Roadworthy

South Dakotan Emily Graslie tours fossil country in a new national PBS documentary.

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 on-camera, courtesy of the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. “They were pretty in-your-face videos,” says Graslie.

20 Miles East of Faith

Growing up in Rapid City, Graslie spent much of her childhood on her father’s ranch near Faith. Sue, the largest and best preserved T-Rex who was also wooed to Chicago by The Field Museum, was discovered in 1990 just outside Faith. “My great grandparents homesteaded there,” says Graslie. “I’m not much of a farm girl, but I care a lot about the history of the area, and the ranch has been special to me.” Before she became a science communicator, Graslie practiced landscape painting with her high school art teacher Jeff Gulbransen. At Missoula, she got her BFA in fine art painting. Her senior thesis was an 8x14-foot mural of a massive thunder cell storm moving in over the prairie, playfully titled 20 Miles East of Faith.

She’s motivated by the art and science of South Dakota. “I love artists like Andrew Wyeth, who spent 90 years just painting the same three farms. Put that in the same category as Monet and his water lilies or haystacks! That’s dedication to really trying to understand, capture, appreciate, celebrate, the world around you through landscape painting,” says Graslie. “I’ve always tried to understand this relationship between rural parts of the country and how natural climate and weather can have a huge impact on your livelihood, on your mental and physical well-being, on every aspect of your life. If you’re a rancher and your income is based on selling your cattle at auction once or twice a year and a huge blizzard wipes out your whole herd, then that has negative implications throughout the year.”

She says her mural tries to capture the American romance of the middle west mixed with the sense of dread imbued by a T-storm looming in the near distance. “We haven’t found a way to conquer Mother Nature yet,” she says. “So, even before my interest in dinosaurs, paleontology, science, I’ve just been enamored with that part of the country.” Graslie’s mural now hangs in a home in Beverly Hills. Graslie’s aunt, who grew up in Faith, bought the work and made sure a wall was resized large enough during home renovations to anchor her niece’s tempestuous depiction of South Dakota.

Another family tie mooring Graslie to South Dakota is Dakota Granite, the quarry in Milbank founded by Graslie’s maternal great uncle. “That granite is the granite countertops in my mom’s kitchen,” says Graslie. “I’ve eaten countless meals at those granite countertops, thinking about my great uncle. Dakota Granite can be seen in Parliament, in D.C., in amazing buildings around the world. To know that granite is two billion years old, there’s a reverence to this. There’s a weight to that meaning.”

Home Movies

In preliminary planning sessions with WTTW-Chicago about Prehistoric Road Trip, Graslie says the only fault executives found with her treatment was the scope. To have national appeal, Graslie had to go further and longer. The documentary evolved into a three-part series to include North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, as well as Illinois. Graslie serves as host, writer, executive producer, and has worked very closely editing with co-producer Ally Gimbel. In Western South Dakota, Graslie interviews scientists and educators on-location from the Badlands to the Mammoth Site to Oglala Lakota College. “Being able to return to my home state and celebrate how special we are has been really important to me personally,” says Graslie. “We don’t often see South Dakota celebrated on the national stage, especially as a place of great scientific accomplishment, which it is. The Museum of Geology at School of Mines and School of Mines in general is an amazing place. It’s the only institution in the country where you can get a master’s degree in paleontology! SDSMT has a relationship with Badlands National Park that precedes the park even before it was established as a national monument. Everywhere we went, we tried to show and celebrate that there’s so much more to this part of the country. I think South Dakotans will hopefully feel a sense of pride in their state and their legacy. And I hope it teaches more people in the state about the land that they’re walking on.”

Join SDPB for PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP Virtual & Live Events

Emily Graslie Live on SDPB's IN THE MOMENT

Friday, June 5, 11:25am (10:25 MT)

PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP Live Screening & In-Person Presentation with Emily Graslie, Roy's Black Hill's Drive-In, Highway 79, Hermosa, SD

Tuesday, June 9, 9pm MT -- FREE ADMISSION for this family friendly event.

PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP Live Virtual Screening & Presentation with Emily Graslie

Wednesday, June 10, 7pm (6 MT) on SDPB's Facebook Page and SDPB.org

Watch PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP on SDPB

Prehistoric Road TripWelcome to Fossil Country

(Episode 1 of 3)

SDPB1: Wednesday, June 17, 9pm (8 MT)

SDPB2: Thursday, June 18, 7pm & Midnight (6 & 11pm MT)

Prehistoric Road TripWe Dig Dinosaurs

(Episode 2 of 3)

SDPB1: Wednesday, June 24, 9pm (8 MT)

SDPB2: Thursday, June 25, 7pm & Midnight (6 & 11pm MT)

Prehistoric Road TripTiny Teeth, Fearsome Beasts

(Episode 3 of 3)

SDPB1: Wednesday, July 1, 9pm (8 MT)

SDPB2: Thursday, July 2, 7pm & Midnight (6 & 11pm MT)

See original digital content, behind-the-scenes travel journal, and an interactive road trip map at wttw.com/PrehistoricRoadTrip

PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP is sponsored locally by The Mammoth Site and Badlands National Park Conservancy. Major funding for PREHISTORIC ROAD TRIP is provided by The Negaunee Foundation. Funding is also provided by The Grainger Foundation and The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation.