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Hey, thanks for being a part
of the conversation. This is played forward,

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real people, real stories, the
struggle to play it forward. Episode

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number five ninety eight is with Stephanie
Warren Drimmer from National Geographics Jurassic Smarts.

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I'm doing great. How are you? Absolutely fantastic. Today's a blessed day

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because so often when we get the
opportunity to talk with the people involved with

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the National Geographics, we get to
talk to the illustrators and the editors and

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stuff. So to be talking to
the physical author this is a blessing because

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listeners need to hear your voice,
hear your passion, and hear your dreams

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of reaching them. Well, I
appreciate that. That's pretty flattering. Now

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we got to talk about page number
one hundred and thirty one here because I

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thought Gastonia, North Carolina was a
weird name until the dinosaur. You've got

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a dinosaur called a Gastonia, that's
right. And it was one of the

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armored dinosaurs covered sort of ed to
tail with the enormous bikes. These dinosaurs

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they're called ankylosaurs, and they were
basically impenetrable armor. One of the things

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about dinosaurs, I mean, all
the way back to when I was just

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a wee little kid in the state
of Montana. I scoured that land because

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there was always those rumors of finding
fossils. Do kids still do that today?

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Absolutely? Kids are still making really
interesting dinosaur discoveries, and as you

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mentioned, a lot of dinosaurs are
still being discovered in Montana. The United

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States was home to a lot of
dinosaurs, including t Rex. The United

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States was the homeland of t Rex. But of course, dinosaurs wanked everywhere

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on the planet. They have been
discovered on absolutely every continent. They roamed

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from coast to coast, everywhere.
What's really fascinating about this book Jurassic Smarts

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is the fact that you go in
there and you have the destination dino.

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And because a lot of people are
gonna say, oh my god, Colorado,

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I would have never thought Colorado,
right absolutely. And you know,

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one of the things I wondered when
I started writing this was, I don't

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know if you have the same perception, but I always picture paleontologists digging for

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fossils in the desert and they're sweating
and it's very hot, and I wondered

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why that is, you know,
And it turns out that the reason that

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paleontologists are always in the desert is
not because dinosaurs lived in deserts. In

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fact, like I said, dinosaurs
lived everywhere. There is land every corner

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of planet Earth, from mountains to
valleys to riverbanks, you know, you

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name it, dinosaurs lived there.
The reason that we look in deserts is

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simply because fossils are easiest to find
there. You know, they can be

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poking up above the sand. There's
erosion that can bring them up to the

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surface, and it's just a lot
easier to scan the ground of the desert

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for fossils instead of you know,
for example, in a forest. But

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as we continued to develop new technologies, we're finding more and more dinosaurs in

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all kinds of environments. It was
usually on top of the rocks and things

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like that in Wyoming as well.
Is that in the dry lands. That's

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where we usually found the fossils,
and then we would take pictures and everything.

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But it was always the rule,
do not touch it, don't bring

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it home, do nothing with it. We just wanted the thrill of victory.

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That is super cool. I would
love to find a dinosaur fossil on

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myself. No, no, I
don't know they were the fish is what

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it was. I mean, but
a fish still fits into the dinosaur,

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does it not. So there were
amazing animals that lived in the oceans in

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dinosaur tents. They were not dinosaurs. There were a different family or different

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families, but they included you know, they often get overlooked, and if

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some editors out there listening, let's
do a book on dinosaur era ocean animals,

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because there were some absolutely enormous,
ferocious predators with super sharp pis,

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you know, super super deadly,
really cool animals to talk about, and

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there are some of them in this
book. But they are not Dinosaurs's just

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just animals that lived at the same
time. So when you are invited to

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be the author of a book like
this, I mean, I can't imagine

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what kind of research that you've got
to go through. Yeah, it's a

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lot of reading. I been doing
this for about twelve years, writing science

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and nature books for kids, and
I had never done a dinosaur book.

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I was always a little bummed about
that because I they were so cool,

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so I was really excited to get
this book. And because I didn't have

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a ton of knowledge about dinosaurs,
I started by reading a lot of books

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aimed at adults for dinosaurs, and
I also did a lot of interviews with

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paleontologists and other dinosaur experts. But
I can tell you that what I learned,

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what you learned in school, pretty
much all all of it was wrong.

