Collecting Animal Bones in Alaska | Best Job Ever

[Music] So here we are on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We're here looking for Caribou antlers and [Music] bones. We are pretty much finding bones wherever we go. What we have here is a shed bull Caribou antler, so a male, large male. This is where it attaches to the skull, and these two points, or these two ends rather, have been cut by humans.

What's interesting about that is that this antler, judging by the weathering, is probably a few hundred years old. It looks like we have a real long-term record of human-Caribou interactions. What we're doing with all these bones is trying to put together a picture of what this ecosystem was like centuries to thousands of years ago.

The Arctic Refuge is an amazing place: gorgeous landscapes, incredible wildlife viewing, beautiful rivers to float past. But it has some challenges, including an epic number of bugs. Here's Eric lounging on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with a few of his [Music] friends. This fieldwork is hard; the weather's bad, often the bugs are horrendous, the food is pretty darn lousy.

But boy, the excitement we have of getting out of our tents—out for real! It's out for real, buddy!—and finding the bones that are out there drives us. We're finding things that have never been seen before, and it's incredibly [Music] exciting.

It's looking good! Yeah, we like it here. Approximately 2,000 beluga whales come here every summer to molt their skin, socialize, raise their young, and it's just a big Beluga party.