#1 Paleontologist on the Discoveries Changing History Forever | Ken Lacovara

Observe the North American dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana, an offer appears in minutes, remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch, astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Long as a school bus, paddles for limbs, six-foot jaw, and then they have a second set of teeth at the top of their throat that points backwards to keep you from swimming back out. I hope you're just dead before you get there. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like they already get you, you're dead. I'm not trying to swim back out. Yeah. Whoa. Is that it? Is eating supposedly like a great white shark? Well, they didn't exist then, but there were lots of big sharks. I don't know if you can see those back of the throat teeth. They're called the pterygoid jaws. So, oh, look, the upper left-hand picture shows those extra set of teeth in the mouth. That's a dragon of the water. Yeah, right there. If you zoom into the mouth, you'll see those extra teeth. All right, let's see how close we can get there, Joe. Oh, yeah, I can kind of see it. All righty, but I don't know if people out there can see it. It's in the back. You're saying it's like, yeah, whoa. So, maybe my favorite fossil that we found at the fossil park is we found one of those pterygoid jaws with all the teeth in it. And what's amazing about our location, so, again, the fossil park site was underwater in the Cretaceous period. In our second gallery called Monstrous Seas, everything in that gallery was found on the property in a layer that goes about 65 feet. Under your feet, where you'll be standing there. And these creatures lived here. So, when you see our giant Mosasaurus, if you can pull that up, if you search for. Like the word Moses? At a fossil park and, yeah. Moses and then an aris on the end. Is that why they named it that? No. No. You'll see a 55-foot-long Mosasaur. And, like, in the fullness of time, it's nearly a statistical certainty that a Mosasaur of that size was in that position, right? Where you see it in the museum today. Yeah, there's our Mosasaurus. Oh, that's yours right there. Yeah, that's the museum. Whoa. And that's actual size. Actual size. And there was almost certainly one right there 66 million years ago. So, we have an amazing paleo artist that did over 50 full-scale reconstructions for us like this. It took him and his studio outside Kansas City more than three years. He's a paleo artist? Paleo artist. His name is Gary Staab. S-T-A-A-B. He's the world's greatest paleo artist. He used to win the National Geographic Paleo Art Award every year until finally they made him a judge so somebody else could win. Whoa. So, he does an unbelievable amount of research. How does he go about, I mean, this is such a broad question, but how does he go about doing that? Like, he gets maybe not even a full set of bones, but he gets enough to have an idea of a structure. And then, I mean, how accurate is it, I guess, is the question. It's as accurate as it can be. As it can be. So. So, Gary first starts with a tremendous amount of research. And, you know, he would never call himself a scientist, but he's a damn good scientist. And he has an unbelievable breadth of anatomical knowledge. And so, he starts with that. And then, he will make a one-tenth scale clay maquette of that. And we iterate on that to get the pose right and everything. And then, he scans that. And he uses a CNC machine to cut about eight-inch foam slices. And you can imagine how many. How many there would be in a creature like this. A lot. He glues them all together and then puts resin or something on the outside and then starts to sculpt all the scales. And he'll say, you know, you start at the tail and then a couple hundred thousand scales later, you're done. He makes the eyes himself. He makes the teeth himself. And then, he paints the whole thing. He puts in pathologies and scars and things like that. That's amazing. And they're unbelievably lifelike. That's amazing. I got to come visit this. You have to. This is so cool. I can't believe this was right there. Right there. The whole time. It's behind the Chick-fil-A. I know. God damn it. He's like, yeah, there's a massage parlor in the back. That's not true. Wow. So, this would have been swimming. Yes. Right approximately where it is. And you would have been dying. Yeah. Yeah. Now, take me back to that first day when you guys found something there. Because you've been doing this all your life. I do want to come back to how you even got into it. And I've been talking to this as a kid. We'll get there. But, like, what was found? And did you have, like, the Dr. House moment where you just, like, look up and you're like, holy shit. I didn't. I've had that moment elsewhere in the world. Oh, you have? All right. We'll get back. I have. But here, you know, it was like a muddy pit that was being mined for marl sand. You know, when they were mining it, it was always kind of a jumble. And I didn't think much of it. This is back in 2003. And I thought, well, you know, I could bring my students here. They could find some fossils. That'll be cute. And then I'll go everywhere else in the world to do my research, you know. So it wasn't until, you know, as I said before, when the quarry owner told me that they were going to go out of business, that I managed to secure a corner of the quarry. And when we started to excavate methodically, then I started to see what we had there and its scientific importance. And then I knew I had to find a way to save the site. Right. So when you started to figure out, maybe the question isn't the first moment there, but when you started to figure out, oh, my God, we just found a dinosaur bone there, you've got to be thinking, oh, my God, I grew up in Linwood, New Jersey. This is like 50 miles from where I grew up, and this is where it happened, right? Well, it didn't surprise me to find a dinosaur bone there because people don't know this, but southern New Jersey is like the cradle of dinosaur paleontology. And you knew that before all this. I knew that, yeah. So dinosaurs were first recognized from really scrappy remains in England. And so in the. In the early part of the 19th century, bones start turning up about an hour south of London in the Tillgate Forest and other places. They can't really tell what they are because the remains are so scrappy. And that's how they get the name dinosaur. In 1841, a British anatomist, Richard Owens, gives them that name. He buries it on, like, page 240 of the Mesozoic Reptiles of Great Britain because he doesn't even think it's important. And he says there's a. New tribe of crocodile lizards is what he calls them, and he gives them the name dinosaur, which means. Incredible. Which means terrible lizard. So he thinks they're just these big puffed up lizards. If you look at the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, these are the first reconstructions of dinosaurs made for a big exposition in Great Britain in the mid-1800s. And they look like monsters, right? They don't really know what they are. So that's. Dinosaurs do look like monsters. When you look at them, it's like what you think was. Yeah, but these look like not good monsters. Oh. They're not. Not the fun kind. Not the fun. Right. Just, like, kind of gross monsters. You said it was Crystal Palace? Crystal Palace dinosaurs, yeah. Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Yeah. That's 1841. And then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found. Yeah, those are the. They still exist in a park south of London. Those sculptures. Oh, I didn't realize. They're full sculptures? They're sculptures, yeah, by a guy named. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Yeah, they look like giant iguanas. Yeah, in fact, one of them is called Iguanodon. Yeah, that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. So that was our. So 1858. And look how, like, brutish and primitive they look. So that's our first conception of dinosaurs, 1851. It's called Hadrosaurus, and it looks like dinosaur. And we can start. We get our current image, like the first iteration of that, of what dinosaurs look like. Dinosaurs are really like. And that's found in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Come on. In 1858. Is that what. That's not why they named it Hadrosaurus, right? It is. I mean, in the paper, he says it's the Greek hadro, which means bulky, so it's bulky lizard. No, it's Haddonfield. But really, it's got to be a double entendre, right? All right, so Hadrosaurus, what period did they exist in? Jurassic? Late Cretaceous. Late Cretaceous. Yes. So similar to T. rex. Yes, similar to T. rex. Got it. How big were these things? They were big. Well, you see the. The human for scale there. I mean, they're elephant-sized. Yeah, maybe a little bigger, really. So world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found in southern New Jersey in 1858. And then, as we spoke of, everybody knows T. rex, but T. rex isn't the only tyrannosaur. There are over two dozen types of tyrannosaur. T. rex isn't the first discovered. The first discovered tyrannosaur is found in Mantua Township, South Jersey, in 1866. Come on. It's a dinosaur called Dryptosaurus. Ken, why were you. Why were you not just. Like, before you even found this land, why were you not out there with, like, a dinosaur detector? You know, like, they have the gold detectors? If I were you, I would have been out there every day waiting for a beep going, got one. I don't have a dinosaur detector. All right. Actually, I do. We should have gotten you one. It's called a shovel. Right. Yeah, I would have been out there with my shovel. Because if I knew that they had found that kind of history there, I'm like, there's got to be more. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day. because if you use the link in my description box, below to join my newsletter. I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I really appreciate that. Also, the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. Yeah, so there's Cryptosaurus. Do we have the history, Joe? Hold on. Go back to discovery and species if you don't mind. All right. So up until 1866, theropods from the Americas were only known from isolated teeth discovered by Ferdinand Van Hayden during geological survey excursions in Montana. During the summer of 1866, workers from the West Jersey Morrill Company uncovered an incomplete theropod skeleton in a quarry near Barnesboro, New Jersey, by the Barnesboro Inn probably, right? Yep. Yep. With sediments belonging to the Mastritian Aged New Egypt Formation in August 1866. That's a little bit wrong, but yeah. That's what's wrong. Well, I would call it the Hornerstown Formation, or actually, no, that's the Navasink Formation there. Navasink. But it's the Maastrichtian period. Okay. And then August 1866, paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. What a name. I used to have his job. You had his job? The Academy of Natural Sciences. Wow. Yeah. You got a resume. Edward Drinker Cope, by the way, didn't drink, which is a little disappointing. I know. Yeah. A teetotaler? Yeah. That's unfortunate. All right. When he arrived, he was thoroughly surprised by the skeleton's completeness and uniqueness, calling it the finest discovery I've yet made. The skeleton was then deposited, there it is, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia under the catalog number, whatever that is. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of other new species, a new species, a Mosasaur, species of Mosasaur was discovered in Swedesboro, southern New Jersey. Other dinosaurs found in, you know, the Mill Pond and Mullica Hill where you used to live, dinosaurs found there. There was something like a Gallimimus found there. So there's this swath of Cretaceous that outcrops from about Freehold, New Jersey, you know, Springsteen land. Yeah. Comes down through Cherry Hill, through Mullica Hill, goes kind of out past. It's going down 322. Yeah, basically. And then, you know, like down I-95. Oh my God. So if you live on that stuff, there's a good chance you could find dinosaurs. I mean, to me, when you say something like that, that is akin. I'm not even just thinking about the wonder of like the science, just look at it monetarily. That's akin to like having a gold mine down there. I mean, this stuff's got to be worse. I guess if you sold them. I've never sold a fossil in my life and never will. No, never. Not once? Not once. Not even on like Craigslist? Nope. Okay. No, and never will. Okay. I bought a few, but I won't sell them. Oh, you bought a few? A few like small things that I needed for teaching or something. Okay. You know, the commercial trade in fossils is very harmful to paleontology. Because what happens? Well, when I started my career and I would go out to places like Montana and Wyoming, pull up on a ranch and I'd find the rancher and I'd say, you know, hey, I'm a paleontologist. Do you mind if I poke around? I'm looking for fossils. And they'd be like, yeah, sure, go ahead. We don't care. In Jersey, that would have been like, fuck off. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And then you've heard of the T-Rex named Sue, right? Wait, who talked about that? It's a huge controversy. It's a sordid, sordid tale. But someone, Elizabeth Weiss, I think, was talking about that when she was in here. Yeah. But there was. I mean, it's a whole big story. But eventually, McDonald's bought Sue for $8 million. They thought they were doing something good and donated it to the Field Museum. Well, guess what? That set the market. Oh, no. And now every rancher who lives on, you know, dinosaur age material thinks they've got their retirement sitting, you know, underground. So now you walk up to a rancher and they're like, you know, you can't do it. You can't get on the property. And then commercial collectors go out and they dig up dinosaurs and they. They auction them off at, you know, Christie's and Barclays and for tens of millions of dollars. You know, here's the thing. If I. Let's look at two things that are found that are considered incredibly economic, incredible economic opportunities. You got gold and you got oil. Those are just two. Gold, we put on jewelry. It's like a fashion symbol, a lot of other things as well. It's a store of value. Oil is obviously something that helps run the world. So you're on. You're on oil. You can sell that. But shouldn't there be some sort of, I don't know, like public interest protection on history per se? There should be. And there are laws like that in most countries. So where I worked in Argentina for so many years, it doesn't matter if it's on public or private land. When you put your finger on a dinosaur fossil, it becomes property of the federal government of Argentina at that moment. I'm not even. See, here's the thing. I'm not even. I'm not even saying it has to be property of the government, but it should be in the interest of something that's not economic like protectionism. Meaning if there's history to be uncovered there, people like you, a professional, should be allowed to come in and there