Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
Speaker 1: of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
Speaker 1: and today on the show, they're not dinosaurs, mon they're
Speaker 1: really Oh my god, what's that thing? That's right, folks,
Speaker 1: we are talking about pre dinosaur animals who are really cool,
Speaker 1: really wild, really really hard for paleontologists to put together
Speaker 1: the sordid history of pre dinosaur animals. We should have
Speaker 1: had a movie about these guys, take it over a
Speaker 1: park and making people question, you know, whether or not
Speaker 1: science has gone too far. So joining me today is paleontologists,
Speaker 1: science communicator, museum educator, and perhaps most importantly of all,
Speaker 1: a metal guitarist, Dane pa.
Speaker 2: It Welcome, Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited. So I am not really an expert
Speaker 1: in these sorts of animals, the pre dinosaur guys. In fact,
Speaker 1: dinosaurs I'm not even that well versed in because I
Speaker 1: have most of what I know are animals that are
Speaker 1: still alive, given that it's the easiest to observe their behavior.
Speaker 1: But I think what is so fascinating to me about
Speaker 1: paleontology is the lack of direct observation that you can
Speaker 1: do and how you guys are kind of like almost
Speaker 1: like forensic detectives piecing together these animals.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, So there's various different branches of how we
Speaker 2: can do this. We can kind of pass together the
Speaker 2: sort of most likely conclusions about Yeah, if you want
Speaker 2: to all about animal behavior specifically, we can use comparative anatomy.
Speaker 2: So you have this phenomenon evolution. You may know that
Speaker 2: of a convergent evolution, where different organisms will evolve similar
Speaker 2: features to solve similar problems in their environments. So you
Speaker 2: can look at the fossil record and you say, this
Speaker 2: animal has this particular shaped arm bone that means it
Speaker 2: was probably digging, or it has this feature in the
Speaker 2: spine which means it ran a certain media. So we
Speaker 2: can piece together. But yeah, it is very much like
Speaker 2: detective work taking these very sparse pieces of evidence, and
Speaker 2: the fossil record is notoriously sparse. I think there's sort
Speaker 2: of a ballpark estimation that only one in a million
Speaker 2: animals that has ever existed actually becomes a fossil. All
Speaker 2: the rest just die and rot away or are eaten,
Speaker 2: or are just completely lost to the winds of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because fossilization. I mean, there's a few ways in
Speaker 1: which something becomes a fossil, but it is certainly not
Speaker 1: a common thing to happen to an animal's carcass. It's
Speaker 1: not as if you have just every dinosaur who has
Speaker 1: dyed is perfectly encased in stone. The conditions, yeah, the
Speaker 1: conditions in which fossil actually form is quite rare. And
Speaker 1: it's even more rare for a fossil, like a complete
Speaker 1: fossil to form where you get the entire animal perfectly
Speaker 1: represented in one piece.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's the classic. It's the classic. One is
Speaker 2: the opening the early scene in the original Jurassic Park
Speaker 2: where they're in the desert and they brush the sand
Speaker 2: away and there is a complete dinosaur skeleton perfectly formed,
Speaker 2: with every bone exactly where it is. That almost never happens.
Speaker 2: Most fossil animals are known from a handful of bits
Speaker 2: of frag like maybe not even complete bones. Teeth are
Speaker 2: very very common because a lot of ret load. Before
Speaker 2: we want to talk reptiles in particular, a lot of
Speaker 2: reptiles shed and regrow their teeth, so teeth are quite common. Sharks.
Speaker 2: Sharks teeth are very common. Shells if you're looking in
Speaker 2: marine and aquatic environments are aquatic water based environments are
Speaker 2: generally speaking more productive for fossil because you have movements
Speaker 2: of the sediments, which is more likely to bury things.
Speaker 2: So a lot of the most productive sites for fossils
Speaker 2: in the world tend to be lakes and lagoons and
Speaker 2: slow flowing rivers where things can be easily buried not
Speaker 2: necessarily destroyed by strong currents or floods and things like that.
Speaker 1: There's that beautiful Burgess Shale which was discovered in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds that had just an incredible wealth of
Speaker 1: fossils from this period of time where you had this
Speaker 1: almost doctor Seussian diversity of animals that seemed like some
Speaker 1: kind of awful fever dream, which oh yeah, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is it is. It's so interesting too because it was
Speaker 1: discovered so early, well relatively early. The trials and airs
Speaker 1: of trying to put together these fossils that were so
Speaker 1: strange looking.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the Burger Shale, it's what call the lagostatn,
Speaker 2: which is a German word and it's basically it's a
Speaker 2: it's the sort of blanket term for sites of exceptional
Speaker 2: preservation and the Burgess Shale seems to have been a
Speaker 2: very deep water environment and possibly an oxic. So there
Speaker 2: had been quite low oxygen in that environment, which means
Speaker 2: not a lot of fuel for like bacteria and things
Speaker 2: to break down the carcasses when they sink to the
Speaker 2: sea floor. And yeah, you've got creatures, which yeah, they
Speaker 2: are so because so the Burgers show represents a period
Speaker 2: of time called the Cambrian which is around two hundred
Speaker 2: and forty odd million years ago, and it's very you know,
Speaker 2: it's very famous phenomena called the Cambrian Explosion, wherein there'd
Speaker 2: been micro organisms and algae and things around for several
Speaker 2: or several tens and hundreds of millions of years beforehand,
Speaker 2: but at this particular point, it was sort of the
Speaker 2: stars aligned, sort of the temperature was just right, the
Speaker 2: atmospheric conditions were just right, Everything just kind of landed
Speaker 2: just right, and there's this huge explosion in diversity of
Speaker 2: tomp like multicellular life. And you have early representatives of
Speaker 2: the early ancestors of arthropods, sponges, worms, sort of very
Speaker 2: very early. Yeah, you can kind of sort of squint
Speaker 2: and see the resemblance to modern animals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what's so interesting to me is when I
Speaker 1: see kind of these these animals from the more wormy ones,
Speaker 1: like the soft bodied ones, which I mean, it's incredible
Speaker 1: that we have fossils of these soft bodied animals, because
Speaker 1: we generally think of fossils as like, hey, bones or shells,
Speaker 1: something hard, because those are more likely to be able
Speaker 1: to be preserved. But yeah, these soft bodied, like worm
Speaker 1: like animals that don't have many I think analogs in
Speaker 1: modern times, but you can you can kind of find like, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, well, we'll talk about one in a little
Speaker 1: bit that is very interesting, one of my favorite ones.
Speaker 1: But first let's talk about the Anomalocras, which I think
Speaker 1: is sort of one of the most famous examples of
Speaker 1: this this period. The name being Latin Greco for abnormal shrimp,
Speaker 1: which is very funny to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very very abnormal shrimp. Anomalo carus is sort of
Speaker 2: it's famous for being kind of characterized as one of
Speaker 2: the first eight lot, one of the first large apex predators.
Speaker 2: It was so as far as we said, it was
Speaker 2: a free swimming animal, which is quite a big innovation.
Speaker 2: There were, you know, a lot of the critters that
Speaker 2: were around at the time were sort of sediment based,
Speaker 2: either fixed to the sea floor or burrowing or crawling
Speaker 2: around sea floor. But Anomala carus was free swimming, had
Speaker 2: these sort of mobile tendrils on its face for gathering
Speaker 2: at prey, and we think it was probably most likely
Speaker 2: eating sort of the small Yeah, the small, soft body
Speaker 2: crystal floor trilobites would have been very abundant food source.
Speaker 2: So these are the famous sort of sort of woodlousey,
Speaker 2: beatley looking critters that.
Speaker 1: Like polls or isopods of today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much so. Unfortunately they went extinct at
Speaker 2: the end of the Permian period, which is the end
Speaker 2: of this sort of we say pre dinosaur is this
Speaker 2: larger period of time called the Paleozoic, So this is
Speaker 2: the sort of first of three major eons or chapters
Speaker 2: if you like, in the history of life on Earth.
Speaker 2: Paleozoic is from the Cambrian explosion five hundred and forty
Speaker 2: million years ago up to two hundred and fifty million
Speaker 2: years ago, which ends with the Permian extinction event, which
Speaker 2: took out huge, huge numbers of these amazing animals, some
Speaker 2: of which had made it all the way from the
Speaker 2: Cambrian explosion, like the trilobites.
Speaker 1: And what was the precipitating event do we think for
Speaker 1: that mause extinction was a change in the climate.
Speaker 2: So well, ultimately, all mass extinction events are some form
Speaker 2: of climate change. It just depends on what the triggering
Speaker 2: event is and what we believe. This one was a
Speaker 2: massive spike in volcanic activity at this site in Siberia.
