Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
Speaker 1: we're doing two episodes here where we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about extreme prehistoric mammals. I think everyone here and it
Speaker 1: already knows vaguely what I'm talking about, talking about the
Speaker 1: creatures that came post dinosaur, that we're that we're just
Speaker 1: as weird and crazy and varied as dinosaurs, except they were,
Speaker 1: of course mammals. They were the prehistoric mammals, the forerunners
Speaker 1: in many cases of what we have today, just earlier models,
Speaker 1: more outrageous models, gigantic models, tiny models, models with features
Speaker 1: that we either don't see today at all or we
Speaker 1: see just a shadow of them. And when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, I remember spending a lot of time in
Speaker 1: dinosaur books, of course, because I you know, I love
Speaker 1: dinosaurs like most kids, and jumped into them. And some
Speaker 1: of the books that I had, including the excellent McMillian
Speaker 1: Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals by Dixon, Cox,
Speaker 1: Savage and Gardener. Uh, this was one of my favorite books,
Speaker 1: and half of it is dinosaurs. Like the first half
Speaker 1: is dinosaurs with all the beautiful illustrations of them and
Speaker 1: how we think they might have looked. And in the
Speaker 1: second half is all mammals and the with the dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: You know, dinosaurs were great, Dinosaurs were awesome, but there
Speaker 1: was more of this division. Like when you took in
Speaker 1: the story of the dinosaur, you knew that something something
Speaker 1: horrible happens, something catacause MC happened, and the age of
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs vanished completely, and that now there's really nothing
Speaker 1: like these creatures roaming the earth. I mean, yes, there are.
Speaker 1: We still have crocodiles now we see to sendence of them,
Speaker 1: and we see some some things that are that that
Speaker 1: remind us more of the world of dinosaurs than others.
Speaker 1: But but when you look at the the extreme prehistoric mammals,
Speaker 1: when you look at things like the giant sloth, uh
Speaker 1: like the creatures we're going to discuss these two episodes,
Speaker 1: it's weirder because they're closer to what we have now,
Speaker 1: but just as alien. Well because they are extreme mammals.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk a little bit more about what is
Speaker 1: extreme and what's normal, but they really do sort of
Speaker 1: boggle the mind. Right, it's a wonderland of creatures that
Speaker 1: you just don't normally um see out there in literature
Speaker 1: in the media, right because Dinosourci always taking top billing.
Speaker 1: But we're kind of we're taking the bones today of
Speaker 1: all these really incredible creatures, dusting them off, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at the oddest parts of them, what makes
Speaker 1: them unique. We're going all prehistoric packing arm today. Now
Speaker 1: you should probably mention of what sparked this. Well, we
Speaker 1: both have seen the exhibit Extreme Mammals. We saw it
Speaker 1: at the firm Bank Museum here in Atlanta, but it
Speaker 1: is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, and
Speaker 1: it has some amazing examples of of these extreme mammals
Speaker 1: that we'll talk about before we get into that. Though,
Speaker 1: I thought it would probably be good for us to
Speaker 1: call over extinction mass extinction, uh, specifically because it's kind
Speaker 1: of plays into this idea of of why these seems
Speaker 1: so exotic and far removed from us. But the fact
Speaker 1: of the matter is that extinction is just not a
Speaker 1: modern phenomenon. In fact, all mammals and other species that
Speaker 1: have ever lived are extinct. Yeah, and which is which
Speaker 1: really drives, and it begins to drive home when you
Speaker 1: start looking through one of these books and you're and
Speaker 1: you realize, oh, well, there were like pages and pages
Speaker 1: of different types of prehistoric horse that that we just
Speaker 1: that are no longer with us, just completely gone. You know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking that, particularly as a kid, if you're
Speaker 1: flipping through that, that's gonna be really hard to get
Speaker 1: a hold on reality, because even when four year old
Speaker 1: will say, Okay, I get dinosaurs, and I get this
Speaker 1: creature once lived, but but what about a mermaid really
Speaker 1: that could live? Right, especially when you say something like
Speaker 1: well the easter bunny, Sure that's that's totally for real.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I mean you look pat back at
Speaker 1: this past which is just amazing, just riddled with these So,
Speaker 1: starting about one thousand years ago, large mammals and other
Speaker 1: species began to disappear a lot more swiftly than normal
Speaker 1: as humans began to spread from Africa and other continents.
