Trevor Valle is a paleontologist who helps protect fossils found on job sites. He tells us about some of the things he finds on a job site, from mammoth bones to whale bones to dinosaur bones, and how to keep them safe from being digged up by a 40-ton excavator. He also talks about the time he accidentally found a 5-million-year-old whale, and the guy who got mad at him for it. And how he keeps the fossils safe from the bulldozer digging in the first place, even though they're 5 million years old and weigh a ton more than a ton, because he's a guy who likes to talk about stuff that's cool and cool things, like dinosaurs and rocks and stuff like that. And he's good at it too, which is probably why he's here on this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience! Also, if you don't know who he is, then you're in for a real treat, because this episode is a must listen. Joe Rogans Experience, by day, is a podcast by night, all day, by night. Enjoy! -Joe Rogan and Friends Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. by Nordgroove. Artwork by Jeff Kaale. Copyright 2019 by Dee McDonnell. Used w/ permission. All rights reserved. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. All credit given to any other works mentioned in the episode goes to original artists, unless otherwise stated or paid for by third parties. If you have a product credit, we are working with us, we do not claim permission to use their music, credit and credit in the music is given to a third party producer or other third party, we have no other credit in any other person s credit or credit given credit given out in the song used in the piece of music used by us. Thank you for any other credit given away, credit is in any way, other than that which is given out, other people s credit is credit given, other wise received, etc etc., etc. etc. This episode was produced and produced by a good work done, etc. Thank you to my good work, etc.. and thank you for all the support and support is appreciated. -A very special thanks goes out to:
00:00:27.000Trevor's a paleontologist, and explain to me the job site thing.
00:00:31.000When someone's digging, they need a paleontologist on site in certain places?
00:00:37.000Well, it all depends on really where you are.
00:00:41.000So here in the state of California, we have a law called CEQA. It was started in 1970. And that mandates that any archaeological or paleontological stuff, so like dead bodies of early Californians or glassware all the way up to woolly mammoth bones,
00:01:00.000or not woolly mammoth, but mammoth bones, saber-toothed cats, stuff like that, or even older...
00:01:08.000So my job right now, I work for a company called SWCA, Environmental Consultants.
00:01:15.000We go out and we make sure that the glassware and the fossils and the bones and all that, they get found by 40-ton excavation machines when they're building new hotels in downtown.
00:02:48.000We were finding shark's teeth and stuff like that hanging around, and the owner of the company was the owner of the construction company, I forgot what their name is, supervisor, the general contractor.
00:03:05.000He's like, oh, you're just finding teeth.
00:03:07.000I'm like, well, you know where you find really big shark teeth, you occasionally find their food, and they ate whales.
00:03:12.000He's like, oh, you won't about three weeks later.
00:04:21.000So, like, in the 1860s, when Darwin released Origin of the Species, his big book on evolution, he was saying, oh, you know, we don't have that many things in the fossil record because paleontology was still new.
00:06:06.000So when you find like a giant ribcage of a whale, how do you know when to stop looking?
00:06:11.000How do you know like we found like five or six bones?
00:06:14.000How do you know I think we got it all?
00:06:15.000When the bones run out we stop and then we dig underneath but sometimes when we dig underneath to like pop what we think is everything out we find more and then we have to go down and then one jacket can turn into five.
00:06:56.000I mean, at that, we limit it to foot traffic only, and we're the first ones in and the last ones out during the day, because we need to make sure everyone else is gone so nothing happens to the...
00:07:09.000What's like the most adamant that anybody's ever gotten with you about keeping a job site open?
00:07:16.000The other week, I was working an archaeological site, and a guy yelled at me because I was trying to salvage an 1800 Sears catalog that was buried in sand.
00:07:26.000And, yeah, he was getting kind of savage with me.
00:07:29.000He was like, you're stopping my guys for a fucking piece of trash!
00:07:33.000I'm like, I'm sorry, man, this is a dateable catalog.