Speaker 2: So we're talking an area hundreds of you know, tens
Speaker 2: of possibly tens of thousands of square kilometers of land
Speaker 2: in Russia basically fractured into a constantly erupting supervolcano, and
Speaker 2: I'm talking on the scale of thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 2: And over the course of that time, it released you know,
Speaker 2: trillions of tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases. It
Speaker 2: caused a runaway greenhouse effect. It acidified the oceans matt
Speaker 2: huge amounts of acid rain. As sea temperatures rise, water
Speaker 2: is less able to hold gas at high temperatures, so
Speaker 2: A that means less oxygen for the life living in
Speaker 2: the ocean, and B it means less CO two is
Speaker 2: being absorbed into the ocean, which causes even more heating.
Speaker 2: Some estimates put it as high as eighty percent of
Speaker 2: all life on Earth was wiped out at the end
Speaker 2: of this extinction event.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. I mean, maybe this is the optimist in me,
Speaker 1: but I feel like that's so really impressive that we
Speaker 1: bounced back from that. You know, it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: amazing that you can have such a mass extinction. Obviously
Speaker 1: very bad for the current trial bides just trying to
Speaker 1: live their lives, but still the life somehow, you know,
Speaker 1: was able to recover from that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, among the survivors were well, obviously everything that's
Speaker 2: alive today is descended from that, you know, relatively small
Speaker 2: handful of life that made it through this extinction event,
Speaker 2: but it caused this huge kind of restructuring of the
Speaker 2: food chain. So there's this really interesting event sort of
Speaker 2: immediately following that extinction. We're still pre dinosaur. By the way,
Speaker 2: the dinosaurs don't really the dinosaurs don't really come into
Speaker 2: their own until the sort of middle to late Triassic period,
Speaker 2: which is sort of two hundred and twenty two hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty million years, So there's a good thirty million
Speaker 2: year block between that extinction and the dinosaurs really starting
Speaker 2: to come into their own, and there's this phenomenon known
Speaker 2: as the Mesozoic marine revolution, which is really interesting kind
Speaker 2: of upheaval in the oceans. So one major part of
Speaker 2: it is the diversification of secondarily aquatic tetrapods. So there's
Speaker 2: a few technical terms here. I want to make sure
Speaker 2: the audience are fully on board here. So secondarily aquatic
Speaker 2: is basically any animal that has evolved from a land
Speaker 2: based ancestor and has gone back into the water.
Speaker 1: So we've got whales. Whales would count as that, right.
Speaker 2: Whales absolutely, yet sturles, crocodiles, sea lions, penguins, anything that
Speaker 2: has come from a land based ancestor into the ocean.
Speaker 2: During the Paleozoic, before the Permian extinction event, they didn't
Speaker 2: really there weren't really any of them because throughout that
Speaker 2: time the large ocean niches, the sort of big spaces
Speaker 2: in the ecosystem were dominated by fish and arthropods, So
Speaker 2: the big predators in the ocean were giant fish and
Speaker 2: giants arthropods, So there were things like Dunkleostius is probably
Speaker 2: the most famous one, which is this it's part of
Speaker 2: a group of fish that doesn't exist anymore, called the placoderms,
Speaker 2: and rather than having teeth they just have extended bones
Speaker 2: of the skull that would sheer against each other like
Speaker 2: scissor blades. That is, there's been some recent studies on
Speaker 2: Doncleosis as to exactly how big it was. It was
Speaker 2: believed to be like a sort of school bus sized monster.
Speaker 2: That's been scaled down with it recently. We think sort of,
Speaker 2: doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Where we like it was the size of the Empire
Speaker 1: state building. Maybe actually just the size of a Volkswagen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's quite a bit of that. There's also the
Speaker 2: sea scorpions, which were another casualty of the Permian extinction events.
Speaker 2: Not technically scorpions, they are arthropods.
Speaker 1: So they look like a flat scorpion, kind of like
Speaker 1: if you took the rolling pin and just sort of
Speaker 1: like rolled out a scorpion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, they've got this great, big,
Speaker 2: grasping pincers. They've got this big, long, flat tail, which
Speaker 2: some of the smaller ones may have swam, but some
Speaker 2: of the big ones probably stuck to the seabed. Some
Speaker 2: of the really big ones were nightmarish, like the biggest
Speaker 2: arthropods of all time. Yes, two meters long, possibly two
Speaker 2: and a half. For some of the really big ones.
Speaker 2: So these are the things that are occupying the big
Speaker 2: the big ocean niches at the time. And then the
Speaker 2: Permian extinction happens and it kind of opens up the
Speaker 2: food chain somewhe It opens up the ecosystem, and you
Speaker 2: have this big adaptive radiation where this happens a lot
Speaker 2: after extinction events. When you have when you've got the
Speaker 2: slate white clean, that leaves a lot of space for
Speaker 2: innovation and sort of evolutionary experimentation. So you start to
Speaker 2: get reptiles moving into the ocean. You get early sort
Speaker 2: of crocodile and turtle relatives. You have lots of very
Speaker 2: strange things that don't really exist anymore, like the placar
Speaker 2: donts Placoderms is the armored fish. And then you have plecardonts,
Speaker 2: which are these weird swimming reptiles that are not turtles,
Speaker 2: but they have very wide, flat bodies and armor across them.
Speaker 2: They sort of look like baked turtles. They're very strange things, yeah,
Speaker 2: very odd looking, but some of them have some of
Speaker 2: them are derived ones. They've got these forward facing teeth
Speaker 2: at the front of the jaw, and then they have
Speaker 2: these very flat plate like teeth at the back of
Speaker 2: the jaw and the roof of the mouth, and that's
Speaker 2: interpreted as being adaptations for prising apart and crushing shellfish.
Speaker 2: And that's the other big part of the mesozoat marine
Speaker 2: revolution is that it forced this big change in ocean
Speaker 2: invertebrates through the evolution of new creatures that can crack
Speaker 2: open and ingest shells and exoskeletons. Because if you think,
Speaker 2: you know, if you're like a limpet or a barnacle
Speaker 2: or something attached to a rock or attached to the
Speaker 2: sea floor, and there's nothing that can break you, basically fine,
Speaker 2: But if something pulls you off the rock and you
Speaker 2: can't reattach yourself or swim away or crawl into a
Speaker 2: hole and hide, you're basically doomed. So sessile animals, so
Speaker 2: things that attached to the sea floor and basically stay
Speaker 2: there the rest of their lives started to decline and
Speaker 2: animal and yeah, these sort of shellfish and invertebrates had
Speaker 2: to find all sorts of new ways to adapt. So
Speaker 2: creatures that lived on the surface declined, Creatures that lived
Speaker 2: in burrows diversified. There was a lot more burrowing animals
Speaker 2: after this. A really good example is crinoids, which, again
Speaker 2: making sure your audience caught up. Crinoids is really really
Speaker 2: weird creatures that evolved early on in the Paleozoic, not
Speaker 2: quite the Cambrian. They have I think it's penta radial symmetry.
Speaker 2: So humans are bilaterally symmetrical. We've got a left side
Speaker 2: and the right side. Chronoids have five way symmetry. You
Speaker 2: can look you look down on them from the top,
Speaker 2: you can split them five ways as they've got the
Speaker 2: mouse in the middle.
Speaker 1: So like starf like kind of terms like starfish and
Speaker 1: there are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they are a kindoderms. Yeah, they're related to starfish
Speaker 2: and sea urchins. So they've got a mouth in the middle,
Speaker 2: and then they have all these big branching feathery arms
Speaker 2: that come outs and their suspension feeders. They gather organic material,
Speaker 2: they put their arms out, they collect food from the water,
Speaker 2: and then they draw their arms into the mouth in
Speaker 2: the middle. And there's two major varieties of them. There's
Speaker 2: the standard ones just as I've described, which can use
Speaker 2: their arms to swim around and crawl around on the
Speaker 2: sea floor, and we call them feather stars. And then
Speaker 2: there's the stalked variety, which have a great, big, long
Speaker 2: stalk that trails from underneath the body and attaches them
Speaker 2: to the seafloor. And they kind of makes them look
Speaker 2: like a flower, and we call them sea lilies, and
Speaker 2: they are all still around today. They've made it through
Speaker 2: all the extinctions, all the way into the present day.
