Quirks and Quarks - Using ants to make yogurt, and other producer picks

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

From elephant whiskers to Arctic rhinos and even science programming in prisons, we revisit some of our producers’ favourite stories from this season. Including:One of the world's earliest plant-eaters discovered in Nova ScotiaElephant trunk whiskers increase their sensitivity to better 'feel' their surroundingsYogurt with a creepy-crawly secret ingredientRhinos roamed Arctic Canada 23 million years agoBringing science education to the incarcerated

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even taped the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. This is a CBC podcast.

Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to the best of quarks and quarks. This week, we're showcasing some of our team's favorite interviews. We start with a story about one of the world's first plant eaters that lived about 307 million years ago on what is now Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. We'll also hear from robotics researchers who studied elephant trunk whiskers.

And we'll unpack the discovery of a 12th century. 23 million-year-old Arctic Rhino. We'll find out about a program to teach science to people in prisons, and then there's the story about a Canadian chef's effort to revive an old way of making yogurt with ants. All this today on the best of quarks and quarks. These days, when you're trying to host a group of friends for dinner, there are any number of different diets to accommodate,

vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free, carnivore. Well, it didn't used to be like that. If you go back, like way, way back to hundreds of millions of years ago, when animals were first making their way onto land, all creatures ate the same thing. Meat. And we know that from their fossilized, sharp carnivorous teeth. But now a 307 million-year-old fossil discovered in Nova Scotia may represent one of the world's first plant-eating animals,

and it's changing what we thought we knew about herbivore history. Dr. Hilary Madden is an associate professor of paleontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carlton University in Ottawa. Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Hi, thanks for having me. Tell me where in Nova Scotia this fossil was found. What kind of environment was it in? So we found this, well, Brian Hebert,

our longtime collaborator and colleague out in Nova Scotia, I found this little beast in the cliffs inside of a tree trunk, a fossil tree trunk or the infill of that tree trunk out on Cape Breton at a place called Poinaconi. And it's on a cliff? Yeah, so basically all of the, much of the coastline is, you know, very steep cliffs out in Cape Breton especially. And it's in those cliffs where we actually find the still standing tree trunks that trapped and preserved these animals inside of them.

Now, the scientist who founded, who is he? So Brian Hibbert is a resident of Joggins, Nova Scotia, one of the other famous localities we work at. And he is what we would call an amateur or a non-professional paleontologist, but has effectively grown up with the cliffs and looking for fossils in Joggins, Nova Scotia. And he's worked with many of the best geologists and paleontologists over the years, and we are fortunate to have him a part of our team right now as well. So he's a citizen scientist. That's right, exactly.

Yeah. Wow. So how different would that area of Cape Breton have been 307 million years ago? Right. So we understand that part of Nova Scotia would have been equatorial, you know, sub-equitorial, maybe just a little bit north of the equator. So it would have had a much more tropical-like climate. It would have been also still coastal as it is today,

but more of a closing coastline. So this is at a point in time where the continents are coming together to form the supercontinent peasant. Pangea. So it's actually going to be trapped sort of in the central portion of Pangea once it eventually amalgamates into that supercontinent. So a much more warm, tropical, swamp-like, forested environment, not like today, especially today, today. Well, tell me about this fossil. What's it look like and what went through your mind when you saw it? So we saw this little animal. So when Brian discovered it and put it in my hand, we got immediately very excited because it was almost instantly recognizable as an animal

known as a microsore. The name is, as it sort of suggests, has been given to animals that are small lizard-like animals or small reptiles. However, this one fit in the palm of my hand, just the skull alone was rather huge. So right out the gate, we were thinking, holy crap, this is a very large, a large microsore. Well, how large was it? So the skull is about three, four inches long. So the animal would have been, as our lead author, Arjun has put it, football-sized animal. So it would have looked rather like a modern-day blue-tongued skink, sort of one of our heftier lizards of today. However, this animal is not related to lizards or reptiles at all. It's actually a close relative of the group that includes mammals, reptiles, and birds, but is not distinctly part of the reptile

or mammal line. Okay. So where does it fit in then to the evolutionary line of animals that came out of the sea onto land? So we think this animal where it currently resides is at a point on the branch of the tree of life between modern-day amphibians and the amniotes, the egg-laying terrestrial animals like mammals, reptiles, and birds. So you say you call it a microsaur, you recognized it right away. How did you study it further? So we wanted to take a closer look at some of the internal anatomy. A lot of these animals look very sort of generic and similar to one another externally. However, inside of their skulls, they contain a lot of really distinct types of information. So,

