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Speaker 3: So I'm gonna be super super honest with you. And
Speaker 3: this pains me to say because it's kind of a
Speaker 3: point of shame for me as a science enthusiast, But
Speaker 3: I don't really give a fuck about dinosaurs, at least
Speaker 3: I didn't for a long time. Flies, turtles, birds, nests, plants.
Speaker 3: I'm down with all of these because in my brain,
Speaker 3: I'm like, we share the planet with them. I can
Speaker 3: look at them, I can watch how they grow, you
Speaker 3: can look at what they eat, how they get it on.
Speaker 3: Dinosaurs were always the wing of the museum that I
Speaker 3: was like, Ugh, I don't know, I'm going to go
Speaker 3: to the food court and eat a soft pretzel, but enjoy.
Speaker 3: So don't judge me, because I know people love dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: People get crazy. And I read Jurassic Park in high school.
Speaker 3: I loved it. I was so into it that I
Speaker 3: was working at a stationary shop and I couldn't put
Speaker 3: it down, so much so that on my watch two
Speaker 3: ceramic bunnies were stolen and I was almost fired. So
Speaker 3: whenever I think about Michael Crichton, I say to him, hey, dude,
Speaker 3: nice work. Your book was so good. It distracted me
Speaker 3: from someone putting two football sized porcelain bunnies down their
Speaker 3: pants or under their shirt or something. But what I
Speaker 3: loved about Jurassic Park was the dinosaur behavior. But I
Speaker 3: wasn't really that stoked about fossilized bones. I just didn't
Speaker 3: connect with it until last year. I went to this
Speaker 3: party that was kind of like a science salon, and
Speaker 3: this week's guest stood up and he gave an informal
Speaker 3: talk about terosaur wings, and suddenly I thought, Okay, I
Speaker 3: think I get it, because I'd never really thought about
Speaker 3: dinosaurs in motion like that. Also side note for the
Speaker 3: truly self congratulatory, you know that terosaurs, the flying things
Speaker 3: that are like Terry on Peewe's Playhouse, are not actually dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: They're flying reptiles. I learned that this year or too.
Speaker 3: But paleontology actually isn't even the study of dinosaurs. It
Speaker 3: comes from paleo, which means old and anto meaning being,
Speaker 3: so it's the study of just old beings. So this
Speaker 3: guest sparked my interest in dinosaurs in a way that
Speaker 3: I'd never had before, because the way he talks about
Speaker 3: them and how they move really puts life to them.
Speaker 3: So he's a paleontologist and a research associate in the
Speaker 3: Dinosaur Institute at the La County Museum of National History,
Speaker 3: and he's also an assistant professor of anatomy at USC's
Speaker 3: Kex School of Medicine. So he has two jobs. One
Speaker 3: of them involves people who are no longer alive. And
Speaker 3: I know it's irrational and like not super death positive,
Speaker 3: but I'm a little bit creeped out by cadavers. I'm
Speaker 3: just I'm too sad about people dying. I want to
Speaker 3: hug them. I also want to run a far away
Speaker 3: trying to get over it. But our guest is hella
Speaker 3: chill about it. He spends part of the day cutting
Speaker 3: up cadavers, part of it being a paleontologist. Please enjoy,
Speaker 3: Michael habib Okay, So what is this deal?
Speaker 4: This is my deal? Well, you're right. Actually did cut
Speaker 4: up a cadaver this morning?
Speaker 3: Did you? Yes?
Speaker 5: Actually a few of them. So that's how my mornings
Speaker 5: often start. We had one hundred and eighty eight medical
Speaker 5: students in a room with thirty five did people?
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: So you get a good cup of coffee in the
Speaker 5: morning and you sit down and you take a part
Speaker 5: of human beings. So that's that's my deal for about
Speaker 5: half the time and another half of the time ago
Speaker 5: and play of dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: There is a wrong way to take a part of cadaver,
Speaker 3: isn't there?
Speaker 5: There are a lot of wrong ways. Actually, there are
Speaker 5: more wrong ways than correct ways, as.
Speaker 4: It turns out.
Speaker 3: So now you study movement of animals, and that's kind
Speaker 3: of how you got into paleontology. What is is paleontology
Speaker 3: only about fossils or is it just about living things
Speaker 3: of that era?
Speaker 5: So palaeontology it doesn't necessarily have to be about fossils,
Speaker 5: but it historically it kind of was. It was considered
Speaker 5: to be the study of fossils essentially, although it more
Speaker 5: literally is just the study of life in the past,
Speaker 5: and you mostly do that through fossils. I'm one of
Speaker 5: those palontologists who does play a fossil.
Speaker 3: Before we go much further, let's define super quick what
Speaker 3: a fossil actually is. I didn't know this until just now.
Speaker 3: Fossils are any trace or remains like a cast, or
Speaker 3: an impression or a substitution with rock, or even the
Speaker 3: thing itself of something that was once alive. They have
Speaker 3: to be at least ten thousand years old to be
Speaker 3: considered a fossil. I don't know what they're called if
Speaker 3: they're younger than that, to be honest, And the word
Speaker 3: fossil comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, which
Speaker 3: is that kind of adorable. I just picture people digging around,
Speaker 3: being like I obtained this by digging.
Speaker 4: It's a fossil.
Speaker 3: Speaking of old things, Michael didn't decide he wanted to
Speaker 3: be a paleontologist until later in life.
Speaker 4: I declared at age four that I wanted to be
Speaker 4: a palantogle.
Speaker 3: Just yeah, okay, just kidding. That's an early proclamation.
Speaker 5: I you know, I like getting in early. That could
Speaker 5: be time to procrastinate.
Speaker 3: So you waited from the age of four until what
Speaker 3: eighteen to enroll in college. That's a long that's a
Speaker 3: lot of stalling.
Speaker 4: It really was, It really was.
Speaker 5: There were all kinds of things that I that I
Speaker 5: waste the time doing in the interim, such as growth
Speaker 5: and development.
Speaker 3: Very strange learning to use a fork.
Speaker 4: He'n't learning to use a fork, right, Yeah, Well what.
Speaker 3: Happened at four? Like when that declaration went down? When
Speaker 3: you're like, mom and dad said down, I'm going to
Speaker 3: be a paleontologist. Like where were you in a museum? Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, I we were in the Smithsonian Museum of
Speaker 5: National History.
Speaker 3: You know what I told my parents I wanted to
Speaker 3: be when I was three, And you what do.
Speaker 5: You want to be?
Speaker 3: When you get big a kirky bit a porky big
Speaker 3: Allison warm worky pig. Side note was a cartoon character
Speaker 3: who wore an open blazer with no shirt. He lacked pants.
Speaker 4: They're probably museums for that. You never know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just called restaurants. So what what was your
Speaker 3: path like when you actually got into the study of it.
Speaker 3: How much education does it take to be a paleontologist?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, the answer is it varies because it
Speaker 5: depends on really what you're doing in paleontology, what kind
Speaker 5: of paletologists you.
Speaker 1: Want to be.
Speaker 3: In Michael's case, from the time he set out to
Speaker 3: be a paleontologist, he finished kindergarten, grammar school, in the
Speaker 3: middle school, in high school, got an undergrad and master's
Speaker 3: degree in biology, then another five years to get a
Speaker 3: PhD in functional anatomy.
