Speaker 1: Hello, Dr Jessup. Anybody here? Well, hello, good sir. I'm
Speaker 1: glad to see you have arrived. I apologize I can't
Speaker 1: be there to greet you in person, but please know
Speaker 1: that I have most appreciative of your attendance. It's so
Speaker 1: hard to find good volunteers these days. It's it's just
Speaker 1: just every undergraduate with even a bit of backbone and
Speaker 1: simply vanished in the past six months. Uh huh okay,
Speaker 1: So am I in the right place? Ah? Well, well,
Speaker 1: perhaps instead you should ask whether you were in the
Speaker 1: right time? Uh huh. Well, the flyer said you were
Speaker 1: doing six for test subjects in something called Middle Cambrian exposure.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what that is, but if you're paying cash,
Speaker 1: I'm still on board. Excellent. Now tell me do you
Speaker 1: have any experience with time displacement? I don't think so,
Speaker 1: of course, not, of course not. You can tell me.
Speaker 1: Can you swim? You know I can, but it's one
Speaker 1: of those things I wouldn't say I'm a great swimmer. Okay,
Speaker 1: nobody's perfect. Do you see the throbbing lightness of the
Speaker 1: world text in the center of the room there, Well, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do, except go to it right, Yes, yes, closer,
Speaker 1: closer doesn't feel right? What's that feeling? What's the matter,
Speaker 1: my little vertebrate? Haven't you ever wanted to feel? Five
Speaker 1: hundred miran years loved? What is that? Is? That? Is
Speaker 1: that an ocean? Oh? My god, It's like the whole
Speaker 1: planet's an ocean. It's full of monsters. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your Mind from housework dot com. Hey, welcome
Speaker 1: to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. That was obviously
Speaker 1: a reference to some kind of journey we may be
Speaker 1: taking to the Cambrian period. That's right. Yeah, we had
Speaker 1: a little cameo by the late great Anton Jess late
Speaker 1: did he die? I don't know. I mean there are
Speaker 1: there are rumors of his death, but who knows for sure?
Speaker 1: They always exaggerated. Is well? Anyway, today I've got a
Speaker 1: little story I want to tell the lead us into
Speaker 1: our topic. Now. Obviously it is October. It's our favorite
Speaker 1: time of year to talk about monsters. We talked about
Speaker 1: monsters anyway, but this is the time where we really
Speaker 1: double down. Its clear mandate for monsters, and I got
Speaker 1: to take a monster science adventure this past month. So
Speaker 1: this this past month, early on one Sunday morning, my
Speaker 1: wife Rachel and I were in Canada and we woke
Speaker 1: up before dawn on this Sunday morning in the town
Speaker 1: of Golden British Columbia. It's in western Canada, the Canadian Rockies,
Speaker 1: and we had some coffee and bagels, and we filled
Speaker 1: up our backpacks with a bunch of layers of warm clothes,
Speaker 1: bottles of water, all that hiking stuff, and we drove
Speaker 1: along the steep mountain sides to this tiny town called
Speaker 1: Field in British Columbia. And there we parked beside a
Speaker 1: gas station and we waited to meet our guide and
Speaker 1: the rest of this tour group. So the guide was
Speaker 1: a paleontologist named David, and the hiking group was mostly
Speaker 1: French speaking families, some really lovely people and some very
Speaker 1: intelligent children with great questions like why do animals die? Uh?
Speaker 1: And so we hiked through the town of Field and
Speaker 1: along this uphill path through the forest up the side
Speaker 1: of Mount Stephen. And as we went on throughout the day,
Speaker 1: the trail got steeper and steeper, and we could see
Speaker 1: through the trees the town. We came from was becoming
Speaker 1: this tiny miniature model in the distance. And then right
Speaker 1: around midday we came out of the tree line and
Speaker 1: we walked up on this bare plane of flat rocks
Speaker 1: and they were pieces of the underlying shale formation that
Speaker 1: had chipped and broken off, and they had gathered in
Speaker 1: this relatively flat part of the mountain side. And on
Speaker 1: this plane of rocks, you walk around and you pick
Speaker 1: up these mineral fragments and they're full of fossils. It's
Speaker 1: just fossils everywhere. Almost every other rock you find has
Speaker 1: the shape of an animal from millions of years ago
Speaker 1: printed into it. You're literally walking on thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of fossils. So you're in this this mountainous environment and David,
Speaker 1: who by the way, i'm picturing as the Android from
Speaker 1: Prometheus and Alien Covenant, is guiding you and showing you
Speaker 1: these these prehistoric remnants in the rock. David was not
Speaker 1: Michael Fastbender, but David was excellent. He was a really
Speaker 1: really good guide. And this place we came to where
Speaker 1: we were walking on fossils, this was the Mount Stephen
Speaker 1: Trio bite beds. It is a graveyard of organisms from
Speaker 1: the Cambrian period about five hundred million years ago. Now.
Speaker 1: Mount Stephen is in an area that's home to the
Speaker 1: Urgess Shale geological formation, which is one of the most
Speaker 1: important sites of Cambrian Period fossils in the world. And
Speaker 1: if you ever get a chance to do one of
Speaker 1: these hikes, I highly highly recommended. I think it literally
Speaker 1: might be the coolest thing I've ever done. You have
Speaker 1: to book them through this organization called the Burgess Shale
Speaker 1: Geoscience Foundation, and they pair you with a guide. Our guide, David,
Speaker 1: the paleontologist, was an excellent science communicator. He was really
Speaker 1: good with the kids on the group, and he was
Speaker 1: a great hiking guide. So if you get a chance
Speaker 1: to go with David, big thumbs up to him. Be
Speaker 1: warned if you do try to do this, it's a
Speaker 1: tough hike. It's like eight kilometers round trip horizontally with
Speaker 1: a seven hundred and ninety five meter elevation gain, which
Speaker 1: is like two thousand, six hundred feet and uh and
Speaker 1: that's starting at like twelve hundred or th hundred meters
Speaker 1: of elevation at the at the base of the mountain.
Speaker 1: Uh So the air is thin and it's worth doing
Speaker 1: some other hikes at higher elevation to get yourself accustomed
Speaker 1: to the lack of oxygen. But I also don't want
Speaker 1: to scare you too much. Obviously I will. I am
Speaker 1: no kind of athlete or experienced altitude hiker or anything
Speaker 1: like that, and I survived so beer advising listeners to
Speaker 1: wear their best flip flops this particular, just be prepared,
Speaker 1: have some layers, have some water, do a little practice.
Speaker 1: If you can make the trip, it is absolutely worth
Speaker 1: it to see these fossils firsthand. You can pick them up,
Speaker 1: you can feel the ribs of these Cambrian organisms. You
Speaker 1: can you can feel the contours of their bodies as
Speaker 1: they printed on this ancient shale. But also it's really
Speaker 1: cool to be there, just because the area around field,
Speaker 1: including Mount Stephen, trial By Beds and the Burgess Shale
Speaker 1: quarry quarries, are just arguably the most important Cambrian fossil
Speaker 1: sites in the world. They are a geological window into
Speaker 1: a time stranger, I would argue than any alien planet
Speaker 1: in any movie, any book, any video game, any Star
Speaker 1: Trek episode. I think the real alien monsters h And
Speaker 1: of course, as you if you know the show, you
Speaker 1: know use the term monster affectionately. It's not a pejorative.
Speaker 1: The real alien monsters are not out there on some
Speaker 1: exo planet. They were right here five million years ago,
Speaker 1: and in this one amazing place you can sort of
Speaker 1: crunch through their frozen graveyard and it's awesome. Now, Joe,
Speaker 1: do you find yourself falling into the same admittedly dumb
Speaker 1: trap that I do when I when I think about
Speaker 1: about the nationalities that are sort of overlaid regarding a
Speaker 1: fossil uh findes like these are Canadian Cambrian monsters and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Like, yeah, because I was recently reading
Speaker 1: to my son about Terra saurs and was reading about
Speaker 1: the about about Bavarian fossils of Terra saurs, and is
Speaker 1: as silly as it is, I couldn't help but think
Speaker 1: of of Bavarian Terra stars thinking about the Varian rhistoric creature,
Speaker 1: like wearing later hosen the big big stein of beer,
Speaker 1: And it's so unfair. You know, I've done the same
Speaker 1: thing thinking of Mongolian fossil finds. In our previous episode
Speaker 1: we talked about various raptors I believe remember it was
Speaker 1: the velociraptor or Dononicus. But I could not help but
Speaker 1: then think about them in terms of like human history
Speaker 1: regarding that area and part of his pack. Uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. And that does
Speaker 1: highlight the need to sort of explain how the Cambrian
Speaker 1: world was so different than our world, not just that
Speaker 1: it had different animals in it, but that planet Earth
Speaker 1: was different then. So when I say it was an
Speaker 1: alien planet, I mean that quite literally. It's not just
Speaker 1: that it had different fauna, it was a It was
Speaker 1: a totally different place to live. And so before we
Speaker 1: get into exploring these monsters of the Cambrian Period, these
Speaker 1: beautiful and bizarre creatures that you couldn't even dream up
Speaker 1: if you tried, I think we should take a look
Speaker 1: at the Cambrian Period itself and explain what it was
Speaker 1: like to be Terra five hundred million years ago. So
Speaker 1: the Cambrian Period lasted from about five hundred forty to
Speaker 1: about four hundred and eighty five million years ago, and
Speaker 1: if you were dropped from today straight into the Cambrian period,
Speaker 1: you would not recognize planet Earth. The Earth, for one thing,
Speaker 1: revolved faster than it does now, So days were only
Speaker 1: about twenty one hours long, and there were about four
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty of them in a year. The air
Speaker 1: would be hot, so the average global surface temperature would
Speaker 1: have been about ten degrees celsius hotter than today. That's
Speaker 1: a good bit hotter. The atmosphere, while it did have
Speaker 1: significant free oxygen, at this point, was not quite what
Speaker 1: it is today. It would have felt a little bit
Speaker 1: thick with carbon dioxide in your lungs. If you happen
Speaker 1: to see dry land, it would probably look more like
Speaker 1: the surface of Mars than Earth today. Because land dwelling
Speaker 1: plants didn't exist yet. It's kind of hard to imagine
Speaker 1: Earth that way. And without plant roots to hold the
Speaker 1: soil in place, lands surfaces eroded very easily in the
Speaker 1: wind and the churning water. So you know, the continents
Speaker 1: are constantly just kind of burning away into the oceans
Speaker 1: and being reformed. So to call back to a previous
Speaker 1: episode we did, was this was definitely a world before fire.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because what would it what would it burn? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I can't be sure it was totally without fire,
Speaker 1: but I mean, yeah, obviously not fire on the scale
Speaker 1: we see of wildfires in forests today. Because there was
Speaker 1: oxygen in the atmosphere at this point, but yeah, what
Speaker 1: what would burn? What would the fuel be? All Right,
Speaker 1: So we have this alien world with just a barren
Speaker 1: land when visible, and then we have this this ocean,
Speaker 1: this strange ocean, and the Cambrians Earth that that's not
Speaker 1: a story about land at all. That is a story
Speaker 1: about ocean. It was the ocean planet at that point.
