Latest / Privycast / Ep. 203 Capitalsaurus and other Sewer Dinosaurs

Transcript

Ep. 203 Capitalsaurus and other Sewer Dinosaurs · Privycast

• 0:01
  You put a couple Santa hats on some dinosaurs and everybody's having a good time.
• 0:07
  Everybody.
• 0:08
  Universally.
• 0:10
  People are having a bad time and you put a Santa hat on a dinosaur and you're having a good time.
• 0:17
  God forbid somebody slap a Santa beard on a dinosaur.
• 0:26
  Welcome back to privy.
• 0:28
  Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
• 0:35
  I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
• 0:39
  Welcome back everybody.
• 0:40
  Thank you for being here.
• 0:41
  The top of the show real quick before we dive into today's episode, I want to remind you that we have privycast swag.
• 0:49
  You can go to privy-cast.com slash store.
• 0:53
  and check out our privy cast logo merch.
• 0:55
  Go look at it.
• 0:56
  hope you enjoy.
• 0:58
  Before we dive in, we need to air some stuff.
• 1:03
  Recently, I saw online an advertisement for a promotional item at our Seattle Mariners T-Mobile Stadium.
• 1:16
  This promotional item was titled the Big Dumber Sunday.
• 1:22
  The Big Dumper is the name that catcher Cal Raleigh is often called by.
• 1:29
  And this promotional item is a toilet bowl with the Seattle Mariners logo on the side.
• 1:35
  And it is of course filled with chocolate ice cream.
• 1:39
  Now, I saw this.
• 1:43
  I got super hyped.
• 1:44
  Your local bathroom enthusiast, who would have thought?
• 1:47
  And I was like, I done got to get myself to a Seattle Mariners game.
• 1:52
  The polar seltzer's back.
• 1:53
  We got the summer prickly pear guava punch.
• 1:58
  It's hitting.
• 1:59
  It's hitting.
• 1:59
  If you never find those limited edition summer exclusive or holiday exclusive flavors, you gotta get a little sniff.
• 2:10
  yeah, the sniff on that is real good.
• 2:15
  But it come to find out, I got so hyped about this Big Dumpers ice cream that I like bought tickets to a Seattle Mariners game.
• 2:22
  Now, we probably would have gone anyway.
• 2:24
  It's fun to take the kids to a ball game, have some fun.
• 2:27
  I'm not really crazy about baseball, like watching Major League Baseball.
• 2:32
  I will say I've grown to enjoy it more as my family grows to enjoy it.
• 2:38
  But yeah, it's just fun to go.
• 2:39
  So we got some tickets and then I found out the optics, by the way.
• 2:45
  Back in the early days of the pod, I told a story about the poop volcano.
• 2:53
  Which you are joining here on the pod here on this side of episode 200.
• 2:58
  The poop volcano was this time in high school where all the kids collectively pooped in the boys locker room toilet and then didn't flush in between jobs and proceeded to
• 3:14
  continue to poop until the pile came up and out of the surface of the bowl.
• 3:22
  It's awful.
• 3:24
  and truly a terrible thing to do to a custodian.
• 3:30
  This big dumper ice cream truly looks like that.
• 3:35
  With the exception that it's chocolate ice cream and not a big nasty smelly deuce.
• 3:42
  It turns out it was all a sham.
• 3:47
  Friend of the show and former guest, Coach Mikey Medina, shared that it isn't real.
• 3:54
  You can't order it.
• 3:56
  And the thing was a scam cooked up.
• 3:59
  by AI.
• 4:02
  So that's a frickin' bummer.
• 4:04
  I'm a little bummed.
• 4:06
  Because like, I really did truly believe it's real, and it's a letdown because now I'm not gonna have a big dumper ice cream coming out of a little toilet, but it's also a bummer.
• 4:21
  Because I feel like an old fogey for getting scammed by AI.
• 4:26
  I thought it was a, you know, I thought getting scammed by AI was an old person's game, you know?
• 4:32
  I thought I was of age to be able to sniff out when AI was up to no good.
