Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 871: Are Birds Actually Dinosaurs?

Transcript

Ep. 871: Are Birds Actually Dinosaurs? · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T l I
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: t E dot com. Holy Smokes were joined today by
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: paleontologists and writer Steve Brussati, who has this very popular
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: science collection. And it started out with The Rise and
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Fall of the Dinosaurs. Correct, that's right, big time New
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: York Times bestseller.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: It got on the list. It was a shock. I
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: s a book on the bestseller list, which is awesome.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And then The Rise and Rain of the Mammals just
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: tells the story of the mammals. And then the new
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: book out right now, the Story of Birds.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: And that's literally out like today, the day that really, yeah,
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: this is the publication day, so i'mtulations, I'm honored to
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: be here with you, and the day the book comes out.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I got an admission to make though, and I
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: just had to come out and say it, I haven't
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: read the books.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad, you're honest. If I could.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Touch them though, and absorb all the knowledge.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: If I could touch them and absorb all the knowledge
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: and then have that in my head, so I could
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: be like that guy yep, and also like dominate that
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: end of trivia, I will.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: of factoids and a lot of trivia in these books,
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: but really they're pop science books, and they and and
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: they're meant for everybody. You know, I'm a professor, I'm
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: a scientist. I teach at the University of Edinburgh and
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Scotland alone from the Midwest here in America, and I
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: do so much academic writing for my job. These books,
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: I like to make them accessible to everybody and to
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: be the kind of books that when I was a
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: teenager growing up in Illinois, out in farm country, it
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: was really through books that I got into science and
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: nature and conservation. And so I try to write in
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: this sort of style that can hopefully reach kids and
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: reach people of all walks of life.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they make it approachable.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So you teach at University of Edinburgh, Yeah,
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: that's right.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: You're a writer, and also in your your bio you
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: do some of the consulting.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, on the.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Jurassic we had years ago, we had the paleetages Jack
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: hornern Yeah, who had like that same gig at a time.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: That's so, what's that like? Was that about?
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cool. So I've worked on the last two
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: films after Jack ret hired. So I've worked on Jurassic
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: World Dominion. That's the one that came out in twenty
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: twenty two with Sam Neil and Laura Dern and Jeff
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Goldbloom and then Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard. You know
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: that storylines converged in that film. And then I worked
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: on the most recent one, Rebirth, which came out last summer,
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: and that's the one with Scarlett you Hanson and Jonathan
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Bailey and Hersael Ali. Great films, a lot of fun.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: I mean, my job is really just to consult on
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: the science. I'm the paleontology consultant. So I what it is, doctor,
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: I knew knew. I don't write the script, I don't
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: direct the film. I don't know, of course not. What
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: it is is that I basically just have this line
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: of communication with the directors, with the writers, with the
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: artists that are designing the dinosaurs, and is a lot
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: of phone calls, chatsover zoom, a lot of emails where
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: they're showing me stuff as they're developing the characters and
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: asking me questions about the real dinosaurs, and so they
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: you know, they do care about accuracy and realism. Of
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: course they're monster movies, but they really are interested in
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: the science, and there's always been a great science and
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: nature and conservation message through those films. So I'm just
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: glad that they do it. I think it's super cool
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: that these filmmakers, for you know, a multi billion dollar franchise,
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: care enough about the science that they want a scientist
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: on board to help out.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: You know what connects us in a weird way. You
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: work down that movie. In that movie, Johansson whar's an
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: f HF Chess Kidding, which is one of our companies.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: F HF Kidding American made chess harnesses, and she's got
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: one on in the movie.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: That's cool. I thought you were going to say, Oh,
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: we're both Steves, and we're both from the Midwest, and
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: we're both Italian American. So that's so in that is
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: that when is she wearing that when they're doing like
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: the rock climbing. I never read my books. I've never
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: watched the films. I'm trying to be honest. Man, No,
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: that's cool. You have to you have to watch it
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: and see because that's that's super neat. I mean they're
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: very realistic with the costumes and with the set designs,
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: and it's incredible. I mean they for Dominion, they had
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: me take a lot of photos of some of our
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: field sites where we're out collecting fossils and digging up dinosaurs,
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: and they use those images to build this set of
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: a dinosaur dig And when I walked on to the
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: to the set, I mean I thought I was in
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: the bad Lands. It was incredible. So the realism on
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: these things is tremendous. When you have budgets something, you know,
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: hundreds of millions of dollars to do that.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: So I'm the story birds. Let me let me ask
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: you this question. I guess it's been over the last
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: ten years. I don't know, you can crack me ten years,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: twelve years, fifteen years or something. It's like people have
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: started to say, like, if you're looking at I like
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: the hunt turkeys, right, you're looking at a wild turkey
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: and paper like it's a dinosaur, man, you know, Like
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: it was also like this idea broke right that when
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: you're or you look at a sand hill crane, you know,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: in a sand hill crane walking along with his babies
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: in tow and it's kind of hunting around, you know,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: and people will be like that, that's it, Like that
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: is a dinosaur.
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: They never went away. How accurate is that understanding?
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: That's true, that's true. So modern day birds are dinosaurs.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: And what I mean by that is they're part of
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: the dinosaur family tree. They evolved from other dinosaurs. They're
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: just a strange type of dinosaur that got small and
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: evolve wings and developed the ability to fly. They're the
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: only dinosaur that lives on today. All the other dinosaurs
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: died out when that asteroid smashed into the Earth sixty
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: six million years ago. So really we need to think
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: of birds how we think of bats. You know, what
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: is a bat? Well, a bat is a mammal, like
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: many of the mammals you have here. Why is it
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: a mammal? It evolved from other mammals as part of
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: the mammal family tree. It has hair, it feeds his
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: baby's milk, it has molar teeth, all the classic mammal stuff.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: But bats are just unusual mammals. Yes, they're different than
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: elephants or wells, or dogs or cats, but they're an
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: unusual mammal that got small, evolve wings, developed the ability
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: to fly. Birds are the dinosaur version of that. So
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: when you're hunting turkeys, you're hunting dinosaurs.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: But if you took like if you took a wild
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: turkey now, yeah, okay, or san Hill cran or whatever
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the hell one you want. You take a wild turkey now,
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: and you brought that wild turkey back to sixty yeah,
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: one million years ago, and cut that turkey loose, would
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: it be would it be that there's something not quite
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: right about that turkey?
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be a wild experiment to do. I mean,
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: I think that if you took a turkey, or if
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: you took something like a cassawaary, you know those giant
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: flightless birds from Australia with the huge claws on their feet.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, to me, they look like raptor dinosaurs reincarnated.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: I mean, and if you know anybody out there listening
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: who maybe is a bit skeptical of this dinosaur bird connection.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, just like look at a
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: chicken and look at the scally foot of a chicken,
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: it looks like a little foot of a tear, and
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: believe it or not, it was that sort of similarity,
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: that sort of obvious, in your face realism of bird
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: feet looking like, you know, dinosaur feet that led the
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: first scientists in the eighteen sixties to propose the idea
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: that birds came from dinosaurs. So it's, oh, idea, it's
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: been around, but you're right that it has no So
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: it's I think it's percolated a lot more into like
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: public you know, consciousness. And the reason I think there's
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: probably a few reasons, but I think the biggest reason
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: is that in the mid to late nineties, the first
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: fossils of feather covered dinosaurs were discovered. Now, it's very
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: hard to turn a feather into a fossil, you know,
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: because a feather is soft, It's like skin or hair
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: or muscle. You know, that stuff is hardly ever fossilized.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: When we find a dinosaur, fossil is usually the bones,
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: the teeth, the hard bits that can get buried and
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: turned to stone. And survive the rigors of millions of years.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: So feathers really challenging to fossilize. But in China there
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: just so happened to be about one hundred and twenty
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: five million years ago, these volcanic fields, and occasionally they
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: would erupt and they would bury these entire ecosystems, kind
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: of like when Vesuvius erupted, Yeah, and buried part dudes. Yeah,
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: And so you get people in Pompeii that were just
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: like freeze frames mid sex. Yes they're making breakfast or
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: like they're walking the dog. And so it's like that
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: with these dinosaurs, and that locked in the feathers. And
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: this was the first time, this one in a trillion
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: fossilization occurrence, the first time that we could see direct
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: league that yes, a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: that really sealed the deal because this idea that birds
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: came from dinosaurs, it goes all the way back to
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: the eighteen sixties, all the way back to Charles Darwin
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: himself when he was writing about evolution, but it really
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: lacked that final you know, trump card, that final noll
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: in the coft.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: How how clear are those feathers?
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, they're incredible. They're beautiful. I have some images in
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: the story Birds of some of the shows that shows them,
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: and I've been really lucky. It's no it's in your face,
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: I mean. And there's a variety of feathers. Some of
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: the feathers are more downy, more fluffy, you know, like
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: some birds have today, especially baby birds. Some are elaborate,
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: quill pen feathers that form giant, you know, wings on
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: the arm, sometimes even on the lakes. And they're beautiful.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: And I've been very, very lucky to spend a lot
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: of time in China working with Chinese scientists who get
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: these fossils from the farmers. It's farmers in northeastern China.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: And I love this because I come from farm country
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: and they're growing some of the same crops that they,
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: you know, grow in Illinois. They're growing corn, especially out there,
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: and the farmers are out working the land and they're
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: cracking open the rocks and they're finding these beautiful fossils.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: And I have seen I've seen farmers bring these into
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: small museums in China and they show us, you know
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: what this is, and it's a dinosaur gloriously covered in
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: feathers really just like the feathers of modern bird. I mean,
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: it is absolutely stunning. And I tell a story in
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: the story Birds, and also a similar I tell some
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: similar stories in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: because I touch on the dinosaur bird connection in that book.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: But stories of going to China, walking into one of
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: these small museums, like opening a door, being confronted with
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: this beautiful skeleton of a raptor dinosaur, like a velociraptor
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: type dinosaur, covered in feathers. I mean, it is it
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: is just astounding.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because yeah, when I was a kid, if you
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: had a dinosaur book, everything was green and scaly.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Same here when I was growing, like in the
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: late eighties and early nineties, back back home in Autawa, Illinois,
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: run from in northern Illinois. In grade school, Wallace Grade School,
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: I went to out in the middle of the farm country,
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: literally in the library in town. I remember the books.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: I remember the dinosaur books. I wasn't that into dinosaurs
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: as a kid. That came a bit later and I
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: was a teenager, but I remember those books. And those books,
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: I mean they would say things like we'll never know
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: the colors of dinosaurs. It's impossible. Dinosaurs probably looks like giant,
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: you know, overgrown crocodiles and lizards. They were probably covered
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: in scales and were green and gray and just kind
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: of dull and kind of plotting and kind of stupid.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: But that idea, that image of dinosaurs has really changed
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: now and we know that a lot of them, of course,
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: were covered in feathers. We can even tell the colors
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: of some of those feathers, the melanin the pigments, the
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: same pigments that give birds their feather colors. Today, we
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: can find those fossilized and that tells us that they
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: were brown, or they were black, or they were white,
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: or they were ginger, or the feathers were iridescent like
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: a crow's feathers. And we know that, we know a
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: lot of dinosaurs were much more intelligent than we used
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: to think.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you know that? Let me let me
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: preface this.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a I have a eleven year old,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and well not just sing because I've been doing this
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: the whole time.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: I've been a parent.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Like we're away checking out, we're checking out whatever kind
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: of new dinosaur thing is out there right right now.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: We're watching the Dinosaurs on Netflix, which is kind of
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: excruciatingly narrated by Morgan Freeman. Yeah, a lot of the
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: stuff in there, man, Like, I sit there, I was
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: watching I'll watched it last night. My little boy laying
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: in bed for bed before bedtime, and a lot of
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: times I'm saying to him as we're laying there, I'm like,
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: that's bullshit.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Man, Like, I'm like, they don't, like, how do you know? That?
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Like one of the things that's good. I mean, we
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: should be skeptical.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: You know, they have them that they constantly vocalize. They
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: never shut up. So even if even if a t
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: rex comes to attack something, he growls at it makes
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: sense he growls on his approach. And he's like, well,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: how do you know. I'm like, because because there's just
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: things that animals are like, and animals don't perpetually vocalize.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: But the biggest thing that I'm like, when I keep
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: telling them, I'm like, there's a quote from my friend.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: I won't give the reason he said this. One time
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: I told him something. He said to me, I don't
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: know why that's not true, but that's not true. Okay, Yeah,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: well yeah, when I see those giant terodactyle things. Yeah,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: the proportions, the super thin neck, the giant head walking
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: around on his elbows.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't know, I don't know, but that's
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: not right.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: That one is right. That one is right because elbows.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: But I'm saying, like the racial headsize and next size
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: and waiting size.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: No, it's totally weird, right, but that so, so you're
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: right about the vocalizations and these things, and a lot
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: of the films and a lot of the dinosaur documentaries. Yeah,
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: the behaviors, we don't.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: Know, but you just said they're smart.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Way, so I will say, so, how do why? Yeah? Yeah,
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: so first I'll stick I'll stick up for the pterodactyls
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: for just so they're totally weird. You're absolutely right. You
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: look at one of these giant terodactyls, which are not
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: actually dinosaurs, by the way, there's dinosaurs. They're super cool.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: They don't know this movie.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: Well, we find fo so we know those proportions are
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: correct because we find fossils of these things. One of
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: the best fossils we ever found. My crew uh at
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: the University of Edinburgh. We work all the time on
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: the Isle of Sky in Scotland, this absolutely beautiful, enchanted
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: majestic island off the west coast. There's Jurassic Age fossils
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: that about one hundred and seventy million years old, and
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: one of my students, Amelia, she found a pterodactyl skeleton.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: So we have it all there in the rocks, the head,
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: the neck, the wings. It has really weird proportions. So
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: that's because we can see it seems to.
