Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's that lady that tries to learn macromae
Speaker 1: and gives up after like four strings. Ally ward back
Speaker 1: with another episode of Ologies. So y'all, this week was
Speaker 1: supposed to be vecceleology Veccileology. I'll get it by next week,
Speaker 1: which is all about Flags, and I am just hip
Speaker 1: deep in Flags right now. I'm editing and researching and
Speaker 1: writing this episode, and I just wanted one more week
Speaker 1: with it because it turns out it's a very complex
Speaker 1: issue with a lot of history and a lot of context.
Speaker 1: And also I'm going to say up top, happy fiftieth
Speaker 1: anniversary to my parents. They're celebrating it on August thirty first,
Speaker 1: and so I'm taking a chill week. I'm going to
Speaker 1: finish Flags. It'll be up on Labor Day in America
Speaker 1: Monday night of next week. And in the meantime, I'm
Speaker 1: giving you an encore presentation about dinosaurs. This is from
Speaker 1: the early days, So you guys, if you haven't listened
Speaker 1: to this dinosaur episode, it's one of my favorites. Listen
Speaker 1: to it while I go celebrate my parents fiftieth anniversary.
Speaker 1: Very exciting. If you're like, how did they make it
Speaker 1: to fifty years hit the Matrimoniology episode. We talk about
Speaker 1: it a little in that one, but anyway, dinosaurs, we're
Speaker 1: going to get into it. So I recorded this as
Speaker 1: one of the very very first Ologies episodes I ever did,
Speaker 1: ever recorded. This is before we even had a Patreon,
Speaker 1: before we even had patron questions. I just took a
Speaker 1: mishmash of questions from people I knew and on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I think there was a cameo in studio from editor
Speaker 1: Stephen Ray Morris, who's a big dino fan. You know
Speaker 1: this from his Sea Jurassic Right podcast. This remains one
Speaker 1: of my favorite factoid episodes ever. So there are some
Speaker 1: facts in here that blew my mind. They still blow
Speaker 1: my mind, and if you haven't listened to it, you
Speaker 1: get kind of a look back at perhaps the fossil
Speaker 1: record of Ologies. When I was first starting the podcast,
Speaker 1: I was editing it all myself on garage band. But
Speaker 1: I wanted to serve this one up to you because
Speaker 1: right now is field season. There are paleontologists out there
Speaker 1: in the world, what's up Montana digging up fossils? So
Speaker 1: I wanted to redeliver this one in case you haven't
Speaker 1: heard it or revisit it if you have. And this
Speaker 1: is before I started calling myself I think your dad.
Speaker 1: This is before I had a secret at the end
Speaker 1: of the episodes. So enjoy this antique episode of ologies
Speaker 1: while I go eat Chinese food with my parents and
Speaker 1: hug them a lot. And I will be back next
Speaker 1: Monday night with the Vexillolology all about flags. It is
Speaker 1: a doozy of an episode and you guys are gonna
Speaker 1: love it, so enjoy. Okay. Then now onto the old intro.
Speaker 1: All right, Okay, here we go. So I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: super super honest with you. And this pains me to
Speaker 1: say because it's kind of a point of shame for
Speaker 1: me as a like science enthusiast. But I don't really
Speaker 1: give a fuck about dinosaurs, at least I didn't for
Speaker 1: a long time. Flies, turtles, birds, ness, plants. I'm down
Speaker 1: with all these because in my brain, I'm like, we
Speaker 1: share the planet with them. I can look at them,
Speaker 1: I can watch how they grow and look at what
Speaker 1: they eat, how they get it on. Dinosaurs were always
Speaker 1: the wing of the museum that I was like, Eh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm going to go to the food
Speaker 1: court and eat a soft pretzel, but enjoy. So don't
Speaker 1: judge me, because I know people love dinosaurs, people get crazy.
Speaker 1: And I read Jurassic Park in high school. I loved it.
Speaker 1: I was so into it that I was working at
Speaker 1: a stationary shop and I couldn't put it down, so
Speaker 1: much so that on my watch two ceramic bunnies were
Speaker 1: stolen and I was almost fired. So whenever I think
Speaker 1: about Michael Crichton, I say to him, hey, dude, nice work.
Speaker 1: Your book was so good. It distracted me from someone
Speaker 1: putting two football sized porcelain bunnies down their pants or
Speaker 1: under their shirt or something. But what I loved about
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park was the dinosaur behavior. But I wasn't really
Speaker 1: that stoked about fossilized bones. I just didn't connect with it.
Speaker 1: Until last year. I went to this party that was
Speaker 1: kind of like a science salon, and this week's guest
Speaker 1: stood up and he gave an informal talk about terrosaur wings,
Speaker 1: and suddenly I thought, Okay, I think I get it,
Speaker 1: because I'd never really thought about dinosaurs in motion like that.
Speaker 1: Also side note for the truly self congratulatory. You know
Speaker 1: that terosaurs the flying things that are like Terry on
Speaker 1: Pewe's playhouse. Are not actually dinosaurs, they're flying reptiles. I
Speaker 1: learned that this year too. But paleontology actually isn't even
Speaker 1: the study of dinosaurs. It comes from paleo, which means
Speaker 1: old and anto, meaning being, so it's the study of
Speaker 1: just old beings. So this guest sparked my interest in
Speaker 1: dinosaurs in a way that I'd never had before, because
Speaker 1: the way he talks about them and how they move
Speaker 1: really puts life to them. So he's a paleontologist and
Speaker 1: a research associate in the Dinosaur Institute at the La
Speaker 1: County Museum of National History. And he's also an assistant
Speaker 1: professor of anatomy at USC's Kex School of Medicine. So
Speaker 1: he has two jobs. One of them involves people who
Speaker 1: are no longer alive. And I know it's irrational and
Speaker 1: like not super death positive. I'm a little bit creeped
Speaker 1: out by cadavers. I'm just I'm too sad about people dying.
Speaker 1: I want to hug them. I also want to run
Speaker 1: a far away trying to get over it. But our
Speaker 1: guest is hella chill about it. He spends part of
Speaker 1: the day cutting up cadavers. Part of it being a
Speaker 1: million dologist. Lee's enjoy Michael habib Okay, so what is
Speaker 1: his deal?
Speaker 2: This is my deal? Well, you're right. Actually did cut
Speaker 2: up a cadaver this morning, did you? Yes, it's actually
Speaker 2: a few of them. So that's how my mornings often start.
Speaker 2: We had one hundred and eighty eight medical students in
Speaker 2: a room with thirty five did people.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So you get a good couple off in the morning,
Speaker 2: you sit down and you take a part of human beings.
Speaker 2: So that that's my deal for about half the time,
Speaker 2: and the other half of the time ago and play
Speaker 2: of dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: There is a wrong way to take a part of cadaver,
Speaker 1: isn't there.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of wrong ways. Actually there are
Speaker 2: more wrong ways than correct ways, as it turns out.
Speaker 1: So now you study movement of animals, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of how you got into paleontology. What is is paleontology
Speaker 1: only about fossils or is it just about living things
Speaker 1: of that era?
Speaker 2: So palaeontology it doesn't necessarily have to be about fossils,
Speaker 2: but it historically it kind of was. It was considered
Speaker 2: to be the study of fossils. Essentially, although it more
Speaker 2: literally is just the study of life in the past,
Speaker 2: and you mostly do that through fossils. I'm one of
Speaker 2: those paleontologists who does play of fossils.
Speaker 1: Before we go much further, let's define super quick what
Speaker 1: a fossil actually is. I didn't know this until just now.
