Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast. Is
Speaker 1: Alison Madama, the science how staff works dot com. And
Speaker 1: this is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Tell me something else, and do your kids
Speaker 1: play with sea monsters in the bathtub? You're just swimming cool?
Speaker 1: Not so much yet. Yeah, they got a couple of
Speaker 1: fish that squired out water, which are pretty exciting. A frog,
Speaker 1: it's getting a little moldy, to be honest. Nothing nothing
Speaker 1: is exciting. Its prehistoric monsters of the deep though, Yes,
Speaker 1: what about you when you hit the bathtub? And then
Speaker 1: the rare happenstance that I take a bath instead of
Speaker 1: a shower, I tend to only have like like a
Speaker 1: like an orange soda or an orange Lacroix with me.
Speaker 1: So I'm kind of out of the plastic sea monster phase.
Speaker 1: But when I was a kid, I mean I still
Speaker 1: loved giant sea monsters. But as when as a kid,
Speaker 1: I was really into them. And I had this book
Speaker 1: which actually brought in today and we have in the
Speaker 1: podcasting chamber with us um and it was titled The
Speaker 1: Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, and it's
Speaker 1: fabulous because it's like every other page is as like
Speaker 1: a double truck spread of of these awesome prehistoric monster
Speaker 1: um illustrations. I had a lot of fun going through it,
Speaker 1: definitely when we were picking out the animals that we
Speaker 1: wanted to feature because it's dinosaurs, and then later on
Speaker 1: it gets into prehistarting mammals that are awesome, you know,
Speaker 1: because it's like giant horses and and you know, killer
Speaker 1: sloths and things like that. And then there's a whole
Speaker 1: section with with the with the sea creatures, the sea monsters,
Speaker 1: if you will, and and they're amazing, I mean that
Speaker 1: the illustrations. Uh, it's several different illustrators, but a guy
Speaker 1: by the name of Colin Newman did the fish and amphibians. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and all the animals seem to have a slightly different personality,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, Yeah, it's like they don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong there, they look very scientific. There's nothing cartoony
Speaker 1: about them, but there's something about the way they're drawn, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where they have kind of they seem to have their
Speaker 1: own little personalities, right. The Shonnasarus, which we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about in a little bit. Kind of seems like
Speaker 1: it's almost smiling. It seems Mary. It seems like a
Speaker 1: Mary marine, a Mary fat dolphin, like I kind of expected.
Speaker 1: It kind of looks like you should be like dressed
Speaker 1: up like a like a nineteen twenties billionaire, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a monopoly man, like going like floating down
Speaker 1: the street in a like an underwater New York. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So before we get to some of the ancient rulers
Speaker 1: of the ocean that we want to talk about today,
Speaker 1: who who's ruling the oceans today? Who? Who are the
Speaker 1: big marine? Who the who are the rulers today? Well, um,
Speaker 1: as as anybody's ever watched Shark Week can tell you,
Speaker 1: the great white is pretty awesome. It's great white is
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. And and how bigs great white get Great
Speaker 1: whites can get about between twenty Yeah, it's pretty sizeable,
Speaker 1: they look pretty years and they can definitely chomp down
Speaker 1: on pretty much anything that gets in their path. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I was wondering when we're talking about great whites, Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, great whites have been around for a long time,
Speaker 1: so I really wanted to check on that and they've
Speaker 1: been around as long as eighteen million years ago to
Speaker 1: twelve million years ago, and then if you look at
Speaker 1: the Great Whites ancestors, they might go back as far
Speaker 1: as fifty million years ago. So it's not quite but
Speaker 1: it's still that's not quite as old as some of
Speaker 1: the characters we're going back like double that for for
Speaker 1: the guys we're looking at, of course the other as
Speaker 1: far as we're talking about sea monsters and just giant
Speaker 1: underwater creatures because obviously creatures in the sea can be
Speaker 1: larger than the creatures on on the surface because of
Speaker 1: you know, they're suspended in water, et cetera. And so
Speaker 1: today we actually have the largest species as far as
Speaker 1: we know that has ever existed, and that is the
Speaker 1: blue whale. Yes, and what are the measurements on the
Speaker 1: blue whale. It's pretty astounding, um, seventy eight feet in length,
Speaker 1: although they have one recorded at it in six ft,
Speaker 1: so that's pretty crazy. If you assume, I don't know,
Speaker 1: ten ft to a building story, so that would be
Speaker 1: equivalent to a ten foot building, I'm sorry, a ten
Speaker 1: story building. Well, yeah, I know, I knew what you
Speaker 1: were getting it. Yeah, and there and they obviously weigh
Speaker 1: a ton too, as much as a hundred fifty tons,
Speaker 1: and the females, of course, are larger than the males,
Speaker 1: which is nice to hear sometimes. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: distant relatives, um of of modern charks was the the megalodon,
Speaker 1: a big tooth. Yeah, and and this one is is
Speaker 1: a favorite I know of a lot of people out there,
Speaker 1: because there's actually a whole series of books, um, the
Speaker 1: meg books. I've not heard of those. Yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: forgive me, I can't remember the author's name offhand, but
Speaker 1: there's a there's a series of them and there it's
Speaker 1: actually I've never read read one, so the fans will
Speaker 1: have to correct me if I'm wrong in this. But
Speaker 1: there's it has to do with like there being like
Speaker 1: a deep area of the ocean that's still warm, but
Speaker 1: it's cut off from the rest of the ocean by
Speaker 1: like a really like chilly layer. Okay, species evolving, they
Speaker 1: have like isolation and they're all like running wild in there,
Speaker 1: and then scientists, you know, end up accidentally freeing them
Speaker 1: and they run rampage jaws like all over the ocean. Wait,
Speaker 1: was it the Michael Crichton I'm larn now, No, No,
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's some of the it's another dude,
Speaker 1: um and they almost made a movie out of her something.