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: Defy a physical reality.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: I know, I'm with you with the terod actor again, Irue.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: And so we also have footprints and handprints so we
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: can see they walk like that. That's an example of
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: something from the fossil record that doesn't live anymore. That
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: if we didn't have fossils, we would have no idea
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: they existed, and we do have the fossils, and the
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: fossils show us they're weird. And the same is true
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: with birds. So in the Story of Birds, I talk
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: about some of these incredible birds that once live that
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: don't live anymore. Terror birds, these top hunters, top predators
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: that stood larger than a human, had a head the
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: size of a horse, a big hooked beak. They don't
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: live anymore. I mean, thank God, but we would never
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: think something as weird as that could exist if we
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: didn't find the fossils. There were soaring birds that had
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: wingspans of over twenty feet wide that we you know,
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: like double the size of an albatross, the biggest birds today.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of things in the fossil record
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: that we find as fossils that we go holy shit like.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: But to circle back, things like the vocalizations, the behaviors,
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: those are often things that we don't know directly. So
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: on these shows and these films, a lot of that
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: those storylines and those behaviors are based on what modern
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: animals do. But sometimes you're absolutely right, people like you
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: that no modern animals will spend a lot of time
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: out in nature confronting animals and trying to hide from
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: animals and trying to sneak up on animals and trying
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: to you know, protect yourself from animals, like you know,
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: all animals behave. Yeah, and there are some things in
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: those shows that, yeah, are wacky. An animal is not
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: just going to announce itself by screaming and growling and
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: roaring and it's hunting. I mean, come on, you don't
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: do that when you're out hunting.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: So when you said you see signs, let me I
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: don't want to. I want to talk about birds too. Yeah,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: but let me hear you one from this this thing
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: I'm watching. Yeah, so this dude, there's this giant dinosaur
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: and he comes out in the water and.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: He catches a fish.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then he like lays the fish on the
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean and then he hangs out.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: What is his beak open?
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's huge. Yeah.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: That says he's as tall as a draft or something. Yeah. Yeah,
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: and he's got his beak.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Open and he waits for a shark to come grab
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: the bait and then catches the shark and swallows.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: You know, kind like that.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: When I sell that with my boy, I'm like, come
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: come on, I mean, well, you don't know. I'm like,
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: they don't know.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: We don't know. We don't know. And you know, I
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: should say that Netflix show. You know, it's it's a
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: very impressive show that the it's cool, yeah, and it's
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: you know, I didn't work on I work on a
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: lot of these shows as a consultant. I didn't work
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: on that one, but I know that the the the
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: producers and the artists and so on. You use my
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: book quite a bit, you know. They marketed it is
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: like rite the story of the rise and fall of
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: the Dinosaure, so you know, and I had meetings with
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: the producers and stuff. So I'm impressed with what they've done.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: I think it's a very good show. But you to
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: make a show, to make something on T well, you know,
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: you know, it is like to make a TV show.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, it has to be compelling, there has to
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: be a storyline, things have to be doing stuff. And
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: when it comes to these fossils, you know, we find
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: a fossil and maybe that fossil tells us, oh my goodness,
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: there's this weird animal with a bizarre head and neck
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: and whatever. Okay, that animal existed, but what did it do,
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: how did it move? What did it eat? Sometimes we
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: might have some evidence, sometimes the last meal is found
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: fossilized in the stomach. That happens sometimes, so we do
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: sometimes get direct evidence for behaviors, but a lot of
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: times we just don't. So we have to speculate a
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: little bit. We have to draw parallels to modern animals.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And this is more for the filmmaking. Again, it being
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: a scientist but.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: What tripped me out? What tripped me out when I
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: first kind of jumped in on you on this this
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: and we can.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Get back to intelligence by intelligence.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: And I'm not like, of course, I mean like sure,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, of course many of them must have been.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: But I'm saying, like, what would you ever look at?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: What would you ever look at to validate that? But
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: because it's not a crazy premise, it's you know, like
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: there's all these different ways we conceptualize animal intelligence. Most
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: people would regard an earthworm as probably not particularly bright
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: when it comes to problem solving. You look at corvid's
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: like crows and ravens, who seem like very very curious.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: They're feathered apes basically interested in solving, interested in pattern recognition.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: So what would you ever look at to be like
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: there was intelligence?
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great I'm glad you asked. It's almost
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: like I've planted the question, but I didn't because we're
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: studying this now in my lab in Edinburgh. It's actually
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: one of the biggest things that we're studying. And we
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: you know, we're paleontologists, we study fossils, but we're working
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: with the bigger team of biologists, including biologists who study
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: behavior and modern animals. So my good colleague Osvath and
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: his crew in Sweden. They have a farm, Mattias and
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Helena is his wife. They have a farm. On their farm,
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: they have a raven enclosure and it's a university research
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: facility and so and I write about this in the
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: story Birds in the last chapter I talked about like
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: modern bird intelligence and cognition, and a lot of that's
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: about their work. And they basically put the ravens through
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: these exercises. They put mirrors in front of their faces,
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: they give them stuff to make tools out of. They
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: run these these different scenarios where you know, they take
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: some food from a raven and see how it behaves
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: and so on. So we work closely with them. We
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: also work very closely with neurobiologists, with the people who
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: actually study brains of modern animals. And there's so much
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: to a brain, I mean, more than anything, just the neurons,
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: those little you know, cells, the powerhouses, the little computer
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: chips in the brain. So we put all this evidence
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: together and we try to understand basically as much as
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: we can about extinct species and their intelligence and their behaviors.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: It is limited But the biggest direct evidence that we
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: have from fossils is we don't get brains fossilizing. Usually
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: a brain is one of the softest, most supple parts
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: of the body, and it decays through it. Oh yeah,
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: and once an animal dies, I mean, the brain is
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: one of the first things to go. But so for
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: a dinosaur like a t rex that's sixty six million
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: years old, I mean, you're not going to get a
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: brain preserved as a fossil. But what you do get
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: preserved as a fossil is the head, the skull, the bones,
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: and the brain is inside the bones. The brain is
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: in a brain cavity. Our brain is in a cavity
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: in our head. So we can cat scan fossil dinosaur
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: skulls the same way a medical doctor would use a
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: cat scanner to see inside of our bodies if maybe
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: something was wrong and they wanted to, you know, check
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: us out and see what might be happening inside. We
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: can use the X rays of the CT scanner to
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: make a digital model of that brain cavity, and that's
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: a digital model of the brain. And so that doesn't
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: tell us everything, but it tells us how big that
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: brain was, how big the brain was relative to the body,
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: how big the different regions of the brains were. You know,
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: there's the old factory bulbs in the brain that control
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: the sense of smell. You know a lot of mammals today,
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: you know, have very good sense of smell and some don't.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: And the eyes of the olfactory bulbs helps control that.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: There's optic lobes in the brain that help control vision.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: We have the ears, you know, that are not part
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: of the brain. But we can also use the cat
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: scanner to see inside the ears and see the cochlea.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: Where the cochlea was. The cochlea, that's that thing in
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: us that's looping and kind of twisted. That's what heres.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Sound relays sound to the brain. We know from modern animals.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: You know, the length of the cochlea correlates to the
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: range of sounds that can be heard. So I think
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: as you can start to see, we can build up
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: a bit of a picture. No, you know, we can't
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: put a t rex through a maze. We can't stick
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: a mirror in front of a t rex and see
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: if it would recognize itself. But we can cat scan
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: a skull. We can build a digital model of the brain.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: We can measure the size of that brain. We can
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: see what the regions of the brain were like. And
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: so for something like t Rex, that tells us it
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: had a pretty big brain for an animal of its size.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: You know, it wasn't like our brain. It wasn't quite
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: that big. But for an animal, a reptilian type of
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: animal of its size, it had a pretty big brain.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: Brain relative to body tells us a lot about intelligence.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: So it was fairly intelligent for a dinosaur. Its brain
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: had huge olfactory balls, huge like off the charts for dinosaurs.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: So t Rex had a really good sense of smell
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: compared to other dinosaurs. The brain had big optic lobes,
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: it had good eyesight. The ear had a long coconate,
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: it could hear well. So t Rex was a pretty smart,
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: very keen hunter. And really, you know, we think of
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: t Rex as this brute forced you know, brute force
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: and a murdering dinosaur, the ultimate monster from Earth history,
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: the size of a bus, had the size of a baptub,
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: crushed the bones of its prey with its teeth. That's
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: all true, But it was also really smart, and that's
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: what I love about t Rex. It had the brawn
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: and it had the brains. And we know this from
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: the fossils. We're not making it up. We have evidence
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: for it.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: You know, I paid a lot of attention to.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Archaeology around ice age hunters in North America. And what's
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: kind of interesting is the amount of conversations and books
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: and things that are written about humans hunting for mammoths.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: But then you look at, like how many known mammoth.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Kill sites there are, like really sort of like places
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: where you have strong evidence that humans and mammoths were
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: together at the same time. Is very small, maybe as
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: few as like thirteen instances. How many like take you
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: were just talking about t rex how many t rex pieces?
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, yes, globally or whatever?
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: Like how many are in the mix?
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Like you're taking the information from what size pool of evidence?
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: You're right. When it comes to fossils, normally, our evidence
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: is fairly limited. I mean, we are like detectives at
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: a crime scene where there's maybe you know, one hair
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: and one fingerprint and you know a few threads, and
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: and you were trying to reconstruct, you know, a story
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: out of it, something plausible, And some fossils are more
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: common than others, and you're right with them. With the mammoths.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: I talked about this in The Rise and Rain of
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: the Mammals, about the relationship between humans and giant mammals,
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: and I'm sure we can dive into that, you know
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: a little bit more as well. But there are very
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: few places where there are mammoths that have spear points
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: you know, from from human hunters, that are associated with
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: the skeletons, or that have cut marks on the bone.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: They exist, but they're not as common as you would think.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: And that's because it's hard would common than you well,
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: some people. Yeah, yeah. And when it comes down to.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Put that to an archaeologist, I'm like, why aren't there more?
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: He goes, My god, there's a lot.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Which when you think about the odds of
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: any single thing becoming a fossil, like, I mean, you
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: and me are probably never going to become a fossil,
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: Like we're probably not gonna die and get buried in
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: sand or mud pretty quickly and then turned into stone
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: and then preserved for thousands of millions of years. And
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: then you know, some paleontologists or some hiker, some farmer
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: who knows walks by and sees our bone sticking. I mean,
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: that's what you need to get a fossil, and only
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: a tiny fraction of individuals that have ever lived will
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: ever turn into a fossil. And that's why oftentimes it's
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: actually things like the footprints of dinosaurs that are more
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: common than the skeletons, because when you think about it,
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: you know, one individual has one skeleton, but how many
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: footprints do we make in our lifetime? So for t Rex,
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: t Rex is one of the better known dinosaurs because
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: it lived right at the end of the Age of dinosaurs,
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: so right before the asteroid hit, which means it's one
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: of the most recent dinosaurs to today that has persisted,
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: which just means there's been less time for its fossils
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: to be eroded away. And it's found across western North America.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: T Rex is only from western North America.
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: It's the the American tyrant dinosaur from the Age of
• 26:57
  Speaker 4: dinosaurs from the Cretaceous, and here in Montana some of
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: the best fossils of t Rex.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: The first fossils of t Rex were found right here
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: in Montana in the early nineteen hundreds by the great
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: fossil collector Barnum Brown. It was from Kansas and was
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: collecting on behalf of the big natural history museum in
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: New York, the American Museum of Natural History. He came
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: out here, this was to southeastern Montana, the Hell Creek area,
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: and he found the bones of this gigantic snarling primeval
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: predator and they brought him back to New York and
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: put him on display. And that's how t rex got
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: its start. And since then some of the best fossils
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: are found out here, but also across the border into
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: the Dakotas. There are some found a bit north in Saskatchewan,
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: and then there's some others that are found all the
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: way south really down to New Mexico and Texas, and
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: there are several dozen decent fossils of t rexes. And
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: then you know thousands of individual teeth and bones and
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: so on, so thousands. Yeah, So you know, and I've
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: been out I've collected with crews out here in Montana.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: You know, not recently. When I was a student, I
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: really cut my teeth as as a paleontologists coming out
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: here and dig at dinosaurs because I went to school
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: in Illinois, and from in Illinois, nobody's ever found a
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: dinosaur in Illinois. I think a similar in Michigan where
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: you're from, and it's just not doesn't have the kind
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: of rocks you know to preserve dinosaur fossils, rocks of
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: the right age. So I came out here and yeah,
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: we'd find t rex bones, t rex teeth, and bones
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: of triceratops and duck build dinosaurs and so on. They're
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: actually not super rare, so we have a good amount
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: of evidence. And that's what's really cool. I love it
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: because we really are like detectives and we want as
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: much evidence as possible. And yeah, of course we want
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: to find complete skeletons, but sometimes, you know, a single tooth,
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: a single bone can tell us something we didn't know before.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: And that's what makes paleontology so much fun. I mean,
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: when we're out looking for fossils, we don't use any
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: special tools. You know, we don't have sonar that we
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: shoot into the rocks to see what's inside. I mean,
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: we're we just go out prospecting, really gold prospect I
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: mean we're just out walking around seeing what stick.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: Out, looking the surface, Yeah, looking at.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: The surface, and if we see something interesting, maybe it's
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: something that's a different color, a peculiar shape, a different texture.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: You know, we'll go down and we'll look at it,
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: and maybe ninety five percent of the time is going
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: to be nothing, some smudge on the rock or some
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: mineral crystal. But sometimes like this pterodactyl we found in
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Scotland that I was mentioning where our students saw this.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: You know, she saw this interesting color, very different from
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: the rest of the rock. She looked down. It had
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: a shape to it. You know, it looks like there
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: was a beak and some teeth on the side, and
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: that turned out to be ahead, which turned out to
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: lead to a skeleton, and then we dug in further
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: and took it out. So it's a real game of
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: luck and chance and circumscis. You've got to be patient,
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: you gotta be persistent, and you know, and I don't
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: mean to be trite, just but it is a lot
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: like like hunting or fishing. I mean, you know, you
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: got to go out and you got to spend the time.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: You don't know what you do your homework. You know,
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: you go to the right places where you think there
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: are going to be fossils of the right age because
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: they're the right kind of rocks and so on. Just
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: like you got fishing. You know, you go to a
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: place where you know there are fish, maybe your friends
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: of fish there and they've had, you know, good luck.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: But then you just got to go and do it
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: and put in the time, and a lot of time
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: nothing happens.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: Most of the days we actually don't find very much.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: But when we do, oh my god, the rush is incredible.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: And of course we always collect fossils as part of
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: a team.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: Nobody goes out and like digs up a brontosaurus by themselves.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: That would be impossible. So there's great camaraderie, great friendship
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: on the field crews, and that's one of the most
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: fun things about this science. You know, this isn't being
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: an astrophysicist where you're in front of your computer, or
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: a molecular biologist in the lab, or a chemist, no offense,
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: those are great. I've studied, you know, a lot of
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: these sciences myself when I was you know, in college,
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: and I have friends that do these sciences and that's great,
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: but those sciences aren't for me. I like the science
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: of being out and looking for stuff, and anybody can
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: do it, you know, anybody can do it. These farmers
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: are finding fossils in China. There's farmers back home in
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: Illinois that find Willie mate and says two tiers. And
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: so that's what's awesome. So if you're interested in fossils,
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: it really is like if you're interested in hunting or fishing,
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: just figure out wherever you live, what the laws are,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: who owns the land, if you need a permit or whatever,
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: and then just go out and do it. And that's
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: how you learn. And it's so much fun.
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: I want to I want to get to.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: With with the chick sloop strike or like the asteroid impact.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah that ever, you know, sixty million years ago, this
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: thing hits kills all the dinosaurs or not? Right, Yeah,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: I want to get those birds. Yes, but let me
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: ask you this though, who who is that dude? It
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: was like a dude who was working I think in
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: north North Dakota or something. He's kind of a controversial figure.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: Maybe that was that was feeling like he was finding
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: right evidence of like the actual impact, yes, or animals
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: animals that were killed yeah in the tsunamis.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah yeah, like like like this freeze frame instant
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: of when the chick sloop strike happened.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's at this site in North Dakota. They
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: call it the Tannas Site. And do you buy that, well,
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: so yes and no. So definitely there are dinosaurs there,
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: There are mammal fossils, there are a lot of fish fossils.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: They're preserved in these basically ancient river channels. And the
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: age comes from very close to the end of the Cretaceous.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: We can just tell that from the rocks. And also
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: there are remnants at that site of like stuff that
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: the asteroid did. So yeah, so, I mean some of
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: the deposits seem to be like, you know, these flood deposits,
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: which okay, lots of things could cause a flood, but
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: the asteroid would have. But the real calling card is
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: there are these little tech tights and spherals. These are
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: these the scientific terms for these things, but they're basically
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: like little balls and little bullets of glass. So it's
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: stuff that would have been when the asteroid hits. So
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: the asteroid hit han Coon down in Mexico, which is,
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: you know, several thousand miles from here, and that sound
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: of bitch was like a mile oh it was a
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: six mile wide. Rocks a six mile wide rock, which
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: I know maybe sounds big, maybe doesn't, but that is
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: a rock the size of Mount Everest. Yeah, it's it's
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: the size of the city of Edinburgh where I live.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: If you look on the maps, about six miles wide,
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: and it would have been traveling, you know, more than
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: ten times faster than a speeding bullet. And I mean really,
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: it was just a piece of space junk, right. It
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: was like some leftover crumb from the formation of the
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: Solar System, and it could have gone anywhere, but it's
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: just happened to make a bee line for what is
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: now Mexico, and it it punched a hole in the
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: face of the Earth over one hundred miles wide. You
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: can still see a lot of that crater. A lot
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: of it's covered by the water the Gulf of Mexico,
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: but some of it's still there on land. The force
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: was tremendous. I mean, it released more energy than like
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: a billion nuclear bombs put together, and so it did.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: The angle right. Yeah, people do came in on a shello.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: And you know what, I honestly that's where I lose
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: track of things. This really gets in the physics of it,
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: and you know.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: It had to do with like one net sucker hit.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what direction did it blast all that stuff exactly?
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: And if it hit more direct or more at an angle,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: you know, that would have caused differences. I'm sure, I'm
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: sure it did. But the physics of all that is
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: a little bit beyond me. But in North Dakota, at
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: this site, there are these little spherals and tech tights,
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: and this is some of the stuff that would have
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: been blasted up okay, and then basically vaporized or liquefied
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: gone up into the atmosphere and then you know, what
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: goes up must come down. Us have totally shoot off
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: past gravity and so that stuff would cool, solidify into
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: these glass bullets and rain down and this would have
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: happened really all over the world, but it would have
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: been there would have been more of this stuff the
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: closer you got to ground zero and North Dakota and Montana,
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: we're not that close to that.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: Thing and the direction, because if it came in at
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: the right angle, maybe it like blasted all that junked
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: out right.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: So that's what's found at this site, and there's also
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: some other sites in Montana where you get these spherules
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: that tells you that this was the asteroid. And by
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: the way, yeah, and the chemistry of these things can
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: be studied and they basically match the chemistry of the
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: rock that was hit in the bedrock in the UK,
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: and that's how we know that these little glass bullets
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: were from that particular asteroid impact. So the site in
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: North Dakota, it definitely was associated somehow with the asteroid.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, were these animals that were killed immediately? Did
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: they die a few weeks later. That's where it gets
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: a bit iffy. A lot of that site is still
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: unpublished scientifically, so it's been talked about a lot in
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: the in the press. It's been in the news quite
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: a bit, sure, but there hasn't been a lot of science.
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: But it's treated its controversial. Yeah, well it is. It
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: is because although we can tell that it must be
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: close to the asteroid, if the claim is that, you know,
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: this was formed by the asteroid the instant the day,
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: that's really tough. Because the fossil record and the rock record,
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: you know, we can get really good preservation stuff, but
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: figuring out you know, a single day sixty six million
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: years ago and having the confidence, you know, we were
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: talking about evidence for things like it can be very consistent,
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: very plausible with the evidence, but it's hard to find
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: that slam dunk evidence that yes, this was formed on
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: this day. So that's the controversy. Nobody doubts that these
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: are very latest Cretaceous fossils. Nobody doubts that this site
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: has something to do with the asteroid and the extinction.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: But the claim that you know, this stuff was fossilized
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: on the day, that one is what gets people debating,
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: and scientists love to debate. We love to debate, of
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: course we do. We love to others. Yeah, exactly right.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: I mean we're so skeptical in sciences all the time,
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: not everything.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: If that thing hit today, yeah is it? Yeah in
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: your mind, if that hit today, is it safe to
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: say that humans would go extinct?
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: I don't know about that. I mean, like most paleontologists, like,
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: I'm much more comfortable looking at the past rather than predicting.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: The the climatic conditions after that.
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's safe the way that you
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: and you would be dead right now.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: I would have it, I know, I would have a
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: tough time just because where we're sitting. Yeah yeah, yeah,
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: oh yeah, So when the so First of all, when
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: that asteroid hit like sixty six million years ago, that
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: was not some normal asteroid. There's lots of asteroids buzzing
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: around out there. Occasionally, you know, there's a meteor or
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: something it hits the Earth, and usually they're pretty small.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: This was huge, and this was the biggest asteroid to
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: hit the Earth in at least the last half a
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: billion years. Like this was utterly terrible, bad luck, way
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: out of the norm of Earth history. And you know,
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: nothing can prepare for something like that. It's such an
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: one in a trillion, out of the blue thing. And
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: so you have these dinosaurs like t Rex and triceratops.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: They were there the day the asteroid hit. We know,
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: they're fossils go right up to the layer from these
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: spherals and the other chemicals and stuff the asteroid left behind.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: They were utterly dominant. I mean, they were ruling the
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: food web, you know, the biggest mediators, the biggest plant eaters.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: Their kind had been around for over one hundred and
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: fifty million years, but now all of a sudden, things
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: went to chaos around them so quickly, so thoroughly, that
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: they didn't have time to adapt. You know, the normal
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: processes of adaptation and natural selection and genes changing a
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: little bit through the generations. Now that can't work. I mean,
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: you had to confront that asteroid with whatever hand to
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: cards you had, and so seventy five percent of all
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: species died. So when after that asteroid hit, your entire
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: species had a one in four chance of surviving. It
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: was utterly catastrophic. And it seems like the biggest thing
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: is that if you were big, you died and destroy
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: everything bigger than a husky dog died at least that
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: lived on the land. Didn't matter what you were, if
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: you dinosaur, if you were a crocodile, whatever. It was
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: probably just because I think it's just a matter of food.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: I think when the asteroid hit, it unleashed, you know,
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: earthquakes and wildfires and tsunamis and these hurricane force winds
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: swept across the landscape, and then all the dust and
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: the dirt and the grime from the collision went up
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: into the atmosphere. The soot, like forests across the world
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: just spontaneously combusted like global wildflire. All that soot went
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere has currents just like
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: the ocean. So within really a few days or a
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: few weeks, all that crap would have spread around the
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: Earth and it would have blocked the sun out and
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: the Earth would have went dark and cold. It would
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: have been a global nuclear winter. And maybe it was
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: just a few years long, maybe it was up to
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: a decade or so long. You know, there are computer
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: models that physicists have used to predict how long that
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: winter would be. But plants would not have had sunlight,
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: they couldn't make their own food, they couldn't photosynthesize. They
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: would have died, and as the forest collapse, you know,
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: they took the entire ecosystems with them. And so if
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: you were big and you needed a lot of food,
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, there just wasn't much food on offer. If
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: you were smaller and you didn't need to eat as much,
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: or you could eat a wider variety of food, very omnivorous,
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: you would add a better odds to survive probably, And
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: that's probably a large reason, maybe the main reason why
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: t rex and trisarahtops died. But you had some of
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: these small birds, and you had these small, little furry mammals,
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: the ancestors of ours that made it through the asteroid
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: because they were small, they could eat lots of different food,
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: they didn't need to eat that much food. They could
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: hide easily, they could dig burrows, they grew quickly, they
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: reproduced quickly. That was probably the winning hand of cards
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: to have when that asteroid hit. And if you wanted
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: to be one of those one out of four species
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: that survived, being small, not having to eat a lot,
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: being able to hide, being able to grow quickly, those
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: were probably your get out of jail free cards.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: What was.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: Like?
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: What parts of the Earth were you most likely to live?
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: Were you most like? Where did most life forms survive?
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Or didn't it work like that?
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: It's hard to tell. There probably was some geographical component
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: of this extinction. Obviously, anything close to ground zero to
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: the Yucatan I mean not only would have died, vapor
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: I mean literally vaporized, just like turned to ghosts. I mean.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: And the physicists have again computer models of this that
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: show that maybe within you know, a thousand miles or
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: so of that ground zero, everything gone.
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: Everything gone.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: There would have been other parts of the world, I mean,
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: you know, all things considered. The farther you were from
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: ground zero, probably the better. It does seem like from
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: the fossil record that some of the survivors, some of
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: the groups that then start to thrive, like some of
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: these small mammals which then become really big and really
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: start to diversify and take over the world soon after.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: Because now the dinosaurs are gone, you know that some
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: of them may have come from northern Asia. Okay, Uh,
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: that that's one idea. It's hard to be sure of
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: that because the fossil record is is kind of limited,
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: but that this could have been like you know, refugium
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: like some some some you know, place where far from
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: the from the worst of the of the carnage, that
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: animals could have survived, and then from surviving there, once
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: the sunlight came back, you know, they could have spread around.
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: That probably did happen. Uh, we just don't know. We
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: need to know more about the whole world and and
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: the fossils we have of that age happened to be
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: concentrated in certain places, as fossils often are, and some
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: of the best fossils are from right here in Montana.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: We have, you know, the very last dinosaurs and the
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: mammals that took over all the way down south to
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: New Mexico, And that's where I've worked quite a bit
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: with with Tom Williamson, who's just retired as the curator
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: at the museum in Albuquerque. Tom and his sons, Taylor
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: and Ryan. He even their twins, and he brought him
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: out starting when they were like six years old and
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: taught him how to collect fossils, and they collected incredible
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: I talk about him in the book I have. I
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: have pictures of them, uh in in the bird book
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: because they've collected some of those important fossils of the
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: birds that survived the Asteroid. They were like twelve years old.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: It was incredible.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: What did those so tell me about what dinosaurs survived? Okay,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: so if we chase on this idea that like that
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: that that was the birth of birds.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what did they look?
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Who were they like? Who were they what did they
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: look like? If we saw them today, would we be like,
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: oh a bird?
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah we would, we would. We'd recognize them immediately because
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: they are the modern style birds. The only dinosaurs that
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: survived the Asteroid were birds that had beaks instead of teeth,
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: that had big wings, big chest muscles. You know that
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: when you know you're out hunting turkeys, and you're cooking
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: a turkey, all that meat in the chest that connects
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: to that big breastbone. That is something modern birds have.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: Those are the airplane engines. That's what's control the wings
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: of birds. Now. Turkeys, you know, don't fly particularly well,
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: but they can fly. Birds that fly a lot, they
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: have even bigger muscles, so beaks, big chest muscles, big wings,
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: really lightweight skeletons, really hollow bones, and really fast growth
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: and reproduction. So most birds made it, Yes, that's who
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: made it, and so birds today, like, it's actually really
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: hard to see a baby bird, like even if you're
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: a keen bird watcherll, Okay, you know it's maybe breeding
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: season and okay, the eggs are being laid, but you
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: have such a narrow window to see a baby bird
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: because they grow so quickly from a hatchling into an adult,
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: sometimes within a matter of days or weeks in some species.
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it takes a trained eye, you know.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredible. And this is all because modern style
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: birds can grow really fast, they have really high metabolisms,
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: they're warm blooded. So those were the only dinosaurs that survived,
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: So of course we need to look at the victims
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: a bit to get a sense of how the victims
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: and the survivors differed. So, of course, among the victims
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: were things like t rex and triceratops, and the duck
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: billed dinosaurs and the dinosaurs with dome heads, and the
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: dinosaurs that were armored, and like the dinosaurs, the classic
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: canonical dinosaurs, they probably died because they were too big,
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: they just couldn't get enough food. But there were also
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: lots of other birds that were flapping and flying and
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: fluttering around over the heads of t rex and triceratops
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: on the day the asteroid hit and most of those
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: birds did not survive either. Some of those birds still
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: had teeth, they still had like raptor dinosaur claws on
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: their hands, they had long tails, basically primitive birds, like
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: holdovers from the dinosaur ancestors of birds. And they all died.
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: They all died except for modern style birds. And so
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: we think that it is being able to grow really
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: fast and reproduce really fast in the modern style birds
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: that came in handy. I mean, if the world goes
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: to hell and it takes you twenty years to go
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: from a baby into an adult, like it did in
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: a t rex. I mean, come on, you're in trouble.
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: But if you can go from a baby to an
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: adult within like a few weeks, okay, the generations turnover
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: really quickly. Of course, these birds had big wings and
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: big flight muscles. They could fly really well, which means
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: they could escape from localized dangers. Oh there's a flash
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: flood coming this way. Oh there's a forest fire. And
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: the beaks we think are important too, because a lot
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: of these birds that had these beaks they could eat seeds,
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: which seems kind of trivial. You know, a lot of
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: birds today eat seeds. We just kind of think it's normal,
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: but in fact it's quite hard to subsist on a
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: diet of seeds. It's a pretty peculiar diet. And these
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: birds with beaks could do it. And we know that
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: in some cases we have the last meals preserved in
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: the stomachs. We know that some of these early birds
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: eat seeds. Now, when we see it in the modern
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: world today, if there's a forest fire, if there's a
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: volcano that obliterates an island, stuff will grow again. And
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: why is that It might take a year, it might
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: take a few years, but seeds can persist in the soil.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: Seeds are really hardy, and so back when the asteroid hit,
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: if you were the type of animal that ate part
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: of a growing plant, you ate leaves, you ate fruits,
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: you ate stems or whatever, you'd be in trouble because
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: the forest collapse, The trees died, the other plants died
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: when sunlight was shut off. But if you could eat seeds,
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: you could eat basically the last surviving food, soores. It
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: wouldn't get you through forever, but it might get you
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: through a year, two years, three years, and so that
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: could have been there get out of jail free card.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: But really I like to think about it, as you know,
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: when that asteroid hit, this was so sudden, so unexpected,
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: totally out of the blue, just this bolt from the heavens.
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: Nothing had a chance to prepare for that. That's not
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: how evolution works. So the earth became this fickle casino.
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: It became a game of chance, and really you had
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: to confront that asteroid with the hand to cards you
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: were dealt. And some animals had just a bad hand
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: to cards. They were big, it took them a long
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: time to grow. They needed to eat a lot of food.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: But other animals had good hand to cards. You know,
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: the dinosaurs like t rex and triceratops, they had the
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: dead man's hand. The birds, the little mammals, they could
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: grow fast, they could eat lots of different foods. The
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: birds could probably eat seeds with their beaks, they could
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: hide easily, and so on. That was a winning handed cards.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: So maybe didn't guarantee your survival. You're at the poker table.
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: It's if you have a good handed cards, it doesn't
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: mean you're gonna win. So got to play the game.
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: But that was probably what allowed those particular dinosaurs, of
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: all the dinosaurs, just modern style birds to survive. And
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: it allowed our ancestors, our tiny furry ancestors, to stare
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: down the asteroid as well. And thank god they did,
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: or else we wouldn't be here.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: Now, what about all those big like those pterodactyle birds,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: m h, not birds, they're not birds, But they didn't
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: they were gone.
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: No, they were gone. So they died with the asteroids.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: Because they were more When you came talking about beaks
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: and teeth, ya think of a merganzer's bill, Is that
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: the kind of truth you're talking about?
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: No, so, no birds today have real teeth some birds
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: do have serrated bills, but it's the keratin of the
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: bills that's serrated. There are some fossil birds, like these
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: giant soaring birds that had twenty foot wingspans. They actually
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: had a bony teeth like their jaws were like saw blades,
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: but it was bone. No birds have teeth like us
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: that have enamel on the outside and grow from a
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: tooth socket, but of course dinosaurs did. Now, when a
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: bird develops in the egg today, it starts to grow
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: teeth very early on, and then the beak starts to
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: grow and that stops the teeth from developing, and the
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: teeth never developed. But some of these developmental biologists, the
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: kind of biologists that you know oftentimes are looking for
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: cures for cancer and these kinds of things, trying to
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: understand how different genes control growth. They can actually make
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: a bird grow teeth in the egg and they look
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: like the teeth of little raptor dinosaurs. So that's some
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: of the modern day evidence. You know, this was unknown
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: to Darwin. Darwin and his contemporaries didn't even know what
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: DNA was. But this is some of the modern day
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: evidence that drives home that point that birds of all
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: from dinosaurs. You can make a chicken grow little dinosaurs
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: teeth in the in the egg, but but they they
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: no modern birds have have teeth that they can't really
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: grow them to completion. There's something about these little teeth
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: that just doesn't work anymore. They start to grow, they
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: fade away. If you make them in the lab grow,
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: they can grow a bit, but then the bird dies
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: in the egg. But there the genes, these dinosaur genes
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: are lurking in the genome of modern birds. Now terodactyls.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: That's about terodactyls. So terodactyls are they're not dinosaurs, they're
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: not birds. They are a group of reptiles that flew.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: They're close cousins of dinosaurs. So it's fine. Most people
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: think they're dinosaurs. And you know, it's funny. They had
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: like they had like a beak structure they did. That's
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: where you get into this thing that's that's confusing. I
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: should say it's confusing, but I guess I don't know.
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: It's not the right word for it. Amazing confusing whatever
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: is that.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: So many things can arrive at the same solution by
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: different paths, Like meaning, a bat Okay, here's a mammal
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: with a wing. A flying squirrel is somewhere in the
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: process of developing.
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they don't flap their wings like a bat,
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: so they don't have the powered flight that a bird
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: or a bat or they're on their way to figure
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: something or another case.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: You have the structures of fish fins, but then you
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: have marine mammals that have like fins and structures. But
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: they all got there these very different paths, right, So
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: when you look at those those like from all the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: kids dinosaurs books and stuff, you see like the pterodactyls,
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: like he's got a bill or a beak flies around, right,
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: But it's just like coincidence.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's what we call convergent evolution. And it's just
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: because if you live a certain lifestyle, let's say you fly,
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's only a certain number of ways that
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: a body can fly, especially if you're gonna flap your wings.
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: So a bird, a bad at pterodactyl just basically, by
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: like the laws of physics, they're gonna end up looking
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: somewhat similar because they're all flying. Same with swimming, you know,
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: you're gonna swim with flippers or fins, you're you're not
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: gonna swim if you know, if you're gonna live your
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: life in the open ocean, you're not gonna swim with
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: the type of arm we have. So evolution over time
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: often converges just you know, in a sense it's coincidentally
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: because nothing an evolution is planned. But really it's because
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: of natural selection. You know, if you're gonna fine tune
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: an animal to be an ever better swimmer or flyer
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: or what have you, there's only certain ways that's gonna work,
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: just with the physics emotion. So you do get distant
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: relatives often re evolving the same features because they're living
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: similar lifestyles. And pterosaurs, the pterodactyls and birds are a
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: great example. You know, they are not particular closely related.
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: They evolved flight independently of each other. It was actually
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: the terotactyls that did it first, way back in the
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: Triassic period on the super continent of Pangea, back when
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: all the land was one. That's when pterodactyls took to
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: the skies and they evolved a really strange type of
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: wing that is not made of feathers but is made
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: of skin. It's like a giant seal of skin that
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: attaches to one super long finger, the ring finger, so
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: like et you know, the long finger, and it's this
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: this sal of skin that attaches to it. That's how
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: they fly. Now. Birds, of course, fly with wings made
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: out of feathers. Bats fly with a skin wing, but
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: one that attaches to the entire hand. So each of
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: them have wings. Each of them flap those wings, but
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: each wing is subtly different, and that tells us they
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: evolved independently. They evolved for flying, Yeah, they were optimized
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: for flying. Yeah, but each one had a slightly different ancestry,
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: and that's why the wings are slightly different. Now with
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: the tterodactyls, then the birds came onto the scene of
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty million years ago. That's when we
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: have the oldest fossils of birds that still look like
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: they're half dinosaur. They have teeth, they have big claws,
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: and by that time there had already been tarodactyls for
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: like eighty million years, So birds were interlopers into this
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: pterodactyl world. And then for the next you know, many
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: tens of millions of years, they competed, I mean, they competed.
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: For supremacy style.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then the asteroid came down suddenly out of
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: the blue, and it killed off almost all of the birds.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: But a few of these modern style birds with beaks
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: and you know, fast growth and so on, survived. The
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: asteroid killed off all the pterodactyls. We don't know why exactly.
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: Most of those pterodactyls were bigger, and I think that
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: probably has something to do with it. There weren't like
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: the equivalent of pterodactyls like all the little song birds
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: and so on that we have today, and some pterodactyls
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: were giant, So I think that's probably one of the reasons.
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: But it could have also just been a bit of
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: dumb luck, you know. I mean, things went to chao.
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: This was one bad day that then compounded over the
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: days and weeks and months. But maybe the terrorisaurs just
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: had a bad break. But they're gone. They're gone, and
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: now birds are alone in the skies. Bats would come
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: later from some of the mammals that survived, and that's
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: why for the first ten million years or so after
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: the asteroid, birds evolve like crazy, and that's where we
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: see the first fossils of most of the modern birds
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: that we know, and that's where the DNA when we
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: build family trees based on DNA, because you know, this
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: story isn't just about what fossils we happen to find.
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: That's part of it, but we can learn so much
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: about the history of life and evolution by basically doing
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: like what they did on the Springer show. You know,
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: you get the DNA, you want to know what's related
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: to what, and you could build these family trees that
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: tells us, for instance, that birds are reptiles. When you
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: build a family tree from DNA, the birds slot within
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: the reptiles. They are right up next to crocodiles. Crocodiles
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: are the closest living cousins of birds. So that really
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: proves this idea that goes back to Darwin. They had
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: no idea what DNA was back then. But along with
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: like you know, the the genes in a bird that
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: can grow teeth, and these are all the more modern
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: recent things that tell us that Darwin and his contemporaries
• 56:11
  Speaker 2: were right that birds really are highly modified reptiles that
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: came from the dinosaurs.
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: How big was the biggest bird that survived that strike?
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: Probably quite small. That was probably part of it as well.
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: We have a few fossils.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: Either bigger, chi bigger, probably smaller, so there are the
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: biggest bird was smaller in the chicken.
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: Probably, so there were other birds living then that were
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: bigger than chickens, but it seems like they vanished. Now.
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: Bird fossils are rare, you know, birds that have delicate bones.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: It's harder to turn a bird into a fossil than
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: it is like a big t rex or something like that.
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: So we're always dealing with limited evidence. But there's a
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: few places in the world that have really good fossils
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: of birds from right before the asteroid. One of them
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: is in the Netherlands and in Belgium, you know, not
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: just a bit south of where I live now, just
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: so happens, and there's some of the birds preserved there,
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: and they're tiny. They have beaks, not teeth. They grew
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: really fast, they had big flight muscles, but I mean
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: their heads were just maybe you know, less than an
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: inch so you could have held these things in your hand,
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: they were really small. We also have good fossils from Antarctica,
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: and I tell this story and in the book, in
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: the story Birds about some of my colleagues, Julia Claric
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: and Matt Lamana. They're very adventurous paleontologence, and they bring
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: teams of themselves and their students down to Antarctica to
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: look for fossils. And I mean that's dedication.
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, I do fieldwork and stuff stuff down there.
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's stuff down there, and there's stuff down there,
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: and they find birds that were living within the few
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: million years before the asteroid, and these are modern style birds.
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: They actually are close relatives of chickens and ducks. You
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: can tell that from the bones. We don't have the DNA,
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: but the bones make it very clear. They have chicken
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: and duck features of their wings and of their legs
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: and of their heads. And they were small, so that
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: was part of the picture too. They had beaks and
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: could eat seeds, they could fly well, and they were small.
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: And it seems like the survivors also lived in or
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: near the water. They were not perching birds, they weren't
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: nesting in the trees the forest collapsed when the asteroid hit.
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Living in the water helped too, so as I think
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: we can see, it was probably just a lot of
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: things compounded together that gave them the better odds to survive,
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: but from those tiny survivors very quickly in the next
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: interval of time after the Cretaceous, the next interval of
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: times called the Paleocene, and this is when mammals really
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: take off and you get mammals that get up to
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: the size of cattle, you know, after one hundred and
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: fifty million years of tiny mammals living with dinosaurs never
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: getting bigger than a badger. And it's because t Rex
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: is gone. Triceratops is gone. But birds do something similar,
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: and you start to see the major modern groups of
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: birds appear as fossils. The DNA tells the same story
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: that they were originating around that time, and this is
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: where you get, you know, the ostrich group and the
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: penguin group, and the distant ancestors of songbirds and of
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: you know, hawks and eagles and so on, and of
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: everything in between them. There's over ten thousand species of
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: birds today and a huge amount of that diversity was
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: established really early on as these few surviving tiny birds
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: with their beaks that could make babies and grow you know,
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: to an adult within years. They looked out on this
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: world where there's no big dinosaurs anymore. And the trees
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: are starting to grow.
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: I wonder if they had it in them to feel optimistic.
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: You know, this is.
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: I'll tell you though. They did have pretty big brains
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: we can tell from the cat scans, and so that
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: was probably part of the picture as well, having bigger
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: brains and higher intelligence and keener.
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: Right decisions as well.
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, be more adaptable, more resilient.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: You know what I think about when I'm think about
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: all these animals from back then, Like I was image,
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: you know, if you cut a big old backstrap out
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: of like a but you know, it seems like but
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: those tear actyls, man, they seem like it doesn't seem
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: like to be the worst kind of meat on the plant.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: Tarotactyl would be probably one of the worst things you
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: can eat. Hardly A lot of them made fish, so
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: they would have been pretty disgusting. As you know, we
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 2: know when we eat things that are like But if you.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: Could have if you could know like what a dinosaur
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: steak like from a like an herbivore dinosaur, yeah, steak
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: would be like or if you could cook up a
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: bird back then would be like is it just like chicken?
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: Now? I love it, you know, it's funny. And I know,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: you know we're talking about this because you know this
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: is your your show, this is Meat Eater Podcast, but
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 2: you wouldn't believe it. I get asked that question quite
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: a bit. What they what they would have tasted like?
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: And what do you think? So I think so, first
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: of all, probably like animals that live today, the ones
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: that eight plants would have tasted a lot better than
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: the ones that they meet.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: So do you think they had like red meat or
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: they had like chicken meat?
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: I don't know. So you know, they weren't mammals, they
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: wouldn't have had the same kind of meat as mammals.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: I think, like you know, ostriches and EMUs like those
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: are probably the best comparison for what a dinosaur would be,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: because you know, they are dinosaurs and they're big dinosaurs.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: I sometimes picture all the meat on one of those
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: things being like snap and turtle.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: Meat, yeah you know, yeah, yeah, turtle meat and and
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: and like alligator is another one. So you know, alligators
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: and birds are the closest relatives of modern day dinosaurs.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: And you know, you eat gator meat, it oftentimes tastes
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: like chicken. Now, sometimes that's because it's farmed and they
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: you know, feed them chickens. But generally, you know, you
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: can get a bit even wild gator. I've had it,
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: you know, down in the Louisiana and it's like that,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: that's kind of chickenese, kind of pultry. Yes, so probably
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: a lot of dinosaur would be like that. But yeah,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 2: go after the triceratops steak the Brontosaurus burgher you. Fred
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: Flinstone was.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: What I was watching that deal with my little boy
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: last night.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: There was a scene where they he kills this that
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: this t rex kills his big dinosaur and he drags
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: at home. Yeah, so those little kids can eat it
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: and they're snacking on it, and it was real dark beef, like. Yeah,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: that's another thing around, Like, I don't know that.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: No, no, I would, And you know, I'm not going
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: to say they're wrong, because this is getting really kind
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: of far from the fossils. I like to try to
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: stick as close to the fossils as I can.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes you kind of wonder, right, Yeah.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: So I truly, honestly, I know it's maybe a bit
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: of a glib thing. We're talking about lot the dinosaurs
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: have tasted the like and which steak, what do you
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: want to eat?
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: Okay differently then we like then never mind what they
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: taste like. But like what what you know? I mean,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: it's a thing you can't tell.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we can't tell because you're.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: Saying like for a long time we didn't have feathers
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: and man feathers. But like the qualities of the qualities
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: of you.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: All we can do there really is look at modern
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: day birds and crocodiles and alligators as the closest relatives
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: and make this probability argument that a lot of dinosaurs
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: would have had similar sort of meat and not just meat,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: but you know when it comes to organs, internal organs
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: and tendons and ligaments and and all these things that
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: we just don't normally get as fossils. Looking at the
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: modern animals is that are closely related to dinosaurs is
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: our best approximation. But it's not. Again, it's not slam dunk.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: You know, it's a guide. It gives us some you know,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: degree of plausibility. But these are things we ultimately don't know,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 2: which which I which makes it fun and shows like that,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: and especially when we do the Jurassic films where we
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: don't have to be as concerned with total scientific realism
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: because they're monster movies. You know, we can have fun
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: with some of that stuff.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: Another one I always wonder about in your guys world
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: is how do you ever get a sense of population dynamics?
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: Meaning like picture that picture.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: That today you were out, Like, let's say you go
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: through the big valleys around here.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: Okay, here and there is an eagle nest.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, but you could feasibly spend a day
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: looking for a bald eagle nest and not find one. Yeah,
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: here and there, Yeah, you'll find an osprey nest. Yeah, okay,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: Like if you look really hard, you'll you'll never You'll
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: probably never find If I gave you a week during
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: peak time and I said find me a hummingbird nest,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't find it.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: But then you go to other places, right, like like
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: shoreline rookeries and stuff, you know, other places you'd be like, well,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: there's thousands of them.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: Or you go to a giant bridge and cliff swallows
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: you'd be like, oh no, I'm looking at hundreds of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: cliff swallows.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. We have in Scotland, we have these, you know,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: ganic colonies out on some of the rocks, you know,
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 2: right near Edinburgh. Yeah, I mean it's I mean hundreds
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: of thousands maybe in one place. Yeah.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: So how do you ever, like, if you imagine the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: years after and you have these surviving birds, is there
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: ever any way to get a sense of like population dynamics?
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Meaning was it that you would that you could boat
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: down the coast for days and not see anything and
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: then find some little nesting colony?
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: Right? It was that bad?
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: Or you think would have been that the skies were
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: full of thousands of them?
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: I honestly don't know. I think the fossils don't give
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: us that information, and I don't I'm not saying it's impossible.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: I never like to say as a scientist that something
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: is impossible to know. That's the worst thing you can
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: say as a scientist. But I think it's it's highly unlikely.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: It's just the it's not like we have a snapshot
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: of an entire community, an entire landscape with.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: Mere but with this stuff with mitochondrial DNA will start
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: telling like you be like, yes, well you can start
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: telling like this thing came out of a population that's right.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: With blank number of reading age females.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 2: So when you have the DNA and this, and this
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: comes into play with human evolution for sure, because when
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 2: you study the mitochondrial DNA of modern day humans of us,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: the geneticists are able to tell that the diversity of
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: mitochondrial DNA is you know, consistent or indicative of some
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: kind of bottleneck. I don't remember all.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: The like seven like the seven Daughters of Eve, like
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: Western Europeans. Yeah, yeah, I'm probably mutilating this, but yeah,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: it might be an old idea, but at a time, no,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: there's something that there was like that all Western that
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: Western Europeans went through a bottleneck of seven females.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 2: And I'm not sure because it's not my field, but
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: I've read a lot of when I was writing the
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: Mammal Book, I read a lot of this, and yeah,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: that we might be wrong about the details, but I
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: think that's still true that there were definitely these bottlenecks
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: and the evolution of Homo sapiens, and that does explain
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: why human genetic diversity. I mean, there is a lot
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: of genetic diversity in one sense, but really, you know,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: if you take you or me, or you take you know,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: somebody from South America or Africa or China. I mean,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: our genes are really similar, really similar because of those bottlenecks.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: With other mammals, you can do similar things. And I've
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: seen people do this, like with wooly mammoths and sabertoothed tigers,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: to try to understand what those last populations were like
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 2: at the end of the last spasm of the ice age.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: You know, how many mammoths were left?
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: Do they collapse and like you track along and be
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: like these ones came from very small, dwindling populations.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: And people have done that for sure. With the last
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: surviving mammoths as far as we know, lived in Wrangel Island.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: There's little Russian islands four thousand years. This is you know,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: it's time people are building pyramids. It's not you know
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: time back in the in the Midwest where there were
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: you know, great Native American tribes that were building you know, civilization.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: I mean there were still mammoths on this island, and
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: those mammoths lived so recently that the DNA, or at
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: least a lot of it's still there. I mean DNA
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: breaks down really quickly, so we don't have any t
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: rex DNA or any tri serratoze.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: So that's what you would draw, like, that's what you
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: would need to draw.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: Yes, populations have rigorous, a rigorous basis for that and
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: and and so we can't really do that with t Rex.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: You know, what were those populations of t rex like
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 2: before the asteroid hit? Now I say, we can't, we
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: can't do it in that way. There have been some
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: ecologists that have published quite esoteric studies estimating the size
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: of t Rex populations based on how many fossils we
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: know and how those fossils are distributed in the amount
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: of time. But it's a statistical exercise and the airbars
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: hit I think, so, I don't remember the details. This
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: is work that There's a very eminent, more statistical minded
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 2: paleontologist named Charles Marshall in California and he led a
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: team that did this and it was actually a big
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: research paper they published in Science in the Premier journal
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: about ten years ago or so. And I think they
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: estimated something like, you know, a million. I mean, I
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: could be butchering a population, but like a million at
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: a time, like standing population of t Rex. But you know,
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: and they were very upfront about the biases. But it
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: was more of like a thought experiment, like what scienceists
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: like to do. Sometimes we're in the pub and we're
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: sketching on the back of a Napolis.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: Thought experience, and you know what you know, I'll say,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: as part of the thought experience is no way.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean what what why? So?
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: So?
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: What's so? What's your what's your gut feeling?
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: Why? Why would I give that gut feeling?
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: Because I would just look at general large predator populations. Yeah,
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: like like just the large predators are generally pretty scarce. Yeah, oh, yes,
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: like how big? I don't know, because the other thing
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: you look at is carrying capacity. But we don't really
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: probably don't understand the land the carrying capacity of the landscape,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: not really do understanding the vegetative regime exactly.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: So there are some studies that have been published by ecologists,
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: you know, hardcore ecologists that understand the modern world, and
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: they're kind of dabbling in dinosaurs doing their own thought experiments,
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: but trying to understand carrying capacity. And it's tough because, yeah,
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: the vegetation back then was very different from the vegetation today.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: The climate was different, the temperature was different. We also
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: don't really know much about the fine details of the
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: metabolism and the growth of these dinosaurs. We debate where
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: they warm blooded or not, you know, and it's not
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: either or you know, you can have degrees of metabolism.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: So all that stuff factors into carrying capacity.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: So it's really yeah, that's a tough one, really because
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: even if with carrying I ask you questions is like,
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: even if you go to you go like the oceans today,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: you know, and you look at the bio mass per
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: unit of space that comes out of you know, stuff
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: at like the fiftieth parallel versus the bio mass or
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: unit of space that comes out of sort of like
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: the oceanic desert. You know, so you can't They're so
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: radically different it's probably impossible. Note, but I gets an
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: interesting thing. We can move on from this after this question.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: But I guess you could look at let's say you
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: go to to before the strike. Yeah, okay, and you
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: sort of and you take any gap of time, right,
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: you take a gap of time of a millionaires or
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: five million years, and you go like, how many fossils
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: were we generating per unit of time? And then if
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: you go post strike, do you wind up? Do you
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: look in the fossil record and be like, you know what,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: there were so few animals alive that from sixty to
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: fifty six to forty six million years ago or whatever,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: there are no fossils, meaning because the chances of making
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: a fossil are so slim that if you had so
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: few species left on earth that like the fossil lottery, yes,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: isn't paying off? Yes, And then in some way you
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: might look and be like there just really wasn't much around,
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And people do this. There are paleontologists who are
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: very statistically inclined that build these statistical model I mean
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: it's actually quite similar to how people build like you know,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: polls for elections or predicting the stock market, like that
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: kind of of statistics. Like it's quite rigorous and quite robust,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: but also, as we know, it's not always correct. You know,
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 2: it's trying to predict things based on limited evidence. There
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: is this argument that that individuals were so rare right
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: after the asteroid. Yeah, that that's why we don't have
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: tons of fossils. Because people often ask, well, if this
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: asteroid came down and cause this extinction on some whose
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: day morning, you know, why don't you have all these
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: bodies being preserved as fossils, and what it comes down
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: to it is just, yeah, the fossil lottery. I mean,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: to turn something into a fossil, it needs to die,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: it needs to be buried in sand or mud, it
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 2: needs to be turned into a rock, and then that
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: rock has to be accessible on the surface of the
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 2: earth today for some scientists to walk by and see
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: the fossil sticking out. So even at any given moment
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 2: of time, even if a lot of things died at once,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: just the odds of any individual getting buried by sand
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: or mud and turned into a fossil it's low. And
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 2: this is part of the you know the same thing
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: when we talk about wooly mammoths. You mentioned mammoths that
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: have been found with direct evidence for human hunting. There's
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 2: not tons or maybe some archaeologists say there actually are,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: But it gets down to, you know, what we expect,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: and even if humans are killing these mammoths and leaving
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: evidence behind spear points and projectiles and so on, just
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: the odds of getting that stuff turned into a fossil
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: is low. So it is very hard. It's very hard.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: We can do these statistical studies and we can make predictions,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: but ultimately we're dealing in this in these cases when
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: we want to understand populations, it's just it's really challenging
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: with fossils. Again, I'm not gonna say impossible, but challenging,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: really challenging, and I think we need to be very
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 2: skeptical as scientists anytime somebody makes a bold claim about
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: you know, these populations of dinosaurs were this big, or
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: they did that, or it was this ecological reason that
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: they collapsed. Sometimes also, let's face it, bizarre things happened.
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: The passenger pigeon is a great example of that that
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: went extinct. You know, the last one died in a zoo,
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: you know, in the nineteen hundreds, really just a few
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: decades before there were billions of these things living across
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: North America. And yes they were overhunted by people in
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds, but also there was a genetic crash.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: They went through some kind of bottleneck, and I mean
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: it just wreaked havoc on them. They collapsed as a population.
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: Very hard to know that kind of thing from fossils,
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: not having the genetics and only having limited fossils preserved
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 2: here and there. So I think we just have to
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: be always mindful that we can learn a lot from fossils.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: Fossils can often tell us, oh my god, there's this
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 2: strange group of podactyls we would never know existed if
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: we didn't have their fossils. And they could fly, and
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: they could grow in this particular way, and they lived
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: in these particular places, and they fit into the family
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: tree this way. Those are things that we can get
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: quite readily from fossils. But you know, details of behavior
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: and population size and these kind of things, it's tough.
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: So we you know, it's it's like we're squinting at
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: the heavens, looking at the stars, making constellations out of
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 2: these limited you know, limited limited stars, trying to find patterns.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: But that also makes I think it makes any science fun, honestly,
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: when there's mysteries and there's uncertainties and you're trying to
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: push the evidence as far as you can go. But
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: we're studying intelligence and cognition and extinct species, like that's
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: what we're doing now. Like I'm under no illusion. I
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: don't think we're going to figure out, you know, how
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: many neurons there wasn't a brain of a t rex
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: or could a t rex recognize a self in a mirror?
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: You know, those are very specific things, but we're pushing
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: at the boundaries and we want to know as much
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: as we can know from the fossils that we have
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: from cat scanning them and looking at the brains and
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: the regions of the brains and comparing to modern animals
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: and so on. So all science is really about, you know,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: pushing the boundaries and knowing as much as we can
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: know with the evidence at hand, and then trying to
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: find new evidence to test that, to overturn that, to
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: buff up our ideas or what have you.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 3: What's the biggest Like if you look at you yourself
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 3: and your own research, the research of your community, hit
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: me with one or two of like the biggest questions
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 3: you have right now, Like the things that are not
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 3: things that you can't answer, but the things that you're
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: optimistic that would find an answer that sort of like
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: professionally keep you up at night.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a lot, you know, there is so
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 2: much we don't know, and we're learning more and more
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: all the time, and we really are in a golden
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 2: age of paleontology. People are finding more fossils than ever before,
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: especially when it comes to dinosaurs, there's about fifty new
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: species found a year. It's like once a week, somebody's
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: finding a new species, and it's because more people are looking.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: I want to pause my question because I forgot to
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: ask you a question preceding this.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: Okay, I thought of earlier.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 3: So hold that.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'll hold that thought.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 3: But it's it's it's buddies with that question.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: Okay, So is it?
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 3: Here's the question, is it whatever?
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: Are fossils ever of such value that that people would
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: industrial scale surface mine four fossils? Or is that because
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: you said it's like looking at the surface or people
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: luck into it. Are there any cases where like like
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: engineers industrial scale surface mining, strip mining four fossils.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: Yes, okay, with things like coal, Okay, coal is a fossil.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: It's fossilized would basically for trees, and of course that's
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: been industrially mine forever because that's economic fossils. No, So
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: so there are other things. I mean, oil comes from
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: ancient organisms, and there's you know, ancient sea planket and
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 2: formed chalk and formed you know, the diatamous earth that's used.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: So there's economics various things that we use economically that
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: have huge outsize importance in our world and our economies
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: are actually fossils. But I know that's not what you're at.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: You're asking if you know, industrially, you'd strip mine the
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: whole area to find the t rexes or something like that,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: and the answer is not really, at least not yet.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: It Recently there have been a lot of these auctions
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: of fossil dinosaurs skeletons, and some of them are bringing
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: pretty big prices Mongolians. Yeah, the Mongolia ones are tree
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 2: because that's illegal, so there's a black market there. But
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 2: the ones that and you do see some of these
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 2: up for auctions sometimes and those are seized oftentimes by
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: the government, either either here or in Mongolia. But if
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: you find a fossil here in the US, I mean,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: if it's on your land, you'd do what you want
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: with it, right, I mean, this is this is our culture,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 2: and so you know, traditionally a lot of ranchers here
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: out west. You know, scientists would say, I want to
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 2: look in your land and we're looking for dinosaur bones.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: And you know, sometimes people would say no, of course,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: but a lot of times people say, yeah, go out,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: you know, it's it's we got all these acres and
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 2: these are just bones that put in the museum, and
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: that's great. It's been wonderful. I mean, I know, you
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: know so many of my colleagues have discovered amazing fossils
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: because they built these relationships with ranchers out here and
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: across the West. Things are changing a bit though, because
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 2: some of these fossils are being put up for auction
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: and going for thirty million dollars, forty million dollars. This
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: stegosaurus went for over forty million dollars. So, of course,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: if this is your land and there's some fossils on there,
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: even if you like the scientists, if you have a
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 2: chance to make forty million bucks, of course, that's.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 3: What I'm saying that you would like that. You would
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 3: that you would.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: The same way people prospect for gold, you would prospect
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: for this ya.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: And so there are commercial fossil hunting outfits and they're
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: quite common here out in the American West, that go
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: out and look for fossils and there's so they can
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 2: sell them. And there are ranchers that buy ranch land
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 2: not for their cattle. They might use it for their
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: cattle as well, but because it's land that has the
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: right kind of rocks to find fossils. So there is
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: a market for this. Ye, there definitely is a market
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: for this, which you know has its pluses and minuses.
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 2: As an academic scientist, you know, I hate it if
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: there's a fossil that's so important and so beautiful and
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: it would be so good at a museum and it
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 2: would be so good at inspiring people and educating kids,
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 2: if that disappears into some rich guy's vault, you know.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, look, this is law. We're
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: not going to change. Nobody wants to change the law.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: And to have the government here like sees a fossil
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: from your land, you know. So that is the economic reality,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: but it's not industrial schedule. It just would be really
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: hard to like strip mine an entire ranch in the
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: hopes you might find a fossil here or there, because
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: they're still rare enough. It's not like f finding, you know.
