#breakthroughfilms

Every scientist’s journey is unique. Paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor grew up surrounded by science–her mom was also a scientist. But her fascination for Mezosoic avian dinosaurs and bird evolution was a convergence of both curiosity and heritage. 

 "This would be a way of combining my love of China and Chinese culture with paleontology, my new fascination and obsession.“ Watch her story at breakthroughfilms.org.

When paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor looks at the abdomen of a small, ancient avian fossil, she gets a thrill when she spots a jumble of nodules, no bigger than a scattering of goosebumps, protruding from the creature’s bones. Their presence could mean the animal’s metabolism supported rapid egg growth. In another specimen, O’Connor discovers an entire bird gobbled up inside of a chicken-sized feathered dinosaur, revealing a clue about the ecology in which both animals lived.

O’Connor’s obsessive eye for detail and encyclopedic knowledge of morphology comes in handy when she’s placing these fossils on the ancient family tree of birds. She credits those skills, as well as her enthusiasm for science, to her mother, a geochemist who earned her PhD while raising O’Connor and her three siblings. It was also her mother’s influence that led O’Connor to focus on geology—and to explore her own Chinese-American roots—by focusing her studies on the scores of bird fossils coming out of China at the turn of the century.

Dozens of discoveries later, O’Connor is now a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing where she uses the world’s largest collection of avian dinosaurs to explore the changes in ancient species that led to wings, tail feathers, flight, and many other adaptations seen in modern birds.

Meet volcanologist Kayla Iacovino. 

Part science-fiction sleuth, part mountaineer, Kayla works to unearth the mysteries deep within volcanos on Earth and in space! So how does her love of ‘Star Trek’ fuel her passion for science? 

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When volcanoes erupt, gases blast from the earth in fast-moving pyroclastic flows destroying everything in their path. Torrents of molten magma create new landscapes. Massive calderas launch explosive boulders miles away.

But how do these destructive forces work? Scientists don’t have a full picture yet. It is currently impossible to fully understand the geochemical forces that lead to these destructive scenarios. But what if we could unravel this mystery by examining millennia-old cooled rocks and soils from these same eruptions?

Kayla Iacovino—part science fiction sleuth, part mountaineer—is doing just that. By hiking mountainous terrain or meandering through a city built on a dormant volcanic crater, the volcanologist collects rock samples from across the world in order to better understand the forces that created them.

At her experimental petrology lab at Jacobs-NASA Johnson Space Center, she subjects these samples to extreme pressure and temperature in “mini magma chambers” to recreate the conditions under which they formed. Ultimately, understanding how the molten materials deep within the Earth became rocks provides Iacovino insights about the overall geological makeup and origins of Earth.