should be a law that says you're allowed to come in to excavate that. And then you're not, let's say, you're not allowed to make money on the private market from that. That would be perfectly fair to me. I agree. And, you know, the. One of the problems with private collecting is that, you know, it's driven by money. And so they're interested in getting that bone out, that skeleton out of the ground as quickly as possible. When I'm excavating a dinosaur, I spend as much time on the sediment that surrounds the dinosaur as I do on the fossils themselves, because the sediment preserves the paleoenvironment. The paleoenvironment? Yeah. So, you know, was it a floodplain? Was it a coast? Was it a mangrove ecosystem? But, you know, imagine if you were an alien and you came by earth and you beamed up a lion, but you didn't know anything about it. Right. You didn't know anything about the African savanna. What do you know about a lion? It's just a thing in space right now. You know nothing, really, right? So you pluck these dinosaur skeletons from the ground. You don't do the paleoenvironmental work. You don't really know anything about these animals. That's where the story is. Yes. You're able. You're basically able to paint the context and setting by doing that, essentially. Yeah. And you start to understand the ecology and, you know, and the climate and all kinds of other things. So it's really. I mean, I excavate. So methodically, you know, 17 years to go 250 square meters. 250 meters in 17 years? Yeah. So. What is it. Just for the layman out there, which is me, what does that look like? Like, are you going in there and each day you have a specific, like, I'm gonna get through these two inches and here's how I'm doing it? Well, we grid it out in one-meter squares. Some of my excavators that have been trained on the team, you know, are more experienced and can go faster than others. I mean, some people might spend. Yeah. They might spend weeks on a single-square meter. Yeah. And, you know, we work with. You know, we'll go through with, like. I like to use a flathead screwdriver with my thumb on top and just kind of go through by feel. And, you know, and then we will use, like, a putty knife and paintbrushes and dental picks. Wow. And it's meticulous work. Now, that's for the kinds of deposits we have at the fossil park. It's different. Like, where I work in Patagonia, the way I prospect is with pickhacks. With a pickaxe. Yeah. And a pickaxe is a skill. Like, I used to. I would have to teach my grad students, like, the proper way to swing a pickaxe. You know, it's like swinging a baseball bat. There's a whole form that goes into it, right? And the way you. The way you prospect with a pickaxe is by sound. So, when you're hitting the rock, it sounds one way. If you hit a fossil, it rings a little bit. And if you're good, you only hit the dinosaur once. That's what I would think. Like, something like that sounds like a risk of. God, I'm scavenging a bone or something. Well, that's why they make a product called PaleoBond. PaleoBond. PaleoBond, made just for us paleontologists. Because they're. How does that work? It's basically super glue. Every now and then, you break a fossil and you glue it back together. Now, you. So, you spent a lot of time down in Argentina. You said you were living down there at one point? I lived in a. Cumulatively, I spent more than a year living in a tent in Argentina. In a tent? Yeah. In Patagonia? Yeah. Southernmost Patagonia. Outside a little town called El Calafate. It's very far south. Now, what. Over what time period were you doing this? My first expedition down there was 2004. And I ran expeditions there 2004, 5, 6, 7, and 9. What drew you to that area? Well, I had been working in the Sahara Desert of Egypt in a very lonely place called the Bahariya Oasis, which is basically nowhere. It's halfway between the Mediterranean and Sudan, halfway between the Nile and Libya. And I'd gone there with a team of colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania. And we were endeavoring to find what were known as the lost dinosaurs of Egypt. There were four species of dinosaurs that were found around 1911 by a German paleontologist named Ernst Strömer von Reichenbach. And he excavated these fossils. Sounds like an asshole soldier. And he seemed fine. He seems like he was a good guy, actually. Okay. He was early enough. He eventually got these fossils to the Bavarian Museum of Paleontology in Munich, and they were on display there for decades. And then in April of 1944, they were bombed by a British air raid, and the museum and those fossils were destroyed. Now, most dinosaur species are known from a single specimen. So the species were gone to science, and they became known as the lost dinosaurs of Egypt. So for decades, paleontologists tried to get back in there. They would write the authorities in Cairo, never get a response. In the '80s, they would fax. In the '90s, they would email, and nobody ever got a response. And then me and this group from UPenn, we got some money from a film company to go find the lost dinosaurs of Egypt. A film company? Yeah. Like a Hollywood film company? Yeah, there's a two-hour documentary that was on A&E called The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. And it was actually in part funded by Ann Drury and Carl Sagan's work. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, it's called The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, and it's a really good film. And it's about a widow who, and Carl Sagan was like, my hero. That might be in the title of this episode. Just to let you know, it's pretty fire. Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, people are clicking on that. Well, that's old news for me, though. So-- Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. Road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJs.com/Mosquite and save $0.10 per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. The real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables. It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. SimpliSafe keeps danger away from your family with three layers of protection. One, smart AI cameras and live US-based agents help stop intruders before they break in. Two, we sound the alarm at points of entry. Three, our agents request emergencies for emergency response. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/Spotify. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com/licenses for alarm license information. We don't get an answer either, but we've got the money, and so we figure, well, screw it, we're just going to go. So we go to Egypt, we find the head dude's office, we sit in his lobby for four days, smile politely and drink tea. I was never more caffeinated while he walks in and out, completely ignoring us, and then finally he stops and signs our desert permits just to get us the hell out of his office. Previous to that, I had worked with the family of that old paleontologist, Ernst Stromer, and I had access to his field journals and his maps. -Did they have, did he have pictures of this stuff, though, too, I would imagine? -Illustrations. Well, he had some photographs that I found later in the museum. -Because it's destroyed in 1944, so I imagine someone took a picture in the museum, right? -Yeah, I found them in the attic of the museum, actually. There's some photo-- if you look up, "Stromer's Spinosaurus Photograph," you might find it. -Because that at least gives you something to work with. You can see the outline. -Well, we had his technical papers, so we had a pretty good idea of