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Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.

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Speaker 1: Time to venture into the vault for an exploration of

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Speaker 1: the Cambrian era. Oh yes, this is an exciting one.

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Speaker 1: This one published just last year October. That's right, And

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Speaker 1: so this was going to be an episode about Cambrian

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Speaker 1: monster was going to be It was one, definitively say,

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Speaker 1: it is one about about Cambrian animals and and their

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Speaker 1: their monstrous characteristics, and about evolutionary biology. We get into

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Speaker 1: some interesting theories about what caused the so called Cambrian explosion.

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Speaker 1: So this was an October episode. We're running it in November.

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Speaker 1: Are we cheating a little bit? We extending the October? Oh? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're doing a little Halloween hangover, little Halloween hang around.

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Speaker 1: I don't know that Halloween gets gets to last until

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Speaker 1: the coming of Crampus in my book. So okay, haven't

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Speaker 1: we Ultimately we have another month or so that we

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Speaker 1: can continue to to dip into the monster bucket here. Um,

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Speaker 1: I do want to say on this particular episode, we

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Speaker 1: also have some merchandise to go along with it. We

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Speaker 1: have a fabulous new logo design which takes our existing

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Speaker 1: logo the sort of abstract symbol that you associated with

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Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind, and it positions it within

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Speaker 1: uh kind of a Cambrian sea of strange life forms.

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Speaker 1: And that logo is available on a shirt, on a throat, pillow,

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Speaker 1: on a sticker, UH, you name it. You can get

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Speaker 1: it through our t public store. There's a link for

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Speaker 1: that at the top of our homepage. It's Stuff to

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Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. And if you're looking at

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Speaker 1: this particular episode on our website, there you'll also see

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Speaker 1: that image front and center as the lead image for

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Speaker 1: this episode. Can you get it engraved on a belt buckle?

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Speaker 1: They do belt buckle. I don't know if they do

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Speaker 1: belt buckles yet, but it's probably. There's there's a lot

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Speaker 1: of of of possibility. You can do hoodies, you can

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Speaker 1: do like various types of shirts. And I bring this up,

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Speaker 1: I mean mainly because it's fun and it's a great

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Speaker 1: way to share Stuff to Blow your Mind and the

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Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind message, I guess you would say,

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Speaker 1: with everyone. But it's also a great way to support

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Speaker 1: the show, UH. Spending a little money on some cool

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Speaker 1: merchandise that is kind of a kind of a wink

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Speaker 1: to other folks who may be listening as well. Alright, well,

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Speaker 1: with that, i'd say let's jump right into our episode

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Speaker 1: on the Cambrian Monster Mash. Hello Dr jessup, anybody here? Well, hello,

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Speaker 1: good sir. I'm glad to see you have arrived. I

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Speaker 1: apologize I can't be there to greet you in person,

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Speaker 1: but please know that I am most appreciative of your attendance.

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Speaker 1: It's so hard to find good volunteers these days. It's

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Speaker 1: it's just if every undergraduate rely even a bit of

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Speaker 1: backbonus simply vanished in the past six months. Huh okay,

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Speaker 1: So am I in the right place? Ah? Well, well,

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Speaker 1: perhaps instead you should ask whether you were in the

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Speaker 1: right time. Uh well, the flyer said, you doing SIUR

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Speaker 1: for test subjects in something called Middle Cambrian exposure. I'm

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Speaker 1: not sure what that is, but if you're paying cash,

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Speaker 1: I'm still on board. Excellent. Now tell me do you

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Speaker 1: have any experience with time displacement? I don't think so,

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Speaker 1: of course not, of course not. And tell me can

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Speaker 1: you swim? You know I can, but it's one of

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Speaker 1: those things I wouldn't say. I'm a great swimmer. Nobody's perfect.

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Speaker 1: Do you see the throbbing light lucifortex in the center

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Speaker 1: of the room or well, yeah, yeah, I do, excellent,

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Speaker 1: go to it all right? Yes, yes, closer, closer? Doesn't

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Speaker 1: feel right? What's that feeling? What's the matter, my little vertebrate?

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Speaker 1: Haven't you ever wanted to feel? Five hundred million years younger?

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Speaker 1: What is that? Is that? An ocean? Oh? My god,

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Speaker 1: it's like the whole planet's an ocean. It's full of monsters.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks

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Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.

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Speaker 1: That was obviously a reference to some kind of journey

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Speaker 1: we may be taking to the Cambrian period. That's right. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we had a little cameo by the late great Anton

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Speaker 1: Jessa late did he die? I don't know. I mean

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Speaker 1: there there are rumors of his death, but who knows

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Speaker 1: for sure? That always exaggerated, is well? Anyway, today, I've

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Speaker 1: got a little story I want to tell to lead

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Speaker 1: us into our topic. Now. Obviously it is October. It's

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Speaker 1: our favorite time of year to talk about monsters. We

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Speaker 1: talked about monsters anyway, but this is the time where

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Speaker 1: we really double down. It's clear mandate for monsters. And

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Speaker 1: I got to take a monster science It's adventure this

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Speaker 1: past month. So this this past month, early on one

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Speaker 1: Sunday morning, my wife Rachel and I were in Canada

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Speaker 1: and we woke up before dawn on this Sunday morning

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Speaker 1: in the town of Golden British Columbia. It's in western Canada,

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Speaker 1: the Canadian Rockies, and we had some coffee and bagels,

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Speaker 1: and we filled up our backpacks with a bunch of

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Speaker 1: layers of warm clothes, bottles of water, all that hiking stuff,

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Speaker 1: and we drove along the steep mountain sides to this

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Speaker 1: tiny town called Field in British Columbia. And there we

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Speaker 1: parked beside a gas station and we waited to meet

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Speaker 1: our guide and the rest of this tour group. So

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Speaker 1: the guide was a paleontologist named David, and the hiking

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Speaker 1: group was mostly French speaking families, some really lovely people

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Speaker 1: and some very intelligent children with great questions like why

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Speaker 1: do animals die? Uh? And so we hiked through the

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Speaker 1: town of Field and along this uphill path through the

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Speaker 1: forest up the side of Mount Stephen, and as we

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Speaker 1: went on throughout the day, the trail got steeper and steeper,

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Speaker 1: and we could see through the trees. The town we

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Speaker 1: came from was becoming this tiny miniature model in the distance.

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Speaker 1: And then right around midday we came out of the

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Speaker 1: tree line and we walked up on this bare plane

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Speaker 1: of flat rocks and they were pieces of the underlying

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Speaker 1: shale formation that had chipped and broken off, and they

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Speaker 1: gathered in this relatively flat part of the mountain side.

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Speaker 1: And on this plane of rocks, you walk around and

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Speaker 1: you pick up these mineral fragments and they're full of fossils.

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Speaker 1: It's just fossils everywhere. Almost every other rock you find

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Speaker 1: has the shape of an animal from millions of years

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Speaker 1: ago printed into it. You're literally walking on thousands and

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Speaker 1: thousands of fossils. So you're in this this mountainous environment

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Speaker 1: and David, who by the way, i'm picturing as the

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Speaker 1: Android from Prometheus and Alien Covenant, is guiding you and

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Speaker 1: showing you these these prehistoric remnants in the rock. David

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Speaker 1: was not Michael Fastbender, but David was excellent. He was

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Speaker 1: a really, really good guy. And this place we came

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Speaker 1: to where we were walking on fossils. This was the

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Speaker 1: Mount Stephen Trial Bye beds. It is a graveyard of

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Speaker 1: organisms from the Cambrian Period about five hundred million years ago. Now.

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Speaker 1: Mount Stephen is in an area that's home to the

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Speaker 1: Burgess Shale geological Formation, which is one of the most

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Speaker 1: important sites of Cambrian Period fossils in the world. And

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Speaker 1: if you ever get a chance to do one of

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Speaker 1: these hikes, I highly highly recommended. I think it literally

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Speaker 1: might be the coolest thing I've ever done. You have

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Speaker 1: to book them through this organization called the Burgess Shale

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Speaker 1: Geoscience Foundation, and they pair you with a guide. Our guide, David,

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Speaker 1: the paleontologist, was an excellent science communicator. He was really

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Speaker 1: good with the kids on the group, and he was

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Speaker 1: a great hiking guide. So if you get a chance

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Speaker 1: to go with David, big thumbs up to him. Be

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Speaker 1: warned if you do try to do this, it's a

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Speaker 1: tough hike. It's like eight kilometers round trip horizontally with

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Speaker 1: a seven hundred and ninety five meter elevation gain, which

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Speaker 1: is like two thousand, six hundred feet, and and that's

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Speaker 1: starting at like twelve hundred or hundred meters of elevation

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Speaker 1: at the at the base of the mountain. Uh So,

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Speaker 1: the air is thin, and it's worth doing some other

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Speaker 1: hikes at higher elevation to get yourself accustomed to the

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Speaker 1: lack of oxygen. But I also don't want to scare

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Speaker 1: you too much, obviously I will. I am no kind

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Speaker 1: of athlete or experienced altitude hiker or anything like that,

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Speaker 1: and I survived so beer advising listeners to wear their

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Speaker 1: best flip flops on this particular Just be prepared, have

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Speaker 1: some layers, have some water, do a little practice. If

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Speaker 1: you can make the trip, it is absolutely worth it

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Speaker 1: to see these fossils firsthand. You can pick them up.

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Speaker 1: You can feel the ribs of these Cambrian organisms. You

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Speaker 1: can you can feel the contours of their bodies as

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Speaker 1: they printed on this ancient shale. But also it's really

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Speaker 1: cool to be there, just because the area around field,

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Speaker 1: including Mount Stephen, trial By Beds and the Burgess Shale

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Speaker 1: Quarry quarries, are just arguably the most important Cambrian fossil

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Speaker 1: sites in the world. They are a geological window in

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Speaker 1: to a time stranger I would argue than any alien

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Speaker 1: planet in any movie, any book, any video game, any

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Speaker 1: Star Trek episode. I think the real alien monsters. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And of course, as you if you know the show,

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Speaker 1: you know we use the term monster affectionately. It's not

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Speaker 1: a pejorative. The real alien monsters are not out there

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Speaker 1: on some exoplanet. They were right here five hundred million

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Speaker 1: years ago, and in this one amazing place you can

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Speaker 1: sort of crunch through their frozen graveyard and it's awesome. Now, Joe,

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Speaker 1: do you find yourself falling into the same admittedly dumb

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Speaker 1: trap that I do when I when I think about

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Speaker 1: about the nationalities that are sort of overlaid regarding fossil

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Speaker 1: uh finds like these are Canadian Cambrian monsters or something

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Speaker 1: like that. Like, yeah, because I was recently reading to

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Speaker 1: my son about Terra saurs and was reading about the

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Speaker 1: about about Bavarian fossils of Terra saurs, and is as

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Speaker 1: silly as it is, I couldn't help but think of

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Speaker 1: of Bavarian Terra stars thinking about the very in rhistoric creature,

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Speaker 1: like wearing later hosen the big big stein of beer.

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Speaker 1: And it's so unfair. You know, I've done the same

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Speaker 1: thing thinking of Mongolian fossil finds in our previous episode,

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Speaker 1: we talked about various raptors. I believe Kim remember it

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Speaker 1: was the velociraptor or dononicus. But I could not help

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Speaker 1: but then think about them in terms of like human

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Speaker 1: history regarding that area, and it yeah, part of his pack.

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Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

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Speaker 1: And that does highlight the need to sort of explain

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Speaker 1: how the Cambrian world was so different than our world,

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Speaker 1: not just that it had different animals in it, but

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Speaker 1: that planet Earth was different than So when I say

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Speaker 1: it was an alien planet, I mean that quite literally.

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Speaker 1: It's not just that it had different fauna, it was

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Speaker 1: a It was a totally different place to live. And

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Speaker 1: so before we get into exploring these monsters of the

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Speaker 1: Cambrian Period, these beautiful and bizarre creatures that you couldn't

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Speaker 1: even dream up if you tried, I think we should

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Speaker 1: take a look at the Cambrian period itself and explain

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Speaker 1: what it was like to be Terra five million years ago.

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Speaker 1: So the Cambrian Period lasted from about five hundred forty

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Speaker 1: to about four hundred and eighty five million years ago,

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Speaker 1: and if you were dropped from today straight into the

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Speaker 1: Cambrian period, you would not recognize planet Earth. The Earth,

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Speaker 1: for one thing, revolved faster than it does now, so

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Speaker 1: days were only about twenty one hours long, and there

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Speaker 1: were about four hundred and twenty of them in a year.

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Speaker 1: The air would be hot, so the average global surface

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Speaker 1: temperature would have been about ten degrees celsius hotter than today.

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Speaker 1: That's a good bit hotter. The atmosphere, while it did

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Speaker 1: have significant free oxygen, at this point, was not quite

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Speaker 1: what it is today. It would have felt a little

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Speaker 1: bit thick with carbon dioxide in your lungs. If you

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Speaker 1: happen to see dry land, it would probably look more

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Speaker 1: like the surface of Mars than Earth today. Because land

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Speaker 1: dwelling plants didn't exist yet. It's kind of hard to

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Speaker 1: imagine Earth that way. And without plant roots to hold

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Speaker 1: the soil in place, land surfaces eroded very easily in

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Speaker 1: the wind and the churning water. So you know, the

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Speaker 1: continents are constantly just kind of burning away into the

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Speaker 1: oceans and being reformed. So to call back to a

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Speaker 1: previous episode we did, was this was definitely a world

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Speaker 1: before fire. Oh yeah, because what would it what would

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Speaker 1: it burn? Right? Yeah? I mean, I can't be sure

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Speaker 1: it was totally without fire, but I mean, yeah, obviously

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Speaker 1: not fire on the scale we see of wildfires in

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Speaker 1: forests today because there was oxygen in the atmosphere at

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Speaker 1: this point. But yeah, what what would burn? What would

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Speaker 1: the fuel be? All Right, So we have this alien

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Speaker 1: world with just a barren land when visible, and then

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Speaker 1: we have this this ocean, this strange ocean, and the

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Speaker 1: Cambrians earth that that's not a story about land at all.

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Speaker 1: That is a story about ocean. It was the ocean

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Speaker 1: planet at that point. You could probably make the argument

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Speaker 1: it's the ocean planet right now, but it definitely was then.

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Speaker 1: According to Cambrian Ocean World Ancient Sea Life of North

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Speaker 1: America by John Foster uh, the level of the seas

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Speaker 1: rose steadily in this saw tooth rise and fall pattern

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Speaker 1: throughout the Cambrian period. So at the beginning of the

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Speaker 1: period sea level was actually a little bit lower than

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Speaker 1: it is today, But by the end of the Late

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Speaker 1: Cambrian sea level was about a hundred and sixty meters

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Speaker 1: or five and thirty feet higher than it is today.

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Speaker 1: So in today's terms, New York Underwater Rome underwater, paris underwater,

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Speaker 1: bag Dad underwater, even parts of Moscow underwater, and the

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Speaker 1: high sea level in the Cambrian led to flooding of

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Speaker 1: about forty percent of the area of Earth's continental masses.

