Voyages

In this episode, we continue or exploration of sites in Texas' Hill Country that illustrate how fossils can reveal the behavior of extinct species. The geological setting of fossils can tell us a huge amount about how they interacted with their environemnts, as illustrated by a spectacular site in Waco. Then, we head up to the heart of the Hill Country to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs, one of the types of trace fossils that provide some of the most direct information about behavior.

The Hill Country of central Texas is rich in fossils from the age of dinosaurs to the Ice Ages, and these fossils have been especially valuable in reconstructing behavior in long-extinct animals. Why is this, and what tools are available to paleontologists to reconstruct long-dead animals as living, breathing organisms? Find out as we travel to Austin and the Hill Country on our Voyage Deep Into the Heart of Fossils!

Voyages is back for its second season! For our triumphant return, we're visiting a single destination: the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, home of the fossil that has occupied much of my time over the last few months. We'll explore the evolutionary story it tells, I'll pull back the curtain on how we undertsand that story, and we'll celebrate the role museums play in making sense of the world around us.

Ninteenth Century France was a political powderkeg, a landscape of radical revolutions and imperial power-grabs. Its art was no less volatile, and while we often think of modernism as beginning with the Impressionists late in the century, the seeds for this artistic revolution were sown decades earlier, when a generation of artists left Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau. In this episode, we visit this forest to find out how it inspired the painters who would upend centuries of landscape painting tradition, the palace that exemplifies everything they were rebelling against, and the town that would give this movement its name.

The identification and naming of new species may not be the most glamorous field of biology, but every species' name tells a story about that species itself and baout the person that named it. In this episode we head to New England to explore the stories behind dinosaur names and why they're important. We start with one of the most famous of all dinosaurs in Yale's Peabody Museum, then head upstream with paleontologist Tara Lepore where two smaller and lesser known dinosaurs that recently went head-to head to be named Massachusetts' state dinosaur.

In the final episode of this series, we journey to the most diverse of all Northwest forests, those of the Klamath & Siskiyou Mountains along the Oregon-California border. We explore how climate and geology combine to generate this richness, as well as how human activity has put it at risk. Despite how complex these forests are, we have tools at our disposal for predicting their future and for protecting them, for the good of both wildlife and us.

The dense rainforests of the Oregon Coast Range, Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and British Columbia's Vancouver Island are an ideal habitat for western red cedar. The abundance of this conifer, along with its resistance to decay, softness, and ability to bend and fold, have made it one of the most important raw materials for Northwest Coast native art. In this episode, we explore the forests of the Pacific coast as well as the complex and evolving artistic style that grew up among them as we travel to the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.