S2, E21: More Than Dinosaurs, Inside Utah's Most Fascinating Museum with Jason Cryan

A museum director who still gets asked “What’s your favorite dinosaur?” might sound like a dream job, but Jason Cryan’s story is more surprising than that. Jason leads the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, and his path runs from a Vermont childhood shaped by the outdoors, to tropical entomology, to building genetics labs and advocating for teams of scientists inside major natural history museums. The throughline is curiosity, and the willingness to change course when the “right” career ladder stops feeling right.

We talk about what makes NHMU a true science museum: two million plus specimens, real research programs, and exhibitions grounded in evidence. Jason shares how systematics works in plain language, from taxonomy and biodiversity discovery to phylogenetics and DNA sequencing, and why asking better questions matters more than having fast answers. Then we zoom out to museum leadership, grants, public trust, and why informal science education can be one of the highest-impact forms of STEM learning.

You’ll also get a tour of what makes the Natural History Museum of Utah unique in the Intermountain West, from dinosaurs through time to the Great Salt Lake gallery, plus the strategy behind rotating special exhibitions like the immersive Bug World collaboration. We close with behind-the-scenes research happening right now, and a reminder that discovery can happen anywhere, even in a Salt Lake City backyard.

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Transcript

Opening And Museum Welcome

SPEAKER_02 0:00

It was just, as I said, transformative. I just decided, listen, this is a new pathway. This idea of an academic career, the Rio Tinto Center, opened in 2011, and it's a phenomenally attractive building. It's a landmark architectural masterpiece. Hi, my name is Jason Cryan. I'm the director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, and I would like to welcome you to this fantastic museum. You're in for an exciting visit. Come, let's explore. It's just a gorgeous place, and when you build a new building as a museum, it gives you the opportunity to create bespoke exhibition. The coast of California has several museums that are larger than we are. But in between those two boundaries, we are the largest museum. We are the state's designated museum of natural history. We're also the University of Utah's Museum of Natural History. Our museum is a what we call a true science museum. We have two million plus specimens.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Talk to me about, I mean, the uniqueness of the Natural History Museum. There's a million things you could do, like you could be an accountant or you could work at a history museum and be able to wear bright shirts and tie-dye socks. Exactly. Yep, totally true. It's like it's so like especially like the people I've talked to who are in something like some s um similar capacity, like I can't think of her name right now to save my life, but the director at the children's museum downtown. Um Kathleen Bunless. Thank you. Yeah. And just being like, how do you like how do you do this? How do you get into it? Like it's just such like a like this specific thing, especially to get in like such a leadership role and kind of like the pathway to get it is so fun because I mean the kind of question I had leading up to this that kind of made me want to reach out is I was talking to someone and someone's like, No one asks me what my favorite dinosaur is anymore. Right. I was like, fair, like can't remember that happened. Yeah, right. But then there's like people like you that's like, oh, I hear that question every day, I ask his every day, I get to see it. I know so much about dinosaurs, it's probably so much more nuanced than that. But um, and it's also been such like an iconic place in Utah, especially on campus from like where it used to be on President Circle, and then the new building's amazing, run by it all the time, and I'm going you know on shoreline and as so many people do. But I want to hear so much of the story of how you ended up there. But talk to me about I mean the path leading up to it. I mean, what made you want to get into that general field at the beginning?

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Okay, I assume we're on okay, all right, very cool. So um, all right. Well, uh first of all, thanks for having me here. It's great. Oh, I'm happy to really enjoy it. Uh so I've um I'm not a Utah originally. I'm an East Coaster. And so my story starts. Uh I was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. So um Green Mountains and and University of Vermont. I stayed there.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Blooming coat industry.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Yeah. Totally uh it was a great place to grow up. It was idyllic kind of um, you know, uh college town right on the lake, Lake Champlain, gorgeous, uh the high peaks of the Adirondacks in the in the distance, plus the Green Mountains of Vermont kind of ringing the the city. So uh kind of a gorgeous place to grow up. I grew up um I'll date myself, I was born in 1970, uh uh the same year that Earth Day was born. Oh, really? So um I grew up in, you know, Vermont's known to be a bit of a crunchy kind of place. So I grew up in this ethos, this this kind of um environment of ex, you know, uh certainly uh sustainability and and environmental uh ethic, um and uh kind of enjoying the outside, uh the outdoors, nature is something that we need to save and preserve and and um and uh um keep for our you know future generations. So that's kind of how I grew up. And I I wasn't a you know a kid who liked necessarily any one particular thing. I wasn't a bug kid or a you know dinosaur kid or whatever, but I was it was that time of of the uh my development where we were just always outside. So, you know, unlike many kids these days, the new

Vermont Roots And Early Curiosity

SPEAKER_02 3:55

generation, kind of sound like an old guy, where their life is so regulated. You know, we I was in the generation where my parents, especially in the summertime, would say, you know, lunch is at noon and dinner's at five, come on back, and otherwise have a great time.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

And so that's how I grew up.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

I was just always clean, you know, climbing trees and and like that area to me is so fascinating because like when I was in the van, I spent a good amount of time up there. Oh, good. And when I went, like kind of took the route of like up through um um Erie, Pennsylvania, up through um Waterfalls, wow, Niagara Falls, and like around the top. Yeah, yeah. And like when up before I went up there, because I didn't really had spent too much time in like the northeast. Yeah, my experience of the East Coast was like I mean, like interned in DC. When you enter in DC, you go to all like the different major cities there. And like I never really felt like I was like very Boston or like I'm just like not an East Coast major metropolitan person, and that's fine. Like to visit, but like as far as like living there day-to-day life, yeah, I'm okay. But it wasn't until I got into like upstate New York and it's like in the Adirondacks, and especially like that New Hampshire and Vermont area, I was like, oh, this is actually pretty sweet.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

Yeah. And in many ways, that sweetness, that that spot is very similar to what I found out here in Utah. So there's a kind of a shared um love of the environment, a shared uh appreciation of nature. And so that's that's you know, my upbringing and kind of what I'm experiencing now in many ways are are kind of parallel. Totally. Um so so I stayed there. I stayed there uh in in Vermont until I graduated undergrad from University of Vermont. And it was during those years uh at UVM that I started doing undergrad research uh in addition to my coursework as a zoology major. And I was paired uh at one point with a with an old faculty member, he was older at the time.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