Speaker 1: Fossils are any trace or remains, like a cast, or
Speaker 1: an impression or a substitution with raw, even the thing
Speaker 1: itself of something that was once alive. They have to
Speaker 1: be at least ten thousand years old to be considered
Speaker 1: a fossil. I don't know what they're called if they're
Speaker 1: younger than that, to be honest, and the word fossil
Speaker 1: comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, which is
Speaker 1: that kind of adorable. I just picture people digging around
Speaker 1: being like I obtained this by digging.
Speaker 2: It's a fossil.
Speaker 1: Speaking of old things, Michael didn't decide he wanted to
Speaker 1: be a paleontologist until later in life.
Speaker 2: I declared at age four that I wanted to be
Speaker 2: a paleontologist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, just kidding. That's an early proclamation.
Speaker 2: I you know, I like getting in early. That could
Speaker 2: be time to procrastinate.
Speaker 1: So you waited from the age of four until what
Speaker 1: eighteen to enroll in college. That's a long that's a
Speaker 1: lot of stalling.
Speaker 2: It really was, It really was. There were all kinds
Speaker 2: of things that I that I waste the time doing
Speaker 2: in the interim, such as growth and development.
Speaker 1: Very strange learning to use a fork.
Speaker 2: He isn't learning to use a fork?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well what happened at four? Like when that declaration
Speaker 1: went down? When you're like, mom and dad said, own,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a paleontologist? Like, where were you
Speaker 1: in a museum?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, absolutely, I we were in the Smithsonian Museum
Speaker 2: of National History.
Speaker 1: Do you know what I told my parents I wanted
Speaker 1: to be when I was three?
Speaker 2: And you what do you want to be when you
Speaker 2: get big? A porky big Allison.
Speaker 1: War Workie Pig side note was a cartoon character who
Speaker 1: wore an open blazer with no shirt. He lacked pants.
Speaker 2: They're probably museums for that, you never know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just called restaurants. So what was your path
Speaker 1: like when you actually got into the study of it.
Speaker 1: How much education does it take to be a paleontologist?
Speaker 2: Well, you know the answer is it varies because it
Speaker 2: depends on really what you're doing in paleontology, what kind
Speaker 2: of palletologists you want to be.
Speaker 1: In Michael's case, from the time he set out to
Speaker 1: be a paleontologist, he finished kindergarten, grammar school, in the
Speaker 1: middle school, in high school, got an undergrad and master's
Speaker 1: degree in biology, then another five years to get a
Speaker 1: PhD and functional anatomy.
Speaker 2: And then off to join the quote unquote real world, which,
Speaker 2: if you're a paleontologist who takes apart dead people for
Speaker 2: living at a medical school, is not an accurate term.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the real world is. I've never
Speaker 2: played in it. I've seen it through windows. It looks scary.
Speaker 2: I've decided to avoid it for the time being.
Speaker 1: So you've never walked into an office every day in
Speaker 1: a tie.
Speaker 2: I don't think I've ever walked into an office in
Speaker 2: a tie.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I'm still stuck on the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: you spent your morning taking up our dead people. Like
Speaker 1: I know that we're here to talk about paleontology, but
Speaker 1: from the anatomy perspective, like, when did you go down
Speaker 1: the path of teaching anatomy? What is it like for
Speaker 1: you in terms of like confronting mortality, because I mean, Paleo,
Speaker 1: you're dealing with ancient things. So do you ever have
Speaker 1: any weird existential crisis about like death and impermanence or anything.
Speaker 2: I think I got most is out of the way.
Speaker 2: When I was young, I was a precocious youngster, and
Speaker 2: by that I meant I, you know, I questioned the uh.
Speaker 2: I had a lot of questions about mortality at a
Speaker 2: uncomfortable age, and my uncomfortable it was uncomfortable for my parents.
Speaker 2: You know, if you if you want to be really
Speaker 2: good at vertebrate anatomy, the model system is basically humans.
Speaker 1: It's like you know more about your car if it sucks,
Speaker 1: because you have to fix it more.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like, we tinker in the human body so much to
Speaker 1: fix it that it's like, well, yeah, had.
Speaker 2: Those implants redone a few times? We see some really
Speaker 2: interesting prostces actually in the lab.
Speaker 1: But oh, do you I bet in l A, I
Speaker 1: bet LA cadavers are like pretty tight. I bet I
Speaker 1: bet they still look pretty sharp. I'm so sorry the
Speaker 1: conversation accidentally went from automotive analogies back to the generous
Speaker 1: and probably very attractive people who have donated their bodies
Speaker 1: to science and the curious things Michael sees with body donors.
Speaker 2: The type of sort of implant I saw most often, Yes,
Speaker 2: penis and plants.
Speaker 1: No where more in LA.
Speaker 2: It's about even between Baltimore and LA.
Speaker 1: You are kidding me. I honestly, I did not know
Speaker 1: that that was a thing.
Speaker 2: We had what we had what we had one donor
Speaker 2: with the one the old models that was pumpable. WHOA, No,
Speaker 2: usually they're just silicon implants. But any case, So, yeah,
Speaker 2: so we've seen lots of We've seen a lot of
Speaker 2: penis implants in the in the lab.
Speaker 1: But this, this deep knowledge of anatomy informs your work
Speaker 1: as a pelleontologist a lot. You tend to study a
Speaker 1: lot of like wing movements of pterosaurs which are not dinosaurs. Technically,
Speaker 1: that's true.
Speaker 2: That's true. So yeah, so it's weird. So the guy
Speaker 2: who who makes doctors in the morning studies terras wear
Speaker 2: wings in the afternoon. Go figure. I've been called a
Speaker 2: physicist in Denial by actually a Caltech physicists, which I
Speaker 2: could sort of be a compliment.
Speaker 1: Particularly in that crowd. That's some complimentary shade.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly. I'll take that particularly interested in how
Speaker 2: that gives you motion, how animals move around by taking
Speaker 2: his wood is really a pretty limitted a number of
Speaker 2: different kinds of materials to work with and make them
Speaker 2: do amazing things. We have enough trouble making high performance aircraft,
Speaker 2: good sale planes and everything that can go hundreds of miles,
Speaker 2: you know, with fiberglass and carbon fiber and all kinds
Speaker 2: of metals at our disposal, and animals only have a
Speaker 2: handful of materials really to work with. It's flawful, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean you got. I mean for hard tissues, you
Speaker 2: basically got your bone, cartilage is reasonably can be reasonably stiff, enamel,
Speaker 2: you know, a handful of other things, and a bunch
Speaker 2: of soft stuff that's based in sea of water, and
Speaker 2: it gives you some really really high performance stuff. I
Speaker 2: mean some of animals I work on this on these
Speaker 2: terrace wores were you know, had wing spans ten and
Speaker 2: a half meters, it's about thirty five feet winked up
Speaker 2: the wing thirty five feet. Yeah, these things could kick
Speaker 2: ass and take names. These are these are powerful flying,
Speaker 2: ground launching badasses, and they're just doing it all with
Speaker 2: the basics of vertebrated anatomy.
Speaker 1: Do you have to study aeronautics as well as physiology
Speaker 1: to try to determine how that would give a terrost
Speaker 1: or the ability to fly?
Speaker 2: So I do have a joint background in fluid dynamics.
Speaker 1: Which is the study of how fluids move. Just five
Speaker 1: minutes ago I learned that fluids are not just liquids.
Speaker 1: Fluids are anything that has no fixed shape and yields
Speaker 1: to external pressure, which totally changes the meaning of bodily
Speaker 1: fluids for me. They could be a liquid or a gas.
Speaker 1: Let's change the subject. Do paleontologists love puzzles? As someone
Speaker 1: who has to put bone fragments back together? Do you
Speaker 1: like puzzles or do you hate them?