Speaker 1: But but it's one it's it's one of these where
Speaker 1: I think it involves like each book ends up involving shark,
Speaker 1: giant sharks battling other prehistoric creatures, and it's part of
Speaker 1: this I don't know. There seems to be this whole
Speaker 1: like subset of fandom on on the Internet where people
Speaker 1: were really into um, prehistoric sea monsters and imagining what
Speaker 1: their battles, like their Godzilla esque battles would would consist of.
Speaker 1: You know which is pretty cool. Was that MTV show
Speaker 1: where they used to have the different celebrities battling it
Speaker 1: out in the in the ring, right, right, so Deathmatch
Speaker 1: except with yeah, except with with prehistoric monsters. Right. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about some of the characters we're gonna get
Speaker 1: around today. Yeah, we're we're dealing with with some legitimate
Speaker 1: prehistoric monsters here, we're shying away from the prestart sharks
Speaker 1: and getting into what a lot of people would would
Speaker 1: probably say like dinosaurs of the deep. Yeah, let's kick
Speaker 1: it off at the Shoonosaurus. So as we were just
Speaker 1: talking about let's imagine diving into the waters about two
Speaker 1: hundred and forty eight million years ago and way back.
Speaker 1: This is the Triassic Period, I believe. Yeah, So let's
Speaker 1: imagine that we're going to dive into what is now
Speaker 1: present day Nevada, except to then it was uh covered
Speaker 1: in water, and you might have encountered this gigantic greene
Speaker 1: reptile that to my eyes, like I said before, it
Speaker 1: looks like this sort of massive, pop bellied dolphin with
Speaker 1: a slightly sharper beak as opposed to the more rounded
Speaker 1: ones you might see on a bottle nose dolphin today.
Speaker 1: But the chopper beak only had teeth at the front,
Speaker 1: which I didn't find particularly scary. So I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I'm going to qualify this as legitimate monster per se. Well, still,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Teeth only at the front, that's kind
Speaker 1: of creepy. You were a smile at you, that would
Speaker 1: be It just reminds you of somebody having buck teeth,
Speaker 1: you know, It's like sore back in. A gentleman by
Speaker 1: the name of Dr. Semen Mueller discovered the fossilized remains
Speaker 1: of what we now know as a Shonasaurus popularis and
Speaker 1: Muller justice like proud looking. He's just he's a popular dude, right,
Speaker 1: So what that means in Latin? I've popular a popular snosaurus.
Speaker 1: I think it's what they're getting at. But sure, so
Speaker 1: Muller discovered them in this area of Berlin or what
Speaker 1: is now Berlin actheas Or State Park. But the serious
Speaker 1: digging didn't start until the nineteen fifties with two guys,
Speaker 1: Dr Charles Camp and Dr Samuel Wells from Berkeley, which
Speaker 1: does a lot with dinosaurs, and these two gentlemen unearthed
Speaker 1: about forty asaurs uh discovered in different locations throughout the park.
Speaker 1: And of course, in nine the shown is source Popularis
Speaker 1: achieved its place and fame. It became the Nevada State fossil.
Speaker 1: So good for them. I have to admit I didn't
Speaker 1: know that we had state fossils. I didn't either. I
Speaker 1: also have learned something that we have state insects. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I knew that, but state fossils is new.