We took it to a CT scanning facility to perform a CAT scan effectively, where we're able to use 3D x-rays to create a model of both the external and the internal surfaces of the skull. And what did you see when you looked inside? Pure joy. This was the most exciting part. We took a look at one of the sample cross-sections through the skull, and much, much to our surprise, we found not only did it have a perfect set of teeth like ours,

marginal teeth around the rim of the mouth. But inside the mouth, it's absolutely packed solid full of tiny little teeth all over the roof of the mouth, and they come directly into occlusion or will bite down against a complementary set of teeth inside the lower jaws. So when we see this kind of dentition in other animals that appear much later in the fossil record, we associate this with herbivory or animals that are capable of processing plant material. It's a lot tougher than meat, you know, maybe surprisingly, is a lot tougher to process. And so a lot of herbivores need to come up with additional ways to process and grind up or slice or chew effectively the plant material before it enters them to their guts. So how surprised were you that this animal was a

plant eater? Exceptionally surprised. So we're looking at ages of rocks that contain animals that are very close to the origin of terrestriality, of being on land at all. And so by seeing this animal already adapting into a new niche, a new ecological habit eating plants so quickly really surprised us and told us that animals were actually much more rapidly radiating once they got onto land, more so than we previously thought. Well, how much earlier in time is this fossil compared to other plant eaters? So we're starting to see now that we know what to look for, because we wouldn't normally be looking for herbivory in an animal that's not an amniote. Now that we're that we know what we're looking for, we're starting to actually see evidence of animals

possibly evolving denticians capable of eating plants much sooner. Actually, a relative of this beast found at Joggins about 350 million years ago, well, found in rocks 350 million years old, also has similar adaptations. But otherwise, we don't see this happening until, you know, 10, 15 million years later. Boy. Well, how difficult to transition is it to go from eating meat to eating plants? So I think this is actually, well, I mean, the animals are showing us they could do it rather quickly, although we're still talking about millions of years of evolution. But eating plants is actually

tough in a few different ways. One, it's tough to mechanically process. So to actually break down the tough plant materials, twigs, stems, tougher plants than are, you know, that were alive back then than are present today. There's no such thing as fruits and super fleshy plants at this time point. But as well they would have needed to acquire a symbiont, a participant in the gut to help them break down the tough plant proteins. And so one idea is that many of these herbivores have ancestors that were at first insectivorous. The insects were the first to acquire the ability to process plant material with gut endosymbiance. And so by eating those insects, it is thought that these early insectivores acquired those gut symbionts that then allowed their descendants to

incorporate more and more plants into their diet. Oh, I see. So symbionts, you mean like gut bacteria, things like that? Correct. Yes. So plants are full of cellulose, which is a type of protein that a lot of us previously had a difficult time processing and carnivores wouldn't have needed that. However, yeah, we acquired that or these animals would have acquired those symbionts from their possibly insectivorous ancestors. So what's this telling you about the whole emergence of herbivory going from meat eating to plant eating? So it tells us that a lot more different groups of animals were experimenting with this approach than we previously thought. So like I mentioned previously, we considered herbivores or herbivory to be an amniote innovation, something that the mammal reptile bird lines were able to

initiate. However, since this animal falls outside of that group, it shows us that, you know, that is not a behavior or an ecology restricted to amniotes and that other types of animals, amniotes were able to also successfully land upon this strategy, although to their demise, they did not survive into the present day. On the other hand, it makes sense because plants are a lot easier to hunt than insects. Correct. So this would have been, you know, a hugely under and unexploited resource. When we first had animals coming out onto land, the insect and invertebrate faunas would have been massive and plentiful. However, animals very quickly radiated and probably. probably started to put pressure on those resources. So by shifting into other types of diets,

like eating the plants and being able to extract adequate nutrients from them, lineages could continue on alongside these carnivorous and insectivorous forms. So what's your message to Canadians? Because this is such a Canadian story. We've got a Canadian site where the fossil was found, Canadian researchers like yourself. What's your message here? Canada is hugely rich in natural history and natural heritage. I think we should be very proud of it. We have fossil records, you know, 500 million years old. We have the Cambrian explosion recorded out west. We have Canada's oldest dinosaurs, some of the world's earliest dinosaurs, oldest footprints. We have now oldest records of mammalian fossils, herbivores, all sorts of things right in our own backyard. So get out

there. If you do see something interesting, alert the local museum. And I might be called up to help excavate and bring your specimen to light and to help name it. In this particular case, Brian, who is the founder of this specimen, got the species epithet assigned to him. So this is his microsaur, Tyrannotor, Heberty. So all you citizen scientists, get out your microscopes and get out there. That's right. Dr. Madden, thank you as much for your time.

Thank you for having me. Dr. Hilary Madden is a paleontologist at Carlton University. An elephant's trunk is unique in the animal kingdom. It's incredibly dexterous, like our hands. And they use them for similar things to grip or touch things in their environment. But their trunks are so strong they can tear down trees. They're also extremely sensitive and covered in whiskers that protect their trunk and help them sense their surroundings to compensate for their notoriously terrible eyesight and thick skin.

Well, scientists working on touch sensors and robotics decided to get to the bottom of how elephant whiskers work and how they factor into how nimble elephants can be with their trunks. Dr. Andrew Schultz led this study. He's a postdoctoral researcher in mechanical engineering at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems in Stuttgart, Germany. Hello and welcome to our program. I'm grateful to be here. Thank you so much, Bob. First of all, tell me about how nimble elephants can be with their trunks that got you interested in studying their whiskers. They have these trunks that are made up of tens of thousands of muscles.

