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00:00What a strange world we live in.
00:19Enormous rodents acting like engineers.
00:25Or bears fanning up and then bedding down for half the year.
00:30And trees just going, okay, don't need these leaves anymore.
00:38It's crazy.
00:41We're so used to bears and beavers and fall colors.
00:44We don't even see how really weird they are.
00:48But it's amazing what they do.
00:50Where do these behaviors come from?
00:53Well, everything alive in our world
00:56comes from ancestors that lived in a hotter past.
01:01Some of them would really surprise you.
01:04I study that ancient world.
01:12I'm a paleobiologist.
01:14But I'm not like most scientists.
01:17Just like beavers, I'm a little weird too.
01:2010 years ago, I lost part of myself.
01:25That didn't stop me, but it changed everything.
01:29I'm going to tell you about it because what's weirder
01:33than a scientist who loses control of her brain?
01:49This world we built, it seems to change at light speed.
01:52We're moving all the time.
01:56Nothing stays the same.
02:01But the natural world seems to dance to a different tune.
02:07Maybe it changes with the seasons,
02:10but it always returns to where it was.
02:13Right?
02:15That's not true at all.
02:20I remember in grade school, there was this film about the Great Lakes.
02:26It was amazing.
02:33There was this man in a canoe, and he's like a time traveler.
02:38He'd set his camp up, and then he'd magically go back in time, like 10,000 years.
02:43And suddenly, he's on a mountaintop.
02:47Or he's paddling along the shore of Lake Superior.
02:52And then, suddenly, he's paddling next to a mile-high glacier.
03:00I always remember how they dropped him in his canoe out of an airplane.
03:04I love that.
03:16But the filmmaker, Bill Mason, he's making a point.
03:20You don't have to go far back in time to find yourself in a completely different natural environment.
03:25Thanks to his crazy film, that lesson really sank in.
03:37As a little girl, I thought, okay, if the past was so totally different,
03:51what were those ancient worlds actually like?
03:55What strange animals lived here before, before the ice ages?
03:59That, for me, was completely fascinating.
04:09Nat and I were nerds together in the Gifted Kids program.
04:15It goes way, way, way back.
04:18We met in grade two.
04:19She was in my grade two class.
04:20And we shared little hobbies.
04:22At that time, we would have this thing during the summers where she's burying roadkill
04:27in her backyard that I would find, but also digging up last year's stuff.
04:34And it drove her parents crazy because sometimes if I brought over roadkill during the wintertime,
04:38you can't dig into frozen ground, right?
04:40You'd have to store these squirrels and these groundhogs in the freezer.
04:45Yeah, when I was in high school, I knew I wanted to do paleontology.
04:49Fossil insects, there's fossil dinosaurs, you know, plants or microfossils.
04:53There's lots of different ways to study the past.
04:56And so I sought out a mentorship program to narrow that down.
05:00If anybody gets to have a destiny, she had one.
05:04I mean, in high school, she's already made contacts with the big movers and shakers of
05:09the Canadian Museum and is doing field projects for them.
05:14First time I went to the Arctic was 1994, when I was a Carleton undergraduate student.
05:18I just remember flying up there and looking down on the tundra, and we were like flying for hours,
05:23and you're just watching tundra go by, you know, in the Arctic Ocean.
05:27And you're like, wow, I hope I brought my toothbrush, right?
05:31I had no idea.
05:32Yeah, not having done camping before.
05:36I was completely hooked then, for sure.
05:39Once you start research in the Arctic, you just have to get back.
05:45And there's so many questions, and it's so hard to get to, and it's so beautiful.
05:52I was definitely on the path.
05:56I lost track, and by the time I get back to sort of rediscover where her career has gone,
06:01she's already been named in Canadian Geographic.
06:04Like, this is the big time.
06:06And I'm like, holy crow.
06:08I gave that girl her first dead ground hug.
06:13After I graduated, I had an opportunity at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
06:17So it's like coming home, right?
