Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This is played forward,
real people, real stories, the struggle to play it forward. Episode
number five ninety eight is with Stephanie Warren Drimmer from National Geographics Jurassic Smarts.
I'm doing great. How are you? Absolutely fantastic. Today's a blessed day
because so often when we get the opportunity to talk with the people involved with
the National Geographics, we get to talk to the illustrators and the editors and
stuff. So to be talking to the physical author this is a blessing because
listeners need to hear your voice, hear your passion, and hear your dreams
of reaching them. Well, I appreciate that. That's pretty flattering. Now
we got to talk about page number one hundred and thirty one here because I
thought Gastonia, North Carolina was a weird name until the dinosaur. You've got
a dinosaur called a Gastonia, that's right. And it was one of the
armored dinosaurs covered sort of ed to tail with the enormous bikes. These dinosaurs
they're called ankylosaurs, and they were basically impenetrable armor. One of the things
about dinosaurs, I mean, all the way back to when I was just
a wee little kid in the state of Montana. I scoured that land because
there was always those rumors of finding fossils. Do kids still do that today?
Absolutely? Kids are still making really interesting dinosaur discoveries, and as you
mentioned, a lot of dinosaurs are still being discovered in Montana. The United
States was home to a lot of dinosaurs, including t Rex. The United
States was the homeland of t Rex. But of course, dinosaurs wanked everywhere
on the planet. They have been discovered on absolutely every continent. They roamed
from coast to coast, everywhere. What's really fascinating about this book Jurassic Smarts
is the fact that you go in there and you have the destination dino.
And because a lot of people are gonna say, oh my god, Colorado,
I would have never thought Colorado, right absolutely. And you know,
one of the things I wondered when I started writing this was, I don't
know if you have the same perception, but I always picture paleontologists digging for
fossils in the desert and they're sweating and it's very hot, and I wondered
why that is, you know, And it turns out that the reason that
paleontologists are always in the desert is not because dinosaurs lived in deserts. In
fact, like I said, dinosaurs lived everywhere. There is land every corner
of planet Earth, from mountains to valleys to riverbanks, you know, you
name it, dinosaurs lived there. The reason that we look in deserts is
simply because fossils are easiest to find there. You know, they can be
poking up above the sand. There's erosion that can bring them up to the
surface, and it's just a lot easier to scan the ground of the desert
for fossils instead of you know, for example, in a forest. But
as we continued to develop new technologies, we're finding more and more dinosaurs in
all kinds of environments. It was usually on top of the rocks and things
like that in Wyoming as well. Is that in the dry lands. That's
where we usually found the fossils, and then we would take pictures and everything.
But it was always the rule, do not touch it, don't bring
it home, do nothing with it. We just wanted the thrill of victory.
That is super cool. I would love to find a dinosaur fossil on
myself. No, no, I don't know they were the fish is what
it was. I mean, but a fish still fits into the dinosaur,
does it not. So there were amazing animals that lived in the oceans in
dinosaur tents. They were not dinosaurs. There were a different family or different
families, but they included you know, they often get overlooked, and if
some editors out there listening, let's do a book on dinosaur era ocean animals,
because there were some absolutely enormous, ferocious predators with super sharp pis,
you know, super super deadly, really cool animals to talk about, and
there are some of them in this book. But they are not Dinosaurs's just
just animals that lived at the same time. So when you are invited to
be the author of a book like this, I mean, I can't imagine
what kind of research that you've got to go through. Yeah, it's a
lot of reading. I been doing this for about twelve years, writing science
and nature books for kids, and I had never done a dinosaur book.
I was always a little bummed about that because I they were so cool,
so I was really excited to get this book. And because I didn't have
a ton of knowledge about dinosaurs, I started by reading a lot of books
aimed at adults for dinosaurs, and I also did a lot of interviews with
paleontologists and other dinosaur experts. But I can tell you that what I learned,
what you learned in school, pretty much all all of it was wrong.
I mean, pretty much everything we thought about dinosaurs is now being proven
incorrect. I was going to ask you about that, because that's one of
the clear statements you start from the very beginning, that we didn't have it
right. Now, we're let's start all over, reboot, reboot, Yes,
I mean, And one of the most obvious visual differences is that we
now know that many, if not most dinosaurs had feathers, including therapods,
perhaps including t rex. So we have are learning all kinds of new things
about what these feathers look like. We can even know what colors they were
in some cases, and for some dinosaurs they were very, very bright and
colorful. Scientists are learning why dinosaurs has feathers. Some of them flew,
but the first feathers we're now thinking probably likely evolved to be used in mating
displays. And that might sound weird, but if you think about modern birds,
which are also dinosaurs, the only ones that survived the extinction. They
use their feathers. You know, we've all seen those amazing nature videos of
birds shaking their tail, feathers, flapping their wings to show off for potential
mates, and it's very likely that dinosaurs use their own feathers for the same
thing. I can totally see that with it with the mud dragon, because
I mean, I mean, look at that schnas. I mean, look
at those eyes, the colors in the eyes, the feathers and everything,
and the beauty of the chest looks like it would be flatting that around.
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, they certainly showed off for each other.
Would the human being ever be looked upon as being prehistoric because they say we
were there? So dinosaurs went extinct except for the small group of flying dinosaurs
we now call birds. Dinosaurs all went extinct sixty six million years ago when
an asteroid the size of a small city slammed into Earth. Lived on our
planet before that for one hundred and sixty million years wow, And modern humans
we didn't show up how about two hundred thousand years ago, So you know,
we can think we've been around for a long time. We've gone from
living in caves to living in skyscrapers in two hundred thousand years, but we
have only lived for about eight hundred times less than dinosaurs lived on. I
was in a conversation with my little guy across the street who's four years old,
and we were talking about the color of dinosaurs, because I mean I
read in the book that we have it all wrong. And you should have
seen his eyes, because we all think they're just gray, muddy and ugly.
Right, Yeah, I mean for so long we were just guessing about
what color dinosaurs were, and now we can use electron microscopes to look at
fossilized pigments in some dinosaur feathers and see what color they were. We know
there was one dinosaur I'm thinking of in Cornice. It was a flying dinosaur.
It had black and white draped wings and this great red mohawk on his
head. So it's totally not what is in the Texas from your childhood.
Yeah, I'm not even going to try to pronounce this dude's name. He's
got like the foxtail. It's a sinosaurra PERTEXI waxy. Why where do you
guys come up with these names? Well, you con sciences for that.
That is not my responsibility. If I was naming dinosaurs, I would call
them all like supersaurus something a little catch here. But sciences have naming conventions
they need here too. So now, where would be the best place to
go looking for dinosaurs? I mean, I mean you said that's it's pretty
much worldwide, but I mean I'm even seeing here stuff in Cleveland. I
mean, that's the heart of rock and roll. I didn't realize there were
dinosaurs there. Like I said, dinosaurs were absolutely everywhere on our planet.
So where you're walking your kids to the butt stop where you're going to work,
dinosaurs once lived there. Where can people go to find out more information,
Stephanie, Because you know how kids are these days. They want something
on the internet that they can put their hands on. Yeah. I mean
you can find this book pretty much anywhere books are sold, one of Google,
Google Jurassic Smarts. It'll pop up. It just came out yesterday,
so it's brand new. Please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you stuff, because I
love talking with the authors. Oh thank you, Well, maybe the next
book, you bet will you'd be brilliant today. Okay, thank you