And as engineers, we think of these as infinite degree of freedom systems. So they can move in infinitely different ways with all of those muscles. And they're so dexterous. And I think something that is so impressive is they can lift 200 to 300 kilograms with their trunk. And then they can be so delicate to pick up a. a tortilla chip without breaking it. So they have all of these different capabilities. And as an engineer, it's really difficult for humankind to build materials that combines all of all of the intricacies of biological systems. So I get really excited about something like the elephant trunk to provide

inspiration for things like engineering innovations. Well, we all see their trunks doing incredible things from picking up people to tortilla chips. But what about the whiskers? Where are they? So the whiskers are covering the entirety of the trunk. And so I think a lot of people see elephants and they think one of the first things they think of is wrinkles. And so if you think of the elephant's trunk, it has these wrinkles and these folds going along the trunk. And inside each of these wrinkles, they kind of have these whiskers that are protruding out. And if you look at your arm, you can kind of think of these whiskers are covering a little bit like your forearm hair. And these whiskers really help the elephant sense their surroundings.

And they're born with about a thousand whiskers covering their trunk at birth. So how did you go about studying these whiskers? What we did is we took these whiskers and we looked at them. And what we found is that the elephant's whiskers base is filled with all of these hollow porous channels. And elephant whiskers don't actually grow back. So when they lose a whisker, part of their trunk becomes you can think of almost invisible. So what these porous holes do is they actually help the elephant absorb energy when they're contacting different objects during their 16 to 17 hours of eating food every single day.

So I think that is one of the first big outcomes that we found. Now that's the base of the whisker. Is it the same all the way to the tip? No, it actually changes along the tip. So the base of the whisker is hollow. And then as it gets to the tip of the whisker, all of those holes start to the tip. fill in. So at the very, very tip, it's very, very dense. The cool part is we found there was some of this porosity, but then simultaneously we also looked at the stiffness of the whiskers.

Okay. And how does that change? So this, this to me was one of the coolest, uh, scientific, let's say, eureka moments and one of the few things that I've, I've had in my career like this. So, so what we found, I still remember I was, I was in, uh, one of the collaborators and co-authors on this paper, Gunter Richter, who's a material scientist that was the expert on all material science on this paper, he found that the whisker base is really, really stiff, and the whisker tip is really, really soft. And I still remember he sprinted into my office, and he's like, oh, my gosh, Andrew, these whiskers have this functional gradient. And then I was like, Gunter, aren't you going to be late for anniversary dinner? And then he looked at his watch and

then sprinted back out of the room. So, and so what is this? means? So a functional gradient stiffness. So what this means is the base of elephant whiskers is really, really stiff. So stiff as something like plastic. And then as you go along the whiskers length, it gets softer and softer until at the very, very tip, it's as soft as something like rubber. And we didn't really know how we could like understand how this functional gradient could be impacting sensing. But an idea from my boss, Catherine, was, why don't we make a physical mimic? And let's try to think and interact with objects like the elephant whisker. So we 3D printed a structure that has a stiff base and a soft tip. And Catherine walked around the halls and was tapping different objects.

And she came up with this hypothesis that was, well, maybe what this stiffness gradient actually does is it helps an elephant know exactly where along the length contact is happening. So what we did is we looked at some simulations and we found that hypothesis was confirmed where when you have this gradient, each signal, each tap along an elephant's whisker is uniquely encoded in that material stiffness, allowing the mechanoreceptors at the base to kind of like fire differently for different places along the whisker. So they're able to use this actually in sensing. Okay.

So is the idea here that if the elephant touches something and only the tip moves, that it'll say, well, that thing's pretty far away. Whereas if the whole whisker moves, that must be something larger or something closer. Is that how works? Exactly. So how are you going to apply what you've learned from the elephant's trunk to robotics? So how we can apply this is we can take this material intelligence inspired by elephant whiskers, and we can look at combining stiff bases and soft tips on sensors

to try to understand how we can build things that have the ability to have a soft and light touch while still able to communicate just how far something might be. And these have advantages over traditional sensors maybe like cameras, because these have the ability to work in almost any environment, and they consume a lot less power than something like the camera would. So we're going to give robots whiskers? I would love to do that. We're just really at the tip of the whisker,

trying to understand how many of these gradients exist in biology and how as engineers we can take inspiration from them to design more intelligent robots. Dr. Schultz, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the invite and happy to talk about whiskers. Dr. Andrew Schultz is a postdoctoral researcher in mechanical engineering at the MaxPontz. Institute for Intelligence Systems in Germany.

