The Navajo Researcher Reviving A Desert Peach | A New Dino With Blade-Like Horns

Bringing back Southwest peach orchards won’t be easy, but researchers are on the lookout for remaining trees—and they need help. And, the newly discovered Lokiceratops is challenging paleontologists’ understanding of how horned dinosaurs evolved and existed together.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:47Flora Lichtman?

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• 1:37Ira Flatow?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Today on the podcast, the search for the southwest peach. But first, recorded live from the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, we meet Lokiceratops, a funky lime green elephant-sized dinosaur with blade-like horns all over its head.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  This is not an animal that wants to hide. This is an animal that wants to stand out and say, I'm sexy.

• 2:09Ira Flatow?

  The Intermountain West is a dinosaur nerd's dream because it's such a hotspot for fossils and some of the most famous dino fossils in the world like T. rex, triceratops can be found in western North America. So of course, we couldn't come out to Utah without digging into, you know, some info about dino science. And today, we're going to meet a fossil that was just unveiled last year, a spectacular horned dinosaur named Lokiceratops. Let's welcome to the people who worked on Lokiceratops. They're right here with us. Savannah Carpenter, paleontologist, school outreach coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr.

• 2:54Ira Flatow?

  Mark Lowen, vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 3:05Ira Flatow?

  Mark, all right, let me begin with you. Take me back to the beginning. Where did Lokiceratops come from?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  So Lokiceratops came from the Badlands in a river valley just about six miles south of the Canadian-United States border in Montana. It was dug up by commercial collectors on a private ranch, and it was sold to a museum in Denmark. And we have a partnership with that museum in Denmark, the Museum of Evolution. And so scientists from there and from the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah got to look at this dinosaur for the first time and figure out just what it might be.

• 3:51Ira Flatow?

  And Savannah, at what point did you start to think, aha, we've got something new here?

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a few other Ceratopsians that were from the same area that Lokiceratops was discovered in. But when we started to sort of lay out all the bones and figure out which is what and figure out how they all fit together like a big old puzzle, sort of started to become clear, this is not any of the other things. One of these things is not like the other. And we realized this is actually something totally unique and brand new to science.

• 4:22Ira Flatow?

  Well, we don't like to see it. Yeah. Well, let's have the reveal of Lokiceratops right here.

• 4:36Ira Flatow?

  Wow. Wow. This is, I mean, I wasn't, Mark, I wasn't expecting... It's lime green.

• 4:44Ira Flatow?

  It's like a flavor, you know?

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's pretty exciting. If you look at this dinosaur, it's got all kinds of projections going off of its head. This is not an animal that wants to hide. This is an animal that wants to stand out and say, "I'm sexy."

• 5:05Ira Flatow?

  Well, it's certainly doing that tonight.

• 5:08Ira Flatow?

  And it has so many horns on it, right? Savannah, it looks like, what, a triceratops has one central horn? But I'm counting on one, two, three, four, maybe five horns on this?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, it is the most ornate horned dinosaur ever found. We wanted to bill it as the horniest dinosaur ever, but that got, that got the nicks, so...

• 5:30Ira Flatow?

  Not in Utah, we can't say that.

• 5:35Ira Flatow?

  Wow, and, okay, the name Loki. Where does, Mark, where does that come from?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  So, again, the museum that first acquired this specimen is from Denmark. So often, when we think about a name for a dinosaur, we're thinking about, you know, will we use some god from mythology and things like that? So we settled on the Norse god Loki. He's the trickster, he's got wide blades. And so that kind of reminded us of some of these ornaments on the top of the frill. At the same time, you'll notice there's a little horn on one side and a bigger horn on the other side. That actually reminded us of reindeer. So this animal is actually called Loki Seratops rangiformis, which literally translates to Loki's horned face that looks like a caribou.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Or a reindeer.

• 6:28Ira Flatow?

  Makes sense to me, yeah.

• 6:32Ira Flatow?