Speaker 1: You could probably make the argument it's the ocean planet
Speaker 1: right now, but it definitely was then. According to Cambrian
Speaker 1: Ocean World Ancient Sea Life of North America by John
Speaker 1: Foster uh the love all of the seas rose steadily
Speaker 1: in this saw tooth rise and fall pattern throughout the
Speaker 1: Cambrian period. So at the beginning of the period sea
Speaker 1: level was actually a little bit lower than it is today,
Speaker 1: But by the end of the Late Cambrian sea level
Speaker 1: was about a hundred and sixty meters or five and
Speaker 1: thirty feet higher than it is today. So in today's terms,
Speaker 1: New York underwater, Rome underwater, Paris underwater, Baghdad underwater, even
Speaker 1: parts of Moscow underwater, and the high sea level in
Speaker 1: the Cambrian led to flooding of about forty percent of
Speaker 1: the area of Earth's continental masses. Compared that to today,
Speaker 1: we're only about five percent of that continental area is
Speaker 1: covered in water, so most of our planets dry land
Speaker 1: mass was gathered together closer to the south pole, and
Speaker 1: the continent that became North America was then called Laurentia,
Speaker 1: not then called by people who have been people today
Speaker 1: called that continent than Laurentia, and you sort of have
Speaker 1: to imagine North America turned sideways, mostly flooded, straddling the equator.
Speaker 1: Also adding to the alien quality in the Cambrian astronomy
Speaker 1: would have been a little bit different. So the Moon
Speaker 1: was more than twenty kilometers closer to Earth than meaning
Speaker 1: that its gravity was stronger, meaning the high and low
Speaker 1: tides on Earth were higher and lower. Okay, you know
Speaker 1: my son was just talking to him to me the
Speaker 1: other day about the size of the moon and prehistoric times.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like he knew that the moon was bigger
Speaker 1: in prehistoric times. Yeah, and uh, and knows that it
Speaker 1: will be it will be smaller in future times. Did
Speaker 1: he into it that or did he find that out somewhere?
Speaker 1: He consumes a lot of dinosaur train and he really
Speaker 1: likes this podcast, Wow in the World. That's a great
Speaker 1: science podcast for for kids. So and then you know,
Speaker 1: we talked to him a lot about science. Man, I
Speaker 1: wish I was that cool when I was, I probably
Speaker 1: just would have told you about like which ninja turtle
Speaker 1: was bigger in prehistoric times. Yeah, so far ninja turtles
Speaker 1: will probably come in and wash it all the way.
Speaker 1: But for now, he's really really into the thing, like
Speaker 1: an alien ocean driving away the continents. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: we looked under that ancient ocean, that's where the real
Speaker 1: craziness comes in, because we would find this vast realm
Speaker 1: of gorgeous, terrifying, surreal monsters that would look completely unlike
Speaker 1: the kind of Earth life we're familiar with today. Because
Speaker 1: the Cambrian period is the geological layer where we see
Speaker 1: evidence of one of the most fascinating and mysterious events
Speaker 1: in the history of life on Earth, known as the
Speaker 1: Cambrian Explosion. So explosion. What exploded? Was this like a
Speaker 1: bunch of volcanoes or something? No, the Cambrian explosion is
Speaker 1: a story about biodiversity. So, Robert, how old is the Earth? Oh,
Speaker 1: it's so at four and a half billion years old. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the general astronomical idea. So four and a half
Speaker 1: billion years old. We've had this planet roughly, and we
Speaker 1: know there's been single celled life on the planet for
Speaker 1: at least maybe three and a half billion years or so,
Speaker 1: based on fossil traces left behind by these organisms. And
Speaker 1: new findings keep pushing the debatable frontier of earliest life
Speaker 1: farther and farther back into the darkness of Earth time.
Speaker 1: One example, I just came across So the other day,
Speaker 1: just earlier this year, in March seventeen, there was an
Speaker 1: article published in Nature arguing that apparent microbe fossils in
Speaker 1: the New Vue Agatuck Belt in Quebec are about three
Speaker 1: point eight billion and possibly four point three billion years old,
Speaker 1: somewhere in that range, and these single celled life forms
Speaker 1: would have been surviving around hydrothermal vents and had this
Speaker 1: biochemistry based on eating and excreting iron. That's that's like
Speaker 1: a comic book film, right, yeah, the iron eater. And
Speaker 1: the crazy thing is that if these findings are correct,
Speaker 1: life on Earth would have began within just a few
Speaker 1: hundred million years of the planet first accreting together in space.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to believe, but whether life on
Speaker 1: Earth began like four point two billion years go or
Speaker 1: more recently. We know that for a long long time,
Speaker 1: life on Earth wasn't becoming much more complex, right. There
Speaker 1: was no serious multicellular life, So no animals, no fish
Speaker 1: and reptiles, no birds, no plants, no mushrooms, just microbial
Speaker 1: organisms like bacteria and archaea floating around in the oceans,
Speaker 1: forming mats and films and occasionally occasionally building these giant
Speaker 1: mineral brains in the surf called strummtallites. So this would
Speaker 1: be if this were a science fiction film, this would
Speaker 1: be the least cinematic alien life form encounter unless it
Speaker 1: made people like, you know, horribly sick obviously, or possessed them.
Speaker 1: Biofilm planet, yeah, yeah, the planet of slime. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was would be the episode of of Star Trek that
Speaker 1: that does not does not make it to the series. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, that would have been the story
Speaker 1: of Earth for most of Earth's history, not having any
Speaker 1: kind of interesting animals or anything like that. Not to
Speaker 1: say that microbes aren't interesting in themselves, but maybe less
Speaker 1: interesting to look at. It would have been slime planet. Yeah. Generally,
Speaker 1: this is the stuff that occupies one, maybe two pages
Speaker 1: of a of a large prehistoric life book before you
Speaker 1: get onto the more exciting things, the things that children
Speaker 1: can imagine fighting each other. But it's most of the
Speaker 1: life that's ever happened. And then billions of years later,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, something happens very suddenly.
Speaker 1: Loads of insane animals show up. And when I say suddenly,
Speaker 1: I have to qualify that that's suddenly from a geological
Speaker 1: point of view, which in reality means it took millions
Speaker 1: of years about five hundred and forty million years ago
Speaker 1: to about five hundred million years ago. But that's still
Speaker 1: pretty suddenly compared to the age of the Earth. And
Speaker 1: this geologically rapid spike in animal diversity delivers creatures with
Speaker 1: bilateral symmetry, with large bodies, with eyes, with legs, with shells,
Speaker 1: with segmented body parts. You've got all of these crazy
Speaker 1: different types of creatures suddenly showing up, and it's like
Speaker 1: where did they all come from? Yeah, it's like all
Speaker 1: these prototypes are rolled out at once. It's like the
Speaker 1: segment in is it is a RoboCop one or two
Speaker 1: where we get all the crazy prototypes that, oh, that's
Speaker 1: a RoboCop two. Yes, yeah, it's one of our favorite
Speaker 1: points of comparison on the show for biology. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: you have suddenly all these different, you know, seemingly crazy
Speaker 1: examples of life, and many of many of which don't
Speaker 1: seem to to fall in easily into that category of well,
Speaker 1: this is a precursor to something we have later on.
