A curator at Seattle's Burke Museum looks deep into the past to see what might lie ahead

We're all agog at Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor on exhibit now at Pacific Science Center. So well-preserved for her age, so — charming, from her Beatles-inspired name to her dainty, 3 ½-foot frame. Seeking a further fossil fix, we called on Christian Sidor, the Burke Museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology. He digs way deeper into the past than Lucy's time.

Q: Your research, which takes you from Antarctica to Tanzania, focuses on when and how mammals evolved?

A: Broadly, I'm interested in what's happening in the Permian and Triassic periods (300 to 200 million years ago), both effectively pre-dinosaur and so by a longshot pre-anything-that-is-a-true-mammal.

Q: Why's that compelling to you?

A: Between those two time periods is when the largest extinction on the planet ever happened; there are estimates of 95 percent species extinction. So it's hugely important to study in terms of what causes extinction and what allows for recovery. It's also a time of incredible global warming. Earth is going from glaciers, at least at the South Pole, to the Triassic, when there are no glaciers at all. The Permian-Triassic also bounds the time period of Pangaea, when all the continents were together . . . which can help us interpret why certain animals and plants today are in the places they are.

Q: What is it with the folks who study hominids (humanlike creatures)? From descriptions in (Lucy discoverer) Donald Johanson's book, "colorful" would be a polite characterization. There's a lot of ego?

A: Oh, yes. I think part of it is there are so few fossils relative to how many people who are working on it, so people become highly territorial.

Q: What's been your most exciting find?

A: As a grad student in 2000 I was with a team in Niger looking for dinosaurs. When we found the first human skeleton (of at least 200 eventually found in the Stone Age graveyard), we said, "Oh-h-h, we're not in the Cretaceous anymore."

Q: You were handed a mess to clean up at the Burke. (Sidor's predecessor was accused of fossil digging without permits and improper documenting, charges he rejected.) How's that going?

A: It's still an ongoing investigation; we have a special federal agent assigned to us. (But) every fossil in the collection — 50,000, from 1,500 different places — now is 100 percent documented.