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SPEAKER_02 6:08

He was an entomologist, and so he uh For those who may not know, what is an entomologist study? Yeah, sorry, jargon. Uh entomologist, the study of insects. Okay. And so he was a bug guy. He was he was this kind of old, irascible, cool, you know, uh faculty member who who um had definitely been around the world and experienced a lot of things. But in this work that I did with him, he took us out to the field and and we'd, you know, run through roof forest and whatever. And he knew everything. So he knew the bugs, certainly, but he also knew the mammal footprints and scat, and he knew the the plants and he knew the birds and all the stuff. And he did it, he did it in kind of this humble, kind of cool way, with a very dry, quirky sense of humor. And it was one of those situations where I just, you know, I was drawn in and really engaged by this. And it was one of those um kind of transformative moments where I said, I want to be that guy. Yeah, um, you know, as one that one teacher that that changes your life. But with my upbringing in Earth Day and all of that nature stuff, uh, and uh after you know surviving many years in in Vermont, I said, I want to be that guy, but I want to do it in the tropics. So I had this kind of love for exploration and biodiversity and these kinds of things. So um I had a wonderful time there at undergraduate, graduated, and then I went to graduate school at NC State University, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, for entomology and evolutionary biology. Uh and I I chose that program for a variety of reasons, but the chief

A Mentor Sparks A New Path

SPEAKER_02 7:39

maybe among them was that the um my major professor allowed me to choose what group of bugs that I was going to be working on. And it just so happens that he was a specialist in a group that was primarily tropical and just wacky. I mean, just really bizarre things.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Well, and like, and that's the fun part, like because I mean growing up in that anybody can say that about the area they grew up in, is like, oh yeah, everything here's boring. Sure. And then until someone comes and visits and they're like, oh my gosh, a dear, I'm like, yeah, yeah, anyway, moving on. But like, I mean, you like the easiest place to compare to is like Australia. Like you hear of bugs there, you're like, I don't want to go there simply because of the bugs. Yeah. But to be able to be like, hey, actually, I want to go to the place where it's like the funnest, the most unique, and do this. And and especially to have like someone open that up for you in the beginning of like where I mean, you're in Vermont, you're in your hometown, probably walking in similar places you grew up walking around all the time. But here's this guy that comes in and makes something so ordinary become very magical. Exactly right. Totally right.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

And he so he it was really a a new vista, a new, a new uh horizon that he opened up for me. Is that um, and in fact, I had to tell you the the exciting thing of my work with him, my specific research with him was I was being um paid in the summer and then for credit in the in the um uh other semesters. Uh my project was to hike uh one of the bigger mountains in in Vermont three or four times a week checking um pitfall traps for beetles at various altitudinal levels. So I was doing a an altitudinal biodiversity gradient study on the ground beetle fauna of this mountain in the Green Mountains, a camel's hump, which is the name of the mountain. So, you know, here was I was a you know, whatever, 19, 20-year-old kid, um hiking all the time and doing science and exploring and and discovering um things. And that was that just opened a new world for me. That's so amazing. So it was it was just uh, as I said, transformative. And I I just decided, listen, this is a new pathway, this this idea of a an academic career, which I hadn't really considered before. Um I you know, I started off as a pre-med student. And so this was just a classic. Classic undergrad. All right, we're gonna go to med school. Exactly. Two semesters later. No, I'm not. No, right. And I I, you know, be as we had said before, I wasn't I didn't find that passion. I really was doing that because my parents were in the medical field, and I thought, well, they have a pretty good life, maybe I'll do that. But then when this happened, this kind of transformative period happened, and I really decided that this is what I wanted to do, then um again, it opened up a whole new world.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

And so once you go, so you go to NC State, you find the guy who's like, all right, I'm we're going the bugs and we're going to the tropics. Totally. I mean, were you just kind of I mean, do you have any idea of what that could lead to, or are you mostly just try like hunting this passion and seeing where it could take you?

SPEAKER_02 10:30

So it's a good question. Uh I think at the time I really thought that I was going to be the next Dr. Cryon at University of X. You know, fill in your you know, insert name here. Um and I was I was really following that academic pathway. And I I thought, you know, uh, okay, master's degree, get that. PhD, get that. Do a postdoctoral fellowship, get that. And then I'll find a job somewhere at some college or university. Um, and so that's really what my pathway was um at the time. And then it changed radically later on. But um to get there, I I you know stayed in graduate school for uh it took me, I guess, seven years to finish those two degrees. Um, entomology, systematic entomology. So the the science of systematics is a science about evolution and biodiversity, and it includes two separate uh sub-sciences, if you will. One is taxonomy. So I was very interested in biodiversity discovery, like going out to the world and figuring out what species are out there, can we classify them? Can we identify them? Are they known? Or are they things that nobody's ever seen before? Can we can discover um new species? So that's kind of one major focus of my work.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

And if you're in North Carolina, but studying tropical bugs, I mean, where did that

Tropical Bugs Systematics And DNA

SPEAKER_00 11:47

take you to?

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Yeah, so uh so in North Carolina, of course, uh for for the majority of my graduate work, I was really taking classes and kind of training, right? Uh but then I spent a good deal of time in in Costa Rica as a graduate student, and then that whole experience prepped me for my my own research as I finished up. Okay. And I uh and you know, we can go into that. Okay, sorry, I'm yeah, carriage before the horse. But I but uh I mean, spoiler alert is is I've I've had the the real honor and and privilege to work in countries all around the world. So um, but to get there, it was a long road. Uh and so um uh I I kind of lost my train of thought. So so uh master's degree. Oh yeah, systematics. Okay, so so systematics um includes taxonomy and phylogenetics. And so the science of phylogenetics is um using evidence based on a variety of different sources to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of organisms, whether it's a plant or a bacteria or an animal, for me it was insects. So I studied um the taxonomy, biodiversity discovery, and then I used for my master's anatomical or morphological evidence to reconstruct evolutionary relationships of these weird things that I studied. And then as a PhD student, I went into molecular phylogenetics, which means that I I learned how to do targeted DNA sequencing through the genome to use genetic evidence to reconstruct these relationships. Wow. So I'm an evolutionary I I you know what I have a lot of titles, right? So I I'm I consider myself an entomologist, yes. I consider myself a tropical biologist, yes. I consider myself an evolutionary biologist, yes. Taxonomist, phylogeneticist.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Well, it's like interesting too, because like you think about, okay, so I'm gonna go be an entomologist. I need to understand bugs. And you're like, well, I need to understand their habitat and where they grow and like how that makes how that plays a point. But then you're like, well, that all is gonna have an impact on like the history of everything and like where did those start from? Where did they change? Why did they change that way? So it's like all kind of interconnected and like not it's not like you had this, and you're like, well, I'm actually gonna study chemistry too, or become like a German literature like professor. So it's like it's fascinating that it all is connected to paint this bigger picture that you have to get through with all the details.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

