Hello, and good morning, Steve. How are you doing today? Hello,
Ero, I'm doing good. How are you? Absolutely fantastic. I'll
tell you get when you team up with National Geographic Kids, you not only
make me feel like a kid, but you educate me as an adult because
what you've got in this book here is stuff nobody's ever talked about. I
never even thought about this stuff in this until right now. Well that's what
we're excited about with the book because it's fun. This book. I think
it's engaging, but it's also educational. And my role on it was to
check the facts, make sure the science was right, and I think that
something NAT GEO does uniquely well. And I hope the book really does help
people envision what it was like to be back in the age of dinosaurs.
You know, I had one of those little kid moments when you were talking
about you better like the taste of insects, and I'm going, oh,
come on, but it's the truth. I mean, you definitely had to
get you had to get your protein from somewhere. You did so you could
hunt to try saratops if you want to, probably posed statures, or you
could eat a lot of insects when you say that you have to go and
do the research. Where where is this information even located at? I mean,
it can't be just on Google. Well, you know, I'm a
paleontologist and it's my job to study dinosaurs and dig up dinosaurs and other fossils,
kind of like a historian it's their job to study human history. So
for me and for other paleontologists, we train for a long time. We
get a lot of experience in collecting and interpreting fossils. And the fossils are
the clues from Earth history. These are the dinosaur bones and teeth and skeletons
that are preserved in rock that tell us what the world used to be like
and who the characters were in these ancient worlds. And so there's not a
single source of information on paleontology, just like there isn't on history or any
other field. But those of us who study these things we build up a
lot of specialist knowledge. And we of course build up a lot of technical
knowledge on things and databases and in technical books, academic books and so on.
But that stuff's not very accessible to the public. So one of the
things I love about books like How to Survive in the Age of Dinosaurs and
other books of National Geographic does is that it brings that really highly technical information
into the public realm in an engaging and fun way. Well, you teach
us that the figure known as the human back then, it wasn't all about
just living in a cave. You have a way that it teaches us that
we slept in trees. And then what I love though, is on the
next page you kind of teach us on how to do it in this modern
world. Yeah, that's what we want people to think about as well.
You know, the Age of Dinosaurs was a long time ago, long before
there were any humans on the planet. You know, we never did have
to stare down at t Rex, thankfully, but by thinking about what that
might have been like and thinking about how to survive in a world that was
so old. The atmosphere was different, but the temperature was different, that
the climate was different, that the types of plants around were different. That
having that thought process will help people also, especially young people, understand the
world around them today and understand that the earth does change and that organisms have
to deal with that. I have to adapt to that. So I hope
that by looking into the deep past, it gives people a greater appreciation for
the present. You know, it's kind of scary, is the fact that
you say that humans were on that food chain. It's like, what,
But then when you sit back and think about it, you're going, yeah,
we definitely we weren't the dominant one back then. No, I mean
humans, our species has only been around for a few hundred thousand years,
and before then there were actually other species of humans which were our cousins and
ancestors, but they haven't been around for that long. And you know,
the age of dinosaurs was millions and millions and millions of years ago, and
we had mammal ancestors that lived with the dinosaurs. You know, we had
actual ancestors that did have to survive underfoot of t rex And I think that's
a fascinating thing to think about. And of course those ancestors had to endure
the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. So I think by looking back at
the age of dinosaurs, we're not just looking at an alien world, but
we're looking at the roots of our world today. We're looking at our deepest
history. What's fascinating here is and I would have never thought about this,
but you actually give us the insight on how we could have trained those dinosaurs.
We you know, I mean movies. We ran away from them,
we were in fear of them, We didn't train them. But in your
book you kind of show us the way. It's funny, and I know
this is going to strike some people as really weird, and it's similar in
some ways to the storyline and the recent Jurassic World films where Chris Pratt's character
is training, almost domesticating some of these raptor dinosaurs. And that seems nuts,
right of, like training of a lasso raptor. But let's think about
it. You know what's a dog. A dog is a wolf basically that
humans thousands of years ago domesticated, They made it docile, they turned it
in turn it from something that was a fierce predator of ours into a companion.
And so more than twenty five times humans have taken a wild animal and
domesticated it. A chicken is another example of that. And birds are actually
dinosaurs. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. They're part of the dinosaur family tree.
