a friend contact me and say, "Hey, I read in a magazine that elk evolved from tusked ancestors." And I was like, "That sounds ridiculous. That can't be right." And I mean, it's oversimplified, but it is basically right. So I looked into it. And when you first have the oldest artiodactyl, so artiodactyls are a group of mammals that have even-toed hooves. So pigs, camels, deers, those types of things. The oldest member of that group that we have evidence for has well-developed canines. Not tusks, but canines.

Through some climate change, we get a very hot, humid forest environment, and at least the deer family takes off, and we do start to see tusks develop. And they're about musk deer-sized in their tusk and their overall size. Most of them don't have any headgear yet, just these tusks. They were probably more isolated, and they used the tusks to fight to the death. More climate change happens, and things dry out. The forests disappear and grasslands take over.

And as this happens, we see, at the same time, tusks are starting to disappear. The deer family is becoming more social. They're living in herds and headgear starts to evolve. So instead of fights to the death, they have standoffs. "Ooh, your rack is bigger than mine. Never mind, you win." 'Cause you don't wanna kill your neighbor. Survival is best in groups at this point in time.

And so I was blown away. I had no idea, and there happened to be two relatively new papers that had come out looking in this transition over time. And so I emailed our content team. I was like, "Hey, this is shocking, and I can just see all the fun titles that we could come up with for this." And so that's what I mean by being counterintuitive. Who would've thought that deer used to have big canines and fight to the death, right?

And then also be totally devoted to accuracy. Anything you put on the internet that's wrong, you will be called out within seconds. I don't care if your mistake happened over three minutes into the video. Somehow, somebody will find it within the first five seconds and tell you. So it's very important that whatever you put out there, especially for science communication, is accurate. And that's where I come in, to fact-check.

Now, for production, we film in our studio in Missoula, Montana, so in the basement of the funeral home. And it takes about an hour-ish, depending on how comfortable you are. So when I first started out, it definitely took me more than an hour to make a ten-minute video. It was kind of tragic how long it took. We get it down to about, like, less than 45 minutes now. We can cruise through it pretty fast. 

But this is what our studio looks like. We shoot on a green screen; it's real boring. A lot of our fans want to always see our studio. And we're like, "Here it is; yep, that's it. It's a green screen." We have a lot of really expensive equipment in there, but we don't have a set. From there, all that raw footage is sent to our post-production team, and that's who cuts the episode, takes out all of my mistake lines, pulls out the good bloopers, and the images are added. And this can take about seven days-ish. It depends on how quickly we can get images. Sometimes that's the biggest holdup, is getting the images. 

From there, a finished, cut episode goes to our sound editor, and she puts in any fun little sounds, like birds chirping when we show a forest scene, and also puts in the music. The final draft is sent to the team, and I also fact-check the graphics. And the reason why I do that is because of our most watched episode ever has one of the most embarrassing mistakes in our channel's history. And that is our megalodon episode, and it has been seen by 26 million people. So fun fact, be sure to triple-check what your stock image titles are to make sure that they're actually what they say they are.

So in this scene, we're talking about the blue whale, the biggest thing that has ever evolved on our planet. And we show a picture of a blue-colored humpback whale. And there were probably nine sets of eyes on this video, and nobody caught it. But you know who did catch it? Our viewers, immediately. And so in these days, you could get very harshly penalized from the YouTube algorithm if you uploaded something and then pulled it down really quickly and then uploaded it again. It's not that way anymore, but we could not risk our views to pull it down. So we just pinned a comment, and then lo and behold, so many people saw it. So anyways, that's what I mean by triple-check everything, including your images.

So here's what our audience kind of looks like. And this is from the 2022 PBS annual survey, so if any of you actually answer these surveys, we use this data, I promise you. So the data that you're seeing right here is anybody that said on that PBS survey that they watch Eons often or all the time. So these are our core audience members. And you can see, 25 to 34 is kind of our sweet spot, but really we range anywhere from 18 to 44 for the channel. Our split on gender is 60% men and 40% everybody else.

