Want to Dig Up Your Own Fossils?

Dr. Ken Lacovara shares an exciting update on the upcoming Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum debut

Ric Edelman: It's Friday, April 19th. On today’s show, is your financial advisor using AI? AI is already everywhere, and every industry is racing to incorporate it into their business. Everybody’s convinced or scared that AI will let them operate faster and cheaper delivering new and better services to their customers than ever. And the RIA industry is not being left out. Financial advisors and their firms are already beginning to use AI. I'm seeing firms deploying it in just about every aspect of their firms.  

The problem is that none of the registered investment advisors that are using AI can explain how it works. That's what the SEC says anyway, and the SEC is angry. It's not shocking that RIAs can't explain how their AI works. Even the AI engineers who build these things have a hard time explaining how it works. The SEC doesn't care about that. I built some of the industry's first financial planning software. Iterations of it are still being used by the financial planning firm that my wife and I built, but I can tell you, and every planner in my firm can tell you, how those spreadsheets work. We can show you that when you put data in here, here's how the software turns that data into output over there. But nobody can do this with AI. 

The SEC is now telling firms that they have to be able to explain their AI driven spreadsheets and make sure there aren't any biases in the calculations that they produce. This is especially important if the data is being shown to clients to influence their investment decisions. In fact, the SEC has already fined two investment firms $400,000 for making false statements about their AI powered investing process. 

Delphi Inc. was fined a quarter of a million - almost $225,000 - for claiming that it used collective data to make its AI system smarter, so it could predict which companies and trends to invest in. The SEC says those claims were false and misleading because the firm did not in fact have the AI and machine learning capabilities that it claimed to have. The SEC also charged the firm with violating marketing rules by promoting an untrue statement of material fact.  

And the SEC says Global Predictions, another company, has to pay $175,000 for making false and misleading claims on its website and on social media that it was, quote, “the first AI regulated financial advisor.” It also falsely claimed that they provided expert AI driven forecasts. So if a financial advisor tells you that they're using AI, ask them a simple question. How does it work? If they can't explain it, find another advisor.  

Coming up next, conversation with Ken Lacovara, the founding director of the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum at Rowan University in South Jersey. 

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Ric Edelman: You're listening to The Truth About Your Future. A few weeks here on the show, I told you the latest update about the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum at Rowan University. That generated an awful lot of questions, comments, a lot of enthusiasm about it because it's such a cool program that is being developed right now. And the link to that show if you missed it is in the show notes. But quite frankly, you don't need to go there, and the reason is - I’m doing you one better. There was such a large number of people who wanted to know more. I thought it'd be fun to bring onto the program himself, Dr. Ken Lacovara. Ken great to have you on the podcast. 

Ken Lacovara: Thanks, Ric. It's great to be here.   

Ric Edelman: Ken is the Founding Dean of the School of Earth and Environment at Rowan University. He is also the Founding Director of the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Visitor Center. Ken has unearthed some of the largest dinosaurs ever to walk on our planet. In Chile, he discovered Dreadnoughtus, which is seven times bigger than T-Rex. In China, his team and he discovered an ancient bird. In the Gobi desert, he was on the team that discovered a dinosaur - I can't even pronounce. And in Egypt, he and his team made the first new dinosaur discovery in nearly a century. And his TED talk was named one of the top TED talks of the year when that got released. One of the world's most renowned paleontologists, Ken Lacovara. You're hot and heavy in the fossil park now, Ken, and getting this museum finished, it's been a 12-year saga, I think, we've been working on this. 

Ken Lacovara: Yeah, we are in the homestretch now, the building looks absolutely gorgeous, it's really an architectural wonder, and exhibits installation has begun, the likes of which people have just not seen before. the level of, detail and realism and the story that threads them all together, will really make this museum unique. 

Ric Edelman: So talk about what the experience is going to be like for people when they arrive.  

