‘Mammals do everything’

Lungmus was introduced to museum curation at the University of Chicago, where she received her doctorate. Her PhD adviser, Lungmus said, was a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, which is associated with the university. 

Today, Lungmus splits her time between teaching, research and managing curatorial work and museum functions at the Sam Noble Museum. 

“We're sort of the repository for a lot of the stuff that gets collected in the state, and we're in charge of stewarding the heritage of the state as it relates to its biodiversity and natural history, …” Lungmus said. “I'm so zen. I'm in my happiest place when I'm in the collection.” 

Growing up in a family that hunted, fished and camped all over the county, Lungmus became obsessed with animals, particularly dogs and horses. For Christmas, Lungmus said, her parents bought her dog breed encyclopedias.

“I wanted to be a veterinarian. I was an equestrian. I've always been around a lot of dogs,” Lungmus said. “It was this love of those two animals that turned into just like a fascination with mammals.”

Dissections in her high school biology class, however, altered Lungmus’s veterinarian course. She began questioning if she could deal with tissue like that on a regular basis. 

It was in that same class, Lungmus was introduced to the concept of evolution — and it clicked. Rather than dealing with live animals, Lungmus wanted to study their lives over time.  

The marriage between studying animals and exploring the outdoors led her to paleontology, and her love of collecting led her to a museum. 

“I always joke that hoarding or whatever runs in my family, but I’m the one that made a career out of it,” Lungmus said. “I get paid to do that for a living now.”

One of the most interesting parts of paleontology, Lungmus said, is that it's very interdisciplinary. Her doctorate is in anatomy and she is trained as an evolutionary biologist, but many others come at the job with backgrounds in engineering, “hard rock” geology and more.

Lungmus describes herself as a skeletal morphologist: one who studies skeletal forms and how they illustrate the ways animals lived their life. Specifically, Lungmus’s research revolves around mammals and their diverse forms. 

“One of the things that people sort of know subconsciously but might not always reflect on, is that mammals do everything,” Lungmus said. 

From bats with powered flight to dogs that sleep in our beds, Lungmus said mammals are the animal group that fills the most ecological niches. However, they’re all limited by biology — they all give live birth, milk their young and are warm-blooded, for example. 

Despite only including about 5,400 species, mammals have adapted to more environments than over 11,000 species of birds and about 30,000 species of fish, Lungmus said. 

“My research is interested in that paradox of, how did a group like mammals, even though there's not very many of us … fill all these different ecologies?” Lungmus said. 

Lungmus said she does this by studying the postcranial skeleton — the skeleton below the skull — and the function of the upper body. As a close professor to Lungmus once put it, Lungmus said, the lower body pushes while the upper body steers, whether it's digging, swimming or flying. 

Studying the shapes of bones, Lungmus said, allows researchers to infer behavior, lifestyle, biomechanics and locomotion of long-dead creatures, Lungmus said. 

‘Solutions that you weren't even looking for’

Paleontology involves understanding extinction events and how animals remain resilient. Lungmus said it can inform how living things remain resilient today. 

“You can't appreciate what makes mammals special if you don't understand where they came from,” Lungmus said. “That's true of the Earth broadly.”

Lungmus believes very strongly in basic research — curiosity-driven research in hopes of learning new things, rather than for a particular application — but understands context matters. 

“You find an answer, and you're like, ‘I didn't realize that was a question,’ and it can turn into these solutions that you weren't even looking for,” Lungmus said. “Basic research is really, really important, but I also work really hard to recognize that I'm not curing cancer.”

Funding for basic research has become a controversial issue over the last few years. 

On April 24, the Trump Administration terminated the positions of all members of The National Science Board, which sets policy and directs and approves funding decisions for the National Science Foundation’s $9 billion basic science research budget. 

In Oklahoma, the state legislature advanced a bill in March that would remove the possibility of tenure for OU faculty and limit contract agreements to five years. 

