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Pterosaurs: Not Flying Dinosaurs · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck Bryants. Just the two of us
0:16
Speaker 1: batching it today. Yeah, that's what my dad used to
0:20
Speaker 1: say if he had to take care of me while
0:22
Speaker 1: my mom was working. We're just batching it? Is that?
0:25
Speaker 1: What was that what he said? Yeah? I thought that
0:28
Speaker 1: was a relatively new term. No, I mean at least
0:32
Speaker 1: the early eighties, right, Maybe my dad was like way
0:35
Speaker 1: ahead of his time. Why hasn't there been a movie
0:37
Speaker 1: called batching it? I I don't know. That's actually pretty obvious.
0:42
Speaker 1: The fact that it was around as a word in
0:44
Speaker 1: the eighties makes me even more surprised that there's not
0:47
Speaker 1: a movie called batching it that, like the protagonist has
0:51
Speaker 1: to put on like a car wash to save their
0:53
Speaker 1: business or something like that. Yeah, Owen Wilson, what did
0:57
Speaker 1: he do? Well? He would just be the star batching
0:59
Speaker 1: it imagine, right, I guess. So could that guy be
1:03
Speaker 1: any more charming than he is? He's pretty charming. Speaking
1:07
Speaker 1: of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a wonderful
1:12
Speaker 1: little beast named Ketze Colatus North ropy. Mhm are you
1:19
Speaker 1: are you familiar? So ketzo colatus is named after the
1:24
Speaker 1: Aztec flying serpent god quetzal Coat, right, so it makes sense.
1:31
Speaker 1: But this guy was a real thing. Not to put
1:34
Speaker 1: down the Aztecs beliefs or anything like that, but this
1:37
Speaker 1: is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the
1:41
Speaker 1: late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call
1:45
Speaker 1: a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd
1:48
Speaker 1: be dead wrong, pal. What it really is is a
1:51
Speaker 1: terrace sore. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're
1:56
Speaker 1: going to sort through, but the most important point is
1:59
Speaker 1: that this east right here is twenty ft tall, as
2:02
Speaker 1: tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin
2:06
Speaker 1: to about an F sixteen fighter jet. And it was
2:09
Speaker 1: a bad mama jama. That's that for ding. That's good.
2:16
Speaker 1: I like it. I didn't even use the way back machine,
2:19
Speaker 1: just trimmed the fat. Gone, oh you do. You don't
2:23
Speaker 1: even need that old clunky thing anymore. We just use
2:25
Speaker 1: our imaginations. Were not actually in the Cretaceous period like
2:28
Speaker 1: we would be if we had used the way back machine. Okay,
2:32
Speaker 1: uh yeah, these terra starts with the p of course,
2:35
Speaker 1: a silent p um that is from Greek meaning winged lizards.
2:40
Speaker 1: And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They
2:45
Speaker 1: were not dinosaurs. Yes, big big distinction here. They're close,
2:50
Speaker 1: it's like a sister to a dinosaur. Perhaps they're from
2:53
Speaker 1: the same claude, which is arcasaurs, but it's a really
2:56
Speaker 1: wide claude. And all that means is that they have
2:58
Speaker 1: in the very remote asked some single common ancestor with dinosaurs. Yeah,
3:03
Speaker 1: and they were. They were around roughly the same time
3:06
Speaker 1: period and definitely and went away in the same fashion.
3:11
Speaker 1: So it's it's normal, i think for people to say,
3:14
Speaker 1: look at that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur, even
3:17
Speaker 1: though neither one of those is necessarily correct. Yeah, So,
3:21
Speaker 1: just to get this across one more time, pterosaurs were
3:24
Speaker 1: not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but they weren't dinosaurs.
3:29
Speaker 1: They weren't birds either, And to confuse things even further,
3:33
Speaker 1: there were birds around at the time of the dinosaurs
3:37
Speaker 1: and the time of the pterosaurs. And to confuse things
3:40
Speaker 1: even further, there were such things as actual flying dinosaurs
3:45
Speaker 1: we call them velociraptors, right, and these vertebrates. Actually we're
3:53
Speaker 1: flying long before birds and bats by like millions and
3:58
Speaker 1: millions of years. Yeah, think this How Stuff Works article.
4:01
Speaker 1: This is a good one. I gotta give big ups
4:03
Speaker 1: to Clint um pump Free. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, it
4:07
Speaker 1: sounds like an action how Stuff Works writer chest be Frock.
4:14
Speaker 1: You know, uh um but he he said, I think
4:17
Speaker 1: eighty million years difference. Eighty million years before. Yeah, I
4:21
Speaker 1: mean that's that's a lot of years it is. Um.
4:25
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of like confusing stuff flying around.
4:28
Speaker 1: And I think there's one other thing we should probably
4:29
Speaker 1: address right out of the gate is that you you
4:32
Speaker 1: you shouldn't call them pterod actyls, even though a lot
4:35
Speaker 1: of people do. Pterod Actyls are actually a specific genus
4:39
Speaker 1: of pterosaurs. Um, So to call all pterosaurs pterod actyls
4:44
Speaker 1: would be incorrect. But you could call all pterod actyls pterosaurs, okay. Yeah.
4:50
Speaker 1: And and technically, like if you have seen this this
4:53
Speaker 1: thing in movies a lot that they say that's a pterodactyl,
4:56
Speaker 1: what you've probably been looking at this whole time is
4:59
Speaker 1: one of the the species. And there you know, potentially
5:03
Speaker 1: up to two hundred of these species right now. I
5:06
Speaker 1: think they've identified about a hundred hundred thirty ish. But
5:11
Speaker 1: a tara uh tara no done is how you'd say it.
