Wisconsin Life

[mellow orchestra music] - Ethan Parrish: Mostly, what I do in my own research is look at ancient lake and river systems.

So, I'm a geologist by trade, but I also am a filmmaker.

Visual media is a powerful tool of communicating science.

So, I think Dave saw one of my introductory educational geoscience videos.

And so the project kind of grew from there.

And ironically, as Dave and I were talking about this kind of educational style video, I was working on naming a river that existed about 50 to 60 million years ago in my own research and trying to name it and collaborating with the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center.

I wasn't gonna do it because I was getting a lot of pushback from colleagues.

And then, as Dave and I talked about what he was trying to do, it kind of reinvigorated me to keep pushing for that.

And I learned a lot through that process, I think.

I ended up getting the river named in Shoshone called the Toya Puki River, which means "mountain fan," incorporating native groups not only from in the scientific process, but in the honorifics, in the what they get out of it, right, and honoring that they have something to bring to the table.

This is, you know, what Dave is doing here.

It's a fundamental addition and a fundamental practice in science writ large.

[air whooshing] - Dave Lovelace: So, one of the interesting things about paleontology, or really, any biological science is that we talk about different organisms.

And those organisms are like, you know, whatever it is that you're looking at.

Plants, it could be animals of various sorts.

All of these animals, all of these creatures that are alive, have a name.

When we're talking about these animals, these organisms, they're part of our world.

They're part of who we are.

And whether they're extinct or alive, they're still an integral piece of our history.

And I think names are pretty critical to how we think about and talk about them.

They have meaning.

I grew up in the sciences of vertebrate paleontology, and we learn all of these names.

And you might hear Tyrannosaurus rex, and it's a name that we all know and love and we've grown up with.

But where did that come from?

What does it mean?

I got into the science and started doing things, and found specimens and found animals that we needed to give names to.

And I realized that was a fun part of our job is I get to create a name.

And they get to be, oftentimes, it's something fun or meaningful to that person.

Historically, we've been naming things after folks.

We honor our ancestors in the sense of our academic ancestors.

Unfortunately, the thing is, is that process is laden with colonialism, with all sorts of historical artifacts that are not inclusive.

And names mean something, right?

And so, there's been an awakening, and certainly, for myself, it took a period of time to recognize that there isn't the inclusivity that we would want in the sciences.

And I don't think anybody's necessarily against it.

It's just that our tradition has always been we name it after folks; we name it after regions.

And those regions themselves hold colonial names.

And so, we have to be aware and be a little bit more understanding and thoughtful about how we go about naming things.

Names hold information themselves.

Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard, right?

Like, these names have some kind of cool, poetic thing, but you think about it.

Here's an animal.

It's like 20 tons walking around the Earth.

Of course, when it hits the ground, it's gonna make this thunderous sound.

Although if you've ever been in a zoo, elephants will tiptoe up and be, and, you know, they make soft sounds.

So thunder lizard, ironically, isn't actually a thunder lizard 'cause there's no way it was walking around with big thudding, you know, sounds in its feet.

But the name itself, right?

Thunder lizard, Brontosaurus, that means something.

But we'll add a name at the end of it.

The species name.

Often is something that is honoring a person, and we'll call these eponyms.

And we're really moving away from using names of people.

Really, we need to think about place.

Place becomes an important part of who we are, just like a name.

And so being able to honor a place or something that's a little bit more relevant.

But the names have meaning.

They attach something to an animal.

And I think it's a huge piece of how we communicate.

We're on the precipice, right, where we're sitting on this edge of recognition.

And the more we discuss it, the more we talk about it, I think, the more prevalent it will be in the sciences, in that folks will realize, like, "Yeah, this is probably a good idea.

"We need to change the way we're doing things.

And it starts now."

And it's really the generation coming up, I think, that's going to see the benefits of this.

And they will carry this on and actually bloom this into its full fruition.

[wind whooshes]