A primary goal of OU’s “Lead On, University” strategic plan is to become a member of the Association of American Universities, an invitation-only organization of the nation’s leading research universities credited for life changing education, research and innovation. Member universities earn the majority of federal funding for research.

On May 11, OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. announced the launch of Project 200, a university-wide recruitment effort of approximately 200 researchers in health, extreme weather, energy and national security and defense to OU.

“We are recruiting accomplished researchers with proven track records of collaborating across multidisciplinary teams. These researchers will arrive with established research programs and significant grant funding, creating new pathways for students, strengthening partnerships, and fueling discovery in the areas most critical to our state and nation,” Harroz wrote in a mass email. 

Unlike some friends and colleagues she knows, Lungmus isn’t working on medical or environmental research with profound policy implications. But that stipulation, she said, actually makes paleontology special. 

“If you don't take it too seriously, you allow it to be what it is, which is a really fun and joyful gateway science for a lot of people to begin to think about natural history more critically,” Lungmus said. 

‘Exposure to different ways of thinking’

Museum operators often joke that dinosaurs get people in the door, where they can be introduced to other natural sciences, Lungmus said. 

“Dinosaurs have always existed at this really cool interface where a lot of kids — and adults for that matter — get into science and fall in love with it, and the first questions they think to ask come from inspiration that they have from things like these big, crazy dinosaurs,” Lungmus said.

Lungmus said dinosaurs inspire people to reconceptualize science.

“They (may come) over to the table that I had because I had a big dinosaur on it, but next thing you know, we're talking about the fossil fuel industry and what pollution is doing to the planet,” Lungmus said. 

Every other fall, Lungmus teaches The Age of Dinosaurs, a natural science general education course. While she admits she enjoys curation and museum science more, she said she teaches to keep the program alive and to train young scientists. 

“The dinosaurs (are) what gets them in the classroom, but then you can be like, ‘let's talk about extinction, and let's talk about living biodiversity, and let's talk about how you infer hypotheses from limited data sets,’” Lungmus said. 

In an email to OU Daily, Lungmus wrote she could talk about the value of general education courses for a long time. 

“I’m very much the product of a liberal arts education, and while I absolutely understand the importance of specialized training and being realistic about career preparation, I also think there is lasting value in students engaging with a broad range of ideas outside of their eventual profession,” she wrote. 

In January, the OU Board of Regents approved the creation of eight accelerated degree programs. The 90-hour specialty degrees are in fields of high demand and are reduced from the traditional 120-credit hour bachelor’s degree requirement through reductions in major-specific and general education coursework. 

Typical bachelor's degrees at OU require 40 hours of general education coursework. The eight accelerated degrees require 31 hours of general education coursework on average. 

The accelerated degrees include bachelor’s in social work, applied artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital manufacturing, healthcare information systems, software development and integration, integrative studies and interdisciplinary studies.

OU Regent Rick Nagel, in an interview with OU Daily Jan. 30, said the 90-hour programs are not meant to sacrifice the quality of the degree. Nagel said that good high school programming in Oklahoma provides students with foundational education, stating OU’s general education courses may be considered “potentially duplicative.”

“We're just saying that in particular areas where there is critical need, to the extent that there are students that are very career-minded and focused, see the degree as a prerequisite to getting into their workforce, we just want to make that as easy for them as possible,” Nagel said.

A college degree, Lungmus wrote, can uniquely provide practice in asking questions, evaluating evidence, approaching unfamiliar topics and understanding the world from more than one disciplinary perspective. 

“The kinds of questions students learn to ask in a science course are different from those they might ask in a humanities, language, or social science course, and I think that exposure to different ways of thinking is an important part of becoming an educated adult,” Lungmus wrote. 

‘A really rare resource’

Lungmus said compared to a junior high and high school education that really didn't match her learning style, experience-based learning in college made her feel like her natural intelligence began to shine.

