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The Current Transcript for August 2, 2018

Host: Megan Williams

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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[Indistinct chatter]

MEGAN WILLIAMS: A migrant rescued from the Mediterranean Sea learns his first words of Spanish. The rescue ship he's on was supposed to go to Italy, but headed to Spain after Italy said no gracias. Coming up politics at sea and the human cost of Italy's tough new stance against migrants and their rescuers. Then...

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Hey sexy. What, no answer? Even a dog barks sometimes.

MW: How to deal with creeps on the street. This week a video went viral of a man in France slapping a woman after she objected to his lewd comments. Many women do their best to just ignore catcalls. But in our next half hour we'll hear from others who are getting serious and creative about halting the harassers. And then...

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[Growling sound]

MW: A fresh take on a very old world. Stay tuned for Anna Maria Tremonti's conversation with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about the beasts that roamed the earth ages ago. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Italian government's suggestion NGOs are colluding with traffickers is 'shameful politicking,' aid worker says

Guests: Aloys Vimard, Francesco Galietti

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[Applause and cheering]

MW: Relief after migrants aboard the rescue ship Aquarius finally stepped onto dry land last month. After a perilous journey across the Mediterranean they were denied entry to a safe port in Italy, and languished at sea for nine days. That's until Spain agreed to let the Aquarius dock in Valencia. But amid criticism and controversy, the Italian government still stands by its policy of denying a safe port for rescue vessels. The conflict is making waves across the European Union with grave consequences for the people trying to save the migrants' lives and the migrants themselves. So far this year more than 1500 migrants have died at sea south of Italy, 220 of those in the past week alone. Today after a break in its mission, the Aquarius sets out for the Mediterranean Sea once again. Aloys Vimard was aboard the Aquarius when it was rejected by Italy last month. He's the project coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres on board the Aquarius. And we've reached him there on board the ship in Marseille, France. Hello.

ALOYS VIMARD: Bonjour.

MW: Can you tell me what those nine days at sea were like for you when Italy refused to let you dock there?

ALOYS VIMARD: Yeah it has been very very shocking for us to be adrift for 48 hours without any instruction from the Italian competent authorities. Because you know for more than two years and a half now, we are at sea performing rescue under coordination of Italian authorities. And it is their duty to assign to us a port of safety. You know that the rescue is considered complete when the rescued people are back to the place of safety. So it has been extremely shocking for us humanitarian workers with 630 people on board to be adrift and left alone with all these people in this ship that is not made for such extensive lengths of stay. So it has been extremely difficult for us.

MW: Okay. You know obviously you say you had more than 600 people on board, people who have been through horrific conditions in Libya; escaped those conditions on these very fragile rubber boats out at sea for hours. How were they dealing with the fact that there was no end in sight to their plight?

ALOYS VIMARD: It was really heart breaking to see those people desperate. Desperate I feel. You know the rescue efforts performed at night, 50 fell into the water. And unfortunately we even lost two people. Two people died during this rescue. So you know it was a very very tough and difficult moment for them. And they were expecting to be safe, to be brought to safety, which was not the case. So they were really asking questions what was going on? Why is the boat not moving anymore? And we were trying to give them some justification. However it was really difficult to explain what was up.

MW: So you made it eventually to Valencia and then the Aquarius went to Marseille, where you have been docked for more than a month. Why?

ALOYS VIMARD: So when we left Valencia we went back straight to what we call the search and rescue zone, where most of the boats are found in distress. So we have been there for two days and we really understand that NGO assistance, we are not welcome. There were boats in distress but we were kept in the dark. We were not informed. A well-equipped boat-ship with medical team, with professional rescuer were told that we were not needed to assist when we had more than 1000 people in distress at sea. Clearly the European Union is giving all the power and legitimacy to the Libyan coast guard to pull back people in distress at sea, in this inhumane condition in Libya. And we came back in Marseille because we were forced to. We were not allowed to come in Malta. We were not allowed to come in Italy for technical port call, resupply and change crew. So we had to come to Marseille.

MW: Right. I was on the Aquarius for more than two weeks late last year. And I know that all of the commands to rescue people come through Rome, through the Maritime Coordination Centre in Rome. So are you telling me when you were out at sea, after you went to Valencia, that you weren't getting any rescue requests from the Central Command Centre in Rome? That they were essentially ignoring you?

ALOYS VIMARD: This is really really concerning to us. You know that when there is a boat in distress it is the responsibility of the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre to make sure that all means are used to rescue people and to bring them to place of safety. And what is happening now is that Italian straightaway handover the case directly to the Libyan Coast Guard.

MW: Now the European Union is actually supporting the Libyan Coast Guard in its role to rescue or intercept boats at sea. Through Italy it supplied boats and training. What do you make of that? What do you think of Europe's attempt to switch the responsibility of these rescues onto the Libyan Coast Guard?

ALOYS VIMARD: You know this is just a policy of deterrence and containment. It is well documented that a horrific situation is for asylum seekers, refugees, migrants in Libya. But it's just [inaudible] to push the suffering out of sight. Out of mind. How it solve the solution? People are desperate. In Libya they don't have hope. And unfortunately the hope is at sea for them. It is not the solution. We know it very well. And it is a shameful politics that will never solve this problem. At least this way is not efficient because the deaths at sea are increasing and it is extremely concerning to us.

MW: Now the Aquarius despite all of that, you're about to head back out. You are launching. And the Italian government still says it will continue to deny a safe port to rescue boats. And Italy of course is the closest European country to North Africa. It's the closest safe harbour. How will the Aquarius react if Italy keeps true to that promise as it has until now?

ALOYS VIMARD: So since there is a coordination centre based in Tripoli, we will try to coordinate the two. We will call them. We will inform them if there is a boat in distress and we will try to coordinate with them. Obviously they will be the one in charge of assigning to us the port of safety. We met them recently and we addressed them this concern, because Libya is not recognized as a place of safety. And if it's a no go for us, we can't bring back people, rescued people, to Libya. So we are really concerned. We don't have a guarantee yet, but we will push and we will [inaudible] European governments. And Italy and Malta are the closest country to bring them back. There is a mix today between the migration management and the rescue at sea. Rescue at sea is clear. Any people in distress at sea must be rescued and brought to a place of safety. There is no question about that. And it's very unfortunate.