00:07:37.000That has hand-illustrated things in it, and it's necessary.
00:08:12.000I've always been fascinated by the idea of a fossil because when we started learning in school about the fossil record and started learning about fossils and now you look at something and it's actually not even the bone anymore.
00:08:24.000It's like the minerals have replaced the bone.
00:08:26.000Like I had a conversation with a friend of mine once about that.
00:10:01.000Petrified wood is the weirdest shit ever.
00:10:03.000But the, let me tell you, man, I used to be that kind of paleontologist and then I started working at the tar pits and then I went to Siberia with these woolly mammoths.
00:11:50.000He had one example of a woolly mammoth that died almost instantly.
00:11:56.000And he believes that the impact of some sort of a large body killed this thing.
00:12:03.000Not just killed it, but broke its back.
00:12:06.000Like, upon impact, like, so just some massive impact, like, you know, X amount, thousands of years ago, they think like 12 plus thousand years ago.
00:12:30.000I would think something falling from space and then falling from the sky at terminal velocity, if it's like a big rock, would do more than just break something's back.
00:12:39.000Well, it depends on, I guess, how close it is to the impact.
00:12:41.000Obviously, it just fucking killed everything really close to it.
00:15:05.000And they say that, like, saber-toothed cats and even, you know, big cats that are alive today, their teeth can actually sense, like, where the jugular is.
00:15:15.000Their teeth can, like, as they sink in, they can feel heartbeats through their teeth.
00:15:42.000Theirs may have a larger nerve ending that I'm not quite sure on cat tooth anatomy, but they may have just a larger nerve ending that allows them to feel easier.
00:15:53.000So did you guys stumble upon any saber-toothed cats?
00:16:50.000Um, he wasn't stuck that long, probably about 10 minutes, but, uh, um, so in the show you'll see, uh, Tim King, he's, uh, like my co-host, like co-adventurer buddy.
00:17:00.000Um, we have to get down this ice cliff and, and it's a huge ice cliff.
00:17:06.000It's not like, you know, Oh, we're kind of going down from like the top of, you know, the top of Pierce college down to the street.
00:17:54.000I mean, we were with a whole film crew, but for narrative's sake, it was our expedition.
00:18:04.000He was getting me into Siberia, and I was going to do biopsies and discover mammoths and things like that.
00:18:11.000So, like, going into an ice cave, you think, oh no, I've got this great flashlight, it's in a Ziploc bag, it's this big bank of LEDs, I've got a little glow thing, I've got a camera that can see in the dark, but no, light goes out and you kind of panic a little.
00:20:19.000When you think, being a paleontologist, and you think about the fossil record, how many holes are there in it from animals that just simply did not get fossilized?
00:21:02.000There's still some people that try to dispute that, but apparently they've been discredited.
00:21:06.000There was a guy who was trying to say that they were actually some form of Down syndrome children, and that's what accounted for the deviation.
00:21:14.000But it seems like the consensus is, no, you're dealing with a totally different species.
00:21:39.000If you found a heavy, brown, Neanderthal-looking motherfucker in there, you know?
00:21:43.000That would rewrite history, and that would be cool to be part of it, but I'm actually not legally allowed to Because I'm a paleontologist, not an archaeologist.
00:21:53.000If I come across human remains, I stop the entire project.
00:21:58.000I call the coroner and my boss, and then a certified archaeologist comes out.
00:22:03.000Being an archaeologist and dealing with people and tribal remains and all that in California, very, very specific.
00:22:10.000I know in Mexico City, they're constantly digging for an apartment building or something like that, and they find some huge pyramid structure that's been covered in dirt for thousands of years that nobody knew existed.
00:22:22.000My co-host, Tim, he's a Mesoamerican archaeologist.
00:23:23.000We have a 55-million-year-old timeline just of horse evolution alone from when they used to be dog-sized, tiny little horse-like animals with multiple toes on their feet.
00:23:39.000All the way up to your modern horse that's like huge single hoof.