• 4:38
  And that I was tricked by a toilet bowl filled with chocolate ice cream is frustrating to me.
• 4:47
  I think the real trouble is, is I wanted it to be real.
• 4:50
  I was hopeful.
• 4:53
  had visions of grandeur that blinded my judgment.
• 4:57
  And I was taken by the AI toilet bowl ice cream.
• 5:01
  I was.
• 5:02
  It's So that's a bummer.
• 5:06
  The only thing, the only big dumper that I can get now is like, I hear they have this gargantuan pile of nachos and I'm pretty sure I can come up with a big dumper off of that
• 5:17
  energy.
• 5:18
  So we live and learn.
• 5:20
  But here we are.
• 5:23
  As a reminder, that sometimes to get to the bottom of something, we really need to keep digging.
• 5:37
  A wise man once told me, can't believe everything you find in the dirt.
• 5:43
  Think about it long enough.
• 5:44
  It's a good one.
• 5:46
  But much like treasure, the best type of treasures that we find are the ones we don't go looking for.
• 5:54
  This one time I lost my work keys in my car and we had hit the panic portion of finding keys where you start to take apart parts of the car.
• 6:06
  to find them and I'm freaking out looking for these keys.
• 6:12
  And I'll spoil it.
• 6:13
  I found them.
• 6:15
  They weren't in the car, but along the journey, I found 20 bucks.
• 6:19
  It was sick.
• 6:21
  And when you find a random 20, it is so choice.
• 6:25
  It's the best.
• 6:27
  Unexpected treasures and finds just hit different and are just so much better.
• 6:35
  than ones that you like go venturing for.
• 6:41
  And sometimes people have made unexpected finds in the process of digging or stirring things up for other purposes.
• 6:52
  And something that has sat in the hopper for some time.
• 6:55
  I've noted before, I have a notes app that's just full of stuff.
• 7:03
  And this actually got brought back up as I was researching and doing work for our episode on space plumbing, wherein we discussed briefly the Super Mario Galaxy movie, is that one
• 7:14
  of the things that you find is you are not going to find a lot of the same things on other planets or moons or what have you that you would find down here when you begin to dig down
• 7:28
  from the surface of those planetary bodies.
• 7:33
  Because down here on earth, as we dig around in the dirt, we've found some weird stuff.
• 7:40
  And in short, there is one find that stands out above all the others.
• 7:47
  And it has led to a very, very misleading headline.
• 7:54
  What has lived in my notes app for some time is the title, the DC dinosaur.
• 8:03
  This of course is referring to a story and the headline in it, which presents this dinosaur fossil as if it was in a Washington DC sewer.
• 8:15
  Now, I will admit that would be pretty rad.
• 8:18
  It would also clog that G up so bad.
• 8:23
  Like if you got a dinosaur bone stuck in your sewer, you're cooked.
• 8:28
  You are cooked.
• 8:31
  And it begs the question, how the heck did the bones get into the sewer?
• 8:36
  Or was the sewer accidentally built around the dinosaur?
• 8:42
  Which would also be stupid.
• 8:44
  This is why I say the article title and the headline is misleading.
• 8:51
  It should be noted that the dinosaur bones were found in the sewers of these various cities.
• 9:00
  They were not.
• 9:02
  Rather, what happens is when they go digging to lay the infrastructure for those sewers, they discover dinosaur fossils and bones.
• 9:16
  And this is one of the many things that serves as a reminder of what this place would have once been like and many of the things which were once out here.
• 9:28
  Today, I want to discuss some prominent moments wherein digging sewers led to the discovery of fossil bones and in short, dinosaurs.
• 9:46
  once a handful of summers ago, the city of Albany here in Albany, Oregon, dug a fat daddy trench right outside my backyard, right on the other side of the fence.
• 9:58
  I mean, we're talking fence, little patch of weeds, six foot ditch.
• 10:04
  And they dug deep because there is a pipeline that runs down there and they were doing work on it.
• 10:12
  That thing was deep.
