Natural History Museum

Oh, poop! What looks like a rock is filled with clues

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 20:05:32 +0000

Oh, poop! What looks like a rock is filled with clues Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/13/2023 - 13:05

Rachel Sauer

In studying dinosaur discards, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scientist Karen Chin has gained expertise recently honored with the Bromery Award and detailed in a new children’s book

It was never Karen Chin’s plan to become the poop lady.

In fact, she started out as a naturalist, leading national park visitors on journeys of discovery via tiny, iridescent insect wings and soaring, ancient conifers, and everything in between.

“I wasn’t just interested in mammals or birds or plants; I was interested in how everything fit together, even the soil and the insects and the fungi and everything like that,” she says. “I realized that dung, it has such an ignominious reputation, but it really reflects the transfer of carbon resources throughout the ecosystem, which powers everything.

“Carbon resources are like money in the natural world—they’re how things are transferred back and forth. How carbon goes back into the ecosystem is very important, and dung provides a record of that. Fossil dung, which I study, provides a record of how that happened in the prehistoric world.”

Karen Chin, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of geological sciences and curator of paleontology in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Museum of Natural History, is a recognized authority on dinosaur diets and dung.

From her initial curiosity about ecosystems to finding clues in dung, Chin, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of geological sciences, has become a preeminent authority on dinosaur diets and the resulting dung that, some 75 million years later, is called a coprolite because it’s now fossilized.

In recognition of her contributions to science, not only was she recently recognized with the Geological Society of America’s Randolph W. “Bill” and Cecile T. Bromery Award for Minorities, but her story is featured in the newly published children’s book “The Clues Are in the Poo: The Story of Dinosaur Scientist Karen Chin.” The book recently was awarded the National Science Teaching Association's award for Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12.

The book details her journey from being a child who loved nature but not dinosaurs, and who learned to love science from her father, to a researcher and educator who emphasizes that science is for everyone and open to all.

“I was very lucky because my father was a scientist, so I, myself, never doubted that I could be one, too,” she explains. “I could watch him and see that he did well. When you’re a child, you’re not thinking of discrimination so much, but now I know that he likely faced some. But growing up I thought, ‘My dad’s a scientist, so I can be one.’

“I realize how fortunate I was, because not everyone who has brown skin has a scientist in their family. So, for children who have aspirations to be a scientist and maybe don’t have scientist role models in their family, if they see me, a scientist of color, I hope that tells them it’s a possibility for them, too.”

Poop wasn’t the plan

But back to the poop: It was not the original plan.

Growing up in California, she was mesmerized by the natural world, memorizing the names of plants and insects and spending hours quietly watching the subtle changes in the life all around her. Her father, a former Tuskegee Airman, was a materials scientist who supported her love for science, even though women in science were few, and women of color even fewer.

"The Clues are in the Poo" children's book was created in collaboration between Karen Chin, author Jane Kurtz and illustrator Francisco Riolobos.

In college, she dreamed of working for the National Park Service and before graduating was hired as a seasonal interpretive ranger at Kings Canyon National Park in California. They had no official women’s uniforms when she received the job offer.

After working as a park interpreter for several summer seasons, she realized she wanted to get deeper into the science and accepted a job preparing dinosaur bones. One day, writing exhibit text for her boss, noted paleontologist Jack Horner, she learned that people had discovered fossil feces “and I thought that was the silliest thing,” Chin recalls. “How could soft material fossilize? I ran to Jack and said, ‘Did you know people say they found fossil dung?’

“Jack is kind of taciturn and he said, ‘Yep, and I found some, too.’ I asked, ‘Where? Where?’ He showed me what he thought was fossil dung, and studying those fossils turned into my doctoral dissertation. When I made a thin section of it—I ground it very, very thin so I could look at it through a light microscope—I could see plant cells from 75 million years ago that had gone through the dinosaur. That blew my mind, and I realized that this was a real window on dinosaur-plant interactions and the world they lived in.”

Studying coprolites is one of the more challenging areas of paleontology because unlike, say, vertebrate paleontology—in which scientists find a bone, it’s obviously a bone and they can tell you the dinosaur to which it belonged—coprolites look like rocks. Often, there’s nothing obviously indicating that it came out the back end of a dinosaur tens of millions of years ago, Chin says.