And while that sounds, 60/40, kind of like a uneven split, for a science channel, that's really good. So if you get into physics channels and things like that, their splits can be closer to 80/20 or even 90/10. So having a 60/40 split is actually pretty good. And then based on race, we definitely are overwhelmingly white. If anybody has any ideas about how to get a diverse audience, that's, like, the million-dollar question for YouTube, so patent that.

Where are they? Well, it makes sense that almost 60% of our audience is in the United States. We make it here, we produce it here; that kind of tracks. And also, the top states are some of the states with the largest populations, so this is no surprise. Outside of the US, our top countries are Canada, the UK, oddly, Germany, and then Australia, which every one of those makes sense, except for Germany, because they're English-speaking countries. Some of our episodes have been translated. YouTube does have a translate feature now. But overwhelmingly, our audience is mostly from English-speaking countries.

This was actually kind of a shock for us when we first released Eons. We thought that since we were gonna be talking about dinosaurs and fossils, that our audience would skew at least high school or younger. That was made very apparent wrong within the first few episodes. Our commenters were saying things like, "Why are you talking down to us? "We're not kindergartners. Like, pick it up, pick it up." And so this survey that I did in 2019, it was very, very informal. I just put out a link and was like, "Hey, we wanna know about you, tell me." And they did. Over 10,000 people answered my survey, which was way too many people, but I got a lot of good data out of it. 

And so as you can see, over 27% already have their bachelor's degree. And 20%, almost 24% are currently in college. 15% have a master's degree, and 15% are in high school or have a high school diploma. So we actually have a fairly educated audience, so we kick it up a notch. Our channel is very high-level science, but we always define jargon whenever we use it.

So let's get into some tips for creating successful science communication. So science communication in the biz is known as edutainment, educating entertainment. So you want to keep people's attention. Usually, I would be pacing back and forth on this stage, but I must stay with the microphone tonight. And so we wanna be engaging, we wanna be entertaining, but we also wanna be educating. So science communication in our world is edutainment. And for us, that means storytelling.

So again, Eons episodes have this very strong narrative. We wanna take you on a journey through time, through discovery, through evolutionary history. So we're not just throwing facts at you and seeing what sticks in your brain. We wanna give you a narrative and a story. So some things that make good science communication topics, and this is gonna be mostly based in geology and paleontology, but a lot of these will work for really any of the sciences. Creature features, so talking about a cool animal. Casual geology, so I just found out that your Capitol has a fossil tour for their building stones, and I'm gonna do it tomorrow, and I'm very excited. Collection and museum features, so if you have access to a museum, maybe talk about an exhibit. 

Q&As and replies are wonderful. People love to engage with your channel, so if you have a Q&A, make sure you reply to those questions. You can do news, debunking, so misinformation, listicles, "Top Three Mammoth Deaths." Yes, that is a TikTok. Tales of discovery, behind the scenes, so looking at a prep lab or a regular lab space. I got to go visit the sharks. Oops, I shouldn't have said that.

Behind the scenes, I said that, and then how-to guides, and personal experiences in science. So obviously, even if you've had negative experience in sciences and have had toxic office mates or something like that, people still like to hear about it and to know how you overcame. But the most important thing is to have a really good opening line and intro. And that's because a view on most platforms is three seconds. And while that sounds really fast, it's not. If any of you are TikTok viewers, think about how fast you scroll past a video that just remotely doesn't look interesting to you. A half a second, a quarter of a second maybe. So three seconds is a lifetime, at least on TikTok. 

So having something that keeps people on your channel or on your content at least three seconds, you'll get that view. But that all comes from the opening line and the intro. So here are some helpful tips. Keep it light, keep it casual, have fun, be humorous. I know from personal experience, when I go to conferences and I listen to other people talk, if they're using memes, if they're making people laugh, that means that people are engaged, and they're gonna keep listening, and they're gonna keep walking around. That's why I usually walk around up and down the stage to keep your eyes doing something so you're not just staring at a screen the entire time.