Speaker 1: It's a precursor to something we have today now. Of course,
Speaker 1: for some people with negative attitudes towards evolutionary science, this
Speaker 1: provides some kind of rhetorical ammunition, right indeed, I mean
Speaker 1: the explosion is often exploited by evolution of niers, even Darwin,
Speaker 1: we have to note thought that the explosion was at
Speaker 1: odds with the normal evolutionary process, which in a funny
Speaker 1: way could be true, but not in the way an
Speaker 1: evolution denier would mean. A couple of thoughts. Evolution is
Speaker 1: we're familiar with it today, tends to take place within
Speaker 1: ecosystems in which every niche is already filled. So basically,
Speaker 1: every way there is for a creature to make a living,
Speaker 1: there's already something trying to do that. So if you
Speaker 1: want to compete, you've got to outcompete these other organisms.
Speaker 1: The global ocean of the Cambrian on the other hand,
Speaker 1: represented a world in which it seems like there was
Speaker 1: still tremendous ecological opportunity to occupy, Like there was territory
Speaker 1: in the ecology that didn't have any existing competition. So
Speaker 1: it was a time in which an animal could start
Speaker 1: doing something to eat or to otherwise survive, and no
Speaker 1: other species was already doing that thing. There was just
Speaker 1: sort of like free land to grab. Yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 1: land grab call the frontier, except without other organisms already
Speaker 1: occupying it. So that there could be one explanation for
Speaker 1: why evolution seems to be working differently at this one
Speaker 1: period in history than it has since. But also the
Speaker 1: Young Earth creationist who exploits ongoing abates in biology to
Speaker 1: sort of resort to the supernatural. They're employing a fallacy
Speaker 1: in rhetoric known as the argument from ignorance fallacy, which
Speaker 1: means like, I don't know what caused something, therefore the
Speaker 1: cause is x uh. Example, you don't know who committed
Speaker 1: the Jack the Ripper murders, therefore it was interdimensional sasquatches. Now,
Speaker 1: the version employed here, of course, says, you can't all
Speaker 1: agree we don't know on what caused the sudden or
Speaker 1: geologically sudden biodiversity of the Cambrian explosion. Therefore, the cause
Speaker 1: is supernatural. Now, this line of thinking obviously doesn't get
Speaker 1: you anywhere once you examine it, but the disagreement and
Speaker 1: debate over the cause is a fascinating, outstanding question, and
Speaker 1: it's something I think we want to entertain a few
Speaker 1: answers to today. Now, some of the hypotheses are primarily
Speaker 1: environmental and chemical. Right, so some scientists have proposed that
Speaker 1: the cause of the camera and explosion could be a
Speaker 1: rise in the content of oxygen in the atmosphere, which
Speaker 1: leads to an increase in the level of dissolved oxygen
Speaker 1: and the oceans. Now, of course, remember that Earth's original
Speaker 1: atmosphere did not have free oxygen, right, That was added
Speaker 1: to the atmosphere gradually as a waste product of photosynthesis.
Speaker 1: You have all these microbes out there and they're eating
Speaker 1: the sunlight and then their geoengineering the atmosphere with their
Speaker 1: waste products, which included oxygen. The gradual natural terraforming of
Speaker 1: our world. Yeah, the microbial terraforming of Earth, which absolutely
Speaker 1: did happen in the past, and that's where we get
Speaker 1: our oxygen. Now, when you think about it. Large, fast
Speaker 1: moving animals need lots of oxygen to feed their energy
Speaker 1: hungry tissues. Like think of the way that when you
Speaker 1: move your muscles a lot, your body starts greedily gulping
Speaker 1: down more and more air. In the same way, if
Speaker 1: you think about these organisms in the past, suddenly you
Speaker 1: wanted to have organisms with large bodies. They would have
Speaker 1: needed access to oxygen. So maybe when that oxygen became available,
Speaker 1: suddenly you could build these big, fast moving bodies and
Speaker 1: you get all this animal biodiversity. So previously the the
Speaker 1: oxygen economy would not support this kind of growth, right,
Speaker 1: But the idea is then it would. So did a
Speaker 1: sudden increase in oxygen drive the explosion? Well, some recent
Speaker 1: studies have cast doubt on this hypothesis, including one published
Speaker 1: in Nature by Spurling at all uh and it basically
Speaker 1: did not find evidence of a significant increase of oxygen
Speaker 1: in ocean water at the beginning of the Cambrian So
Speaker 1: evidence shows that if there was an increase in oxygen
Speaker 1: at the Cambrian transition, it was kind of a small one.
Speaker 1: Al Right, Well, what else do we have? Well, other
Speaker 1: hypotheses are more biological and ecological, like what if there
Speaker 1: was one type of biological innovation, some new way for
Speaker 1: animals to make a living or new thing. Animals could
Speaker 1: do that rapidly accelerated competition with an ecosystems, which would
Speaker 1: speed up natural selection and cause new species to form
Speaker 1: much more rapidly. How about the example of site. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a big yeah. So previous animals they might
Speaker 1: have had some kind of photosensitive spots or receptors that
Speaker 1: would have allowed them to, for example, move towards the sunlight.
Speaker 1: But the Cambrian is the first period in history where
Speaker 1: we have evidence of complex site organs, you know, eyes.
Speaker 1: It's the age of organisms with compound eyes. So imagine
Speaker 1: how much adaptive pressure would be put on you if
Speaker 1: you lived in a world where all creatures were basically
Speaker 1: blind and then suddenly some of your competitors could see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is a crazy thing to try to imagine,
Speaker 1: but yeah, just just think of sight coming online in
Speaker 1: a world and all the additional stuff that this entail.
Speaker 1: Suddenly pigmentation begins to matter. I mean, it's hard to
Speaker 1: even apply. You're one is tempted to apply this to
Speaker 1: human arms race um, which is which is often an
Speaker 1: an apt comparison. But I mean, what can we even
Speaker 1: look to in human technology and human weapons systems. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking maybe you could apply it. You can
Speaker 1: compare it to flight and say that, well, once, once
Speaker 1: human technology allowed us to take to the air, that
Speaker 1: created an entire new theater of war, and they also
Speaker 1: changed the existing theaters of war. And I think you
Speaker 1: could make that comparison pretty well, like flight changed the
Speaker 1: nature of warfare forever, Like suddenly just having like lots
Speaker 1: of ground troops didn't didn't matter a whole lot, right,
Speaker 1: But this, this seems more extensive than that. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like it's it's the opening of another dimension of
Speaker 1: competition in a way. Yeah, and yeah, and you think
Speaker 1: so you you mentioned pigmentation. Suddenly the colors you are matter,
Speaker 1: like blending in matters. But also think about the way
Speaker 1: it would make movement matter. It would make the shapes
Speaker 1: of bodies matter. It would just completely change all the
Speaker 1: dynamics of how creatures interacted with one another. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: only prey predator interactions, but of course just interspecies of communication, uh,
Speaker 1: and as well as mating, etcetera. I mean, every thing
Speaker 1: changes because of this. Yeah, So We'll come back to
Speaker 1: look at more of these answers to this question throughout
Speaker 1: the episode, but I think we should take our first
Speaker 1: break and then we come back. We will look at
Speaker 1: one of the first major inhabitants of our Cambrian monster House.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So as we roll through these,
Speaker 1: I also want everyone to think of potential Halloween costume ideas,
Speaker 1: because I think we have some We have some wonderful
Speaker 1: prehistoric monsters here that I think are more inventive listeners
Speaker 1: might be able to turn into a mask or a
Speaker 1: full body cost Okay, So I want you Starship Troopers
Speaker 1: fans out there to get a little bit excited about
Speaker 1: stone Bug Planet fans of the book or the movie, well,
Speaker 1: I mean they both got bugs. Okay. So in eight
Speaker 1: six there's a Canadian geologist by the name of Richard McConnell,
Speaker 1: and he's visiting the town of Field, the same town
Speaker 1: I went to when I began the walk up Mount
Speaker 1: Stephen Field, British Columbia, where some railroad workers told him
Speaker 1: they had found so then creepy on the slopes of
Speaker 1: nearby Mount Stephen. They were these things that they called
Speaker 1: quote stone bugs, and these were in fact, trilobytes the
Speaker 1: best known inhabitants of the Cambrian oceans. Now, trialobytes are
Speaker 1: not a single species, but there are a class of
Speaker 1: extinct animals from the phylum Arthropoda, and so that would
Speaker 1: be the same phylum that includes, for example, insects and crustaceans,
Speaker 1: lobsters or arthropods. Insects and spiders or arthropods. These exoskeleton creatures,
Speaker 1: now trialobytes were an enormously successful form of life, beginning
Speaker 1: in the Cambrian and surviving for about three hundred million
Speaker 1: years until they were wiped out about two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million years ago in the Permian Triassic extinction event
Speaker 1: also known as the Great Dyeing, which was the biggest
Speaker 1: mass extinction in the history of planet Earth. About nent
Speaker 1: of all marine species went extinct. It's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to imagine, but until then, trial bites were like sort
Speaker 1: of like the insects of today, just this enormously successful,
Speaker 1: the type of creature found everywhere. They were a swarm
Speaker 1: upon the face of the deep or as I kind
Speaker 1: of want to think of them as the infinity bugs.