Speaker 2: I love puzzles. A lot of balletoges love puzzles. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure they all do. I think for some
Speaker 2: palotogess it probably feel like taking your work home with you. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you get home and I don't have any kids, but
Speaker 2: I can imagine something that. Do you know, then they
Speaker 2: can come home their kids like, hey, you want to
Speaker 2: build this puzzle with me?
Speaker 1: Like, oh god, what amount of time do you spend
Speaker 1: in the field as a paleontologist, and how much of
Speaker 1: that is back in a lab or looking at spreadsheets
Speaker 1: or measuring fossil densities and stuff.
Speaker 2: So in terms of the amount of time, like how
Speaker 2: much of the year in the field, it's a good
Speaker 2: chunk of the summer, that's uh, that's usually when I
Speaker 2: do all my field work. So basically July and August
Speaker 2: a good bit of it I'll be in the field,
Speaker 2: mostly in New Mexico.
Speaker 1: Was that a titanosaur?
Speaker 2: That's the Titanosaur project? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Can you can you reveal what you're working on with that?
Speaker 2: Sure? Sure, obviously you actually basically whatever you find. It's
Speaker 2: not like you went out there and we're gonna find it.
Speaker 2: Actually we kind of went out there going, I really
Speaker 2: kind of hope you don't find a titanosaur because really, well,
Speaker 2: I mean not not. We were being BLib about it,
Speaker 2: which is what makes it funny, but like there was
Speaker 2: a part of us it was like, I really hope
Speaker 2: we won't find things super huge because then we feel
Speaker 2: compelled to excavate it and it's gon take forever. And
Speaker 2: of course what we found was two individuals of the
Speaker 2: group that includes the largest land animals of all time.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: In fact, one of our one of our specimens may
Speaker 2: be the largest dinosaur from North America. That's huge. Literally, yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's just I mean these you know, these are
Speaker 2: animals that mid size titanosaur is like thirty tons plush,
Speaker 2: and a big one is like sixty tons plus. How
Speaker 2: many feet the big guys you're looking at one hundred
Speaker 2: feet ish? Wow?
Speaker 1: How many times bigger than an elephant? Are these guys big?
Speaker 2: A big bull African elephant, which would be the largest
Speaker 2: living land animal. I think the record is like six
Speaker 2: point two tons or something that really averages more like
Speaker 2: five and change. Okay, so if a big titanosaur is
Speaker 2: regularly hitting sixty that's twelve times.
Speaker 1: So these titanosaurs are like if twelve elephants stacked under
Speaker 1: one giant overcoat and pretended to be a person.
Speaker 2: That's so huge.
Speaker 1: This is so exciting. I'm sweating. This is so Wait.
Speaker 1: What happened when you were in the field and someone's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we got a bone over here, Like what what is
Speaker 1: that moment?
Speaker 2: Like, Well, it depends on what the bone is. In
Speaker 2: the case of the Titanosaur project. You know, you see
Speaker 2: some bones into the hill and I first law was, Oh,
Speaker 2: that looks really exciting. We see some interesting morphology and
Speaker 2: we can tell it it's what we call pneumatizes. We
Speaker 2: could tell it had was the animal had all these
Speaker 2: air sacks in it, and we're thinking, oh, wow, that's cool.
Speaker 2: That could be like a big predatory dinosaur because they
Speaker 2: have as they had a lire sex in their bones too.
Speaker 2: We started excitating around it and we're like, this doesn't
Speaker 2: really look like it would fit on what could this be?
Speaker 2: You think it's because this is a pretty big element
Speaker 2: as you're going to the hill and you're thinking that
Speaker 2: it's like a relatively big part of a small animal,
Speaker 2: and then at some point your brain switches and you
Speaker 2: realize you're doing the small part of an enormous animal.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And there was that moment where the actually was a
Speaker 2: particular rod of bone that we started to see as
Speaker 2: we started to work around it with our tools, that
Speaker 2: we realized that this was a vertebra from the neck,
Speaker 2: a neck bone.
Speaker 1: I love this part so much.
Speaker 2: I literally just loo kind of went ah shit. And
Speaker 2: of course the one of the poor volunteers. There was like, what,
Speaker 2: what did I break something? I'm like, no, no, this
Speaker 2: just went from this went from a one season project
Speaker 2: to an eight season project. And they're like why, I'm like, well,
Speaker 2: if this is articulated.
Speaker 1: In paleontology terms, articulated means found all in the same place,
Speaker 1: just a bunch of bones kicking it together in order
Speaker 1: having a bone party under some.
Speaker 2: Dirt, if there's more of it, I mean, I was
Speaker 2: at this point, I'm thinking, Okay, well, maybe it'll just
Speaker 2: be the one one element. It wasn't, of course, Oh
Speaker 2: my god. Then you know we've got we've got a
Speaker 2: you know, forty ton plus animal on the hillside. And
Speaker 2: you start and then you start look at the hillside.
Speaker 2: You go, actually, I think it might kind of just
Speaker 2: be the hillside.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's just a mountain, Like.
Speaker 2: It's just kind of has this kind of sediment loosely
Speaker 2: sitting on top of a dinosaur. Who gets to name it, well,
Speaker 2: that depends. So we don't know whether or not we
Speaker 2: will be naming it because we don't know if it's
Speaker 2: a new species yet or not. There is a type
Speaker 2: of titanosaur from North America that is named just one,
Speaker 2: which is interesting because the rest of the world there's
Speaker 2: a ton of these things, like like one of the
Speaker 2: hot groups of dinosaurs to work on these days. Like
Speaker 2: we went from not knowing much about them twenty years
Speaker 2: ago the suddenly this has been this explosion.
Speaker 1: So saur pods are those really long necked, kind of
Speaker 1: round bellied plant munched cuties. Apparently twenty years ago we
Speaker 1: didn't know much about them because our equipment for scanning
Speaker 1: and for transport sucked.
Speaker 2: There's better equipment and tech these days to work with
Speaker 2: things this big. You know, half a century agos one
Speaker 2: finds a titanis for coming out of the hillside. It's like,
Speaker 2: well that's pretty yeah, moving on, you.
Speaker 1: Know, do we just have better vehicles?
Speaker 2: Now we got good vehicles. It's more commonplace to be
Speaker 2: able to use a helicopter. I mean, obviously half a
Speaker 2: century go people could use helicopter, but it was just
Speaker 2: they were not something that was regularly available to the
Speaker 2: budget kind of budgets that we work at. The lift
Speaker 2: heavy jackets.
Speaker 1: Yes, when he says heavy jackets, he does not mean
Speaker 1: woolen coats. A jacket is that big plaster lump they
Speaker 1: smooth around excavated fossils to protect it and support it
Speaker 1: when they're storing it or delivering it. Frankly, it looks
Speaker 1: like a very fun rainy day craft project. And if
Speaker 1: you google dinosaur jackets, I dare you, I dare you
Speaker 1: not to go down a rabbit hole looking at children's
Speaker 1: hooties and wondering if you can fit into the largest
Speaker 1: is offered. Even if you don't get to name the species,
Speaker 1: you get to actually be like this one's Gary or whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, so yes, so you can get nicknames. So yeah,
Speaker 2: so they're naming process. So if this thing's up being
Speaker 2: a new species, we will give a new technical name
Speaker 2: in a publication and I'll be myself and my colleagues
Speaker 2: will name it. But in terms of nicknames, in terms
Speaker 2: of nicknames, those kind of just happen organically, okay, and
Speaker 2: Archie titanosaurs actually have nicknames. Oh whatever, they are Daisy
Speaker 2: and Duke. A look at that, and it's usually the
Speaker 2: students didn't naming these things.