You can collaborate with other SciCommers, but you need to be very strategic. So if you've just launched your channel about fossils, don't come to Eons for a collaboration because the collaborations need to benefit both channels. Obviously, you, ooh, excuse me, you would benefit from working with Eons, but if you have no audience, how does Eons benefit from this collaboration? Eons very rarely collaborates at all. We usually only collaborate within the PBS DS family or within the Complexly family, and it takes a lot of work. So it's gotta be a real good collaboration.

So what I suggest is that you find other science communicators that are at your level, that have a similar amount of following, and that is in the sciences, but different. So if you do geology paleo stuff, maybe find a modern biologist. So you know that your two audiences are already interested in science, in natural histories, but they might not have found you yet. And then collaborate on some cool episode about modern sharks compared to their ancient ancestors or something like that. So you guys can share your audiences, and hopefully, both of you grow your channels.

Try to use the native features built into the apps as much as possible. I know that TikTok has started to crack down on third-party apps that help you cut your episodes together and then you just upload it. So anytime you can, anytime you have time, use the native features built into the app, and the algorithm will definitely work with you. And then like I mentioned earlier, I may have mentioned it earlier, I've said this many times today. Your thumbnail and title are the most important part of your video, hands down, especially on YouTube. That is your point of contact with the audience. Are they gonna click on it, or are they not gonna click on it?

And with YouTube, you can change stuff. So we've had some low-performing videos from the past where we've actually gone in and changed the thumbnail and the title, and our views shoot up for that video. So it just shows you how important your thumbnail and title can be. Engagement, again, ask questions, answer comments, and go into your analytics. TikTok, no, they have no analytics; it's impossible. They don't even know what they're doing. But with YouTube and Meta, actually have some pretty good back-end analytics. And if you're a science communicator, it probably means you're a scientist. So look at the data and find out what's working for you and what's not working for you.

So I mentioned the algorithm, and I'm just gonna, ugh. The algorithm is a thing, and it does what it's supposed to do. It does what it's designed to do, and that's to keep people on the app as long as possible. And so if your content is doing that, you're gonna see your numbers go up. If your content isn't doing that, your numbers are either gonna plateau, or they're gonna go down. So it's very unlikely, if you are playing by the ethic rules of the platform that you're on, that you're being shadow banned. No, I'm sorry, your content is getting stale. Freshen it up, change some stuff up, play with your analytics, make it better. It's the hard truth, I'm sorry.

But I do wanna mention something that's weirdly happening with social media specifically, and this is what I'm calling social media's beige era. So all the platforms are turning into the same thing. They all have the same features now. There's nothing that makes any of these apps any different than the other, other than the interface, how you interact with the app. And 2024, I think, is gonna be the year that TikTok goes beige. And the reason for that is that they're starting to push long-form content. They want content that's between 5 and 30 minutes long. That is YouTube. Stay in your lane, TikTok, but they're not.

The other thing is they're pushing is horizontal format, even though the app doesn't rotate. So now you just have a really tiny horizontal box on top and a whole bunch of dead screen at the bottom. What? It makes no sense. And they're also pushing photo carousels. Hello, Instagram on TikTok, what? So my suggestion is to focus on whatever app you're getting the most traction, and then repurpose all that content for the other apps. If you're looking at monetizing, YouTube is where it's at. TikTok is eh, kind of. Those two platforms have creator funds that you can make a little bit of money, not a lot, but outside brand deals.

Comments. [sighs] Comments are awful; they're horrible. You need to have a tough skin. Especially if you are a woman or identify as a woman, it is going to be awful. I almost quit Eons within the first six months because the comments were so horrific. Get a banned words list and make it robust, extremely robust. And what's really funny is all of these comments that are talking about my makeup, the only thing that I changed was my lip color. It was a little bit darker, so it matched something in my shirt, and people lost their collective minds about me having a slightly darker lip shade. This last one, though, cracks me up. "You look like Napoleon Dynamite's girlfriend all grown up." So sometimes they're creative burns, and other times they're really mean, and sometimes they're really gross.

But a banned words list will help growing your audience into a positive community who downvotes these horrible comments, and they get lost in the mist of your comments section. Our comments section can be very large. We can get up to, like, 3,000 comments on a video. And so if just five people downvote something, the likelihood of you seeing it is fairly low. But I can't go into our comments section. I know it's a positive place now, but I just stay away. But some of 'em are funny, some of 'em are funny. I'll give 'em that.

