For Michelle (MB) Barboza-Ramirez and Gabriel-Philip Santos, science has always been a form of storytelling.
Santos and Barboza-Ramirez are two of the hosts of “Eons: Life and Death on Pangea,” a new six-episode series from PBS Digital Studios and Complexly that debuts on July 29. The series explores The Great Dying, a mass extinction event that wiped out more than 80 percent of Earth’s species hundreds of millions of years ago.
It was never a foregone conclusion that Santos and Barboza-Ramirez would both become scientists and hosts for “Eons.” Santos – a paleontologist, educator, and storyteller – started out his professional journey as a pre-med student, while Barboza-Ramirez – a naturalist and geoscience educator – was a business major and a self-proclaimed science hater.
“I never planned to be a scientist,” said Barboza-Ramirez, who uses they/them pronouns. “I hated science as a kid.”
But that all changed when they were forced to take a science class in college and chose geology.
“What really changed it for me was realizing that science wasn’t just equations on a blackboard, but it was people being out in the world, asking questions because they were curious, and then finding the answers to those questions,” they said. “That really struck me, and really changed the entire trajectory of my life.”
Both Santos and Barboza-Ramirez are excited to host the show, in part because they both believe it’s important for audiences to see people like them – Filipino and Latinx – talking about science in a public forum. Santos said when he showed the first cut of the show to his mom, she started crying when she saw him on screen.
“We’re these brown kids, a Latinx and Filipino person, being on TV and getting to talk about science,” he said. “It’s just something so special.”
Santos and Barboza-Ramirez met at California State University in Fullerton, and Santos eventually came on board as a host at “Eons” through his friendship with Barboza-Ramirez. Through “Eons,” both of them strive to make science more accessible to a broader audience through the art of storytelling.
“I think there’s this idea that storytelling is separate from science,” Santos said. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Part of telling a story is convincing the audience why they should care. With something like The Great Dying – a massive extinction event that wiped out the majority of species on Earth at the time – the why is clear. According to Barboza-Ramirez, climate change played a considerable role.
“We’re experiencing some global climate change right now,” they said. “Yes, we can do computer models, which do really well, but we can also look to the past. This already actually happened. How did things fare? How could it have been stopped?”
Santos said he sees “Eons” as a way to broaden people’s perspectives and to combat against the plethora of misinformation in the world about science. He said part of that process involves making sure that audiences can connect to the stories he and Barboza-Ramirez tell on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one.
“‘Eons,’ for me in particular, is so important because we never forget that we are explaining this to people with emotions, with feelings,” he said. “By creating those emotional connections, we can get people to think differently about things like climate change, like evolution, and hopefully change their perspective on the way that they incorporate that into their daily lives.”
“Eons: Life and Death on Pangea” is formatted differently from other PBS Digital Studios content, expanding into a longform structure that allows the hosts to go out into the world, visiting dig sites and museum collections to see physical evidence of the world from hundreds of millions of years ago. The main writer on the series is Farhan Mitha, but numerous researchers and fact checkers also come into play to make sure the story is true.
“The work is not just building the story, but it’s also ensuring that the content is as accurate as possible,” Santo said.
Both Santos and Barboza-Ramirez had different favorite parts about the filming experience. Barboza-Ramirez has worked mostly studying Miocene terrestrial herbivorous mammals – a fancy way of saying plant eaters that lived on land about 5 million years ago. For “Eons,” they got to visit dig sites that featured fossils from 250 million years ago.
“I have no business being in a field site that’s 250 million years old, because that’s not what I study,” they said. “On Episode 2, I actually get to go with my [other] co-host Blake [de Pastino] to a dig site for Dimetrodon … this very cool synapsid that, if you watch the show, you’ll learn a lot more about.”
For Santos, his favorite experience was traveling to a boundary that actually records the end of the mass extinction, as well as the recovery that happened afterwards. The site is right behind the University of Utah in Salt Lake City – hidden in plain sight. For Santos, seeing this boundary was awe-inspiring and even a little hopeful.
“Even though this moment, this line in the rock recorded when life almost vanished on our planet, there is so much life around us to remind us that life did continue. Life thrived and flourished,” he said. “It was just one of those things that reminded me, we have to remember how precious and random all these events in our universe are for us to be here.”
But at the same time, he said, our actions do matter.
“The choices we make matter to how we can save and live on our planet,” Santos said. “It’s just one of those rare moments when you just realize how lucky and important things are in the universe, and how important and precious life is now.”
