EP 181 | Extinct Animal Facts with George Wakeman - Pandora's Box Podcast

George Wakeman's Journey to Extinct Animal Facts Pandora's. Speaker 2 Box. Speaker 1 Is about to open wide. I thought this was a fitting song to play into the show. Yeah. I like it. Walk the dinosaur. I was not. Was you're listening to Pandora's box. Ladies and gentlemen on AW Radio thanks for joining us today. Got a great guest in the studio today. George Wakeman, content creator turned author Instagram is extinct. Animal Facts got 550K followers and gaining. George, I've been following you. It's hard to say when I started following you on Instagram, but it was at least five years ago. When did you start your Instagram? Speaker 2 It locked down around 5 years ago. Yeah, 2020. I needed something to take my mind off the barrage of information that was coming through on the Internet. And I thought, what's not political, what's not, you know, controversial, what's just something I can just get stuck into and it doesn't matter because it happened 10 million years ago. Short faced bearers, everything, everything along those lines. So all the content, just it just, I just started basically thinking I'll post this stuff and see what people think and then I'll think up to like 30 posts or a month or so at 4005 thousand followers. And we decided snowballing. So from there it became a hobby that I then started taking a little bit more seriously. But yeah, I'm, I enjoy it. I it's only things I would read out of pure interest myself anyway. I'm sure passing on the information. Yeah, in an aesthetically pleasing way, I'd like to think. Speaker 1 Yeah, well, no, you do a great job, man. I think relatively speaking, I must have been one of your first followers, I imagine just because I said I've definitely been following you. I said I, I, I in my mind, it was at least five years. So I reckon, yeah, relatively speaking, I must be one of your one of your earlier followers. But I think for anybody that's. Speaker 3 Not to flex. Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I'm just not to Brian. Yeah, one of the Ogs. But yeah, I think for anybody that's super into that, you know, into extinct animals, whether it's, you know, dinosaurs or whether it's Saber tooth cats or even, you know, all these creatures from like the Permian pre dinosaur even, it's like that. That stuff is a I think that does offer a level of escapism. As you said, like for like cover times. It was heavy times, man. You know, he's like all you hear on the news, every time you turn on the news, it was like, everybody's gonna die. Yeah, can't leave the house. Like, oh, it's so, so dreary and so depressing. So if you can, if you can lose yourself in just thinking, oh, these crazy animals, like actually used to walk the earth, like, and then you used to like sit and think about that for a minute. And it kind of blows your mind, doesn't it? Speaker 2 This is what gets me because I think it's I'm quite a fantasy and sci-fi. Speaker 1 That me too, man. Speaker 2 So I feel like this is sci-fi, the fantasy combined that actually happened and actually existed. And that to me is what gets me. The fact that these things happened on this planet just so long ago in such incomprehensible amounts of time that your brain literally can't compute what's going on. I just think it's I, I get lost in it all day. I could just read about it all day. Speaker 1 Mate, the, the reason why I'm smiling is because I'm just thinking, man, we, we are kindred spirits, man, because that's exactly what I think. I think I've even like said that to people in the past, you know, like, you know, you whether it's like, you know, you read The Hobbit and you're hearing about like, you know, smile or whatever it might be. You watch fantasy and there's all these crazy creatures. But obviously in fantasy, as amazing as it is, it's made-up, it's fictional. But then you have all these crazy creatures that are just as insane as the ones in fiction fantasy. But they actually existed. Yeah. And that's what sort of blows your mind, isn't it? That's why I. Speaker 2 Think the appeal is of dinosaurs. I think that's why they stick so heavily in the like cultural collective. You know, they've already found out about realistically 200 years ago when we first put a framework in place, then existed. But you have to think that these creatures basically they take on the mythical sort of presence of monsters of things we see in popular culture and film. They all abide by the same rules that the Sparrow outside or reptile crocodile down the road at the zoo does sort of thing. So I think having that duality of like, it's a real animal, it based on it's based on the laws of biology and physics. You have to abide by all the rules. But it also feels like something completely out that someone would make up, someone would make up a Tyrannosaurus Rex and you go, wow, what a cool animal. What a created guy you know. Speaker 1 And then thought that actually was was roaming around one day. That's amazing, man. Yeah, as I said, I've been following you for a long time. George's Upcoming Book: From Present to Hadean That's all right, man. No worries. So your book, what lets you write in your book? Obviously. So this, it's not out there yet, am I right? Insane. But it's going to come out very soon. Speaker 2 17th of March it'll be. Speaker 1 Releases 17th of March And do I see that's going to be in Waterstones? Speaker 2 Yeah, Waterstones and Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It'll be WH Smith. Quite amazing. Is there any way you get books really. Yeah, you can pre-order it if you go in store or online. Speaker 1 That's amazing. How long did it take you to write the book? Speaker 2 It was about two years, but I think the first, the year in between me starting that was it was a good ten months of me basically putting ideas together, thinking can I do this? Do I know enough? Do I understand enough about what I'm trying to talk about with confidence and nuance that makes the everyday person have to understand this stuff? Because I forget what I know about this sort of. So I just read about it everyday. This, this page has forced me to basically have an education in this over the last five years. So I forget what isn't common knowledge