Speaker 5: And then off to join the quote unquote real world, which,
Speaker 5: if you're a paleontologist who takes apart dead people for
Speaker 5: living at a medical school, is not an accurate term.
Speaker 4: I don't know what the real world is.
Speaker 5: I've never played in it. I've seen it through windows.
Speaker 5: It looks scary. I've decided to avoid it.
Speaker 4: For the time being.
Speaker 3: So you've never walked into an office every day in
Speaker 3: a tie.
Speaker 5: I don't think I've ever walked into an office in
Speaker 5: a tie.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I'm still stuck on the fact that, like
Speaker 3: you spent your morning taking of our dead people. I
Speaker 3: know that we're here to talk about paleontology, but from
Speaker 3: the anatomy perspective, like when did you go down the
Speaker 3: path of teaching anatomy? What is it like for you
Speaker 3: in terms of like confronting mortality, Because I mean, paleo
Speaker 3: you're dealing with ancient things. So do you do you
Speaker 3: ever have any weird existential crisis about like death and
Speaker 3: impermanence or anything.
Speaker 4: I think I got most is out of the way.
Speaker 5: When I was young, I was a precocious youngster, and
Speaker 5: by that I meant, you know, I questioned the uh.
Speaker 5: I had a lot of questions about mortality at an
Speaker 5: uncomfortable age, and my uncomfortable it was uncomfortable for my parents.
Speaker 5: You know, if you if you want to be really
Speaker 5: good at vertebrate anatomy, the model system is basically humans.
Speaker 3: It's like you know more about your car if it sucks,
Speaker 3: because you have to fix it more do you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, Like, we tinker in the human body
Speaker 3: so much to fix it that it's like, well, yeah, had.
Speaker 4: Those implants redone? A few times? We see some really
Speaker 4: interesting prostces action in the lab.
Speaker 2: Oh do you?
Speaker 3: I bet in l A, I bet LA cadavers are
Speaker 3: like pretty tight. I bet they're I bet they still
Speaker 3: look pretty sharp. I'm so sorry the conversation accidentally went
Speaker 3: from automotive analogies back to the generous and probably very
Speaker 3: attractive people who have donated their bodies to science and
Speaker 3: the curious things Michael sees with body donors.
Speaker 5: The type of sort of implant I saw most often, Yes,
Speaker 5: penis implants.
Speaker 3: No where more in LA.
Speaker 4: It's about even between Baltimore and LA.
Speaker 3: You are kidding me. I honestly, I did not know
Speaker 3: that that was a thing. We had.
Speaker 5: What we had what we had one donor with the
Speaker 5: one the old models that was pumpable. WHOA, No, usually
Speaker 5: there silicon implants, but any case, so, yeah, so we've
Speaker 5: seen lots of We've seen a lot of penis implants
Speaker 5: in the in the lab.
Speaker 3: But this, this deep knowledge of anatomy informs your work
Speaker 3: as a pelontologist. A lot you tend to study a
Speaker 3: lot of like wing movements of pterosaurs which are not
Speaker 3: dinosaurs technically.
Speaker 4: That's true. That's true. So yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 5: So the guy who who makes doctors in the morning
Speaker 5: studies tears were wings in the afternoon.
Speaker 4: Go figure.
Speaker 5: I've been called a physicist in denial by actually Caltech physicists,
Speaker 5: which I could sort of be a compliment.
Speaker 3: Particularly in that crowd. That's some complimentary shade.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll take that, and.
Speaker 5: Particularly interested in how that gets you motion, how animals
Speaker 5: move around by taking his wood is really a pretty
Speaker 5: limited number of different kinds of materials to work with
Speaker 5: and make them do amazing things. We have enough trouble
Speaker 5: making high performance aircraft, good sale planes and everything that
Speaker 5: can go hundreds of miles, you know, with fiberglass and
Speaker 5: carbon fiber and all kinds of metals at our disposal,
Speaker 5: and animals only have a handful of materials really to
Speaker 5: work with. That's flawful, I guess, yeah, I mean you got,
Speaker 5: I mean for hard tissues, you basically got your bone
Speaker 5: cartilage is reasonably can be reasonably stiff, enamel, you know,
Speaker 5: handful of other things and a bunch of soft stuff
Speaker 5: that's based in sea of water, and it gives you
Speaker 5: some really really high performed stuff. I mean some of
Speaker 5: the amals I work on this on these terrace wors
Speaker 5: were you know, had wingspans ten and a half meters,
Speaker 5: it's about thirty five feet wing tip, the wing thirty
Speaker 5: five feet. Yeah, these things could kick ass and take names.
Speaker 5: These are powerful flying, ground launching badasses and they're just
Speaker 5: doing it all with the basics of fertebraated anatomy.
Speaker 3: Do you have to study aeronautics as well as physiology
Speaker 3: to try to determine how that would give a terrost
Speaker 3: or the ability to fly?
Speaker 4: So I do have a joint background in fluid dynamics, which.
Speaker 3: Is the study of how fluids move. Just five minutes
Speaker 3: ago I learned that fluids are not just liquids. Fluids
Speaker 3: are anything that has no fixed shape and yields to
Speaker 3: external pressure, which totally changes the meaning of bodily fluids
Speaker 3: for me. They could be a liquid or gas. Let's
Speaker 3: change the subject. Do paleontologists love puzzles? As someone who
Speaker 3: has to put bone fragments back together? Do you like
Speaker 3: puzzles or do you hate them?
Speaker 5: I love puzzles a lot of palantoges love puzzles. Okay,
Speaker 5: I'm not sure they all do. I think for some
Speaker 5: ties it probably feels like taking your work home with you, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: you get home and I have many kids, but I
Speaker 5: can imagine something that do you know, then they can
Speaker 5: come home their kids like, hey, you want.
Speaker 4: To build this puzzle with me? Like, oh god?
Speaker 3: What amount of time do you spend in the field
Speaker 3: as a paleontologist and how much of that is back
Speaker 3: in a lab or looking at spreadsheets or measuring fossil
Speaker 3: densities and stuff.
Speaker 5: So in terms of the amount of time and like
Speaker 5: how much of the year I'm in the field, it's
Speaker 5: a good chunk of the summer, that's that's usually when
Speaker 5: I do all my field work. So basically July and
Speaker 5: August a good bit of it I'll be in the field,
Speaker 5: mostly in New Mexico.
Speaker 3: Was that a titanosaur?
Speaker 4: That's the Titanosaur project? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Can you can you reveal what you're working on with that?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 5: Obviously you actually basically whatever you find, it's not like
Speaker 5: you went out there and we're gonna find it. Actually
Speaker 5: we kind of went out there going I really kind
Speaker 5: of hope you don't find a titanosaur because really, well,
Speaker 5: I mean not not we were being BLib about it,
Speaker 5: which is what makes it funny, but like there was
Speaker 5: a part of us it was like, I really hope
Speaker 5: we won't find things super huge because we feel, you know,
Speaker 5: compelled to excavate it and it's going to take forever.
Speaker 5: And of course what we found was two individuals of
Speaker 5: the group that includes the largest.
Speaker 4: Land animals of all time.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: In fact, one of our specimens may be the largest
Speaker 5: dinosaur from North America.
