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Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host

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Speaker 1: of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,

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Speaker 1: and today on the show, they're not dinosaurs, mon they're

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Speaker 1: really Oh my god, what's that thing? That's right, folks,

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Speaker 1: we are talking about pre dinosaur animals who are really cool,

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Speaker 1: really wild, really really hard for paleontologists to put together

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Speaker 1: the sordid history of pre dinosaur animals. We should have

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Speaker 1: had a movie about these guys, take it over a

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Speaker 1: park and making people question, you know, whether or not

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Speaker 1: science has gone too far. So joining me today is paleontologists,

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Speaker 1: science communicator, museum educator, and perhaps most importantly of all,

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Speaker 1: a metal guitarist, Dane.

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Speaker 2: Pa It Welcome, Hey, thanks for having me.

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Speaker 1: I'm so excited. So I am not really an expert

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Speaker 1: in these sorts of animals, the pre dinosaur guys. In fact,

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Speaker 1: dinosaurs I'm not even that well versed in because I

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Speaker 1: have most of what I know are animals that are

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Speaker 1: still alive, given that it's the easiest to observe their behavior.

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Speaker 1: But I think what is so fascinating to me about

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Speaker 1: paleontology is the lack of direct observation that you can

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Speaker 1: do and how you guys are kind of like almost

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Speaker 1: like forensic detectives piecing together these animals.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, So there's various different branches of how we

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Speaker 2: can do this. We can kind of pass together the

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Speaker 2: sort of most likely conclusions about Yeah, if you want

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Speaker 2: to all about animal behavior specifically, we can use comparative anatomy.

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Speaker 2: So you have this phenomenon evolution, you may not out

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Speaker 2: of a convergent evolution where different organisms will evolve similar

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Speaker 2: features to solve similar problems in their environments. So you

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Speaker 2: can look at the fossil record and you say, this

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Speaker 2: animal has this particular shaped arm bone that means it

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Speaker 2: was probably digging, or it has this feature in the

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Speaker 2: spine which means it ran a media, so we can

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Speaker 2: piece together. But yeah, it is very much like detective

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Speaker 2: work taking these very sparse pieces of evidence, and the

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Speaker 2: fossil record is notoriously sparse. I think there's sort of

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Speaker 2: a ballpark estimation that only one in a million animals

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Speaker 2: that has ever existed actually becomes a fossil. All the

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Speaker 2: rest just die and rot away or are eaten, or

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Speaker 2: are just completely lost to the winds of time.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because fossilization. I mean, there's a few ways in

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Speaker 1: which something becomes a fossil, but it is certainly not

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Speaker 1: a common thing to happen to an animal's carcass. It's

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Speaker 1: not as if you have just every dinosaur who has

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Speaker 1: dyed is perfectly encased in stone. The conditions, yeah, the

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Speaker 1: conditions in which fossil actually form is quite rare. And

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Speaker 1: it's even more rare for a fossil, like a complete

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Speaker 1: fossil to form where you get the entire animal perfectly

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Speaker 1: represented in one piece.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's the classic. It's the classic. One is

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Speaker 2: the opening the early scene in the original Jurassic Park

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Speaker 2: where they're in the desert and they brush the sand

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Speaker 2: away and there is a complete dinosaur skeleton perfectly formed,

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Speaker 2: with every bone exactly where it is. That almost never happens.

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Speaker 2: Most fossil animals are known from a handful of bits

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Speaker 2: of frag like maybe not even complete bones. Teeth are

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Speaker 2: very very common because a lot of ret load. Before

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Speaker 2: we want to talk reptiles in particular, a lot of

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Speaker 2: reptiles shed and regrow their teeth, so teeth are quite common. Sharks.

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Speaker 2: Sharks teeth are very common. Shells if you're looking in

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Speaker 2: marine and aquatic environments. Are aquatic water based environments are

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Speaker 2: generally speaking more productive for fossils because you have movements

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Speaker 2: of the sediments, which is more likely to bury things.

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Speaker 2: So a lot of the most productive sites for fossils

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Speaker 2: in the world tend to be lakes and lagoons and

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Speaker 2: slow flowing rivers where things can be easily buried not

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Speaker 2: necessarily destroyed by strong currents or floods and things like that.

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Speaker 1: There's that beautiful Burgess Shale which was discovered in the

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Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds that had just an incredible wealth of

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Speaker 1: fossils from this period of time where you had this

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Speaker 1: almost doctor Seussian diversity of animals that seemed like some

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Speaker 1: kind of awful fever dream, which oh yeah, yeah, which

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Speaker 1: is it is. It's so interesting too because it was

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Speaker 1: discovered so early, well relatively early. The trials and airs

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Speaker 1: of trying to put together these fossils that were so

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Speaker 1: strange looking.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. So the Burger Shale, it's what we called a lagostatn,

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Speaker 2: which is a German word and it's basically it's a

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Speaker 2: it's the sort of blanket term for sites of exceptional

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Speaker 2: preservation and the Burgess Shale seems to have been a

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Speaker 2: very deep water environment and possibly an oxic. So there

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Speaker 2: had been quite low oxygen in that environment, which means

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Speaker 2: not a lot of fuel for like bacteria and things

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Speaker 2: to break down the carcasses when they sink to the

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Speaker 2: sea floor. And yeah, you've got creatures, which yeah, they

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Speaker 2: are so because so the Burger Show represents a period

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Speaker 2: of time called the Cambrian which is around two hundred

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Speaker 2: and forty odd million years ago, and it's very you know,

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Speaker 2: it's very famous phenomena called the Cambrian Explosion, wherein there'd

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Speaker 2: been microorganisms and algae and things around for several or

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Speaker 2: several tens and hundreds of millions of years beforehand, but

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Speaker 2: at this particular point, it was sort of the stars aligned,

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Speaker 2: sort of the temperature was just right, the atmospheric conditions

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Speaker 2: were just right. Everything just kind of landed just right,

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Speaker 2: and there's this huge explosion in diversity of comp multicellular life.

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Speaker 2: And you have early representatives of early ancestors of arthropods, sponges, worms,

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Speaker 2: sort of very very early. You know, you can kind

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Speaker 2: of sort of squint and see the resemblance to modern animals.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what's so interesting to me is when I

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Speaker 1: see kind of these these animals from the more wormy ones,

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Speaker 1: like the soft bodied ones, which I mean, it's incredible

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Speaker 1: that we have fossils of these soft bodied animals, because

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Speaker 1: we generally think of fossils as like hey, bones or shells,

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Speaker 1: something hard, because those are more likely to be able

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Speaker 1: to be preserved. But yeah, these soft bodied, like worm

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Speaker 1: like animals that don't have many I think analogs in

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Speaker 1: modern times, but you can you can kind of find like, actually,

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Speaker 1: you know, we'll talk about one in a little bit

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Speaker 1: that is very interesting, one of my favorite ones. But

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Speaker 1: first let's talk about the Anomalocras, which I think is

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Speaker 1: sort of one of the most famous examples of this

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Speaker 1: this period. The name being Latin Greco for abnormal shrimp,

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Speaker 1: which is very funny to me.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, very very abnormal shrimp. Anomala carus is sort of

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Speaker 2: it's famous for being kind of characterized as one of

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Speaker 2: the first eight lot, one of the first large apex predators.

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Speaker 2: It was so as far as we said, it was

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Speaker 2: a free swimming animal, which is quite a big innovation.

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Speaker 2: There were you know, a lot of the critters that

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Speaker 2: were around at the time were sort of sediment based

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Speaker 2: either fixed to the sea floor or burrowing or crawling

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Speaker 2: around the sea floor. But anomal Carus was free swimming,

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Speaker 2: had these sort of mobile tendrils on its face for

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Speaker 2: gathering at prey, and we think it was probably most

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Speaker 2: likely eating sort of the small Yeah, the small, soft

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Speaker 2: body crystal floor trilobites would have been very abundant food source.

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Speaker 2: So these are the famous sort of sort of woodlousey,

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Speaker 2: beatlely looking critters.

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Speaker 1: That likes or isopods of today.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much. So. Unfortunately they went extinct at

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Speaker 2: the end of the Permian period, which is the end

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Speaker 2: of this sort of we say pre dinosaur is this

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Speaker 2: larger period of time called the Paleozoic, So this is

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Speaker 2: the sort of first of three major eons or chapters

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Speaker 2: if you like, in the history of life on Earth.

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Speaker 2: Paleozoic is from the Cambrian explosion five hundred and forty

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Speaker 2: million years ago up to two hundred and fifty million

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Speaker 2: years ago, which ends with the Permian extinction event, which

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Speaker 2: took out huge, huge numbers of these amazing animals, some

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Speaker 2: of which had made it all the way from the

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Speaker 2: Cambrian explosion, like the trilobites.

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Speaker 1: And what was the precipitating event do we think for

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Speaker 1: that mouse extinction was a change in the climate.

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Speaker 2: So well, ultimately, all mass extinction events are some form

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Speaker 2: of climate change. It just depends on what the triggering

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Speaker 2: event is and what we believe this one is. Was

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Speaker 2: a massive spike in volcanic activity at this site in Siberia.

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Speaker 2: So we're talking in an area hundreds of you know,

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Speaker 2: tens of possibly tens of thousands of square kilometers of

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Speaker 2: land in Russia basically fractured into a constantly erupting supervolcano,

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Speaker 2: and I'm talking on the scale of thousands and thousands

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Speaker 2: of years. And over the course of that time, it

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Speaker 2: released you know, trillions of tons of toxic fumes and

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Speaker 2: greenhouse gases. It caused a runaway greenhouse effect. It acidified

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Speaker 2: the oceans huge amounts of acid rain. As sea temperatures rise,

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Speaker 2: water is less able to hold gas at high temperatures,

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Speaker 2: so A that means less oxygen for the life living

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Speaker 2: in the ocean, and b it means less CO two

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Speaker 2: is being absorbed into the ocean, which causes even more heating.

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Speaker 2: Some estimates put it as high as eighty percent of

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Speaker 2: all life on Earth was wiped out at the end

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Speaker 2: of this extinction event.

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Speaker 1: That's incredible. I mean, maybe this is the optimist in me,

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Speaker 1: but I feel like it's so really impressive that we

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Speaker 1: bounced back from that. You know, it's it's kind of

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Speaker 1: amazing that you can have such a mass extinction. Obviously

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Speaker 1: very bad for the current trialbides just trying to live

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Speaker 1: their lives, but still the life somehow, you know, was

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Speaker 1: able to recover from that.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, among the survivors were well, obviously everything that's

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Speaker 2: alive today is descended from that, you know, relatively small

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Speaker 2: handful of life that made it through this extinction event,

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Speaker 2: but it caused this huge kind of restructuring of the

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Speaker 2: food chain. So there's this really interesting event sort of

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Speaker 2: immediately following this extinction. We're still pre dinosaur. By the way,

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Speaker 2: the dinosaurs don't really the dinosaurs don't really come into

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Speaker 2: their own until the sort of middle to late Triassic period,

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Speaker 2: which is sort of two hundred and twenty two hundred

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Speaker 2: and thirty million years, So there's a good thirty million

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Speaker 2: year block between that extinction and the dinosaurs really starting

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Speaker 2: to come into their own, and there's this phenomenon known

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Speaker 2: as the Mesozoic marine revolution, which is really interesting kind

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Speaker 2: of upheaval in the oceans. So one major part of

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Speaker 2: it is the diversification of secondarily aquatic tetrapods. So there's

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Speaker 2: a few technical terms here. I want to make sure

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Speaker 2: the audience are fully on board here. So secondarily aquatic

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Speaker 2: is basically any animal that has evolved from a land

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Speaker 2: based ancestor and has gone back into the water.

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Speaker 1: So we've got whales. Whales would count as the right.

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Speaker 2: Whales absolutely, yet sea turtles, crocodiles, sea lions, penguins, anything

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Speaker 2: that has come from a land based ancestor into the ocean.

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Speaker 2: During the Paleozoic before the Permian extinction event, they didn't

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Speaker 2: really there weren't really any of them because throughout that

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Speaker 2: time the large ocean niches, the sort of big spaces

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Speaker 2: in the ecosystem were dominated by fish and arthropods, So

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Speaker 2: the big predators in the ocean were giant fish and

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Speaker 2: giants arthropods, So there were things like Dunkleostius is probably

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Speaker 2: the most famous one, which is this it's part of

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Speaker 2: a group of fish that doesn't exist anymore, called placoderms,

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Speaker 2: and rather than having teeth, they just have extended bones

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Speaker 2: of the skull that would sheer against each other like

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Speaker 2: scissor blades. That is, there's been some recent studies on

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Speaker 2: dontriosis as to exactly how big it was. It was

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Speaker 2: believed to be like a sort of school bus sized monster.

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Speaker 2: That's been scaled down with it recently we think sort of.

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Speaker 1: Doesn't it where we like it was the size of

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Speaker 1: the Empire state building. Maybe actually just the size of

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Speaker 1: a Volkswagen.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, there's quite a bit of that. There's also the

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Speaker 2: sea scorpions, which were another casualty of the Permian extinction events.

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Speaker 2: Not technically scorpions, they are arthropods, so they are.

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Speaker 1: They look like a flat scorpion, kind of like if

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Speaker 1: you took rolling pin and just sort of like rolled

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Speaker 1: out a scorpion.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much.

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Speaker 1: So.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, they've got this great, big, grasping pincers. They've got

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Speaker 2: this big, long, flat tail which some of the smaller

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Speaker 2: ones may have swamed, but some of the big ones

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Speaker 2: probably stuck to the seabed. Some of the really big

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Speaker 2: ones were nightmarish, like the biggest arthropods of all time. Yes,

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Speaker 2: two meters long, possibly two and a half. For some

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Speaker 2: of the really big ones. So these are the things

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Speaker 2: that are occupying the big the big ocean niches at

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Speaker 2: the time. And then the Permian extinction happens and it

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Speaker 2: kind of opens up the food chain somewhe It opens

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Speaker 2: up the ecosystem, and you have this big adaptive radiation

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Speaker 2: where this happens a lot after extinction events. When you

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Speaker 2: have when you've got the slate white clean, that leaves

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Speaker 2: a lot of space for innovation and sort of evolutionary experimentation.

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Speaker 2: So you start to get reptiles moving into the ocean.

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Speaker 2: You get early sort of crocodile and turtle relatives. You

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Speaker 2: have lots of very strange things that don't really exist anymore,

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Speaker 2: like the placar donts. Placoderms is the armored fish, and

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Speaker 2: then you have placardonts, which are these weird swimming reptiles

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Speaker 2: that are not turtles, but they have very wide, flat

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Speaker 2: bodies and armor across them. They sort of look like

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Speaker 2: fake turtles. They're very strange armadillo things, yeah, very odd looking,

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Speaker 2: but some of them have some of them are derived ones.

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Speaker 2: They've got these forward facing teeth at the front of

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Speaker 2: the jaw, and then they have these very flat plate

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Speaker 2: like teeth at the back of the jaw and the

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Speaker 2: roof of the mouth, and that's interpreted as being adaptations

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Speaker 2: for prising apart and crushing shellfish. And that's the other

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Speaker 2: big part of the mesozoat marine revolution is that it

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Speaker 2: forced this big change in ocean invertebrates through the evolution

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Speaker 2: of new creatures that can crack open and ingest shells

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Speaker 2: and exoskeletons. Because you know, if you're like a limpet

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Speaker 2: or a barnacle or something attached to a rock or

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Speaker 2: attached to the sea floor, and there's nothing that can

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Speaker 2: break you, basically fine, But if something pulls you off

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Speaker 2: the rock and you can't reattach yourself or swim away

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Speaker 2: or crawl into a hole and hide, you're basically doomed.

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Speaker 2: So sessile animals, so things that attached to the sea

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Speaker 2: floor and basically stay there the rest of their lives

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Speaker 2: started to decline and animal and these sort of shellfish

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Speaker 2: and invertebrates had to find all sorts of new ways

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Speaker 2: to adapt. So creatures that lived on the surface declined,

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Speaker 2: creatures that lived in burrows diversified. There was a lot

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Speaker 2: more burrowing animals after this. A really good example is crinoids,

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Speaker 2: which again making sure your audience caught up. Crynoids is

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Speaker 2: really really weird creatures that evolved early on in the Paleozoic,

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Speaker 2: not quite Cambrian. They have I think it's penta radial symmetry,

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Speaker 2: So humans are bilaterally symmetrical. We've got a left side

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Speaker 2: and the right side. Chronoids have five way symmetry. You

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Speaker 2: can look you look down on them from the top,

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Speaker 2: you can split them five ways as they've got the

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Speaker 2: mouse in the middle.

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Speaker 1: So like starf like kind of erms like starfish, and.

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Speaker 2: There are yeah, there they are a kindoderms. Yeah, they're

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Speaker 2: related to starfish and sea urchins. So they've got a

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Speaker 2: mouth in the middle, and then they have all these

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Speaker 2: big branching feathery arms that come outs and their suspension feeders.

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Speaker 2: They gather organic material, they put their arms out, they

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Speaker 2: collect food from the water, and then they draw their

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Speaker 2: arms into the mouth in the middle. And there's two

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Speaker 2: major varieties of them. There's the standard ones just as

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Speaker 2: I've described, which can use their arms to swim around

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Speaker 2: and crawl around on the sea floor, and we call

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Speaker 2: them feather stars. And then there's the stalked variety, which

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Speaker 2: have a great, big, long stalk that trails from underneath

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Speaker 2: the body and attaches them to the seafloor. And they

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Speaker 2: kind of makes them look like a flower, and we

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Speaker 2: call them sea lilies, and they are all still around today.

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Speaker 2: They've made it through all the extinctions, all the way

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Speaker 2: into the present day. During the Massasoka marine Revolution, you

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Speaker 2: have this explosion of creatures that can break through exoskeletons.

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Speaker 2: The sea lilies, the ones fixed to the seafloor start

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Speaker 2: to abandon the shallow water and move into the deeper ocean.

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Speaker 2: So most of the sea lily species that we have

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Speaker 2: today live in deep offshore waters, whereas the feather stars

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Speaker 2: that can move around and swim and escape, they live

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Speaker 2: on the reefs and coastal environments. So it is this

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Speaker 2: complete restructuring of how in entire food chains and ecosystems

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Speaker 2: work over this extinction boundary.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a mass when you have like a

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Speaker 1: massive shock like that, you have for the remaining species

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Speaker 1: that are now adapting to say the you know, the

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Speaker 1: arms race that's happening as new species start to take

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Speaker 1: over in the niches that have been abandoned by the

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Speaker 1: species that have gone extinct. Everything is impacted right in

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Speaker 1: a way that like they all have to readapt It

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Speaker 1: kind of reminds me of one of the animals I

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Speaker 1: was thinking of talking about today was Endocera's gigantium, which

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Speaker 1: is sort of like that that big unicorn like cephalopod

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Speaker 1: during the I'm gonna say a period as if I

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Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about, even though I don't, the

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Speaker 1: Ordovician period. So it was this like ancestor of modern

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Speaker 1: day squid octopuses, not alloids, but unlike modern day squids

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Speaker 1: and octopuses, it had this massive shell and unlike the nautilus,

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Speaker 1: which still has that shell, it was this really straight,

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Speaker 1: large conical shell that spanned from over nine up to

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Speaker 1: possibly the larger estimates are eighteen feet, although that's not

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Speaker 1: exactly confirmed, but it could be anywhere from like three

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Speaker 1: to over five meters. And so it's thought it was

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Speaker 1: like this ambush predator, right, because you're so big, you're

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Speaker 1: not going to be very mobile, and you have this

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Speaker 1: giant shell to defend itself. So that once, and similarly

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Speaker 1: to other giant shelled cephalopods, thought that it went extinct

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Speaker 1: because it could not outcompete with this new sort of

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Speaker 1: wave of like the fish and more mobile, more agile,

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Speaker 1: and swifter creatures that were evolving at the time. So

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Speaker 1: it went from because you'd think, like a lot of

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Speaker 1: people will often ask like, well, if you have something

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Speaker 1: that has this amazing defense mechanism, like a giant shell,

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Speaker 1: why would it get rid of it? Right, because like

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Speaker 1: squid octopuses, they're very vulnerable, they're so squishy, But it

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Speaker 1: doesn't matter necessarily if you're perfectly protected, if you're not

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Speaker 1: getting any food, if you're unable to compete with the

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Speaker 1: faster predators and the faster prey.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the the evolution of a spine was a big

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Speaker 2: innovation because that that's you know, that provided the sort

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Speaker 2: of propulsion for sort of early predatory fish to see,

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Speaker 2: you know, be a lot faster and a lot more

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Speaker 2: agile and maneuverable in the water. And yeah, so I

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Speaker 2: think things like endoceras and you know, these giant autaloids

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Speaker 2: would have would have had no predators, had had no

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Speaker 2: competition until these larger, you know, the early ancestors of

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Speaker 2: sharks and things like that, some of which would have

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Speaker 2: been capable of cracking through these shells. Yeah, sharks were

341
00:19:58,400 --> 00:20:00,600
Speaker 2: a big innovation at the time they used sort of

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00:20:00,640 --> 00:20:02,719
Speaker 2: started to occupy the ape experiens in each but they

343
00:20:02,720 --> 00:20:04,640
Speaker 2: were kind of overtaken by the blackaderms, the big sort

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Speaker 2: of sheer teeth fish. They were kind of your two

345
00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:10,800
Speaker 2: main sort of apex predator bodies that came in at

346
00:20:10,840 --> 00:20:12,840
Speaker 2: the time, and they were all kinds of bizarre as well.

347
00:20:13,560 --> 00:20:17,040
Speaker 2: You have these really nice out groups, as they're called,

348
00:20:17,080 --> 00:20:19,040
Speaker 2: So you have sort of you have your sort of

349
00:20:19,119 --> 00:20:22,040
Speaker 2: evolutionary group of animals that we consider modern day sharks,

350
00:20:22,359 --> 00:20:23,960
Speaker 2: and then you sort of go back a step on

351
00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:27,080
Speaker 2: the family tree and off on a little weird side branch,

352
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Speaker 2: and you find all these really odd creatures that aren't

353
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Speaker 2: quite entirely sharks that that's sort of the closest thing

354
00:20:33,840 --> 00:20:37,560
Speaker 2: we can relate in to things like one of the

355
00:20:37,560 --> 00:20:42,160
Speaker 2: more famous one is Stepacanthus, which has got these like rays.

356
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Speaker 2: It's rather than like the kind of triangular dorsalt thing.

357
00:20:45,040 --> 00:20:47,680
Speaker 2: It's got this kind of flattened structure on its back

358
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Speaker 2: with all these bristles and spines across it. We think

359
00:20:49,680 --> 00:20:52,720
Speaker 2: it's a sexual display structure of some kind because we

360
00:20:52,760 --> 00:20:56,800
Speaker 2: only find it in the males. There's a ah the

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00:20:56,920 --> 00:20:58,760
Speaker 2: names escaping me now there's all kinds of there's a oh,

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00:20:58,760 --> 00:21:00,040
Speaker 2: helicaprion as a real.

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Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, so yeah, this this whole family group of

364
00:21:05,440 --> 00:21:09,159
Speaker 3: sharks that, instead of having a jawline as conventional sharks do,

365
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Speaker 3: all their teeth run down the middle of the jaw,

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Speaker 3: and there's some that have them like scissor blades, one

367
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Speaker 3: on top of the other.

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Speaker 2: But helica prion has this big spiral of teeth which

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00:21:17,359 --> 00:21:20,000
Speaker 2: we now interpret as being new teeth growing in the

370
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Speaker 2: center and kind of growing outwards towards the outer edge

371
00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:26,119
Speaker 2: of the spiral, and then as they are replaced, they

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00:21:26,200 --> 00:21:29,119
Speaker 2: kind of fall out of the front. It's possible it

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Speaker 2: may have been able to use that to cut through

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00:21:32,040 --> 00:21:35,080
Speaker 2: you know, shells and of things like the squid and

375
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Speaker 2: the autoloids that were hanging around at the time.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it is. It is so weird because with

377
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Speaker 1: a lot of these animals, when I mean, one thing

378
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Speaker 1: is that I think that the reason these shapes look

379
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:50,840
Speaker 1: so bizarre to us is that we are we acclimate

380
00:21:50,880 --> 00:21:55,239
Speaker 1: ourselves to the shapes of say, you know, we look

381
00:21:55,280 --> 00:21:58,359
Speaker 1: at a hammerhead shark, right, and we're we're acclimatized to that.

382
00:21:58,440 --> 00:22:01,320
Speaker 1: So we see that and we understand it. We see

383
00:22:01,320 --> 00:22:04,840
Speaker 1: this this as a normal animal shape more or less,

384
00:22:05,080 --> 00:22:08,320
Speaker 1: but that's really only because we have gotten used to

385
00:22:08,359 --> 00:22:10,679
Speaker 1: it that when like the first people who probably saw

386
00:22:11,040 --> 00:22:13,800
Speaker 1: a hammerhead shark was like, well, this is an incredibly

387
00:22:13,800 --> 00:22:17,199
Speaker 1: weird shape for a shark head. So something like Stethacanthus

388
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Speaker 1: that has this weird anvil on its head, which I'd

389
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Speaker 1: be I'd love to see a hammerhead shark and as

390
00:22:23,400 --> 00:22:25,960
Speaker 1: Deethacanthus get together and see what what what they would

391
00:22:26,040 --> 00:22:30,639
Speaker 1: make us they can build, see what they can craft? Uh,

392
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Speaker 1: But you know, yeah, I mean it's it is interesting

393
00:22:32,800 --> 00:22:35,120
Speaker 1: because they're all especially when we're trying to piece together

394
00:22:35,200 --> 00:22:38,840
Speaker 1: say the purpose like how how say the jaws work

395
00:22:38,840 --> 00:22:41,159
Speaker 1: of this like weird spiraling saw two thing, how they

396
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:44,919
Speaker 1: would actually maneuver that? Or like this death of Canthus,

397
00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:47,640
Speaker 1: what that that protrusion was? And the way we piece

398
00:22:47,680 --> 00:22:49,680
Speaker 1: it together in terms of well, if it was only

399
00:22:49,720 --> 00:22:54,280
Speaker 1: found on males, maybe it would be uh a sexual

400
00:22:54,400 --> 00:22:59,080
Speaker 1: signaling uh device essentially. But it's also kind of odd

401
00:22:59,119 --> 00:23:01,840
Speaker 1: because we even in current animals, right, like if you

402
00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:05,080
Speaker 1: look at the narwal right, they have this it's not

403
00:23:05,200 --> 00:23:08,200
Speaker 1: really it's not really a horn. It's a giant tooth,

404
00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:12,879
Speaker 1: and it's generally found in the males. It's less likely

405
00:23:12,960 --> 00:23:15,199
Speaker 1: to be found in the females, although some females do

406
00:23:15,280 --> 00:23:19,440
Speaker 1: have it, which is again confusing, and it is unclear

407
00:23:19,480 --> 00:23:22,520
Speaker 1: exactly these are animals that are alive today we can

408
00:23:22,720 --> 00:23:26,080
Speaker 1: observe them. Whales are always tricky because they're in the water.

409
00:23:26,760 --> 00:23:29,359
Speaker 1: These ones especially tricky because they're in very cold water

410
00:23:29,800 --> 00:23:33,399
Speaker 1: and we don't generally do well. We struggle even to

411
00:23:33,920 --> 00:23:38,400
Speaker 1: understand what nar wals use their tusks for. And that

412
00:23:38,560 --> 00:23:40,960
Speaker 1: is as we have been aware of nar wals for

413
00:23:41,440 --> 00:23:45,359
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, I mean, you know,

414
00:23:45,480 --> 00:23:50,000
Speaker 1: thousands of years when including local populations, and yet the

415
00:23:51,320 --> 00:23:53,800
Speaker 1: even with understanding that yes, it seems to be a

416
00:23:53,840 --> 00:23:56,720
Speaker 1: sexual difference, but then we find all these strange things

417
00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:00,000
Speaker 1: about it, right like where the narmal tusk is innervation

418
00:24:00,119 --> 00:24:02,640
Speaker 1: that it has all these pores in which a seawater

419
00:24:02,680 --> 00:24:06,280
Speaker 1: can filter through, possibly as a sensory organ but we

420
00:24:06,400 --> 00:24:09,960
Speaker 1: don't know. And so it's just it's when you think

421
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:13,399
Speaker 1: about that puzzle that we have currently with an animal

422
00:24:13,440 --> 00:24:16,920
Speaker 1: we can physically interact with, we can look at its tusk,

423
00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:20,359
Speaker 1: we can get afresh, you know, narwhal tusk and examine it,

424
00:24:21,240 --> 00:24:23,000
Speaker 1: and then we try to do that with something that's

425
00:24:23,040 --> 00:24:26,760
Speaker 1: extinct like stud acanthus. It's like, what this protrusion could

426
00:24:26,840 --> 00:24:32,600
Speaker 1: have possibly been. It could have been a sexual ornament,

427
00:24:32,880 --> 00:24:34,680
Speaker 1: it could have been a sensory organ, it could have

428
00:24:34,720 --> 00:24:38,080
Speaker 1: been both, and you know, just like it's it's so

429
00:24:38,760 --> 00:24:39,880
Speaker 1: it's so tantalizing.

430
00:24:40,800 --> 00:24:43,280
Speaker 2: Oh, like what say, like the comparison i've heard, you know,

431
00:24:43,400 --> 00:24:45,360
Speaker 2: and sort of looking at you know, what we what

432
00:24:45,400 --> 00:24:47,880
Speaker 2: we can pass in the fossil record. The comparison I've

433
00:24:47,880 --> 00:24:50,239
Speaker 2: heard is like human medical research. You know, we've been

434
00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:53,320
Speaker 2: studying the human body in earnest for you know, a

435
00:24:53,359 --> 00:24:55,679
Speaker 2: couple of hundred years now, and there are more people

436
00:24:55,760 --> 00:24:59,720
Speaker 2: working in human medicine than arguably any other field of science.

437
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:02,679
Speaker 2: And we're still learning new things about the human body.

438
00:25:02,960 --> 00:25:05,360
Speaker 2: You know, we're not going to run out of beatings

439
00:25:05,400 --> 00:25:07,480
Speaker 2: to figure out in the fossil record anytime soon.

440
00:25:07,880 --> 00:25:12,919
Speaker 1: Still not exactly sure what that all appendix is doing there. Well,

441
00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:14,520
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break and when we

442
00:25:14,560 --> 00:25:18,520
Speaker 1: get back. That's right, we're talking about more pre dinosaur

443
00:25:19,359 --> 00:25:23,400
Speaker 1: awesome things, including one that does look like a hallucination.

444
00:25:25,080 --> 00:25:28,879
Speaker 1: All right, so we are back. I do want to

445
00:25:28,920 --> 00:25:33,040
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about anomal chorus before we

446
00:25:33,080 --> 00:25:36,520
Speaker 1: move on, because it is I think we had talked

447
00:25:36,560 --> 00:25:40,800
Speaker 1: a bit about its perception of this as this apex predator,

448
00:25:40,840 --> 00:25:43,439
Speaker 1: but the way we've seen it has kind of changed

449
00:25:43,440 --> 00:25:46,720
Speaker 1: a little bit over the years. You know, it was

450
00:25:46,760 --> 00:25:52,840
Speaker 1: originally discovered in the Burgess Shale in the early nineteen hundreds,

451
00:25:52,880 --> 00:25:55,399
Speaker 1: and it took a while to assemble this thing, and

452
00:25:55,480 --> 00:25:58,960
Speaker 1: it kind of was I think the first pieces they

453
00:25:59,000 --> 00:26:02,760
Speaker 1: found were that those front appendages that that looked like

454
00:26:02,840 --> 00:26:05,680
Speaker 1: giant shrimp. And that's kind of where that name came from,

455
00:26:05,720 --> 00:26:10,919
Speaker 1: because it's like straight abnormal shrimp. And I couldn't really

456
00:26:10,960 --> 00:26:14,080
Speaker 1: confirm this, but I think I once read an account

457
00:26:14,119 --> 00:26:17,280
Speaker 1: where they were saying that at one point they thought

458
00:26:17,400 --> 00:26:20,880
Speaker 1: that those front appendages were just whole animals because they

459
00:26:20,880 --> 00:26:23,880
Speaker 1: were they seemed like a complete shrimp.

460
00:26:24,440 --> 00:26:27,359
Speaker 2: Like a big like a big yeah.

461
00:26:27,480 --> 00:26:30,639
Speaker 1: And so what the actual entire animal looks like is

462
00:26:30,920 --> 00:26:34,920
Speaker 1: it It was over a foot long, its front limbs

463
00:26:35,400 --> 00:26:38,320
Speaker 1: looked like it had a pair of giant shramp attached

464
00:26:38,320 --> 00:26:43,119
Speaker 1: to its face. It has these two big compound eyes

465
00:26:43,160 --> 00:26:48,080
Speaker 1: attached to short ice docks, a segmented body with these

466
00:26:48,359 --> 00:26:52,600
Speaker 1: fan blade like appendages on each segment which are thought

467
00:26:52,840 --> 00:26:56,960
Speaker 1: to actually have had gill structures attached to them. Then

468
00:26:57,000 --> 00:26:59,280
Speaker 1: it ended in this sort of like fan like tail.

469
00:26:59,440 --> 00:27:02,960
Speaker 1: So the whole thing kind of looked like a giant

470
00:27:03,119 --> 00:27:06,159
Speaker 1: flattened shrimp, but also it looked like it had two

471
00:27:06,840 --> 00:27:10,080
Speaker 1: other shrimp attached to its face. And it was thought

472
00:27:10,320 --> 00:27:13,680
Speaker 1: to be this example like you had mentioned earlier, because

473
00:27:13,720 --> 00:27:16,320
Speaker 1: it was one of the most even though it doesn't

474
00:27:16,359 --> 00:27:19,240
Speaker 1: seem that huge at only about over a foot long

475
00:27:19,640 --> 00:27:23,199
Speaker 1: compared to the other life at the time, it was

476
00:27:23,440 --> 00:27:28,000
Speaker 1: very large and very mobile, but there was so there's

477
00:27:28,040 --> 00:27:31,240
Speaker 1: this idea of it being this fierce apex predator like

478
00:27:31,359 --> 00:27:35,320
Speaker 1: basically the early example of say like a great white shark.

479
00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:40,239
Speaker 1: But the front appendages were studied a lot, and they

480
00:27:40,280 --> 00:27:45,520
Speaker 1: found that they seemed to not really be meant for

481
00:27:45,840 --> 00:27:51,040
Speaker 1: extreme strength, right like say, wrangling something that's really giving

482
00:27:51,080 --> 00:27:54,760
Speaker 1: it a lot of trouble. So the ideas that maybe

483
00:27:54,800 --> 00:27:58,879
Speaker 1: it was actually going after softer bodied prey, maybe something

484
00:27:58,920 --> 00:28:02,639
Speaker 1: a little easier to grab, like a trial a bite,

485
00:28:02,680 --> 00:28:07,320
Speaker 1: like some kind of soft bodied early these more sessile

486
00:28:07,400 --> 00:28:13,600
Speaker 1: animals that could be grabbed and perhaps even chased and grabbed,

487
00:28:13,640 --> 00:28:16,280
Speaker 1: but something that's not going to give these two front

488
00:28:16,320 --> 00:28:18,000
Speaker 1: appendages too much trouble.

489
00:28:19,600 --> 00:28:21,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sort of you look at the so there's

490
00:28:21,920 --> 00:28:23,760
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of diagrams and sort of close ups

491
00:28:23,760 --> 00:28:27,360
Speaker 2: of the different So these sort of front appendages, they

492
00:28:27,400 --> 00:28:30,960
Speaker 2: have these bristly spines that were along the underside which

493
00:28:30,960 --> 00:28:34,640
Speaker 2: seem they almost they sort of I'm getting fish hook

494
00:28:34,680 --> 00:28:37,480
Speaker 2: from them. So it's it's not necessarily it's not strictly

495
00:28:37,560 --> 00:28:40,160
Speaker 2: very precise. It's more you just kind of snag whatever

496
00:28:40,200 --> 00:28:43,280
Speaker 2: comes onto it. And there's different species, and the different

497
00:28:43,320 --> 00:28:47,640
Speaker 2: species all have slightly different shaped hooks to them, so

498
00:28:47,720 --> 00:28:51,280
Speaker 2: that's suggesting possibly they might be going after slightly different prey.

499
00:28:51,440 --> 00:28:54,240
Speaker 2: Might be a bit of ecological partition going on.

500
00:28:54,720 --> 00:28:58,120
Speaker 1: Funchbeak finchbeak differences where you have different sort of beaks

501
00:28:58,160 --> 00:28:58,520
Speaker 1: that are.

502
00:28:58,480 --> 00:29:02,240
Speaker 2: Exactly yeah, yeah, yeah, Sarwin's finches. Yeah, And then you

503
00:29:02,320 --> 00:29:05,960
Speaker 2: got to think, yeah, like the creatures it's you know, yeah, yeah,

504
00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:07,560
Speaker 2: it is only a full long, and you've got to

505
00:29:07,560 --> 00:29:09,600
Speaker 2: think the creatures that it's going after are probably going

506
00:29:09,680 --> 00:29:13,200
Speaker 2: to be centimeters long if that, And yeah, there's there's

507
00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:17,840
Speaker 2: going to be very rudimentary, very early defenses. You know

508
00:29:17,920 --> 00:29:19,800
Speaker 2: that far back in history. There's going to be stuff

509
00:29:19,800 --> 00:29:21,160
Speaker 2: that burrows, is going to be stuff that has armor,

510
00:29:21,200 --> 00:29:22,360
Speaker 2: But there's going to be a lot of stuff that

511
00:29:22,400 --> 00:29:24,520
Speaker 2: sits on the surface and is going to be largely

512
00:29:24,520 --> 00:29:30,440
Speaker 2: defenseless against a gargantuan creatures entire foot long.

513
00:29:31,840 --> 00:29:35,560
Speaker 1: Like barely register what this thing is before just getting

514
00:29:35,840 --> 00:29:36,520
Speaker 1: slurped up.

515
00:29:37,280 --> 00:29:38,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like a lot of a lot of creatures are

516
00:29:38,760 --> 00:29:40,400
Speaker 2: going to be very slow moving. A lot of things

517
00:29:40,480 --> 00:29:42,560
Speaker 2: aren't going to have any eyes. They're going to have

518
00:29:42,720 --> 00:29:47,480
Speaker 2: very very very basic nervous systems and sensory organs and

519
00:29:47,520 --> 00:29:50,800
Speaker 2: things like that. So, Yeah, although it does have this

520
00:29:50,840 --> 00:29:53,520
Speaker 2: sort of reputation as you know, the earliest apex predator,

521
00:29:53,600 --> 00:29:56,480
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily a very high bar to jump, even

522
00:29:57,200 --> 00:29:59,280
Speaker 2: the kind of standard of the prey that's around at

523
00:29:59,280 --> 00:29:59,600
Speaker 2: the time.

524
00:30:00,840 --> 00:30:04,400
Speaker 1: Well, that is a sick burn for the poor Middle

525
00:30:04,480 --> 00:30:08,640
Speaker 1: Cambrian period soft bodied animals living on the seafloor.

526
00:30:09,320 --> 00:30:10,720
Speaker 2: Wow, look at you.

527
00:30:12,520 --> 00:30:15,840
Speaker 1: Speaking of soft bodies. I don't we have to talk

528
00:30:15,880 --> 00:30:21,080
Speaker 1: about hallucinogenee hallucigenea. Yeah, lucigeneia.

529
00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:24,280
Speaker 2: I generally go with hallucinogenea.

530
00:30:23,840 --> 00:30:25,560
Speaker 1: Hallucigenius us.

531
00:30:26,240 --> 00:30:28,120
Speaker 2: As long as it's spelled right, it doesn't really matter.

532
00:30:28,320 --> 00:30:32,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, Hallucinogenea, I think is I had written out

533
00:30:32,200 --> 00:30:37,560
Speaker 1: a fancy pronunciation guide for myself that I just tripped over. Uh,

534
00:30:38,320 --> 00:30:42,360
Speaker 1: but yeah, hallucigenea, that it was this like genus of

535
00:30:42,640 --> 00:30:49,320
Speaker 1: panarthropod's uh lobopodians Greek term for blunt feet, which is

536
00:30:49,440 --> 00:30:52,720
Speaker 1: kind of cute, I guess. But yeah, these these mostly

537
00:30:52,920 --> 00:30:58,880
Speaker 1: soft bodied marine wormlike animals, and they're I mean, I

538
00:30:58,880 --> 00:31:01,960
Speaker 1: I when you look at them, there's I mean, there's

539
00:31:02,160 --> 00:31:06,520
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different, uh kind of types

540
00:31:06,560 --> 00:31:11,960
Speaker 1: of these local podions and different ones not wucagenea, but

541
00:31:12,320 --> 00:31:15,440
Speaker 1: different types of low podions do look a lot like

542
00:31:15,680 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 1: modern day velvet worms, which are also panarthropods, who have

543
00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:24,680
Speaker 1: these little tiny legs. They have this soft body. They

544
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:27,800
Speaker 1: look so much like maybe a caterpillar, but they are not.

545
00:31:28,640 --> 00:31:31,880
Speaker 1: They're they're not at all related to caterpillars.

546
00:31:31,920 --> 00:31:34,600
Speaker 2: Like bleshy caterpillars, very fleshy.

547
00:31:34,640 --> 00:31:37,920
Speaker 1: There's I love them. I think they're velvet.

548
00:31:37,720 --> 00:31:40,520
Speaker 2: Velvet worms are great. Yeah, they have a strange sort

549
00:31:40,520 --> 00:31:42,920
Speaker 2: of air of cuteness about them. And then they do

550
00:31:42,960 --> 00:31:46,080
Speaker 2: the whole spin. Yeah, glue, they.

551
00:31:46,560 --> 00:31:50,040
Speaker 1: They do squirt a bit of glue. It's the sticky

552
00:31:50,080 --> 00:31:53,280
Speaker 1: substance that they have these two protrusions at the side

553
00:31:53,280 --> 00:31:55,200
Speaker 1: of their head that actually kind of look like these

554
00:31:55,280 --> 00:31:58,520
Speaker 1: cute little eyes, but they're not their eyes. They are

555
00:31:58,840 --> 00:32:02,640
Speaker 1: glands from what which they spew this sticky glue like

556
00:32:02,720 --> 00:32:05,880
Speaker 1: substance at their prey. Because as cute as there, they

557
00:32:05,880 --> 00:32:09,680
Speaker 1: look like little pokemon that would say something like yeah,

558
00:32:10,200 --> 00:32:14,400
Speaker 1: really really adorable, but they are vicious predators and they

559
00:32:14,440 --> 00:32:18,120
Speaker 1: will immobilize their prey with this sticky substance. Uh, and

560
00:32:18,160 --> 00:32:20,720
Speaker 1: then just you know, casually stroll up to them eat

561
00:32:20,720 --> 00:32:24,440
Speaker 1: them at their leisure. It's actually quite horrifying. What they do.