Speaker 1: Then the extension rate sped up beginning about twelve thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and it continues to accelerate today. There were
Speaker 1: astonishing mammals that roamed North America until about twelve thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. There were beavers the size of grizzly bears,
Speaker 1: giant beaver. Yeah, and short faced bears that stood at
Speaker 1: about eleven feet tall or three point four meters high.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was amazing. So besides over hunting by human,
Speaker 1: scientists have proposed several different theories as to why this happened.
Speaker 1: Climate change, killer plagues, a comment, right impact, or atmospheric explosion. Now,
Speaker 1: truth of the matter is it's probably a bit of
Speaker 1: a combination of all of these factors. So it's not
Speaker 1: just humans. But you know, if you've if you've got
Speaker 1: a comment that is hurling towards the earth, that obviously
Speaker 1: is going to take out a big amount of the population.
Speaker 1: And probably most famously, as you have already mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago, dinosaurs they disappeared in a flash,
Speaker 1: and it's thought to be that there could have been
Speaker 1: a comment and then some atmosphere changes that followed that
Speaker 1: wipe them out. Yeah, And it's these environmental changes some
Speaker 1: of these theories, to me, you're the most interesting because
Speaker 1: you're you're looking as always you're looking at organisms responding
Speaker 1: to the environment, organisms responding to to where they can
Speaker 1: get resources, how they can can best take take them
Speaker 1: in and these forms evolving over time to exploit them.
Speaker 1: So you with with mammals, you see their maximum diversity
Speaker 1: about fifteen million years ago, during the Miocene epoch twenty
Speaker 1: three point oh three to five point three million years ago.
Speaker 1: It is a time of warmer global climates than those
Speaker 1: in proceeding or following periods. Now, since then, global climates
Speaker 1: have deteriorated and the tropical regions have shrunk, and tropical regions,
Speaker 1: of course, that's where you see the most diversity even today,
Speaker 1: like these are. If you were to use some sort
Speaker 1: of like business model, I guess it would be like
Speaker 1: the capitalist wonderland of the rainforest is where all the
Speaker 1: crazy forms can just run wild and and go nuts.
Speaker 1: But then also the alternating cold and warm periods brought
Speaker 1: on by the ice ages encourage the evolution of particularly
Speaker 1: large mammals such as the wooly mammoth, giant deer, giant
Speaker 1: ground sloths, and as you said, now they're all gone
Speaker 1: over the last twelve thousand years. Yeah, and uh. In
Speaker 1: order to really talk about mammals, we should probably discuss
Speaker 1: what makes them uniquely mammals or mammalian river dolphin mammal, Right,
Speaker 1: spiny ant eater mammal, that mammal, platypus mammal. What do
Speaker 1: they all have in common? Well, they all got the milk.
Speaker 1: They have the milk. They're all vertebrates, they're all warm blooded,
Speaker 1: they all have hair on their bodies, and they all
Speaker 1: produce milk to feed their babies with. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: are all excellent design feature because the memory glance. This
Speaker 1: allows a mother to leave her offspring in the nest,
Speaker 1: go out and forwards, then come back and pump them
Speaker 1: full of supernutritious milk. The dense fur helps them retain heat,
Speaker 1: which is an important design feature because they're warm blooded,
Speaker 1: and that in warm bloodedness keeps them running at above
Speaker 1: environmental temperatures, so they can remain active for long periods
Speaker 1: regardless of the weather. The trade off, of course, is
Speaker 1: that they have to eat a lot to pay the
Speaker 1: body's high energy bills. Uh. And also you also see
Speaker 1: with mammals they tend to have large complex brains because
Speaker 1: they have to control an advanced nervous system and rapidly
Speaker 1: processed sense data. Yeah and um. Some placental mammals can
Speaker 1: nourish their growing babies in side their bodies for as
Speaker 1: long as two years now. That's really important because that
Speaker 1: means that their offspring are born more fully developed then
Speaker 1: more stupial babies or ones that hatch from an egg. Um.