Speaker 1: I wonder what Georges is. I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: So if they shown a source belonged to the order Ectheosauria,
Speaker 1: which means a fish lizard. Okay, so if you're to
Speaker 1: look at it, um, it had four paddles, kind of
Speaker 1: like the flippers that you see on dolphins today, and
Speaker 1: it had a fish like tail that barreled it through
Speaker 1: the water. How big is bigay roughly fifteen meters according
Speaker 1: to some measurements, and that's about double the length of
Speaker 1: the larger or great whites. Yeah, but that in perspective.
Speaker 1: And so that was for one particular species, the popularis.
Speaker 1: And then they unearthed another species um called the I
Speaker 1: believe the sicky in it sickeni insis, and that might
Speaker 1: have been even bigger. So a Shinasaurus breathed air, just
Speaker 1: like dolphins do, but the Shona saurs didn't lug its
Speaker 1: massive body to short lay eggs. Instead, it gave birth
Speaker 1: to live young at sea like its fellow athosaurs. So
Speaker 1: this is pretty cool. I was reading um that scientists
Speaker 1: unearthed the fossil of an adult female a thesaur giving birth,
Speaker 1: that the fossil record was able to capture that. That's
Speaker 1: I think that's just amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's one
Speaker 1: thing if you can get one just sort of standing there,
Speaker 1: but when you when you when you get like fossil
Speaker 1: uh finds that involve you have birth or or or
Speaker 1: you know, eggs or or like. The occasionally will be
Speaker 1: like two dinosaurs duking it out, you know. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: taken together, you kind of wonder why the Athosaurus, of
Speaker 1: which the Shona saurs was one, died out because there
Speaker 1: are some pretty highly successful animals and the occupied, according
Speaker 1: to scientists, um, the ecological niche of today's dolphins, and
Speaker 1: say they're around for about a hundred million years, So
Speaker 1: I would definitely say that's a that's a good run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's the Sinosaurus for you. Okay, I hope you
Speaker 1: guys have a good picture and if you don't have
Speaker 1: a good picture of the Shinnosaurus, look it up because
Speaker 1: he's he's worth a gander. Yeah, we'll have to put
Speaker 1: some pictures up on our Facebook page. Yeah, there there
Speaker 1: are a lot of pictures out there, so surely we
Speaker 1: can find a few we can link to. So let's
Speaker 1: come over to a different order, the paura order. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is where I mean, the other guys were great,
Speaker 1: but the police sours or where it really gets awesome. Um,
Speaker 1: and the one I'm gonna mention here is the Leo
Speaker 1: plurid on, all right, and this guy looks This is
Speaker 1: when they really start looking fearsome. This doesn't look like
Speaker 1: a fat dolphin. Let's turn the page there so I
Speaker 1: can actually gaze upon him again. Yeah, he I mean
Speaker 1: this looks like something that would battle like Godzilla. Um. Like,
Speaker 1: he's very very streamlined looking. Um looks kind of if
Speaker 1: you've seen like a whale skeleton. You know, the actual
Speaker 1: skull isn't big in bulbous, you know. Uh, that's kind
Speaker 1: of like the the overall shape going on with the
Speaker 1: with Elia Plurdon. So it's very streamlined looking, has a
Speaker 1: and has this like very sort of cruel looking head,
Speaker 1: big thick football player neck um streamlined body into these
Speaker 1: massive flippers, and so POS believe he was probably extremely
Speaker 1: maneuverable in the water and could move at different depths
Speaker 1: pretty easily, and was probably an excellent long distant swimmer.
Speaker 1: And where I've actually seen some like some some computer
Speaker 1: animated kind of videos where they show this guy and uh,
Speaker 1: one of his relatives like just sort of like popping
Speaker 1: out of nowhere and like biting the head off of
Speaker 1: another underwater creature, which is cool, and I imagine that's
Speaker 1: what the end game of this was like, but but
Speaker 1: I really dig the idea of of him being like
Speaker 1: one of these long pursuit killers, you know, where he's
Speaker 1: like he's chasing after him and he's just gonna wear
Speaker 1: you down over time, which which is actually kind of
Speaker 1: like early human hunters. I mean in the sense that
Speaker 1: early human hunters did like the long pursuit of a
Speaker 1: of an animal and then eventually wore it out. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: another possibility is that he could be engaged in those
Speaker 1: long swims to find a mate, right, Yeah, that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were. These were probably guys that covered a lot
Speaker 1: of territory. Um. Another part of that big cruel looking
Speaker 1: head he's got is he had some powerful muscles to
Speaker 1: drive the teeth into the prey um. What was its
Speaker 1: prey pretty much anything it wanted because this was a
Speaker 1: this is a top predator um and those are pretty rare.