00:23:44.000We have every transitional stage for 55 million years.
00:24:35.000I am only going to breed white horses.
00:24:38.000When you first started studying paleontology and you got into this subject, the subject of animals being someone actually actively changing the way an animal...
00:24:50.000That's got to be a very bizarre thing to try to conceptualize that someone took, say, a wolf...
00:25:40.000They came in closer for fire and for warmth, for food, for protection.
00:25:47.000So if you kind of think about it, we were giving scraps to these dogs and getting them to come closer.
00:25:53.000But they're like, hey, I'm going to hang out with these people because they have a fire, I have food, and I can bark and let them know when things are coming.
00:26:02.000So if you think about it, they actually domesticated us.
00:28:36.000You know, it's good stuff when you actually, when you take time to do the research.
00:28:41.000Things, you know, things just kind of pop out and it's kind of nice that way when you have, because we have the internet and all that, it's easy to do research but it's also very easy to get thrown astray with like,
00:28:57.000you know, I usually only read things that end in like.edu.org.
00:29:35.000But yeah, and like people are, I get that a lot because I go to Siberia.
00:29:39.000I, you know, with Mammoth Unearthed and I dig up a woolly mammoth carcass and I'm telling people about it and like occasionally I'll throw like a picture up on Twitter because we filmed it last year and it's just debuting on Sunday and And then people are like,
00:29:56.000oh, well, look, you found that animal.
00:31:25.000But he never even bothered doing the work to understand that we used to have different-looking fucking bananas within a written human record.
00:34:05.000Yeah, and there's this whole sequence in Mammoth on Earth where I'm hanging out with the Nanette people, drinking reindeer blood to sacrifice a reindeer to the ground so I can find a mammoth, because mammoths to them are bad juju.
00:34:24.000See, I'm a scientist, and it's like, I'm not a theist, I'm not an atheist, I'm not even agnostic, I'm just a scientist, I need data.
00:34:32.000So here I am with these people for a week, the Nanette, and I don't have my archaeologist anthropology buddy with me because he's on a different side of the planet at this point on the other side of Siberia still trying to find a mammoth.
00:35:33.000Yeah, so here I am surrounded by all these just very awesome, caring, hearty native people.
00:35:41.000And then they're, well, you know, we're going to have to sacrifice a reindeer in order for you to find a mammoth, because if you find one and pull any bones out, we have to, you know...
00:35:50.000So do you have to compensate them for their caribou when that happens?
00:36:26.000But the fact that I'm watching the animal get butchered in front of me...
00:36:32.000This wouldn't be some modern, weird, ritualistic thing with people wearing nitrile gloves and it's very clean.
00:36:39.000No, it's just like, nope, slit the animal open, go throw the organs over there, and then take this metal coffee cup with a blue and pink daisy print on it, dip it into the chest cavity, and pass it around.
00:38:53.000Even as somebody that works in what we call deep time, like, I'm working a site right now that can be, you know, 30, 40,000 years old, but I just came from a site that was 7, 8 million years old.
00:39:10.000I mean, it's like there was a land bridge between Asia and Alaska, the Bering Sea land bridge that these mammoths cruised over 40,000 years ago.
00:39:57.000It's like, you think, trying to think of what absolute zero is, you know, it's like what true nothingness, the concept of zero is very difficult.
00:40:05.000Because everyone's like, oh, you know, I take the coffee cup away, I have zero coffee.
00:40:19.000Well, I was listening to a lecture on the Big Bang where it was explaining the concept of a pre-Big Bang universe, which apparently they believe only existed for the amount of time that it takes light to get across a photon or across an atom.
00:40:48.000Yeah, and when this guy was trying to explain this, I rewound it and played it back and forth like fucking four times in a row, and I'm like, ooh, I'm too stupid.
00:41:54.000When you're finding these woolly mammoths, is this just luck, or does someone alert you to the fact that they found one, and then you go...
00:42:03.000We had to use kind of the scary bit, which is the Tusk Hunters themselves.