“First I have to say, ‘I suspect this is a coprolite’ and then offer the evidence for why I think it is,” she says. “Then I need to explain what it can tell us about the ancient world, even though I may not be able to tell you who produced the feces.

“I see coprolite study as high-risk, high-reward research because it’s challenging and you don’t know whether some avenues you explore will tell you that much. Because it is challenging, I think people have shied away from studying coprolites, but you can discover some really amazing things.”

Her research has included finding fossilized muscle tissue in a tyrannosaur coprolite (from an older relative of T. rex), a hugely exciting discovery, and revising what had previously been theorized about the diets of herbivorous dinosaurs. Studying coprolites revealed that at certain times of year some duck-billed dinosaurs ate wood, which doesn’t seem especially nutritious and Chin initially interpreted the woody content to be an inescapable consequence of eating conifers with tiny leaves.

Karen Chin works in the Kaiparowits Formation of southern Utah.

However, Chin realized that the wood tissues were different because they’d been rotted by fungus before the dinosaur ingested them, “so I needed to revise my interpretation,” Chin says. “Dinosaurs could have obtained cellulose from rotted wood, but if they were after cellulose, why not just eat leaves? Because we found these coprolites in the same horizon as nesting grounds, I hypothesized that when the dinosaurs were reproducing, they changed their diet to incorporate more protein. By feeding on rotted wood, which has lots of insects and crustaceans and snails hanging out in it, they were accessing a predictable source of protein.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to definitively prove this hypothesis, but the discovery was really exciting and has changed our views of dinosaurs. For a long time, we thought of herbivorous dinosaurs as only eating leaves, but through the coprolites we know they sometimes ate rotted wood and ingested invertebrates.”

‘Everyone’s welcome in science’

Not only is Chin recognized for her expertise in coprolites, but for her rare gift of drawing even the most science agnostic into fascinating prehistoric tableaus to roam with dinosaurs. Plus, dinosaurs and poop?

“That’s the perfect marriage of two things kids find fascinating,” says Oregon-based children’s author Jane Kurtz, who wrote “The Clues Are in the Poo” in collaboration with Chin. “I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with dinosaur poo?’ Karen is quoted in a lot of other sources I’d been reading for a book I wrote about two early paleontologists who got in a bitter fight about identifying and naming Brontosaurus. So, just in that way that curious people do, and writers do, I was poking around and all roads seemed to lead to Karen.”

Kurtz emailed Chin about writing a children’s book based on her life, that would celebrate science and curiosity and be the book that Kurtz wishes she’d had as a girl who loved bugs and frogs and needed a science role model.

When Kurtz asked Chin how she felt about possibly publishing a picture book that would feature her, she was initially reticent to promote herself, but added that “’I know that young people of color really need to see themselves in this field’,” Kurtz recalls. “So, she addressed that straight on, and I thought, wow, perfect, she’s absolutely right, and we’re in a time of children’s books where people are being very careful to think about voices that have been left out.

Karen Chin working in southern Utah (left) and Montana.

“I told her that I felt I was left out of the science conversation as child, and I have a feeling there were lots and lots of people like me. I think everyone has the capacity to be fascinated by science. There are lots of books about dinosaurs, but there aren’t that many books that focus on how we know what we know about dinosaurs. To me, that’s the really intriguing question.”

That question also animates Chin’s passion for science and science education. She acknowledges that a lot of kids grow up loving dinosaurs and wanting to be paleontologists, which might explain why she often has English and physics and language majors in her upper-level paleobiology classes.

“I try to teach it so that everybody can get something out of it, but I also recognize that there are not that many jobs in paleontology and I think students realize that, too,” Chin says. “So, I tell the students that my goal is that if I run into you three years from now in Boulder and I ask you a very technical thing—for example, what kind of animal is a bryozoan?—I won’t expect you to remember some of those details. But I do hope you learned ‘how to learn’ and that you are committed to lifelong learning.

“I think one of the most important things I can teach is science literacy, so that when students see something—such as an article that makes a claim—they should be asking, ‘OK, where’ the evidence?’ and thinking about whether the article presents a reasonable conclusion. You don’t have to pursue a career in science to be a part of it. Everyone’s welcome in science.”

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In studying dinosaur discards, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scientist Karen Chin has gained expertise recently honored with the Bromery Award and detailed in a new children’s book.

