- [Narrator] Live from your public media studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts," a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts."

And now Erika Funke.

(light upbeat music) - Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts," where we'll turn back the hands of time.

Turn back, turn back the hands of time.

Sarah Scinto starts us on our trek.

(soft dramatic music) - [Sarah] One of the earliest films to feature dinosaurs is 1925's "The Lost World," a silent film adapted from a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps better known as the creator of "Sherlock Holmes."

"The Lost World" includes, among others, a brontosaurus, a triceratops and a tyrannosaurus.

Arthur Conan Doyle may have been inspired by Jules Verne, who included prehistoric fish and mastodons in his 1864 novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth."

"The Lost World" is also the title used by author Michael Crichton in 1995 for the sequel to "Jurassic Park," one of the most popular movie franchises of all time.

Movies like "Jurassic Park" and its sequels have inspired many to learn more about dinosaurs and fossils, and for some to pursue a career in paleontology.

The discoveries scientists make about the varieties and structure of dinosaurs result in more accurate portrayals, in everything from movies to museums, improving the connection between science and stories.

For "Keystone Edition Arts," I'm Sarah Scinto, WVIA News.

- Many sci-fi stories from days of yore feature the occasional time machine.

Dr. Frank Varriale's time machine is an electron microscope.

- [Frank] Except for birds, we are dealing with a group of animals that are entirely extinct from the face of the earth.

It's that characteristic that all humans have had with almost anything, it's the mystery.

And you can't actually see the behavior in these animals 'cause they're extinct, or we can't observe them anymore.

So we need to approach this from unique angles, like what evidence is still there in the animal that will give me a hint or a window into the behavior of the animal when it was still alive.

And in my case, I need to look at the teeth, but not only do I need to look at the teeth, I need to look at them by using a scanning electron microscope.

I have a specimen of the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus.

Here's one of the teeth.

And it's turned on its side, so the apex of the tooth is here, the bottom of the tooth would be here.

And what we're seeing is this nice shiny surface here is the wear facet.

This is the part of the tooth that's been worn by abrasion with food and other material.

And if we zoom in here, you see a bunch of scratches in here.

Occasionally, there's some various pits.

If you look closely, there's two grains.

There's almost a direction of scratches that is dominant in this direction, and then there's maybe a 20, 35 degree offset.

And then there's a grain of scratches that is going in this opposite direction.

What you're witnessing here is the scratches that were made on the surface of this animal's tooth at nearly its last meal.

I immediately saw the dental micro wear that indicated that it was chewing in a semi-circular fashion.

It wasn't just chewing in this direction where the jaw was coming up and down like a scissor.

It was coming up, and then it was also going backwards.

Wow, this group of dinosaurs is more complex in their chewing behavior than we thought they were.

And you have almost like a eureka moment and you realize you're discovering something for the first time, even if it's as small as that in just one animal, that no one's ever said before.

And this just adds to the story.

My avenue of research is just one technique that is being used to try to coax out of dinosaurs and many other extinct animals what was that creature like when it was alive.

And it's exciting to find that out.

It's exciting to deduce how these animals lived when they are such mysterious things.

- Dr. Varriale poses a question that we'll all consider with our guests.

What were these mysterious creatures like when they were alive?

We welcome Dr. Frank Varriale, an associate professor in the Biology Department at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, Dr. Mateusz Wosik, who's paleontologist and assistant professor of biology at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, Dr. Lalaine Little, Director of the Pauly Friedman Art Gallery, also at Misericordia University, and Mark Schultz, award-winning comic book artist, illustrator and author known for "Xenozoic Tales."

We have a chance to talk with you in a round robin way to begin.

How did dinosaurs first enter your imagination, Frank?

- One of the things that you showed is a picture of Godzilla that I have on one of my specimen cabinets, and "Godzilla" and "The Land of the Lost," the Sid and Marty Krofft show "Land of the Lost" is my earliest exposure to dinosaurs, and that's where I fell in love with them.