Speaker 2: During the Massasoka marine Revolution, you have this explosion of
Speaker 2: creatures that can break through exo skeletons. The sea lilies,
Speaker 2: the ones fix to the sea floor, start to abandon
Speaker 2: the shallow water and move into the deeper ocean. So
Speaker 2: most of the sea lily species that we have today
Speaker 2: live in deep offshore waters, whereas the feather stars that
Speaker 2: can move around and swim and escape, they live on
Speaker 2: the reefs and coastal environments. So it is this complete
Speaker 2: restructuring of how entire food chains and ecosystems work over
Speaker 2: this extinction boundary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a mass when you have like a
Speaker 1: massive shock like that, you have for the remaining species
Speaker 1: that are now adapting to say the you know, the
Speaker 1: arms race that's happening as new species start to take
Speaker 1: over in the niches that have been abandoned by the
Speaker 1: species that have gone extinct. Everything is impacted right in
Speaker 1: a way that like they all have to readapt It
Speaker 1: kind of reminds me of one of the animals I
Speaker 1: was thinking of talking about today was Endoceras Gigantium, which
Speaker 1: is sort of like that that big unicorn like cephalopod
Speaker 1: during the I'm gonna say a period as if I
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about, even though I don't, the
Speaker 1: Ordovician period. So it was this like ancestor of modern
Speaker 1: day squid octopuses, not alloids, but unlike modern day squids
Speaker 1: and octopuses, it had this massive shell and unlike the nautilus,
Speaker 1: which still has that shell, it was this really straight,
Speaker 1: large conical shell that spanned from over nine up to
Speaker 1: possibly the larger estimates are eighteen feet, although that's not
Speaker 1: exactly confirmed, but it could be anywhere from like three
Speaker 1: to over five meters. And so it's thought it was
Speaker 1: like this ambush predator, right, because you're so big, you're
Speaker 1: not going to be very mobile, and you have this
Speaker 1: giant shell to defend itself. So that once, and similarly
Speaker 1: to other giant shelled cephalopods, thought that it went extinct
Speaker 1: because it could not out compete with this new sort
Speaker 1: of wave of like the fish and more mobile, more agile,
Speaker 1: and swifter creatures that were evolving at the time. So
Speaker 1: it went from because you'd think, like a lot of
Speaker 1: people will often ask like, well, if you have something
Speaker 1: that has this amazing defense mechanism, like a giant shell,
Speaker 1: why would it get rid of it? Right, because like
Speaker 1: squid octopuses, they're very vulnerable, they're so squishy, But it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter necessarily if you're perfectly protected, if you're not
Speaker 1: getting any food, if you're unable to compete with the
Speaker 1: faster predators and the faster prey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the the evolution of a spine was a big
Speaker 2: innovation because that that's you know, that provided the sort
Speaker 2: of propulsion for sort of early predatory fish to swe
Speaker 2: you know, be a lot faster and a lot more
Speaker 2: agile and maneuverable in the water. And yeah, so I
Speaker 2: think things like endoceras and you know, these giant autaloids
Speaker 2: would have would have had no predators, had had no
Speaker 2: competition until these larger, you know, the early ancestors of
Speaker 2: sharks and things like that, some of which would have
Speaker 2: been capable of cracking through these shells. Yeah, sharks were
Speaker 2: a big innovation at the time they used sort of
Speaker 2: started to occupy the ape expression each but they were
Speaker 2: kind of overtaken by the placoderms, the big sort of
Speaker 2: sheer teeth fish. They were kind of your two main
Speaker 2: sort of apex predator bodies that came in at the time,
Speaker 2: and they were all kinds of bizarre as well. You
Speaker 2: have these really nice out groups, as they're called, So
Speaker 2: you have sort of we have your sort of evolutionary
Speaker 2: group of animals that we consider modern day sharks, and
Speaker 2: then you sort of go back a step on the
Speaker 2: family tree and off on a little weird side branch,
Speaker 2: and you find all these really odd creatures that aren't
Speaker 2: quite entirely sharks that that's sort of the closest thing
Speaker 2: we can relate into the things like one of the
Speaker 2: more famous one is Stepacanthus, which has got these like rays.
Speaker 2: It's rather than like the kind of triangular dorsalt thing.
Speaker 2: It's got this kind of flattened structure on its back
Speaker 2: with all these bristles and spines across it. We think
Speaker 2: it's a sexual display structure of some kind because we
Speaker 2: only find it in the males. There's a ah, the
Speaker 2: names escaping me. Now there's all kinds. There's a oh,
Speaker 2: helica prion.
Speaker 1: As a real yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, this this whole family group of sharks that,
Speaker 2: instead of having a jawline as conventional sharks do, all
Speaker 2: their teeth run down the middle of the jaw, and
Speaker 2: there's some that have them like scissor blades, one on
Speaker 2: top of the other. But helica prion has this big
Speaker 2: spiral of teeth which we now interpret as being new
Speaker 2: teeth growing in the center and kind of growing outwards
Speaker 2: towards the outer edge of the spiral, and then as
Speaker 2: they are replaced, they kind of fall out of the front.
Speaker 2: It's possible it may have been able to use that
Speaker 2: to cut through, you know, shells and of things like
Speaker 2: the squid and the autoloids that were hanging around at
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it is. It is so weird because with
Speaker 1: a lot of these animals, when I mean, one thing
Speaker 1: is that I think that the reason these shapes look
Speaker 1: so bizarre to us is that we are we acclimate
Speaker 1: ourselves to the shapes of say, you know, we look
Speaker 1: at a hammerhead shark, right, and we're we're a climatized
Speaker 1: to that. So we see that and we understand it
Speaker 1: we see this sh this as a normal animal shape
Speaker 1: more or less, but that's really only because we have
Speaker 1: gotten used to it that when like the first people
Speaker 1: who probably saw a hammerhead shark was like, well, this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly weird shape for a shark head. So
Speaker 1: something like stephacanthus that has this weird anvil on its head,
Speaker 1: which I'd be I'd love to see a hammerhead shark
Speaker 1: and a deethacanthus get together and see what what what
Speaker 1: they would make us, what they can build, see what
Speaker 1: they can craft? Uh, but you know, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it is interesting because they're all especially when we're
Speaker 1: trying to piece together say that the purpose like how
Speaker 1: how say the jaws work of this like weird spiraling
Speaker 1: saw too thing, how they would actually maneuver that? Or
Speaker 1: like this death of canthus, what that that protrusion was,
Speaker 1: and the way we piece it together in terms of well,
Speaker 1: if it was only found on males, maybe it would
Speaker 1: be a sexual signaling uh device essentially. But it's also
Speaker 1: kind of odd because we even in current animals, right,
Speaker 1: like if you look at the narwhal, right, they have
Speaker 1: this it's not really it's not really a horn. It's
Speaker 1: a giant tooth, and it's generally found in the males.
Speaker 1: It's less likely to be found in the females, although
Speaker 1: some females do have it, which is again confusing, and
Speaker 1: it is unclear exactly these are animals that are alive today.
Speaker 1: We can observe them. Whales are always tricky because they're
Speaker 1: in the water. These ones especially tricky because they're in
Speaker 1: very cold water and we don't generally do well. We
Speaker 1: struggle even to understand what narwals use their tusks for.
Speaker 1: And that is as we have been aware of nar
Speaker 1: wals for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, thousands of years when including local populations, and
Speaker 1: yet the even with understanding that, yes, it seems to
Speaker 1: be a sexual difference, but then we find all these
Speaker 1: strange things about it, right like where the narwal tusk
Speaker 1: is interval. It has all these pores in which a
Speaker 1: seawater can filter through, possibly as a sensory organ but
Speaker 1: we don't know. And so it's just it's when you
Speaker 1: think about that puzzle that we have currently with an
Speaker 1: animal we can physically interact with, we can look at
Speaker 1: its tusk, we can get a fresh you know, narwhal
Speaker 1: tusk and examine it, and then we try to do
Speaker 1: that with something that's extinct like steph acanthus, And it's like,
Speaker 1: what this protrusion could have possibly been. It could have
Speaker 1: been a sexual ornament, it could have been a sensory organ,
Speaker 1: it could have been both, and you know, just like
Speaker 1: it's it's so it's so tantalizing.
Speaker 2: Oh, like what say, like the comparison i've heard, you know,
Speaker 2: and sort of looking at you what we what we
Speaker 2: can pass in the fossil record. The comparison I've heard
Speaker 2: is like human medical research. You know, we've been studying
Speaker 2: the human body in earnest for a couple of hundred
Speaker 2: years now, and there are more people working in human
Speaker 2: medicine than arguably any other field of science. And we're
Speaker 2: still learning new things about the human body. Yeah, we're
Speaker 2: not going to run out of beatings to figure out
Speaker 2: in the fossil record anytime soon.
Speaker 1: Still not exactly sure what that all appendix is doing there. Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: get back. That's right, we're talking about more pre dinosaur
Speaker 1: awesome things, including one that does look like a hallucination.