Speaker 1: Where did they come up with Daisy and dukes? It's
Speaker 1: not it has nothing to do with gene shorts, does it,
Speaker 1: Like Daisy Duke's Daisy Duke's for those unfamiliar are a
Speaker 1: type of micropant fashioned from truncated denim trousers. They are
Speaker 1: beneficial in warm climates.
Speaker 2: I actually don't know. I am assuming that that was
Speaker 2: the joke. But I went back. I went out on
Speaker 2: a scouting trip to check some some map info and
Speaker 2: came back to the quarry and discovered that my two
Speaker 2: undergraduate students had named them Daisy and Duke. And apparently
Speaker 2: there have been some multi hour conversation in which this
Speaker 2: had occurred to this day. I don't know exactly what
Speaker 2: went down. I don't know what they came up with.
Speaker 2: I decided that if I asked, I might receive information
Speaker 2: I didn't want, and so it was better just to
Speaker 2: let it go.
Speaker 1: That's wise. The idea that there is a titanosaur in
Speaker 1: a hillside named after Jortz is thrilling to me. So
Speaker 1: when might Daisy and Duke make their museum debut? Please
Speaker 1: put shorts on them.
Speaker 2: There's only so much exhibit space.
Speaker 1: Here's a deal with museums. It's actually like the shoe
Speaker 1: department at JC Penny. What you see on the floor
Speaker 1: is a representative fraction of what they got in the back.
Speaker 1: So you may see a cool dinosaur or like a
Speaker 1: weird old knife or a clay jug. But the museum
Speaker 1: has literally millions of specimens on site archived for research.
Speaker 1: The only county natural History museum, for example, has thirty
Speaker 1: five million artifacts in storage. But if you did get
Speaker 1: to name it genus and species, any idea where you
Speaker 1: would start.
Speaker 2: There's weird rules about names and stuff, And because we
Speaker 2: might actually be gave it the name, I can't say right,
Speaker 2: you can't say it. But we have a potential name
Speaker 2: in mind for what one of the two specimens in
Speaker 2: particular is probably a new species.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I squealed, easy, easy.
Speaker 2: What I can say is it's a cool name that
Speaker 2: came out of conversations in part with the native people
Speaker 2: who live in the area.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: I don't mean the abrasive white men. I mean actual
Speaker 2: native people. And we were in four Quarters, so we're
Speaker 2: near we get a little bit of of everything.
Speaker 1: Oh Art, So it is the dig site is near
Speaker 1: four Corner.
Speaker 2: It is a species name. We don't have anything necessarily
Speaker 2: in mind, although I suspect what my proposal would be
Speaker 2: is that we name it after the donor that funds
Speaker 2: the expedition, because it is a privately funded expedition.
Speaker 1: That's so baller, though, to fund a dinosaur dig. If
Speaker 1: I were jay Z, I'd be like, screw a yacht,
Speaker 1: I'm going to funded dinosaur dig. If I had like
Speaker 1: Beyonce money, I'd be like, let's go dig up some bones.
Speaker 2: Well, you know the funny thing is, too, you don't
Speaker 2: need Beyonce money in order to do it it.
Speaker 1: Really, how much money does it cost to dig up
Speaker 1: a dinosaur? This is the most fun game I've ever played.
Speaker 2: Let's let's have fun with this. How long? How much
Speaker 2: do you think a field season for us costs?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Gosh, Well, it depends on if you have interns, if
Speaker 1: you have to pay them, or if you just have
Speaker 1: to buy them, like you know, a bottled water.
Speaker 2: We have a combination of paid employees for the museum
Speaker 2: as well as volunteers. Okay, but let's just look at
Speaker 2: just the field season. Let's assume that salaries for the
Speaker 2: museum employees is just part of their yearly and everything.
Speaker 2: So just the additional money for the supplies the trucks
Speaker 2: to get people out there, to feed them and keep
Speaker 2: them safe, make the jackets.
Speaker 1: Pay attention for some huge revelations, get transport the specimens.
Speaker 1: I would say eight hundred thousand dollars, four million dollars,
Speaker 1: a billion dollars.
Speaker 2: I' less than ten thousand year.
Speaker 1: You're kidding me? Are you kidding me? So you can't?
Speaker 1: You could buy a Toyota camri used or a dinosaur expedition,
Speaker 1: that's right. What kind of a world is this? I
Speaker 1: haven't Why haven't we all done this? A good question, shrill,
Speaker 1: I'm so, I'm so excited.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've yet to run anyone who underestimates the cost.
Speaker 2: They always overestimate. Oh yeah, it's there. You know, this
Speaker 2: is this thought that all there must be pouring billions
Speaker 2: of dollars in Pon tells me now now, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: There's no way that anyone could think it was less
Speaker 1: than ten thousand. That's amazing.
Speaker 2: No, it can, it can, it can obviously climb from that.
Speaker 2: You're still talking about tens of thousands of dollars, not
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands or millions.
Speaker 1: So less than a wedding these days, Yeah, people drop
Speaker 1: some cash on their way Jacksons.
Speaker 2: My parents said they went to two weddings last year.
Speaker 2: They were each cost over sixty five thousand.
Speaker 1: Dollars serious by a goddamn dinosaur vertebrae for that the
Speaker 1: whole dinosaur.
Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's that's six and
Speaker 2: a half field seasons.
Speaker 1: The average American wedding costs around thirty thousand dollars, and
Speaker 1: the average amount it costs to be a guest in
Speaker 1: someone's wedding, like getting there, buying nylons with no runs
Speaker 1: in them presence is eight hundred and eighty eight dollars.
Speaker 1: Everyone start eloping so we can reallocate that money to
Speaker 1: digging up more cool dead stuff. So do you have
Speaker 1: a favorite dinosaur?
Speaker 2: Do I have a favorite dinosaur? Yes, I have a
Speaker 2: couple of favorite dinosaurs, depending on what kind of favoritism
Speaker 2: right one has in mind, the one.
Speaker 1: That really has a place in your heart, Like you
Speaker 1: know which one it is, there's one that you really
Speaker 1: like the most.
Speaker 2: Sure so growing up. So the one that makes me
Speaker 2: think ah childhood is this Thingonicus okay, which is very
Speaker 2: similar to Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame. Incidentally, the real
Speaker 2: velociraptor was about coyote sized and feathered, not giant and scaly.
Speaker 1: Dinoh enthusiasts love to note that the velociraptors in Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park were not historically accurate. It's true Dinonicus, which means
Speaker 1: terrible law, was much closer to what was portrayed as
Speaker 1: a velociraptor, and I thought this was just someone sleeping
Speaker 1: on the t job. But the confusion is said to
Speaker 1: have originated from Gnonicus originally being labeled as a subspecies
Speaker 1: of velociraptors. Either way, these things should have had feathers.
Speaker 1: So imagine a giant claude bird wanting to murder you.
Speaker 1: That's upsetting. It's not as upsetting to some people, though
Speaker 1: as a movie getting facts wrong.
Speaker 2: Some of them are. I've seen some people get really
Speaker 2: upset about it. I just I don't get that upset
Speaker 2: about it. But yeah, I mean, it's essentially if they're
Speaker 2: sentially fancy creatures. Butaus was particularly interesting. It was particularly
Speaker 2: important historically because it was one of the first dinosaurs
Speaker 2: that was specifically used in some of the what would
Speaker 2: some of the original hypotheses about the origines of birds
Speaker 2: and specially being dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: So, by the way, all birds are technically dinosaurs. And
Speaker 1: that may be a thing that you've accepted and you've
Speaker 1: processed in your heart or mind, but it still weirds
Speaker 1: me out.
Speaker 2: There's also a bad ass of huge claws and you know,
Speaker 2: fast and could leap and all that kind of goo stuff.