MW: Now this week there were reports that an oil rig support vessel rescued 108 people from international waters and took them back to Libya. Now that's a country that has not signed the Geneva Convention on Human Rights, and that under international law as you say is not considered a port of safety. What happened? I mean why are these vessels that have traditionally refused to take people trying to escape and endanger, back to a country that's dangerous?

ALOYS VIMARD: This is extremely difficult to know what happened. We were really shocked when we saw and we heard about these events. It is to me difficult to say. It is difficult to comment. We don't know what happened in the ship but it is obviously extremely concerning. This is the first time that the European ship bring back people to an unsafe country. So it is extremely extremely shocking. And we are trying to understand what happened. So we can react and be prepared.

MW: Now I want to talk about the accusations launched against humanitarian rescue ships such as the Aquarius. Italy's interior minister Matteo Salvini, he's the new far right interior minister in the coalition government, he addressed the Italian Senate after rejecting safe port for the Aquarius and in his speech he made the link between traffickers and rescue ships saying that there's some sort of collusion going on between the two. What's your reaction to that?

ALOYS VIMARD: It's terrifying to hear such statements. You know, we are in this context, extremely politicized. And we've seen many many statements. You know that MSF is working in 71 countries around the world and wherever we go it's based on the observation, assessment on need. And there are no any more ships that were dedicating and productive into search and rescue. And there were thousands of dead. So it is not fair. It's not the code. We are humanitarian workers. There are people dying at sea and we must be present to assist those people. And to witness what is happening, so it is extremely concerning to us to hear such a statement when it should be the responsibility of the European governments to avoid that unnecessarily people die in sea. So we are just trying to do our best. It is extremely heartbreaking to see how these people can dehumanize, criminalize. And I believe definitely that you don't leave your country, your family, you know if you don't have a reason. You know these people just deserve to live like anyone.

MW: Now one of the accusations launched against the humanitarian rescue boats is that you're a pull factor, that you're mere presence on the Mediterranean Sea is encouraging people to leave Libya and risk their lives at sea. What's your response to that?

ALOYS VIMARD: You know we hear this focus on the pull factor, but we should also look at the push factor. And while we were in Valencia and since that rescue we did not rescue any other boats. We were only at sea for two days almost in two months. And while we were not at sea and no rescue boats were present, like 700 people died in the last two months. So you know there were no NGOs at sea. People are not waiting for the NGO to be at sea and to attempt the crossing. They are escaping poverty as well prosecution or whatever. But this is the last hope that they have and they are not waiting for us to be present and to take those risks.

MW: What would you like to see governments do to react to the continuous attempts of migrants to reach Europe?

ALOYS VIMARD: We would like to bring means and resources for productive and dedicating search and rescue at sea. And also to obviously to bring people to safety and to treat those people that with dignity. So we are helping European Union to find solutions and with solidarity among the European Union to take the responsibility to process the people and to respect their rights.

MW: Thank you very much for speaking with me today.

ALOYS VIMARD: You're welcome.

MW: Aloys Vimard is the project coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres. We reached him on board the rescue ship Aquarius in Marseille, France.

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It is enough to see where some of the financing comes from. I love every type of generosity. Of volunteering. I am a blood and organ donor. But when I read that behind some organisation is the Open Society Foundation of George Soros, I start to have some doubts about how spontaneous this generosity is.

MW: That was the Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini addressing the Italian Senate after refusing a safe port to the Aquarius rescue ship. He has been raising doubts about the intentions of humanitarian efforts on the Mediterranean Sea. For some insight into why he's taking that approach, we're joined now by Francesco Galietti. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Policy Sonar, that's a Rome based consultancy, specializing in risk analysis and strategies for global investors. We've reached him in San Vincenzo, Tuscany. Hello.

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: Hello. Thanks for having me.

MW: Pleasure. Why do you think the Italian government is taking this approach towards migrant and rescue ships now?

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: Well Salvini is simply putting in words and facts what many Italians have been asking for many months. But if we look at the numbers, the figures on migrants and boat, people have been trending downwards long ago. So it's mostly about perceptions. The second explanation has more to do with geopolitics. I think that Salvini is pursuing a strategy of stabilisation of North Africa. Things aren't moving quite quickly as we speak. But it's also fair to say that Libya isn't what it was just a few months ago. So sending ships back to Libya, these days, it's not what it was months ago.

MW: Leaving what's going on in Libya aside for now, I mean what rationale does Minister Salvini have for linking human traffickers with rescue ships?

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: And for Canadian listeners it's important to know that for many months Italians have been bombarded with footages of boat people picked up by NGOs in the middle of the Mediterranean. And clearly Salvini has leveraged on this. And he has identified NGOs as a culprit. So as he called them an Uber free shuttle service for crossing the state of Sicily.

MW: We wanted to get a sense of public opinion on this in Italy. So we spoke to a few people on the streets of Rome yesterday. I'd like you to hear one comment that was pretty representative of what we heard. This is Marco Lepore and he's an accountant.

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There is a big problem for Italy in particular because all the problem is against the Italy. Italy is the only state that welcome this poor. And it's very hard to block these people, but on the other hand all African people can only in Italy because in Italy is gate open. And so I think that the politics choose these way because it's the only way to share the problem between all the states in Europe.

MW: Is he right that Italy is shouldering more than its share of responsibility for accepting migrants in Europe?

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: Yes the issue of burden sharing, who takes how many immigrants is certainly very much on the table and is making the headlines. However it is not the only one. I think that in particular if you consider the frictions within the EU and between Italy and France, a lot is also about dealing with the cause rather than with the symptoms and not dealing with migrants when they are in the water already, so I think that for Italy it has become a priority to engage further south in Libya and to have outposts in Libya as far south as Fezzan and even Niger which has been traditionally French sphere of influence. So burden sharing is one of these top issues but having outposts to deal with immigrants on African soil is another one.

MW: Right. Refugee processing centres in Africa. Quickly we have to go now, but what kind of resolution do you see to this?

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: It's all about stabilizing Libya. It's investing a great deal in the relations with Egypt which it sees as the main stabilizing force in North Africa. I think that is one possible factor and then the other one is that there is a silver lining as we all know immigrants are coming mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa. But we have seen signs of progress. If you think of Eritrea and Ethiopia finally signing a truce. A peace deal. That is very good news. It may in due time mean that we will see fewer immigrants from those countries.

MW: Okay so peace obviously will lead to fewer people coming. Thanks very much for speaking with us today.

