Transcript of #2580 - Kenneth Lacovera

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Kenneth.

Hey.

Dinosaurs.

Yes.

I reached out because I got so frustrated one day I went down this rabbit hole of all these people that don't believe dinosaurs are real. Like, what the fuck? And I understand if you have, you know, just a very limited understanding of why some of the bones that are in museums are recreations and some of them are real. And there's a lot of people out there that are saying some really stupid shit, and so I really wanted to bring in an actual legitimate paleontologist who's a dinosaur expert that could help illuminate us.

Yeah, well, there's a reason why my back hurts, you know? So, um, you know, first, like, I appreciate the skepticism. Like.

Sure.

That's good.

Sure.

And when dinosaurs were first realized as a thing in the middle part of the 19th century, it was good to be skeptical, right? That's a big claim. But now.

Well, there are a lot of hoaxes too. We should be clear about that.

There have been in the history of paleontology.

Especially in the early days, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, this would require this massive conspiracy from different continents, different countries, people that have never met each other, people that didn't live at the same time.

Yes.

I think it's hard to scale a conspiracy like this, right?

I have a friend who was on a ranch in Montana when a T. rex was discovered.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, I'm an eyewitness. I've dug up many, many dinosaurs with my own hands. I've got the scars to prove it. But what I would say is, you know, don't believe me. Science isn't a belief system, right?

Right.

Go outside and dig up some fossils for yourself. And the thing about paleontology is it's a science, and so we can make predictions and we can test those predictions. So depending on where you live in the world, I can predict whether you will find fossils or not. And if you will find fossils, I can predict what kind of fossils you will find because creatures lived at different times, right? And so if you live in upstate New York, you're not going to find dinosaurs.

Now, when were you first exposed to this dinosaurs are fake thing?

I don't know a particular time, but you know, you definitely hear it.

But is this a recent thing? This is what I'm confused. I never heard this my whole life. Like, growing up, I never heard this. Never heard it in high school. Never heard it until fairly recently. Like, within the last decade.

Well, I think it's kind of tied to creationism, right? And so.

Oh, okay. Right.

There are people that think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Wait a minute, it's not?

Well.

Wait, hold on. How old do you think it is?

Well, I think it's 4.567 billion years old.

Well, I've got a book I need you to read. So when is this, but it has sort of ramped up. Like, the dinosaur skepticism is ramped up fairly recently, right?

I don't know. I mean, I think that there's just more people with a platform to say more things, right?

Right.

But I, I mean, personally, I don't hear it a lot. Like, people don't walk up to me and say, "Hey, you're a hoax or dinosaurs aren't real." I see.

Maybe they will now, after this show.

Maybe they will now.

Look forward to that.

Probably going to make a lot of new friends now.

One of the things that I've heard you talk about that I think is really interesting for a lot of people is if you looked at the history of the Earth, the history of life on Earth, and you looked at it in terms of like a calendar. Like, as if it was, you know, first day is January 1st. Like, when do dinosaurs show up? And you said they don't even show up until December 24th.

Yeah, it's amazing. And so, you know, we kind of think, where would it's all about, right? But if you start the Earth 4.5 billion years ago on January 1st, it's not until Thanksgiving that we get complex life on Earth. And by complex, I mean like little squirmy trilobites and things like that. That's half a billion years ago. So that's Thanksgiving. The first dinosaurs show up in the second week of December, and they persist for about 165 million years until an asteroid murders them the day after Christmas, right?

That's crazy.

Second week of December to the day after Christmas. And then our species, Homo sapiens, shows up 300,000 years ago. That's about 20 seconds before midnight on the last night of the year.

That's so wild to think about it that way.

And the reason we can find so many dinosaur skeletons is because they were just here, right? Like, if you see somebody at a New Year's Eve party and you want to refer to somebody that you just saw at Christmas, what do you say? You say like, "Oh, I just saw Bob."

Right.

"I just saw him at Christmas."

Yeah.

And dinosaurs were just here. It's only 2% of Earth's history ago.

Right. And there's an issue with the fossil record in general, right? And that issue is that it's very difficult to make a fossil. Most things, when they die, will not make a fossil.

Nope.

So the vast majority of dinosaurs who died, there are no fossil records of.

Absolutely. I mean, imagine in your backyard today if a deer were to die there.

Right.

A raccoon were to die there. There's almost no chance that it enters the fossil record, right?

Right.

And so the chance of any one individual becoming a fossil is almost zero, but it's not zero, right?

Right.

And we get to do the experiment so many times. There's a phrase I love, which is that unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot.

That's great.

Yeah.

That's, yeah, that's life and fossils in a nutshell.

Yeah.

Do you think that there are a bunch of dinosaurs, maybe some pretty extraordinary ones that we don't have fossil record of?

Nearly all of them.

Really?

Nearly all of them. Yeah, I mean, dinosaurs are preferentially preserved in the fossil record. And so the dinosaurs that we know the most about are the ones that live in places where sediment accumulates. And where is that? That's bottomlands, lowlands, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like floodplains, coastlines. So if you happen to live there, you have a better chance of making that transition from the biosphere to the geosphere. But if you're a dinosaur that lives up in the mountains somewhere, like the dinosaur equivalent of a pronghorn or a bighorn sheep or a mountain goat, you're not going to get fossilized because mountains shed sediment, right? Mountains are erosional, so you're not going to make a fossil there. So there's probably whole environments that were occupied by dinosaur species that we don't know about that we'll probably never know about.

Well, those aren't really fossils, right?

They're, we would call them sub-fossils.

Sub-fossils?

Yeah.

What is the distinction?

Well, they're not really very mineralized, right?

Right.

So it's still the original bone material.

Is that because of the age of them?

Yeah. And they haven't, the mineralization process, what we call permineralization, occurs when you have groundwater that has minerals dissolved in it, and then the minerals precipitate out in the pore spaces of the bone. Think of like the stuff that builds up in your shower, right? It's the same sort of process.

Right.

And so to some degree, the bones then become a mineralic copy of their former selves. Now, we used to think that was mostly the process, but now we know more and more that you can actually have not only original bone, but original soft tissue preserved in bones as well.

That's interesting. And that's recently they found blood, right?

There's a report of that. I think, you know, people are debating that occurrence. My friend Mary Schweitzer, who's one of the founders of molecular paleontology, along with Beth Shapiro, who you've met from Colossal.

Yeah.

I read that Mary is uncertain about that discovery. She said that non-mammalian blood cells should have a nuclear bulge and these ones don't. And also that, you know, her criterion is that you report only if you can sample that exact structure, not a bulk sample, which I think it was. So I think it's possible. I think it's well possible. But I think, you know, maybe the jury's out on that particular one.

So here it is here. Science has discovered trace of dinosaur blood preserved for 115 million years, shattering assumptions about how long biological molecules can survive.

Yeah, it would not surprise me at all. But, you know, I think that other scientists are going to be looking for, you know, ways to validate that claim.

And so this is the real problem with this whole idea of Jurassic Park, right? Like, we really don't have DNA from these things.

No, we don't. We don't have any non-avian dinosaur DNA. We don't have any DNA that's that old. The oldest DNA that we have from a single individual is a little more than a million years. And environmental DNA, where you just sample the sediment and see what was in the environment, I think is about 2 million years. 2 million years is a long way from dinosaurville.

Right, right, right, right. You'd have to do some crazy science experiments with a chicken, right? Like, if you wanted to make a dinosaur.

Well, that's another way of doing it is looking, you know, when, as evolution occurs, sometimes genes are, you know, left out of the sequence, but mostly they're just turned off. So something like a chicken has a lot of non-avian dinosaur genes. They haven't been active since non-avian dinosaurs that are turned off. And you could find those genes and potentially turn them back on again. Or you could look for relatives that have genes that are missing from a chicken sequence and patch them back in.

It seems like you would be like better suited starting off with like an ostrich. Starting off with something that's already on the way. You know, like a chicken is a little too small. Ostrich, pretty big sucker, you know?

I think one of the things that makes a chicken attractive is because they're important commercially. There's just been so much work done on chickens.

Right.

You know, so we know the chicken genome really well and know chickens really well.

And there's a lot of chickens available.

And there's a lot of chickens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's harder to find an ostrich.

Yeah.

So, you know, there was a thing that I saw on Instagram the other day, which is a bounty of amazing information. I mean, you can't go wrong with Instagram. But there was this guy who was refuting evolution. And one of the ways he was refuting evolution, he was showing a teddy bear that had become fossilized because it had been exposed to some like heavily mineralized waterfall or some shit. And like, he had this teddy bear and he's like hitting the teddy bear with like a hammer or a stick, you know, like making noise with it.

They have to be. So the process of fossilization is fairly rapid. Otherwise, you wouldn't have anything left to fossilize.

Okay, let's say if like Jamie dies. Sorry, Jamie. And Jamie dies in a mudslide.

It could be anybody, by the way.

Okay, sorry. Let's pick somebody else.

Some guy named Tom or something.

Ari Shapiro.

Ari Shapiro.

My friend Ari Shapiro. What if Ari, Ari dies in a mudslide? Because he's most likely amongst us to die in a mudslide.

He's closest to them at a more frequent basis.

He's always there. He's always in some.

Risk is higher.

Weird part of the world. He's a traveler. So if he died in a mudslide, how long before his body would become a fossil?

It depends on the geochemical circumstances.

Best case scenario.

I mean.

Lots of minerals, lots of muck, lots of mud and stuff.

Months, years?

Months?

Yeah.

Months.

It has to happen fairly quick or other processes would destroy the body and the skeleton.

Okay. So if you knew that he died in a mudslide and you came back two years later, you knew where he died, you knew the spot, and you dug it up, you would find his fossilized skeleton a couple of years later.

Well, it would be what we would call a sub-fossil at that point.

Sub-fossil.

There'd be mineralization that was happening.

Like the LaBrea-Tarpit stuff.

Yeah. And then, you know, by the time they turn into like just a rock, which doesn't always happen, but, you know, some fossils have really just turned into minerals, that could be thousands of years or even longer. But those initial processes that stabilize the organism have to happen really quickly or the organism will decay away or weather away.

Right. And this is the issue with finding fossilized things, is that most things don't leave fossils.

Almost everything does not leave a fossil.

And the Earth wants to consume. Like, there's a bunch of predators and a bunch of scavengers and a bunch of bacteria and a bunch of things, and things decay, and then you just have weathering and time, especially if the bones are exposed.

Yeah.

And then there's nothing.

Which, you know, that's one way of just seeing how old the Earth is, right? Like, if you have this event that has an almost zero chance of happening, but we end up with a lot of fossils, it tells us that we have a lot of time with which to work, right? Like, multitudinous individuals over vast swaths of time leave an abundant fossil record, even though the chance of any one individual being fossilized is almost zero.

Isn't that crazy? Almost zero.

Yeah.

So what was the first dinosaur that was discovered?

And how did they make this distinction? Because before even the term dinosaur, it's kind of referred to everything as a dragon, right? Like large reptiles. Didn't they refer to them as dragons? Well, yeah. I mean, people have been finding fossils for as long as there's been people, right? And they recognize them as different things at different times. There's a fascinating area called folk paleontology, right? And there's a woman, Adrian Mayor, who's written a couple books about this. And it's about, you know, ancient people or even historical people, they come across fossils and they don't know about dinosaurs yet, right?

Right.

And so that might be where a lot of these legendary animals come from. But dinosaurs are first recognized from really scrappy remains that start turning up in Britain in the early part of the 19th century. And they can't really tell what they are because their remains are so poor. There's three that are initially named as separate species, Megalodon and Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon. And in 1842, a British anatomist named Richard Owens describes them as a group of crocodile lizards, which they're not.

I'm sorry, Megalosaurus.

Megalosaurus.

Megalosaurus.

Okay, I was confused.

Definitely not Megalodon.

Yeah.

Megalosaurus.

What?

Yeah.

Okay, so is this one of the first jaws of Megalosaurus that was found?

Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine you find it. How big is that?

It's a big dinosaur. I'm not sure the exact dimensions, probably 25, 30 feet.

25, 30 feet long. So that's a large jaw. That's a chunk.

Yeah, it's big.

So that's what it looks like?

Yeah, there you go.

Okay.

Well, I don't know. Is that Megalodon? I'm not sure that is.

It's a picture from the article about it.

Megalosaurus. Megalosaurus, sorry.

What's that, Jamie?

It's a picture from the article about it. Same article that that other one was.

It looks like.

So if you look at the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and so these are the first artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs based on these really scrappy remains. And they just have no idea what they are. They're made by really the first paleo artist named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. And they look like monsters because he doesn't know what they are. They look like a CRISPR accident between like a lizard and a pineapple.

So what do they look like?

So there they are. And you can still go and see them today. They're a little bit south of London. And so that was our first conception of what dinosaurs were.

How old is this stuff?

These are, I think, 1850s, middle part of the 19th century.

That's when they made these sculptures?

Yeah.

Wow. Go back to the actual sculptures, Jamie, please.

So this is, you know, based on that 1842 report of what dinosaurs are. So that's what we think they are. And then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found, guess where?

Where?

New Jersey.

Really?

Yeah. So the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found in Haddonfield, New Jersey. If you look up.

Is that it?

No, look up Hadrosaurus. And Hadrosaurus is found in a marl mine in southern New Jersey, a little town right outside Philadelphia. And it's the first mounted dinosaur skeleton. They have enough bones to mount. And it's taken up to, yeah, that left picture, the black and white one. Yeah. So that's the first mounted skeleton.

Is that really a picture?

Of a dinosaur. I think that's an illustration of the mount.

Yeah, that doesn't look like a picture.

Yeah. So it's taken up to New York. The same guy that did those sculptures in London then does this. And so they're mounted in New York. They're taken to Philadelphia. And it's kind of the founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences, which fortunately just ceased being open to the public.

Fortunately or unfortunately?

Unfortunately.

Oh, very unfortunately.

Very unfortunately.

I was like, what? Are you a hater?

No, I love the Academy. So they are mounted, they're taken to the Academy. And it kind of creates this incredible public interest that people are lined up around the blocks to see this dinosaur skeleton and kind of creates the dinomania that, you know, we still have in the world today. And that really, so I always say that, you know, England is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontology, but southern New Jersey is the cradle of dinosaur paleontology.

Interesting.

And so first, the nearly complete skeleton found there in 1858. And then the world's first tyrannosaur discovered was not T. rex. There's about 28 species of tyrannosaur that we know of. First one discovered also in southern New Jersey, about a mile from the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum where I work.

Now, let me ask you this about the first dinosaur, Hydrosaurus. Is that how to say it right?

Hadrosaurus was the first nearly complete one.

How did they know whether it stood upright or, I mean, they had it posed in this very looming.

Yeah.

Like.

They didn't. And they got it wrong, actually. Yeah. So you'll see those old reconstructions kind of have them making like a tripod, kind of like a kangaroo does when it's, you know, just kind of hanging out. And we don't think they did that today. We would put the spine like parallel with the ground.

Could you see, could you just show us an image of what they think Hadrosaurus looked like?

Yeah, we have.

So that's the skeleton and you think like what is an accurate representation?

Yeah, I think that's pretty good. If you look at our museum, the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum and Hadrosaurus, we have a fleshed-out reconstruction that I think is, you know, as accurate as we can be right now.

Well, isn't that an issue though? With the fleshed-out stuff, you're just kind of guessing. Like if I'm sure you've seen what a hippo skeleton looks like.

Yeah, like a monster.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Like you would never imagine. It looks like hungry, hungry hippo. Like, oh, you know, big, sweet, cuddly.

Right.

It's not really, but looks like it is in kids' toys.

Yeah, there you go.

Is that what you think it looked like?

Yeah, I mean, that is our best approximation.

But it's just a guess, right?

Well.

Because you don't really know what the tissue looked like.

Yeah, I mean, more than a guess, but it could have soft tissue features that we don't know about for sure. The color, we're guessing. That we don't know. And so what we do is we look at modern analogs. So what does a, you know, what does a herd animal look like? Or we have a baby Hadrosaurus. What does a small forest herbivore look like? And for that, we use the baby tapir, right? Because they have that camouflage color. So color, we don't know about. We don't know like if they were shrink-wrapped or real blubbery, that sort of thing.

Jamie, just for fun, pull up the hippo skeleton.

Yeah, that's good.

Versus an actual hippo because it's so kooky. Because that, to me, is one of the most drastic ones.

Yeah, or like a goose, right? If you don't know what a goose looks like and you don't know the feathers, it looks like a little demon.

Well, even a rabbit.

Yeah.

Rabbits look crazy.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, there you go.

Like look at the skeleton of a hippo. How nuts is that?

It's bizarre.

That is wild.

Right.

You would imagine that would be like the most terrifying, ferocious, demon-looking creature. But then you see them, you're like, oh, hello, buddy.

Except they are terrifying.

Oh, they're super dangerous.

Yeah.

They're pretty amazing creatures.

Yeah.

And responsible for, they're like the second most deadly animal in Africa.

You do not want to be around a hippo.

Yeah. Super aggressive, giant pig-like things.

Chase boats.

Yeah. So obviously, if we had a hippo skeleton, we would fuck that up.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And an elephant, like would we put the trunk on an elephant? I'm not sure that we would.

Right.

Right? And then what do you know about an elephant if you don't know about the trunk?

Right.

Right. So there's a lot we don't know about dinosaurs, but that's what keeps us in business, right? If we knew everything, we'd stop.

Of course.

Yeah.

So how much do we know about skin texture? Because there have been some fossilized impressions of the texture of the skin, correct?

Yeah. So it depends on the group of dinosaurs. So Hadrosaurus, which we know best because Hadrosaurus seemed to like wetland areas and so does sediment, we have tens of thousands of Hadrosaur remains. And we know them from their skeletons. We know them from their eggs, from their embryos, from preserved skin. There are a few Hadrosaurs that are preserved in 3D. And we can see their skin. We can see their gut contents. In one case, we can see gut parasites.

Really?

Yeah.

So you've got skin, you've got gut, you've got gut parasites.

Not gut, but gut contents. You can see like sediment. And they get pollen out of the gut of Hadrosaur so you can see what plants they were eating.

What is the best thing that Jamie can look up? You could find the most complete.

There's a Hadrosaur that goes by the name Leonardo. So I don't give dinosaurs names. I call Leonardo JDRI115H.

Oh, like a prisoner.

Yeah.

Why do you do that? You don't want them to be.

Well, because they're my specimens. They're not my buddies, you know? But if you look up Duckbill Dinosaur Leonardo, you'll probably find it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So when they found this, what year was this when they found this fairly complete version of it?

I think it was.

Oh, look at that.

Around 2000, maybe.

Wow.

I went out and saw it and did a little bit of work on it in 2003, I think.

That's really pretty complete.

When you see that thing, it's like being in a room with a dinosaur. It's 3D.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, that's the issue that I have where people say there are no complete dinosaurs.

Yeah.

This is like one of the things that gets repeated in these dinosaur debunking videos.

Yeah.

And they're like, guys, that's not true.

Well, we have.

They have really close to complete, like close enough.

Yeah.

That it's much more likely that they're fucking real than everybody's in on this hoax.

Right. And completeness is.

Look at that. Is that like the tail?

Yeah, that's the tail right there.

Whoa. That's nuts. So what am I looking at? Like what is that feature?

Well, the tail there, it looks like you're looking at, I think you're looking at some.

But you're a geologist, right?

Well, I'm a geologist, right?

So what is this geological.

Well, I'm a paleontologist as well.

But you are both, right?

I am both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what is this geological feature? Was that a mudslide?

Well, I mean, if I'm guessing, it kind of looks like, well, it looks fluvial to me.

It looks like a tree.

So it looks like, those look like floodplain deposits to me. And sometimes where you get those colors, like the purples, that could be paleosols, which are ancient soils that are preserved. But that's pretty typical of what a lot of the badlands in the US looks like.

That is really cool.

I'm not sure.

Imagine finding that. Imagine stumbling upon that. You're like, hey.

Well, I have.

Well, yeah, you have. You don't have to imagine.

Yeah.

Exposed fossils protruding from the hillside.

Oh, there we go. Okay, now I know where it is.

In Alberta.

Yeah.

Wow.

There we go.

Complete with fossilized skin.