Speaker 1: Right when you think about the structure of the food chain,
Speaker 1: you've got a couple of folks sitting on top, or
Speaker 1: animal species sitting on top, and then a whole mass
Speaker 1: accumulating on the bottom. Yeah, Like I I like the
Speaker 1: explanation of it as a as a pyramid. You know,
Speaker 1: and at the bottom of the pyramid you have is
Speaker 1: the thickest and that's where you have all the plant life.
Speaker 1: And as you move up the pyramid you have the herbivores,
Speaker 1: the omnivores, and then the carnivores. So the guy setting
Speaker 1: at the top is just like like one animal the
Speaker 1: other animals. Well yeah, yeah, guy right, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm using guy in a very gentle sense. The the
Speaker 1: animal setting at the very top of the pyramid on
Speaker 1: this which I'd like to imagine being like on a
Speaker 1: throne of bones, you know, like he pretty much runs
Speaker 1: the show, but that whole pyramid supports him. So there's
Speaker 1: so that's That's actually one of the interesting things when
Speaker 1: we get into looking at the fossil records and these
Speaker 1: like super predators and these these top predators, is that
Speaker 1: there weren't that many of these guys out there compared
Speaker 1: to the rest of the biomass that was ruling the
Speaker 1: earth in those days. So so we have we often
Speaker 1: have a lot less to go on. Um. I should
Speaker 1: also mention that the Leo Proudan this was a late
Speaker 1: Jurassic creature, so about two dred and thirteen million years ago.
Speaker 1: Where have you found some of these guys. Um they
Speaker 1: have shown up in uh the in eastern England and
Speaker 1: northern France. Uh you know, dating back up again about
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty million years or so. And uh
Speaker 1: oh and and this was pretty interesting too. Apparently there
Speaker 1: has been some um, some misinformation about their size. UM.
Speaker 1: Generally we're looking at about thirty nine feet in length,
Speaker 1: but there have been a there's been like a documentary
Speaker 1: or two that have have exaggerated it to eighty two feet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is quite quite an exaggeration. And and I was
Speaker 1: reading up on this and some of the reasons get
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. There's a probably the internet's biggest UM fan
Speaker 1: is this guy named Richard Forrest, and he runs POLICEO
Speaker 1: sour site, which is like just to a search for
Speaker 1: POLICEO source site, you'll find it and uh and he
Speaker 1: has a whole section where he talks about like some
Speaker 1: of these size controversies. And he said, it comes down
Speaker 1: to like two different things. On on one hand, again,
Speaker 1: you don't have a lot of fossil record for these
Speaker 1: big killers, uh, so you can kind of have to
Speaker 1: throw in some estimation. You know, like a lot of
Speaker 1: times you're estimating their size any way based on like
Speaker 1: their jaw side. And then then also you might you're
Speaker 1: you're thinking, like, all right, I have X number of
Speaker 1: skeletons of this guy, but this is this is not
Speaker 1: you know, the one that I have here is probably
Speaker 1: not the biggest, so we can probably estimate that they
Speaker 1: get maybe twenty bigger. So then you so you end
Speaker 1: up saying, hey, the species can get to this length.
Speaker 1: And then then also he said that if you're if
Speaker 1: you have you're trying to get funding for your study,
Speaker 1: then apparently size matters, so you want to stress the
Speaker 1: size of your creature, you know. Um and uh and
Speaker 1: then finally he referred to something and I love this,
Speaker 1: uh a process called godzilla god He said, godzilla ization,
Speaker 1: which sounds like you would want to say god zillification.
Speaker 1: But uh. At any rate, this has to do with
Speaker 1: the media picks up on one of these stories and
Speaker 1: the the Yeah, like the Predator X, which we'll get
Speaker 1: into you he just gets more ferocious with each media.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like like Science Daily gets it, he's
Speaker 1: pretty tough. Then New Scientists gets he's even tougher, you know,
Speaker 1: and like trickles down to finally people on the blogs
Speaker 1: are just like going nuts about how crazy this dinosaur
Speaker 1: is or pliosaur is um. So anyway, I found that
Speaker 1: really interesting. Well to his point, to forest point, I
Speaker 1: will say that when I when we were picking out
Speaker 1: the animals for this prehistoric podcast, I was checking out
Speaker 1: animals based on definitely appearance, but also size. I mean,
Speaker 1: the big ones you're you're curious, you know, they kind
Speaker 1: of blow you away, um, just off the bat. And
Speaker 1: then when you start getting into the different species. You know,
Speaker 1: of course they all have their own really unique adaptations
Speaker 1: that are fascinating in their own right, but off the bat,
Speaker 1: if something is forty two ft, definitely, yeah, that definitely
Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, this this should go on the podcast,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean I I tended
Speaker 1: to go first on just how ferocious and mean looking there,
Speaker 1: and then and then look and see how big they were.
