Smithsonian paleobiologist Scott Wing stands in the snow-covered badlands of Wyoming, where alligators once lived 56 million years ago.
Refining how Earth’s temperature has fluctuated over deep time provides crucial context for understanding modern climate change.
“If you’re studying the past couple of million years, you won’t find anything that looks like what we expect in 2100 or 2500,” said Wing, the museum’s curator of paleobotany whose research focuses on the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of rapid global warming 55 million years ago. “You need to go back even further to periods when the Earth was really warm, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a better understanding of how the climate might change in the future.”