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Speaker 1: Compared that to today, we're only about five percent of

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Speaker 1: that continental area is covered in water. So most of

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Speaker 1: our planets dry land mass was gathered together closer to

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Speaker 1: the south pole, and the continent that became North America

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Speaker 1: was then called Laurentia, not than called by people who

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Speaker 1: have been but people today called that continent than Laurentia.

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Speaker 1: And you sort of have to imagine North America turned sideways,

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Speaker 1: mostly flooded, straddling the equator. Also adding to the alien

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Speaker 1: quality in the Cambrian, astronomy would have been a little

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Speaker 1: bit different. So the Moon was more than twenty kilometers

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Speaker 1: closer to Earth than meaning that its gravity was stronger,

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Speaker 1: meaning the high and low tides on Earth were higher

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Speaker 1: and lower. Okay, because you know, my son was just

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Speaker 1: talking to him to me the other day about the

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Speaker 1: size of the moon and prehistoric times. Oh yeah, like

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Speaker 1: he knew that the moon was bigger in prehistoric times. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and uh, and knows that it will be it will

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Speaker 1: be smaller in future times. Did he into it that

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Speaker 1: or did he find that out somewhere. He consumes a

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Speaker 1: lot of Dinosaur Train and he really likes this podcast,

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Speaker 1: Wow in the World, that's great science podcast for for kids.

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Speaker 1: So and then you know, we talked to him a

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Speaker 1: lot about science. Man, I wish I was that cool

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Speaker 1: when I was a kid. I probably just would have

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Speaker 1: told you about like which ninja turtle was bigger in

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Speaker 1: the prehistoric times? Yeah, so far Ninja turtles will probably

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Speaker 1: come in and wash it all the way. But for now,

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Speaker 1: he's really really into the science, like an alien ocean

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Speaker 1: driving away the continents. Okay, So if we looked under

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Speaker 1: that ancient ocean, that's where the real craziness comes in,

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Speaker 1: because we would find this vast realm of gorgeous, terrifying,

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Speaker 1: surreal monsters that would look completely unlike the kind of

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Speaker 1: Earth life we're familiar with today. Because the Cambrian period

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Speaker 1: is the geological layer where we see evidence of one

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Speaker 1: of the most fascinating and mysterious events in the history

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Speaker 1: of life on Earth, known as the Cambrian explosion. So explosion.

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Speaker 1: What exploded? Was this like a bunch of volcanoes or something. No,

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Speaker 1: the Cambrian explosion is a story about bio diversity. So, Robert,

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Speaker 1: how old is the Earth? Oh, it's so at four

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Speaker 1: and a half billion years old. Yeah, that's the general

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Speaker 1: astronomical idea. So four and a half billion years old.

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Speaker 1: We've had this planet roughly, and we know there's been

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Speaker 1: single celled life on the planet for at least maybe

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Speaker 1: three and a half billion years or so, based on

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Speaker 1: fossil traces left behind by these organisms. And new findings

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Speaker 1: keep pushing the debatable frontier of earliest life farther and

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Speaker 1: farther back into the darkness of Earth time. One example,

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Speaker 1: I just came across So the other day, just earlier

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Speaker 1: this year, in March, there was an article published in

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Speaker 1: Nature arguing that apparent microbe fossils in the New vo

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Speaker 1: Agatuck Belt in Quebec are about three point eight billion

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Speaker 1: and possibly four point three billion years old, somewhere in

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Speaker 1: that range, and these single celled life forms would have

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Speaker 1: been surviving around hydrothermal vents and had this biochemistry based

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Speaker 1: on eating and excreting iron. That's pretty rough and tumble.

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Speaker 1: That's like a comic book film, right, yeah, the iron eat.

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Speaker 1: And the crazy thing is that if these findings are correct,

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Speaker 1: life on Earth would have began within just a few

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Speaker 1: hundred million years of the planet first accreting together in space.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to believe, but whether life on

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Speaker 1: Earth began like four point two billion years ago or

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Speaker 1: more recently, we know that for a long, long time,

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Speaker 1: life on Earth wasn't becoming much more complex, right. There

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Speaker 1: was no serious multicellular life. So no animals, no fish

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Speaker 1: and reptiles, no birds, no plants, no mushrooms, just microbial

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Speaker 1: organisms like bacteria and archaea floating around in the oceans,

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Speaker 1: forming mats and films and occasionally occasionally building these giant

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Speaker 1: mineral brains in the surf called stromatallites. So this would

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Speaker 1: be if this were a science fiction film, this would

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Speaker 1: be the least cinematic alien life form encounter unless it

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Speaker 1: made people like, you know, horribly sick obviously, or possessed them.

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Speaker 1: Biofilm planet, yeah, yeah, the Planet of Slime. Yeah. There

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Speaker 1: was the episode of of Star Trek that that does

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Speaker 1: not does not make it to to the series. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that's you know, that would have been the story

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Speaker 1: of Earth for most of Earth's history, not having any

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Speaker 1: kind of interesting animals or anything like that. Not to

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Speaker 1: say that microbes aren't interesting in themselves, but maybe less

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Speaker 1: interesting to look at. It would have been slime planet. Yeah. Generally,

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Speaker 1: this is the stuff that occupies one, maybe two pages

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Speaker 1: of a of a large prehistoric life book before you

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Speaker 1: get onto the more exciting things, the things that children

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Speaker 1: can imagine fighting each other. But it's most of the

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Speaker 1: life that's ever happened. And then billions of years later,

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Speaker 1: at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, something happens very suddenly.

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Speaker 1: Loads of insane animals show up. And when I say suddenly,

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Speaker 1: I have to qualify that that's suddenly from a geological

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Speaker 1: point of view, which in reality means it took millions

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Speaker 1: of years about five hundred and forty million years ago

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Speaker 1: to about five hundred million years ago. But that's still

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Speaker 1: pretty suddenly compared to the age of the Earth. And

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Speaker 1: this g illogically rapid spike in animal diversity delivers creatures

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Speaker 1: with bilateral symmetry, with large bodies, with eyes, with legs,

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Speaker 1: with shells, with segmented body parts. You've got all of

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Speaker 1: these crazy different types of creatures suddenly showing up, and

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Speaker 1: it's like, where did they all come from? Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: like all these prototypes are rolled out at once. It's

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Speaker 1: like the segment in is it is a RoboCop one

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Speaker 1: or two where we get all the crazy prototypes that, oh,

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Speaker 1: that's a RoboCop two. Yes, yeah, it's one of our

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Speaker 1: favorite points of comparison on the show for biology. Yeah

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Speaker 1: uh yeah. You have suddenly all these different, you know,

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Speaker 1: seemingly crazy examples of life, and many of many of

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Speaker 1: which don't seem to to fall in easily into that

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Speaker 1: category of well, this is a precursor to something we

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Speaker 1: have later on. It's a precursor to something we have

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Speaker 1: today now. Of course, for some people with negative attitudes

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Speaker 1: towards evolutionary science, this provides some kind of rhetorical ammunition,

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Speaker 1: right indeed, I mean the explosion is often exploited by

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Speaker 1: evolution of knives. Even Darwin, we have to note thought

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Speaker 1: that the explosion was at odds with the normal evolutionary process,

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Speaker 1: which in a funny way could be true, but not

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Speaker 1: in the way an evolution denier would mean a couple

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Speaker 1: of thoughts. Evolution is we're familiar with it today, tends

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Speaker 1: to take place within ecosystems in which every niche is

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Speaker 1: already filled. So basically every way there is for a

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Speaker 1: creature to make a living, there's already something trying to

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Speaker 1: do that, So if you want to compete, you've got

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Speaker 1: to outcompete these other organisms. The global ocean of the Cambrian,

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Speaker 1: on the other hand, represented a world in which it

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Speaker 1: seems like there was still tremendous ecological opportunity to occupy,

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Speaker 1: Like there was territory in the ecology that didn't have

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Speaker 1: any existing competition. So it was a time in which

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Speaker 1: an animal could start doing something to eat or to

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Speaker 1: otherwise survive, and no other species was already doing that thing.

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Speaker 1: There was just sort of like free land to grab. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: like yeah, land grab call the frontier, uh, except without

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Speaker 1: other organisms already occupying it. So that there could be

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Speaker 1: one explanation for why evolution seems to be working differently

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Speaker 1: at this one period in history than it has since.

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Speaker 1: But also the Young Earth creationist who exploits ongoing debates

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Speaker 1: in biology to sort of resort to the supernatural. They're

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Speaker 1: employing a fallacy in rhetoric known as the argument from

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Speaker 1: ignorance fallacy, which means like I don't know what caused something,

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Speaker 1: therefore the cause is x uh example, you don't know

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Speaker 1: who committed the Jack the Ripper murders. Therefore it was

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Speaker 1: interdimensional sasquatches. Now the version employed here, of course, says,

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Speaker 1: you can't all agree. We don't know on what caused

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Speaker 1: the sudden or geologically sudden biodiversity of the Cambrian explosion.

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Speaker 1: Therefore the cause is supernatural. Now, this line of thinking

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Speaker 1: obviously doesn't get you anywhere once you examine it. But

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Speaker 1: the disagreement and debate over the cause is a fascinating,

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Speaker 1: outstanding question, and it's something I think we want to

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Speaker 1: entertain a few answers to day. Now, some of the

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Speaker 1: hypotheses are primarily environmental and chemical. Right, so some scientists

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Speaker 1: have proposed that the cause of the camera and explosion

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Speaker 1: could be a rise in the content of oxygen in

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Speaker 1: the atmosphere, which leads to an increase in the level

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Speaker 1: of dissolved oxygen in the oceans. Now, of course, remember

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Speaker 1: that Earth's original atmosphere did not have free oxygen, right,

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Speaker 1: that was added to the atmosphere gradually as a waste

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Speaker 1: product of photosynthesis. You have all these microbes out there

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Speaker 1: and they're eating the sunlight and then their geoengineering the

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Speaker 1: atmosphere with their waste products. Which included oxygen. The gradual

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Speaker 1: natural terraforming of our world. Yeah, the microbial terraforming of Earth,

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Speaker 1: which absolutely did happen in the past. And that's where

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Speaker 1: we get our oxygen. Now, when you think about it,

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Speaker 1: large fast moving animals need lots of oxygen to feed

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Speaker 1: their energy hungry tissues. Like think of the way that

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Speaker 1: when you move your muscles a lot, your body starts

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Speaker 1: greedily gulping down more and more air. In the same way,

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Speaker 1: if you think about these organisms in the past, suddenly

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Speaker 1: you wanted to have organisms with large bodies. They would

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Speaker 1: have needed access to oxygen. So maybe when that oxygen

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Speaker 1: became available, suddenly you could build these big, fast moving

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Speaker 1: bodies and you get all this animal biodiversity. Okay, so

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Speaker 1: previously the oxygen economy would not support this kind of growth, right,

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Speaker 1: But the idea is then it would. So did a

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Speaker 1: sudden increase in oxygen drive the explosion. Well, some recent

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Speaker 1: studies have cast doubt on this hypothesis, including one published

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Speaker 1: in Nature and by Spurling at all uh and it

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Speaker 1: basically did not find evidence of a significant increase of

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Speaker 1: oxygen in ocean water at the beginning of the Cambrian

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Speaker 1: so evidence shows that if there was an increase in

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Speaker 1: oxygen at the Cambrian transition, it was kind of a

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Speaker 1: small one. All right, Well, what else do we have? Well,

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Speaker 1: other hypotheses are more biological and ecological, Like what if

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Speaker 1: there was one type of biological innovation, some new way

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Speaker 1: for animals to make a living or new thing. Animals

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Speaker 1: could do that rapidly accelerated competition with an ecosystems, which

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Speaker 1: would speed up natural selection and cause new species to

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Speaker 1: form much more rapidly. How about the example of site

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is a big one. Yeah, so previous

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Speaker 1: animals they might have had some kind of photosensitive spots

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Speaker 1: or receptors that would have allowed them to, for example,

427
00:24:22,960 --> 00:24:26,240
Speaker 1: move towards the sunlight. But the Cambrian is the first

428
00:24:26,280 --> 00:24:30,280
Speaker 1: period in history where we have evidence of complex site organs,

429
00:24:30,600 --> 00:24:34,000
Speaker 1: you know, eyes. It's the age of organisms with compound eyes.

430
00:24:34,400 --> 00:24:37,280
Speaker 1: So imagine how much adaptive pressure would be put on

431
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:40,240
Speaker 1: you if you lived in a world where all creatures

432
00:24:40,280 --> 00:24:44,280
Speaker 1: were basically blind and then suddenly some of your competitors

433
00:24:44,280 --> 00:24:47,280
Speaker 1: could see. Yeah, this is this is a crazy thing

434
00:24:47,320 --> 00:24:49,800
Speaker 1: to try to imagine, but yeah, just just think of

435
00:24:49,880 --> 00:24:53,960
Speaker 1: sight coming online in a world and all the additional

436
00:24:53,960 --> 00:24:57,800
Speaker 1: stuff that this entail. Suddenly pigmentation begins to matter. I mean,

437
00:24:57,800 --> 00:25:01,040
Speaker 1: it's hard to even apply. You're one is tempted to

438
00:25:01,080 --> 00:25:04,360
Speaker 1: apply this to human arms race um, which is which

439
00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:08,479
Speaker 1: is often an an apt comparison. But I mean, what

440
00:25:08,520 --> 00:25:12,080
Speaker 1: can we even look to in human technology and human

441
00:25:12,080 --> 00:25:14,800
Speaker 1: weapons systems. I mean, I'm just thinking maybe you could

442
00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:17,680
Speaker 1: apply it. You can compare it to flight and say

443
00:25:17,680 --> 00:25:20,400
Speaker 1: that well, once, once human technology allowed us to take

444
00:25:20,440 --> 00:25:25,119
Speaker 1: to the air, that created an entire new theater of war,

445
00:25:25,320 --> 00:25:29,280
Speaker 1: and they also changed the existing theaters of war. And

446
00:25:29,320 --> 00:25:31,520
Speaker 1: I think you could make that comparison pretty well, like

447
00:25:31,880 --> 00:25:35,720
Speaker 1: flight changed the nature of warfare forever, Like suddenly just

448
00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:38,520
Speaker 1: having like lots of ground troops didn't didn't matter a

449
00:25:38,560 --> 00:25:42,200
Speaker 1: whole lot, right, But this, this seems more extensive than that.