Speaker 4: That's huge. Literally, Yeah.
Speaker 5: So it's just I mean, these, you know, these are
Speaker 5: animals that a mid sized titanosaur is like thirty tons plush,
Speaker 5: and a big one is like sixty tons plus how
Speaker 5: many feet the big guys you're looking at one hundred feet?
Speaker 3: Ish?
Speaker 4: Wow?
Speaker 3: How many times bigger than an elephant? Are these guys big?
Speaker 5: A big bull African elephant, which would be the largest
Speaker 5: living land animal. I think the record is like six
Speaker 5: point two tons or something that really averages more like
Speaker 5: five and change. Okay, so if a big titanosaur is
Speaker 5: regularly hitting sixty, that's twelve times.
Speaker 3: So these titanosaurs are like if twelve elephants stacked under
Speaker 3: one giant overcoat and pretended to be a person. That's
Speaker 3: so huge. This is so exciting. I'm sweating. This is
Speaker 3: so Wait what happened when you were in the field
Speaker 3: and someone's like, oh, we got a bone over here,
Speaker 3: Like what what is that?
Speaker 4: Moment Like, well, it depends on what the bone is.
Speaker 5: In the case of the Titanosaur project, you know, you
Speaker 5: see some bones into the hill and at first of
Speaker 5: all was oh, that looks really exciting. We see some
Speaker 5: interesting morphology and we could tell it it's what we
Speaker 5: called pneumatizes. We could tell it had was the animal
Speaker 5: had all these air sacks in it, and we're thinking, oh, wow,
Speaker 5: it's cool. That could be like a big predatory dinosaur
Speaker 5: because they have are they had a lire sex in
Speaker 5: their bones too, And we started exiting around it and
Speaker 5: were like.
Speaker 4: This doesn't really look like it would fit. What could
Speaker 4: this be?
Speaker 5: You think it's because this is a pretty big element.
Speaker 5: Is you're going to the hill and you're thinking that
Speaker 5: it's like a relatively big part of a small animal,
Speaker 5: and then at some point your brain switches and you
Speaker 5: realize you're doing the small part of an enormous animal.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: And there was that moment where.
Speaker 5: It actually was a particular rod of bone that we
Speaker 5: started to see as we started to work around it
Speaker 5: with our tools, that we realized that this was a
Speaker 5: vertebra from the neck, a neck bone.
Speaker 3: I love this part so much.
Speaker 4: I literally just kind of went ah shit.
Speaker 5: And of course the one of the poor volunteers there
Speaker 5: was like, what, what did I break something? I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 5: this just went from this went from a one season
Speaker 5: project to an eight season project, and like why, I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: if this is articulated.
Speaker 3: In paleontology terms, articulated means found all in the same place,
Speaker 3: just a bunch of bones kicking it together in order
Speaker 3: having a bone party under.
Speaker 5: Some dirt, if there's more of it, I mean, I
Speaker 5: was at this point, I'm thinking, Okay, well, maybe it'll
Speaker 5: just be the one one element. It wasn't, of course,
Speaker 5: Oh my god. Then you know we've got we've got
Speaker 5: a you know, forty ton plus animal on the hillside.
Speaker 5: And you start and then you start look at the hillside,
Speaker 5: you go, actually, I think it might kind of just
Speaker 5: be the hillside. Oh my god, that's just a mountain,
Speaker 5: Like it's just kind of is this this kind of
Speaker 5: sentiment loosely sitting on top of the time this one
Speaker 5: who gets to name it? Well that depends, so we
Speaker 5: don't know whether or not we will be need mean
Speaker 5: it because we don't know if it's a new species
Speaker 5: yet or not. There is a type of titanosaur from
Speaker 5: North America that is named just one, which is interesting
Speaker 5: because the rest of the world there's a ton of
Speaker 5: these things, like one of the hot groups of dinosaurs
Speaker 5: to work on these days. Like we went from not
Speaker 5: knowing much about them twenty years ago. That's only this
Speaker 5: has been this explosion.
Speaker 3: So saur pods are those really long necked kind of
Speaker 3: round bellied plant munchioned cuties. Apparently twenty years ago we
Speaker 3: didn't know much about them because our equipment for scanning
Speaker 3: and for transport sucked.
Speaker 5: There's better equipment and tech these days to work with
Speaker 5: things this big, you know, half a century ago. So
Speaker 5: one finds a titanis for coming out of the hillside,
Speaker 5: it's like, well that's pretty yeah, moving on, you know,
Speaker 5: do we.
Speaker 3: Just have better vehicles now?
Speaker 4: We got to good vehicles.
Speaker 5: It's more commonplace to be able to use a helicopter.
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously, half a century ago people could use
Speaker 5: the helicopter, but it was just they were not something
Speaker 5: that was regularly available to the budge kind of budgets
Speaker 5: that we work at on the lift heavy jackets ps.
Speaker 3: When he says heavy jackets, he does not mean woolen coats.
Speaker 3: A jacket is that big plaster lump they smooth around
Speaker 3: excavated fossils to protect it and support it when they're
Speaker 3: storing it or delivering it. Frankly, it looks like a
Speaker 3: very fun rainy day craft project. And if you google
Speaker 3: dinosaur jackets, I dare you. I dare you not to
Speaker 3: go down a rabbit hole looking at children's hooties and
Speaker 3: wondering if you can fit into the largest size offered.
Speaker 3: Even if you don't get to name the species, you
Speaker 3: get to actually be like this one's Gary or whatever.
Speaker 5: Oh sure, so yes, so you can get nicknames. So yeah,
Speaker 5: so they're naming process. So if this thing's up being
Speaker 5: a new species, we will give a new technical name
Speaker 5: in a publication and I'll be myself and my colleagues
Speaker 5: will name it. But in terms of nicknames, there's are
Speaker 5: nicknames those kind of just happen organically, Okay, and Archie.
Speaker 5: Titanosaurs actually have nicknames. Oh whatever, they are Daisy and Duke.
Speaker 5: A look at that, and it's usually the students' naming
Speaker 5: these things.
Speaker 3: Where did they come up with Daisy and dukes? It
Speaker 3: not has nothing to do with gene shorts, does it? Like?
Speaker 3: Daisy dukes? Daisy Duke's, for those unfamiliar, are a type
Speaker 3: of micropant fashioned from truncated denim trousers. They are beneficial
Speaker 3: in warm climates.
Speaker 5: I actually don't know. I am assuming that that was
Speaker 5: the joke, but I went back. I went out on
Speaker 5: a scouting trip to check some map info and came
Speaker 5: back to the quarry and discovered that my two undergraduate
Speaker 5: students had named them Daisy and Duke. And apparently there
Speaker 5: had been some multi hour conversation in which this had occurred.
Speaker 5: To this day, I don't know exactly what went down.
Speaker 5: I don't know what they came up with. I decided
Speaker 5: that if I asked, I might receive information I didn't want,
Speaker 5: and so it was better just to let it go.
Speaker 3: That's wise. The idea that there is a titanosaur in
Speaker 3: a hillside named after Jortz is thrilling to me. So
Speaker 3: when might Daisy and Duke make their museum debut? Please
Speaker 3: put shorts on them.
