Give voice to your crazy ideas

A lesson in manifesting your wishes to the world, also known as voicing the crazy ideas that you never expect to come true. Because you never know who might be in the room that thinks your idea sounds fun.

I have studied skeletal development and evolution for almost 20 years. I started the jerboa colony as a postdoc in Boston in 2008, and I travelled to collect specimens for the first time in the spring of 2007. That was to Inner Mongolia, China, and my postdoc advisor, Cliff Tabin, gave early indulgence to my craziest ideas. He sent me to China, where I don’t speak the language, to catch animals I’d never seen before. Eighteen years later, I’m making a career of it.

We’ve made a lot of progress with the samples we collected over four trips from 2007-2012 and with the colony now housed in my lab. We understand a lot more about development and evolution of extreme limb phenotypes the level of the organism, tissues and cells. We identified genes that are expressed different from mice in ways suggesting these genes might play roles in the extreme elongation of limb and/or tail vertebrae. We’ve started to crack the differences in their genomes that might shape the skeleton, but it’s extremely complex. Our best estimate right now is that there are more than 1,000 potentially important mutations, but that’s likely underpowered because we primarily study two animals - the Egyptian jerboa and mice.

But there are 33 species of jerboas, and technology has improved. Sequencing got cheaper, new sequencing approaches are possible, and there are new reagents to better preserve samples. With samples from more species, we could narrow down the sequences that evolved leading up to the common ancestor of all jerboas and changed less since they radiated. It could be a powerful advance in our understanding.

Much of this phylogenetic diversity is present in the southern desert of Mongolia, and colleagues from the University of New Mexico have gone regularly, collecting mammals and their internal and external parasites over the last two decades. I’ve long wanted to join their team, but right around when I had the clear reason, funding for their expeditions ended.

And then in October of 2023, I spoke at a conference in Vancouver where I ended my talk with the rationale for getting materials from more species, and I flippantly ended with “So if anyone wants to send me to Mongolia…” and folks giggled. And then five months later I was at another conference, dashing past the coffee table up to my room to get my charger for my talk in the next session when a man caught my eye and said “I want to send you to Mongolia.” And now, here I am on a flight to Tokyo, after a flight to San Fransisco and before a flight to Ulaanbataar (it’s a lot of flying) with the whole team. We’ll spend just a few days in the capital city of Mongolia prepping gear and supplies and head out for a 2-3 day drive south to the desert around Dalanzagdad. It’s remote. No field station. No town nearby. Just nature. I have a green diamond-shaped solo tent that will be my home for a bit over 2 weeks. There will be 13 of us total - some from the US and some from Mongolia, all catching mammals, focused on jerboas, and collecting everything that we can for future lines of research. 

Everything will ache and my guts may hate me for this (lots of goat!), but I’m excited for new experiences and for what we may learn from this opportunity. So say your crazy out loud. It might not be so crazy…