Speaker 1: This is really cool. Whales and drafts, they're just born
Speaker 1: with their eyes open, ready to go. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever seen a love birth
Speaker 1: of a draft, but it is amazing to see because
Speaker 1: within like tent poles being born. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: tent being popped up, and they're a little bit wobbly
Speaker 1: at first, but it is. It's because in an environment,
Speaker 1: especially if you were a prey creature out there in
Speaker 1: the grasslands, you gotta you gotta be ready to go.
Speaker 1: You gotta be ready to just pop up and run
Speaker 1: with the rest of them. There's no just lounging around
Speaker 1: the din all day until you finally reached the point where,
Speaker 1: you you know, go out and get that job right
Speaker 1: where the rubber meets the road. So what makes something
Speaker 1: extreme because it's kind of hard to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's that's an crazy horn because within certain groups, maybe
Speaker 1: all of them have this type of horn on their heads,
Speaker 1: but maybe one is just you know, four times larger
Speaker 1: than the next, well, I mean extreme again we have distress.
Speaker 1: Of course, we're talking about our standpoint, our bow point,
Speaker 1: because today the idea of tiny little horses is is
Speaker 1: kind of silly and ridiculous, but there was a time
Speaker 1: when that was the model so well. And so you
Speaker 1: really do have to look within the group though to
Speaker 1: determine what is extreme, because you know each animal is
Speaker 1: going to have just normal traits, just like we do.
Speaker 1: We're we're an example at both normal and extreme traits. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I'll get to that. But a kangaroo is a
Speaker 1: good example. It's marsupial and uh. While some of the
Speaker 1: smaller shrew like marsupials that do hop um, kangaroos are
Speaker 1: extreme because they're the only large bipedal mammal that have
Speaker 1: that pego stick kind of locomotion, and fossil evidence actually
Speaker 1: dating back to million years ago indicates that their ancestors.
Speaker 1: Kangaroo's ancestors did not hop so most likely when rainforest
Speaker 1: gave way to dry grassy planes, hopping became something that
Speaker 1: was selected for right because you wanted to get across
Speaker 1: as quickly as possible, and that is what makes kangaroos extreme.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you see the same thing in video games.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'll give you the ability to make your character jump, which,
Speaker 1: if you were going to play it completely straight, your
Speaker 1: character would walk or run across the level, he would
Speaker 1: not jump like a kangaroo. But the design feature will
Speaker 1: often be such that there's no there's no additional cost
Speaker 1: to jumping, so the player who's just focusing on getting
Speaker 1: through the level might just jump ridiculously. That's probably a
Speaker 1: also a ridiculous tie in to make here, but I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's it's a good visual there. Um. So
Speaker 1: I had mentioned that humans are extreme, um, and that
Speaker 1: comes in the form of our bipedalism and as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: big brains before relative to our body size. You know
Speaker 1: everything else warm blooded, differentiated teeth, five fingers, and toes
Speaker 1: pretty normal, right. You look at at all sorts of
Speaker 1: species across nature and you see the same thing. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: we're also many of us relatively hairless. And of course
Speaker 1: that's a whole side issue that we've discussed before in
Speaker 1: the podcast. Yes, and it doesn't have to do with
Speaker 1: a quad gates, although that would be really cool if
Speaker 1: it did. Yes, all right, so we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: break and when we come back, We're going to begin
Speaker 1: a ten part countdown of our favorite extreme mammals. We're gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, start with the smallest and work up to
Speaker 1: the biggest on our list. So we're gonna knock some
Speaker 1: of these out on this episode and the rest will
Speaker 1: knock out on the following episode. And I am going
Speaker 1: to try to have a gallery up as well, so
Speaker 1: that as you go through this, we're going to describe
Speaker 1: these creatures, but you're gonna naturally want to see them
Speaker 1: as well, So I'll try to make sure that we
Speaker 1: have a gallery that you can you can listen to
Speaker 1: the podcast and go through that as well and actually
Speaker 1: look these things in the face. All Right, we're back,
Speaker 1: and we are going to talk about the tiniest, geniest
Speaker 1: mammal to have ever existed. We're talking about one and
Speaker 1: a half inches long. Yes, this thing is amazingly small,
Speaker 1: and uh, his name is bad and annoys, and uh,
Speaker 1: this guy was very small. We're talking zero point zero
Speaker 1: three three two point zero sixty four ounces um with
Speaker 1: more likely we're looking at like one point three grams
Speaker 1: as the general weight of these guys. And they lived
Speaker 1: about fifty million years ago in what is now wyoming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, the smallest, just so you can have something
Speaker 1: compared against the smallest mammal alive today is the bumblebee back,
Speaker 1: which is only slightly larger. Uh. This, uh, this little
Speaker 1: creature here is thought to be a relative of the shrew.