All right, so let's get into some tricky topics. Will asked me to put in some conflict, so here we go. So AI paleo art. I have three images up here, and I would love to see hands for who thinks these images are AI-generated or just stock images. So here's the first one. Raise your hand if you think this is AI art or stock art. Got a couple, couple hands. Don't be shy, it's okay. You can be wrong; it's all right. This is a learning opportunity. Okay, this is AI. [grunts] Yes, I know. How about this one? Show of hands, AI or stock? Ah, you guys are catching on. This one's actually stock. It's just really, really bad stock. Images of a, [laughs] of a Stegosaurus. All right, how about this last one, little woolly mammoth here? AI? Okay, yep. This is also AI art. But still, it's getting pretty good, right?

So I'm basically gonna use images and some information from this article because I think the writer did a really good job at breaking down what AI can and cannot do, at least for paleo art specifically. So in this image, she prompted AI with sabertooth, and this first hallucination is from 2022. And this is the first prompt she ever put into AI art, an AI generator. And what is happening? However, this next one is from October of 2023. So you can see how much that AI has learned between 2022 and 2023, which is actually really shocking, right? However, it also depends on what generator you're using.

So this is another prompt, triceratops. And DALL-E got it pretty good. I mean, that looks like, okay, that's a Triceratops, but what is going on with Midjourney? It has no idea what is happening. And these were put in on the same day, mid-October of 2023. So some AI generators can handle paleo art okay, and some cannot and fail miserably. I mean, like, what? What is that? But also, AI works on data. So some of those images that I showed you to begin with are very popular animals. T-Rex, sabertooth cats, woolly mammoths. There is a lot of data, and there's a lot of images for AI to use to generate the images.

But what about stuff that is not so popular? Who here knows what Opabinia should look like? All right, a couple of you. Well, AI is not a couple of you because this is what Opabinia looks like. So basically, the only thing that they got right was it lives in water. But what is going on with the eye on the antenna? Like, I mean, Opabinia is a very classic Cambrian animal. It lived about 505 million years ago. Their fossils are found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. And it had five eyes, like, what? And then it had this weird proboscis thing with a clasper on the end of it. Like, it was just strange all the way around, but even AI had no idea what was happening.

So again, AI is a generalist. It can only do what data is available for it to use to generate these images. This one is a Gorgonopsid. Who knows what a Gorgonopsid is? This is what it actually looks like, or what we think it looks like. Yeah, so these things are actually more closely related to us mammals than they are to reptiles. They show up kind of in the Permian. They were very strange. But what is DALL-E doing? And remember, DALL-E was the good one with Triceratops, and this is what it came up with for Gorgonopsid.

So luckily, with paleo art, AI is only as good as the data, and so there is no way any current AI generator could hang with new finds, new discoveries. There's not enough information out there for it to generate. So we don't have to worry about people generating AI art for their new species of Gorgonopsid because they won't work. But we still need to be mindful of the creatures that there is a lot of data out there for, the popular kids: T-Rex, Triceratops, woolly mammoth, sabertooth cats. 

And we had a recent lesson on Eons. So it's a wonderful Saturday afternoon in January, and all of a sudden, my phone starts exploding with panicked messages, and it all boiled down to this tweet, this meme. And so we had posted, just recently, maybe 24 hours before this, a YouTube Short that used AI art. Now, this guy on Twitter thought that there were four images that were AI art, and his comments section quickly shut him down, at least on the Pterosaur and the theropod over there, the dinosaurs, actually. But what we got caught on, I guess, is the modern animals, a parrot and a crocodile. And I don't fact-check those graphics. Maybe I should start; I don't know. 

But we do have a anti-AI policy. It is very robust. We do not use it in any way, shape, or form, and we pay humans. We have a lot of paleo artists that do amazing work for us. And again, AI art's not gonna really help us with some unknown species of fossil. So anyways, what did we do? We replied, and we pulled the image down as soon as it was brought to our attention, and I think we've uploaded it again with corrected images. So the parrot and the crocodile were taken out and new ones put in. But we owned up to our mistake, and we let everybody know that we are anti-AI and we do pay our paleo artists, and we love our paleo artists.