- [Erika] Filmic, huh?

- [Frank] Yes.

- Yeah, yeah.

Mat.

- [Mat] For me, it probably would've been "Jurassic Park," but I grew into it actually academically.

I grew out of that as most kids usually do past those first few years of life.

And then in college, I had the opportunity to do research.

I went to Elmhurst University and I studied under Merrilee Guenther during my undergrad.

And so I got a chance to do that, and it blossomed from that point on.

- That was it.

Again, that mystery.

- It got me hooked.

- Laine.

- My first job was at the Museum of Natural Science in Houston.

So on my way to my tiny little office in the education department, I had to walk underneath the ribs of a gigantic, I think it was a brontosaurus dinosaur.

- So that was your start?

- Yes.

- Yeah, yeah.

And Mark, how about you?

- Mine was comic books in the early '60s when I was a kid, and the original "King Kong," the 1933 "King Kong," which influenced an entire, several generations of people my age before the "Jurassic Parks" came out.

- Three of us from WVIA, Mark, spent time this past week, we were in the Fossil Gallery at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, and we were there with Charles R. Knight and his work, of course.

And I wondered if you could tell us something about this fellow, because you did the illustrations for his autobiography, yes?

- [Mark] Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Charles Knight was the, was the man who really defined the look of dinosaurs, again, throughout the early decades of the 20th century.

And he was a bit ahead of his time in that he, again, he had experience as an animist studying extinct animals.

And he understood that a lot of the common thinking of the time was that dinosaurs were reptilian.

They dragged their tails.

They walked close to the ground and were very sluggish.

It didn't add up to him, and his depictions of dinosaurs were very active creatures, which came to be as we understand now, it seems more like the true story.

But as someone like myself who's a storyteller, that's exciting to have a creature that size that's moving and presents some sort of a danger.

(both laughing) - And we'll ask you about how you've rendered them, Mark.

But I wanted to ask you, Mat.

As a paleo artist, Knight was working with the science of his time, and things have happened, research has taken place.

You two among them are furthering what we understand.

What role does the imagination, your imagination play in the work you do?

- [Mat] I oftentimes say that I got a PhD in problem solving, not in biology, actually.

Because to do science, you really have to find ways to identify different resources and tools to study the different types of questions that you're trying to ask.

And so one of the things that we can usually do with dinosaur fossils is oftentimes people will look at the outside of the bone, and so what we call the superficial morphology, just observing the features, if there's a spike here or if there's a certain scar mark, whatever it might be.

I look actually at the inside of the bones.

And so I actually get to cut up the dinosaur bones, put them onto plexiglass slides like I have here that I brought with me.

And then I look at that underneath a microscope.

And so I utilize different tools that normally you would see perhaps in a hospital setting.

And I then study essentially the age of that individual at death, the internal bone microstructure, so that way I can get an idea on the animal's physiology, and perhaps their metabolism as well.

So a completely different way to study that than normally you would, and I would be limited only to the outside, but I actually get to look in.

- We were excited because the reason you are all at this table was because of a collaboration between you, as a paleontologist, and you Laine, as an art historian.

There was a fascinating show at the Pauly Friedman Gallery, and I wanted to ask you about how it came about, Laine, and how you think, if we look at an image, how you think it serves us to perceive such a slice with an aesthetic viewpoint.

- [Lalaine] Sure.

So one of the things that we try to do as an academic art gallery is to make sure that the public knows that all of the research that our research scientists do, all of the benefits of our academic education should belong to the public, should belong to the community.

And that was one of the things that we wanted to do is make this research accessible and understandable to a large swath of people.

If you're an art person or if you're a science person, you can go and enjoy both aspects, trigger both sides of your brain.

- [Erika] And we, you and I, the three of us had talked about the bone scan there.

It has a sense of a cosmic feel.

It looks like they're little stars.

Doesn't it look like a universe, or a black hole, or something?