Speaker 1: I like it. So the trio byte body structure kind
Speaker 1: of resembles like a roly poly or a pill bug,
Speaker 1: maybe crossed with a horseshoe crab. It's got these articulated
Speaker 1: segments lining its back, and if you look at it
Speaker 1: from the top down, you'll see this flat, hard shell
Speaker 1: made of a matrix of tiny calcite needles. And if
Speaker 1: you look at it on the vulnerable underside, you'll see
Speaker 1: the legs and the gills and the mouth. And actually
Speaker 1: it does kind of look like a like a roly
Speaker 1: poly or a pill bug on the underside too, if
Speaker 1: you ever see them. Yeah, I have to say the
Speaker 1: Trilobyte of all the creatures were going to discuss today, Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's the most famous, I think, so
Speaker 1: most of you have probably seen images of it before.
Speaker 1: But it also does look a lot more like existing creatures.
Speaker 1: It doesn't if you, if you didn't know better, you
Speaker 1: could easily see an image of this and think that
Speaker 1: it could be something living today. Yeah. I think the
Speaker 1: creepiness of the triobyte world comes not from seeing their
Speaker 1: body plans, because you can see stuff that looks kind
Speaker 1: of like them, Like you say, it's just how many
Speaker 1: of them there were, and thinking of this being one
Speaker 1: of the dominant body plans on the planet or the
Speaker 1: dominant body plan on the planet. And if you're still
Speaker 1: drawing a blank as to what this looks like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to include images of of all the species that
Speaker 1: we're discussing here on the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: It's stuff to blow your mind dot com. All right,
Speaker 1: So we've had to look at the creature's legs. Let's
Speaker 1: turn this puppy around. Okay, turn it so if you
Speaker 1: look at it from the top down, you can basically
Speaker 1: divide a trialobyte in three both ways, so if you
Speaker 1: look at it lengthwise, you're looking at it head on. Lengthwise,
Speaker 1: there is bilateral symmetry, and this is the cameraan period.
Speaker 1: We see these animals with bilateral symmetry really taking over.
Speaker 1: You can fold them in half and they're like a book.
Speaker 1: They match on both sides. And in that lengthwise direction,
Speaker 1: the trilobyte is divided into three lobes. You've got the
Speaker 1: axial lobe, which runs down the middle from the head
Speaker 1: to the tail, kind of like the spine of the
Speaker 1: book or like the spine of a vertebrate. And then
Speaker 1: you've got the two plural lobes on each side. Which
Speaker 1: you're shielding the legs from above. There were these you know,
Speaker 1: shelled lobes stick out on the side and they cover
Speaker 1: up where the legs would be moving underneath. Now you
Speaker 1: rotate at ninety degrees, and then you've got another three sections.
Speaker 1: You've got the head known as the cephalon, the middle
Speaker 1: section known as the thorax, and the rear section known
Speaker 1: as the pigidium. Now, one thing you might wonder, why
Speaker 1: do we see these articulated segments on the shell of
Speaker 1: a trilobyte, Like, why doesn't it have something more like
Speaker 1: a big solid turtle shell? You know, why why the
Speaker 1: different plates overlapping? Well, there are multiple answers, but one
Speaker 1: is that apparently some trilobytes were able to partially curl
Speaker 1: up and protect their soft or bellies, like an armadillo
Speaker 1: or a pillbug. Yeah, it's so. Do you do you
Speaker 1: use the word pillbug or roly poly? Do I think
Speaker 1: they're the same thing, the same creature or the same
Speaker 1: you know, classification of creatures at the very least. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I grew up with roly poly. I think I did too,
Speaker 1: And somehow in my adulthood transition to pillbug, I've sold
Speaker 1: out my childhood wonders. It does sound significantly less silly. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: trial bite fossils are that. That's what you're walking on
Speaker 1: in the Mount Stephen trial by beds, right. So you
Speaker 1: walk around, you crunch through these things, you pick up
Speaker 1: these rocks and they've got these little shells in them,
Speaker 1: and the trial bite fossils are so common you can
Speaker 1: get the sense that these animals must have been stacked
Speaker 1: a mile high when they actually existed, right. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of them in the Cambrian but they're perhaps
Speaker 1: overrepresented in the fossil record because many of the fossilized
Speaker 1: shells we find are not the animals themselves, but the
Speaker 1: discarded shells left over from the molting process. So, like
Speaker 1: Arthur pods today, trial bytes were himmed in by this
Speaker 1: protective shell, and if they wanted to grow bigger, they
Speaker 1: had to molt, which meant discarding that protective outer layer
Speaker 1: and temporarily risking a soft bodied existence in order to
Speaker 1: grow that larger, harder shell. It would be like if
Speaker 1: there were a prehistoric hominid creature that left multiple skeletons,
Speaker 1: you know, which is of course impossible, but with an
Speaker 1: exoskeleton is is completely is very possible. Well, the vulnerability
Speaker 1: of molting makes me think about the comparison to a
Speaker 1: human newborn. You know, when when babies are born, they
Speaker 1: don't necessarily have all their their hard protective skeletal parts yet,
Speaker 1: and I have a lot of unfused together the unfused
Speaker 1: skull for example, and the soft cartilaginous body parts where
Speaker 1: you really do make yourself vulnerable when you're first born.
Speaker 1: But of course they're depending on the fact that mammals
Speaker 1: have protective parents that will try to prevent injury to
Speaker 1: their offspring when they're young and vulnerable trial bites. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they're they're quite so protective of their
Speaker 1: I mean you could say that puberty is kind of
Speaker 1: a molting period where where where we tend to be
Speaker 1: soft and vulnerable, if not in if not in mentally,
Speaker 1: at least mentally. Yeah. Uh so, that's interesting to think
Speaker 1: of the molting process having an impact on the sheer
Speaker 1: number of fossilized remains. But but then on top of that,
Speaker 1: of course, it makes you analyze, and we've discussed this
Speaker 1: on the show before, like what makes a creature more
Speaker 1: liable to be fossilized and I mean, you look at
Speaker 1: the creatures that are fossilized in any great number. It's
Speaker 1: not going to be an apex predator living in a
Speaker 1: dry region. It's going to be something like a low
Speaker 1: level and bird invertebrate that lives in the muck, something
Speaker 1: that gets buried quickly. Uh, and that leaves behind hard
Speaker 1: body parts near water, especially right. So the great the
Speaker 1: great land squid of old right, has not been preserved.
Speaker 1: But their beaks are many. Oh, yes, that's right. We
Speaker 1: would get the beaks. Yeah, these beds of beaks. We've
Speaker 1: under what they are. Yeah. But because there are so
Speaker 1: many triobyte fossils, and because they're so strange and so
Speaker 1: alien to the modern life forms we encounter in our
Speaker 1: day to day lives, I mean they might be they
Speaker 1: might bear some resemblance to insects, for example, right, and
Speaker 1: this is why railroad worker might call them stone bugs.
Speaker 1: But it's no surprise that they show up in human
Speaker 1: culture too. I wanted to mention one cool example I
Speaker 1: came across. Remember Adrian Mayor, who wrote the first fossil Hunters.
Speaker 1: We talked about her in our in our what was
Speaker 1: it the geomethology? Yes, yes, this had to do with
Speaker 1: how did ancient people look at fossil life remains? Didn't
Speaker 1: I think they were monsters? That they think they were dragons? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And did did these ideas of mythical monsters come from
Speaker 1: people finding fossils? So she's got another boat called Fossil
Speaker 1: Legends of the First Americans, and she writes of how
Speaker 1: triobyte fossils were apparently used as protective amulets by some
Speaker 1: of the Ute people of Utah. So this one story
Speaker 1: is that in the early nineteen hundreds there was an
Speaker 1: amateur natural historian named Frank back With, and he noticed
Speaker 1: a trial bite necklace at a Ute burial site. So
Speaker 1: he asked some friends of his name, Joseph and Tedford
Speaker 1: pick of It, who were members of the tribe, what
Speaker 1: this meant, and they told him that the fossil was
Speaker 1: called Timpei kansavaci, which meant little water bug in stone
Speaker 1: and Beckwith also records that the men told him that
Speaker 1: their elders believed that wearing the trial bites could protect
Speaker 1: against sickness and bullets. But I thought that's kind of
Speaker 1: cool that look somehow the fossils were intuited to have
Speaker 1: been water dwelling creatures, and I wonder how people would
Speaker 1: have figured that out back then. I thought that was
Speaker 1: really interesting. Yeah, especially given that there would be there
Speaker 1: would be plenty of terrestrial invertebrates to compare it to.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe they maybe they saw more of the
Speaker 1: of the crab in this creature than they did, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, terrestrial bugs. I know, I wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: that perceptive. I would have called it like roly Poly
Speaker 1: or something. Well, anyway, considering that all the there are
Speaker 1: all these shells everywhere, another possible answer to the question
Speaker 1: of what caused the Cambrian explosion comes up? What if
Speaker 1: the Cambrian explosion is an illusion? What if it is
Speaker 1: not so much an event in history where all these
Speaker 1: animals suddenly emerged, but a misperception created by the types
Speaker 1: of evidence available to us, a reporting error exactly, It
Speaker 1: would be a sampling bias. How would that be. Well,
Speaker 1: like we've been talking about, we know fossilization has this
Speaker 1: serious preference for hard body parts, and it appears to
Speaker 1: be around the Cambrian period that biomineralization, right, the forming
Speaker 1: of these mineral based body parts like skeletons and shells,
Speaker 1: that that became common in many different animals. It's the
Speaker 1: age of shells and exoskeletons. So it could be that
Speaker 1: many animal forms had precedent in the Precambrian era, that
Speaker 1: there were there were animals sort of like them living before,
Speaker 1: and it's simply that we don't have good records of
Speaker 1: them because they were aren't making hard body parts yet. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this makes sense. So it's not it's it's not
Speaker 1: that just suddenly there are all these creatures around with
Speaker 1: their hard shells. There were plenty of creatures around beforehand.