what it would have looked like. So we go there. Yeah, those pictures there, I found those photos in the museum that you see published there. -And that's the Spinosaurus in question right there from Egypt? -Yeah, yeah. -Well, maybe they built the pyramids. -Probably not. -Yeah, probably not. -I can hope, though. -So, I find Stromer's Spinosaurus quarry, and I find 100-year-old German newsprint, like things don't degrade too much in the desert. I find sardine cans, I find burlap, I find plaster. He doesn't leave a single bone behind. But in the course of prospecting in the Bahari Oasis, we find a new species of dinosaur that we named Perala titan. We publish it in 2001. At the time, it's the world's second largest dinosaur. -Perala titan? -Perala titan means tidal giant. The geology that I did there showed that Perala titan lived in a tidal mangrove forest very far from the mainland. So, this is the first, like, mangrove-living dinosaur that we knew about. -Is that it? -It's sort of, yeah. -Did you come up with the name yourself or the team did? -I did, I did, yeah. -So, you've named a few dinosaurs. -I have named a few, yeah, yeah. So, that's 2001. Early in 2001, and then 9/11 happens. And now it doesn't look like we're going back to Egypt. And there was actually some terrorist activity in the Bahari Oasis. And so, I set my sights on southernmost Patagonia because it's a place I can see that has rocks of the right age. They're sedimentary rocks, so you can form fossils. And there's vast exposures of those rocks, like badlands. Imagine the badlands of South Dakota. Like, times 25. -Whoa. -And, better yet, no paleontologist had really worked within about 1,000 kilometers of that site, which means you have a very good probability of finding new species if you're finding stuff there. So, like, perfect conditions for me. -You lived in a tent, you said. -Yeah, yeah. So, I get down there. The first field season is really rough. There's a dirt road that I have to travel on four hours outside of town, and then I don't have any way to get across this river. There's no bridge, so I have to raft across this roaring glacial stream every time I want to get to the site or every time I want to go back to town for supplies. We find some huge, huge bones that year, but I have no way to get them out of the desert. So, I hire a couple of gauchos and their horses, and we cover these bones in burlap and plaster to protect them, and then I got this piece of corrugated metal, and we make a sled out of it, and we pad it out with prairie grass, and we strap the bones to it and the gauchos drag the bones with their horses out of the desert that way. And that was our first field season. -It's a movie. That's a movie. -It's a wild sight. The wind in Patagonia is ferocious. Like, you can't keep bees in Patagonia because they just go away. And there were always scorpions under my tent. There were oftentimes puma tracks outside my tent in the morning. -I was just going to bring up pumas. They roamed that land like crazy. -Yeah, they're very shy, though. The gauchos have hunted them mercilessly. -Oh, so they don't come after you at all. -No, no. I've saw tracks many, many times. I never saw a puma itself. -Yeah, I was watching-- I love those Netflix documentaries like "Our Planet" and all that. So I'll sit up at night watching that. But I was watching an episode on the pumas down in Patagonia. Patagonia is such a strange landscape because you picture, I don't know, something more simple like a desert, like the Sahara. It's just a lot of dirt, and it's hot and everything. And then Patagonia has these valleys and then roaming hills, and it's got some vegetation. -It's so beautiful. -It's amazing. -If you just search my name in Patagonia, you'll probably see a bunch of pictures. -What a flex. Just search my name. -Sorry. -I'm like Mr. Patagonia. I'm the mayor, actually. There we go. -Yeah, there's probably some landscape picture. Well, there's that-- what? Fourth one is me laying next to a big bone of Dreadnoughtus there in the field. -We're going to talk about that. That's the one that we found. -Quick question. I always talk with some of my authors that I bring on about this. I actually had David Gran in here recently who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, which later became that Scorsese movie. And he wrote Lost City of Z before that. He writes stories a lot of times that take place in wild, exotic places. And the latest one he wrote was called The Wager, which is about like basically like a Lord of the Flies type situation in the 18th century down in this area of the world. And so one of the things I love about David and a lot of great authors is they go to these places and they live in it for a while. And as like the true kind of Hemingway model, they'll walk through it and they will feel the stories of the people around them that were there sometimes, you know, 500 years before, 1,000 years before, whatever it is, and start to get that emotion of the setting. Do you get that when you're digging for, in this case, something that's hundreds of millions of years old? Like, do you have a similar type of, like, you can almost see the dinosaurs around you, what it might have looked like? I do. I do. I think most geologists and most paleontologists have like one foot in today and one foot in the ancient past. And, you know, when I'm walking in a forest, when I'm driving around, when I'm at a place like my field site in Patagonia, I'm not always here. I'm oftentimes back then, right? And I can see in my mind's eye what it would have been like. And, you know, when I fly, I always want the window seat, of course. And I'm just imagining the past Earths that we're flying over. And, you know, you can see that when you know the history, right? So for me, it's, you know, it's an emotional, it's maybe akin to a spiritual, sometimes, feeling. It's very sublime. My best moment in the field, which I am sure I will never top. This is like peak dreadnoughts, right? So we have most of this enormous skeleton exposed. It's just, it's an unbelievable find. I never thought I would see a site like this in my life, right? So this is exposed. There's an aperiodic comet that comes through. So not like Halley's Comet that we, you know, you can expect every 76 years. This is one that we didn't know about, right? didn't know about it because we're in comunicata we're out there in the field and this one was only visible from the southern hemisphere it was called comic comet mcnaught so we we don't we don't know it's coming but we see this little fuzzy thing in the night sky and then the next night it's changed position and i'm watching this thing and then the tail starts to grow and and then pretty soon this huge naked eye you know comet with a huge tail and i remember one night i i sent the grad students down and they were starting to gather firewood and you know get dinner ready and i'm sitting there and i've got a bottle of jameson whiskey and i'm sitting on a rock and i'm looking at this gargantuan dinosaur skeleton this giant comet hanging over it and i thought man it's just never going to get any better than this whoa yeah i felt that yeah i just i feel like i was there with you yeah that's so cool now this dreadnought is though we keep talking about this but it's not so cool it's not so cool it's not so cool it's not so cool we're talking about this yeah how did you first i mean i mean we saw even one element of the picture there with you with a huge bone this is obviously a dinosaur that once you discovered it you were able to name it we can get into that but what what