- [Lalaine] Absolutely, and it's one of those decisions.

Does it need to be on its side?

Does it need to be like an egg?

And those are the kinds of decisions that Mat and I talked about when we were deciding which works to show and how to show them, how to frame them so that they make the most sense, both aesthetically and as a scientist.

- [Erika] And what is that we just saw?

- [Mat] So ultimately, what you're actually looking at is a transverse cross section taken out of a shin bone called the tibia of a duck-billed dinosaur.

And so this is probably about a two to three-year-old individual.

And the way I can actually tell that is that in the same thing that you see in the cross sections of trees that have been cut down, you'll see these rings.

And if you count those rings, you get the idea of how old that individual tree was when it was cut down.

But we can do the same thing in animal bones.

And so in that image, you saw that there was a couple rings there.

So if you're able to count those out, that's about how old that individual was when it died.

- Wow, fascinating.

And the wonderful thing is that there's a sense of beauty there I think.

We would think about proportion, wouldn't we?

And a kind of curvature, but the sense that we're drawn in to what's in that blackness there.

Frank, I think of all the dinosaur teeth.

Mark, you've done a lot of dinosaur teeth in your day.

Haven't you illustrated- - [Mark] Oh my gosh, not easy to do.

- Tell us about the role of imagination.

You gave us a sense that you had an aha moment, you had these aha moments.

But what about, as you're going along and doing your work and you're thinking about the "King Kong" you saw, what role does the imagination play in your work?

- Similar to what Mateusz has suggested is that we're trained to think.

And so our childhood imagination gets co-opted and used to generate these ideas that we're gonna test, right?

We want to create a hypothesis and test that hypothesis.

And so when I was looking at dental micro wear in a different dinosaur than some of the ones you see here, a thing called Leptoceratops that's a little bit smaller than this Styracosaurus, it had curved micro wear on its lower teeth.

And so my mind started to imagine scenarios of jaw action in my mind space, right?

You get this mechanical model in your mind of how this animal could potentially move its jaws.

And so I started to generate hypotheses of what the dental micro wear should look like on the upper teeth, based on what I was seeing on the lower teeth.

And then as I progressed through my sample, I finally got to the upper teeth, and they fit one of the hypotheses that I had generated.

And I had my little eureka moment, my aha moment at that point in time.

And that's when I realized I'm seeing something and understanding something that no one has said or understood about these animals before.

- That is giving chills a little bit.

- It does, yeah, eureka moment.

Your hair on the back of your neck stands up.

- [Erika] We haven't mentioned the word, probably haven't said the word extinction yet, but we will before the end of the show.

And Mark, I wanted to ask you, you have created a whole, what, a post-apocalyptic world, and you have dinosaurs and you have Cadillac cars and you have adventurers.

(laughs) Tell us how it was and what does it mean to bring Cadillacs together with dinosaurs?

Where did that in your imagination come from?

- Well, watching '50s science fiction movies largely.

And Cadillacs kind of are dinosaurs, or at least they were back when I started the series.

Again, it's the influence of the stories I read as a kid and the movies I saw, authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and I mentioned "Kong" and just... You just let things stew in your mind over time, kind of like Frank said, and sooner or later something comes out.

I had time, I had four years to let this gestate before I actually submitted it to a publisher.

So you throw out things that aren't working, you're bringing new things, and of course, I'm always following what scientists like these two guys are doing and finding bits and pieces that I can incorporate in my work to try to give it...

I mean, I'm an entertainer.

These are fantasies, but I wanna put a veneer of reality in there.

And if I can do that, it helps the audience invest in the story if they think that I know a little more than they know.

It just takes a little bit.

But it's fascinating what these men do, and I take that and I incorporate that, bits and pieces of that.

- And so would that have to do with rendering dinosaurs, a brontosaurus say, as you understand that they understand it?

- [Mark] Well, I will take what works dramatically for my story because again, these are fantasies.

Sometimes I do work with scientists to try to, to get their vision across to an audience, to a broad audience.