  And this, this dinosaur, the fossil, had to be put together, right? Like many fossils, they don't come whole, they come in a bunch of pieces. How difficult was that to do?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was definitely a big job. We kind of had a big jumble of bones and our job was to figure out what bone was what, and then also put it together, kind of like a puzzle, like I mentioned earlier. So we sort of laid them all out on a table, figured out which pieces go with the skull, which pieces go below the skull, and sort of just created it from there, one bone at a time.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Savannah and I are working on at least five new relatives of this dinosaur from right here in Utah. So, there's lots of work to be done. We're, you know, we're just scratching the surface. We really don't know anything about dinosaurs. And that's an honest fact. You know, we've found less than 0.01% of the dinosaurs that ever lived, for sure. So we, when I say we know nothing, we really know nothing about the world of the dinosaurs. We're just trying to reconstruct it. I remember being around a table with all the pieces of this dinosaur, and we actually thought that it was a different dinosaur. You know, it was actually sold to the Museum of Evolution as a dinosaur called Medusus heretops,

• 7:49Speaker 03

  which comes from a mile and a half away, at the same level. So we were sure that it was going to be that. But when we started to put it together, and we saw a completely different pattern of the frill, Savannah and I just looked at each other and we were like, "This is new." And this is new means we get to name it, which is pretty cool.

• 8:15Ira Flatow?

  You guys really get into your work, don't you?

• 8:18Speaker 04

  It's easy. We have the most fun job, I think. So it's not hard to be excited about dinosaurs when you're a dinosaur nerd.

• 8:26Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, and it's a good place to be a dinosaur nerd.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 8:29Ira Flatow?

  And where did it live? What was the environment it was living in, Mark? Tell me about what it was like there.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  So this animal lived at the edge of a giant seaway that cut North America in half. So it's actually living in the swamps of this seaway that would have been kind of like Louisiana. We know that there was vegetation in the water, lots of low deciduous trees, and it's about 100 miles away from the mountains, which are pretty much in the same place as they are in Glacier National Park. So this animal is living out on the floodplain. It's living alongside duck-billed dinosaurs. There's a giant cousin of Tyrannosaurus that's trying to eat it. We find little fish, we find crocodiles, we find all kinds of things in the ecosystem.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  So we're interested not just in what does the dinosaur look like, but what are the other things that live alongside the dinosaurs?

• 9:27Ira Flatow?

  Let's go to a question from the audience over here.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  What would be the main power scheme on these dinosaurs?

• 9:35Speaker 03

  So, one of the things about this dinosaur is we recognize that it has all these projections off the top of its frill. We think that these are actually very closely related to some of the structures that we see in birds, like a cassowary. So, we actually patterned the coloration of this animal off of birds being very bright. Another thing about it is we actually find the skin of a very closely related animal right here in Utah called Nissutoceratops. Nissutoceratops has the skin pattern that you'll actually see on this mount, and it's very much like the shoulder of a chameleon.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  So in some ways, we picked the leopard chameleon as a model for the colors that we would see. Keep in mind, this animal's larger than an elephant, living in an ecosystem where it's not trying to hide. Its size protects it from the predators that it lives with. So, we tried to go with the colors that we see in birds, especially on the ornaments on the top of the skull.

• 10:43Ira Flatow?

  Savannah, can you look at the fossil? Are there any details that clued you into what Loki's life was like?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Ooh, yeah. So, one of my favorite features that this fossil has is something called a pathology. It actually has a little bit of a hole on the side of its squamosal, part of its frill, where it had an injury. We do see pathologies in plenty of dinosaurs, things like T. rex that has broken bones from ankylosaur clubs, and triceratops with little holes from where it maybe fought other triceratops, or was bit by a T. rex or something. So, I really like looking at pathologies. I think it's kind of cool to see that, you know, this animal has lived a long and hard life, perhaps. It's injured, and he's walking through the swamp and doing his best. Maybe he got in a fight, maybe he walked into a branch, like

• 11:30Speaker 04

  I am often to do. So, you know, that's kind of, it makes him a little bit more personable, this dinosaur, I think.

• 11:38Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, he's personable, Loki.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:40Ira Flatow?