Speaker 4: There's only so much exhibit space.
Speaker 3: Here's a deal with museums. It's actually like the shoe
Speaker 3: department at J. C. Penny. What you see on the
Speaker 3: floor is a representative fraction of what they got in
Speaker 3: the back. So you may see a cool dinosaur or
Speaker 3: like a weird old knife or a clay jug. But
Speaker 3: the museum has literally millions of specimens on site archived
Speaker 3: for research. The only County National History Museum, for example,
Speaker 3: has thirty five million artifacts in storage. But if you
Speaker 3: did get to name it genus and species, any idea
Speaker 3: where you would start.
Speaker 5: There's weird rules about names and stuff, And because we
Speaker 5: might actually be giving it the name, I can't see right,
Speaker 5: you can't say it. But we have a potential name
Speaker 5: in mind for what one of the two specimens of
Speaker 5: particular is probably a new species.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I squealed, easy, easy, easy.
Speaker 5: What I can say is it's a cool name that
Speaker 5: came out of conversations in part with the native people
Speaker 5: who live in the area.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 5: I don't mean the abrasive white men I mean actual
Speaker 5: native people. And we were in four quarters, so we're
Speaker 5: near we get a little bit of everything.
Speaker 3: Oh, Art, so it is the dig site is near
Speaker 3: four corner. It is.
Speaker 4: It is a species name.
Speaker 5: We don't have anything necessarily in mind, although I suspect
Speaker 5: what my proposal would be is that we name it
Speaker 5: after the donor that funds the expedition, because it is
Speaker 5: a privately funded expedition.
Speaker 3: That's so baller, though, to fund a dinosaur dig. If
Speaker 3: I were jay Z, I'd be like, screw a yacht.
Speaker 3: I'm going to funded dinosaur dig. If I had like
Speaker 3: Beyonce money, I'd be like, let's go dig up some bones.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, the funny thing is, too, you don't
Speaker 5: need Beyonce money in order to do it.
Speaker 3: Really, how much money does it cost to dig up
Speaker 3: a dinosaur? This is the most fun game I've ever played.
Speaker 4: Let's let's have fun with this. How long? How much
Speaker 4: do you think a field season for us costs?
Speaker 3: Oh? Gosh, Well, it depends on if you have interns,
Speaker 3: if you have to pay them, or if you just
Speaker 3: have to buy them, like you know, a bottled water.
Speaker 5: We have a combination of paid employees for the museum
Speaker 5: as well as volunteers.
Speaker 4: Okay, let's just let's just look at just the field season.
Speaker 5: Let's assume that salaries for the museum employees is part
Speaker 5: of their yearly and everything. So just the additional money
Speaker 5: for the supplies the trucks to get people out there,
Speaker 5: to feed them and keep them safe, make the jackets.
Speaker 3: Pay attention for some huge revelations, get transport the specimens.
Speaker 3: I would say, eight hundred thousand dollars, four million dollars,
Speaker 3: a billion.
Speaker 4: Dollars, some ten thousand year.
Speaker 3: You're kidding me? Are you kidding me? So you can't
Speaker 3: You could buy a Toyota camri used or a dinosaur expedition.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: What kind of a world is this? I haven't Why
Speaker 3: haven't we all done this? A good question, shrill, I'm so,
Speaker 3: I'm so excited.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've yet to run anyone who underestimates the cost.
Speaker 4: They always overestimate. Oh yeah, it's there. You know.
Speaker 5: This is this thought that all there must be pouring
Speaker 5: billions of dollars tells me now.
Speaker 4: Now, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: There's no way that anyone could think it was less
Speaker 3: than ten thousand. That's amazing.
Speaker 4: No, it can it can. It can obviously climb from that.
Speaker 5: You're still talking about tens of thousands of dollars, not
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands or millions.
Speaker 3: So less than a wedding these days, Yeah, people drop
Speaker 3: some cash on their way.
Speaker 5: Jackson mc someways my parents said they went to two
Speaker 5: weddings last year. They were each cost over sixty five
Speaker 5: thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: Serious. You can buy a goddamn dinosaur vertebrae for that,
Speaker 3: the whole dinosaur.
Speaker 5: Maybe, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's that's six and
Speaker 5: a half field seasons.
Speaker 3: The average American wedding costs around thirty thousand dollars, and
Speaker 3: the average amount it costs to be a guest in
Speaker 3: someone's wedding, like getting there buying nylons with no runs
Speaker 3: in them presence is eight hundred and eighty eight dollars.
Speaker 3: Everyone start eloping, so we can reallocate that money to
Speaker 3: digging up more cool dead stuff. So do you have
Speaker 3: a favorite dinosaur?
Speaker 4: Do I have a favorite dinosaur? Yes?
Speaker 5: I have a couple of favorite dinosaurs, depending on what
Speaker 5: kind of favoritism right one has in mind, the one.
Speaker 3: That really has a place in your heart, like you
Speaker 3: know which one it is there's one that you really
Speaker 3: like the most?
Speaker 5: Sure so growing up? So the one that makes me think,
Speaker 5: ah childhood is the Sincdnonychus okay, which is very similar
Speaker 5: to Velociraptor of Drurassic Park fame. Incidentally, the real velociraptor
Speaker 5: was about coyote sized and feathered, not giant and scaly.
Speaker 3: Dino enthusiasts love to note that the velociraptors in Jurassic
Speaker 3: Park were not historically Accurateonicus, which means terrible Law, was
Speaker 3: much closer to what was portrayed as a velociraptor, and
Speaker 3: I thought this was just someone sleeping on the job,
Speaker 3: but the confusion is said to have originated Fromonicus originally
Speaker 3: being labeled as a subspecies of velociraptors. Either way, these
Speaker 3: things should have had feathers. So imagine a giant claude
Speaker 3: bird wanting to murder you. It's upsetting. It's not as
Speaker 3: upsetting to some people, though as a movie getting facts wrong.
Speaker 4: Some of them are.
Speaker 5: I've seen some people get really upset about it. I
Speaker 5: just I don't get that upset about it. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's essentially if they're sentially fancy creatures, Buticus
Speaker 5: was particularly interested. It was particularly important historically because it
Speaker 5: was one of the first dinosaurs that was specifically used
Speaker 5: in some of the some of the original hypotheses about
Speaker 5: the organ as the birds and especially being dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: So, by the way, all birds are technically dinosaurs. And
Speaker 3: that may be a thing that you've accepted and you've
Speaker 3: processed in your heart or mind, but it still weirds
Speaker 3: me out.
Speaker 5: Words of living dinasaurs, words of dinasaurs. There's also a
Speaker 5: bad ass of huge claws and you know, fast and
Speaker 5: could leap and all that kind of good stuff.
Speaker 4: So I was he's a kid.
Speaker 5: I was like, ooh, I like the one that can,
Speaker 5: you know, go and assassinate things with great.
Speaker 1: If.
Speaker 5: Now these days I might very well say and have
Speaker 5: said that my favorite might be chungy raptor chang raptor.
Speaker 3: Now, who what a weird thing. First off, it's c
Speaker 3: h A n g y u raptor. To find it
Speaker 3: google it. It took me a while. So this was a
Speaker 3: non bird flying dinosaur. But it looks a fucked on
Speaker 3: like a bird. It's a bird with wings on its
Speaker 3: hind legs. It has four wings, four wings and a
Speaker 3: tail that was like a foot long, big claws and teeth.
