advisor to both Yuong-Nam and Yoshi. Jacobs studies vertebrate fossils to determine what they tell us about the history of the Earth and the history of life. He tries to go to places where that record can be improved and where there’s a chance of making breakthrough discoveries and putting them into context so we can learn more about past life on the Earth.
‘The main reason I like doing [fieldwork] is because that’s where you find fossils, and palaeontologists have to have fossils,’ Jacobs says. ‘It’s very much like a different world being there, but it really was a different world at the time those dinosaurs lived, completely separated by a distance of time. And the only way that you bridge that gap in time, that huge barrier, is to understand what happens each step of the way for the last 70 million years. It’s uncanny when you think about it, that you even go to a place like [the Gobi Desert] and find the kinds of fossils you do, and ask the sorts of questions that you can ask, and understand it in terms of what the world is like today. But it’s those general principles that will allow us to really understand the Earth, and that’s important for humans to know.’
Dave Eberth, a Canadian sedimentologist and habitat specialist also joined the expedition. Eberth is a senior research scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and is basically a geologist who works with fossils. He is able to look at how rock formations came together millions of years ago, and then use his knowledge to create a bigger picture of what life was like at the time.
Currie met Eberth at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference. He was so impressed that he hired Eberth to work at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The two have a feisty rapport. Indeed, Eberth has often said he is sceptical of Currie’s theories about dinosaur behaviour. ‘Anything I say, he objects to; anything he says, I object to,’ Currie says. In their case it’s not totally contentious; it pushes each other to solidify their theories and move the scientific dialogue forward.
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