  Savannah, there's this huge issue in paleontology, a struggle between public places and the private collector, right? That's been going on forever. How does Loki fit into this?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, like we mentioned earlier, Loki seratops was found on private land, and that happens all the time here in the United States. The laws do say, if you find something on private land, that is yours, and that is often a death sentence for a dinosaur. It's not going to be studied, not going to go to a museum, right? We kind of lucked out that the Museum of Evolution in Denmark sort of swooped in and rescued this dinosaur. It's actually there on display now, and still accessible for researchers, and we were allowed to do science on it. So, even though it was found on private land and sold privately, this really is like a fairy tale ending for that type of sale. Like, this dinosaur, it turned out perfectly for Loki seratops.

• 12:36Ira Flatow?

  Does Loki, Mark, teach you anything about dinosaur evolution?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Again, since we thought it was that other dinosaur, when we actually start looking at it, there's four different dinosaurs that are very similar, all living at the same place.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  In an area smaller than downtown Salt Lake City. So when I was taught paleontology back 20 years ago, um, we could never have that many dinosaurs in the same place at the same time if they're closely related. Turns out, we didn't know anything about that. These things are like birds. If you took all of these skeletons of birds of paradise today and took all their feathers off, a paleontologist would have a hard time telling them apart. But of course, there's, you know, over 15 different species and lots of different variations. We're looking at dinosaurs way more like birds now. We're starting to understand that these animals are evolving like birds.

• 13:36Ira Flatow?

  Let's go to a question from the audience over here.

• 13:39Speaker 06

  I'm Arwen, and my question is, since you said they're in a very small location, is that because they only lived there? Or is it because that's an ideal habitat to preserve the fossils?

• 13:53Ira Flatow?

  These kids ought to be sitting up here, I think, asking these questions. Wow. Great question.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  It's actually a miracle of the way that the ice sheets melted and cut a little area around the Milk River in Montana and Alberta. And so there's a small area where all of the sediments have been carved down, and in those carved-down sediments, we call them coolies, there are fossils. And so this is just a little area in which the ice melt, rivers wash down and wash this out, and so we have it preserved.

• 14:32Ira Flatow?

  Wow. And then, well, another thing I learned was since coming here to Utah is that you discovered this as an undergraduate? This is your first dino find? Our first dino find?

• 14:50Ira Flatow?

  How exciting is that?

• 14:51Speaker 04

  It is so exciting. Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of this story is that I got to do this as an undergraduate, learning to do paleontology. I love talking about that with potential students and current students because I think a lot of people don't realize, as an undergrad, you can absolutely still contribute to science, right? And so, I'm really excited to have been able to do that as part of my, part of my time at University of Utah.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 15:20Ira Flatow?

  Mark, you have a little more experience. This is what, your 13th, 14th?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, 15 maybe, something like that.

• 15:28Ira Flatow?

  Something, but it never gets old, right?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Never gets old, never gets old. And, and we have more than 15 that we're working on. You know, there's lots of dinosaurs that we still have to tell you about. And we're as excited about them as you are.

• 15:41Ira Flatow?

  We had, we did a show about dinosaurs a few months ago, and then, actually, one of the kids in the audience asked the paleo dollars, is the best question, how do you know if it's a rock or if it's a fossil? And she said, "I lick it." Is that a technique you guys use at all?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  The lick test.

• 16:00Ira Flatow?

  Yes, the lick test.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  My first summer digging up dinosaurs, I didn't have an eye for what was fossil yet, and so I definitely hiked around just sort of licking things.

• 16:11Ira Flatow?

  What does it taste like? Well, how do you know?

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Ah, yeah. So bone is porous, kind of spongy, and that means when you lick it, it'll actually stick to your tongue in a way that a rock just won't. So, you know, it is a good last ditch test.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  But they do taste like dirt.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Do not lick things you find, though.

• 16:29Ira Flatow?

  Go ahead, there's a question here.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Joanna, and I'm just wondering if you use DNA testing at all on these, or if they're just too old, then you can't?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm gonna take this just because I taught this in class on Thursday, and a couple of my students are in the audience, so they'll enjoy this.

• 16:48Ira Flatow?

  Is she a plant in the audience?