Speaker 1: All right, So we are back. I do want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about anomal chrus before we
Speaker 1: move on, because it is I think we had talked
Speaker 1: a bit about its perception of this as this apex predator,
Speaker 1: but the way we've seen it has kind of changed
Speaker 1: a little bit over the years. You know, it was
Speaker 1: originally discovered in the Burgess Shale in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and it took a while to assemble this thing, and
Speaker 1: it kind of was I think the first pieces they
Speaker 1: found were that the front appendages that that looked like
Speaker 1: giant shrimp. And that's kind of where that name came from,
Speaker 1: because it's like straight abnormal shrimp. And I couldn't really
Speaker 1: confirm this, but I think I once read an account
Speaker 1: where they were saying that at one point they thought
Speaker 1: that those front appendages were just whole animals because they
Speaker 1: were they seemed like a complete shrimp.
Speaker 2: Like a like a big yeah.
Speaker 1: And so what the actual entire animal looks like is
Speaker 1: it It was over a foot long, its front limbs
Speaker 1: looked like it had a pair of giant shramp attached
Speaker 1: to its face. It has these two big compound eyes
Speaker 1: attached to short ice docks, a segmented body with these
Speaker 1: fan blade like appendages on each segment which are thought
Speaker 1: to actually have had gill structures attached to them. Then
Speaker 1: it ended in this sort of like fan like tail.
Speaker 1: So the whole thing kind of looked like a giant
Speaker 1: flattened shrimp, but also it looked like it had two
Speaker 1: other shrimp attached to its face. And it was thought
Speaker 1: to be this example like you had mentioned earlier, because
Speaker 1: it was one of the most even though it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem that huge at only about over a foot long
Speaker 1: compared to the other life at the time, it was
Speaker 1: very large and very mobile, but there was so there's
Speaker 1: this idea of it being this fierce apex predator like
Speaker 1: basically the early example of say like a great white shark.
Speaker 1: But the front appendages were studied a lot, and they
Speaker 1: found that they seemed to not really be meant for
Speaker 1: extreme strength, right like say, wrangling something that's really giving
Speaker 1: it a lot of trouble. So the ideas that maybe
Speaker 1: it was actually going after softer bodied prey, maybe something
Speaker 1: a little easier to grab, like a trial a bite,
Speaker 1: like some kind of soft bodied early these more sessile
Speaker 1: animals that could be grabbed and perhaps even chased and grabbed,
Speaker 1: but something that's not going to give these two front
Speaker 1: appendages too much trouble.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sort of you look at there's there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of diagrams and sort of close ups of the
Speaker 2: different So these sort of front appendages, they have these
Speaker 2: sort of bristly spines that were along the underside which
Speaker 2: seem they almost they sort of I'm getting fish hook
Speaker 2: from them. So it's not necessarily it's not strictly very precise.
Speaker 2: It's more you just kind of snag whatever comes onto it.
Speaker 2: And there's different species, and the different species all have
Speaker 2: slightly different shaped hooks to them, so that's suggesting possibly
Speaker 2: they might be going after slightly different prey. Might be
Speaker 2: a bit of ecological partition going.
Speaker 1: Over fuschbeak finchbeak differences, where you have different sort of
Speaker 1: beaks that.
Speaker 2: Are exactly yeah, yeah, yeah, Arwin' stinches.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then you got to think, yeah, like the
Speaker 3: creatures it's you know, yeah, yeah, it is only a
Speaker 3: foo long, and you've got to think the creatures that
Speaker 3: it's going after are probably going to be centimeters long
Speaker 3: if that, and yeah, there's there's going to be very rudimentary,
Speaker 3: very early defenses.
Speaker 2: You know that far back in history, there's going to
Speaker 2: be stuff that burrows, is going to be stuff that
Speaker 2: has armored, But there's going to be a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff that sits on the surface and is going to
Speaker 2: be largely defenseless against a gargantuan creature of entire long Yeah, like.
Speaker 1: Can barely register what this thing is before just getting
Speaker 1: slurped up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like a lot of a lot of creatures are
Speaker 2: going to be very slow moving. A lot of things
Speaker 2: aren't going to have any eyes. They're going to have
Speaker 2: very very very basic nervous systems and sensory organs and
Speaker 2: things like that. So Yeah, although it does have this
Speaker 2: sort of reputation as you know, the earliest apex predator,
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily a very high bar to jump, even
Speaker 2: the kind of standard of the prey that's around at
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 1: Well, that is a sick burn for the poor Middle
Speaker 1: Cambrian period soft bodied animals living on the seafloor.
Speaker 2: Wow, look at you.
Speaker 1: Speaking of soft bodies. I don't we have to talk
Speaker 1: about hallucinogeneous hallucigenea. Yeah, lucigeneia I generally go with hallucinogenea
Speaker 1: hallucigeneous genus.
Speaker 2: As long as it's spelled right, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, Hallucigenia, I think is I had written out
Speaker 1: a fancy pronunciation guide for myself that I just tripped over. Uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, hallucigenia that it was this like genus of
Speaker 1: panarthropod's uh lobopodians Greek term for blunt feet, which is
Speaker 1: kind of cute, I guess. But yeah, these these mostly
Speaker 1: soft bodied marine wormlike animals, and they're I mean, I
Speaker 1: I when you look at them, there's I mean, there's
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different kind of types of
Speaker 1: these local podions and different ones not whucagenea, but different
Speaker 1: types of low podions do look a lot like modern
Speaker 1: day velvet worms, which are also panarthropods, who have these
Speaker 1: little tiny legs. They have this soft body. They look
Speaker 1: so much like maybe a caterpillar, but they are not.
Speaker 1: They're they're not at all related.
Speaker 2: To caterpillars, like bleshy caterpillars.
Speaker 1: Very fleshy. There's I love them. I think they're.
Speaker 2: Velvet velvet worms are great. Yeah, they have a strange
Speaker 2: sort of air of cuteness about them and then they
Speaker 2: do the whole spin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, glue, they they do scirt a bit of glue.
Speaker 1: It's the sticky substance that they have these two protrusions
Speaker 1: at the side of their head that actually kind of
Speaker 1: look like these cute little eyes, but they're not their eyes.
Speaker 1: They are glands from one which they spew this sticky
Speaker 1: glue like substance at their prey. Because as cute as
Speaker 1: they they look like little pokemon that would say something
Speaker 1: like yeah, really really adorable, but they are vicious predators
Speaker 1: and they will immobilize their prey with this sticky substance. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then just you know, casually stroll up to them
Speaker 1: eat them at their leisure. It's actually quite horrifying. What
Speaker 1: they do. To their credit is like, you know, this prehistoric,
Speaker 1: just a creature from before we even had insects, and
Speaker 1: but yeah, so so we see this and this is
Speaker 1: as modern. But hallucigenia was even weirder. It was such
Speaker 1: a strange looking thing that we really struggled after discovering
Speaker 1: it because we actually had it's kind of incredible. The
Speaker 1: fossil records of it were quite good, like there are
Speaker 1: there were like these full sort of impressions of this animal.
Speaker 1: But even with that, it really struggled to figure out
Speaker 1: how this thing works. What is its feet, what's its back,
Speaker 1: what's its head, and what's its butt? Things that you
Speaker 1: would think are basic things you could figure out looking
Speaker 1: at something.
Speaker 2: Its whole body plan is search an anomaly. And yeah,
Speaker 2: like I said, there's, there's, there's, there's. There's been so
Speaker 2: many different interpretations of like trying to trying to figure
Speaker 2: out just which way round this thing goes. People have
Speaker 2: interpreted one end as the head and one end as
Speaker 2: the back, and like this, does it sit this way
Speaker 2: up or this way up? And yeah, things like that
Speaker 2: and yeah, and they say it's it's it's incredible that
Speaker 2: we do have these like this sort of soft body
Speaker 2: preservation of these things. But this is the weird, it's
Speaker 2: a weird sort of paradox with kind of fossil preservation
Speaker 2: is that, you know, soft bodied animals do generally preserve
Speaker 2: less well in the fossil record, but in environments that
Speaker 2: are just right for it, you find loads of them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so those are really really useful fossil sites.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so. It just we kind of looked out
Speaker 1: at getting these these ones at this you know, I
Speaker 1: believe this was also the Burgess Shale.
Speaker 2: I think I believe so, yes China as well.
Speaker 1: Yes there are. In fact, there was a research done
Speaker 1: by Chinese researcher and I think I don't know where
Speaker 1: this other researcher is from Lars Ramskolden who Jiang Wang,
Speaker 1: who were actually like in the nineties, like we're studying
Speaker 1: some of these fossil records, and they there had always
Speaker 1: been this assumption that there was so essentially what this
Speaker 1: thing looks like is it's a tube, as are we all.
Speaker 2: To be free, which is which is which is how
Speaker 2: what most animals are.
Speaker 1: We're still tubes. We're just tubes with extra widgets. But
Speaker 1: you know, so it's tubes. Tubes, Yeah, tubes at all.