Luckily, for us, also, our response was seen way more than that original meme, thank goodness. And the response from our audience was overwhelmingly positive. The top comment and the bottom comment are two relatively famous paleo artists. And they're just like, "Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging this. Thank you for pulling it down, and I'm glad you were able to correct it." And then Emily had a really good idea is making sure when we're searching our stock images, we're searching for images that were uploaded before 2022 when AI started. So that was our first foray into AI art. I didn't think it was gonna happen immediately, but what do you know, it did. So if you are working on stock image sites, be wary. We work with Getty, and Getty has not started to label AI-generated art. It's still unknown whether or not it is or it isn't. And so that's why it's helpful to look for images before 2022.

So now let's talk about hoaxed and poached fossils. And we're gonna start with this podcast episode, "The Case of the Most Famous Fake Human Fossil." And if you're unfamiliar, this is Piltdown Man. The first fossils of Piltdown Man were found in 1911 and continued to be found until about 1919. And they were published as Eoanthropus dawsoni. Funnily enough, the guy that originally discovered said fossils died in 1919. And what do you know? No more fossils were found. And in 1953, they were exposed as a deliberate fake. So they figured out that at least the lower jaw was from orangutan, not a human at all. 

And in 2016, a very comprehensive paper came out looking at the history of all the finds, the history of the hoax itself, and who they thought was the hoaxer. Hoaxster, hoaxer? And it turns out that Charles Dawson, the guy that found the original fossils, was more than likely the guy that faked it. And he was thirsty for scientific street cred. Like, he wanted it bad, and so he faked something.

Now, this rolls into a really racist time in human evolution hypotheses. A lot of people did not want humans to come from small-brained apes in Africa at all. And they would do anything to have us come from a large-brain ape that doesn't exist in Eurasia instead. And so this tied into that kind of racist thinking of the time. So here's the darker areas of the skull or the bits and pieces that they found. And so yeah, we did a whole Eons podcast episode about that, going through the hoax, who we thought the hoaxster was, and then kind of touched on the reason why the hoax happened in the first place. 

The next one is "The Giant Dinosaur that was Missing a Body." This is about Deinocheirus. And in 1965, this massive set of arms were discovered in the Gobi Desert. And this is the woman that found them, actually. 1965, that's pretty good. There were not a lot of female paleontologists back then. And in 2009, much later, researchers discovered a poached skeleton that was missing one hand, the feet, and the skull. So we find with a lot of poached dinosaurs, that they only take the claws and the teeth. Both of those things are fairly relatively small, and they're easy to smuggle out of these countries. So very rarely do you get a whole poached skeleton. But if you find just a skeleton without hands and feet, it's more often than not, poached.

And what was really cool was in 2011, there was a fossil preparator that got some bones from a private collector, and they matched up with the poached skeleton. So they could actually take a single toe bone and fit it right into the matrix of the poached skeleton. So they knew exactly, those hands and feet came from this specimen. Luckily, the private owner was like, "Nope. I don't want anymore. Take it. No, you don't have to pay me or nothing. Bye, don't release my name," 'cause poached specimens is not a good look for anybody. And then in 2014, the completed specimen, and it gave us this really weird-looking dinosaur, and this dinosaur is about the size of a T-Rex. This is an ornithomimid, so a plant-eater, basically. But these giant arms, right? And this is kind of what we think it looks like. But the whole specimen was repatriated to Mongolia in 2014. So it kind of has a happy ending. Not all poached specimens have happy endings, obviously. A lot of 'em still are in private collections. But in the case of Deinocheirus, we got this wonderfully weird dinosaur, and it was sent back to the country of origin.