And and you put your finger on something important, and that is you know the reason to do science. I mean I'm kind of talking about the mechanics of how I got there, but man, it it's it's the curiosity, it's the basic discovery, the the idea of of um the joy of discovery, uh of of asking really basic questions of what, why, you know, where when. So these are the the basic questions of science that that are just so fascinating to discover. You know, what insects are there? Um when when did they evolve? Why did they evolve, or where do they evolve? What what describes their pattern through history such that they're found in the places that they're found today? Um so it's these basic, basic questions, and then you use all these fancy techniques to kind of get there. But but at its fundamental core, it's like a kid asking a simple question, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean I I wish more people had that because I think everybody to an extent is curious. And I think we live in a society where like curiosity is dampened too early.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

But I think whether or not you have this childlike curiosity for lack of a better term, I mean the scientific method in itself is something that everybody can apply more in their life. Because we kind of we grew up in this world where I mean everything's at our fingertips, so it makes us think that we know everything because we can look at anything. But like the way that you ask questions, the way you structure things, the way you go about collecting data to reject or accept a null hypothesis is a very different thing. Very different. Like even someone the other day, it's gonna sound silly, but it was like in a comment and they were like, Well, I just Googled this and that says you're wrong. Like, yeah, but you're like the way you're asking the question already and has inherent bias in it.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Totally. Yeah, and in fact, the way that I grew up and the way that many of us did in that generation is is the scientific method in life, kind of writ large, right? So you you make an observation, you you know, check things out, you explore a little bit, you try a different little experiment, maybe that didn't pan out, you try something else. And so that's the scientific method kind of in life that we just then apply to these science questions in a laboratory setting.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah. Like even like zooming out to like the path of career, like it's it's interesting with academia, and it can be applied in a lot of other places, but we use academia for the sake of the argument and the conversation is like it's easy to be like, okay, cool, I got my undergrad, I'm gonna go get my master's, I'm gonna go get my doctorate, I'm gonna go get my postdoc, and then I'm there once I have that, check the box, and I can go get my I mean it's it's very easy layout, but I feel like a lot of people, especially like after undergrad where or like wherever people's various jumping off point could be, it's like, all right, cool, like I don't know what is next. Yeah, and so many people just like or if they do know what's next or think they do, they do it and they just like do it forever. But really, like there should be more of this like, all right, pause, analyze, does this make sense? Are we like is life good? Am I happy? Am I are my values being met? Am I with the people that I want to be? Is my time being spent in the right way? Yeah, and like sometimes it's like, no, we need to change something.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

And you're right about that. And and so many times during this whole arc uh that I I'm describing to you, you know, I I either ask myself, Am I on the right path? Or maybe more poignantly, my family would ask, you know, can you make a living doing this? What you're what you're doing? How would the bugs do? And so uh I've always been a little bit on the uh of the black sheep in the family in that regard. I mean, I it was not a traditional career path that my family was was experienced with. But it was, uh I think to your point, it was following that passion and following that that inner drive to say to to kind of validate that yes, I am on the right path for me. Um and it hopefully will lead somewhere pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Yeah. I mean, so far, so good.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

So um, gosh, so my story then continues. Um, I finished my graduate work uh in in 1999, and as a kid from Vermont, had having spent some time in the South, which was culturally interesting and and different, uh, I was offered a a position of all places at uh Brigham Young University as a postdoctoral position. It's very different than those two places for a non-LDS kid from New England to go to kind of the heart of the Mormon you know religion, um, at least academically. Um it was uh but listen, I was there for two years, and at the time uh it was a vibrant laboratory that I joined. I was the first postdoctoral worker in the lab for my advisor. Uh but we had graduate students and undergraduates and other faculty members who were um from all over the country, some all over the world, doing really exciting, engaging science. And it was just a really vibrant place. It's almost like you did your own Mormon mission in the U.S. Yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, it's a good way to say it. Uh so I spent two years at BYU and it and really um was then introduced to Utah. Okay. Was introduced to the the not only the culture of Utah, but just the environment here. It's just blew me away.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

I mean, for someone who likes to be outside and study the biodiversity and the entomology and the systems within them all, not a bad place to poke around. Pretty darn good. There's there's a couple more hills than uh what was it, uh, humpback mountain.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Yeah, totally, right. Yeah, it's uh yeah, and the yeah, just everything about it was was alien and yet um exciting. I mean, it just awe-inspiring, really. So I loved it. I mean, I just I loved it. But at the time I I knew that it was temporary, I knew that it was a fixed deal, I was you know, um two years in. Um and so during that time I was I started to look for positions as as postdocs do. You start looking around for the the permanent job. And as I mentioned before, you know, I thought I was gonna be Jason Cryan professor of whatever at university of wherever. Um and before

BYU Postdoc And Career Pivot

SPEAKER_02 19:47

I really got too far down the road of applying to places uh for university jobs, um, and this takes maybe a step back and say the project I was working on as a postdoctoral worker was a project um uh going back to my early roots working on ground beetles uh and uh not my specialty through graduate school, um but yet it was working on ground beetles that had evolved through the Hawaiian archipelago. And so each island in the chain has its own unique set of species. They don't fly, so they can't interbreed. They can't from one island to the next island, um, they can't readily encounter each other and interbreed. So they're they had evolved to separate species. So there's this whole really interesting species complex across the archipelago. And I was doing taxonomy and evolutionary reconstruction and all of those things on them. I actually never went to Hawaii, so that was a bummer. I know that was a bummer. But what is it never gonna go to the middle? Yeah, James's a gun that's over, the field work's already done.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Look at the numbers in the pictures that you're like, cool.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Go sequence a gene. Which is fine. That is totally fine. Um but the the grant that was um funding that research had been uh awarded to my my postdoctoral advisor at BYU in collaboration with a faculty member at Cornell University back in in uh uh upstate New York. He, the the faculty member at the Cornell, had a lot of uh many colleagues uh in entomology throughout the state and and elsewhere, of course, but um one of those colleagues had contacted him and said, Hey, I'm from the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, and we are looking for um somebody, uh a bright young scientist who can come in and start a genetics laboratory to do evolutionary studies. And so that guy said, I got the guy. And so he called me and and set me up and hooked me up with the the folks at uh NC State, I'm sorry, New York uh State Museum. And they said, Listen, um if you haven't heard of us, here's who we Are here's what we're intending to do. We'd like to fly you out and have you interview for this job. So even really without applying, they they kind of flew me out.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

And I can't imagine how many of you there are in the country, if not the world. Now there are more.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Yes. Back then there were fewer. And so I was um I was maybe not a unicorn, but I was, you know, uh one of a small club.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

