by Katy Beem
A bounty of roadkill. Car trouble. Swapping corny dad jokes. Pulled over West River for speeding. While scouting and shooting sites in America’s prime fossil country for Prehistoric Road Trip, a 3-part PBS series premiering June 17, Emily Graslie and her documentary crew withstood many quintessential rites of passage proffered by a South Dakota road trip. But Graslie is still freshly incredulous that, in
nine weeks of filming at over 40 locations throughout five states, including South Dakota, the crew endured no weather calamities. Noodling out the logistics of filming, Graslie had prepped her non-South Dakota crew for Mother Earth’s best and worst. “You’re filming in the most climatically unpredictable part of the country,” says Graslie. “You’re talking about freak rainstorms, hailstorms – record-breaking hail! Huge thunder cells. Just the previous year, a tornado picked up a five-ton tractor near Buffalo and dropped it five miles away! I am still shocked we didn’t have a single rain day! We didn’t have to cancel anything.”
Prehistoric Road Trip is Graslie’s pet project, born of meetings with executives at WTTW, Chicago’s PBS member station, who asked Graslie if she’d ever considered making a documentary. “Paleontology in Western South Dakota is the first thing that came out of my mouth,” says Graslie. Born and raised in Rapid City, 30-something Graslie has been Chief Curiosity Correspondent at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago since 2013. The Field created the position for her after a generous supporter was taken with “The Brain Scoop,” the smart, plucky YouTube series Graslie created as a student studying fine arts and interning for the zoological museum at the University of Montana. Determined to showcase an undervalued and underutilized collection of grizzly bear, badger, and bird specimens dating back as far as the 1890s, Graslie touted the 30,000+ Rocky Mountain vertebrates online, and even dissected a roadkill wolf oncamera, courtesy of the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. “They were pretty in-your-face videos,” says Graslie.
Photo: Julie Florio and WTTW
Emily Graslie at Standing Rock Reservation.
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