• 10:14
  And one of the concerns that I genuinely had when they were digging was like on that episode of King of the Hill, where they find like Native American artifacts on the edge of
• 10:25
  his yard, is that city of Albany is going to be like digging this big trench back there.
• 10:31
  And they're going to find like parts of a dead body or some ancient artifact or something.
• 10:37
  They're going to tear up my yard.
• 10:38
  Like, dude, you just.
• 10:41
  never know.
• 10:43
  Like, and then they have to tear everything up because I bought a house that's like nearby where that crap happened.
• 10:49
  Thankfully they didn't and except the natural gas line that they were trying to work on or whatever it is, gasoline, I'm not sure.
• 10:57
  They had a porta potty right on the other side of my fence for a couple of months, which was kind of cool.
• 11:02
  I did sneak back there and do a little toilet Tuesday what's up from the honey bucket porta potty right outside my back window.
• 11:10
  Really tried to win a Porta Potty that summer, would have been cool to record in that.
• 11:15
  Honey bucket if you're hearing this.
• 11:17
  Shout at me.
• 11:20
  But like, what if they start digging and they find a dinosaur fossil or some other nonsense?
• 11:29
  In short, in the mid 18th, many major cities and urban centers, as they are stupidly called on the internet, began digging and putting the infrastructure in that would be
• 11:43
  needed for sewers and sewer systems.
• 11:49
  This is because at this time in our history, all of these cities began to boom and grow in size and in population, and they needed to lay infrastructure to meet the demands of those
• 12:02
  growing city centers.
• 12:05
  This is, as we have discussed in the past on the show, a way to deal with the rising health and safety concerns that pop up when you have more and more people in a
• 12:17
  concentrated space.
• 12:19
  And what is weird is though this search began as the Washington DC sewer dinosaur named colloquially online as the capital of Soros, it led to a number of discoveries that were
• 12:35
  very similar in nature.
• 12:38
  In the middle of the 1800s, they decided to do some work to address the ongoing sewage and health safety concerns in cities.
• 12:50
  was to install a system of pipes that would be designed to transport the nastiest byproducts of the human person away from where those humans live and have their dwellings.
• 13:05
  The sewers in question here are not the plumbing sewers that come from your house.
• 13:10
  That's like the plumbing line that comes from your house.
• 13:13
  This is rather referring to the sewers.
• 13:17
  that are much deeper underground than those and that those little sewer line pipes dump out into.
• 13:24
  They're way down.
• 13:28
  And when they dig them, it's common for these larger sewer lines and pipes to be a hundred plus feet below the surface.
• 13:42
  That's way down.
• 13:43
  especially in comparison to a regular sewer line, is six to 10 feet.
• 13:50
  And so, as the story goes, in 1898, construction workers were excavating the area near 1st and F Street in Washington, D.C.
• 14:04
  While they were digging, they uncovered what was later determined to be a part of a dinosaur vertebra, part of its backbone, as well as other fragments in the region where
• 14:16
  they were digging.
• 14:17
  They found so many different fragments in this area that paleontologists, which is like science dinosaur scientists, which is weird because we don't even have dinosaurs.
• 14:29
  It's like you're scientists for things that don't exist anymore.
• 14:35
  Wild.
• 14:38
  But these dinosaur scientists say they aren't even really sure what the dinosaur would have actually looked like.
• 14:46
  Sometimes, keep in mind, when they try to say what the dinosaurs of old look like, they play like bone Legos with no instructions.
• 14:57
  They go like, oh, this looks like a femur and this looks like a hip socket.
• 15:01
  And they just like, there's a lot of guessing.
• 15:03
  based on bones that they find near each other and similar bones that are also constructed together.
• 15:09
  Yeah, they're not sure what these dinosaurs would actually look like.
• 15:15
  They play like dinosaur Legos.
• 15:18
  And the completed set is a little off from the model, if you know what I'm saying.
• 15:24
  So it's a bit of a guessing game.
• 15:25
  It could also be that they are not even all of the same dinosaur, like just a thought, but like
• 15:34
  Like you're just assuming that when you find bones of like a dinosaur, that it's all the same dinosaur.
• 15:42
  Like you don't know that more on that in just a little bit.