Speaker 1: But it's it's kind of I guess they went through
Speaker 1: a similar thing with like with the actual like land dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: You know, for the longest, everybody loved the t rex
Speaker 1: and that was whatever was biggest, whatever was baddest, and
Speaker 1: then kind of people got more into like oh, velociraptors,
Speaker 1: which we've of course we did a whole podcast on that, right,
Speaker 1: and now velociraptors have their very own awareness day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: take that t rex. So I wonder if with like
Speaker 1: with the with the the prehistoric sea creatures, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like we're having the same process, but it's like
Speaker 1: a few years behind. So everybody's still up in arms
Speaker 1: about the big ones. It's kind of like nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: like pro wrestling, when everything has to be giant steroid guys,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's like we're still in like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, it's so big. It's like, let's look at
Speaker 1: how big this dinosaur is. It's like fifty ft. No,
Speaker 1: it's eighty feet. But maybe in like five years or so,
Speaker 1: we'll be really into the smaller predators of the in
Speaker 1: the fossil record. Well, before we get into the smaller ones,
Speaker 1: I want to tell you guys about the cronosaurs. And
Speaker 1: you guys might have heard about this one. This is
Speaker 1: another ple cosaur and he was occurring in the Early Cretaceous.
Speaker 1: So if you don't know when the Early Cretaceous period was,
Speaker 1: that's about four million years ago for this particular guy,
Speaker 1: this particular cronosaurus. So we're creeping up closer and closer
Speaker 1: to the more modern seat law. Right, And this was
Speaker 1: another marine reptile who's capable of reaching astounding lengths. This
Speaker 1: one clocked in at lengths of forty two ft. So
Speaker 1: take a moment and think about that. We can just
Speaker 1: throw these numbers around all day. Buttot again, that's that's impressive.
Speaker 1: Imagine swimming at your local beach and encountering a forty
Speaker 1: two organism. That's that's pretty astounding. So the Cretosaurus has
Speaker 1: been found um are fossils of the cronosaurs have been
Speaker 1: found in Australia mainly it's the biggest known place asaur.
Speaker 1: It had a flat topped head, and if you think
Speaker 1: of a crocodile head, that's what that's what to me.
Speaker 1: It kind of looks like it's reminiscent of a crocodile head.
Speaker 1: But it had those four flippers, and it had this
Speaker 1: body that tapered off into a point. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: tail exactly, didn't have a lobed fin or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but just kind of tapered off. It was an excellent swimmer,
Speaker 1: like the leoh plurid on that Robert just mentioned, that
Speaker 1: is a really tough word to say. Let's just say
Speaker 1: like it's fellow places I haven't spelled out fanatically in front.
Speaker 1: I mean I still keep tripping over it. So it
Speaker 1: had to leave the water to lay eggs. And this
Speaker 1: was really really it's only vulnerable times. It had this
Speaker 1: big head, strong teeth and jaws made it very formidable.
Speaker 1: Then it's a really big head, like it looks in
Speaker 1: the illustration, it looks oversized, like it looks a little ridiculous. Right,
Speaker 1: So we're sitting in this room that's maybe I don't know,
Speaker 1: ten ft by seven feet, and the preseosaur head, the
Speaker 1: Cronosaurus head I think, which just dominate this space. The
Speaker 1: head alone, it's pretty insane. But if you're really interested
Speaker 1: in them, I highly recommend you go to the Coronosaurs Corner.
Speaker 1: And that's a site that you've forwarded to me. And
Speaker 1: what that is is the site for a museum, and
Speaker 1: it's a museum in Australia, specifically the town of Richmond
Speaker 1: in Queensland. And Cronosaur's Corner is part of Australia's Dinosaur Trail.
Speaker 1: Did you know that Australia had a dinosaur trail? I
Speaker 1: knew they were They had some really cool fossils, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know that they had a dinosaur trail, right,
Speaker 1: so only they have established a route which you can
Speaker 1: go on and check out all the cool fines. And um,
Speaker 1: I was looking at the Chronosaur's site and they have
Speaker 1: all these pictures of the different fossils that people have found,
Speaker 1: so apparently they might still be letting you dig and
Speaker 1: and find stuff. I mean, you could come up with
Speaker 1: a Chronosaurus vertebratee or something, which I thought it was
Speaker 1: really cool. And they have a based on the pictures,
Speaker 1: they have like a giant like fake chronosaurus out front
Speaker 1: of the museum that you can I don't know if
Speaker 1: you're allowed to climb on it. Look like some of
Speaker 1: the photos people had climbed on it. But don't go
Speaker 1: climbing on it and blame us, but it looked really cool.