Yogurt might be an ordinary part of your everyday breakfast, but it's also a food with a long and storied history. Yogurt was invented several times throughout history in many cultures that kept animals for their milk and needed a way to keep it from spoiling. Its first known appearance was over 7,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. And while today's commercial yogurts are made using mass-breeding, produced bacterial cultures, our ancestors use different techniques to start the critical fermentation process, like ants. Yep, creepy, crawly, tiny ants. Recently, a team of researchers,

including Canadian chef David Zilber, went to Bulgaria to test out an ancient recipe for yogurt involving fresh milk and live ants. And the results were, apparently, delicious. Mr. Zilber is a fermentation food scientist and former director of the fermentation lab at Noma Restaurant in Denmark. Hello, and welcome to our program. Hello, Bob. Thank you for having me. Where did the idea for using ants to ferment yogurt come from? It was actually at the behest of some former colleagues of mine from my days at Restaurant Noma, a food researcher named Diego who was making an antwich out of foraged Danish ants.

And he realized that, you know, this ice cream sandwich wouldn't coagulate the same way every time. So he reached out to a researcher at the Danish Technical University, Leonie, who is the lead author on this paper. And she realized that the ant microbiome was actually causing the fermentation to go awry in certain instances. This caught the attention of an entomologist working at Copenhagen University, a friend of my name Veronica Sinote, who studies new social insiniscay. like termites and ants and bees and sent her down a rabbit hole as well. Why ants? Why are they such a key ingredient? Well, microbes are everywhere. I've worked with fermentation for probably half my career. So all animals have a microbiome. It varies between them, but insects absolutely have

microbiomes. And the funny thing about you social insects, bees, wasps, ants, they tend to like cozing up to human settlements and wandering through our food stuff. Now, the story goes that if you were hundreds of years ago, a herder in the Balkan mountain ranges, taking your sheep, taking your cows out to pasture, and you wanted to eat something hardy, you could take a little bit of milk from your herd, and in want of the yogurt starter that you would have had back home at the homestead, you could grab an ant from an ant hill and throw it in, bury that cup of yogurt in the Ant Hill, use it as an incubator, and the following morning have fresh yogurt that would keep for at least a few days.

Well, take me through what you did. How did you make Aunt Yogurt? There were three of us who traveled to Bulgaria, myself, Veronica, and our host and guide and anthropologist named Sebji Mudlu, Syracova. We were visiting her extended family in a town called Nova Mahala of just a thousand people. But nonetheless, we were staying with her great aunt and uncle. He had found a great ant-hill in advance of our arrival. and we milked his cow in the morning,

took that milk up to the ant hill that was on top of the local mountain, found some ants in situ, threw them into the pot, wrapped it in cloth, and buried it in the ant hill. You buried it in the ant hill? Why did you do that?

Well, to use it as an incubator. And ant hills actually have a body temperature. So even though it dipped to maybe about 8 or 10 degrees that night, which is far too low for thermophilic bacteria that are responsible for making yogurt to actually ferment and coagulate those milk proteins, the milk did ferment. So we had a pleasant surprise the next morning.

Were these ants live when you put them into the milk? Yeah, not for long. If not just before. I think we crushed them with our fingertips to help, you know, disperse their microbes, if you will. All right. So what did you find when you opened up the yogurt the next day? We were a little bit worried because it still felt pretty liquid.

When we opened the jar, it definitely looked liquid. Like there was a little bit of fat separation like cream. on top, but as soon as we dipped a spoon in, we pulled out coagulated curds, which was a pleasant and fantastic surprise. What did it taste like? It wasn't crazy sour. It wasn't like the tartest yogurt you'd ever had, but it still tasted very much like the grass-fed milk that we'd enjoyed from the cow fresh the day before with this kind of

slight note of green grass and maybe like fresh almonds. The fun thing about ants is that they taste like citrus, the formic acid, in their bodies is really quite tart and really quite potent. But then on top of that, the pheromones that they actually use to communicate with each other have the same intellectual structure of ingredients like lemon grass and lime leaf. Okay. Well, what's going on? What is in the ants? What are the ingredients that make the milk turn into yogurt? Well, this was really a scientific expedition, if you So we did sample the microbiota. We took swabs of the cows' teats, of the milk, of the ants.

And Veronica took those samples back to Copenhagenomics and ran metagenomic sequencing to find that there was a contribution from the ant microbiota. In addition to their microbes, and I'll come back to that in a second, their enzymes actually had an effect on the milk. So the ants' own digestive enzymes. The formic acid was also found in the milk to help coagulate the milk proteins. But the big surprise was that bacteria that you really wouldn't expect in insects like this actually spilled out from their bodies and into the milk.

Most notably, fructolactobacillacillacillacillacanthensis. And if that sounds familiar, that's because that's the microbe responsible for producing San Francisco sourdote. Oh, really? Yeah. It was living in their guts and had transferred into the milk and was fermenting the milk, much like it ferments a sourdough starter. So a microbeknown for San Francisco sourdough ends up in ants in Bulgaria? That's the thing, is that maybe the causal chain of connectivity doesn't run the way we think it does.