And that's a different job.

I'm trying to get the vision of another person correct that is relatively accurate.

What I do in my stories is just taking things from my own uses and picking and choosing, if it helps to tell a dramatic story.

- Is there a moral to the story?

Are we to think about, when we see your post-apocalyptic world, are we to think, ooh, we could be there too?

- [Mark] Well, I hope so.

(chuckles) That's the ultimate goal and want readers to invest in what they're doing, so they can suppose that this is something that they can see themselves, something they would enjoy being part of.

Yeah, yeah.

- That's good.

And so where do we stand on cautionary tales?

I did read that there was in, I think it was in one of the, maybe Smithsonian, an article on Charles R. Knight, the fellow who was a pioneer in showing us what he thought and the science of his time thought that these creatures looked like.

But one of the authors felt that maybe there was something of a feeling on his part, even though he was early in the game, that the extinction is something that we should be concerned about.

I don't know whether... Did that come out in the autobiography at all?

Do you know?

Did you pick that up on Charles Knight, what he was concerned about?

- Oh, absolutely, yeah.

He had a big picture notion in his mind of what happens to different species.

And yes, I believe so, yeah.

- [Erika] And so what do we... What you as working paleontologists who are...

There's a bone there.

That's quite amazing.

And we'll talk about that and the slices and the teeth.

What do we learn from your work when it comes to the larger social cultural world we live in?

Are there things?

- Absolutely.

Paleontology in general can inform a large swath of our understanding of the history of climate and climate change on the surface of the Earth, right?

You're looking at the past history of Earth as it projects into the future and understanding changes.

Throughout the Mesozoic era, there was a period in time where the carbon dioxide was much higher during the Mesozoic and there was an ocean in the middle of the United States of America.

And climate change, modern climate change can be understood with the lens of past history.

It's important to understand the past and use that to project into the future about what are, what are the changes that are occurring now and what will they express on the surface of the Earth.

- And Mateusz.

- And so we always have to remember that we have to be able to walk before we can run, right?

So studying the aspect of what Frank just mentioned and studying the past is really the key to being able to understand the future.

For someone that, for instance, that's studying, perhaps trying to identify trends in the stock market even, you'll look at the past year's worth of trends to be able to then predict whatever might be happening in the next few months or next year.

That's exactly what we're doing, but at a much larger time scale.

And so to actually understand how the planet might change going into the future, we really have to look at that past component.

- Laine, what did you take away from working with your colleague as an art historian?

You were trying to, again, help us as a community understand what goes on at Misericordia University, but you with your eye and your sense of Picasso and the Western and Eastern tradition of visual arts.

- One of the things I was trying to get at was that there is a purpose and a function for every visual element, and that's what I teach in art history.

And to have these in photographic form and to see that, although Frank's teeth had its own wall, and they looked like the surface of the moon, there was a purpose to every divot, every piece of information that was caught in those teeth.

And it was yet high contrast, interesting composition, these pieces.

And then with Mateusz's work, we were looking at, he could point at the photograph and say, "This is where the egg hatched" just by looking at that and looking at the way that, that there's order and that there is a color code, that there is a line that marks these, these moments in this animal's life.

It was really incredible.

- [Erika] That's wonderful.

Now we have over my left shoulder, and it isn't every day that we have a dinosaur bone over our left shoulders.

So tell us what it is.

And you prepared it.

- I did, yeah.

So this is actually a tibia, which is a lower shin bone of a duck-bill dinosaur called Monquirasaurus.

We have one of these little toys here on our table here.

And oftentimes, kids' toys are the perfect representation of what we're trying to get across.

And so what I actually did there is I took out the slice, but to be able to do that, I did want to recast the actual complete fossil that I took out, almost like a hockey puck, and put that back in, right?

So that's part of this process of actually taking the material out.

And some people refer to it as destructive sampling.

I actually like to refer to it as consumptive analysis.