Speaker 1: Get your picture made with it for sure. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: we have any Australian listeners who's who've been to this
Speaker 1: particular corner of the world, please send us pictures. We
Speaker 1: would love to see them. Will post them on Facebook. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And Chronosaurus Corner, by the way, that's the corner with
Speaker 1: a K because it's you know, for branding purposes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chronosaurus is with the K corner KK. I don't know
Speaker 1: those Australians are always thinking, yeah, so what about the elasmosaurus.
Speaker 1: The way this guy looks, Yeah, this one's really cool.
Speaker 1: This is I guess the best way to describe it is,
Speaker 1: and I don't I really don't want to take this
Speaker 1: in a longness monster direction, but you know how the
Speaker 1: longness monsters basically supposed to look kind of like that,
Speaker 1: except with a much longer neck. And if I were
Speaker 1: to take a quote from nineteenth century English paaleontologist Dean Conniberry,
Speaker 1: he said that these that the Elasmosaurus has resembled quote
Speaker 1: snakes threaded through the bodies of turtles. So yeah, these
Speaker 1: dudes have really long necks. How long? Um? They contained
Speaker 1: twenty eight vertebrae uh and more than half of the
Speaker 1: animal's total length was neck, Like twenty six ft was
Speaker 1: neck and the things only forty six ft long. Right,
Speaker 1: So if I'm whatever, I am five ft something, let's
Speaker 1: round it off to five ft four. That would mean
Speaker 1: that I had a you know, more than a two
Speaker 1: and a half foot neck, which is kind of really
Speaker 1: is that would be tough with the podcast microphones. But
Speaker 1: it could it could come in interesting and we'll see
Speaker 1: how ye, how could that benefit benefit me? Well, they
Speaker 1: think that well, obviously it would come into play hunting.
Speaker 1: That's the big deal. Obviously if you're any kind of
Speaker 1: dinosaur or um or a plea saur and they think
Speaker 1: it went one of two ways. One way would be
Speaker 1: that basically his head can get get there before his
Speaker 1: body can, right, so his body's kind of hanging back here,
Speaker 1: and so he can sort of creep his his head
Speaker 1: up to you before you're the waters are disturbed by
Speaker 1: his body. Which sounds kind of cartoony, you know, it's
Speaker 1: you can kind of you know, sneak his head around
Speaker 1: the corner and then if you see something good, the
Speaker 1: body comes running fast. It reminds me of the Scooby
Speaker 1: Do cartoons, you know, where the legs are going so
Speaker 1: fast and they make that noise, you know, the Scooby noise. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It also reminds me of like um, like Inspector Gadget
Speaker 1: and um the elastic Man from Fantastic You know how
Speaker 1: that their head would come around a corner on like
Speaker 1: a super long neck and you know that's that's basically
Speaker 1: the advantage of this guy would have another possibility of
Speaker 1: feeding wise. Um. And this is one that we can
Speaker 1: back up with modern examples in the animal kingdom. UM
Speaker 1: involves up the the elasmosaur is just sort of you know,
Speaker 1: floating along the top of the water with his head
Speaker 1: all the way up right, looking down above water, like
Speaker 1: the periscope of a of a subway kind of thing. No, No,
Speaker 1: I think it would be more like like the crow's
Speaker 1: nest on a like a ship, except if if you
Speaker 1: were like up in the crow's nest looking down and
Speaker 1: seeing what kind of fish are down in the water.
Speaker 1: So he's he's got his head all the way up
Speaker 1: and he's looking down and seeing what's going on the water,
Speaker 1: and then he sees a fish he wants to eat,
Speaker 1: you know, he just strikes down to the water with
Speaker 1: his head long neck, grabs hold of it and has
Speaker 1: his lunch. And there is there's actually a bird that
Speaker 1: has a similar practice today and it is called snake bird.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, and then a anhinga. Uh. And I look
Speaker 1: up a picture of this guy and you definitely get
Speaker 1: a real prehistoric vibe off of him. Um. That's um.
Speaker 1: If you want to do a Google image search. It's
Speaker 1: a n H I n G A, and uh, it's
Speaker 1: got this creepy long neck and he just kind of sits,
Speaker 1: you know, up in the water. Uh, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of swan like ready to strike. And uh it's really cool.
Speaker 1: So that that's that's one way they think he this
Speaker 1: guy would have eaten. Um. So, so that's the Elasmosaurus
Speaker 1: in a nutshell. But I found like one other, like
Speaker 1: really cool um fact about about this particular prehistoric sea
Speaker 1: monster and it actually takes place in the Old West,
Speaker 1: all right, so um and I was not familiar with this.