Speaker 1: I love that. So we so oh yeah, so a tube.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then on it's along its back or possibly it's belly.
Speaker 1: It has these spines, and then along its belly or
Speaker 1: some have thought its back, it has these soft appendages.
Speaker 1: So the first go of it, they thought it had
Speaker 1: that it walked on these spines kind of like stilts.
Speaker 1: And it's only this thing is only like a few
Speaker 1: centimeters big, so it's tiny, tiny, But originally thought Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it kind of walks on these sharp thorn
Speaker 1: like projections, as if there's stilts. And then the these
Speaker 1: appendages on its back were used to gather food and
Speaker 1: pass it along to its mouth. But then researchers took
Speaker 1: another look at that fossil and they used like a
Speaker 1: dental drill to kind of like get a little deeper
Speaker 1: into it, and they actually found another pair of that
Speaker 1: soft appendage. So it's like, now those are beginning to
Speaker 1: look much more like legs, uh. And so they flipped
Speaker 1: it back over and so this might make more sense
Speaker 1: that it's walking on these soft appendages whereas the spikes.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's a defense. But in terms of that, it
Speaker 1: was assumed that there's like always this sort of big
Speaker 1: balloon like blob on one end of it. And people thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's its head. You know. It's kind of a weird
Speaker 1: look ahead. It's kind of a blobby looking head, but
Speaker 1: it's a head, right, because it's is it is a
Speaker 1: balloon on one end of the animal. But yeah, like
Speaker 1: I said, these researchers raum schooled and Jean one like
Speaker 1: questioned whether that really was the head, and they kind
Speaker 1: of because this showed up on multiple fossils, but they thought, like,
Speaker 1: this seems more like it's an artifact of something else,
Speaker 1: some kind of stain maybe.
Speaker 2: And then more recently, can you can get like preservation,
Speaker 2: You can get like tephonomy and preservation issues, or sometimes
Speaker 2: stuff is like the fossil itself can be prepared in
Speaker 2: such a way that it leaves marks and stains and things,
Speaker 2: and they can get misinterpreted further down.
Speaker 1: The line exactly. But the thing that was weird, right
Speaker 1: was that this was something that seemed to kind of
Speaker 1: recur in multiple fossils. So it was like, Okay, so
Speaker 1: perhaps this is some kind of air and processing, but
Speaker 1: it does seem to happen and more than just one individual.
Speaker 1: And so more recently Martin Smith and John Bernard Karen
Speaker 1: used electron microscopes on this head and they came up
Speaker 1: with a new theory, which is that this seems like
Speaker 1: it was a stain made of fluids that were expelled
Speaker 1: during decomposition. So what was once thought of its as
Speaker 1: its head is basically the fluids that were pushed out
Speaker 1: of its butt as it was decomposing, which I'm afraid
Speaker 1: to say happens to all of us when we decomposed.
Speaker 1: So if you think that sounds gross bad news, that
Speaker 1: basically happens to all animals as we decompose. We have
Speaker 1: a lot of fluids, gases that will be forced out
Speaker 1: of our tube bodies.
Speaker 2: Problem tube. It's a it's a great example of how
Speaker 2: new technology can be used to like examine old specimens.
Speaker 2: You know, it's you know, sometime because it's our work
Speaker 2: in the museum myself, and yeah, people sometimes wonder why
Speaker 2: we hang onto the you know, fossils that are dug
Speaker 2: up tens of years ago, hundreds of years we want
Speaker 2: you people wonder why do we hang onto them? And
Speaker 2: these days you can use X rays and electron scanning,
Speaker 2: microscopes and set scans and all sorts of stuff, and
Speaker 2: you can get all kinds of new information from old
Speaker 2: fossil specimens by applying new technology to them. You know,
Speaker 2: you don't know what the next big innovation is. If
Speaker 2: you want really bizarre body plans from the Palaeozoic, you
Speaker 2: really can't go much further than the Tully monster, which
Speaker 2: is such a strange creature. We genuinely don't know what
Speaker 2: it is. So eventually, yeah, we talked about out groups,
Speaker 2: you know, things that you know, it's a close relative
Speaker 2: of this thing, and it's kind of off on its
Speaker 2: own branch of the family tree. With most fossil animals,
Speaker 2: we can kind of get a broad idea of like, okay,
Speaker 2: it's an arthropod, or it's a fish or something. The
Speaker 2: Tully monster we genuinely have no idea. All we know
Speaker 2: is it's got a left side and the right side,
Speaker 2: and that's the only thing it has. That's the only
Speaker 2: thing it has in common with any group of animals
Speaker 2: otherwise symmetry.
Speaker 1: Right there, you go.
Speaker 2: It's got it has symmetry. It's got eyes on stalks
Speaker 2: like a snail, its mouth is on the end of
Speaker 2: a hose, it's got fins like a squid. It's got
Speaker 2: something that looks like a noto cord like a vertebrate,
Speaker 2: and it's just put in its own group. It's genuinely
Speaker 2: such a weird little creature. And it exists in the
Speaker 2: Carboniferous period as well, which is actually quite a long
Speaker 2: way from the cart from the from the Cambrian, So
Speaker 2: it's not like this is one of those really super
Speaker 2: early weirdos that showed up at the beginning of complex life.
Speaker 2: This is something that you know, it's whatever it is.
Speaker 2: It's a lineage has been around a while and we
Speaker 2: don't know. Yeah, it's a ghost lineage. We don't know
Speaker 2: what it's evolved from. We don't know how it's related
Speaker 2: to other animals.
Speaker 1: Looking at this thing, do you remember that video game Spore?
Speaker 2: Yes, it is totally a spore creature.
Speaker 1: Yes, looks it looks like when you make something in
Speaker 1: Spore that does it does not survive past the first
Speaker 1: few stages of your game. But yeah, this is such
Speaker 1: This is such a wacky looking thing because it's got
Speaker 1: something that almost looks like an elephant trunk or a
Speaker 1: or like a tentacle. But at the end it's got
Speaker 1: this like little grabby like almost moment a.
Speaker 2: Thing like a some Some have interpreted that that, yeah,
Speaker 2: like a beak or pincers or something. Some have interpreted
Speaker 2: it as being like flexible like a trunk. Some of
Speaker 2: interpreted as being jointed like an arm. Yeah, it's got
Speaker 2: like the gills along the side of a body are
Speaker 2: like a lamprey. It's got like sets of holes down
Speaker 2: the side of its body past It's got all these
Speaker 2: weird mixtures of features and nobody's quite sure what to
Speaker 2: make of it.
Speaker 1: You know, it kind of looks like one of those
Speaker 1: Boston Dynamics robots, but without the legs, uh, which is
Speaker 1: you know, it is very interesting. This is uh, this
Speaker 1: could be the Lockness monster. Like you know this, maybe
Speaker 1: we should take another few submarines in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that's what that's what people have seen rising.
Speaker 2: It's a giant It's a giant tely monster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, incredible. This is this is definitely cryptid territory where
Speaker 1: it does not it does not look like something that
Speaker 1: should have existed.
Speaker 2: It should not be here.
Speaker 1: It should it. Apparently it didn't. It didn't make it.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't. Didn't didn't make it into the present,
Speaker 2: which is a shame because you know, if if they were,
Speaker 2: if if they were one of those creatures that had
Speaker 2: made it through the extinctions, we could like do a
Speaker 2: genetic test on it and figure out where it might fit.
Speaker 2: But we've just got these fossils and as far as
Speaker 2: we know, they only existed in the Cambrian and we
Speaker 2: don't know what branch of the tree of life they
Speaker 2: come from.
Speaker 1: Who knows. Maybe it had two butts, we we we
Speaker 1: really can't tell.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other thing that Martin Smith and Gene Karen
Speaker 1: found was that when they examined the other side right
Speaker 1: now that they've guessed that the side with the fluid
Speaker 1: explosion is probably the butt. What they look when they
Speaker 1: looked at the head, they found a couple of spots
Speaker 1: that looked suspiciously like eye spots. So we go from
Speaker 1: having this the initial impression of this thing, which is
Speaker 1: that it has like it walks on stilts. It has
Speaker 1: this weird balloon head with no eyes, and then we
Speaker 1: turned it upside down. Now it's walking on its little,
Speaker 1: soft little feet, it has spikes on its back, and
Speaker 1: it's got a it's got a head that has eye spots.