Speaker 4: What the hell man, which is not something you hear
Speaker 4: a lot about.
Speaker 3: Now. Michael was on the team that first analyzed and
Speaker 3: published the paper naming this a new species, So you know, so.
Speaker 4: That one has a special place in my heart for
Speaker 4: that reason.
Speaker 3: How do you feel about the feathered tale that was
Speaker 3: found recently an amber?
Speaker 4: Very cool? I actually had a little heads up that
Speaker 4: that was coming, you did.
Speaker 3: Is there like a text thread that all the paleontologists
Speaker 3: of the world are on?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: No, no no.
Speaker 3: By the way, I have found out by hanging around
Speaker 3: scientists that they do have text chains and they do
Speaker 3: talk about nerdy news. I was added to one with
Speaker 3: some scientists and field scientists called Scorpions on our Faces
Speaker 3: and I love it. Now a little background on this
Speaker 3: last year, a paleontologist was trolling some amber markets in
Speaker 3: Myanmar and saw this apricot sized piece of plant resin
Speaker 3: for sale. Is like a jewelry piece whatever the seller
Speaker 3: said there was like maybe a plant stuck in it. Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: it was actually a whole baby dinosaur tail feathered like
Speaker 3: the best episode of Antiques Roadshow ever. They named it Eva.
Speaker 3: Eva is ninety nine million years old and probably got
Speaker 3: her tailstock in tree sap and died there, which is
Speaker 3: currently making want to cry. So rip little feathered buddy,
Speaker 3: and thank you for not ending up as a random
Speaker 3: chunky pendant.
Speaker 4: That's that's a it's a really neat find.
Speaker 5: It is the beginning of what'll probably you'll be seeing more.
Speaker 4: More things like that in the future.
Speaker 3: Are we going to be cloning anything?
Speaker 4: No, You're not.
Speaker 5: Gonna be cloning anything from this because while it while
Speaker 5: it more or less looks exactly like it just was
Speaker 5: preserved yesterday because the soft tissue is there. Wow, that
Speaker 5: doesn't mean that them like their structure is completely unaltered.
Speaker 5: And DNA has a reasonably short half life, so you
Speaker 5: would just get doubled a gook out like you can
Speaker 5: probably get DNA, but not it wouldn't mean anything. Okay,
Speaker 5: DNA doesn't have to break down much, and it would
Speaker 5: be very broken down in the stuff. You might not
Speaker 5: even get any but you might be able to get
Speaker 5: a small amount, but it wouldn't matter. DNA becomes incomprehensible
Speaker 5: very quickly because it only has a four out of alphabet.
Speaker 5: So if you only have four letters in your alphabet.
Speaker 5: Your words based if you will, have to be very lengthy, right,
Speaker 5: so if you break them even a few times, it
Speaker 5: means nothing.
Speaker 3: If you saw the movie Gatica, which was from one
Speaker 3: million years ago aka nineteen ninety seven, it's about genetic engineering,
Speaker 3: and I always thought it was so clever that Gatica
Speaker 3: was spelled using only the letters of DNA sequencing. So
Speaker 3: GTCA isn't that cool? Anyway back to old SAP chickens.
Speaker 5: Those specims gonna be very interesting for understanding anatomy of
Speaker 5: early feathers, for example, but you're not going to not
Speaker 5: going to be cloning anything out out of that unfortunately,
Speaker 5: Although how cool it had have been if like Michael
Speaker 5: Crichton had known about those sites, or if those have
Speaker 5: been available when he was right. You wouldn't even have
Speaker 5: to use the mosquito thing he could just because that
Speaker 5: wouldn't actually work. But it feels very plausible when you
Speaker 5: read the book, which which is the whole point science
Speaker 5: fiction it's supposed to he was he found a really
Speaker 5: nice way of suspending disbelief. With this stuff had been published,
Speaker 5: it could have just been like and they found a
Speaker 5: bunch of stuff, Yeah.
Speaker 3: They've found a whole dinosaur ammer, a whole.
Speaker 5: Dam just made you know that would have been would
Speaker 5: have been great. Although I have to say the Mosquito
Speaker 5: intermediate thing was was clever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is clever.
Speaker 4: It's a very very clever conceit.
Speaker 3: Let the girl. How do you feel about pop culture
Speaker 3: and its treatment of dinosaurs. Do you feel like it's
Speaker 3: good that it stokes people's interest or do you feel
Speaker 3: like it's there's too much mythology and too much fiction.
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's I think it's both. I mean,
Speaker 5: most of it is nowhere even in the ballpark of accurate,
Speaker 5: But on the whole, I take the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Speaker 4: I think for the most part it's awesome. I think
Speaker 4: it's great. You know how many scientists would kill to
Speaker 4: have their field is popular? Is kind oftology? I mean
Speaker 4: it's I mean how petty would have to be to complain?
Speaker 5: People are really interested in what I do, but sometimes
Speaker 5: they get it wrong. You know, like that would be
Speaker 5: that would be awful.
Speaker 3: It could be a real jackass.
Speaker 4: I'd be a real jackass.
Speaker 3: Although, how did you feel about Ross on Friends being
Speaker 3: so pedantic and exhausting? Did you ever feel like he
Speaker 3: got a bad rap.
Speaker 4: I think he earned it.
Speaker 5: He's obnoxious, well, okay, you know, and he's supposed to
Speaker 5: I mean the care You're supposed to be obnoxious, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, he's supposed to be obnoxious. And Dave Swimmer
Speaker 5: did a great job with the character. And interestingly enough,
Speaker 5: there is a palontologist named David Swimmer.
Speaker 3: Are you serious? He was in fact serious. David Schwimmer
Speaker 3: is a paleontologist at Columbus State University, and he authored
Speaker 3: a paper called Giant Celacanth mega Celacanthus dobi from the
Speaker 3: Upper Cretaceous of North America and its Bearings on the
Speaker 3: phylogeny of Mesozoic sela cants. He recently posted about working
Speaker 3: on a study of some quote mystery copper lights. The
Speaker 3: copper light is a fossilized turd. From the exhaustive Google
Speaker 3: image searching I have done, Doctor David Shwimmer appears to
Speaker 3: have a salt and pepper goatee in a short, wiry ponytail.
Speaker 3: He looks like your aunt's cool boyfriend and the kind
Speaker 3: of person you want to sit around a campfire with
Speaker 3: drinken afresca and talking about the best sunsets. He's ever seen.
Speaker 3: Oh God, does he love it or hate it?
Speaker 4: I don't know. Probably a little bit of both in
Speaker 4: my guests, But.
Speaker 3: I hope he's met David Shwimmer for I hope they hug.
Speaker 3: I want them to hug. Did you have any hero
Speaker 3: that were paleontologists growing up? Like, do you have a
Speaker 3: paleontologist just mentor or hero or someone who maybe died
Speaker 3: that you never got to meet?
Speaker 5: Uh? Well, you know, I had. I had a few
Speaker 5: years grow up. Actually I had one in particular that
Speaker 5: comes in mind. This is actually a really cool story.
