Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from house up
Speaker 1: works dot com. The allosaurus attacks, his teeth plunge like knives.
Speaker 1: The Diplodocus's skin turns ragged and red. The allosaurus bites deeper,
Speaker 1: his claws gripped her belly. A frightened diplodocus roars to
Speaker 1: the herd. Another diplodocus swings his rump sideways. His bony
Speaker 1: tail snaps like a whip through the air. The allosaurus
Speaker 1: falls back, his eyes sting like fire. The mother quetsoco
Speaker 1: Atlas jerks backwards in fear. She hears her maid calling
Speaker 1: as he flies overhead. Too late. The dromeo Saurus attack.
Speaker 1: They swallow eggs hole, they rip leathery wings. The quetso
Speaker 1: co Atlas swoops down as near he dares he sees
Speaker 1: and understands. He turned sharply away. I am quetzo co Atlas.
Speaker 1: The ground trembles below me. I glide over the rock
Speaker 1: ledge and soar into the sky. Hey, you welcome to
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert I gotta ask, when
Speaker 1: you are at home reading dinosaur books with your son,
Speaker 1: do you read them out loud in that Tulsa Doom
Speaker 1: voice you just did. Yes, if I can get away
Speaker 1: with it, I use voices, but sometimes he just says,
Speaker 1: use your regular voice, dad, and I I have to
Speaker 1: oblige or he could just grow up thinking that Fulsa
Speaker 1: Doom is his dad. Well, these books in particular really
Speaker 1: really encourage a very dramatic reading. Now who wrote these
Speaker 1: two we were looking at it was two different books. Yes,
Speaker 1: now these are. One book is called I Am Quetzalcoatlas
Speaker 1: and the other one is I Am Diplodocus. These were
Speaker 1: written by Karen Wallace and illustrated by Mike Bostock. Now,
Speaker 1: you sent me a link to these on Amazon, and
Speaker 1: I went and looked it up, and it is so
Speaker 1: funny because there is just one star review is coming
Speaker 1: out the eye sockets. People are mad about these books. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the first of all, I want to get out there.
Speaker 1: These are great books. I highly recommend. These are five
Speaker 1: star books in my opinions. These are these are dinosaur
Speaker 1: children's but dinosaur children's books. And uh. And when I
Speaker 1: say I love them, I'm not being like ironic, like,
Speaker 1: oh it's a horrible book, and you know it's but
Speaker 1: I but I find something weird about them. Now, these
Speaker 1: are these are great dinosaur books, but they are a
Speaker 1: bit dark, or at least they're a bit realistic. You know,
Speaker 1: so many dinosaur books are like kids having adventures with
Speaker 1: dinosaurs or things are kind of whitewashed. No, these these
Speaker 1: books encourage the child to look through the eyes of
Speaker 1: of of an animal living in an in an ancient time, uh,
Speaker 1: competing for resources, having to deal with the relentless predators,
Speaker 1: encountering death and injury, and and I think all the
Speaker 1: ones I've read end in death. Uh. But and it's
Speaker 1: weird because when I read the first one to my son,
Speaker 1: which I think was the quets solco Atlas one, I
Speaker 1: was reading it for the first time allowed to him,
Speaker 1: and we were getting to the violence, and then we
Speaker 1: were getting to the part where the male Quetsoco Atlas
Speaker 1: flies over and sees his family consumed by predators, and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, my kid's gonna lose it.
Speaker 1: This is too dark, this is too violent. He doesn't
Speaker 1: he makes a skip over predation and documentaries. He's not
Speaker 1: crazy about super dramatic scenes in children's movies, so I
Speaker 1: didn't think he'd be able to handle this, but he did.
Speaker 1: He loved it, and and he has this, I don't know,
Speaker 1: an interesting disconnect where if it's dying a saur violence,
Speaker 1: it's okay. If he has a whole book about like
Speaker 1: it's called The Death of the Dinosaurs, it's a kid's
Speaker 1: book in which it's just it's basically Corman McCarthy's The
Speaker 1: Road with Dinosaurs, Death after Death after Death. And he
Speaker 1: and after we read it, he was like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: a great book. I love that. Yeah, there is no
Speaker 1: God and we are his dinosaur prophets. Uh. And indeed,
Speaker 1: one of the reviews for the uh for the book
Speaker 1: by Karen Wallace, I am a t rex Ryan Toronto
Speaker 1: Tyronosaurs Rex. Uh. One of the one star reviews, someone said,
Speaker 1: this reads like a Cormy McCarthy novel. They did, and
Speaker 1: I agree with them, but in a good way, in
Speaker 1: a five star way. A lot of these one star
Speaker 1: reviews featured lots of direct quotes from the books, like
Speaker 1: lists of words ripping, slicing, slashing, tearing, and thieving. I'm sorry, whoever,
Speaker 1: I just quoted from the internet, but uh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there there is a certain way in which
Speaker 1: I understand how dinosaur violence can seem different than violence
Speaker 1: the it's taking place in the present. I mean, for
Speaker 1: one thing, we definitely do have a time desensitization mechanism
Speaker 1: in our brains. And in the same way that if
Speaker 1: you hear about how yesterday a thousand people were massacred,
Speaker 1: that is a heartbreaking tragedy. But if you hear about
Speaker 1: how a thousand years ago a thousand people were massacred,
Speaker 1: it's fodder for jokes. It just doesn't it just doesn't
Speaker 1: resonate in the same way. I guess it was no
Speaker 1: less tragic then, but it just really doesn't hit you.
Speaker 1: And dinosaurs may suffer from that, but I think they
Speaker 1: also are subject to a kind of conditioning in the
Speaker 1: brain that comes from dinosaur illustrations, which is that, at
Speaker 1: least in my mind. Maybe maybe this is not true
Speaker 1: across the board, but when I scan my memory of
Speaker 1: dinosaur illustrations from my childhood, they're always action scenes. Something
Speaker 1: violent is happening or is about to happen. It's not
Speaker 1: just lots of pictures of you know, some herbivore standing
Speaker 1: around in the water, drinking water, eating leaves, maybe a
Speaker 1: carnivore just basking in the sun. There's always feeding imminent
Speaker 1: or or fighting taking place. Something's leaping at something else,
Speaker 1: mouth open, claws extended, they're wrestling. I think of that, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: this wouldn't be dinosaurs, but it would be prehistoric animals.
Speaker 1: I think of that iconic image of the saber tooth cat,
Speaker 1: and it's some other scavenger I don't remember what, maybe
Speaker 1: a dire wolf fighting over a mammoth carcass. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean paleo art is rich. There's there are a lot
Speaker 1: of just wonderful works there. I mean, especially when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with with actual painted paleo art and and not
Speaker 1: some of the c g I stuff. You find a
Speaker 1: lot of the times now and you do have scenes
Speaker 1: of like peaceful duck built dinosaurs out in the water.
Speaker 1: But the ones that stick with us, and the certainly
Speaker 1: the ones that I remember from dinosaur books to chin
Speaker 1: and then I'm rediscovering now with my almost five year old,
Speaker 1: are these scenes, like you say, I'm drum attic encounters
Speaker 1: of a one dinosaur battling another herbivore versus predator duking
Speaker 1: it out in a prehistoric landscape. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: stuff that draws us in usually also there's like a
Speaker 1: volcano or roughing in the background. Why is that, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess tying in like the whole extinct,
Speaker 1: like the the extinction of the dinosaurs is wrapped up
Speaker 1: in them. They're like the Norse gods, of of of
Speaker 1: prehistoric creatures. True, yeah, they existed for like tens of
Speaker 1: millions of years, and yet in our minds they're constantly
Speaker 1: going extinct. But but you're right, there's almost always a volcano.
Speaker 1: It's like two animals fighting volcano in the background. Crazy
Speaker 1: like the fight scenes you see for dinosaurs, Like how
Speaker 1: often do you encounter something that climactic even in our
Speaker 1: biggest blockbusters, like two to combatants battling killing each other
Speaker 1: as a volcano erupts in the background. Um, it's crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: I guess that's how it's got to be. And you
Speaker 1: know what, it's probably not the fact or not the
Speaker 1: case that that's really what the dominant art is is.
Speaker 1: Just that's what I remember. I think you it makes
Speaker 1: an impact. You know, you've probably called that out right.
Speaker 1: But one thing that's kind of cool is that you
Speaker 1: don't have to go to fiction to find a few
Speaker 1: of these crazy action scenes from the prehistoric world, and
Speaker 1: this brings us to our topic today. Robert, you suggested
Speaker 1: this episode and the idea is fossil action scenes. Now,
Speaker 1: what made you want to do this? Was it just
Speaker 1: reading these books? Yeah? It was really um. I mean
Speaker 1: I encountered stories about some of the some of these
Speaker 1: major finds before. But when I read to my son
Speaker 1: about dinosaurs, I I read some of these kids books.
Speaker 1: But we also go through the Macmillian Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Speaker 1: Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, which is an older book, and
Speaker 1: certainly as we read through it, we have I have
Speaker 1: to remind myself that I'm not dealing with a recent text.
Speaker 1: It's like twenty or maybe thirty years old at this point,
Speaker 1: so it's probably got some outdated info. But man, those
Speaker 1: illustrations make up for that is gorgeous. Us. I'm looking
Speaker 1: at it right now. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous book. Imagine
Speaker 1: some of you listening and grew up with it as well.
Speaker 1: But it makes mention of some of these As we
Speaker 1: read the more in depth discussions on these these different
Speaker 1: fossil finds, it'll mention. Oh yeah, there is an encounter
Speaker 1: between protoceratops and this particular predator. Uh and and and
Speaker 1: we've learned a lot from what this creature consisted of
Speaker 1: based on this fossil find. Now you might be wondering, well,
Speaker 1: why why would that be such a special thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: these animals live for millions of years and they get fossilized.
Speaker 1: So why wouldn't we see all kinds of action scenes
Speaker 1: in the fossil record? Why is that a rare and
Speaker 1: wonderful thing to come across? Well, you have to think
Speaker 1: a little bit about the conditions under which fossils arise
Speaker 1: to understand why this really shouldn't happen all that often. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and really it makes it makes these encounters all the
Speaker 1: more amazing. So so yeah, stick stick with us here
Speaker 1: as we dive into just how fossilization occurs. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So when we think of fossils, were usually thinking of bones,
Speaker 1: But that's actually a little bit narrow because a fossil,
Speaker 1: in reality, as the term would be used by somebody
Speaker 1: who works in paleontology or biology, is a physical remnant
Speaker 1: of any kind left behind by an organism that lived
Speaker 1: in a previous geological age. So these could be things
Speaker 1: like preserved footprints or eggs or nest sites, burrows, things
Speaker 1: like that are sometimes fossilized. Or of course it could
Speaker 1: be the things were more familiar with body parts themselves.