This finding kind of really makes you question, well, where do these organisms originate from? How do they find their way into our food? The living world around us is a repository for these life forms as well. Just like our own mouths host a lot of the same. bacteria and microbes that we might find in fermented foods. So to the insects that would seek to eat our foods, they also act as carriers for these microbes as well. And that's what this experiment proved. So does that suggest then that maybe other insects would also produce yogurt besides ants? Oh, it's highly likely. It is absolutely highly likely.

Mr. Zilbert, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure, Bob. Thank you for the chat. Mr. David Zilbert is a Canadian chef, fermentation food scientist, and former director of the fermentation lab at Noma Restaurant in Denmark. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to the best of Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app.

Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is World Class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics, like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at

straffordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world class now. Hi, everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson, and I host Frontburner. How many podcasts have you heard where people are searching out facts on the fly. Or where they just talk in circles and two hours later, you're not really sure what you just learned. Well, Front Burner is not that. Five days a week, you get one story a day.

It's deeply researched about 20 minutes long, and hopefully we answer all the questions that you want asked. We do lots of Canadian news, but a wide range of topics too. Find and follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of rhinoceruses, you might picture mighty horn beasts, roaming the grasslands of Africa or in Southeast Asia. But it turns out that rhinos also flourished much further north, as far north as the Canadian Arctic. In new research, scientists at the Canadian Museum of Nature described the skeleton of a now-extinct rhinole species found on Devon Island, Nunavut, about a thousand kilometers north of nature. of the Arctic Circle.

This rhino would have been alive more than 20 million years ago. Scientists think it was one of more than 50 species of rhinoceros that once inhabited almost every continent on our planet. This remarkable discovery is shedding light on the evolution and migration of these animals. Dr. Danielle Fraser is the head of paleobiology at the museum and led the team of researchers that studied the skeleton. Dr. Fraser, welcome back to Quirks and Quarks. Thanks for having me.

First of all, describe this ancient rhinoceros. How does it compare with the ones we're seeing today? Well, it was fairly small, probably a little bit smaller or similar in size to the Indian rhinoceros. So we're estimating it was about one meter or so at the shoulder and possibly the weight of about a musk ox. Compared to modern rhinoceruses, it was quite different. It didn't have a horn. And in fact, most fossil or extinct rhinoceruses did not have a horn. And we know that because when we see horns on rhinoceruses, they have a roughness on their nose, and it doesn't have that.

So it was quite different from our vision of the modern African forms. Well, you say about one meter at the shoulder. So that sounds like the size of a very large dog or a small pony. Yeah, that's a good comparison. How much of the skeleton was recovered? We recovered about 75% of the skeleton, which is quite uncommon for the Arctic. We have also found other relatively complete animals like Pueila Darwinai in the past. So it's a very uncommon discovery.

Now, other than its size and the fact that it didn't have a horn, was there anything else unusual about it compared to today's rhinos? Well, the unusual thing that we discovered is that it was probably browsing on tree leaves and things like that. So at the time, the paleo environment in the high Arctic was very different from today. Today, it's a polar desert. And in the past, 23 million years ago, it was very much like Southern Ontario or northern New York State. And so we know this animal had to have been eating tree leaves and bushes. And so definitely not a grass eater.

Wow. 23 million years ago, that's a long time. When we think of life in the Arctic, most people think about the woolly mammoths and things that were around just, what, 50,000 years ago. This is a long time before that. Very long time before that. And it was very distantly related to woolly rhinos that we see actually only in Eurasia and they never make it to North America, unfortunately. Although I think we will eventually find them. What other kinds of animals were around this region at that time? So we know that there were rodents and relatives of rabbits. And there have also been swans found at the site. And then of course the famous Puella Darwinai, which was a transitional seal. But the interesting thing about the rhino is it's the largest bodied animal that we've found so far in the Houghton Crater on Devon Island.

And that's unusual because the Miocene is definitely a time when we had lots of larger animals around North America. So where are they? And I think we need to get back up there and discover them. Well, how would the rhino have gotten to North America? Yeah. So one of the key discoveries is that it was related to forms that we find in Europe and the near east. and the Middle East. And so that told us that the ancestors to that animal very likely crossed over the North Atlantic, which is really interesting because people typically think about the

Bering Land Bridge, which is on the other side of North America, when we think about animals exchanging between Eurasia and North America. So there was an Atlantic land bridge? Where did it go to and from? Yeah, so we call it the North Atlantic Land Bridge, but there were actually two. One went from the U.K. over Iceland to Greenland and then to the Canadian Arctic archipelago. And the other went from basically Finland over Svalbard to Greenland and then into the Arctic. And we showed in our paper by comparing to geological data that this land bridge may have been crossable almost 20 million years longer than was previously thought. Wow. So what does this rhino tell us about the evolution of the rhino species? Well, it tells us that rhinos were.