to most people. So for me, it was like, how do I take everything I've learnt from reading this page and turn it into one cohesive narrative that someone can pick up and go, I don't know that much about prehistory. I know enough, you know, sort of GCSE level science sort of stuff. But I want to know on a deep level what the hell happened. I want to like write. This book is 300 pages. You read it from start to finish and then you know you, you've got such a better understanding of what has come before us. Speaker 1 And does that start literally from the origins of life? Speaker 2 It goes backwards actually. So it starts in the in the presence, So it talks about the current situation. It's sort of acknowledges what we are and how we're this peculiar glitch of an animal where every sort of life woman's come before us hasn't done what we've done, even even come close really. You know, we say, oh, look how clever that dog is because it can catch a Frisbee or it can wag its tail or put its paw up. When you think we're sending things to space, it's it's a bit of a jump, isn't it? So for me, we start, we start at the present and we go all the way back to the Haidean period with the origins of life. And then from there there's about eight chapters where I just breakdown science, religion, what we know, how we know it, and the intermediate mixing of all these to basically say this is what we are. It's it's a defamiliarisation. I'd say. It's sort of saying, OK, you live your everyday life as a human, you don't really think about these things. But objectively, if you were on the outside looking in, this is what we are, and it's a bit, it's a bit strange to just even comprehend. So I really wanted to get into a nice tight narrative. Speaker 1 That sounds amazing, man. Well, consider me sold. Why Extinct Animals Capture Our Imagination I'm really interested. Obviously, it's the first time I've seen you advertise in the book, but it's the first time I've heard in depth about, you know, the content. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy and my I've got a daughter that's just about to turn 6. And it's really nice for me because I say, I always say that dinosaurs one of my first loves. And obviously when when I was a little kid, I don't know how old you are, but I'm going to, I've just turned 36. So when I was a small child, when the first Jurassic Park movie came out, I remember there were also these great dinosaur magazines that came out when I was a little kid. And you'd get these like glow in the dark little skeletons. And every week you'd get like, yeah, you'd get like a different bit. And then, you know, you'd like build AT Rex or whatever. And I was, I was, you know, I was so excited on a Saturday to go down to the shop with my dad and get one of them, you know, but it's really nice that she's, she's a, she's taken after me in that regard as well. And she just, she loves watching any, whether it's to do with just animals or, or dinosaurs. And, you know, you know, she, she already knows a Pachycephalosaurus from a, from a really from a whatever. And I think that's, that's really nice for me as a dad to see that. So yeah, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy and I'll, I'll give it to her. So as she gets older, she, she can read it. And that that'd be that'd be really nice. Speaker 2 It'd be a good, I, I think around the age 1011, people will start grasping what's going on in the book. Yeah. So it'd be a great one to sort of grow into. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, until then I can, I can read a little bits and bobs to her here and there, can't I? With you becoming an author, was that something that you always sort of dreamed of, of becoming, or did it happen quite spontaneously? Speaker 2 Or I've always enjoyed sort of writing and creating art. The two things I've really just I've never, I've never wanted to sort of monetise any of these sort of interests I've had because I like like to keep the hobby as a hobby. I was never wanted to sort of force myself or trying to create art for the sake of it to go on Instagram, that sort of thing. So I've had hobbies I enjoyed, but I never really thought about monetizing it or doing anything with it. And I came to the conclusion that I probably need to write a book, as I say, around the two year mark of me running the page, because I was like, I've got a lot of knowledge here that I've just accumulated just day in, day out, just, you know, just reading this sort of stuff. And I feel like my exterior interests, you know, I talk about like general history, religion, media, technology, the project, the the trajectory that humans are going on, where we're going, the uncertainty. Knowledge vs. Credentials in Deep Time I find that really interesting as well. And I've tried to sort of implement those thoughts and ideas it through the lens of deep time. So as, as it was, it was almost like the book didn't, I didn't decide to write the book. The book came to me as I was getting on with things. And then as I spent a few months basically putting ideas together, grouping segments and thinking, that's a good idea. Oh, that goes with that idea pretty well. Maybe there's something here. Maybe there's a solid sort of narrative I can put together. And then it was like, right, I need to get this book out of my head onto paper. And then I didn't really think too much beyond that really, because I've got no idea what to anticipate with this book coming out. Because obviously you'd expect people to have like paleontology PhDs and that sort of thing who are writing books in, in, in, in the current discourse. So I'm an outsider coming in, but I've got my own sort of like, I use the word term authority loosely, but I, you know, people know me for deep time and dinosaur facts and that sort of thing. So it's really, it's really a test of how well people would appreciate my content of the years to see if they want to trust me and buy a book. Speaker 1 I think at the end of the day then man, like, you know, yeah, you might not have a PhD in paleontology, but I think if you know your stuff, you know, when other people know their stuff, then you just like, that's very simply, you know. So although you might not have those, those technical credentials, you