Speaker 1: It starts to look a little bit more like a
Speaker 1: weird caterpillar, but nonetheless a body plan that does make sense,
Speaker 1: Like the spikes make sense when you make it, you know,
Speaker 1: make that analogy to modern day caterpillars. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of caterpillars that have these thorny projections on their
Speaker 1: back that protects it from predators. The soft, soft appendages
Speaker 1: are very good for locomotion when you're trying to get
Speaker 1: over ridges and bumps and crawl under things, so that
Speaker 1: you have this this fluidity of motion, and the eye
Speaker 1: spots of course pretty important. Like we talked about how
Speaker 1: some animals that didn't even have any ability to detect
Speaker 1: light at all were very vulnerable to predators. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It's like it went through so many strange iterations,
Speaker 1: and even though what we kind of now think it
Speaker 1: probably look like and was oriented as is still incredibly weird,
Speaker 1: it at least makes some sort of sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's sort of an example of, like it's
Speaker 2: a very early example of like recognizable features of sort
Speaker 2: of what would go on to become kind of the
Speaker 2: body plan of later on anamalgy with discernible legs and
Speaker 2: eyes and a front end and a back end and
Speaker 2: things like that. Yeah, it's it's very it's it did
Speaker 2: it in a very weird way, but yeah, it's it
Speaker 2: is sort of like an early sort of template or
Speaker 2: trial run for what life on Earth would look like
Speaker 2: further down the line.
Speaker 1: A prototype, Uh, you know, it's the first draft is
Speaker 1: never going to be perfect, and.
Speaker 2: That evolution isn't you know. Most most animals are kind
Speaker 2: of a B plus, you know, they're sort of good enough.
Speaker 1: That's all. That's all that's required. People sometimes have this
Speaker 1: impression of evolution as being like a machine that creates
Speaker 1: the perfect animals, like well, if we are alive right now,
Speaker 1: or the animals that are alive, they must be you know,
Speaker 1: perfected forms of life through the elegant process of evolutions.
Speaker 1: Like now, as long as you can pop out some
Speaker 1: babies and those babies can pop out babies of their own,
Speaker 1: it's good enough, good enough.
Speaker 2: And there's there's always an issue that like the the
Speaker 2: more quote unquote perfectly adapted an animal is, the more
Speaker 2: at risk it is to extinction when the climate change.
Speaker 2: I like to use it so when I do science,
Speaker 2: I like to use the example of bears. So like
Speaker 2: black bears, quite they've got quite a broad diet, they're
Speaker 2: fairly adaptable, they can tolerate lots of different temperatures. They're
Speaker 2: doing okay. Polar bears very strict diets, very tight range
Speaker 2: of temperatures they can tolerate, and they're having a really
Speaker 2: tough time of it right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, it's it's that it's a it's
Speaker 1: the classic thing of like, well did you invest everything
Speaker 1: into one crop right like like pandas do or do
Speaker 1: you diversify, you know, and need a bunch of different things,
Speaker 1: which does it does help out, but yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: There is a recent study of looking into sort of
Speaker 1: the pre we're going back really far. This is like
Speaker 1: pre animal DNA, like the oh yeah, the produced DNA
Speaker 1: and how researchers have sort of used genes from that
Speaker 1: produce DNA and then found ones that are similar to
Speaker 1: like gene markers and mice and then tried to see
Speaker 1: if they could just like put that in there, like
Speaker 1: sneak a little bit of protest DNA into the mouse
Speaker 1: to get the same effect as the as that protein
Speaker 1: sequence that was so similar, and they found indeed they could,
Speaker 1: which I think is what's so interesting about these early
Speaker 1: animals is yes, they may have lacked a lot of things,
Speaker 1: like some of them didn't even have eye spots, some
Speaker 1: of them didn't have a brain, but they had enough
Speaker 1: of a genetic library that they could go through say
Speaker 1: a mass extinction event or these these incredible sort of
Speaker 1: bottleneck types of events and still have enough diversity that
Speaker 1: they were able to start developing you know, a flurry
Speaker 1: of useful features that were then used in later animals
Speaker 1: that we now recognize as having sort of a useful
Speaker 1: body plant rather than a strange tube with strange appendages.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, like like you know, talking about like giant panthers,
Speaker 2: like herbivores, like as a thing, didn't really exist until
Speaker 2: the Carboniferous, which is like near the near the end
Speaker 2: of the Camry period, And that's where you start getting
Speaker 2: kind of our ancestors. You start getting the first tetrapods
Speaker 2: and the land based vertebrates, and like the sort of
Speaker 2: the stem mammals, the kind of proto mammals. That's some
Speaker 2: of my that's some of my favorite fossil animals is
Speaker 2: these thing the creatures that kind of break your traditional
Speaker 2: conception of like animal classification because you kind of learning
Speaker 2: you kind of learn in school, you know, mammal, bird, reptile, fish, amphibian, inverterate.
Speaker 2: But then there's so much stuff in the fossil record
Speaker 2: that just doesn't fit in any of them. And yeah,
Speaker 2: like the synapsids, which is the sort of the broader
Speaker 2: group that mammals belong to. Their early ancestors are showed
Speaker 2: up in the sort of Cambrian period and really really
Speaker 2: flourished in the Permian so sort of right near the
Speaker 2: end of the Paleozoic period, and that you know, you've
Speaker 2: got creatures that are starting to resemble a kind of
Speaker 2: modern eque system. You've got great big terrestrial predators and
Speaker 2: herbivores with all kinds of weird horns and spikes and
Speaker 2: frills and things coming off them. You've got the first
Speaker 2: saber toothed predators shar not like even even before the
Speaker 2: diet You've got you got the gorgonopsids, who are these
Speaker 2: like horse sized, like lizard wolf things, just just nightmarish stuff.
Speaker 1: But we had there were dragon we from weird dragon
Speaker 1: type animals, maybe without the wings, but yes, and.
Speaker 2: These are these are another group where again you have
Speaker 2: all these questions that you can't quite answer through the
Speaker 2: fossil record about yeah, because they're they're they're on the
Speaker 2: they're on the the line towards the mammals, but they're
Speaker 2: not quite there yet. So were they warm bloody or
Speaker 2: cold blooded? Did they have skin or scales or fur?
Speaker 2: Did they produce milk? Is that something that we only
Speaker 2: find in true mammals or how far how far back
Speaker 2: does that go?
Speaker 1: There's you don't need We've we've learned you don't need
Speaker 1: nipples to make milk. You can just kind of let it.
Speaker 1: She'll sort of flosh out of you.
Speaker 2: Just bring them out like a sponge.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, and like sicilians, Yes, I know, yes, it's
Speaker 1: just like you have so like so when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about monitrems, I'm talking about platypuses and echidnas and they
Speaker 1: are you know, egg laying mammals, and they do but
Speaker 1: they do exude milk, but instead of having discrete nipples,
Speaker 1: they have these glands and pores and the milk just
Speaker 1: kind of like leaks out of them, which lovely. Sicilians
Speaker 1: are a reptile that are not so they are not mammals,
Speaker 1: but they and they don't technically produce milk, but what
Speaker 1: they do have is a very nutritious and delicious skin
Speaker 1: that they allowed their babies to eat off of their bellies.
Speaker 1: Like it's mom jerky. It's jerky made from Ah. Hey,
Speaker 1: you know it's loving, like when mom makes you cookies.
Speaker 1: But hey, kids, you want a little piece of mom jerkey?
Speaker 2: Sure, lovely on that. Any whatever solution works, whatever works,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty I'm pretty sure Sicilians have been around since
Speaker 2: the Jurassic or something, so it's worked from so far.
Speaker 1: They're very old and very it's it's a recipe that's
Speaker 1: been around for many generations.
Speaker 2: Mom Mom's classic homebrew, Mom's classic home homebrewed Deally skin.
Speaker 1: There we go. Yes, we'll take a quick break, and
Speaker 1: when we get back, we're going to talk about one
Speaker 1: of the biggest land Arthur pod. No, the biggest planned
Speaker 1: Arthur prod that we know about. Uh and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: So we will be right back. So I do want
Speaker 1: to talk about arthropleura because I love bugs. It's not
Speaker 1: really a bug. Oh, actually, I don't know. Bug doesn't
Speaker 1: have a very scientific classification, does it.
Speaker 2: I thought there was. I'm sure I heard that there is.
Speaker 2: There is a specific group of insects that are called bugs.
Speaker 2: I can't remember what it is, but in the general pilance, yeah,
Speaker 2: people just use bugs for bugs.
Speaker 1: I feel like like an exoskeleton. For me, a bug
Speaker 1: could also be like a shrimp. That's a bug to me.
Speaker 2: So it's a wet bug.
Speaker 1: It's a wet bug. We're eating wet bugs, folks. So
Speaker 1: plural was a genus of massive arthropods that lived well.
Speaker 1: It was around like three hundred forty something to two
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety million years ago. It was like just
Speaker 1: a few million years shy of coinciding with dinosaurs, you know,
Speaker 1: which is nothing.
Speaker 2: And when we talk we talk about we talk about
Speaker 2: geological time, and we talk about short periods of time
Speaker 2: that could be like ten thousand years, a couple of
Speaker 2: million years. That's nothing.