562
00:32:24,560 --> 00:32:28,360
Speaker 1: To their credit is like, you know, this prehistoric, just

563
00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:35,200
Speaker 1: a creature from before we even had insects, and but yeah,

564
00:32:35,480 --> 00:32:38,040
Speaker 1: so so we see this and this is as modern.

565
00:32:38,120 --> 00:32:43,280
Speaker 1: But hallucigenia was even weirder. It was such a strange

566
00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:48,040
Speaker 1: looking thing that we really struggled after discovering it because

567
00:32:48,040 --> 00:32:52,160
Speaker 1: we actually had it's kind of incredible. The fossil records

568
00:32:52,200 --> 00:32:55,880
Speaker 1: of it were quite good, like there are there were

569
00:32:55,920 --> 00:33:00,200
Speaker 1: like these full sort of impressions of this animal. But

570
00:33:00,240 --> 00:33:04,960
Speaker 1: even with that, it really struggled to figure out how

571
00:33:05,000 --> 00:33:08,320
Speaker 1: this thing works. What is its feet, what's its back,

572
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:11,320
Speaker 1: what's its head, and what's its butt? Things that you

573
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:14,840
Speaker 1: would think are basic things you could figure out looking

574
00:33:14,840 --> 00:33:15,360
Speaker 1: at something.

575
00:33:16,160 --> 00:33:18,800
Speaker 2: Its whole body plan is search an anomaly. And yeah,

576
00:33:18,840 --> 00:33:22,000
Speaker 2: like I said, there's, there's, there's, there's. There's been so

577
00:33:22,080 --> 00:33:25,680
Speaker 2: many different interpretations of like trying to trying to figure

578
00:33:25,720 --> 00:33:27,840
Speaker 2: out just which way round this thing goes. People have

579
00:33:27,920 --> 00:33:29,959
Speaker 2: interpreted one end as the head and one end as

580
00:33:30,000 --> 00:33:33,040
Speaker 2: the back, and like this that does it sit this

581
00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:35,840
Speaker 2: way up or this way up? And yeah, things like that,

582
00:33:36,400 --> 00:33:40,240
Speaker 2: and yeah, and and those. It's it's incredible that we

583
00:33:40,280 --> 00:33:42,600
Speaker 2: do have these, like this sort of soft body preservation

584
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:44,680
Speaker 2: of these things. But this is a weird, it's a

585
00:33:44,680 --> 00:33:47,280
Speaker 2: weird sort of paradox with kind of fossil preservation is that,

586
00:33:48,040 --> 00:33:52,440
Speaker 2: you know, soft bodied animals do generally preserve less well

587
00:33:52,520 --> 00:33:55,400
Speaker 2: in the fossil record, but in environments that are just

588
00:33:55,480 --> 00:33:57,680
Speaker 2: right for it, you find loads of them. Yeah, so

589
00:33:58,040 --> 00:34:01,680
Speaker 2: those are really really useful fossil.

590
00:34:01,040 --> 00:34:03,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so. It just we kind of looked out

591
00:34:03,720 --> 00:34:06,920
Speaker 1: at getting these these ones at this you know, I

592
00:34:06,920 --> 00:34:10,640
Speaker 1: believe this was also the Burgess Shale. I think I

593
00:34:10,719 --> 00:34:15,399
Speaker 1: believe so, yes, China as well, Yes there are. In fact,

594
00:34:15,640 --> 00:34:21,160
Speaker 1: there was a research done by Chinese researcher and I

595
00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:24,919
Speaker 1: think I don't know where this other researcher is from

596
00:34:25,280 --> 00:34:31,279
Speaker 1: Lars gram Skolden, who Jiang Wang, who were actually like

597
00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:34,960
Speaker 1: in the nineties, like we're studying some of these fossil records,

598
00:34:35,320 --> 00:34:38,799
Speaker 1: and they there had always been this assumption that there

599
00:34:38,880 --> 00:34:41,239
Speaker 1: was so essentially what this thing looks like is it's

600
00:34:41,280 --> 00:34:44,000
Speaker 1: a tube, as are we all to be.

601
00:34:43,880 --> 00:34:46,200
Speaker 2: Free, which is which is which is how what most

602
00:34:46,239 --> 00:34:47,080
Speaker 2: animals are.

603
00:34:47,800 --> 00:34:52,040
Speaker 1: We're still tubes. We're just tubes with extra widgets. But

604
00:34:52,239 --> 00:34:56,839
Speaker 1: you know, so to tubes. Tubes, Yeah, tubes at all.

605
00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:01,120
Speaker 1: I love that. So we so yeah, so a tube

606
00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:06,880
Speaker 1: and then on it's along its back or possibly it's belly.

607
00:35:07,200 --> 00:35:10,960
Speaker 1: It has these spines, and then along its belly or

608
00:35:11,280 --> 00:35:14,799
Speaker 1: some have thought its back, it has these soft appendages.

609
00:35:14,880 --> 00:35:18,840
Speaker 1: So the first go of it, they thought it had

610
00:35:19,120 --> 00:35:22,040
Speaker 1: that it walked on these spines kind of like stilts.

611
00:35:22,840 --> 00:35:24,640
Speaker 1: And it's only this thing is only like a few

612
00:35:24,760 --> 00:35:29,359
Speaker 1: centimeters big, so it's tiny, tiny, But originally, yeah, it's

613
00:35:29,360 --> 00:35:33,960
Speaker 1: just it kind of walks on these sharp thorn like projections,

614
00:35:33,960 --> 00:35:37,200
Speaker 1: as if there's stilts, and then the these appendages on

615
00:35:37,239 --> 00:35:40,040
Speaker 1: its back were used to gather food and pass it

616
00:35:40,080 --> 00:35:44,960
Speaker 1: along to its mouth. But then researchers took another look

617
00:35:45,120 --> 00:35:48,320
Speaker 1: at that fossil and they used like a dental drill

618
00:35:48,400 --> 00:35:50,719
Speaker 1: to kind of like get a little deeper into it,

619
00:35:50,760 --> 00:35:53,880
Speaker 1: and they actually found another pair of that soft appendage.

620
00:35:53,880 --> 00:35:55,879
Speaker 1: So it's like, now those are beginning to look much

621
00:35:55,920 --> 00:35:59,040
Speaker 1: more like legs, uh, And so they flipped it back

622
00:35:59,080 --> 00:36:01,680
Speaker 1: over and so this might make more sense that it's

623
00:36:01,719 --> 00:36:05,759
Speaker 1: walking on these soft appendages whereas the spikes. Maybe that's

624
00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:10,800
Speaker 1: a defense. But in terms of that, it was assumed

625
00:36:10,800 --> 00:36:13,600
Speaker 1: that there's like always this sort of big balloon like

626
00:36:13,719 --> 00:36:17,040
Speaker 1: blob on one end of it, and people thought, well,

627
00:36:17,040 --> 00:36:19,120
Speaker 1: that's its head. You know. It's kind of a weird

628
00:36:19,160 --> 00:36:21,000
Speaker 1: looking ahead. It's kind of a blobby looking head, but

629
00:36:21,000 --> 00:36:24,160
Speaker 1: it's a head, right, because it's is it is a

630
00:36:24,200 --> 00:36:27,719
Speaker 1: balloon on one end of the animal. But yeah, like

631
00:36:27,760 --> 00:36:32,840
Speaker 1: I said, these researchers around Scholed and Jean one like

632
00:36:33,080 --> 00:36:36,799
Speaker 1: questioned whether that really was the head, and they kind

633
00:36:36,800 --> 00:36:40,719
Speaker 1: of because it's showed up on multiple fossils, but they thought, like,

634
00:36:40,800 --> 00:36:43,520
Speaker 1: this seems more like it's an artifact of something else,

635
00:36:43,880 --> 00:36:47,240
Speaker 1: some kind of stain maybe. And then more recently, can.

636
00:36:47,680 --> 00:36:50,200
Speaker 2: You can get like preservation and you get like tethonomy

637
00:36:50,200 --> 00:36:53,400
Speaker 2: and preservation issues or sometimes stuff is like the fossil

638
00:36:53,440 --> 00:36:55,920
Speaker 2: itself can be prepared in such a way that it

639
00:36:56,040 --> 00:36:58,080
Speaker 2: leaves marks and stains and things, and they can get

640
00:36:58,080 --> 00:36:59,440
Speaker 2: misinterpreted further down.

641
00:36:59,320 --> 00:37:02,480
Speaker 1: The line exactly. But the thing that was weird, right

642
00:37:02,600 --> 00:37:04,520
Speaker 1: was that this was something that seemed to kind of

643
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:07,440
Speaker 1: recur in multiple fossils. So it was like, Okay, so

644
00:37:07,840 --> 00:37:10,000
Speaker 1: perhaps this is some kind of air and processing, but

645
00:37:10,040 --> 00:37:13,759
Speaker 1: it does seem to happen and more than just one individual.

646
00:37:13,800 --> 00:37:18,560
Speaker 1: And so more recently Martin Smith and Jean Bernard Karen

647
00:37:19,400 --> 00:37:23,399
Speaker 1: used electron microscopes on this head and they came up

648
00:37:23,440 --> 00:37:28,000
Speaker 1: with a new theory, which is that this seems like

649
00:37:28,040 --> 00:37:31,200
Speaker 1: it was a stain made of fluids that were expelled

650
00:37:31,560 --> 00:37:35,879
Speaker 1: during decomposition. So what was once thought of its as

651
00:37:35,920 --> 00:37:39,919
Speaker 1: its head is basically the fluids that were pushed out

652
00:37:39,920 --> 00:37:43,480
Speaker 1: of its butt as it was decomposing, which I'm afraid

653
00:37:43,480 --> 00:37:46,520
Speaker 1: to say happens to all of us when we decomposed.

654
00:37:46,560 --> 00:37:49,480
Speaker 1: So if you think that sounds gross bad news, that

655
00:37:49,600 --> 00:37:52,799
Speaker 1: basically happens to all animals as we decompose, we have

656
00:37:52,840 --> 00:37:56,439
Speaker 1: a lot of fluids, gases that will be forced out

657
00:37:56,480 --> 00:37:59,280
Speaker 1: of our tube bodies.

658
00:38:00,280 --> 00:38:02,719
Speaker 2: Problem tube. It's a it's a great example of how

659
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:06,200
Speaker 2: new technology can be used to like examine old specimens.

660
00:38:06,200 --> 00:38:08,719
Speaker 2: You know, it's you know, sometimes because it's our working

661
00:38:08,760 --> 00:38:10,840
Speaker 2: in the museum myself, and yeah, people sometimes wonder why we

662
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:12,640
Speaker 2: hang onto the you know, fossils that are dug up

663
00:38:12,640 --> 00:38:14,279
Speaker 2: tens of years ago, hundreds of years we want you

664
00:38:14,440 --> 00:38:16,839
Speaker 2: people wonder why do we hang onto them? And these

665
00:38:16,920 --> 00:38:20,200
Speaker 2: days you can use X rays and electron scanning, microscopes

666
00:38:20,320 --> 00:38:22,160
Speaker 2: and set scans and all sorts of stuff, and you

667
00:38:22,160 --> 00:38:25,320
Speaker 2: can get all kinds of new information from old fossil

668
00:38:25,320 --> 00:38:28,759
Speaker 2: specimens by applying new technology to them. You know, you

669
00:38:28,760 --> 00:38:31,160
Speaker 2: don't know what the next big innovation is. If you

670
00:38:31,280 --> 00:38:36,839
Speaker 2: want really bizarre body plans from the Palaeozoic, you really

671
00:38:36,840 --> 00:38:40,080
Speaker 2: can't go much further than the Tully monster, which is

672
00:38:40,200 --> 00:38:43,440
Speaker 2: such a strange creature. We genuinely don't know what it is.

673
00:38:44,040 --> 00:38:46,960
Speaker 2: So eventually, yeah, we talk about out groups, you know,

674
00:38:47,080 --> 00:38:49,080
Speaker 2: things that you know, it's a close relative of this thing,

675
00:38:49,160 --> 00:38:50,600
Speaker 2: and it's kind of off on its own branch of

676
00:38:50,640 --> 00:38:53,440
Speaker 2: the family tree. With most fossil animals, we can kind

677
00:38:53,480 --> 00:38:56,840
Speaker 2: of get a broad idea of like, okay, it's an arthropod,

678
00:38:56,960 --> 00:38:59,520
Speaker 2: or it's a fish or something. The Tully monster we

679
00:38:59,640 --> 00:39:02,080
Speaker 2: genuinely have no idea. All we know is it's got

680
00:39:02,120 --> 00:39:04,120
Speaker 2: a left side and the right side, and that's the

681
00:39:04,200 --> 00:39:06,799
Speaker 2: only thing it has. That's the only thing it has

682
00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:09,800
Speaker 2: in common with any group of animals otherwise symmetry.

683
00:39:09,880 --> 00:39:10,680
Speaker 1: Right there, you go.

684
00:39:10,920 --> 00:39:13,680
Speaker 2: It's got it has symmetry. It's got eyes on stalks

685
00:39:13,680 --> 00:39:15,480
Speaker 2: like a snail, its mouth is on the end of

686
00:39:15,520 --> 00:39:18,359
Speaker 2: a hose, it's got fins like a squid. It's got

687
00:39:18,400 --> 00:39:21,080
Speaker 2: something that looks like a noto cord like a vertebrate,

688
00:39:21,800 --> 00:39:24,480
Speaker 2: and it's just put in its own group. It's genuinely

689
00:39:24,880 --> 00:39:27,840
Speaker 2: such a weird little creature. And it exists in the

690
00:39:27,880 --> 00:39:31,160
Speaker 2: Carboniferous period as well, which is actually quite a long

691
00:39:31,239 --> 00:39:33,960
Speaker 2: way from the cart from the from the Cambrian, So

692
00:39:34,040 --> 00:39:36,240
Speaker 2: it's not like this is one of those really super

693
00:39:36,320 --> 00:39:40,080
Speaker 2: early weirdos that showed up at the beginning of complex life.

694
00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:42,879
Speaker 2: This is something that you know, it's whatever it is.

695
00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:45,480
Speaker 2: It's a lineage has been around a while and we

696
00:39:45,560 --> 00:39:48,480
Speaker 2: don't know. Yeah, it's a ghost lineage. We don't know

697
00:39:48,520 --> 00:39:51,000
Speaker 2: what it's evolved from. We don't know how it's related

698
00:39:51,120 --> 00:39:52,040
Speaker 2: to other animals.

699
00:39:52,400 --> 00:39:55,120
Speaker 1: Looking at this thing, do you remember that video game Spore?

700
00:39:56,480 --> 00:39:58,560
Speaker 2: Yes, it is totally a spore creature.

701
00:39:58,680 --> 00:40:01,440
Speaker 1: Yes, looks it looks like when you make something in

702
00:40:01,520 --> 00:40:05,160
Speaker 1: Spore that does it does not survive past the first

703
00:40:05,239 --> 00:40:08,640
Speaker 1: few stages of your game. But yeah, this is such.

704
00:40:08,800 --> 00:40:10,879
Speaker 1: This is such a wacky looking thing because it's got

705
00:40:10,920 --> 00:40:13,920
Speaker 1: something that almost looks like an elephant trunk or a

706
00:40:14,640 --> 00:40:17,799
Speaker 1: or like a tentacle. But at the end it's got

707
00:40:17,800 --> 00:40:21,920
Speaker 1: this like little grabby like almost a thing.

708
00:40:22,200 --> 00:40:25,440
Speaker 2: Like a some Some have interpreted that that, yeah, like

709
00:40:25,440 --> 00:40:28,560
Speaker 2: a beak or pincas or something. Some have interpreted as

710
00:40:28,600 --> 00:40:31,080
Speaker 2: being like flexible like a trunk. Some of interpreted as

711
00:40:31,120 --> 00:40:34,560
Speaker 2: being jointed like an arm. Yeah, it's got like the

712
00:40:34,600 --> 00:40:36,960
Speaker 2: gills along the side of a body are like a lamprey.

713
00:40:37,080 --> 00:40:39,160
Speaker 2: It's got like sets of holes down the side of

714
00:40:39,160 --> 00:40:39,600
Speaker 2: its body.

715
00:40:39,680 --> 00:40:40,080
Speaker 1: Tastic.

716
00:40:40,200 --> 00:40:44,240
Speaker 2: It's got all these weird mixtures of features and nobody's

717
00:40:44,320 --> 00:40:45,560
Speaker 2: quite sure what to make of it.

718
00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:47,640
Speaker 1: You know, it kind of looks like one of those

719
00:40:47,640 --> 00:40:53,520
Speaker 1: Boston Dynamics robots, but without the legs, uh, which is

720
00:40:53,680 --> 00:40:57,400
Speaker 1: you know, it is very interesting. This is uh, this

721
00:40:57,480 --> 00:41:00,879
Speaker 1: could be the Lockness monster. Like you know this, maybe

722
00:41:00,920 --> 00:41:04,960
Speaker 1: we should take another few submarines in there.

723
00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:07,600
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that's what that's what people have seen rising.

724
00:41:08,920 --> 00:41:11,600
Speaker 2: It's a giant. It's a giant Tellly monster.

725
00:41:11,800 --> 00:41:17,919
Speaker 1: Yeah, incredible. This is this is definitely cryptid territory where

726
00:41:18,400 --> 00:41:20,600
Speaker 1: it does not it does not look like something that

727
00:41:21,080 --> 00:41:22,360
Speaker 1: should have existed.

728
00:41:23,520 --> 00:41:24,520
Speaker 2: It should not be here.

729
00:41:24,719 --> 00:41:28,440
Speaker 1: It shouldn't it Apparently it didn't. It didn't make it.

730
00:41:29,800 --> 00:41:31,680
Speaker 2: No, it didn't. Didn't didn't make it into the president,

731
00:41:31,719 --> 00:41:33,960
Speaker 2: which is a shame because you know, if if they were,

732
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:35,839
Speaker 2: if if they were one of those creatures that had

733
00:41:35,840 --> 00:41:37,880
Speaker 2: made it through the extinctions, we could like do a

734
00:41:37,880 --> 00:41:40,319
Speaker 2: genetic test on it and figure out where it might fit.

735
00:41:40,400 --> 00:41:42,839
Speaker 2: But we've just got these fossils and as far as

736
00:41:42,880 --> 00:41:45,680
Speaker 2: we know, they only existed in the Cambrian and we

737
00:41:45,719 --> 00:41:48,640
Speaker 2: don't know what branch of the tree of life they

738
00:41:48,680 --> 00:41:49,120
Speaker 2: come from.

739
00:41:49,280 --> 00:41:52,000
Speaker 1: Who knows. Maybe it had two butts. We we we

740
00:41:52,120 --> 00:41:53,080
Speaker 1: really can't tell.

741
00:41:53,600 --> 00:41:55,160
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe.

742
00:41:56,680 --> 00:42:01,800
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other thing that Martin Smith and Gene Karen

743
00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:05,799
Speaker 1: found was that when they examined the other side right now,

744
00:42:05,800 --> 00:42:10,000
Speaker 1: that they've guessed that the side with the fluid explosion

745
00:42:10,080 --> 00:42:13,160
Speaker 1: is probably the butt. What they look when they looked

746
00:42:13,200 --> 00:42:16,040
Speaker 1: at the head, they found a couple of spots that

747
00:42:16,200 --> 00:42:21,200
Speaker 1: looked suspiciously like eye spots. So we go from having

748
00:42:21,280 --> 00:42:24,600
Speaker 1: this the initial impression of this thing, which is that

749
00:42:24,680 --> 00:42:28,200
Speaker 1: it has like it walks on stilts. It has this

750
00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:32,600
Speaker 1: weird balloon head with no eyes, and then we turned

751
00:42:32,640 --> 00:42:36,480
Speaker 1: it upside down. Now it's walking on its little, soft

752
00:42:36,480 --> 00:42:39,480
Speaker 1: little feet, it has spikes on its back, and it's

753
00:42:39,520 --> 00:42:42,480
Speaker 1: got a it's got a head that has eye spots.

754
00:42:42,960 --> 00:42:45,839
Speaker 1: It starts to look a little bit more like a

755
00:42:45,920 --> 00:42:50,880
Speaker 1: weird caterpillar, but nonetheless a body plan that does make sense,

756
00:42:51,080 --> 00:42:54,719
Speaker 1: Like the spikes make sense when you make it, you know,

757
00:42:54,800 --> 00:42:56,960
Speaker 1: make that analogy to modern day caterpillars. There are a

758
00:42:56,960 --> 00:42:59,759
Speaker 1: lot of caterpillars that have these thorny projections on their

759
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:05,799
Speaker 1: backs that protects it from predators. The soft, soft appendages

760
00:43:05,840 --> 00:43:08,080
Speaker 1: are very good for locomotion when you're trying to get

761
00:43:08,120 --> 00:43:11,239
Speaker 1: over ridges and bumps and crawl under things. So that

762
00:43:11,280 --> 00:43:16,600
Speaker 1: you have this this fluidity of motion, and the eye

763
00:43:16,640 --> 00:43:20,280
Speaker 1: spots of course pretty important. Like we talked about how

764
00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:23,880
Speaker 1: some animals that didn't even have any ability to detect

765
00:43:24,080 --> 00:43:28,759
Speaker 1: light at all were very vulnerable to predators. So yeah,

766
00:43:28,800 --> 00:43:32,399
Speaker 1: it is. It's like it went through so many strange iterations,

767
00:43:32,440 --> 00:43:35,640
Speaker 1: and even though what we kind of now think it

768
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:40,400
Speaker 1: probably look like and was oriented as is still incredibly weird,

769
00:43:40,560 --> 00:43:42,840
Speaker 1: it at least makes some sort of sense.

770
00:43:43,880 --> 00:43:46,560
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's sort of an example of like it's

771
00:43:46,600 --> 00:43:49,520
Speaker 2: a very early example of like recognizable features of sort

772
00:43:49,520 --> 00:43:51,880
Speaker 2: of what would go on to become kind of the

773
00:43:51,880 --> 00:43:56,040
Speaker 2: body plan of later on animalgy with discernible legs and

774
00:43:56,280 --> 00:43:58,880
Speaker 2: eyes and a front end and a back end and

775
00:43:58,920 --> 00:44:01,960
Speaker 2: things like that. Yeah, it's it's very it's it did

776
00:44:02,040 --> 00:44:04,360
Speaker 2: it in a very weird way, but yeah, it's it

777
00:44:04,440 --> 00:44:06,840
Speaker 2: is sort of like an early sort of template or

778
00:44:06,880 --> 00:44:09,080
Speaker 2: trial run for what life on Earth would look like

779
00:44:09,120 --> 00:44:10,080
Speaker 2: further down the line.

780
00:44:10,280 --> 00:44:14,799
Speaker 1: A prototype, Uh, you know, it's the first draft is

781
00:44:14,880 --> 00:44:18,680
Speaker 1: never going to be perfect.

782
00:44:17,640 --> 00:44:20,799
Speaker 2: And that evolution isn't you know, most most animals are

783
00:44:20,840 --> 00:44:22,719
Speaker 2: kind of a B plus, you know, they're sort of

784
00:44:22,719 --> 00:44:23,279
Speaker 2: good enough.

785
00:44:23,719 --> 00:44:27,440
Speaker 1: That's all, that's all that's required. People sometimes have this

786
00:44:27,480 --> 00:44:31,400
Speaker 1: impression of evolution as being like a machine that creates

787
00:44:31,440 --> 00:44:34,600
Speaker 1: the perfect animals, like well, if we are alive right now,

788
00:44:34,680 --> 00:44:38,120
Speaker 1: or the animals that are alive, they must be you know,

789
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:42,600
Speaker 1: perfected forms of life through the elegant process of evolutions.

790
00:44:42,640 --> 00:44:44,719
Speaker 1: Like now, as long as you can pop out some

791
00:44:44,880 --> 00:44:48,080
Speaker 1: babies and those babies can pop out babies of their own,

792
00:44:48,200 --> 00:44:50,319
Speaker 1: it's good enough, good enough, good enough.

793
00:44:51,360 --> 00:44:53,640
Speaker 2: And there's there's always the issue that like, the the

794
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:57,279
Speaker 2: more quote unquote perfectly adapted an animal is, the more

795
00:44:57,280 --> 00:45:00,000
Speaker 2: at risk it is to extinction when the climate change.

796
00:45:00,160 --> 00:45:02,200
Speaker 2: I like to use it, so when I do science,

797
00:45:02,239 --> 00:45:04,000
Speaker 2: I like to use the example of bears. So like

798
00:45:04,320 --> 00:45:07,399
Speaker 2: black bears, quite they've got quite a broad diet, they're

799
00:45:07,440 --> 00:45:09,839
Speaker 2: fairly adaptable, they can tolerate lots of different temperatures. They're

800
00:45:09,840 --> 00:45:14,520
Speaker 2: doing okay. Polar bears very strict diets, very tight range

801
00:45:14,520 --> 00:45:16,520
Speaker 2: of temperatures they can tolerate, and they're having a really

802
00:45:16,560 --> 00:45:17,600
Speaker 2: tough time of it right now.

803
00:45:17,719 --> 00:45:21,680
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, it's it's that it's a it's

804
00:45:21,719 --> 00:45:24,600
Speaker 1: the classic thing of like, well, did you invest everything

805
00:45:24,640 --> 00:45:30,239
Speaker 1: into one crop right like like pandas do or do

806
00:45:30,320 --> 00:45:34,720
Speaker 1: you diversify you know, and need a bunch of different things,

807
00:45:34,760 --> 00:45:37,319
Speaker 1: which does it does help out, but yeah, it is.

808
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:42,040
Speaker 1: There is a recent study of looking into sort of

809
00:45:42,080 --> 00:45:45,080
Speaker 1: the pre we're going back really far. This is like

810
00:45:45,239 --> 00:45:52,080
Speaker 1: pre animal DNA, like the oh yeah, the protest DNA,

811
00:45:52,719 --> 00:45:58,680
Speaker 1: and how researchers have sort of used genes from that

812
00:45:58,760 --> 00:46:02,400
Speaker 1: produce DNA and then found ones that are similar to

813
00:46:02,680 --> 00:46:05,560
Speaker 1: like gene markers and mice and then tried to see

814
00:46:05,560 --> 00:46:07,360
Speaker 1: if they could just like put that in there, like

815
00:46:07,440 --> 00:46:10,200
Speaker 1: sneak a little bit of protest DNA into the mouse

816
00:46:10,440 --> 00:46:13,720
Speaker 1: to get the same effect as the as that protein

817
00:46:13,800 --> 00:46:18,560
Speaker 1: sequence that was so similar, and they found indeed they could,

818
00:46:18,800 --> 00:46:22,080
Speaker 1: which I think is what's so interesting about these early

819
00:46:22,120 --> 00:46:25,280
Speaker 1: animals is yes, they may have lacked a lot of things,

820
00:46:25,320 --> 00:46:27,440
Speaker 1: like some of them didn't even have eye spots, some

821
00:46:27,480 --> 00:46:30,160
Speaker 1: of them didn't have a brain, but they had enough

822
00:46:30,800 --> 00:46:34,439
Speaker 1: of a genetic library that they could go through say

823
00:46:34,480 --> 00:46:37,799
Speaker 1: a mass extinction event or these these incredible sort of

824
00:46:37,800 --> 00:46:42,319
Speaker 1: bottleneck types of events and still have enough diversity that

825
00:46:42,360 --> 00:46:46,520
Speaker 1: they were able to start developing you know, a flurry

826
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:50,000
Speaker 1: of useful features that were then used in later animals

827
00:46:50,040 --> 00:46:52,720
Speaker 1: that we now recognize as having sort of a useful

828
00:46:52,760 --> 00:46:57,919
Speaker 1: body plan rather than a strange tube with a strange appendages.

829
00:46:58,760 --> 00:47:01,320
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, like like you know talking about like giant panels,

830
00:47:01,400 --> 00:47:05,279
Speaker 2: like herbivores, like as a thing, didn't really exist until

831
00:47:05,480 --> 00:47:08,239
Speaker 2: the Carboniferous, which is like near the near the end

832
00:47:08,320 --> 00:47:10,680
Speaker 2: of the Camry period, And that's where you start getting

833
00:47:11,680 --> 00:47:14,440
Speaker 2: kind of our ancestors. You start getting the first tetrapods

834
00:47:14,480 --> 00:47:18,560
Speaker 2: and amis of the land based vertebrates, and like the

835
00:47:18,640 --> 00:47:21,760
Speaker 2: sort of the stem mammals, the kind of proto mammals.

836
00:47:21,800 --> 00:47:24,480
Speaker 2: That's some of my that's some of my favorite fossil

837
00:47:24,520 --> 00:47:27,320
Speaker 2: animals is these thing the creatures that kind of break

838
00:47:27,360 --> 00:47:30,440
Speaker 2: your traditional conception of like animal classification because you kind

839
00:47:30,440 --> 00:47:35,279
Speaker 2: of learning you kind of learn in school, you know, mammal, bird, reptile, fish, amphibian, inverterate.

840
00:47:35,440 --> 00:47:37,160
Speaker 2: But then there's so much stuff in the fossil record

841
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:40,359
Speaker 2: that just doesn't fit in any of them. And yeah,

842
00:47:40,400 --> 00:47:43,040
Speaker 2: like the synapsids, which is the sort of the broader

843
00:47:43,120 --> 00:47:47,400
Speaker 2: group that mammals belong to. Their early ancestors are showed

844
00:47:47,480 --> 00:47:50,799
Speaker 2: up in the sort of Cambrian period and really really

845
00:47:50,840 --> 00:47:53,160
Speaker 2: flourished in the Permian so sort of right near the

846
00:47:53,200 --> 00:47:56,200
Speaker 2: end of the Paleozoic period, and that you know, you've

847
00:47:56,239 --> 00:47:58,880
Speaker 2: got creatures that are starting to resemble a kind of

848
00:47:58,920 --> 00:48:02,360
Speaker 2: modern eque system. You've got eight big terrestrial predators and

849
00:48:02,480 --> 00:48:04,759
Speaker 2: herbivores with all kinds of weird horns and spikes and

850
00:48:04,760 --> 00:48:07,600
Speaker 2: frills and things coming off them. You've got the first

851
00:48:07,640 --> 00:48:11,160
Speaker 2: saber toothed predators showing not like even even before the

852
00:48:11,200 --> 00:48:13,839
Speaker 2: diet You've got you got the gorgonopsids, who are these

853
00:48:13,920 --> 00:48:21,120
Speaker 2: like horse sized, like lizard wolf things, just just nightmarish stuff.

854
00:48:21,200 --> 00:48:26,080
Speaker 1: But we had there were dragon we be from weird

855
00:48:26,239 --> 00:48:29,080
Speaker 1: dragon type animals, maybe without the wings.

856
00:48:29,200 --> 00:48:32,080
Speaker 2: But yeah, and these are these are another group where

857
00:48:32,200 --> 00:48:34,840
Speaker 2: again you have all these questions that you can't quite

858
00:48:34,880 --> 00:48:39,120
Speaker 2: answer through the fossil record about yeah, because they're they're

859
00:48:39,160 --> 00:48:42,240
Speaker 2: they're on the they're on the the line towards the mammals,

860
00:48:42,560 --> 00:48:44,160
Speaker 2: but they're not quite there yet. So were they warm

861
00:48:44,200 --> 00:48:46,640
Speaker 2: bloody or cold blooded? Did they have skin or scales

862
00:48:46,719 --> 00:48:50,239
Speaker 2: or fur? Did they produce milk? Is that something that

863
00:48:50,280 --> 00:48:52,640
Speaker 2: we only find in true mammals or how far how

864
00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:53,520
Speaker 2: far back does that go?

865
00:48:53,640 --> 00:48:57,279
Speaker 1: There's as you don't need We've we've learned you don't

866
00:48:57,320 --> 00:48:59,719
Speaker 1: need nipples to make milk, you can just kind of

867
00:48:59,760 --> 00:49:01,720
Speaker 1: let it just sort of slosh out.

868
00:49:01,520 --> 00:49:04,080
Speaker 2: Of you, just bring them out like a sponge.

869
00:49:04,200 --> 00:49:08,879
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, and like sicilians, Yes, I know, yes, it's

870
00:49:08,960 --> 00:49:13,040
Speaker 1: just like you have so like so when I'm talking

871
00:49:13,080 --> 00:49:19,440
Speaker 1: about mon treams, I'm talking about platypuses and echidneas and

872
00:49:19,520 --> 00:49:24,000
Speaker 1: they are you know, egg laying mammals, and they do

873
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:29,920
Speaker 1: but they do exude milk, but instead of having discrete nipples,

874
00:49:29,920 --> 00:49:32,400
Speaker 1: they have these glands and pores and the milk just

875
00:49:32,440 --> 00:49:36,800
Speaker 1: kind of like leaks out of them, which lovely. Sicilians

876
00:49:36,880 --> 00:49:41,240
Speaker 1: are a reptile that are not so they are not mammals,

877
00:49:41,480 --> 00:49:46,080
Speaker 1: but they and they don't technically produce milk, but what

878
00:49:46,160 --> 00:49:51,960
Speaker 1: they do have is a very nutritious and delicious skin

879
00:49:52,640 --> 00:49:56,560
Speaker 1: that they allowed their babies to eat off of their bellies.

880
00:49:56,960 --> 00:50:01,160
Speaker 1: Like Mom, it's mom jerky. It's jerky made from Ah. Hey,

881
00:50:01,600 --> 00:50:04,200
Speaker 1: you know it's loving, like when mom makes you cookies.

882
00:50:04,239 --> 00:50:06,400
Speaker 1: But hey, kids, you want a little piece of mom's jerky.

883
00:50:07,120 --> 00:50:08,799
Speaker 2: Sure, lovely.

884
00:50:10,080 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 3: On that.

885
00:50:11,320 --> 00:50:13,400
Speaker 2: Any whatever solution.

886
00:50:13,160 --> 00:50:14,759
Speaker 1: Works, whatever works.

887
00:50:15,040 --> 00:50:17,439
Speaker 2: I'm pretty I'm pretty sure Sicilians have been around since

888
00:50:17,480 --> 00:50:20,520
Speaker 2: the Jurassic or something, so it's worked from so far.

889
00:50:20,640 --> 00:50:24,960
Speaker 1: They're very old and very it's it's a recipe that's

890
00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:27,600
Speaker 1: been around for many generations.

891
00:50:28,400 --> 00:50:33,480
Speaker 2: Mom Moms classic homebrew Mom's classic home homebrewed bally Skin.

892
00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:36,480
Speaker 1: There we go. Yes, we'll take a quick break, and

893
00:50:36,520 --> 00:50:39,200
Speaker 1: when we get back, we're going to talk about one

894
00:50:39,239 --> 00:50:42,880
Speaker 1: of the biggest land Arthur pod. No, the biggest planned

895
00:50:42,960 --> 00:50:45,879
Speaker 1: Arthur prod that we know about. Uh and uh yeah,

896
00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:49,839
Speaker 1: So we will be right back. So I do want

897
00:50:49,840 --> 00:50:54,200
Speaker 1: to talk about arthropleura because I love bugs. It's not

898
00:50:54,239 --> 00:50:57,240
Speaker 1: really a bug. Oh actually, I don't know. Bug doesn't

899
00:50:57,239 --> 00:50:59,600
Speaker 1: have a very scientific classification, does it.

900
00:51:00,440 --> 00:51:02,360
Speaker 2: I thought there was. I'm sure I heard that there is.

901
00:51:02,560 --> 00:51:05,640
Speaker 2: There is a specific group of insects that are called bugs.

902
00:51:05,640 --> 00:51:08,640
Speaker 2: I can't remember what it is, but in the general pilance, yeah,

903
00:51:08,640 --> 00:51:11,680
Speaker 2: people just use bugs for bugs. I feel like like

904
00:51:12,360 --> 00:51:13,240
Speaker 2: an exoskeleton.

905
00:51:13,400 --> 00:51:15,600
Speaker 1: For me, A bug could also be like a shrimp.

906
00:51:15,920 --> 00:51:16,840
Speaker 1: That's a bug to me.

907
00:51:17,440 --> 00:51:18,439
Speaker 2: So it's a wet bug.

908
00:51:18,520 --> 00:51:22,279
Speaker 1: It's a wet bug. We're eating wet bugs, folks. So

909
00:51:22,880 --> 00:51:28,120
Speaker 1: Arthur blurro was a genus of massive arthropods that lived well.

910
00:51:28,200 --> 00:51:32,680
Speaker 1: It was around like three hundred forty something to two

911
00:51:32,760 --> 00:51:36,200
Speaker 1: hundred ninety million years ago. It was like just a

912
00:51:36,239 --> 00:51:40,560
Speaker 1: few million years shy of coinciding with dinosaurs, you know,

913
00:51:40,760 --> 00:51:41,760
Speaker 1: which is nothing.

914
00:51:42,800 --> 00:51:45,279
Speaker 2: And when we talk we talk about we talk about

915
00:51:45,320 --> 00:51:48,040
Speaker 2: geological time, and we talk about short periods of time

916
00:51:48,239 --> 00:51:50,200
Speaker 2: that could be like ten thousand years, a couple of

917
00:51:50,239 --> 00:51:51,360
Speaker 2: million years. That's nothing.

918
00:51:51,440 --> 00:51:55,160
Speaker 1: It's nothing, nothing, just a little blip. But yeah, unlike

919
00:51:55,320 --> 00:51:59,400
Speaker 1: the other animals I've talked about, this is a terrestrial animal.

920
00:51:59,480 --> 00:52:01,480
Speaker 1: So like we talked about I mean you've talked about

921
00:52:01,480 --> 00:52:03,680
Speaker 1: play of animals as well that have been terrestrial. But

922
00:52:03,760 --> 00:52:09,080
Speaker 1: like the the other really strange ones like anomalo, cars, hallucigenea, uh,

923
00:52:09,239 --> 00:52:18,680
Speaker 1: the the that big theah yeah yeah, the not alloid, Yes,

924
00:52:18,800 --> 00:52:22,359
Speaker 1: those have all been marine mammals or marine mammals. Those

925
00:52:22,360 --> 00:52:26,319
Speaker 1: have all been marine life and they and we we

926
00:52:26,480 --> 00:52:29,120
Speaker 1: have records of them because of this amazing or just

927
00:52:29,200 --> 00:52:32,279
Speaker 1: shale because in for the for the not alloid because

928
00:52:32,280 --> 00:52:37,440
Speaker 1: of its shell. But this is a terrestrial creature and

929
00:52:37,480 --> 00:52:40,800
Speaker 1: it's really interesting because we do have good records well

930
00:52:40,880 --> 00:52:44,000
Speaker 1: maybe not good, but enough record of it. And it

931
00:52:44,160 --> 00:52:49,920
Speaker 1: was a it was incredible looking so like it was

932
00:52:50,040 --> 00:52:55,799
Speaker 1: basically a giant millipede slash centipede. It had many many segments,

933
00:52:55,920 --> 00:52:59,799
Speaker 1: many many legs, unlike its modern relatives, though it grew

934
00:52:59,800 --> 00:53:03,120
Speaker 1: to be over eight feet long, which is around two

935
00:53:03,120 --> 00:53:06,880
Speaker 1: and a half meters, So it's the largest terrestrial arthropod

936
00:53:07,400 --> 00:53:10,880
Speaker 1: that we know of, and it had it's a little

937
00:53:11,080 --> 00:53:14,120
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're thinking of your classic millipede that

938
00:53:14,200 --> 00:53:17,600
Speaker 1: you typically find in a backyard, and say in the

939
00:53:17,719 --> 00:53:21,080
Speaker 1: US or in the UK, it's kind of rounded dome

940
00:53:21,200 --> 00:53:23,439
Speaker 1: like sort of like a little like a little train,

941
00:53:23,640 --> 00:53:27,440
Speaker 1: subway train. But there are plenty of species of millipedes

942
00:53:27,440 --> 00:53:30,919
Speaker 1: and centipedes that actually look more like this arthropleura, which

943
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:36,400
Speaker 1: is their flatter, they're a little wider, and they have

944
00:53:36,480 --> 00:53:42,960
Speaker 1: this like pretty serious armor. So they left behind a

945
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:48,040
Speaker 1: good number of fossils. But in addition to fossils of

946
00:53:48,080 --> 00:53:51,400
Speaker 1: the animal itself, they also left behind tracks. Because they

947
00:53:51,440 --> 00:53:55,320
Speaker 1: were so big, they were able to form these little

948
00:53:55,360 --> 00:53:59,359
Speaker 1: tracks that were I mean, it's kind of incredible, right,

949
00:53:59,360 --> 00:54:02,480
Speaker 1: like you think about, like, oh, basically, what this is

950
00:54:02,480 --> 00:54:06,319
Speaker 1: a giant miller people leaving behind footsteps that then get

951
00:54:07,400 --> 00:54:11,000
Speaker 1: some you know, you imagine like maybe some landslide happens

952
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:13,680
Speaker 1: and then it preserves these these footsteps.

953
00:54:13,800 --> 00:54:17,320
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's walking through wet mud in the swamp

954
00:54:17,400 --> 00:54:20,560
Speaker 2: somewhere and that's then dried up and been and covered up.

955
00:54:20,560 --> 00:54:22,600
Speaker 2: And yeah, some of these so they have them in

956
00:54:22,600 --> 00:54:26,800
Speaker 2: in Scotland actually, yes, and yeah, they find these trackways

957
00:54:26,800 --> 00:54:28,960
Speaker 2: of like you know, these two symmetrical rows of the

958
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:31,840
Speaker 2: little dots in the ground and they're half a meter wide.