Speaker 1: If it's more recent, it might even include maybe uh,
Speaker 1: soft tissue encased in ice or resin and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But more often with the much longer extinct animals we're
Speaker 1: talking about, uh, fossilized bones, these geological entities that come
Speaker 1: up from the bedrock. Now, the vast majority of animals
Speaker 1: that die don't get fossilized. And you can probably figure
Speaker 1: this out if you just do a little mental math
Speaker 1: about how many organisms have ever existed and how you're
Speaker 1: not constantly wading through fossils on planet Earth. Um, there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of hurdles you have to pass through
Speaker 1: to turn from a regular dead animal into a fossil.
Speaker 1: First of all, fossilization is going to strongly prefer animals
Speaker 1: with hard body parts, right, you want to have bones, teeth, shells,
Speaker 1: animals that don't have hard body parts. If you're a
Speaker 1: jelly fish or a slug or something like that, you're
Speaker 1: almost always going to decompose entirely and just disappear into history. Also,
Speaker 1: fossilization depends very much on the environment. It's much more
Speaker 1: likely to happen in an environment that promotes rapid burial,
Speaker 1: because you can think about it, it's pretty intuitive. Actually,
Speaker 1: the longer a dead organism lies exposed to the open environment,
Speaker 1: the you know, the seafloor or the air or whatever
Speaker 1: it might be, the more vulnerable it is to all
Speaker 1: kinds of pressures that would destroy it. So this could
Speaker 1: be scavenging, scavenging by animals, decomposition by microbial life, erosion
Speaker 1: by forces like wind and tidal action and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and just general destruction. If you're sitting out in the open,
Speaker 1: the parts of your body, even the hard parts of
Speaker 1: your body, you're gonna get worn down and destroyed over time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I always think that too. When I when
Speaker 1: I was a kid and I lived in a rural area,
Speaker 1: we'd go the same way to school every day or
Speaker 1: into town every day, and there was a dead fox
Speaker 1: at one point, and every maybe it was a coyote,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, but every time you pass, there'd be
Speaker 1: a little less of it, would be a little more scattered, because, yeah,
Speaker 1: a body is going in a natural environment, it's just
Speaker 1: gonna be scavenged and torn apart, and then it's going
Speaker 1: to break down like that. That coyote is never going
Speaker 1: to be a fossil. Uh. The route where I walk
Speaker 1: my dog Charlie has of late had a slowly settling
Speaker 1: pile of fur with a couple of visible jawbones and
Speaker 1: teeth and stuff. Not sure what that was. At some
Speaker 1: point it was something mammalian. Uh. And yeah, you you
Speaker 1: just watch it over time disappear. So, yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: happens out in the open. So for this reason, if
Speaker 1: you want to turn into a fossil, if you want
Speaker 1: to be preserved, you want to be in a sediment
Speaker 1: forming environment. That would be an area like the bottom
Speaker 1: of the sea floor, where there's a good deposition of
Speaker 1: sediment on top of you. And this is one reason
Speaker 1: you're going to see way more fossils of water dwelling
Speaker 1: animals than you do of land dwelling animals. But rapid
Speaker 1: burial can also happen in some other situations, for example,
Speaker 1: on land where there are sand dunes and the desert
Speaker 1: that might quickly bury an animal body that you know,
Speaker 1: if a sand dune collapses or gets blown by wind
Speaker 1: over the body or in an area where some kind
Speaker 1: of moving water flow. Alluvial areas can wash sediment over
Speaker 1: the body and bury it that way. Of course, over time,
Speaker 1: we know what happens to sediment under pressure. It gets
Speaker 1: turned into rocks and solidified in various ways. But even
Speaker 1: if an organism is quickly buried, that doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: it's going to turn into a fossil. Then you you've
Speaker 1: still got a few hurdles, one of which is that
Speaker 1: it has to undergo some geological transformation. When you come
Speaker 1: across dinosaur bones in the museum, they're not really the
Speaker 1: bones of the dinosaur that you're looking at. What what
Speaker 1: you're looking at as a kind of geological photocopy in
Speaker 1: a sense. Uh So. One of the processes by which
Speaker 1: this happens is known as per mineralization. And this is
Speaker 1: when you've got groundwater that trickles around and through a dead,
Speaker 1: buried organism, and as it trickles through the organism, it
Speaker 1: carries these minerals with it, dissolved minerals in the water
Speaker 1: and leave some of them behind. So the mineral laden
Speaker 1: water fills all these little microscopic gaps and pores in
Speaker 1: your bones, and it deposits some of those minerals that
Speaker 1: it carries in those empty spaces, and then over time
Speaker 1: these minerals accumulate and crystallize throughout the structure of the bone,
Speaker 1: essentially turning the bone into a rock in the shape
Speaker 1: of the original bone. I have to admit, like looking
Speaker 1: back on my own history of dinosaurs, I think I
Speaker 1: had a sense of sadness when I learned for the
Speaker 1: first time that dinosaur bones are not actual dinosaur bones,
Speaker 1: that they are their fossils. Of course, it's it's still amazing,
Speaker 1: but but I think I feel like there's there's a
Speaker 1: certain sadness that can sink in when you when you
Speaker 1: first have to realize, oh, this is it's not as
Speaker 1: simple as the bones of the creature that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to imagine. Well, while these processes do go on, I
Speaker 1: can't say for sure that it's like none of the
Speaker 1: original bone is left. I'm not actually sure about that.
Speaker 1: You know, some part of it may remain in in
Speaker 1: the process like per mineralization. Of course, I also have
Speaker 1: to add that when you're at the museum, you're also
Speaker 1: looking at you might be looking at a specimen for
Speaker 1: which and there there is no complete skeleton, and they're like,
Speaker 1: you know, casts created based on projections. And in some
Speaker 1: museums you might go to, especially smaller museums, you might
Speaker 1: be looking at an entire replica as opposed to actual fossls,
Speaker 1: and a good museum will tell you the difference. I mean,
Speaker 1: for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Speaker 1: I remember going through their big fossil exhibits. They would
Speaker 1: have illustrations alongside the reconstructions that would show you sometimes
Speaker 1: like what part was original and what part was recast.
Speaker 1: So you have this per mineralization process, but then you've
Speaker 1: also got this process known as replacement, and this is
Speaker 1: similar but sort of more more total, more holistic, and
Speaker 1: organism's body is buried and then it disappears because it
Speaker 1: gets decomposed, maybe my microbial life or gets dissolved through
Speaker 1: chemical reactions with the soil or the groundwater gets washed
Speaker 1: away and eroded, and what you're left with is a
Speaker 1: cavity in the ground in the shape of the original structure.
Speaker 1: So you might have like a cavity in the shape
Speaker 1: of a skeleton or a shell or a bone, and
Speaker 1: then this cavity gets filled in with some other mineral,
Speaker 1: creating a sort of mineral cast in the same shape
Speaker 1: as the original organ in structure. Then, of course there
Speaker 1: are other ways. There is for example, carbonization where organisms
Speaker 1: get squeezed between layers of sediment and leave this carbon
Speaker 1: imprint that sometimes happens to like plants and insects. Then
Speaker 1: there would also be resin in casing, which we all
Speaker 1: know from Jurassic Parks seeing the mosquito and the amber.
Speaker 1: Things can be frozen and ice, of course, like we
Speaker 1: see from the previous ice age. You might see a
Speaker 1: mammoth frozen and ice. And then things can be for example,
Speaker 1: buried in tar, like in the tar pits. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of ways things can be preserved across
Speaker 1: the geological eons. But despite all these different ways that
Speaker 1: it can happen, it doesn't happen that much. Only a
Speaker 1: very small portion of the animals that exist get preserved,
Speaker 1: and then only a small portion of those that get
Speaker 1: preserved actually get found by us. So we have a
Speaker 1: have a very limited sampling of what there once was
Speaker 1: on planet Earth. But another thing to think about is
Speaker 1: not just the scarcity of fossiles, but the process by
Speaker 1: which they're created. It doesn't tend to favor action. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're not likely to catch a fossil of an
Speaker 1: animal in mid behavior where it's clear what was happening.
Speaker 1: Something was dead, was probably very very often moved around
Speaker 1: by some water currents or something like that, so you
Speaker 1: don't really necessarily get a sense of what was going
Speaker 1: on in this animal's life. Yeah, fossil evidence of feeding
Speaker 1: behavior or any kind of like really key life moments
Speaker 1: are exceedingly rare. And it's that it's always worth remembering
Speaker 1: that the fossil record itself is inherently incomplete. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna never gonna have a complete fossil record because, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed, like the limits of fossilization, that all the
Speaker 1: criteria that have to be met a stand in the
Speaker 1: way of that um And I don't mention this to
Speaker 1: cast doubt on what we have or the you know,
Speaker 1: the visions of the past that we derive from our fossils.
Speaker 1: It's just that we're left to figure out the shape
Speaker 1: of what came before with an in complete jigsaw puzzle
Speaker 1: that has no box right heart of the cover. And
Speaker 1: it's Joe discussed here to begin with, sediment has to
Speaker 1: cover in organisms remains in order for the long fossilization
Speaker 1: process to begin. Most organisms decomposed before this can happen.
Speaker 1: Fossilization odds increase if the organism happens to exist in
Speaker 1: large numbers or lived in and around a sediment. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, trilobytes meet both criteria. Tons of them, they're
Speaker 1: on the ocean floor, They're very well represented in the
Speaker 1: fossil record. Not so great for a lot of these
Speaker 1: great wonderful land predators you'd want to see, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: something like a t rex that that would have been
Speaker 1: an apex predator. I always think of a pyramid, a
Speaker 1: pyramid of bones, okay, and your apex predator is seated
Speaker 1: on a throne at the top of this pyramid. So
Speaker 1: you can only have so many pyramids based on the
Speaker 1: bones and the bodies and the life force of the creatures.
Speaker 1: And so your apex predator that's gonna be a really
Speaker 1: rare fined. Yeah, I mean, the ecology can't support lots
Speaker 1: of them in the place, so there's not that many
Speaker 1: to choose from. And then it's also existing in circumstances
Speaker 1: that make it less likely to get fossilized when it dies,
Speaker 1: right and then you know, and that's why we have
Speaker 1: we have a number of species out there where we're
Speaker 1: basing the entire species on me maybe even just a
Speaker 1: few different bones, you know, or at least an incomplete skeleton.
Speaker 1: And then plus fossils might be set in stone, but
Speaker 1: they're far from impervious. Like all rocks, they can erode,
Speaker 1: they can melt, they can fragment. So even once fossilization occurs,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean they're gonna last. It also doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that somebody didn't build a church over it at some point.
Speaker 1: And it's now and so you know, it's a UNESCO
Speaker 1: World Heritage Site now, and you'll never get that juicy
Speaker 1: like you know, three t rex of feeding fossil extravaganza
Speaker 1: that's trapped underneath it. You know, there's so even if
Speaker 1: fossilization happens, we might never see it. So even when
Speaker 1: you do wind up with the fossil jigsaw puzzle pieces
Speaker 1: you need, you still have to figure out how they
Speaker 1: fit together. You have to imagine the missing pieces. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's been a long process in which we've continually refined
Speaker 1: our understanding of the form of these dinosaurs. We're still
Speaker 1: continuing to refine our understanding of what they looked like,
Speaker 1: how they behaved. I mean, you look at something like
Speaker 1: the iguanadon the spike thumbed creature, one of the earliest
Speaker 1: dinosaur finds who's got two thumbs and got illustrated in
Speaker 1: a very weird way. Yeah, you look that guy, because
Speaker 1: if you look at those illustrations, the body just changes rapidly.