Speaker 1: It's just those were not preserved. Those are not as
Speaker 1: president the fossil record, right, because they didn't have the
Speaker 1: hard shells. Yeah. On the other hand, even soft animals
Speaker 1: leave some fossil traces like tracks and burrows, And generally,
Speaker 1: I think paleontolog just think that these types of fossils
Speaker 1: are not as abundant as they would seem to be
Speaker 1: if the Precambrian world was basically a soft, flappy copy
Speaker 1: of the Cambrian. But either way, this leads us to
Speaker 1: a kind of new way of framing the Cambrian question.
Speaker 1: If the Camerian explosion is characterized as this explosion of
Speaker 1: animal body plans, and especially those with hard body parts.
Speaker 1: Why do the hard body parts show up? Like? Where
Speaker 1: do they come from? Why evolve shells? And this leads
Speaker 1: us to another possible answer to the to the cause
Speaker 1: of the Cambrian explosion. What if it was caused by
Speaker 1: a by aological innovation like predation? Oh so like you,
Speaker 1: So you have all of these creatures that have that
Speaker 1: have evolved and then suddenly they realized, Hey, we can
Speaker 1: just eat each other. I can I can just eat
Speaker 1: these guys. Why should I compete for the same same
Speaker 1: meal when I can make them my meal and then
Speaker 1: I'm essentially eating what they already ate, Right, Why would
Speaker 1: I waste my time filter feeding when I can just
Speaker 1: eat ted over there? Yeah. So Eric Spurling, the Stanford
Speaker 1: paleontologist who is the lead author on one of the
Speaker 1: papers I mentioned earlier in this episode, he explained in
Speaker 1: a Nature News article earlier this year, or actually know
Speaker 1: it was last year, that he thinks a very modest
Speaker 1: increase in dissolved oxygen could have been enough to push
Speaker 1: the the ocean chemistry over the edge to allow for
Speaker 1: the emergence of predation and carnivory. As an ecological niche,
Speaker 1: which would have thereafter driven evolution across the animal spectrum
Speaker 1: as this arms race between predator and prey emerged. In
Speaker 1: a world of predators, you need shells and you need
Speaker 1: to be able to move. Yeah, alright, well this this
Speaker 1: sounds the sounds plausible, and there's some evidence that this
Speaker 1: is what was happening. Here's an odd fact. Sometimes trialobyte
Speaker 1: fossils are missing chunks, not because the fossils have been damaged,
Speaker 1: but apparently because the animals were One example, a specimen
Speaker 1: of the trial trialobyte illinoid is found in Walcott's Quarry
Speaker 1: at the Burge of Shale, has this distinct W shape
Speaker 1: missing from its left side, as if something took this
Speaker 1: kind of two fanged bite out of it. So in
Speaker 1: this alien ocean, and you have to imagine me, uh,
Speaker 1: in the voice of Ripley and aliens, who's laying the eggs?
Speaker 1: What's taking the bites out of these trilobytes. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: less dramatic if if you put it that way, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's got to be something something else out there,
Speaker 1: some sort of predator that is that is chopping down
Speaker 1: of these guys. And this leads us to the second
Speaker 1: monster in our Cambrian monster House, the weird shrimp. Alright,
Speaker 1: hold that thought, because we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we will we will get
Speaker 1: to know the weird shrimp, which is truly unless you're already,
Speaker 1: you know, super familiar with this time period, I would
Speaker 1: say it's the first really alien creature of the Cambrian period.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. Okay. So in Ewo, a British
Speaker 1: Canadian paleontologist named Joseph Frederick Witty Eves was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to classify some odd Cambrian fossils that
Speaker 1: looked like headless shrimp shells. You can look at pictures
Speaker 1: of these online, but um, you could see these five
Speaker 1: hundred million year old imprints of these clawed tails and bodies,
Speaker 1: but the heads were always missing. Yeah, they look they
Speaker 1: basically look like entrees. Yeah. Yeah, it's like somebody pulled
Speaker 1: the head off the shrimp and served it to you
Speaker 1: in a little cocktail glass. Now, he named the organism
Speaker 1: Anomala carus, which means weird shrimp or strange shrimp or
Speaker 1: odd shrimp, however you prefer. Meanwhile, Burgess shale pioneer Charles Walcott,
Speaker 1: which who is the guy who the Walcott's Quarry at
Speaker 1: the Burgess Shield was named after, he collected and described
Speaker 1: a fossil of a different animal. These preserved remains only
Speaker 1: showed a large, disembodied mouth, a thick muscular ring shape,
Speaker 1: surrounded by a circle of jagged teeth facing inward, and
Speaker 1: Walcott believed this mouth to be the remains of a
Speaker 1: jellyfish that he named Patoya. Al Right, so this would
Speaker 1: be the mouth of an otherwise soft creature, that was
Speaker 1: his argument. And all we have left is the mouth, right.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't until many decades later that researchers Harry
Speaker 1: Whittington and Derek Briggs figured out that these two weird
Speaker 1: anomalous animals were weird and anomalous because they were different
Speaker 1: parts of the same creature, a huge Cambrian editor that
Speaker 1: retained the name of Anomala carus. The weird shrimp were
Speaker 1: actually a pair of clawed appendages basically mouth tentacles for
Speaker 1: snatching up prey and shoving it into the mouth parts,
Speaker 1: and the mouth parts where the toothy ring, which had
Speaker 1: previously been identified as patoya. If you've never seen an
Speaker 1: image of Anomala carus. This is another thing to look
Speaker 1: up well, or maybe we'll try to include a picture
Speaker 1: on the landing. Yeah, we'll include a picture of this
Speaker 1: this creature, because it's just too it's too weird. If
Speaker 1: it need be, we will draw one and uploaded to
Speaker 1: the side. It's sort of like impossible to make yourself
Speaker 1: believe that this thing really existed on Earth. But I've
Speaker 1: seen the fossils now, and so the reason these disembodied
Speaker 1: parts were originally misidentified was a common problem in paleontology.
Speaker 1: As we've mentioned several times now, fossilization is strongly biased
Speaker 1: toward hard body parts like shells and bones. Anomala carus
Speaker 1: did not have a hard exoskeleton covering its whole body,
Speaker 1: but probably had a very light kitanous outer layer like
Speaker 1: a shrimp shell on some parts of its body, and
Speaker 1: when it died and decomposed, its body probably fell apart
Speaker 1: into different pieces, and not all of those pieces were
Speaker 1: preserved at the same rate. So it's rare to find
Speaker 1: fossils that preserve any information about soft body parts, and
Speaker 1: even rarer still to find soft bodies intact all in
Speaker 1: one place. Rare, but not entirely impossible because since the
Speaker 1: original discovery of what amounted to Anomala cars is killing equipment,
Speaker 1: more fully preserved Anomala cars specimens have been discovered. For example,
Speaker 1: one fossil discovered in nineteen two shows the spiked feeding
Speaker 1: arms branching off of the head, within reach of the
Speaker 1: crushing mouth ring, and all contained within the imprint of
Speaker 1: this elongated soft body lined with lateral lobes that probably
Speaker 1: undulated to power swimming. So if you're trying to imagine
Speaker 1: this thing right now, you have to picture a kind
Speaker 1: of wide, flat at lobed jellyfish snake undulating along through
Speaker 1: the ancient seas, with a gaping mouth ring on the
Speaker 1: underside that could squeeze with teeth but never fully close,
Speaker 1: and then sticking out of its face a couple of
Speaker 1: hooked fang tentacles lined with spikes. Yeah this this looks
Speaker 1: like a creature that belongs in a Star Wars cantina. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it should be like having a drink and telling you
Speaker 1: it doesn't like you, and it probably doesn't like you.
Speaker 1: Now you you might be thinking, okay, so how big
Speaker 1: were these things? Right? Like? A few inches long? Parts
Speaker 1: found in fossil sites in China indicate that Anomalo carras
Speaker 1: type organisms may have grown to almost two meters long,
Speaker 1: which is around six feet. You know, people do those
Speaker 1: like booking a swim with the dolphins thing. I think
Speaker 1: people should book swim with the anomalo carras. They should
Speaker 1: use some kind of DNA engineering to bring these things back,
Speaker 1: you know, and then have you swim with them at
Speaker 1: the resort the per day shouldn't explosion hypothesis is correct? Especially,
Speaker 1: I mean, this was eating other animals was a growth industry,
Speaker 1: so it it does make sense that that the the
Speaker 1: successful model for eating other creatures would produce larger and
Speaker 1: larger organisms, right yeah. So, but the question I guess
Speaker 1: is if these things are preying on the you know,
Speaker 1: the widespread triobittes of the ancient seas, I don't know,
Speaker 1: would they take a bite out of you if they could.
Speaker 1: So you're in the water with them. You obviously don't
Speaker 1: look or smell like their normal prey. But then again,
Speaker 1: they might just want to see what it tastes like.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know. We kind of get into that
Speaker 1: whole shark and gorilla area. I don't know if I've
Speaker 1: mentioned this on the podcast, but I don't think so well.