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's usually not like finding a coal seam
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: or a vein of oil or something. You know, you
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 2: might find a bone bed of fossils where you have
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: a lot of skeletons preserved together because there was a
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: flood or something that killed the whole herd of dinosaurs.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 2: You probably could industrially mind those, but otherwise most fossil dinosaurs,
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: at least are so random, one here, one there when
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: they're that it would be hard to do that.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: Okay, So let's get back to the question of.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: What what are the What are the not the fantastical
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: things that you'll never know, but what are the kind
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: of things, like the big questions you have that you
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: could see like a pathway to answering when when you
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: look at the whole collection of your work, the story
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: of the mammals, the story of the dinosaurs, the story
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: of the birds, where are the pieces where you're like,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: I see how we get to there, but I don't
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: understand how we got from.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: The their to there. You know.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: You know, there's a bunch and in each one of
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: the books, I actually kind of here and there highlight
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: a few of them. I thrown them in there because
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: I want people reading the books to understand that we
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 2: don't have all the answers. You know, I can write
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: this these books, and I can tell you the story
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: of dinosaurs and birds and mammals and their evolutionary trajectory
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: and where they came from, and how they change does
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: the world change. And it's a nice story. It's a
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: story backed up by evidence by fossils by DNA, but
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 2: it doesn't mean we know every chapter in that story.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: There's always debates and mysteries and uncertainties, and there's so
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 2: much we don't know, even though we're finding more fossils
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: than ever before. And one of the big ones is
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: what I'm studying now the cognition and intelligence of dinosaurs
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 2: and other extinct species. That's why we're doing this project
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 2: with my colleagues, with Mattias and Helena and Sweden and
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: Pavela and Christina are colleagues in Prague who are neurobiologists.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: And then Larry Whitmer is a great paleontologist, and Ryan
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 2: Ridgeley and then our students, you know, so my students,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: I'm going to shout out the names because I think
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: it's important that you know, you give the students the
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: credit because they're doing the work. I got Adam Manning
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: and Millie Mead and and soon Fraser Weston studying in
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: my lab the brains, the cognition, the intelligence of extinct species.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: We are pushing, like we know there's a limit. We
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: know that we're not going to be able again to
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: say t Rex had this number of neurons, or t
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: Rex could recognize a self in a mirror. But what
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 2: we want to do is push our knowledge of dinosaur
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: brains to the absolute limit. How many dinosaurs can we
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: see t scan, how many brain models can we build,
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: how many ones can we measure? Map this all out
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: on the family tree, look at the trends and brain evolution,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: and tie what we can see in dinosaur brains to
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: what we see in the brains of modern mammals, and
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 2: not just modern mammals, but modern birds and modern crocodiles
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 2: and all kinds of modern animals. And the hope is
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: that here and there, maybe that there's some feature of
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: a brain, some physical feature, some lobe of a brain
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: or something that in modern animals that if they have
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: that lobe of the brain, they can do a certain behavior.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 2: And then if we identify that in a fossil, we
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: can say, oh, that extinct species could do that too.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 2: We know that it's kind of pie in the sky.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: We know that we're running up to our limits of understanding,
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 2: but that's why we're doing it, because it's exciting and
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: it's fun, and it's not just describing dusty old bones,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 2: it's trying to understand them as living animals. So that's
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 2: a big one and I high like that. In the
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: Story of Birds, I talk about how we're doing this
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 2: project and we're doing it now and we don't have
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 2: all the answers, but we're getting them. I mean literally,
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 2: like you know, this morning before doing this, you know,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: my students are they're seven hours ahead, you know, in Scotland.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: They're sending me updates about what they're doing this week
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: and the things they're they're they're they're learning as they're
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 2: looking at catscans and dinosaur brains. So that's one. Uh,
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: there's a there's a handful of others. And we don't
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: really know why dinosaurs were able to outlast the crocodiles
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 2: and the salamanders and the other creatures that were evolving
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: around the same time as them way back on the
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 2: super continent of Pangaea. We know there was an extinction,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: the super continent broke apart, and that's why we have
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: separate continents today. You know, it's why South America and
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 2: Africa looked like two puzzle pieces they did once fit together.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: The ocean now separates, of course the continents. But back
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: before the water rushed in, the earth would have bled
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: lava for like six hundred thousand years, and this led
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: to runaway global warming. There's tons of carbon dioxide mething.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: These nasty gases heated up the atmosphere really quickly, and
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: that caused an extinct.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 3: Connell drift was faster than it is now.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: No, it's probably it does speed up or slow down
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: over time, mostly based on what's happening deeper in the Earth,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 2: like in the mantle of the earth, as you have
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 2: these convection currents. But by and large continents move about
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 2: the speed our fingernails grow, which is slow. But over
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 2: the course of millions of years, you know that compounds
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: and it adds up. But this extinction, we know it
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: happened about two hundred million years ago as Pangaea split.
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: We know there was climate change. We see the effects
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: of that in the fossil record, but also the rocks.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: You know, there's a lot about the carbon and oxygen
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: signals in the rocks that can tell you things about
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: temperature and precipitation. So we know there was this extinction.
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 2: We know that before there was this extinction, there were
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 2: a whole bunch of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs were pretty small.
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 2: For the first few tens of millions of years that
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: there were dinosaurs, most of them were the size of
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 2: you and me. Some got up to the size of horses,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 2: some maybe the size of a giraffe. But there was
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: nothing like a brontosaurus, nothing like a t rex. But
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: the world was dominated instead by these giant salamanders the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: size of cars, and by all kinds of crazy crocodiles,
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 2: you know, not just like the crocs and gators today,
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: but some crocs that ate plants, and some that had
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: sALS on their backs, and some that had beaks, and
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: some that walked only on their hind legs. And then
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: this extinction happens as the super continent breaks apart and
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: these volcanoes are there, they blink out, and they blink out.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: Only a few crocs survived. Those are the ancestors of
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: modern crocs. So this is why crocs really only live
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: in the tropics or the subtropics today. Some amphibians make
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: it through, but not the enormous car size one, but
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: dinosaurs make it through, and it only after that extinction
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: a good fifty million years after the very first proto
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 2: dinosaurs walked on Pangaea. Do you get these big meat
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: eaters and big plant eaters and the ones with horns
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: and spikes and duckbills and dome heads and armor and
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: so on. So we don't really know why, I mean,
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: why did dinosaurs survived. We don't have a good explanation.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: It was a time of chaos, of course, and carnage
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: and rapid change. Maybe some of it was dumb luck,
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: but there must have been some hand of cards those
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: dinosaurs were holding that allowed them to scribe. We don't know.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: People have different ideas, Oh, the dinosaurs could move faster,
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 2: where the dinosaurs had higher metabolism, Where they grew faster,
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: they were smarter. I mean maybe maybe, but the evidence
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 2: is so limited. But we will find that out. I
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: have no doubt that we will get a good understanding
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: of that. We just need some brilliant young paleontologists to
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: come along with a fresh set of eyes and think
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: about it in a new way.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: Let me back up to your quick question, how old
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: was a old t rex? If you had to guess
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: how many years old?
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: Oh like when it died? Yeah, so we can often
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: tell with dinosaurs because dinosaur bones have growth rings in
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: them like tree trunks. So not every bone does, but
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: a lot of bones do, especially the ribs and the
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 2: limb bones. So if we find a t rex, we
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 2: can cut it open and we can see how many
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 2: growth rings there are, and we can we can make
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 2: plots graphs showing how they grew over a lifetime. We
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 2: can count the number of growth rings, and we can
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 2: make an estimate how big that t rex was, and
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 2: we can make a growth curve, just like you might
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 2: for a modern you know, population of deer or turkey
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 2: or what have you. It's very important for conservation to
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: understand how the animals are growing. So t rex is
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 2: one of the better understood ones because there's actually quite
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: a lot of fossils and what we see in the
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: growth lines is there's barely any t rex skeletons that
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: have more than thirty growth lines. Okay, so you know,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 2: I just turned forty two. I would have been long
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: dead if I was a t rex, and so you know,
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: and that's just what it was. So it lived pretty
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: fast and died pretty young. Still it took though. If
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: we look at those growth curves, it probably took about
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: twenty years or so for a t rex to go
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: from a baby to a full grown adult, So that
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 2: that's t rex. Other dinosaurs would have lived shorter life
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: spans and others would have lived longer.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so some of the long necked dinosaurs, you know,
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: the huge ones. I mean, some of these things got
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: to be bigger than Boeing seven thirty seven airplanes, heavier
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 2: than a Boeing seven thirty seven airplane. We're talking fifty
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 2: sixty tons even more. Argentinosaurus patagatite, And they have great names,
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: and they only probably lived to be about fifty or
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: sixty years old. It's not that they like lived for centuries,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: for a little bit every year.
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: The thing I was the thing that this isn't a question,
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: but it's the thing about those blows my mind is like,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: imagine the habitat impact, Yeah, of just the feet, Yeah, Jimmy,
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: Like you imagine like what like when when an animal
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: goes through it was and it leaves like an observable path,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: Like how Jemmy, you can't imagine if you if it
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: went through a thicket.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the thicket's gone?
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah do you I mean, like you can't you can't
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: picture like what it's doing or how it's like occupying
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: the landscape.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 3: Like things that would seem like a barrier aren't a barrier.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: Things it would just be like crushed. Yeah, you know,
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: it's one that imagine. Man, it's impossible to imagine.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 2: It's it's impossible to imagine. I would say almost, because
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: we have one line of evidence in the fossil record,
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: and these are the footprints and the handprints that some
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: of these dinosaurs leave behind. And in fact, in Scotland
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: on the Isle of Sky, where we do a lot
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: of our work. Yeah, sometimes we find a pterodactyl, sometimes
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: we find some dinosaur bones, but most of the fossils
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: are actually footprints. They are footprints and handprints left behind
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: as dinosaurs were doing their thing, frolicking around on the
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 2: mudflats on the beach in the lagoons back one hundred
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: and seventy million years ago in Scotland's subtropical And so
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 2: we have some evidence and some of these footprint sites,
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: I mean they are just littered with dinosaur tracks, tracks
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: stepping over other tracks. We have tracks of long neck dinosaurs.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 2: You know, these ones were probably weighed probably about fifteen
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: tons so big, you know, three elephants put together, but
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 2: not anywhere near as big as the biggest long neck dinosaurs.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: These footprints are the size of car tires. I mean,
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 2: every time their hand or foot touched the ground, they
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: left a hole the size of a car tire. And
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 2: you know there would be flocks of these things. So
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: sometimes with the ground is just totally chewed up, mashed
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: up by just dinosaur footprint over dinosaur footprint. There's even
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: I kid you not, there's a scientific term that geologists
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: use to describe this kind of rock that is chaotic
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: chaotic rock because you have all of this these dinosaurs
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 2: stepping in the sand and mud and messing up. It's
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 2: called dino turbased. Yes, it is a word, and it's
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 2: a serious word. You see this in academic papers. And
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: it's just a rock that has been so thoroughly obliterated
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: by the footfalls of dinosaurs that it leaves a telltale sign.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: So imagine, yeah, they're walking through a forest. You know
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 2: they would have left their mark. Now, of course, you
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 2: know they wouldn't have just destroyed everything. I mean, no
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: ecosystem could be in harmony, so there must have been
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 2: ways that everything coexisted.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: I got two questions left. These are both going to
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: put you in. Uh, these are both going to put
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: you in like where you have to theorize.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, then I'm gonna have a nice drink of tea,
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: Okay to get in the mood.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 3: Here's one.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: So, after your whole career, you've looked at all these
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: extinction events, species that rose and vanished. Okay, based on
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: what you've seen and based on what you know about
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: all the different ways things have blinked out. Yeah, how
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: do you think, like, give me a couple when we go,
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: when we humans go.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 3: And we're done, what do you think it is?
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 2: Well, totally speculative because no evidence for any of this.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, looked at things that went away, and you understand
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: all these different things like like impact strikes from asteroids, yeah,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: seismic activity, climate changes, whatever. Okay, Like what is the
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: if you imagine, like, what is the thing that gets us?
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 2: I think there's a few ways that could happen. Obviously,
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 2: and and this circles back to, you know, something you
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 2: were alluding to a little bit agoing the conversation. If
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: there was a six mile wide asteroid that hit the Earth,
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: I mean we would be in trouble. I would think,
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: you know, we the dinosaurs didn't know that was coming.
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 2: The dinosaurs didn't have an ability for a while. We
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: would know, and we would hopefully be able to do
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: something about it.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 3: Have you ever seen the movie Melancholia?
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 2: No, I've seen Armageddon.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 3: Melancholi is the thinking man's arm again.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll have to watch. That'll be up for the
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: plane ride home. Maybe it's not. But but if that happened,
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 2: I mean we would it would It would hurt us bad.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: It would hurt us bad. Even if we were able
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: to stop. I mean, if we're able to totally stop it, fine,
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 2: but if that asteroid hit us and we had to
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: deal with it, that would be really bad. I will
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 2: never downplay the technological thing. I mean, could we kind
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 2: of nuclear war ourselves to death? I mean yeah, probably.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: Could AI get super intelligent and decide it doesn't want
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: us anymore and wipes us out. I mean, those are
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: getting so out there that I don't know.
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 3: You just start people would just start unplugging shit.
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'd unplug everything that you can unplug and
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: then the problem go.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: But I'll tell you what worries me an asteroid doesn't
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: really worry me because we would know that it's coming.
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: You know, there's no volcano big enough that would just
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: wipe us out in an instant. The AI stuff, as
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 2: you say, like there might be a dystopian future there maybe,
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: but you're talking about total extinction really, and so what
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: is what worries me?
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: But before we're gone, there will be where there's just
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 3: handfuls of us.
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 2: Left here and there. Yeah, what worries me is there
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: could be a human population and what happened to the
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: passenger pigeon might happen to us. And again, that was
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 2: that bird. It was maybe the most common bird in
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: North America.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: Yea, there's this there's this idea that there there had
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: to be a lot of them.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there were.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 3: There was no version where there.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 2: Was a few, No, and exactly, and I mean there
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 2: were so many they would block out the sun for
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: minutes on end when a flock went by. And this
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 2: is you know, this isn't imagined. I mean this is
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 2: within recent human history. I mean there are writers from
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: the the nineteenth century that would talk about as flocks
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: pastors and yeah, and you can you can there's a
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 2: lot of taxidermy specimens, you can hold them. And they
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: they were there were so many of them. I mean,
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: if you were around in the mid eighteen hundreds, I'm
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: sure you would say, oh, these birds are so common.
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, nothing whatever happened to them. But they they
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 2: not only collapsed, they went totally extinct, and they did
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: so within really a few decades. And it was because, yes,
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 2: you know, they were over hunted, and yes, land use
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: was changing, and all of this prairie land like back
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 2: home where I'm from in Illinois, uh, you know, was
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 2: being you know, converted to farmland, and there was runoff
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 2: and pesticize and that all played a role. But what
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 2: really did it was it seemed that they went past
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 2: some threshold and there was some genetic bottleneck and something
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 2: happened with their genes. There wasn't just enough variety anymore.