Speaker 1: T Rex is another one where we've we've had some
Speaker 1: some distinct changes over time and how we interpret its
Speaker 1: bodily positioning and uh, you know, so a lot of
Speaker 1: the time we can only guess at the shape. We
Speaker 1: can form theories about the shape, and the same goes.
Speaker 1: The same holds true for how different prehistoric species would
Speaker 1: have interacted with each other based on their forms and
Speaker 1: the behavior of existing animals. Evidence of dinosaurs feeding, as
Speaker 1: we said, is exceedingly rare, but every so often the
Speaker 1: fossil records record throws us a real hum dinger. They
Speaker 1: give us an action scene preserved in stone. So that
Speaker 1: is what we're gonna be looking at for the rest
Speaker 1: of the episode. But I think we should take a
Speaker 1: quick break first, and when we come back we will
Speaker 1: get into some of these amazing fossil action scenes. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back now, Robert. Before we actually take a look
Speaker 1: at these fossil action scenes, one thing we should keep
Speaker 1: in mind is that we should say again, you can't
Speaker 1: always look at a fossil and know how and where
Speaker 1: an organism died, right because a lot of remains are,
Speaker 1: for example, moved around by water currents before they get
Speaker 1: buried and fossilized. Uh, it might call to mind you
Speaker 1: can imagine like a big alluvial floodwater deposit where a
Speaker 1: bunch of bones get washed into the same place, and
Speaker 1: then you could come along as a future archaeologist and
Speaker 1: dig this up and look like, oh, there was an
Speaker 1: ancient monster battle here, this is where the battlefield was
Speaker 1: and all the creatures fell. But really what you're looking
Speaker 1: at as a place where the bones were moved to
Speaker 1: along a you know, a path, the path of a
Speaker 1: river or or a flood deposit or something like that.
Speaker 1: So we do need to keep in mind that you
Speaker 1: always have to approach a fossil site with skepticism to
Speaker 1: look at the surroundings, to look for clues to figure
Speaker 1: out if what you're looking at is a true, you know,
Speaker 1: institute scene or if it's some something that has been
Speaker 1: altered by the environment or by the behavior of animals
Speaker 1: or something like that. Indeed, keep that in mind at
Speaker 1: all time. So let's go ahead and launch into it here. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of fun to think of this as a
Speaker 1: as a big fight card, like a you know, like
Speaker 1: a like a sort of wrestling term or you know,
Speaker 1: you know, like a boxing wrestling and then a type
Speaker 1: of situation where you you have the card right the
Speaker 1: opening matches, the mid card, and then finally the main event. Robert,
Speaker 1: I think you're more into the fighting arts than I am. Well,
Speaker 1: probably some of the fighting arts, but here we're talking
Speaker 1: about the dinosaurs were fighting arts, and with our first case,
Speaker 1: we're actually gonna we're gonna kick off with just prehistoric
Speaker 1: mammal fighting arts. So it's time to look at the
Speaker 1: showdown of the Colombian mammoths. So these were placed to
Speaker 1: scene epic animals. Colombian mammoths about one point five million
Speaker 1: years ago until around ten to thirteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: They lived in North America, stretching down into ice Age
Speaker 1: Central America. And Uh, these things were big. They were
Speaker 1: bigger than their cousins, the wooly mammoths we know about
Speaker 1: the Colombian mammoths could grow up to about thirteen feet
Speaker 1: tall way maybe eight to ten tons or so. And
Speaker 1: so I want to set the scene for how these
Speaker 1: fossils are discovered. In nineteen sixty two, there's some workers
Speaker 1: who are, according to one account I read, installing some
Speaker 1: electric lines, and another account I read they were doing
Speaker 1: some surveying. So I'm not sure what's the true story there,
Speaker 1: but they were out working on a ranch in the
Speaker 1: Nebraska Panhandle. So that's western Nebraska. It's a sparsely populated
Speaker 1: part of the state, but it is a place where
Speaker 1: you can come across some ancient fossils. And near this
Speaker 1: tiny town of Crawford in western Nebraska, they came across
Speaker 1: the leg bone of an extremely large animal, and they
Speaker 1: took this leg bone wrapped in some feedsack to a
Speaker 1: paleontology student named Mike Vorhees who was brought in for excavation.
Speaker 1: Why are you Why are you grinning? Well, and I'm
Speaker 1: just certainly wondering if there's a connection to Jason Vorhees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's spelled differently. This is I e s all right,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll try and force the mental image out
Speaker 1: of my mind. Yeah, but I mean both bone kings
Speaker 1: of a sort. Now vorhes Is brought in and he
Speaker 1: discovered that there was not one, but two male Colombian
Speaker 1: mammoths fossilized together in the same site. Why together, Well,
Speaker 1: it looks like they died fighting each other. As I
Speaker 1: said a minute ago, the columbia In mammoths are related
Speaker 1: to the smaller, more northern dwelling wooly mammoth, and mammoth's
Speaker 1: lived in Europe and Asia since about two point five
Speaker 1: million years ago or so, and they are not the
Speaker 1: ancestors of existing elephants. I think that might be a
Speaker 1: common misconception, but instead their cousins of elephants along a
Speaker 1: different line of elephant like creatures. They're more closely related
Speaker 1: to Asian elephants than to African elephants. And Asian mammoths
Speaker 1: are believed to have migrated to North America over the
Speaker 1: Bearing Straight Land Bridge about one and a half million
Speaker 1: years ago or so, and they had evolved into the
Speaker 1: form we recognize as the Colombian mammoth by about one
Speaker 1: point one million years ago. So they occupied North America,
Speaker 1: stretching down into Central America up to about the southern
Speaker 1: border of Canada, so you can think about them all
Speaker 1: throughout the the United States area on all in the plains.
Speaker 1: I've heard that they've been found, uh, pretty pretty far
Speaker 1: east and pretty far west. Wooly mammoth's tended to live
Speaker 1: farther up north in like Canadia. Canadia, I said it
Speaker 1: you Canada and Alaska. Now, the Columbian mammoths could live
Speaker 1: about seventy or eighty years, so that's a nice lifespan.
Speaker 1: And once they were adults, they really had no natural predators.
Speaker 1: They're huge now. When they were children, of course children.
Speaker 1: The that is that the term for mammoth's juvenile mammoths
Speaker 1: were preyed upon by the standard carnivores of the time,
Speaker 1: maybe sabretooth cats and things like that. I guess it
Speaker 1: would be a calf, right, calf, an elephant calf? Is
Speaker 1: that right? I think that's probably right. We'll go with it. Now,
Speaker 1: mammoths show sexual dimorphism in the tusks, with the males
Speaker 1: having these longer, heavier tusks than the females, and sometimes
Speaker 1: the Columbia tusks could grow up to about sixteen feet long.
Speaker 1: I think about that. This is on an animal with
Speaker 1: a body length and maybe thirteen to fifteen feet. So
Speaker 1: the tusks are these gigantic weapons. And these animals wind
Speaker 1: extinct sometime between thirteen thousand ten thousand years ago, probably
Speaker 1: due to a combination of climate change in human hunting
Speaker 1: that we don't really know for sure. Have you got
Speaker 1: an illustration here? Oh? There it is. Man, look at
Speaker 1: those massive tusks and they're they're kind of hooked in
Speaker 1: inward and they're not uh, not underhanded sloping up, but
Speaker 1: like hooked around like a grasping claw or something. And
Speaker 1: now to get back to the fossil find that young
Speaker 1: paleontologist Mike Vorhees who worked on the excavation in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, he stuck around with the project and there
Speaker 1: was a two thousand six article on NPR News where
Speaker 1: they interviewed him and he was describing the original discovery
Speaker 1: and he said, quote, once we got to the skull,
Speaker 1: it turned out, well, there's one tusk. There's two tusks. Oh,
Speaker 1: three tusks. What's going on here? Even a young student
Speaker 1: realizes that an elephant only has two tusks. So it
Speaker 1: gradually dawned on us that we actually had two animals
Speaker 1: locked in a death struggle and probably the most exciting
Speaker 1: single fossil I've ever seen. Now, Robert, I have attack
Speaker 1: for you a photo of this where you can kind
Speaker 1: of see what's happening here. Now, scientists more recently believed
Speaker 1: that the two mammoths that are fossilized in this scene
Speaker 1: were very likely in this testosterone fueled bull elephant phase,
Speaker 1: each about forty years old, fighting over mating opportunities, and
Speaker 1: it appears they were well matched because the fight led
Speaker 1: to this entanglement of the tusks, which somehow killed them both.
Speaker 1: So you've got the two skeletons locked face to face
Speaker 1: with tusks entwined. One of the mammoth's tusks is gouging
Speaker 1: into the eye socket of the other, so that that
Speaker 1: would make a good what's her name, Wallace book right
Speaker 1: his his eyes gouged. It hurts immensely. Yeah, you this
Speaker 1: this illustration of the skulls and the tusks intertwined like
Speaker 1: this would make a really gnarly tattoo. Yes, it would,
Speaker 1: that would be. Yeah, it's like a metal band album
Speaker 1: cover kind of thing. It's it's for real Now, the
Speaker 1: fight between these two mammoths was probably a lot more
Speaker 1: dangerous than the average mammoth fight, and it's because both
Speaker 1: of these mammoths had one of their tusks broken off
Speaker 1: and thus shortened. And this actually made it more lethal
Speaker 1: than one of these would have normally been because it
Speaker 1: allowed them to get in closer for fighting, and since
Speaker 1: they got in closer than would normally be possible, it
Speaker 1: led to this tangling of the tusks that killed them. Now,
Speaker 1: it's probably the case that their deaths came slowly, or
Speaker 1: at least one of their deaths came slowly, with one
Speaker 1: of the two bowls dying before the other one and
Speaker 1: then pinning into the ground by the face. And in
Speaker 1: this state they would have been unable to reach food
Speaker 1: or water, but also would have been vulnerable to opportunistic scavengers.
Speaker 1: And this, this aggressive fighting between male mammoths can possibly
Speaker 1: be chalked up to the glory of what's known as must.
Speaker 1: There are you familiar with this concept, Robert Musk the
Speaker 1: smell of the scent no, no, no, must, must with
Speaker 1: a thh, not with a kill? A familiar with? Okay?
Speaker 1: So must? Is this kind of this problem? This is
Speaker 1: not the right way to say it, but I want
Speaker 1: to characterize it this way. It's like a recurring murderous
Speaker 1: puberty in male elephants. More literally, what it is is
Speaker 1: a hormonal period lasting up to weeks and even months,
Speaker 1: when a bull elephants body begins to produce about sixty
Speaker 1: times the amount of testosterone normally found in male elephants,
Speaker 1: and during this period, known as the must, bull elephants
Speaker 1: secrete a substance called tempour in from the temporal glands
Speaker 1: on the sides of their head. You can see pictures
Speaker 1: of them where it looks like they're just using some
Speaker 1: gross orange fluid from their temples. Uh. But it also
Speaker 1: alters their regular behavior, so they become much more violent
Speaker 1: and aggressive. Elephants that are that work with humans in
Speaker 1: these periods become much more dangerous to work with. And
Speaker 1: they also emit this noise known as a must the rumble,
Speaker 1: and they can be seen I watched video of this
Speaker 1: doing this display called tusking the ground where they will
Speaker 1: stab their tusks into the soil um and I think
Speaker 1: they're multiple theories on why exactly they do that, but
Speaker 1: it looks pretty threatening. I'm not sure if it's meant
Speaker 1: to look threatening, you know. I I certainly watched the
Speaker 1: number of documentaries detailing elephants, but but I feel like
Speaker 1: most of them tend to focus on the female herds.
Speaker 1: Ye in the matriarchal order there, because you have the
Speaker 1: the elderly females, uh, leading and then you have the
Speaker 1: younger females, and then you have the the young the
Speaker 1: calf's following around. And in the males they live separately.
Speaker 1: And now that you've described their behavior at times, you
Speaker 1: understand why they have to live outside the house, right,
Speaker 1: so when they go into a must period, you just
Speaker 1: don't want to be around them. They're no good uh.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's not unknown actually for for other
Speaker 1: types of animals to engage in these than these mutually
Speaker 1: deadly male dominance encounters. For example, stags sometimes go into
Speaker 1: male dominance conflicts where they get their antlers hopelessly locked.
Speaker 1: You might remember from last year there was the discovery
Speaker 1: of these two bull moose in Una lucklyit Alaska. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I remember this. Yes, So they're frozen in
Speaker 1: ice with their antlers locked, and it looks like what
Speaker 1: happened in this case was that the two moose were
Speaker 1: in a fight over mating rights, and they got their
Speaker 1: antlers stuck together, and then they drowned, and then the
Speaker 1: water that they drowned in froze. This also happened sometimes
Speaker 1: with male white tailed deer and elk who they have
Speaker 1: these antlers and they locked them together in these dominance displays,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they get their antlers entangled during fights over
Speaker 1: mating and territory, and once they're stuck together, they can
Speaker 1: become exhausted and die and sometimes even be eaten alive
Speaker 1: by coyotes, and their vulnerable state even crazier. Here's another
Speaker 1: thing I came across male dominance entanglement swans. Did you
Speaker 1: see this video? It went viral a while back, but
Speaker 1: there were the two photographers in Latvia named Alexander and
Speaker 1: Vitali drov And in two thousand nine they filmed this
Speaker 1: encounter where they had a pair of swans that were
Speaker 1: just hopelessly entangled by the wings and necks, floating pathetically
Speaker 1: in a pond, just kind of paddling around randomly, looking
Speaker 1: on the verge of death, and the two men came
Speaker 1: up to them. I from what I've read, by the way,
Speaker 1: don't don't try this because swans can actually be very
Speaker 1: aggressive and dangerous. Yeah, so don't try to mess with swans.
Speaker 1: But the two men were unable to untie the knot
Speaker 1: of birdnecks and wings and the two swans, you would
Speaker 1: you'd have to see it. It's crazy. They are in
Speaker 1: a knot. They're just completely twisted around each other. And
Speaker 1: once they finally get all this stuff untangled, the two
Speaker 1: swans just scramble away, and without this intervention, it looks
Speaker 1: like they probably would have died. But in a National
Speaker 1: Geographic article about this incident, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum
Speaker 1: bird expert Brian K. Schmidt says that they were probably
Speaker 1: also male swans who were fighting overbreeding territory. So with
Speaker 1: all these animals, from swans to stags to mammoths, it
Speaker 1: often probably doesn't come to a physical fight, right, and
Speaker 1: two males are going to be making threatening displays at
Speaker 1: one another and then the less dominant one is going
Speaker 1: to run away. But sometimes this doesn't happen in the
Speaker 1: situation escalates into this genuine battle of strength, and I
Speaker 1: just think it's kind of odds is a strange poeticism
Speaker 1: to it that there's this tendency of male animals across
Speaker 1: all these different classes of life to put up fighting
Speaker 1: displays for the right to mate with females, only to
Speaker 1: end up in an eternal death embrace with their enemy
Speaker 1: and usurper. Yeah, to remove them from themselves from competition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the for the thing that they're after feels somehow metaphorical.
Speaker 1: Well that is, that is one heck of an encounter.
Speaker 1: It's one of these where you can look at you
Speaker 1: can look at the fossil evidence you can, and then
Speaker 1: you can imagine conflict and and just just see these
Speaker 1: behemoths locked up with each other and just battling to
Speaker 1: the death. Yeah. It's also kind of sad though, to
Speaker 1: imagine what they looked like once they were on the ground,
Speaker 1: maybe once one of them has died and they're just stuck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's an ignominious end for a for
Speaker 1: a powerful beast. I agree. Well, you know, if that,
Speaker 1: if that's the story of an end, I think we
Speaker 1: should discuss the story of a beginning. So we're on
Speaker 1: the lower still on the lower card here, so it's
Speaker 1: time to you know, we can include some some fossil
Speaker 1: action scenes that are less combative in nature. Well, I
Speaker 1: should hope, so come on, yeah, because certainly bring the peace,
Speaker 1: love and understanding. Yeah, because the animal interactions don't have
Speaker 1: to include violence. They can of course include mating. They
Speaker 1: can also include birth itself or or the the care
Speaker 1: for young. Right, And that's why we turn now to
Speaker 1: the it feels saurus all right, Yes, And what we're
Speaker 1: dealing with here is it the osaurus live birth. And
Speaker 1: this this now blew me away when I've heard about it.
Speaker 1: Here's something that's interesting to me. I didn't know that
Speaker 1: I theosaurs would have live offspring. I just would have
Speaker 1: assumed they laid eggs because it seems like they're sort
Speaker 1: of half reptile half fish, both of which lay eggs. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we and certainly when we think of aquatic reptiles,
Speaker 1: we think of existing examples that are the very sea turtles, who,
Speaker 1: as as as I think most of us know, have
Speaker 1: to return to shore to lay their eggs and then
Speaker 1: go back to sea. So what we're dealing with here
Speaker 1: are are athosaurs, in many cases specifically the Ichthyosaurus. There
Speaker 1: are several varieties. The time here is early Jurassic to
Speaker 1: early Cretaceous. Location Europe Greenland and North America and these uh,
Speaker 1: these specimen. These organisms were generally up to six ft
Speaker 1: six inches long or two ms long. So the athosaurs
Speaker 1: were the fish lizards the name applies. They were indeed
Speaker 1: highly specialized marine reptiles. They ruled the seas, ranging far
Speaker 1: and wide throughout the early Triassic times for roughly one
Speaker 1: million years. I love these guys and I actually have
Speaker 1: a bumper sticker on my car of of one done
Speaker 1: by the local Atlanta artists our land. Uh it I
Speaker 1: interpreted as an ichthiosaura. It might just be a funky dolphin.
Speaker 1: But but but I see it, and I think, knowing
Speaker 1: our lands, I have googly eyes. It does have strange eyes.
Speaker 1: But you know, the funky dolphin thing is is is
Speaker 1: apt because indeed, when you look at a skeleton or
Speaker 1: certainly a work of paleo art, the Ichthyosaurus does look
Speaker 1: very much like a weird dolphin, and paleontologists believed they
Speaker 1: would have probably occupied the same ecological niche uh. The
Speaker 1: origins are unclear, but they likely evolved from a land
Speaker 1: reptile rather than another aquatic one. That is really interesting.
Speaker 1: Of course, now we know that these these marine mammals
Speaker 1: evolved probably from land dwelling mammals. Right, They were land
Speaker 1: dwelling mammals that moved back into the water. And now
Speaker 1: we see the same thing happen with reptiles, but earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's mind blowing to see the evolution of a basic
Speaker 1: form across a different species. So you have, you know,
Speaker 1: the shark, the tune of the dolphin, the athosaurs. It
Speaker 1: makes me wonder if you know, some distant water world
Speaker 1: on another planet, Uh, you're gonna have creatures that are
Speaker 1: very different in many respects but still end up taking
Speaker 1: the basic form of the athiosaur or the dolphin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems widely successful. So we talked earlier about you know,
Speaker 1: the what helps a creature become a fossil if it
Speaker 1: lives in the water, but it lives in a near sediment,
Speaker 1: and if it's around insufficient numbers and the ethos are
Speaker 1: definitely lines up with this. It's an animal that we
Speaker 1: know very well from the fossil record, based on several
Speaker 1: hundred complete skeletons, many stemming from early Jurassic fossils recorded
Speaker 1: in shallow waters now shale in southern Germany. And and
Speaker 1: these are these are some excellent fossils because in many
Speaker 1: cases there's a thin film of carbon around them that
Speaker 1: indicates the exact shape of their bodies while they had flesh.
