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Dr. Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeontology in the School of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at the University of Leicester. She is also Director of Green Circle Nature Regeneration CIC, a non-profit organization in the UK, and she is co-author of the recently released book Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy. Sarah completed her undergraduate degree in geology at the University of Southampton and was awarded her PhD in paleobiology from the University of Leicester. Afterwards, she remained at the University of Leicester as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the faculty there. She has received the President’s Award of the Geological Society of London, the Paleontological Association’s Annual Meeting President’s Prize, and numerous grant awards to support her research over the years. In our interview, Sarah shares insights and stories from her life and science.
People Behind the Science Podcast Show Notes
Life Outside of Science (2:18)
Outside of the lab, you can often find Sarah out walking, riding around on her mountain bike, playing squash, birdwatching, or cooking.
The Scientific Side (3:42)
As a paleontologist, Sarah primarily studies the fossils of creatures that lived millions of years ago to better understand the evolution of life and the ecology of life through time. She examines the remains of ancient organisms in the fossil record to understand what they looked like, how they ate, what they ate, how they moved, and more.
A Dose of Motivation (5:25)
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” – Amelia Earhart
What Got You Hooked on Science? (10:37)
Sarah’s interest in science began with a fascination with animals. As a kid, she spent hours reading about animals at the library and pouring over entries about animals in encyclopedias. Throughout her school years, Sarah enjoyed her science courses and thought she would pursue a career in biology. In high school, she enrolled in A-levels courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. It didn’t take long for Sarah to realize that physics was not a good fit for her. Scrambling for a back-up plan, Sarah discovered that a nearby school offered an A-level course in geology. After reading about volcanoes, plate tectonics, earthquakes, and fossils in books on geology from her local library, Sarah was captivated. She was delighted when the nearby school allowed her to join their A-level geology class. Sarah continued studying geology as an undergraduate student, and she was excited to secure a PhD position studying a newly discovered and amazingly well-preserved fossil deposit in South Africa. The fossils there included exceptional specimens with preserved soft tissue structures in addition to the bones, shells, and teeth which are more commonly present. She spent weeks digging in the field and splitting open shale to reveal the remains of an ancient sea floor that no one else had ever seen before. This experience was a thrill and further cemented Sarah’s desire to pursue a career in paleontology.
The Low Points: Failures and Challenges (24:58)
Beyond the usual challenges of getting papers, grants, and job applications rejected, Sarah faces a number of scientific challenges in her work. For example, she often does experiments in her lab to understand the processes that occur as an animal’s tissues decay over time. These experiments are instrumental for understanding the fossils she studies because the animals preserved as fossils have all gone through some degree of decay. In some cases, Sarah completed the whole process of setting an experiment up with plans to sample at certain intervals, and the actual timeline of decay was either way shorter or way longer than she expected. This can result in missing data from important timepoints or spending more time than she expected waiting for decay to occur. Sarah has learned that doing small pilot experiments first can save a lot of time and frustration.
A Shining Success! (17:24, 27:34)
Recently, Sarah published the results of a study that were 25 years in the making. During her PhD, she found a section of an unusual-looking fossil while splitting shale in South Africa. She returned to the cliff face where it was found and examined the stripes in the sediment until she found a match. From there, they dug out an incredible fossil of a segmented creature that wasn’t like anything Sarah had ever seen before. The fossil was transported to the UK, and Sarah continued studying it. She shared data in a few conference presentations and reached out to top experts in the field, but no one really had answers about what this specimen was. For the next 25 years, Sarah worked on this fossil on and off, and she finally had an epiphany after speaking with a colleague. The fossil looked so unusual because only the inside tissues were preserved after collapsing inwards. She was looking at the animal’s preserved muscles, gut, and other organs without seeing bones or a shell. After this revelation, the pieces began to fall into place. Sarah was excited to describe this new species, and she named it Keurbos susanae after her mother Sue.
Some of Sarah’s other research has examined the evolution of the vertebrate eye. A long-standing theory in the field suggested that the evolution of eyes in primitive vertebrates involved a slow accumulation of various eye-like structures over time. It was believed that hagfish, one of the most primitive living vertebrates, represented a missing link between creatures that could and couldn’t see. The hagfish living today are completely blind, but when Sarah began examining 300 million-year-old fossils of ancient hagfish, she found evidence of a retina full of pigment-making structures important for vision. This discovery overturned the prevailing theory for the evolution of the eye because these hagfish appear to have had vision capabilities millions of years ago, but they lost vision over time.
Book Recommendations (32:47)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy by Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz
Most Treasured Travel (38:13)
Doing field work in China has been remarkable. Sarah has visited the city of Kunming in the Yunnan province many times. While there, she has spent time in the city and then traveled out to rural China to their field sites, and the juxtaposition between the two is incredible. They study fossils there that are about 517 million years old, and the deposit provides an exquisite record of complex ecosystems and the diversity of life that existed on our planet at that time. The local farmers are paid to dig for fossils, so there have been many discoveries from that area. The people Sarah has met are wonderful, and the food is spicy and delicious.
Quirky Traditions and Funny Memories (42:30)
On one memorable trip, Sarah and one of her PhD students flew to Chicago for a project that involved working in a museum as well as field work out in rural Illinois. They drove for hours from the city to a remote farm that was run by three brothers. Sarah’s goal was to collect specimens of 300 million year old nodules with remarkable fossils that had been found on the farmers’ land. When Sarah and their student arrived at the farmers’ house, they were surprised to see a large collection of guns on display, along with mounted specimens from hunting. The farmers were amazed when Sarah admitted she had never seen a gun in her life, and for the next three hours, they showed Sarah their full collection of all different kinds of guns. After having a good laugh at her lack of experience with firearms, the farmers showed her to their sheds full of fossil-containing nodules and told her to help herself to as many as she’d like. Doing field work has given her many opportunities to meet local people, and she has always been impressed by the similarities between people that span many cultures and how willing people have been to help her out.
Advice For Us All (48:40)
Have confidence in yourself, be authentic, and speak up. It’s okay to get things wrong or say things that others may disagree with. You’ll have to work hard to be a scientist, and there will be many obstacles and setbacks, but be confident and stay curious.
Guest Bio
Sarah is fascinated by the biology of ancient organisms and their ancestors. Her work has focused mostly on exceptionally well-preserved fossils that include organic features like muscles, organs, and other tissues. These tissues are absent in most fossils because they quickly rot away after death, but in rare cases, they can be transformed, through various processes, into geologically-stable materials. Examining these fossils and understanding how the remains have transformed after death and during fossilization can provide a detailed and comprehensive view of the anatomy of long-extinct animals. She uses a holistic approach, incorporating information from decay experiments in the lab about how the fossils formed, as well as details about where the animals lived and where fossilization occurred. Some of Sarah’s more recent work involves applying her expertise to study the fate of durable, man-made organic compounds like plastics. She has also turned her attention to the preservation of a much wider range of man-made materials and objects, from concrete and mobile phones through to fast food and books — these she calls “technofossils” — exploring what from our man-made world will survive into the fossil record and what it will say about us to future paleontologists. In their recent book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, Sarah and co-author Jan Zalasiewicz (Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at University of Leicester) delve into this topic. Sarah’s overall research program combines laboratory experiments that model physical and chemical transformations with data collected from real-world samples to improve our understanding of how different processes lead to the preservation or loss of organic material. She enjoys spending time outdoors, whether she is working in the field or engaging in hobbies like walking, cycling, birdwatching, and playing squash in her free time. Sarah also loves cooking and is a big fan of Asian cuisine.
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