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

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? 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 already, 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 Monster of 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. That's a thing? Stab. 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? 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, 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 there would be in a creature like this. 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've got to come visit this. You have to. This is so cool. 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 this as a kid. We'll get there. But what was found? And did you have the Dr. House moment where you just 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 there. I have. But here, it was like a muddy pit that was being mined for marl sand. 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 is, isn't the first moment there. But when you started to figure out, like, oh, my God, we just found a dinosaur bone there. You 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 the. In England. And so 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. 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. They do. They do. They do. They do. But when you look at them, it's like what you think was going to come out from under your bed. Yeah, but these look like not good monsters. Oh. 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. They're full 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 what dinosaurs are really like. And that's found in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Come on. In 1858. 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. So similar to T. rex. Yes, similar to T. rex. Got it. How big were these things? They were big. Well, you see 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 Dryptoptera, a dinosaurus. Ken, 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. 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And you can join my newsletter via the link in the description. - Yeah, so there's Dripthesaurus. - Do we have the history show? 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 moral company uncovered an incomplete theropod skeleton in a quarry near barnsborough new jersey by the barnsborough and probably right yep yep with sediments belonging to the mastrician age new egypt formation in august 18 that's a little bit wrong but yeah that's what's wrong well i wouldn't call it i would call it the hornerstown formation or actually no that's the navasync formation there no but it's the mastrician okay period and then august 1866 paleontologist edward drinker cope what a name i used to have his job you had his job at the 1866 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 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 scientists sciences in philadelphia under the catalog number whatever that is wow yeah yeah lots of other uh new species uh a new species of mosasaur species of mosasaur was discovered in swedesborough southern new jersey other dinosaurs found in you know the mill pond and malika hill where you used to live dinosaurs found there there was there was something like a a gallimimus found there um so there's this there's this swath of cretaceous that outcrops from about freehold new jersey you know springsteen land yeah um comes down through cherry hill through mullica hill goes kind of out past um um like salem and then it's going down 322. yeah basically and then you know like like down i-95 oh my god so if you live on that stuff there's a good chance you can 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 well i guess if you sold them i've never sold a fossil in my life and never will no not once not one not even on like craigslist nope okay no and never will okay i bought a few but i won't oh you bought a few a few like small things that i needed for teaching or something okay um you know the commercial trade in in fossils is very um harmful to paleontology um because what happens well when i started my career and i would i would go out to places like montana and wyoming um i've pulled 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 um in jersey that would have been like off yeah pretty much yeah um and then um you've heard of the t-rex named sue right uh it's at the field museum now it's a huge controversy it's it's a sordid sordid tale but someone elizabeth weiss i think was talking about that when she was um yeah i mean it's a whole big story but eventually um mcdonald's bought sue for eight million dollars 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 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 you know christie's and barclays and 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 things that something that helps run the world so 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 there are laws like that in most countries so where i worked in argentina for for so many years um it doesn't matter if it's on public or private land when you put your finger on a 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 saying it has to be property of the government but it should be in the interest of something that's not economic like protectionism you know what i mean 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 that would be perfectly fair to me i agree and you know the 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 of 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 paleo environment the paleo environment yeah so you know was it a flood plain was it a coast was it a mangrove ecosystem but you know imagine if you were an alien and you you came by earth and you beamed up a lion but you didn't know anything about the african savannah what do you know about a lion it's just a thing in space you know about nothing really right so you pluck these dinosaur skeletons from the ground you don't do the paleo environmental 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 you know you start to understand the ecology and you know in the climate and all kinds of other things um so it's really i mean i excavate so methodically you know 17 years to go 250 square meters seven 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 are you going in there and that each day you have a specific like i'm going to get through these two inches and here's what we grew it out in in one meter squares um some of my um excavators that have been trained on the team you know are more experienced and can go faster than others i mean some people might speak better than others and they're more experienced than others and they spend weeks on a on a single square meter yeah um 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 paint brushes and dental picks and it's meticulous work um 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 a pickhack and with a pickaxe yeah and a pickaxe is a skill like i said i 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 um 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 damaging a bone or something well that's why they make a product called paleo bond paleo bond paleo bond made just for us paleontologists because 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 yeah in patagonia southernmost patagonia um outside a little town called el calafate it's very far south now what over what time period were you doing this uh my first expedition down there was 2004 and i ran expeditions there 2004 5 6 7 and 9. what what drew you to that area well i had been working in in the the sahara desert of egypt in a very lonely place called the bahari 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 uh 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 stromer von reichenbach and he excavated these fossils sounds like an asshole soldier laughs laughs he seems like he was a good guy actually um 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 man and they became known as the lost dinosaurs of egypt so um 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 um me and this group from from UPenn um we got some money from a film company um to to go find the lost dinosaurs of Egypt film company yeah um like a Hollywood film company yeah there's a two-hour documentary on that was on A&E called the lost dinosaurs of Egypt and it was actually in part funded by Andrew and Carl Sagan's widow who in 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 yeah people are clicking well that's that's old news for me though but um so we don't get an answer either but we've got the money and so we figure well screw it we're just gonna 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 um