FRANCESCO GALIETTI: Welcome. Have a great day.

MW: Francesco Galietti is the co-founder and the CEO of Policy Sonar, that's a Rome based consultancy specializing in risk analysis and strategies for global investors. We spoke to him in San Vincenzo, Tuscany. The CBC News is next. Then, making cat calls a crime. As French lawmakers wrestle with the issue, we'll hear from a city in England that's already outlawed street harassment. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Making street harassment a hate crime could unfairly target minorities, warns advocate

Guests: Helen Voce, Sophie Sandberg, Julie Lalonde

MW: Hello, I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. Still to come, imagine discovering a new species of dinosaur. It's every fossil hunters dream and for Steve Brusatte it's something he's accomplished 15 times. The paleontologist extraordinaire spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti earlier this year, sharing his insights into how the prehistoric species adapted or succumb to environmental change. We're excavating that conversation in about a half hour from now. But first, silencing the cat call for good.

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VOICE 1: Baby girl, you're so sexy. Baby girl, I'd hit that.

VOICE 2: Look at that ass, do you do squats?

VOICE 3: You're so sweet honey, I could tear you up. Hey sexy. What, no answer? Even a dog barks sometimes.

VOICE 4: I don't have a car but I can still give you a ride.

VOICE 5: You're way too sexy to be walking alone. Slow down. Just let me lick your shoulder.

VOICE 6: Wow! Honey you look like a mermaid. Nice and bouncy, just the way I like them.

MW: That's just a sampling of some of the cat-calls collected by New Yorker Sophie Sandberg. She writes the comments out in chalk on the streets of New York then posts them to an Instagram account she created called catcallsofnyc.

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So one particular catcall that has stuck out in my mind for a while now is one on 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. It was sent in by a woman who said the experience started with a compliment. She didn't remember exactly what it was, she was kind of trying to just keep walking and ignore it. It was something along the lines of beautiful or commenting on what she was wearing. And the man who made these comments continued to follow her. And that's when she started to become afraid. He was following her for five blocks she said. And then after those five blocks he was getting kind of closer and closer to her. And finally he said can I at least pay for you three hundred dollars? And that's when she felt so afraid and unsafe that she ducked into a store. She was also near her apartment, so she was worried that the man might know where she lived. And you know even follow her up into her apartment. So this was a comment that started out simple enough something like beautiful something seemingly a compliment, that turned really aggressive and turned into something that brought her a lot of fear on her walk home. So what I do with this comment is, I'll take the part of the story that was a verbal comment and I'll write it down and then when I post the photo of the chalk I put in the caption the entire story of the experience to give people more context and show them how the comments are often linked to physical instances of harassment such as following.

MW: That's Sophie Sandberg in New York. We'll hear from her in a few minutes. But as women well know the problem isn't particular to the Big Apple. This week a video of an incident in Paris put street harassment into headlines around the world. Marie Laguerre, a 22 year old student was strolling alone when a male pedestrian made a sexual comment and dirty noises as they passed one another. Ms. Laguerre refused to let the behaviour go unchecked and told the man to shut up. What happened next was captured on a CCTV video that has since gone viral. The man responded by first hurling an ashtray that nearly hit her. Then he slapped her face, sending her reeling. The incident and the video happened just as French lawmakers were scheduled to adopt a new bill that would make sexual harassment in the street punishable by fine. It's proving a controversial idea in France, but it's something one city in England has already experimented with. Helen Voce is the chief executive of Nottingham Women's Centre. She was involved in the campaign that called for police in Nottinghamshire to consider misogynistic street harassment as a hate crime. We've reached her in Nottingham. Hello.

HELEN VOCE: Hi.

MW: Hi. Before we hear about the change in policing with regards to street harassment in Nottinghamshire. You've seen the video of the assault on Marie Laguerre. What were you thinking as you watched it?

HELEN VOCE: That this isn't an isolated incident, is it? I think women experience these sorts of things every day around the world and it has become normal, hasn't it? We sort of have to accept it. And I think that's what we've done in Nottinghamshire. We're not going to accept it anymore.

MW: Now Marie Laguerre told the press that she had simply had enough. That she couldn't not respond. Did it leave you with any questions about how you might react in the same situation?

HELEN VOCE: I think what it made me think is, it's really an unpredictable situation, isn't it? I'm just having a picnic now with some Muslim friends. And they say they never know how to respond and they get so much what I call misogyny hate crime, because if you go along with it sometimes it's not what the person wanted and they react aggressively. And I think nine times out of 10 if you don't go along with what the person is saying and you get angry or you say shut up, then it can get violent or at least quite verbally aggressive. And that's why it's quite difficult for women to decide what to do on the spot. And cause often they are on their own. And often the men are in a group as well. And I think most women wouldn't feel comfortable challenging the group of men. So that's why we campaigned for the support of the police in Nottinghamshire.

MW: So take us back to that time in 2016, what was happening there that made you launch this campaign and which led to the police to start thinking about how to better curtail sexual harassment on the streets?

HELEN VOCE: Yeah. We were doing some research with the local campaigning group around hate crime more generally, and as we were looking at the results of that, people were describing race hate crime or anti-Muslim hate crime and there was a massive crossover with what we're now calling misogyny hate crime. But the language is quite anti-women. And so we said to the city this is a thing. You know I think we should actually look at this and ask the police if they'll start looking at misogyny hate crime as a separate strand. So we held an event to talk to women about their experiences and say do we think this is a good approach? Big support from women, and a really supporting female officer really high up, the chief and deputy chief inspector, he was really supportive and I think that was key. So the right people were in the right place at the right time for us to really sort these and be able to push this new policy through.

MW: And how has the policy been implemented and what affect has it had?

HELEN VOCE: It took a good couple of years but the biggest thing we didn't want is for the police to change the policy within time of the court the day after it was implemented and the police said what are you talk about? So we did lots of training with officers and frontline staff so they really understand how to respond to women. Because what women needed was to be listened to. And that's not a lot to ask, is it? So that was the training that we did with the police to make sure they really understood how women needed to be responded to.

MW: Well I'm wondering so the police force chose to reclassify misogynistic harassment as a hate crime. Was there pushback in the community to do that?