Speaker 1: So so it's not just a matter of you know,
Speaker 1: when you look at some of the dinosaurs uh skeletons,
Speaker 1: you'll see varying theories about like, well, maybe this one
Speaker 1: had some sort of um like an inflatable growth on
Speaker 1: its head, especially with the duck build dinosaurs, or just
Speaker 1: stuff about skin texture and feathers and things like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't always have enough fossil events to really fully
Speaker 1: imagine the flesh, but with the atheosaurs we do. We
Speaker 1: have this carnibon outline that tells us the shape they
Speaker 1: had in life. We also have a fossilized poop or
Speaker 1: corporate lights. We have the stomach contents in some cases,
Speaker 1: so we know what they ate, mostly fish and some cephalopods,
Speaker 1: and we even have remnants of pigment cells to suggest
Speaker 1: a dark reddish brown colorization. Now you might be well,
Speaker 1: whine with an animal that lives in the water or
Speaker 1: want to have like a dark ruddy, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of color, And there there's a theory that they may
Speaker 1: have used this dark colouration to to heat up rapidly
Speaker 1: between deep dives into the cool depths for fish. Whoa, yeah,
Speaker 1: so again, they basically had the same role as a
Speaker 1: modern dolphin, and paleontologist believed they may have become extinct
Speaker 1: due to later competition with the increasingly advanced sharks of
Speaker 1: the cretation. Now that's funny because I love sharks, but
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to think of sharks as advanced. Well,
Speaker 1: this was a time when they were. They were the
Speaker 1: hot new model. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they
Speaker 1: are the dinosaurs now, I mean so yeah, it's certainly
Speaker 1: we do have these amazing prehistoric sharks, right, I mean
Speaker 1: the Megalodon, krotoxy Ryan and all these. But this was
Speaker 1: a time when the atostars ruled the world, the world
Speaker 1: the seas for for this long stretch of time. But
Speaker 1: then the sharks got more advanced and they likely outcompete
Speaker 1: them for resources. Now, one cool thing about the ichthyosaur
Speaker 1: is that if it's occupying a similar to the dolphin
Speaker 1: and it evolved for the same way, it's probably not
Speaker 1: going to be a gill breathing organism, right, but it's
Speaker 1: an air breathing organism. Right. Yeah, everyone agrees they were
Speaker 1: air breathers, there's no getting around that. But they seem
Speaker 1: to get around the necessity of returning to shore to
Speaker 1: lay their eggs as other uh you know, extinct and
Speaker 1: existing marine animals, marine reptiles must And that's where the
Speaker 1: action packed fossil comes into play. Not a fossilized bit
Speaker 1: of combat, but a seemingly fossilized live birth whole, or
Speaker 1: at least that's what the fossil evidence suggests. So there's
Speaker 1: there's been some debate in the past on whether this
Speaker 1: might have been near stomach contents. Uh. You run into
Speaker 1: similar cases of interpretation, like you have some some bodies
Speaker 1: grouped together. Is there just it's just just some accidental
Speaker 1: overlay here, Um, what's going on when we look at
Speaker 1: these But the consensus now seems to be that that
Speaker 1: we do have fossil evidence of embryos and live earth
Speaker 1: sometimes scattered outside of the body. And there's some discussion
Speaker 1: over whether this was due to explosion after death, like
Speaker 1: the body bloats up and then burst right. Um. Early
Speaker 1: arguments that they might have given birth on land gave
Speaker 1: way to uh an aquatic consensus at least with the
Speaker 1: with with with many of the athios are species, evidence
Speaker 1: shows that they were born tail first to prevent drowning
Speaker 1: breach by nature. Now this being said, In two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: uh Ryosuki Motani of the University of California Davis and
Speaker 1: colleagues published research concluding that a fossil i specimen of
Speaker 1: the athiosaur Chao Hu sais this is the oldest of
Speaker 1: Mesozoic marine reptiles that lived approximately two forty eight million
Speaker 1: years ago. Uh They showed that the partial skeleton which
Speaker 1: was recovered in China may show a live birth. It
Speaker 1: features three embryos and neonates, one inside the mother, another
Speaker 1: exiting the pell us, with half the body still inside
Speaker 1: the mother, and the third outside. Interestingly enough to study
Speaker 1: concluded that these specimens might have given birth on dry
Speaker 1: land due to the head first positioning of the emerging
Speaker 1: young So this would have been an older example. So
Speaker 1: we can imagine how how this might have developed into
Speaker 1: the full uh at sea live birth that the majority
Speaker 1: of the atheosaurs engaged in. God, it's crazy to imagine
Speaker 1: that this must not be all that weird for the
Speaker 1: majority of life on Earth. But but I don't know.
Speaker 1: All doing all of the life stuff, mating, giving birth,
Speaker 1: all in this marine environment with nothing to grab a
Speaker 1: hold of. I mean, and it's crazy to think too,
Speaker 1: that this is a form that evolved from a terrestrial creature.
Speaker 1: You basically encounted the same, the same blocks, the same,
Speaker 1: the same struggle to try and imagine, uh, just the
Speaker 1: the scope of evolution over the course of time periods
Speaker 1: that humans just simply did not evolve to fathom totally.
Speaker 1: Now I've got another one for you, Robert, in the
Speaker 1: same scope, getting away from the fighting more towards the
Speaker 1: reproduction and nurture. Uh, this one's gonna be short, but
Speaker 1: in a group of German scientists reported, I thought this
Speaker 1: was amazing, the first known find of a pair of
Speaker 1: vertebrate animals fossilized in the active mating. So it's a
Speaker 1: pair of turtles from about fifty million years ago or so.
Speaker 1: It's described in the article Caught in the Act, the
Speaker 1: first record of copulating fossil vertebrates by Walter G. Joyce
Speaker 1: at All in Biology Letters in and these turtles were
Speaker 1: discovered in the Eocene Messil Pit fossil site in Germany,
Speaker 1: which is a site of an ancient lake that's produced
Speaker 1: tons of fossils, and the turtles in question were Aliachellis
Speaker 1: crassus sculpta, an example of what's known as the pig
Speaker 1: nosed turtle, and the authors used the fact that the
Speaker 1: two turtles died in the coital position to infer something
Speaker 1: interesting about the lake, or at least this was their
Speaker 1: their conclusion. Not everybody agrees with it. But when these
Speaker 1: types of turtles mate, the smaller male mounts up on
Speaker 1: top of the back of the larger female, and once
Speaker 1: they're in the copulation position, they tend to sort of freeze.
Speaker 1: They just sort of stopped moving around and they do
Speaker 1: their thing and they're frozen in position. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: if they're frozen in position and it happens out in
Speaker 1: open water, the couple of turtles will tend to sink
Speaker 1: down into the water during the mating process. And what
Speaker 1: the authors de do is is that the mating began
Speaker 1: on the surface waters which were inhabitable fine, and then
Speaker 1: sank down into the abyss hole section of the lake,
Speaker 1: which they hypothesized was toxic. And this is their explanation
Speaker 1: for why this lake has produced so many fossils. That
Speaker 1: that the abyssle section of the lake is has some
Speaker 1: kind of dissolved I think they were talking about dissolved
Speaker 1: CEO two that would be toxic to animals that have
Speaker 1: some kind of respiration quality in their skin. And so
Speaker 1: as the mating pair sank lower during mating, their skin
Speaker 1: absorbed poisons and they died in the act, only to
Speaker 1: be buried and fossilized in the sediment below and now
Speaker 1: pointed and then laughed at by everyone. Well, I like
Speaker 1: how this this story starts out feeling like a James
Speaker 1: Bond love sequence, like from Russia with love needs to
Speaker 1: be playing over, you know, Da da da da da,
Speaker 1: and then it turns deadly. Yeah, as it always does. Uh,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I thought that's kind of interesting. You can
Speaker 1: look up the picture of the two turtles. They are
Speaker 1: joined in their fossilized state, uh, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to look at. So yeah, as turtles
Speaker 1: mating always always are. If you ever go to the zoo,
Speaker 1: you you may encounter mating turtles, and it's all it's
Speaker 1: always worth gazing at and listening to because it's generally
Speaker 1: there's a lot of grunting involved. I'm not sure have
Speaker 1: you seen the YouTube videos of turtles trying to mate
Speaker 1: with various objects such as shoes and bowls. No, I
Speaker 1: have not. Yeah, they tend to make a kind of
Speaker 1: squeaking sound that's cute. I will have to look those up.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to get back into the combat. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, So we're finally going to get back into
Speaker 1: the combat, and we're going to get back to the
Speaker 1: to some of the dinosaurs that everyone's properly familiar with.
Speaker 1: You've been itching for a fight, haven't you. Yes, I have.
Speaker 1: And enough enough of this love, enough of this reproduction
Speaker 1: and birth. Yeah, and we're definitely in terms of the
Speaker 1: big fight card. We're into the upper mid card now,
Speaker 1: so it's time for some really hard hitting action. And
Speaker 1: when you when you think about dinosaur combat, there are
Speaker 1: a few names that are gonna be on that list,
Speaker 1: and I guarantee for most people, I mean, for modern listeners,
Speaker 1: this one might even be up at the top, but
Speaker 1: I think it's probably two or three, maybe four, and
Speaker 1: that is the Velociraptor. Now, I wonder if wasn't there
Speaker 1: some TV show that does these historical matchups where it's
Speaker 1: like who would win in a fight between a velociraptor
Speaker 1: and a medieval night Probably there was some show like
Speaker 1: this wasn't there, so it sounds like something that would
Speaker 1: be on that I didn't watch. Samurai versus Velociraptor. Well,
Speaker 1: advantage probably goes to the velociraptor. Just just off the
Speaker 1: top of my head without really crunching with data. Uh,
Speaker 1: these will tell me why these were pretty terrifying creatures.
Speaker 1: So late Cretaceous is the time period the location asia
Speaker 1: modern day Mongolian parts of China. These guys were six
Speaker 1: ft long or one point eight meters long, so there
Speaker 1: an growth the family Dromeo Saraday and they look pretty
Speaker 1: much like the creatures you know and love from the
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park movies, but with three major differing factors here.
Speaker 1: So first of all, we know now that they had feathers,
Speaker 1: likely iridescent feathers, Okay, So I don't think that takes
Speaker 1: away from the terrifying nature of the velociraptor. I know
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't like it. I love it.
Speaker 1: I think that's even better. But birds are scarier than lizards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: birds are scary. And you know what, you don't have
Speaker 1: to like it. That's what the science says. Uh. They
Speaker 1: had feathers and they were terrifying. You don't have to
Speaker 1: like it to be eaten. They don't care. The velociraptor
Speaker 1: doesn't care if you're if you approve, if it's uh,
Speaker 1: if it's plumage. And second, the head is all wrong
Speaker 1: in the movies. Okay, so the actual velociraptor probably had
Speaker 1: a head that was you know, it is a long, low,
Speaker 1: flat snouted head. It looked more like an alligator. And
Speaker 1: a third it was it was This was a smaller
Speaker 1: creature than you see in them, of vise. It was
Speaker 1: about the size of a large dog, not as tall. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a bit longer. So the creature you see in Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park is actually patterned after Udnonicus, which is a close
Speaker 1: relative in the same family. So Michael Crichton basically wrote
Speaker 1: about Dnonicus, but thought, hey, velass velociraptor sounds cooler. We'll
Speaker 1: just make it be Adnonicus and then we'll call it
Speaker 1: of a loci raptor. Now I don't know if this
Speaker 1: theory is correct, but I have read that people essentially
Speaker 1: figured out why Crichton chose the name of velociraptor, and
Speaker 1: it's that they think he was using as a major
Speaker 1: research resource for Jurassic Park, this one particular book by
Speaker 1: this author who had an idiosyncratic view of Dinonicus and
Speaker 1: thought that it was a velociraptor of a different type.
Speaker 1: So I have read that. I don't know if that's correct,
Speaker 1: and I guess I guess Michael Crichton has passed on
Speaker 1: and we can't ask him, but but I have heard
Speaker 1: that's jested as how that mix up happened. Okay, so
Speaker 1: he might have had a little more excuse there as
Speaker 1: opposed to just it sounds cooler. But regardless, we know
Speaker 1: better now, and we're still depicting these Jurassic Park movies.
Speaker 1: They're still making more, aren't they. Yeah, they're still making more,
Speaker 1: and they're still depicting the velociraptor as Adnonicus without feathers,
Speaker 1: which I think they have a responsibility to to fix that.
Speaker 1: I mean, granted, nobody's going in and watching Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: or Jurassic World or whatever. The next one is going
Speaker 1: to be called as their hopefully as their primary educational
Speaker 1: dinosaur documentary. Hopefully that's not also where you get your
Speaker 1: info about chaos theory, right. But but on the other hand,
Speaker 1: like this is still like a prime visualization of dinosaur life.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's a it's amazing footage. They're putting
Speaker 1: all this money into it. Why not make it match
Speaker 1: up with our current understanding of the fossil record. I
Speaker 1: why not have some some feathered dnonicus or just go ahead,
Speaker 1: have feathered velociraptors. Because the thing is, even though they
Speaker 1: were smaller than what you see in the movie, they
Speaker 1: still would have been deadly, especially if they were hunting
Speaker 1: in a pack. Yeah. Yeah, I mean think how scary
Speaker 1: that would be to get get attacked by these tiny things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: or you know, dog size thing. Nobody wants to get
Speaker 1: eaten by a pack of dogs as tiny as a
Speaker 1: relative word or a tiny relative to what they were.
Speaker 1: And it's certainly in the dinosaurs seen a scheme of things.
Speaker 1: So no matter how you shake it, the raptor was
Speaker 1: indeed a member of the terrible cloud lizards group here,
Speaker 1: all of which were swift, fearsome hunters, probably pack hunters
Speaker 1: in many cases. Uh, there's controversy about that we can
Speaker 1: get into it, get back to especially concerning Denona, because
Speaker 1: they would have had large brains, elongated sickle shaped claws
Speaker 1: on the second toe of each foot, and uh as
Speaker 1: the as Jurassic Park indicates. They would have been clever girls.
Speaker 1: But they were probably not as smart as cats or
Speaker 1: dogs are today, so don't get too excited about that.
Speaker 1: They couldn't have, you know, piloted a helicopter, so you
Speaker 1: think maybe smart for dinosaurs, but not as smart as
Speaker 1: the movies would have you believe. Probably mean that's probably
Speaker 1: a larger conversation, right, because I've seen my car to
Speaker 1: try to open a door, So who's to say that
Speaker 1: a dinosaur couldn't open a door. We'll leave that one
Speaker 1: for another another episode. But will your cat run with
Speaker 1: your motorcycle gang? Oh well no, probably not. I think
Speaker 1: she would. She would flatly refuse to do that. Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll leave Jurassic World out of this now. Now tell
Speaker 1: us about the other contender here, Robert, all right, the
Speaker 1: other contender is Protoceratops. This one you've seen many pictures
Speaker 1: of this one before. It was a common dinosaur, and
Speaker 1: it's essentially a smaller tri Serratops. Smaller horned dinosaur, but
Speaker 1: without any of the without any of the horns, say
Speaker 1: for a sort of nose bulge. Okay, now it does
Speaker 1: have like a frill, right, yes, it does have a
Speaker 1: broad neck frill. And this was primarily to to anchor
Speaker 1: muscles for the heavy toothed beak and aw, so it
Speaker 1: was and it and its one horn was more of
Speaker 1: a crest, and this crest was larger and older males,
Speaker 1: suggesting it was probably used in mating battles. It walked
Speaker 1: on all fours, though it may have been able to
Speaker 1: run on its back legs when needed. So this is
Speaker 1: where we get a really important dinosaur combat fossil, also
Speaker 1: known as the fighting dinosaurs. Uh and this was This
Speaker 1: was a nine find in Mongolia, and it seems to
Speaker 1: show a deadly battle between a velociraptor and a protoceratops
Speaker 1: roughly seventy four million years old. One interpretation is that
Speaker 1: the raptor is eviscerating its prey with its claws, while
Speaker 1: the protoceratops is caving in the predator's chest with its
Speaker 1: horned beak. Another interpretation is that the raptor is slicing
Speaker 1: open the throat and the Protoceratops is biting down on
Speaker 1: the raptor's right arm with its beak. Either way, it's
Speaker 1: a deadly tableau that indicates they died at the same time.
Speaker 1: UM A Polish Mongolian team discovered it in the White
Speaker 1: stand Zone cliffs of the Southern Gobi Desert and it's
Speaker 1: considered a national treasure of Mongolia and you can you
Speaker 1: can see it on display in the Mongolian Dinosaur Museum
Speaker 1: in ulm Pitar. I've never heard of that museum before,
Speaker 1: but Mongolia is a treasure trove of fossils. I bet
Speaker 1: that place is awesome. Yeah. I tried to go to
Speaker 1: the website but it was down. I would certainly love
Speaker 1: to hear from anyone who's actually been there. So interpretations
Speaker 1: vary on this encounter, Like you know, certainly it's an encounter.
Speaker 1: Nobody seems to be doubting that, but some look to
Speaker 1: it as a preserved example of a common encounter like these.
Speaker 1: This was the common predator and this was the common prey,
Speaker 1: and this kind of thing went down all the time
Speaker 1: in the past. Others have argued that it might have
Speaker 1: been a chance encounter between two species that didn't have
Speaker 1: much to do with each other. Um this, and this
Speaker 1: illustrates some of the problems with basing everything you know
Speaker 1: about prehistoric species interaction on a single bit of evidence totally.
Speaker 1: But that's not all. Luckily so, a two thousand ten
Speaker 1: study published in the journal paleo Geography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology revealed
Speaker 1: some corroborating fossil evidence uh so that we're talking about
Speaker 1: Upper Cretaceous deposits uh in inner Mongolia UH that features
Speaker 1: a mass of badly eroded Protoceratops bones. Among them, they
Speaker 1: found two velociraptor like teeth and bite marks, So the
Speaker 1: paleontologists stressed that this uh, this raptor in this case
Speaker 1: likely scavenged its meal. But this find and the fighting
Speaker 1: dinosaurs of find indicate that the creatures probably regularly fed
Speaker 1: on Protoceratops, both as hunters and scavengers. And they point
Speaker 1: out that almost all living carnivores do the exact same
Speaker 1: thing with their core prey species. You would rather just
Speaker 1: come across a dead one and eat that without having
Speaker 1: to struggle, But if you're starving, you'll yeah, or or
Speaker 1: likewise that maybe you know, maybe you prefer the thrill
Speaker 1: of the kill that the fresh meat. Though of course,
Speaker 1: any interaction like that is going to bring the risk
Speaker 1: of injury or death. Uh, and injury for a predator
Speaker 1: can be a major thing. Like I remember researching these
Speaker 1: these cases where male cheetahs develop a strategy for bringing
Speaker 1: down an ostrich, which generally isn't on the menu. And
Speaker 1: one of the reasons is taking down an ostrich is dangerous.
Speaker 1: And if you're a cheetah that depends on high speed,
Speaker 1: an injury can mean starvation because it's not like you
Speaker 1: can just go on the shelf and recoup and then
Speaker 1: get back in the game. Now that that could be
Speaker 1: a death sentence. Um, So yeah, taking on dangerous prey
Speaker 1: is dangerous. Well, that is a perfect segue into our
Speaker 1: next conflict, which is the showdown between Tanantasaurus and Dynonicus.
Speaker 1: So now we're gonna be looking at what are assumed
Speaker 1: to be a standard predator and prey species of North America.
Speaker 1: So Tanantasaurus, which is uh that means sinew lizard lived
Speaker 1: in the early Cretaceous a little more than a hundred
Speaker 1: million years ago in North America, especially western regions, and
Speaker 1: it's about six to eight meters long, up to around
Speaker 1: two ms high, about two thousand to hundred pounds, and
Speaker 1: then we're back to Denonicus. Uh. That's the genus that
Speaker 1: includes the species Denonicus and tirapists. That's also Early Cretaceous,
Speaker 1: same same time period, pretty much a hundred million years ago,
Speaker 1: roughly uh, North America, United States, and Denonicus is up
Speaker 1: to about three and a half ms long, maybe a
Speaker 1: little more than a meter high, usually about a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds, so also not huge. You know, we
Speaker 1: were just talking about the smallness of the raptor um.
Speaker 1: There is a great story about this fossil tableau I'm
Speaker 1: about I'm about to explain. But the story is by
Speaker 1: Desmond Maxwell and the December nine to January two thousand
Speaker 1: issue of Natural History magazine, which I think that's the
Speaker 1: magazine put out by the American Museum and Natural History,
Speaker 1: I think UM. And it's describing the work of the
Speaker 1: Yale Peabody Museum paleontologist John Ostrom and others in understanding
Speaker 1: Dononicus largely through its relationship with its supposed prey to Nontosaurus.
Speaker 1: So John Ostrom is now known as this really important
Speaker 1: very influential twentieth century paleontologist, and he's widely associated with
Speaker 1: our current understanding of dinosaurs as the ancestors of modern birds.
Speaker 1: People had gone back and forth in the paleontology community
Speaker 1: about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. I think during
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds people associated dinosaurs with birds, but then
Speaker 1: a lizard model seemed to take over, and then the
Speaker 1: bird model started coming back. So in the mid nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: Ostrom was working on fossil fossil excavations in the Cloverlely
Speaker 1: Formation in Montana and Wyoming. I think this was southern Montana,
Speaker 1: and on the last day of the digging season in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, Ostrom discovered a composed scene of fossil
Speaker 1: bones that was totally unlike anything he had encountered in
Speaker 1: his work before, where there were five specimens in total
Speaker 1: at this site. Four were small therapods. Now, when you
Speaker 1: think therapod, that's sort of the velociraptor or tyrannosaurus kind
Speaker 1: of model, you know, two legs, the that that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, and then pieces of one large ornithopod. Her
Speaker 1: before in the site where these were discovered came to
Speaker 1: be known by the Yale excavation crew as the shrine site. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it evokes this kind of holy mystery. Neither of these
Speaker 1: species had been described in the scientific literature before, though
Speaker 1: I think denonicas skeletons had been found, They hadn't just
Speaker 1: they just hadn't really been described by scientists. And the
Speaker 1: small therapods were most noticeable for this one huge hook
Speaker 1: shaped claw found on each foot, and this in them
Speaker 1: their name Denonicus, also of course means terrible claw. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: this one large herbivore was called Tanantosaurus, meaning sinew lizard.
Speaker 1: It's kind of they should have called it like gristle lizard. Now,
Speaker 1: because of the arrangement of the fossils, Ostrom came to
Speaker 1: a strange conclusion. These four predator carcasses lie, you know,
Speaker 1: they lay buried around the remains of one large prey animal,
Speaker 1: and because of the nature of the area. Looking at
Speaker 1: how the bodies were oriented and some stuff about the sediment,
Speaker 1: Ostrom didn't think the bones could have been washed into
Speaker 1: the plate into that place by moving water. The fossils
Speaker 1: appeared to be lying in the place where the animals died,
Speaker 1: so he concluded that Denonicus was a pack hunter. Now
Speaker 1: you remember this from Jurassic Park, right, their pack hunters,
Speaker 1: you know all that. So the scene, as you should
Speaker 1: imagine it, is that a pack of around eight denonic
Speaker 1: becus attacked, wore down, and killed this much larger prey animal,
Speaker 1: the Tanantosaurus, but not before about half of the hunting
Speaker 1: pack was injured and killed in the struggle. And now
Speaker 1: this interpretation has remained very controversial. Scientists go back and
Speaker 1: forth on it. In Jurassic Park, we do see the
Speaker 1: stand in for the Denonicus executing these complex pack hunting behaviors,
Speaker 1: but real evidence for this kind of pack hunting behavior
Speaker 1: has been kind of elusive. And the article basically mentions
Speaker 1: three main lines of evidence that the Didonicus were pack hunters.