previous to that I I had worked with the the family of that old paleontologist and Stromer and I had access to his his field journals and his maps did they have did he have pictures of this stuff though too illustrations well he had some photographs that I found later in the in the museum because it's destroyed in 1944 so I imagine someone took a picture in the museum yeah I found them in the attic of the museum actually there's some photographs if you look up um Stromer 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 of what it would have looked like so okay we go there um yeah those pictures there I I found those photos in the museum that you see published and that's the Spinosaurus in question right there from Egypt yeah yeah well maybe they built the pyramids yeah probably yeah I can hope though so I find Stromer's Spinosaurus quarry and I find 100 year old German newsprint like things don't you know 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 Baja Rio Oasis we find a new species of dinosaur that we named perala Titan we publish it in 2001 at the at the time world's second largest dinosaur perala Titan means title giant the 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 that we knew about is that it I sort of yeah did you come up with the name yourself I did I did yeah so you've named a few dinosaurs I have named a few yeah yeah so 2001 um early in 2001 and 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 Baja Rio Oasis um and so I I set my sights on on southernmost Patagonia because it's a place I can see that has rocks of the right age um 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. right and better yet no paleontologist had really worked within about a thousand 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 um 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 protect them and then I got this this piece of corrugated uh metal and we make a sled out of it and we pat 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 um it's a movie that's a movie it was a it's a wild site the wind in Patagonia is ferocious like you can't keep bees in Patagonia because they just go away yeah um and um there were always scorpions under my tent there were oftentimes puma tracks outside my tent in the morning bring up pumas they roam that land like yeah they're very shy though the gauchos have hunted them mercilessly so oh so they don't come after you at all no no I've sold 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 up I was watching an episode on the pumas down in Patagonia it's such a Patagonia is such a strange landscape because you know you picture I don't know something more simple like a desert like the Sahara it's just this 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 uh 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 oh yeah there's probably some landscape picture well there's that uh what fourth one is me laying next to a big bone of Dreadnoughtus there in the field that's what we're going to talk about that that's the one that um quick question I I always talk with like some of my authors that I bring on about this I 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 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 a thousand 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 um 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 often time back then yeah right and I can see in my mind's eye what it would have been like and um you know and it's very when I fly I always want the window seat of course and just I'm just imagining the past Earths that we're flying over and you know you can see it's kind of like a play that when you when you when you know the history right um so for me it's um you know it's a it's an emotional it's maybe it may be akin to a spiritual sometimes feeling um it's very Sublime my best moment in the field um which I am sure I will never top this is like Peak dreadnoughts right so we have we have most of this enormous skeleton exposed it's just it's an unbelievable fine 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 so not like Haley's Comet that we can expect every 76 years this is one that we didn't know about right and we definitely didn't know about it because we're in communicata we're out there in the field and this one was only visible from the southern hemisphere it was called comic Comet mcnaught um so we we don't we don't know what'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 had 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 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 were 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 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 floodplain 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 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 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 send 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 right but 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 hurt me i'm in a phone booth and i'm on the phone calling everything right yeah so somebody answers the phone i say i need an insurance policy on a dinosaur and he says for how much you know 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 bone 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 volunteer workers 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 to help stabilize the bone the jackets i'm sorry what does that the plaster jackets the plaster and burlap jackets and then we unite all the jackets 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 dreadnoughts bones every drawer every shelf the countertops wrapping around like 30 feet of all this wind 30 feet of all that 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 fear is 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 yeah so you got the spine back there it looks like that's the tail and the far back to my right on the table are it's it's 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 37 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 hippos 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 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 it's a lot of vegans out there right now going we're on to something there we go yeah so so these giant sauropod dinosaurs well first of all with the mass so you know if you're nine times the mass of a t-rex what have you to fear except maybe gravity right um 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 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 lil 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 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 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 i hate to say because like i know all these people but um there's one that really bothers me uh there was a beautiful spinosaurid dinosaur found in brazil and it was found in a very hard iron stone so it was very difficult to work with in the lab and they named it irritator irritator like making it all about them yeah we could i mean a rebrand might be in might be in order yeah and i mean you know the thing that gets me about they name 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 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 this evolved little shrew is now in charge of their legacy yeah you know and i feel like that is a no pun intended a grave responsibility yeah i agree with you and so for the dinosaurs that i've named i've i 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 um um which is why i think we need a a naming body for paleontology so we get names that honor the creatures i nominate you for president yes i think you'd be really good they could put the uh it can it can be housed at the new museum sounds like you 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 gonna 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 what are what's your favorite one besides dread notice that you found uh besides dread notice um well you know probably my first love paralysis titan from egypt that was really special um i was part of a team that discovered that and um 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 um and we had that documentary narrated by matthew mcconaughey matthew mcconaughey narrated it yeah oh that's hard yeah um so that was a really good 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 and you know what he might have been you know oh right listen i 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 said my name probably 100 times but i'm guessing he doesn't remember my name i need that podcast dr ken lacovara 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 wow that's cool yeah you've been around doing this for for so so long but like i'd asked you about it earlier and