was the first moment where you thought oh we might be tapping on something new and then what was the first moment where you're like okay this is definitely something we haven't seen before yeah so the first thing i saw was um about a tea saucer size uh area of bone it turned out to be part of the femur the largest bone in the body um when you're prospecting for dinosaurs a lot of people think we just dig a hole and hope to get lucky that would almost never happen right so what you do is you get yourself in the right geological situation and you just walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock and so i saw a little bit of this femur we start to uncover it at the surface it's usually pretty easy to uncover it because the sediment on top is weathered so pretty soon we have this you know more than six foot long femur and the year before we found a seven foot long uh femur but it was isolated so i'm thinking like okay here we go again another isolated bone but pretty soon we dig a little bit more there's the tibia there's the fibula there's some some back vertebrae dorsal vertebrae and by the end of the first day we have 10 bones exposed now these oh you did that in one day yeah because the sediment is so soft on the top um for these big sauropod dinosaurs so the the you know the long neck long tail quadrupeds think brontosaurus for shorthand right they're called the sauropods their skeletons are usually the most fragmentary because imagine you're the size of a house right and you fall over on something like a flood plain at that moment very little of your body is in contact with the earth so very little of your skeleton has a chance to make that transition from the biosphere to the geosphere before it's scavenged away or weathered away and so a lot of times you find a sauropod dinosaur and it's you know one two or three bones um so already we have 10 bones already we have a really great result and then we start to dig deeper as you go deeper the rock is less weathered so it becomes harder and harder until it's like concrete and we're using pickaxes which is you know almost all the rest of our time yeah um and by the end of it by the end of five field seasons we have 145 bones of this giant creature 16 tons of fossils this is what we took out of the desert 16 tons 16 tons um we get it eventually into a shipping container it takes me three and a half years to work out the export permits for the government of argentina that was a nightmare a real nightmare i remember finally you know i get the permits we get i have to pay for the customs officer to come to this uh stancia to watch us load the bones and he's doing all this paperwork you couldn't pay someone off ken you're from new jersey come on i could have sent a couple guys down there i've shamed my state i know um and then we get down to the port and this guy starts taking little pieces of the plaster jacket right and he takes me in the little room and he's got this the pieces of plaster and he puts it in a tube and he shakes it up and he says no cocaine you know and he shakes it up no heroin and like he thinks this is funny i don't think this is very funny i've got a 17 month old boy at home at this point i do not think this is very funny um and then they send a drug dog through the container and and the drug dog was like apparently a high ranking dog because he had the vest and lots of patches and and i'm thinking like you know at this point it's been five years i've spent all my research money i've lived in a tent for more than a year and now it comes down to the opinion of the dog but the but the dog was good we got two paws up this is kind this is kind of like a genius drug running operation though if you wanted to imagine that you could just like if the cartels are out there listening not to give you guys a new idea but you know you could just like get some drugs into dinosaur bones get it out of the country and well apparently they thought of that which is why they had the dogs in there so and then they tell me i need an insurance policy oh so i'm in this little dusty town called rio gajegos i'm in a phone booth there's literally wild dogs trying to get into the phone booth and i'm on the phone calling lloyds of london oh my god lloyds of london has heard everything right yeah so somebody answers the phone i say i need an insurance policy on a dinosaur and he says for how much how do you even put a price on that i just i can't i i put the price of 2204 million i didn't want to pay that much for insurance so basically i i told him 25 000 which is like well 25 000 how big was this dinosaur again you show 16 tons of if this dinosaur was ever put on the market for auction and it never will be it'd be probably 100 million dollars 25 grand well i mean it's not like i could go out and buy a replacement and i didn't want to pay a lot for insurance so i got you told him 25 000 i got you um so then i finally get the dinosaur up to my lab in philadelphia it's too much material for any one lab to process so i keep a third in my lab and i send a third to another museum a third to another museum and we have like a hundred volunteers working on these fossils day and night for a couple of years to carefully unopen those jackets and to clean off the remaining rock and help stabilize the bone the jackets i'm sorry what is that the plaster jackets the plaster and burlap jackets and then we unite all the jackets um back in my lab and it's just unbelievable i mean every i had a big lab and like every space is taken up by dreadnought exposed every drawer every shelf the countertops wrapping around like 30 feet of all that way um you might be able to find that if you googled dreadnoughtus and drexel which is dread like d-r-e-a-d yeah the name means fears nothing dreadnought yeah why did you name it that well so dreadnoughtus in life all fleshed out would have weighed 65 tons yeah look at that picture there um there we go so that was in my lab back in the day look at all the bones that are in there whoa yeah so you got the spine back there it looks like that's the tailbone tail in the far back to my right on the table are its its dorsal vertebrae so the mid back portion is huge huge animal so in life this thing is 65 tons 65 tons is the mass of 13 bull african elephants it's the mass of nine t-rex it's 10 tons heavier than a boeing 37 737 but this was an herbivore not a you can only get that big if you eat plants right all the food you can only get that big if you eat plants sure well look at the big animals today look at elephants and hippo and you know whales plankton they eat low on the food chain because that's where the energy is each level of the food chain is called a trophic level and when you go from one level to the next you leave about 90 percent of the energy behind so if you want to be either really big or really numerous you have to eat plants because that's where all the energy is i never thought of it that way yeah there's a lot of vegans out there right now going we're on to something there we go yeah so uh so these giant sauropod dinosaurs well first of all with the mass so you know you know if you're nine times the mass of a t-rex what have you to fear except maybe gravity right so the name dread not fears nothing when did you come up with the name like during this process or during this process we were uh we were working on on the data that would become the paper and we had a terrible snowstorm one day and i couldn't go to work so i sat on the couch that day and i wrote out about 30 possible dinosaur names um latinized dinosaur names and i wrote out them hung it on