Speaker 1: And I love it. If you have cats, then you've
Speaker 1: met these or pieces of these things. Yes, I love this.
Speaker 1: Paleontologist Jonathan Block was just looking at some material underneath
Speaker 1: a microscope when he spotted a tiny, tinyy fossil jaw
Speaker 1: and then realized that he was looking at teeth, and
Speaker 1: this is how it was discovered. Yeah, this guy is
Speaker 1: crazy small and just and and and adorable. I mean,
Speaker 1: that is something that's small. You can't help it find
Speaker 1: a little adorable, even if it's kind of shrew like,
Speaker 1: and shrews are kind of ghastly in a way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But to think that it could sit there and run
Speaker 1: up your the tip of your pencil and hang out,
Speaker 1: that's how small we're talking. Would we could crawl up
Speaker 1: to the tip of your pencil and uh and just
Speaker 1: sat there. It weighed as little as a dollar bill.
Speaker 1: I feel like it would be a great writing companion, right,
Speaker 1: mused if you will. But like a lot of these forms,
Speaker 1: this this, this one one extinct. You won't find these
Speaker 1: guys anymore. Um. And really a way to think about
Speaker 1: a lot of these forms is think of like the
Speaker 1: most specialized business imaginable. Say like during a boom time,
Speaker 1: say during say that the dot com boom, you'll have
Speaker 1: like a very specialized website that comes out. It's it's
Speaker 1: trying to make money off of off of the boom.
Speaker 1: And then when they stuff dot com No, no, we
Speaker 1: we've we've survived. I'm kidding were I mean, we are
Speaker 1: specialized in the information realm. Yeah, but we don't think
Speaker 1: of any kind of like specialized, uh you know particular,
Speaker 1: say like a bakery, a bakery that only specialized in
Speaker 1: meat flavor donuts. Well, great, you're gonna clean up as
Speaker 1: long as bacon flavored donuts are the thing. While those
Speaker 1: are in style, you're just it's gonna be hand over
Speaker 1: a fist. But when that goes out of style, well
Speaker 1: then you're gonna you're gonna either have to evolve into
Speaker 1: a different form or you're going to perish. And so
Speaker 1: you see that with a lot of the creatures we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about in this for a for a
Speaker 1: period of time, that was an excellent design. But when
Speaker 1: the environment changed, when the resources changed, when the get,
Speaker 1: when the basic game changed, then uh, then that form
Speaker 1: had to vanish. If this was alive today, do you
Speaker 1: think that it would have, um, you know, pretty high
Speaker 1: internet status if it could sneeze? Yeah, yeah, it could sneeze.
Speaker 1: Anything always always helps. Yeah. Um. The next item on
Speaker 1: our list is the horn to go for. And I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but think about Calibus from Clash of the Titans.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, the horned beast man with the whip.
Speaker 1: Of course, fabulously I brought to life Ray Harry Howson,
Speaker 1: who's sadly passed away this week. But but but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see this is this is kind of the
Speaker 1: rodent version of that character. Uh. The rodent we're talking
Speaker 1: about the hornet gopher is epic Gallus. Uh. He was
Speaker 1: one ft long thirty centimeters lived in North America. Probably
Speaker 1: resembled a modern marmot, except he has long, powerful claws
Speaker 1: on the front feet and horns a pair of almost
Speaker 1: rhino like horns that are sort of rising up from
Speaker 1: the top of its snout. And and and I mean
Speaker 1: you see these in the skulls that they have, that
Speaker 1: they've detected these things. I mean, it's it's it's very
Speaker 1: obviously a pair of horns. Yeah, and it's a bit
Speaker 1: of a mystery as to what they were used for,
Speaker 1: probably digging. Some people have said maybe it's a mating display,
Speaker 1: but the fact that both genders have the horn would
Speaker 1: seem really unlikely because it doesn't indicate like, I'm a
Speaker 1: male with high reproductive fitness come over here, so you know.