Speaker 1: It's nothing, nothing, just a little blip. But yeah, unlike
Speaker 1: the other animals I've talked about, this is a terrestrial animal.
Speaker 1: So like we talked about I mean you've talked about
Speaker 1: plane of animals as well that have been terrestrial. But
Speaker 1: like the the other really strange ones like anomalo, cars, hallucigenea, uh,
Speaker 1: the the that big the yeah yeah yeah, the not alloid, Yes,
Speaker 1: those have all been marine mammals or marine mammals. Those
Speaker 1: have all been marine life and they and we we
Speaker 1: have records of them because of this amazing or just
Speaker 1: shale because in for the for the not alloid because
Speaker 1: of its shell. But this is a terrestrial creature and
Speaker 1: it's really interesting because we do have good records well
Speaker 1: maybe not good, but enough record of it. And it
Speaker 1: was a it was incredible looking so like it was
Speaker 1: basically a giant millipede slash centipede. It had many many segments,
Speaker 1: many many legs, unlike its modern relatives, though it grew
Speaker 1: to be over eight feet long, which is around two
Speaker 1: and a half meters, So it's the largest terrestrial arthropod
Speaker 1: that we know of, and it had it's a little
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're thinking of your classic millipede that
Speaker 1: you typically find in a backyard, and say in the
Speaker 1: US or in the UK, it's kind of rounded dome
Speaker 1: like sort of like a little like a little train,
Speaker 1: subway train. But there are plenty of species of millipedes
Speaker 1: and centipedes that actually look more like this arthropleura, which
Speaker 1: is their flatter. They're a little wider, and they have
Speaker 1: this like pretty serious armor. So they left behind a
Speaker 1: good number of fossils. But in addition to fossils of
Speaker 1: the animal itself, they also left behind tracks because they
Speaker 1: were so big, they were able to form these little
Speaker 1: tracks that were I mean, it's kind of incredible, right
Speaker 1: like you think about, like, oh, a, basically what this
Speaker 1: is a giant miller people leaving behind footsteps that then
Speaker 1: get some you know, you imagine like maybe some landslide
Speaker 1: happens and then it preserves these these footsteps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's walking through wet mud in the swamp
Speaker 2: somewhere and that's then dried up and been and covered up.
Speaker 2: And yeah, some of these so they have them in
Speaker 2: in Scotland actually, yes, and yeah they find these trackways
Speaker 2: of like you know, these two symmetrical rows of the
Speaker 2: little dots in the ground and they're half a meter wide.
Speaker 2: You know, you can quite easily stand in the middle
Speaker 2: of it. They also they very recently, actually a fully
Speaker 2: preserved head of one of these has announced not long ago,
Speaker 2: with like mandibles and feelers. So there's there's gonna be
Speaker 2: there's gonna be some work done on that to figure
Speaker 2: out like feeding mechanics and things like that. I think
Speaker 2: most people are pretty on board that it was probably
Speaker 2: a herbivore because this was this would have been living
Speaker 2: in the what we call the coal swamps, which is
Speaker 2: it's a big part of actually the fossil history of
Speaker 2: where I live. So I live in stoke On Tract,
Speaker 2: which a little town in the rough north of England,
Speaker 2: and the coal mines and the coal measures you know,
Speaker 2: were a big part of industrial revolution and industry in
Speaker 2: that whole time of the year. So my museum is
Speaker 2: mostly full of fossils that have come from that period
Speaker 2: in time, so it's a lot of fish and a
Speaker 2: lot of plant fossils occasionally get these big arthropods. They
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been forests made of trees as we can eventually,
Speaker 2: because vascular plants weren't quite they weren't quite dominant in
Speaker 2: the way. So it would have been like giant horsetails
Speaker 2: and liver warts and club mosses and things like that.
Speaker 2: So these other plants that these days are generally confined
Speaker 2: to the understory would have been making up the trees
Speaker 2: at the time, and then of course that goes on
Speaker 2: to make the coal that we mind. But yeah, arthropleura
Speaker 2: would have been easily one of the biggest animals on
Speaker 2: the land around at the time. It would have been
Speaker 2: living alongside there's other giant invertebrates around at the time.
Speaker 2: There's dragon flies that are half a meter across in wingspan.
Speaker 2: There's giant scorpions and spiders and things like that.
Speaker 1: It's a there's enough, there's enough ambient oxygen to be
Speaker 1: able to diffuse through those spiracles.
Speaker 2: It's a it's partially that and that's one of those
Speaker 2: things that kind of gets misrepresented a lot a lot
Speaker 2: of people. The idea.
Speaker 1: It's not like the only reason that.
Speaker 2: They were able to Yeah, it's not the only isdea
Speaker 2: and people often apply it to other animals as well.
Speaker 2: People think that more oxygen makes bigger reptiles and bigger mammals.
Speaker 2: It doesn't doesn't work that way mainly.
Speaker 1: But the lack of birds was a big one.
Speaker 2: Lack of birds probab definitely helps. Yeah, but another big
Speaker 2: part is the opportunity. As far as we can tell,
Speaker 2: arthropods and specifically something like a millipede might have been
Speaker 2: the first animals on land. So there's another fossil from
Speaker 2: Scotland actually older than Arthroplura, called Numadesmus, which is another
Speaker 2: set of footprints. It's another set of tiny fossil footprints
Speaker 2: that dates back to about four hundred million years ago
Speaker 2: something like that, which is one of the oldest pieces
Speaker 2: of evidence of any organism coming onto the land. And
Speaker 2: when you know, so we would have been earthly sort
Speaker 2: of grab some millipede looking type creatures coming onto the
Speaker 2: land and there's no competition, there's nothing competing with them
Speaker 2: for space or food resources. So just they've got the
Speaker 2: whole planets of themselves basically to expand and grow and
Speaker 2: diversify until the arising of the tetrapods that fall invertebrates
Speaker 2: as they start coming out of the water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's it is interesting because if you
Speaker 1: think about it right like this, they think that this
Speaker 1: was not particularly a vision based sensory creature, right like,
Speaker 1: it either had very simple eyes or did not have
Speaker 1: very well functioning eyes, so that it would have probably
Speaker 1: struggled to compete with a tetrapod that was able to
Speaker 1: move around from more nimbly and perhaps have a better
Speaker 1: visual grasp of being able to like say, get to
Speaker 1: something faster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there weren't There weren't very many big land
Speaker 2: based predators at the time, so the more predatory invertebrates
Speaker 2: at the times, so things like scorpions and spiders, I
Speaker 2: think their their body plan kind of limits how big
Speaker 2: they can get on land and like how lethal they
Speaker 2: can be. I think the largest of the land scorpions
Speaker 2: pushed nearly a met along, so not unsubstantial, but it
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been a threat to something as big as arthurplura,
Speaker 2: and having this big, tough exo skeleton would have been
Speaker 2: a big, a big help as well. But yeah, you
Speaker 2: start to get the early tuchpods coming on land, and yeah,
Speaker 2: they're more agile. They've they've got limbs, they've got eyes,
Speaker 2: they've got everything they need to to flick flip this
Speaker 2: thing over and get to the belly if they want
Speaker 2: to just.
Speaker 1: Have like a buffet. If you imagine like a like
Speaker 1: a group of sort of like tetrapods that look like
Speaker 1: a bunch of little weird mongooses just flip this guy
Speaker 1: over and then having a having a last supper like
Speaker 1: meal at the long this oh yeah book.
Speaker 2: We booked a table for booked a table for twenty
Speaker 2: four but we're all going to sit on one side.
Speaker 1: I mean, it does it kind of reminds me of that,
Speaker 1: like because we do have like you mentioned, you know,
Speaker 1: it's scorpions. You know, we have a lot of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, not too not too different in terms of
Speaker 1: the body pillion compared to really touch pods things like mongooses, And.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's sort of it. Yeah, that's that's quite
Speaker 2: a su comparison. Actually, I never not thought of that
Speaker 2: poor like like mongooses and mustelides and things like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's yeah, sort of long body, short legs kind of. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're not far off. It's a very it's a good
Speaker 2: sort of generalist body plan when you know you want
Speaker 2: to move in around on land. Yeah, basically everything. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you if you're not going for any kind of
Speaker 2: big specialty.
Speaker 1: There's eventually, I think, give it a few hundred million
Speaker 1: years and we're all either going to be noodles or crabs,
Speaker 1: and that's it.
Speaker 2: Everything is of everything is evolving back into a.