• 16:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Um, DNA has a half-life of 521 years.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  So the oldest DNA that we can get is about 6.8 million and that's about the limit. Uh, maybe a little bit farther. We're never going to get the DNA of dinosaurs out of the bones. But there is DNA from dinosaurs all over the world, belonging to the 18,000 species of birds that are still alive that are dinosaurs. So people who have been talking about bringing back the dinosaurs have been doing things like trying to get those genes to express, to get the dinosaur features that you think of with a dinosaur to express

• 17:40Speaker 03

  in bird DNA, things like teeth, elongated bony tails, things like that. And did you know, we have never cloned a bird or an insect. The only thing that we can clone today are mammals and not all of them. Right? So we're a long ways from cloning dinosaurs because dinosaurs are like birds. You know, we can't clone birds. We can't clone reptiles. I'm not going to say we never could, but we have the problem of where are you going to get the DNA? And then how are you going to do it?

• 18:13Ira Flatow?

  Do you, is Loki your favorite? Do you each have favorite dinosaurs? Is Loki your favorite?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  I mean, for me, it's the only dinosaur I have helped name. So it's a no brainer for me. A little more complicated when you've named, you know, 15 plus.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  So my favorite dinosaur by far has got to be Microraptor. It's got wings on its arms. It's got wings on its legs and it's iridescent pink, green, purple. So yeah, I've got to go with a chicken sized X-wing velociraptor.

• 18:48Ira Flatow?

  Well, I don't think we can top that as a final question. Really cool.

• 18:58Ira Flatow?

  Thank you very much for both of you. This has been so much fun. Savannah Carpenter, paleontologist and school outreach coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Utah and Dr. Mark Owen, vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah. Thank you both.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Thank you, Ira.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 19:24Ira Flatow?

  After the break, inside the search for a hardy peach that grows in the southwest desert and has its roots in Navajo history.

• 19:32Speaker 08

  My favorite one that I've tried so far actually has like a cinnamon spice flavor to it.

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• 22:10Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lixman, live with KUER from the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah.

• 22:24Flora Lichtman?

  We are now approaching one of my favorite micro-seasons: peach season. Now, when you think of states known for their peaches, I'm going to guess that Utah probably is not at the top of your list, but in fact, there is a variety of peach, the southwest peach, that grows in Utah's arid landscape. Native communities cultivated this peach tree here since the 1600s, but many of the orchards have been lost over time, and the remaining trees are now scattered across the state. But a local scientist and a member of the Navajo Nation is on a mission to track down southwest peach trees so we can learn more about how you grow a peach in the desert, how it does it.

• 23:07Flora Lichtman?

  Reagan Whiteselusi is a plant scientist and assistant professor at Utah State University Extension in San Juan County, Utah. She researches traditional Native American crops, including the southwest peach. And she's based in Blanding, Utah. Reagan, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you.

• 23:29Flora Lichtman?

  Okay. What is this peach's backstory? Is it native to Utah? How did it get here?

• 23:35Speaker 08

  So, that is the question. It is thought that the peaches have been traded before Spanish settlers coming across from Mexico into the southwest. That that was, that trading was done in advance of their settlement. So, the earliest recording that I've found, and if somebody else, you know, has found something earlier, please let me know, but was in 1630 by Friar Day Alonso Benavides, as he was making his way from Mexico up the Rio Grande to get to Santa Fe, making the first account of thousands of fruit trees planted along the Rio Grande, being grown by the Native Americans that lived along the Rio Grande.

• 24:15Flora Lichtman?

  Thousands?

• 24:16Speaker 08

  Thousands.

• 24:16Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, so huge orchards.

• 24:18Speaker 08

  Vast, very vast orchards, yes.

• 24:20Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so for the people listening at home who are not with us tonight in this theater, what does the peach look like?

• 24:27Speaker 08

  So, it's a small, like the size of an apricot. They can be white fleshed, yellow fleshed, they have a light blush color. Sometimes, on the inside, I've actually found a peach that had a little bit of red flesh. There's a photo of that going around on the internet, you can look it up. That's the exact one. When I bit into it, I was like, "I have to take a picture of this." And so, yeah, they're freestone, but yeah, very small, like an apricot.

• 24:52Flora Lichtman?

  I have to know what they taste like.