450
00:25:42,359 --> 00:25:45,600
Speaker 1: You know, It's like it's it's the opening of another

451
00:25:45,680 --> 00:25:49,720
Speaker 1: dimension of competition in a way. Yeah and yeah, and

452
00:25:49,760 --> 00:25:54,080
Speaker 1: you think so you you mentioned pigmentation, Suddenly the colors

453
00:25:54,119 --> 00:25:56,920
Speaker 1: you are matter, like blending in matters. But also think

454
00:25:56,920 --> 00:25:59,600
Speaker 1: about the way it would make movement matter. We would

455
00:25:59,600 --> 00:26:03,040
Speaker 1: make the shapes of bodies matter, would just completely change

456
00:26:03,080 --> 00:26:06,560
Speaker 1: all the dynamics of how creatures interacted with one another. Yeah,

457
00:26:06,560 --> 00:26:11,280
Speaker 1: not only prey predator interactions, but of course just interspecies communication,

458
00:26:11,560 --> 00:26:16,120
Speaker 1: uh and as well as mating. I mean everything changes

459
00:26:16,160 --> 00:26:18,920
Speaker 1: because of this. Yeah. So we'll come back to look

460
00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:22,800
Speaker 1: at more of these answers to this question throughout the episode,

461
00:26:22,800 --> 00:26:24,399
Speaker 1: but I think we should take our first break and

462
00:26:24,400 --> 00:26:25,920
Speaker 1: then we come back. We will look at one of

463
00:26:25,960 --> 00:26:30,440
Speaker 1: the first major inhabitants of our Cambrian monster House. Thank you,

464
00:26:30,640 --> 00:26:33,360
Speaker 1: thank Alright, we're back. So as we roll through these,

465
00:26:33,400 --> 00:26:37,120
Speaker 1: I also want everyone to think of potential Halloween costume ideas,

466
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:39,879
Speaker 1: because I think we have some We have some wonderful

467
00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:43,960
Speaker 1: prehistoric monsters here that I think are more inventive listeners

468
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:46,159
Speaker 1: might be able to to turn into a mask or

469
00:26:46,240 --> 00:26:48,879
Speaker 1: a full body cost Okay, So I want you Starship

470
00:26:48,920 --> 00:26:52,439
Speaker 1: Troopers fans out there to get a little bit excited

471
00:26:52,480 --> 00:26:55,679
Speaker 1: about Stone Bug Planet, Okay. Fans of the book or

472
00:26:55,760 --> 00:26:59,439
Speaker 1: the movie, well, I mean they both got bugs, that's okay.

473
00:26:59,440 --> 00:27:03,119
Speaker 1: So in eight teen six, there's a Canadian geologist by

474
00:27:03,119 --> 00:27:05,960
Speaker 1: the name of Richard McConnell, and he's visiting the town

475
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:08,280
Speaker 1: of Field, the same town I went to when I

476
00:27:08,359 --> 00:27:11,760
Speaker 1: began the walk up Mount stephen Field, British Columbia, where

477
00:27:11,800 --> 00:27:15,800
Speaker 1: some railroad workers told him they had found something creepy

478
00:27:15,960 --> 00:27:19,080
Speaker 1: on the slopes of nearby Mount stephen They were these

479
00:27:19,119 --> 00:27:23,879
Speaker 1: things that they called quote stone bugs, and these were

480
00:27:23,920 --> 00:27:27,840
Speaker 1: in fact trialo bytes, the best known inhabitants of the

481
00:27:27,840 --> 00:27:31,760
Speaker 1: Cambrian oceans. Now trio bytes are not a single species,

482
00:27:31,800 --> 00:27:34,359
Speaker 1: but there are a class of extinct animals from the

483
00:27:34,359 --> 00:27:37,080
Speaker 1: phylum arthur Poda, and so that would be the same

484
00:27:37,080 --> 00:27:41,959
Speaker 1: phylum that includes, for example, insects and crustaceans, lobsters or arthropods.

485
00:27:42,040 --> 00:27:47,399
Speaker 1: Insects and spiders or arthropods. These exoskeleton creatures now trialo bytes,

486
00:27:47,440 --> 00:27:50,919
Speaker 1: were an enormously successful form of life, beginning in the

487
00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:54,639
Speaker 1: Cambrian and surviving for about three hundred million years until

488
00:27:54,680 --> 00:27:57,040
Speaker 1: they were wiped out about two hundred and fifty million

489
00:27:57,119 --> 00:28:00,760
Speaker 1: years ago in the Permian Triassic extinct Shinn event, also

490
00:28:00,800 --> 00:28:03,800
Speaker 1: known as the Great Dying, which was the biggest mass

491
00:28:03,840 --> 00:28:08,000
Speaker 1: extinction in the history of planet Earth. About of all

492
00:28:08,280 --> 00:28:13,240
Speaker 1: marine species went extinct. It's kind of hard to imagine,

493
00:28:13,920 --> 00:28:16,520
Speaker 1: but until then trial bytes were like sort of like

494
00:28:16,560 --> 00:28:21,439
Speaker 1: the insects of today, just this enormously successful type of

495
00:28:21,600 --> 00:28:24,720
Speaker 1: creature found everywhere. They were a swarm upon the face

496
00:28:24,760 --> 00:28:27,000
Speaker 1: of the deep or I kind of want to think

497
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:30,359
Speaker 1: of them as the infinity bugs. I like it. So

498
00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:32,840
Speaker 1: the trialo byte body structure kind of resembles like a

499
00:28:32,960 --> 00:28:36,000
Speaker 1: roly poly or a pill bug, maybe crossed with a

500
00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:40,240
Speaker 1: horseshoe crab. It's got these articulated segments lining its back

501
00:28:40,800 --> 00:28:42,360
Speaker 1: and if you look at it from the top down,

502
00:28:42,400 --> 00:28:46,160
Speaker 1: you'll see this flat, hard shell made of a matrix

503
00:28:46,200 --> 00:28:49,560
Speaker 1: of tiny calcite needles. And if you look at it

504
00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:52,840
Speaker 1: on the vulnerable underside, you'll see the legs and the

505
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:55,120
Speaker 1: gills and the mouth. And actually it does kind of

506
00:28:55,120 --> 00:28:57,200
Speaker 1: look like a like a roly poly or a pill

507
00:28:57,240 --> 00:28:59,480
Speaker 1: bug on the underside too, if you ever see them. Yeah,

508
00:28:59,480 --> 00:29:01,840
Speaker 1: I have to say Trilobyte, of all the creatures were

509
00:29:01,840 --> 00:29:04,120
Speaker 1: going to discuss today, well, first of all, it's the

510
00:29:04,160 --> 00:29:07,320
Speaker 1: most famous, I think, so most of you have probably

511
00:29:07,400 --> 00:29:11,160
Speaker 1: seen images of it before. But it also does look

512
00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:15,520
Speaker 1: a lot more like existing creatures. It doesn't if you,

513
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:18,320
Speaker 1: if you didn't know better, you could easily see an

514
00:29:18,360 --> 00:29:20,320
Speaker 1: image of this and think that it could be something

515
00:29:20,360 --> 00:29:23,360
Speaker 1: living today. Yeah, I think the creepiness of the trial

516
00:29:23,440 --> 00:29:27,280
Speaker 1: Bye World comes not from seeing their body plans, because

517
00:29:27,320 --> 00:29:29,400
Speaker 1: you can see stuff that looks kind of like them.

518
00:29:29,440 --> 00:29:32,840
Speaker 1: Like you say, it's just how many of them there were,

519
00:29:32,880 --> 00:29:35,640
Speaker 1: and thinking of this being one of the dominant body

520
00:29:35,680 --> 00:29:39,080
Speaker 1: plans on the planet, or the dominant body plan on

521
00:29:39,080 --> 00:29:41,000
Speaker 1: the planet. And if you're still drawing a blank as

522
00:29:41,000 --> 00:29:44,000
Speaker 1: to what this looks like, I'm going to include images

523
00:29:44,120 --> 00:29:46,400
Speaker 1: of of all the species that we're discussing here on

524
00:29:46,440 --> 00:29:48,440
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode. It's stuff to blow

525
00:29:48,480 --> 00:29:51,080
Speaker 1: your mind dot com. Alright, so we've had a look

526
00:29:51,080 --> 00:29:56,480
Speaker 1: at the creature's legs. Let's turn this puppy around. Okay,

527
00:29:56,480 --> 00:29:57,960
Speaker 1: turn it so if you look at it from the

528
00:29:58,000 --> 00:30:01,280
Speaker 1: top down, you can basically deve via a trilobyte in

529
00:30:01,520 --> 00:30:04,720
Speaker 1: three both ways. So if you look at it lengthwise,

530
00:30:04,760 --> 00:30:08,320
Speaker 1: you're looking at head on. Lengthwise, there is bilateral symmetry,

531
00:30:08,360 --> 00:30:10,920
Speaker 1: and this is the cameraan period. We see these animals

532
00:30:10,920 --> 00:30:14,160
Speaker 1: with bilateral symmetry really taking over. You can fold them

533
00:30:14,200 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: in half and they're like a book. They match on

534
00:30:16,240 --> 00:30:20,400
Speaker 1: both sides. And in that lengthwise direction, the trilobyte is

535
00:30:20,400 --> 00:30:23,440
Speaker 1: divided into three lobes. You've got the axial lobe, which

536
00:30:23,520 --> 00:30:25,800
Speaker 1: runs down the middle from the head to the tail,

537
00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:27,760
Speaker 1: kind of like the spine of the book, or like

538
00:30:27,840 --> 00:30:30,520
Speaker 1: the spine of a vertebrate. And then you've got the

539
00:30:30,520 --> 00:30:33,560
Speaker 1: two plural lobes on each side which you're shielding the

540
00:30:33,680 --> 00:30:36,600
Speaker 1: legs from above. There were these you know, shelled lobes

541
00:30:36,640 --> 00:30:39,040
Speaker 1: stick out on the side and they cover up where

542
00:30:39,040 --> 00:30:42,040
Speaker 1: the legs would be moving underneath. Now you rotate at

543
00:30:42,120 --> 00:30:44,960
Speaker 1: ninety degrees, and then you've got another three sections. You've

544
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:48,440
Speaker 1: got the head known as the cephalon, the middle section

545
00:30:48,480 --> 00:30:51,280
Speaker 1: known as the thorax, and the rear section known as

546
00:30:51,360 --> 00:30:54,680
Speaker 1: the pagidium. Now, one thing you might wonder, why do

547
00:30:54,720 --> 00:30:58,320
Speaker 1: we see these articulated segments on the shell of a trilobyte, Like,

548
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:01,160
Speaker 1: why doesn't it have something more like a big solid

549
00:31:01,320 --> 00:31:06,480
Speaker 1: turtle shell? You know, why why the different plates overlapping? Well,

550
00:31:06,560 --> 00:31:11,120
Speaker 1: there are multiple answers, but one is that apparently some

551
00:31:11,240 --> 00:31:14,400
Speaker 1: TrailO bites were able to partially curl up and protect

552
00:31:14,440 --> 00:31:19,520
Speaker 1: their soft underbellies like an armadillo or a pillbug. Yeah

553
00:31:19,720 --> 00:31:22,160
Speaker 1: it so do you do you use the word pillbug

554
00:31:22,240 --> 00:31:25,040
Speaker 1: or roly poly? Do I think they're the same thing? Yes,

555
00:31:25,160 --> 00:31:27,520
Speaker 1: I believe the same creature or the same you know,

556
00:31:27,680 --> 00:31:30,760
Speaker 1: classification of creatures at the very least. But yeah, I

557
00:31:30,800 --> 00:31:33,240
Speaker 1: grew up with roly poly. I think I did too,

558
00:31:33,280 --> 00:31:36,200
Speaker 1: And somehow in my adulthood transition to pillbug, I've sold

559
00:31:36,200 --> 00:31:40,720
Speaker 1: out my childhood wonders. It does sound significantly less silly. Well, anyway,

560
00:31:40,880 --> 00:31:43,920
Speaker 1: trialo bite fossils are that. That's what you're walking on

561
00:31:43,960 --> 00:31:45,920
Speaker 1: in the Mount Stephen Trialo by beds, right, So you

562
00:31:45,920 --> 00:31:48,120
Speaker 1: walk around, you crunch through these things. You pick up

563
00:31:48,120 --> 00:31:50,600
Speaker 1: these rocks and they've got these little shells in them.

564
00:31:50,800 --> 00:31:54,160
Speaker 1: And the trio bite fossils are so common you can

565
00:31:54,200 --> 00:31:56,880
Speaker 1: get the sense that these animals must have been stacked

566
00:31:56,920 --> 00:32:00,640
Speaker 1: a mile high when they actually existed. Right, There were

567
00:32:00,680 --> 00:32:03,560
Speaker 1: a lot of them in the Cambrian but they're perhaps

568
00:32:03,640 --> 00:32:06,800
Speaker 1: overrepresented in the fossil record because many of the fossilized

569
00:32:06,840 --> 00:32:10,920
Speaker 1: shells we find are not the animals themselves, but the

570
00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:15,800
Speaker 1: discarded shells left over from the molting process. So, like

571
00:32:15,960 --> 00:32:18,840
Speaker 1: Arthur pods today, trial bites were himmed in by this

572
00:32:18,920 --> 00:32:21,880
Speaker 1: protective shell and if they wanted to grow bigger, they

573
00:32:21,880 --> 00:32:25,520
Speaker 1: had to molt, which meant discarding that protective outer layer.

574
00:32:25,560 --> 00:32:29,720
Speaker 1: And temporarily risking a soft bodied existence in order to

575
00:32:29,760 --> 00:32:32,880
Speaker 1: grow that larger, harder shell. It would be like if

576
00:32:32,880 --> 00:32:37,560
Speaker 1: there were a prehistoric hominid creature that left multiple skeletons,

577
00:32:37,880 --> 00:32:40,080
Speaker 1: you know, which is of course impossible, but with an

578
00:32:40,080 --> 00:32:43,840
Speaker 1: exoskeleton is is completely is very possible. Well, the vulnerability

579
00:32:43,840 --> 00:32:46,240
Speaker 1: of molting makes me think about the comparison to a

580
00:32:46,320 --> 00:32:48,719
Speaker 1: human newborn. You know, when when babies are born, they

581
00:32:48,760 --> 00:32:53,040
Speaker 1: don't necessarily have all their their hard protective skeletal parts yet,

582
00:32:53,040 --> 00:32:56,760
Speaker 1: and I have a lot of unfused together the unfused

583
00:32:56,800 --> 00:33:00,520
Speaker 1: skull for example, and the soft cartilaginous body arts where

584
00:33:00,560 --> 00:33:05,200
Speaker 1: you really do make yourself vulnerable when you're firstborn. But

585
00:33:05,280 --> 00:33:07,360
Speaker 1: of course they're depending on the fact that mammals have

586
00:33:07,440 --> 00:33:10,000
Speaker 1: protective parents that will try to prevent injury to their

587
00:33:10,040 --> 00:33:13,120
Speaker 1: offspring when they're young and vulnerable trialo bites. I don't

588
00:33:13,160 --> 00:33:15,240
Speaker 1: know if they're they're quite so protective of they're young.