Speaker 1: Crab and too crab or noodle and then we'll duke
Speaker 1: it out see which one which body plan works the best. Uh,
Speaker 1: but I mean this it is go ahead, sorry, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it is really interesting. So this this uh with the
Speaker 1: Arthur Pleurro being able to see these footsteps, does the
Speaker 1: footprints that have been fossilized, does give us a little
Speaker 1: bit of insight into its behavior because these tracks were found.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a little bit of a it's a
Speaker 1: little bit of a puzzle, right because these tracks were
Speaker 1: found like near bodies of water. Now, part of that is,
Speaker 1: like you said, because that is a premium place for
Speaker 1: these tracks to be fossilized. So it's not a very
Speaker 1: good statistical indicator where they spent most of their time,
Speaker 1: because we're gonna have this false like bias towards finding
Speaker 1: fossils near the water. So maybe it was just a
Speaker 1: few of them who are just like, oh, that's an
Speaker 1: interesting area. It happened to walk there, and we get
Speaker 1: those footprints and that's what's preserved. Whereas maybe they spent
Speaker 1: most of their times, like on in whatded areas away
Speaker 1: from water. We don't know, but we do know they
Speaker 1: did at least go in those places at least once
Speaker 1: or twice.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When interpreting behavior for fossil animals, this happens all
Speaker 2: the time. You people will over interpret or misinterpret or
Speaker 2: things like yeah you get you know, well you get like,
Speaker 2: you know, a bone bed of dinosaurs, for example, you
Speaker 2: find a whole bunch of them buried together, and people go,
Speaker 2: they were social, they were living in herds. No, this
Speaker 2: all this tells you is that they died together. It
Speaker 2: doesn't tell you what they were doing for the rest
Speaker 2: of their lives. It could have been a flash flood,
Speaker 2: it could have been a disease or Somethingeah.
Speaker 1: They all fill in the same hole. We don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Well, there are examples of that. There's
Speaker 2: like like sinkholes and things you know, like that have
Speaker 2: been that have been full of the bones of animals
Speaker 2: that have fallen and you could easy, oh these animals
Speaker 2: like living in caves. No, no, this is just where
Speaker 2: they died. And yeah, like you and like trace fossils
Speaker 2: as well, you know, so things like footprints and copper lights.
Speaker 2: You know, people will sometimes you overinterpret it as one
Speaker 2: particular behavior. You know, You've always got to keep in
Speaker 2: mind that a fossil or a trace fossil or whatever
Speaker 2: it is you're looking at just represents one animal at
Speaker 2: one particular point in its life. It doesn't represent the
Speaker 2: complexities of its behavior and its biology. You've got to
Speaker 2: be really careful about interpreting these sorts of things.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's I think that's what I like about
Speaker 1: Like when you look at like modern animal behavior and
Speaker 1: then you try to think about what humans say, you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand years from now, or maybe aliens would
Speaker 1: might how they might misinterpret something. So like that, what
Speaker 1: we're talking about reminds me of hermit crab death cyclones
Speaker 1: where they they get stuck. So like we leave out
Speaker 1: glass or plastic bottles on the beach. Hermit crabs will
Speaker 1: investigate the aperture because they are drawn to apertures because
Speaker 1: I mean, they're always sort of looking out for interesting
Speaker 1: little nooks and crannies to get into but also potentially home.
Speaker 1: So they look at this aperture and then they kind
Speaker 1: of fall into the neck of the bottle. And a
Speaker 1: lot of these bottles are designed such that the hermit
Speaker 1: crab can get in, but they can't get out because
Speaker 1: they don't have the friction right that, like, they have
Speaker 1: the traction of the sand as they're going in, but
Speaker 1: once they've slipped in, they no longer have traction, so
Speaker 1: they're stuck and then they die. And hermit crabs have
Speaker 1: this behavior that when they smell a dead hermit crab,
Speaker 1: it gives off this a there's this decomposition odor that
Speaker 1: attracts other hermit crabs because free home so forree real
Speaker 1: estate folks. And so then they are drawn to this
Speaker 1: this bottle and they're like.
Speaker 2: Hey, you you just end up with.
Speaker 1: At you get a jug of dead hermit crabs, And
Speaker 1: what a weird thing. Like if you're an archaeologist hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years from now and you look at this thing.
Speaker 1: You might think, like, well, people liked to gather hermit
Speaker 1: crabs and jugs and keep them in there for some
Speaker 1: reason or or this like hermit crabs liked to use
Speaker 1: these jugs as like a din and this is like
Speaker 1: a family of hermit crabs. Everything absolutely wrong, But like
Speaker 1: you can think about all the ways we could come
Speaker 1: up with some theory about this, all the ways in
Speaker 1: which it's wrong. I do. I like, I love these
Speaker 1: sort of illustrations where I forgot the artist's name, but
Speaker 1: it's those I think the same artist that was like
Speaker 1: behind like all Yesterday's or all tomorrow's. Oh yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 2: I've met him. I've met him Google Dixon, Sorry.
Speaker 1: Dixon, Okay, yes, And and sort of the the take,
Speaker 1: you know, taking a the skeleton of a swan and
Speaker 1: then trying to reimagine as someone might try to reconstruct
Speaker 1: it as this terrifying creature that uses its side like
Speaker 1: like armbones to stab prey and get fish.
Speaker 2: And it's yeah, when you when you find things that
Speaker 2: have no modern equivalence is when you really start to struggle,
Speaker 2: like interpreting the behavior or the biology of it, like.
Speaker 1: The Tolly monster, which you know, but yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a really I think that's what's something that is so
Speaker 1: interesting to me about palaeontology is that you do you
Speaker 1: have such limited data and so it is the that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you can't come to interesting conclusions or come
Speaker 1: to correct conclusions, but it requires so much thoughtfulness because
Speaker 1: you know, it is like what we were saying with like, say,
Speaker 1: you don't take into account that you're finding this fossil
Speaker 1: because this is the most this is the only place
Speaker 1: that a fossil could have formed, and it doesn't actually
Speaker 1: tell you much about the animal animal's behavior and how
Speaker 1: you cope with those problems and then yet continue on
Speaker 1: to figure out, you know, what might actually be a
Speaker 1: better theory. And it's just so interesting to me. So
Speaker 1: bad news everyone, My guests did get hit by an
Speaker 1: asteroid and now has to spend a few million years
Speaker 1: re evolving. Now he's fine, just his internet cut out.
Speaker 1: So what a wonderful guest he was, wasn't he? So again,
Speaker 1: his name is Dane pat You can find him on
Speaker 1: a Blue Sky so and he is also a museum educator,
Speaker 1: a science communicator. Very cool. I was so lucky to
Speaker 1: have him on the show today. Before we go, I
Speaker 1: do got to play a little game called guests Who's
Speaker 1: squawkn the Mystery animal sound game. Every week I play
Speaker 1: a mystery animal sound and you, the listener, try to
Speaker 1: guess who is making that sound. So here is last
Speaker 1: week's mystery animal sound. The hint was this, who's a
Speaker 1: stripey baby? All right? So congratulations to Emily M Joyp
Speaker 1: and Jares for guessing correctly that this is a baby zebra. Specifically,
Speaker 1: this is a baby planes zebra. So the brain the
Speaker 1: brain call of a zebra. These are meant to help
Speaker 1: orient the herd in one direction. It might also be
Speaker 1: useful for disorienting and confusing predators because you have this
Speaker 1: cacophony of this sound. Very distracting. Calls can also be
Speaker 1: used to communicate socially. Something cute about planes zebras is
Speaker 1: that herds will collectively protect folds by forming a ring
Speaker 1: around them defensive things. So where all the youngest the
Speaker 1: babies are protected from creditors. All right, So onto this
Speaker 1: week's mystery animal sound. It is inspired by young listener Eleanor.
Speaker 1: And here is the hint. If you wanted it, you
Speaker 1: should have put a ring on it, all right. So
Speaker 1: if you think you know who is making that sound.
Speaker 1: You can write to me at Creature Feature Pod at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. You can also write to me your questions,
Speaker 1: interesting articles you've read, questions about your pets, just pictures
Speaker 1: of your pets. I always love those, so yeah. That's
Speaker 1: Creature featurepot at gmail dot com. Thank you guys so
Speaker 1: much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you
Speaker 1: leave a rating and or review, it really does help me.
Speaker 1: I read all the reviews and all the ratings are
Speaker 1: incredibly helpful to keeping keeping them metrics up for that algorithm.
Speaker 1: Because robots rule the world. Bet boop. Thanks to the
Speaker 1: Space Cossics for their super awesome song excel Alumina. Creature
Speaker 1: Feature creat Your Features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or he guess what. Some of you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows not your mother, and I can't
Speaker 1: tell you what to do, but I will tell you this.
Speaker 1: If you find a Tully monster under your bed, don't panic.
Speaker 1: Call your local paleontologists. They'll be very interested to meet him.
Speaker 1: See you next Wednesday