Speaker 2: So I was he's a kid. I was like, ooh,
Speaker 2: I like the one that can, you know, go and
Speaker 2: assassinate things with great prejudice. Now these days I might
Speaker 2: very well say and have said that my favorite might
Speaker 2: be channga.
Speaker 1: Raptor channga raptor. Now, who what a weird thing? First off,
Speaker 1: it's c h a n g y u raptor. To
Speaker 1: find it google it, it took me a while. So this
Speaker 1: was a non bird flying dinosaur. But it looks a
Speaker 1: fucked on like a bird. It's a bird with wings
Speaker 1: on its hind legs. It has four wings, four wings,
Speaker 1: and a tail that was like a foot long, big
Speaker 1: claws and teeth. What the hell man?
Speaker 2: Which is not something you hear a lot about.
Speaker 1: Now. Michael was on the team that first analyzed and
Speaker 1: published the paper naming this a new species, so you know.
Speaker 2: So that one has a special place in my heart
Speaker 2: for that reason.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the feathered tail that was
Speaker 1: found recently an amber?
Speaker 2: Very cool? I actually had a little heads up that
Speaker 2: was coming.
Speaker 1: You did. Is there like a text thread that all
Speaker 1: the paleontologists of the world are on.
Speaker 2: No, no, no no.
Speaker 1: By the way, I have found out by hanging around
Speaker 1: scientists that they do have text chains and they do
Speaker 1: talk about nerdy news. I was added to one with
Speaker 1: some scientists and field scientists called Scorpions on our Faces
Speaker 1: and I love it. Now a little background on this
Speaker 1: last year, a paleontologist was trolling some amber markets in
Speaker 1: Mean mar and saw this apricot sized piece of plant
Speaker 1: resin for sale. Is like a jewelry piece whatever the
Speaker 1: seller said there was like maybe a plant stuck in it. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it was actually a whole baby dinosaur tail feathered like
Speaker 1: the best episode of Antiques Roadshow ever. They named it Eva.
Speaker 1: Eva is ninety nine million years old and probably got
Speaker 1: her tail stuck in tree sap and died there, which
Speaker 1: is currently making want to cry. So rip a little
Speaker 1: feathered buddy, and thank you for not ending up as
Speaker 1: a random chunky pendant.
Speaker 2: It's a really neat find. It is the beginning of
Speaker 2: what'll probably you'll be seeing more more things like that.
Speaker 1: Okay, in the future are we gonna be cloning anything.
Speaker 2: No, you're not gonna be cloning anything from this because
Speaker 2: while it while it more or less looks exactly like
Speaker 2: it just was preserved yesterday, because the soft tissue is there, Wow,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that the molecular structure is completely unaltered.
Speaker 2: And DNA has a reasonably short half life, so you
Speaker 2: would just get doubled a gook out like you could
Speaker 2: probably get DNA but not it wouldn't mean anything. Okay,
Speaker 2: DNA doesn't have to break down much, and it would
Speaker 2: be very broken down in the stuff. You might not
Speaker 2: even get any but you might be able to get
Speaker 2: a small amount, but it wouldn't matter. DNA becomes incomprehensible
Speaker 2: very quickly because it only has a four letter alphabet.
Speaker 2: So if you only have four letters in your alphabet,
Speaker 2: your words, basically if you will have to be very lengthy, right,
Speaker 2: so if you break them even a few times, it
Speaker 2: means nothing.
Speaker 1: If you saw the movie Gatica, which was from one
Speaker 1: million years ago aka nineteen ninety seven, it's about genetic engineering,
Speaker 1: and I always thought it was so clever that Gatica
Speaker 1: was spelled using only the letters of DNA sequencing. So GTCA.
Speaker 1: Isn't that cool? Anyway back to old sap.
Speaker 2: Chicken, those specials gonna be very interesting for understanding anatomy
Speaker 2: of early feathers, for example. But you're not gonna not
Speaker 2: gonna be cloning anything out out of that unfortunately, Although
Speaker 2: how cool it had been if like Michael Crichton had
Speaker 2: known about those sites, or if those have been available
Speaker 2: when he was writing. You wouldn't even have to use
Speaker 2: a mosquito thing he could just because that wouldn't actually work.
Speaker 2: But it feels very plausible when you read the book,
Speaker 2: which you know, which is the whole point science fiction
Speaker 2: it's supposed to he was he found a really nice
Speaker 2: way of suspending disbelief with this stuff had been published,
Speaker 2: could have just been like and they found a bunch
Speaker 2: of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they found a whole a whole dinosaur amer who.
Speaker 2: Hand and they just made you know, that would have
Speaker 2: been would have been great. Although I have to say the
Speaker 2: mosquito intermediate thing was was clever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is clever.
Speaker 2: It's a very very clever concepution. Let the girl.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about pop culture and its treatment
Speaker 1: of dinosaurs? Do you feel like it's good that it
Speaker 1: stokes people's interest, or do you feel like it's there's
Speaker 1: too much mythology and too much fiction.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's I think it's both. I mean,
Speaker 2: most of it is nowhere even in the ballpark of accurate.
Speaker 2: But on the whole, I think the advantage is outweigh
Speaker 2: the disadvantages. I think for the most part, it's awesome.
Speaker 2: I think it's great. You know, how many scientists would
Speaker 2: kill to have their fields popular? Is ptology? I mean
Speaker 2: it's I mean, how petty would I have to be
Speaker 2: to complain it? People are really interested in what I do,
Speaker 2: but sometimes they get it wrong. You know, like that
Speaker 2: would be that would be awful.
Speaker 1: You'd be a real jackass.
Speaker 2: I'd be a real jackass.
Speaker 1: Although, how did you feel about ross on Friends being
Speaker 1: so pedantic and exhausting? Did you ever feel like he
Speaker 1: got a bad rap?
Speaker 2: I think he earned it. He's obnoxious, Well, okay, you know,
Speaker 2: and he's supposed to be I mean, the character is
Speaker 2: supposed to be obnoxious, right, I mean he's supposed to
Speaker 2: be obnoxious. And name Swimmer did a great job with
Speaker 2: the character. And you know, interestingly enough, there is a
Speaker 2: palontologist named David Swimmer.
Speaker 1: Are you serious. He was, in fact serious. David Schwimmer
Speaker 1: is a paleontologist at Columbus State University, and he authored
Speaker 1: a paper called Giant ceilacant Mega Seilacanthus DOBI from the
Speaker 1: Upper Cretaceous of North America and its Bearings on the
Speaker 1: phylogeny of Mesozoic seila cants. He recently posted about working
Speaker 1: on a study of some quote mystery copper lights. Copper
Speaker 1: light is a fossilized turd. From the exhaustive Google image
Speaker 1: searching I have done, Doctor David Swimmer appears to have
Speaker 1: a salt and pepper goateea in a short, wiry ponytail.
Speaker 1: He looks like your aunt's cool boyfriend and the kind
Speaker 1: of person you want to sit around a campfire with,
Speaker 1: drinking a fresca and talking about the best sunsets he's
Speaker 1: ever seen. Oh God, does he love it or hate it?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Probably a little bit of both in
Speaker 2: my guests, but I.
Speaker 1: Hope he's met David Swimmer, for I hope they hug.
Speaker 1: I want them to hug. Did you have any heroes
Speaker 1: that were paleontologists growing up? Like, do you have a
Speaker 1: paleontologist just mentor or hero or someone who maybe died
Speaker 1: that you never got to meet.
Speaker 2: H Well, you know, I had a few years grow up,
Speaker 2: but actually I had one in particular comes in mind.