know, it's, it's clear that you know, you know your, you know your business. Speaker 2 Well, thank you. What I find really useful about it is because it's all so old. It's so anti controversial and so far removed from the current day-to-day things. People don't really have emotional sort of, you know, left or right or this way or that way sort of sides on things. So, you know, it's say, say something like along the lines of nutrition, which I find like a very nuanced, topped, complicated topic. I mean, there's so many variables and that sort of thing. Of course, I read a few books on nutrition and thought, oh, I, I, I guess I know this. And then you don't realise what you don't know. I feel like that doesn't really apply to looking back in deep time because so much of it is sort of concrete now. I know, I know there's all these sort of conspiracy theories about fake dinosaurs and that they never really happen. Yeah. Which which if you want to get into I I quite enjoy that topic. Speaker 1 I mean, it's quite, it's quite funny. I watched, I watched a really interesting Joe Rogan podcast with a paleontologist on years ago now. I can't remember the name of the paleontologist. He was a he's like a big guy, bold, and I think he's got like a green or yellow beard. But they talked about the subject of an hour and he was so irate about. He was so irate that that like, people were trying to make out that dinosaurs were fake and that, you know, people. Speaker 2 Coined the term Big Paleo, didn't they? Speaker 1 I think so, yeah. Yeah, I remember that podcast. Yeah, yeah. But I thought that was that was really interesting. But it was funny how it was funny how triggered he was essentially at the idea that. Speaker 2 It must annoy people if you know, if you've got a lifetime of like institutionalized education behind you and then you've got idiots on the Internet just saying whatever they want. And that's that's the issue I think. Speaker 1 It was, it was quite funny. I funnily enough around that time I had a a friend of mine was seeing a very religious girl who who thought that and she was really trying to convince my my mate. And my mate's an intelligent guy, but he is also known for being a little bit gullible. So I was really just trying to to say to everyone Alacama, you know, you don't actually believe though this they're right because apparently she'd made them watch documentaries on it and stuff, you know, like documentaries, you know, you do specials. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like they just dig up just stones and they mould them into whatever shape they want. The Vastness of Time and Undiscovered Fossils And then they say it's a dinosaur, that sort of thing, you know. But yeah, no, it is funny in terms of like your. Sorry, George, I was going to say man as well. Can you, can you pull the just a little bit closer to you? It should just comes wherever you want to be if hopefully. But what was the sort of the catalyst? Was there like a specific moment in your childhood that was like a catalyst for your love of prehistoric animals? And where did it all begin for you? As I said, for me, I think it's hard to remember exactly, but you know, the the first Jurassic Park movie, as I said, those little magazines, What what about you? Speaker 2 Well, I was born in 1994, so that was a year after Jurassic Park came out. So I, it must have just been since since I could basically animate myself, It was I was drawn towards dinosaurs, apparently was the fun. I always sort of like lent towards. I don't remember a particular time or anything, but I always remember from my childhood. I I just Jurassic Park being in my, in my memory used to be on repeat. Apparently I had hundreds of dinosaur toys and like I'll be able to line them all up and name all of them and I'll be like two or three years old. My grandparents would be looking at me like what? How does he know this is such? Speaker 1 An interesting, yeah, yeah, so. Speaker 2 Yeah. So I don't know, I've always had an interest with deep time and even actual world in general. But I think I think because obviously when you watch the nature documentary of anything alive now, it's incredible. You can watch a David Amber documentary and you can sit there blown away in your own living room at what what you're looking at and the way life has developed in so many forms. And then you got this other side where it's like things have happened and now they don't exist anymore. But why? And that's sort of like the curiosity of a human being, like, OK, this existed. It's like a mystery you've got to solve now. So you get in the benefits of the wonder of nature, but the mystery of things that don't exist anymore. So I think for whatever reason, that's been the main pull, just just trying to work out what happened. And, and, and I like the perspective as well. Like, I like the idea that everything we've built around us, who feels so permanent, but it it really isn't in the grand scheme of things. Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess it's one of those things, like time is relative, isn't it? I mean, you know, you like to like a midge that lives for a day, you know, does does like a second feel like a year to us or whatever? You know, it's one of those things, isn't it? Like we think of like 100 years as a long time. Of course, relative to us it is. But in the grand scheme of things, I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of people that maybe aren't into like prehistory, it's hard for them sometimes to wrap their heads around like, you know, you know, the dinosaurs got wiped out like 66,000,000 years ago. And that was when they they died out. And there were creatures that were alive millions and millions of years before the dinosaurs even evolved. And what was it? There's like an interesting status, and it's like the the T Rex lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than it did to the evolution of the stegosaurus. Yeah, little facts like that, which I think you really think about it and it sort of blows your mind. Speaker 2 There would have been fossils of stegosauruses knocking about when the T Rex was alive. Speaker 1 That's crazy. Another thing I think is fascinating, because you mentioned the mystery of it all is just