589
00:33:16,120 --> 00:33:17,800
Speaker 1: I mean you could say that puberty is kind of

590
00:33:17,840 --> 00:33:20,920
Speaker 1: a molten period where where where we tend to be

591
00:33:21,360 --> 00:33:24,360
Speaker 1: soft and vulnerable, if not in if not in mentally,

592
00:33:24,440 --> 00:33:29,600
Speaker 1: at least mentally. Yeah. Uh so that's interesting to think

593
00:33:29,640 --> 00:33:32,400
Speaker 1: of the molten process having an impact on the sheer

594
00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:36,200
Speaker 1: number of fossilized remains. But but then on top of that,

595
00:33:36,240 --> 00:33:39,440
Speaker 1: of course, it makes you analyze, and we've discussed this

596
00:33:39,520 --> 00:33:42,920
Speaker 1: on the show before, like what makes a creature more

597
00:33:43,200 --> 00:33:47,000
Speaker 1: liable to be fossilized? And I mean, you look at

598
00:33:47,040 --> 00:33:49,720
Speaker 1: the creatures that are fossilized in any great number. It's

599
00:33:49,720 --> 00:33:51,720
Speaker 1: not going to be an apex predator living in a

600
00:33:51,800 --> 00:33:54,360
Speaker 1: dry region. It's going to be something like a low

601
00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:57,040
Speaker 1: level and burd invertebrate that lives in the muck. Yea

602
00:33:57,280 --> 00:34:01,320
Speaker 1: something that gets buried quickly. Uh, and that leaves behind

603
00:34:01,400 --> 00:34:04,800
Speaker 1: hard body parts near water, especially right. So the great

604
00:34:04,920 --> 00:34:08,240
Speaker 1: the Great Land squid of old rights have not been preserved,

605
00:34:09,239 --> 00:34:12,279
Speaker 1: but their beaks are many. Oh yes, that's right. We

606
00:34:12,320 --> 00:34:14,799
Speaker 1: would get the beaks, yeah, these beds of beaks, and

607
00:34:14,840 --> 00:34:18,040
Speaker 1: we'd wonder what they are. Yeah. But because there are

608
00:34:18,080 --> 00:34:21,120
Speaker 1: so many trialobite fossils, and because they're so strange and

609
00:34:21,160 --> 00:34:24,200
Speaker 1: so alien to the modern life forms we encounter in

610
00:34:24,239 --> 00:34:25,920
Speaker 1: our day to day lives, I mean, they might be

611
00:34:25,960 --> 00:34:28,960
Speaker 1: they might bear some resemblance to insects for example. Right,

612
00:34:28,960 --> 00:34:32,560
Speaker 1: And this is why railroad worker might call them stone bugs,

613
00:34:32,840 --> 00:34:34,640
Speaker 1: but it's no surprise that they show up in human

614
00:34:34,640 --> 00:34:37,120
Speaker 1: culture too. I wanted to mention one cool example I

615
00:34:37,120 --> 00:34:40,880
Speaker 1: came across. Remember Adrian Mayor who wrote the first Fossil Hunters.

616
00:34:40,880 --> 00:34:43,400
Speaker 1: We talked about her in our in our what was

617
00:34:43,440 --> 00:34:46,799
Speaker 1: it the geomethology? Yes, yes, this we had to do

618
00:34:46,880 --> 00:34:50,800
Speaker 1: with how did ancient people look at fossilized remains, didn't

619
00:34:50,880 --> 00:34:54,200
Speaker 1: think they were monsters? That they think they were dragons? Yeah? Yeah?

620
00:34:54,200 --> 00:34:57,360
Speaker 1: And did did these ideas of mythical monsters come from

621
00:34:57,520 --> 00:35:01,280
Speaker 1: people finding fossils? So she's got another boat called Fossil

622
00:35:01,360 --> 00:35:04,040
Speaker 1: Legends of the First Americans, and she writes of how

623
00:35:04,160 --> 00:35:07,640
Speaker 1: trio bite fossils were apparently used as protective amulets by

624
00:35:07,680 --> 00:35:10,839
Speaker 1: some of the Ute people of Utah. So this one

625
00:35:10,880 --> 00:35:13,160
Speaker 1: story is in the early nineteen hundreds, there was an

626
00:35:13,160 --> 00:35:17,160
Speaker 1: amateur natural historian named Frank Beckwith and he noticed a

627
00:35:17,200 --> 00:35:20,080
Speaker 1: trio bite necklace at a Ute burial site. So he

628
00:35:20,120 --> 00:35:23,000
Speaker 1: asked some friends of his name, Joseph and Tedford pick

629
00:35:23,120 --> 00:35:26,240
Speaker 1: of It, who were members of the tribe, what this meant,

630
00:35:26,400 --> 00:35:29,080
Speaker 1: and they told him that the fossil was called timpei

631
00:35:29,200 --> 00:35:34,279
Speaker 1: kanitsa Pavacci which meant little water bug in Stone and

632
00:35:34,440 --> 00:35:37,080
Speaker 1: Beckwith also records that the men told him that their

633
00:35:37,080 --> 00:35:40,200
Speaker 1: elders believed that wearing the trio bites could protect against

634
00:35:40,239 --> 00:35:43,560
Speaker 1: sickness and bullets. But I thought that's kind of cool that.

635
00:35:43,920 --> 00:35:47,480
Speaker 1: Look somehow the fossils were intuited to have been water

636
00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:51,040
Speaker 1: dwelling creatures, and I wonder how people would have figured

637
00:35:51,080 --> 00:35:54,160
Speaker 1: that out back then. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah,

638
00:35:54,239 --> 00:35:56,640
Speaker 1: especially given that there would be there would be plenty

639
00:35:56,640 --> 00:35:59,759
Speaker 1: of terrestrial invertebrates to compare it to. I guess maybe

640
00:35:59,760 --> 00:36:03,880
Speaker 1: they maybe they saw more of the of the crab

641
00:36:04,080 --> 00:36:07,440
Speaker 1: in this creature than they did, uh, you know, terrestrial bucks.

642
00:36:07,760 --> 00:36:09,560
Speaker 1: I know, I wouldn't have been that perceptive. I would

643
00:36:09,600 --> 00:36:13,600
Speaker 1: have called it like roly Poly or something. Well, anyway,

644
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:16,600
Speaker 1: considering that all these there are all these shells everywhere,

645
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:20,360
Speaker 1: another possible answer to the question of what caused the

646
00:36:20,360 --> 00:36:25,080
Speaker 1: Cambrian explosion comes up. What if the Cambrian explosion is

647
00:36:25,080 --> 00:36:28,480
Speaker 1: an illusion? What if it is not so much an

648
00:36:28,480 --> 00:36:31,880
Speaker 1: event in history where all these animals suddenly emerged, but

649
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:36,680
Speaker 1: a misperception created by the types of evidence available to us.

650
00:36:37,200 --> 00:36:39,320
Speaker 1: So this would be like a reporting error exactly. It

651
00:36:39,320 --> 00:36:42,279
Speaker 1: would be a sampling bias. How would that be. Well,

652
00:36:42,600 --> 00:36:45,080
Speaker 1: like we've been talking about, we know fossilization has this

653
00:36:45,200 --> 00:36:48,960
Speaker 1: serious preference for hard body parts, and it appears to

654
00:36:49,040 --> 00:36:53,000
Speaker 1: be around the Cambrian period that biomineralization, right, the forming

655
00:36:53,080 --> 00:36:56,400
Speaker 1: of these mineral based body parts like skeletons and shells,

656
00:36:56,840 --> 00:36:59,560
Speaker 1: that that became common in many different animals. It's the

657
00:36:59,600 --> 00:37:03,319
Speaker 1: age of shells and exoskeletons. So it could be that

658
00:37:03,440 --> 00:37:08,200
Speaker 1: many animal forms had precedent in the Precambrian era, that

659
00:37:08,239 --> 00:37:11,480
Speaker 1: there were there were animals sort of like them living before,

660
00:37:11,880 --> 00:37:14,279
Speaker 1: and it's simply that we don't have good records of

661
00:37:14,280 --> 00:37:18,200
Speaker 1: them because they weren't making hard body parts yet. Okay,

662
00:37:18,360 --> 00:37:20,200
Speaker 1: so this makes sense. So it's not it's it's not

663
00:37:20,239 --> 00:37:22,480
Speaker 1: that just suddenly there are all these creatures around with

664
00:37:22,520 --> 00:37:25,120
Speaker 1: their hard shells. There were plenty of creatures around beforehand.

665
00:37:25,160 --> 00:37:27,600
Speaker 1: It's just those were not preserved. Those are not as

666
00:37:27,600 --> 00:37:29,920
Speaker 1: president the fossil record, right, because they didn't have the

667
00:37:29,960 --> 00:37:34,320
Speaker 1: hard shells. Yeah. On the other hand, even soft animals

668
00:37:34,400 --> 00:37:40,200
Speaker 1: leave some fossil traces like tracks and burrows, and generally,

669
00:37:40,239 --> 00:37:43,320
Speaker 1: I think paleontol just think that these types of fossils

670
00:37:43,320 --> 00:37:45,680
Speaker 1: are not as abundant as they would seem to be

671
00:37:46,280 --> 00:37:49,840
Speaker 1: if the Precambrian world was basically a soft flappy copy

672
00:37:49,920 --> 00:37:52,520
Speaker 1: of the Cambrian But either way, this leads us to

673
00:37:52,600 --> 00:37:54,880
Speaker 1: a kind of new way of framing the Cambrian question.

674
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:58,680
Speaker 1: If the Cambrian explosion is characterized as this explosion of

675
00:37:58,760 --> 00:38:02,000
Speaker 1: animal body plans, and especially those with hard body parts,

676
00:38:02,680 --> 00:38:05,360
Speaker 1: why do the hard body parts show up? Like? Where

677
00:38:05,360 --> 00:38:08,560
Speaker 1: do they come from? Why evolve shells? And this leads

678
00:38:08,640 --> 00:38:11,880
Speaker 1: us to another possible answer to the to the cause

679
00:38:11,920 --> 00:38:14,759
Speaker 1: of the Cambrian explosion. What if it was caused by

680
00:38:14,800 --> 00:38:19,759
Speaker 1: a biological innovation like predation? Oh so like you, So

681
00:38:19,840 --> 00:38:22,120
Speaker 1: you have all of these creatures that have that have

682
00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:25,319
Speaker 1: evolved and then suddenly they realize, Hey, we can just

683
00:38:25,320 --> 00:38:27,879
Speaker 1: eat each other. I can I can just eat these guys.

684
00:38:27,920 --> 00:38:31,120
Speaker 1: Why should I compete for the same same meal when

685
00:38:31,160 --> 00:38:33,480
Speaker 1: I can make them my meal and then I'm essentially

686
00:38:33,480 --> 00:38:36,600
Speaker 1: eating what they already ate, Right? Why would I waste

687
00:38:36,600 --> 00:38:39,240
Speaker 1: my time filter feeding when I can just eat ted

688
00:38:39,320 --> 00:38:44,359
Speaker 1: over there? Yeah? So Eric Sperling, the Stanford paleontologist who

689
00:38:44,400 --> 00:38:46,400
Speaker 1: is the lead author on one of the papers I

690
00:38:46,400 --> 00:38:48,920
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier in this episode, he explained in a Nature

691
00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:52,120
Speaker 1: News article earlier this year, or actually know it was

692
00:38:52,200 --> 00:38:56,000
Speaker 1: last year, that he thinks a very modest increase in

693
00:38:56,080 --> 00:39:01,200
Speaker 1: dissolved oxygen could have been enough to push the the

694
00:39:01,320 --> 00:39:04,879
Speaker 1: ocean chemistry over the edge to allow for the emergence

695
00:39:04,920 --> 00:39:09,880
Speaker 1: of predation and carnivory as an ecological niche, which would

696
00:39:09,880 --> 00:39:13,880
Speaker 1: have thereafter driven evolution across the animal spectrum as this

697
00:39:14,080 --> 00:39:17,520
Speaker 1: arms race between predator and prey emerged. In a world

698
00:39:17,520 --> 00:39:20,160
Speaker 1: of predators, you need shells and you need to be

699
00:39:20,200 --> 00:39:24,840
Speaker 1: able to move. Yeah, alright, well, this this sounds the

700
00:39:24,880 --> 00:39:27,920
Speaker 1: sounds plausible, and there's some evidence that this is what

701
00:39:28,040 --> 00:39:32,359
Speaker 1: was happening. Here's an odd fact. Sometimes trialobyte fossils are

702
00:39:32,480 --> 00:39:36,480
Speaker 1: missing chunks, not because the fossils have been damaged, but

703
00:39:36,520 --> 00:39:40,600
Speaker 1: apparently because the animals were One example, a specimen of

704
00:39:40,640 --> 00:39:44,480
Speaker 1: the trial trialobyte illinoid is found in Walcott's Quarry at

705
00:39:44,480 --> 00:39:48,320
Speaker 1: the Burge of Shale, has this distinct W shape missing

706
00:39:48,400 --> 00:39:51,040
Speaker 1: from its left side, as if something took this kind

707
00:39:51,040 --> 00:39:53,920
Speaker 1: of two fanged bite out of it. So in this

708
00:39:54,000 --> 00:39:57,239
Speaker 1: alien ocean, and you have to imagine me uh in

709
00:39:57,320 --> 00:40:00,560
Speaker 1: the voice of ripley and aliens whose laying the eggs,

710
00:40:01,239 --> 00:40:05,520
Speaker 1: what's taking the bites out of these trilobites. Maybe it's

711
00:40:05,600 --> 00:40:09,200
Speaker 1: less dramatic if if you put it that way, but

712
00:40:09,200 --> 00:40:11,560
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's gotta be something something else out there,

713
00:40:11,640 --> 00:40:15,040
Speaker 1: some sort of predator that is that is chomping down

714
00:40:15,040 --> 00:40:17,600
Speaker 1: on these guys. And this leads us to the second

715
00:40:17,640 --> 00:40:22,279
Speaker 1: monster in our Cambrian monster house, the weird shrimp. All right,

716
00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:24,120
Speaker 1: hold that thought, because we're gonna take a quick break,

717
00:40:24,160 --> 00:40:26,359
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we will we will get

718
00:40:26,400 --> 00:40:29,359
Speaker 1: to know the weird shrimp, which is truly unless you're

719
00:40:29,360 --> 00:40:32,200
Speaker 1: already you know, super familiar with this time period, I

720
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:35,960
Speaker 1: would say it's the first really alien creature of the

721
00:40:36,239 --> 00:40:44,080
Speaker 1: Cambrian period. Alright, we're back, Okay. So in a British

722
00:40:44,160 --> 00:40:48,719
Speaker 1: Canadian paleontologist named Joseph Frederick Witty Eves was trying to

723
00:40:48,719 --> 00:40:52,799
Speaker 1: figure out how to classify some odd Cambrian fossils that

724
00:40:52,920 --> 00:40:58,280
Speaker 1: looked like headless shrimp shells. You can look at pictures

725
00:40:58,280 --> 00:41:01,279
Speaker 1: of these online, but um, you could see these five

726
00:41:01,360 --> 00:41:05,960
Speaker 1: hundred million year old imprints of these clawed tails and bodies,

727
00:41:06,360 --> 00:41:08,759
Speaker 1: but the heads were always missing. Yeah, they look kind

728
00:41:08,760 --> 00:41:11,759
Speaker 1: of They basically looked like entrees. Yeah. Yeah, it's like

729
00:41:11,840 --> 00:41:14,200
Speaker 1: somebody pulled the head off the shrimp and served it

730
00:41:14,239 --> 00:41:17,600
Speaker 1: to you in a little cocktail glass. Now. He named

731
00:41:17,640 --> 00:41:22,680
Speaker 1: the organism Anomala carus, which means weird shrimp or strange

732
00:41:22,719 --> 00:41:27,760
Speaker 1: shrimp or odd shrimp, however you prefer. Meanwhile, Burgess Shale