Speaker 5: I one of my one of my heroes growing up
Speaker 5: was a paletologist who worked in Baltimore named David Wysample.
Speaker 5: And I went he was giving a talk at a
Speaker 5: nature center near where I lived at the time. I
Speaker 5: was like nine or ten or something, and I got
Speaker 5: super excited. I'll never forget that day. It was all
Speaker 5: adults and me. I was the only kid at this thing,
Speaker 5: and I asked more questions than everyone else combined.
Speaker 4: And he just rolled with it.
Speaker 5: And he talked to me afterwards and he was like
Speaker 5: and he basically just not only that I think paletology
Speaker 5: was awesome, but after that day, I decided paleontologists were.
Speaker 4: Just awesome, most awesome people. Oh that's just great. You
Speaker 4: know this this hard work.
Speaker 5: Sorry, so anyway, the uh so, that gave me this
Speaker 5: awesome additional passion for the field. But what makes the
Speaker 5: story really cool is fast forward a little over.
Speaker 4: A decade later, he became my pH supervisor.
Speaker 3: Seriously, did he remember you at all?
Speaker 5: He didn't until I jogged his memory once he's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: remember there's this kid and he's like wait, I'm like
Speaker 5: that was me and oh that's a which is really
Speaker 5: which is pretty cool.
Speaker 3: That's like the end. That's like the ending scene of
Speaker 3: some movie that like works out. Everything worked out, Okay,
Speaker 3: everything worked out.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I basically feel like I get paid to my hobby,
Speaker 5: which is awesome.
Speaker 3: What's your least favorite thing about the job, and then
Speaker 3: we'll follow that with your favorite thing, So like least
Speaker 3: favorite quick thing about the job.
Speaker 5: The least favorite thing about the job is the same
Speaker 5: and least favorite thing that a lot of people would
Speaker 5: passy about the job, which is, even though there was
Speaker 5: less bureaucracy and less paperwork than a lot of jobs,
Speaker 5: there's still enough of it to be annoying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what about flies on the digs.
Speaker 5: We don't have a lot of problems with them in
Speaker 5: New Mexico. But the other place that I do feel
Speaker 5: to work these days is in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.
Speaker 5: It's an amazing place, it's incredible. But when we go there,
Speaker 5: typically in August, the mosquitoes are just terrible.
Speaker 4: It's terrifying. You could from as you could see the
Speaker 4: swarms from a distance because it looks like smoke hanging
Speaker 4: over the grass. Man.
Speaker 3: I love bugs, but not not in.
Speaker 4: Mass like that. Yeah, go to give blood, go to Alberta.
Speaker 3: One day, they're gonna they're gonna find one of those
Speaker 3: mosquitos and amber. They're gonna clone you. You're gonna be
Speaker 3: like that. We made another. Well, what's your favorite thing
Speaker 3: about the job? Oh?
Speaker 5: That one's hard because just because the job actually is
Speaker 5: super fun.
Speaker 4: I love fieldwork.
Speaker 5: I love opening drawers and new museums and the collections
Speaker 5: my good places to you know, travel to do research.
Speaker 4: I really do enjoy teaching now.
Speaker 5: Of course when I'm teaching isn't really pantology, but I
Speaker 5: love anatomy in general. I love teaching anatime and a
Speaker 5: friend's dad up years ago at a social gathering. Her dad,
Speaker 5: Kioto Mines, said he'd give me a little bit of
Speaker 5: a hard time. And you guess so you're you're an academic, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: what do you actually make?
Speaker 3: What do you like? Salary wise?
Speaker 4: No? No, he meant like, isn't like what do you
Speaker 4: what do you make?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: What do you make?
Speaker 3: And I think that seems a little rude.
Speaker 4: Oh he was.
Speaker 5: He was doing being He was being rude, I think
Speaker 5: on purpose. And I took a quick second and said,
Speaker 5: I make doctors face.
Speaker 4: Just what did he do?
Speaker 3: Did you crying? No?
Speaker 4: He turned around, popped it from the beer and handed
Speaker 4: it to me.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 5: It was like checkmate. It was is pretty good. So
Speaker 5: you know, but I do love that component. I love
Speaker 5: I love training, you know, future physicians. There's just so
Speaker 5: much talent and brain power just wandering around at all times.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: You could sit down in the Starbucks at USC and
Speaker 5: you start talking to people and you like, learn five
Speaker 5: new things before noon.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of quality noggins in one area. I
Speaker 3: have some rapid fire questions for you from listeners, but
Speaker 3: before we take questions from you, are beloved listeners, we're
Speaker 3: going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show.
Speaker 3: Sponsors wh are sponsors? You know what they do? They
Speaker 3: help us give money to different charities every week. So
Speaker 3: if you want to know where Ologies gives our money,
Speaker 3: you can go to aliwar dot com and look for
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Speaker 3: where to go. Those are all picked biologists who work
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Speaker 3: Okay, your questions some of them might be ridiculous, some
Speaker 3: of them might be too difficult to answer. I'm not sure,
Speaker 3: but okay, I'm just going to start. David wants to
Speaker 3: know any new thoughts on what color dinosaurs were, Any new.
Speaker 4: Thoughts nice, It depends on how new you're looking at.
Speaker 5: But within the last handful of years, yes, there was
Speaker 5: a significant breakthrough in It's still a little bit controversial,
Speaker 5: but it seems to be accurate in looking at the
Speaker 5: impressions of feathers, in particular because feathers store their pigments,
Speaker 5: some of their pigments and these little kind of little
Speaker 5: capsules basically that do preserve in some of these fossils
Speaker 5: and these really well preservedossils. You need a microscope to
Speaker 5: see them, but they are there. They're called milanosomes, and
Speaker 5: they store melanin or melanins, ahould say, which is a
Speaker 5: good family of different pigments. And of course the original
Speaker 5: pigment isn't in them anymore. But the shape and size
Speaker 5: of the blanosome tells you what kind of melanin it
Speaker 5: had in it. So they can use microscopy advanced microscopean
Speaker 5: imaging techniques to on those feathers to determine where certain
Speaker 5: melanins were located.
Speaker 3: Ooh, what is microscopy. It's just looking at things with
Speaker 3: a microscope.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 5: That means they can get some of the blacks, grays,
Speaker 5: dark browns, and reddish browns, but they can't get other colors.
Speaker 5: So we have some idea that some of these things
Speaker 5: these had bold patterns, but we don't know how bold
Speaker 5: the colors were.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Okay, Tony wants to know if dinosaurs are the
Speaker 3: ancestors of modern birds, does that mean that dinosaurs tasted
Speaker 3: like chicken?
Speaker 4: They probably did taste like chicken.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you know what putting in it is birds
Speaker 5: are just weird dinosaurs Yeah, and uh, and they probably did.
Speaker 5: I mean, keep in mind, the closest living relatives of
Speaker 5: birds are crocodilians, And if you ever had alligator, it
Speaker 5: tastes a little bit like chicken too, So there you go.
Speaker 5: So there's what we call a phylogenetic bracket of tastiness
Speaker 5: there and technical about it. And yeah, so I imagined
Speaker 5: it would taste pretty much pretty much like chicken. Your
Speaker 5: typical dinosaur would probably may be mostly more dark meat
Speaker 5: than white meat.