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I mean, pretty much everything we
thought about dinosaurs is now being proven

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incorrect. I was going to ask
you about that, because that's one of

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the clear statements you start from the
very beginning, that we didn't have it

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right. Now, we're let's start
all over, reboot, reboot, Yes,

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I mean, And one of the
most obvious visual differences is that we

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now know that many, if not
most dinosaurs had feathers, including therapods,

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perhaps including t rex. So we
have are learning all kinds of new things

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about what these feathers look like.
We can even know what colors they were

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in some cases, and for some
dinosaurs they were very, very bright and

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colorful. Scientists are learning why dinosaurs
has feathers. Some of them flew,

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but the first feathers we're now thinking
probably likely evolved to be used in mating

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displays. And that might sound weird, but if you think about modern birds,

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which are also dinosaurs, the only
ones that survived the extinction. They

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use their feathers. You know,
we've all seen those amazing nature videos of

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birds shaking their tail, feathers,
flapping their wings to show off for potential

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mates, and it's very likely that
dinosaurs use their own feathers for the same

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thing. I can totally see that
with it with the mud dragon, because

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I mean, I mean, look
at that schnas. I mean, look

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at those eyes, the colors in
the eyes, the feathers and everything,

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and the beauty of the chest looks
like it would be flatting that around.

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Absolutely, yeah, I mean,
they certainly showed off for each other.

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Would the human being ever be looked
upon as being prehistoric because they say we

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were there? So dinosaurs went extinct
except for the small group of flying dinosaurs

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we now call birds. Dinosaurs all
went extinct sixty six million years ago when

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an asteroid the size of a small
city slammed into Earth. Lived on our

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planet before that for one hundred and
sixty million years wow, And modern humans

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we didn't show up how about two
hundred thousand years ago, So you know,

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we can think we've been around for
a long time. We've gone from

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living in caves to living in skyscrapers
in two hundred thousand years, but we

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have only lived for about eight hundred
times less than dinosaurs lived on. I

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was in a conversation with my little
guy across the street who's four years old,

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and we were talking about the color
of dinosaurs, because I mean I

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read in the book that we have
it all wrong. And you should have

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seen his eyes, because we all
think they're just gray, muddy and ugly.

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Right, Yeah, I mean for
so long we were just guessing about

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what color dinosaurs were, and now
we can use electron microscopes to look at

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fossilized pigments in some dinosaur feathers and
see what color they were. We know

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there was one dinosaur I'm thinking of
in Cornice. It was a flying dinosaur.

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It had black and white draped wings
and this great red mohawk on his

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head. So it's totally not what
is in the Texas from your childhood.

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Yeah, I'm not even going to
try to pronounce this dude's name. He's

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got like the foxtail. It's a
sinosaurra PERTEXI waxy. Why where do you

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guys come up with these names?
Well, you con sciences for that.

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That is not my responsibility. If
I was naming dinosaurs, I would call

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them all like supersaurus something a little
catch here. But sciences have naming conventions

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they need here too. So now, where would be the best place to

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go looking for dinosaurs? I mean, I mean you said that's it's pretty

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much worldwide, but I mean I'm
even seeing here stuff in Cleveland. I

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mean, that's the heart of rock
and roll. I didn't realize there were

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dinosaurs there. Like I said,
dinosaurs were absolutely everywhere on our planet.

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So where you're walking your kids to
the butt stop where you're going to work,

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dinosaurs once lived there. Where can
people go to find out more information,

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Stephanie, Because you know how kids
are these days. They want something

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on the internet that they can put
their hands on. Yeah. I mean

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you can find this book pretty much
anywhere books are sold, one of Google,

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Google Jurassic Smarts. It'll pop up. It just came out yesterday,

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so it's brand new. Please come
back to this show anytime in the future.

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The door is always going to be
open for you stuff, because I

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love talking with the authors. Oh
thank you, Well, maybe the next

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book, you bet will you'd be
brilliant today. Okay, thank you