733
00:41:27,800 --> 00:41:30,560
Speaker 1: pioneer Charles Walcott, which who is the guy who the

734
00:41:30,560 --> 00:41:33,520
Speaker 1: Walcott's Quarry at the Burgess Shield was named after, he

735
00:41:33,680 --> 00:41:37,240
Speaker 1: collected and described a fossil of a different animal. These

736
00:41:37,280 --> 00:41:42,400
Speaker 1: preserved remains only showed a large, disembodied mouth, a thick,

737
00:41:42,600 --> 00:41:46,840
Speaker 1: muscular ring shape surrounded by a circle of jagged teeth

738
00:41:46,960 --> 00:41:50,000
Speaker 1: facing inward. And Walcott believed this mouth to be the

739
00:41:50,040 --> 00:41:53,440
Speaker 1: remains of a jelly fish that he named Patoya. All right,

740
00:41:53,480 --> 00:41:56,400
Speaker 1: so this would be the mouth of an otherwise soft creature,

741
00:41:56,520 --> 00:41:58,640
Speaker 1: that was his argument. And all we have left is

742
00:41:58,680 --> 00:42:02,279
Speaker 1: the mouth, right. And it wasn't until many decades later

743
00:42:02,280 --> 00:42:05,799
Speaker 1: that researchers Harry Whittington and Derek Briggs figured out that

744
00:42:05,840 --> 00:42:10,000
Speaker 1: these two weird anomalous animals were weird and anomalous because

745
00:42:10,040 --> 00:42:14,040
Speaker 1: they were different parts of the same creature. A huge

746
00:42:14,320 --> 00:42:18,360
Speaker 1: Cambrian predator that retained the name of Anomala carus. The

747
00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:23,320
Speaker 1: weird shrimp were actually a pair of clawed appendages basically

748
00:42:23,600 --> 00:42:27,480
Speaker 1: mouth tentacles for snatching up prey and shoving it into

749
00:42:27,560 --> 00:42:31,000
Speaker 1: the mouth parts, and the mouth parts were the toothy ring,

750
00:42:31,120 --> 00:42:34,919
Speaker 1: which had previously been identified as patoya. If you've never

751
00:42:34,960 --> 00:42:37,319
Speaker 1: seen an image of Anomala cars this is another thing

752
00:42:37,360 --> 00:42:39,400
Speaker 1: to look up, well, or maybe we'll try to include

753
00:42:39,400 --> 00:42:42,280
Speaker 1: a picture on the landing. Yeah, we'll include a picture

754
00:42:42,280 --> 00:42:44,680
Speaker 1: of this this creature because it's just too it's too weird.

755
00:42:44,719 --> 00:42:48,160
Speaker 1: If if need be, we will draw one and uploaded

756
00:42:48,200 --> 00:42:50,560
Speaker 1: to the side. It's sort of like impossible to make

757
00:42:50,600 --> 00:42:54,440
Speaker 1: yourself believe that this thing really existed on Earth. But

758
00:42:54,520 --> 00:42:58,120
Speaker 1: I've seen the fossils now, and so the reason these

759
00:42:58,160 --> 00:43:02,120
Speaker 1: disembodied parts were originally is identified was a common problem

760
00:43:02,160 --> 00:43:05,600
Speaker 1: in paleontology. As we've mentioned several times now, fossilization is

761
00:43:05,600 --> 00:43:09,560
Speaker 1: strongly biased toward hard body parts like shells and bones.

762
00:43:09,960 --> 00:43:14,000
Speaker 1: Anomala Carus did not have a hard exoskeleton covering its

763
00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:17,160
Speaker 1: whole body, but probably had a very light, kitanous outer

764
00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:20,360
Speaker 1: layer like a shrimp shell. On some parts of its body,

765
00:43:20,760 --> 00:43:24,000
Speaker 1: and when it died and decomposed, its body probably fell

766
00:43:24,080 --> 00:43:27,480
Speaker 1: apart into different pieces, and not all of those pieces

767
00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:31,160
Speaker 1: were preserved at the same rate. So it's rare to

768
00:43:31,160 --> 00:43:34,920
Speaker 1: find fossils that preserve any information about soft body parts,

769
00:43:34,960 --> 00:43:38,000
Speaker 1: and even rarer still to find soft bodies intact, all

770
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:42,040
Speaker 1: in one place. Rare, but not entirely impossible, because since

771
00:43:42,080 --> 00:43:46,040
Speaker 1: the original discovery of what amounted to Anomala cars is

772
00:43:46,120 --> 00:43:51,239
Speaker 1: killing equipment, more fully preserved Anomala Carus specimens have been discovered.

773
00:43:51,360 --> 00:43:55,080
Speaker 1: For example, one fossil discovered in nineteen two shows the

774
00:43:55,239 --> 00:43:59,400
Speaker 1: spiked feeding arms branching off of the head within reach

775
00:43:59,440 --> 00:44:02,359
Speaker 1: of the shing mouth ring, and all contained within the

776
00:44:02,400 --> 00:44:07,040
Speaker 1: imprint of this elongated soft body lined with lateral lobes

777
00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:10,600
Speaker 1: that probably undulated to power swimming. So if you're trying

778
00:44:10,640 --> 00:44:13,040
Speaker 1: to imagine this thing right now, you have to picture

779
00:44:13,080 --> 00:44:19,720
Speaker 1: a kind of wide, flat lobed jellyfish snake undulating along

780
00:44:19,800 --> 00:44:23,200
Speaker 1: through the ancient seas, with a gaping mouth ring on

781
00:44:23,239 --> 00:44:27,240
Speaker 1: the underside that could squeeze with teeth but never fully close,

782
00:44:27,880 --> 00:44:30,160
Speaker 1: and then sticking out of its face a couple of

783
00:44:30,200 --> 00:44:34,600
Speaker 1: hooked fang tentacles lined with spikes. Yeah, this this looks

784
00:44:34,640 --> 00:44:38,520
Speaker 1: like a creature that belongs in a Star Wars Cantina. Yeah. Yeah,

785
00:44:38,560 --> 00:44:40,600
Speaker 1: it should be like having a drink and telling you

786
00:44:40,680 --> 00:44:44,120
Speaker 1: it doesn't like you, and it probably doesn't like you.

787
00:44:44,440 --> 00:44:47,000
Speaker 1: Now you're you might be thinking, okay, so how big

788
00:44:47,040 --> 00:44:50,240
Speaker 1: were these things? Right? Like? A few inches long? Parts

789
00:44:50,280 --> 00:44:54,040
Speaker 1: found in fossil sites in China indicate that Anomalocarras type

790
00:44:54,160 --> 00:44:57,839
Speaker 1: organisms may have grown to almost two meters long, which

791
00:44:57,880 --> 00:45:01,880
Speaker 1: is around six feet. You know, people do those like

792
00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:04,959
Speaker 1: booking a swim with the dolphins thing. I think people

793
00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:07,440
Speaker 1: should book swim with the anomal of carrass. They should

794
00:45:07,520 --> 00:45:10,520
Speaker 1: use some kind of DNA engineering to bring these things

795
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:12,840
Speaker 1: back well you know, and then have you swim with

796
00:45:12,920 --> 00:45:16,040
Speaker 1: them at the resort. Well, you know, the predation explosion

797
00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:20,600
Speaker 1: hypothesis is correct, especially, I mean, this was eating other

798
00:45:20,640 --> 00:45:23,279
Speaker 1: animals was a growth industry, so it it does make

799
00:45:23,360 --> 00:45:26,959
Speaker 1: sense that that the the successful model for eating other

800
00:45:27,040 --> 00:45:31,319
Speaker 1: creatures would produce larger and larger organisms, right. Yeah. So,

801
00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:33,520
Speaker 1: but the question I guess is if these things are

802
00:45:33,600 --> 00:45:36,960
Speaker 1: preying on the you know, the widespread trilobites of the

803
00:45:36,960 --> 00:45:39,560
Speaker 1: ancient seas, I don't know, would they take a bite

804
00:45:39,600 --> 00:45:41,960
Speaker 1: out of you if they could. So you're in the

805
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:44,720
Speaker 1: water with them, you do obviously don't look or smell

806
00:45:44,800 --> 00:45:47,759
Speaker 1: like their normal prey, but then again, they might just

807
00:45:47,800 --> 00:45:50,120
Speaker 1: want to see what you taste like. It's hard to know.

808
00:45:50,280 --> 00:45:54,200
Speaker 1: We kind of get into that whole shark and gorilla area.

809
00:45:54,360 --> 00:45:56,600
Speaker 1: I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast,

810
00:45:56,680 --> 00:45:58,400
Speaker 1: but I don't think so. Well, every time I go

811
00:45:58,440 --> 00:46:02,640
Speaker 1: to the ocean, I comfort my self regarding the risk

812
00:46:02,719 --> 00:46:04,840
Speaker 1: or apparent risk of sharks and and of course just

813
00:46:04,920 --> 00:46:08,239
Speaker 1: shark media in general by thinking about the just like

814
00:46:08,280 --> 00:46:10,760
Speaker 1: a brief clip on The Simpsons where a shark jumps

815
00:46:10,760 --> 00:46:13,200
Speaker 1: out of the water and grabs a gorilla out of

816
00:46:13,200 --> 00:46:17,400
Speaker 1: a tree, which is ridiculous for several reasons, but it

817
00:46:17,719 --> 00:46:20,439
Speaker 1: drives home like this is this is something that does

818
00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:25,359
Speaker 1: not happen. Is not part of the the the the

819
00:46:25,360 --> 00:46:28,920
Speaker 1: the energy model for either species, you know. Uh, And

820
00:46:29,080 --> 00:46:31,160
Speaker 1: and that's essentially what I am. I am a gorilla

821
00:46:31,200 --> 00:46:34,040
Speaker 1: in the water, and the shark has not evolved to

822
00:46:34,239 --> 00:46:37,120
Speaker 1: eat me exclusively. It can if need be, but it's

823
00:46:37,160 --> 00:46:40,080
Speaker 1: not out there looking for gorillas, right. It might have also, though,

824
00:46:40,160 --> 00:46:43,799
Speaker 1: evolved a sort of like prey diversity, curiosity, it might

825
00:46:43,880 --> 00:46:47,040
Speaker 1: take a little nibble on you to see what you're like, right, right,

826
00:46:47,160 --> 00:46:49,759
Speaker 1: So I guess that would be the main concern. But

827
00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:52,800
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you would have this element of surprise because

828
00:46:52,840 --> 00:46:54,600
Speaker 1: by the way, I don't mean to be promoting like

829
00:46:54,680 --> 00:46:58,640
Speaker 1: fear of sharks. We're not their primary prey, right, But

830
00:46:58,640 --> 00:47:01,400
Speaker 1: but I'm guessing with with h means, if if we

831
00:47:01,400 --> 00:47:03,799
Speaker 1: were to go with our opening scenario and you were

832
00:47:03,840 --> 00:47:06,839
Speaker 1: just dropped into the waters among these things, I would

833
00:47:06,840 --> 00:47:10,399
Speaker 1: hope you would have this this element of surprise over them,

834
00:47:10,400 --> 00:47:13,080
Speaker 1: and they would be a bit shocked and uncertain and

835
00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:16,439
Speaker 1: hesitant to approach you. So another thing that's really cool

836
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:20,640
Speaker 1: about Anomala carras is that they have these amazing eyes.

837
00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:25,480
Speaker 1: For a long time, detailed evidence of non biomineralized arthropod

838
00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:28,080
Speaker 1: eyes had been hard to find. But in two thousand

839
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:30,520
Speaker 1: eleven there was a letter to Nature that detailed this

840
00:47:30,600 --> 00:47:34,120
Speaker 1: amazing find at the Emu Bay Shale of South Australia,

841
00:47:34,480 --> 00:47:38,200
Speaker 1: and what they had found was preserved Anomala carus eyes,

842
00:47:38,719 --> 00:47:40,399
Speaker 1: and they found that they had a pair of two

843
00:47:40,440 --> 00:47:44,160
Speaker 1: to three centimeter eyes about five fifteen million years old,

844
00:47:44,920 --> 00:47:47,759
Speaker 1: and they were compound eyes made of at least sixteen

845
00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:51,759
Speaker 1: thousand hexagonally packed lenses, meaning these eyes would have been

846
00:47:52,080 --> 00:47:55,960
Speaker 1: about as acute as the most powerful arthropod eyes today,

847
00:47:56,000 --> 00:47:59,799
Speaker 1: like dragonfly eyes. And the authors think that this is

848
00:48:00,239 --> 00:48:02,920
Speaker 1: that this evidence of acute vision lends support to the

849
00:48:02,960 --> 00:48:06,560
Speaker 1: idea that anomal a caress was a powerful, fast moving

850
00:48:06,640 --> 00:48:10,560
Speaker 1: apex predator going all throughout the water column, which and

851
00:48:10,719 --> 00:48:14,000
Speaker 1: this would have accelerated the arms race that triggered Cambrian

852
00:48:14,040 --> 00:48:18,640
Speaker 1: biodiversity and biomineralization. You know this also this makes me wonder, though,

853
00:48:19,239 --> 00:48:22,560
Speaker 1: would a creature like this have anything to fear? Well,

854
00:48:22,600 --> 00:48:24,680
Speaker 1: I mean probably not. I mean, if it's the apex

855
00:48:24,719 --> 00:48:27,480
Speaker 1: predator of an ancient ocean, what, it's the biggest thing

856
00:48:27,480 --> 00:48:30,080
Speaker 1: out there and it's got the most powerful killing equipment.

857
00:48:30,360 --> 00:48:33,000
Speaker 1: What does it have to worry about? Nothing? Until you know,

858
00:48:33,040 --> 00:48:36,080
Speaker 1: the time traveling human shows up and starts clubbing them.

859
00:48:36,120 --> 00:48:38,000
Speaker 1: I guess that club they brought. You'd have to bring

860
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:40,680
Speaker 1: your own club. That's the key here. But nothing dead

861
00:48:40,680 --> 00:48:45,080
Speaker 1: will go. Ah, well, you know, maybe a still living

862
00:48:45,120 --> 00:48:48,720
Speaker 1: tree branch will work. Oh yeah, maybe that. Somebody should

863
00:48:48,719 --> 00:48:51,000
Speaker 1: have told kyleys about that. I guess that wouldn't have

864
00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:53,080
Speaker 1: been all that effective against the determinator. Yeah, where are

865
00:48:53,120 --> 00:48:56,000
Speaker 1: they going to get a tree branch and the desolate

866
00:48:56,000 --> 00:48:59,880
Speaker 1: post apocalypse future. Okay, we're on a tangent here, so

867
00:49:00,239 --> 00:49:03,480
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at some more uh Cambrian monsters. But

868
00:49:03,640 --> 00:49:05,920
Speaker 1: one more thing about anomally carriss before we move on.