06:20So I found myself working in the Canadian high Arctic again,
06:23which, before the ice age, was about 22 degrees warmer than it is today.
06:28So much more like what you'd see in a modern boreal forest in Canada.
06:37When you're a geologist, one thing you know is that the earth is always changing.
06:42There's no such thing as the status quo.
06:48So most people are surprised to hear we're in an ice age now.
06:53For about the last two and a half million years,
06:56the Greenland ice sheet has periodically grown so large that it's covered most of Canada.
07:04It's even covered New York, where I'm speaking from now.
07:09Between those advances of the ice sheets,
07:13we have these short warm periods.
07:15We call them interglacial periods.
07:17We're in an interglacial right now.
07:21We call it the Holocene.
07:24But in the big picture, we're still living on an ice age planet.
07:30Before the ice age, the planet was in a much warmer state.
07:34That period was called the Pliocene.
07:36The place where a human would notice the biggest change before the ice ages is in the high latitudes.
07:44The high latitudes were much warmer.
07:47Places where we have tundra today, there were dense forests.
07:51And we see the physical evidence, Pliocene fossils, from that ecosystem today.
08:02So my first really big fossil discovery was Puyela darwini, a missing link between land walking mammals and seals.
08:11That really put Natalia on the map.
08:18You know, as a paleontologist, you work with the fossil record.
08:21But the fossil record gives us many gaps.
08:25So when actually a gap can be filled with one particular find, that's a huge success.
08:33As a young researcher, that sets you on a very great trajectory in your scientific career.
08:43And she certainly did that with this fossil find.
08:50The seal was exciting, but for Natalia, that was just the start.
08:59It was a summer day in 2006.
09:02At a site on Ellesmere Island called the Files Leaf Beds.
09:05And that's just about 1,300 kilometres north of the modern tree line.
09:13It was a day just like any other day, right?
09:15So you've got your backpack on and your bug net, and you're just scanning the earth all day long,
09:21looking for any signs of anything that looks like it might be a fossil.
09:24Then at the end of one of these days, I saw a sort of orange-coloured piece of something.
09:35And I thought, it looks cool. It could be wood.
09:37So I thought I was looking at a piece of possibly petrified wood initially.
09:43When I got back to camp that night, I got out a hand lens and looked a little closer.
09:48So looking at the broken edge for tree rings, because that would be a sure sign it's a piece of tree,
09:53but there were no tree rings.
09:56So I'm thinking that's odd, right? It might be a preservation thing.
10:00But my mind is now going more towards thinking this might actually be bone.
10:05So at that point in the field, that's where it ends.
10:07I have this tiny fragment. It might be bone. It's kind of a weird colour.
10:11I can't even tell how old it is. That's a really big problem.
10:14And remember, in terms of remoteness, Ellesmere Island is about the closest thing to going to Mars
10:22that we have on Earth, like so far up there. But for the next four years, every time we get back to
10:29the site in the summer, we're collecting more pieces. And by 2010, we've got about 30 fragments,
10:36enough to fill a small Ziploc bag.
10:40So now it's jigsaw puzzle time. You've got all these pieces.
10:44It's from the same site and thinking it's probably the same bone.
10:48So I'm trying to piece them all together. But it's not looking good. We don't have much of the bone.
10:54So then in parallel, we had this breakthrough. In the lab, we sawed off a little edge of the bone
11:01and it created this distinctive burning smell, like a bit like burnt hair or burnt bone.
11:09It's the smell of burning collagen. And collagen is that soft tissue that's really abundant in our
11:15body and also in bone. And the important point is that it turns out collagen protein
11:21is like a fingerprint. So it's time for CSI Ellesmere Island.
11:25And we did the proteomics on this bone. That's a fancy word for the collagen fingerprinting.
11:33And what we discover is that we have a four million year old high arctic camel.
11:38A giant camel way above the arctic circle. It's mind blowing.