were really adaptable. So like you said in your introduction, the rhinos made it almost everywhere on Earth, including the Arctic. So even though it was a much warmer Arctic 23 million years ago, it was still freezing in the winter. This tells us that the rhino was able to survive. It also tells us that the Arctic was actually a really important region for shaping the evolution of rhinos and possibly other animals. How so? Well, this is because what we found in the paper is that they were actually crossing over the North Atlantic repeatedly over their 48 to 50 million year history. And that tells us that their evolution would have gone in an entirely different direction if they weren't able to cross over the North

Atlantic. Well, how surprised were you about how it would have gotten to what is now Devon Island in the high Arctic? Well, I was very surprised because sort of the traditional wisdom in paleontology has been that animals couldn't cross over the North Atlantic. after about 50 million years ago. So to find something that suggested it was happening 23 million years ago and even more recently in our bigger analysis just was kind of mind-blowing and started changing my idea about that region of the world and its importance for mammal evolution. Was the land bridge actually all land or were they crossing over ice? So there is some uncertainty in the reconstructions from the geologists.

but it was likely that there was a little bit of water, at least a few kilometers here and there. And so we looked at deep sea cores, and they actually show evidence of at least winter ice forming as early as the mid to late Eocene. And so we hypothesized that although, yes, modern rhinos have been observed to swim, that ice in the winter may also have helped them to cross from island to island. So how many more skeletons of different animal species might there be up there, in the high Arctic? That is really difficult to estimate, but we know that during that same period, at lower latitudes, we had things like camels. We often had more than one rhino coexisting at the same site,

and we had a variety of carnivorous animals. So I would be really surprised if the next time we get up there, we don't find something equally as cool as the Arctic rhino. We're hearing about changes in the Arctic with climate changes changing four times faster than the rest of the planet. how might that affect finding fossils up there? Yeah, so it actually has a positive impact on our ability to find fossils, which sounds counterintuitive. But what happens is as the permafrost melts, this actually works out some of the fossils.

And so in fact, we are arguing to the various funding bodies out there that might pay for us to go to the Arctic, that we need to get up there now and get those fossils as they come out of the permafrost before they disappear forever. Dr. Fraser, thank you. much for your time. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Danielle Fraser is the head of paleobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. I think if you're a serious listener of Quarks and Quartz, you probably think there's great value to science education. It helps you understand the complex

world around you. It helps equip you to be a critical thinker, and it opens your eyes to the wonders of our amazing universe. So it should be taught in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary, context. But Philip Heron thought the benefits of science education could extend far beyond that. He wanted to share the scientific method with a broader and perhaps unexpected population, people in prison. So he created a program called Think Like a Scientist. It's a seven-week program he teaches in elementary and high schools, but also to the incarcerated. When I saw the poster for Think Like scientist. I just thought, I've got nothing to lose. I am so far out my comfort zone being in a prison environment anyway, so why not try something different? And yeah, that's what I did to just take a leap.

Dr. Heron started the program in the United Kingdom, and he's now brought it to Canada. Here he is introducing himself to one of his classes. Thank you very much for coming. My name is Bill Heron. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Scarborough campus and the Department of Physical Environmental Sciences. But I'm here today to talk to you about the program, Think Like a Scientist. We're going to be teaching how to use a scientific method, not just for scientific experiments, but for everyday life through science. Dr. Heron, welcome to Quarks and Quarks.

Thank you very much, Bob. That's wonderful. Thank you. Why did you think science education was important for the incarcerated? Oh, well, it's important for everything. Everyone, really, as you well know, we go through currently a very dramatic time in science where there's a lot of mistrust in science and there's a lot of fake news. And it's really important to have an informed population who can critically think through today's problems. And, you know, people in prison are no different. You'd have people who would talk my ear off about black holes for 25 minutes and tell me all about asteroids and tell me all about, you know, the caves and places I've never heard of. And then I would pause and go, wow, this is fantastic.

want to take a science class? And every single time someone would say, oh, no, no, no, science is not for me. Wow. So they're interested in the topic, but they think science is too complicated. Or maybe because they're gender, because they're race, because there's, you know, stereotypes around their socioeconomic background or even just historical experiences within a classroom. Well, apart from science content, what skills were you hoping to teach the people in prison? Critical thinking is tremendously important to be able to. to go through and analyze a situation. But it's basically the scientific method.

You have a question. You have a hypothesis. You conduct an experiment. You analyze the data and you go, oh, it doesn't work. I mean, Bob, you've had thousands of scientists on this program, and we all have one thing in common, and that's generally failure. 99% of all my geophysics experiments end in failure. And we don't talk about it because people who come on the show

and you have that 1% of great success that ends up getting them on to talk to Bob. McDonald's Quicks and Quarks. Whereas behind the scenes, you know, scientists fail so often that it's just commonplace. And really what I want to teach the students in prison, actually the students at the University of Toronto is that failure is part of the process. And it's something that should be accepted. We don't just fail and stop. We fail and move forward. So you feel that's an important lesson for people who are in prison? Absolutely. I mean, you know, what you want to do is build students' confidence to be able to