• 15:46
  The bones they found while digging for the sewer vary in many ways.
• 15:52
  The tailbone was the best piece and based on part of the tail, they have done a lot to try and figure out what they're going to call the thing.
• 16:00
  They started out with the name Creosaurus.
• 16:04
  But it turned out that name was already taken.
• 16:07
  That couldn't possibly be this dinosaur.
• 16:10
  Again, based solely on the tailbone.
• 16:13
  It's wild.
• 16:15
  Then they said, man, the dinosaur tailpiece we found on this Washington DC sewer dinosaur is oddly similar to the tailbone piece of a dinosaur we found in New Jersey named
• 16:28
  Driptosaurus.
• 16:30
  The tailbone of the dinosaur went to the Smithsonian.
• 16:33
  where it lived for decades.
• 16:36
  But then they looked at the tailbone a little more, which how are you still looking at the same piece of bone and scrutinizing it after all this time?
• 16:46
  Like there's people dying of infectious diseases.
• 16:50
  There's people dying of cancer and other various ailments.
• 16:54
  There's all of these things that we could go out and discover.
• 16:57
  And there's people like, you know what?
• 17:01
  I think the most important use of science is to figure out exactly what that dinosaur was.
• 17:07
  I'm going to take another crack at that tailbone.
• 17:10
  I don't get it.
• 17:12
  And they said, actually, this tailbone of this dinosaur part that we found while we were digging this sewer in Washington, DC in the late 1800s, now that I'm looking at it in the
• 17:23
  90s, because I needed to, it isn't the Driftosaurus, which is similar to the one in Washington, DC.
• 17:30
  It's likely.
• 17:31
  something totally different noted.
• 17:36
  Like, okay, now that we know what it is not, thank you, sir.
• 17:41
  Again, all based off the tailbone.
• 17:45
  Just a reminder that a lot of this stuff is a guess.
• 17:49
  Like, yes, the dinosaur is real, but like, we're guessing at how many, if, you know, what shape they were and how many is really just an educated guess.
• 18:00
  Its own thing.
• 18:02
  They've begun to call this dinosaur the capital of source because of course it was found in our nation's capital, which is celebrating our nation.
• 18:10
  It's 250th anniversary this year.
• 18:13
  And that was the end of it.
• 18:15
  But the trouble was the guy who called it that didn't follow the bone dinosaur rules for what you call stuff.
• 18:24
  Capital of source doesn't follow the bone dinosaur naming rules.
• 18:31
  and it was not a scientific designation.
• 18:34
  And so people got super upset at him.
• 18:36
  They're like, you can't call the Washington DC dinosaur capitalosaurus because it's not scientific enough.
• 18:44
  However, colloquially, in these streets, the names stuck.
• 18:49
  Got And it's the official dinosaur of Washington's dino now.
• 18:57
  The site of the discovery is called Capitolisaurus Court.
• 19:01
  And January 28th is Capitolisaurus Day.
• 19:06
  The more you know.
• 19:08
  But what became evident is this is not the first time
• 19:12
  Someone has found a dinosaur skeleton when digging for a sewer.
• 19:22
  Turns out, it wouldn't be the last.
• 19:25
  More recently, and a little closer to us here in the Pacific Northwest in Washington DC, was the discover of the Albertosaurus.
• 19:38
  And just so I can be clear, if capitalosaurus isn't okay, how in the world is Albertosaurus getting a pass?
• 19:48
  But as the story goes, Canadian workers found large dinosaur bones while digging a sewer tunnel in the city of Edmonton, Alberta.
• 19:59
  They actually found two different fossils or pieces of bone, one being a tooth and
• 20:06
  another being a part of a limb bone which they believe belonged to two different dinosaurs.
• 20:12
  One, the Edmontinosaurus and the other, the Albertosaurus.
• 20:19
  These names do really all begin to sound made up and as you can tell in these cases, they're both pretty much just named after where they were discovered.
• 20:33
  If I were to describe
• 20:35
  What these dinosaurs look like as some of God's great creatures.
