Ask the Paleontologist
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If you’ve ever watched the Fox series Bones, Stephen Frost has a spoiler alert for you: it’s nothing like real anthropology.
The show’s stars use forensic anthropology to solve crimes, finding answers to their questions about human remains with a few quick keystrokes on a computer. In reality, anthropology research takes months of meticulous work. The big payoff usually comes to those with vast reserves of patience and persistence.
So says Frost (right), a UO paleontologist. “To be a good researcher, you really have to stick with it,” he says. “It’s easy to say, ‘This is getting tough, I’ll just let it go.’”
As an expert guide, Frost regularly leads UO undergraduates through the meticulous process of anthropology research. His specialty is analyzing the size and shape of monkey bones, also known as morphometrics. He wants to know how primates evolved and what that says about our own evolution.
At any given time, he’s helping several undergrads design their own projects in this area.
Frost sets the bar high. He urges his students to strive to publish their work in research journals and defend their findings at national conferences. These achievements serve them well regardless of whether their future is in anthropology or some other profession, he says.
“It means they’ve done something at a professional level,” Frost said. “It will be a useful experience whether they’re presenting at a corporate meeting or teaching students. They’re learning how to present their ideas and communicate clearly what they’ve done.”
Q: What kind of research projects do your undergraduates pursue?
Frost: There’s an old idea in biology which predicts that with mammals, the farther you are from the equator the larger you will be. One of my students, Julia Arenson, has been looking at how macaques, a group of Asian monkeys, vary with latitude. She measured the skull specimens of macaques from Indonesia, Nepal, China, and Japan, and how they changed across that distance. Sure enough, the macaques get bigger the farther you get from the equator. She presented at two national conferences—the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the American Society of Primatologists—and will use this to write an honors thesis. And, hopefully, also submit it for publication.
Another student, Kelsey Clarke, collaborating with (department head) Frances White, took some of my data and looked at testosterone and social structure in primates. There’s a theory that among primate groups with higher levels of male-male competition, the males tend to be bigger and have more testosterone. She was able to confirm this and she also presented at the same conferences.
A third, Rachel Glenzer, compared a new method for measuring skull specimens, called three-dimensional photogrammetry, to two other well-known methods: using a “microscribe” or using a 3-D laser scanner. With photogrammetry, you take pictures of an object and (with computer software) you can build a three-dimensional image. She was able to show that the photogrammetry images were not as good as laser scanners at accurately capturing the shape, but they were as good as the microscribe, which is a handheld probe. She ended up doing this project for her honors thesis and she presented at the AAPA as well.
Q: How do students collect information?
SF: A lot of it is working with databases. It’s a lot of data management, data processing, and working with new and difficult software. I do a lot of helping over the bumps. I’ll also ask them to measure (skull specimens and other bones) in our labs—I’ll ask them to measure the same couple of specimens 10 times each, and if they’re still around after that I know they’re motivated! I want to make sure they’re good enough at collecting data before they go and collect it on their own. A lot of times they’ll say, “The result (of my analysis) is not what I expected from what we talked about,” and we’ll look at it together.
Beyond the UO, museums can be major repositories for research data. One of our undergraduate students went to the Smithsonian—they found her a place in collections to work, and they pulled specimens she was interested in and she set them up in front of her device and measured them. Another student went to the American Museum of Natural History to conduct research. The duration of these trips is often limited by what the students can afford to spend, but our department does try to help undergraduates do this when we can.
Q: How do undergraduates get started?
SF: You need to start freshman or sophomore year to really get something done. They’ll come to me and say, “I’m interested in getting involved in research or just doing something.” We’ve developed a track through which undergraduates can start to produce research abstracts and, hopefully, publications.
First, we send them to volunteer in the UO Comparative Primate Collection, where they’ll do things like clean the crock pots used to boil down flesh, or they’ll label all those little finger bones. It takes a lot of attention to detail, a lot of patience. If you like it—if it’s fun—then I’ll discuss with them, “What do you want to do?” I want to give them something they’re interested in, and that I’m interested in, and from which they could potentially get a publication.
Q: What’s your role as undergrads develop projects?
SF: When they take on a problem, I’ll give them some things to read and I give them my data first, so they can get a feeling for it. Then they collect data of their own. Also at the beginning, we discuss their goals—say they want to present at a meeting or write an honors paper—and I’ll walk them through the timeframe for when things need to happen. But I don’t hound them; I let them time-manage themselves. I review their (paper) drafts and we’ll talk about what they want to show in their presentation. I’m involved in all steps.
Q: Your students often present
at the UO Undergraduate Symposium. How do you help?
SF: Presenting your ideas at a conference is a good way to learn how to express yourself accurately and precisely. I’ll give students some thoughts about (how to present work in a poster). I don’t tell them what to do but we have a lot of posters up in the lab and they’ll look at those posters for ideas. One of the toughest things is, maybe they found five things in their project that are exciting—I’ll say, “Pick just one that you’re going to present in this poster, and think about what figures you’re going to use and how to illustrate it best,” and then we’ll fit some text around that.
Q: How does the symposium benefit undergraduates?
SF: When they have participated in research, they know what’s in the data and what isn’t, and you can just see in the way they talk about it—there’s a confidence. They also know the limits of the data. People will ask them questions and they’ll say, “Well, the way I measured the data, we can’t really say that.”
When they get excited about what they’re doing and they get a result and it’s interesting, I get excited, too. That’s why I’m in this business—I got a result with something I did and I think, “Wow, isn’t that fun? My data show something.”