11:50So just think about this. Before the ice ages, it was over 20 degrees warmer and forested in the high
11:57arctic. But that doesn't mean there weren't winters. There were definitely winters. Cold snow and months of
12:0524 hour darkness. And then a nine foot tall arctic camel in this place.
12:11When you think about camels today, it's really easy to imagine that they evolved to live in the
12:17desert, right? And this is where the finding of the high arctic camel is so mind blowing, right? Because
12:26it's not in a desert, right? It's living a complete opposite to a desert. It's in a forest.
12:31Ever notice how huge a camel's eye is? Well, it turns out they have incredible vision,
12:39including night vision. That's pretty useful when it's dark six months of the year.
12:45And one of the most dramatic features of the camel is it's the hump, right? Well,
12:50it's actually a specialized fat deposit. And when you think about the importance of fat energy storage,
12:58this is something that's also very important for animals that survive through harsh winters, right?
13:04And so this then makes you wonder what if the evolution of a specialized fat deposit is actually
13:10something that originated in the far north. The wide feet of camels, it's listed as one of the traits
13:18that helps them walk over sand, also would function well in soft snow. It's amazing actually,
13:25when you think how life in the Arctic may have set camels up for life in the desert.
13:38As a young scientist, the camel is a really big story.
13:45With 30 pieces of bone, I could help rewrite the history of camels.
13:49I could kind of feel the presence of the paleontologists who came before me,
13:57the people who'd so far written the great story of the past.
14:03And now I had some red ink on those pages. I was adding to the story, changing that story.
14:10We all have imposter syndrome, right? And I guess my own imposter syndrome was beginning to fade.
14:17It was January 2011. I was out on a ski in the Gatineau Hills.
14:31It's a night ski, and it was really slippery. It's freezing rain. It was freezing rain the day before.
14:38And I remember looking down, adjusting my headlamp,
14:42I had this floaty feeling. And there was a moment that I lost in there. And then a waking up kind of feeling.
15:06I got back up on my skis. I could do that. And ski all the way back to the car.
15:18I didn't have the sense that anything really bad had happened. But something bad had happened, actually.
15:25In that moment, my life changed forever.
15:37I remember the headache, nausea. But there were strange things, too.
15:43The morning after the accident, I remember standing in front of my bathroom mirror,
15:54trying to find the toothpaste.
15:58Yeah, my husband would walk in and be like, it's right there, Nat.
16:02It's right on the counter on the left, like normal.
16:05I didn't have a family doctor, like everyone. And so I was just doing walk-in clinics.
16:20I ended up going to an emergency room eventually. And I remember this room had these huge windows.
16:27It was a bright, sunny day. And the light streaming in was just so painful.
16:31The message I was getting was I had mild concussion. And symptoms would go away in 10 days to a couple of weeks.
16:42And plus, I was too busy to be sick. I was taking a group of students on a trip to Antarctica.
16:49And I wasn't going to miss that.
16:55I should never have set foot on that ship.
17:01The Drake Passage is the roughest sea which you can find on Earth.
17:09And every ship which goes to Antarctica has to go there. There is no other way.
17:17Our journey down there was, for the Drake Passage, reasonable.
17:23However, on the way back, we were not so lucky.
17:26So it was a very violent storm. Your body is just being tossed around inside this tin can.
17:37I have good sea legs, so I'm not seasick. But I was scared.
17:43At the height of the storm, the waves were eight to nine meters, swelling to 10 meters.
17:48And the whole ship is shuddering from that impact.
17:54The waves just spilling over the ship. You're seeing any minute this ship breaks apart.
18:01It did occur to me that maybe this wasn't a great thing for my brain.
18:05Yeah.
18:10I remember very clearly that this was too much for Natalia. She just became silent.
18:18That's what I remember. She was not responsive to me either.
18:25In terms of understanding concussions, 2011 might as well have been a century ago.
18:30The medical profession just didn't understand the seriousness of head injuries in the way we do now.