• 20:40
  The Edmontosaurus is one of those weird shaped, stupid looking dinosaurs that when you look at it, you think, of course you didn't make it.
• 20:53
  Like you're big, you eat plants, and you essentially are just a big meal for a bigger, more gnarly, sharp toothed dino.
• 21:05
  Like the Edmonton'saurus didn't stand a chance.
• 21:11
  He's fricking Sid the sloth of the dinosaur world.
• 21:15
  It's a miracle that he's still alive.
• 21:19
  A bigger, more nasty dinosaur gonna have him for a snack, which is likely what the Albertosaurus was.
• 21:28
  The Albertosaurus, they believe, is technically like or related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, but one which lived in like where Canada is now.
• 21:40
  And all I can think when I hear that, and I know that their argument is like, the world was warmer back then.
• 21:46
  Wasn't that a while ago?
• 21:47
  And it probably was a bit, but here we are.
• 21:51
  All I can think of is that the Albertosaurus was a snow dinosaur.
• 21:55
  That's all I can think.
• 21:57
  And it's fun.
• 21:59
  I think the idea of snow dinosaurs is fun.
• 22:02
  I wish there was more snow dinosaurs.
• 22:04
  Imagine Santa's sleigh being pulled by eight medium sized magical snow dinosaurs.
• 22:10
  pretty great.
• 22:11
  Put a Santa hat on a T-Rex and tell me you're not having fun.
• 22:16
  You put a couple Santa hats on some dinosaurs and everybody's having a good time.
• 22:22
  Everybody.
• 22:24
  Universally.
• 22:25
  People are having a bad time and you put a Santa hat on a dinosaur and you're having a good time.
• 22:32
  God forbid somebody slap a Santa beard on a dinosaur.
• 22:37
  It's impossible.
• 22:39
  Here's where we're
• 22:40
  It's impossible to be that upset about the frustrating bone Legos that they're doing out here.
• 22:49
  I think it's a hodgepodge nonsense, personally.
• 22:54
  And there's others like, oh my gosh, he's a conspiracy theorist.
• 22:57
  I already said I'm not a scientist.
• 22:58
  I'm just saying like, you're asking me to believe a lot about something that you're like, oh, this was our explanation of things.
• 23:06
  All I'm saying is if you slap a Santa hat and a Santa beard on a dinosaur, nobody's upset.
• 23:12
  What are you getting?
• 23:16
  Did you hear my bit about the snow dinosaurs?
• 23:20
  Pretty good idea though, right?
• 23:22
  Brief.
• 23:24
  I took a pack of four to them to my parents so that way they had them.
• 23:30
  No, just pull out some of those.
• 23:33
  I just think the idea of snow dinosaurs would be good.
• 23:38
  No, well, I'm just saying you put a Santa hat and a Santa beard on dinosaurs and everybody's happy.
• 23:43
  Right.
• 23:46
  Anyway, we're off in left field here.
• 23:50
  There's a Christmas special that needs to happen though where Santa's sleigh is pulled by eight tiny, medium-sized, magical snow dinosaurs.
• 23:58
  And I digress.
• 24:00
  But they found these bone parts digging for a sewer in Edmonton, Alberta.
• 24:06
  Add that to the list of sewer dinosaurs.
• 24:09
  Another sewersaurus, if you will.
• 24:12
  was found in New Zealand.
• 24:13
  They were digging a wastewater system expansion in Auckland, New Zealand.
• 24:19
  Auckland.
• 24:19
  Auckland.
• 24:20
  Auckland.
• 24:21
  And they began to excavate huge vertical shafts in order to make the upgrade.
• 24:30
  And when they do so, they dug through fossil beds and found what is reported as a once in a lifetime find, somewhere around 300,000 fossils.
• 24:42
  In these fossil beds, it is said that there were 266 different fossil species.
• 24:51
  It's interesting because they note for this many species to be found in a location like this, it would require a couple of things.
• 24:58
  elevated water levels and receding water in places where the depressions would lead those dead animals to then settle down into those locations, thus causing them to be fossilized
• 25:11
  together, resulting in these large multi-organism findings.