Ken Lacovara: Sure. Well, the first thing they'll see is, a building that is really nestled into the landscape. Very sustainably built, has geothermal energy, solar energy - we will be New Jersey's largest carbon net zero building, which I'm extremely proud of. We will contribute no greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by operating this museum. We have three major exhibit galleries. The first one features the dinosaurs that existed at the very end of the Cretaceous period on the east coast of North America. There's five big branches of dinosaurs, and we have all five types represented on the east coast, so you don't have to go to Patagonia or the Gobi Desert. We have this amazing history right here. The second gallery, features amazing, sculpted, fully fleshed out creatures like a 55 foot long Mosasaur, it's basically a sea monster. And everything in that gallery is a fossil that was found on the property in a layer that will literally be beneath the visitor's feet. And then the third large gallery is called the Hall of Extinction and Hope. And in there, we first lay out our uniquely occurring evidence for the fifth extinction, which is when the dinosaurs and 75% of species perished when an asteroid hit 2,500 miles from New Jersey off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. We take you through that, and then we round the corner into the time that we now call the Anthropocene. And we discuss the unfolding climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. But give the visitor reason for hope in the battle to save our Earth's atmosphere and biodiversity and ways that they can act upon that so that they can literally be making positive change in the world before they walk out the doors of the museum. 

Ric Edelman: That's really only a part of the total experience that people are going to have at the park, right?  

Ken Lacovara: That's right. It's really a small part of it. We have a room called Discovery Forest, a very hands on place with learning kiosk. We're in partnership with the TED organization on that. And so we will have a TED Ed theater in there. Some really cool mechanical interactives. There's this crazy Rube Goldberg ball drop machine on the back wall that shows you about the probability of an animal turning into a fossil. We have a live animal center called Critter Cove, which features a saltwater touch tank also has a large enclosure for a white throated monitor lizard. There's two rat colonies connected by a tube that goes across the ceiling. We have a VR experience that very few people have had you will be clad in space suits. And you go back to the Cretaceous period on a mission to collect DNA samples, protein samples, get a biomechanical scan and a color scan. You're walking amongst the dinosaurs in this Cretaceous environment. You have to do all that and then get back in your pod and get back to earth before it's too late. We have a beautiful museum store - 2,000 square feet of retail that will have high quality, very carefully curated science and nature related content featuring a lot of the artistry of local crafts people in the Delaware Valley. We have a cafe that has this beautiful overlook to our fossil quarry. We have a theater that seats 138, where we can show films and have musical performances - that converts to flat floor event space and other spaces will be used for event space. So you can come to the Edelman Fossil Park and get married or have your birthday party or your bar mitzvah or corporate event or whatever you would like to do. 

Ric Edelman: This facility it's up on a on a ridge overlooking the fossil park itself. Talk about the quarry that led to the discovery of dinosaurs.  

Ken Lacovara: The vast majority of people don't realize that Southern New Jersey is really the cradle of dinosaur paleontology. Dinosaur, which means terrible lizard - they're not lizards at all. In 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found in Haddonfield, New Jersey, 11 miles north of the Fossil Park. And then in 1866, the world's first tyrannosaur is found. Everybody's heard of T-Rex, but that wasn't the first discovered tyrannosaur. There are 24 other species. The first one found was found a mile away from the Edelman Fossil Park Museum. And then, for the longest while, nobody really had any idea what happened to the dinosaurs. Early paleontologists and geologists could see that they were here at a certain point. They persisted for some interval and then poof, they were gone. And there were all kinds of crazy crackpot theories such as, you know, maybe caterpillars ate all the fiber rich plants and the dinosaurs perished of constipation. And you know you're on the wrong track when that's your explanation. And then in 1980, Louise and Walter Alvarez, Louise was a Nobel prize winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and his son, a geologist, noticed in the stratigraphic deposits in Italy that there was a spike in the level of iridium. Iridium is platinum. It's a platinum metal. The reason why iridium, why platinum, is so valuable is because it's heavy. So when the earth formed, it all sank to the center of the earth. So there's very little on the crust, but in an asteroid, there's no place to sink to. So asteroids have a much higher concentration of iridium than we do on the surface. So they noticed that a spike in the level of iridium right at the end of the Cretaceous period, right at the end of the time of the dinosaurs. So they hypothesized that it was an asteroid, or they thought maybe at the time, or a comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. And that was in 1980. That started a worldwide search for this deposit. Now the crater was found in 1991 off the Yucatan Peninsula, but still we didn't have the bodies. We just had a few bones in some scattered places around the world. I began working at the site that's now the Edelman Fossil Park in 2003, not really understanding what we had there. It was just a place where I could bring my students so they could collect some fossils. And then I would go all over the world to do my research. And then, it became apparent to me, about that eight years after that, that we were looking there at an extinction layer. And so we started to excavate very, very carefully. And then we found the fallout from the blast that happened in Mexico. We found these little grains called shock quartz and the glass spherules. And then we found the iridium spike. And in the last 14 years, we have collected over a hundred thousand fossils, representing over a hundred species from the extinction layers. The best window into this moment on the planet, this pivotal calamitous moment in which the dinosaurs were wiped out, that really paved the way to the modern world as we know it. And so this is now a place of global importance. And I decided at the time I had to find a way to save the place. And I kind of thrashed around trying this route and that route. I was at Drexel University at the time. And then I came over to Rowan University where Jean is on the board and, you know, really thanks to, to you and Jean, we were able to save this site of world heritage and in the process build a museum there that will then share this amazing location to everyone who wants to go there.  