I know it's a different spin on words, kind of wordsmithing there.

But it's very similar to the idea of if you're spending a lot of time making your own dinner, you're not going to just then serve your plate, and then on your way over to, let's say watching TV while you're eating, you're just gonna dump that plate with all the food in the garbage.

You're gonna eat it.

You're gonna transform that food into energy in your body.

So you're essentially gonna recycle it.

That's essentially what I'm doing here as well, too.

So I'm tapping into the inside bone microstructure of the bone itself, so that way I can get idea on the different types of questions that I'm trying to test.

- [Erika] Wow, and the wonderful thing about what we have before us is the toys and another one, another aspect.

Now this tooth.

- [Frank] Yes, Triceratops.

- Tell us what that is.

- [Frank] So when dinosaurs like a relative of triceratops, styracosaurs chew their food, the lower teeth insert up inside the upper teeth.

So unfortunately I don't have an upper tooth, but if you imagine my hand as an upper tooth, this tooth would come and slide up inside of it.

And you can see that there's a flat surface here, and that's the occlusal surface that's formed by wear of the upper teeth against the lower teeth.

And one of the things that's been found by various other researchers is that the enamel and the dentine, there's two types of dentine and enamel, and it makes a self sharpening surface that allows the organism to continue to sharpen its teeth as it chewed its food.

And then on that flat surface would be the micro wear.

- Whew, whew.

- And that's information I could use to put into a story.

- Ah, isn't that wonderful?

- Learned something there.

- Matter of fact, several years ago, I was asked by an individual who was making a video game about Leptoceratops because they wanted to get the chewing accurate of Leptoceratops because they were gonna show it feeding in the video game.

- Nice.

- [Erika] See, it's... And the question I think probably on everybody's mind is, do we have any critters in our area?

Can you do your research?

Either of you here, have you been?

Can you go out and find some things?

- For dinosaurs specifically, no.

There's very few formations in Pennsylvania that preserve dinosaur material, and most of those are footprints, and they're a little bit further south near Allentown.

- [Erika] Okay, and you work sometimes with little teeny dinosaurs, don't you?

- [Mat] I do, yeah.

So one of the research projects that I'm studying is, is the very beginning of the life of dinosaurs.

Not only their individual life, but also the origin of dinosaurs as well, too.

So from two different perspectives.

But I'll look at, we always think that dinosaurs are these massive animals and we forget that actually many of them were very small as well, too.

But they also have to grow up at some point.

So some of these animals, like the bone that I brought here with me today, they would've reached sizes about one and a half times the size of an African elephant, about 15,000 pounds.

But they started off within the size of about a softball size egg.

And in terms of their growth rate, they would actually grow at about two to three times the rate of an African elephant.

An African elephant's baby is born at about the size of a kid's bicycle, and it weighs maybe about 200 pounds.

A duck-bill dinosaur egg would hatch and would be about the size of maybe, maybe like a small kitten or a puppy and weigh a couple pounds, but it would grow up to being much larger than an African elephant in only seven years versus 20.

So studying these concepts of how fast these animals grew is really what's fascinated me throughout life.

- Wow.

Another lightning round.

Why are we fascinated with dinosaurs, and not from a professional standpoint, Frank?

- Why are we... We're fascinated by them because they are a world that doesn't exist anymore.

And they're monstrous, right?

That childhood fascination with some creature that's existed that you can't see in your everyday life, that we have to deduce and figure out what it looked like and how it behaved.

- And that's your job, artist, Mark, right Mark?

Share with us what you think.

- Well, I say that they're dragons that really existed.

We know they were giant.

Kids know they really existed.

- [Erika] Well, this is not a place to stop, but we want to thank you all, Frank, Mateusz, Laine, Mark for being with us, and you for watching.

For more information on the topic, including links to our guests and resources, please visit wvia.orgkeystone/keystone and click on "Keystone Edition Arts."

And remember, you can watch this episode or any previous episode on demand anytime online or on WVIA's app.

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