For UC Berkeley Professor Jack Tseng, the world of paleontology never gets old. With each new discovery, paleontologists like him learn more about the animals that walked the earth millions of years ago.

"If you look at books from 50 years ago, they postured dinosaurs very differently from the way we do it today," Tseng says. "This constant profusion of new scientific knowledge into the popular psyche is recorded in children's books, which is a lovely way to see how this science has progressed."

Fossils also hold valuable clues about our planet's future and our role within it as we experience climate change, he says.

"The questions we ask of them have to do with how different species sometimes survive, when others go extinct. Paleontology is sort of pre-adapted to plug in to understanding the future of Earth because we have billions of years of the fossil record to learn from."

This season on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes will come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May. See all episodes of the series.

Key takeaways:

• Paleontologists can better understand how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals looked and lived by studying living animals.
• New discoveries have reshaped what we thought we knew about dinosaurs and the prehistoric world.
• Fossils hold clues about the role of different species of plants and animals during climate change — and the future of Earth.

Listen to the podcast and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Stanley Luo.

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