the fact as well that, you know, there's, As for all the amazing, you know, dinosaurs and, and, and amazing other creatures as well, whether it's, you know, prehistoric mammals or, or, or, you know, proto mammals that predate the, the, the dinosaurs or whatever they, they might be invertebrates that lived in, in the sea, you know, millions of years before, you know, the Permian, whatever it might be. We, we've only discovered like a small percentage of, of fossils of creatures that actually live. Because obviously for something to fossilise to last as long, you know, to this modern day has to be very specific environment and requirements for something to fossilise. Well, exactly. So who knows what's lived on the planet that we still haven't even found out about yet. I mean, obviously when, when say Jurassic Park came around, we didn't really know about some of the other like massive theropod dinosaurs that we know about now, like car, car, Carodontosaurus or, or Giganotosaurus, whatever it might be, Maposaurus, you know, And now all of a sudden you've got all these other giant theropods which rivalled or maybe even a bit bigger than T Rex in size. And it's like, what are we going to discover tomorrow, you know? Digestible Content for Deep Time Discoveries Yeah. I mean, I, I think this and This is why I really keep pushing the page and keep trying to stay on top of all the current discourse, because I think the way that technology is progressing and the way we're finding out things about our past, the next 50 years are going to be really exciting finding out everything. You know, I think we're getting closer and closer to the big questions because we've got the big ones. Like, you know, how did life start? Why did life start all this sort of thing? You know, I, we may never answer that question, but I think we're going to get pretty close, hopefully at some point. And I just want to be here for the ride. I want to be able to tell people as much as I can, find out about the new instances and the new discoveries going on and basically just get people educated because I think a lot of people aren't interested in this sort of thing. They really don't sort of see the deep time sort of intrigue. There are a lot of people out there who do. And I really want to sort of be the person who can sort of tell these people and give it to them in a digestible bit of information. Because people can't have the time to read these papers and these new things, these new research documents coming out. But if I can give you a quick post and you can scan it with your eyes, get a bit of an idea what's going on, build a better idea in your head about constructing your version of what you think deep time was in history. Yeah, that's enough for me. That's. Speaker 1 Right. And that is a skill in itself, isn't it? I mean, it's just like pretty pretty well known that, you know, you, you say being a good teacher doesn't necessarily mean that you know the most technically about a subject. It just means that you're the best at teaching. Do you know what I mean? So that like that might be your, your, that seems to be like almost like your niche where you you have the knowledge, but what you're really good at is putting it out there in a way that is digestible for everybody. Yeah. Speaker 2 I want to be accessible for people because, like I say, I mean, a lot of my followers don't even speak English is not their first language. So that's a huge part of it as well. Obviously you can translate things now and they can translate posts and captions, but I do have to, I do have to remind myself, right, people don't have the full, you know, history of how mammals came about. Maybe go a bit slower on this one section. All this here and there, but I quite, I quite enjoy the short form content and creating that because I think it's just it gets into people's brains easier. I do enjoy the long form content as well, rethinking and sort of stewing on certain concepts and topics. So that's why I've got the newsletter as well. So I've got the social media side, which is fun, flashy a bit, you know, easy to get get along and digest with. And then I've got the longer form content like the the newsletter and the book. And that's sort of like for people who really want to take that extra step further. Sure. I really sort of ask the deep questions about what what has gone on. From Ice Age Mammals to Cambrian Life Yeah, man. What's your have you got like a favorite period in history? So am I right somewhere in the centres of it right now? Speaker 2 I think we're in. Yeah, I think, yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, we're in the centres of it, can't we? At the moment, I think have you got like a favorite which I which I think is basically just post that the age of mammals essentially isn't it's like post dinosaurs right up to today. Yeah. Have you got like a favorite like era of prehistory? You know, is it is there like is it like, you know, those, those giant mammals, whether it's the save toothed cats or the short faced bears or the giant ground sloths, whatever they they say something that piques your interest a little bit more than anything else. Or is it the dinosaurs or is it the the the Demetri doms of the world, whatever. What is it? Speaker 2 They've all got a special place in my heart, obviously, because I find different. It's so fascinating. I think the the dinosaurs, obviously that's a given. That'd be a really cool sort of thing to go back and see. I think the Ice Age is fascinating. I also think the time around before the Ice Age where you had these interglacial periods and you had mammals that, you know, didn't look too dissimilar from what we had right, right now. You had some of these elephant different types of prohibitions. They, they were just such a variety. So I like, I think that's a really interesting period as well. And like I say, deep time, when you go behind the dinosaurs, you go to the Cambrian explosion, that sort of thing. I find that a really interesting time how we sort of went from the soft bodied animals and then all of a sudden organisms learn to absorb the calcium and the phosphorus from the actual sediment and turn it into armour and ligaments and that sort of thing. It's just, it's just a bit insane