Speaker 3: Because they have more hemoglobin for.
Speaker 5: Moving, uh sort of, it's very close with What turns
Speaker 5: the dark meat dark is something called myoglobin, which okays
Speaker 5: for restoring oxygen in muscle, and it's only you you,
Speaker 5: you're on the right track, is so good, And that's
Speaker 5: used particularly in call aerobic muscle, so muscle that uses
Speaker 5: a lot of auction.
Speaker 4: It's high endurance muscle.
Speaker 3: So it's this oxygen storing protein myoglobin that makes dark
Speaker 3: meat dark, which is why legs which move around more
Speaker 3: are dark meat, and chicken breast, which just sits there
Speaker 3: not flapping much, is white. So good luck ever looking
Speaker 3: at a roasted dinosaur the same Adam has a question,
Speaker 3: how do you know when to switch brushes? When you're
Speaker 3: digging out a fossil.
Speaker 5: How do you know when the switch brushes when the
Speaker 5: one you currently have is unusable. Okay, yeah, it's as
Speaker 5: we've already discussed, petologis are cheap and we will use
Speaker 5: them until they're basically worn to hell.
Speaker 3: And then you just do you have to get the
Speaker 3: finer and finer brushes. When you're getting tiny grains of
Speaker 3: sand off.
Speaker 5: You don't usually have to reduce the brush size much,
Speaker 5: maybe a little bit. It's more things like chisel anyting,
Speaker 5: sharp chisel sizes and things like that. If you're doing
Speaker 5: some more detailed work, you have to go to a
Speaker 5: smaller tool. Brushes any kind of broad soft paint rush
Speaker 5: will kind of do. Certain perssel types are better than others.
Speaker 5: But you know, it's you know, it's not you're not like,
Speaker 5: it's not like painting. We're going out to detail work.
Speaker 5: You're just you're not taking off each individual grain of sandy.
Speaker 5: Just you have some loose stuff and then you brush
Speaker 5: out of the way, and you have some more loose
Speaker 5: stuff and you brush out of the way.
Speaker 4: The key thing is to not to damage the fossil.
Speaker 3: I always picture you guys going down to like a
Speaker 3: water color, two hairs on the brush, like delicately. It's
Speaker 3: good to know that you guys are just like, no,
Speaker 3: just get the dust up.
Speaker 5: I've used dental tools to etch stuff around a fossil
Speaker 5: be for that seems fun. It is for a while,
Speaker 5: and then it starts to become tedious, but it's mostly fun. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I stally love it, but yeah, we don't go to
Speaker 5: tiny brushes.
Speaker 3: TJ wants to know how many of the fossils on
Speaker 3: display museums are actually replicas casts.
Speaker 5: Right, right, So it depends on what museum you're at,
Speaker 5: and it depends in a large part of what age
Speaker 5: the museum is, or the exhibit is, in particular when
Speaker 5: it was built. If it's a really old exhibit, so
Speaker 5: you go say it hasn't been changed since the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 5: it's likely mostly original material. Oh, because during that time
Speaker 5: they didn't do as much casting. They didn't mind drilling
Speaker 5: through some of these things to put them on exhibit.
Speaker 5: And then as you got into the mid to late
Speaker 5: twentieth century, that fell out of favor because they didn't
Speaker 5: want to put holes in the research specimen. But now
Speaker 5: if it's a really recent exhibit, Ironically enough, you're going
Speaker 5: to see more original stuff on display again because we
Speaker 5: have better armatures now, what we call cradle armatures.
Speaker 3: Armatures are the metal cradles that hold the bones in
Speaker 3: place externally, not lets you remove pieces for research and
Speaker 3: put them back do whatever. More importantly, you don't have
Speaker 3: to drill the shit out of fossils to wire them together,
Speaker 3: which is very old school.
Speaker 5: Now, what percentage of each of the specimen's original is
Speaker 5: a whole nother ballgame. You very rarely find a complete skeleton.
Speaker 5: So there's a few different ways of ending up with
Speaker 5: a complete skeleton. For exhibit one is you create a
Speaker 5: composite from multiple originals of the same species that are
Speaker 5: all similar enough in age and size that it'll more
Speaker 5: or less work.
Speaker 4: As an average individual you're.
Speaker 5: Displaying isn't a single individual ever lived, but it's sort
Speaker 5: of an average of four or five app individuals that
Speaker 5: were very similar.
Speaker 3: So it's like a frank consur, it's like a frankensor.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: And then if the thing's really incomplete, and this happens
Speaker 5: quite often, like you found that you do have enough
Speaker 5: to know what it is. You have enough to know
Speaker 5: it's a new animal. What have you, but you only
Speaker 5: have to say fifteen percent of of the skeleton. You
Speaker 5: will then fill in the rest of casts.
Speaker 3: But the museums are trying their best. Yeah, so do
Speaker 3: some do some placard reading. It's interesting to see trends
Speaker 3: in paleontology, and I don't know, it's interesting to see
Speaker 3: paleontology itself evolve. Stephen one of our audio engineers, really
Speaker 3: really really big dinosaur nerd, like super big. You may
Speaker 3: know Stephen Ray Morris from being America's podcast Starling and
Speaker 3: from his own programs such as the per Cast, which
Speaker 3: is about cats and see Jurassic Wright, which is his
Speaker 3: podcast devoted solely to the movie and it involves his
Speaker 3: own childhood Jurassic Park fanfic which is lit as fuck.
Speaker 6: Oh, I know, I had a question. So I had
Speaker 6: a question about the toro, the Toros Serratops and the
Speaker 6: Triceratops controversy.
Speaker 3: The controversy here is it sometimes dinos get mistaken for
Speaker 3: other ones, and dinosaur ghosts hate this.
Speaker 6: If the Triceratops is just a juvenile torosaurus or if
Speaker 6: the you know, they decided if it was actually two
Speaker 6: different species.
Speaker 4: Right, So that is that is actually still a that
Speaker 4: is an ongoing debate.
Speaker 5: The majority of paleontologists that work on horn dinosaurs consider
Speaker 5: them still to be separate species. But there is one
Speaker 5: research team that has published data indicating that they think
Speaker 5: that Triceratops is actually what we call a junior synonym,
Speaker 5: that is, it's really just a juvenile of another animal.
Speaker 5: I'm personally not entirely convinced, but it's a neat idea.
Speaker 5: But right now, I'd say the majority opinion amongst paleontologists
Speaker 5: is still that Triceratops is a valid name.
Speaker 4: But we'll see how it plays out. Thank you, no worries.
Speaker 3: What's the hot goss on Brnosaurus ronosaurs?
Speaker 5: So so the the short answer is Brontosaurus is a
Speaker 5: valid name.
Speaker 3: Again, do you like petty gossip? Okay, then this is
Speaker 3: a beautiful story. So in the late eighteen hundreds, two
Speaker 3: rich dudes, oth Neil Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope
Speaker 3: had a mutual reciprocal hatred for each other. They tried
Speaker 3: to outdo each other in terms of paleontological supremacy, and
Speaker 3: they would sabotage each other's work. They would publicly discredit
Speaker 3: the other one one of them, Marsh put the wrong
Speaker 3: skull on a Apatosaurus and called it a Brontosaurus. In
Speaker 3: the end, we got a lot of fossils, a lot
Speaker 3: of knowledge out of their rivalry, but they both went
Speaker 3: broke in the process. Just google Bone Wars. It's like
Speaker 3: a Bravo show, but with more monocles. But here's the
Speaker 3: update on the Brontosaurus.