18:36For reasons that we don't yet fully understand, an injured brain is very, very vulnerable.
18:46A second injury, or even a failure to recover from a first one,
18:50can really make a concussion a more severe event.
18:53And this is because there are two phases in the recovery.
18:57One is when you have the headaches, the nauseas, the dizziness.
19:02But then we have a second phase of recovery.
19:05This time that the brain needs to really heal.
19:09And that's the most crucial, the most important for recovery.
19:12It's invisible to us.
19:14So oftentimes we may have a second injury when we are the most vulnerable.
19:26We can never know for sure, but for Natalia, it's very likely that going to Antarctica was the clincher.
19:33I can't ever really know, but I think that may have been my fork in the road.
19:43So not just the ski accident, so much as what came after.
19:54And it was all so innocent.
19:57I was doing my best.
19:59I followed the doctor's advice.
20:02I really just wish someone had said, stop, you shouldn't go.
20:09This is a serious injury and you've got to take it easy.
20:12You've got to rest and heal.
20:15Because it was then having come back from the trip that I realized something was wrong.
20:23Something was wrong with my brain.
20:28It's very unsettling when the world around you doesn't sound, doesn't look the same as what you're used to.
20:40So one of the weird things that happens is the kind of noise sensitivity and distortion.
20:48The frequencies are all wrong and it's a bit disturbing.
20:52So a bird singing in the spring is like an arrow through your body.
20:57I remember closing the window because it just hurt and it's a bird, right?
21:01It's not even a loud bird, it's a robin.
21:04Music that I enjoyed before just sounded like a mess.
21:08Like I just don't know why people would put those instruments together.
21:11Or even if there's two voices in a song, I'm just like, oh, it's just awful.
21:15Or when my husband John would be eating next to me and there's a sound of cutlery.
21:23And it's unbearable and I'm trying not to scream.
21:29The fatigue level and the nausea level and the headache level,
21:33it's a whole body experience, right?
21:35And you're really sick.
21:38Like every day being sick and just hoping the next day you'll feel maybe less sick for years.
21:46I had doctors say things like, well, I get tired too.
21:54You know, at the end of the day, they just weren't getting it.
21:58One doctor told me that it had nothing to do with brain injury,
22:02that my symptoms were caused by anxiety.
22:06Others believed me, but they didn't offer me any tools.
22:16Before the injury, in my day, I would always know, you know, roughly what time of day it was,
22:21what I'd been doing, what my options are for doing next, what I had to do next,
22:25what was the most important thing to do next, like all that was clear.
22:29But after the injury, it was like that just started collapsing in chunks around me.
22:35And I'd be just stuck on this little island in one moment,
22:39without connection to what was happening before or anything ahead of me.
22:46So there's always these like little moments of like being trapped,
22:50of not knowing like how you got there and what you're supposed to do next.
22:54So early on, I was trying to be as active as I could.
22:57Um, exercise was my therapy, but I kept running into problems with the exercise.
23:05My symptoms would be getting worse, but I was very determined that
23:08this was an important part of what I needed to do to get better.
23:12So I kept pushing myself and getting worse, trying to do more.
23:18This is the thing about Natalia is that in her former life, toughing it out was her game.
23:23Back to her career as a cross country skier, she would always place the best in bad weather.
23:29And grinding it out is fine if you're an elite in sport.
23:32Grinding it out is not okay if you've got a brain injury.
23:35I just kept thinking, this will pass, I'm young, I'm healthy, I will get better.
23:42So none of us could imagine that this could go on. It's temporary. So we thought,
23:49let's just step in and cover for Nat for a while.
23:52So I had been with Nat on Ellesmere Island, and I was doing the dating work for the Camel Project.
24:03We were looking forward to maybe another decade of this for other fossils,
24:08and nothing was going to stop us from publishing in top journals.
24:14So the Arctic Camel Discovery came out in the journal Nature at the beginning of 2013.
24:21Nature, for a scientist, that's like when you start a band and end up in Rolling Stone magazine.