Speaker 1: One of them is the arrangement of bones itself, the
Speaker 1: weird way the bones are laid out at the shrine. Now,
Speaker 1: it's fairly certain that the fossilized animals died in the
Speaker 1: position where they were found. And here's one good piece
Speaker 1: of evidence. After a dinosaur dies, tendons in the vertebrae
Speaker 1: cause a curling up of the neck and the tail
Speaker 1: spine along the backbone essentially, and this is why you
Speaker 1: sometimes see dinosaur falls with their necks curled back in
Speaker 1: these crazy positions, as if screaming in pain. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. Uh. This is generally thought to
Speaker 1: be called caused by this contraction of the vertebral tendons
Speaker 1: as the animal rots. Now, in the specimen the Tenantosaurus,
Speaker 1: the tail and neck were heavily curved towards each other,
Speaker 1: making it almost impossible that the body had been moved
Speaker 1: around by water currents. It looked like this is where
Speaker 1: it was when it died. So if multiple Denonicus died
Speaker 1: alongside this one large Tenantosaurus at the same time and
Speaker 1: in the same place, what would explain that other than
Speaker 1: some deadly fight for survival? Uh? So, the Tenantosaurus is
Speaker 1: certainly large enough to batter, crush, and kill the relatively
Speaker 1: small predators. Right that it wouldn't be one Dnonicus versus
Speaker 1: a Tenanto sourus wouldn't be much of a fight. The
Speaker 1: prey animal is much bigger. Uh. Then again, if a
Speaker 1: pack of eight attacked the this one prey animal and
Speaker 1: half of the pack died, that does not sound like
Speaker 1: a sustainable hunting strategy. That is that that that is
Speaker 1: that does not pay off for the hunters here, right,
Speaker 1: So was it a fluke? Are we seeing some incredibly weird,
Speaker 1: rare event where the predators desperate and starving? There's an
Speaker 1: alternate explanation of the site, which is that the denonicus
Speaker 1: were scavenging. The ideas that a bunch of dnonicus came
Speaker 1: across the corpse of a dead tenanta sore and somehow
Speaker 1: died in the feeding process of scavenging on it. But
Speaker 1: then you're faced with another odd question, what killed him? Like?
Speaker 1: Why did all these different denonicus die while scavenging this
Speaker 1: one corpse? The scavenging interpretation that has been advocated by
Speaker 1: the prominent paleontologist Jack Horner, And I want to read
Speaker 1: a quote from the article I described It said, quote
Speaker 1: Horner likens the idea of a Tenantasaurus killing four dinonicus
Speaker 1: to that of a lone willed to best dispatching four lions. True,
Speaker 1: the will to beast is bigger than the lions, right,
Speaker 1: but it just seems kind of crazy thinking it would
Speaker 1: like kill all these predators. But back to the quote, Yet,
Speaker 1: an adult will to beast might weigh from fifty to
Speaker 1: a hundred pounds more than an adult lion, compared with
Speaker 1: the difference of about a ton between the Tenantosaurus and
Speaker 1: the Dynonicus preserved at the shrine site. A will to
Speaker 1: beast falling on a lion would probably inflict little damage.
Speaker 1: A Tenantosurus would crush at anonicus, So some evidence going
Speaker 1: both ways there. It's hard to know what to think,
Speaker 1: but a couple other interesting lines of thought. One of
Speaker 1: them is teeth. Now, the Tanata source remains are associated
Speaker 1: with lots of Denonicus teeth. It seems like when you
Speaker 1: find one of these prey animals dead, there's Denonicus teeth
Speaker 1: all around. That tells you something, right, It indicates a
Speaker 1: predator prey relationship um there. And there's so many Denonicus
Speaker 1: teeth found with Tenantosurus remains, way more than you could
Speaker 1: reasonably expect to be lost to a like by a
Speaker 1: soliditary scavenger. If one came across one Dnonicus was eating
Speaker 1: off of a dead corpse, it wouldn't leave eleven teeth
Speaker 1: in it, right, That's just too many teeth to be
Speaker 1: lost to be sustainable. Also, the placement of the teeth
Speaker 1: tends to concentrate in the abdomen and pelvis. Why is
Speaker 1: that interesting, Well, it's actually consistent with what you see
Speaker 1: in predators today, where predators tend to feed on these areas,
Speaker 1: the abdomen and the pelvis first. When they kill an
Speaker 1: animal freshly, Uh, they tend to go for the parts
Speaker 1: while they're still sort of warm and moist, to be
Speaker 1: a little gross, to be a little wallace as children's
Speaker 1: children's book material, folks. So if the dnonicus were doing
Speaker 1: the same, it looks like they were feeding on a
Speaker 1: fresh kill, not scavenging piecemeal on some dead animal that
Speaker 1: came across. And then one final point, the anatomy of
Speaker 1: the dnonicus makes it look plausibly like a pack hunter.
Speaker 1: It's got this one terrible law that looks effective for
Speaker 1: both grasping and slashing. Uh. The the an tirapists part
Speaker 1: of the name the dnonicus and tirapists that means counterbalancing,
Speaker 1: referring to the bone structure of the tail. Now why
Speaker 1: would that matter, Well, it means that the animal is
Speaker 1: capable of making its tail rigid and using it as
Speaker 1: a counterweight to balance and control the movement of its body,
Speaker 1: which suggests kind of quick graceful movement and the lightweight
Speaker 1: of the predator's body also kind of suggests a fast,
Speaker 1: active hunter rather than a passive scavenger. So we still
Speaker 1: don't know whether the pack hunting interpretation of the Dononicus
Speaker 1: is correct, but some subsequent studies kind of try to
Speaker 1: endorse the idea. Others have some evidence against it. We
Speaker 1: don't know for sure, but this one site, with all
Speaker 1: these with these dead predators and dead prey together is
Speaker 1: still something that's really interesting to think about and how
Speaker 1: it informs our understanding of how these almost hunted. All Right,
Speaker 1: it's main event time. And when it comes to main
Speaker 1: event to combat between dinosaurs, you know, what's what's the
Speaker 1: kirk Khan, What's the Flair steamboat, the Massawa Coba Kobashi,
Speaker 1: the batman joke, or the gandolf ball rog encounter. What's
Speaker 1: the one that that is so prominently featured in so
Speaker 1: many dinosaur books for children, for adults, even like a
Speaker 1: paleontology textbooks. What is the what is the iconic battle? Well,
Speaker 1: it has to be everybody's favorite herbivore, which would be
Speaker 1: what tri saratops and everybody's favorite carnivore, which would be
Speaker 1: turning the source Rex. That's correct. Now, I will say
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus is also a pretty awesome herbivore. People love those thagomizers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the thagomizers named for Gary Larson cartoon. These are, of
Speaker 1: course the spikes and the tail of the Stegasaurus. Uh. Sadly,
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus will have to wait for another episode to get
Speaker 1: his due. But in this case, yes, t Rex versus
Speaker 1: tri Sarah tops the cl pasic the paleo artists the
Speaker 1: favorite battle. So let's go into a rundown of the
Speaker 1: two combinants. Here we have Tarannosaurus rex t rex late
Speaker 1: Cretaceous North America and Asia as It's stomping grounds size
Speaker 1: up to forty nine feet fifteen meters long, so an
Speaker 1: adult human would would fall short of the knee. So
Speaker 1: this was one of the largest carnosaur dinosaurs uh and one,
Speaker 1: and therefore one of the largest terrestrial carnivores ever to
Speaker 1: walk the Earth. Yeah. I think it's just the Spinosaurus
Speaker 1: and the Gigantosaurus up there with it. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: believe so. And it's a It's diet probably primarily dependent
Speaker 1: on duck build hadrosaurs and for a while paleontologists drifted
Speaker 1: towards uh, when I tend to think of as a
Speaker 1: bully scavenger view of the beast. So so, it's this
Speaker 1: enormous creature obviously, but there were there were theories about
Speaker 1: its its size and its speed that made the paleonta
Speaker 1: to say, well, maybe what this thing did is it
Speaker 1: just scared away the predators from an existing kill. That's
Speaker 1: my corps get away from it. Yeah, And who's gonna
Speaker 1: stop t rex? Because once in this theory, this view
Speaker 1: of a of a slow t rex, once it ambles up,
Speaker 1: you better eating all you can eat, because it's it's
Speaker 1: gonna get whatever it wants at that point. Now, opinions varied,
Speaker 1: but over time the consensus drifted back towards the apex
Speaker 1: predator model of the t rex, the saying that it
Speaker 1: likely hit among the trees and then ran full force
Speaker 1: jaws open at its prey. Uh. And it's certainly had
Speaker 1: encounters with triceratops as well, which we'll get to. And
Speaker 1: of course that's our our next combatant in this battle,
Speaker 1: the triceratops. Now, you might put up for the stigasaur,
Speaker 1: but I think triceratops is the most widely beloved herbivore dinosaur.
Speaker 1: I think there's a there's a very strong case for
Speaker 1: that being true. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's you
Speaker 1: just look at it and you can tell that this
Speaker 1: is this is an animal you're behind and to go
Speaker 1: back to Jurassic Park. Uh. Stegosaurus I don't think made
Speaker 1: it into the film, but tri sarratops Is is prominently featured.
Speaker 1: All the human cast members, maybe except for Jeff Goldblum,
Speaker 1: I think, are hugging on it and touching it because
Speaker 1: it's laying there recovering from its illness. Surely getting some
Speaker 1: staff infections from that thing. Yeah. Meanwhile, Stegosaurus is off
Speaker 1: camera asking hey, what about my scene? Stephen? When when
Speaker 1: do I go on? And Steven Spielberg is like, uh,
Speaker 1: they did, well just a minute, we're we have to
Speaker 1: do this scene. I think they show up in the
Speaker 1: sequel in the Lost World, do they? Yeah, I remember correctly.
Speaker 1: I think that they're somebody's taking a picture of one
Speaker 1: and the Stegosaurus becomes disturbed by the loud noise that
Speaker 1: the camera makes while it's winding its film back. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: good to know, good to know. So the tri Steratops
Speaker 1: late Cretaceous North American thirty ft nine meters long, the
Speaker 1: most famous of the horned dinosaurs, also the largest and
Speaker 1: the most abundant, so they lived in herds across North America.