959
00:54:32,320 --> 00:54:34,360
Speaker 2: You know, you can quite easily stand in the middle

960
00:54:34,360 --> 00:54:38,360
Speaker 2: of it. They also they very recently, actually a fully

961
00:54:38,400 --> 00:54:43,160
Speaker 2: preserved head of one of these has announced not long ago,

962
00:54:43,480 --> 00:54:47,799
Speaker 2: with like mandibles and feelers. So there's there's gonna be

963
00:54:48,160 --> 00:54:50,320
Speaker 2: there's gonna be some work done on that to figure

964
00:54:50,360 --> 00:54:53,120
Speaker 2: out like feeding mechanics and things like that. I think

965
00:54:53,160 --> 00:54:56,840
Speaker 2: most people are pretty on board that it was probably

966
00:54:56,880 --> 00:54:59,720
Speaker 2: a herbivore because this was this would have been living

967
00:55:00,239 --> 00:55:02,480
Speaker 2: in the what we call the coal swamps, which is

968
00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:04,799
Speaker 2: it's a big part of actually the fossil history of

969
00:55:04,800 --> 00:55:06,919
Speaker 2: where I live. So I live in Stoke on Track,

970
00:55:06,920 --> 00:55:09,680
Speaker 2: which is a little town in the rough north of England,

971
00:55:10,200 --> 00:55:12,800
Speaker 2: and the coal mines and the coal measures you know,

972
00:55:12,840 --> 00:55:16,120
Speaker 2: were a big part of industrial revolution and industry in

973
00:55:16,160 --> 00:55:18,319
Speaker 2: that whole time of the year. So my museum is

974
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:21,600
Speaker 2: mostly full of fossils that have come from that period

975
00:55:21,640 --> 00:55:23,120
Speaker 2: in time, So it's a lot of fish and a

976
00:55:23,120 --> 00:55:27,279
Speaker 2: lot of plant fossils occasionally get these big arthropods. They

977
00:55:27,320 --> 00:55:30,680
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been forests made of trees as we can eventually,

978
00:55:30,760 --> 00:55:34,600
Speaker 2: because vascular plants weren't quite they weren't quite dominant in

979
00:55:34,600 --> 00:55:37,640
Speaker 2: the way. So it would have been like giant horsetails

980
00:55:37,640 --> 00:55:39,680
Speaker 2: and liver warts and club mosses and things like that.

981
00:55:39,760 --> 00:55:42,640
Speaker 2: So these other plants that these days are generally confined

982
00:55:42,680 --> 00:55:45,560
Speaker 2: to the understory would have been making up the trees

983
00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:47,719
Speaker 2: at the time, and then of course that goes on

984
00:55:47,800 --> 00:55:50,480
Speaker 2: to make the coal that we mind. But yeah, Arthropleura

985
00:55:50,520 --> 00:55:53,799
Speaker 2: would have been easily one of the biggest animals on

986
00:55:53,840 --> 00:55:55,640
Speaker 2: the land around at the time. It would have been

987
00:55:55,680 --> 00:55:59,040
Speaker 2: living alongside there's other giant invertebrates around at the time.

988
00:55:59,080 --> 00:56:02,800
Speaker 2: There's drag and flies that are half a meter across

989
00:56:02,800 --> 00:56:06,279
Speaker 2: in wingspan. There's giant scorpions and spiders and things like that.

990
00:56:06,440 --> 00:56:10,440
Speaker 1: It's a there's enough, there's enough ambient oxygen to be

991
00:56:10,480 --> 00:56:12,919
Speaker 1: able to diffuse through those spiracles.

992
00:56:14,160 --> 00:56:16,560
Speaker 2: It's a it's partially that and that's one of those

993
00:56:16,600 --> 00:56:18,920
Speaker 2: things that kind of gets misrepresented a lot a lot

994
00:56:18,920 --> 00:56:19,280
Speaker 2: of people.

995
00:56:20,239 --> 00:56:22,680
Speaker 1: It's not like the only reason that they were able to.

996
00:56:22,880 --> 00:56:25,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not the only idea, and people often apply

997
00:56:25,320 --> 00:56:27,239
Speaker 2: it to other animals as well. People think that more

998
00:56:27,280 --> 00:56:31,720
Speaker 2: oxygen makes bigger reptiles and bigger mammals. It doesn't doesn't

999
00:56:31,719 --> 00:56:32,840
Speaker 2: work that way mainly.

1000
00:56:32,880 --> 00:56:35,520
Speaker 1: But the lack of birds was a big one.

1001
00:56:36,160 --> 00:56:39,080
Speaker 2: Lack of birds definitely helps, Yeah, but another big part

1002
00:56:39,120 --> 00:56:42,279
Speaker 2: is the opportunity. As far as we can tell, arthropods

1003
00:56:42,280 --> 00:56:45,560
Speaker 2: and specifically something like a millipede might have been the

1004
00:56:45,560 --> 00:56:48,720
Speaker 2: first animals on land. So there's another fossil from Scotland

1005
00:56:48,760 --> 00:56:54,840
Speaker 2: actually older than Arthroplura, called numidesmus, which is another set

1006
00:56:55,040 --> 00:56:58,839
Speaker 2: of footprints. It's another set of tiny fossil footprints that

1007
00:56:58,920 --> 00:57:02,480
Speaker 2: dates back to about four hundred million years ago something

1008
00:57:02,520 --> 00:57:05,200
Speaker 2: like that, which is one of the oldest pieces of

1009
00:57:05,239 --> 00:57:08,959
Speaker 2: evidence of any organism coming onto the land. And when

1010
00:57:09,320 --> 00:57:11,239
Speaker 2: you know, so it would have been earthly sort of

1011
00:57:11,600 --> 00:57:14,520
Speaker 2: grab some millipede looking type creatures coming onto the land

1012
00:57:14,840 --> 00:57:18,520
Speaker 2: and there's no competition, there's nothing competing with them for

1013
00:57:18,560 --> 00:57:21,840
Speaker 2: space or food resources. So just they've got the whole

1014
00:57:22,080 --> 00:57:25,919
Speaker 2: planets of themselves basically to expand and grow and diversify

1015
00:57:26,360 --> 00:57:30,640
Speaker 2: until the arising of the tetrapods that fall invertebrates as

1016
00:57:30,640 --> 00:57:31,760
Speaker 2: they start coming out of the water.

1017
00:57:32,840 --> 00:57:34,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's it is interesting because if you

1018
00:57:34,840 --> 00:57:38,280
Speaker 1: think about it right like this, they think that this

1019
00:57:38,560 --> 00:57:44,520
Speaker 1: was not particularly a vision based sensory creature, right like,

1020
00:57:44,560 --> 00:57:49,439
Speaker 1: it either had very simple eyes or did not have

1021
00:57:49,960 --> 00:57:54,200
Speaker 1: very well functioning eyes, so that it would have probably

1022
00:57:54,320 --> 00:57:58,600
Speaker 1: struggled to compete with a tetrapod that was able to

1023
00:57:59,200 --> 00:58:02,640
Speaker 1: move around, perhaps more nimbly and perhaps have a better

1024
00:58:03,560 --> 00:58:08,040
Speaker 1: visual grasp of being able to like say, get to

1025
00:58:08,120 --> 00:58:08,800
Speaker 1: something faster.

1026
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:12,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there weren't There weren't very many big land

1027
00:58:12,840 --> 00:58:16,760
Speaker 2: based predators at the time, so the more predatory invertebrates

1028
00:58:16,760 --> 00:58:19,520
Speaker 2: at the time, so things like scorpions and spiders, I

1029
00:58:19,520 --> 00:58:22,680
Speaker 2: think their their body plan kind of limits how big

1030
00:58:22,720 --> 00:58:25,840
Speaker 2: they can get on land and like how lethal they

1031
00:58:25,840 --> 00:58:28,680
Speaker 2: can be. I think the largest of the land scorpions

1032
00:58:29,480 --> 00:58:32,440
Speaker 2: pushed nearly a meat along, so not unsubstantial, but it

1033
00:58:32,440 --> 00:58:34,760
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been a threat to something as big as arthroplura,

1034
00:58:35,120 --> 00:58:38,520
Speaker 2: And you're having this big, tough exoskeleton would have been

1035
00:58:38,560 --> 00:58:40,600
Speaker 2: a big, a big help as well. But yeah, you

1036
00:58:40,680 --> 00:58:43,760
Speaker 2: start to get the early tuxpods coming on land, and yeah,

1037
00:58:43,800 --> 00:58:47,040
Speaker 2: they're more agile. They've they've got limbs, they've got eyes,

1038
00:58:47,040 --> 00:58:49,760
Speaker 2: they've got everything they need to to flick flick this

1039
00:58:49,800 --> 00:58:51,760
Speaker 2: thing over and get to the belly if they want to.

1040
00:58:51,760 --> 00:58:54,000
Speaker 1: Just have like a buffet. If you imagine like a

1041
00:58:54,200 --> 00:58:57,400
Speaker 1: like a group of sort of like tetrapods that look

1042
00:58:57,480 --> 00:59:00,240
Speaker 1: like a bunch of little weird mongooses just flip this

1043
00:59:00,320 --> 00:59:03,360
Speaker 1: guy over and then having a having a last supper

1044
00:59:03,480 --> 00:59:06,960
Speaker 1: like meal at the long this. Oh yeah, we.

1045
00:59:07,000 --> 00:59:09,040
Speaker 2: Booked a table for booked a table for twenty four,

1046
00:59:09,040 --> 00:59:10,640
Speaker 2: but we're all going to sit on one side.

1047
00:59:11,280 --> 00:59:12,920
Speaker 1: I mean, it does. It kind of reminds me of that,

1048
00:59:13,040 --> 00:59:16,320
Speaker 1: like because we do have, like you mentioned, you know,

1049
00:59:16,360 --> 00:59:19,720
Speaker 1: with scorpions. You know, we have a lot of uh

1050
00:59:20,480 --> 00:59:22,440
Speaker 1: you know, not too not too different in terms of

1051
00:59:22,440 --> 00:59:26,000
Speaker 1: the body pillion compared to really touch pods things like mongooses, And.

1052
00:59:27,360 --> 00:59:30,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sort of it. Yeah, that's that's quite a comparison. Actually,

1053
00:59:30,960 --> 00:59:33,080
Speaker 2: I have not thought of that poor like like mongooses

1054
00:59:33,200 --> 00:59:36,280
Speaker 2: and mustelids and things like that. Yeah, yeah, that's yeah,

1055
00:59:36,400 --> 00:59:38,640
Speaker 2: sort of long body, short legs kind of. Yeah, they're

1056
00:59:38,640 --> 00:59:41,840
Speaker 2: not far off. It's a very it's a good sort

1057
00:59:41,840 --> 00:59:44,200
Speaker 2: of generalist body plan when you know you want to

1058
00:59:44,480 --> 00:59:47,800
Speaker 2: know moving around on land. Yeah, basically everything. Yeah, if

1059
00:59:47,800 --> 00:59:50,600
Speaker 2: you if you're not going for any kind of big specialty.

1060
00:59:50,440 --> 00:59:53,560
Speaker 1: There's eventually, I think, give it a few hundred million

1061
00:59:53,640 --> 00:59:56,960
Speaker 1: years and we're all either going to be noodles or

1062
00:59:57,160 --> 00:59:58,440
Speaker 1: crabs and that's it.

1063
00:59:59,320 --> 01:00:02,000
Speaker 2: Everything is about. Everything is evolving back into a.

1064
01:00:01,960 --> 01:00:04,760
Speaker 1: Crab and too crab or noodle and then we'll dig

1065
01:00:04,840 --> 01:00:07,720
Speaker 1: it out see which one which body plan works the best.

1066
01:00:08,320 --> 01:00:13,120
Speaker 1: Uh but I mean this it is go ahead, sorry,

1067
01:00:13,600 --> 01:00:16,440
Speaker 1: but yeah, it is really interesting. So this this uh

1068
01:00:16,560 --> 01:00:20,800
Speaker 1: with the arthropleural being able to see these footsteps, does

1069
01:00:20,960 --> 01:00:24,320
Speaker 1: the footprints that have been fossilized, does give us a

1070
01:00:24,400 --> 01:00:27,240
Speaker 1: little bit of insight into its behavior because these tracks

1071
01:00:27,280 --> 01:00:30,520
Speaker 1: were found. I mean it's a little bit of a

1072
01:00:30,600 --> 01:00:32,840
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of a puzzle, right because these

1073
01:00:32,880 --> 01:00:37,919
Speaker 1: tracks were found like near bodies of water. Now, part

1074
01:00:37,960 --> 01:00:40,680
Speaker 1: of that is, like you said, because that is a

1075
01:00:40,800 --> 01:00:45,280
Speaker 1: premium place for these tracks to be fossilized. So it's

1076
01:00:45,360 --> 01:00:49,560
Speaker 1: not a very good statistical indicator where they spent most

1077
01:00:49,560 --> 01:00:52,120
Speaker 1: of their time, because we're gonna have this false like

1078
01:00:52,720 --> 01:00:57,200
Speaker 1: bias towards finding fossils near the water. So maybe it

1079
01:00:57,240 --> 01:00:59,120
Speaker 1: was just a few of them who are just like, oh,

1080
01:00:59,120 --> 01:01:02,320
Speaker 1: that's an interesting area area. It happened to walk there,

1081
01:01:02,960 --> 01:01:05,880
Speaker 1: and we get those footprints and that's what's preserved. Whereas

1082
01:01:05,880 --> 01:01:08,360
Speaker 1: maybe they spent most of their times like on in

1083
01:01:08,480 --> 01:01:11,680
Speaker 1: what areas away from water. We don't know, but we

1084
01:01:11,880 --> 01:01:15,440
Speaker 1: do know they did at least go in those places

1085
01:01:15,600 --> 01:01:16,920
Speaker 1: at least once or twice.

1086
01:01:17,200 --> 01:01:21,680
Speaker 2: Yeah. When interpreting behavior for fossil animals, this happens all

1087
01:01:21,800 --> 01:01:25,520
Speaker 2: the time. People will over interpret or misinterpret or things

1088
01:01:25,600 --> 01:01:28,080
Speaker 2: like yeah, you get you know, well you get like,

1089
01:01:28,240 --> 01:01:30,240
Speaker 2: you know, a bone bed of dinosaurs, for example, you

1090
01:01:30,280 --> 01:01:32,680
Speaker 2: find a whole bunch of them buried together, and people go,

1091
01:01:32,760 --> 01:01:35,040
Speaker 2: they were social, they were living in herds. No, this

1092
01:01:35,120 --> 01:01:37,080
Speaker 2: all this tells you is that they died together. It

1093
01:01:37,120 --> 01:01:39,280
Speaker 2: doesn't tell you what they were doing for the rest

1094
01:01:39,320 --> 01:01:40,920
Speaker 2: of their lives. It could have been a flash flood,

1095
01:01:40,960 --> 01:01:42,600
Speaker 2: it could have been a disease or some Yeah you.