Speaker 5: The original material that was named Brontosaurus was then later
Speaker 5: found that have been comprised of multiple animals of different
Speaker 5: species whoops. And so it was decided that brought the
Speaker 5: saurus was not a valid name because well, it's all
Speaker 5: known stuff. You can't combine them and say it's a
Speaker 5: new animal, right. Researchers recently went through that material again
Speaker 5: with better knowledge, more data than we now have, because
Speaker 5: over time you get better and better knowledge of what's
Speaker 5: out there. The cross compared a bunch of stuff and
Speaker 5: what they found was that, yes, a lot of that
Speaker 5: material was already known species, but some of it didn't
Speaker 5: match anything and therefore was in fact new. So and
Speaker 5: that means the original name holds.
Speaker 3: That's some good breaking news on the Bronosaurus front. Yes,
Speaker 3: I feel like between Pluto and Bronosaurus a lot of
Speaker 3: people got really confused about who was what what was happening?
Speaker 3: Just over ten years ago. Just catch you up, Pluto
Speaker 3: was demoted to a dwarf planet because it doesn't have
Speaker 3: enough game compared to the objects around it. That is
Speaker 3: very casual explanation, like Pluto's somewhere just butt hurt, Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: just crying into a wine cooler, being like what am
Speaker 3: I am? I?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: Well, okay, last question. This is actually from Leela Higgins,
Speaker 3: who an entomologist at the Natural History Museum. She wants
Speaker 3: to know how does studying ancient fossils help the world today?
Speaker 5: Ah, that is a good question, So I and I
Speaker 5: can give. There's a couple of different answers to that.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 5: One answer would be that that knowledge, for its own
Speaker 5: sake is kind of helping the world on a more
Speaker 5: practical side. If if the questions really you know, what
Speaker 5: is it? What sort of practical applications it doesn't have?
Speaker 5: I'll be honest to say that some of it doesn't happening,
Speaker 5: but some of it does. If you want to know,
Speaker 5: for example, what kind of shit goes down when global
Speaker 5: when global atmospheric energy i e. Service temperature changes very rapidly.
Speaker 5: You need to go into the fossil record. This shit
Speaker 5: has happened before, right, It's not. It's not like the
Speaker 5: Earth has never seen rapid warming or rapid cooling or
Speaker 5: things before it did. That's one of the reasons why biologists,
Speaker 5: for example, gets scared when you look at the growing
Speaker 5: temperature spike.
Speaker 4: It's because, oh, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've seen this in our records right about the
Speaker 5: time a whole bunch of shit died.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: And it's not, of course, because stuff gets too warm.
Speaker 5: It's because the rate.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: And if you want to know how fast things have
Speaker 5: to change to be disruptive, you have to look at
Speaker 5: the fossil record.
Speaker 3: For more info on this. Look up huge ass meteor
Speaker 3: that slammed into an area of present day Mexico over
Speaker 3: sixty five million years ago and change the climate leading
Speaker 3: to mass extinction of seventy five percent of the animals
Speaker 3: and plants on Earth aka the k T event k
Speaker 3: dash T.
Speaker 5: And then lastly, in my particular case as a biomechanist, I
Speaker 5: do work with engineers on robotics applications. For the most part,
Speaker 5: if you're interested in an animal model, Fromer says that
Speaker 5: you want to make a running robot or something you
Speaker 5: want to look at inspiration from biological systems. Living things
Speaker 5: are the first place you would normally go because you
Speaker 5: can get a lot more data from them. Obviously, however,
Speaker 5: point nine percent of all things that have ever lived
Speaker 5: are extinct.
Speaker 3: How weird is that ninety nine point nine percent of
Speaker 3: all things that have ever lived are extinct? Just do
Speaker 3: you cut bangs, text your crush. We're all going to die.
Speaker 5: So if you limb yourself to just looking at those things,
Speaker 5: only getting a small fraction of the possible solutions to
Speaker 5: moving around or eating or what are the things that
Speaker 5: you want to that you want to model, So looking
Speaker 5: at other ways it's been done is very informative.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it's I think that's kind of the
Speaker 3: basis of why people are curious about science. It's that
Speaker 3: the past can hopefully or possibly inform the future. So
Speaker 3: you always have like a vested interest and knowledge because
Speaker 3: it could it kind of plots your course going forward,
Speaker 3: it seems.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's exactly, and that was a much much more
Speaker 5: succinctive way of putting what I rambled on about.
Speaker 3: Well, then, the idea of us having a unmanned aviation
Speaker 3: that's in the shape of a pterosaur, just like a
Speaker 3: robotic pterosaur. Can you work on that?
Speaker 4: I could probably work on that out.
Speaker 5: And I don't know how useful that would be, but
Speaker 5: we could probably work on it. That would be pretty
Speaker 5: Funy a riteable robot terrastor that you can use to
Speaker 5: get to work?
Speaker 4: Can that be l a traffic?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is that okay?
Speaker 4: Well, we'll see what I can do.
Speaker 3: Put it on your to do list to very gingerly
Speaker 3: stock doctor Michael Habib. Find him on the twitters at
Speaker 3: arrow evo a E r O E v O because
Speaker 3: aerial evolution is his bag, and to see photos of
Speaker 3: his fieldwork in the museum but probably not cadavers. Follow
Speaker 3: him on Instagram He's at habibanator. Just as it sounds.
Speaker 3: This podcast is on Twitter at ologies pod and on
Speaker 3: Instagram at ologies and I'm on both of those as
Speaker 3: Ali Ward. And if you like this podcast and you
Speaker 3: like not having to listen to a bunch of ads,
Speaker 3: consider supporting it for about the price of a coffee
Speaker 3: per month on Patreon. I'm putting this out myself because
Speaker 3: I love doing it. Hopefully you like it, so join
Speaker 3: the community on Patreon. Thank you to everyone who's already
Speaker 3: supporting on Patreon. I want to hug all of you,
Speaker 3: and thank you to anyone who's bought merch at ologismerch
Speaker 3: dot com. And to my friend Katie for her amazing
Speaker 3: animation she's making which she'll see soon, and for the
Speaker 3: feedback she gave me and helping shape the show. Dude,
Speaker 3: good role. And to my folks who dug up that
Speaker 3: old tape who I guess that makes it kind of
Speaker 3: a fossil, who was obtained by digging, and who listened
Speaker 3: to this even though the language and subject matter can
Speaker 3: be not safe for parents, but above all else, remember
Speaker 3: ask smart people dumb questions before a future urologist is
Speaker 3: dissecting you or a meteor crashes into the planet and
Speaker 3: kills us. All next week gemology.
Speaker 5: So then we like get outside and then it's like
Speaker 5: the deepest, biggest boom you've ever felt.
Speaker 3: Whoa And it was just like boom, and I was like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, this was scary.
Speaker 4: Okay, say goodbye everybody.
Speaker 3: Pacodermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, mattology, nathology, zeriology, slinology.
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