Speaker 1: And unlike the net frills of other horned dinosaurs, and
Speaker 1: there are several varieties and even some sub varieties of
Speaker 1: Triceratops here, Unlike these others, though, this frill was solid bone,
Speaker 1: a defensive structure to protect the neck. And we have
Speaker 1: fossil evidence of encounters between Triceratops and t Rex, including
Speaker 1: evidence of partially healed tyrannosaur tooth marks on a triceratops
Speaker 1: brow horn. Whoa healed and now that means it it
Speaker 1: met a t Rex and went and lived to tell
Speaker 1: the tale exactly it either it at least drove the
Speaker 1: creature away or managed to escape and maybe even lethally interested,
Speaker 1: who knows, but either way the message seems to be Triceratops,
Speaker 1: when it encountered t Rex, it was capable of holding
Speaker 1: its own at least in some cases. Because of course,
Speaker 1: you're also gonna have varying situations of age and size, right,
Speaker 1: like a young um, a young tristerotopes encountering older t rex,
Speaker 1: which I understand plays into Karen Wallace's I Am a
Speaker 1: Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I think that's why every That's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons some of the the reviews were so
Speaker 1: critical is that I don't know for sure because I
Speaker 1: haven't read it, but I think the t rex kills
Speaker 1: try stereotops. This is like the grail legend king version
Speaker 1: of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king whose strength is failing.
Speaker 1: Uh okay, So where's the fossil evidence? Where where do
Speaker 1: we actually have an encounter between these two creatures. Well,
Speaker 1: we do have what has been referred to as the
Speaker 1: Montana dooling dinosaurs, and this is from about sixty eight
Speaker 1: million years ago. Now here's a little fine print. UM.
Speaker 1: Based on interpretation, seems like what we have here is
Speaker 1: an encounter between the smaller nano Tyrannis, which is a
Speaker 1: close relative of the t rex, though some people argue
Speaker 1: that this might be a juvenile t Rex tiny enough
Speaker 1: to be injected into your bloodstream attack your DNA directly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well not not that small. Don't let the nano foo,
Speaker 1: will you? Um? Dino scale is still in play, but
Speaker 1: but certainly a smaller t Rex. And then the other
Speaker 1: creature uh is Casmio Sarine Saratopsian, and this would have
Speaker 1: been from the Triceratops family, but smaller. Though some people
Speaker 1: are commenting on this fossil, go ahead and call it
Speaker 1: a Triceratops based on what we've seen of this fossil,
Speaker 1: let's believe that the two dinos killed each other in battle.
Speaker 1: T Rex suffered a crushed skull and chest, and its
Speaker 1: teeth pierced the horned one's skull as well. They were buried,
Speaker 1: probably by an earthquake because the theories like an earthquake happen,
Speaker 1: So they died and their bodies were there and then
Speaker 1: an earthquake buried them. Or does it look like the
Speaker 1: earthquake was going on while they were fighting. I don't
Speaker 1: want it to be the last either. Interpretation is pretty amazing,
Speaker 1: like you think of your most cinematic battles between hero
Speaker 1: and villain. Does it ever end in both characters killing
Speaker 1: each other and then a volcano erupts and covers them,
Speaker 1: or or an earthquake swallows them hold or a mudslide
Speaker 1: buries them like that kind of thing is rare even
Speaker 1: in our most uh you know, imagine fictional showdowns, modern
Speaker 1: modern stories. You don't want the hero to die usually.
Speaker 1: I mean, what do they have, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty,
Speaker 1: like plunge to their death together or something that would
Speaker 1: be a pretty awesome fossil Can you imagine a future
Speaker 1: generation of intelligent squid creatures looking through the fossil record
Speaker 1: of humanity and they say, well, we don't have a
Speaker 1: lot to go on about human on human combat, but
Speaker 1: we do have the Sherlock Moriarty fossil fine and it's amazing,
Speaker 1: and it's got this opium pipe you know. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so um. This particular fine though, the Montana doling
Speaker 1: dinosaurs is is pretty controversial. So it was unearthed by
Speaker 1: fossil hunters. Fossil hunters that were not working on behalf
Speaker 1: of you know, scientific organization or a museum. They found
Speaker 1: this thing, They dug it up, and then they tried
Speaker 1: to sell the rock embedded fossils at auction for eight
Speaker 1: to ten million dollars. Yeah. So the idea was to
Speaker 1: snag a wealthy and fossil enthusiast who then might donate
Speaker 1: it to a museum. Uh, it ended up failing to
Speaker 1: sell it auction into in and uh the thing was
Speaker 1: valued at seven to nine million dollars, but bidding only
Speaker 1: reached five point five million. So they just put it
Speaker 1: into into storage, into a vault. And that's that's where
Speaker 1: it is today now to give all that's that's sad,
Speaker 1: that's junk. Yeah. Uh so how did this even come
Speaker 1: come to pass? Well, you have to look back a
Speaker 1: little to you know, the post Jurassic Park zeal for dinosaurs. Okay,
Speaker 1: uh and uh in particular, there was a t rex
Speaker 1: skeleton uh named Sue this one moment up for bidding
Speaker 1: and it was valued about a million dollars, but the
Speaker 1: Field Museum of Natural History purchased it for eight point
Speaker 1: four million. And so critics have said, well, this was
Speaker 1: kind of the start of the dinosaur gold rush. You've
Speaker 1: got into people's mind if we find a really awesome fossil,
Speaker 1: so find we can sell it, you know, at high
Speaker 1: price to the highest bidder, and then they can they
Speaker 1: can do the science once we've done that. But first
Speaker 1: we're gonna get we're gonna get our our our payday.
Speaker 1: And this area discussion reminds me a lot of the
Speaker 1: meteorite hunter debate. So when when profit chasing hunters are
Speaker 1: the ones finding scientifically significant rocks instead of the scientist,
Speaker 1: then all sorts of problems emerge. Proper identification, proper protection
Speaker 1: of the find, proper values placed on the rocks, not
Speaker 1: to mention, opening the door to fossil or meteorite theft,
Speaker 1: to black markets, to rock squatting, as we see with
Speaker 1: with the with the idea of this, this fossil find
Speaker 1: just landing in a vault until somebody ponies up enough money. Um.
Speaker 1: The falsification is pretty interesting to consider that Nicolas Cage,
Speaker 1: the actor, paid two hundred and seventy six thousand hours
Speaker 1: in an auction in twenty two seven for a t
Speaker 1: rex skull, a skull that turned out to have been
Speaker 1: illegally removed from Mongolia and he had to return it.
Speaker 1: That's Nick, you should be ashamed of yourself. Well, he
Speaker 1: turned he did the right thing, the Nick credit. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess so, I'm sorry. I don't mean to be vindictive,
Speaker 1: he I. I think when you first told me about this, Robert,
Speaker 1: I imagined him reading an apology letter in his can
Speaker 1: air accent as I just recently rewatched that movie. Well,
Speaker 1: the headline on the CNN piece that I sent about
Speaker 1: that um um the title was I think Nicholas Cage
Speaker 1: returns his t rex skull, which kind of implied that
Speaker 1: the skull inside his head was that of a t rex,
Speaker 1: which I kind of like. By the way, that CNN
Speaker 1: article reported that quote, he bought the tyronos Are skull
Speaker 1: during a time when he also bought fifteen mansions, two castles,
Speaker 1: four yachts, and nine rolls royces. So you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you go on a spending uh spree and you make
Speaker 1: a few questionable purchase in purchases, including maybe a stolen
Speaker 1: Mongolian t rex skull. Well, if you're going for opulence
Speaker 1: and violating the world's right to preservation of natural history,
Speaker 1: I think you should just go all out, not you know,
Speaker 1: skip fourteen in the mansions and instead have one castle
Speaker 1: made out of t rex skulls. Uh. Well, basically, I
Speaker 1: would say the big take home here is that sadly
Speaker 1: the Montana dueling dinosaurs uh find uh has not received
Speaker 1: the actual scrutiny that it deserves. And if there's a
Speaker 1: plus side though, the failure of of this and I
Speaker 1: think there was a Stegasaurus find that also failed to
Speaker 1: to to bring in the dough that the hunters wanted.
Speaker 1: These you could indicate that the fossil bubble has burst
Speaker 1: and you'll see less of this in the future, So
Speaker 1: fossil hunters will hopefully be more you influenced by the
Speaker 1: desire to to get these fines to two institutions and experts,
Speaker 1: as opposed to just making a massive payday off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe I'm just not being sympathetic enough to
Speaker 1: see the other side of the coin. But to me,
Speaker 1: it seems like, I don't know, relics of past geological
Speaker 1: eras seem like the common heritage of humanity. Shouldn't they
Speaker 1: be in a place where open to the public, where
Speaker 1: people can come and see them. Yeah, but but then again,
Speaker 1: but of course they need to get down to the question.
Speaker 1: While if that fossil relic is in Mongolia at a museum,
Speaker 1: not everybody gets to see that. If that fossil relic
Speaker 1: is in Chicago, not everyone gets to see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's better than being in a private it's in
Speaker 1: a private vault, like virtually nobody gets to see that,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't benefit anyone. But still, this fossil exists
Speaker 1: and that that is exciting. So maybe one day, uh
Speaker 1: kids will get to see it in a museum and
Speaker 1: paleontologist will get to give it a lot more attention hopefully.
Speaker 1: So all right, Robert, you got anything else about fossil
Speaker 1: action scenes? No, I think that the card has concluded.
Speaker 1: The main event has concluded. Uh we we've people are
Speaker 1: throwing their beer cups down into the ring, right, everyone's
Speaker 1: piling out of the the the cretaceous thunder dome here,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, we're left to just consider just the
Speaker 1: just how amazing it is. First of all that fossils exist,
Speaker 1: like the the the the string of events that have
Speaker 1: to take place to reach fossilization and and then recovery
Speaker 1: and appreciation by modern humans. But then to consider that, yes,
Speaker 1: we have these amazing moments from life, violent confrontations, mating,
Speaker 1: uh and even birth preserved in the fossil record. And
Speaker 1: I do I've said this on the podcast before, but
Speaker 1: I do just want to say again, if you've never
Speaker 1: had the chance to go to a good natural history
Speaker 1: museum and look at fossil exhibits, you should find a
Speaker 1: way to do this. It it is worth it. It's
Speaker 1: so cool, it's it's a life changing experience to really
Speaker 1: see dinosaur fossils in person. Indeed, and if you want
Speaker 1: to check out those books that we read from at
Speaker 1: the beginning, again, those are by Karen Wallace. There's I
Speaker 1: Am a Diplodocus, I Am a quetzal Coatlas, and then
Speaker 1: she also has one on Ankleiosaurus Tyrannosaurus. Uh and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's it. Yeah, yeah, they'll be prepared for
Speaker 1: the carnage. Be prepared for the carnage. Come for the carnage,
Speaker 1: all right. In the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out various other podcast episodes we've done, head a numbers
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's what you'll
Speaker 1: find the landing page with this episode, and we'll try
Speaker 1: to have some links on there that go out to
Speaker 1: some of the material we've talked about here, and maybe
Speaker 1: even a really awesome dinosaur battle illustration to cap it
Speaker 1: all off, I hope. So also, of course, if you
Speaker 1: want to email us to get in touch directly with
Speaker 1: feedback about this episode or any other, if you have
Speaker 1: any questions, if you have any comments, if you have
Speaker 1: any weird ideas. If you want to tell us about
Speaker 1: some really cool fossil action scene you saw that we
Speaker 1: didn't even know about, or you just want to say hi,
Speaker 1: you can always email us at blow the Mind at
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