the refrigerator for two years and every time we'd have guests over the house i'd give them the paper and i'd say you know just check the ones that you like oh that's cool and dread notice was the runaway winner it's such a hard name it sounds like an album cover yeah dread not it's kind of badass isn't it yeah i feel like yeah yeah like that could definitely pass for a few guys right little wayne's got a new uh new name for the next one so you how many years was that process where you sent it out for to three different places and then brought it all back for one it was five years five years yeah and then you sent it out for three different places yeah five years in the field five years in the lab yeah and then we published it on september 4th 2014. now how how does that so you name it because you discovered it's never been discovered before you're checking all the sources there's never been anything like this so you published a paper and you're just allowed to name it and now that's what it's named that's how that's literally how it works yep that's so cool yeah that's how it works for fossil species for living species there's there's a commission on zoological nomenclature and they have to approve the name we don't have that in paleontology and i actually wish we did because there are some crappy dinosaur names out there what's the crappiest uh i hate to say because like i know all these people but um There's one that really bothers me. There was a beautiful spinosaurid dinosaur found in Brazil, and it was found in a very hard ironstone, so it was very difficult to work with in the lab, and they named it Irritator. Irritator? Like making it all about them. Yeah. I mean, a rebrand might be in order. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the thing that gets me about this. They named that Irritator? Yeah. God, it's so, like, menacing. So, you know, here's this dinosaur species that evolved and lived under its own auspices and did amazing things while our ancestors are these little shrew-like mammals trying to stay away from them. And now we evolve into what we are. They're extinct. And now, you know, me, my, you know, this evolved little shrew is now in charge of their legacy. Yeah. You know, and I feel like that is, no pun intended, a grave responsibility, you know? I agree with you. And so, for the dinosaurs that I've named, I've wanted to come up with names that, like, is meaningful to that animal that tells you a little something about them that honors their legacy, which is why I think we need a naming body for paleontology so we get names that honor the creatures. I nominate you for president. I think you'd be really good. They can put the, it can be housed at the, in the museum. Sounds like you'd put an office wing there, right? We could do that. That's not a no. He's thinking about it. He's like, he's going to go back to Ben Lamb going, how much we need for this? Ben, pay up. Let's go. So, you discovered this one. You've discovered other ones that you've named as well. What are, what's your favorite one besides Dreadnoughtus that you've found? Besides Dreadnoughtus, well, you know, probably my first love, Perala Titan from Egypt. That was really special. I was part of a team. I was part of a team that discovered that. And that was super exciting for me. That was, you know, that was my first big expedition. I was a first year professor. You know, I got my first publication was in the journal Science. That was, that's a home run for a scientist. And we had that documentary narrated by Matthew McConaughey. Matthew McConaughey narrated it? Yeah. Oh, that's hard. Yeah. So that was a really, really good. So you sit down and say, well, I'm not here. Yeah. And it was living while you were dying. Apparently it took like three times as long as they expected to do the voiceover because he's a perfectionist. Well, yeah. And maybe, you know. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's. BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in. And that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. We don't just alert. We help stop crime before it starts. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com slash Spotify. SimpliSafe. Ahead of crime in real time. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. And you know what? He might have been, you know. Oh, right. Listen, that's exactly what I want Matthew McConaughey doing. If he's doing a dinosaur voiceover, I need him high as a kite and having a good time and making sure he's getting the vibe. So, he's said my name probably a hundred times, but I'm guessing he doesn't remember my name. I need that podcast. Dr. Ken Lockhart. With Matthew McConaughey. Dinosaurs. I'll bring the bong. We'll make sure he hits that. I have no idea what you're talking about. We'll have a good time. Don't worry about it. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, you've been around doing this for so, so long, but like I'd asked you about it earlier and said we were going to come back to it, I should say. You know, were dinosaurs something you were just really fascinated with as a kid? Did it go back that far? They were, yeah. You know, I grew up, you know where it is. And so, I grew up in Linwood, which is, on the coast, you know, near Atlantic City, near Ocean City, where there's sand and mud, right? There's no fossils there. There's not even proper rocks, right? So, I don't know these things are in the world. And I grew up in a very blue-collar family. My father was a carpenter. My parents were older when they had me, so they're actually like World War II generation. So, neither of them finished high school because of World War II. I'm first generation high school. Wow. We didn't have books around the house. I certainly didn't know a science. The only people I knew that went to college were my school teachers. So, a woman brings in a box of rocks and minerals and fossils in my Cub Scout meeting. And this just excites me terribly, right? I just, I didn't know about these things before. And I think I got a hold of the little golden guide to geology because I wrote an essay in second grade about igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. And I wrote that sedimentary rocks are the best kind of rocks because you can find fossils in them. And now that I have a piece of paper, a PhD in geology, I can confirm that they are the best kind of rocks. So, I determined to be a paleontologist and a geologist at that age. But I have no idea how to get from A to B. And then, you know, that dream kind of starts to fade. And I kind of start to think, well, that's probably not for people like us. And it turns out I was pretty good at playing the drums. And I threw myself in the drumming. And like, I mean, threw my. My wife says my motto is, why do it when you can overdo it? So, like, all. All I do now is play the drums. And in high school, I just, I do this to the exclusion of everything else. My high school guidance counselor, when I went into him to talk about choosing a college, he's looking at my stuff and he's shaking his head, puts down my folder and says, Ken, I really don't think you're college material. You should probably consider a trade, right? Because all I do is play the drums. And I had a really good memory, so I could get by. Like, I don't think I ever brought a book home because I just played the drums. So, then I. I overdid it. And I don't know if you've ever heard of competitive drum corps, but it's like the world series of. I think like the world series of marching band. Okay. Super hard, super, you know, amount of dedication required. Like the movie Drumline? Yeah, but harder, more technical. Okay. Not as flashy. It was Nick Cannon. So, I kind of flip out. And like, this is what I'm doing. I move out to California to be in the world's best drum corps called the Blue Devils. I play with them. We tour the country. We go to the international. How old are you? In the Blue Devils, I was 20. Okay. I started touring the country with drum corps when I was 17. So, like, I'm just drumming. I come back and I'm gigging around, you know, Atlantic City, Summers Point, places like that. I end up as the house drummer at the Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City. Oh, yeah. And I play hundreds of shows in the opera house there. I'm up on stage with the singers and the dancers. It's a 1,000-seat theater. We do eight shows a week. I'm wearing a tuxedo every night. And things are going great. And then something happens. Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos, comes out. And I read it. And I feel like he has written it just for me. And he's answering all the questions that I had about how the universe worked. And I thought, I got to find a way to become a scientist. I got to find a way to get back to my childhood passion. So, I. I decide on this secret plan, right, because it's too audacious. It's too ridiculous at this point in my life to tell people that this is my plan, right? And so, I get myself back in school. I was taking what they call a gap year now. Back then, it was just called dropping out. So, I get myself back in school. I like the old term. Which is Glassboro State College. Rowan. Right, which is Rowan now, where I work. Now, I'm super serious. I get straight A's. It gets me into a good grad program at the University of Maryland. I get. I get my master's there. That gets me into a really good Ph.D. program in geology at the University of Delaware. And I get my Ph.D. there. And then, I get unbelievably lucky and land a job at Drexel University right out of the gate. How many years did that take, doing college, master's, and Ph.D.? It was about 10. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And then, I. So, I'm ready to start this class that I'm teaching. It's a night class. I show up. This is 1999. This is before I became full-time faculty. But I'm teaching as an adjunct there. So, I show up for my first class. I'm in my little professor suit. I got my little professor case, you know. And there's a sign on the door that the class is canceled because of enrollment. So, now, I'm like, oh, shit. I'm in Philadelphia. I'm all dressed up. I got nothing to do. I see a sign on a kiosk that there's a lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences that night from the eminent paleontologist, Peter Dotson. And he's going to talk about the possibility of dinosaurs in Egypt. So, I figure, okay, I'll go to that. So, I go there. I listen to his talk. And then, I go up to him afterwards. And I say, you know, Dr. Dotson, it's really nice to meet you. But I got to tell you something. Your geology is all wrong. And he's like, what are you talking about? You told him he was wrong. I did. I said, like, I can see from your slides those images of the rocks that you're calling river deposits are not river deposits. Those are coastal deposits. I'm sure of it. And he said something to the effect of, well, if you think you could do a better job, "Why don't you come to Egypt with us?" And so I met with his crew the next day, and by the end of lunch, I was going to Egypt to look for dinosaurs. And this is where we get into this sitting outside the office waiting to get a permit. Now, Peter is a great friend of mine. I saw him like two weeks ago. That's cool. It's a funny story. Now, we've been all over the world together, but that's how it started. Now, you were saying after 9-11, you couldn't go back over there, obviously, because of all the connections and all that. But have you been able to go back there now and do some work? I could. I haven't been back there since because my research just went, you know, elsewhere. What is the status of the lost dinosaurs or anything related to them as compared to like 2000 or 2001? Spinosaurus, the most famous of the lost dinosaurs, has since had new specimens discovered in Morocco. And so there are about six, I think, fragmentary specimens. That have been discovered. They've been the subject of great debate. They were reconstructed as a quadrupedal meat-eating dinosaur. And there aren't any other quadrupedal meat-eating dinosaurs. And this has been a huge controversy in paleontology. Part of it is that those that reconstruction is based on like six different individuals and they have different proportions. So, you know, it's really hard to say. There weren't other quadrupedal? Meat-eating dinosaurs? All the meat-eaters are bipedal. Bipedal. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because you would think about like, you know, I can only compare it to what we have now, but like lions and stuff like that. Wolves. Quadrupedal. Yeah. Interesting. So here it is. 168 million-year-old plant-eating dinosaur fossil found in Morocco. Yeah, that wouldn't be it. But if you look up Spinosaurus in Morocco, you'll see it. Spinosaurus in Morocco. Let's pull that up and see what we get. And so there are new reconstructions of it now. Some of them show a bipedal. Some of them show them quadrupedal. Many of them show it to be adapted for like coastal life, maybe a swimming kind of dinosaur. I do think that's true. A swimming dinosaur, meaning it would, so it's similar to a hippo in that way. It goes and swims. Sort of, yeah. It doesn't live under there. That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, probably a very strong tail. It has a very weird, long, thin, like crocodile-type skull. It looks more like a crocodile than a dinosaur. Do we have an estimate? I keep thinking of this today. Do we have an estimate on, I don't even care which period, whether it's Jurassic or crustacean or whatever, but do we have an estimate on what the maximum population of dinosaurs was on the Earth at a given time? You mean number of species or numbers of individuals? Numbers of individuals. Oh, it would have been, imagine, you know, before people fanned out across the world, like the abundance of mammals. There would have been mammals on the land, the herds of, you know, a million bison and, you know, passenger pigeons that would block out the sun for a day. And it would have been like that, right, probably even more. So, there would have been just, you know, millions and millions, maybe billions of dinosaurs on the land at one time. Yeah. All right, Joe just got this up. Should I, should we scroll to the top, Joe, on this article? All right. Yeah, so that's the second picture. So, it says, "Spinosaurus. It's an enormous river monster, Rome-Morocco." That is a, that looks like a dinosaur crocodile right there. Well, it has a very crocodile, it's called convergent evolution. So, when two different species are adapting to similar situations, oftentimes they begin to look like each other, right? They begin to have morphological similarities. Again, over hundreds of millions of years, though. Well, millions of years. I'm sorry, millions of years, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, just think of the dorsal fin of a whale, that's, you know, the back fin of a whale and the dorsal fin of a whale. The dorsal fin of a fish, they don't get them from a common ancestor. They evolve them because they're, they're solving similar problems in their environment, right? What do we know, like whales today that exist are such