And uh when they reached out, were you like, well, you know what, that sounds great, maybe I'll come talk, but I really do want to go be again Dr. Crying at University of wherever.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Yeah. No, I didn't. I said, that sounds great. Let me, you know, I'd love to learn more. Okay. So um and of through the course, I'm I'm maybe glossing over a few important facts. I'm a collections-based worker, researcher. So that means that I've used throughout my graduate work and and beyond, I've used museum natural history collections to further my research. So looking at specimens, you know, um assessing taxonomy and and father genetics from those specimens. So I'm I was no stranger to the importance of natural history collections and their use in the kind of science that I do. So when they called, I said, this is great, sounds wonderful, let me go out. So I went out um and interviewed, and they actually, I was at the tail end of their um interview process, and they ended up offering me the job on the spot, which was crazy. So I called my wife back in Provo, Utah, and said, How do you feel about moving to Albany? So uh that was my first job. So I was I never became, you know, faculty at a university of that. I since then have always been a museum-based scientist. So I worked at the New York State Museum for a dozen years. Uh, I ran the genetics lab there for those that year, uh those years, doing my own work and then facilitating the genetic portion of the research of other scientists at the museum. So it was a it was a fantastic kind of collaborative um um environment. And and during those time uh during those years, I was then working on my own um work. So I study weird things that are related to cicadas. They're they're all over the world, but primarily diverse in the tropics. Plant hoppers, tree hoppers, spittle bugs, all kinds of really weird, bizarre critters. Um and so during those years I I was successful with grants, uh research grants specifically from National Science Foundation. And I had the privilege and honor to work, uh I think it's like 25 countries all around the world, Asia, Africa, Central and South America, uh through the Caribbean. And I would do the work that I had been trained to do. So biodiversity discovery, going out and and studying these critters in their environment, collecting, you know, them, um, figuring out which ones are known, which ones are new to science. I've described many new species, then bringing them back to the laboratory, sequencing their DNA and and reconstructing their evolutionary pathways, relationships, and then using that as a hypothesis to talk about like meaningful, cool biological, you know, uh questions. Where are they in the world? Why, as we said before, right? Um, what are they? How are they related? Where are they in the world? How do they get there? Where when did they evolve? You know, what symbiosis do they have in their life history? So all of these cool questions that can only be answered if you know something about the evolution.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Yeah. Well, and it's like I think I love that like there's always that question that people have is like what you do today is for your like six-year-old self and your sixty-year-old self. Yeah. And I love that you like your six-year-old self is probably like, we did it, Jesus. We're looking at bugs, we're we're crawling around outside. To be clear I'm not 60 yet, but you're still working with that guy to make sure he's proud of that. But it's it's it's so fun to see of like all of that. I mean, especially when and like I'm kind of curious about because you go through all of your research, you get to build your own lab there, and then be able to like further that research and finally get to travel the places instead of seeing all of all of the collections, which is probably great. But like when you were there at the New York State Museum, I mean, were you pretty exposed to a lot of other things in the museum, or were you pretty pigeonholed in um in entomology itself?

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Yeah, it's a great question. So so really that's that position allowed me to kind of understand the importance and appreciate the the power of natural history museums, of science museums, right? So, so I immediately realized that my earlier career aspirations of being a professor at a university um may not have fit me as well as uh where they found, right? So being in a museum is exciting, it's it you have a ready infrastructure to encounter and engage with uh science curious public um in ways and so so science education became very important to me. Um, and I spent a lot of my time um while at the New York State Museum engaging in educational programming and and public kind of events and and festivals and whatnot because there I realized the power of of informal education and and public science education. And that's man, that's that is an exciting part of museum work.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

And I always get envious of people who have really fast feedback loops. Like it's it's one thing if like you're working in corporate America, you have your like blah blah blah, you do this, you send your rapport, you have your marketing plan, oh, and then you have your annual review, maybe your biannual review. And like it's kind of like and which are not exciting at all, but to be able to be like, all right, kids. Or all right, someone who's like again, they're because they're curious, they want to learn more and be like, I'm gonna teach you something. And you're they're like, I had no idea. That's like I didn't know this about cicadas. I didn't know they could be in all the different places, and this is how it all works, and how they like are so different where you can find similarities and differences and just like kind of watch them just be like kind of go in that I imagine that like download mode where they're just like eyes open, just nodding. Yeah, yeah. Like I'm very envious of that. Yeah. And so I mean it's it's interesting to see. So you so you get into the the science museum, the natural history museum side of things, and going there and being, I mean, a scientist and a researcher is one thing, but then to transition to, I mean, like the the leadership side, that like the management side, yeah. I mean, was that thrust upon you? Is that something that you were searching for?

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Because sometimes it's a little bit above. It's a great question. So um a couple things happen um in coincidence, I would say that that changed my career path yet again. Um the first thing is uh because I was successful with getting grants, basically, uh that the we always used to laugh and say, you know, the good news is you got a grant, the bad news is you got a grant. Because there's a lot of responsibilities that come with that. So it's not just going out into the world and playing, it's annual reporting and and um you know um a lot of administrative paperwork that's that are that's related to accepting money from the federal government. So at one point in my career at the while I was at the New York State Museum, I I believe I was administering three separate major grants from the NSF. And it was taking a substantial amount of my time. So my students, my graduate students and postdocs, they were in the lab, they were going to places, they were kind of having the fun of science. And I was doing that still, but I was also doing a a significant amount of administrative work. And so I kind of started to the warm up to the realization that if I'm gonna do the administrative work, maybe administration could be something I would consider as a full-time gig. The second thing is um there were three things that that kind of were were confluent. The second thing is I started to um come to the professional realization that I that I was having a lot of fun and I was doing some really interesting work, I thought, but I wasn't certain that I was moving the needle on anything major, right? So I wasn't curing cancer, I wasn't um making a societal impact that really was that was meaningful to anyone aside from, oh, that's interesting. And so I kind of developed this growing feeling that I really wanted to do something bigger. I wanted to to make a bigger, more lasting, more meaningful impact with my my time. So that was number two. And number three, then um the economic

Grants Administration And Bigger Impact

SPEAKER_02 30:13

downturn of 2009, 10, 11 hit New York State disproportionately hard because of Wall Street and the kind of the way. So um unfortunately at the time, the the state government and the New York State Museum was part of the state government, um, they were very concerned about fiscal responsibility and and making sure that that there was the impression of of you know kind of fiscal conservativism. But and their response to uh my requests of, you know, this weird request of a guy at the state museum wants to go to uh Central Africa to collect bugs, um they decided that they were worried about the headlines if it hit the the newspaper. And I'm being a little facetious. It wasn't just me, it was all of the scientists, and they basically said, listen, we want you to focus on New York State and all of this other international stuff we're we're really not excited about anymore. And yet I was bringing in millions of dollars of of federal dollars, federal money, research money, to do that very work. And so my career um looked like it was in jeopardy if I were to stay there. So so given those three factors, I decided to just make a change and I went back, left the New York State Museum and went back to North Carolina where I was able to uh um take the job of deputy director and director of research and collections for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, which is the largest natural science museum in the Southeast. It's a it's a beautiful museum, it's a great place in Raleigh, North Carolina. So for the second time in my life, I found myself moving from the Northeast down to Raleigh, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

I see this pattern up the city. There's a pattern and it doesn't stop there.