869
00:49:06,239 --> 00:49:09,040
Speaker 1: There is still a fascinating debate going on about how

870
00:49:09,160 --> 00:49:12,480
Speaker 1: and what Anomala carress ate. So some of these wounded

871
00:49:12,520 --> 00:49:15,560
Speaker 1: trial bytes that we discussed earlier have injuries that really

872
00:49:15,600 --> 00:49:19,680
Speaker 1: seemed to match the two pronged grasping appendages of the

873
00:49:19,719 --> 00:49:23,520
Speaker 1: anomal carrass and some experts believe that its mouthparts would

874
00:49:23,560 --> 00:49:27,080
Speaker 1: not have been powerful enough to prey upon trial bytes

875
00:49:27,120 --> 00:49:29,840
Speaker 1: with their hard outer shells. So that kind of creates

876
00:49:29,840 --> 00:49:34,080
Speaker 1: a question like what was was it eating something else?

877
00:49:34,640 --> 00:49:37,520
Speaker 1: Like how could it have gotten through these hard outer shells?

878
00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:40,319
Speaker 1: There are a few options. Maybe maybe they were just

879
00:49:40,480 --> 00:49:44,040
Speaker 1: really beefy and they could crunch through those shells. Maybe

880
00:49:44,040 --> 00:49:46,960
Speaker 1: they had some method of prying the shells off of

881
00:49:47,040 --> 00:49:50,360
Speaker 1: weaker trialobytes and sucking up all the soft parts inside.

882
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:53,799
Speaker 1: Or there's also an interesting possibility I learned about from

883
00:49:53,840 --> 00:49:56,799
Speaker 1: the guide on our hike, David. Maybe they took a

884
00:49:56,880 --> 00:50:00,160
Speaker 1: tip from the crab shack down the shore and they

885
00:50:00,160 --> 00:50:03,360
Speaker 1: sought out soft shells trial bytes who were in the

886
00:50:03,719 --> 00:50:07,040
Speaker 1: process of molting. So you you release your hard shell,

887
00:50:07,400 --> 00:50:09,839
Speaker 1: put that aside to be fossilized for people to find

888
00:50:09,880 --> 00:50:12,800
Speaker 1: millions of years later, and then you stay soft for

889
00:50:12,880 --> 00:50:16,080
Speaker 1: a little bit while you, you know, you grow. What

890
00:50:16,200 --> 00:50:19,160
Speaker 1: if they sought those out, the molten trial bytes and

891
00:50:19,360 --> 00:50:22,279
Speaker 1: nominomomb Oh man, Yeah, I mean that could be. That

892
00:50:22,320 --> 00:50:26,080
Speaker 1: could be the very uh niche that they are exploiting.

893
00:50:26,320 --> 00:50:28,720
Speaker 1: When you turn to the model of of of eating

894
00:50:28,719 --> 00:50:32,480
Speaker 1: other creatures, what better time than the molting period. Yeah, okay,

895
00:50:32,520 --> 00:50:35,279
Speaker 1: So the trial bytes and anomalo carras type creatures are

896
00:50:35,320 --> 00:50:39,080
Speaker 1: some of the main players that we see in UH

897
00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:42,040
Speaker 1: in Cambrian evolution, but there are also all of these

898
00:50:42,120 --> 00:50:47,759
Speaker 1: fascinating bizarre periphery organisms. Like Robert, would you like to

899
00:50:47,800 --> 00:50:49,719
Speaker 1: take us on a tour of the rest of the

900
00:50:49,719 --> 00:50:53,879
Speaker 1: Cambrian monster house. Sure? Yeah, we have some wonderful UH

901
00:50:53,920 --> 00:50:57,440
Speaker 1: specimens here to discuss here, and there's not there's not

902
00:50:57,480 --> 00:51:00,520
Speaker 1: necessarily as much data behind all of them. I mean

903
00:51:00,560 --> 00:51:03,239
Speaker 1: there's data, but it's maybe not as as sexy as

904
00:51:03,520 --> 00:51:08,680
Speaker 1: a trilobyte. However, they still have some some fascinating features,

905
00:51:08,719 --> 00:51:11,320
Speaker 1: and I think many of them would make excellent Halloween costomes.

906
00:51:11,360 --> 00:51:14,040
Speaker 1: I would say they're much sexier than the trilobyte, maybe

907
00:51:14,080 --> 00:51:17,680
Speaker 1: just not as a robust. So the first one here

908
00:51:17,719 --> 00:51:22,560
Speaker 1: I want to discuss is um opabinia. I've often called

909
00:51:22,600 --> 00:51:26,920
Speaker 1: the stock eyed vacuum cinabyte. That's a good description one

910
00:51:26,920 --> 00:51:30,280
Speaker 1: that I think evokes the alien qualities of this creature.

911
00:51:30,400 --> 00:51:33,080
Speaker 1: So if you're not looking at a picture of this

912
00:51:33,239 --> 00:51:35,000
Speaker 1: right now and stuff to blow your mind dot com,

913
00:51:35,120 --> 00:51:37,600
Speaker 1: I want you to imagine something like a shrimp orl lobster,

914
00:51:38,320 --> 00:51:42,200
Speaker 1: but with rows of side lobes along its sides, paddling

915
00:51:42,239 --> 00:51:46,160
Speaker 1: along like the ores of like a galley so spiking ship.

916
00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:48,360
Speaker 1: You's got these lobes on the sides, kind of like

917
00:51:48,440 --> 00:51:51,480
Speaker 1: we described with the nominal caras that undulate to move

918
00:51:51,480 --> 00:51:54,840
Speaker 1: it along throughout the water. Right And you know, it

919
00:51:54,960 --> 00:51:56,960
Speaker 1: is not that remarkable at the the end, Like I said,

920
00:51:56,960 --> 00:51:58,640
Speaker 1: if you were just catching it a glimpse of it

921
00:51:58,640 --> 00:52:01,040
Speaker 1: out of the corner of your eye, that the back

922
00:52:01,080 --> 00:52:03,840
Speaker 1: portion doesn't look that different from again, like a lobster

923
00:52:03,960 --> 00:52:06,920
Speaker 1: or shrimp or something. But it's the front end of

924
00:52:06,960 --> 00:52:10,239
Speaker 1: the creature that is is rather interesting because it has

925
00:52:10,280 --> 00:52:15,520
Speaker 1: a long, flexible proboscis tipped with grasping spines, and the

926
00:52:15,560 --> 00:52:18,359
Speaker 1: creature itself was about three inches long, not counting this

927
00:52:18,520 --> 00:52:22,600
Speaker 1: uh weird cool richie tentacle. Yeah, five eyes to right,

928
00:52:23,160 --> 00:52:26,960
Speaker 1: five eyes on stalks, yes, five eyes just standing right

929
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:31,640
Speaker 1: at you on stalks like they put them on stalks.

930
00:52:31,960 --> 00:52:34,520
Speaker 1: It's like just a mess with us. Yeah, and I

931
00:52:34,600 --> 00:52:36,840
Speaker 1: think this all sounds very love crafty and but but

932
00:52:36,880 --> 00:52:40,640
Speaker 1: according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, a

933
00:52:40,719 --> 00:52:44,920
Speaker 1: reconstructed image of the creature resulted in laughter at a

934
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:47,840
Speaker 1: nine two scientific meetings. So instead of looking at this

935
00:52:47,920 --> 00:52:51,399
Speaker 1: thing and thinking, oh, this sounds horrific, it's like, got

936
00:52:51,400 --> 00:52:53,360
Speaker 1: this reaching arm that you know is up to no

937
00:52:53,480 --> 00:52:56,640
Speaker 1: good with its spikes on the end. But yeah, apparently

938
00:52:56,680 --> 00:53:01,240
Speaker 1: when it was first presented, uh, other other scientists laughed

939
00:53:01,280 --> 00:53:04,440
Speaker 1: at the prospect of something this ridiculous looking. So you

940
00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:06,839
Speaker 1: have to think, So, it's got this reaching appendage that's

941
00:53:06,840 --> 00:53:09,640
Speaker 1: sort of like its mouth appendage thing, So what's sort

942
00:53:09,640 --> 00:53:13,000
Speaker 1: of like maybe sort of like an ant eater, I guess,

943
00:53:13,040 --> 00:53:16,359
Speaker 1: but it's obviously not a vertebrate, not a mammal. Yeah,

944
00:53:16,440 --> 00:53:18,880
Speaker 1: it was. The idea here is that this would have

945
00:53:19,120 --> 00:53:21,440
Speaker 1: haunted the soft seabed and it would have would have

946
00:53:21,480 --> 00:53:27,040
Speaker 1: reached into sand burrows with this, So this spiked terminating

947
00:53:27,360 --> 00:53:32,400
Speaker 1: wriggly arm to grab delicious worms and uh and actually

948
00:53:32,440 --> 00:53:35,439
Speaker 1: have a quote here. This is from HB. Whittington from

949
00:53:35,960 --> 00:53:41,920
Speaker 1: the enigmatic animal Opabinia regalis Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia.

950
00:53:41,960 --> 00:53:47,000
Speaker 1: This was presented the Royal Society b quote. Opabinia regalius

951
00:53:47,040 --> 00:53:51,120
Speaker 1: may have plowed shallowly in the bottom mud, propelled by

952
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:54,480
Speaker 1: movement of the lateral lobes. The eyes are presumed to

953
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:57,880
Speaker 1: have been capable of detecting movements in the surrounding waters,

954
00:53:58,200 --> 00:54:00,760
Speaker 1: and the frontal process to have been is to explore

955
00:54:00,840 --> 00:54:03,560
Speaker 1: the mud for food and bring it to the backward

956
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:08,520
Speaker 1: facing mouth. The frontal process that is the most amazing

957
00:54:08,600 --> 00:54:12,680
Speaker 1: euphemistic term for killing equipment. And then they put the

958
00:54:12,680 --> 00:54:16,000
Speaker 1: frontal process through the thorax the way that my son

959
00:54:16,280 --> 00:54:19,400
Speaker 1: uh describes it with the animals when he's like drawing dinosaurs.

960
00:54:19,400 --> 00:54:21,440
Speaker 1: He says that this is the part that makes the

961
00:54:21,440 --> 00:54:28,080
Speaker 1: animal's eyes close and then die. Yeah, so you know,

962
00:54:28,080 --> 00:54:30,319
Speaker 1: the frontal process is the part that makes the trial

963
00:54:30,400 --> 00:54:34,880
Speaker 1: by its eyes closed. So this is this is the

964
00:54:34,920 --> 00:54:38,040
Speaker 1: cool specimen. It's it's unique, it's enigmatic, it's silly looking,

965
00:54:38,120 --> 00:54:40,600
Speaker 1: but it's also, you have to admit, a very sensible

966
00:54:40,719 --> 00:54:44,120
Speaker 1: organism when you really think about it. Um, it's it

967
00:54:44,200 --> 00:54:46,640
Speaker 1: needs something to grab those worms. It has a single

968
00:54:47,280 --> 00:54:51,480
Speaker 1: you know, grabber to do it. Now, it's also interesting

969
00:54:51,520 --> 00:54:56,200
Speaker 1: that this one remains unassigned to any other extinct or

970
00:54:56,360 --> 00:54:59,759
Speaker 1: currently living major group. That there are some theories, but

971
00:54:59,800 --> 00:55:02,799
Speaker 1: for most part, this is one of those um, you know,

972
00:55:02,840 --> 00:55:06,520
Speaker 1: abandoned prototypes you can think of. You know, there's there's

973
00:55:06,560 --> 00:55:09,319
Speaker 1: nothing out there that that we know of that is

974
00:55:09,360 --> 00:55:12,960
Speaker 1: a descendant of this thing. That's interesting because when I

975
00:55:12,960 --> 00:55:15,919
Speaker 1: think about organisms like this, I think about the relationship

976
00:55:16,000 --> 00:55:21,680
Speaker 1: between manipulation limbs and the evolution of intelligence. I mean,

977
00:55:21,719 --> 00:55:25,799
Speaker 1: there's one way of looking at the evolution of hominid intelligence,

978
00:55:26,040 --> 00:55:28,440
Speaker 1: and it's to say that, Okay, one thing that may

979
00:55:28,480 --> 00:55:32,319
Speaker 1: have driven humans and other you know, great apes to

980
00:55:32,360 --> 00:55:36,040
Speaker 1: have larger brains and more intellectual power than the average

981
00:55:36,080 --> 00:55:39,399
Speaker 1: mammal is that they've got free limbs that they don't

982
00:55:39,440 --> 00:55:42,200
Speaker 1: always have to use for walking and stuff like that

983
00:55:42,440 --> 00:55:46,680
Speaker 1: to manipulate objects, and that the manipulation of objects allowed

984
00:55:46,719 --> 00:55:49,920
Speaker 1: them to, you know, have advantages in the manipulation of

985
00:55:50,000 --> 00:55:53,440
Speaker 1: tools and stuff like that. Yeah, you can't help but

986
00:55:53,520 --> 00:55:56,640
Speaker 1: imagine like what if this had been a successful uh

987
00:55:57,120 --> 00:56:00,640
Speaker 1: limb of of of evolutionary ascension, and then it ended

988
00:56:00,760 --> 00:56:05,040
Speaker 1: up with all of these different like monolimbed creatures, you know,

989
00:56:05,120 --> 00:56:07,640
Speaker 1: plowing about in the seas, climbing up onto land and

990
00:56:07,680 --> 00:56:09,759
Speaker 1: maybe getting to the point where they're using that that

991
00:56:09,920 --> 00:56:14,359
Speaker 1: one spiky tentacle to to type on computer keyboards. Yeah, yeah,

992
00:56:14,440 --> 00:56:17,600
Speaker 1: you see it in octopy to you know, having these free,

993
00:56:17,760 --> 00:56:20,440
Speaker 1: these free limbs that they can manipulate things with. I

994
00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:23,960
Speaker 1: wonder could opabinia if it hadn't gone extinct yet, could

995
00:56:23,960 --> 00:56:27,520
Speaker 1: it have become the tool using creature before they were

996
00:56:27,520 --> 00:56:31,400
Speaker 1: even mammals. But instead it just remains this this weird

997
00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:33,960
Speaker 1: dead end that looks it looks like if you decided

998
00:56:34,000 --> 00:56:37,600
Speaker 1: to make an animal out of random Lego pieces and

999
00:56:37,680 --> 00:56:39,840
Speaker 1: you stuck that. I think they still have that that

1000
00:56:39,880 --> 00:56:44,800
Speaker 1: sort of twisty grabber mechanism and the Lego kids today. Alright,

1001
00:56:44,880 --> 00:56:49,319
Speaker 1: the next creature on our list. Here is the hallucigenia.

1002
00:56:49,440 --> 00:56:53,520
Speaker 1: Hallucigenia well named. Yeah, it almost doesn't need a cool nickname,

1003
00:56:53,560 --> 00:56:55,600
Speaker 1: but I know you have one thought up already. How

1004
00:56:55,600 --> 00:57:01,120
Speaker 1: about the creeping headless spike worm. Yes, yeah, that's because

1005
00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:04,520
Speaker 1: it works because we're essentially looking at a tube of

1006
00:57:04,600 --> 00:57:08,640
Speaker 1: flesh with two rows of spines on one side and

1007
00:57:08,760 --> 00:57:13,400
Speaker 1: one row of mouth tipped tentacles on the other, and

1008
00:57:13,480 --> 00:57:17,000
Speaker 1: on either end, if we're keep in mind here we're

1009
00:57:17,000 --> 00:57:19,400
Speaker 1: working from the fossils. Here on either end, there's kind

1010
00:57:19,400 --> 00:57:22,680
Speaker 1: of a dark stain. Presumably one of them is the head.