Speaker 1: This may actually merit the whole podcast at some point,
Speaker 1: but there was a period during the Old West known
Speaker 1: as the Bone Wars or the Great Dinosaur Rush, and
Speaker 1: this just comes we should do a whole rush series
Speaker 1: podcast because I also want to do one on the
Speaker 1: uranium rush of the cool Yeah, yeah, if you guys
Speaker 1: have fresh ideas for podcasts besides gold rushes, or maybe
Speaker 1: we could do some interesting twists on gold rush besides
Speaker 1: Also Sarah and Katie will we'll have that for second, miss,
Speaker 1: But tell me about the So this one is you know, guys,
Speaker 1: you know the gold Rush of course was you know,
Speaker 1: people rushing out into the wilderness because there's gold out
Speaker 1: there and we've gotta have it. This is more instead
Speaker 1: of like grizzled old prospectors, this is like Yale educated
Speaker 1: paleontologists rushing out into the American West to try and
Speaker 1: find fossils. Yeah, and to get the prestige in honor of,
Speaker 1: you know, of discovering these things. So uh, and you
Speaker 1: have two guys in particular though, um, one name, one
Speaker 1: name Marsh and one name Cope, Edward Drinker Cope. And
Speaker 1: these guys like we're friends at one point, but then
Speaker 1: just just totally had a falling out over competition for
Speaker 1: these fossils and and and so they started feuding with
Speaker 1: each other. And when I say feuding, I mean they
Speaker 1: were resorting to bribery, theft, destruction of bones. Um, they
Speaker 1: were attacking each other in the scientific publications, trying to
Speaker 1: ruin each other's credibility and sabotage their funding. I mean,
Speaker 1: these guys were getting really nasty about about about bones
Speaker 1: and so so also they're you know, rushing to to
Speaker 1: get things done, right. So what happened when they went
Speaker 1: to Kansas. They went to Kansas, and uh and Cope
Speaker 1: found an Elasmosaurus um fossil, and so he starts like
Speaker 1: putting the you know, putting together the pieces and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what the overall you know, um body
Speaker 1: of the animal looked like. And in in his haste,
Speaker 1: he managed to put the head on the wrong end
Speaker 1: on the tape, so he ended up with the head
Speaker 1: on the tail. And then he sent this off, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it goes to publish, and and when he finds
Speaker 1: out what he did, he starts buying back the copies
Speaker 1: at his own expense, uh, so that nobody will see
Speaker 1: this horrible illustration, and he presented Mark his enemy. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: it takes just rich de light in this and just
Speaker 1: starts like like hammering him even more, even though Marsha
Speaker 1: later on made a similar mistake with Brona Saras skeleton.
Speaker 1: So it sounds amazing. And there's actually a graphic novel
Speaker 1: account of this titled, uh, Bone Sharps, Cowboys and thunder Lizards,
Speaker 1: A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope Athaniel Charles marsh in
Speaker 1: the Gilded Age of Paleontology. Uh, it looks really cool.
Speaker 1: Check that out. And that's by kind of Jim Otto Vianni. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a whole there's a whole comic book publisher publishing
Speaker 1: house out there, and they just do awesome comic books
Speaker 1: about scientists. So yeah, well that I'll have to put
Speaker 1: a link to that pitch. So what about some I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't have to go all the way back to
Speaker 1: uh the Bone Wars to figure out some modern day
Speaker 1: controversy around fossil finds. What about Predator X. Yeah, Predator
Speaker 1: X is the big one just just came out last
Speaker 1: year in two thousand nine out of believe um, a
Speaker 1: Norwegian expedition yeah, up around uh Spalls Bard actually and
Speaker 1: uh this was you know, studied by Oslo's Natural History
Speaker 1: Museum and uh and they found these these fossils and
Speaker 1: it looks to be a forty nine foot uh plosaur
Speaker 1: very similar. Yeah, dub predator. Predator X is not the
Speaker 1: official title. In fact, it has no like an official
Speaker 1: species uh you know name as of yet, no official classification.
Speaker 1: I guess they're still working on that. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people are thinking that it's a plosur like the Cronosaurus. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks very similar to the Chronosaurus and the Lapooradon Um,
Speaker 1: I rushed through it the a pronunciation there because it
Speaker 1: didn't have the word in front of me. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people think it's one of those two.