“I genuinely left high school feeling like I was kind of an idiot, … so I had really good grades, I had good scores, but I just didn't feel like I had any sort of innate intelligence and innate skill set for this,” Lungmus said. 

Lungmus said she meets young students interested in science today that don't feel confident in certain subjects. She said she tells students who are interested in what she does but aren't particularly comfortable with math, for example, that it isn't always the same as it is in high school.

“I almost failed most of my math classes, …” Lungmus said. “I always tell (students) math becomes a lot easier when you're using it to answer a question that you care about the answer to.”

Lungmus teaches classes at OU every other year. This year, she taught upper level classes in the geology department, where she now instructs experience-based learning. 

“I teach (one) class here in the museum. We have a large teaching classroom downstairs, so the students get to interact with actual specimens from the museum,” Lungmus said. “I'm pulling out real dinosaur bones to bring down for lab tomorrow … it's a really rare resource.”

Lungmus also takes geology students to Bartell Field Camp in Canon City, Colorado, for their capstone course, where they learn how to do field research on site. Lungmus said it’s in an area that’s been important to dinosaur research: where the first Stegosaurus and Allosaurus were found.  

“Collegiate experiential learning (like) that is really hard to get, and it's really unique in the type of training that we can do in our department and we can do at this university,” Lungmus said.

Lungmus said it's really special for her to be able to take students to historic sites and show them how to look for dinosaurs. 

“I'm one of the only scientists in the region who's permitted with the Bureau of Land Management to be walking these transects and to be collecting vertebrate fossils. So we're actually picking stuff up, looking for animals, looking for dinosaurs,” Lungmus said. 

Since the end of the pandemic, Lungmus said the museum has been rebuilding Paleo Expeditions, a week-long trip to the Colorado field sites for six to eight high schoolers across the state that takes place at the end of the summer. Last year was the first time they took the high schoolers out to Colorado, and she said it appeared to be a life changing experience. 

“Some of them have never left the state. Like, last year, I think there were six students, and four of them had never left Oklahoma,” Lungmus said.

Lungmus said the museum is currently in the process of selecting this year’s cohort from nearly 20 applicants. 

‘Novel scenarios’

On a geology department field trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma this semester, Lungmus and some students in Field Geology went out to do some mapping — what Lungmus called classic geologic work. Out on the hike, Lungmus said she found the skeletal remains of a rabbit.

“I picked up a couple pieces of this bone and I had a bunch of my students gather around, and I showed it to them, and I basically walked them through this process … because I teach them the skeleton, so I'm like, ‘what bone is this?’ Most of them got it right,” Lungmus said. 

Lungmus said she compared the leg bone to the arm bone, showing the students it was twice as long. 

“What does that tell you about the way the animal moved?” she asked.

The students recognized that the animal must have emphasized its back body when it moved, Lungmus said, and that the long limbs indicated a fast creature. 

 “We're working through those things, and seeing that before I even got through all my questions, their heads were able to jump ahead three steps, … it was so cool to watch as one at a time, their brains were like, ‘Oh my God, I know what animal that is,’” Lungmus said. 

Lungmus said she watched the concepts she was teaching those students in the classroom click in a new context. She said that's the kind of experience that computers won't ever be able to replicate. 

“That's, I think, one of the things that's really important as a skill set, especially as we move into this next sort of era where it's really easy to ask computers to do a lot of the grunt work for us,” Lungmus said. “Whether that's organizing or that's writing code or that's working in a spreadsheet, what we need to get better at is synthesizing very different types of data in novel scenarios.”

Lungmus said it's important that students be able to take what they know from familiar environments and solve unanticipated problems. 

“Increasingly, it's going to be less about, ‘Do you know how to run this program? Do you know how to draw this map? Do you know how to do this mathematical equation?’” Lungmus said. “It's going to be more, ‘How well do you interact with a totally novel set of circumstances in a scenario you've never been faced with before?’”