Speaker 1: Every time I go to the ocean, I comfort myself
Speaker 1: regarding the risk or apparent risk of sharks and and
Speaker 1: of course just shark media in general by thinking about
Speaker 1: the just like a brief clip on The Simpsons where
Speaker 1: shark jumps out of the water and grabs a gorilla
Speaker 1: out of a tree, just ridiculous for several reasons, but
Speaker 1: it drives home like this is this is something that
Speaker 1: does not happen, is not part of the the the
Speaker 1: the the energy model for either species, you know, uh
Speaker 1: and and and that's essentially what I am. I am
Speaker 1: a gorilla in the water, and the shark has not
Speaker 1: evolved to eat me exclusively. It can if need be,
Speaker 1: but it's not out there looking for gorillas. Right. It
Speaker 1: might have also, though, evolved a sort of like prey
Speaker 1: diversity curiosity. It might take a little nibble on you
Speaker 1: to see what you're like, right, right, So I guess
Speaker 1: that would be the main concern. But I'm guessing you
Speaker 1: would have this element of surprise because, by the way,
Speaker 1: I don't mean to be promoting like fear of sharks.
Speaker 1: Obviously we're not their primary prey, right. But but I'm
Speaker 1: guessing with with humans, if if we were to go
Speaker 1: with our opening scenario and you were just dropped into
Speaker 1: the waters among these things, I would hope you would
Speaker 1: have this this element of surprise over them and they
Speaker 1: would be a bit shocked and uncertain and hesitant to
Speaker 1: approach you. So another thing that's really cool about Anomala
Speaker 1: carres is that they have these amazing eyes. For a
Speaker 1: long time, detailed evidence of non biomineralized arthropod eyes had
Speaker 1: been hard to find, but in two thousand eleven there
Speaker 1: was a letter to Nature that detailed this amazing find
Speaker 1: at the Emu Bay Shale of South Australia, and what
Speaker 1: they had found was preserved Anomala carus eyes, and they
Speaker 1: found that they had a pair of two to three
Speaker 1: centimeter eyes about five fifteen million years old, and they
Speaker 1: were compound eyes made of at least sixteen thousand hexagonally
Speaker 1: packed lenses, meaning these eyes would have been about as
Speaker 1: acute as the most powerful arthropod eyes today, like dragonfly eyes.
Speaker 1: And the authors think that this is uh that this
Speaker 1: evidence of acute vision lends support to the idea that
Speaker 1: Anomala carreras was a powerful, fast moving apex predator going
Speaker 1: all throughout the water column, which and this would have
Speaker 1: accelerated the arms race that triggered Cambrian biodiversity and i
Speaker 1: O mineralization. You know, this also just makes me wonder, though,
Speaker 1: would a creature like this have anything to fear? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean probably not. I mean if it's the apex
Speaker 1: predator of an ancient ocean. What, it's the biggest thing
Speaker 1: out there and it's got the most powerful killing equipment.
Speaker 1: What does it have to worry about? Nothing? Until you know,
Speaker 1: the time traveling human shows up and starts clubbing them.
Speaker 1: I guess that club they brought. You'd have to bring
Speaker 1: your own club. That's the key here. But nothing dead
Speaker 1: will go. Ah, well, you know maybe it's still living.
Speaker 1: Tree branch will work. Oh yeah, maybe that. Somebody should
Speaker 1: have told kyleys about that. I guess that wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been all that effective against the determinator. Yeah, where are
Speaker 1: they going to get a tree branch? And the desolate
Speaker 1: post apocalypture? Okay, we're on a tangent here, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at some more uh Cambrian monsters. But one
Speaker 1: more thing about Anomala carress before we move on, there
Speaker 1: is still a fascinating debate going on about how and
Speaker 1: what Anomala carress ate. So some of these wounded trial
Speaker 1: bytes that we discussed earlier have injuries. It really seemed
Speaker 1: to match the two pronged grasping appendages of the anomal
Speaker 1: caress and some experts believe that its mouth parts would
Speaker 1: not have been powerful enough to prey upon TRIALO bytes
Speaker 1: with their hard outer shells. So that kind of creates
Speaker 1: a question like what was was it eating something else?
Speaker 1: Like how could it have gotten through these hard outer shells.
Speaker 1: There are a few options. Maybe maybe they were just
Speaker 1: really beefy and they could crunch through those shells. Maybe
Speaker 1: they had some method of prying the shells off of
Speaker 1: weaker trialo bytes and sucking up all the soft parts inside.
Speaker 1: Or there's also an interesting possibility I learned about from
Speaker 1: the guide on our hike, David. Maybe they took a
Speaker 1: tip from the crab shack down the shore and they
Speaker 1: sought out soft shells trialo bytes who were in the
Speaker 1: process of molting. So you you release your hard shell,
Speaker 1: put that aside to be fossilized for people to find
Speaker 1: millions of years later, and then you stay soft for
Speaker 1: a little bit while you, you know, you grow. What
Speaker 1: if they sought those out, the molten trial bytes and
Speaker 1: nominoomb oh man, Yeah, I mean that could be. That
Speaker 1: could be the very uh niche that they are exploiting.
Speaker 1: When you turn to the model of of of eating
Speaker 1: other creatures, what better time than the molting period. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the trialo bytes and anomal carrass type creatures are
Speaker 1: some of the main players that we see in UH
Speaker 1: in Cambrian evolution, but there are also all of these
Speaker 1: fascinating bizarre periphery organisms. Like Robert, would you like to
Speaker 1: take us on a tour of the rest of the
Speaker 1: Cambrian monster house? Sure? Yeah, we have some wonderful UH
Speaker 1: specimens here to discuss here, and there's not there's not
Speaker 1: necessarily as much data behind all of them. I mean
Speaker 1: there's data, but it's maybe not as as sexy as
Speaker 1: such as a trilobyte. However, they still have some some
Speaker 1: fascinating features, and I think many of them would make
Speaker 1: excellent Halloween costomes. I would say they're much sexier than
Speaker 1: the trial byte, maybe just not as a robust step.
Speaker 1: So the first one here I want to discuss is
Speaker 1: um opabinia. I've often called the stock eyed vacuum cinabite.
Speaker 1: That's a good description one that I think evokes the
Speaker 1: alien qualities of this creature. So if you're not looking
Speaker 1: at a picture of this right now and stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind dot com, I want you to imagine
Speaker 1: something like a shrimp or a lobster, but with rows
Speaker 1: of side lobes along its sides, paddling along like the
Speaker 1: ores of a like a galley spiking ship. You's got
Speaker 1: these lobes on the sides, kind of like we described,
Speaker 1: with anomalocras that undulate to move it along throughout the water. Right.
Speaker 1: And you know, it is not that remarkable at the
Speaker 1: the end, Like I said, if you were just catching
Speaker 1: it a glimpse of it out of the corner of
Speaker 1: your eye, that the back portion doesn't look that different
Speaker 1: from again, like a lobster or shrimp or something. But
Speaker 1: it's the front end of the creature that is is
Speaker 1: rather interesting because it has a long, flexible proboscis tipped
Speaker 1: with grasping spines, and the creature itself was about three
Speaker 1: inches long, not counting this uh weird cool richie tentacle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Five eyes to right, five eyes on stalks. Yes, five eyes,
Speaker 1: just standing right at you on stalks like they put
Speaker 1: them on stalks. It's like just a mess with us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this all sounds very love crafty and
Speaker 1: but but according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Speaker 1: a reconstructed image of the creature resulted in laughter at
Speaker 1: a nineteen seventy two scientific meetings. So instead of looking
Speaker 1: at this thing and thinking, oh, this sounds horrific, it's like,
Speaker 1: got this reaching arm that you know is up to
Speaker 1: no good with its spikes on the end. But yeah,
Speaker 1: apparently when it was first presented, uh, other other scientists
Speaker 1: laughed at the prospect of something this ridiculous looking. So
Speaker 1: you have to think, so, it's got this reaching appendage
Speaker 1: that's sort of like its mouth appendage thing, So what's
Speaker 1: sort of like maybe sort of like an ant eater,
Speaker 1: I guess, but it's obviously not a vertebr at, not
Speaker 1: a mammal. Yeah, it was. The idea here is that
Speaker 1: this would have haunted the soft sea bed and it
Speaker 1: would would have reached into sand burrows with this, so
Speaker 1: this spiked terminating wriggly arm to grab delicious worms and
Speaker 1: uh and actually have a quote here. This is from HB.
Speaker 1: Whittington from the enigmatic animal Opabinia regalis Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale,
Speaker 1: British Columbia. This was presented the Royal Society b quote.
Speaker 1: Opabinia regalius may have plowed shallowly in the bottom mud,
Speaker 1: propelled by movement of the lateral lobes. The eyes are
Speaker 1: presumed to have been capable of detecting movements in the
Speaker 1: surrounding waters, and the frontal process to have been used
Speaker 1: to explore the mud for food and bring it to
Speaker 1: the backward facing mouth. The frontal process. That is the
Speaker 1: most amazing euphemistic term for killing equipment. And then they
Speaker 1: put the frontal process through the thorax the way that
Speaker 1: my son Uh describes it with the animals when he's
Speaker 1: like drawing dinosaurs. He says that this is the part
Speaker 1: that makes the animal's eyes close and then die. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, the frontal process is the part that
Speaker 1: makes the trial by its eyes closed. So this is
Speaker 1: a this is a cool specimen. It's it's unique, it's enigmatic,
Speaker 1: it's silly looking, but it's also you have to admit,
Speaker 1: a very sensible organism when you really think about it
Speaker 1: um it's it needs something to grab those worms. It
Speaker 1: has a single you know, grabber to do it. Now.