00:42:52.000But there are other people in the area that don't have a tusk permit that try and go and poach tusks because they can sell them on the black market.
00:43:01.000You have to have a permit to get a tusk.
00:43:04.000So if you're a guy and you live in Siberia and you're in your backyard and you're digging a hole and you find a tusk, you can't just take that tusk.
00:43:32.000But these people, since they go out, right when the snow starts to melt, right when the permafrost starts to get weaker, they go in and they drill in and dig into these cliff sides.
00:43:43.000They know where all of the big finds are first.
00:43:47.000So Tim and I had to get in well with this kind of weird gray hat semi-mob scene of Tusk Hunters.
00:43:58.000And here's like two American dudes walking in.
00:44:01.000You know, one's dressed as Indiana Jones, one's dressed as a biker, coming in going, hey, do you know where any mammoths are?
00:44:08.000And they're looking at us like, yeah, you're a wealthy American dude.
00:44:13.000We don't really want to tell you because you're going to take the tusks away, and this is our entire commodity.
00:44:18.000So we had to really be nice to them and really be very, very deferring because we heard a few times that some of these tusk bosses, the big guys kind of like Igor...
00:44:30.000There was a group that went in to poach him.
00:45:02.000It was something I was not prepared for.
00:45:07.000So how long does the politics of getting in with these people, how long does that take for them to trust you to the point where they're going to lead you to this stuff?
00:45:16.000Well, we would have people talk on our behalf for a couple days, and then we would go meet them.
00:47:06.000And people are like, oh, dude, I don't understand Russian.
00:47:11.000So I'm like, in a weird combination of Google Translate, Maps on my phone, and then starting to recognize how the letters work, I found a pharmacy.
00:49:29.000But we're the first, again, the first Westerners, because this had been found by a small group of people in this tiny little fishing village called Kazachie.
00:51:50.000What's your feeling on these people that want to clone something like this?
00:51:55.000Because this is a real issue that we're heading into in 2014, where we actually have the capability of doing something like this, where they can take...
00:52:05.000Some DNA from some sort of a living dinosaur or living elephant, rather, and figure out a way to create a mammoth.
00:53:58.000Couldn't we have an island called Paleolithic Park and have a bunch of cloned mammoths wandering around and we have a nice place where you could take your family and see?
00:55:09.000I want to be that cliche moment of Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park, like, falling out of the Jeep and, like, knocking his sunglasses off and going, like, holy crap, that's a brachiosaur.
00:55:21.000I want to see the T-Rex steal the goat from the rope.
00:56:04.000It's like it's the anniversary of Jesus riding the velociraptor from Galilee right now.
00:56:10.000It seems inevitable, though, that someone's going to do something along these lines.
00:56:14.000I agree with you that it's probably not ethical to clone a mammoth, but when you start collecting things like blood, you have real genetic tissue.
00:56:25.000If there was any blood left, we would.
00:56:31.000The same thing that happens to a mammoth is the same thing if I put myself in permafrost or anybody.
00:56:37.000It doesn't matter how fit you are, how adapted to the environment you are, anything like that.
00:56:44.000When a mammal cell freezes, all the liquid inside freezes and the ice crystals form and shatter the cell wall, leaking out all of the genetic material into this soup.
00:56:57.000So you need an intact cell with a complete nucleus in order to even begin thinking about cloning.
00:57:32.000It's like blood, like hemoglobin stained tissue and melted...
00:57:40.000The same thing that would happen if you put a steak in a deep freezer for a year and then take it out and let it sit on your counter for overnight.
00:58:38.000And at first it was all nice and solid and hard, and we drilled a couple holes through the tissue when it was hard in order to take core samples and look at muscle tissue.
00:58:48.000And then we noticed this goo, which is a combination of cellular material and water, you know, melting ice, mud, what's left of blood, and just growth starting to seep out of the holes.
00:59:40.000Bacteria and virae and all that, they're much hardier than a human cell is.