24:27And to be clear, at that time, I could barely read, never mind write.
24:36So it was really John and the team just closing ranks around me and picking up what I couldn't hold.
24:50At that time, in the early years of the concussion, I'm trying really hard to keep my job.
24:57to keep things going.
25:04And it's sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion, because things are kind of falling apart.
25:20Within a couple of months, I got a note from my doctor that I was not expected to recover.
25:28I was declared by the insurance company totally disabled.
25:33And the museum indicated to me that, you know, I lost my job.
25:37Yeah.
25:40It was beginning to dawn on me, this is a forever injury.
25:46I have a disability.
25:47I can't be a scientist anymore.
25:58There didn't seem a way out, right?
26:00I thought, like, how many years do I want to live like this?
26:04If they don't think I'm going to get better, right, then like, what's the point?
26:09I would say the hardest was, like, year three.
26:17It was just, like, too much pain all the time.
26:20Like, I could not walk without feeling sick.
26:24I could not think without feeling sick.
26:29So it's just, like, waking up sick, going to bed sicker.
26:33Every day.
26:36And we put my dog down, and I wished I could have been put down, too.
26:41Because I couldn't do it.
26:42It was too hard.
26:43This is not the Natalia that I knew.
26:50This gal runs across the tundra with a shotgun on her back, normally.
26:54Maybe, and again, no disrespect, maybe she's just some gal with headaches.
26:58Yeah, so these glasses are an adaptation.
27:14I put tape here at the middle, and that helps stabilize the world for me.
27:26This is Natalia.
27:27She's got stuff to get done, and she's got that grit and that resolve which pulls her forward.
27:32Even a decade later, she's pushing and pushing, pushing, trying to say,
27:36is this where I land, or is it the next thing?
27:40She's got pull.
27:40She wants to be somewhere.
27:43Bit by bit, I learned to live in new ways.
27:46So my brain stayed injured, but I got smarter, and I got greedy with my energy,
27:53so that I would have energy to do the important stuff.
27:56I stayed off my feet so I could keep moving ahead.
27:59I learned to drive again.
28:05I started to write again, bit by bit.
28:07So nothing is the same as it was before.
28:12It's always with little pieces of energy through the day.
28:15I have to learn to catch them, to use those.
28:18But the thing that never changed was all the resting.
28:30Lying on the couch, eyes closed, quiet.
28:33Go for a walk, have to lie down, read a page, then have to lie down.
28:51Visit the doctor, that's all I can do in the day.
28:54Eat supper, lie down.
29:02Yeah, you just feel like you're missing life.
29:06Yeah.
29:07So you lose a lot of time.
29:08I felt like whole seasons were going by.
29:20And I was lying down and missing it.
29:21A brain injury steals your time.
29:34The thing is, all the knowledge, all the unanswered questions,
29:54all that existed before the brain injury, never left.
29:59I still had the paleontologist mind.
30:06And as I rested, those ideas turned and turned in my imagination.
30:15I still wanted to travel back in time.
30:18Back to the distant past.
30:22I still had questions.
30:30I thought about camels in the endless arctic night with their night vision superpowers.
30:40I thought about beavers building their dams,
30:44being in their lodges under the ice all winter long.
30:51About how amazing that behaviour is, actually.
30:54I thought about placing bears.
30:59Just like giving up and saying, that's it, I'm going to bed.
31:02Wake me up in six months when the sun comes out.
31:06And trees, doing the same thing the bears did.
31:09Just going, well, there goes the sun.
31:11I guess we don't need these leaves until spring.
31:15My injured brain never stopped thinking about the last forests of the arctic.
31:21But now I also had time to think.
31:24Lots of time to think.
31:28I guess, to think about what those weird ancient forests mean for us today.
31:36I realised the scientist in me was still alive.
31:41But to keep her alive, I needed my friends in science.
31:45I needed people in my life who could meet me where I am.
31:52Which obviously is a different place than where I was.