Speaker 1: It's It's also interesting that this one remains unassigned to
Speaker 1: any other extinct or currently living major group. That there
Speaker 1: are some theories, but for the most part, this is
Speaker 1: one of those um, you know, abandoned prototypes you can
Speaker 1: think of. You know, there's there there's nothing out there
Speaker 1: that that we know of that is a descendant of
Speaker 1: this thing. That's interesting because when I think about organisms
Speaker 1: like this, I think about the relationship between manipulation limbs
Speaker 1: and the evolution of intelligence. I mean, there's one way
Speaker 1: of looking at the evolution of hominid intelligence, and it's
Speaker 1: to say that, Okay, one thing that may have driven
Speaker 1: humans and other you know, great apes to have larger
Speaker 1: brains and more intellectual power than the average mammal is
Speaker 1: that they've got free limbs that they don't always have
Speaker 1: to use for walking and stuff like that to manipulate objects,
Speaker 1: and that the manipulation of objects allowed them to you know,
Speaker 1: have advantages in the manipulation of tools and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't help but imagine like what if this had
Speaker 1: been the successful uh limb of of of evolutionary ascension,
Speaker 1: and that ended up with all of these different like
Speaker 1: monolimbed creatures, you know, plowing about in the seas, climbing
Speaker 1: up onto land and maybe getting to the point where
Speaker 1: they're using that that one spiky tentacle to to type
Speaker 1: on computer keyboards. Yeah, yeah, you see it in octopi to,
Speaker 1: you know, having these free, these free limbs that they
Speaker 1: can manipulate things with. I wonder could Opabinia, if it
Speaker 1: hadn't gone extinct yet, could it have become the tool
Speaker 1: using creature before there were even mammals. But instead it
Speaker 1: just remains this this weird dead end that looks it
Speaker 1: looks like if you decided to make an animal out
Speaker 1: of random Lego pieces and he stuck that. I think
Speaker 1: they still have that, that sort of twisty grabber mechanism
Speaker 1: and the Lego kids today. Alright, the next creature on
Speaker 1: our list here is the Hallucigenia. Hallucigenia well named yeh,
Speaker 1: it almost doesn't need a cool nickname, but I know
Speaker 1: you have one thought up already. How about the creeping
Speaker 1: headless spike worm. Yes, yeah, that's because it works because
Speaker 1: we're essentially looking at a tube of flesh with two
Speaker 1: rows of spines on one side and one row of
Speaker 1: mouth tipped tentacles on the other. And on either end,
Speaker 1: if we're keep in mind here we're working from the fossils.
Speaker 1: Here on either end there's kind of a dark stain.
Speaker 1: Presumably one of them is the head. And presumably the
Speaker 1: idea here is that, at least the early ideas that
Speaker 1: it walked about on those spines and it waved its
Speaker 1: tentacles above it. Uh so you had this still walking
Speaker 1: tentacle waiver something with no modern analogy, no modern analogy.
Speaker 1: It looks like something that you would see illustrated in
Speaker 1: a Wayne Barlow alien book. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, or like
Speaker 1: something um, I don't know. It looks kind of like
Speaker 1: one of those blobs that sometimes shows up in a
Speaker 1: Gary Larson cartoon and he's just trying to create a
Speaker 1: weird alien shape. Yeah. I mean, it looks like something
Speaker 1: that would come out of a dream. Thus its name.
Speaker 1: You know, it looks it's hallucigenia. It's something that is
Speaker 1: that that seems like a fever dream of brought to
Speaker 1: life in a fossil. Now. I think this was first
Speaker 1: first put together by paleontologists in the seventies, right right,
Speaker 1: and then they had there was a subsequent find from
Speaker 1: Chi I know that showed a similar creature with a
Speaker 1: second row of tentacles tipped with claws, and then they realized, oh,
Speaker 1: we have it upside down. The creature walked on the
Speaker 1: tentacles and the spikes provided an upward facing protective array.
Speaker 1: So that's a lot. I mean, it's still a weird
Speaker 1: looking critter, don't get me wrong, but that's a lot
Speaker 1: more in keeping us what we might expect. You know,
Speaker 1: that's not that different from say, a turtle with legs
Speaker 1: on the bottom and the protective display on top, or
Speaker 1: any you know, various examples from the invertebrate world. I
Speaker 1: don't know, is that less weird? I'm trying to think. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's it's like a worm and it's got these
Speaker 1: long tentacles with mouths on them that it walks on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still weird, and it's got spikes sticking up. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess a little less weird than walking on the spikes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess. It's kind of a fun experiment you can
Speaker 1: play anytime you see like a crazy alien illustration. Try
Speaker 1: to decide is it more alien if you turn it
Speaker 1: upside down? Uh? Because yeah, you can either improve upon
Speaker 1: the design or figure about how they came up with
Speaker 1: it to again with maybe. Alright, so let's talk about
Speaker 1: it a little bit bit more here. So, University of
Speaker 1: Durham invertebrate paleontologist Martin R. Smith, who was an interesting
Speaker 1: chap He has a nice online presence. He placed the
Speaker 1: fossil of one of these creatures in an electron microscope
Speaker 1: in an attempt to, you know, figure out more about it.
Speaker 1: And one of the pressing questions was name, like, which
Speaker 1: which end is the head and which one is the anus? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's sort of. I knew there was
Speaker 1: some problem with locating its head, and that comes through
Speaker 1: in my name nomenclature of it, the headless spike worm.
Speaker 1: Now I mentioned the stains earlier, right, like, basically from
Speaker 1: the fossils we knew we knew that there was like
Speaker 1: a big stain on one end and a smaller stain
Speaker 1: on the other, and one was presumably the head. So
Speaker 1: the larger stain was was for a long time interpreted
Speaker 1: as a balloon like head on this creature. But it
Speaker 1: turns out it was very much a stain. It was
Speaker 1: the quote decay fluids that had been squeezed out of
Speaker 1: one end of the guts of the organism grows. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this was the anus in the head was on
Speaker 1: the other side. And when they looked to the head,
Speaker 1: you know what, they found hockey mask. Close they found
Speaker 1: a smiley face. Yeah, a pair of eyes with a
Speaker 1: semicircular grin. Uh. And it so it was sort of
Speaker 1: like a they say, it was sort of like a
Speaker 1: caterpillar looking creature. Yeah. Now when I say smiley face,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of abstract. I'm looking at an image
Speaker 1: of it here. But but we can't help but look
Speaker 1: at it with our with our human failings and say, oh,
Speaker 1: well that's a smiley face. Oh hallucigenia, you devil you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So hallucigenia is a fun one for sure. Stealing my heart.
Speaker 1: Take me somewhere even weirder, Robert, All right, well the
Speaker 1: next one is will Waxia, and uh, I believe you
Speaker 1: did you? Did you come up with a name for
Speaker 1: this one or did I? Okay, I think I actually
Speaker 1: came up with a few different ones here. So it
Speaker 1: looks kind of like a prehistoric iron maiden. It also
Speaker 1: looks like an organic battle holm or perhaps a grim
Speaker 1: dark Pokemon, and it provides another splash of of the
Speaker 1: bizarre to the Cambrian seas. So two rows of long
Speaker 1: spines and a kind of plate mail armor of leaf
Speaker 1: shaped ribbed plates again on something that looks like a hat.
Speaker 1: It it looks like a spiked hat like plate mail
Speaker 1: kind of scenario. I can't stress the armor analogy enough.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a half of a walnut with
Speaker 1: with plate mail on it and knives sticking out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like something an orc would wear on its head.
Speaker 1: And uh, A lot of the fossils here are essentially
Speaker 1: that we have of this thing are essentially flattened remains
Speaker 1: of this natural armor, because again it's the hard parts
Speaker 1: that were left with and we just have to try
Speaker 1: and interpret what the soft tissue would have consisted of.
Speaker 1: And there are different interpretations here. Now Martin Smith, who
Speaker 1: I just mentioned earlier, he favors the mollus interpretation. He
Speaker 1: says that their mouth, which would have been a radula
Speaker 1: bearing two rows of teeth, have several similarities with the
Speaker 1: teeth of modern mollus and uh and and they look
Speaker 1: nothing like worm teeth, because that's the other argument is
Speaker 1: that these are essentially worm creatures. Specifically they would be
Speaker 1: bristle worms. But that's more of a controversial interpretation. So
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of depth for that particular organism
Speaker 1: other than it just looks really strange. And when you
Speaker 1: when you see illustrations of the Cambrian sea, you will
Speaker 1: often find it'll get it will get in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: It won't be the central organism, but it will it
Speaker 1: will have a place in the in the in the illustration.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a question around among this ancient Cambrian
Speaker 1: monster house, this sea full of bizarre alien creatures, we
Speaker 1: have to imagine that modern day life forms can trace
Speaker 1: their roots back to organisms that inhabited these oceans, especially
Speaker 1: when you think about very successful, whole modern philo like vertebrates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the whole idea here is not that like everything
Speaker 1: dies often and and life begins a new Uh, that
Speaker 1: some of these models would would have descendants alive today,
Speaker 1: I'll be you know, rather different to organisms. And we
Speaker 1: have just such a case with Pekaia. Though it's a
Speaker 1: controversial example, right, yes, yeah, that this is not this
Speaker 1: is not set in stone that the fossils, of course are. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you you referred to this as the ancestor fish slug
Speaker 1: or potential potential ancestor. So if you're not looking at
Speaker 1: an image of this creature, imagine a c slug that
Speaker 1: swims like a modern fish, and you've got a clear
Speaker 1: vision of Pecaia, or at least a clear vision as anyone.