HELEN VOCE: We had a few men's rights campaigners that said, what about men? And we said if you want to do something about men then you go off and do it. But what we're concentrating on, is women. So yes there was a little bit, but not within the police. The police were supportive. They knew it was an issue. They have women under reporting of course all forms of crime. So it was really good for them to be able to make a public statement, that this sort of behaviour isn't acceptable. So that women felt more confident to come to them across all types of crimes. Because one thing that's really important to stress here, we haven't invented new crimes. The crimes were already there. Assault or someone grabbed on the streets or public order offences and sexual assault. So women weren't using them. So this helps to raise awareness that the police were really wanting to hear from women if they have experienced crimes or incidents. That's the biggest change. And if something is not a crime but somebody did feel threatened by something they can still go to the police. The classic one that is, some workers passing in a white van, a woman walking on the road, and shouting something out the window or curb calling alongside and shouting stuff to make her feel scared. And if they had the name of the company, the police would go along and talk to the company and say this has happened and the company could follow up. So incident that wouldn't lead to prosecutions or anything could also be followed up by the police.

MW: Right. Now this began as a two year pilot project and when it was launched what did you hope it would achieve? I mean has it lead to more prosecutions or was that even the goal?

HELEN VOCE: That's a really good thing you said right at the end. It was never what women wanted and most of the time it's an anonymous person that we haven't got any of their details. I mean if it's a car, maybe we get a number plate. But really just wanted it to stop. And so yeah that was the aim for women. They didn't want prosecutions. There has been one prosecution I think. But yes for women that wasn't the success. It was basically they want more confidence to tackle things by saying to someone, do you know this is a hate crime? So yeah I think women have felt more confident to be able to challenge things when they feel comfortable to do so.

MW: Thanks very much for speaking with us today. Very interesting project.

HELEN VOCE: Thank you.

MW: I've been speaking with Helen Voce who is the chief executive of the Nottingham Women's Centre. We reached her in Nottingham. Julie Lalonde, has been listening in on our conversations so far. She's the director of Hollaback Ottawa, a local chapter of a global movement to end street harassment. And she joins us from our studio in Ottawa. Hello.

JULIE LALONDE: Hello.

MW: Now before I ask you about your thoughts on the Nottinghamshire model. What did you think when you saw the video out of Paris this week?

JULIE LALONDE: I wasn't surprised either. Unfortunately versions of that happen everyday around the world. We were lucky in this case that not only was there CCTV coverage but also that the woman was willing to come forward and talk about her experience. But unfortunately it is painfully common for versions of that to happen.

MW: In Nottingham, the onus is still on women to come forward and report the incidents as we've just heard. But research is showing that the policy of treating misogynistic harassment as a hate crime seems to be helping women feel safer in that city. What do you make of the approach?

JULIE LALONDE: I think I'm a big believer that communities should decide what's best for them. So a few years ago Peru did something similar where street harassment is illegal in Peru as well. Hollaback movement globally and here in Ottawa, we don't advocate for criminal justice response to street harassment. First, we know that most forms of street harassment are already a crime in Canada. You can't follow someone. You can't threaten someone. You can't grab somebody without their consent. But more than that our concern is that conversations around street harassment turn racist really fast and the perception is that it is men of colour, immigrant men, street involved men, men from poor neighborhoods who engage in street harassment. And so our fear with legislation, creating new legislation, is that it's going to result in higher levels of policing of certain neighbourhoods and ignoring the fact that here in Ottawa for example you're as likely to be street harassed walking through campus walking by Parliament Hill as you are in a neighbourhood that is deemed a poor neighbourhood. So that's our concern with legislative responses to street harassment.

MW: That it will lead in some way to racial profiling. A couple of years ago you conducted a survey about women's experience with harassment. What did that survey tell you about the scale of the problem in Ottawa?

JULIE LALONDE: Well 97 percent of the people who filled out our survey had had an experience of street harassment in the past year. They were all women or non-binary folks. And something that wasn't picked up as much by the media but was really shocking to me was that the average age of the respondent was 29. And yet a third of our respondents said that as a result of street harassment they don't go outside alone at night. A third had said that they don't go to, if they were experiencing harassment in a certain neighbourhood or on a certain bus route, that they'll avoid that route moving forward. I mean these are grown women who are curtailing their everyday lives as a result of harassment that they've experienced are very valid fear based on past experience. That's not okay that women are not able to access public space in the way that men are for example.

MW: I want to bring someone else into the conversation now. Sophie Sandberg documents harassment on the streets of New York City through her Instagram account called catcallsofnyc. She's on the line with us now from New York. Hello.

SOPHIE SANDBERG: Hi. Thanks for having me.

MW: Off the top Sophie we heard some readings of the cat-calls you gather. Can you tell us how you find those stories and then what you do with that information?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: Yes. So how I collect them is through the Instagram account. I get direct messages every day practically. Sometimes multiple a day about stories that women have from walking down the street in New York. And then what I do with those stories is, I go to the spot where it originally happened and write them down on the sidewalk to raise awareness and show people what's being said.

MW: Now you've got I've read 29000 followers on Instagram. Do you find it at all depressing that an account that documents street harassment is so popular?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: You know I actually find it more empowering than depressing. I mean I think that for a long time people have been silenced by street harassment. And what my platform is doing is really giving people a voice. So these stories exist either way whether or not I'm shining light on them. So I think that by giving these women a voice and people who have faced harassment a voice. People are actually empowered by it and they're able to have conversations about it. And fight back.

MW: Now you I'm sure have experienced harassment. You grew up in New York. What has been your experience with street harassment there?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: So mainly it's made me feel like I said silenced. I haven't been able to respond. As angry as some of the comments make me, I always feel a certain fear. You know especially because we can see retaliation when people respond to these comments. So for a long time I felt very uncomfortable walking down the street and mainly silenced. So this is kind of my way of finding a way to speak back against it because in the moment I always felt uncomfortable to say anything.

MW: And you're giving a lot of women a forum to speak out against it as well. Can you tell us some of the worst stories that you've heard?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: So you played one of the worst stories on your program before. But a lot of them are linked to following like that, a really prolonged experience with harasser. There was a story where a woman was groped as kind of a joke. That was another bad experience. Some of the comments themselves are extremely vulgar, really threatening, you know what someone would do to someone walking down the street in a very sexual manner. I think those are some of the most scary comments. Julie Lalonde you have been deeply engaged with this issue for a while as well. How has it changed how you react when you're faced with harassment on the street?

