#2580 - Kenneth Lacovara

I reached out because I got so frustrated one day I went down this rabbit hole of all these people that don't believe dinosaurs are real like what the fuck and I understand if you have you know just a very limited understanding of why some of the bones that are in museums or recreations and some of them are real and there's a lot of people out there that are saying some really stupid shit and so I really wanted to bring in an actual legitimate paleontologist who's a dinosaur expert that could help illuminate us because I think there's a lot of wasted thinking and a lot of wasted talking about fucking dinosaurs it's driving me nuts I'm sure you must be inundated there's so many people that think dinosaurs never existed yeah well there's a reason why my back hurts you know so um um you know first like I appreciate the skepticism like sure that's good and when dinosaurs were first realized as a thing in the middle part of the 19th century it was good to be skeptical right that's that's a big claim but now there are a lot of hoaxes too we should be clear about that there have been in the history of paleontology especially in the early days right yeah yeah but you know this would require this massive conspiracy uh from different continents different countries people that have never met each other people that didn't live at the same time yes I think it's hard to scale a conspiracy like this right I have a friend who was on a ranch in Montana when a t-rex was discovered yeah well I I you know I'm an eyewitness I've dug up many many dinosaurs with my own hands I've got the scars to prove it but what I would say is you know don't believe me uh science isn't a belief system right right go outside and dig up some fossils for yourself and the thing about paleontology is it's a science and so we can make predictions and we can test those predictions so depending on where you live in the world I can predict whether you will find fossils or not and if if you will find fossils I can predict what kind of fossils you will find because creatures lived at different times right and so if you live in in upstate New York you're not going to find dinosaurs your rocks are too old but you will find find some cool trilobites and eurypterids and things like that right if you live in Florida you're not going to find many dinosaurs or a couple little pockets but your rocks are too young in general right and so you have to find rocks that are between about two hundred and thirty thousand years old and you're not going to find dinosaurs that are between thirty seven million years old and sixty six million years old to find non-avian dinosaurs I say that because birds are dinosaurs and if you have rocks of the right age that are sedimentary rocks and you have exposures of those rocks go outside and find dinosaurs that's what I do now when were you first exposed to this dinosaurs are fake thing I don't know a particular time but you you know you definitely hear it but was it is this a recent thing this is what I'm confused I never heard this my whole life like growing up I never heard this never heard in high school never heard it until fairly recently like within the last decade well I think it's it's kind of tied to creationism right and so okay right there are people that think the earth is six thousand years old wait a minute it's not well wait hold on how old do you think it is well I think it's uh 4.567 billion years I've got a book I need you to read uh so when is this but it has sort of ramped up like the dinosaur skepticism is ramped up fairly recently right I don't know I mean I think that there's just more people with a platform to say more things right um but I I mean personally I don't hear it a lot like people don't walk up to me and say hey you're a hoax or dinosaurs aren't real I see they will know after the show maybe they will now I'm probably going to make a lot of new friends now uh one of the things that I've heard you talk about that I think is really interesting for a lot of people is if you looked at the uh the history of the earth the history of life on earth and you looked at it in terms of like a calendar like as if it was you know first day is January 1st like when do dinosaurs show up and you said they don't even show up until December 24th yeah it's amazing and so you know we kind of think we're what it's all about right but if you start the earth four and a half billion years ago on January 1st it's not until Thanksgiving that we get complex life on earth and by complex I mean like little squirmy trilobites and things like that that's half a billion years ago so that's Thanksgiving the first dinosaurs show up in the second week of December and they persist for about 165 million years until an asteroid murders them the day after Christmas right and so that's the whole thing right and so that's the whole thing right and so that's the whole thing the whole run of the dinosaurs second week of December to the day after Christmas and then our species Homo sapiens shows up 300,000 years ago that's about 20 seconds before midnight on the last night of the year that's so wild and think about it that way and the reason we can find so many dinosaur skeletons is because they were just here right like if you see somebody at a New Year's Eve party and you want to refer to somebody that you just saw at Christmas what do you say to that? you say like oh I just saw Bob right I just saw him at Christmas and dinosaurs were just here it's only two percent of earth history ago right um and there's there's an issue with the fossil record in general right and that issue is that it's very difficult to make a fossil most things when they die will not make a fossil so the vast majority of dinosaurs who died there are no fossil records of absolutely I mean imagine in your backyard today if if a deer were to die there a raccoon were to die there there's almost no chance that it enters the fossil record right and so the chance of any one individual becoming a fossil is almost zero but it's not zero right and we get to do the experiment so many times there's a phrase I love which is that unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot that's great yeah that's yeah that's that's life and fossils in a nutshell yeah what do you think that there are a bunch of dinosaurs maybe some pretty extraordinary ones that we don't have fossil record of nearly all of them really nearly all of them yeah I mean um dinosaurs are preferentially preserved in the fossil record and so the dinosaurs that we know the most about are the ones that live in places where sediment accumulates and where is that that's that's bottom lands low lands right like flood plains coastlines so if you happen to live there you have a better chance of making that transition from the biosphere to the geological atmosphere to the geological atmosphere to the geosphere but if you're a dinosaur that lives up in the mountains somewhere like the dinosaur equivalent of a of a pronghorn or a bighorn sheep or a mountain goat you're not going to get fossilized because mountains shed sediment right mountains are erosional so you're not going to make a fossil there so there's probably whole environments that were occupied by dinosaur species that that we don't know about that we'll probably never know about this episode of the joe rogan experience is presented by the movie ghost soldier jim caviezel plays fitz a former american forces soldier and advanced weapons developer who defends the defenseless as a military veteran fits has a strong code of justice and a natural instinct to protect a vulnerable community from a powerful corporation that wants to take their land no matter the consequences ghost soldier is a fun action film that demands to be seen in theaters now playing nationwide get tickets now rated pg-13 this episode is sponsored by better help look it's good to prepare for the future but when you start watching this episode of the joe rogan experience you're going to be able to start over analyzing what's happening around you dreaming up every hypothetical situation of what could happen that's when it gets dangerous you can start to hyper fixate and stress out and all over things that haven't even happened that's no good for current you or future you if you're struggling to stay in the present and out of your head try talking with a quality therapist from better help they have psychologists family therapists marriage counselors social workers and more whatever you need to work through better help can match you with a seasoned professional with the specialty that you need better help is now a network with more than 125 health plans with many co-pays as low as 15 for eligible members and if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the u.s you can still get 20 off your first month sign up and get 20 off at betterhelp.com that's better h-e-l-p.com when you shop kroger delivery you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right carefully selecting and packing your order with care because bringing you fresh quality groceries is what we do best and right now enjoy 20 off your first online order of 75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Right, so that's the thing for people to understand at home. When a fossil is made, it's generally made because something gets trapped inside mud or trapped inside tar, like the debris of tar pits, something along those lines. Well, those aren't really fossils, right? We would call them sub-fossils. Sub-fossils? Yeah. What is the distinction? Well, they're not really very mineralized, right? So it's still the original bone material. Is that because of the age of them? Yeah, and they haven't—the mineralization process, what we call permineralization, occurs when you have groundwater that has minerals dissolved in it, and then the minerals precipitate out in the pore spaces of the bone. Think of like the stuff that builds up in your shower, right? It's the same sort of process. And so to some degree, the bones then become a mineralic copy of their former selves. Now, we used to think that was mostly the process, but now we know more and more that you can actually have not only original bone but original soft tissue preserved in bones as well. That's interesting. And that's recently they found blood, right? There's a report of that. I think, you know, people are debating that occurrence. My friend Mary Schweitzer, who's one of the founders of molecular paleontology, along with Beth Shapiro, who you've met from Colossal, I read that Mary is uncertain about that discovery. should have a nuclear bulge and these ones don't. And also that, you know, her criterion is that you report only if you can sample that exact structure, not a bulk sample, which I think it was. So I think it's possible. I think it's well possible. But I think, you know, maybe the jury's out on that particular one. So here it is here. Science has discovered trace of dinosaur blood preserved for 115 million years, shattering assumptions about how long biological molecules can survive. Yeah, it would not surprise me at all. But, you know, I think that other scientists are going to be looking for, you know, ways to validate that claim. And so this is the real problem with this whole idea of Jurassic Park, right? Like we really don't have DNA from these things. No, we don't. We don't have any non-avian dinosaur DNA. We don't have any DNA that's that old. The oldest DNA that we have from a single individual is a little more than a million years. And environmental DNA, where you just sample the sediment and see what was in the environment, I think is about 2 million years. 2 million years is a long way from Dinosaurville. Right, right, right, right. You'd have to do some crazy science experiments with a chicken, right? Like if you wanted to make a dinosaur? Well, that's another way of doing it is looking, you know, when, as evolution occurs, sometimes genes are, you know, left out of the sequence, but mostly they're just turned off. So something like a chicken has a lot of non-avian dinosaur genes. They haven't been active since non-avian dinosaurs that are turned off. And you could find those genes and potentially turn them back on again. Or you could look for relatives that have genes that are missing from a chicken sequence and patch them back in. It seems like you would be, like, better suited starting off with, like, an ostrich, starting off with something that's already on the way. You know, like a chicken is a little too small. Ostrich is a pretty big sucker, you know. I think one of the things that makes a chicken attractive is because they're important commercially. There's just been so much work done on chickens, you know, so we know the chicken genome really well and know chickens really well. And there's a lot of chickens available. And there's a lot of chickens. Yeah. It's harder to find an ostrich. Yeah. So, you know, there was a thing that I saw on Instagram the other day, which is a bounty of amazing information. I mean, you can't go wrong with Instagram. But there was this guy who was refuting evolution. And one of the ways he was refuting evolution, he was showing a teddy bear that had become fossilized because it had been exposed to some, like, heavily mineralized waterfall or some shit. And, like, he had this teddy bear, and he's, like, hitting the teddy bear with, like, a hammer or a stick, you know, like, making noise with it. Like, look, this is hard as a rock. This is a completely fossilized teddy bear. But clearly this is not millions of years old. Evolution is fake. It was really interesting. But there are circumstances where things can become mineralized much quicker, correct? They have to be. So the process of fossilization is fairly rapid. Otherwise, you wouldn't have anything left to fossilize. Okay. Let's say if, like, Jamie dies. Sorry, Jamie. And Jamie dies in a mudslide. It could be anybody, by the way. Okay. Sorry. Let's pick somebody else. Some guy named Tom or something. Ari Shafir. My friend Ari Shafir. What if Ari dies in a mudslide? Because he's most likely amongst us to die in a mudslide. He's closest to them at a more frequent basis. He's always there. He's always in some weird part of the world. He's a traveler. So if he died in a mudslide, how long before his body would become a fossil? It depends on the geochemical circumstances. Best case scenario. I mean. Lots of minerals, lots of muck, lots of mud and stuff. Months, years. Months, yeah. Months. It has to happen fairly quick or other processes would destroy the body and the skeleton. So if you knew that he died in a mudslide and you came back two years later, you knew where he died, knew the spot and you dug it up, you would find his fossilized skeleton a couple of years later. Well, it would be what we would call a subfossil at that point. Subfossil. There'd be mineralization that was happening. Like the Liberia tarp it does. Yeah. And then, you know, by the time they turn into like just a rock, which doesn't always happen, but, you know, some fossils have really just turned into minerals, that could be thousands of years or even longer. But those initial processes that stabilize the organism have to happen really quickly. or the organism will decay away or weather away. Right, and this is the issue with finding fossilized things is that most things don't leave fossils. Almost everything does not leave a fossil. And the earth wants to consume. Like there's a bunch of predators and a bunch of scavengers and a bunch of bacteria and a bunch of things, and things decay, and then you just have weathering, especially if the bones are exposed, and then there's nothing pretty quickly. You know, that's one way of just seeing how old the earth is, right? Like if you have this event that has an almost zero chance of happening, but we end up with a lot of fossils, it tells us that we have a lot of time with which to work, right? Like multitudinous individuals over vast swaths of time leave an abundant fossil record, even though the chance of any one individual being fossilized is almost zero. Isn't that crazy? Almost zero. Yeah. So what was the first dinosaur that was discovered? And how did they make this distinction? Because before even the term dinosaur, they just kind of referred to everything as a dragon, right? Like large reptiles. Didn't they refer to them as dragons? Well, yeah. I mean people have been finding fossils for as long as there's been people, right? And they recognize them as different things at different times. There's a fascinating area called folk paleontology, right? And there's a woman, Adrienne Mayor, who's written a couple books about this. And it's about, you know, ancient people or even historical people, they come across fossils and they don't know about dinosaurs yet, right? They don't know about paleontology. So people do what people do, which is we make stuff up, right? We make up explanations. And you can look at certain things like, you know, if you see some dinosaur vertebrae weathering out of the Gobi Desert, well, you might think they're dragons, right? Or she contends that Protoceratops, which is a tiny relative of Triceratops, has a very pointy head with a beak, has a quadrupedal body, well, like head of an eagle, body of a lion, right? The griffin. Or she might say, you know, during the Pleistocene, we have dwerving of animals that are living in Mediterranean islands like Sicily and Malta and Crete. Well, if you look at an elephant skull and you imagine a dwarf elephant, the nose hole in an elephant, the nares, are coalesced into a single hole that's up here. It looks like a cyclops, right? And so that might be where a lot of these legendary animals come from. But dinosaurs are first recognized from really scrappy remains that start turning up in Britain in the early part of the 19th century. And they can't really tell what they are because their remains are so poor. There's three that are initially named as separate species, Megalodon and Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon. And in 1842, a British anatomist named Richard Owens describes them as a group of crocodile lizards, which they're not. And he gives them the name dinosaur. And he doesn't even know that this is a big deal. He buries it on, like, page 250 of the Mesozoic Reptiles of Great Britain. And he just kind of throws a little line in there about there's this tribe of crocodile lizards, and we'll call them dinosaurs. Today is brought to you by the number one brand for better sex, Blue Chew. Blue Chew Gold is a four-in-one powerhouse that gets your brain and your body on the same page for sex. Two ingredients get the blood flow pumping, and two ingredients prime your brain for arousal. No overthinking, just peak performance in as little as 15 minutes. Look at the stats. Gold is three times stronger, five times faster, and eight times longer-lasting than old-school methods. Blue Chew Gold is the real deal. Right now, buy two months of Blue Chew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You'll also receive free orders. free overnight shipping that's promo code rogan head over to bluechew.com for details and important safety information check it out this ad and the products being advertised are intended for a united states audience so when you said megalodon you megalodon i'm sorry i'm megalosaurus megalosaurus okay i was confused definitely not megalodon yeah what yeah uh okay so this is this one of the first jaws of megalosaurus that was found yeah yeah i imagine you find how big is that uh it's a big dinosaur it's uh i'm not sure the exact dimensions probably 25 30 feet 25 30 feet long so that that's a large jaw that's a yeah yeah it's big so that's what it looks like okay well i don't know is that megalodon i'm not sure that's a picture from the article megalosaurus megalosaurus sorry what's that jamie it's a picture from the article about the same article that the other one was it looks so if you look at look at the um crystal palace dinosaurs and so these are the first artistic uh reconstructions of dinosaurs based on these really scrappy remains and they just have no idea what they are they're made by uh uh really the first paleo artist named benjamin waterhouse hawkins and uh they look like monsters because he doesn't know what they are they look like a like a crisper accident between like a lizard and a pineapple so there they are and you can still go uh and see them today they're they're a little bit south of london and so that was our first conception of what dinosaurs look like uh these are i think 1850s uh middle part of the of the 19th century that's when they made these sculptures yeah wow go back to the actual sculptures jimmy please so this is you know based on that 1842 report of what dinosaurs are so that's what we think they are and then in 1858 the world's first nearly complete dinosaur is uh skeleton is found guess where where new jersey really yeah so the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found in haddonfield new jersey if you look up no uh look up hadrosaurus and uh hadrosaurus is uh found in a marl mine in uh in southern new jersey a little town uh right outside philadelphia and um it's the first mounted dinosaur skeleton they have enough bones to mount and it's it's taken up to uh yeah that left picture the black and white one yeah uh so that's the first uh mounted skeleton is that really a dinosaur i think that's an illustration of the mount um yeah that doesn't look like a picture yeah so it's taken up to new york the same guy that did those sculptures in london then um does this and uh so they're mounted in new york they're taken to philadelphia and uh it's kind of the founding of the academy of natural sciences which fortunately just uh ceased uh being open to the public um fortunately or unfortunately unfortunately very very unfortunately i was like what no are you a hater no i love the academy um uh so they are uh they're they're mounted they're taken to the academy and it kind of it creates this incredible like public interest that people are lined up around the blocks to see this dinosaur skeleton and uh kind of creates the dino mania that you know we still have in the world today and that really so i always you know england is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontology but southern new jersey is the cradle of dinosaur paleontology interesting and so first nearly complete skeleton found there 1858 and then the world's first tyrannosaur discovered was not t-rex there's about 28 species of tyrannosaur that we know of first one discovered also in southern new jersey about a mile from the edelman fossil park and museum where i work now let me ask you this about the first dinosaur hydrosaurus is that the first nearly complete one how did they know whether it stood upright or i mean they had it posed in this very looming yeah like they didn't and they got it wrong actually yeah so you'll see those old reconstructions um kind of have them making like a tripod kind of like a kangaroo does when it's when it's you know just kind of hanging out and we don't think they did that today uh we would put the the spine like uh parallel with the ground could you see uh could you just show us an image of what they think hadrosaurus look like yeah we have um so that's the that's the skeleton and you think like what is an accurate representation yeah i think that's pretty good if you look at um our museum the edelman fossil park and museum and hadrosaurus we have a fleshed out reconstruction that i think is you know as accurate as we can be right now well isn't that an issue though with the fleshed out stuff you're just kind of guessing like if i'm sure you've seen what a hippo skeleton looks like like a monster crazy yeah crazy yeah like you would never imagine it looks like hungry hungry hippo like oh you know big sweet cuddly right it's not really but looks like it is in kids toys yeah that's what you think it looked like yeah i mean that is our best approximation uh you know it's just a guess right well because you don't really know what the tissue looked like yeah i mean more than a guess but it could have soft tissue features that we don't know about for sure the color we're guessing that we don't know and so what we do is we look at modern analogs so what does uh you know what does a herd animal look like or we have a baby hadrosaurus what does a a small forest herbivore look like and and for that we use the baby tapir right because they have that camouflaged color so color we don't know about um we don't know like if they were shrink wrapped or real blubbery that sort of thing and then they could have soft tissue structures that that we won't know about jamie just for fun pull up the hippo skeleton yeah that's versus an actual hippo because it's so kooky because that to me is one of the most drastic ones yeah or like a goose right if you don't know what a goose looks like and you don't know the feathers it looks like a little demon or even a rabbit yeah rabbits look crazy yeah um so yeah there you go like look at the skeleton of a hippo how nuts is that that's wild right you would imagine that would be like the most terrifying ferocious demon looking creature but then you see him you're like oh hello buddy except they are terrifying they're super dangerous yeah yeah they're they're pretty amazing creatures yeah and responsible for i think they're like the second most deadly animal in africa you do not want to be around yeah super aggressive giant pig-like things chase boats yeah so obviously if we had a hippo skeleton we would that up oh yeah for sure and an elephant like would we put the trunk on an elephant i'm not sure that we would right right and then right what do you know about an elephant if you don't know about the trunk right right so there's a lot we don't know about dinosaurs but that's what keeps us in business right if we knew everything we'd stop of course yeah um so how much do we know about skin texture um is there have been some fossilized impressions of the texture of the skin yeah so it depends on the group of dinosaurs so hadrosaurs which we know best because hadrosaurs seem to like wetland areas and so does sediment we have tens of thousands of hadrosaur remains and we know them from their skeletons we know them from their eggs from their embryos from from preserved skin so there's a few hadrosaurs that are preserved in 3d and we can see their skin we can see their gut contents in one case we can see gut parasites really yeah so you've got skin you've got gut you've got gut parasites not gut but gut contents you can see like uh sediment and they get pollen out of the gut of hadrosaurs so you can see what plants they were eating what is the best thing that jamie can look up you can find them um there's a hadrosaur uh that goes by the name leonardo um so i don't give dinosaurs names i call leonardo jdri 115h oh like a prisoner yeah why do you do that you don't want them to be well because they're my specimens they're not my buddies you know but if you look up uh duckville dinosaur leonardo you'll probably find it okay yeah um so when they found this what year was this where they found this fairly complete version i think it was uh oh look at that that around 2000 maybe wow i went out and saw it and did a little bit of work on it in 2003 i think that's really pretty complete when you see that thing it's like being in a room with a dinosaur it's 3d yeah well that's the issue that i have where people say there are no complete dinosaurs this is like one of the things that gets repeated in these dinosaur debunking videos they're like guys that's not true that's what we have they have really close to complete like close enough yeah it's much more likely that they're real then everybody's in on this hoax right and completeness is look at that is that like the tail yeah that's tail whoa that's nuts so what am i looking at like what is that feature well the tail there it looks like you're looking at um i think you're looking at some so you're a geologist right like so what is this geological paleontologist as well um but you're both right i am both yeah yeah um so what is this geological feature it's like was that what was that a mudslide well i mean if i'm guessing it kind of looks like well it's it looks like a crazy tree so it looks like those look like floodplain deposits to me and sometimes where you get those colors like the purples that could be paleosols which are ancient soils that are preserved uh but that's pretty typical of what a lot of uh the badlands in uh in the u.s looks like so that is really cool i'm not sure imagine finding that imagine just stumble upon that you're like hey well i have well yeah you have you don't have to imagine yeah Exposed fossils protruding from the hillside in Alberta. Yeah. Wow. There we go. Complete with fossilized skin. Alberta has some amazing dinosaurs, amazing dinosaurs. So how many of these do you think had feathers? Well, that's an area of debate right now in paleontology. So birds have feathers, obviously. Birds are literally dinosaurs. It seems like the theropod dinosaurs. I'm good for now. Thanks. The meat eaters, although they're not all meat eaters, but that group that T-Rex is in, Velociraptor is in, they seem to be mostly feathered. So they have at least a feathered ancestor. Whether they retain their feathers or not is the question. And then on the other side, we see some indications of things that have, we might call them feathers or, you know, sometimes they call them like branched integumentary structures, which means modified scales. So it seems like dinosaurs on both sides of the dinosaur, a family tree, have some modifications of their scales that are feather-like. And so it begs the question, is the ancestral dinosaur like that? We don't know the answer to that right now. Right. There's a really cool exhibit in Montana in Bozeman at the museum there. Yeah, Museum of the Rockies. Yes, where half of the raptor is, the raptor is the wrong size, though. They made the raptor big, like a Jurassic Park raptor. Well, some were big. Really? How big were they? Yeah, well, like Velociraptor and Jurassic, Jurassic Park is, they should not be big. Right. A Velociraptor has a skull that's about like that. Yeah, it's like the size of like, what, like a house cat or something? It's like a pissed off turkey. Okay. So if a Velociraptor's in your kitchen, it's more of an opportunity than a problem, you know, just like throw some carrots on and, you know. Yeah. Have some Velociraptor roast later that night. So why did they do that in Jurassic Park? Why did they make the Velociraptor so big? I think they're just more entertaining. For fun. But there are dinosaurs in that group, like Deinonychus, that are big, like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. So there really were dinosaurs like that that were as big as that. They just weren't Velociraptor. Got it. Yeah. And so this exhibit in Montana at the museum, what's interesting is it shows one possible option where they're the traditional Jurassic Park looking dinosaur. And then the other one is covered with feathers. Yeah. And so one side of this specimen or this piece, this exhibit is feathered and one's scaly. Well, feathered is way cooler. In the case of Velociraptor, we can actually see the quill insertion knobs on its ulna. Oh, wow. Right. So we can see just like you would see on a turkey or a vulture or something. See if you could see the one, the side that shows the, there it is. That's the exhibit. Yeah. That's the exhibit. That's fucking sick. Yeah. So I think, you know, that crazy looking feathered side, I think that's plausible. Why do they have to have him humping? Is that what they're doing? I don't know. Oh, he's catching it. Seems like he's not. His face. Look at his wig. He looks like Rod Stewart. That does kind of look like that there, doesn't it? That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. The feather, that's like, they went really far with the artistic recreation of, you know, their interpretation of the colors. And we don't know what color they were, but, you know, think about the world today. There's a correlation between small things are more colorful and bigger things. Like, think about what color is a hippo and a rhino and a whale. Polar bear. And, well, they're a little different because they have the. Grizzly bear. Yeah. All brown. Or, you know. Yeah. But big things, generally gray, right? It's kind of disappointing. Because it's expensive to make pigment, right? Metabolically expensive. Right. And if you're really big, you're not hiding. You're not fooling anyone, you know? And so I think big creatures kind of come in the factory color, which apparently is, like, gray. What about tigers, though? Well, they're big-ish, right? They're not elephant or hippo-sized, right? They're pretty fucking big. They're pretty big. Look at Siberia. But they have camouflage, right? Perplexity says Jurassic Park was making. supposed to be using this dinosaur, but Velociraptor is easier to say, so they used that word instead. Yeah, that's Deinonychus that I said is big. Oh, that's. So they really did make it accurate. They just used the wrong name. Yeah, for Hollywood's sake, I guess. Why? Are people too stupid to understand the word Deinonychus? I don't know. That's silly. Michael Crichton might have made that decision. Velociraptor is a cool name. It's very cool, but this is cool, too. Yeah. That's the explanation I got here. Yeah. Yeah, but use Velociraptor. Velociraptor's a more dramatic, easier-to-say name. Right. I don't know. Yeah. I think you could have said Deinonychus and freaked people out. I think so, too. And that first Jurassic Park movie, that was state-of-the-art science, except for that. But then they kind of got locked in and kind of frozen in time, and so the movies become less and less accurate over time because they stick with, like, the 1993 models, whereas science has progressed since. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. So what did they screw? What's the difference? Well, the one thing is, like, our knowledge of feathers and the theropod group of dinosaurs. Like, they never got on board with that. Anything else? You know, I mean, a lot of it can be covered by the fact that they're genetically engineered right, and so they're mixing dinosaur times and places and things like that, so a lot of things that never live together. And then it gets a little silly in the Jurassic World movies where they just start to make up dinosaurs that never existed, right? Like, what is it called? Indominus rex, I think. Right. It's like when Fast and Furious, when they drove a car in space. Right. After a while, you've got to go crazy. Right. They're jumping the shark. You have nine of these movies. You've got to get creative. Now, they did do a good job. My big baby, Dreadnoughtus, that I discovered in South America was in Jurassic Park, Dominion, and I actually think they did a really good job of the anatomy of it. And Dreadnoughtus was the one that was absolutely enormous, but it had a tiny little brain, right? Well, all of those big sauropod dinosaurs, sauropods, like, think Brontosaurus, right? The long neck, long tail, quadrupedal ones. They had small heads, and they had small brains. You could probably fit, you know, two Dreadnoughtus brains in a pint glass. And it's a 65-ton organism. So they weren't thinking deep thoughts. You know, I think their day is pretty much eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Just chew, chew, chew. You know, sex every now and then, and that's about it. Let me see what that image looks like again, Jamie. The one that you just showed, the first one? So that's how big it was. Yeah, it's big. It's about 13 African elephants. It's about nine T. rex. Wow. So is that the biggest dinosaur we've ever discovered? Well, you can define biggest in different ways. You can say what's the longest, what's the tallest, or what's the most massive. Right, largest mass. So this is in a group called the Titanosaurs, and the Titanosaurs, are in general the most massive dinosaurs. Look at that thing compared to a 737. That's nuts. So what I would say about Dreadnoughtus is it's the most massive dinosaur for which we can confidently calculate a weight, but there are other more fragmentary Titanosaurs that are clearly in that same size range, but they might only be known by a couple of dorsal vertebrae, backbones, or, you know, a piece of leg or something like that. And there's no math. And the literature that turns a fragment like that into a mass. The best way of estimating the mass is we know now from living quadrupedal animals. Imagine, you know, I say, you know, Joe, build a table for me, and I'm going to put 65 tons on it, right? So you would scale the legs to the weight that it has to carry, right? And so we know from measuring the minimum shaft circumference of the humerus, the upper arm bone, and the femur, the upper leg bone, that dimension scales with body mass. And it's a very tight correlation with modern organisms. So for Dreadnoughtus, we were fortunate in that we had the humerus and the femur so we could make those measurements, pop it on that scale, and it comes out to be 65 tons. When you shop Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right. Carefully sell them at Kroger Delivery. We're selecting and packing your order with care because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. Kroger, fresh for everyone. You know you don't have to wait to shop Black Friday at Lowe's, right? Save up to $150 now on select power tools, equipment, and accessories. Got gifts to get? We've got plenty under $50. Plus, my Lowe's rewards members get same-day delivery for free. Shop Black Friday deals before the rush at Lowe's. Valid through 1118. $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2 p.m. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at Lowe's.com slash shipping terms. Mmm, and how much. Yeah, that's it there. So you can see we have the humerus on the left and the femur on the right. Is that image that shows the skeleton, is that what we actually have of it? We have a lot more, but that is from our paper, that image. And it. It shows. It shows dreadnoughts. And then that bone tissue on the left there, you can tell if you look at an organism's bone tissue, whether it's growing rapidly or not. So, you know, if you're an adolescent, you can see it doesn't have very well-ordered bone tissue near the edge of it. Because the way bone grows, is first bone cells just kind of get thrown down in a mess. And then later on, they get structure. And so in the case of dreadnoughts, at 60, 25 tons. You can see there where that arrow is above that, very disordered bone cells. So it was growing rapidly at the time of its death at 65 tons. So we don't really know how big these things could get. Wow. And the chance of you finding the biggest, right? You're not going to find the biggest that ever existed. Right, right. That's the problem. Yeah. You know, that's one of the weird things about crocodiles, right, is that, and you would wonder, like, how much of that is carryover from dinosaurs. They seem to just keep growing, and they don't seem to have, like, an age limit. They die eventually, but they don't die like a dog does where you can kind of predict, oh, you know, if Roscoe gets fed right and taken care of, he might make it to 14. No. They kind of live for a long time, like hundreds of years perhaps. Yeah, well, crocodiles have what we would call indeterminate growth, right? They just get bigger as they get older. And then things like birds, mammals, we have determinate growth, right? But crocodiles, who are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, right? They're not dinosaurs. They don't have a dinosaur in their ancestry, but they're cousins. They have done everything. You know, we know the crocodiles are alive today, but there were crocodiles that were going down, like, the shark route. They were going, it looked like they were going fully marine. There was a pelican-like crocodile that was in Egypt. It was in the mid-Cretaceous period, and it had, like, hundreds of tiny little teeth, and we think it had a pouch like that. What is that one called? It's called stomatosuchus. Stomatosuchus, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Whoa. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Wow. Yeah. Now, why do we think it had a pouch? Well, just the distance between the jawbones, and it's just a lot of space there. I don't know if you'll— If you'll see a picture of the original fossil from, I think, 1911. It's very interesting that people think of a pelican as being benign. Not if you're a fish. Yeah, or a pigeon. Yeah, right. I've seen pelicans eat pigeons, and you're like, what the hell? Yeah. I thought you guys were cool, and I thought you delivered babies. So, in the Triassic, there were— That's a stork, actually. There were crocodiles that were, you know, maybe even running on two legs, like maybe— It's a little controversial, but maybe bipedal crocodiles. Oh, fun. Yeah. Well, are you aware of one of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories? I'm not sure. One of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories is there used to be a race of lizard people that were highly advanced that lived along with the dinosaurs many, many, many years ago. Yeah, we don't have their fossils. Millions and millions of years ago. No, we don't have their fossils. What do you mean, used to? You're still here, bro. I'm trying to warm them up to these ideas. Sorry, sorry. This is the one that ran on two legs? Wow. That's sick. Postosuchus you want to look for. So, it's sort of a T-Rex-style crocodile. It's like Wally Gator from hell, basically. Right? Yeah, like that. So, and crocodiles were in charge when the first dinosaurs evolved. So, in the Triassic, the dinosaurs, the little dinosaurs that were trying to make it, they were living in the crocodile world, and crocodiles are big and scary and were doing all kinds of crazy things. That's wild. That's wild to think of, that they were there before the dinosaurs. Yeah, crocodiles are old. That's so crazy, and they're still around. Yep. Are you aware of some of the really crazy stories from the Congo from, I think it was like the 1800s, where they claimed to have seen 40-plus-foot-long crocodiles? So, it's this indeterminate growth thing, and there's the question, like, is this a gross exaggeration? They based it on the size of the craft that they were on, the boat. Is it gross exaggeration, or is it possible that there were dinosaurs? Or, excuse me, crocodiles that had reached that size that had been eventually killed off once people invented guns? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we don't have any skeletons from modern crocodiles that are that big, but in the Cretaceous, there were definitely crocodiles that big. There's one from North Africa called Sarcosuchus Imperator that was like 35 feet long. What a great name. I know. Let's see what he looked like. Yeah, Sarcosuchus. Sarcosuchus Imperator. Imperator, yeah. Sarcosuchus. Something came up with that. Yep. And then there's one from New Jersey called Dinosuchus that is in that same size range. So that's his skull compared to what? That last skull that you just had, Jamie. What is that compared to? What is the one underneath the regular crocodile? Yeah, that's like a, yeah, some sort of modern crocodilian. That thing's insane. And how big was that? Well, look up Sarcosuchus and Staab, S-T-A-A-B. He's a sculptor, a friend of mine. He did all of our. He did all of our work for the museum, but he made an amazing reconstruction. That's it right there? Of this. There's one of him sitting on its back, which is really cool. Ooh, that's pretty cool. So that's how big these things were. Really big. Really big. They probably ate dinosaurs. Yeah. Yeah. And what year are we talking about? When they lived? Yeah. This is in the mid-Cretaceous. I think it's Santa Mania, so around 95 million years ago. Do we know why things were so big back then? Well, no, but another way of looking at it is it's a different age of giants. We live in an age of giants now. The biggest animal to ever live is alive right now, right? The biggest trees to ever live are alive right now. Yeah, the blue whale and the redwoods. So we have some really big things now. Since dinosaurs went extinct, there was a hornless rhino called Paraceratherium that was like 20 feet tall. Which was crazy. Crazy. But, you know, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, it's a long time. And all kinds of things happened. There were tiny little dinosaurs, and some got really big. And I think there was sort of this arms race between the big predators and the big herbivores. Yeah, there's Paraceratherium. Whoa. So a huge, huge hornless rhinoceros. Isn't that cool? Wow. So this thing was basically trying to be a sauropod dinosaur, you know, after the dinosaurs went extinct. And how do we know what this thing looked like on the outside? How much of a version of this do we have fossilized? We don't have its soft tissue, so it's. So it just guesses that it had all this rhino-like. Yeah, I mean, we can see where its relatives are. And so, you know, I guess you would look in that family to see what kind of traits they have. But, yeah, look how big that thing is. So some of it has it looking like a rhino. Some of them have them looking like the skin of an elephant, but it's really just guessing. Yeah. Yeah. When you said redwood trees are the biggest, here's another wacky conspiracy theory. You'll love this one. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of people that believe that there's evidence that enormous mountains that exist somewhere that have flat tops are actually the stumps of trees that were cut down by giants. Wow. Well, those would be some big trees. There have been many, many YouTube documentarians doing scholarly work on this particular issue. Like that one right there. Right. I can tell you what that is. No, no, no. You can't. It's a tree. You're going to give us propaganda from the government. What that is is a fucking tree, bro. Right. Well, yes. The government line would be that that is columnar basalt that formed in the throat of a volcano. Show me that, the other one, the Devil's, whatever it is. What's it called again? Devil's Tower. Devil's Tower in Wyoming. That's from, famously, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is an amazing movie. That's right. And I think the Native American legend is that those are scratch marks from a giant bear. Whoa. Yeah. So how was this made? Basalt, which is a. It's the rock that is under. Under most oceans, and it can also come up through volcanoes. When it cools slowly, it forms these hexagonal columns. If you know the Palisades along the Hudson River, right outside New York, columnar basalt. Giant's Causeway in Ireland, columnar basalt. So it's that. It's slowly cooling basalt. It has time enough while it's cooling to form those hexagonal patterns. Oh, okay. Interesting. Sorry to divert you with foolishness. So imagine that. That's just the throat of the volcano. So imagine putting. Putting the volcano back around that. Right. So pretty big. So we had these enormous crocodiles that ate dinosaurs. And what. Do we know or do we have an idea of what the shift was where dinosaurs started becoming enormous and ferocious? Yeah. There's an extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 202 million years ago. It's a climate crisis because of the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. So we have Pangea at this point. And a lot of people think that Pangea is how the continent started. It's not. It's just. It's just one moment in history when all the continents happen to bump into each other. But Pangea starts to rift apart during this time period. And the Atlantic starts imagining the Atlantic kind of unzipping from the top and the bottom, right, as the continents pull apart. And we get this big. It's called a large magmatic province developing, which means lots of volcanic activity. And not like volcanoes like in Sicily that are. Blast stuff into the sky, but more like oozing lava on the landscape, fissures, right? This causes a lot of CO2 to hit the atmosphere. And we get rapid climate change. And we get the fourth mass extinction at the time. And that really knocks back the crocodiles and the dinosaurs, for whatever reason, kind of get the jump then after this. Because usually after an extinction, there's a lot of niche space available. So things go extinct. Imagine those job descriptions becoming open, and now you can evolve into those roles. And for whatever reason, the dinosaurs are the ones that bounce back better after the fourth mass extinction. And so was it cooling because of the volcanic eruption? In this case, it was warming because of the CO2. We've had the first four mass extinctions. The first two were about cooling. The second two were about overheating. And so for whatever reason, dinosaurs were better suited to adapt. Yeah. And so now we enter the Jurassic right after that. And the dinosaurs, they start to get big. They start to get really diverse in the Jurassic. And then in the Cretaceous, the last of the three ages of dinosaurs, that's kind of like the full flower of the dinosaur world. And they're really numerous. They're on every continent, including Antarctica. And they're just in all kinds of forms. It's just fascinating to me that 65 million years ago, the impact in the Yucatan, that's the start of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But yet the crocodiles, they make it through fairly well. Like during that 65 million years, what is the difference between the kind of crocodiles that existed pre-impact and post-impact? Were they of similar size or had they had already gotten to that particular form that they're at now? The super giant crocodiles weren't around then. They were closer to- They were already gone? Yeah. They were closer to modern ones. So- Is this an assumption? Or is this based on what we've found? It's based on what we've found. But it's possible that we could find super large crocodiles that were in the 65 million years. Absolutely. Yeah. So we're learning a lot about this impact, which we now know is about 66 million years. And so an asteroid hits the planet, right? It's maybe up to 18 kilometers across, going about 20 meters per second, hits the planet off the coast of the Yucatan, blows a crater in the Earth's crust that's about 110 miles across, initially by like 12 miles deep, right? Imagine like you've been to the Grand Canyon, I'm sure that's a mile deep, right? Imagine what 12 miles would look like. That's crazy. And like that. Yeah. And so imagine the volume of rock. I've looked it up. It's basically about the area of Massachusetts times 12 miles. So imagine that mass, but you take that, it's pulverized and it may be millimeter sized pieces, but it doesn't matter. It still has that mass. Throw it up through the Earth's atmosphere, you've given it a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy. Now, when that stuff comes back in, it's got to balance the energy books. And it does that mostly by friction with the atmosphere. So, you know, you remember the films of the Apollo space capsules flaming back into the atmosphere, right? So think about that day, trillions upon trillions of millimeter sized space capsules, each one flaming back into the atmosphere, each one heating up a little parcel of air around itself, such that we think that day within an hour after the impact, temperatures got up somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven. So if you're on the surface of the Earth that day, you're literally toast. So who gets through? Well, little things on land that can burrow. Who are good burrowers? Little mammals, crocodiles, turtles, lizards. Right. The crocodiles are in the water. And burrow. Crocodiles are good burrowers. And some birds. All of the non-bird dinosaurs, the non-avian dinosaur egg nests that have ever been found are just some crater that some mama dinosaur scraped in the ground where she deposited her eggs right on the surface. So 100% of their life cycle on the surface of the Earth, no place to hide. Wow. And so where'd the birds go? Well, some birds are burrowers, right? And so today we have. Chickens aren't, right? Chickens are not. But we have burrowing parrots today, burrowing penguins. And that's the only way they survived is by burrowing? I think. Interesting. Because that heat is. It's like those outdoor restaurant heaters. It's radiative heat, not convective heat. So it's line of sight. So you got to get out of the line of sight of the sky. And so you have to get underground somewhere. Now, was there some big dinosaur in a cave by chance at that moment? Like, yeah, sure. But I'm talking about like a breeding population. I think they're functionally extinct the day of the impact, which is shocking. They're around for 165 million years, right? Dominating the Earth for most of that time. If you were here the day before that asteroid hit, you would look around and you would say, well, this is how it's always going to be, right? These guys are always going to be in charge. And the next day the asteroid hits, and I think they're functionally extinct that day. Wow. What do you think the historical depiction of dragons is all about? And why is it so ubiquitous across so many different continents and so many different cultures? Like, why do they. They have stories of these giant lizards, including historians that have account. Like, doesn't. I think Herodotus. Does Herodotus have an account of some sort of a dragon creature in Egypt that they killed? I think there's like legitimate historians where you're like, okay, well, he told the truth about all these other things, told the truth about like the labyrinths of Hawari or wherever it was. But why. What is that? What are these stories of dragons? Yeah, I don't know. But, you know, if you look at the skeletons of various animals, I mean, you know, you can see many, many vertebrae. If you look at the tail of a sauropod dinosaur or the neck of a plesiosaur, you find a titanoboa in Colombia. Or if you just find a modern snake skeleton. Look at this. Herodotus described winged serpents, often retold today as an account of dragons. The key distinction, he said he saw heaps of bones, not living flying creatures. The main passage is in Histories 2.75 to 76, what he actually wrote. Herodotus says he traveled to a place in Arabia, opposite the Egyptian city of Butoh, to investigate reports of winged serpents. When I came thither. Ooh, I want to be able to say that. When I came thither, I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number. Then he recounts the local explanation. Each spring, winged serpents flew from Arabia, towards Egypt, but ibis birds intercepted and killed them at a mountain pass. This, he was told, explained why Egyptians honored the ibis. What is an ibis? Yeah, an ibis. It's like a. Ibis? Yeah, it's a. I think they call them friend of the farmer in Egypt. They're kind of field birds. They have a long curved beak and they like follow the plows. Crazy, they kill dragons. These serpents are like water snakes. Their wings are not feathered, but most like the wings of a bat. Huh. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of bad zoology back in history, and, you know, these people are. But is it possible that this tiny one was a real creature, a winged serpent? And we just don't have any skeletons of them? Well, I mean, we don't have any skeletons of them. Right, so this is just pure speculation. Explicitly identifies these with the serpents that he said to invade Egypt. Collectors supposedly drove them away by burning storax. And aromatic resin. So an example is in Sicily, every spring, farmers find megalodon teeth in their fields, right? Because there's old marine deposits there and they have shark fossils in them. And when you get the freezing and thawing in winter, the stones, or in this case fossils, work their way up to the top, right? And so they could clear the field one year and they come back and the next year there's the. These fossils in them. And they had no concept of deep time. They had no concept that this could have been a marine environment. So what did they call them? They called them serpent tongues or glossopetrae, they called them. Serpent tongues? Serpent tongues. So they thought that they were serpents that would lose their stone-like tongues for some reason. And they would find those. And so people were trying to make sense of their landscape, right? And they find these things and they don't understand deep time. They don't understand geological processes, obviously. And it becomes folklore. And so they try to, they make an explanation, right? Tis the season for giving, for calling, for cheer, texting and calling loved ones straight through the new year. But who can keep up with this daunting feat? Visible Wireless, the plan to meet. This season, switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack with unlimited 5G data and a hotspot to match. With plans starting at just $19 a month at a rate that's guaranteed for a year. The gift that keeps on giving. Now that's holiday cheer. Use promo code HOLIDAYHACK, $19 a month for service on the Visible plan. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. There's also an issue with the depictions of things that we know currently exist. Like when I was in Egypt, excuse me, when I was in Italy, I was in Ravello. And there's a really old church in Ravello. And the church is, I think it's a thousand years old. And what's really crazy is it is on the base. It is built on top of an even older church. So they have like a glass floor and you can look through and see the original church, but it's like really old. Like they don't know how old it is. But one of the cool things on the wall, and I took a photo of it, it's on my Instagram, was of a whale. And it's a tile artwork of a whale. And it's from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. And you see this artwork and like what they thought of what looked like is crazy yeah it had giant teeth and it looked like it i think did it have wings that's it yeah kind of wings so that was the tile artwork that's the picture that i took that's on that uh that church in ravello that's wild um look up uh crazy like that's what they thought a fucking whale looked like like it looks like part lion or something part bear part fish look at um steno and shark and um you'll see this is kind of the first um illustration of of um steno yes is that all one word uh s-t-e-n-o and shark or and yeah and then look up shark yeah nicholas steno and shark and so um he would find these uh the shark teeth and so this is his illustration of what a shark looked like he thought and but what he was doing here nicholas steno is sometimes um called the father of geology because he was the first one to say no these are not these serpent tongues they look like shark teeth and so they must have been in the mouth of a shark even though we're finding them on land right right and so uh he actually came up with three laws of geology which we still use today they're very simple which is the oldest stuff is on bottom the youngest stuff is on top if you see a valley and there's the same rock on both sides you can imagine that they were once uh connected um and so he's the first one to really start to turn geology into a science but it had a really slow start and and this is you know pretty far in our history what year is this um he is i think you can look it up there i think he is 1500s is that right now we knew about sharks back then 1600s we knew about sharks yeah but people didn't understand how there could be sharks on land right shark fossils on land right and so like the antiquity of our planet is a fairly recent discovery there's a guy named um james hutton who's a man of the scottish enlightenment and he was he's what we could really call the first geologist and that's not until um like 1795 i think is when he published his book the the theory of the earth and he did something that just makes me love geology you know forever which is he figured out that we live on an old planet with a hammer and a rowboat and so he went to this place called sickar point um uh s-i-c-c-a-r point off the north coast of scotland i've been there it's like geology church for me and um he looked at at what he could tell were ancient beach sediments and they're tilted and they're cross-cut by other beach sediments and then that whole thing is tilted and then the whole thing is uplifted into a cliff coast and he realized that the well you know i'm an old guy and i've never seen any changes like this happening and so it must take a really long time to deposit these sediments for them to lithify yeah that's it it's gorgeous so look there so you have those vertical beds see on the on the right hand side well imagine you have to turn those over so they're horizontal because sediment is deposited horizontally right you can't deposit it like that so imagine you have a you have a horizontal beach it's building up layer after layer that gets lithified meaning turned into stone that whole thing gets turned vertically and then you see where it's cross-cut there that means waves came across there cut through it and then a whole other layer when that was horizontal is deposited those are lithified turned into stone and then the whole thing is rotated again to the orientation that it has today and then uplifted into a sea coast and he realized that couldn't happen in in just a short amount of time how did he formulate this idea did i mean did we have an understanding of like volcanic activity back then not well and and so hutton actually you know part of what he did was he looked at the formation of granite and granite was thought to be back then like a sedimentary rock where the particles would accumulate and he collected evidence that no granite forms from molten rock and it's part of a rock cycle and so um he really founds an idea that we call uniformitarianism it's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the present and it's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the present and it's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the present and it's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the present and it's a past so we can see processes in action today and imagine how they might have have built the world in the past and god imagine being a an academic back then or whatever it was a scholar and and trying to well you can't really coordinate with other people about this because how few people even understand what the hell you're talking about yeah what a small group of human beings that are even pondering these things in the 1600s is that what you said yeah it well um 1700s 17 yeah and it was so unorthodox so the the most learned people in europe at the time thought the earth was 6 000 years old isaac newton thought the earth was 6 000 years old really yeah when darwin got on the hms beagle he was a young earth creationist he thought the earth was 6 000 years old and so this guy is like really swimming against the current here and he has to worry about being like locked up like no not at that time this is you know scottish enlightenment so there's all kinds of ideas flying around and he actually wrote this as he was dying oh good move yeah um so he didn't live long you're on the way out yeah when you publish the good stuff and he was because of that i think it wasn't it wasn't really a very polished piece of text and it's very hard to get through and then his ideas were picked up by uh by an englishman uh charles lyell who was a good writer and who who wrote the principles of uh of geology hutton's work was the theory of the earth and so uh captain fitzroy gifts young charles charles darwin a copy of the principles of geology as they're about to go on their voyage and and darwin was a member of what was called the venerian society which is um this basically young earth society of scientists but darwin ever a sponge for information he reads this as they're sailing from from england to saint jago in the in the cape verde islands and he starts to have his mind changed and he gets there and he starts to see evidence of of geological uplift and and processes of of cycles and then they get to uh montevideo in uh and what's now uruguay and he holds up the whole expedition because he thinks there's a mail boat coming behind them that might have the second volume of the principles of geology and it does and he he soaks this up and then by the time he gets down to patagonia he's paraphrasing lyell we would say today plagiarizing lyell and he's become um this this advocate for this uniformitarian principle that the present is the key to the past and and what hutton wrote is the earth shows no vestige of a beginning no prospect of an end and now all of a sudden darwin goes from thinking the earth is six thousand years old to thinking about deep time to having this vast tapestry and that gives him the intellectual space to imagine evolution through natural selection wow just imagine being in an intellectual back then where there's not a lot to go by and trying to formulate trying to look at all this stuff and go what is going on yeah it's amazing isn't it and everybody wants to think there's a dude and he just told adam name all these things and that's it it was hard i mean and you know it's not that long ago like thomas jefferson didn't know the earth is old thomas jefferson never heard the word dinosaur you know it's not that long ago that's crazy yeah that's hard to believe yeah but obviously this is a thing that has happened all throughout human history like there's a new discovery oh look we figured out fire oh look we figured out shelter oh look we figured out hey this is a shark tooth why is it in this field yeah hey why is this why is this land going like this it's just so interesting to think that these people were the first people to try to put this puzzle together and how few people they had to collaborate with like how few people like now today if you you talk about volcanoes or geologic activity everybody knows about it back then like how many people except those dumbasses on the internet who don't think dinosaurs are real well they still think volcanoes are real they still know some things they still understand like the shifts of tectonic plates and the things that we know why earthquakes happen most people are aware of those things but if you're uh an intellectual back then there's probably so little to go by you're trying to come up with some completely radical theory of how things got to the position that they're in right now and you start to try to explain it to people that are young earth creationists you want to bring up natural selection and random mutation and all the different things that he's trying to put into people's heads yeah that's why darwin was so reluctant to publish i mean it's you know it's it's science is by nature conservative and it's hard to push that as it should be right as it should be yeah and um so you know it took darwin 25 years to to publish his thoughts and he was very insecure about it he was worried about the ramifications for his family his his uh wife emma was you know a very devout christian and he was terribly concerned about it he even he was he was an insecure guy and at one point he didn't think that he had the intellectual standing because he wasn't really a an expert in any one particular topic so he decides he's got to become an expert and he's not going to be an expert in any one particular topic so he decides he's not going to be an expert so he takes nine years off from writing origin of species to become the world's expert on barnacles And for nine years, he studies barnacles in his study. That's dedication. His little son, Frankie Darwin, has a friend over one day and turns to his friend and says, where did your dad do his barnacles? Because he just thinks that's what dads do because that's all Charles Darwin does for nine years. That's crazy. Why barnacles? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was just like an open niche for him. Huh. Yeah. When my son was like four or so, he had a friend over the house, and he turned to his friend and said, where does your dad keep his dinosaurs? That's what dads do. Yeah. Wow. I mean, we're really so fortunate that civilization has lasted as long as it has. Hopefully, we don't screw this up, but that we have accumulated so much information. Because if we had to start from scratch, if there's some sort of massive natural disaster, Oh, yeah. and we had to start from scratch, within a few hundred years, we'd forget most of this. I always think about, like, who would I take with me if I had, like, five people to start civilization over, right? Now, one of them would definitely be a metallurgist because, like, how would we ever figure that out again? Right. It's just amazing that we figured that out. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. How to make an alloy. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Or how to, you know, we're going to beat these rocks out of a mountainside and put them in fire and get copper. You know? I mean, that's. How do you harness electricity? How about that guy? Yeah. Bring an electrician. Bring him, too. Bring an engineer who understands how to make a generator. Yeah. Or a refrigerator. Right. Most people are fucked if that happens. Most people are fucked. We're just so fortunate that in this volatile world that we live in that's filled with potential for natural disasters, and now man-made disasters, that we have managed to stay alive for so many hundreds of years and figured out how to write things down, and now we got to the point where, there's YouTube videos about dinosaurs being fake. Full circle. Which is why it's really interesting to me. I'm really always interested in people that have very steadfast beliefs that they hold despite the evidence. Yeah. Because I've been guilty of that in the past, and I try not to be, but I think that is a thing that people have where if they have an idea and they have openly espoused that idea, they will defend it, and they will find ways. to defend it, even if it's not rational. Like, they become married to that idea. That idea is their identity. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the opposite of science, right? And, I mean, scientists are people and flawed, but, you know, you'll rarely hear a scientist use the word prove, right? What we say is we have failed to falsify, right? Leaving the possibility open that it could be falsified in the future. I heard your episode with Brian Cox. He's great. He's great. And, you know, he was talking about. He was talking about, like, a scientist should be happy when their ideas are overturned. That means we're making progress, right? Now, in reality, scientists are humans, and there's some ego involved, and it's hard, but he is correct, right? I mean, that's how you make progress. You hypothesize, you test, and if you falsify that hypothesis, then you say, okay, that's not it. Now, let's find out what it is. Right. The problem is sometimes it progresses one funeral at a time, right? That's right. Yeah, that was. Max Planck said that, I think. Yes. That's the issue is that people have egos. Yeah. And, again, if. If someone has been teaching for a decade or so this one particular thing, and I'll say, oh, that's horseshit. Yeah. And you think, oh, my God, I lied to all those kids. No, I didn't. This is horseshit. And you start drinking and yelling. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully selecting and packing your order with care. Because. Bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Restrictions apply. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Got gifts to get? Plus, Milo's Rewards members get same-day delivery for $50. Free. Valid through 1118. Terms at Lowes.com slash shipping terms. When I was a young geology student, it was. I had some old professors that were like pre-plate tectonics. Whoa. That really only happened in the 60s. Really? Yeah. It's new. And so they were hanging on to this old idea called geosynclinal theory. Which I can't explain to you because it doesn't make sense, right? It was super complicated because it doesn't make sense. And they were still trying to like shoehorn that into our understanding of plate tectonics. And so it's just. It's really hard for people sometimes to let go of their ideas. That's wild. Yeah. So as recently as the 60s. That's when the transition was happening. Wow. Yeah. And how did they figure that out? It kind of goes back to this U.S. Naval officer and Princeton professor, Harry Hess. And. During. During World War II, he was working with the Navy to develop magnetometers that would help detect submarines, right? U-boats and things. And they were getting all this background signal from the ocean itself. And he realized that the ocean floor is magnetized. And he started to map this out. And it seems to be magnetized in stripes, right? And so what are these stripes? Well, he found out that. Because we didn't really know the bathymetry, right? The form of the bottom of the ocean. And we started to see that there's mid-ocean ridges, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And these stripes of magnetism are parallel with those. And so he hypothesized that new crust is being created at the mid-ocean ridges, which is true, and that the magnetosphere of the Earth periodically flips. And if it's in one configuration, the rocks will be polarized in what we would call positive. If it's in the other, they would be negative. And so as the magnetosphere periodically shifts. If it breaks down and flips polarity, you can see that recorded in the rocks. And that became the idea of seafloor spreading, which is the motor that then pushes ocean crust, but also pushes continents around the world. And before that, like the idea of continental drift, that's the older term that was proposed in the 20s, I think, by Alfred Wegener. People just kind of laughed him off the scientific stage because they said, well, how could continents move? What's the mechanism for that? So they didn't have a mechanism. And then Harry Hess comes up. And then Harry Hess comes up with the mechanism. And that's when plate tectonics started to really become the. It's almost like the discovery of DNA in biology. Like plate tectonics and geology just kind of makes everything make sense. That's one of the big things that a lot of people are terrified of is a pole shift. Yeah. We don't know really how quickly that can happen. It happens, if I'm right, on average about 800,000 years. But sometimes it can be millions of years. Sometimes it can be. Less. What happens when the magnetosphere breaks down and reconstitutes? Like is that a couple of months? Is that a couple hundred years? In that time, I think we lose our protection from the solar radiation, from the magnetosphere and the gamma rays. So, yeah. So if this happens every 800,000 years, when was the last time it happened? About 800,000 years ago. Oh, fun. Yeah. But highly variable. I don't like how you're saying that. Yeah. Now, when I was working down in Patagonia for many, many years, that was before we really repaired the hole in the ozone layer, which is a great environmental success story. We did that. But I was under that hole. And it would be a chilly day. I'd be working in my parka, but my skin felt like it was in a microwave. It was just like really weird heating of your body. Wow. Which is why I go to the dermatologist twice a year now. Did you get sunburn? Yes, but it just felt different, Joe. It's not like when you go to the beach today. This just felt like you were being baked. It felt different. Australia had an issue with that, right? Yeah, they're far south. I was further south in Patagonia. They had a bunch of, the last time I was there, they had these things that they would have the ads everywhere for skin cancer. I was like, this is weird. And then someone explained to me, yeah, Australia's had a problem with the ozone layer over Australia. Yeah, I think their lifestyle is. It's pretty outdoorsy, too. Very much. Yeah. Yeah. So what do we know about pole shifts? We know that the poles are moving right now, right? They are, yeah. And what is the speed they're moving at? Well, so the magnetic pole moves, right? I don't know the speed. You can look up maps and see where it was at different times. But it's currently moving. It's always moving. Right. Yeah, and it kind of moves in a poorly shaped. Circle. And I don't think, this isn't my field. It's, you know, more geophysics. But I don't think we fully understand what causes the magnetosphere to break down and regenerate, right? I mean, basically we have a magnetosphere because we have a solid iron nickel core surrounded by a liquid iron outer core. And they rotate at different speeds. And so you have. You have, you know, metal rotating inside metal. That's basically a generator, right? So that generates the magnetosphere. which is a very good thing to have um but i'm not sure exactly what causes it to to break down over time um so when it's you said it's moving in a circle is it akin to like the procession of the equinoxes um it's it's not related to that not related but moving in the same sort of way like a wobble it's not a it's not a perfect circle it's i know you could look it up but it's there's a map of where the you know the the magnetic pole is over time and what evidence do we have that shows that every 800,000 years ago this happens and what is the devastation or what is the result of this this shift that we can observe from 800,000 plus years ago so in the right geological circumstances and you need um a really quiet body of water so that could be uh in the deep sea or it could be in a deep lake if you get fine uh grains of water and you get fine grains of water and you get fine grains of water and you get fine grains of um of iron rich particles settling right magnetic particles they will orient themselves to the poles as they settle and so you get rock layers that have a polarity to them and geologists will go out and they will drill in mountainsides and they have to keep their core oriented and then they will test the uh the magnetic direction of those rocks and you can see over time that they shift from one way to the other and now what happens in the in that interval when it's switching i i don't think we know that i think it's a pretty short interval and like we probably don't have a fossil record that records that time very well so explain what that means though that it shifts so north becomes south south becomes north you could say that yeah so just whoop yeah and we don't really know what effect that has on the earth on the climate on i don't think it's well known it's not known to be um but i do not think it's well known is there a way that we could figure that out like could we put that in a perplexity see a perplexity has an answer for what the fuck happens well the thing is it sounds crazy that sounds like it could be the end of civilization well it's a small interval of time and it's very hard to catch a little interval of time in the fossil record right a small interval of time that occurs every 800 000 years or so you know some cases like at the very end of the cretaceous there's about a five million year span where there's no magnetic flip oh interesting do we know why no i don't know but that's not great for me right because we use these flips it's kind of like um imagine you have like a like geological strata is like a pole and you have these stripes on the pole and they have different widths where you can find your piece of the pole here and somebody else has a piece of the pole there and you can match them up and say oh there's the layer that's the same from africa to south america well at the end of the century there's a no flip so and that's mostly where i work so i i can't use that tool i don't have anything to match up interesting and how'd they figure out that it didn't flip during that time period because when you when you find rocks of that age that are in um deposited in those quiet environments the the pole is just always facing the same direction for five million years yeah and is there any kind of a working model of the potential disaster that would incur not that i've seen that would occur if if you had a guess yeah like if you had to say like what what could happen if the pole shifted tomorrow well it's interesting i mean i would guess and this is guessing um that we would probably have an increased rate of cancer uh we would maybe also have an increased rate of mutation and so maybe this is something that historically has been like a a spur to evolution um but you know i can't imagine anybody would think of it as a potential disaster but i can't imagine anybody would think of this as a potential disaster perplexity says yes a magnetic reversal could affect life but the evidence does not support it causing a global catastrophe or mass extinction during a reversal earth's magnetic field weakens and becomes more complicated but it does not simply disappear the atmosphere and remaining magnetic fields continue to protect the surface what could change radiation exposure weaker field lets more charged particles penetrate the earth uh penetrate closer to the earth some additional radiation could reach the surface but the atmosphere remains a substantial shield or reversal would not leave life directly exposed to space ask perplexity this what is the most potentially catastrophic version of a pole shift that has been proposed so ask that follow-up interesting about navigation a lot of a lot of birds and some creatures in the sea use the magnetosphere for for navigation so that would really mess them up would you say proposal or something yeah well outcome of a pole shift that's been proposed now we're going to get to the truth worst case this is where it gets scary this is for a magnetic reversal we've kind of been discussing one of the most catastrophic proposals is a global environmental crisis severely weakened field allows more energetic particles into the atmosphere damages the ozone line and the atmosphere and the atmosphere and the atmosphere and the atmosphere and the layer increases harmful ultraviolet radiation and contributes to ecological disruption and extinctions researchers propose this scenario in a 2021 study but its sweeping consequences remain disputed rather than established the atoms event hypothesis oh i don't like that examined uh the last champs excursion about 42 000 years ago a temporary magnetic reversal rather than the last lasting reversal about 780 000 years ago they proposed that the weakened field combined with unusual solar conditions triggered this chain of events more energetic particles ionize the atmosphere changing its chemistry ozone depletion increased the ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface changes in atmospheric circulation okay so there were some changes and some issues uh these stresses contribute to the disappearance of australian megafauna and neanderthals the authors also speculated that increased uv exposure encouraged humans' to seek shelter in caves hmm cave we've talked about with like 20 30 000 people lived in it right right um darren kuyu you mean yeah you know where that no i'm not okay darren kuyu is a very weird uh archaeological discovery in turkey where a guy was his chickens kept going missing through like a hole in the wall and this guy breaks into this hole in the wall and then realizes it's kind of the beginning of a tunnel and then follows the tunnel in and finds a hole in the wall and then realizes it's kind of the beginning of a tunnel in and finds an underground city that goes what does it go like 100 meters into the ground it's uh suitable to house 20 plus 000 people and including there's uh air holes to the surface there's places where they believe they had grain storage they have no idea how old it was they have no idea who built it they have no idea why but maybe some of the speculation is that there maybe even more likely some human invaders that they were trying to avoid so this is darren kuyu wild and i think was this found in the 90s jamie says 63 63 so this guy like just say what's this and then finds this thing there's no record of it's carved into the ground i mean it's all carved in the stone it's really crazy and when you when you learn how big it is can you show like an image of the the ones there that's what it looked like so this is a representation of what is actually underground like how nuts is that that's amazing that these people live there for hundreds of years perhaps thousands of years because they really don't know how old this is and this is underneath them the whole time and no explanation also no historical record that's why i think last time we talked about they've only uncovered a portion of it right right right so so far they know that it could house 20 000 people but who knows it might be more of it and then there's another one that's similar to that in china the china one's really weird there was a guy who had a pond and he was draining his pond and then upon draining his pond he realized that there was some sort of an opening in the ground and then went through this opening in the ground and there is this enormous underground chamber that's carved out of stone with staircases and it's bananas when you look and unfortunately since the time of this guy's life he's been in a lot of trouble and he's been in a lot of trouble and he's been in a lot of discovery. Some people, it seems like they've carved other intricate artwork into the walls that probably weren't there. So you have more than one timeline that's dealing with this. And when was this discovery? 92? Yeah, I think it's 92. Right there, it says, yeah, that's it. So look how nuts this is. So no historical record. China has some of the most amazing historical records because it's an ancient civilization. And this guy found this draining a pond. What does that say? It says they kept draining ponds and they found two dozen more like it. So this is a huge underground complex. And if you look at all the machine lines on the walls, how it's been carved, what tools were they using? How did they do this? What was the engineering involved? How did you get all the stuff? And then you have the stone out of there. No record anywhere mentions who made them or why. That's wild. Wild. I started my career working in the oasis of Egypt. And, you know, we were there for dinosaurs. But since we worked there in 2000, 2001, they started finding mummies there. And these were like Roman era mummies, and they have found thousands of them since then. And they now call it Valley of the Golden Mummies. And so during Roman times, you know, Egypt was ancient to them. And it was very fashionable to be buried like an ancient Egyptian. And there were thousands of these then. Wow. Yeah. That's cool. My friend David Cho, he did a thing back in the early vice days where he went into the Congo looking for a dinosaur. Because there's like people in the Congo that swear that there's something that lives deep in the Congo that, the way they describe it, it sounds like some long neck dinosaur, brontosaurus looking thing. Are you aware of that? I'm not, but I'd like to take a look at it. Yeah, me too. But you never heard that rumor? See if you can find what the hell that's supposed to be. There's a name that they have for it. Yeah. You want to try that name? Mokoli Mbembe? So the way they describe it, and by the way, these are people that have no access to history books. These are people that, like a lot of these villagers, they have no access, no contact with the Western world when they were describing this, which is really weird. So they're describing a brontosaurus. And at least this is how people have drawn how they described it. So in the 1980s, Roy Mackel, microbiologist for the University of Chicago, conducted multiple expeditions to locate the animal and eyewitness testimony described it. The head was distinctly snake-like, a long thin tail and a body approximately the size of an elephant, or at least that of a hippopotamus. Legs are short with the hind legs possessing a long, thin tail. The head was distinctly snake-like, a long, thin three claws. The animals are reddish brown in color and have a rooster-like frill running from the top of their head down to the back of their neck. However, no expeditions have found evidence of the animal other than eyewitness testimonies. Now, it's interesting to me, that sounds like it has feathers, right? It sounds like some sort of a feathered dinosaur that they're describing that lives in the water. And the problem with the Congo is, the Congo is huge. It is. It's enormous. And it's really dangerous. Really dangerous. Getting in there. Yeah. Yeah. And if you go there, especially now, there's like an Ebola outbreak. Yeah. And then that's probably the easiest thing to deal with. There's like some serious war going on there. Very, very dangerous place to be. Yeah. So not a whole lot of people going out looking for that dinosaur. No, you know, the thing that I always think about when you hear about like these crypto-biological species is there has to be a breeding population of them to exist, right? Right. Like there can't be one Loch Ness monster or one Bigfoot. There has to be a breeding population. And, you know, if that's a thousand, like you're not going to miss a thousand plesiosaur-sized creatures in the Loch Ness, right? You're just not going to miss it. And you're probably going to have evidence if there's a thousand, you know, giant apes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're probably going to miss it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Loch Ness one is, look, you ever been to Scotland? I love Scotland. Yeah. I love Scotland. Awesome place. Best place to hike. People love to get hammered and they love to tell stories. Okay. And when you, and you live next to a giant lake. That whiskey is pretty good. And you're worried about kids drowning. You make up stories about monsters. Right. And then also you're bored. So these stories about monsters, you get more exaggerated and more fantastic and, you know. Absolutely. If you call in, come over here and tell your story. And the guy tells this fucking crazy story of a monster that he saw when he was fishing one day. Of course, it's fun. Like having, especially when you're dealing with people back then. I mean, this originates back when there's no books. Okay. And then you get to books and these stories have been told forever and ever, and you don't really know what the fuck is in that water because there's no way to know. You don't have a submarine. No one goes in there. A lot of unknown. That makes sense to me. Bigfoot also makes sense. The woods are big. Who knows what's out there. It's when people who live in an environment talk about something. Like there, I watched a documentary. It was kind of a sad documentary of this guy who was looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon. And he was convinced that he was going to find a giant sloth in the Amazon that was going to make his career. But it just goes over the period of time where he continues to look for this sloth. And all these people keep saying, "I saw it. I saw it." He's like, "Where is it?" And he keeps looking. And he's years in. And he realized like, "Oh my God, this might be bullshit. I might have wasted years of my academic career searching for an animal that's long extinct." Yeah. Although, you know, there's a lot of unexplored parts of the Amazon, right? Or little explored. And like, when was the okapi discovered? Wasn't that in the '60s? I mean- What is the okapi? It's a big plant-eating animal in Southeast Asia. But, you know, I mean, it's rare to find a big unknown animal today, right? That's the okapi? Yeah. I've never seen that before. Yeah, that thing is cool. Yeah. And I think they weren't known until, you know, last century. That's nuts. And so, you know, I mean, there are definitely things out there to be discovered. But you have to be skeptical when it's in a place like Scotland or Washington State, you know? Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah. But the Congo? Yeah. I mean, every time biologists go to a place like the Congo or the Amazon, they find new species. Now, most of those species are like beetles and things. Right. But who knows what's out there, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what's interesting. Like, you know, they have found those particularly large chimpanzees in the Congo. There's a tribe of very large chimpanzees. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries can make a difference in your life. This is what we do best. Restrictions apply. Seaside for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Whoever said good things come to those who wait? Never shop Black Friday early at Lowe's. Right now, get up to 50% off select major appliances. Plus, get free delivery, free haul away, and free basic installation and parts when you spend $896 or more on select major appliances. Shop Black Friday early, in-store and online now at Lowe's. Valid through 12-2, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See associate at lowes.com for details. Like actual chimps, not the bonobos, because the bonobos live there, too. Right. Yeah. Not bonobos. They call them beely apes or the bondo ape, and it's just a much larger chimpanzee. Yeah, interesting. And they ground nest. They ground nest like gorillas. It's really weird. The locals call them lion eaters. They have two versions of the chimpanzee. The chimpanzees. They call them tree beaters and lion eaters. Doesn't really mean they kill lions. They call them lion killers, but it's probably an exaggeration. Although they did catch one eating a leopard, but they don't know if this one was. And this is like scientists. There's a guy, a Swedish wildlife photographer, Carl Amann, I believe is his name. He started looking for these things in the 1990s, and he got a bunch of camera trap photos of them, just particularly large chimpanzees. Like some of them has been in the woods for a long time, but they're as big as six feet tall. They even shot one at an airfield. There's this photograph of these two guys with one they shot, and it's a chimpanzee that's the size of a gorilla. It's really weird. Wow. And so this is a real animal. There's video of them. They have fecal samples. They have bones. They have all kinds of things. There's really some confusing bones, too. Like one of the skulls has a crest like a gorilla's, which would indicate massive mandible muscles. Right. So they thought maybe it was a hybrid. Of a chimpanzee and some other ape. But now they think it's, no, it's just one weird group of chimps that seems to be quite a bit larger than the regular chimps. So you can find that photo of the dead one at the airport. Because the dead one at the airport is kooky. These dudes behind it, they shot it at an airport. And you look at it, you're like, what? That is so big. That's the biggest chimp I've ever seen in my life. And so the point is, these things were just rumors for a long time. Because this is such a remote area. And because it's very hard to get funding to go look for some crazy monkey that no one is sure is real or not. You have to convince your university. It's very hard to get money for discovery. I mean, I faced that early in my career. Like, you know, it's always, well, how do you know you'll find something? Like, I don't know, but I do know how to find things. Look at that photo. Wow. Isn't that crazy? It's big. That thing's huge. Really big. Like, how weird is that? Weird. So, I mean, there's things that are real that don't seem like they should be real. Yeah. You know, like the hobbit people they found on the island of Flores. Yeah, Homo florenciensis. Amazing, right? Yeah. I just had a whole podcast about that the other day. Yeah, that's so cool. And I remember when that came out, there was an immense pushback, right? And they said, no, it's got to be a pathological individual. And then they started finding more and more. And now it's, you know, and now I think it's convention that these, that was a species that existed. Yes. And then they found them. Was Gregory IV? Was that his name? Yeah. Brilliant guy who was on, who was explaining to, he was one of the people that went over there. He had actually heard about them from the people that lived on that island in the 1980s, long before it was ever discovered. And then got eyewitness accounts. Of people who claim to have still seen them on the island as recently as like a couple months before the discovery Yeah, it was really kooky stuff. And then there's people that have there's a depiction that these guys had that went to the island or a Description of a tall monkey that they had encountered that was walking on two feet in the 2019 Really weird and it's weird and there's that they found bones That indicate that they lived or a similar type species lived in the Philippines. They found them in China They found them the homo naledi, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's another one in Africa. Yep, really wild stuff Yeah, it's like a recent discovery. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. You know that there's so much still to be discovered We're really mysteries saying like that. The hominid group is more like a bush. Yeah It's rare that we are the only species of human alive on the planet today You There's a bunch right? Yeah. Yeah like the Denisovans and all these different Yeah, we're learning so much more about them, you know And there's so much good Neanderthal research happening right now and they're no longer portrayed as like these these brutish caveman Like they were they were making stone tools. They you know, it looks like they had art Maybe burials. I think there's some evidence to that And they were us that they're in our genes as well You know one of the things That like I think I'm happiest about have you ever had your your DNA run by like 23 and me you're one of those Yeah, so according to 23 and me I have more Neanderthal markers in my genome than 99 percent of their customers Wow, that's crazy. I'm 57 percent. Yeah. Yeah, my wife said I could have saved you a hundred bucks But that's based on the old idea of Neanderthals being dopes, right? Yeah, they did have larger brain capacity, right? They had larger brains than we do. Yeah, they were a little more broad-shouldered definitely stronger than than we are but You know to some degree they're still with us. I think you know you heard you heard Beth Shapiro say on your show that if you if you took the Neanderthal genes that are in humanity today collectively You could put back together almost the entire Neanderthal genome. Yeah, which is Wildly unethical. Well, yeah. Yeah, it would be and we should not do that But should we I mean if I lived in China, I mean, I think I'd people propose that the government, you know I'll be like listen, let's fuck it. Yeah, that would be a supremely bad idea. Would it be I don't know Maybe they'd be happy you did it. Hey, thanks for bringing me back. Yeah, I don't know We have a lot of problems already today. I think well, it's isn't it interesting that we are so We're so enamored by our ability to manipulate science and manipulate matter in life that we're willing to Bring back the mammoth everybody thinks that's a good idea Like there's zero pushback if you decide to bring back the mammoth people like yeah, definitely should do that They brought back the dire wolf, right? Yep. No problem. Yeah, I mean a few people's like that's not really a dire wolf But if they brought back in the end at all, everybody be like hey, I think so. Yeah, you can't do that. Yeah, that's us Yeah, and then weird. It's kind of I mean, I think colossal is doing amazing work. Oh, they definitely are Yeah, I'm in shout out to Ben lamb. Yeah, man, Ben Ben lambs great I'm a I'm an advisor to the company And so it's just fascinating I go there and I feel like I'm in a movie. It's it's very Jurassic Park. You've been there, right? Yeah, I took my daughter. It's incredible. Yeah, it's it's really awesome. Like they're trying to bring back the thylacine, which is crazy Yeah, but bringing back in the end at all be a giant problem. That's a that's a that's a like a movie I think that's a terrible nobody. I know wants to do that. Nobody, you know that wants to talk about it I bet people thought about it. Well working long hours in the lab drink it Coffee go outside for a cigarette, you know, I'll be fucking cool I hope not bring back the fucking Neanderthals if you get if someone found Denisovan DNA And they found out that Denisovans actually had a very large cerebral cortex and were Probably smarter than us Would you would it be cool to bring them back? Well? Not to me, but you know, there are people out there. Why not? Well, I I like the way The nature does it okay, except when it comes to animals that aren't as smart and then we're willing to bring them back Isn't that interesting? Well, you know my view of like the things that colossal is working on like the mammoth and and the thylacine the Marsupial wolf and the dodo and the blue buck. I mean, these are creatures that recently went extinct Mm-hmm largely at our hand and so this is still their world, you know people conflate the idea of mammoths and dinosaurs Mm-hmm mammoths were just here. I mean the last mammoths went extinct about 3,000 years ago, right? They were on an island right Wrangel Island off Siberia. So 3,000 years ago That's the world that has pyramids and written stories and beer right? Like yeah, if your world has beer, that's our world, right? And they have a place in that world. Their ecosystem is still here. They're just absent from it. Yeah, I Get it, but still Let them let them stay dead Why do you have to bring them back? Well put it this way if I'm just I'm playing devil's advocate. Yeah, clearly I want them to bring them back. I think it's cool. Let's say I don't know pick a species pick the the cheetah Okay, so the cheetah goes extinct on Monday And if I said Joe I could bring back the cheetah on Tuesday, would you do it? Hmm? Me I mean, it's only been one day they've been gone. Yeah, I think cheetahs are cool. Yeah Yeah, well, what if it's a year later and I said well I could bring back the cheetah Now a year later, I Would say yeah, it's still the same world right, right? What if it's a thousand years later? Well now you're messing with reality because the ecosystem is adjusted and changed a bit I mean, you know a thousand years ago is you know, we're interestingly enough. We have a few animals that have Adaptations that exist because of animals that were eating them that were extinct like the pronghorn Yeah, North American pronghorn is so fast as shit because they're running away from cheetahs that no longer exist no longer exist Yeah, but like a thousand years ago, that's like William the Conqueror, right? Like that's the same world. That's this world Yeah, so, you know, where do you draw the line right? Right? I draw the line it like, you know during the time of humans That's still basically this world and they have a place in this world. Well, that was the mr Fourth when we had the conversation about these tiny hominids One of the things was what what would you do if you found them? Are you allowed to catch one? You know what I mean? Like is this like a is this like a kidnapping a human? Yeah, I think it would be yeah, right people kind of but they're covered in hair and they don't have stone tools And we don't even know if they have a language Right. Mm. So is it a monkey? I mean, right but anything smarter than a monkey like leave it alone But if it's a monkey like yeah put it in the zoo like no problem you go to the zoo the monkey The monkeys are there but something just a little smarter than the monkey like oh, man, that's fucked up Yeah, I think so, you know, like you go to a zoo and you look at a gorilla and like there's somebody home Oh, I don't like it. Right? I don't like somebody. I do not like primates at the zoo. It drives me crazy Yeah, I went to the Denver Zoo With my kids and there was this this is a quite a long time ago There was this one particular area where they had all the primates caged and this one monkey was wailing just screaming And I think he was just frustrated Just this is living in hell. He's in prison. He's just like And I'm like, I don't like that sound that sounds like pain that sounds like suffering like why the fuck they have Can we just make it's 20 whatever it was back then 2020, whatever it was. Can't we just have Video of these things now, do we do we need to have them locked up like this? Yeah, it seems especially these little tiny ass cages It's one thing if you have a giant enclosure and they get trees and free food And and no eagles eating them great fun times, right? But the actual little zoo cages with a primate in it is really fucked up. Yeah. Yeah, it is I remember in grad school I went to the National Zoo one time because it was free and I was in grad school and like that's what I could do I saw this elephant it reached through the the bars and it's enclosure I grabbed this pointy rock and it started scraping the sidewalk with it and then it scraped its leg and then it set the rock down and it felt the sidewalk and it felt It's leg and it was comparing the two And you can see like it was it was really thinking about it. It was it was the smart being there, right? It's trying to measure the hardness of things and see if he could dig its way out Maybe yeah. Yeah, maybe maybe thinking of this has got to be a way out of this. That's hell. I Just it's great when you have kids because they get to see animals. Yeah, don't but it's There's something really dark about a lot of those places one of the One cool one is a San Diego Zoo If you don't ever been to San Diego I have been and you know zoos do so much great conservation work like they are really, you know Some of the engines of conservation that are keeping species that are right on the brink from teetering over I think the San Diego Zoo is largely responsible for the emerging recovery of the California Condor You know, they were down to 22 individuals, I think in around 1970 So they collected all of them from the wild and had a very careful breeding program to try to Get them through this genetic bottleneck and they started releasing them and now there's a new population of California Condors in Zion Canyon in Utah, and so I think there's only about 550 of them alive right now but they're you know they're up from 22 they're moving in the right direction which is great yeah no that is cool and that's an example of zoo conservation you know they do they do great work in general they also have uh large enclosures yeah they do it's a very nice thing and you can go in like one of those jeeps and you drive around and animals come up and you feed them it's pretty pretty weird they don't they don't seem to be tortured i always say that like the animals that seem the happiest at the zoo are giraffes they don't seem bothered by the zoo at all because they're just like another day with no lions yeah just wandering around like they're the only animal at the zoo that they will let you feed them a baby can feed them like a bait a child a small child can hold up a leaf of lettuce and they'll come over with their crazy tongue and wrap it around the lettuce and everybody screams oh my god i don't get the impression that giraffes are like the the sharpest knives in the drawer you know they definitely aren't yeah no yeah well they fight with their heads right you see they fight yeah they whip their neck they whip their necks it's crazy that's what those little horns are for they're those little things that they have are to each other up with did you see um apple tv's prehistoric planet no with david attenborough no i didn't um so like great cgi um but they had my dinosaur dreadnoughtus and there is in episode two and i had the thrill of hearing sir david say dreadnoughtus you know which is my ringtone now by the way oh that's cool but they had a they had a fight scene of dreadnoughtus who were like slapping each other with their heads like giraffes do which i think they would absolutely not do their necks are really long and lightly built filled a lot with air and their heads are tiny like a giant dreadnoughtus has a head that's not much bigger than a horse head why didn't they consult with you or someone like you well i that's a good question joe it seems like i'm not sure some producer got involved some jackass so they had a very good paleontologist darren nash who is in in england uh but darren sends me a message a couple weeks before it debuts and he says uh you know kenneth i have to tell you something um we wanted to portray this idea that dinosaurs must have had amazing soft tissue structures that we'll never know about so i decided to give dreadnoughtus pop-out neck bladders like a grouse and he says uh this was my decision and i realized that i didn't want to do it i realized you'll have to answer the neck bladder question for the rest of your days and it's true if if you could