The raptor dinosaurs were the ancestors of today's birds. So when that fence,
humans have already domesticated some dinosaurs. So I think if we lived back in
the Jurassic period, there would have been dinosaurs around that we could have domesticated
and used to our own advantage. Dinosaurs weren't the only dangers that the human
back then, the Neanderthals were facing. I mean I never even thought about
this, and we deal with this all the time even today. Volcanoes,
yes, yes, and volcanoes are nasty, I mean can be very destructive.
You think some of the eruptions like Mount Saint Helens or Pinatubo once that
humans have witnessed very recently, people die, you know, it destroys communities.
But these volcanoes today are nothing compared to some of the enormous megavolcanoes that
once erupted. There were times when there were volcanoes that were basically like Grand
Canyon sized fissures in the earth that opened up and spewed out rivers of lava
for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. I mean imagine the destruction,
and the destruction was vast. These volcanoes were so powerful they released so
much nasty gas from deep in the earth that they poisoned the atmosphere. They
led to climate change, and they led to big extinctions were a huge percentage
up so one of these extinctions, up to ninety five percent of all species
died because of these volcanoes. So imagine and just be thankful that humans have
never had to endure this. So many of your pictures include these big,
big jungles, and to me, I look at these trees and I think
it had to have been hot. So I mean, really, were the
temperatures cooler than what we are right now since they say that we're in this
this this hot period now, or are we just pretty much hanging out with
the same kind of you know, vibe weather vibe. The temperatures today are
quite different than they were during the age of dinosaurs. On the whole,
the age of dinosaurs was warmer than today. There were no ice caps,
there were no big glaciers, there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
more greenhouse gas, and so in general the world was much warmer. So
that's interesting, right, because our world is changing today. The climates are
changing today. So by studying dinosaurs, by looking back into the past,
we can actually understand what the world was like when it was Warmer. That's
valuable information for us to a lot of the younger kids Generation Z as well
as this new Alpha generation. They can't survive without their internet. I mean,
I can't imagine them stepping back into a dinosaur world, you know what.
There you go, see. I don't think we didn't cover that in
the book, you know, of course, but some but you're right,
are the the many different technologies and trappings of modern society. If anything,
might make us more vulnerable if we went back in time and all of a
sudden didn't have our phone to pull out a map to see which route we
should take to best move away from the t rex nursery or whatever. You
know. So I think we would have to go back to nature. And
that's something that a lot of us are not used to. And that's a
fun thing to think about. Oh yeah, because I'm an RV and I
depend you know, whatever camp ground, I'm going to a better internet so
I can have, you know, so I can do what I need to
do with it with my internet. I'm with you there. I mean,
I'm not in our V but I love camp but we camp out, you
know a lot when we're doing field work to dig up fossils. We're going
to be going out to New Mexico soon in a couple of weeks to do
that, and we're really out in the middle of nowhere. They're very bad
reception, and at first it's always weird, but you know, and I
kind of like it when not having all the emails to come in from the
university, all the the aureaucratic stuff I have to do when you're digging things
up. Because I believe in this theory called dear future reader. I'm a
daily writer, so I always look at it as being letters to somebody in
the future. I'll never meet them. Do you feel that the dinosaurs have
left you a message? Yeah, they have through the fossil. Through the
fossils, we find it's a message that maybe they didn't intend to leave.
I don't think anything ever intends to become a fossil, but it's a message
from the past. And it's the same way I think archaeologists find clues from
human history. It just tells us what their world was like. It helps
us see how the Earth has changed, how the Earth is a very old
planet, how the Earth has been through so much. It helps us really
as paleontologists really are historians prehistorians, and it just helps us understand the Earth.
And that's what I love about beating a paleontologist. Man, you've got
to come back to this show anytime in the future, Steve. The door
is always going to be open for you. Well, thank you, Ero,
it's great. I love your enthusiasm. I think we play off each
other well because we love It's so cool. It's so fun to think about
these things. I got a great job being able to study dinosaurs, and
I love talking about them. So let's do it again, and vicariously we
live through you, sir. You'd be brilliant today. Okay, all right,
thanks a lot. Cheers, grow