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: They weren't reproducing enough anymore and generating new types of
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: individuals that were more fit that could deal with the changes,
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 2: and they just crashed. They just crash. And I'm not
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 2: a geneticist, so you know, the geneticist might understand it,
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: and I would understand much better than me. But it
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 2: does seem like there's some kind of mystery there, Like
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: we know there was a.
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 3: Past gen if some path that gen carried off.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: Of humans, yeah that I think jin carries off ninety
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: percent of humans. The remaining ten percent there's just something
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: we don't understand and they don't thrive.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 2: And I think that is the most likely scenario, that
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 2: that's something. Yeah, whether it's it's a virus, whether it
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 2: is I don't know, something from AI or I don't
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 2: know some aliens now who knows? But something decimates a
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: lot of humans, you know, it doesn't totally kill us off,
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 2: but it kills a lot and then we have these
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 2: this constellation of different populations that aren't really meeting and
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 2: reproducing and generating new genetic diversity, and we just crash.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 2: And I think that is one likely Syrian now a
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 2: good friend.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: Of mine, how money is on path?
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so a good friend of mine. Henry g Is
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: his name. He's a senior editor at Nature, you know,
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 2: the prominent scientific journal. He's a great science writer and
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 2: he wrote a book called The Decline and Fall of
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: the Human Empire. So his publisher back in the UK,
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 2: we have the same publisher and editor, so we love
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 2: supporting each other's books, and I loved it, you know,
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 2: he said it to me before it was published and
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 2: I read it. Oh my god. He talks about this stuff,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 2: you know, about how human populations could crash and how
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 2: having little genetic diversity, you know, among these these last
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 2: ruinning populations could cause us to die off. And that's
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 2: getting kind of kind of scary. But let me just
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 2: say one thing though this may be a bit more
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 2: general about the lesson that I take from dinosaurs, and
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 2: that lesson really is that you can be dominant. Your
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 2: group can be dominant. You can be around for one
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 2: hundred and fifty million years like the t rex and
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: triceratops and Brontosaurus dinosaurs were. You can be the top medats,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: the top plant eaters, you can have a great diversity
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 2: of species in the food chain. You can live everywhere
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 2: around the world. But then if something happens where the
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 2: environment changes really quickly. For them, it was an asteroid,
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 2: but who's to say it couldn't be maybe not a
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: volcano that obliterates everything, but a volcano that causes sudden
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: climate change. Or it could be the climate change that
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 2: is happening now that we just let that run wild,
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: But that something happens and climate's environments change so quickly
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: that the dominant things don't have time to adapt, and
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 2: they just so happen to not be suited to this
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 2: new world. And that's what I worry about a bit
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: with humans. You know, we are incredibly successful, with more
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 2: than eight billion of us around the world. We live everywhere,
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 2: but we're so recent. We're the oldest Homo sapience is
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 2: like three hundred thousand years old.
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: We're so well adapted to this world, this world that's
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 2: coming out of an ice age, this world of pretty
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 2: nice climate, you know, world of pretty clear, consistent coastlines
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: and rivers that can be navigated, and floods that can
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 2: be dealt with. And as weather patterns change and climate changes,
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: and climate always changes by the climate's always changing in
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 2: the history of the Earth. I mean, come on, what's
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 2: happening now is you know, it's not like this is
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 2: the only time temperatures have gotten No, no, of course not.
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: But what's happening now is that it is happening very fast,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 2: and it's happening to us. And so we have come up.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 2: Our societies, our culture, even our physical bodies have evolved
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 2: and developed in this world that we know. So if
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 2: things change really quickly, that could put us in trouble.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 2: And there are plenty of species that are a lot
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 2: older than us that are probably better adapted, more resilient,
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: And so that's where I start to get concerned that
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: simply if the pace of change is too fast, whether
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 2: it's global warming, whether it's an ice age coming in,
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: whether it's some big volcanoes, whatever it is, that can
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 2: change the status quo if it does it really quickly. Well,
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: the dinosaurs tell us that even the most dominant and
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: successful animals, if you give them a lot of change
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 2: too fast, that they can quickly get on the back
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: foot and they can be gone soon.
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 3: You use the word concern, Yeah, but like I don't
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 3: feel that way.
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: I mean I do about my kids, yeah, right, And
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: I guess they're kids. But you know when I get
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: like way out, yeah, I guess in a way, and
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: the sort of geological time we're.
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 3: Talking about, I don't find myself rooting.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: I don't find myself rooting for the humans of ten
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: thousand years from now, Like I'm not rooting for them.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 3: Maybe I should.
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: But here's my last question, Because your work explores all
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: these times when you've had, as I said up earlier,
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: explores all these these like mass extinction events right where
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: everything gets carried off and then the Earth rebuilds and
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: things that carried off the Earth rebuilds. I like to
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: tell my kids, I'm like, man, someday, someday we won't
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: be around to appreciate. But someday we're gonna be gone,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: and this earth is going to be full of insane,
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: crazy animals that you can't imagine.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 3: And I don't like, I don't know who it'll be.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: Maybe there will be beetles, there will be beatles bigger
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: than elephants, Like I don't know.
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: Who knows, right, Yeah, yeah, how can you predict.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 3: Will go away? Will go away?
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: And and even if even if there's a nuclear holocaust
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: and we carry away all large mammals and carry away
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: all these complex life forms, like at some time in
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: the future there will be just the Earth will be
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: again full of like crazy stuff. How long when you
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: look in the past, like how long do these things take?
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: If you look at these various times in the Earth
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: became just wiped out?
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, like the chicks loop strike, the Earth gets
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 3: like wiped out?
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: How long is it before you'd go and be like,
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: the Earth is like kicking ass again, you know, and
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: you got fixed up and small stuff and green stuff.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: And usually what we see in the fossil record is
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: that the I mean, first of all, the Earth always
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: bounces back. And so when I talk about concern about
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: modern climate change and environmental change, I'm more concerned for us, sure,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 2: our species, and not just our species, but our civilization,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 2: the way we get on with each other. I'm more
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 2: concerned with that than with the Earth. The Earth is
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: gonna be fine, you know, the Earth, And that's say
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 2: it's a good thing. I means other species will go
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: extinctive climate changes quickly. I don't want to be flippant
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: about it. I mean it's much better than these shirts
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 2: don't have. The Earth will be fine. When the asteroid hit,
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: seventy five percent of all species died. I mean there
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: were entire zones like near the impact where everything was vaporized.
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: I mean that was as catastrophic as things can get.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: And what do we see. We see in the fossil
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: record that at least within a few thousand years at most,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: you have forests again. Okay, you see new mammals move
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 2: in within a few thousand years, that's when you get
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 2: the first primates. By the way, our ancestors are only
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: there making their appearance right after the dinosaurs go extinct,
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 2: but really soon after, within tens of thousands of years
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: at most. There are fossils from right here in Montana
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 2: that show that within a few hundred thousand years you
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: have all kinds of crazy new mammals, you know, mammals
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: the size of pigs, mammals that are digging in, mammals
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: that are climbing trees. Within a million years you got
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 2: these cattle sized mammals, and mammals have gone on. From there.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 2: The earth can recover really quickly, and you don't know
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: what the recovery.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 3: Is going to be.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes me up to you know, for the
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: earth exactly mean too. And so I have a six
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 2: year old, you know, my son Anthony, and so we
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: know we don't quite talk about things this deep, not yet,
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 2: but he's getting more interest in the he's six.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: I used to trip my kids out by telling them
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: bad stuff like this that I kind of quit.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 3: That's gold. I tell them bad.
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Well I tell the.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: Bad stuff and they're real little like i'd be like
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: the sun well like eventually burn out.
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they started tripping out that I'm late
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 3: next week.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: This is what Anthony does to me though, because he's
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 2: really interested in outer space right now. So he watches
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 2: a lot of these shows and and uh, and so
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 2: he'll tell me, do you know the Sun's gonna burn out?
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 2: And so many million you know, tens hundreds of millions
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: of years? Now, come on, son, you know, live your
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 2: life first. But no, but I'm when we start to
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 2: have these conversations, I try to convey that, you know,
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 2: the Earth is, it's more than just us. Obviously, we
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 2: care about our species as we should, but the Earth
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: is so old four and a half billion years old.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 2: The Earth is, there has been this fantastic menagerie of
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: species that have lived over time. Species have risen and fallen,
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: and they've been crazy things like you're earlier tarodactyls. If
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: we didn't have fossils, we never know, we never believe
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 2: something that that existed. And there's a whole bunch of
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 2: things like that. So the Earth is wonderful and that's
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 2: why we should conserve as much of it as we
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: can and understand nature as best we can and be
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: in nature. I think, you know, many of us aren't
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 2: in nature enough. For listeners of this show, you know,
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 2: you guys are probably out in nature a lot for
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 2: the average person. I mean, even me. Yeah, man, most
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 2: of the time, I'm just at my desk, I'm at home,
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: I'm writing, I'm teaching my classes. I don't get out enough.
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: But I think we all just need to get out
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: more and appreciate the earth, and appreciate our part in
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 2: the earth and where we fit in, and to take
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 2: pride and joy in this glorious world around us. And
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 2: absolutely we should be rooting for the earth, and that
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 2: means we should make our impact minimal. But the same time,
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 2: you know, we're not just some average species. I mean,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: there are eight billion of us. We're going to put
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 2: pressure on the earth. You know, we have to we
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: have to build houses, we have to get around. You know,
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: we can't stop doing these things. But we need to
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 2: find better ways to live in harmony. And I'm very optimistic. Ultimately.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 2: I am optimistic because we we're smart, we have huge brains,
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 2: we have consciousness, we can work together and grow. We
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: can solve problems. I mean, there were humans, you know,
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years ago,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: like ancestors of ours that figured out language and built
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 2: boats and reached islands. I mean, this was the edge
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: of the known world and they did this. We are
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: capable of incredible things as a species. And just watching recently,
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 2: you know, the Artemis mission going beyond the moon, farther
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 2: than any humans have gone, Like, that's awesome. We are
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: capable of amazing things as a species when we put
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 2: our mind to it, when we work together, and when
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 2: we support science, when we support education, we put the
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 2: money into things like launching that mission, or money into
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 2: conserving things, even something as simple as making sure the
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 2: bald eagle and the California condor don't bite the dust.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, those are incredibly successful. We want to do
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 2: something we can and the dinosaurs couldn't do that. T
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 2: Rex couldn't do that. T Rex couldn't have the brain
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: power to do that. But we can. So Ultimately, I'm
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 2: concerned about climate change and environmental change, but I remain
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 2: stimistic that we we can do something about it, and
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 2: we can adapt. And that's what gives That's what gives
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 2: me hope.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Steve Brussadi, thanks so much for coming on
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: the show. Brand new book, The Story of Birds, a
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: new history from their dinosaur origins to the present. If
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: you want to go in order, you'd go rise and
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: follow the dinosaurs.
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 2: Well, because I'm promoting the new book. You know, we
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 2: got to sell these new books.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: Start with this and then go back. Yeah, read this
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: and then go because they're all free standing.
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 2: They are. They're free standing books. They're all you know,
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 2: the dinosaur one tells the story of dinosaur evolution. The
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 2: mammal one tells the story of mammal evolution, including our ancestry.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 2: So honestly, the mammal one might be, you know, of
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 2: quite a lot of interest to a lot of your listeners.
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 3: Start with the birds.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 2: Start with the birds, and it's the newest one and
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 2: so it's right up to date. But really they can
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: be read in any order. And again, they're not textbooks,
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: they're not academic books. I try to make them really
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 2: accessible and honestly, like the you know, the something that
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 2: makes me more happy really than anything is I get
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 2: random emails or you know, dms on on Instagram or
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: social media from people that read the books, and it's
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 2: great and if you read the books, anybody that's that's
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 2: that's listening, please do reach out. I love hearing from people,
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 2: and I'm easy to find online. But quite recently I've
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 2: gotten I got a message from a long haul truck
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: driver here in the West who had the Dinosaur Book
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 2: on audiobook as he's doing these late night drives. I
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 2: got a message from from a kid who is like
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 2: in his early twenties in the military, was stationed abroad,
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 2: who is reading the Dinosaur Book just to pass the time,
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 2: Like that's awesome. I just it is so cool. So
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 2: that's the books. These books are for everybody. I really
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 2: try to do make them accessible. And I would say
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: if you've never read science books before, you know, they
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 2: shouldn't be too scary. And there's a whole genre of
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 2: pop science really that you can explore out there that
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 2: isn't scary, that is accessible. There's a lot of great
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 2: science writers, and I've mentioned you know a few like
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 2: Henry g there are many others too, and just you know,
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: start reading around and seeing what inch And that's what
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 2: I try to do in these books, is tell some
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 2: good stories about these fantastic animals that have lived over
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 2: time and how they've paved the way for the world today.
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 3: All right, man, thank you so much for coming on pleasure.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 2: Thank you