let's say take a high school diploma after taking our class or maybe see themselves in education in a different way everyone has failure as part of their life and when you're in prison some of these things you want to improve and go forward and I can tell you some of the best students I've ever experienced and taught have been in prison because there's just a group of people that I really want to learn and really want to improve so what's it like teaching in prison but in prison the teacher is the anomaly that I'm the one who's the outsider coming into to their environment. So it's always a kind of a strange dynamic that you're the one who's different. It's in some ways also really, really interesting to have no phones, no real technology, and a whole lot of people who are

engaged and really interesting about what you're going to talk about. It's very different and sometimes from teaching a class at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. How do you choose which prisoners to teach? I don't choose any of the, any of the students. I kind of allow the institution to pick whoever and they have to apply and then they get chosen through there. So I don't know. I don't know who's who walks into my classroom. Oh, I see. So it's totally voluntary. This is not mandatory. No, it's not mandatory. And it takes a bit of courage, I suppose, for someone to sign up when they really don't have enough information to really know what's going happen. And then once they're there, we try to create the best possible environment for them to

learn and thrive. So do you have an actual classroom that you teach in? It depends on the institution. Now, this was kind of a big thing when I taught in England, in English prisons. I found a lot of the students had negative experiences with what you would kind of paint in your mind as a traditional classroom, you know, your hardwood floors, your individual desks. So we tried to stay away from that. And actually we found any room that wasn't a traditional classroom. So, you know, a breakout room, a lounge, and we try and teach in there. And changing that environment sometimes resets the students' minds in a lot of ways and tries to create a different environment for them to learn. Well, what kind of science topics do you teach the prisoners?

So I always start every class with a relatable topic. And the relatable topic is the science of sleep. Now everyone has a question about sleep. Why does my leg twitch? Or, you know, why do we dream? Or what's rapid eye movement? Within two seconds of a class, you've got everyone talking and everyone engaged. And that's really, really important to have something familiar. As you know, from your science communication experience, you need something familiar to get people in.

The topics we include, you know, climate change is huge topics. Earthquakes and volcanoes, which is my kind of specialist topic. AI, artificial intelligence, we've got robotics, we've got space missions, we've got other aspects like neurodiversity and finding your best environment to learn. I'm Dalton Harrison and I'm just finishing my master's degree in criminal justice and criminology at University of Leeds. I think for me that really impacted me in how to view the world but also like he taught me how to critically think, which sounds strange really because I'm a lot older than a lot of the other people that were there. And I thought, how did I never think

critically. How did I never look at causing effect? How did I never look at what impacts happen and the butterfly effect, so to speak? And all of a sudden, I literally started to shift my whole perception. And that was in the first week. So by the second week, when we're talking about nature, about planets, I was just absolutely blown away by the whole process, just step by step about how he made me uncover myself, but then the world around me in nature and my environment and how that is effective in the greater sort of world around me that I wasn't even paying attention to. I'd had a lot of problems before prison

and my mental health deteriorated. I got involved in a lot of behaviours that were confusing to me when I was looking back at them. Like, how could I do that? How could I take part in this kind of behaviour? What made me think that was normal? I started to evaluate not only my past, but also what was happening to me in the present.

So I was looking at how when I was in an overnight wing, how my sleep patterns were so deteriorated because everything was chaotic. It was horrible. Everyone was just getting into the overnight wing. Everyone was screaming, shouting. There's a lot of mental health, a lot of self-harm. And I was suddenly thinking, whoa, so when I went to this wing, this happened.

So yeah, it was a big impact on me, definitely. So in your packs, you will see that we have a section called analysis where I would love you to read this article that we've got from the conversation. It's called Why Children Who Sleep Get Better Grades? And I would love you to kind of read it and judge it. This is where I really want you to think, what aren't you convinced by? I want you to think about that. What are they missing?

Now, I really, really think this is important to write down what you didn't understand about this. And this is what we do in science anyway. Things go through peer review and other academics and other science. kind of comment on other people's research and basically state the things that they don't understand. I want you to do that. It's okay to not understand. I just caught a totally different aura when I met Phil. Like he won't like the officers. He want like a teacher from school. He just had a totally different feel about him.

Yeah, really easy to talk to. Just calm, welcoming, smile. I'm Phoenix Griffin and I'm currently on my last year at Legion. doing a criminology and criminal justice degree. The biggest thing I took away from it was confident to try new things. It just gave me a new way of thinking, but you learn from your mistakes. So if you get it wrong, it's fine. So that was really big for me, the confidence and no questions, a silly question. Hi, I'm Jamie Williams. I'm one of the directors of Spectrum First education and I volunteer as a co-facilitator for Think Like a Scientist. Phil just told me about Think Like a Scientist, the work he was doing or beginning to do.