Speaker 1: We're not one of those two, but very similar, you know,
Speaker 1: except bigger. Um how big. They're saying that this uh,
Speaker 1: this guy would have weighed around fifty tons um with
Speaker 1: a foot long teeth and uh and yeah it would
Speaker 1: be long, um and that's its head makes the t
Speaker 1: rex is look like, you know, a bubble head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we keep picking on t I feel bad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the t rex, he's a land based animal. It's
Speaker 1: like if you put him in the water and he evolved,
Speaker 1: I'm sure he would have been bigger. That's true. We'll
Speaker 1: lay off the t rex. So so the jury is
Speaker 1: still kind of still kind of out on on Predator
Speaker 1: X exactly what it was and and uh you know
Speaker 1: what it was up to, but clearly it was some
Speaker 1: sort of massive you know, probably a policeosaur and was
Speaker 1: you know, at the top of its food chain. So
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty awesome looking. So there you have it. Um,
Speaker 1: we've run through four really cool prehistoric sea monsters and uh,
Speaker 1: there's some of our favorites you guys may have some
Speaker 1: favorites out there for you love to hear him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let us know, um and do let us know which
Speaker 1: one you think would win in a slugfest between various
Speaker 1: sea monsters of the d Yeah. You can always send
Speaker 1: us an email at science Stuff at has frix dot com,
Speaker 1: or check in with us on Facebook at Stuff from
Speaker 1: the Science Lab or on Twitter and lab stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: see what you got over there? You got some listener
Speaker 1: you want to share some listener mail. We recently did
Speaker 1: a really cool podcast on the Cardassian scale. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: to remind everybody, this is the scale, you know, type
Speaker 1: one civilization, type two, and it has to do with
Speaker 1: energy useage of a planet and how you would like
Speaker 1: the different levels of technological sophistication for a civilization. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it shows up in science fictional lot um, so
Speaker 1: we can put the collegible listeners. Hey, what's a good
Speaker 1: example of a you know, type four civilization Cardassian on
Speaker 1: which covers type one, two and three that's planetary, solar
Speaker 1: and and galactic energy. So four would be something beyond
Speaker 1: those three. So uh, some of you guys right in
Speaker 1: with ideas. Yeah, yeah, so let's see we had we
Speaker 1: heard from Marcus, and Marcus uh pointed out an example
Speaker 1: in the Star Ocean RPG video game franchise. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: it involves people who are in a type to civilization,
Speaker 1: but in the game they have only just recently achieved
Speaker 1: type two, and once they do, they write a way
Speaker 1: discover intelligent life. The other civilization had always known about them,
Speaker 1: but rules have been made, uh that type two should
Speaker 1: not interfere with the natural development of under vulp civilization.
Speaker 1: So it deals, uh, you know, to a large extent
Speaker 1: with with kardashev Um classifications. Uh. Then we heard from
Speaker 1: mo and Most says, quote, it seems to me that
Speaker 1: that you could make another universe. That if you could
Speaker 1: make another universe, you would somehow tether it, tether to it,
Speaker 1: and find some way of using that tether to generate power.
Speaker 1: If you needed more power, you would just have to
Speaker 1: either wait a bit or build more universes. What you
Speaker 1: don't solve your if you don't solve your energy problems, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, one way to do it is to build
Speaker 1: another universe. So in the just getting into again, this
Speaker 1: is like crazy advanced you know, theoretical, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: science and how we just threw it out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's just build another universe and parness the power from that.
Speaker 1: Apparently they went into it in a there's a recent
Speaker 1: like Radio Lab episode where it's like to uh, Robert
Speaker 1: Krulitch just talking to somebody about, uh, do it do
Speaker 1: it yourself universe is and what that would entail. And
Speaker 1: certainly if you could create another universe to generate power,
Speaker 1: that would you would be at least type four, maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe type five to to to get
Speaker 1: you know, real silly about it. Um. Then we heard
Speaker 1: from Gary, and Gary said in Frederick Poll's Heachy novels Um,
Speaker 1: I hope I'm saying that right, because it sounds kind
Speaker 1: of silly. There is a race called the Foe who
Speaker 1: were type four. They were actively trying to collapse our
Speaker 1: universe into a big crunch and a tip in an
Speaker 1: attempt to re engineer the universe when it big banged
Speaker 1: again into an all energy, no matter universe, because it
Speaker 1: would be better for their form of life. I'd say
Speaker 1: engineering an entire universe from the start is type four.
Speaker 1: And then he also pointed out that there's some examples
Speaker 1: in the Stargate universe, but the stuff in Frederick Pole's
Speaker 1: book that that's definitely yet type four and it sounds
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. I really need to read some of his stuff,
Speaker 1: all right, So that's cool. We covered cardashop skills, Monsters
Speaker 1: of the Deep, and if you want to read more
Speaker 1: about any of those things, check out our home page
Speaker 1: at how star works dot com and thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
Speaker 1: that how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
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