SPEAKER_02 32:07

So uh so I decided, you know, I I intentionally moved from being an active scientist to being an administrator who advocated for the needs and represented the needs of a whole team of scientists doing really cool things. And that's where I started to feel like, okay, now I'm really maybe moving the needle. So it's not just me talking about Jason and his little laboratory, it's Jason uh fighting for the needs and and um representing these scientists who were doing awesome things. And now I had a staff of 30, for example, instead of just me. And that was that was really transformative. So I stayed there in that dual role, uh deputy director where I did kind of strategic initiatives, uh I took part in strategic initiatives across the whole museum. And then I was the the chief scientist, the the director of research and collections for the scientific enterprise of that museum. I was there for eight years in that role and uh learned a lot, and that was the the time when I really learned how to um run a museum kind of in a day-to-day fashion. Uh so it was fantastic, it was great. And then the opportunity came to um apply for a job back in Salt Lake City, back in Utah at this phenomenal museum, the Natural History Museum of Utah. And so I was um uh very fortunate to to get this job, and so here I am.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's amazing to see I mean, like, cause like it's one thing to chase a childhood passion, which I mean I think fuels a lot or should fuel a lot of people's decisions in general of like what you're passionate about, where it wants to take you, and even uh conversation like Kathleen Bodenlust where she's like, yeah, like it's but like when I was did like corporate America thing, and then all of a sudden I'm like, well, where was I happier? What did I actually like doing? And then it took her back to that, and like it's where she was able to find it again. And with this, it's like interesting to see how because like I mean it it's almost like a similar trend of like the the downtrend of New York where it's like, oh well, you we can't justify this, we can't make money off of this, like taking a passion and being able to like, well, here's how I can make it make sense for a lot of people, but also like defend the things that you are passionate about of like, well, I'm gonna help you not only with like the administrative part of grants and and all the headache that it has, but also be like, I'm gonna defend that what you're doing is important and so that you can keep doing what you're doing. I'm gonna be involved at some point, but I'm gonna take uh or be this advocate for you. Yeah. And I mean, so talk to me about I mean the uniqueness of the Natural History Museum in Utah. Because I mean, there's only I mean I'm trying to think of how many natural history museums I've been to in my life, and it's gotta be more than three, less than seven. But I mean, talk to me about like the little like the uniqueness of the museum that we have in the broader ecosystem of science and history museums.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Yeah. So uh of course I take everything I say with a grain of salt because I'm inherently biased. Well, I love this place. Um but so the NHMU is um truly uh um how do I say it? It's uh small but mighty. Um and we're not even that small necessarily. We are considered a a medium-sized museum. The the museum was started through legislative action in the early 1960s.

Natural History Museum Of Utah Origin

SPEAKER_02 35:20

Uh and it was the original intent of the museum was to basically aggregate um all of the the disparate research collections that faculty members across the University of Utah campus had um had begun and and they were working on. But yet they the university didn't have resources to kind of maintain all of those things. So they centralized all of those collections, brought them together such that uh creating the museum such that these collections could be preserved in perpetuity for you know cultural and and natural history preservation for for future generations. So that's kind of the the the origins of the of the um University of Utah and state of Utah's natural history museum. Um as I think you mentioned earlier, it was originally on the main campus uh at the university. It opened its doors to the public with with kind of um traditional natural history exhibitions in 1969, I believe, on uh University uh I'm sorry, President Circle and on the University Campus in the um Thomas building, which used to be the um university's library building. And then it was transferred to the to the museum. And it stayed that. It stayed this kind of quaint little um natural history museum, very traditional, diorama-driven um kind of exhibits um for the next 40 years or so. Um but 35 years anyway. Um there was during that time uh w there were several, there were two, I'm sorry, three directors. I'm the fourth director of the museum. Uh there were three directors. My direct predecessor was Sarah George. Um she and her team started dreaming about making this museum something bigger, something um that that the whole state of Utah should be proud of, in fact, something that would be nationally recognized. And her work and and the team's work over those many years um resulted in, and I'm I'm glossing over a lot of history, but it resulted in the building that we now occupy, the Rio Tinto Center, uh opened in 2011, and it's uh a phenomenally attractive building. It's it's a landmark architectural masterpiece. It's a building of 160 plus square feet that uh inside and outside reflects the natural geologic um features of the state of Utah. Um it's it's just a gorgeous place. And when you build a new building as a museum, it gives you the opportunity to uh create bespoke um exhibitions that fit intentionally the the building and the educational paradigms that you want to uh represent. And so again, inside and outside this building is just phenomenal with the the special exhibitions or the permanent exhibitions that that um were created specifically for this building, rather than you know, fitting them into a different building. Yeah. So um the museum now has grown to um we are the largest museum in the intermountain west. So uh to the east, then the next larger museum is Denver Museum of Natural Science, and larger in terms of collection size, staff size, you know, those kinds of things. And then to the west, um the coast of California has several museums that are larger than we are. But in between those two boundaries, we are the largest museum. Uh we are the state's designated museum of natural history, we're also the University of Utah's Museum of Natural History. So we have a kind of a dual identity, which uh is very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Yeah, it's interesting that the duality of it. And the how I mean, roughly how many people because I imagine I mean, I remember going on so many field trips to the net, and I was always the kid who was like way excited. I'm like the front of the bus, just like let's get there already. But I mean, how many students, I mean, in that capacity come through and also just like general people come through the doors?

SPEAKER_02 39:26

So we we typically now uh pre pre-pandemic it was uh about $300,000. $300,000. 300,000 people a year. Um and we have now recovered almost to that size. So we're I'd say we're 96, 97% recovered to that stage uh since the pandemic. Of those roughly 300,000 visitors, about 45,000 are school kids on field trips.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

Oh, I would have I would have guessed it was more, but that's cool that it's like because I like to think people like to go to like they love it. Like I love going to museums when I go places, aquariums, I'm like that guy. Like it's also like I have weird habits I've learned when I go on vacation. Like when I go on vacation, for some reason I always want to watch game shows on TV. Excellent. And I want to go to museums. But if it's like at home, not as much. Yeah. But I'm glad that other people have that sentiment.