bring that up jamie a prehistoric planet dreadnoughtus um and so why did he make that i don't know and so everywhere i go now to give a talk i have to answer the neck bladder question and this was just one guy's idea yeah yeah and so they did you have a conversation with him saying i don't think that was a good idea well it was too late he was telling me like two weeks before the show why would he do that why would he do that why would he do that why would he do that why would he do that to my dinosaur in particular i'm not sure but yeah there we go so yeah and so in the show they go like and uh as part of their mating ritual oh come on so it's like so creative i'm i'm such a creative guess i'm giving a talk in uh san antonio tomorrow and i guarantee i will get the neck bladder question look at how it's like said like almost like it's fact here yeah despite his external bulk the internal physics of dreadnoughtus relied on weight reduction its vertebrae were not enough to reduce the size of the body so he decided to make the neck bladder question so he decided to make the neck bladder question so he decided to make the neck bladder question pneumatized containing a complex system of air pneumatized containing a complex system of air pneumatized containing a complex system of air sacs that part's true heavy bone there but sacs that part's true heavy bone there but sacs that part's true heavy bone there but not the outside not the outside those those not the outside not the outside those those not the outside not the outside those those big white things he just made those big white things he just made those big white things he just made those up made up yeah and like even the the up made up yeah and like even the the up made up yeah and like even the the distance between them the size of them distance between them the size of them distance between them the size of them all just creative yeah no that's kooky all just creative yeah no that's kooky None of that. There's no evidence for that. That's really kooky. But these big dinosaurs do have pneumatized skeletons, which means that they have air bladders that go through their skeletons. Their skeletons are very honeycombed, so they lose mass, but they don't lose a lot of strength. Okay. And if you're that big- Like a bird. Like a bird. Because birds are dinosaurs. Right. So if you're the size of a house, if you took elephant anatomy and scaled it up to Dreadnoughtus size, I think its proteins would start to denature, which means cook, right? Inside of its own body. And so their big metabolic challenge is shedding heat. So how do they do that? Well, one thing is that long neck and long tail gives them a lot of surface area per volume, so they can shed heat that way. Like elephant's ears. Yes. But like super long, right? Dreadnoughtus had a 40-foot long tail and a 30-foot long neck. But then they have these pneumatic invasions. They get more and more pneumatized over their growth, the growth of an individual. And we're not sure, but it seems likely to me that those pneumatic tubes that go through their skeleton are connected to their lungs. And they have what we call bird-style lungs, which kind of should be called dinosaur-style lungs, because they had them before birds. But the way a bird and a dinosaur breathes is in this two-step process. They don't have bellows lungs like we do, where we always mix good air and bad air. Dinosaurs don't do that, and birds don't do that. So that when they take a breath in, it doesn't go into their lungs. It's staged in this lower air bladder. And then when they breathe out, that air goes across their lungs only in one direction. And then the next time they breathe in, that air that just went across their lungs gets staged in an upper air bladder. The new air comes into the lower air bladder. And next time they breathe out, new air across the lungs, that old air then is expelled. Whoa. Yeah. So it's a really efficient way of breathing. And as a result of this, birds are really good in what we call hypoxic conditions, right? Low oxygen. That's why the barred goose can fly over the hemlock. No bat can do that, but a barred goose could do that. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so this might be a way, if it's connected to the pneumatic invasions in their skeleton, where they can dump heat into their environment. We were in Scotland, and there's this lady that was, she was a, what is it called when a person trains birds? Oh, right. Whatever it was. Yeah. A person that trains birds. Yeah. And you know, you had the glove, you put the glove on, and she had an eagle. And the eagle landed on my arm, and I was shocked at how light they are. Yeah. And it's because of the bones. Yeah. And you know, birds have a lot of. Yeah. But they have all kinds of weight-saving adaptations. Hollow bones, they've lost their teeth, right? Teeth are heavy, so birds just have beaks. And this happens, you can see in the Cretaceous period, the birds starting to lose their teeth. So there's birds alive at the end of the Cretaceous, like one called Hesperornis, which looks kind of like a coomber ant today. Looks very, very modern, but has teeth still, right? And then there's birds. There's like the Shoebill that seem like they're from like 100 million years ago. Yeah, that's a crazy-looking bird, isn't it? Oh, those things are so weird. Yeah. And then they start cracking. They slam their jaws together and make that nutty sound that sounds like gunfire. And you know the Hotson? It's a bird when it's born, it has claws, like, you know, harking back to its non-avian dinosaur days, and they climb around. Really? Yeah. When it's born? Yeah. There it is. That's a real live bird? Yeah. Okay. That's a dinosaur. That is wonderful. That's 100% a dinosaur. Is that an actual picture? Is that AI? I just popped it in. Yeah, it's cool. That's an actual picture of it. That's wild, isn't it? What a freaky-looking thing. Yeah. Heartless-looking demon. Look in his eyes. You know, that's the thing. Reptiles, dinosaurs, chickens. We keep chickens. They're insensate, you know? You look in their eyes, and it's just like. Oh, there's nobody there. Why is that called a stink bird? What's that, Jimmy? Stink bird? Why is it a stink bird? Do they think. It smells so bad, predators won't eat it. Whoa. What? I want to take a whiff. Yeah. But you can see. Like, if you look at that thing, or you look at chickens. Have you ever seen, like, chickens running in slow motion? Mm-hmm. They're dinosaurs. I have chickens. Yeah. I've seen chickens eat. My chickens eat a mouse. Yeah, mine too. And frogs. Oh, frogs, huh? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But it's incredible how ferocious they are. Record them running in slow-mo, and it looks like Jurassic Park. It does. It's amazing. Right. Yeah. It does. Yeah. It's very interesting to watch how predatory they are when they do get a hold of something like a mouse. Yeah. Because, you know, I've shown videos on this podcast, like, countless times, where people don't know. I'm like, you ever see what a chicken does to a mouse? Yeah. And they show them, and they're like, what the fuck? Like, there's a cat playing with the mouse, and the chicken snatches the mouse from the cat and just destroys it immediately. Yeah. They're vicious. They're terrible to each other, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, if one gets injured, they'll just peck the wound. Oh, yeah. They're chickens. Oh, they're heartless. Chickens are little dinosaurs. Yeah. They're mean. They're mean. That's what pecking order's all about. That's a real thing. Yeah, it is. And you've got to separate chickens. It is. It's a real problem. Yeah. They kill each other. Yeah. We only get hens, so we have, you know, eliminated some of that stress. We only get hens, too, but we fucked up this time, and one of our chicks was a rooster. Oh, yeah. So now we have a rooster. Yeah. We had a rooster before. We had to get rid of him, because he started attacking people. Mm-hmm. But this guy's cool. We get him from this site online, and you can pay an extra 25 cents to have them sexed. Well, we paid that, too. Yeah. We just fucked up. Well, we've had 20. We have, right now, 20 chickens, and over the course of the times that I've had chickens, we've probably had 50 or 60 all told forever, you know, when a bunch of them die off and get new ones. This is the only time they ever made a mistake. There was only one mistake. Yeah. And we were looking at this one chick, and as he was getting bigger, we were like, why is he bigger than everybody else? And why he's got that little fucking thing in his nose? Like, I think that's a rooster. Right, right. And my wife was the first one. Right. Right. Right. Right. She's the first one to figure it out. She's like, he's a rooster. And then, as he just, you know, a few months in, you're like, it's clear. Right. He's way bigger than them. And he starts, wah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Well, there he is. Fuck, we got a rooster. But this guy's keeping it together. We've had him for a year now, and he doesn't fuck with anybody. He's really chill. Mm-hmm. You know, luckily, because the last rooster had a go. Yeah. Yeah. I think he probably became soup. Yeah. I don't know what happened. Gave them to one of my guys. Our chickens have names, so we don't eat them. We bury them. Yeah, we have names for our chickens. We have names for some of them. Once it got over 20 with some of the new ones, a lot of them haven't been named. Right. A couple names we've recycled. We've had a couple of Frenchies. Well, it's a great way to get free food. It's not free, obviously. You have to pay for chicken feed and all that stuff, but it's like karma-free protein. The eggs are great, aren't they? They're fantastic. If you have pastured, grass-fed chicken eggs, you can't go back to the store-bought ones. Well, it's just they're so fresh. You know exactly where they came from. You know exactly what your chickens are eating. There's no concern whatsoever, and it also doesn't harm anybody. I put them raw in my smoothie every morning. Wow, you're brave. Well, you know. Have you ever been to the Explorer's Club dinner? What is that? You know the Explorer's Club in New York, right? I've heard of it. Yeah. I'm not totally familiar with it. So it's like the global. It's a center for exploration, and we have a dinner every spring, and it's a huge event. There's like 2,000 people that come, and the appetizers, famously, are insects. Wow. And so you get scorpions and tarantulas and silkworm grubs and some things. You know, crickets I like. Cicadas. Fish eyes. Yeah. My very first experience. At the Explorer's Club dinner, I think in 2003, no, 2004, Buzz Aldrin's wife was feeding me scorpions on a stick. Whoa. I was like, what the hell is happening to me? It was wild. Yeah. You should come sometime. So the club itself is up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It looks exactly like you think it would, right? Oh, and old wood and. Lots of taxidermy, old wood paneling, all these artifacts. Every human that's ever walked on the moon has had an Explorer's Club dinner. Oh, wow. That's cool. Neil Armstrong had a flag in his sleeve, and that's in our archives at the Explorer's Club. And is it just like people that explore everything all over the world, archaeologists, paleontologists? Like, what is it? Yeah. Different people take these weird trips? Well, it's, you know, it's hardcore explorer researchers. Those are fellows. Members are people that have done a lot of exploration, you know, for good causes, and there's also friends. They're supporters of the club. You know, I got to meet Sir Edmund Hillary there before he died, which was incredible. He told my wife and I the story of climbing Everest. Like, it happened last week, and, like, we were the first people he ever told. Wow. It was amazing. I've gotten to meet—I was—honestly, I'm still processing this, but I was lucky enough to receive the Explorer's Club medal in 2019, and which, like, many of my heroes had received that in the past, including the Apollo astronauts. And it happened to be the 50th. It was the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. So I got to go to a lunch with basically all of the living Apollo astronauts, and we were sitting at a table with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, my son, who was, like, 10 at the time, 9 or 10, was sitting next to Fred Hayes from Apollo 13, and I kept leaning over to him saying, like, burn this moment into your memory so you remember it when you're 90 years old, because he's the first people to leave the planet, first people to walk on the moon. It was incredible. So when you're at this Explorer's Club, how come they can't just give you wings? How come they have to feed you bugs? Is it just a novelty? It's kind of a tradition. Yeah, it's a tradition. Like, you go to the Explorer's Club bar, and there's always, like, a martini glass filled with crickets for bar snacks. Just to be silly. Yeah. Right. And so who's funding all this? How does this place stay open? It sounds like a pretty extravagant organization. Well, you know, there are dues, and a big portion of their yearly budget is made up of, like, made from the Explorer's Club dinner, which has become. Oh, okay. So it's a big celebration. It's a big celebration. You know, celebrities go. Well, I mean, it is so important that people are willing to take these crazy trips. Yeah. Like Gregory IV going to Flores and all these different places where people go. Like, without that, our limited, currently limited understanding would be so much smaller. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of what the Explorer's Club does now is to fund young explorers, to fund conservation projects. We have a. We have a. We have a program called the EC50, which every year is about, you know, 50, like, up-and-coming explorers. And it plugs them into the kind of networks they need to get their expeditions funded and to get, you know, all the logistics done. It's also a place where, like, if you're stuck somewhere in the world, you contact the club and there's a good chance that, you know, there's somebody that can help you or even, like, put a rescue mission together. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, that's probably very important. Yeah. When the. When the. The submersible, the Titan imploded, the club was in the process of putting a search mission together when it was found out that it was destroyed. Mm. Yeah. I wanted to bring us back to dinosaurs and the original hoaxes, because it seems like this is part of the problem with the conspiracy narrative that's online, is that there were quite a few people that were profiting off of dinosaur bones. Yeah. in the early days of dinosaur discovery. So how did that all start? And what was the—was there a financial motivation to do this? Yeah, I think so. You know, there have been cases where fossils are fabricated. More recently, in like the last 20 years, some really good fossil hoaxes have been made in China, but they've been discovered by paleontologists. Like, you know, sometimes it might take a little bit of time, but paleontologists uncover that these things have been fabricated or patched together. What were the original hoaxes, though? I'm not really sure. Because I know there was a controversy. There was like several people that kept discovering dinosaur bones. And then it turns out there was like a sort of like a competition amongst these guys. Oh, are you maybe talking about the famous bone wars between Cope and Marsh? So those are real fossils. But they had this horrendous competition with each other. It was a Yale professor, Othniel Marsh, and somebody from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Edward Drinker Cope. And this is in the latter portion of the 19th century. Right. And so they're like. Whoever said good things come to those who wait never shopped Black Friday early at Lowe's. Plus, get free delivery, free hallway, and free basic installation and parts when you spend $896 or more on select major appliances. Paleontology is new to the world. It's new to North America. And every time they go out and find something, it's a new species, right? Because nobody has ever done this. So they're building these tremendous lists of species. They end up out west in Wyoming, like sabotaging each other's quarries. I think there's gunplay at one point. It ends up with congressional hearings in Washington. It becomes scandalous and very widespread. But they were dealing with real fossils. They just hated each other. And they were in this incredible competition. Cope challenged Marsh that he said, you know, when we die, let's donate our brains to science and see who has the bigger brain. Like, that's the kind of a-holes these dudes were. You know, like, it's insane. They're nasty people. And all of this starts right where the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I work, is like right there, about a mile away. There's a marl pit where that first ever discovered tyrannosaur is discovered. And so Cope is notified by the miners that there's something there. And he goes and he sees this tyrannosaur and he excavates it and he describes it. And at this point, he wants the approval of this great Yale professor, Marsh, right? So he invites him down. When Marsh is in that quarry in Mantua Township, New Jersey, he takes the quarry owner to the side and cuts a secret deal with him so that all the fossils they found henceforth would be shipped up to the Yale Peabody Museum and not go to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences. And that starts this battle between them. And then there's a famous story that Cope had this elasmosaur skeleton, which is like a big plesiosaur. And Marsh, like, ostentatiously corrected him, taking the head of it and putting it on the other side because he got the animal backwards, you know. So just trying to embarrass each other and sabotaging each other. And they were not nice guys. It's just weird when that kind of behavior happens amongst the people that are supposed to be the intellectuals. Yeah. Yeah. There's clearly like huge egos on both sides. But they have – they found so many fossils that like I have to