1011
00:57:23,160 --> 00:57:25,840
Speaker 1: And presumably the idea here is that, or at least

1012
00:57:25,840 --> 00:57:28,200
Speaker 1: the early ideas that it walked about on those spines

1013
00:57:28,240 --> 00:57:31,680
Speaker 1: and it waved its tentacles above it. Uh, so you

1014
00:57:31,720 --> 00:57:36,480
Speaker 1: had this still walking tentacle waiver something with no modern analogy,

1015
00:57:37,480 --> 00:57:39,680
Speaker 1: no modern analogy. It looks like something that you would

1016
00:57:39,680 --> 00:57:44,760
Speaker 1: see illustrated in a Wayne Barlow alien book, you know, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,

1017
00:57:45,080 --> 00:57:48,160
Speaker 1: or like something um, I don't know. It looks kind

1018
00:57:48,160 --> 00:57:50,720
Speaker 1: of like one of those blobs that sometimes shows up

1019
00:57:50,720 --> 00:57:53,160
Speaker 1: in a Gary Larson cartoon when he's just trying to

1020
00:57:53,160 --> 00:57:55,560
Speaker 1: create a weird alien shape. Yeah, I mean it looks

1021
00:57:55,640 --> 00:57:57,720
Speaker 1: like something that would come out of a dream, thus

1022
00:57:57,720 --> 00:58:00,400
Speaker 1: its name. You know, it looks it's hallucigen you it's

1023
00:58:00,440 --> 00:58:03,480
Speaker 1: something that is that that seems like a fever dream

1024
00:58:03,800 --> 00:58:06,280
Speaker 1: of brought to life in a fossil. Now. I think

1025
00:58:06,400 --> 00:58:10,600
Speaker 1: this was first first put together by paleontologists in the seventies,

1026
00:58:10,680 --> 00:58:13,640
Speaker 1: right right, and then they had there was a subsequent

1027
00:58:13,800 --> 00:58:17,360
Speaker 1: find from China that showed a similar creature with a

1028
00:58:17,440 --> 00:58:21,760
Speaker 1: second row of tentacles tipped with claws, and then they realized, oh,

1029
00:58:21,920 --> 00:58:24,400
Speaker 1: we have it upside down. The creature walked on the

1030
00:58:24,440 --> 00:58:29,120
Speaker 1: tentacles and the spikes provided an upward facing protective array.

1031
00:58:29,400 --> 00:58:31,800
Speaker 1: So that's a lot. I mean, it's still a weird

1032
00:58:31,840 --> 00:58:34,000
Speaker 1: looking critter, don't get me wrong, but that's a lot

1033
00:58:34,040 --> 00:58:35,880
Speaker 1: more in keeping us what we might expect. You know,

1034
00:58:35,960 --> 00:58:39,080
Speaker 1: that's not that different from say a turtle with legs

1035
00:58:39,080 --> 00:58:42,000
Speaker 1: on the bottom and the protective display on the top,

1036
00:58:42,160 --> 00:58:45,560
Speaker 1: or any you know, various examples from the invertebrate world.

1037
00:58:45,720 --> 00:58:48,800
Speaker 1: I don't know, is that less weird? I'm trying to think. Okay,

1038
00:58:48,840 --> 00:58:51,920
Speaker 1: so it's it's like a worm and it's got these

1039
00:58:51,960 --> 00:58:54,880
Speaker 1: long tentacles with mouths on them that it walks on. Yeah,

1040
00:58:54,920 --> 00:58:58,320
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still weird and it's got spikes sticking up. Okay, yeah,

1041
00:58:58,320 --> 00:59:01,240
Speaker 1: I guess a little less weirder than walking on the spikes. Yeah,

1042
00:59:01,360 --> 00:59:03,760
Speaker 1: I guess. It's kind of a fun experiment you can

1043
00:59:03,760 --> 00:59:07,439
Speaker 1: play anytime you see like a crazy alien illustration. Try

1044
00:59:07,480 --> 00:59:09,760
Speaker 1: to decide is it more alien if you turn it

1045
00:59:09,840 --> 00:59:13,960
Speaker 1: upside down? Uh? Because yeah, you can either improve upon

1046
00:59:13,960 --> 00:59:16,000
Speaker 1: the design or figure out how they came up with

1047
00:59:16,000 --> 00:59:20,720
Speaker 1: it to again with maybe. Alright, so let's talk about

1048
00:59:20,720 --> 00:59:22,760
Speaker 1: it a little bit bit more here. So, University of

1049
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:27,600
Speaker 1: Durham invertebrate paleontologist Martin R. Smith, who is an interesting

1050
00:59:27,640 --> 00:59:30,480
Speaker 1: chap He has a nice online presence. He placed the

1051
00:59:30,760 --> 00:59:33,840
Speaker 1: fossil of one of these creatures in an electron microscope

1052
00:59:33,840 --> 00:59:37,040
Speaker 1: in an attempt to figure out more about it, and

1053
00:59:37,200 --> 00:59:40,080
Speaker 1: one of the pressing questions was name, like which which

1054
00:59:40,160 --> 00:59:42,320
Speaker 1: end is the head and which one is the anus? Well, yeah,

1055
00:59:42,360 --> 00:59:44,240
Speaker 1: I mean that that's sort of. I knew there was

1056
00:59:44,280 --> 00:59:46,800
Speaker 1: some problem with locating its head, and that comes through

1057
00:59:46,800 --> 00:59:50,520
Speaker 1: in my name nomenclature of it, the headless spike worm. Now,

1058
00:59:50,600 --> 00:59:53,720
Speaker 1: I mentioned the stains earlier, right like, basically from the fossils.

1059
00:59:53,760 --> 00:59:55,280
Speaker 1: We knew. We knew that there was like a big

1060
00:59:55,320 --> 00:59:57,439
Speaker 1: stain on one end and a smaller stain on the other,

1061
00:59:57,520 --> 01:00:00,760
Speaker 1: and one was presumably the head. So the larger stain

1062
01:00:01,000 --> 01:00:03,560
Speaker 1: was was for a long time interpreted as a balloon

1063
01:00:03,760 --> 01:00:07,080
Speaker 1: like head on this creature. But it turns out it

1064
01:00:07,120 --> 01:00:10,040
Speaker 1: was very much a stain. It was the quote, decay

1065
01:00:10,160 --> 01:00:13,200
Speaker 1: fluids that had been squeezed out of one end of

1066
01:00:13,240 --> 01:00:15,880
Speaker 1: the guts of the organisms. Yeah, so this was the

1067
01:00:15,920 --> 01:00:19,040
Speaker 1: anus and the head was on the other side. And

1068
01:00:19,280 --> 01:00:21,000
Speaker 1: when they looked to the head, you know what, they

1069
01:00:21,040 --> 01:00:26,480
Speaker 1: found hockey mask. Close they found a smiley face. Yeah,

1070
01:00:26,560 --> 01:00:31,200
Speaker 1: a pair of eyes with a semicircular grin. Uh. And

1071
01:00:31,400 --> 01:00:33,120
Speaker 1: so it was sort of like a they say, it

1072
01:00:33,160 --> 01:00:35,920
Speaker 1: was sort of like a caterpillar looking creature. Yeah. Now

1073
01:00:35,920 --> 01:00:38,440
Speaker 1: when I say smiley face, it's it's kind of abstract.

1074
01:00:38,520 --> 01:00:40,840
Speaker 1: I'm looking at an image of it here. But but

1075
01:00:41,000 --> 01:00:43,800
Speaker 1: we can't help but look at it with our with

1076
01:00:43,800 --> 01:00:46,360
Speaker 1: our human failings and say, oh, well that's a smiley face.

1077
01:00:49,320 --> 01:00:53,160
Speaker 1: Oh hallucigenia, you devil you. Yeah, so hallucigenia is a

1078
01:00:53,160 --> 01:00:56,400
Speaker 1: fun one for sure. Stealing my heart, take me somewhere,

1079
01:00:56,400 --> 01:00:59,080
Speaker 1: even weirder Robert, all right, well, the next one is

1080
01:00:59,440 --> 01:01:03,080
Speaker 1: will Whack see a Boy? And uh, I believe you?

1081
01:01:03,320 --> 01:01:04,560
Speaker 1: Did you? Did you come up with a name for

1082
01:01:04,600 --> 01:01:07,840
Speaker 1: this one or did I? Okay, I think I actually

1083
01:01:07,960 --> 01:01:09,720
Speaker 1: came up with a few different ones here. So it

1084
01:01:09,760 --> 01:01:13,040
Speaker 1: looks kind of like a prehistoric iron maiden. It also

1085
01:01:13,120 --> 01:01:16,640
Speaker 1: looks like an organic battle him or perhaps a grim

1086
01:01:16,760 --> 01:01:22,120
Speaker 1: dark Pokemon, and it provides another splash of of the

1087
01:01:22,120 --> 01:01:26,520
Speaker 1: bizarre to the Cambrian seas. So two rows of long

1088
01:01:26,640 --> 01:01:30,920
Speaker 1: spines and a kind of plate mail armor of leaf

1089
01:01:31,000 --> 01:01:34,720
Speaker 1: shaped ribbed plates again on something that looks like a hat.

1090
01:01:35,160 --> 01:01:38,560
Speaker 1: It it looks like a spiked hat like plate mail

1091
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:42,160
Speaker 1: kind of scenario. I can't stress the armor analogy enough.

1092
01:01:42,400 --> 01:01:44,840
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a half of a walnut with

1093
01:01:44,840 --> 01:01:48,080
Speaker 1: with plate mail on it and knives sticking out. Yeah,

1094
01:01:48,160 --> 01:01:50,439
Speaker 1: it looks like something an orc would wear on its head.

1095
01:01:52,800 --> 01:01:55,680
Speaker 1: And uh, A lot of the fossils here are essentially

1096
01:01:55,720 --> 01:01:58,200
Speaker 1: that we have of this thing are essentially flattened remains

1097
01:01:58,240 --> 01:02:01,240
Speaker 1: of this natural armor. Again, it's the hard parts that

1098
01:02:01,280 --> 01:02:03,960
Speaker 1: were left with and we just have to try and

1099
01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:07,040
Speaker 1: interpret what the soft tissue would have consisted of. And

1100
01:02:07,080 --> 01:02:09,960
Speaker 1: there are different interpretations here. Now, Martin Smith, who I

1101
01:02:10,080 --> 01:02:14,360
Speaker 1: just mentioned earlier, he favors the mollus interpretation. He says

1102
01:02:14,360 --> 01:02:17,800
Speaker 1: that their mouths, which would have been a radula bearing

1103
01:02:17,840 --> 01:02:20,840
Speaker 1: two rows of teeth, have several similarities with the teeth

1104
01:02:20,880 --> 01:02:24,080
Speaker 1: of modern mollus and uh and then they look nothing

1105
01:02:24,120 --> 01:02:27,160
Speaker 1: like worm teeth. Because that's the other argument is that

1106
01:02:27,200 --> 01:02:32,760
Speaker 1: these are essentially worm creatures. Specifically they would be bristle worms.

1107
01:02:32,800 --> 01:02:38,160
Speaker 1: But that's more of a controversial interpretation. So there's not

1108
01:02:38,240 --> 01:02:40,520
Speaker 1: a lot of depth for that particular organism other than

1109
01:02:40,560 --> 01:02:43,480
Speaker 1: it just looks really strange. And when you when you

1110
01:02:43,560 --> 01:02:47,520
Speaker 1: see illustrations of the Cambrian Sea, you will often find

1111
01:02:47,520 --> 01:02:49,160
Speaker 1: it will get will get in there somewhere. It won't

1112
01:02:49,200 --> 01:02:52,360
Speaker 1: be the central organism, but it will it will have

1113
01:02:52,400 --> 01:02:56,280
Speaker 1: a place in the in the in the illustration. Now

1114
01:02:56,280 --> 01:03:00,440
Speaker 1: I've got a question round, Yes, among this ancient Embrillan

1115
01:03:00,760 --> 01:03:04,240
Speaker 1: monster house, this sea full of bizarre alien creatures, we

1116
01:03:04,320 --> 01:03:08,520
Speaker 1: have to imagine that modern day life forms can trace

1117
01:03:08,600 --> 01:03:13,320
Speaker 1: their roots back to organisms that inhabited these oceans, especially

1118
01:03:13,600 --> 01:03:18,040
Speaker 1: when you think about very successful modern philo like vertebrates. Yeah,

1119
01:03:18,120 --> 01:03:20,880
Speaker 1: because the whole idea here is not that like everything

1120
01:03:20,960 --> 01:03:24,960
Speaker 1: dies often and life begins a new Uh, that some

1121
01:03:25,040 --> 01:03:29,240
Speaker 1: of these models would would have descendants alive today, I'll

1122
01:03:29,240 --> 01:03:33,440
Speaker 1: be rather different to organisms, and we have just such

1123
01:03:33,480 --> 01:03:37,360
Speaker 1: a case with Pecaia. Though it's a controversial example, right, Yes, Yeah,

1124
01:03:37,400 --> 01:03:40,200
Speaker 1: that this is not this is not set in stone

1125
01:03:40,640 --> 01:03:44,000
Speaker 1: that the fossils, of course are. Yeah. You you referred

1126
01:03:44,000 --> 01:03:49,200
Speaker 1: to this as the ancestor fish slug or potential potential ancestor.

1127
01:03:49,840 --> 01:03:52,360
Speaker 1: So if you're not looking at an image of this creature,

1128
01:03:52,440 --> 01:03:56,720
Speaker 1: imagine a sea slug that swims like a modern fish,

1129
01:03:56,800 --> 01:04:00,240
Speaker 1: and you've got a clear vision of Pecaia, or at

1130
01:04:00,320 --> 01:04:03,000
Speaker 1: least its clear vision as anyone. The crazy thing about

1131
01:04:03,040 --> 01:04:06,080
Speaker 1: it is that that scientists point to its not a chord,

1132
01:04:06,320 --> 01:04:09,080
Speaker 1: a precursor to the spinal cord, and also a key

1133
01:04:09,120 --> 01:04:12,360
Speaker 1: aspect of this creature's swimming mechanics as a reason that

1134
01:04:12,440 --> 01:04:16,360
Speaker 1: it could just be an ancestor of all vertebrates, including humans.

1135
01:04:17,160 --> 01:04:20,200
Speaker 1: But we're also throwing a curve in all this because

1136
01:04:20,240 --> 01:04:22,920
Speaker 1: it has a two lobed head that doesn't sound like

1137
01:04:22,920 --> 01:04:26,360
Speaker 1: any vertebrates I've ever heard of. Yeah, scientists remain split

1138
01:04:26,440 --> 01:04:30,680
Speaker 1: on this. Now. A nineteen discovery of a primitive fish

1139
01:04:30,720 --> 01:04:34,200
Speaker 1: in the Lower Cambrian also suggests that it in Pekaia

1140
01:04:34,440 --> 01:04:37,760
Speaker 1: had an even more ancient common ancestor. Okay, so it

1141
01:04:37,840 --> 01:04:41,200
Speaker 1: might be that this thing wasn't a direct ancestor of

1142
01:04:41,280 --> 01:04:44,360
Speaker 1: existing vertebrates, but that it might have been an offshoot

1143
01:04:44,440 --> 01:04:48,919
Speaker 1: of whatever was a direct ancestor of living vertebrates. And

1144
01:04:48,960 --> 01:04:50,880
Speaker 1: I think it will make a great Halloween costume for

1145
01:04:50,920 --> 01:04:54,120
Speaker 1: anyone out there who's who's not sold on the previous specimens.