so. Speaker 1 It's crazy, man, that might. Speaker 2 Interest me as well, but I also like the Hadean period where you're talking like, you know, single cell organisms. Speaker 1 So so that so Hadrian is is that the literally the very origin so. Speaker 2 That's the first one, but I think I think translates loosely to start of the earth or earth origin. Speaker 1 So that's when like the single celled organisms first evolved. Speaker 2 They they, they're pretty sure it happened around the end of the Hadrian. Yeah, Yeah. So the start of the Hadrian is when you get the light bombardment and the planet forms and then as that sort of channels off, that's when life is meant to have thought to have started. But obviously so for debate a little bit. Speaker 1 Yeah. And isn't that when sort of you had like these sort of strained, very alien looking invertebrates started evolving in the seas like before fish even evolved? Speaker 2 This would have been way after that. So this you're still talking single cell organisms. Speaker 1 For a very short. Speaker 2 Time, yeah, you're talking the Cambrian explosion would have been when the hard bodies came about, like the armour, that sort of thing. And then before that would have been the audition, I think it's called, right? How do you pronounce it? That's like bigger animals. They would have been, you know, the sort of size of your arm or your hand. They would have had no hard things at all. We only know about them because there's about four or five sites around the world. Wow, where the small imprints of like sort of like a Jelly, basically like a floating Jelly in in in the water. And it had the complexity for cell structures to sort of navigate and do simple processes. But in terms of like building arms or ligaments or anything, or even like a brain or anything that was just looking there for so long. And then the Cambrian explosion was when that sort of fully. Speaker 1 And is that when you've got things like the sea scorpions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which they were about, I think they could grow up to about 9 feet long. Is is that right? The biggest ones? Speaker 2 I'm not sure about the ones in the Cambrian, but in the Carboniferous period, that's the one where you have the age of giant insects because the oxygen levels are so high. They've been about that size. Then you had you had Arthroplura, which was a milli milli millipede and that was about 12 feet long. Speaker 3 This sounds like my worst. Speaker 1 Well, man, 12 feet long. Speaker 2 Maybe, maybe between 9:00 and. Speaker 1 12 right that is that is mad though, isn't it I'm. Speaker 3 Scared of bugs? Speaker 1 Was that around that wasn't there What what it called like it was it mega Neuropsis? It was like a giant dragonfly. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the same time that's. Speaker 1 And it was like this and it was like this big, yeah, that would expand would be like. Speaker 2 An eagle. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like a dragonfly the side, but it like looked at exactly like a modern day dragonfly. Other than the size though. Speaker 3 That's I'm disgusted. Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, I'm scared. You wouldn't have wanted to go back in that time. It wouldn't. It wouldn't have been for you, Emo. It wouldn't have been for you. Crystal-Eyed Wonders and Armored Giants I would have fancied it myself. It'd be cool to watch, but you'd have to be, like, in a bubble. So nothing could touch you. Yeah, but I saw something that big, like, I'm bad at insects in general. I find them fascinating. Yeah, but I can't touch them. Speaker 1 Yeah, to be fair, I think it's a common thing. A lot of people are like that, aren't they? Speaker 3 I don't like looking at them either, their faces are scary. Speaker 2 That's the thing, I like looking at them if there's a little bit of glass in between. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't even do that if you're if you're at the zoo or something. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's fun to me. Speaker 1 Is that like translate to like spiders for you as well? Things like that. Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm OK then. If there's one in the house I need to get rid of, then like, yeah, fine. But if I see you know, this big birdie spiders in the zoo, I'm a bit like my my, my fight or flight is kicking off. Speaker 1 Yeah, sure. So when you hear those stories about people that come back from holiday and like 1 crawls out of their bag and stuff like that, it's I think the idea of like something like that, like loose in your house in England somewhere isn't, isn't the greatest scary. Yeah, nice man. Yeah. So when we were talking about you coming on, we we discussed that it might be quite cool for you to maybe like, take us through roughly 10 of your sort of favorite prehistoric animals from the dawn of time right up to modern day and sort of get stuck into that. And if you'd sort of explain why you've picked those creatures, Are you happy to do that, man? Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, I've got plenty to go with you. Speaker 1 Let's get stuck in, man. Let's get stuck in so we'll. Speaker 2 Probably have to start with the the trailer bites, right? You know what they are. They're sort of like a wood louse looking creature, maybe a bit bigger, maybe about you know, the size of your foot long. They basically survived for an incomprehensible amount of time. They were just so resilient. They survived pretty much every mass extinction apart from the The Great Dying which was the main Triassic one which killed off 95% of life at the time or was thought to off. Speaker 1 Right. Was that in the Triassic? Was it? Speaker 2 That was before. Speaker 1 Before that was the Permian extinction. Speaker 2 Permian to Triassic, yeah, They didn't survive that, unfortunately. And they had some of the first basic eyes, which were actually made entirely out of crystal, and we still know they exist now. Speaker 1 Crystal, but crystal like we would think of a. Speaker 2 Crystal. Yeah, their eyes were crystal. Speaker 1 That's crazy, isn't it? Speaker 3 That's so great. That's so weird. That's man. Like a diamond necklace out there. Pretty. Speaker 