The last one I wanna talk about is one that's still going on, and there is not a happy story yet. "Why We Mostly Don't Talk About Burmese Amber, and Here's Why." This was a TikTok. Burmese amber is known as conflict amber. If you're unfamiliar, Myanmar has had a lot of troubles for a long time. And in 2017, the Myanmar government military forces seized control of the amber mines from the Kachin Independence Army. That was not good. In 2019, the UN reported human rights violations. And in 2020, SVP, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology called for a moratorium on publishing amber material that is 2017 or later. And we really try to abide by that.

And it sucks because the amber that comes out of Myanmar is from the Cretaceous, and you get amazing specimens like this. This is a tale of a non-avian dinosaur, a little bitty, not-bird dinosaur. And it's so well-preserved you can see the feathers. It's amazing, right? Luckily, this specimen was published in 2016, so it's before the moratorium of 2017, so we can actually talk about it. But basically, anything that was collected after 2017, and really any papers that were published 2017 or later, we shy away from 'cause it's really easy to lie in your supplemental material and say, "Oh, yeah, don't worry. Hmm, this was collected years ago. We just are now getting around to publishing it."

But some of these pieces of amber can fetch thousands of dollars, and so that's why they've become so conflicted is because these armies can sell it, make a lot of money, but when it leaves the country, you're also excluding local scientists. People that live in the area that want to study it, they're unable to because it leaves and goes to a private collector or a rich institution somewhere. So that's mainly why we shy away from Burmese amber, and I think a lot of other places abide by SVP's rule of, nope, don't even touch it. Don't make it better than it is for people to buy, and don't raise more money for human rights violations.

Now, let's talk. This is the end, problematic scientists. We run into a lot of this with our human evolution episodes because we usually look at human evolution through a historical lens. And if you are familiar with old Victorian scientists, you know that a lot of them had some real awful ideas. This is our "No Single Cradle of Humankind." And in this episode, we talk about how humans probably evolved all over Africa, but there was an idea that came out about this, like, now-sunken continent called Lemuria. Because again, these researchers did not want humans to come from Africa.

So in one of our sentences, we actually edit out Ernst Haeckel because mainly, it wasn't critical to the story. It was just a line. So we replaced it with a more generalized "one German zoologist" when we were talking about this ancient sunken continent that doesn't exist, Lumeria. So a lot of times, we can just not give them airtime. If their name and their picture is not part of the story and we're just kind of generally talking about the transition of thought, we just take 'em out, and we don't give them credit. 

Other times, like this TikTok where we were talking about Robert Broom. Broom was an interesting guy. He liked to hunt for fossils in the nude. So we were basically making fun of him in this TikTok, but he was a very controversial person. He found a lot of great things, but he had some very awful thoughts about those great specimens. And so we added a line to that TikTok. "Now, before we get into our story, let's undress a difficult historical truth about Broom. He contributed to the early study of human 'races,' the harmful effects of which continue to this day." So he basically thought that the different races of human were actually different species, bleh.

So this isn't the end of it, though, because we wonder, amongst ourselves in Eons on our content team, is this good enough? Is this gonna, like, stand up to five to ten years from now? Should we always call them out? Should we stop talking about historical paleoanthropology altogether? What is right thing to do here? And we don't know. We're still trying to figure that out. Because even Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had some pretty terrible ideas about human evolution, and we don't mention them. So in the barnacle episode, where if you watch the bloopers of this, you'll get to hear my very, very awful Victorian men scientist. Oh, my God, it's really bad. It's really bad. Anyways, we don't mention it because we're not talking about humans specifically. We're not talking about human evolution. We were talking about how much Darwin hated barnacles and the evolutionary history of barnacles.

Same thing with Alfred Russel Wallace. So this is the Wallace Line episode. Again, Wallace had some pretty bad ideas about humans, but since we're not talking about humans specifically in the episode, we don't call him out. Should we? Should we have? We don't know. So this is something that we're still coming to terms with on how to deal with it, at least on our channel.

So with that, I thank you all for your attention. I thank the University of Wisconsin for bringing me here and the University of Wisconsin Foundation for funding this trip. I've had an amazing time talking to all of the journalism students, touring campus, going to museums, seeing sharks. It's been a wonderful time, and I thank you so much for your attention.

[audience applauding]