refer back to them constantly. And when you look at a species name, you know, in public, it will just have one name like Dreadnoughtus. But usually you have in science, it will have the genus, the species, and then in parentheses like the discovery. in the year. And like, I'm always having to write down Cope and Marsh because they just found so many North American species. Wow. So they weren't involved in any hoaxing? No, no hoaxing. It was, you know, they got some stuff wrong and they were very, very driven to name new species. So some of the species that they have since been knocked back and, you know, other paleontologists will say that's not really a different species. That's already this – that's the species that was already known. Okay. So I'm confusing this with something else then. Like wasn't there a bunch of cases once they started finding dinosaurs of people hoaxing dinosaur bones? I'm sure there have been. I'm not really aware of the history of that. Did you find out what's the – put in what is the most famous or notable hoax of dinosaur bones? Already on that. Thank you, sir. Don't really get a good answer though. When I asked it the first time, most successful hoax, it brought up something about the China thing. So I re-asked and said what are the original hoaxes? First thing it brings up is something about fossils, which isn't dinosaur bones. And then 1845, there's some – T-monster bones. Then the Cardiff giant. Oh, but that's a man. That's not a dinosaur. Okay. So just – so one of the issues is that a lot of the bones that you see, like if you go to the Museum of Natural History, those are not real bones. Well, it depends. So sometimes the actual bones are mounted. For small fossils, you might have the whole thing. For big ones, you almost never find a big animal that's complete. So when you see a T-monster. You might see a T-rex at the museum and it's a full T-rex with the claws out. How much of that is an actual T-rex? Sometimes zero, right? Sometimes the entire thing is a recreation. Well, sometimes, yeah, because they have the original one in collections. Right. And so that's more common now because it's not great to mount the bones of a big creature because two things. One is that you have to do things to the bone. You have to put like metal clamps on them. Back in the old days, they would drill holes in them, which is terrible. But also it inhibits study, right? And so if a paleontologist wants to – like the fourth cervical vertebra, now it's up 40 feet and you need a scissor lift or you can't look at the ends of it because they're covered up by the other bones. So best practice now really is to keep the stuff in the collections and to mount the recreations. Like at our museum at the Edelman Fossil Park, we have like a dryptosaurus. It's a 3D print. We do put smaller skeletons on display because if we wanted to study them, we could – we can easily take them out of the cases and study them. But it's not – you know, you should – and we do. We list if something is a replica or if it's the original material. Was that always the case? It's not always the case in museums even today. Right. But that's where the conspiracy weirdos, where they get fixated. Like that's not even real bones because it's not. It's actually a recreation of the real bones. Yeah. But the real bones allegedly do exist somewhere but oftentimes not – all of them. So some of it is speculation in terms of like what they've added to it, correct? Depending on the creature, some of it can be. So the best practice if you're going to mount the real bones is to make the replicated pieces a different color, right? And you see that done in a lot of museums. So it's easy to tell like those are the original bones. Right. And those are the ones that they've added for the sake of completeness. Right. And how do they make the distinction? Like how do they estimate what the other bones were if we don't have a complete fossil? We use what we call phylogenetic bracketing, which simply means you look at the creature that you have. You find relatives on this side, relatives on this side. Anything they hold in common is probably something that was held by the group in the middle, right? Like in the case of Dreadnoughtus, we didn't have the skull, right? We had just a little bit of premaxilla and a single tooth. So we looked to a close relative that was found in central Patagonia that was really known only from the skull called Sarmientosaurus. And so we use that in our research. We use that in our reconstruction as the skull of Dreadnoughtus, like as a stand-in because we didn't recover the skull. As far as the neck, the neck was like 40 feet long, but we only have two vertebrae from the neck. There's a dinosaur from northern Patagonia called Phutolognosaurus that is known mostly from its neck. So we use those other vertebrae as a stand-in for the ones that we were missing. But from the rest of the skeleton, we had almost all of that, right, and almost all of the tail. So, you know, we know that. We know that part really well, whereas there is, you know, some uncertainty with the neck and the skull of Dreadnoughtus. That's cool. So where, if you were going to look for a new undiscovered dinosaur species today, let's imagine that, you know, you talk to the king of the world and he gives you an unlimited budget and says, I think, Kenneth, that there's more out there, and I think you can find it. Where would you go? Yeah, well, there's way more out there, for sure. For sure. You know, we all kind of use the same formula. You have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what you're interested in, right? Those rocks have to be sedimentary rocks. And then today you need exposure. And so that's why you see us paleontologists mostly working in badlands and deserts. It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in those environments. It's that that's where we have access to the rocks today. And then the fourth thing, which I like to have, is to get as far away from other paleontologists as possible, right? Because you have a better chance then. What you're discovering being something new to science. And so I've kind of made my career by going to the places where people weren't willing to go to before. Like the southernmost Patagonia is a super harsh environment. Even in their summer, it's cold and it's terribly windy. My first year down there, I provisioned cereal for the crew to eat for breakfast. You can't eat cereal for breakfast in Patagonia because it blows off your spoon before you can eat it. Oh, wow. So it's like that. And so you get those three things. The first three things, and you will find fossils. You get the fourth thing, and there's a good chance that what you find is new to science. So the places where I would go and largely have been are Patagonia. It's just an incredibly rich treasure trove for dinosaurs. Several different areas in China are incredible. The American West is still terrific. You know, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah, still fantastic. I would love. Like if I had not only that funding, but like, you know, if you could wave the political magic wand, I'd love to do more prospecting in North Africa. You know, I'd love to go to Libya and, you know, Algeria. Because in the Cretaceous period, it's this coastal environment. Sea level is very high in the Cretaceous. And there's a mangrove ecosystem that cuts through basically the middle of what North Africa is now. That's where we found Perala Titan. Perala Titan, which at the time was the second most massive known dinosaur. That's where famous Spinosaurus is from. And, you know, I'm sure there's lots of other dinosaurs there in this like equatorial Tethys Seaway. Before the Mediterranean, it was open on both ends. It's called the Tethys Seaway. So that's an area that I would really like to prospect. That sounds amazing. It would be a shame if you didn't. The ultimate thing, like if you want to talk about like your super-duper magic wand, would be Antarctica. Really? Right. Yeah. Because Antarctica is already at the South Pole during the time of the dinosaurs, but it's not glaciated. And it's this boreal forest, but it still gets half a year of darkness. And we don't have an environment on the planet today like that, right? There's no modern analog to a forest that gets half a year of darkness like that. And we know there were dinosaurs there, and we don't know really hardly anything about them. There's a little bit of outcrop on the Antarctic Peninsula and on Vega Island off of that. And paleontologists have found some dinosaurs there, but it's a whole continent, and there's got to be thousands and thousands of dinosaurs and new species under that ice cap, and we have no idea what's down there. When you've been on these expeditions, you must have had a few sketchy experiences. Oh, yeah, for sure. What's the sketchiest? Well, it depends. I mean, falling is a big health hazard to us. Yeah. Probably the time that I thought I was about to die was. I was on the Montana-Wyoming border. I'm not actually sure which state I was in at the moment, but I had a slab of rock tied on my back that had pterosaur tracks on it, you know, the flying reptiles. And it was probably, I don't know, 75 pounds. And I'm climbing up this rock face, and I should have had ropes, but I thought, like, ah, it's not that big. I could do it. You know, it was like 20 or 30 feet. I get about halfway up, and the rock starts breaking off in my hands. Uh-oh. And I'm like, oh, shit. And so I look down. And I can't see where to put my feet to go back down. Oh, God. So now I'm hanging on the side of this outcrop, and I'm thinking, like, this is how it's going to be, you know? Wow. And so I hung there for I don't know how long. It seemed like a long time for me, and I said, well, I'm just going to have to try. And so I start going up, and the rock is breaking off in my hand. I'm going up, and it's breaking off in my hand. And I finally, you know, roll over the lip of this cliff. And I was shaking when I got to the top of that. I thought that was going to be the end of me. Yeah, well, the 70s. 25-pound rock on your back. That's crazy. Yeah. There have been times in Patagonia where, you know, my first field season at the Dreadnoughtus site, we had to get there by rafting down this roaring glacial stream, and we had to take all of our supplies across the river by stream, and then we would jacket these dinosaur bones in burlap and plaster. I had no way to get a vehicle there, so I hired a couple of gauchos and their horses, and we would take these plaster-jacketed bones, put them on a sled, pad it out with prairie grass, and tow them out of the desert with horses. And I knew I wasn't going to have, like, a real project unless I could get a vehicle there. And all the locals were saying, there's no way to drive there. drive there. But on the last day of that field season, I went off by myself, which I would kill my grad students if they did, but went off by myself in the pickup, went way up north, found this old rickety bridge across the river and spent the whole day picking my way through the badlands and showed up that night in camp with the pickup truck. But there were a couple of places where I would put the wheels of the pickup over the hill and I'm just seeing sky, right? And I would get out and like, look, and then I get back in and I'm seeing sky and I drive over the edge and lock the brakes and bounce down the hill. And then you have to keep it straight or you're going to roll, right? And that's how we got there. And then when I came back- Did you even have a spare tire? I had a spare tire, yeah, and sand tracks. This is what it looks like? So this is the Dreadnoughtus site here. And you can see it's a really rugged terrain. You got a truck there? I got a truck. Yeah. Imagine driving through what you see behind me there. Wow. And so it was hairy. And then when we came back the next year, I had a little bit of money and I hired a guy with one of those like road scrapers. And we scraped like a 15 kilometer long road in the ground. It wasn't a good road, but it was a road. And that's when I knew we were going to have a project. But there were moments then. And then one time in Egypt, there was a Bedouin who thought I was a grave robber. And so he's on one of these little like Bethlehem donkeys. They're almost comical because their feet are almost touching the ground. But he's coming at me and he's got like a scimitar. And he's, you can see a long way in the desert, like a mile away. And I'm kind of like, okay, can we get this over with? Because it's taken a long time for him to get there. And so he hops off the donkey and he's yelling at me. And I have an entrenching tool. You know what that is? It's like a little army shovel, but you can fold the handle at a right angle. And I always have one of those with me because it's a great climbing tool and a digging tool and use it for camp things, but also it's a weapon. And so I'm looking at this guy and if he moves with that scimitar, I'm going to get him. And so I'm looking at this guy and if he moves with that scimitar, then I'm coming across with my entrenching tool. But I very slowly, I showed him my other hand. I went down very carefully and got my walkie talkie and I lifted it up and I got my Egyptian colleague on the walkie who's like five miles away. And he explained who I was and what I was doing. He thought I was a grave robber. And then he said, ah, and I'm a doctor. And I said, Iowa. And then, you know, then he knew what I was doing. And then he was like my buddy after that, you know? Oh, yeah. That's lucky. Yeah. So there are moments, everybody has them in the field, but there are so many more great moments. Like everywhere I've gone in the world, the world is just full of nice people, you know? And I've just met so many great people and made so many great friends. And that same oasis that I was working at in Egypt, in the little village, like there's no supermarket, right? So there's like the orange stand and the bread stand and the cucumber stand. And so I had left my expensive camera at one of the. One of these little stands, I think it was the orange stand. And I was out in the desert for like three days and I wasn't even sure I left it there. And this camera is definitely worth more than these people making a year, right? And I come back and this guy sees my Jeep coming down the little dirt road and he runs out in the middle of the street and he's got my camera and he's jumping up and down and very happy that I'm coming back so he can give it to me, you know? And like, just so nice. And in Egypt, like if you, you have to be careful about complimenting people. Because if you say like, oh, that's a nice sweater you're wearing. Like, boom, off comes the sweater. Here, take my sweater, you know? And then you have to explain that, you know, well, it's not my size or whatever. These kids in this mud brick lodge where we stayed for a couple of months, they always have like a surplus of teenage boys to do every little job, right? And I taught them how to play American football and, you know, and so they liked me. And on my birthday, they gave me a water buffalo, right? Which is worth a fortune to them. They gave me a gamusa, a water buffalo. And I had to explain to them, and we named it Daisy. I had to explain to them, you know, I can't take Daisy on the plane. So could you take care of this for me when I go back to America, you know? And like everywhere I've gone, there's just been such nice, generous people. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Well, listen, thank you very much for coming here. Thanks for all your work. Thanks for all your courage to make these excursions and expeditions and bring back all that information. Yeah, I forgot. I got something for you. Can I give it to you? Sure. Yeah. So this, so at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I am in New Jersey, we have an extinction layer there, right? And we have collected over 100,000 fossils representing over 100 extinct species, right in that layer, the last moments of the Cretaceous period. So this is a tooth from an extinct crocodile called Theracosaurus. And this individual is from the extinction layer, meaning this very individual died in the world's fifth, mass extinction. The asteroid murdered that actual crocodile. Wow. That's cool. That will stay right here, sir. Yeah. So I want you to have that. And I also brought this. This is from our research collection, but this is a tibia of a species of crocodile. Do you know what gavial crocodiles are today? Or gharials, they're also called those narrow snouted ones in India. Okay. So this is a Cretaceous gavial crocodile. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. But that dude is another victim of the asteroid strike. And so that's like the wonder of this place. And so you can go there and like, it's the best window we have in the planet in that pivotal calamitous moment that wipes out the dinosaurs and really makes the modern world as we know it. So how old is this? That's 66 million years old. Holy shit. And we find that with the fallout from the material that got blasted out of the crater. And the best thing about this place is that, you know, obviously we manage and curate that research layer very carefully. But above that, we have a layer that's still full of fossils. And we invite the public to come in and dig from those layers. And every kid, every grownup that goes in there who tries a little bit and who's not afraid to get their hands dirty, and I hope you do it with us someday, finds a 66 million year old fossil with their own hands that they get to take home. How many fossils are there? Millions, probably. Millions. Wow. Yeah. This is awesome. Yeah. Isn't that something? Very. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for being here, man. I really appreciate it. It's a pleasure. And your book, Why Dinosaurs Matter. Go get it, folks. Is there an audio book? There is, and I read it. Yes! Yeah. That's what I want to hear. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you. It's been fun. It has been. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Restrictions apply. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Thank you.