Ric Edelman: It's such an exciting story and so pivotal in the development of the science of paleontology. Only scientists were able to go into the fossil park and yet you have millions and millions of fossils there. So many more than you could ever use for scientific research. Wouldn't it be cool to let school children go into the quarry and play in the mud and dig for fossils? And that is ultimately what we're building through the museum and fossil park. Talk about what the experience is going to be like as people go down into the quarry.  

Ken Lacovara: Yeah, that's really the magic of this place. When you arrive at the site. You'll see this giant four acre quarry that goes down 45 feet. As you walk down the path, on average, every footfall takes you back 400,000 years until you get to the bottom where it's 66 million years old. So, every school kid, every grown up, every grandmother who goes into the fossil quarry, who's not afraid to get their hands dirty, and who tries a little bit, and I've seen you, Ric, up to your shoulders in mud there - everyone who does that finds a 66 million year old fossil with their own hands, and we let them take that fossil home. And that's just a transformational experience for really anybody, and especially for kids. It's an authentic discovery. And when they see something that no human has ever seen before, and when they know a little something that no human has ever known before, they become a legitimate explorer. And I think that's just a launching pad to all kinds of great things. As you've heard me say, I call fossils, the gateway drug to the sciences, right? And so we bring kids in there. We literally give them a free sample of science to get them hooked on the idea. And pretty soon you're inculcated with the scientific method, which is a way to receive and process information in a rational way. And boy, do we need some of that in the world today. And once that's how you think, that's how you think. And then you can go on and apply that to business and pharmacology and chemistry and all the things the world needs.  

Ric Edelman: It's so terribly exciting. We're so grateful for your leadership, Ken, in making all this happen. Jean and I are honored to be a very small part of this journey with you. The Fossil Park and Museum is scheduled to be opened later this summer, and people can learn all about it right now at the, at the website that is already up and running. The link to that is in the show notes for you, so you can look at it there. Strongly encourage you to watch Ken's TED talk. The link to that is in the show notes as well. It's an engrossing presentation that you made along with your bestselling book. 

Ken Lacovara: That's right. Well, thank you, Ric. And I'm just blessed to be able to do this with you and Jean. I can't imagine better partners in this. I'm so excited for what we, together, are about to bring to the world. 

Ric Edelman: That's Ken Lacovara, the founding director of the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum at Rowan University in South Jersey. Ken, thanks so much. Always great to be with you, my friend.  

Ken Lacovara: It's my pleasure. Take care. 

Ric Edelman: On Monday's show, do you have an emotional connection to robots? 

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Links from today’s show: 

Why Bitcoin Will Rise to $420,000 (FREE Webinar!) - REGISTER HERE: https://dacfp.com/webinar-why-bitcoin-will-rise-to-420000/  

Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum: https://www.rowan.edu/fossils/  

Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe (2016 TED talk with Dr. Kenneth Lacovara): https://www.ted.com/talks/kenneth_lacovara_hunting_for_dinosaurs_showed_me_our_place_in_the_universe?language=en  

Rowan University: https://www.rowan.edu/ 

School of Earth and Environment at Rowan University: https://earth.rowan.edu/  

Get Ready for a Jurassic Adventure in NJ (2/21/24 Episode): https://www.thetayf.com/blogs/this-weeks-stories/get-ready-for-a-jurassic-adventure-in-nj  

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