Speaker 2: This is actually a really cool story. I one of
Speaker 2: my one of my heroes growing up was a paletologist
Speaker 2: who worked in Baltimore named David wy Sample, and I
Speaker 2: went he was giving a talk at a nature center
Speaker 2: near where I lived at the time. Okay, I was
Speaker 2: like nine or ten or something, and I got super excited.
Speaker 2: I'll never forget that day. It was all adults and me.
Speaker 2: I was the only kid at this thing, and I
Speaker 2: asked more questions than everyone else combined. And he just
Speaker 2: rolled with it. And he talked to me afterwards and
Speaker 2: he was like, and he basically just not only I
Speaker 2: think palingtology was awesome, but after that day I decided
Speaker 2: paleontologists were just awesome awesome people. Oh that's just so great.
Speaker 2: You know this this hard work. So anyway, the uh so,
Speaker 2: that gave me this awesome additional passion for the field.
Speaker 2: But what makes it the story really cool is fast
Speaker 2: forward a little over a decade later, he became my
Speaker 2: PHG supervisor.
Speaker 1: Seriously, did he remember you at all.
Speaker 2: He didn't until I jogged his memory once He's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: remember there's this kid and he was like wait, I'm
Speaker 2: like that was me and oh that's which is really
Speaker 2: which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: That's like the end. That's like the ending scene of
Speaker 1: some movie that like works out. Everything worked out, Okay.
Speaker 2: Everything worked out. Okay. Yeah. I basically feel like I
Speaker 2: get paid in my hobby, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: What's your least favorite thing about the job, and then
Speaker 1: we'll follow that with your favorite thing, So like least
Speaker 1: favorite quick thing about the job.
Speaker 2: The least favorite thing about the job is the same
Speaker 2: and least favorite thing that a lot of people would
Speaker 2: probly say about their job, which is, even though there's
Speaker 2: less bureaucracy and less paperwork than a lot of jobs,
Speaker 2: there's still enough of it to be annoying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about flies on the digs?
Speaker 2: We don't have a lot of problems with them in
Speaker 2: New Mexico. But the other place that I do feel
Speaker 2: to work these days is in Dinsaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.
Speaker 2: Whi's an amazing place, It's incredible, but when we go
Speaker 2: there typically in August, the mosquitoes are just terrible. It's terrifying.
Speaker 2: You could from a distance, you could see the swarms
Speaker 2: from a distance because it looks like smoke hanging over
Speaker 2: the grass.
Speaker 1: I love bugs, but not not in mass like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go to give blood, Go to Alberta. One day.
Speaker 1: They're gonna they're gonna find one of those mosquitos and amber.
Speaker 1: They're gonna clone you. You're gonna be like that. We
Speaker 1: made another. Well, what's your favorite thing about the gym?
Speaker 2: Oh, that one's hard because just because the job actually
Speaker 2: is super fun. I love fieldwork. I love opening drawers
Speaker 2: in new museums and the collections my good places to
Speaker 2: you know, travel to do research. I really do enjoy
Speaker 2: teaching now. Of course when I'm teaching isn't really pantology,
Speaker 2: but I love anatomy in general. I love teaching anatome.
Speaker 2: And a friend's dad up years ago at a social gathering,
Speaker 2: her dad care to me and he said he'd give
Speaker 2: me a little bit of a hard time. And he goes,
Speaker 2: so you're you're an academic, right, Yeah, what do you
Speaker 2: actually make?
Speaker 1: What do you like? Salary wise? No?
Speaker 2: I know he meant like, isn't like, what do you
Speaker 2: what do you make?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: What do you make?
Speaker 1: And I think that seems a little rude.
Speaker 2: Oh he was, he was doing being He was being rude,
Speaker 2: I think on purpose. And I took a quick second
Speaker 2: and said, I make doctors face.
Speaker 1: What did he do? Did you crying?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: He turned around, popped it from the beer and handed.
Speaker 1: It to me. That's amazing.
Speaker 2: It was like, check me, this is pretty good.
Speaker 1: So I know.
Speaker 2: But I do love that component. I love I love
Speaker 2: training future physicians. There's just so much talent and brain
Speaker 2: power just wandering around at all times. Right, you could
Speaker 2: sit down in the Starbucks at usc and you start
Speaker 2: talking to people and you like learn five new things
Speaker 2: before noon.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of quality noggins in one area. I
Speaker 1: have some rapid fire questions for you for listeners. Some
Speaker 1: of them might be ridiculous, some of them might be
Speaker 1: too difficult to answer. I'm not sure, but okay, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm just going to start so before we get to
Speaker 1: questions from not even listeners yet, because I recorded this
Speaker 1: before we even had listeners or a Patreon. For each episode,
Speaker 1: I donate to a charity of the ologists choosing, and
Speaker 1: this week it is going to NHM dot org. That's
Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum in LA which is responsible for
Speaker 1: so much goodness, including an amazing dinosaur program. They have
Speaker 1: obviously top notch paleontologists there, So NHM dot org gets
Speaker 1: the donation this week. That donation is made possible by
Speaker 1: sponsors of the show, who I genuinely love, and so
Speaker 1: here are a few words about them. Okay, let's dig
Speaker 1: in to questions. David wants to know any new thoughts
Speaker 1: on what color dinosaurs were, Any new thoughts.
Speaker 2: It depends on how new you're looking at. But within
Speaker 2: the last handful of years, yes, there was a significant
Speaker 2: breakthrough in It's still a little bit controversial, but seems
Speaker 2: to be accurate in looking at the impressions of feathers,
Speaker 2: in particular, because feathers store their pigments, some of their pigments,
Speaker 2: and these little kind of little capsules basically that do
Speaker 2: preserve in some of these fossils, and these really well
Speaker 2: preserved fossils. You need a microscope to see them, but
Speaker 2: they are there. They're called milanosomes, and they store melanin
Speaker 2: or melanin's ahould say, which is a family of different pigments.
Speaker 2: And of course the origin pigment isn't in them anymore.
Speaker 2: But the shape and size of the blanosome tells you
Speaker 2: what kind of melanin it had in it. So they
Speaker 2: can use microscopy advanced microscopean imaging techniques to on those
Speaker 2: feathers to determine where certain melanins were located.
Speaker 1: Ooh, what is microscopy. It's just looking at things with
Speaker 1: a microscope.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: That means they can get some of the blacks, grays,
Speaker 2: dark browns, and reddish browns, but they can't get other colors.
Speaker 2: So we have some idea that some of these things,
Speaker 2: these had bold patterns, but we don't know how bold
Speaker 2: the colors were.
Speaker 1: Interesting, Okay, Tony wants to know if dinosaurs are the
Speaker 1: ancestors of modern birds, does that mean that dinosaurs tasted
Speaker 1: like chicken?
Speaker 2: They probably did. It taste like chicken. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 2: putting in it is birds are just weird dinosaurs, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they probably did. I mean, keep in mind, the
Speaker 2: closest living relatives of birds are crocodilians, and if you've
Speaker 2: ever had alligator, it tastes a little like chicken too.
Speaker 1: So there you go.
Speaker 2: So there's what we call a phylogenetic bracket of tastiness
Speaker 2: there and technical about it and yeah, so I imagine
Speaker 2: it would taste pretty much pretty much like chicken. Your
Speaker 2: typical dinosaur would probably maybe mostly more dark meat than
Speaker 2: white meat.
Speaker 1: Because they have more hemoglobin for moving.
Speaker 2: Uh sort of, it's very close with What turns the
Speaker 2: dark meat dark is something called myoglobin, which okays, for
Speaker 2: restoring oxygen in muscle. And it's only you, you, you're
Speaker 2: on the right tracks, so good, And that's used particularly
Speaker 2: in what we call aerobic muscle, so muscle that uses
Speaker 2: a lot of auction. It's high endurance muscle.
