Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from
Latif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata. Full bio
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in digging up really old dead stuff.
I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things."
she's particularly interesting
in the remote Canadian tundra.
the Fyles Leaf Bed,
away from the magnetic north pole.
going to sound very exciting,
with your backpack and your GPS
anything that might be a fossil.
she noticed something.
it was just a splinter of wood,
people had found
prehistoric plant parts.
more closely and realizing
like this has tree rings.
of that exact same bone,
It fits in a small Ziploc bag.
together like a jigsaw puzzle.
into so many little tiny pieces,
and it's not looking good.
NR: Yeah, right?
to do it virtually.
when it all fits together.
that you had it right,
in the right way?
put it together a different way
No, we got this.
was a tibia, a leg bone,
to a cloven-hoofed mammal,
it was huge. It's a really big animal.
one of the fragments
and we nicked just the edge of it,
smell that comes from it.
in her gross anatomy lab:
structure to our bones.
like a natural freezer and preserved it.
Natalia was at a conference in Bristol,
of hers named Mike Buckley
that he called "collagen fingerprinting."
have slightly different structures
of an unknown bone,
to those of known species,
It's kind of important.
and modern-day mammal species.
the 3.5 million-year-old bone
out of the High Arctic
That's amazing -- if it's true.
a bunch of the fragments,
of the bone that they found,
larger than modern-day camels.
about nine feet tall,
of East and Central Asia.
you have in your brain
like the Middle East and the Sahara,
for those long desert treks,
tromp over sand dunes.
end up in the High Arctic?
for a long time, turns out,
originally American.
that camels have been around,
would they look different?
different body sizes.
functionally like giraffes.
early ones would have been really small,
would not recognize.
wouldn't that be great?
to seven million years ago,
went down to South America,
the Bering Land Bridge
of the last ice age,
how Natalia found one so far north.
the polar opposite of the Sahara.
warmer than it is now.
six-month-long winters
of straight darkness.
Saharan superstars
those arctic conditions?
think they have an answer.
make the camel so well-suited
get through the winter?
to tromp not over sand,
which, huge news to me,
get through that six-month-long winter,
it crossed over the land bridge
for a hot desert environment?
may be helpful to camels in hotter climes
to have that insulation
quintessential desert nature
of its High Arctic past.
to tell this story.
to marvel at evolutionary biology
of climate change.
different reason.
a lot of scientists are historians, too.
of our planet, of life on this planet.
of how the story goes.
and we stick with it,
It's totally adapted for that.
uncover some tiny bit of evidence.
everything you thought you knew.
finds this one shard
new and totally counterintuitive theory
Dr. Seuss-looking creature
the way I think of the camel.
this ridiculously niche creature
one specific environment,
that just happens to be in the Sahara,
one of these for you here.
from her regular gig
as a living reminder
is a dynamic one.
to readjust, to reimagine.
just one shard of bone away
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Latif Nasser - Radio researcherLatif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata.
Why you should listen
The history of science is "brimming with tales stranger than fiction," says Latif Nasser, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. A writer and researcher, Nasser is now the research director at Radiolab, a job that allows him to dive into archives, talk to interesting people and tell stories as a way to think about science and society.
Latif Nasser | Speaker | TED.com