Speaker 1: Another clue is that they have really small eyes, which
Speaker 1: would indicate the possibility of poor eyesight. So most likely
Speaker 1: they're just we're, you know, hanging out, burrowing, digging a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, with any of these things, you're going to
Speaker 1: find the various people have have the varying theories again
Speaker 1: that it's intra species combat, it's the sexual display, that
Speaker 1: it's defense, but yeah, they're the burrowing things. Seems to
Speaker 1: make the most sense sance this, This would have been
Speaker 1: a burrowing animal. It would be amazing to come upon,
Speaker 1: I mean because it really those those horns are just
Speaker 1: so unexpected, and I think that's probably what's so amazing
Speaker 1: to us humans is because we are used to our
Speaker 1: regular run of the Milico first. But it's probably just
Speaker 1: as simple as you know. Here in the United States
Speaker 1: in the Southeast, I could care less about squirrels or
Speaker 1: they're taking over my yard. But maybe another person in
Speaker 1: another world might think that they're quite excited. I've I've heard,
Speaker 1: you know, accounts of people who who visit, say Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and they have they've lived most of their lives in
Speaker 1: a place that does not have squirrels. They come here
Speaker 1: and it's amazing. They're like, oh my good us look
Speaker 1: at these amazing creatures. And we're just like, yeah, those
Speaker 1: are those are tree rats. That's that's what. But epigallis
Speaker 1: a lot of fun because it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: devil rat. Uh. And it also you can't help but
Speaker 1: be reminded a bit of the jackalope, which of course
Speaker 1: is a is a false creature created through taxidermy that
Speaker 1: has like the head of a jack rabbit with antlers um,
Speaker 1: which is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing to see on a
Speaker 1: wall somewhere. But in this example of the epic Galius,
Speaker 1: we see something just as crazy. Now, the next example
Speaker 1: that we have on our list is a tiny horse.
Speaker 1: It's called hieroch ethereum the dawn horse horsey a w N. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it called the dawn horse because this is basically
Speaker 1: the earliest known equit ancestor of all horses. Uh, but
Speaker 1: rather peculiar. Would you would might not instantly recognize it
Speaker 1: as a horse, or if you saw it today, you
Speaker 1: might think that there was something weird going on in
Speaker 1: your brain, like you're having a little acution episode. But
Speaker 1: first and foremost, this tiny horse was eight inches tall
Speaker 1: at the shoulder or twenty cimeters. Extremely tiny. This this
Speaker 1: is just like completely out of scale with what we
Speaker 1: think of as a modern horse. It's true, And I
Speaker 1: think about it as like, oh, this is something that
Speaker 1: I think a Russian billionaire would try to pray resurrect, right,
Speaker 1: like for what are we gonna do with the wooly mammoth?
Speaker 1: But if you could clone eight inch horses, yeah, and
Speaker 1: start selling those, my goodness, Russian billionaire's daughters all over there.
Speaker 1: Who wants a pony when you can have an eight
Speaker 1: inch horse and a stable of them? Yeah, you could
Speaker 1: be in your apartment in New York. You know, you're right,
Speaker 1: this is perfect for the apartment dweller. Um. Now, they
Speaker 1: were a bit different from horses in other regards as well.
Speaker 1: For instance, they had four toes in the front and
Speaker 1: three in the back, so they ended up having large,
Speaker 1: unhorselike feet. It's true. Um so when you think about
Speaker 1: a horse, you think about that powerful toe with a hoof, right,
Speaker 1: it's just not a footpad, and these guys has had
Speaker 1: more le footpads for trying to navigate the terrain. You know.