5:17
Speaker 1: I that's what I would have gone, like, Tara no
5:21
Speaker 1: down right. That's probably what you've been seeing in movies
5:25
Speaker 1: all this time that you've been saying, that's a pterodactyl.
5:27
Speaker 1: Like if you if you look up an image search
5:30
Speaker 1: of the Torontodon, you'll say that that's a pterodactyl because
5:35
Speaker 1: I saw it in King Kong. Yeah, it's like this
5:37
Speaker 1: giant wing beast with kind of short, stubby legs and
5:40
Speaker 1: a huge wing span and like a weird crest on
5:42
Speaker 1: its head in a long pointy beak. A pterodactyl. Everybody
5:45
Speaker 1: knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be an idiot. Yeah,
5:47
Speaker 1: you saw in King Konge. Saw the same thing in
5:51
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park three in two thousand one. Right, things hadn't
5:54
Speaker 1: changed all that much. But in that time span, it's
5:57
Speaker 1: actually kind of surprising because our under standing of um
6:01
Speaker 1: tara stars had increased dramatically, and yet we were still
6:05
Speaker 1: just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterod actyls, which
6:09
Speaker 1: isn't the case. Yeah, there was a paleontologist named O. C.
6:13
Speaker 1: Marsh who, Uh, it's a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Uh.
6:20
Speaker 1: He collected these first fossils and what is now and
6:24
Speaker 1: was then Western Kansas in the late eight hundreds, like
6:29
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy, and they've been well. I was about to say,
6:33
Speaker 1: they've been digging up lots of these since then. They
6:35
Speaker 1: sort of have, but uh, not nearly as many as
6:39
Speaker 1: other types of fossils, because these fossils are really highly
6:44
Speaker 1: breakable and dissolvable and uh, they're they're tough to get
6:48
Speaker 1: a hold of and keeping one piece throughout the process. Yeah,
6:51
Speaker 1: we should, we should talk about that. Like, one of
6:53
Speaker 1: the reasons there is so little understanding of tara stars
6:55
Speaker 1: is because they don't fossilize very well now because their
6:59
Speaker 1: bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed
7:02
Speaker 1: to allow these giant reptiles to fly. They didn't say like, oh,
7:07
Speaker 1: we need to be designed to leave our mark later. No,
7:10
Speaker 1: it's like we want to fly right exactly. So early on,
7:13
Speaker 1: I think the first tarodon or the first terrasaur Um
7:17
Speaker 1: specimen was found in the late eighteenth century in Germany
7:21
Speaker 1: Um and by the time O. C. Marsh was digging
7:23
Speaker 1: them up a hundred years later in Kansas Um. They've
7:27
Speaker 1: they've been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been
7:30
Speaker 1: abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that
7:33
Speaker 1: were identified, right, So when O. C. Marsh started to
7:37
Speaker 1: dig him up, this is a big deal. And because
7:40
Speaker 1: he was finding virtually all of the same species, the
7:44
Speaker 1: taranodon um, that became the common conception of the the
7:50
Speaker 1: what the terrasaar is. But it was coupled with an
7:53
Speaker 1: earlier named Pterodactyl that had been given to the the
7:58
Speaker 1: entire uh species or the entire group by George Cuvier
8:03
Speaker 1: and I think eighteen twelve. Yeah, and that first fossil
8:06
Speaker 1: you're talking about, no one knows. No one got credit
8:09
Speaker 1: for that, for digging that thing up. But like you said,
8:12
Speaker 1: it was in Germany in a lime in limestone, like
8:15
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty million year old limestone late in
8:18
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century that eventually found its way to a
8:23
Speaker 1: man with a great name, uh Cosimo Alessandro Collini. Man.
8:29
Speaker 1: When I first came across this in his article, I
8:31
Speaker 1: was like, I'm looking forward to hearing Chuck say that
8:33
Speaker 1: guy's name that's him. He was Italian go figure, and
8:36
Speaker 1: he was a natural scientist, and he, like many others
8:40
Speaker 1: to follow, for a long time, didn't really know what
8:42
Speaker 1: it was, since since he they found that in an
8:46
Speaker 1: ancient lagoon with all kinds of seafaring creatures, he understandably
8:52
Speaker 1: thought it was a seafaring creature. Yeah. And some of
8:55
Speaker 1: the best perverse preserved fossils that we have of these
8:58
Speaker 1: things are found in things like lagoons where something happened
9:02
Speaker 1: to them. They died, suddenly quickly fell into a like
9:07
Speaker 1: a body of water um which probably broke their fall
9:10
Speaker 1: a little bit. They landed at the muck. Then we're
9:12
Speaker 1: covered up potentially in some anaerobic um in an anaerobic state,
9:18
Speaker 1: and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what it takes
9:22
Speaker 1: to to fossilize a terra star. Yeah. And Cuvier, who
9:26
Speaker 1: um kind of got it all wrong by calling it
9:29
Speaker 1: a pterodactyl for everyone in the future. He was actually
9:32
Speaker 1: the same dude though, who did say, actually, I think
9:35
Speaker 1: those are wings, not paddles, and that was, you know,
9:39
Speaker 1: a big breakthrough. Yeah, And the reason he called them
9:41
Speaker 1: pterodactyls it means wing finger in the Greek. Right, so
9:46
Speaker 1: tara saw means winged lizard and pterodactyl means wing finger
9:51
Speaker 1: because as we'll see, the the front edge of the wing,
9:55
Speaker 1: the leading edge of the wing is actually an extraordinarily
9:58
Speaker 1: long pinky. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
10:02
Speaker 1: I think so too. It that's a good way to
10:03
Speaker 1: lead up to a break too, don't you think? Agreed?