1096
01:01:42,600 --> 01:01:45,120
Speaker 1: All fill in the same hole. We don't know.

1097
01:01:45,400 --> 01:01:48,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Well, there are examples of that there's

1098
01:01:48,440 --> 01:01:52,680
Speaker 2: like like sinkholes and things you know, like that have

1099
01:01:52,760 --> 01:01:55,440
Speaker 2: been that have been full of the bones of animals

1100
01:01:55,440 --> 01:01:57,400
Speaker 2: that have fought, and you could easy, oh these animals

1101
01:01:57,440 --> 01:01:59,840
Speaker 2: like living in caves. No, no, this is just where

1102
01:01:59,840 --> 01:02:02,880
Speaker 2: they died. And yeah, like you and like trace fossils

1103
01:02:02,880 --> 01:02:05,360
Speaker 2: as well, you know, so things like footprints and copper lights.

1104
01:02:05,720 --> 01:02:08,840
Speaker 2: You know, people will sometimes you over interpret it as

1105
01:02:08,960 --> 01:02:11,040
Speaker 2: one particular behavior. You know, You've always got to keep

1106
01:02:11,080 --> 01:02:13,600
Speaker 2: in mind that a fossil or a trace fossil or

1107
01:02:13,600 --> 01:02:16,720
Speaker 2: whatever it is you're looking at just represents one animal

1108
01:02:16,800 --> 01:02:19,800
Speaker 2: at one particular point in its life. It doesn't represent

1109
01:02:20,560 --> 01:02:23,600
Speaker 2: the complexities of its behavior and its biology. You've got

1110
01:02:23,640 --> 01:02:26,080
Speaker 2: to be really careful about interpreting these sorts of things.

1111
01:02:26,680 --> 01:02:29,120
Speaker 1: I mean, it's I think that's what I like about,

1112
01:02:29,160 --> 01:02:32,000
Speaker 1: Like when you look at like modern animal behavior and

1113
01:02:32,040 --> 01:02:36,480
Speaker 1: then you try to think about what humans say, you know,

1114
01:02:36,520 --> 01:02:39,160
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand years from now, or maybe aliens would

1115
01:02:39,720 --> 01:02:42,480
Speaker 1: might how they might misinterpret something. So like that, what

1116
01:02:42,520 --> 01:02:46,280
Speaker 1: we're talking about reminds me of hermit crab death cyclones

1117
01:02:46,400 --> 01:02:49,800
Speaker 1: or they they get stuck. So like we leave out

1118
01:02:49,920 --> 01:02:53,680
Speaker 1: glass or plastic bottles on the beach hermit crabs will

1119
01:02:54,280 --> 01:02:58,680
Speaker 1: investigate the aperture because they are drawn to apertures because

1120
01:02:59,040 --> 01:03:02,080
Speaker 1: I mean, they're always sort of looking out for interesting

1121
01:03:02,120 --> 01:03:05,120
Speaker 1: little nooks and crannies to get into but also potentially home.

1122
01:03:05,280 --> 01:03:07,520
Speaker 1: So they look at this aperture and then they kind

1123
01:03:07,520 --> 01:03:10,840
Speaker 1: of fall into the neck of the bottle. And a

1124
01:03:10,880 --> 01:03:13,840
Speaker 1: lot of these bottles are designed such that the hermit

1125
01:03:13,880 --> 01:03:16,040
Speaker 1: crab can get in, but they can't get out because

1126
01:03:16,040 --> 01:03:18,280
Speaker 1: they don't have the friction right that, like, they have

1127
01:03:18,360 --> 01:03:20,800
Speaker 1: the traction of the sand as they're going in, but

1128
01:03:20,880 --> 01:03:23,240
Speaker 1: once they've slipped in, they no longer have traction, so

1129
01:03:23,280 --> 01:03:28,160
Speaker 1: they're stuck and then they die. And hermit crabs have

1130
01:03:28,240 --> 01:03:30,919
Speaker 1: this behavior that when they smell a dead hermit crab,

1131
01:03:30,920 --> 01:03:37,720
Speaker 1: it gives off this there's this decomposition odor that attracts

1132
01:03:37,720 --> 01:03:45,240
Speaker 1: other hermit crabs because free home, so free real estate folks.

1133
01:03:46,000 --> 01:03:49,320
Speaker 1: And so then they are drawn to this this bottle

1134
01:03:49,560 --> 01:03:50,120
Speaker 1: and they're.

1135
01:03:49,920 --> 01:03:53,000
Speaker 2: Like, hey, you just you just end up with a

1136
01:03:53,080 --> 01:03:54,280
Speaker 2: pile in this battle.

1137
01:03:54,440 --> 01:03:57,120
Speaker 1: You get a jug of dead hermit crabs. And what

1138
01:03:57,280 --> 01:04:00,640
Speaker 1: a weird thing. Like if you're an archaeologist hundred thousand

1139
01:04:00,680 --> 01:04:02,160
Speaker 1: years from now and you look at this thing you

1140
01:04:02,240 --> 01:04:06,360
Speaker 1: might think, like, well, people liked to gather hermit crabs

1141
01:04:06,400 --> 01:04:08,840
Speaker 1: and jugs and keep them in there for some reason

1142
01:04:09,120 --> 01:04:12,040
Speaker 1: or or this is like hermit crabs liked to use

1143
01:04:12,120 --> 01:04:14,520
Speaker 1: these jugs as like a din and this is like

1144
01:04:14,560 --> 01:04:19,640
Speaker 1: a family of hermit crabs. Everything absolutely wrong, But like

1145
01:04:19,680 --> 01:04:22,479
Speaker 1: you can think about all the ways we could come

1146
01:04:22,600 --> 01:04:25,000
Speaker 1: up with some theory about this, all the ways in

1147
01:04:25,040 --> 01:04:28,320
Speaker 1: which it's wrong. I do. I like, I love these

1148
01:04:28,400 --> 01:04:32,680
Speaker 1: sort of illustrations where I forgot the artist's name, but

1149
01:04:32,760 --> 01:04:35,640
Speaker 1: it's those I think the same artist that was like

1150
01:04:35,680 --> 01:04:38,040
Speaker 1: behind like all Yesterday's or all tomorrow's.

1151
01:04:39,080 --> 01:04:43,760
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I've met him.

1152
01:04:43,800 --> 01:04:49,600
Speaker 2: I've met him. Google Dixon, Sorry Dixon.

1153
01:04:49,400 --> 01:04:54,200
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, and and sort of the the take, you know,

1154
01:04:54,560 --> 01:04:59,240
Speaker 1: taking up the skeleton of a swan and then trying

1155
01:04:59,280 --> 01:05:01,880
Speaker 1: to reimagine it as someone might try to reconstruct it.

1156
01:05:02,000 --> 01:05:06,520
Speaker 1: Is this terrifying creature that uses its side like like

1157
01:05:06,720 --> 01:05:10,040
Speaker 1: armbones to stab prey and get fish.

1158
01:05:10,400 --> 01:05:12,600
Speaker 2: And it's yeah, when you when you find things that

1159
01:05:12,680 --> 01:05:15,720
Speaker 2: have no modern equivalence is when you really start to struggle,

1160
01:05:15,760 --> 01:05:19,000
Speaker 2: like interpreting the behavior or the biology of it, like.

1161
01:05:18,960 --> 01:05:24,720
Speaker 1: The Tolly monster, which you know, but yeah, it is

1162
01:05:24,760 --> 01:05:27,240
Speaker 1: a really I think that's what's something that is so

1163
01:05:27,320 --> 01:05:30,560
Speaker 1: interesting to me about palaeontology is that you do you

1164
01:05:30,640 --> 01:05:35,960
Speaker 1: have such limited data and so it is the that

1165
01:05:35,960 --> 01:05:40,400
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you can't come to interesting conclusions or come

1166
01:05:40,440 --> 01:05:45,600
Speaker 1: to correct conclusions, but it requires so much thoughtfulness because

1167
01:05:46,080 --> 01:05:49,640
Speaker 1: you know, it is like what we were saying with like, say,

1168
01:05:49,760 --> 01:05:54,400
Speaker 1: you don't take into account that you're finding this fossil

1169
01:05:54,440 --> 01:05:56,760
Speaker 1: because this is the most this is the only place

1170
01:05:56,760 --> 01:05:59,200
Speaker 1: that a fossil could have formed, and it doesn't actually

1171
01:05:59,240 --> 01:06:01,760
Speaker 1: tell you much about the animal animal's behavior and how

1172
01:06:01,800 --> 01:06:06,000
Speaker 1: you cope with those problems and then yet continue on

1173
01:06:06,720 --> 01:06:10,080
Speaker 1: to figure out, you know, what might actually be a

1174
01:06:10,440 --> 01:06:13,280
Speaker 1: better theory. And it's just so interesting to me. So

1175
01:06:14,840 --> 01:06:18,680
Speaker 1: bad news everyone. My guest did get hit by an

1176
01:06:18,720 --> 01:06:22,800
Speaker 1: asteroid and now has to spend a few million years

1177
01:06:22,840 --> 01:06:27,120
Speaker 1: re evolving. Now he's fine, just his internet cut out.

1178
01:06:27,280 --> 01:06:31,960
Speaker 1: So what a wonderful guest he was, wasn't he? So again,

1179
01:06:32,040 --> 01:06:36,000
Speaker 1: his name is Dane pat You can find him on

1180
01:06:36,280 --> 01:06:41,880
Speaker 1: a Blue Sky so and he is also a museum educator,

1181
01:06:42,000 --> 01:06:45,520
Speaker 1: a science communicator. Very cool. I was so lucky to

1182
01:06:45,560 --> 01:06:47,880
Speaker 1: have him on the show today. Before we go, I

1183
01:06:48,080 --> 01:06:50,200
Speaker 1: do got to play a little game called guests Who's

1184
01:06:50,200 --> 01:06:53,640
Speaker 1: Squawking the Mystery animal sound game. Every week I play

1185
01:06:53,800 --> 01:06:57,000
Speaker 1: a mystery animal sound and you, the listener, try to

1186
01:06:57,040 --> 01:07:02,840
Speaker 1: guess who is making that sound. So here is last

1187
01:07:02,880 --> 01:07:06,800
Speaker 1: week's mystery animal sound. The hint was this, who's a

1188
01:07:06,880 --> 01:07:18,040
Speaker 1: stripey baby? All right? So congratulations to Emily M, joeyp

1189
01:07:18,680 --> 01:07:23,919
Speaker 1: and Jares for guessing correctly that this is a baby zebra. Specifically,

1190
01:07:23,960 --> 01:07:28,120
Speaker 1: this is a baby plane's zebra. So the brain the

1191
01:07:28,160 --> 01:07:31,479
Speaker 1: brain call of a zebra. These are meant to help

1192
01:07:31,520 --> 01:07:34,880
Speaker 1: orient the herd in one direction. It might also be

1193
01:07:35,040 --> 01:07:38,960
Speaker 1: useful for disorienting and confusing predators because you have this

1194
01:07:39,120 --> 01:07:44,720
Speaker 1: cacophony of this sound. Very distracting calls can also be

1195
01:07:44,880 --> 01:07:50,120
Speaker 1: used to communicate socially. Something cute about plaines zebras is

1196
01:07:50,160 --> 01:07:54,680
Speaker 1: that herds will collectively protect bowls by forming a ring

1197
01:07:54,800 --> 01:07:58,240
Speaker 1: around them defensive things. So where all the youngest the

1198
01:07:58,280 --> 01:08:03,360
Speaker 1: babies are protected from creditors. All right, So onto this

1199
01:08:03,400 --> 01:08:08,520
Speaker 1: week's mystery animal sound. It is inspired by young listener Eleanor,

1200
01:08:09,600 --> 01:08:12,520
Speaker 1: And here is the hint. If you wanted it, you

1201
01:08:12,560 --> 01:08:20,240
Speaker 1: should have put a ring on it, all right. So

1202
01:08:20,280 --> 01:08:22,080
Speaker 1: if you think you know who is making that sound,

1203
01:08:22,080 --> 01:08:23,880
Speaker 1: you can write to me at Creature Feature pod at

1204
01:08:23,880 --> 01:08:27,280
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. You can also write to me your questions,

1205
01:08:27,360 --> 01:08:32,240
Speaker 1: interesting articles you've read, questions about your pets, just pictures

1206
01:08:32,280 --> 01:08:35,120
Speaker 1: of your pets. I always love those, So yeah, that's

1207
01:08:35,200 --> 01:08:38,360
Speaker 1: Creature featurepotd at gmail dot com. Thank you guys so

1208
01:08:38,520 --> 01:08:41,400
Speaker 1: much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you

1209
01:08:41,520 --> 01:08:45,160
Speaker 1: leave a rating and or review, it really does help me.

1210
01:08:45,240 --> 01:08:47,720
Speaker 1: I read all the reviews and all the ratings are

1211
01:08:47,760 --> 01:08:52,720
Speaker 1: incredibly helpful to keeping keeping them metrics up for that algorithm.

1212
01:08:53,040 --> 01:08:56,800
Speaker 1: Because robots rule the world. Be boop thanks to the

1213
01:08:56,800 --> 01:08:59,400
Speaker 1: Space Cossics for their super awesome song ex So Alumina.

1214
01:08:59,439 --> 01:09:02,800
Speaker 1: Creature Feature creat Your features a production of iHeartRadio. For

1215
01:09:03,040 --> 01:09:06,160
Speaker 1: more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the

1216
01:09:06,200 --> 01:09:09,280
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are he guess what p of

1217
01:09:09,360 --> 01:09:11,920
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows? Not your mother, and

1218
01:09:11,960 --> 01:09:13,719
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what to do, but I will

1219
01:09:13,760 --> 01:09:17,360
Speaker 1: tell you this. If you find a tolly monster under

1220
01:09:17,400 --> 01:09:21,439
Speaker 1: your bed, don't panic. Call your local paleontologist. They'll be

1221
01:09:21,600 --> 01:09:24,840
Speaker 1: very interested to meet him. See you next Wednesday