Speaker 1: They also lived fifty million years ago during the early
Speaker 1: part of the Tertiary period, and they were a pretty
Speaker 1: wide spread throughout Europe and Asia exactly, So I mean
Speaker 1: you'd have to go back pretty far to be able
Speaker 1: to check these guys out. And they were probably pretty
Speaker 1: bright because they think they had rather large and complex brains,
Speaker 1: so they were probably very alert, you know, constantly on
Speaker 1: the watch because they're tiny horses. And while we think
Speaker 1: they're adorable, we would think they're adorable, the actual creatures
Speaker 1: they had to share the world with probably thought they
Speaker 1: looked delicious probably and uh, speaking of deliciousness, they were vegetarians,
Speaker 1: so they weren't going after any meat themselves. They're having
Speaker 1: more complai, I would hope so, because it would have
Speaker 1: really put a dark twist on this if we finally
Speaker 1: revealed that they were carnivores, but of course they're not.
Speaker 1: They're they're vegetaries. Well now I'm just imagining and look,
Speaker 1: you know, this eight inch horse like hanging off the
Speaker 1: neck of a giant creature trying to take it down.
Speaker 1: But they had a more complete series of teeth than
Speaker 1: modern horses, which were used to feed on those soft, leavy,
Speaker 1: leafy vegetation spots. All right, so we we've had two
Speaker 1: tiny creatus, well, three tiny creatures so far. We've we've
Speaker 1: talked about the uh, the the tiny pencil crawler. We've
Speaker 1: talked about the horned rat, we talked about the dawn horse,
Speaker 1: and now we're going to talk about the whale who
Speaker 1: could walk. This was amazing to see at the Extreme
Speaker 1: Mammals Exhibit because it it is a whale with with
Speaker 1: four feet essentially, and it is terrifying to look at
Speaker 1: because you know, normally think of whales as being the
Speaker 1: sort of benevolent creatures lolling around in the waters but
Speaker 1: not able to actually scramble up on a river bank
Speaker 1: or you know, the sand and eat your foot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it basically kind of looks like a ten foot long
Speaker 1: mammalian crocodile, like a flesh of dial Yeah. And one
Speaker 1: of the cool things about this one is so a
Speaker 1: lot of our our stories of sea monsters come from
Speaker 1: the fact that if you if you have a whale
Speaker 1: that is washed up on the beach and of its
Speaker 1: flesh is gone, the and not not only the whale,
Speaker 1: but other other sea mammals um with the flesh disappears,
Speaker 1: and you're just looking at the skeleton. It looks like
Speaker 1: a drastically different creature and you think, oh, look at
Speaker 1: this thing. It has this slender head and it's was
Speaker 1: living in the water. It must have been something fierce.
Speaker 1: Well this is basically what this is, basically what this
Speaker 1: creature looks like. Yeah, it just really looks like it
Speaker 1: could take you off guard, I guess you could say,
Speaker 1: which is the whole point of it. Right. It lived
Speaker 1: about forty nine million years ago in the shallow seas
Speaker 1: of what is now modern day Pakistan. Yeah, because Pakistan
Speaker 1: back in these days, uh as an island off the
Speaker 1: coast of of India in the Indian Ocean, yep. And
Speaker 1: uh it weighed in about four hundred pounds pretty big. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And of course we can look at modern whale specimens today,
Speaker 1: and we we see the remnants of their their legs,
Speaker 1: the remnants of their limbs that have not completely been
Speaker 1: the form is not completely been abandoned in their evolution.
Speaker 1: It's true, the front legs of whales have evolved into flippers,
Speaker 1: and there's tiny remnants of hind legs inherited from their
Speaker 1: landwelling ancestors which remain in this elaton, but they perform
Speaker 1: no known function. Yeah, so it's sort of like the
Speaker 1: wisdom teeth of the body. So scientists consider angle cita
Speaker 1: is to be in early whale because it shares these
Speaker 1: underwater adaptations. Uh, it had the adaptation of a nose
Speaker 1: that enabled it to swallow underwater, and it's periodic bones
Speaker 1: head structures like those of whales, enabling to hear well underwater.
Speaker 1: And in addition, it's teeth are also similar to other
Speaker 1: early whales. Indeed, all right, so this is the first
Speaker 1: section of these extreme mammals. But do make sure to
Speaker 1: check into the next episode because we're gonna look at
Speaker 1: something that looks like a snuffle opicus. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: just the tip of the iceberg. The really weird stuff
Speaker 1: is going to happen in the next episode. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: you can reach out to us, you can get in
Speaker 1: touch with us, you can check out the gallery that
Speaker 1: goes along with these episodes. And you can do it
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