10:06
Speaker 1: Let's go. Well, now we're on the road, driving in
10:22
Speaker 1: your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from
10:25
Speaker 1: Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right, Okay,
10:34
Speaker 1: we're back. I feel like we kind of jumbled things
10:36
Speaker 1: up like a bunch of terra star bones. Sure, so
10:39
Speaker 1: let's reset here, shall we? Should we reset with the
10:43
Speaker 1: head let's the head crests. If you've seen a movie
10:50
Speaker 1: like Jurassic Park, and you saw what you thought was
10:53
Speaker 1: a pterodactyl and that and he had that beautiful looking
10:57
Speaker 1: he or she, well maybe maybe he, because now they
10:59
Speaker 1: think maybe only the males. But these head crests, uh,
11:05
Speaker 1: these things were sort of one of the staples of
11:08
Speaker 1: of many, if not all, of these species. But they
11:11
Speaker 1: were all really different and some fantastic looking, and they're
11:16
Speaker 1: not exactly sure. There's still a lot of debate over
11:18
Speaker 1: what they use these big crests for. Yeah, they thought
11:22
Speaker 1: maybe they use them as a rudder in the air
11:25
Speaker 1: to steer with and the flying around. It does make sense, um.
11:29
Speaker 1: Some people thought that they may be used them as
11:32
Speaker 1: a marine rudder. Maybe they used them for defense because
11:34
Speaker 1: they were like made of horn and bone covered with skin,
11:38
Speaker 1: and they think possibly they had coloring to them, maybe
11:41
Speaker 1: they had feathers or light for They're not quite sure.
11:44
Speaker 1: But because there's just such a lack of understanding, and
11:47
Speaker 1: because tara saur fossils are so few and far between,
11:51
Speaker 1: it's still basically anybody's guess what they were used for.
11:54
Speaker 1: But then I think in Germany, I'm not exactly certain
11:57
Speaker 1: when this was discovered, but a email TerraSAR was discovered
12:03
Speaker 1: um a and it had a or I should say
12:06
Speaker 1: she had an egg in her um overducts. Still, so
12:11
Speaker 1: it was the only terra star to ever be positively
12:14
Speaker 1: identified by sex um in the history of the world.
12:18
Speaker 1: And she lacked that headcrest, so it really lent support
12:22
Speaker 1: to the idea that it was males only, kind of
12:25
Speaker 1: like how a peacock has the very bright feathers and
12:28
Speaker 1: the p hen does not. They think that maybe it's
12:31
Speaker 1: the same thing or more kin to like antlers in
12:34
Speaker 1: Dear or Moose. They're males are the ones that have
12:36
Speaker 1: the antlers, and they think they use it maybe a
12:38
Speaker 1: little bit for defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm
12:41
Speaker 1: a dude and I'm looking for some action. Check out
12:44
Speaker 1: the sides of my antlers. They think it was probably
12:47
Speaker 1: the same with Tira sars now. Yeah, and these things, like, uh,
12:50
Speaker 1: it's amazing when you look up these pictures. Some of
12:52
Speaker 1: them are just really fantastically colored. Some of them are
12:56
Speaker 1: really big, like that Tapahara imperator. Yeah, if you look
13:02
Speaker 1: up one terrace are during this episode, make it this guy. Yeah,
13:06
Speaker 1: this is cool. This thing looks like it literally has
13:08
Speaker 1: a sailboat sail on top of its head. It's and
13:11
Speaker 1: like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like what the
13:15
Speaker 1: artist's conceptions are, it just must have been something to see. Yeah,
13:19
Speaker 1: that nicktosaurus is pretty interesting too. Um, this this one
13:24
Speaker 1: didn't seem to have any sort of it looked like
13:27
Speaker 1: a sail, uh without the sail, Like, what do you
13:32
Speaker 1: call the frame of the sail. I'm sure there's some
13:34
Speaker 1: great name for it, the uh the timber, the timber, sure,
13:40
Speaker 1: but these I mean it's they liken it in this article. Uh,
13:44
Speaker 1: the pump does two television into a and they are
13:48
Speaker 1: really big and look only clunky to me. Yeah, I
13:53
Speaker 1: mean it would be good for skewering, I guess, but
13:56
Speaker 1: it could also be terrible for screwing. Like if you
13:57
Speaker 1: were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could probably
14:01
Speaker 1: catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get the
14:02
Speaker 1: fish off because it's they're just these antenna We're just
14:05
Speaker 1: way too tall and long. Yeah. And then this terra
14:08
Speaker 1: dusto is really um, you should look at that one
14:10
Speaker 1: up to it's pretty amazing. This one looks like this
14:15
Speaker 1: one looks like if a dinosaur mated with a pelican
14:21
Speaker 1: and a toothbrush. Yeah. I saw one person described it
14:25
Speaker 1: as a toothbrush with wings. Yeah. The like the lower
14:27
Speaker 1: jaw has like a thousand really long small needle like teeth,
14:33
Speaker 1: and it looks like this big toothbrushy underbyte. Yeah, and
14:36
Speaker 1: it does. Like when you look at it, you're like, oh,
14:38
Speaker 1: it's clearly gotta be related to a pelican. Again, it's not.
14:41
Speaker 1: Pelicans and birden birds are around during the time of dinosaurs,
14:44
Speaker 1: and if birds are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs.