• 24:54Speaker 08

  There is an assortment of flavors. So, there's your typical peach flavor, there's what I like to relate to something similar, like a muskmelon. A lot of the white flesh peaches taste more like muskmelon. There is some that taste kind of like canned peaches. Some of them, the peel is slightly astringent, so you kind of get this bittersweet mix of a flavor that can come across. And then, my favorite one that I've tried so far, actually has like a cinnamon spice flavor to it.

• 25:25Flora Lichtman?

  Do we know why they taste different? Is it based on where they're growing or what the habitat is?

• 25:30Speaker 08

  It's definitely just a genetic variability among them.

• 25:34Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. So it feels like the $64 million question is, how do these peaches grow here? Do we know?

• 25:42Speaker 08

  So Native Americans have been very successful. If anyone is aware of how Native Americans have saved seed and adapted their crops to be able to thrive in the desert climate. It's just a matter of what we would do, you know, what appears to be good, what appears to be growing good, a way of assisted selection throughout, you know, saving seed and then replanting those seeds as necessary to replicate the crops so that way we have a food source.

• 26:12Flora Lichtman?

  And is there something in their genes that allows them to deal with this sort of landscape that they're in?

• 26:18Speaker 08

  We are still looking at the genetics, so we don't have that completely narrowed out. We've done a brief study, kind of just looking at, well, what is the population variability between each of the communities that we've been able to identify? Because there's very few of them left in our communities. And so they're very difficult to track down. So that was the first thing that we started to do was, is there any connection of these peaches to modern peach cultivars that are commonly found in nurseries, the fruit commercial production industry for peaches? And so far, they're so inbred, they've been so isolated in their communities, that they are just not having any relationship to anything other than their own community itself. They're so inbred that they're even regionally inbred within themselves.

• 27:03Speaker 08

  So peaches found in Hopi are regionally inbred and localized to Hopi conditions. Same thing with peaches found in Navajo Mountain area or peaches found in Canyon de Chay. We are still exploring and collecting samples to continue the genetic work with them to be able to identify some of the variability. So yeah, that's part of it. We've done studies where we've looked at just drought tolerance. So we've controlled them in like containerized systems in the greenhouse and looked at how well they recover after being put underneath drought circumstances where they're basically wilting in a greenhouse, so very hot. And we've rehydrated them, we completed these cycles over and over, and they just recovered a lot better.

• 27:48Speaker 08

  They put on more leaf growth. They just performed so much better than any of the other cultivars that we were... Testing them against. Where did you first learn about the peach? I was a little girl growing up and I first had heard the story from my dad, probably when I was about eight. Had no idea, didn't really think much of it. What was the story? Uh, they were just talking about how there were peaches and there's corn and you know, they're talking about all these different crops. So it's the first time it was mentioned to me and my father would reiterate that every so often. And it wasn't until I was going to college, my first year of college, I was actually wanting to be a wedding planner. And I, I know, go figure.

• 28:30Speaker 08

  And um, and so I was like, this isn't for me. I don't, I was actually trying to get a business degree. And I was like, I don't need a business degree to become a wedding planner. And so I was, I was like, but I need a degree because it's something my mother always reiterated to my sisters and I is, get a degree, make sure you can sustain yourself. You don't know what's going to happen. If you marry somebody, you don't know what's going to happen. And um, and I lived by that. So I was, I was thinking, what is it that I could do? And I went to my father, I was like, you know me best, I don't know what to do. And I don't like to be a person that does not have a plan in place or know the direction that I'm going. I don't like to be idle. And so I asked him and he says,

• 29:11Speaker 08

  go up to Utah State University, get a degree in agriculture, your sister's up there, you'll be close to family. And see if you can bring back the peaches. See if you can help our people bring back their agriculture. So there I went. And you just, it's amazing. That was it. I took his advice. So that's over 10 years ago. Yeah. Why is this peach so important to you? You know, as I started this pathway, um, one thing that was very lacking in my upbringing was my, that I had a disconnect in my heritage, who I am as Native American, being Dene. And I had always thought, you know, I want to live a life where I can be able to represent