Speaker 1: So it's this oxygen storing protein myoglobin that makes dark
Speaker 1: meat dark, which is why legs which move around more
Speaker 1: are dark meat, and chicken breast, which just sits there
Speaker 1: not flapping much, is white. So good luck ever looking
Speaker 1: at a roasted dinosaur the same Adam has a question,
Speaker 1: how do you know when to switch brushes when you're
Speaker 1: digging out a fossil? Hi?
Speaker 2: You know when the switch brushes when the one you
Speaker 2: currently have is unusable? Okay, yeah, it's as we've already discussed,
Speaker 2: paletogs are cheap and we will use them until they're
Speaker 2: basically worn to hell.
Speaker 1: And then you just do. You have to get the
Speaker 1: finer and finer brushes when you're getting tiny grains of
Speaker 1: sand off.
Speaker 2: You don't usually have to reduce the brush size much,
Speaker 2: maybe a little bit. It's more things like chisel anything sharp,
Speaker 2: chisel sizes and things like that. If you're doing some
Speaker 2: more detailed work, you have to go to a smaller tool. Brushes.
Speaker 2: Any kind of broad soft paint brush will kind of do.
Speaker 2: Certain brissel types are better than others. But you know
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's not You're not like, it's not
Speaker 2: like painting. You're going out to detail work. You're not
Speaker 2: taking off each individual grain of sandy. Just you have
Speaker 2: some loose stuff and then you brush out of the way,
Speaker 2: and you have some more loose stuff and you brush
Speaker 2: out of the way. The key thing is to not
Speaker 2: to damage the fossil.
Speaker 1: I always picture you guys going down to like a
Speaker 1: water color, two hairs on the brush, like delicately. It's
Speaker 1: good to know that you guys are just like, no,
Speaker 1: just get the dust off.
Speaker 2: I've used dental tool to etch stuff around a fossil
Speaker 2: be for that seems fun. It is for a while,
Speaker 2: and then it starts to become tedious, but it's mostly fun. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I stally love it, but yeah, we don't go to
Speaker 2: tiny brushes.
Speaker 1: TJ wants to know how many of the fossils on
Speaker 1: display museums are actually replicas for casts?
Speaker 2: Right, right, So it depends on what museum you're at,
Speaker 2: and it depends in a large part of what age
Speaker 2: the museum is or the exhibit is, in particular when
Speaker 2: it was built. If it's a really old exhibit, so
Speaker 2: you go say it hasn't been changed since the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 2: it's likely mostly original material. Oh, because during that time
Speaker 2: they didn't do as much casting. They didn't mind drilling
Speaker 2: through some of these things to put them on exhibit.
Speaker 2: And then as you got into the mid to late
Speaker 2: twentieth century, that fell out of favor because they didn't
Speaker 2: want to put holes in the research specimen. But now
Speaker 2: if it's a really recent exhibit, ironically enough, you're going
Speaker 2: to see more original stuff on display again because we
Speaker 2: have better armatures now what we call cradle armatures.
Speaker 1: Armatures are the metal cradles that hold the bones in
Speaker 1: place externally, not lets you remove pieces of research and
Speaker 1: put them back do whatever. More importantly, you don't have
Speaker 1: to drill the shit out of fossils to wire them together,
Speaker 1: which is very old school.
Speaker 2: Now, what percentage of each of the specimen's original is
Speaker 2: a whole nother ballgame. You very rarely find a complete skeleton,
Speaker 2: So there's a few different ways of ending up with
Speaker 2: a complete skeleton. For exhibit one is you create a
Speaker 2: composite from multiple originals of the same species that are
Speaker 2: all similar enough in age and size that it'll more
Speaker 2: or less work as an average individual. So where you're
Speaker 2: displaying isn't a single individual ever lived, but it's sort
Speaker 2: of an average of four or five app individuals that
Speaker 2: were very similar.
Speaker 1: So it's like a frank consur It's like a Frank consort.
Speaker 2: Okay. And then if the thing's really incomplete, and this
Speaker 2: happens quite often, like you found that you do have
Speaker 2: enough to know what it is, you have enough to
Speaker 2: know it's a new animal, what have you. But you
Speaker 2: only have to say, fifteen percent of of the skeleton.
Speaker 2: You will then fill in the rest of casts.
Speaker 1: But the museums are trying their best. Yeah, so do
Speaker 1: some placard reading. It's interesting to see trends in paleontology.
Speaker 1: And I don't know it's interesting to see paleontology itself evolved.
Speaker 1: Stephen one of our audio engineers, really really really big
Speaker 1: dinosaur nerd, like super big. You may know Stephen Ray
Speaker 1: Morris from being America's podcast Darling and from his own
Speaker 1: programs such as the per Cast, which is about cats
Speaker 1: and see Jurassic Wright, which is his podcast devoted solely
Speaker 1: to the movie and it involves his own childhood Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park fanfic which is lit as fuck.
Speaker 4: Oh, I know, I had a question. So I had
Speaker 4: a question about the toro, the Toro Seratops and the
Speaker 4: Triceratops controversy.
Speaker 1: The controversy here is it sometimes dinos get mistaken for
Speaker 1: other ones, and dinosaur ghosts hate this.
Speaker 4: If the Triceratops is just a juvenile torosaurus or if
Speaker 4: the you know, they decided if it was actually two
Speaker 4: different species.
Speaker 2: Right, So that is that is actually still a that
Speaker 2: is an ongoing debate. The majority of paleontologists that work
Speaker 2: on horned dinosaurs considered them still to be separate species,
Speaker 2: but there is one research team that has published data
Speaker 2: indicating that they think that Triceratops is actually what we
Speaker 2: call a junior synonym that is, it's really just a
Speaker 2: juvenile of another animal. I'm personally not entirely convinced, but
Speaker 2: it's a neat idea. But right now, I'd say the
Speaker 2: majority opinion amongst pellontologists is still that Tricerotops is a
Speaker 2: valid name. But we'll see how it plays out. Thank you,
Speaker 2: no worries.
Speaker 1: What's the hot gossip on Bronosaurus ronosaurs?
Speaker 2: So the short answer is Bronosaurus is a valid name.
Speaker 1: Again, do you like petty gossip? Okay, then this is
Speaker 1: a beautiful story. So in the late eighteen hundreds, two
Speaker 1: rich dudes ofth Neil, Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope
Speaker 1: had a mutual reciprocal hatred for each other. They tried
Speaker 1: to outdo each other in terms of paleon too logical supremacy,
Speaker 1: and they would sabotage each other's work. They would publicly
Speaker 1: discredit the other one. One of them, Marsh, put the
Speaker 1: wrong skull on an a Potosaurus and called it a brontosaurus.
Speaker 1: In the end, we've got a lot of fossils, a
Speaker 1: lot of knowledge out of their rivalry, but they both
Speaker 1: went broke in the process. Just google bone wars. It's
Speaker 1: like a Bravo show, but with more monocles. But here's
Speaker 1: the update on the Bronosaurus.
Speaker 2: The original material that was named brought to Saurus was
Speaker 2: then later found that have been comprised of multiple animals
Speaker 2: of different species whoops. And so it was decided that
Speaker 2: brought to Saurus was not a valid name because well,
Speaker 2: it's all known stuff. You can't combine them and say
Speaker 2: that's a new animal, right. Researchers recently went through that
Speaker 2: material again with better knowledge, more data that we now
Speaker 2: have because over time you get better and better knowledge
Speaker 2: of what's out there. The cross compared a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 2: and what they found was that, yes, a lot of
Speaker 2: that material was already known species, but some of it
Speaker 2: didn't match anything and therefore was in fact new. So
Speaker 2: and that means the original name holds.