14:48
Speaker 1: But it does look a lot like it, and it
14:51
Speaker 1: makes sense that it would because from what we're learning
14:53
Speaker 1: about Tera saurs now these days, is that a lot
14:56
Speaker 1: of them were ocean going, that they had the goods
14:59
Speaker 1: to fly across an entire ocean over the course of
15:02
Speaker 1: a few days, like maybe an albatross would um, and
15:05
Speaker 1: that they would fly low, some of them and skim
15:08
Speaker 1: the surface of these ancient oceans in on Earth and
15:12
Speaker 1: scoop up marine life with their with their jaws, with
15:15
Speaker 1: their lower jaw, just like a pelican would um. So
15:19
Speaker 1: what's what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea
15:22
Speaker 1: that this is going on a hundred million years ago,
15:25
Speaker 1: is that pelicans are not related to these things, so
15:29
Speaker 1: that this this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more
15:34
Speaker 1: than one time. You know what I'm saying. I find
15:37
Speaker 1: that fascinating Rather than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that,
15:40
Speaker 1: Actually they didn't. That's just two different branches of the
15:44
Speaker 1: same tree developing into something very similar. And what they
15:48
Speaker 1: call it um yeah or no convert convergent evolution. I
15:56
Speaker 1: think yes, it is it's conversion evolution, when like a
15:59
Speaker 1: trait or behave of your characteristic develops separately among different
16:04
Speaker 1: branches of the tree, rather than developing once and then
16:07
Speaker 1: descendants all have that same trait. Yeah. And although they
16:11
Speaker 1: did certainly love a good seafood meal, uh, they used
16:15
Speaker 1: to think that was sort of all they ate, and
16:17
Speaker 1: now new research suggests that they do eat or did eat, uh,
16:22
Speaker 1: all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs. Yeah. The way
16:26
Speaker 1: that they're they describe them now is that it's just
16:28
Speaker 1: like birds. Right, You've got birds that eat all sorts
16:30
Speaker 1: of different things that fill all sorts of different ecological niches.
16:34
Speaker 1: That's what they're coming to to the conclusion about with terasaurs,
16:38
Speaker 1: Which I mean, Chuck, this is like a huge sea
16:41
Speaker 1: change from what it was even back in the nineteen
16:43
Speaker 1: fifties or sixties or seventies, and we thought there were
16:46
Speaker 1: just a few species, and it turns out there were
16:49
Speaker 1: a ton of different ones and a lot of variety
16:51
Speaker 1: and a lot of diversity. And now we're starting to
16:54
Speaker 1: kind of get a handle on that. Yeah, and they
16:56
Speaker 1: think they were probably able after they hatched to fly
17:00
Speaker 1: pretty quickly to take care of themselves pretty quickly. Um and,
17:05
Speaker 1: like you mentioned, they're flying they believe now? Was they
17:10
Speaker 1: were kind of built for the long haul. Um did.
17:13
Speaker 1: Weren't super fast, but could you know, like a long
17:16
Speaker 1: distance jet liner? Right? But some of them there were small,
17:21
Speaker 1: Some of them were smallest songbirds, and I imagine they
17:23
Speaker 1: were flitty. Yeah. I can't remember the name of one,
17:25
Speaker 1: but there was one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny,
17:28
Speaker 1: little little flying pterosaur. Could you imagine anything more frightening
17:34
Speaker 1: than what you would call a pterodactyl the size of
17:36
Speaker 1: a robin? Yeah? I imagine a hundred of those, or
17:41
Speaker 1: it could look kind of cool like the little UFOs
17:43
Speaker 1: and batteries not included, remember those. I didn't see that movie.
17:47
Speaker 1: Do you remember like the ads or anything from it? Though? No?
17:50
Speaker 1: It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and
17:54
Speaker 1: um and with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay,
18:00
Speaker 1: it was very similar though, huh. I think Donna Michi
18:03
Speaker 1: was in both. Maybe why not? He had that market cornered.
18:07
Speaker 1: If you can get your hands on Donna Michi, you
18:09
Speaker 1: put him in your movie, buddy, Yeah for sure. So okay,
18:15
Speaker 1: where are we at, Chuck? Well? I think we can
18:18
Speaker 1: go we can hop over to um the fact that
18:22
Speaker 1: for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds, but
18:25
Speaker 1: bats was the other thing that people confused them with.
18:29
Speaker 1: There was a an anatoby professor named Samuel Thomas von Summering,
18:34
Speaker 1: and in the eighteen hundreds he incorrectly suggested that these
18:38
Speaker 1: were bats. Another paleon Teller's named Harry Seeley even wrote
18:43
Speaker 1: a book called Dragons of the Sky in which he
18:46
Speaker 1: said birds were the descendants of these uh. And it's
18:49
Speaker 1: a it's understandable why these dudes were wrong. They were
18:52
Speaker 1: doing the best they could. And when you look at
18:55
Speaker 1: those wings, uh, it looks you know, that membrane, it
19:00
Speaker 1: looks like it would be a bat swing. But there
19:02
Speaker 1: are there are some differences. Yeah, there's some big differences.
19:05
Speaker 1: And you like a bat in particular, I could see
19:08
Speaker 1: confusing it with right, like an ancient bat, because with
19:12
Speaker 1: a bat, you have four digits, and three of those
19:16
Speaker 1: digits form the bones in the wing, and you've got
19:20
Speaker 1: one little digit wiggling free, so a bat can climb
19:23
Speaker 1: around with its index fingers. Right, with a terra star,
19:27
Speaker 1: you have three digits that are free and then the pinky.