1146
01:04:54,480 --> 01:04:56,880
Speaker 1: Grandma fish slug. Yeah, yeah, I mean I can just

1147
01:04:56,920 --> 01:05:00,120
Speaker 1: imagine it moving like you get used to see ing

1148
01:05:00,880 --> 01:05:04,200
Speaker 1: footage of sea slugs and uh similar creatures and the

1149
01:05:04,200 --> 01:05:06,200
Speaker 1: way they move. But this would have moved if I'm

1150
01:05:06,280 --> 01:05:09,200
Speaker 1: if I'm reading it correctly, more more like a fish,

1151
01:05:09,200 --> 01:05:12,240
Speaker 1: more like an eel. So imagine like an eagle slug,

1152
01:05:12,280 --> 01:05:15,120
Speaker 1: and that's what you have here totally. Now there's one more.

1153
01:05:15,240 --> 01:05:17,160
Speaker 1: I I thought it would be good to mention because

1154
01:05:17,160 --> 01:05:20,520
Speaker 1: it's got a slightly love crafty and face, right leon

1155
01:05:20,640 --> 01:05:24,680
Speaker 1: Colia the Blind whip Hunter. Yes, it looks kind of

1156
01:05:24,720 --> 01:05:27,000
Speaker 1: it's this one's kind of hard to explain really, but

1157
01:05:27,440 --> 01:05:30,200
Speaker 1: you know, it looks shrimpy, looks a little flea like

1158
01:05:30,920 --> 01:05:34,280
Speaker 1: but imagine a blind monster that stumbles around in the

1159
01:05:34,360 --> 01:05:38,800
Speaker 1: murk just bull whipping everything in its vicinity with flails

1160
01:05:38,880 --> 01:05:42,320
Speaker 1: and then just really whipping the heck out of potential prey,

1161
01:05:42,440 --> 01:05:45,360
Speaker 1: so whips coming out of its face. Yes, and that's

1162
01:05:45,360 --> 01:05:47,960
Speaker 1: what we have with leon Colia. Now we assume it

1163
01:05:48,040 --> 01:05:51,480
Speaker 1: was blind because we haven't found evidence of I stalks yet,

1164
01:05:51,880 --> 01:05:54,439
Speaker 1: which if the thing, of course is that given these

1165
01:05:54,440 --> 01:05:58,480
Speaker 1: previous examples, it's entirely likely that that that could occur.

1166
01:05:58,720 --> 01:06:02,040
Speaker 1: At some point a future fossil find will reveal, oh, well,

1167
01:06:02,080 --> 01:06:03,920
Speaker 1: they did have eye structures and they look like this,

1168
01:06:04,520 --> 01:06:07,720
Speaker 1: but for the time being, the ideas that they were

1169
01:06:07,840 --> 01:06:12,000
Speaker 1: seemingly blind. The creature here was about two inches long,

1170
01:06:12,360 --> 01:06:15,760
Speaker 1: and it's usually classified as an as an arthropod, though

1171
01:06:15,840 --> 01:06:21,600
Speaker 1: sometimes it's thrown into the arachnomorph subgroups, which would connect it,

1172
01:06:21,680 --> 01:06:26,080
Speaker 1: you know, more to scorpions in trilobytes. But still it's

1173
01:06:26,080 --> 01:06:28,760
Speaker 1: a fascinating creature to try and imagine, especially in this

1174
01:06:28,760 --> 01:06:33,000
Speaker 1: this changing time where eyesight is coming online for various

1175
01:06:33,080 --> 01:06:38,080
Speaker 1: organisms and new new methods of exploiting other organisms are

1176
01:06:38,120 --> 01:06:40,960
Speaker 1: becoming possible, and this one is just whipping things with

1177
01:06:41,000 --> 01:06:44,680
Speaker 1: its face un fel it can eat something. Yeah, So

1178
01:06:44,720 --> 01:06:47,000
Speaker 1: I guess that's going to have to conclude our tour

1179
01:06:47,360 --> 01:06:50,560
Speaker 1: of the Cambrian monsters. But I do want to ask you, Robert.

1180
01:06:50,600 --> 01:06:54,600
Speaker 1: So clearly we have not exhausted all of the fascinating

1181
01:06:54,680 --> 01:06:59,280
Speaker 1: questions about the Cambrian period and the the emergence of biodiversity,

1182
01:07:00,200 --> 01:07:04,600
Speaker 1: animal biodiversity, especially in the Cambrian periods. So I want

1183
01:07:04,600 --> 01:07:08,320
Speaker 1: to ask you which of the Cambrian explosion theories we've

1184
01:07:08,360 --> 01:07:11,000
Speaker 1: discussed today appeals to you the most. Obviously we haven't

1185
01:07:11,040 --> 01:07:14,400
Speaker 1: covered all of the possibilities. There are other possible explanations

1186
01:07:14,400 --> 01:07:17,760
Speaker 1: out there. But what what what? What strikes true to you? Like?

1187
01:07:17,840 --> 01:07:20,680
Speaker 1: What sounds right? Does it? Could it have been site

1188
01:07:21,080 --> 01:07:24,000
Speaker 1: as the thing that triggered all of this biodiversity, or

1189
01:07:24,080 --> 01:07:29,640
Speaker 1: the innovation of predation and carnivary, or the chemistry for biomineralization,

1190
01:07:30,400 --> 01:07:33,240
Speaker 1: or is it just this sampling bias where you know,

1191
01:07:33,320 --> 01:07:36,280
Speaker 1: maybe that there isn't as much bio innovation in this

1192
01:07:36,320 --> 01:07:38,840
Speaker 1: period as it seems just from the fossil record. I mean,

1193
01:07:38,840 --> 01:07:40,280
Speaker 1: I guess I could play it safe and say a

1194
01:07:40,320 --> 01:07:43,120
Speaker 1: little bit of all of those, but but I guess

1195
01:07:43,640 --> 01:07:48,200
Speaker 1: I tend to buy more into the predation and and

1196
01:07:48,360 --> 01:07:52,000
Speaker 1: cite arguments with some support by by by some of

1197
01:07:52,000 --> 01:07:53,960
Speaker 1: the additional arguments. But but those are the two that

1198
01:07:54,040 --> 01:07:56,960
Speaker 1: I guess I feel like they have the most meat

1199
01:07:57,360 --> 01:07:59,800
Speaker 1: for me. But then again, I'm not a I'm not

1200
01:07:59,840 --> 01:08:03,880
Speaker 1: a a scientist, you know, specializing in this time period.

1201
01:08:04,600 --> 01:08:05,800
Speaker 1: But but those are the ones that I feel like

1202
01:08:05,960 --> 01:08:08,040
Speaker 1: the most. Maybe it's just calling to the five year

1203
01:08:08,080 --> 01:08:11,760
Speaker 1: old of me. It's the it's the explanation that involves

1204
01:08:12,160 --> 01:08:14,960
Speaker 1: creatures warring with each other and battling each other, and

1205
01:08:15,040 --> 01:08:17,639
Speaker 1: therefore that's the one that I can imagine. Yeah, it's

1206
01:08:17,640 --> 01:08:20,000
Speaker 1: hard to resist, now, I know, I've I think I

1207
01:08:20,040 --> 01:08:23,440
Speaker 1: read at some point that one of the arguments against

1208
01:08:23,800 --> 01:08:27,920
Speaker 1: the site hypothesis is just that site doesn't generally matter

1209
01:08:28,640 --> 01:08:31,280
Speaker 1: in the water, and especially in the deep water, as

1210
01:08:31,360 --> 01:08:33,720
Speaker 1: much as it does on land. And not that it

1211
01:08:33,760 --> 01:08:36,360
Speaker 1: doesn't matter at all, it does, but that you know,

1212
01:08:36,439 --> 01:08:39,120
Speaker 1: things like smell and hearing and stuff like that are

1213
01:08:39,160 --> 01:08:41,559
Speaker 1: more useful in the ocean. But yeah, I don't know,

1214
01:08:41,800 --> 01:08:45,000
Speaker 1: I'm not sure which I'm most convinced by. The predation

1215
01:08:45,120 --> 01:08:49,280
Speaker 1: one seems very interesting to me that if animals weren't

1216
01:08:49,320 --> 01:08:54,360
Speaker 1: really capitalizing on getting their energy from other more large

1217
01:08:54,439 --> 01:08:57,400
Speaker 1: sized animals before and suddenly they started doing that. That

1218
01:08:57,400 --> 01:08:59,880
Speaker 1: that could be you know, a game changer. It's also

1219
01:09:00,040 --> 01:09:03,599
Speaker 1: kind of an original sin type scenario too. It feels

1220
01:09:03,680 --> 01:09:06,360
Speaker 1: very mythic, right like that that the first creature to

1221
01:09:06,400 --> 01:09:09,080
Speaker 1: figure out that it can it can prey on its

1222
01:09:09,160 --> 01:09:12,160
Speaker 1: fellow organisms. And how does that occur? Like obviously it's

1223
01:09:12,200 --> 01:09:15,880
Speaker 1: it's not just a situation of one day, Uh this

1224
01:09:16,120 --> 01:09:18,200
Speaker 1: this creature just takes a bite out of another one

1225
01:09:18,280 --> 01:09:21,639
Speaker 1: Like it's going to be a more gradual process and uh,

1226
01:09:21,680 --> 01:09:24,320
Speaker 1: you know, and I'm likely begins with some sort of

1227
01:09:24,400 --> 01:09:28,000
Speaker 1: gray area of competition for food, like for instance, a

1228
01:09:28,040 --> 01:09:32,160
Speaker 1: creature it becomes adapt at stealing food from either maybe

1229
01:09:32,200 --> 01:09:34,479
Speaker 1: stealing food from its mouth, and what happens if you

1230
01:09:34,520 --> 01:09:37,479
Speaker 1: steal food from another creature's belly? Yeah, you know, I

1231
01:09:37,520 --> 01:09:41,240
Speaker 1: mean that That is the difficulty of this hypothesis is

1232
01:09:41,280 --> 01:09:44,080
Speaker 1: you have to imagine what's the process that gets you

1233
01:09:44,120 --> 01:09:48,479
Speaker 1: there by gradual evolutionary change, Even if it's geologically rapid,

1234
01:09:48,479 --> 01:09:52,320
Speaker 1: it still would have been gradual in biological terms. Um,

1235
01:09:52,000 --> 01:09:55,040
Speaker 1: trying to you know, go from an organism organisms that

1236
01:09:55,080 --> 01:10:00,280
Speaker 1: are all basically vegetarian to some organisms eating other animals. Yeah, yeah,

1237
01:10:00,479 --> 01:10:02,360
Speaker 1: Like another example that comes to mind, as of course,

1238
01:10:02,400 --> 01:10:06,200
Speaker 1: animals that will consume their own young or their own eggs.

1239
01:10:06,640 --> 01:10:09,760
Speaker 1: We've talked about, you know, the parental cannibalism to sort

1240
01:10:09,760 --> 01:10:14,960
Speaker 1: of re absorb essentially lost energy, and how that could

1241
01:10:15,400 --> 01:10:19,919
Speaker 1: seemingly be an avenue into the UH into inter predation,

1242
01:10:20,280 --> 01:10:23,599
Speaker 1: because if you're absorbing your own biomatter back into yourself,

1243
01:10:23,840 --> 01:10:26,759
Speaker 1: then it becomes a less of a leap to absorb

1244
01:10:26,800 --> 01:10:29,640
Speaker 1: the biomatter of another. I can also see a scavenging

1245
01:10:29,720 --> 01:10:34,799
Speaker 1: to predation route that maybe uh, the the gradual changes

1246
01:10:34,880 --> 01:10:38,519
Speaker 1: that allow you to better and better extracts nutrition from

1247
01:10:38,720 --> 01:10:40,960
Speaker 1: dead animals that you find on the bottom of the

1248
01:10:40,960 --> 01:10:45,360
Speaker 1: ocean could eventually become useful in killing live animals right right.

1249
01:10:45,640 --> 01:10:48,360
Speaker 1: Or you could just always do it and an angel

1250
01:10:48,400 --> 01:10:52,400
Speaker 1: told you not to until a snake suggested otherwise, just

1251
01:10:52,520 --> 01:10:55,360
Speaker 1: another possibility that could be it. Well, Robert, I don't

1252
01:10:55,720 --> 01:10:57,479
Speaker 1: I don't get the feeling that we're done with the

1253
01:10:57,479 --> 01:10:59,680
Speaker 1: Cambrian period. I think we may come back here in

1254
01:10:59,680 --> 01:11:02,639
Speaker 1: the few true to explore some other scientific issues and

1255
01:11:02,640 --> 01:11:04,519
Speaker 1: when there may be other things to discuss with the

1256
01:11:04,520 --> 01:11:07,120
Speaker 1: Burdge of Shale as well. Yeah, and uh, and in general,

1257
01:11:07,160 --> 01:11:09,000
Speaker 1: I'd love to do some more episodes in the future

1258
01:11:09,960 --> 01:11:12,160
Speaker 1: regarding prehistoric creatures. I feel like this is something we

1259
01:11:12,439 --> 01:11:15,360
Speaker 1: come back to time and time again, well at least

1260
01:11:15,360 --> 01:11:19,439
Speaker 1: on what a bi monthly uh kind of pattern, I guess. So,

1261
01:11:19,520 --> 01:11:21,200
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's the seven year old in me.

1262
01:11:21,240 --> 01:11:24,520
Speaker 1: I've I've never gotten over how much I love dinosaurs

1263
01:11:24,560 --> 01:11:27,720
Speaker 1: and other weird organisms that don't exist today. It's it's

1264
01:11:27,760 --> 01:11:30,240
Speaker 1: part of my love for monsters, and it's part of

1265
01:11:30,960 --> 01:11:33,960
Speaker 1: what keeps bringing me back to paleontology. All right, well,

1266
01:11:33,960 --> 01:11:37,200
Speaker 1: we'll leave it at that, but in the meantime, definitely

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Speaker 1: check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. I'll

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Speaker 1: check out the landing page for this episode because again

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to try to include images, illustrations of

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Speaker 1: fossil representations, whatever I can find for each of the

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Speaker 1: organisms presented here, so you can have some additional visual

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Speaker 1: idea of what we're talking about. And I'll include links

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Speaker 1: back to some of our other episodes that have dealt

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Speaker 1: with prehistoric organisms. And if you want to get in

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Speaker 1: touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or

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Speaker 1: any other to suggest future episode topic. You can always

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Speaker 1: email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

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Speaker 1: Does it how stuff works dot com