31:56And more than anything, I felt I needed to return to the arctic.
32:01Just like I had taken others earlier in my career, now I needed to be taken back to Ellesmere Island.
32:12The mysteries of lost worlds that existed before the ice age, they're waiting for us up here.
32:32What's invisible down south, buried under forests or scraped away by glaciers.
32:42Here it's just lying on the surface.
32:46Great.
32:47And I'm so grateful I can come back.
32:58Setting up camp is a lot of work.
33:00It's a lot of preparation, so essentially we start over a year in advance.
33:05I used to run these trips and oversee everything, but now I'm not leading.
33:12I'm advising so that I can save my energy and my thinking to do the science.
33:17And I am relying on other people a lot.
33:22Well, Natalia, she knows this area way better than anybody else.
33:26She has a super understanding of the environment here and the layers we are digging in.
33:33So without her, we would be screwed.
33:35That's the reality.
33:38For me, this is like going home.
33:45Fieldwork is where we learn, right?
33:47And to make discoveries, you have to be in the field.
33:51Ooh, this is something good.
33:56I love it out here.
34:06This is my favorite place in the world.
34:16We've discovered these amazing mammals up here.
34:19The giant arctic camel, for example.
34:22We can see that features that make camels today such specialized creatures of the desert
34:29actually evolved in the last forest of the Pliocene.
34:34Excellent night vision for the arctic night.
34:38The fat hump to get through the long winter.
34:40The feet broad like snow shoes.
34:44And it was that realization, the idea that these high arctic forests could create an animal that could
34:51so easily survive in a completely different environment, that got me thinking.
34:56What else that is so familiar to us today might come from this ancient world?
35:02The answer is potentially quite a lot.
35:09Compared with what we see around us in the world today, these forests were a really weird environment.
35:14For half the year, the sun never set.
35:18And then it was dark for the other half.
35:21So every living organism, microbes, plants, animals had to survive half the year without light,
35:28without photosynthesis, without food.
35:31We don't have any forests like those today.
35:35They were the last of the polar forests.
35:37The world had been hot for tens of millions of years.
35:41And now, as the ice age began, this was ending.
35:45The Pliocene was ending.
35:48Yeah, it's actually a little bit sad.
35:49But while it lasted, this forest was so extreme, it must have had extreme adaptations.
36:01In sign speak, this was huge natural selection.
36:06Can we see the results today?
36:08Of course.
36:10What if hibernation in some mammals today actually came from when they were living
36:16at these high latitudes in these dark, you know, winter forests, right?
36:21Maybe this is where hibernation evolved for some lineages such as bears.
36:26For example, when we're looking at the bears today, this is a really important strategy
36:32for bears to survive winter, right?
36:34They, in the fall, they put on fat.
36:36They eat a lot of food that helps them build up their fatty layer.
36:39And then this allows them to survive in this dormant state through the winter
36:44than to come out again in the spring.
36:49So in a forest where it's dark for six months of the year,
36:53hibernation could be a perfect adaptation.
36:56In these extreme Pliocene forests, it could have been critical.
37:03What would Canada be without its beavers, right?
37:05Beavers today are ecosystem engineers and very important for the development and maintenance
37:15of wetlands, right?
37:16So these are keystone species, very important part of the ecology.
37:21Beavers we know are very sensitive to, for example, the sound of running water
37:26will make them build a dam.
37:28These are instinctive behaviors.
37:30The motor patterns, right?
37:32The pinning of the sticks and the pushing together of the branches and the mud and all that.
37:36Those all appear in the animal without any coaching from the parents.
37:40So you can rear a baby beaver and it'll do all these behaviors.
37:44And then when it's about two years old, it'll build a dam.
37:47So this suggests these are hardwired behaviors.
37:52Building dams so you have a lake you can swim in when the surface freezes in the winter.
37:57Putting your home, your fortress, we call it the lodge, right?
38:00In the middle of your artificial lake.