19:30
Speaker 1: The fourth digit is the one that forms that long
19:33
Speaker 1: sometimes ten long bone that's the front ende of the wing.
19:42
Speaker 1: But they had three uh, they had three fingers free.
19:46
Speaker 1: And this is really significant because before they used to
19:49
Speaker 1: think and if you go back and you look at
19:51
Speaker 1: how pterodactyls were drawn in like the middle of the
19:55
Speaker 1: twentieth century, UM, when they weren't in flight, they're probably
19:59
Speaker 1: standing on their back legs, and they realized that this
20:03
Speaker 1: is probably not how terasaurs stood that instead, because the
20:09
Speaker 1: the the their foe arms were far more powerful than
20:12
Speaker 1: their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that
20:16
Speaker 1: they um walked on all four legs using putting most
20:21
Speaker 1: of their weight on their front way legs with their
20:24
Speaker 1: front floor arms, with their three free digits, and their
20:28
Speaker 1: their wings tucked off to the side. Um. And they
20:32
Speaker 1: look kind of like like a cartoon bulldog walks, is
20:36
Speaker 1: what I'm seeing. That's what they think now, Like a
20:38
Speaker 1: cartoon bulldog, not a real one. Right, well, I mean
20:42
Speaker 1: a real bulldog doesn't walk quite like a cartoon bulldog.
20:45
Speaker 1: Cartoon bulldogs more exaggerated and pronounced. You know what I mean,
20:49
Speaker 1: It's a cartoon. Should we take another break? All right,
20:52
Speaker 1: we'll do that, and then we'll talk a little bit
20:54
Speaker 1: about how they fly and and other good stuff. Right
20:57
Speaker 1: after this terrasaurs, Well, now we're on the road driving
21:15
Speaker 1: in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two
21:17
Speaker 1: from Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right,
21:26
Speaker 1: all right, So you mentioned they were quadrupedal mhm, four footed,
21:33
Speaker 1: four footed, and initially they thought that they would like
21:37
Speaker 1: birds because we see birds do it, and it's probably
21:41
Speaker 1: especially back in the eighteen hundreds, it was, uh, maybe
21:44
Speaker 1: they're all working off the notion of the easiest solution
21:49
Speaker 1: is probably correct because they would see a bird hop
21:53
Speaker 1: off those back legs and think, well, this is clearly
21:56
Speaker 1: what ptero dactyls did. Yeah, yeah, and I never thought
21:58
Speaker 1: about that, But that's like exctuly what a bird does.
22:00
Speaker 1: It jumps up in the air from its back legs
22:03
Speaker 1: and flaps its wings and then provides lift from that
22:06
Speaker 1: point on using its wings. Yeah. I'd never really thought
22:09
Speaker 1: about that, but that's how birds fly. Yeah, they hop
22:12
Speaker 1: around and if they want to. And and it's funny.
22:14
Speaker 1: One of the other articles you sent, uh, one of
22:17
Speaker 1: those guys believed the palion Tallers believes that it even
22:20
Speaker 1: evolved into flying that they used to hop around on
22:24
Speaker 1: four legs, and eventually they started jumping higher and higher
22:28
Speaker 1: and then started flapping and then before you knew what
22:31
Speaker 1: they were flying. Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to
22:34
Speaker 1: gliding to flying. Um, And they don't know. Again, they
22:39
Speaker 1: haven't found what you would call a proto um terrace
22:42
Speaker 1: star like whatever was the link between ancient reptiles and terrasaurs.
22:48
Speaker 1: But um, that's kind of the current guess right now
22:51
Speaker 1: is that they evolved from some small light lizard that
22:54
Speaker 1: was good at jumping. Yeah, and there they one of
22:57
Speaker 1: the big keys and finding out and I don't think
22:59
Speaker 1: you said this how strong their arms were. Yeah, that
23:03
Speaker 1: that sort of was a big breakthrough because when you
23:06
Speaker 1: think of like, you think it all comes from the
23:10
Speaker 1: legs because they're jumping. But because they found more fossils,
23:15
Speaker 1: they realized they were a quadrupedal and they said, man,
23:18
Speaker 1: they actually have incredibly strong arms and shoulders and these
23:21
Speaker 1: little tiny feet. So not only are the quadrupedal, but
23:25
Speaker 1: a lot of that initial hopping lift may come from
23:29
Speaker 1: the arms and not the legs at all. So they think,
23:33
Speaker 1: now what they do is so it's just basically pushed
23:35
Speaker 1: themselves off their front arms and legs to an extent,
23:38
Speaker 1: and it just basically hop up into the air and
23:41
Speaker 1: then start flapping their wings rather than like a bird
23:44
Speaker 1: jumping off of their back legs. Is that what you mean? Yeah?
23:47
Speaker 1: And then but most of that comes from the from
23:50
Speaker 1: the arms and shoulders rather than the feet, and the
23:53
Speaker 1: feet I think just sort of drag behind. Uh and
23:57
Speaker 1: perhaps maybe helped with steering, Is that right? Uh? Yeah?
24:00
Speaker 1: And they so there you can actually divide terosaurs into
24:03
Speaker 1: two groups depending on when they they were around. One
24:07
Speaker 1: started around a hundred and fifty million years ago, and
24:10
Speaker 1: then one came later. And the first groups had long tails.
24:14
Speaker 1: So if you look at old drawings of pterot actyls,
24:16
Speaker 1: you'll frequently see with kind of like a long forked
24:19
Speaker 1: devil's tail, you know, and that it's actually kind of accurate.