amazing creatures. What do we chart them back to? Obviously, they're not dinosaurs, but. Whales are super cool. So, whales are artiodactyls. They're in the same group with all the hooved animals, like deer. Interesting. Yeah. So, they first evolve, if you look at, if you can look up Pakicetus, like Pakistan, or Ambulocetus, try Pakicetus first. So, there's a group of hooved animals that are carnivores. They're living on the south shore of Asia, you know, roughly 38, 35 million years ago, and they're becoming more and more aquatic in the way that maybe a sea otter is. And you can imagine in a million years, maybe a sea otter is a fully aquatic animal, right? And we have this beautiful transitional record of whales now becoming more aquatic. And then we start to see something like Bacillocetus, which looks like a whale, but it still has some legs, you know? And then we eventually see those get smaller and go away, and then whales. And so, the first whales are the toothed whales, and we have toothed whales today in the group called Adonis. They're called Adontocetes, like the killer whale and the sperm whale. And then later, the baleen whales evolve, the big ones like the humpback whales and the blue whales that have the baleen for filtering out plankton. But yeah, if you look there, see that third picture, I think that's probably Pakicetus there. A whale is related to that? That is a whale. Yeah. And so, that's how they start. How big is that, the Pakicetus? That's like wolf size. And it gets to a whale. Yeah. Now, here's the thing that I love about geology and deep time, is that it's all so contingent. So, you kill off that thing on the southern shores of Pakistan 38 million years ago, and today there are no whales. And the planet looks entirely different as a result. It affects the whole food chain. It would, yeah. That asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, like all asteroids, like all the planets, it formed when the solar system formed four and a half billion years ago. Go out to the asteroid belt four and a half billion years ago and hit that asteroid with a piece of popcorn. And then 66 million years ago, it doesn't hit the earth, and the dinosaurs don't go extinct. And they lasted for 165 million years, and why not another 66 million years more? And we're not here. We never have to. And we're not here. If you can Google something called Pikaia, so P-I-K-A-I-A, I think. Got it. I'm really testing your skills here, Joe, aren't I? Yeah, there we go. Check out that first picture. The first one right there? Yeah. So, Pikaia is from the Cambrian period. So, it's about a half a billion years ago, really old. So, pre-dinosaur. Way, way pre-dinosaur, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, this is a time when we get, it's called the Cambrian explosion. We get like the phyla that we have today, like we're in the phylum Chordata, right? So, the phyla that we have today, they all appear. In the Cambrian. And we get, life is mostly small and kind of slimy then. But we get the first macro predator. It's this meter long thing called Anomalocaris. And it's got a hard body and it's free swimming in these big pincers and this terrible mouth. So, if you went back to the Cambrian and looked around, you'd see something like Anomalocaris and you'd say, bingo, that's going to be the winner. That's going to be the thing that, you know, shapes the future of the Earth. But there's little Pikaia that exists at the same time. Pikaia is about a centimeter and a half. It's tiny, it's soft, it doesn't look tough. You would never, ever put your money on Pikaia. But it has some interesting features. It has bilateral symmetry. Bilateral symmetry. This side looks like this side. Okay. It has its sensory organs concentrated anteriorly, right, at one end. It has a one-way digestive system, which I happen to think is the best kind of digestive. Agreed. Right? Does that sound like anybody you know? Humans. Yep. It sounds like everything that has bones. Yeah. It sounds like vertebrate animals. And so, if little Pikaia doesn't make it out of the Cambrian period, there will never be fish, there will never be whales, there will never be dinosaurs or chickens or wombats or hoary bats or you or you or me if that thing fails in the Cambrian period. That's how contingent it all is. Yeah. It's the butterfly effect of life. It is. At any one moment in time, there are an infinite number of futures, but we only get one. Do you ever get stressed out thinking about where it all comes from? Not where it all comes from. Where it's going is what stresses me out because, you know, the chance of us is almost zero, but it wasn't zero, and we got that one pass. We got that one pass that led to us, and, you know, because of many, many accidents. And what are we doing with our great good fortune now? We're using the atmosphere as a garbage can, and we're killing off life on Earth. And we need these things to persist into the future. And I feel so terrible that the planet that we're leaving for our posterity, for our children and our grandchildren, is not the one that we've been so privileged to enjoy. Yeah. It's a depauperate, degraded planet that we're passing off to them, and we're passing off these problems to them, and. It's the species thing, too. I mean, what was that number you gave me earlier? 72% since 1970? Well, that's individuals. Whew. But if you look at the extinction of species, the most optimistic estimate that I can calculate is that we're losing a species on planet Earth roughly every other day. That's the best case. Worst case is about one every 13 minutes. So the truth is probably somewhere in between there. Take the, if you look up the fringe-limbed tree frog. Fringe-limbed tree frog. Fringe-limbed tree frog from the cloud forests of Panama, a remarkable little creature with parasols on its limbs so it could glide from tree to tree across the misty forest canopy. Yeah, look at that very first picture. Okay. Now, that particular individual that's in that picture, I happen to know, its name is Tuffy. And Tuffy lived in the Atlanta Botanical Garden until the ripe old frog age of 12 when he died. And Tuffy died. He was the last of his species. That's a species that has had an unbroken chain of ancestry stretching back 3.8 billion years to our microbial forebearers. It's a lineage that survived all five mass extinctions, including the one that took out the dinosaurs, but it couldn't survive us. How do we, Ken, how do we go 3.8 billion years back? Like, what's the, can you just walk me as a layman through the science of that? Yeah. That got us to determine that? That's unbelievable. Yeah. So if, so the early Earth forms from a giant solar nebula, right? It's a cloud of dust and gas in space. Almost all of that material goes into the sun, which is cause, causes the sun to ignite. What's left, like the 1% that's left are the planets. Almost all of that goes into Jupiter. And then there's a little bit left that forms the rest of the planets in the asteroid belt, which is probably a failed planet. It's a very turbulent time in the solar system. And on, in early Earth, it's called the age of bombardment. And so there's all this leftover debris in the solar system, often crashing into the Earth, causing sterilizing level impacts, right? So we can't really have life on Earth from 4 billion, 4.5 billion years ago until 3.8 billion years ago. That's when the age of bombardment ends. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe. And hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. 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