And I was fascinated. You know, our specialty is sort of inclusive education and trying to break down barriers to learners. I went in just to observe the first time. So I landed into Toronto, basically went straight there. You have maybe preconceptions of what it's going. to be like. There's maybe some sort of concern that wouldn't be present when you're telling them about other teaching that you're doing in schools or university. But actually, the second you're in that classroom, you're meeting people, they're learners, that they're really interested in what

you're talking about and you're not really thinking about the context and the sort of prison aspect of it at all. You know, we had, I think, quite interesting reactions from some prison governors who looked at the people that had signed up to classes and thought, wow, that's not who I'd expect to be in that class. And actually that could be quite difficult to manage, given these people's history at the institutions and generally, and maybe how they got on interpersonally with each other. But that just wasn't present in the classrooms at all, and people were just locked in, engaged with the topic. I think there's a few times when we've been asked, you know, would you be comfortable or this person in your class or not.

And our policy is always to try and say yes, because we want to focus on the education and the learning, and we trust that the rooms are going to be, you know, there's security, there's safety there. Well, Dr. Herron, space is my favorite topic. So what do you teach your students about that? So we talk about space missions and we talk about exploration and we talk about, you know,

going to Mars. We talk about potentially humans visiting the Mars. What I do at the start of the class on space missions, I read out a quote from Canadian astronaut David San Jacques. He says, the problem you develop here in space is that everything is a little bit the same every day. It could be depressing sometimes if you're not careful. You're very far away from the people who love on Earth, and that can make you sad perhaps. You're always with the same people on board. So if conflict arises, you have nowhere to go.

after I finish saying that sentence, the whole room is like, that's prison. Throwing terrible food and you've got prison. Like, this is, I could be an astronaut and all of a sudden you've changed this experience from being, you know, something kind of distant to being something real. And, you know, everyone's really then can see themselves as being an astronaut and see themselves as part of science. That entirely changes their perspective. Do you assign homework?

Yeah, I do. We assign homework in that particular. space. There's a great kind of exercise from Charles Cockles' work where you write a letter home. You're writing your first email home as a scientist on Mars. And you're there for a space mission to try and build a habitat or something like that. And then you're sending your first email back. And by having this expression of something familiar to them, which is writing a letter home and something that is scientific-based, you get this great connection. between art and science and deep interaction between the student and the material.

What have you learned from this experience along the way? If I can get people to be not scared of physics, to take geophysics classes, that's going to be wonderful. And this is ultimately working in these sorts of outreach programs, teaching in primary schools, teaching in high schools, and teaching in science in prison, this is ultimately building, building a really good skill set. In science, you know, this asking a question, construction a theory, conducting experiments, analyzing the data, pretty much, well, in my experience, being someone who studies earthquakes and volcanoes and plate tectonics, 99% of all my experiments end. There's a failure as part of being a scientist. In fact, you could say that scientists fail

probably more often than anyone else. That is our job to fail to understand things. In fact, The reason why we're doing a scientific experiment in the first place is because we don't understand. We fail to understand. If we knew we wouldn't do it. The course happened at a time that was very turbulent in my life. I'd sort of got into, in the beginning of my sentence, I'd started to try and to get into education little steps. And then all of a sudden, like, my life shattered. My mum passed away when I was in prison.

And I felt like everything was gone. I thought, what's the point? I've got nobody, you know, my mum, I was trying to make her see that I changed and I tried to get back into things. And then with Phil, the final presentation that we did with the course, we had to do like a talk. And I got, I picked Alan Turing with somebody that really inspires me. He's LGBT. He's, as me being a trans guy in a female prison, I felt like, you know, what he did impacted millions of lives. but yet he was seen as a criminal.

He was seen as someone that was bad because of who he was. And I think for me that really impacted me and that talk I did, I invested everything into it. And at the end, Phil was just like, the praise that I got was so overwhelming and made me so emotional. And when I got out, he contacted me to do a talk at Durham University in the Geoscience Division of Durham University. And that was my first ever talk.

I just thought, right, think about how I did it in the lesson, do it again. You know, and it was, but that moment changed my life, standing in the front of that lecture hall, in a life that I never dreamed was possible in a way, in front of all these academics, in front of everybody that was, that I thought was above me. All of a sudden, we were all collaborating in a sort of a talk that was life-changing for me, definitely.

And that made me want to keep going in academia. or it made me want to keep trying. And I've done my degree. I've just finished my master's. And I never dreamt that that would be my life. Because sometimes you just need someone to back you up and just say, well, actually, you just haven't got the right answer yet. And that's what I kept doing until I finished my master's.

So I kept getting it wrong. But then I kept going. And that's the difference between a lot of people in prison that just don't have that person shouting for them. Dr. Philip Heron is an. assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences. He's founder of the Think Like a Scientist program. You also heard from Jamie Williams, a director with Spectrum First Education and a co-facilitator of Think Like a Scientist, and from

former students who are currently pursuing academics, Dalton Harrison and Phoenix Griffin. And that's it for the best of Quarks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at CBC.ca. Our web page is CBC.ca.ca slash Quarks, where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bukowitz, and Sonia Biting. Our senior producer is Hannah Hoag. I'm Bob McDonald.

Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.