24:24
Speaker 1: They think that the original ones had longer tails to
24:26
Speaker 1: learn to steer in the air. But then as they
24:29
Speaker 1: got more and more UM adapted to flying gracefully, they
24:34
Speaker 1: lost their tails. So the later ones, the ones that
24:37
Speaker 1: were around UM when the Cretaceous period ended suddenly UM
24:42
Speaker 1: mostly called oz dar kids, which is not an easy
24:45
Speaker 1: word to pronounce um that that they had they had
24:50
Speaker 1: lost their tails because they had developed other methods of
24:53
Speaker 1: of changing how they fly midflight. So like they because
24:59
Speaker 1: the wing member rain was connected to their ankle from
25:01
Speaker 1: their shoulder um with their finger uh kind of providing
25:06
Speaker 1: the front of the wing, if they altered the angle
25:09
Speaker 1: of their wristbone where they moved their ankle in and out,
25:12
Speaker 1: it would change the actual dynamics of their wing and
25:16
Speaker 1: they could dive and lift and do all sorts of
25:18
Speaker 1: other things. Which is this is a big sea change
25:21
Speaker 1: in our understanding of terasaurs too, because they used to
25:24
Speaker 1: think that they basically had to run and jump off
25:26
Speaker 1: of a cliff to gain flight. Yeah, because they were
25:31
Speaker 1: so weird looking and so weirdly um developed in different ways,
25:36
Speaker 1: huge heads, enormous beaks, big head crests, small, puny, little
25:41
Speaker 1: withered feet, you know, like um like um Mr Burne's
25:46
Speaker 1: hands or yeah, that's a good one, or um David
25:50
Speaker 1: Cross and the Titanica uh segment on Mr Show like that, right,
25:56
Speaker 1: that's like a terrastaur's leg. So it didn't make any
26:00
Speaker 1: sense how they flew. But now that we're starting to
26:03
Speaker 1: learn more and more about them, we're like, oh, actually
26:05
Speaker 1: they had a lot of really really interesting adaptations, um,
26:08
Speaker 1: not the least of which was their bones. Yeah, I
26:12
Speaker 1: mean are all of their bones hollow or just those
26:15
Speaker 1: wing bones all of them? Wow? I mean that made
26:17
Speaker 1: them incredibly light obviously, but that also ended up being
26:21
Speaker 1: one of the problems and trying to get fossils of
26:24
Speaker 1: these guys, because they just they were very highly uh destructible,
26:30
Speaker 1: non fossilizeable, non fossilizable. Do you remember a fossil episode
26:35
Speaker 1: that was like one of the better old ones if
26:37
Speaker 1: you ask me, Yeah, I agree, I learned, I learned
26:39
Speaker 1: a lot on that. Yeah, we should trot that out
26:42
Speaker 1: in the selects soon. That's a great idea, would be
26:45
Speaker 1: a good one. Um. They also thought if they were
26:47
Speaker 1: on water, uh, like they had just had a little
26:50
Speaker 1: snack on a on a lake, that they would use
26:53
Speaker 1: those wings as paddles and just get going that way,
26:56
Speaker 1: pushing off the surface and then flapping until they were,
26:59
Speaker 1: you know, shaking it off above the above the water, right,
27:02
Speaker 1: exactly a lot like marine birds do today. Right. So
27:07
Speaker 1: those bones, um, like you you kind of hit it
27:10
Speaker 1: on the head. They are extor they were extremely light, right,
27:14
Speaker 1: They they were about a millimeter thick, something like the
27:18
Speaker 1: thickness of a playing card I saw. But it is
27:21
Speaker 1: super nuts, especially considering that these things were holding up
27:24
Speaker 1: like a bird that was up to twenty ft tall, right,
27:27
Speaker 1: or not a bird, a TerraSAR man. I just averted
27:32
Speaker 1: so much email chuck, Uh, like a millimeter thick bone wall.
27:36
Speaker 1: But the way that their bones were made, they were
27:40
Speaker 1: made of cross sections of basically like plywood, so they
27:44
Speaker 1: were really strong. And then if you cut their bone
27:48
Speaker 1: in two and looked down the hollow tube, you would
27:51
Speaker 1: see that there are little struts criss crossing to provide
27:54
Speaker 1: even more internal support for those bones. So you could
27:59
Speaker 1: have a twenty foot tall uh terra Star that could
28:03
Speaker 1: actually fly because it was that light. I saw one
28:07
Speaker 1: um one of the as dark kids. Uh was it
28:10
Speaker 1: was something like had a twenty foot wingspan, but it
28:14
Speaker 1: probably didn't weigh any more than twenty pounds. Yeah. And
28:18
Speaker 1: some of these, I mean, what were the largest ones
28:20
Speaker 1: liket in wingspan? Yeah, so about like ten to fifteen
28:25
Speaker 1: meters in wingspan. Um, like the size of like a
28:30
Speaker 1: jet plane, like a fighter jet. I just flew in
28:33
Speaker 1: my first private jet. Oh yeah, how was it? Uh?