Alberta has some amazing dinosaurs. Amazing dinosaurs.

So how many of these do you think had feathers?

Well, that's an area of debate right now in paleontology. So birds have feathers, obviously. Birds are literally dinosaurs. It seems like the theropod dinosaurs.

Theropods.

I'm good for now.

Okay.

Thanks. The meat eaters, although they're not all meat eaters, but that group, like T. rex is in, Velociraptor is in, they seem to be mostly feathered. So they have at least a feathered ancestor. Whether they retain their feathers or not is the question. And then on the other side, we see some indications of things that have, we might call them feathers or, you know, sometimes they call them like branched integumentary structures, which means modified scales. So it seems like dinosaurs on both sides of the dinosaur family tree have some modifications of their scales that are feather-like.

Right.

Yeah.

There's a really cool exhibit in Montana in Bozeman at the museum there.

Yeah, Museum of the Rockies.

Yes. Where half of the raptor is, the raptor is the wrong size though. They made the raptor big, like a Jurassic Park raptor.

Well, some were big.

Really? How big were they?

Yeah. Well, like Velociraptor in Jurassic Park is, they should not be big.

Right.

A Velociraptor has a skull that's about like that.

Yeah. It's like the size of like, what, like a house caterpillar?

It's like a pissed-off turkey.

Okay.

Right? So like if a Velociraptor is in your kitchen, it's more of an opportunity than a problem. You know, just like throw some carrots on and, you know.

Yeah.

Have some Velociraptor roast later that night.

So why did they do that in Jurassic Park? Why did they make the Velociraptor so big?

I think just more entertaining that way.

For fun.

But there are dinosaurs in that group, like Deinonychus, that are big, like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. So there really were dinosaurs like that that were as big as that. They just weren't Velociraptor.

Got it.

Yeah.

And so this exhibit in Montana at the museum, what's interesting is it shows one possible option where they're the traditional Jurassic Park-looking dinosaur. And then the other one is covered with feathers.

Yeah.

And so one side of this specimen or this piece, this exhibit is feathered and one's scaly.

Well.

The feathered is way cooler.

In the case of Velociraptor, we can actually see the quill insertion knobs on its ulna.

Ah.

Right? So we can see, just like you would see on a turkey or a vulture or something.

See if you could see the one, the side that shows the, there it is.

Oh, yeah.

That's the exhibit.

Yeah.

That's the exhibit. That is fucking sick.

Yeah. So I think, you know, that crazy-looking feathered side, I think that's plausible.

Why do they have to have him humping? Is that what they're doing?

I can't believe he's catching it.

Oh, he's catching it. Seems like he's not. His face, look at his wig. He looks like Rod Stewart.

Yeah, that does kind of look like that.

Yeah.

There it doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah, the feather, that's like they went really far with the artistic recreation of.

They did.

You know, their interpretation of the colors.

And we don't know what color they were, but, you know, think about the world today. There's a correlation between small things that are more colorful and bigger things aren't. Like think about what color is a hippo and a rhino and a whale.

Polar bear.

And, well, they're a little different because they have the.

Grizzly bear.

Yeah.

Or brown.

Or, you know.

Yeah.

But big things generally gray, right? It's kind of disappointing. Because it's expensive to make pigment, right? Metabolically expensive.

Right.

And if you're really big, you're not hiding. You're not fooling anyone, you know? And so I think big creatures kind of come in the factory color, which apparently is like gray.

What about tigers though?

Well, they're big-ish, right? They're not elephant or hippo size, right?

They're pretty fucking big.

They're pretty big.

Look at it.

Yeah.

Siberian.

But they have camouflage.

Perplexity says Jurassic Park was making, it's supposed to be using this dinosaur, but Velociraptor is easier to say. So they used that word instead.

Yeah, that's Deinonychus that I said is big.

Oh, that's, so they really did make it accurate. They just used the wrong name.

Just, yeah, for Hollywood's sake, I guess, or music.

Why? Were people too stupid to understand the word Deinonychus?

I don't know.

That's silly.

Michael Crichton might have been interested.

Velociraptor is a cool name.

It's very cool.

Yeah. This is cool too.

Yeah. That's the explanation I got here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But use Velociraptor's more dramatic, easier-to-say name.

Right.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I think you could have said Deinonychus and freak people out.

I think so too.

Yeah.

And that first Jurassic Park movie, like that was state-of-the-art science, you know, except for that. But then they kind of got locked in and kind of frozen in time. And so the movies become less and less accurate over time because they stick with like the 1993 models, whereas science has progressed since.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Interesting. So what did they screw, what's the difference?

Well, like the one thing is like our knowledge of feathers in the theropod group of dinosaurs, like they never got on board with that, right?

Anything else?

You know, I mean, a lot of it can be covered by the fact that they're genetically engineered, right? And so they're mixing dinosaur times and places and things like that. So a lot of things that never lived together. And then it gets a little silly in the Jurassic World movies where they just start to make up dinosaurs that never existed, right? Like what is it called? Indominus Rex, I think.

Right. It's like when Fast and Furious when they drove a car in space.

Right.

After a while, you got to go crazy.

Right. Jump in the shark.

You have nine of these movies. You got to get creative.

Now, they did do a good job. My big baby, Dreadnaughtaus, that I discovered in South America was in Jurassic Park Dominion. And I actually think they did a really good job with the anatomy of it.

And Dreadnaughtaus was the one that was absolutely enormous, but it had a tiny little brain, right?

Well, all of those big sauropod dinosaurs, sauropods like think Brontosaurus, right? The long neck, long tail, quadrupedal ones. They had small heads and they had small brains. You could probably fit, you know, two Dreadnaughtaus brains in a pint glass.

What?

And it's a 65-ton organism. So they weren't thinking deep thoughts. You know, I think their day is pretty much eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

Just chew, chew, chew.

You know, sex every now and then.

Chew, chew.

And that's about it.

Let me see what that image looks like again, Jamie. The one that you just showed, the first one. So that's how big it was.

Yeah, it's big. It's about 13 African elephants. It's about nine T. rex.

Wow. So is that the biggest dinosaur we've ever discovered?

Well, you can define biggest in different ways. You can say what's the longest, what's the tallest, or what's the most massive.

Right. Large mass.

So this is in a group called the Titanosaurs. And the Titanosaurs are, in general, the most massive dinosaurs. And.

Look at that thing compared to a 737.

Yeah, it's big.

That's nuts.

So what I would say about Dreadnaughtaus is it's the most massive dinosaur for which we can confidently calculate a weight. But there are other more fragmentary Titanosaurs that are clearly in that same size range. But they might only be known by a couple of dorsal vertebrae, backbones or, you know, a piece of leg or something like that. And there's no math in the literature that turns a fragment like that into a mass. The best way of estimating the mass is we know now from living quadrupedal animals.

And how much.

Yeah, that's it there.

Of.

So you can see we have the humerus on the left and the femur on the right.

Is that image that shows the skeleton, is that what we actually have of it?

We have a lot more. But that is from our paper, that image. And it shows Dreadnaughtaus. And then that bone tissue on the left there, you can tell if you look at an organism's bone tissue, whether it's growing rapidly or not. So, you know, if you're an adolescent, you can see it doesn't have very well-ordered bone tissue near the edge of it. Because the way bone grows, those first bone cells just kind of get thrown down in a mess. And then later on, they get structure.

Wow.

And the chance of you finding the biggest, right? You're not going to find the biggest that ever existed.

Right, right. That's the problem.

Yeah.

You know, that's one of the weird things about crocodiles, right? Is that, and you would wonder like how much of that is carried over from dinosaurs. They seem to just keep growing. And they don't seem to have like an age limit. They die eventually, but they don't die like a dog does where you can kind of predict, oh, you know, if, you know, Rosco gets fed right and taken care of, he might make it to 14. No. They kind of live for a long time, like hundreds of years perhaps.

Yeah, well, crocodiles have what we would call indeterminate growth, right?

Right.

They just get, they get bigger as they get older. And then things like birds, mammals, we have determinate growth, right? But crocodiles, who are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, right? They're not dinosaurs. They don't have a dinosaur in their ancestry, but they're cousins. They have done everything. They've done, you know, we know the crocodiles alive today. But there were crocodiles that were going down like the shark route. They were going, it looked like they were going fully marine. There was a pelican-like crocodile that was in Egypt in the mid-Cretaceous period.

What is that one called?

It's called Stomatosuchus.

Stomatosuchus.

Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

Whoa.

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Whoa.

Yeah.

Wow. Now, why do we think it had a pouch?

Well, just the distance between the jawbones. And it's just a lot of space there. I don't know if you'll see a picture of the original fossil from, I think, 1911.

It's very interesting that people think of a pelican as being benign.

Not if you're a fish.

Yeah, or a pigeon.

Yeah, right.

I've seen pelicans eat pigeons. And you're like, what the hell?

Yeah.

I thought you guys were cool. I thought you delivered babies.

So in the Triassic, there were.

That's a stork, actually.

There were.

Whoa.

Crocodiles that were, you know, maybe even running on two legs, like maybe, it's a little controversial, but maybe bipedal crocodiles.

Oh, fun.

Yeah.

Well, you aware of one of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories?

I'm not sure.

One of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories is there used to be a race of lizard people that were highly advanced that lived along with the dinosaurs many, many, many years ago.

Yeah, we don't have their fossils.

Millions, millions years ago. No, we don't have their fossils.

What do you mean used to?

Yeah, bro.

Still here, bro.

I'm trying to warm them up to these ideas.

Oh, sorry, sorry.

This is the one that ran on two legs? Wow. That's sick.

Postosuchus, you want to look for.

So it's sort of a T. rex style crocodile.

It's like Wally Gator from Hell, basically.

Whoa.

Right? Yeah, like that. So, and crocodiles were in charge when the first dinosaurs evolved. So in the Triassic, the dinosaurs, the little dinosaurs that were trying to make it, they were living in the crocodile world. And crocodiles are big and scary. And we're doing all kinds of crazy things.

That's wild to think of that they were there before the dinosaurs.

Yeah, crocodiles are old.

That's so crazy. And they're still around.

Yep.

Are you aware of some of the really crazy stories from the Congo from, I think it was like the 1800s, where they claim to have seen 40-plus foot-long crocodiles? So it's this indeterminate growth thing. And there's the question like, is this a gross exaggeration? They based it on the size of the craft that they were on the boat. Is it gross exaggeration? Or is it possible that there were dinosaurs, or excuse me, crocodiles that had reached that size that had been eventually killed off once people invented guns?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we don't have any skeletons from modern crocodiles that are that big. But in the Cretaceous, there were definitely crocodiles that big.

Right.

There's one from North Africa called Sarcosuchus imperator that was like 35 feet long.

What a great name.

I know.

That's what he looked like.

Yeah, Sarcosuchus.

Sarcosuchus imperator.

Imperator, yeah.

Sarcosuchus.

Mm-hmm.

And then there's one from New Jersey called Deinosuchus that is in that same size range. It's like. So that's his skull compared to what? That last skull that you just had, Jamie. What is that compared to? What is the one underneath that American crocodile?

Yeah, that's like a.

Yeah.

Some sort of modern crocodilian.

That thing's insane.

If you look up.

How big was that?

Well, look up Sarcosuchus and Staab, S-T-A-A-B. He's a sculptor, a friend of mine. He did all of our work for the museum. But he made an amazing reconstruction.

That's it right there?

Of this. There's one of him sitting on its back, which is really cool.

Oh, he's next to it there.

Ooh, that's pretty cool.

So that's how big these things were.

Really big.

Really big.

Really big. They probably ate dinosaurs.

Sorry.

Yeah.

And what year are we talking about?

When they lived?

Yeah.

This is in the mid-Cretaceous. I think it's Cenomanian, so around 95 million years ago.

Do we know why things were so big back then?

Well, no. But another way of looking at it is it's a different age of giants. We live in an age of giants now. The biggest animal to ever live is alive right now, right?

Right.

The biggest trees to ever live are alive right now.

Blue, right?

Yeah, the blue whale and the redwoods. So we have some really big things now. Since dinosaurs went extinct, there was a hornless rhino called Paraceratherium that was like 20 feet tall, which was crazy. But, you know, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, it's a long time. And all kinds of things happened. There were tiny little dinosaurs. And some got really big. And I think there was sort of this arms race between the big predators and the big herbivores. Yeah, there's Paraceratherium.

Whoa.

So a huge, huge hornless rhinoceros. Isn't that cool?

Wow.

So this thing was basically trying to be a sauropod dinosaur, you know, after the dinosaurs went extinct.

And how do we know what this thing looked like on the outside? How much of a version of this do we have fossilized?

We don't have it soft tissue. So it's.

So it just guesses that it had all this.

Yeah, I mean, we can see that it's where its relatives are. And so, you know, I guess you would look in that family to see what kind of traits they have. But yeah, look how big that thing is.

So some of it has it looking like a rhino. Some of them have them looking like the skin of an elephant. But it's really just guessing.

Yeah.

Yeah. When you said redwood trees are the biggest, here's another wacky conspiracy theory. You'll love this one. There's a lot of people that believe that there's evidence that enormous mountains that exist somewhere that have flat tops are actually the stumps of trees that were cut down by giants.

Wow. Well, those would be some big trees.

There have been many, many YouTube documentarians doing scholarly work on this particular issue.

That's true.

Like that one right there.

Right. I can tell you what that is.

No, no, no, you can't.

That's not true.

You're going to give us propaganda from the government. What that is is a fucking tree, bro.

Right. Well, yes. The government line would be that that is columnar basalt that formed in the throat of a volcano.

Show me that, the other one, the Devil's, whatever it is. What's it called again?

Devil's Tower.

Devil's Tower in Wyoming. That's from famously Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is an amazing movie.

That's right. And I think the Native American legend is that those are scratch marks from a giant bear.

Whoa.

Yeah.

So how was this made?

Basalt, which is a, it's the rock that is under most oceans. And it can also come up through volcanoes. When it cools slowly, it forms these hexagonal columns. If you know the Palisades along the Hudson River right outside New York, columnar basalt. Giant's Causeway in Ireland, columnar basalt. So it's that. It's slowly cooling basalt. It has time enough while it's cooling to form those hexagonal patterns.

Oh, OK.

Yeah.

Interesting. Sorry to divert you.

So imagine that, that's just the throat of the volcano. So imagine putting the volcano back around that.

Right.

It's pretty big.

So we had these enormous crocodiles that ate dinosaurs. And what do we know? Or do we have an idea of what the shift was where dinosaurs started becoming enormous and ferocious?

Yeah, there's an extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 202 million years ago. It's a climate crisis because of the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. So we have Pangea at this point. And a lot of people think that Pangea is how the continent started. It's not. It's just one moment in history when all the continents happen to bump into each other. But Pangea starts to rift apart during this time period. And the Atlantic starts, imagining the Atlantic kind of unzipping from the top and the bottom, right, as the continents pull apart.

And so was it cooling because of the volcanic eruption and all this stuff in the air?

In this case, it was warming because of the CO2.

Warming.

Yeah.

OK.

We've had the first four mass extinctions. The first two were about cooling. The second two were about overheating.

And so for whatever reason, dinosaurs were better suited to adapt.

Yeah. And so now we enter the Jurassic right after that. And the dinosaurs, they start to get big. They start to get really diverse in the Jurassic. And then in the Cretaceous, the last of the three ages of dinosaurs, that's kind of like the full flower of the dinosaur world. And they're really numerous. They're on every continent, including Antarctica.

Right.

And they're just in all kinds of forms.

It's just fascinating to me that 65 million years ago, the impact in the Yucatán, that is the start of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But yet the crocodiles, they make it through.

Yeah.

Fairly well. Like during that 65 million year, what is the difference between the kind of crocodiles that existed pre-impact and post-impact? Were they of similar size? Or had they had already gotten to that particular form that there are at now?

The super giant crocodiles weren't around then. They were closer to.

They were already gone.

Yeah, they were closer to modern ones. So.

Is this an assumption? Or is this based on what we've found?

It's based on what we've found.

Right, but it's possible that we could find super large crocodiles that were in the 60, 65 million years.

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, we're learning a lot about this impact, which we now know is about 66 million years. And so an asteroid hits the planet, right? It's maybe up to 18 kilometers across, going about 20 meters per second, hits the planet off the coast of the Yucatán, blows a crater in the Earth's crust that's about 110 miles across, initially by like 12 miles deep, right? Imagine like you've been to the Grand Canyon, I'm sure. That's a mile deep, right?

Yeah.

Imagine what 12 miles would look like. That's crazy.

And like that.

Yeah. And so imagine the volume of rock. I've looked it up. It's basically about the area of Massachusetts times 12 miles. So imagine that mass. But you take that mass, it's pulverized into maybe millimeter-sized pieces. But it doesn't matter. It still has that mass. Throw it up through the Earth's atmosphere, you've given it a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy. Now, when that stuff comes back in, it's got to balance the energy books. And it does that mostly by friction with the atmosphere.

Mm-hmm.

So think about that day. Trillions upon trillions of millimeter-sized space capsules, each one flaming back into the atmosphere, each one heating up a little parcel of air around itself, such that we think that day within an hour after the impact, temperatures got up somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven. So if you're on the surface of the Earth that day, you're literally toast. So who gets through? Well, little things on land that can burrow. Who are good burrowers? Little mammals, crocodiles, turtles, lizards.

Right. The crocodiles are in the water.

And burrow. Crocodiles are good burrowers. And some birds. All of the non-bird dinosaurs, the non-avian dinosaur egg nests that have ever been found are just some crater that some mama dinosaur scraped in the ground where she deposited her eggs right on the surface. So 100% of their life cycle on the surface of the Earth, no place to hide.

Wow. And so where do the birds go?

Well, some birds are burrowers, right? And so today we have.

But chickens aren't, right?

Chickens are not. But we have burrowing parrots today, burrowing penguins, burrowing.

And that's the only way they survived is by burrowing?

I think.

Interesting.

I think. Because that heat is, it's like those outdoor restaurant heaters. It's radiative heat, not convective heat.

Right.

So it's line of sight. So you got to get out of the line of sight of the sky. And so you have to get underground somewhere. Now, was there some big dinosaur in a cave by chance at that moment? Like, yeah, sure. But I'm talking about like a breeding population. I think they're functionally extinct.

Right.

The day of the impact, which is shocking. They're around for 165 million years, right, dominating the Earth for most of that time. If you were here the day before that asteroid hit, you would look around and you would say, well, this is how it's always going to be, right? These guys are always going to be in charge. And the next day, the asteroid hits. And I think they're functionally extinct that day.

Wow. What do you think the historical depiction of dragons is all about? And why is it so ubiquitous across so many different continents and so many different cultures? Like, why do they have stories of these giant lizards, including historians that have accounts? Like, doesn't I think Herodotus? Does Herodotus have an account of some sort of a dragon creature in Egypt that they killed?

Yeah, I don't know. But, you know, if you look at the skeletons of various animals, I mean, you can see many, many vertebrae. If you look at the tail of a sauropod dinosaur or the neck of a plesiosaur, you find a titanoboa in Columbia.

Right.

Or if you just find a modern snake skeleton.

Here, look at this. "Herodotus described winged serpents, often retold today as an account of dragons. The key distinction, he said he saw heaps of bones, not living flying creatures. The main passage is in Histories 2.75 to 76, what he actually wrote. Herodotus says he traveled to a place in Arabia opposite the Egyptian city of Buto to investigate reports of winged serpents. When I came thither," ooh, I want to be able to say that. "When I came thither, I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number.

Yeah, an ibis. It's like.

Ibis?

Yeah. It's a, I think they call them friend of the farmer in Egypt. They're kind of field birds. They have a long curved beak. And they like follow the plows.

Crazy that they killed dragons. "These serpents are like water snakes. Their wings are not feathered, but most like the wings of a bat."

It's small.

Huh.

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of bad zoology back in history. And, you know, these people.

But is it possible that this tiny one was a real creature, a winged serpent? And we just don't have any skeletons of them?

Well, I mean, we don't have any skeletons of them.

Right. So this is just pure speculation. "Explicitly identifies these with the serpents that he said to invade Egypt. Collectors supposedly drove them away by burning store racks and aromatic resin."

So an example is in Sicily. Every spring, farmers find megalodon teeth in their fields, right? Because there's old marine deposits there. And they have shark fossils in them. And when you get the freezing and thawing in winter, the stones or in this case, fossils work their way up to the top, right? And so they could clear the field one year. And they come back. And the next year, there's these fossils in them. And they had no concept of deep time.

Serpent tongues.

Serpent tongues. So they thought that they were serpents that would lose their stone-like tongues for some reason. And they would find those. And so people were trying to make sense of their landscape.

Right.

Right? And they find these things. And they don't understand deep time. They don't understand geological processes, obviously.

And it becomes folklore.

And so they try to, they make an explanation.

It is built on top of an even older church. So they have like a glass floor. And you can look through and see the original church. But it's like really old. Like they don't know how old it is. But one of the cool things on the wall, and I took a photo of it. It's on my Instagram, was of a whale. And it's a tile artwork of a whale. And it's from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. And you see this artwork. And like what they thought a whale looked like is crazy.

Yeah.

It had giant teeth. And it looked like, I think, did it have wings?

No.

That's it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, kind of wings.

Wings.

So that was the tile artwork. That's the picture that I took that's on that church in Ravello.

That's wild. Look up.

Isn't that crazy? Like that's what they thought a fucking whale looked like. Like it looks like part lion or something, part bear, part fish.

Look at steno and shark. And you'll see this is kind of the first illustration of.

Steno?

Yes.

Steno.

Is that all one word?

S-T-E-N-O.

And shark or?

And yeah. And then look up shark, yeah. Nicholas Steno and shark. And so he would find these shark teeth. And so this is his illustration of what a shark looked like, he thought. But what he was doing here, Nicholas Steno is sometimes called the father of geology because he was the first one to say, no, these are not these serpent tongues. They look like shark teeth. And so they must have been in the mouth of a shark, even though we're finding them on land. Right.

Right? And so he actually came up with three laws of geology, which we still use today. They're very simple, which is the oldest stuff is on bottom, the youngest stuff is on top. If you see a valley and there's the same rock on both sides, you can imagine that they were once connected. And so he's the first one to really start to turn geology into a science. But it had a really slow start. And this is, you know, pretty far in our history.

What year is this?

He is, I think you can look it up there. I think he is 1500s. Is that right?

Now, we knew about sharks back then.

1600s.

We knew about sharks.

Yeah, but people didn't understand how there could be sharks on land.

Right.

Right? Shark fossils on land.

Right.

And so like the antiquity of our planet is a fairly recent discovery. There's a guy named James Hutton, who was a man of the Scottish Enlightenment. And he's what we could really call the first geologist. And that's not until like 1795, I think, is when he published his book, The Theory of the Earth. And he did something that just makes me love geology, you know, forever, which is he figured out that we live on an old planet with a hammer and a rowboat.

How did he formulate this idea? I mean, did we have an understanding of like volcanic activity back then?

Not well. And so Hutton actually, you know, part of what he did was he looked at the formation of granite. And granite was thought to be back then like a sedimentary rock where the particles would accumulate. And he collected evidence that no granite forms from molten rock. And it's part of a rock cycle. And so he really founds an idea that we call uniformitarianism. It's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the past. So we can see processes in action today and imagine how they might have built the world in the past.

God, imagine being an academic back then or whatever it was, a scholar, and trying to you can't really coordinate with other people about this because how few people even understand what the hell you're talking about.

Yeah.

What a small group of human beings that are even pondering these things. In the 1600s, is that what you said?

Yeah, well, 1700s.

1700s.

Yeah. And it was so unorthodox. So the most learned people in Europe at the time thought the Earth was 6,000 years old. Isaac Newton thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

Did he really?

Yeah. When Darwin got on the HMS Beagle, he was a young Earth creationist. He thought the Earth was 6,000 years old. And so this guy is like really swimming against the current here.

And he has to worry about being like locked up. Like you could be.

No, not at that time. This is, you know, Scottish Enlightenment. So there's all kinds of ideas flying around. And he actually wrote this as he was dying.

Oh, good move.

Yeah. So he didn't live long.

When you're on the way out.

Yeah.

That's when you publish the good stuff.

And he wasn't because of that, I think, it wasn't really a very polished piece of text. And it's very hard to get through. And then his ideas were picked up by an Englishman, Charles Lyell, who was a good writer and who wrote the Principles of Geology. Hutton's work was The Theory of the Earth. And so Captain Fitzroy gifts young Charles Darwin a copy of the Principles of Geology as they're about to go on their voyage. And Darwin was a member of what was called the Venarian Society, which is this basically young Earth society of scientists.

Wow. Just imagine being an intellectual back then where there's not a lot to go by and trying to formula, trying to look at all this stuff and go, what is going on?

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

And everybody wants to think there's a dude. And he just told Adam, name all these things. And that's it.

It was hard. I mean, and you know, it's not that long ago. Like Thomas Jefferson didn't know the Earth was old. Thomas Jefferson never heard the word dinosaur.

Wow.

You know, it's not that long ago.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

That's hard to believe.

Yeah.

But obviously, this is a thing that has happened all throughout human history. Like there's a new discovery. Oh, look, we figured out fire. Oh, look, we figured out shelter. Oh, look, we figured out, hey, this is a shark tooth.

Yeah.

Why is it in this field?

Yeah.

Hey, why is this land going like this? It's just so interesting to think that these people were the first people to try to put this puzzle together. And how few people they had to collaborate with. Like how few people, like now today, if you talk about volcanoes or geologic activity, everybody knows about it. Back then, like how many people.

Mostly, except those dumb asses on the internet who don't think dinosaurs are real.

Well, they still think volcanoes are real. They still know some things.

Yes.

They still understand like the shifts of tectonic plates and the things that we know why earthquakes happen. Most people are aware of those things. But if you're an intellectual back then, there's probably so little to go by. And you're trying to come up with some completely radical theory of how things got to the position that they're in right now. And you start to try to explain it to people that are young Earth creationists. You want to bring up natural selection and random mutation and all the different things that he's trying to put into people's heads.

Yeah, that's why Darwin was so reluctant to publish. I mean, it's, you know, science is by nature conservative. And it's hard to push the boundary.

As it should be, right?

As it should be, yeah. And so, you know, it took Darwin 25 years to publish his thoughts. And he was very insecure about it. He was worried about the ramifications for his family. His wife, Emma, was, you know, a very devout Christian.

Wow.

And he was terribly concerned about it.

Wow.

He was an insecure guy. And at one point, he didn't think that he had the intellectual standing because he wasn't really an expert in any one particular topic. So he decides he's got to become an expert. So he takes nine years off from writing Origin of Species to become the world's expert on barnacles. And for nine years, he studies barnacles in his study.

That's dedication.

And his little son, Frankie Darwin, has a friend over one day and turns to his friend and says, where did your dad do his barnacles?

Right?

Because he just thinks that's what dads do because that's all Charles Darwin does for nine years.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Why barnacles?

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was just like an open niche for him.

Huh.

Yeah. When my son was like four or so, he had a friend over the house. And he turned to his friend and said, where's your dad keep his dinosaurs? That's what dads do.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, we're really so fortunate that civilization has lasted as long as it has. Hopefully, we don't screw this up. But that we have accumulated so much information, you know, because if we had to start from scratch, if there's some sort of massive natural disaster.

Oh, yeah.

And we had to start from scratch, within a few hundred years, we'd forget most of this.

I always think about like who would I take with me if I had like five people to start civilization over, right? And one of them would definitely be a metallurgist because like how would we ever figure that out again?

Right.

It's just amazing that we figured that out.

Right.

Yeah.

Right. Right. How to make an alloy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or how to, you know, we're going to beat these rocks out of a mountainside and put them in fire and get copper, you know? I mean, that's.

How do you harness electricity? How about that guy?

Yeah.

Bring an electrician.

Bring him too.

Bring an engineer who understands how to make a generator.

Yeah. Or a refrigerator.

Right. Most people are fucked if that happens. Most people are fucked. We're just so fortunate that in this volatile world that we live in that's filled with the potential for natural disasters and now man-made disasters, that we have managed to stay alive for so many hundreds of years and figured out how to write things down. And now we got to the point where there's YouTube videos about dinosaurs being fake.

Full selfie.

Which is why it's really interesting to me. I'm really always interested in people that have very steadfast beliefs that they hold despite the evidence.

Yeah.

Which I've been guilty of that in the past. And I try not to be. But I think that is a thing that people have where if they have an idea and they have openly espoused that idea, they will defend it. And they will find ways to defend it even if it's not rational. Like they become married to that idea. That idea is their identity.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the opposite of science, right? And I mean, scientists are people and flawed. But, you know, you'll rarely hear a scientist use the word prove, right? What we say is we have failed to falsify, right?

Right.

Leaving the possibility open that it could be falsified.

Right.

In the future. I heard your episode with Brian Cox. He's great.

He's great.

And, you know, he was talking about like a scientist should be happy when their ideas are overturned. That means we're making progress, right?

Yeah.

Now, in reality, scientists are humans. And there's some ego involved. And it's hard. But he is correct, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that's how you make progress. You hypothesize, you test. And if you falsify that hypothesis, then you say, OK, that's not it. Now let's find out what it is.

Right. The problem is sometimes it progresses one funeral at a time, right?

That's right. Yeah, that was Max Planck said that, I think.

Right.

Yeah.

That's the issue is that people have egos.

Yeah.

And again, if someone has been teaching for a decade or so this one particular thing and all say, oh, that's horseshit.

Yeah.

And he was like, oh, my God, I lied to all those kids. No, I didn't. This is horseshit. And you start drinking and yelling.

When I was a young geology student, it was I had some old professors that were like pre-plate tectonics.

Whoa.

That really only happened in the '60s.

Really?

And yeah, it's new.

Yeah.

And so they were hanging on to this old idea called geosynclinal theory, which I can't explain to you because it doesn't make sense, right? It was super complicated because it doesn't make sense. And they were still trying to like shoehorn that into our understanding of plate tectonics. And so it's just it's really hard for people sometimes to let go of their ideas.

That's wild.

Yeah.

So as recently as the '60s.

That's when the transition was happening.

Wow.

Yeah.

And how did they figure that out?

It kind of goes back to this US naval officer and Princeton professor, Harry Hess. And during World War II, he was working with the Navy to develop magnetometers that would help detect submarines, right? U-boats and things. And they were getting all this background signal from the ocean itself. And he realized that the ocean floor is magnetized. And he started to map this out. And it seems to be magnetized in stripes, right?

That's one of the big things that a lot of people are terrified of is a pole shift.

Yeah. We don't know really how quickly that can happen. It happens, if I'm right, on average about 800,000 years. But like, you know, sometimes it can be millions of years. Sometimes it can be less. What happens when the magnetosphere breaks down and reconstitutes? Like is that a couple of months? Is that a couple hundred years? In that time, I think we lose our protection from, you know, the solar radi from the magnetosphere and the gamma rays.

So if this is happen if this happens every 800,000 years, when was the last time it happened?

About 800,000 years ago.

Oh, fun.

Yeah. But highly variable, so.

I don't like how you're saying that.

Yeah. Now, when I was working down in Patagonia for many, many years, that was before we really repaired the hole in the ozone layer, which is a great environmental success story. We did that. But I was under that hole. And it would be a chilly day. I'd be working in my parka, but my skin felt like it was in a microwave. It was just like really weird heating of your body.

Wow.

Which is why I go to the dermatologist twice a year now.

Did you get sunburn?

Yes, but it just it felt different, Joe. It's not like when you go to the beach today. It just felt like you were being baked. It felt different.

Australia had an issue with that, right?

Yeah, they're pretty far south. I was further south in Patagonia.

They had a bunch of last time I was there, they had these things that they would have the ads everywhere for skin cancer. I was like, this is weird. And then someone explained to me, yeah, Australia's had a problem with the ozone layer over Australia.

Yeah, I think their lifestyle is pretty outdoorsy too.

Very much.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what do we know about pole shifts? We know that the poles are moving right now, right?

They are, yeah.

And what is the speed they're moving at?

Well, so the magnetic pole moves, right?

Right.

I don't know the speed. You can look up maps and see where it was at different times.

But it's currently moving. Like we've measured it.

It's always moving.

Right.

Yeah, and it kind of moves in a, you know, poorly shaped circle. And I don't think this isn't my field. It's, you know, more geophysics. But I don't think we fully understand what causes the magnetosphere to break down and regenerate, right? I mean, basically, we have a magnetosphere because we have a solid iron-nickel core surrounded by a liquid iron outer core.

Mm-hmm.

So that generates the magnetosphere, which is a very good thing to have. But I'm not sure exactly what causes it to break down over time.

So when it's you said it's moving in a circle. Is it akin to like the precession of the equinoxes?

It's not related to that.

Not related, but moving in the same sort of way like a wobble?

It's not a perfect circle.

Right.

I don't know. You could look it up. But there's a map of where the, you know, the magnetic pole is over time.

And what evidence do we have that shows that every 800,000 years ago, this happens? And what is the devastation or what is the result of this shift that we can observe from 800,000 plus years ago?

So in the right geological circumstances, then you need a really quiet body of water. So that could be in the deep sea. Or it could be in a deep lake. If you get fine grains of iron-rich particles settling, right, magnetic particles, they will orient themselves to the poles as they settle. And so you get rock layers that have a polarity to them. And geologists will go out. And they will drill in mountainsides. And they have to keep their core oriented.

So explain what that means, though, that it shifts. So north becomes south. South becomes north.

You could say that, yeah.

So just whoop.

Yeah.

And we don't really know what effect that has on the Earth, on the climate, on.

I don't think it's well known. It's not known to me. But I do not think it's well known, no.

Is there a way that we could figure that out? Like could we put that in Perplexity? See if Perplexity has an answer for what the fuck happens?

Well, the thing is that.

Because that sounds crazy. That sounds like it could be the end of civilization.

Well, it's a small interval of time. And it's very hard to catch a little interval of time in the fossil record, right?

A small interval of time that occurs every 800,000 years.

Or so.

Or so.

In some cases, like at the very end of the Cretaceous, there's about a 5 million year span where there's no magnetic flip.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Do we know why?

No.

Oh, boy.

I don't know. But that's not great for me, right? Because we use these flips. It's kind of like imagine you have like a geological strata is like a pole. And you have these stripes on the pole. And they have different widths where you can find your piece of the pole here. And somebody else has a piece of the pole there. And you can match them up and say, oh, there's the layer that's the same from Africa to South America. Well, at the end of the Cretaceous, it's like 5 million years and no flip. And that's mostly where I work. So I can't use that tool.

Interesting. And how did they figure out that it didn't flip during that time period?

Because when you find rocks of that age that are deposited in those quiet environments, the pole is just always facing the same direction.

For 5 million years.

Yeah.

And is there any kind of a working model of the potential disaster that would incur?

Not that I've seen.

That would occur? If you had a guess.

Yeah.

Like if you had to say like what could happen if the pole shifted tomorrow?

Well, it's interesting. I mean, I would guess and this is guessing that we would probably have an increased rate of cancer. We would maybe also have an increased rate of mutation. And so maybe this is something that historically has been like a spur to evolution. But, you know, I can't imagine anybody would think of it as a good thing.

Interesting about navigation. A lot of birds and some creatures in the sea use the magnetosphere for navigation. So that would really mess them up.

Would you say proposal or something?

Yeah, well, outcome of a pole shift that's been proposed. Now we're going to get to the truth.

Worst case scenario.

This is where it gets scary. This is for a magnetic reversal we've kind of been discussing. One of the most catastrophic proposals is a global environmental crisis. Severely weakened field allows more energetic particles into the atmosphere, damages the ozone layer, increases harmful ultraviolet radiation, and contributes to ecological disruption and extinctions. Researchers proposed this scenario in a 2021 study. But its sweeping consequences remain disputed rather than established. The Adams event hypothesis. Oh, I don't like that.

Is that the cave we've talked about with like 20,000, 30,000 people lived in it?

Right. Right.

Maybe a little wild.

Darren Cuyu, you mean?

Yeah.

Yeah. You know where that? No, I'm not.

OK, Darren Cuyu is a very weird archaeological discovery in Turkey where a guy was his chickens kept going missing through like a hole in the wall. And this guy breaks into this hole in the wall and then realizes it's kind of the beginning of a tunnel and then follows the tunnel in and finds an underground city that goes what does it go like 100 meters into the ground? It's suitable to house 20,000 plus people. And including there's air holes to the surface.

Wow. Wild.

And I think was this found in the '90s, Jamie?

It says '63.

'63. So this guy like just say, what's this? And then finds this thing. There's no record of it. It's carved into the ground. I mean, it's all carved into stone. It's really crazy. And when you learn how big it is, can you show like an image of the one there? That's what it looked like. So this is a representation of what is actually underground.

Wow.

Like how nuts is that?

That's amazing.

That these people lived there for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, because they really don't know how old this is. And this is underneath them the whole time and no explanation. Also, no historical record.

That's wild.

Also, I think last time we talked about they've only uncovered a portion of it, right?

Right. Right, so so far, they know that it could house 20,000 people. But who knows?

Wow.

It might be more of it. And then there's another one that's similar to that in China. The China one's really weird. There was a guy who had a pond. And he was draining his pond. And then upon draining his pond, he realized that there was some sort of an opening in the ground and then went through this opening in the ground. And there is this enormous underground chamber that's carved out of stone with staircases. And it's bananas.

Wow.

When you look and unfortunately, since the time of this guy's discovery, some people it seems like they've carved other like intricate artwork into the walls that probably weren't there. So you have like more than one timeline that's dealing with this. And when was this discovery?

Yeah.

'92? Yeah, I think it's '92. Right there, it says it. Yeah, that's it. So look how nuts this is. So no historical record. Like China has some of the most amazing historical records because it's an ancient civilization.

Sure.

And this guy found this draining a pond.

Oh, what does that say?

It says they kept draining ponds.

Oh, wow.

And they found two dozen more like it. Like so this is a huge underground complex that and if you look at all the machine lines on the walls, like how it's been carved, like what tools were they using? Like how did they do this? What was the engineering involved? How did you get all the stone out of there? No record anywhere mentions who made them or why.

That's wild.

Wow.

I started my career working in the Bahri Oasis of Egypt. And, you know, we were there for dinosaurs. But since we worked there in 2000, 2001, they started finding mummies there. And these were like Roman-era mummies. And they have found thousands of them since then. And they now call it Valley of the Golden Mummies.

Wow.

And so during Roman times, you know, Egypt was ancient to them. And it was very fashionable to be buried like an ancient Egyptian. And there were thousands of these then.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's cool. My friend David Cho, he did a thing back in the early Vice days where he went into the Congo looking for a dinosaur because there's like people in the Congo that swear that there's something that lives deep in the Congo that the way they describe it, it sounds like some long-necked dinosaur, brontosaurus-looking thing. Are you aware of that?

I'm not. But.

You never heard that?

I'd like to take a look at it.

Yeah, me too. But you never heard that rumor?

Mm-mm.

See if you can find what the hell that's supposed to be. There's a name that they have for it. Yeah. You want to try that name?

Mm-hmm.

Mokali Mbembe? So the way they describe it and by the way, these are people that have no access to history books. These are people that like a lot of these villagers, they have no access, no contact with the Western world when they were describing this, which is really weird. So they're describing a brontosaurus. And at least this is how people have drawn how they described it. So in the 1980s, Roy Mackle, microbiologist from the University of Chicago, conducted multiple expeditions to locate the animal.

It is.

It's enormous. And it's really dangerous.

Really dangerous.

Like getting in there.

It's really dense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you go there, you know, especially now, there's like an Ebola outbreak.

Yeah.

And then that's probably the easiest thing to deal with. There's like some serious war going on there.

Mm-hmm.

Very, very dangerous place to be.

Yeah.

So not a whole lot of people going out looking for that dinosaur.

Now, you know, the thing that I always think about when you hear about like these crypto-biological species is there has to be a breeding population of them to exist, right?

Right.

Like there can't be one like this monster.

One big foot.

One big foot. There has to be a breeding population. And, you know, if that's 1,000, like you're not going to miss 1,000 plesiosaur-sized creatures in the Loch Ness, right?

Right.

You're just not going to miss it. And you're probably going to have evidence if there's 1,000, you know, giant apes walking around Washington.

The Loch Ness one is look, you ever been to Scotland?

Yeah.

I love Scotland.

I love Scotland.

Awesome place.

Best place to hike.

People love to get hammered. And they love to tell stories. OK? And you live next to a giant lake.

That whiskey is pretty good.

And you're worried about kids drowning. You make up stories about monsters.

Right.

And then also, you're bored. So these stories about monsters, they get more exaggerated and more fantastic. And, you know.

Absolutely.

We're calling, come over here and tell your story. And the guy tells this fucking crazy story of a monster he saw when he was fishing one day. Of course, it's fun.

Yeah.

Like having especially when you're dealing with people back then, I mean, this originates back when there's no books. OK? And then you get to books. And these stories have been told forever and ever. And you don't really know what the fuck is in that water because there's no way to know.

Yeah.

You don't have a submarine. No one goes in there. A lot of unknown. That makes sense to me. Bigfoot also makes sense. The woods are big. Who knows what's out there? It's when people who live in an environment talk about something. Like there I watched a documentary. It was kind of a sad documentary of this guy who was looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon. And he was convinced that he was going to find a giant sloth in the Amazon. This was going to make his career. But it just goes over the period of time where he continues to look for this sloth.

Yeah, although, you know, there's a lot of unexplored parts of the Amazon, right?

Right.

Or little explored. And like when was the old copy discovered? Wasn't that in the '60s? I mean.

What is the old copy?

It's a big plant-eating animal in Southeast Asia. But, you know, I mean, it's rare to find a big unknown animal today, right?

That's the old copy?

Yeah.

Oh, I've seen that before. Yeah, that thing's cool.

Yeah, and I think they weren't known until, you know, last century.

That's nuts.

And so, you know, I mean, there are definitely things out there to be discovered. But you have to be skeptical when it's in a place like Scotland or Washington State, you know.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

But the Congo.

Yeah, I mean, every time biologists go to a place like the Congo or the Amazon, they find new species. Now, most of those species are like beetles and things.

Right.

But who knows what's out there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's what's interesting.

Yeah.

Like, you know, they have found those particularly large chimpanzees in the Congo. There's a tribe of very large chimpanzees.

Like actual chimps, not the.

Yeah, the actual chimps.

Binobos live there too.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, not binobos. They call them bealey apes or the bondo ape. And it's just a much larger chimpanzee.

Yeah, interesting.

And they ground-nest. They ground-nest like gorillas. It's really, really weird.

Yeah.

The locals call them lion-eaters. They have two versions of the chimpanzees. They call them tree beaters and lion-eaters. It doesn't really mean they kill lions.

Yeah.

Like they call them lion killers, but like it's probably an exaggeration. Although they did catch one eating a leopard. But they don't know if this one was and this is like scientists. Like there's a guy, a Swedish wildlife photographer, Carl Aman, I believe is his name. He started looking for these things in the 1990s. And he got a bunch of camera trap photos of them, just particularly large chimpanzees, like some of them as big as six feet tall. They even shot one at an airfield. There's this photograph of these two guys with one they shot.

Wow.

It's really weird.

Wow.

And so this was this is a real animal. Like there's video of them. They have fecal samples. They have bones. They have all kinds of things. There's really some confusing bones too. Like one of the skulls has a crest like a gorilla's, you know, which would indicate like massive mandible muscles.

Right.

But they so they thought maybe it was a hybrid of a chimpanzee and some other ape. But now they think it's no, it's just one weird group of chimps that seems to be quite a bit larger than the regular chimp.

Yeah.

So you can find that photo of the dead one with the at the airport because the dead one at the airport is kooky. Like these dudes behind it, and they're like they shot it at an airport. And you look at it, you're like, what? That is so big.

Yeah.

Like that's the biggest chimp I've ever seen in my life. And so the point is, like these things were just rumors for a long time because this is such a remote area and because it's very hard to get funding to go look for some crazy monkey that no one is sure is real or not.

Sure.

And you have to convince your university.

It's very hard to get money for discovery. I mean, I faced that early in my career. Like, you know, it's always, well, how do you know you'll find something? Like. I don't know. But I do know how to find things.

Look at that photo.

Wow.

Isn't that crazy?

That's big.

That thing's huge.

Really big.

Like how weird. So I mean, there's things that are real that don't seem like they should be real.

Yeah.

You know, like the hobbit people they found on the island of Flores.

Yeah, Homo floresiensis.

Yeah.

It's amazing, right?

Yeah, I just had a whole podcast about that the other day.

Yeah, that's so cool.

It's.

And I remember when that came out, there was an immense pushback, right?

Yeah.

And they said, no, it's got to be a pathological individual. And then they started finding more and more. And now it's, you know, now I think it's convention that these that was a species that existed.

Yes. And then they found was Gregory IV, was his name? Brilliant guy who was on who was explaining us to he was one of the people that went over there. He had actually heard about them from the people that lived on that island in the 1980s, long before it was ever discovered.

Yeah.

And then got eyewitness accounts of people who claimed to have still seen them on the island as recently as like a couple months before the discovery. Yeah, it was really kooky stuff.

Yeah.

And then there's people that have there's a depiction that these guys had that went to the island or a description of a tall monkey that they had encountered that was walking on two feet in the 2019. Really weird.

That is weird.

And there's they found bones that indicate that they lived or a similar type species lived in the Philippines. They found them in China. They found them the Homo naledi, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

There's another one in Africa.

Yep.

Really wild stuff.

Yeah.

So it's like.

Yeah, it's a recent discovery.

Yeah, it's cool, you know, that there's so much still to be discovered.

We're really.

We're still in the mysteries.

So you're like the hominid group is more like a bush now.

Yeah.

You know, and there's it's rare that we are the only species of human alive on the planet today. Usually, there's a bunch.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, like the Denisovans and all these different ones that.

Yeah, we're learning so much more about them.

Yeah.

You know, and there's so much good Neanderthal research happening right now. And they're no longer portrayed as like these brutish cavemen. Like they were making stone tools. They, you know, it looks like they had art, maybe burials. I think there's some evidence to that. And they were us. They're in our genes as well. You know, one of the things that like I think I'm happiest about, have you ever had your DNA run by like 23andMe or one of those?

Yeah.

So according to 23andMe, I have more Neanderthal markers in my genome than 99% of their customers.

Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah.

I'm 57%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My wife said I could have saved you $100.

Ah. But that's based on the old idea of Neanderthals being dopes, right?

Right.

Yeah.

They did have larger brain capacity, right?

They had larger brains than we do. Yeah, they were a little more broad shoulder, definitely stronger than we are. But, you know, to some degree, they're still with us. I think, you know, you heard Beth Shapiro say on your show that if you took the Neanderthal genes that are in humanity today collectively, you could put back together almost the entire Neanderthal genome.

Yeah, which is wildly unethical.

Well, yeah. Yeah, it would be. And we should not do that. But.

Or should we?

I mean, if I lived in China, I mean, I think I'd propose that to the government. You know, I'd be like, listen, let's fuck it.

Yeah, that would be a supremely bad idea.

Would it be? I don't know. Maybe they'd be happy you did it.

Maybe.

Maybe like, thanks for bringing me back.

Yeah, I don't know. We have a lot of problems already today. I think that was.

Well, isn't it interesting that we are so we're so enamored by our ability to manipulate science and manipulate matter and life that we're willing to bring back the mammoth? Everybody thinks that's a good idea. Like there's zero pushback if you decide to bring back the mammoth. People are like, yeah, definitely should do that. They brought back the dire wolf, right?

Yep.

No problem.

Yeah.

I mean, a few people's like, that's not really a dire wolf. But if they brought back a Neanderthal, everybody would be like, hey.

I think so, yeah.

You can't do that.

Yeah.

That's us.

Yeah.

Isn't that weird?

It is kind of.

It's kind of weird.

I mean, I think colossals doing amazing work.

Oh, they definitely are.

Yeah, I'm involved.

Shout out to Ben Lam.

Yeah.

Ben Lam, Ben.

Ben Lam, he's great. I'm an advisor to the company. And so it's just fascinating. I go there, and I feel like I'm in a movie. It's incredible.

It's very Jurassic Park.

You've been there, right?

Yeah, I took my daughter.

Yeah, it's incredible.

Yeah, it's really awesome.

Yeah.

Like they're trying to bring back the Thylacine, which is crazy.

Yeah.

But bringing back a Neanderthal would be a giant problem. That's a like a movie.

I think.

It's a terrible movie.

Well, nobody I know wants to do that.

Nobody you know that wants to talk about it. I bet people have thought about it.

Well.

Working long hours in the lab, drinking coffee, go outside for a cigarette. You know, it'd be fucking cool.

I don't know. I hope not.

Should bring back the fucking Neanderthals. If you got if someone found Denisovan DNA and they found out the Denisovans actually had a very large cerebral cortex and were probably smarter than us, would it be cool to bring them back?

Well, not to me. But, you know, there are people out there.

Why not?

Well, I like the way the nature does it.

Oh, OK. Except when it comes to animals that aren't as smart. And then we're willing to bring them back. Isn't that interesting?

Well, you know, my view of like the things that colossal is working on, like the mammoth and the Thylacine, the marsupial wolf, and the dodo, and the blue buck, I mean, these are creatures that recently went extinct largely at our hand. And so this is still their world. You know, people conflate the idea of mammoths and dinosaurs. Mammoths were just here. I mean, the last mammoths went extinct about 3,000 years ago.

Right, they were on an island, right?

Wrangell Island, off Siberia. So 3,000 years ago, that's a world that has pyramids and written stories and beer, right?

Yeah.

Like if you're in a world that has beer, that's our world, right? And they have a place in that world. Their ecosystem is still here. They're just absent from it.

Yeah, I get it. But still, let them stay dead. Why do you have to bring them back?

Well, put it this way. If.

I'm just I'm playing devil's advocate.

Yeah.

Clearly, I want them to bring them back. I think it's cool.

Let's say, I don't know, pick a species. Pick the cheetah.

OK.

So the cheetah goes extinct on Monday. And if I said, Joe, I could bring back the cheetah on Tuesday, would you do it?