2 Much and you can you can see that they're so well preserved because there was so many of them, because they they existed so well and for so long. You can find the they've still got the crystals of their eyes now and you can collect them. They're they're really collectible. Speaker 1 Did they evolve in that Cambrian explosion that you were talking about earlier on? I think that's when they came about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, that's fascinating. Right. OK, what's #2? Speaker 2 We're going in order of time or because I've got in order, I've got a list, but I don't think. Speaker 1 They're in, Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be in time, just whatever you think. Speaker 2 I'd have to go with the dinosaurs. I mean, there's a lot of dinosaurs alike. I mean, the variety come in and there's so much to appreciate. But I do think. Speaker 1 Please mention as many as you want as well. When I said 10, it was just sort of a rough number. So notable mentions or whatever you whatever you think I've. Speaker 2 Got a few tricks up my sleeve, I think. I think you've got to start with Ankylosaurus. I mean, I, I, I say to people like if you, I mean, we're used to the idea of dinosaurs existing now, so we sort of take it for granted. But that's quite a hard thing to believe in the 1st place, I think. And then you've got to tell people as well as that there's one particular type of dinosaur that was armoured like you would armour a medieval soldier and it had a Mace on its tail that we could use as a weapon to destroy theropods legs and knees and stuff. It just sounds like someone would make it up. And for that reason I think they're just incredible. And we don't have a great amount of evidence of their existence, but we have one really well preserved fossil where you can see it's skin, you can see the ways it's sort of like armour all like lines up. And I think you should be able to be an absolutely fascinating creature to see in existence. You can't comprehend what it'd be like. I mean, you could loosely compare it to a turtle maybe, and that's nothing like. Speaker 1 It so yeah, or maybe like some sort of like giant armadillo, Yeah, like a giant armadillo with a club on its on its. Speaker 3 Is that like the one in Ice Age where it has like that was like, yeah, Oh my God. Speaker 1 Because I think I've read before that glyptodons and and ankylosaurs, it's like a, it's an example of is it called convergent evolution, evolution, convergent evolution? Speaker 2 Similar environments produce similar. Speaker 1 Results a bit like an ichthyosaur and a dolphin, for example. Exactly. It's like, you know, look very, very similar, but obviously one's very. Speaker 2 Environments at different times. Speaker 1 Basically, but one obviously is a is an ancient reptile and 1 is a modern mammal. Survival, Collaboration, and Ancient Monsters Yeah, but I mean, you look at Dodeo, Cedarus and glyptodons and that sort of thing, they don't look like mammals at all. To think they were mammals I think is a bit the mind. Speaker 1 Because they some of them were big as well when the size of like a large SUV they found. Speaker 2 Not evidence of early humans killing them and using their shells as shelters in South America. Speaker 1 That's that's pretty. That's pretty bad ass. I mean, not poor, poor, poor Glyptodon, but but yeah, it's. Speaker 2 Huge you will, then isn't. Speaker 1 It, I mean, imagine how crazy that must have been living in a time as a human where like, think of how insane the world must have seemed because everything, you're kind of making everything up as you go along. Yeah. And I think, you know, sometimes I think with let's say, like horror movies, horror literature, but then also our knowledge of science, we have a very clear distinction in our mind, say between like what an animal is and what we would think of as a monster. But I think in those days, the lines would be completely blurred. Yeah, you would have seen these crazy things. You thought, okay, this is a scientifically documented animal and this is some made-up monster like a werewolf. You have just seen these massive fricking like essentially like armadillos or whatever it might have been and it would have kind of been quite terrifying but fascinating at the same time. You know, you'd be there at night and obviously a lot of predators and nocturnal the the kind of strange towels or cries or roars you would have heard in the dark. I mean, it must have been kind of a a very magical but crazy time to to to live in. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I'll get the impression you wouldn't have time for abstraction the way you just described it really, because it would just be you think impulses. And you know, I mean, I think we sort of pulled away from impulses and analytic tendencies to start understanding abstraction and sort of societal bonds, which helped us think outside the box to a degree. I think now that may be in the determining factor in US becoming what we did, you know, the social animal that sort of worked together versus just going off, oh, we're territorial, that's a problem. We need to go and fight that tribe versus, OK, let's maybe see if we can trade or, or whether whether sort of 'cause that. But I think it is interesting because I mean, you look back at some of those brutal times in history, look back at, you know, the Roman Empire, You look back at the Genghis Khan sort of reign. And even then you think they still had this scaffolding of civilisation, even though not what we consider civilisation now. They still had a level where, like, people understood to a certain degree or, you know, you have buildings in some form within the Pleistocene. You've had absolutely nothing. You've had a try between A50 and 150 people. That would be all, you know. And anyone else outside of that is potentially a really dangerous threat. And you would have had to have done all sorts of things to survive that we probably can't comprehend now. And, you know, without any modern medicine, anything like that, I mean, the technology would have been very, very limited. And you got to think union sticks and a bit of fire to fight off things like Saber to cats, which would have been, you know, twice the size of any