28:38
Speaker 1: You know, what. First of all, I've always wanted to
28:40
Speaker 1: fly on a private jet, but never thought I would
28:44
Speaker 1: have cause to um, because you know, unless you're extremely wealthy,
28:49
Speaker 1: you only do that if you get invited to for
28:52
Speaker 1: some strange reason, Like you don't just book it. You
28:55
Speaker 1: you should be on high alert if you're some wealthy
28:58
Speaker 1: person invites you on the private jet. Uh. And it
29:01
Speaker 1: was awesome. It was as awesome as you think, And
29:04
Speaker 1: the most awesome part of it was the just the
29:08
Speaker 1: sheer lack of hassle. Yeah, like you Like, I parked
29:12
Speaker 1: my car at the little tiny airport here in De
29:15
Speaker 1: Cabb County. Uh, walked across the parking lot and into
29:18
Speaker 1: the lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain,
29:23
Speaker 1: and he was like, are you Chuck, And I said yes,
29:25
Speaker 1: and he said right this way, and he walked out
29:28
Speaker 1: the back door and there's a plane and they say
29:32
Speaker 1: watch your head. You get on it. And he says,
29:34
Speaker 1: you're ready to go. That's was it just you? No, no, no,
29:38
Speaker 1: that was like uh five of us on an eight seater.
29:42
Speaker 1: Everybody was waiting for you. Uh. Yeah. I was the
29:44
Speaker 1: last person to get there, and I was a little stressed.
29:47
Speaker 1: But then I thought, wait a minute, that's the other
29:48
Speaker 1: perk is they don't leave you yea, like there. I
29:51
Speaker 1: mean there's a schedule, but it's really late. But it
29:56
Speaker 1: was cool. I mean they're the one we were on.
29:58
Speaker 1: Was I mean, it's not roomy, so it's not like
30:02
Speaker 1: Air Force one or anything, like you feel like you
30:05
Speaker 1: can just walk around. But like when I was standing,
30:08
Speaker 1: I'm five ft ten and if I said completely straight,
30:12
Speaker 1: my head would brush the ceiling a little bit. Mhm.
30:15
Speaker 1: But uh, and you're just like private but no t
30:19
Speaker 1: s A like you just you just walk on. They
30:23
Speaker 1: fly you there and then you get off and you're
30:26
Speaker 1: right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle,
30:29
Speaker 1: and all I could think of was like, man, it
30:31
Speaker 1: must be great to be a billionaire sure and never
30:35
Speaker 1: have to deal with an airport again. Yeah, but yeah,
30:38
Speaker 1: it was kind of cool. But then also once you're
30:39
Speaker 1: up there, you're kind of like, well, you know, it's
30:42
Speaker 1: it's it's not like life changing. Yeah you you me,
30:45
Speaker 1: Actually I've never flown on one. You me flew on
30:47
Speaker 1: one and you said basically the exact same thing you
30:50
Speaker 1: did that. Just the the lack of hassle and how
30:53
Speaker 1: fast you get somewhere. Yeah, Um, is just just beyond amazing. Yeah.
30:58
Speaker 1: I mean it takes away hours and hours of airport crap.
31:01
Speaker 1: I know, you start to develop like that terrible sensation
31:05
Speaker 1: where your eyes hurt for some weird reason to even
31:07
Speaker 1: know you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like
31:10
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to
31:12
Speaker 1: leave behind. Yeah. And it also when you're going to
31:15
Speaker 1: take off, because just because it's small, it feels like
31:19
Speaker 1: you're going as fast as you're going, whereas in a
31:21
Speaker 1: in a jumbo jet, it really doesn't right, Like I
31:24
Speaker 1: was kind of like, man, we're going fast. So oh hey,
31:28
Speaker 1: so um, speaking of you, me and flying, I have
31:31
Speaker 1: an update. Okay, do you remember the story about the
31:35
Speaker 1: Russia visas that we failed to get? I told her
31:38
Speaker 1: that I told that story and she was like, you said,
31:41
Speaker 1: we we forgot And I was like, yeah, we did, right,
31:43
Speaker 1: and she's like, no, we asked like five different people,
31:46
Speaker 1: five different times, and we're told we didn't need visas.
31:49
Speaker 1: So I wanted to let you know, Chuck, that we
31:52
Speaker 1: actually are as buttoned up as you think. We were
31:55
Speaker 1: just misinformed. We got that great email from a new
31:58
Speaker 1: listener that was like, listen to some dumb story about
32:01
Speaker 1: some guy, and it's dumb visa. I was like, oh,
32:04
Speaker 1: welcome to the show, brother, Yeah you should probably door.
32:10
Speaker 1: Was that that guy? That one guy? Okay, yeah, he's
32:13
Speaker 1: very turned off by your side about your visa story.
32:16
Speaker 1: Yeah whatever, So anyway, thanks for indulging the private jet convo. Yeah,
32:20
Speaker 1: I'll bet that guy loved the private jet. It'll probably
32:23
Speaker 1: never happen again. But it was basically like writing around
32:25
Speaker 1: on a on a tarrasaur. So that's how I wedged
32:28
Speaker 1: it in there. Nice work, that's nice. So, um, I'm
32:33
Speaker 1: trying to think of what else, Like Tara Saurs kind
32:36
Speaker 1: of bring out the little entertain year old to me.
32:37
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my
32:40
Speaker 1: um little outdoor archaeologist boots. I see that white white
32:45
Speaker 1: pull up cruise socks, and I'm just a total little nerd.
