#36: Dr. Paul Sereno - The Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Age of Discovery

Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Pieces of Impact podcast.

My name is Steve Seeger and I am your host.

And if you are new here, we have conversations across business, media, sports and the outdoors with our guests who are leading impactful lives and we share their stories.

And before we get in today's conversation with Dr. Paul Sereno, I wanted to give some context and some background on him.

because his career sounds like something out of a movie.

I mean, he's a paleontologist, professor at UChicago.

He's an explorer, artist, author, teacher, and really about as close as you can get to a real-life Indiana Jones.

His career has taken him all over the world, from the foothills of the Andes to the Sahara Desert, India, China, Tibet, Morocco, Niger, and now even toward the Amazon.

He's discovered countless new species of dinosaurs, but his work also extends beyond dinosaurs into archaeology, too, including the discovery of Gobero, which is an ancient human site that he found in the East Sahara with more than 100 burials from the time.

when the desert was actually green.

So we're going to talk about what it actually means to lead an expedition.

We're going to get into whether we're actually entering a golden age of discovery.

We'll unpack how modern technology is changing the field.

We'll dig into AI and how he feels it's useful, but a little overhyped.

We'll also talk about de-extinction.

That's a fun topic.

And then we're going to go into his upcoming work in the Amazon, his thoughts on whether humans would exist if the asteroid had missed or even just hit a little farther out in sea.

We'll talk about how lost fossils can still be preserved with casts and scans as well.

And the courses that he teaches and what you can take away from potentially listening to this episode.

So I had a lot of fun with this one.

But with that, here is my conversation with Dr. Paul Sereno.