Hmm, me?

I mean, it's only been one day. They've been gone for a day.

Yeah, I think cheetahs are cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, I want to bring them back.

What if it's a year later? And I said, well, I could bring back the cheetah now, a year later?

I would say yeah.

It's still the same world, right?

Right.

What if it's 1,000 years later?

Well, now you're messing with reality because the ecosystem has adjusted and changed.

A bit. I mean, you know, 1,000 years ago is, you know.

Well, interestingly enough, we have a few animals that have adaptations that exist because of animals that were eating them that were extinct, like the pronghorn.

Yeah.

North American pronghorn is.

They're so fast.

Fast as shit.

Because they're running away from cheetahs that no longer exist.

That no longer exist.

Yeah.

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

But like 1,000 years ago, that's like William the Conqueror, right?

Yeah.

Like that's the same world.

Oh, yeah.

That's this world.

Yeah.

So, you know, where do you draw the line?

Right, right, right.

I draw the line at like, you know, during the time of humans, that's still basically this world. And they have a place in this world.

Well, that was the Mr. IV when we had the conversation about these tiny hominids. One of the things was, what would you do if you found them? Are you allowed to catch one? You know what I mean? Like is this like a is this like a kidnapping a human?

Yeah, I think it would be, yeah.

Right.

They're people.

Kind of.

Yeah.

But they're covered in hair, and they don't have stone tools. And we don't even know if they have a language, right?

Mm-hmm.

So is it a monkey?

Yeah. I mean.

Right? But anything smarter than a monkey would be like, leave it alone. Leave it alone. But if it's a monkey, like, yeah, put it in the zoo. Like, no problem. You go to the zoo. The monkeys are there. But something just a little smarter than a monkey, like, oh, man, that's fucked up.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

You know, like you go to a zoo, and you look at a gorilla, and like there's somebody home.

Oh, I don't like it.

Right?

I don't like it at all.

Like there's totally somebody home.

I do not like primates at the zoo.

No.

It drives me crazy.

Yeah.

I went to the Denver Zoo with my kids. And there was this this was quite a long time ago. There was this one particular area where they had all the primates caged. And this one monkey was wailing, just screaming. And I think he was just frustrated. Just he's just living in hell. He's in prison. He's just like, and I'm like, I don't like that sound. That sounds like pain. That sounds like suffering. Like, why the fuck do they have can we just make it's 20 whatever it was back then, 2020, whatever it was.

Yeah.

It's like it seems especially these little tiny-ass cages. It's one thing if you have a giant enclosure, and they get trees and free food and no eagles eating them. Great, fun times.

Right.

But the actual little zoo cages with a primate in it is really fucked up.

Yeah, yeah, it is. I remember in grad school, I went to the National Zoo one time because it was free. And I was in grad school. And like that's what I could do. I saw this elephant. It reached through the bars in its enclosure. And it grabbed this pointy rock. And it started scraping the sidewalk with it. And then it scraped its leg. And then it set the rock down. And it felt the sidewalk. And it felt its leg. And it was comparing the two.

Wow.

And you could see like it was it was really thinking about it. It was a smart being there.

Right, it's trying to measure the hardness of things and see if it could dig its way out.

Maybe, yeah.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe thinking of there's got to be a way out of this. That's hell. I just it's great when you have kids because they get to see animals that don't.

Yeah.

But it's there's something really dark about a lot of those places. One of the one cool one is the San Diego Zoo. Have you ever been to San Diego?

I have been. And, you know, zoos do so much great conservation work.

Yeah.

Like they are really, you know, some of the engines of conservation that are keeping species that are right on the brink from teetering over. I think the San Diego Zoo is largely responsible for the emerging recovery of the California condor.

Mm-hmm.

You know, they were down to 22 individuals, I think, in around 1970.

Wow.

So they collected all of them from the wild and had a very careful breeding program to try to get them through this genetic bottleneck. And they started releasing them. And now there's a new population of California condors in Zion Canyon in Utah. And so I think there's only about 550 of them alive right now. But they're, you know, they're up from 22. They're moving in the right direction, which is great.

Yeah, no, that is cool.

And that's an example of zoo conservation. You know, they do great work in general.

They also have large enclosures.

Yeah.

In San Diego.

They do. It's a very nice zoo.

And you can go in like one of those jeeps, and you drive around. And animals come up, and you can feed them.

Yeah.

It's pretty weird. They don't seem to be tortured. I always say that like the animals that seem the happiest at the zoo are giraffes. They don't seem bothered by the zoo at all because they're just like, another day with no lions.

Yeah.

Just wandering around like they're the only animal at the zoo that they will let you feed them. A baby can feed them. Like a child, a small child can hold up a leaf of lettuce. And they'll come over with their crazy tongue and wrap it around the lettuce. And everybody screams, oh, my god.

Right. I don't get the impression that giraffes are like the sharpest knives in the drawer, you know?

They definitely aren't.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

Well, they fight with their heads.

Right.

You ever see they fight?

Yeah, it's like a bad idea.

They whip their necks. It's crazy. That's what those little horns are for. They're those little things that they have to fuck each other up with.

Did you see Apple TV's "Prehistoric Planet"?

No.

With David Attenborough?

No, I didn't.

So like great CGI. But they had my dinosaur, Dreadnaughtus, in there is in episode two. And I had the thrill of hearing Sir David say, "Dreadnaughtus," you know, which is my ringtone now, by the way.

Oh, that's cool.

But they had a fight scene of Dreadnaughtus who were like slapping each other with their heads like giraffes do, which I think they would absolutely not do. Their necks are really long and lightly built, filled a lot with air. And their heads are tiny. Like a giant Dreadnaughtus has a head that's not much bigger than a horse head.

Why didn't they consult with you or someone like you?

Well, that's a good question, Joe.

It seems like a.

I'm not sure.

Some producer got involved. Some jackass.

So they had a very good paleontologist, Darren Naish, who is in England. But Darren sends me a message a couple of weeks before it debuts. And he says, you know, Kenneth, I have to tell you something. We wanted to portray this idea that dinosaurs must have had amazing soft tissue structures that we'll never know about. So I decided to give Dreadnaughtus pop-out neck bladders, like a grouse. And he says, this was my decision. And I realize you'll have to answer the neck bladder question for the rest of your days.

Darren, why did he make that?

I don't know. And so everywhere I go now to give a talk, I have to answer the neck bladder question.

And this was just one guy's idea?

Yeah, yeah. And so they.

Did you have a conversation with him saying, I don't think that was a good idea?

Well, it was too late. He was telling me like two weeks before the show.

Why would he do that?

Why would he do that to my dinosaur in particular? I'm not sure. But yeah, there we go.

Ew.

So yeah. And so in the show, they go like, and as part of their mating ritual.

Oh, come on. That's like so creative.

I'm giving a.

Such a creative guest.

I'm giving a talk in San Antonio tomorrow. And I guarantee I will get the neck bladder question.

Look at how it's like said like almost like it's fact here.

Yeah.

Despite its external bulk, the internal physics of Dreadnaughtus relied on weight reduction. Its vertebrae were pneumatized, containing a complex system of air sacs.

Well, that part's true.

Replaced heavy bone with air, but not the outside.

Not the outside.

Those big white things. He just made those up.

Made up, yeah.

And like even the distance between them, the size of them, all just creative.

Yeah, no evidence.

That's kooky for that.

There's no evidence for that.

That's really kooky.

But these big dinosaurs do have pneumatized skeletons, which means that they have air bladders that go through their skeletons. Their skeletons are very honeycombed. So they lose mass, but they don't lose a lot of strength.

OK.

And if you're that big.

Like a bird.

Like a bird. Because birds are dinosaurs.

Right.

So if you're the size of a house, if you took elephant anatomy and scaled it up to Dreadnaughtus size, I think its proteins would start to denature, which means cook, right, inside of its own body. And so their big metabolic challenge is shedding heat. So how do they do that? Well, one thing is that long neck and long tail gives them a lot of surface area per volume. So they can shed heat that way.

Like elephants' ears.

Yes, but like super long, right?

Right.

Dreadnaughtus had a 40-foot long tail and a 30-foot long neck. But then they have these pneumatic invasions. They get more and more pneumatized over their growth, the growth of an individual. And we're not sure. But it seems likely to me that those pneumatic tubes that go through their skeleton are connected to their lungs. And they have what we call bird-style lungs, which kind of should be called dinosaur-style lungs because they had them before birds. But the way a bird and a dinosaur breathes is in this two-step process.

Whoa.

Yeah. So it's a really efficient way of breathing. And as a result of this, birds are really good in what we call hypoxic conditions, right, low oxygen. That's why like the barred goose can fly over the Himalayas, right?

Yeah.

No bat can do that. But a barred goose can do that.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And so this might be a way, if it's connected to the pneumatic invasions in their skeleton, where they can dump heat into their environment.

We were in Scotland. And there's this lady that was she was a what is it called when a person trains birds?

Oh, right.

Whatever it was.

Yeah.

A person that trains birds.

Yeah.

And, you know, you had the glove. You put the glove on.

Yeah.

And you chain an eagle.

Yeah.

And the eagle landed on my arm. And I was shocked at how light they are.

Yeah.

And it's because of the bones.

Yeah, and, you know, birds.

It's big.

Have a lot of yeah. But they have all kinds of weight-saving adaptations. Hollow bones. They've lost their teeth, right? Teeth are heavy. So birds just have beaks. And this happens you can see in the Cretaceous period, the birds starting to lose their teeth. So there's birds alive at the end of the Cretaceous, like one called Hesperornis, which looks kind of like a coomer ant today, looks very, very modern, but has teeth still, right?

And then there's birds like the shoebill that seem like they're from like 100 million years ago.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Those are other birds, isn't it? Oh, those things are so weird.

Yeah.

And then they start cracking. They slam their jaws together and make that nutty sound.

Yeah.

That sounds like gunfire.

And, you know, the hoatsin. It's a bird when it's born, it has claws like, you know, harking back to its non-avian dinosaur days. And they climb around.

Really?

Yeah.

When it's born?

Yeah, there it is.

That's a real live bird?

Yeah.

OK, that's a dinosaur. That is 100% a dinosaur.

It's cool. Is that an actual picture? Or is that AI?