32:49
Speaker 1: You keep dusting everything in here too. I'm not even
32:52
Speaker 1: like one of those dinosaur nerds, but some just getting
32:54
Speaker 1: into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that to YouTube? Just
32:57
Speaker 1: kind of draws out like the little kid? I think so,
33:00
Speaker 1: And I think probably because at least when I was
33:03
Speaker 1: in you and I were growing up. I feel like
33:05
Speaker 1: public schools just like did such a poor job of
33:08
Speaker 1: talking about these periods. Oh yeah, you know, yeah I
33:13
Speaker 1: remember that. But I also remember dinosaurs being kind of
33:15
Speaker 1: huge in the eighties. Uh yeah, at least they were
33:20
Speaker 1: in Ohio. M does that an Ohio thing? I don't know,
33:23
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic Park obviously changed
33:27
Speaker 1: everything as far but when was that nineties? Yeah? Early nineties. Yeah,
33:32
Speaker 1: but I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among the
33:34
Speaker 1: kids before that. Maybe maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I hit
33:37
Speaker 1: my head and don't realize it. I don't know. I
33:39
Speaker 1: know kids. I mean, my daughter loves dinosaurs, So it's
33:41
Speaker 1: a thing. Yeah, it definitely is a thing. Um, and
33:44
Speaker 1: it's getting to be even more of a thing the
33:47
Speaker 1: more we learn about terrasaurs too. It was just somebody
33:50
Speaker 1: called that the twenty one century the golden age of
33:54
Speaker 1: terrasaur research. So they're expecting big things from the field. Yeah,
33:59
Speaker 1: and like you said, hopefully they can find that proto
34:02
Speaker 1: terroristaur and that's when the community really gets all excited
34:07
Speaker 1: when they can make those links. Hey, you know, it's
34:10
Speaker 1: speaking of the community. I read this article in National
34:14
Speaker 1: geographic and God bless him. I can't remember the guy
34:17
Speaker 1: who wrote it, but it's called white Terrasaurs were the
34:20
Speaker 1: Weirdest Wonders on Wings. It's a great article, and um,
34:25
Speaker 1: the guy basically just got into all like the dirty
34:28
Speaker 1: laundry of the terrastar paleontology community. And apparently they're very
34:33
Speaker 1: well known among paleontologists for just despising each other. Like
34:37
Speaker 1: the terrastaur paleontologists don't like each other, talk smack about
34:42
Speaker 1: each other publicly, and just snipe at one another a lot,
34:46
Speaker 1: which just makes the whole thing even that much more fascinating,
34:48
Speaker 1: you know, Like they're real competitive and real backbity interesting. Yeah,
34:54
Speaker 1: and in this case that's a good thing, Yeah, because
34:56
Speaker 1: they keep pushing one another. Agreed, You got anything else? Now?
35:02
Speaker 1: Are we done with terrasaurs? I don't have anything else,
35:06
Speaker 1: I don't think. Okay, Well, if you want to know
35:09
Speaker 1: more about tarasaurs, go to your local natural history history
35:13
Speaker 1: museum and say, hey, tell me about that pterodactyl. See
35:16
Speaker 1: if you can stump them. Uh. And since I said stump,
35:19
Speaker 1: it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this one.
35:26
Speaker 1: Which one is this one? Oh? Um foot binding. I
35:30
Speaker 1: believe we did this in a select episode. It was
35:33
Speaker 1: it's one of our older ones, but a really good one.
35:36
Speaker 1: I think I agreed, and this goes like this. Hey guys,
35:39
Speaker 1: I'm assumed to be grad student from uh Guangdong, China
35:44
Speaker 1: and have been a listener for a couple of years now.
35:47
Speaker 1: This is my first time writing in and it's about
35:49
Speaker 1: foot binding. I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering
35:52
Speaker 1: she told me that her grandmother had bound her feet.
35:55
Speaker 1: I asked if great great Grandma had trouble walking, and
35:59
Speaker 1: she said she had never even wobbled a little bit.
36:02
Speaker 1: Because it turns out she never made her own little shoes.
36:05
Speaker 1: She just bought toddler shoes for herself. That's called making lemons. No,
36:13
Speaker 1: that's called making lemonade out of lemons with your feet.
36:16
Speaker 1: That's right, she said. Great great Grandma came from a
36:18
Speaker 1: wealthy family, and bound feet were more of a symbol
36:21
Speaker 1: of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do
36:24
Speaker 1: farming chores and catering to the male foot fetish at
36:27
Speaker 1: that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born,
36:30
Speaker 1: but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother,
36:32
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen fourteen. She made sure that her
36:35
Speaker 1: feet were never bound. She also put all of her
36:38
Speaker 1: kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then.
36:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, footbinding is certainly not something that I am
36:43
Speaker 1: proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away
36:46
Speaker 1: from having to get my own feet bound. That's supposed
36:48
Speaker 1: to sitting here writing you guys right now, it just
36:50
Speaker 1: says uh to me, how far we've gone. Thanks for
36:53
Speaker 1: the show. By the way, in the Draft podcast, Josh
36:56
Speaker 1: was having trouble pronouncing Q I n G honesty. Q
37:01
Speaker 1: may be roughly pronounced as t S, not exactly the same,
37:06
Speaker 1: So just say sing next time, that would do. I didn't.
37:10
Speaker 1: I don't even think I tried that one. I tried
37:12
Speaker 1: every other phoneyme except for sing uh. And this is
37:16
Speaker 1: best regards from Ruoi. Thank you very much. Ruoi. That's
37:21
Speaker 1: pretty cool and like nice sense of perspective to um.
37:25
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us with
37:26
Speaker 1: an awesome story like Ruoe did, you can catch up
37:29
Speaker 1: with us on social media. Just go to our website
37:32
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know dot com uh and you will
37:34
Speaker 1: find all of our social media links there. And if
37:36
Speaker 1: you want to send us a good old fashioned email,
37:39
Speaker 1: Wrap it up, smack it on the bottom, and send
37:41
Speaker 1: it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
37:49
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
37:52
Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com.