said we were going to come back to it i i should say you know it was were dinosaurs something you were just really fascinated with as a kid did it go back that far they were yeah um you know i grew up you know where it is and so i i grew up in lynnwood which is on the coast you know near atlantic city near ocean city where there's sand and mud yeah there's no fossils there there's not even proper rocks right um so i don't know these things are in the world and um i grew up in a very blue collar family my father was it was a carpenter um 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 first generation high school wow we didn't have books around the house i certainly didn't know a scientist the only people i knew that went to college were my school teachers um 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 i think i got a hold of the little golden guide to geology because i wrote an essay in second grade about igneous metamorphic 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 phd in geology i can confirm that they are the best kind of rocks um 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 um 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 um and it turns out i was pretty good at playing the drums and i threw myself in the drumming and like i mean i was pretty good at playing the drums through my my wife says my motto is why do it when you can overdo it so like 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 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 and i could play the drums and i could play the drums like i don't think i ever brought a book home because i just played the drums um so then i overdid it and um i don't know if you've ever heard of competitive drum corps but it's like the world series of think like the world series of marching band but like okay super hard super you know amount of dedication required like the movie drum line kind of yeah but harder more technical okay uh not as flashy um there's nick cannon so i kind of flip out and 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 uh in the blue devils i was 20 okay right i started touring the country with drum corps when i was 17 so like i'm just drumming i come back and um 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 i play hundreds of times and i'm like oh my god i'm gonna play a hundred times and i'm gonna play a of shows in the opera house there. I'm up on stage with the singers and the dancers. It's a thousand 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 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, 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 my master's there. That gets me into a really good PhD program in geology at the University of Delaware. And I get my PhD 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 PhD? 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, and 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, 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, kid, 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. 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, 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, as compared to, like, 2000 or 2001? Spinosaurus, the most famous of the lost dinosaurs. Spinosaurus 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. 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, obviously, 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 it 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, it doesn't live under there? Sort of, yeah. That's right, yeah. And so, you know, probably a very strong dinosaur. It has a very strong tail. It has a very weird, long, thin, like, crocodile-type skull that 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. 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 um you know before people fanned out across the world like the the the abundance of mammals on the land the herds of 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 um so there would have been just you know you know millions and millions maybe maybe billions of dinosaurs um 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 second picture fossils confirm enormous risk of extinction that is a that looks like a dinosaur crocodile right there well it has a very crocodile it's it's called convergent evolution so when two different species are adapting to similar situations oftentimes they 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 yeah yeah i mean just think of um the dorsal fin of a whale that's you know the back fin of a whale and 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 they're such amazing creatures what 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 um so they first evolve if you look at um if you can look up pachycetus like pakistan um or ambulocetus um try pachycetus first so um 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 becoming more and more aquatic and you can imagine in a million years maybe a sea otter is a full aquatic animal right and we have this beautiful transitional record of whales now becoming more aquatic and then we start to see something um like bacillocetus which looks like a whale but it still has some legs you know and then we eventually see those get smaller and 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 odontocetes like the killer whale and the sperm whale and the sperm whale are the ones that have the saline whales of all the the big ones like the humpback whales and the blue whales that have the baleen for filtering out plankton um but we yeah if you look there see that third picture i think that's probably uh pachycetus their whale is related to that that is a whale yeah and so that's how they start how big is that the package that's like wolf size and it gets to a whale yeah it's like 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 um 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 about 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 and they lasted for 165 million years and why not another 66 million years more and we're not here we never have and we're not here if you can google something called uh pikeya so p-i-k-a-a-i-a i think got it i'm really testing your skills here joe aren't i yeah there we go out that first picture the first one right there yeah so pikeya is from the cambrian period so it's about a half a billion years ago okay really old so pre-dinosaur way way pre-dinosaur right and so this is a time when we get it's called the cambrian explosion we get like the the the phyla that we have today like we're in the phylum cordata 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 uh then and but we get the first macro predator it's this meter long thing called anomalocarus 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 anomalocarus and you'd say bingo that's 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 pikeya that exists at the same time pikeya 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 pikeya 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 system agreed right does that sound like anybody you know humans it sounds like everything that has bones yeah sounds like vertebrate animals and so if little pikeya 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 it's the butterfly effect of life it is at any one moment in time there are infinite numbers of animals that are going to be killed and all the animals that are going to be killed are going to be killed and all the animals that are going to be killed are going to be killed and all the animals that are going to be killed and all the animals that are going to be killed and all the animals that are going to be killed the chance of us is almost zero but it wasn't zero and we got that one path 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 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 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 percent since 1970 well that's individuals 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 uh if you look up the fringe limb tree frog. Fringe limb tree frog. Fringe limb tree frog from the cloud forest 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 a botanical garden until the ripe old frog age of 12 when he died. When 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 forebears. 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 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 causes the sun to ignite. what's left like the one percent that's left are the planets almost all 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 four billion four and a half 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 is in the description below or right here. 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