SPEAKER_02 40:13

That's very cool.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

Minus the game shows probably.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Yeah. We'll have to talk about that later. Uh so yeah, no, it's it's great. And we actually receive uh we're part of the Utah's IC, I C I S E, the Informal Science Education Enhancement Uh Collective. So we are a group of um informal science organizations that provide science education to Utah's um public and charter school system. And so we receive a separate legislative appropriation for that. And it it allows us to bring those 45,000 kids in on field trips free of charge. And so um it's it's just a wonderful thing to be able to impact the you know the the public school system in Utah.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Yeah. And because I know that we like there's obviously the uh um I want to say displays, but that's not the one. The exhibitions, there you go. Exhibitions that are there permanently versus ones that rotate out or so. But I mean tell me about some of the permanent ones that are there that I mean, whether it's just being more general or also like specific to Utah itself.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Yeah, yeah. So so um, you know, as I said before, we have these amazing permanent exhibition galleries that that are designed intentionally and really some really cool aspects that that um are kind of wow factors for people. So for example, you know, uh Utah itself is just such a great paleontological resource hotspot. Um, you know, one of the one of the um most diverse paleontological resource areas in the world. And it's precisely because we have rocks that are open to the uh environment, open to the air from millions and millions of years through the whole timetable. So paleontologists can go and see dinosaurs in the rocks. So because of that, you as you would imagine, the the our museum has an amazing paleontological collection. And so one of the permanent galleries in our museum is all about dinosaurs through time. And it's it's just a wonderfully laid-out exhibition. You're on a pathway through time essentially, and you can learn about different time periods and the f and the animals that lived in those time periods. Um, but it's it's laid out in a kind of a very progressive um arrangement. And so it's not an old diorama, it's something very exciting and very unique.

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Yeah, I remember those dioramas on the one on President Circle, and I'm glad it.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

I'm glad we've evolved since then. Exactly right. Evolution is in our DNA, we say. Uh so there's that. Then there's a wonderful being, of course, in Utah. So I maybe the theme, I'll start by saying the the scientific themes, the environmental themes that we talk about, the cultural themes that we talk about are all done through the lens of Utah, but they're also all talking about um ideas and theories and and um phenomenon that are broadly applicable across all science globally. So it's it is definitely a place-based museum. It's it's a mostly about Utah, but the things that we learn there, the things that we talk about there are really applicable uh to other areas as well. So uh you go through the Past Worlds Gallery, the whole dinosaur um timeline, which is phenomenal, uh, and you

Dinosaurs Great Salt Lake Bug World

SPEAKER_02 43:23

get to the Great Salt Lake Gallery. So again, a Utah place-based um gallery that talks about the ecology and the biology and the geochemistry of the Great Salt Lake. And then, as I said intentionally, you can look out the window that's in that gallery and see the Great Salt Lake. So it's such a great connection between the educational and the the real, the environment, which is which is special. And those kinds of um moments are replicated through the through many of the other galleries as well.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Which is what I love about again, going to museums and aquariums and such. Like one of my favorite aquariums is Monterey Bay, and it's so cool because you can be in the In the aquarium, be like, hey look, otters. Yeah. And then you go outside, you're like, Hey look, otter. Which is my favorite animal fun fact. Excellent. Um, but then also talk to me about some of the ones that you've had the pleasure of of exhibitions you brought in and had over your tenure there.

SPEAKER_02 44:14

Yeah, thanks. So so in addition to these permanent galleries, we bring in typically two big special exhibitions a year. And we found that this is the right model for our museum. So it's it's um these rotating temporary exhibits um each for about five or six months. They allow us to engage new folks, certainly, re-engage other visitors who had been there before, and they they maybe have seen the permanent galleries, uh, but yet this is something new and exciting that they come in. And we um really encourage many of those visitors to to transfer their tickets into memberships because they they realize that there's something always new at our museum and they're always going to come back, bringing their kids, their grandkids, visitors, all kinds of things. So we've had a wonderful rotation of really world-class special exhibitions in the past few years. For example, we've had um both natural sciences and cultural sciences exhibits, including Egypt, uh, uh one about the the pharaohs and and Egypt Egyptian culture uh culture. We've um had exhibits about the Angkor Empire, the the Southeast Asian um Empire that disappeared in uh you know many tens of thousands of years ago. Um we've brought in exhibitions about orcas, we've brought in exhibitions about um um gosh, you name it. Um Dinosaur certainly.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

I'm surprised every time you're not like, alright guys, so there's this bug attention I'm thinking about.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Well, it's funny you say that because the current exhibition that we have right now is uh one of my favorites, uh, and you won't be surprised to know it's all about bugs. Uh Bug World is is with us right now, and it's a it's just a mind-bending uh experience. All many of the other, most of the other exhibitions I just mentioned are all kind of content-rich, a lot of labels to read, a lot of objects to show to see. Bug World is um it's a departure for us. It's this is an exhibition that was developed by the Tipapa National Museum of New Zealand in collaboration with um Weta Workshops. So, Weta Workshops, if you haven't heard that name before, you have absolutely seen their work if you've seen movies like Lord of the Rings or Hobbit or Avatar or a host of other movies. And they're famous cinematically for taking kind of cool science fiction fantasy work concepts and making hyper-realistic props and costumes. Um, and so National Museum of New Zealand and Weta workshops combined to create this totally immersive kind of Alice in Wonderland experience where you are essentially the size of a bug and and you go into these four focal experiences in the in the gallery and you are immersed in in the world of an insect. Um and each of those four experiences highlights a different superpower of insects, for example. But you are just you're in it. There's there you're not reading labels, you're not um you know watching videos necessarily, you are you know face to face with a giant insect doing something really cool and engaging. It's it's the wow factor.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

So you get to know what it's like to be a ground beetle of different elevations hiking around.

SPEAKER_02 47:37

Totally right, yeah. Um so it you know, I I would say this is this um exhibition will be with us through the summer of 2026, uh, and it will uh it will continue to draw just throngs of excited people. It's it's really a it's a phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Amazing. Yeah. And then looking even more forward, I mean, are there any other I mean big projects you're working on? Any other big exhibitions coming through that people?

