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