Speaker 1: That's some good breaking news on the Brontosaurus front. Yes,
Speaker 1: I feel like between Pluto and Brontus, a lot of
Speaker 1: people got really confused about who was what what was happening.
Speaker 1: Just over ten years ago, just catch you out, Pluto
Speaker 1: was demoted to a dwarf planet because it doesn't have
Speaker 1: enough game compared to the objects around it. That is
Speaker 1: a very casual explanation like Pluto's somewhere just butt hurt.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, just crying.
Speaker 1: Into a wine cooler, being like what am I am? I?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: Okay, last question. This is actually from Leela Higgins, who
Speaker 1: an entomologist at the Natural History Museum. She wants to
Speaker 1: know how does studying ancient fossils help the world today?
Speaker 2: Ah, that is a good question, so I and I
Speaker 2: can give. There's a couple of different answers to that.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 2: One answer would be that that knowledge, for its own
Speaker 2: sake is kind of helping the world on a more
Speaker 2: practical side. If the question is really, you know, what
Speaker 2: is it? What sort of practical applications it doesn't have?
Speaker 2: I'll be honest to say that some of it doesn't happening,
Speaker 2: but some of it does. If you want to know,
Speaker 2: for example, what kind of shit goes down when global
Speaker 2: when global atmospheric energy i e. Aservice temperature changes very rapidly,
Speaker 2: you need to go into the fossil record. This shit
Speaker 2: has happened before, right, It's it's not like the Earth
Speaker 2: has never seen rapid warming or rapid cooling or things
Speaker 2: before it did. That's one of the reasons why biologists
Speaker 2: for example, gets scared when you look at the growing
Speaker 2: temperature spike. It's because oh yeah, yeah, we've seen this
Speaker 2: in our records right about the time a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of shit died. Right. And it's not, of course, because
Speaker 2: stuff gets too warm. It's because of the rate, right.
Speaker 2: And if you want to know how fast things have
Speaker 2: to change to be disruptive, you have to look at
Speaker 2: the fossil record.
Speaker 1: For more info on this. Look up huge ass meteor
Speaker 1: that slammed into an area of present day Mexico over
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago and change the climate leading
Speaker 1: to mass extinction of seventy five percent of the animals
Speaker 1: and plants on Earth aka the k T event k
Speaker 1: dash T.
Speaker 2: And then, lastly, in my particular case, is a biomechanist.
Speaker 2: I do work with engineers on robotics applications. For the
Speaker 2: most part, if you're interested in an animal model from
Speaker 2: says you want to make a running robot or something,
Speaker 2: you want to look at inspiration from biological systems. Living
Speaker 2: things are the first place you would normally go because
Speaker 2: you can get a lot more data from them. Obviously, however,
Speaker 2: nine point nine percent of all things that have ever
Speaker 2: lived are extinct.
Speaker 1: How weird is that ninety nine point nine percent of
Speaker 1: all things that have ever lived are extinct. Just do
Speaker 1: you cut bangs, text your crush. We're all going to die.
Speaker 2: So if you limb yourself to just looking at those things,
Speaker 2: you're only getting a small fraction of the possible solutions
Speaker 2: to moving around or eating or what are the things
Speaker 2: that you want to that you want to model. So
Speaker 2: looking at other ways it's been done is very informative.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's I think that's kind of the
Speaker 1: basis of why people are curious about science. It's that
Speaker 1: the past can hopefully or possibly inform the future, so
Speaker 1: you always have like a vested interest and knowledge because
Speaker 1: it could it kind of plots your course going forward,
Speaker 1: it seems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly, And that was a much much more
Speaker 2: succinct way of putting what I rambled on.
Speaker 1: The idea of us having a unmanned aviation that's in
Speaker 1: the shape of a pterosaur, just like a robotic terosaur.
Speaker 1: Can you work on that?
Speaker 2: I could probably work on that out, And I don't
Speaker 2: know how useful that would be, but we could probably
Speaker 2: work on it. That would be pretty funny. A writeable
Speaker 2: robot Terrasto that you can use to get to work.
Speaker 2: Can that be LA traffic?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is that okay?
Speaker 2: Well, we'll see what I can do.
Speaker 1: Put it on your to do list to very gingerly
Speaker 1: stock doctor Michael Habib. Find him on the twitters at
Speaker 1: arrow evo a E r O E v O because
Speaker 1: aerial evolution is his bag, and to see photos of
Speaker 1: his fieldwork in the museum but probably not cadavers. Follow
Speaker 1: him on Instagram. He's at habibanator. Just as it sounds,
Speaker 1: this podcast is on Twitter at Ology's pod and on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Ologies, and I'm on both of those as
Speaker 1: Ali Ward. And if you like this podcast and you
Speaker 1: like not having to listen to a bunch of ads,
Speaker 1: consider supporting it for about the price of a coffee
Speaker 1: per month on Patreon. I'm putting this out myself because
Speaker 1: I love doing it. Hopefully like it, so join the
Speaker 1: community on Patreon. Thank you to everyone who's already supporting
Speaker 1: on Patreon. I want to hug all of you, and
Speaker 1: thank you to anyone who's bought merch at ologiesmerch dot com.
Speaker 1: And to my friend Katie for her amazing animation she's
Speaker 1: making which she'll see soon, and for the feedback she
Speaker 1: gave me and helping shape the show dude role. And
Speaker 1: to my folks who dug up that old tape, who act?
Speaker 1: I guess that makes it kind of a fossil. It
Speaker 1: was obtained by digging and who listened to this Even
Speaker 1: though the language and subject matter can be not safe
Speaker 1: for parents, but above all else, remember ask smart people
Speaker 1: dumb questions before a future urologist is dissecting you or
Speaker 1: a meteor crashes into the planet and kills us. All
Speaker 1: next week gemology.
Speaker 2: So then we like get outside and then it's like
Speaker 2: the deepest, biggest boom you've ever felt.
Speaker 1: And it was just like bloom, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: oh god, this is scary. Look at this, you guys.
Speaker 1: This is before I put secrets at the end of episode.
Speaker 1: So I gotta add one now. Okay, so this is
Speaker 1: a modern day one. This is now late August of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, two years later, and I will say that
Speaker 1: my secret for this episode is number one. Okay, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you this one. I'm recording this entirely in my underwear,
Speaker 1: and I'm getting ready to run out the door to
Speaker 1: go to the airport. I'm gonna go up to my
Speaker 1: folks to celebrate their anniversary, and my suitcase is packed
Speaker 1: but open. I'm recording this as fast as I can,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna send it off to Stephen Ray Morris
Speaker 1: to kind of rejudge this episode. Also, he has a
Speaker 1: secret about perhaps some Dino panels he might be involved
Speaker 1: with in the future. He's not allowed to announce yet,
Speaker 1: so I'm putting in a secret at the very end,
Speaker 1: and I didn't really announce anything, I just teased it.
Speaker 1: There you go. And the other secret I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: you is that this Flag episode ended up so much
Speaker 1: harder that I thought it was going to be, So
Speaker 1: thank you for enjoying this encore episode. Well, I got
Speaker 1: through the research on that and delivered it in a
Speaker 1: way that did it justice and had a little bit
Speaker 1: of a breather this weekend to hang out with my family.
Speaker 1: So there you go. There are your secrets. All right,
Speaker 1: We'll be back on Labor Day night, Monday of next
Speaker 1: week with a brand new Flag episode. I think you're
Speaker 1: gonna like it. Okay, Bye bye, Okay, thank goodbye, everybody.
Speaker 3: Pacadermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, metatologynethnology, zeriology, elatology.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?
Speaker 1: First time you see them, it's like a miracle.