SPEAKER_02 48:03

Yeah, we're we're excited. We're uh we have several coming up. We we schedule our special exhibitions uh out for several years. So we're working on an internal uh exhibition right now. So we're developing it at our museum. This is all about the traditional weaving tradition, uh the weaving traditions of the eight federally recognized Native American tribes in Utah, specifically regarding basketry, basket production, but also with other specialty kind of baskets like cradle boards, the the um apparatus that that Native Americans used. Uh they they're woven like baskets, but they would use to carry their their infants on their backs. So this is going to be a really exciting exhibit exhibition. It's beautiful. And this is an exhibition for which we've kind of pioneered, uh, maybe that's not the the great word to say, um, we have developed uh a really um thoughtful approach to working with our Native American partners to co-curate this exhibition. So we have representatives from all of the eight tribes uh of Utah working with us um to develop the content and the look and the feel and the learning objectives of of this exhibition, which will open up uh in 2020 uh December, I believe, of 2026. Okay. Um it's it's going to have a really unique look and feel to it. It's gonna tell the story, very important stories of of Native American culture in in Utah. It's uh it's gonna be very interesting. So that's exciting. And then beyond that, looking forward, we're working with another company right now to develop a a um really unique exhibition on um the history and culture of Japan. So that'll be exciting, and that'll allow us to make um you know forge new relationships with the Japanese um community here in Salt Lake area. Um but that's gonna be an interesting um special exhibition because it's gonna tell these stories of of Japanese history and culture through the lens of um flowers, specific flowers that are meaningful to Japanese culture. So chrysanthemum, um, sakura, the cherry blossom. You know, all of these, there are several other flowers that we're we'll be using to tell stories that are unique to the Japanese culture, which is but actually two questions.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

One I wanted to ask you from the beginning before we even sat down, and the second one, as soon as we got five minutes in, I want to ask you number one, what's your favorite dinosaur?

SPEAKER_02 50:37

Uh I so uh I'm an entomologist, but I I've been learning a lot about paleontology in my role as you know the director. So uh I would say my favorite favorite dinosaur, I really like ceratopsians. Okay. Ceratopsians are very cool. So these are the horned dinosaurs. Triceratops is the most famous one, but man, the diversity of the other ones are just super cool. And so it's really and our museum has this beautiful signature display. We call it the Ceratopsian wall, which is essentially a dozen or so um ceratopsian skulls mounted on the wall with an evolutionary tree that maps the relationships across those very JSON-coated. Very Jason-coded. And in fact, that's one of the reasons why I love this museum when I was applying for this position is the ubiquity of the of the use of evolutionary trees throughout our gallery. Yeah. So um, so ceratopsins are so cool because they, you know, originally we thought with with triceratops, they had this really thick kind of shield-like head frill. Um, but yet all of these other things have very delicate head frills, and so they were there, if they're not shields, then what are they? What are those structures for? What could they have been used for? And so it it just generates all kinds of really interesting discussions about evolution and adaptation and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Yeah. So many always leads to more one answer leads to more questions, and then you just keep going. Yeah, yeah. Um and then secondly, and actually I just thought about a third question. Secondly, uh, what's your favorite? I think I might know the answer, but what's your favorite insect?

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Yeah. Uh so so uh it depends if you're looking for a group of insects or a specific insect. So both. Uh okay, so the group of insects, uh treehoppers are just wacky. I mean, they're I love other things that I study. I study all of the things that are related to cicadas. I don't actually study cicadas, but the whole all of their cousins, if you will. It's uh the scientific name is Al Kenorinca. That doesn't really matter, but the the they include this wacky family of animals

Favorite Dinosaur And Favorite Insect

SPEAKER_02 52:34

that are they're these are all sap-sucking insects, so they have their mouths are uh adapted into a straw, and they stick that straw into the substrate. In this particular case, they're plant eaters, so they stick that into a tree and they will suck out either the xylem or the phloem of the of the tree, the two liquid tissues in vascular plants. Some this group, particularly this this treehopper group, they're phloem feeders, uh, which is kind of interesting, and they they um they are just entomologically famous for having wacky shapes and colors and life history syndromes. Yeah, just amazing. When I show pictures of these things to people, um very frequently I'm asked, you know, you Photoshop this, right? This is not real, but they are. Yeah. There's one particular, to answer the second question, there's one particular treehopper that is is grown to be my favorite. This is a species that um takes if if you indulge the story, um it's a species that I had described 29 years ago. And I know that that date because um my wife um at the time, still my wife, but at the time she was pregnant with our to be our son. She went into labor early, and so we're sitting in the hospital and the doctors are like trying to hold her off because he was pre me. Um and so I figured, well, I'll sit with her, but I'll do some work. And I was working on a manuscript to that included several new species descriptions, one of which was a single weird little bug that I had found in a in a collection, I think, from the National National Uh Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. And it was this wacky little thing that was from Ecuador, I think. Um, Bazaar. It was a singleton. And so um we, uh my wife and I really had really only intended to have one kid. We figured, well, he's gonna be a singleton, he's gonna be a weird little thing. So let me name this weird little bug after this weird little baby. And so we had chosen the name Nathaniel for our son, and so uh was born Nathaniel Cryon, but also was born Lycodai's Nathaniel, the like Nathaniel's treehopper. That's amazing. Which was cool. So so um it remained in taxonomic obscurity for years because it was just a single little bug in a drawer at the Smithsonian. Nobody knew anything about its um life history, what it did in real life, and the whole thing. It was just a bug on a pin. Until um when my son was in high school, and in that intervening period, social media became a thing and Facebook grew, and I had joined several Facebook pages where people would send in pictures of weird insects and say, Hey, can anyone uh identify this?

SPEAKER_00 55:24

I can see you just curling up in a tree who was there.

SPEAKER_02 55:28

So I became known as the guy who could kind of you know identify these weird treehoppers. Yeah. So lo and behold, uh one Facebook user um sent me a picture of this beautiful weird treehopper. He said, Listen, I've been, I just got to Ecuador, I don't know anything about this, but I took a picture of this thing, and do you know what it is? It was a live picture of a of a living uh lycadarius nathanulae. So the second time now this thing kind of came back into my life. So that was cool, and I identified it and it's great, beautiful macro photography uh of this of this gorgeous little species. So then time passed and and uh I made my way out here to Utah and just now a couple of years ago, um I was entertaining a a visitor to the museum who's a children's book author. And she uh we were talking about my career and what I study and blah blah blah, and she said, treehoppers. I have a friend, and she was from Seattle. She said, I have a friend back in Seattle who's a painter and she really likes painting weird little, you know, bugs. And I think she just painted some tree hoppers. Let me go back to Seattle and I'll send you a picture of her new painting. I said, Fine, that's great. A couple weeks later I get this email with an attachment, and I open it up, and it's a ho it's a picture that this lady had painted of treehoppers, and one of them is Lycodarius Nathaniel. So it's it's this insect that keeps on popping up in my life in different ways, and maybe just like my son, he just keeps on popping up. But uh but it's great. That's really my favorite.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

I mean, I I'd see why in Sony, like I uh like I don't know why I developed it, but I always had like a my North Star is always like blue jays. So if I see a blueberry, I'm like, all right, we're we're on the right path. Sure. And so similarly it's like this the singleton just keeps popping up and in such like such unique, like every way is so different.