38:03With an underwater entrance accessible even in winter and raising the kits inside.
38:08It's an extraordinary solution for getting through a long dark winter.
38:13So did beavers become forest engineers to survive in those Pliocene Arctic forests?
38:21And it's not just about the animals.
38:23Think about the boreal forest going to sleep in the fall.
38:25Big hint, we call it fall, right?
38:30Without photosynthesis for half the year, why would you hold on to your photosynthesizing parts?
38:35The leaves?
38:38So maybe even fall colors are a remnant of high arctic forests.
38:43For me, it's hard to stop imagining all those natural features of our environment all passed down from a hotter past when forests could grow in the Arctic.
39:05This big idea only really crystallized in my mind in the years after the brain injury.
39:16That in so many ways, the last forests of the high arctic were kind of like a garden of Eden.
39:21The cradle of our boreal forest ecosystem today.
39:26I made a career looking for fossils.
39:35It took me four expeditions to find 30 fragments of a camel leg bone.
39:41Reconstructing the Pliocene Arctic is slow, slow work.
39:45And I don't work as fast as I used to.
39:49But our tools for understanding the past are changing.
39:54It's not just fossil bones we're hunting for anymore.
39:56Okay, this is really good. It's worth the whole trip.
40:02Today, I have colleagues who can recover molecules of ancient DNA from the dirt.
40:08They're finding things we only dreamed of.
40:12What we're finding here is frozen sediments, right?
40:16That are four million years old, potentially even five million years old.
40:21If we can retrieve the DNA sequences, it will give us an idea of the entire ecosystem from before
40:28the last ice age, that far back in time. Everything from bacterias, you know, fungi,
40:35plants, animals. The first glimpse of that world from a molecular perspective,
40:41it would be amazing. It would be historical.
40:45This is the next frontier.
40:50The time before the ice age may seem very far away, but that's just an illusion.
40:58The Arctic forests of the Pliocene are coming back.
41:02This barren Arctic tundra, it's just a phase.
41:06Seriously, now we have more than 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere.
41:12It has never been that high while humans have been on Earth.
41:16But if you go further back in time, there you had naturally those levels of carbon in the atmosphere.
41:23And guess what?
41:24This was during the Pliocene, right?
41:27Three million years ago.
41:28Exactly the period we're looking at here.
41:32So, this lost world that has fascinated me all of my life isn't just a distant past.
41:40It's a vision of the future. We need to ask, is this a world where we could survive?
41:48I think the surprise has been that I function a lot better when it's really cold.
41:54So, when I'm on the edge of hypothermia and my speech is slightly slurred,
42:00I'm actually feeling a lot better.
42:02And the cold somehow is removing some of my headache issues.
42:06Cognitively, that's still a challenge.
42:08But physically, super thrilled that I can actually walk around.
42:15For the last 10 years, I've been using my brain to figure out my life.
42:21I used to think the past was complicated.
42:24While living in the present with a brain injury, that's a way bigger puzzle.
42:30The brain I started with, I'm probably never getting it back.
42:35But it's better than I thought it would be.
42:38I can still do science, just differently.
42:42Oh my god, look at that.
42:45There's something bigger here.
42:47It has a tooth on it.
42:50Yes, this is really great.
42:52Even if we don't have all the teeth, I think we should be able to tell what this is.
42:57Holy cow.
42:59That's really nice.
43:01Five, six fragments and a mandible.
43:05Right on.
43:06Good day.
43:10I've had to adapt.
43:12And isn't that what nature teaches us?
43:14That nothing stays the same?
43:16Tomorrow is never like yesterday.
43:18Life adapts.
43:19Of all people, a paleontologist should know that.
43:23What?
43:37It's just a thing.
43:41I think it's a bit of a moment.
43:44We've just been around that long.
43:46I think it's a bit of a i-
43:47I think it's a bit of a bit of a bit.
43:48Yeah, it's a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit.
43:50I feel like it's not a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit.
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