JULIE LALONDE: It hasn't on an individual level. And I think that's one of the misconceptions, not just about the Hollaback movement, but about these conversations that there's this perception that we're telling women to just get sassy, yell, get up in their faces. We absolutely advocate for women to do whatever makes them feel safe. I don't think you're less of a feminist if you just walk by and pretend you didn't hear a comment or you just smile and keep walking. Women have to do what makes them feel safe. And I think this example in France is a perfect example of how you can't win in these circumstances. If I smiled, then the perception is I was into it. If I tell him to shut up, like the woman did in France, then I'm asking for him to physically assault me as a result. And that to me is the conversation, whenever I talk to men and young men in particular about street harassment, the perception is always that it's a compliment. I'm just trying to pay you a compliment. I'm just trying to say something nice. Well if that was the case then me saying I don't want to hear it shouldn't make you become physically violent with me. And that to me is where we need to take the conversation, less about hey how can women individually respond because women have been responding since literally as long as we've had streets, is how long harassment has happened. Like women are doing what we can to be safe, but instead we need to have a conversation with, why is it that men do this? It is a very gendered phenomenon. Women are not standing around on street corners yelling at men when they walk by. Why is it that men are more likely to do it when they are in groups than when they are alone? And why do we keep believing that I'm supposed to be flattered when as I said if it's a true compliment a woman giving you a dirty look should be an indication that she's not into it but instead that tends to actually escalate the behavior.

MW: I want to play you some tape for another perspective. This is a French writer named Guillaume Bigot. He was responding to the proposed French law that would punish street harassment with a fine. Have a listen.

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This type of law is completely against the French tradition. As you know France is a Latin country and all of hard literature, poetry, and even the French education is full of seduction between men and women and it implies the fact that there is a grey line. It's not completely white or black. It's grey and seduction is something extremely subtle. And of course if you behave in a proper manner towards a woman you can definitely make her feel that she's beautiful. I'll compliment her. Seduction is like a dance more or less, you can make a step forward or step backward. It cannot be defined by the law. For instance whistling at a woman, it can be extremely rude but it can be extremely nice too. Or making compliments is completely depends on who is doing it. And how it is being done. Can you imagine that the police will try to make differences between this type of compliment. This type of whistling. And in that case. If find in another case. You find it's completely insane. It's completely crazy.

MW: Sophie Sandberg what do you make of the idea that somehow cat-calling and whistling can be linked to a noble tradition of seduction?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: I think that's actually a common attitude and a really damaging one because if the people who are facing this behaviour, that is being called seduction but the person you know doing it, and the person facing it is feeling uncomfortable we need to listen to people who are on the other side of it. You know you can't call it seduction or a compliment if you're the one doing it when on the other side it feels uncomfortable and it evokes fear.

MW: Julie Lalonde he's framing it as this French tradition. How common do you think that attitude is here in Canada?

JULIE LALONDE: Well first of all I'm French Canadian so like [inaudible] to the idea that it's part of my culture. But as part of the Hollaback movement one of the advantages we have is that being on five continents we can tell you, we can prove to you that arguments like that happen in tons of different communities based on this idea that it's cultural. So in Italy they have the same conversation. In New York people often times justify it as we're a rough city if you are not tough enough to walk down the streets of New York you don't deserve to live here. We hear that all the time different communities, cultures, justifying street harassment. And in Ottawa what we hear is that, first of all that it just doesn't happen. Everyone's really nice in Ottawa. We're kind of boring. Nothing really happens. Or that because it's so cold, like this is a serious argument that people have made to me, it is so cold in Ottawa for so long we have so few weeks of beautiful weather that maybe it's a problem but it's a problem for six weeks. So get over it. I've been street harassed in the dead of February, so I'm not going to take that argument. But also like what a bizarre threshold that we set. First of all we allow men to tell us that we should be flattered. We're saying we're not flattered and they're insisting that we should be. But also I don't care what your rationale is, women around the globe are saying we don't want to be treated like animals in public and the fact that we have to constantly defend that position is very telling.

MW: So Sophie what are the role of men in all this?

SOPHIE SANDBERG: I think that men can get involved very easily. I know Hollaback actually does a lot of bystander intervention trainings which have proven to be very effective. So I think getting men involved on the street level is extremely important. A lot of the men that I've talked to throughout doing the project haven't known about street harassment. They've thought, oh maybe it happens once in a while it's not a daily issue. So just being able to show them that it is actually a daily issue. It's a pervasive problem, has made them more aware and more ready to ask you know how can I help on the street?

MW: And just a final question to you Julie Lalonde you know you've been deeply involved in this issue for quite a long time. What do you think the price that girls and women are paying, the psychic and social price, they're paying is for being constantly harassed on the street?

JULIE LALONDE: It is curtailing women's access to public space. Women think about what they wear when they leave the house every single day whether they're conscious of it or not. We are less likely to be cyclists. We are less likely to be pedestrians. I mean there's evidence to show that women do not access public space in the same way that men do because of street harassment. And if you want proof in the pudding, talk to 11-12 year old girls and they will tell you, last summer when I looked like a little girl, I was probably, I had just walked around feeling different. Now that I look like a young woman, my experience of walking down the street in the summer is completely different.

MW: Yeah that's sad introduction to womenhood. Thank you both for speaking with me today.

JULIE LALONDE: Thank you.

SOPHIE SANDBERG: Thank you so much.

MW: Julie Lalonde is the director of Hollaback Ottawa. Sophie Sandberg is the creator of the Instagram account catcallsofnyc. Coming up in our next half hour, Steve Brusatte may be living a lot of little kids dream life today. The paleontologist and fossil hunter opens up about his abiding passion for T-Rex. That's after the short break. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Is there a dinosaur hiding in your drawer? Meet the man who's found 15 new species

MW: I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Showers of shooting stars herald the approach of a giant comet on a collision course with the Earth. 3000 kilometres to the south, the massive comet crashes into Earth. Then the Shock waves arrive, next comes the blast front. Finally, a rain of molten rock starts to fall out of the darkening sky. This is the end of the age of the dinosaurs.

[Music]

MW: That's how the end of the dinosaur era sounded, at least on the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs. And what an era it was, for 150 million years our planet was a very different place. Teeming with prehistoric beasts. Steve Brusatte has the fascinating job of seeking out that long distant world. He's a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the resident paleontologist for that BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs. He's recently published a book titled The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World. He spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in May at the Royal Ontario Museum.

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AMT: Hello.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Hi. Good Morning.