• 25:16
  It's as if there was like a big old flood that helped kill all those individual animals and things and deposit them in that way.
• 25:27
  Just thought.
• 25:30
  In this mess, they found whale vertebrae, whale teeth, a saw shark's spine, eagle ray dental plates, great white shark teeth, and flax snails.
• 25:40
  While there was no dinosaurs, these fossilized diggings were another mention of how digging for wastewater and sewer expansions were discovered and led to the discovery of
• 25:54
  fossils and other things.
• 25:58
  In Michigan in 2022, workers who were constructing a drain to lead into the sewers found the remains of a mastodon.
• 26:08
  Could you imagine?
• 26:10
  You're just out there doing your job, digging a big old hole and they're poking out of the dirt as you dig is a flippin' elephant tusk.
• 26:22
  In the middle of Michigan.
• 26:24
  It's wild.
• 26:27
  And while we could speak for some time about these various sewer digs resulting in
• 26:36
  dinosaur bone and other fossil finds, I think it's more valuable to pause and ask ourselves, why are these dinosaur bones and other fossils of ancient animals found so near
• 26:51
  to now where we dig for our sewer?
• 27:01
  While we already said it, one of the biggest reasons sewer work leads to the number of fines it does is the sheer level of digging down a person has to do to get low enough for
• 27:14
  those sewers to be put in.
• 27:17
  In many cases, this is the longest that part of the earth has gone untouched, only to be now touched by human excavation.
• 27:28
  There's a lot of land.
• 27:31
  So why do we keep hitting bone deposits on sewer digs?
• 27:36
  Like, we could dig anywhere.
• 27:40
  But why do these digs for sewers keep finding dinosaur bones in fossils?
• 27:47
  Many cities are built along waterways or other naturally occurring features which provide some type of infrastructure support to the city itself.
• 28:00
  Some of these low natural waterways have existed for thousands of years, though the cities that now are associated with them have not.
• 28:09
  Often these are lowland or low-lying areas or things that derive from natural streams or low plains in the land.
• 28:22
  Just as those animals of a time now long gone and people
• 28:28
  would gather near rivers for water, foraging and hunting.
• 28:33
  Modern society is built along rivers and streams for the support it provides for the people who live there.
• 28:42
  When those people begin digging down to bury the things which will carry and direct their waste, they then have a greater chance of finding these bones and fossils which have a
• 28:54
  higher chance of being in those areas because
• 28:58
  Those were probably naturally an attractive spot for animals and other people of the past.
• 29:07
  That coupled with early excavation of these sewers specifically in parts of the country to be shown to have a high concentration of dinosaur bones and fossils.
• 29:21
  led this area to be known as Dinosaur Alley.
• 29:26
  Dinosaur Alley refers to a strip of land on the east coast of the United States, particularly running between and around Washington, D.C.
• 29:36
  and Baltimore.
• 29:39
  It's called such for the sheer level of dinosaur bones and fossils found in the area, many of which were in conjunction with excavation projects, some of which
• 29:50
  or for the laying of sewers.
• 29:52
  It should be noted, bone scientists think that the bones and remains they found make up less than half the species that could exist in this area.
• 30:03
  Again, it's cool to think about, but how do you even conceptualize that idea?
• 30:10
  It makes you wonder.
• 30:11
  But I promise the longer that time goes on and the more we dig out in this dirt,
• 30:19
  the more likely we are to find another dinosaur.
• 30:25
  Until the next sewersaurus is found, we get to revel in the neatness that is dinosaurs and how sewers, to now remove our poop, have helped us find their crusty remains.
• 30:40
  Thank you so much for joining us this episode.
• 30:43
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• 30:46
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• 30:48
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• 30:49
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• 30:50
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• 31:16
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• 31:18
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• 31:23
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• 31:26
  can find the list of all the music in the description down below.
• 31:30
  This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
• 31:34
  Thank you again for being here.
• 31:36
  Keep pooping in the free world.
• 31:37
  Own your stank.
• 31:38
  And now, as always, don't forget to flush.