Growing up in Toronto, Karma Nanglu was always fascinated by marine life. Today, he’s a paleobiologist who studies marine fossils — a specialty he describes as “studying the past to understand the future.” His research led to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and now he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Nanglu advocates for better science literacy, more diversity in science and making the field more accessible to all.

On becoming a paleontologist

I credit my dad, Gyaltsen, with inspiring me to get into science by exploring nature with me. I named a hemichordate worm from the Burgess Shale after him: Gyaltsenglossus senis. As a child in Toronto, I became really interested in marine biology, even though the ocean was something I saw only in documentaries. When I decided to go to grad school, one of the people who reached out to me was a paleontology professor at the University of Toronto. I thought to myself “this makes no sense; I have no training on paper” — but the ancient marine ecosystems he was proposing to study were really cool. I flew to B.C. to dig up a bunch of these rare worms in the ocean. Through the process of doing this work, I realized fossils are incredibly interesting.

On the Cambrian explosion

A big part of my research has been focused on the Cambrian explosion, an event that happened 540 million years ago, where we see the first fossil record of most of today’s animal groups. I’m interested in animals from that period called hemichordates — they look like worms, but they’re actually more closely related to humans. The Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies has, arguably, the best representation of the Cambrian period in the world. It continues to yield insights into this incredible animal diversification that occurred relatively early in its history. During my PhD, in a five-metre-by-10-metre section of the Burgess, we pulled out something like 22,000 fossils. Though this deposit is up in the Rockies now, it was an ancient sea floor 500 million years ago. So, I’m doing marine biology, but in an almost forensic way.

On diversity and science literacy

Intelligence comes equally from everywhere. If some people are excluded, we’re losing talent in every field. I’m finding that science is becoming more and more diverse, and that is heartening for me. It’s a big part of why I love Canada and Toronto, in particular. When you can find those communities within science, they can be valuable in terms of validating your own scientific journey. Science literacy is also valuable. It’s about reading about a scientific phenomenon in the world and feeling like you can scientifically discriminate when something just smells kind of fishy.

On his legacy

I want to help uncover how early animal diversification occurred over tens of billions of years. I also want to be known as a scientist who helped support other scientists — a good collaborator, co-author and a good ambassador for Canadian science.

— As told to Catherine Zhu