AMT: We are of course in the Paleontology Part of the ROM and I thought we would look around at the dinosaur exhibit here. When you look at these skeletons I see monsters. What do you see? Do you see friends?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I see one of the biggest mysteries of nature and I also see the most fascinating creatures that have ever lived on our planet.

AMT: So tell me about what we're looking at, this guy right here, who is this?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: This is the greatest dinosaur of them all. The king of the dinosaurs; T-Rex. When I was younger and I would go to museums I would always run right in, right up to the T-Rex because standing underneath a skeleton like this I think is really just mesmerizing. This is an animal that's the size of a bus. It would have weighed seven or eight tons. It has a head that's the size of a bathtub. It has 50 some teeth up there, each one the size and shape of a banana. It could crush through bone. I mean the hyperbole could go on but this is an awesome creature.

AMT: And why so big? What are the distinguishing features of T-Rex?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So T-Rex has the huge head, those railroads bites banana teeth that have big muscles on its jaws, that could bite so hard it could crush through the bones of its prye. It could crush through a car. If there were cars around back in the Cretaceous and it had its big long tail and its big muscular hind legs but those pathetic puny little forearms that we still really don't know exactly what they were for.

AMT: So walk me around and tell me what else I'm seeing right around T-Rex.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So around T-rex we have T-rex and his friends, let's say, or probably T-rex and things that would consider T-rex an enemy. So this is the skull of a triceratops. Another very famous dinosaur so it has the three horns on its face. That's why it's called triceratops and so the two big ones over the eyes and then one on the nose. And so Triceratops lived with T-Rex. They lived at the same time about 66 million years ago and we know that T-rex hunted Triceratops because sometimes paleontologists find fossils like these, the skulls of triceratops with bite marks that match the size and the spacing of T-Rex teeth right on the head of the Triceratops. So these are ancient enemies. This is Batman and the Joker right here.

AMT: And people are finding new dinosaurs to this day. How many dinosaurs are identified every year?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: People are finding more dinosaurs now than ever before. It's amazing to think about it. You would have thought dinosaurs might be something like gold or oil or diamonds where you know people have been looking for centuries and were maybe getting close to being tapped out. But that's not the case at all. Somebody right now is finding a new species of dinosaur on average once a week, somewhere around the world. And that's a crazy number, 50 some new species a year and some new ones are still coming out of Canada, out west in Alberta. Others are still coming out of the U.S. but most of the new dinosaurs are coming from places like China, Argentina, Brazil, developing countries, big countries, wide open countries that are training their own scientists in their own museums and universities and that's what's causing this big dinosaur rush.

AMT: Well I know you've had your own discoveries and I want to ask you more about them. So let's go find someplace to sit down and keep talking. You named 15 new kinds of dinosaurs. What does that mean?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So It means that these are 15 new species so new types of dinosaur. And when you find a new type of dinosaur or identify one you get the chance to name it. You describe it. You have to describe it to other scientists and write up a report on it and publish that as part of that you can name it. So sometimes we find new dinosaurs who are out doing fieldwork but most of the ones that I've named have been ones that I found in museum drawers. Just old fossils that people had neglected or hadn't looked at for a while or fossils that colleagues of mine had found when we'd been on field work. I have a lot of great colleagues that are really good at finding fossils much better than me. And so it's a lot of fun to work with teams of people all over the world and to have something new in your hands that nobody else has ever seen before, something that's tens or hundreds of millions of years old that you have a chance to study this thing for the first time and give a name to it. And there's something very special about that.

AMT: So when the fossils were discovered it wasn't immediately clear that they belonged to another animal.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Yes that's right. So whenever we find a new fossil the first thing we try to do is figure out what it is. So is it a bone? Is it a tooth? Okay is it one bone or many bones? And which bones are there bones from the head or bones from the shoulder or bones from the tail? And then once we kind of go down the list then we can start to ask are the bones of something that's been found before or are they totally new. And so it takes a long time just to do the comparisons because you have to sit down and make comparisons to other dinosaurs that have been found, either the original fossils or the reports in the literature or photographs or whatever you have. And so only after that long painstaking time of making all these comparisons can we determine what we have here is something new and has this bump on its bones someplace where no other dinosaur does, or it has a big horn sticking out of your head, or it has expertise, or it has a big crest on its head, or whatever. So sometimes we find really unusual features of these dinosaurs and that can tell us that we have something new.

AMT: And you say you've found some of them in drawers but where were they from originally?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So one of the great things about my job is I get to travel around digging up dinosaurs but also travel around to museums and to look into the collections of museums. And museums are very important because museums are the storehouses of information of fossils of rocks and minerals and animals and all kinds of things. So a big part of our job is studying the collections of museums. So I've been in museums for instance in China where I open up drawers and I've seen fossils that I go 'oh OK that's something new I've never seen anything like that before' and then sit down and start to go through the process of figuring out what it is. So that's how we found one of these new species, the thing called [unintelligible] from China. It was in a drawer it had been described very briefly in a Chinese publication many decades ago. There wasn't much known about it but when I opened the drawer I could see that it was very similar to some dinosaurs from Africa that I had been studying. So that's how the detective process works in these kind of cases.

AMT: And you name them. Like do you keep names in your head? What's your favorite name?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: A lot of times now we're giving names in local languages. So I work with a great team in Romania and a few years ago one of my colleagues found this beautiful fossil velociraptor type of dinosaur and we called it Ballo or Bandak which is an old Romanian term for stocky Dragon. So we're even using now Gaelic names in Scotland for some of the fossils we find in Scotland. So Gaelic you know the ancient language of the Highlands and we just think that's a cool thing to do.

