PaleontOLogy > Meet the OLogist: Ross MacPhee

ROSS MACPHEE: I'm Ross MacPhee. I'm curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. And I am both a biologist, interested in life in general, and a paleontologist, which means that I'm interested in the progress of life over many millions of years. And I put those two together to try and understand how in particular mammals came to be what they are today.

I've done a lot of things in paleontology over my career, but currently I'm working at high latitudes in the polar regions, both north and south. In the northern area, I'm very interested in Ice Age extinctions. Everybody knows about mammoths and mastodons and saber tooth cats, but the question that follows is, well, what the heck happened to them? Why aren't they still around with us? This is a very compelling question nowadays, because there's so much interest in whether or not species are falling over in droves largely because of human impact. So what I'm interested in doing, in this case, is try to understand why all of these very large mammals, because they almost always were very large mammals, disappeared in the last several thousand years.

At the opposite end of the planet, it's very far back in time, it's about 45 million years in the area that I'm working. And here we're trying to understand what role the Antarctic might have played in how mammals got around on the planet. Now, if you look at a map today, it won't make any sense to you, because the Antarctica is quite a distance from, say, Africa or South America or Australia.

But if you go back 120 or more million years ago, you'll see that they formed one large mass, a supercontinent called Gondwana. And what's happened over time is that most of these other fragments of Gondwana have fled north, leaving Antarctica perched at the bottom of the world. You would never guess from the fact that it's a deep freeze now that it was a place where you could actually live and have a good life 45 million years ago. We know that there were tropical forests. We know that there was a fair abundance of mammals living there at that period of time.

But we are really interested in finding out how they connected up. How did these mammals get there? Were they there to begin with? Did they come out of Africa when Africa was connected?

In the case of Australian marsupials, it's quite clear that they had to have gotten their marsupials out of Antarctica. How did that happen? When did that happen? Questions like these are what we're after.

ROSS MACPHEE: There is no question. What I enjoy most is getting out into the field. When I'm at the museum, what I do is sit behind the monitor, and I write papers. I write grants. I answer phone calls. I do budgets, and all of these kinds of things that are very necessary. They're all part of the game.

But what attracted me to this line of work to begin with was the opportunity to go to fascinating places, to dig around in the dirt, and find interesting things. So there's no question in my mind that fieldwork is the optimal part of this job.

ROSS MACPHEE: My favorite part of the museum is where the skeletons are. Skeletons are interesting. That's the internal framework of the body. If you're a paleontologist, if you're interested in how mammals, for example, evolved, then this is all you are going to find. You're not going to find complete carcasses, you're going to find bones and teeth. So you have to have a pretty good understanding of how we're wired together. What's great about the American Museum is that it has probably more skeletons per square foot than almost any other museum on the planet. So there's a lot on display, and you can see and understand a lot about how animals are related, and how they functioned, and how they might have behaved as well on the basis of skeletal characteristics. What this means is it's the fourth floor, where all of the vertebrate paleontology dioramas and displays are there to be seen. And all of the big extinct mammals that I work with like mammoths and mastodons that are on display. That's my favorite place. 

ROSS MACPHEE: How I figured what I wanted to be is a long and complicated question so I'll just answer it by saying, I love dirt. And what dirt meant to me, always, was the opportunity to find lost things. Not only bones and teeth, but, of course, pirate treasure and any number of aspects of both the history of the planet and even human history, lost cities, that kind of thing.

So whether I was going to become an archaeologist, or a paleontologist, or a farmer, it kind of all depended. Now what made the difference, in my case, of course, was being able to go to university and learn about all of the interesting things you could do in earth science, broadly speaking. And that's how it eventually ended up that I became a paleontologist.

ROSS MACPHEE: You know, it's really hard to know what one would be if life hadn't worked out in the way that it has. And it's hard for me to say what I would have ended up being, because I've got a lot of different interests. I think if I had any talent, which I'm not sure that I do, I think it would be great to be somebody like Ridley Scott, the producer and director, who made wonderful movies like "Alien" and "Gladiator."

Failing that, I'm sure that, because I'm interested in lots of things, I would have found something interesting to do, something that was just as compelling as being a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. I think the whole deal is, you've got to be flexible. And you have to not only seize opportunities when they're offered up-- go out and make them for yourself. It's really the best way to live.

ROSS MACPHEE: My advice to kids who are really interested in science is to do actually a lot more than just science. If you want to play a big role in our nation's scientific community, it's actually very important that you understand a lot of things. Quite apart from, say, physics or maths or biology or any of the very narrow streams that one ends up going into. It's really good, for example, to understand a bit about history. It's even better to understand a lot about other cultures. It's great when you can do things that combine a whole bunch of areas into one.

For example, I would recommend to anybody who is interested in the outdoors to consider something like conservation biology and the importance of preserving our ecosystems. And this really brings in nearly every subject matter you can imagine, including politics and budgets and things that are so fundamental to our complicated way of life now. So, yeah, become a scientist, but be as broad as you can.

ROSS MACPHEE: I hear all the time people saying, science is such a bore. Well, is your electric guitar a bore? Wouldn't you like to figure out or know how it works? Is your iPod a bore? Don't you want to know something about how it works? And on and on from there, your video recorder.

All of these machines that make our lifestyle possible, were developed from somebody having a good idea. Who knew enough to make them and to adapt them to the kinds of needs that we have.

And it may be true that doing perms and comms and graphing different elements is of no interest whatsoever, but you've got to take the long view.

To use a sports analogy, which I like to do in this case, you should think about training your mind just as you would training your muscles. In other words, the payoff will not be immediate. It will take a lot of work, but at the end, you'll be great, as opposed to where you started from. If you just think that everything's got to come immediately, its all got to be interesting so on, you're going to be disappointed.

So instead, take this longer view and understand that the payoff will be enormous at the end.

ROSS MACPHEE: It's been a long time since I read kids' books so I did what anybody would do these days, which is, go to the web and see what's out there that sounds interesting. So I work in the Antarctic which means I'm very interested in the so-called heroic age of exploration when people like [? Shackleton ?] and Scott and so forth were down there exploring for the very first time, country lands that have never been trod by humans before.

And there was a great book that I saw that I downloaded and had a look at, it's called "The Ghost Memoirs of Robert Falcon Scott." He's the famous explorer who died in the Antarctic in 1912.

And here's the idea, it's sort of science fiction. There's a kid who's just surfing along in cyberspace and he accidentally stumbles over the cyber ghost of Robert Falcon Scott. And they start entering into an email correspondence and Scott tells the kid all about his life and what happened to him. Gives a lot of history of Antarctic exploration, which is certainly an easy way of learning [? it ?] if you have any kind of interest in that kind of thing.

And they just developed this very strange, over the ether, relationship, which is so modern. And this is the point, I would think if I were 12 years old right now, that's exactly the kind of story I would be interested in and could fantasize about.

ROSS MACPHEE: My favorite flavor of ice cream, if I ever allowed myself to it now, is rum raisin.