Speaker 1: The crazy thing about it is that that scientists point
Speaker 1: to its not a chord, a precursor to the spinal cord,
Speaker 1: and also a key aspect of this creature's swimming mechanics
Speaker 1: as a reason that it could just be an ancestor
Speaker 1: of all to bruts, including humans. But we're also throwing
Speaker 1: a curve in all this because it has a two
Speaker 1: lobed head that doesn't sound like any vertebrates I've ever
Speaker 1: heard of. Yeah, scientists remain split on this now. A
Speaker 1: nineteen discovery of a primitive fish in the Lower Cambrian
Speaker 1: also suggests that it in Pecaya had an even more
Speaker 1: ancient common ancestor. Okay, so it might be that this
Speaker 1: thing wasn't a direct ancestor of existing vertebrates, but that
Speaker 1: it might have been an offshoot of whatever was a
Speaker 1: direct ancestor of living vertebrates. And I think it will
Speaker 1: make a great Halloween costume for anyone out there who's
Speaker 1: who's not sold on the previous specimens. Grandma fish slug. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I can just imagine it moving like you
Speaker 1: you get used to seeing footage of sea slugs and uh,
Speaker 1: similar creatures and the way they move, but this would
Speaker 1: have moved if I'm if I'm reading it correctly, more
Speaker 1: more like a fish, more like an eel. So imagine
Speaker 1: like an eagle slug, and that's what you have here, totally.
Speaker 1: Now there's one more. I thought it would be good
Speaker 1: to mention because it's got a slightly love crafty in face, right,
Speaker 1: Leon Coylia the blind whip Hunter. Yes, it looks kind
Speaker 1: of This one's kind of hard to explain really, but
Speaker 1: you know, it looks shrimpy, looks a little flea like.
Speaker 1: But imagine a blind monster that stumbles around in the murk,
Speaker 1: just bull whipping everything is vicinity with flails and then
Speaker 1: just really whipping the heck out of potential prey. So
Speaker 1: whips coming out of its face. Yes, and that's what
Speaker 1: we have with leon Colia. Now we assume it was
Speaker 1: blind because we haven't found evidence of IY stalks yet,
Speaker 1: which if in the thing, of course, is that given
Speaker 1: these previous examples, it's entirely likely that that that could occur.
Speaker 1: At some point a future fossil find will reveal, oh, well,
Speaker 1: they did have eye structures and they look like this,
Speaker 1: but for the time being, the ideas that they were
Speaker 1: seemingly blind. The creature here was about two inches long,
Speaker 1: and it's usually classified as in as in our prode,
Speaker 1: though sometimes it's thrown into the arachnomorph subgroups, which would
Speaker 1: connect it, you know, more to scorpions and trilobytes. But
Speaker 1: still it's a fascinating creature to try and imagine, especially
Speaker 1: in this this changing time where eyesight is coming online
Speaker 1: for various organisms and new new methods of exploiting other
Speaker 1: organisms are becoming possible, and this one is just whipping
Speaker 1: things with its face. I felt I can eat something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I guess that's going to have to conclude our
Speaker 1: tour of the Cambrian monsters. But I do want to
Speaker 1: ask you, Robert, so clearly we have not exhausted all
Speaker 1: of the fascinating questions about the Cambrian period and the
Speaker 1: the emergence of biodiversity, animal biodiversity, especially in the Cambrian periods.
Speaker 1: So I want to ask you which of the Cambrian
Speaker 1: explosion theories we've discussed today appeals to you the most.
Speaker 1: Obviously we haven't covered all of the possibilities. There are
Speaker 1: other possible explanations out there. But what what? What What strikes
Speaker 1: true to you? Like? What sounds right? Does it? Could
Speaker 1: it have been cite as the thing that triggered all
Speaker 1: of this biodiversity, or the innovation of predation and carnivary,
Speaker 1: or the chemistry for biomineralization, or is it just this
Speaker 1: sampling bias where you know, maybe that there isn't as
Speaker 1: much bio innovation in this period as it seems just
Speaker 1: from the fossil record. I mean, I guess I could
Speaker 1: play it safe and say a little bit of all
Speaker 1: of those, But but I guess I tend to buy
Speaker 1: more into the predation and and cite arguments, with some
Speaker 1: support by by by some of the additional arguments. But
Speaker 1: but those are the two that I guess I feel
Speaker 1: like they have the most meat for me. But then again,
Speaker 1: I'm not a I'm not a scientist, you know, specializing
Speaker 1: in this time period, but but those are the ones
Speaker 1: that I feel like are the most Maybe it's just
Speaker 1: calling to the five year old in me. The it's
Speaker 1: the it's the explanation and involves creatures warring with each
Speaker 1: other and battling each other and there for that's the
Speaker 1: one that I can imagine. Yeah, it's hard to resist now,
Speaker 1: I know, I've I think I read at some point
Speaker 1: that one of the arguments against the site hypothesis is
Speaker 1: just that site doesn't generally matter in the water and
Speaker 1: especially in the deep water, as much as it does
Speaker 1: on land. And not that it doesn't matter at all,
Speaker 1: it does, but that you know, things like smell and
Speaker 1: hearing and stuff like that are more useful in the ocean.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I don't know, I'm not sure which I'm
Speaker 1: most convinced by. The predation one seems very interesting to
Speaker 1: me that if animals weren't really capitalizing on getting their
Speaker 1: energy from other more large sized animals before and suddenly
Speaker 1: they started doing that, that that could be you know,
Speaker 1: a game changer. It's also kind of an original sin
Speaker 1: type scenario too. It feels very mythic, right, like that
Speaker 1: that the first creature to figure out that it can
Speaker 1: it can prey on its fellow organisms. And how does
Speaker 1: that occur? Like obviously it's it's not just a situation
Speaker 1: of one day, uh this this creature just takes a
Speaker 1: bite out of another one, Like it's going to be
Speaker 1: a more gradual process and uh, you know, and and
Speaker 1: likely begins with some sort of gray area of competition
Speaker 1: for food, like for instance, a creature it becomes adept
Speaker 1: at stealing food from either maybe stealing food from its mouth.
Speaker 1: And what happens if you steal food from another creature's belly? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean that that is the difficulty of
Speaker 1: this hypothesis is you have to imagine what's the process
Speaker 1: that gets you there by gradual evolutionary change, Even if
Speaker 1: it's geologically rapid, it still would have been gradual in
Speaker 1: biological terms. Um, trying to you know, go from an
Speaker 1: organism organisms that are all basically vegetarian to some organisms
Speaker 1: eating other animals. Yeah yeah, Like another example that comes
Speaker 1: to mind is, of course animals that will consume their
Speaker 1: own young or their own eggs. We've talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: the parental cannibalism. To sort of reabsorb essentially lost energy,
Speaker 1: and how that could seemingly be an avenue into the
Speaker 1: into interpredation, because if you're absorbing your own biomatter back
Speaker 1: into yourself, then it becomes less of elite to absorb
Speaker 1: the biomatter of another. I can also see a scavenging
Speaker 1: to predation route that maybe, uh, the the gradual changes
Speaker 1: that allow you to better and better extracts nutrition from
Speaker 1: dead animals that you find on the bottom of the
Speaker 1: ocean could eventually become useful in killing live animals right right.
Speaker 1: Or you could just always do it and an angel
Speaker 1: told you not to until a snake suggested otherwise, just
Speaker 1: another possibility that could be it. Well, Robert, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't get the feeling that we're done with the
Speaker 1: Cambrian period. I think we may come back here in
Speaker 1: the future to explore some other scientific issues and when
Speaker 1: there may be other things to discuss with the burdge
Speaker 1: of shale as well. Yeah, and and in general, I'd
Speaker 1: love to do some more episodes in the future regarding
Speaker 1: prehistoric creatures. I feel like this is something we come
Speaker 1: back to time and time again. Well, I at least
Speaker 1: on what a bi monthly uh, kind of pattern, I
Speaker 1: guess so, I mean it's it's the seven year old
Speaker 1: in me. I've I've never gotten over how much I
Speaker 1: love dinosaurs and other weird organisms that don't exist today.
Speaker 1: It's it's part of my love for monsters, and it's
Speaker 1: part of what keeps bringing me back to paleontology. All right, well,
Speaker 1: we'll leave it at that, but in the meantime, definitely
Speaker 1: check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I'll
Speaker 1: check out the landing page for this episode because again
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to try to include images, illustrations of
Speaker 1: fossil representations, whatever I can find for each of the
Speaker 1: organisms presented here, so you can have some additional visual
Speaker 1: idea of what we're talking about. And I'll include links
Speaker 1: back to some of our other episodes that have dealt
Speaker 1: with prehistoric organisms. And if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or
Speaker 1: any other to suggest a future episode topic, you can
Speaker 1: always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
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