AMT: What has been the strangest experience you've had on a fossil expedition?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I've been really fortunate to travel to lots of amazing places to look for fossils all over Europe Portugal, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, UK of course, to China, to Brazil, of course across the US and Canada and each place is great. There's different adventures in each place. And each place has its own challenges but you know one of the stories I tell in the book is when we were working in Portugal in a place that probably most people wouldn't even think about, when you think about dinosaurs down in the Algarve in the southern part of Portugal. This great tourist area I mean people especially in Europe tourists flock to the Algarve. And you have all these tourists on the beaches and about 20 miles or so inland about 30 kilometers or so, inland from the beaches. You're all of a sudden in this really parched mountainous area and so we knew that there were some scraps of bone that had been found there by an undergraduate German geology student in the 1970s who was just going out and doing a mapping project for his degree. He came across a few pieces of bone and so we knew about those and we went there to try to relocate those things and it took us several days to find the area and we finally did. And we were only finding scraps and we were trying to follow those scraps and so eventually one of my colleagues, Octavio Matteos, he followed a trail of scraps up a hillside and into some pretty dense vegetation. But it was really dry really hot that day and he started screaming out and we could tell from a distance that he had found something but then his voice stopped. And so we had no idea what was really going on. So we tried to follow where we thought the sounds came from and eventually we came to him and he was just rubbing his eyes. And he had just passed out as it turned out of a combination of excitement and dehydration. The dehydration because he forgot his water in the car and it was 50 degrees. 50 degrees. I have a picture on my GPS. So That was the dehydration. The excitement was he found a bone but he found a mass graveyard of hundreds of skeletons of these giant car size salamanders that were the types of animals that preyed on the very first dinosaurs.

AMT: What's been your most exciting discovery then?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Personally I would say some of the stuff we're doing in Scotland has been really fun. So being based in Scotland now I grew up in around the Chicago area and then moved to the University of Edinburgh to take up my job there. And so when I moved there I started to do fieldwork locally and I wanted to find Scottish dinosaurs. And there's only one place in Scotland where anybody's found dinosaurs before and it's a place called the Isle of Sky. It's this very beautiful enchanting island off the west coast of Scotland quite far north, quite cold, rainy, windy, lots of images, a beautiful landscape craggy peaks and peat clogged streams, a token sort of environment. So we've been going there since I started in Edinburgh and a few years ago my colleague, Tom Chalons, and I we were looking for little bones of fossil fish, but as we were doing that we noticed there were some big depressions in the tidal platform that jutted out into the North Atlantic. And it only it was only visible at low tide. So we walked around we saw there actually quite a lot of these depressions and each one was about the size of a car tire, and then we noticed there was a bit of a pattern to them, a bit of a left right, left right, zig zag type of pattern. And then we noticed that some of them had little bits sticking out in front. They really looked like toes and so [unintelligible] that what we had weren't just random tide pools or random holes in the rock, but they were footprints that were left by dinosaurs and by that some of the very biggest dinosaurs of all, some of those huge long necked Brontosaurus types of dinosaurs, things that were 10 or 15 metres long that probably would have weighed about ten tonnes, living 170 million years ago in an ancient lagoon. And they left their tracks in a lagoon. They were waiting in shallow water and this was right in the middle of the Jurassic period, right when these dinosaurs were first starting to become truly enormous in size. I mean dinosaurs are, to me, they're the most incredible creatures that have ever lived on earth. They are mind boggling some of them. If you look at a brontosaurus one of those types of dinosaurs some of them got as big as Boeing 737. I mean to me that is an incredulous fact there were dinosaurs the size of jet planes and these were statues they weren't buildings these were animals real living breathing moving animals. They had to hatch from an egg. They had to grow up. They had to find food. They had to raise their young. And I just I can't see how you can't look at an animal like that and not just be totally floored.

AMT: There were actually three periods of dinosaurs. Tell me about them.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The Age of Dinosaurs what we call the Mesozoic era. This is the Triassic Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods. And so everybody knows the Jurassic of course because of Jurassic Park, but dinosaurs started in the Triassic period and this was when the world was one. This was the age of the supercontinent Pangea. And the Triassic started in the embers of the worst mass extinction that's ever happened when these super volcanoes erupted in Siberia and killed off up to 95 percent of all living things. But that gave new animals the opportunity to rise up and to colonize this mostly vacant world and dinosaurs were one of those groups. So the First dinosaurs were small. They were humble. They were the size of house cats look nothing like a T-Rex or a brontosaurus. And it took them 50 million years to rise up. Then the Triassic ended in another mass extinction that supercontinent started to split apart and as it split apart lava came up through those cracks. And so there were more super volcanoes and a lot of the early competitors of the dinosaurs died. But dinosaurs sailed through. And then in the next period of time, we're now in the Jurassic, and this was another new world that dinosaurs had to conquer even further and they did. And this is when they spread all around the world. This is when dinosaurs became truly gigantic. This is when you've got your dinosaurs the size of jet planes. This is when you got your bus size meat eaters. This was when you got some dinosaurs start to get smaller and developed feathers and wings and turned into birds. And then the Jurassic transitioned into the Cretaceous and this was really the apogee of the age of dinosaurs. This was dinosaurs at their best. This was when the cotton's have split apart so much that the world looked very similar to it does today. And there was a North America South America and Africa and so on. And you had different dinosaurs living on all those different continents. So this was an age of great diversity. So you had T-Rex and Triceratops here in western North America. You had gigantic long necked dinosaurs and bull headed predators out in South America. You had dwarf dinosaurs living on the islands of Europe. And then that Cretaceous world abruptly came to an end 66 million years ago when that asteroid fell out of the sky one day.

AMT: Do we know if it was a comet or an asteroid that hit?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: We don't know we know it was either a comet or an asteroid. It's really hard to tell the difference but we know one of them happened and the first sign of that was this chemical fingerprint of this very bizarre element called Iridium that was found in the rock layers that marked the end of the Cretaceous around the world. And that is something that's very common in outer space but very rare on earth. So that keyed off some of the first scientists studying this issue that something extraterrestrial that happened. And then eventually the crater was found. So the crater is in Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula. This craters over 100 miles wide. It's largely hidden by water as it's largely offshore. So you can't see it really easily. So we know that either a comet or an asteroid hit. We can tell from the size of the crater and from the clues left behind in the rocks that this thing was about six miles wide or about 10 kilometers wide. It was traveling faster than a jetliner, probably even faster than a speeding bullet and it smashed into the earth with the force of over a billion nuclear bombs and it punched that hole in the crossed over a hundred miles wide. And that let off a whole avalanche, a whole domino effect of environmental destruction, tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricane, force winds, volcanoes. And these things reshaped the earth and the dinosaurs, except for a few birds, couldn't cope.

AMT: Why is it important today to know what species lives and what species died? 66 million years ago?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I Think there's great relevance to understanding that extinction and also other extinctions in Earth's history. Because these are times when real animals real ecosystems had to deal with real moments of sudden and extreme environmental change. So what lived and what died. We want to know these things because our Earth right now is going through some really profound change, climate change, environmental change. I think we probably want some insight into what species are most vulnerable. We want some insight into what might happen in the aftermath of say a big temperature spike. And we can predict these things in different ways. But the best way to get a really firm handle on those things is to go into the fossil record and look at what happened when real animals had to deal with these things in the past.