• 29:56Speaker 08

  who I am. And so I married somebody from the Zuni Pueblo and he started to teach me a lot of these things in our home. And that started to open up my mind and my heart to be able to start thinking about how do I need to be receptive to working with my people who are more often than not commonly misunderstood in many ways. And I was one of them that was at a mindset where I was misunderstanding my own people. I guess I would, I would explain it as maybe potentially undermining their abilities or their credibility to how traditional methods are done because it's not proven to be a

• 30:41Speaker 08

  scientific method or a viable way of a lifestyle, you know? And not understanding exactly what that lifestyle is also creates another misconception of what is it that I need to understand? Or how do I need to understand you in order to be able to, to either uptake your lifestyle or to be able to respect what it is that you do? And, and so I went down a pathway of rediscovery of myself in this. And so a lot of my passion comes first and foremost of me starting to figure out what my identity is through this research project. So I understand that you're looking for these trees. I, yes, I am looking for these trees. I'm still looking.

• 31:26Speaker 08

  We have found quite a bit within the Navajo and there are a handful of samples that I've collected from the Hopi tribe. I've identified the remaining orchards within the Zuni Pueblo, but they are not bearing fruit. Or if there is a tree, there's like two trees that do bear fruit, but the squirrels oftentimes get them before anybody can get them.

• 31:48Flora Lichtman?

  When you find a tree, what happens?

• 31:50Speaker 08

  When I find a tree, I first and foremost, I work with the people that know about these orchards or where these trees exist. Who is the caretaker? I identify that. That's respect to them, respect to their families, respect to their ancestors who had planted these trees. And from that step on, we go and we investigate. We look at how well they are being taken care of. Are they thriving enough to be able to bear fruit? You know, what kind of scientific samples can we collect from this that can be useful for the data, whether it's for genetic purposes, whether it's for looking at fruit analysis, whether it's for seed preservation to germinate a new tree from the seed, because these are all seed-propagated trees historically?

• 32:33Speaker 08

  And seeing if we can preserve the germplasm from these trees and then be able to isolate that to be able to have more trees generate and healthy production systems that are tribally practiced, or have tribal practices managing them, is what I want to say. And then making sure that they're genetically pure so we can start giving seeds back to the community.

• 32:54Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so would it be helpful if, you know, some friendly Utah residents were on the lookout for these trees?

• 33:01Speaker 08

  Yes, yes, it would be. I need help. There's a lot of people that have started reaching out to me and said, hey, I know, I think there was a tree that was given to me by, you know, some Navajo people or for some Hopi people. Could these be part of it? Could you utilize the genetic resource from these trees? Could you utilize some seeds? So anything is helpful at this point in time because we're trying to piece together a pathway of history. We've been able to use corn to try and understand trading between Native American tribes in the early American history. We could also potentially use peaches to do that and see what trading looked like across the North American continent, potentially.

• 33:41Flora Lichtman?

  Thank you so much, Reagan. Give it up for Reagan. Reagan Moyster-Lucey is a plant scientist and assistant professor at Utah State University Extension in San Juan County, Utah.

• 33:53Speaker 08

  Thank you so much.

• 33:55Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, before we wrap up, if you want to learn more about the southwest peach, we've got some resources for you on our website, sciencefriday.com/peach. You'll find a story from KUER reporter David Condos and a guide to spotting the southwest peach. That's at sciencefriday.com/peach.

• 34:17Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, Flora here. One of my favorite parts about working on Science Friday is getting to interact with you. Y'all remind me every day that no matter what pops up as I doom scroll, the world is actually filled with curious, smart, hilarious people. And at Science Friday, we depend on you in lots of different ways. You make the show better with your questions and your comments and your insights. And we've always depended on your support to keep the lights on. As you probably know, because you listen to this podcast, it is a tenuous time for science and for independently-produced public media. So listener support is now more crucial than ever. And it doesn't even need to be

• 35:00Flora Lichtman?

  a lot. If every listener gave just $2, Science Friday would be funded for the year. I'm not kidding. If Science Friday is something that adds value to your life and you can swing it, please go to sciencefriday.com/support to make your donation today. That's sciencefriday.com/support. And thanks.

• 35:24Ira Flatow?

  That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen. Sandy Roberts. Robin Casmer. Charles Bergquist. George Harper. I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.