SPEAKER_02 57:23

Everyone's different and it's it's uh but it's it's interesting, and and we still don't know anything about its life history or you know exactly what it's like.

SPEAKER_00 57:29

That's maybe the next way it pops up. Exactly. So yeah, it's pretty cool. So obviously people can like know the museum, they go see it, they go on field trips, but kind of like you've alluded to is like a big function of the the museums is like this research that it is done. So maybe give a few examples of like research that's being done, maybe more behind the scenes that people may not see in their typical tour of the museum.

SPEAKER_02 57:51

Absolutely. Well, thank you for asking for that because it really um truly our museum is a what we call a true science museum, and and that um we are differentiated from science centers uh in that we have we maintain the natural and cultural history collections for the state of Utah. We have two million plus specimens and objects that we we maintain in those collections. Um and we have a whole cadre of of people who are scientists um preserving those collections but also doing authentic research. So we are truly an uh an authentic science research institution. And man, I tell you, the team is doing some really cool stuff. So we have people working here in Utah on a variety of things, uh, both uh you know, cultural history aspects, questions about uh we have uh one of our um archaeologists, anthropologists works on, I should mention uh Dr. Elizabeth Lauterbeck. Uh she's working on the um cultural the history and cultural usage of the Four Corners Potato, which is this unique kind of um plant that has been found in um archaeological remains of cultures that were here thousands of years ago. And so this is a plant that was used as a food source and then had since been lost essentially and is now coming back. And so we have research going on about that. We have research going on about um um paleontology, certainly. We have uh our our paleontology team is unearthing new dinosaur species uh across southern Utah. Um uh our our paleontologist, Dr. Randy Ermis, uh, in addition to the Utah work, is also doing paleontological work down in Patagonia and Argentina. And so he's he's using his knowledge of the geologic history and paleontology to make connections that uh span not only millions of years of time, but also modern geography and continental changes. Um we have another paleoecologist who's doing amazing work crawling through caves that have never been explored in in not only in Utah, but also in South Africa, in the cradle of humanity. And so he's um

Research Collections And Local Discovery

SPEAKER_02 59:58

discovering animals and and early humans that people have never seen before um in in recorded history. So uh we have just people doing amazing work, and and that's just the beginning. We have so many others, we have people doing amazing work um illuminating the nature and culture of Utah and then connecting us to the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:21

Yeah. Well, and like and that's I mean, it's it's like fascinating to see, like even talking to you today, like it's wild, like because like my naivete is like, oh yeah, we've discovered so much of it. I mean, we've been here so long, we've explored so much, like every stone's been uh uh overturned. But in reality, it's like au contraire, there's so much more to do, so much more to catalog, so much more to index, so much more to discover. I mean, even your favorite bug, you're like, it's I've yeah, I've seen it in a museum. Yeah, I some guy on Facebook showed me a picture, and then some other woman sent me an email of a painting. Other than that, that's kind of like all that all the context I have. And I'm sure that you there are not many more people that would have the life exposure to be like, oh, I've actually seen it a bunch, Jason. Here it is, like you know, and and so I love that it's like there's there's still this excitement of the world, not not just around you, but around all of us to discover in a world where we're like, yeah, we've discovered it all. It's not like we're going like not America of Vespucci going across the world or like going to the like the moon or the bottom of the ocean, like well, bottom of the ocean might be a different one. But um, it's so fascinating that you still get to have that those aha moments and light bulbs and and and get to discover it all, but also be able to be in a capacity where you get to help people facilitate facilitat you get a facilitate for so many other people in so many other capacities at scale. Absolutely right.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:36

I've had, you know, just fortunately myself personally, I've had the the great fortune of working around the world. But discovery can happen right here. And there's a fantastic story um that I I hope you'll agree with me is is really inspiring. And that is um we have a great colleague at the museum. He's a faculty member at the University of Utah, um, Dr. Jack Longineau. And he and I, Jack and I had originally met tromping through the jungles of Costa Rica. Kind of we we just ended up um two entomologists in the same place. It was pretty cool. So I've known him for years. However, he is uh he had worked in Oregon, and then he um maybe a decade or so ago came to Utah. He is an ant biologist, so he's a he's a specialist in ants, um, primarily throughout the new world, Central America, South America, but really globally, he's he's well known. He moved to Utah as a new faculty member uh here and he bought a house up in the avenues with his wife, who's a uh tropical forest ecologist, a canopy ecologist. And he was looking in his new backyard for bugs, and he found a species that he didn't recognize. It turns out he found a new species of insect, of ant, in his backyard in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, I mean, he discovery, the moments for discovery are all around us. You don't have to go to a rainforest in the tropics. You can just observe your own surroundings and you'll find something cool. Amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:03

I can't imagine like, all right, just moved in, just closed, moving in, and what is that? And here's something new. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Well, Jason, I mean, I love that I mean, I love kind of coming back to like the moment that inspired all of you. I mean, going on this hike with this guy, like being being very drive, saying, Oh, here's all this and this was inspired you. I love that you get to be in a capacity where I have no doubt that there's gonna be someone in the future where they're gonna be on a podcast to be like, so what made you want to study and tomology? Like, well, I was on this field trip and there's this guy who showed me this beat this bug, and he told me about this tree hopper and singleton, and so it just made me want to go explore the world. So, I mean, thank you for not just I mean chasing your passions and doing what's great, but also just inspiring a whole cater of new people that are gonna, I mean, carry on that legacy in some way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:47

Well, thanks for inviting me to tell the story. It's uh it's great to be here, and and um uh you know, I just I'm honored to be in the position where I can, you know, maybe help um shape the next generation. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

Yeah. And before we wrap, I want to ask the two questions I always ask every guest. And number one, if you could have someone on the Small Lake City Podcast and hear more about them, their story, and what they're up to, who would you want to hear from?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

Uh Nalini Ned Carney. Uh she's the forest ecologist that Jack Langineau is is married to. All right. Uh she's world renowned as one of the pioneers of canopy, uh tropical canopy research, and she lives right here. She's doing amazing things.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:24

We'll go hang out her backyard and see if we can discover something else. Perhaps. Um, and then lastly, if people want to, I mean, keep in touch with the museum, know what's going on, uh, what's the best place to find information?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:35

Yeah, all the information can be found at our website, nhmu.utah.edu. Okay.

unknown 1:04:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:41

Jason, thanks so much for your work. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much.