00:59:44.000I know that there's some strains of trichinosis that can survive a deep freeze.
00:59:50.000They say that some strains of trichinosis you can get from something that's been frozen for years.
00:59:57.000If you take a piece of meat from an animal that has trichinosis and freeze it for a couple years, thaw it out and cook it, if you don't cook it to 160 degrees, you can get trichinosis.
01:03:05.000East Hollywood, we're in this weird little...
01:03:08.000It's this bizarre place where we're not quite Los Feliz, we're not quite Silver Lake and Echo Park, and we're not quite Koreatown.
01:03:15.000You should just run out there and buy real estate for East Hollywood right now, just because the fact that you've said that it's kind of like this cool new spot, people are like, geez, good job.
01:06:19.000How much does it piss you off when you see those shows where they pretend that they have footage of a Megalodon?
01:06:25.000Have you seen that goofy shit where they actually have fake photos from World War II? I purposely don't watch them because then my blood sugar goes up and I probably end up doing a Twitter tirade and my girlfriend would get mad at me.
01:06:38.000Why would she get mad at you for a Twitter tirade?
01:08:52.000Yeah, but just keep it out of my science.
01:08:55.000I kind of feel like that's the last crazy gasp of this sort of science denial.
01:09:02.000I feel like this, what we're experiencing right now, is the last crazy gasp of it.
01:09:08.000We're in this incredible age of information, but I believe that even what we're experiencing right now will pale in comparison To the access to data that we'll have in just 20 or 30 years.
01:09:45.000Well, we can actually imprint something in your eyeball, and it's permanent, and you never have to worry about it breaking, and it's a simple procedure.
01:10:47.000I just read this fantastic article on the difference between belief, where somebody says, I believe the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or I believe it's 6,000 years old.
01:10:59.000One is, I believe factually that the Earth is 4.5 billion.
01:11:04.000It's like, I believe I have faith in it.
01:11:07.000We need to figure out how to keep those both within the public thought, both within the idea that it's perfectly okay to have these sorts of beliefs, but science doesn't impact religion.
01:11:22.000We are not out to kill God or anything like that.
01:11:59.000And they take comfort in some strange things.
01:12:02.000Like, I've had these conversations with people before where they defend religion by the fact that it gives people comfort and like, okay, that's all well and good, man.
01:12:11.000But, you know, well, think about how many great people have been Christian and great people have believed in religion.
01:12:21.000What we can measure, what we can prove, what we can show, what we've learned, if that is in any way impacted by these people who believe things, if it's hindered, retarded, slowed down, diverted in any way, then those belief systems are fucking dangerous because they're confusing and they get in the way of our understanding of As much as we know now,
01:14:06.000If it makes you a better person and it's another tool in your basket to use, whether it's digging up a mammoth or finding the cure for cancer, by all means, please use it.
01:16:13.000It's like theory is the biggest thing ever in science.
01:16:17.000I've actually heard intelligent people who are educated biologists being referred to as non-Darwinists or they believe in a non-Darwinian form of evolution.
01:16:29.000What other potential forms of evolution are there or are hypothesized?
01:17:09.000Scientific paper written by Jack Lester King, Thomas H. Dukes, published in 1969. It's credited along with Motu Kimura's 1968 paper, Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level.
01:17:25.000Proposing what became known as the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.
01:17:29.000Paper brings together a wide variety of evidence ranging from protein sequence comparisons to studies of the Treffer's mutator gene in E. coli.
01:18:27.000Yeah, and weirdly in this big grand synthesis of the world, she filmed a movie in my girlfriend's old home in Toronto, like in 94, and has a signed headshot.
01:18:42.000My girlfriend has a signed headshot from Mary Lou Henner.
01:19:58.0008pm on the National Geographic channel, Mammoth Unearthed.
01:20:02.000Listen, dude, I'm so happy there's people like you out there doing that.
01:20:04.000It's so cool to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor and just take in this information, knowledge, and I'm looking forward to your show.