The author looking at fossils and whatnot. Photos by Derek Mead
I just finished the first year of my PhD. People often ask, “When will you be finished?” An academic PhD isn’t like a lot of other degrees because the finish line is a fuzzy boundary existing somewhere off in that distant horizon. It wll be done when it is done. I have friends who could have been out the door in four short years, but things happen: research animals die, a one-of-a-kind machine breaks down, a baby is born.
So I don’t have a good answer for those folks. I have a plan that could be finished in a few years, but right now I don’t know how that plan is going to go. I’ve survived that first year, and even having finished two Bachelors of Science and a Masters of Science I can still say this was one of the craziest, busiest, and most challenging academic terms of my career.
I’ve had people refer to me as just a “college student” or some variant on that, and rather than be offended (I see my position much more as a job than as a student), I figured it might be better to share what it's actually like. I expect there to be significant shifts in where my time and energy get focused from year to year, so here’s a, more or less, average day for a first year paleontology PhD student.
One major change I’ve noticed going from the end of a masters to the beginning of a PhD is the shift away from doing research for a bit. At the end of my masters, all my time in the lab was done, and I was focused on writing up the thesis for approval by my committee. Entering a PhD, I was back to taking classes and more or less thinking about research for the year. It’s not uncommon for a first year PhD student to spend their first year developing ideas for their eventual dissertation research. This was especially true for someone like me who switched universities, even though I didn’t necessarily switch my research focus.
My Master's thesis focused on the dental microwear texture of xenarthrans, a group of mammals including sloths, armadillos, anteaters, and their extinct relatives such as giant ground sloths and armored glyptodonts the size of a VW Beetle. Dental microwear is a technique that looks at the microscopic surface of the part of a tooth that actively contact food being chewed, and the texture of that surface can tell researchers something about the food that was being eaten while the animal was alive.
Most mammals (such as the Smilodon above) have teeth covered in a layer of hard enamel. Enamel is typically around 95 percent mineral and only 5 percent organic, meaning it doesn’t decay as much as other tissues and thus yields a nice fossil. Xenarthrans, on the other hand, don’t have enamel on their teeth, only dentin, which is more organic than enamel and thus softer and more prone to post-mortem alteration (much like the sperm whale tooth I'm measuring with calipers in a photo below).
This meant that researchers couldn’t be sure if microwear of xenarthrans, either extant or extinct, was a reliable indicator of diet as seen in other mammals, and my Master’s thesis was all about testing that idea. The results of that work will be published later this month, and I’ll be able to say more then, but at least now you know there’s more to paleontology than big scary dinos. There are also big scary sloths.
It probably comes as no great shock, but much of my day is spent staring at a screen. My life is basically contained within my laptop. I have homework to complete, homework to grade, papers to read, correspondence to maintain, statistics to run, and maybe even some science to write.
As a teacher, I also have to work on assignments and put together labs. For paleontology students, this means getting their hands on as many samples as possible.
We have a lot of stuff in our collections here, so a big part of my week is hunting around for what I might want to use for a given class.
People often ask me if I spend a lot of time digging up and preparing fossils and the honest answer is that I don’t. Digging is fun, but it’s also very time consuming and doesn’t necessarily contribute to the type of science I focus on (paleoecology, i.e. more big picture than just one dig).
And preparatory work is a whole different skill that I simply don’t have and am by and large happy to leave to someone with the experience and the talent to make it happen. Also, we use sand boxes because you can gently prop up a fossil at almost any angle. Neat, right?
Beyond just learning basic morphology of extinct animals, we can also sometimes learn from their pathology. In this instance, it looks like this crocodile got in a fight that landed it with a sweet skull hole.
This is actually more in line with what I do. Once the fossils are dug up and prepped I come in and take some measurements. These measurements may be as simple as using my electronic calipers as you can see here, or may be as involved as looking at the texture of a tooth under a microscope or measuring the stable isotopic ratios from a piece of bone. All depends on the question you’re asking.
Because we have such a large collection, and there aren’t very many paleontologists at the university, my advisor suggests just going and walking around the cabinets every once in a while. I might stumble across something really cool, or just have an idea I wouldn’t have had otherwise. A lot of my training as a scientist is about how to focus on a specific question and design a project to answer it. However, it is important to not lose that fervent curiosity which led a lot of us into wanting to become scientists in the first place.
Getting a PhD is a lot of work. My friends who have been through it are keen to remind me that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Burnout is a real risk, so sometimes I need to just wander over to the public area of the museum and remind myself that this is my job, and that’s awesome. I still get excited looking at the remains of all this crazy life that I get to play with and study for a living. Top that off with the genuine excitement I get to see on the faces of kids when they come to visit and it’s hard not to feel reinvigorated.