AMT: Is that what the early fossil hunters were trying to learn and they went on their expeditions?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The earliest fossil hunters, at least in the more modern times, because ancient Greeks and Native Americans and Mongolian nomads and many others found dinosaur bones talked about dinosaur bones. But it was really in the early 1800s that professional scientists developing professions started to discover and identify and study dinosaur bones, and come to understand them as the remains of these giant reptiles that used to live millions of years ago. I think the earliest dinosaur hunters were mostly inspired by was just the sheer mystery, just the fact that these things existed. I mean can you imagine being the first person that ever found the skeleton of a brontosaurus or something like that? In fact the first person who did couldn't fathom what it was and they thought it must be a whale because the only thing they could think in their mind - that could get so big - was a whale. So in the early days, I think it was driven a lot just by the wonder of discovery. And then the competition of discovery got a lot of very wealthy people, particularly in the eastern U.S., people like Andrew Carnegie and others that wanted to find the biggest dinosaur and they sent teams out west to do it. But more recently there is just a newer appreciation for why dinosaurs are important, why they're not just objects, why they're not just curiosities but why they're important for understanding earth history. So paleontologists of my generation now are just very active in using fossils as clues to understand evolution, to understand climate change, to understand how the history of our earth. And that's the most important things fossils can tell us and that's what I always try to stress to my students.

AMT: And in the meantime, how long do you see yourself scouting for dinosaurs?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I think this is a career long obsession. I'm very fortunate to have this job where I can travel around, looking for new stuff, digging up stuff, working with amazing people all over the world and there's just always a thrill to the chase. And there is a discovery mentality, there's a collector mentality, there's a scientist mentality all kind of rolled into one and it's a hard thing to describe but when you find a fossil, you're the first person that's ever seen that and this is something that's tens maybe hundreds of millions of years old. And there's just something I think almost sacred about that and it's an incredible feeling and it's the feeling that I hope I can continue to experience as I find more things.

AMT: I think that will inspire other people to do exactly what you're doing. Thank you.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Thank you.

AMT: I'm just going to take you through there to look at a few other things. The school kids are coming in. I am from CBC Radio. My name is Anna Maria and I'm with a man who is teaching at the University of Edinburgh and his name is Steve Brusatte. But he's going to tell you something about his work because he's discovered some things. Go ahead Steve.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: All right. Hi guys how are you.

STUDENTS: Hi.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I'm a paleontologist. Ever heard of paleontology?

STUDENTS: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I travel around the world digging up dinosaurs. And I also travel around a lot to go to museums. So this museum is one of the most important museums in the whole world. It has some of the most and best dinosaurs anywhere in the world. And so you know this dinosaur, what this is. Yes what is this?

STUDENTS: T-Rex.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Yes. It is T-Rex. And So I study T-Rex and I study other dinosaurs too and I've named and described a lot of new species of dinosaurs. And so some of the dinosaurs that I've discovered and named have been some of the cousins of T-Rex. There's one that we called Pinocchio rocks.

STUDENT: Oh I have heard of that.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Have You?

STUDENT: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Good. All right. So you know why we call it Pinocchio?

STUDENT: No I just heard of it.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: You know the story of Pinocchio?

STUDENTS: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So what is Pinocchio do when he lies? Yes. His nose goes way out. And so this dinosaur, maybe this dinosaur was a liar dinosaur, maybe. But we called it Pinocchio because it had a really long nose. So it was like a T-Rex but with its nose all stretched out and had little horns on its nose to. It had like five horns on the cap of his nose. So it comes from China. It comes from southern China and China, right now, I don't know if maybe some of you have family in China, but China is the most exciting place in the world for dinosaurs. There's like 25 new dinosaurs every year from China and some of them even have feathers. Do you know that some dinosaurs had feathers?

STUDENT: Yes. Some of them fly.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Exactly yes. Like some of these over there behind us. You should look at those, those were dinosaurs that could fly. So that's pretty cool.

AMT: Do you have any questions for Steve about dinosaurs?

STUDENT: Is it hard finding dinosaurs?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Yes. It is pretty hard because we don't have any special equipment you know we don't have like a radar gun that we can shoot into the rocks. We just have to walk around and just look with our eyes until we see something. So sometimes we get lucky and find good dinosaurs. But I've been to places where many days we're looking and we don't find anything.

STUDENT: What happens if you discover a new dinosaur? What do you do with the bones?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So the first thing we have to do is make sure the bones are safe because they're you know they're very old. Some dinosaurs are over 100 million years old. And so the bones can be really fragile and they can break really easily. So we'll put some glue and stuff on the bones and then we'll usually protect them with what's called a plaster jacket. So plaster is the stuff that casts are made of if you break a bone. So we'll wrap the fossils a newspaper and then we'll put the plaster around it that will harden. And then we'll take it back to the lab. We'll clean it up very carefully and then measure it, photograph it, compare it to other dinosaurs and see if we have some new.

STUDENT: What the first dinosaur you ever discovered?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The first time I ever went to dig up dinosaurs was out in like some of the Western states in America. So places like Montana and Wyoming and South Dakota. And so one of the first dinosaurs that I ever worked on was one of the big ones with the long necks, one called Kamira Saurus. And that's from the Jurassic period, so it was about 150 million years old.

STUDENT: What happens if we don't find the bones of the dinosaur?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Then I get really sad but sometimes we don't. Sometimes you only find a few bones and so that means you have to make comparisons to other dinosaurs to maybe figure out what the other bones would have looked like. But it does make me sad if we ever lose any dinosaur bones.

STUDENT: What's your favorite dinosaur that you ever found?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So I think my favorite dinosaur ever is that one T-Rex. But the favorite one that I have ever I think worked on, there was one from China that I named called [unintelligible] and it's a raptor dinosaur. So it's a very close cousin of Velociraptor and it has feathers all over its body and it even has wings. Okay I think that's all I could do. But thanks guys. It was very nice to meet all you guys.

[Applause]

MW: Steve Brusatte's new book is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World. He spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in May. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Today comedian Kathy Griffin is on the show. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or you want to hear again or listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or tablet. Hear the day's top stories. Even make your own playlist of your favorite stuff to listen to later. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Megan Williams. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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