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Hawaii’s mysterious mints, discovered then ignored, get a fresh look

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 03:25:06 +0000

Hawaii’s mysterious mints, discovered then ignored, get a fresh look Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 11/16/2019 - 20:25

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder grad student’s work deepens understanding of evolution and extinction

In the late 1980s, just as another group of scholars was preparing a 2,500-page, two-volume text cataloging the unique flora of the Hawaiian Islands, Harold St. John, once a pioneering professor of botany, long-time chair of the Botany Department and director of the arboretum at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa from 1929 to 1958, then in his 90s, published 37 articles describing 894 new plant species in the islands, an almost unprecedented number, including 157 new species of mint.

Under the international code of scientific nomenclature, first publication takes priority. But the researchers on the other project found some small errors in his work, and the scientific community dismissed and then ignored St. John’s prodigious work.

Above is a species of mint identified by Justin Williams as Stenogyne sessilis. At the top of the page, Mitchell examines Stenogyne macrantha. Photos courtesy of Justin Williams.

“People wrote him off. They just thought he was this old guy who’d done sloppy work,” says Justin Williams, a graduate student in museum and field studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Natural History Museum. Williams suggests that St. John’s few errors might have been due to his intentionally rushing to press in the race for publication priority.

Flash forward three decades. Botany has been revolutionized by molecular DNA work, which has led researchers to re-examine and, in many cases, rewrite, long-held taxonomies for Hawai’ian flora. And Williams’s own research on mints in the Hawaiian Islands has led him to a surprising revelation: “Preliminary data is suggesting that Harold St. John was onto something.”

But that’s just one wrinkle in Williams’ gradual unraveling of mysteries surrounding Hawai’i’s mint species. They are true mints, but like so much of the islands’ flora and fauna, they are quite distinct from their generic continental relatives you might pluck from your garden for iced tea or other continental species.

For one thing, they don’t have that familiar minty odor. Rather than evolving into trees like Hawai’ian violets and lobeliads, they are either dainty herbs or enormous woody vines. And unlike any other mint, they produce fleshy fruits.

“Hawaiian mints seem to be an oddball when we evaluate them under traditional … evolution theory,” says Williams, who has been working with two of the 157 species described by St. John, courtesy of the botany department at the world-famous Bishop Museum.

“Preliminary molecular results strongly support that these two specimens are unique taxa, supporting St. John’s species hypothesis and refuting previous claims that his work was rushed and sloppy.”

Williams’ molecular sleuthing indicates that while Hawaiian mints likely came to the islands from North America, some 2,500 miles away, they later dispersed more than 3,500 miles to the island of Tonga, unusual for a species that evolved fleshy fruit—which sinks, rather than floats, in seawater, a factor that has limited long-distance dispersal of several other Hawaiian species.

The mints also seem to violate Hennig’s “progression rule” in evolution, which states that the most primitive species of any group will be found in the earliest, most central location.

Finally, the currents and prevailing winds don’t support the case for “extra-Hawaiian dispersal,” but that’s what the DNA says.

These mints have the potential to redefine how we think of insular evolution, as well as regular evolution and the speciation and extinction process,”

“These mints have the potential to redefine how we think of insular evolution, as well as regular evolution and the speciation and extinction process,” Williams says.

Of the currently parsed 59 mint species, all but two are found in Hawai’i. The other two, only found on that islands of Tahiti and Tonga, were first collected in the late 1800s. Williams notes that the Tongan species was collected only once, in 1958 … by Harold St. John.

The mysteries surrounding St. John and Hawaiian mint species fascinate Williams. But he hopes his systematics research—properly describing and placing species on the taxonomic tree—will have a real-world impact for the islands known as “the endangered species capital of the world,” where two-thirds of species are considered threatened, endangered or even extinct.

“Refining our systematic understanding of what the species are will inform immediate conservation action, but also provide a foundation from which to answer interesting evolutionary and ecological questions,” Williams says. He hopes that persistent fieldwork will lead to the rediscovery of species thought to be extinct, as well as new populations of rare and endangered plants.

“In a time of mass global extinction, any efforts to refine our knowledge of these processes, especially that of extinction, could significantly contribute to us reversing that trend,” Williams says.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder grad student’s work deepens understanding of evolution and extinction, and augments work of iconic but once dismissed botanist.