We recently connected with Lindsay Nikole and have shared our conversation below.

Lindsay, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My video series, “The History of Life” which I eventually turned into my book, “Epic Earth: A Wild Ride through the History of Life on Our Planet”, were two of the most meaningful projects to me because they allowed me to translate the information that helped me weirdly, emotionally and existentially. I used to have a lot of existential anxiety about knowing where the future was headed, but in college when I started learning about evolution, I found a lot of comfort learning about the deep past. It felt like this puzzle that I wanted to put together. What existed before the dinosaurs? What did the earliest animals look like? As I continued to learn, I realized that my education was actually providing comfort for my existential anxiety, so when I was creating this series about how life unfolded, it gave me the opportunity to pass on that information to people who might find a lot of comfort in it the same way that I did.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Lindsay Nikole and I’m a zoologist and science communicator sharing information about animal sciences and beyond. I initially got into zoology because I wanted to work with big cats. I was obsessed with lions when I was in high school and I had the opportunity to volunteer at a big cat sanctuary in South Africa for my senior project and that experience inspired me to pursue zoology in college. It’s a passion that I found later in life and because of that I’m hoping to inspire people of all ages to get excited about animal science content. A lot of animal education content is geared towards kids but you can find that passion for the natural world at any point in life and it can be taught to you in a way that is still fun as a 20 year old, or a 30 year old or a 50 year old.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I graduated in 2020 during Covid, and I was on track to work at a Big Cat sanctuary when the world shut down. Most if not all jobs in animal care globally had completely frozen so I decided to downloaded TikTok and start making videos about all the things that I had learned in college because the people I was quarantined with were getting a little bit tired of hearing about it all the time so they suggested that I start making videos about it on TikTok. It initially started as just a hobby but I committed myself to making at least one video a day and I realized that I really, really enjoyed making the videos and also seeing the response from people excited about learning. Now I’m so thankful that I get to use my platform to inspire and educate people about the natural world around them.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

A lot of the media around the natural world can feel very depressing. You learn about this really cool animal and then you find out that human beings are destroying their habitat or destroying their populations, and we’re not always given a solution so in my work, I want to present animals and the natural world in a way that is inspiring, because there is so much hope in the organizations that are working to conserve animal species. There’s hope in our communities and the way to find that hope is to be sparked with curiosity and passion about the natural world in so many different ways. There’s millions of species to be curious about and so I hope that I can introduce people to some of these species and inspire that kind of passion in others.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindsay_nikole/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/lindsaynikole
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@lindsaynikole

Image Credits

Tiffany Ribeiro