modern lion or, or leopard. And then you've got things like the walls, which would have been hunting in packs that we, you know, in crazy amounts of numbers compared to what we see now. You know, you, you go to Canada or America, you see a wolf, you're like, wow, what a what an amazing opportunity. They would have been everywhere in the place to see. They've been absolutely everywhere. Speaker 1 That's crazy. And then it's not just the the predators. I mean, obviously just just like today, you know, some of the most dangerous animals of the herbivores, partly because, you know, they're not, they tend to be the brightest. A lot of them are basically just vegetation factories. They just have to spend all day eating. So their, their brain power isn't the highest, but obviously because they live in dangerous environments often like when you see, you know, the big, the big herbivorous mammals in, in Africa, because they're living around crocodiles and lions and hyenas. The rest of it, they have to basically, they don't think twice. There's, there's no like, are you a threat? I'm going to check you're a threat before I kick you in the head and, you know, cave in your skull and you die. You know, it's, it's like if you get too close, they might just kill you And they're so big and strong. You think of like a rhino or an elephant or a hippo or something like that. And then obviously, when you go back to, as I said, the Pleistocene, some of the animals then would have dwarfed some of the giant mammals of today that, say, live in places like Africa. Neanderthals, Hobbits, and the Human Story Yeah, definitely. So you know, but but also crazy as you said, even though we only had sticks and fire and stuff, mad that we still successfully haunted a lot of these things. Speaker 2 I think so, yeah. I think, I think it plays down to the power of social connection and work and understanding. I mean, it's I, I think there must have been something that gave us a real step above what every animal was thinking. Because the way that humans basically navigate the planet and then pretty much most of the megafauna in any area we touched when extinct centuries later. We, I don't think we were the direct cause of that, but I think we had a lot to do that. So I think it just puts down it, it shows how much of an impact you can have when you're that level above the intelligence, everything else, because every animal there is going on instincts, you know, they, they, they can't think is, is this a threat? Is it not they just live day by day like as as you sort of said? So the fact that we could think further than a day and think outside the box a little bit seem to have massive consequences for everything else. Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that's crazy, isn't it? Don't they think that's one of the reasons that we out competed the Neanderthals is just because even the Neanderthals, I think you might have even had slightly bigger brains than us, but just the the parts of their brain that was social basically for social development wasn't as developed. Speaker 2 I don't think it's a development problem. They're thinking now they're leaning towards more of it maybe being a cultural problem where we are more open to collaboration as Homo sapiens, whereas they're a bit more closed off because they'd spent more time up north compared to us. We evolved, we evolved separately in separately different areas and we went up north a bit later. We came across them. I also think there's a lot of our DNA that supplies to them. So I feel like we would have just interpreted with them, same as Denisovians, we would just sort of, you know, a lot the collaboration thing and the and the moon ran and the absolute trust strangers sort of thing seem to really do a lot for us and nothing. We just sort of likely absorb them into our sort of overall frame. Speaker 1 Yeah. Because don't they think that like most, I can't remember if this just Caucasians or everyone in general, but isn't it? No, I think it's more Caucasian. So they say that we have between basically 0 and 4% Neanderthal DNA depending on the person. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 That counts for every race outside of anyone who's they can trace their ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa. Speaker 1 Right, right. And am I right in thinking that the the Denisovans were more in what we think of as modern day Asia and South Russia, places like that? Speaker 2 So in the Himalayas they can they can trace for Denisovans blood through the through the genetics. Now I think they do molecular studies and they they found traces and they found a school recently they found it a while ago actually the school they recently confirmed it was of a Denisovan origin. So that opens up a lot of doors now to understanding what existed at the same time. But yeah, I mean, I think there's about 30 types of harmonies we've sort of aware of or loosely understand of. There could have been hundreds. We we, we like to say with fossilisation, we don't really know what we don't know, that there could have been all sorts hanging around. And we think of these as being sort of cave specimens because we find a lot of the evidence in caves, but that's not because they lived in caves full time. That's because it was just where things preserve these because things don't get touched as a good point. So like I say, I think we're going to find more and more out about this in the next couple of decades. And I'm here to sort of spread it out, yeah. Speaker 1 Am I right in thinking this? This might be an outdated sort of theory or whatever you want to call it, but this, we, we are still missing a link, aren't we? You know, when you think about the missing link, is that is that still a thing as far as you're aware? Speaker 2 I don't think that's as heavily sort of lentil anymore. It's more like it's a web and we're just adding bits and pieces here and there. There are certain parts where we can't say, how did a Homo erectus become, you know, the next one sort of thing, Homo sapien. There's a few steps missing as we go across the tree, but I think we've got enough of the framework now where we can sort of like, you know, you must have seen that tree diagram where you sort of see the thing branch up. We've got a pretty robust idea now, but it's not complete yet. I wouldn't say there's a missing like integral part. We can sort of paint it together now. I think a lot, a lot of it with a molecular study they can do now really sort of paints pictures. Speaker 1 That's fascinating. I don't think it's it's mad to think. Was it Homo floresiensis that were like The Hobbit people? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 So did you know that MO So they used to be like a basically a a group of humans that were all like what like 3 foot tall 3. Speaker 3 Foot. Oh my. Speaker 1 God, so when you hear. Speaker 3 My mum's one of those. Speaker 1 Wait, so when you watch like The Hobbit and there's obviously like a little race of people that kind of look like humans, but they're small, that was like they're kind of was a a. Speaker 3 Group. Speaker 1 Of humans like that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying they're walking around in waist coats and smoking pipes, but. Speaker 2 When they discovered that species, actually, they wanted to call it a Hobbit in the scientific name, right. But the Tolkien estate, Sydney, really. Or if you are going to do, we're going to sue you. So they said, OK, we'll we'll back off. Speaker 1 That you would have thought they would have thought that was a bit of an honour in a way, or a thought, but. Speaker 2 I think they're quite annoyed they gave away the rights to Amazon to be honest. I think they're that one a bit now. Speaker 1 Apparently, back in the day when The Beatles were at the peak of their fame, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, have you heard this randomly? Yeah, They reached out to Tolkien, who was still alive at the time, and basically said we want to make this movie. We want to make like a Hobbit movie and we want to play. I can't remember. Oh, no, it's the Lord of the Rings, little Hobbit, and we want to play, I don't know if it was Frodo and Samoa or something. And talking was just flat. I was like, no, I don't care if you're the biggest rock stars on the planet, you are not going to freaking have this random like Beatles does. Lord of Rings I. Speaker 2 Didn't go that way, but I would be intrigued to see if someone could go into the multiverse and pull that out and give us a copy on DVD. I'd be. I'd pay a lot of. Speaker 1 Money for that John Lennon is Frodo Baggins. Just imagine it. Speaker 3 I haven't even watched it, but I'd want to see that. Speaker 1 I mean, I don't mind, my knowledge on the subjects is limited, but I imagine it would it have been like all? Would it have been like the four beetles were the four main hobbits? I don't. Speaker 2 Know that's what I thought. Speaker 1 Yeah, that would have been comical. I wonder who would have been Pippin out of them? Not Ringo. Prehistoric Combat and Brutal Survival No Span. Yeah. So alright, so we've done in terms of your, you know, your notable, you know, pre pre, you know, extinct animals since the dawn of time. So you've done so far, you did the, what was it the trilobite? Trilobite. Yeah, yeah. And you've done the ankylosaurs. Am I right in thinking as well? I think, I think I've heard this, that there's no at least at least from our fossil records, there's there's no predatory bites on a 9 kilos or fossil that we're aware of, which is obviously very different to say like Triceratops fossils where there's lots of, you know, holes in the bones that look like that, you know, where T Rex teeth fit perfectly in there. And this might be evidence that T Rex was essentially respected ankylosaurs enough to not try their luck with them as much as say they might have taken the risk with Triceratops. Speaker 2 That that's potentially what happened, but obviously it's you're talking about sample size. There's so many remains of Triceratops. It was such a successful animal. There's so much evidence they existed. And when you find it, when you find more situations, how it's been preserved, you can obviously sort of understand more about how how how it lived its life. But I think we've got a, a very small amount of Ankylosaurus sort of remains. So you you could never concretely say that without more evidence, of course. Yeah. I mean, it's a good argument because like I say, you've got to think if you're a top heavy Tyrannosaurus, you've got these small arms, you can't get yourself back up off the floor. That's the last thing you want to sort of fight really. You know, Triceratops, you've got something sort of meaty to grab onto the horns and the thrill, but an Anclosaurus would have been an absolute nightmare to try and attack. Speaker 1 The thing is, they had such a low center of gravity as well, because even though they were massive creatures, you know, they had quite short limbs. So they've been very close to the floor, but super heavy, so hard to flip, as you said, all this armor on their back and then as strong and as massive as T Rex was one swing of that club. If that if that breaks AT if you're AT Rex and that breaks your leg, that that that could be you done for. That's that's game over. Yeah. You know, like the chances of you being able to successfully eat while that leg is healing. And that's if it doesn't get infected. Speaker 2 Yeah. And you have to be. I mean, there is evidence there were scavengers as well as predators. Yeah, sort of mixed right now. I think it was all sort of approach. It would just do whatever it could sort of survive and then scaling you back then would have been difficult. I mean, I think it's very hard for us to comprehend even though it was, it was an ecosystem like the ones we see now. I think it is difficult for us to comprehend just how difficult it would be to survive there in general. There's a, there's a reason the dinosaurs look the way they do because they reflect the environment they they, they evolved in. And that's that tells you how scary that ecosystem would have been. Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. But I mean, I think, I think that even goes back to what you were saying about, you know, like, you know, pre prehistoric humans. I mean, how brutal that life was when, you know, when I was saying, you know, it would have been like a magical time and you were saying, well, you know, you don't even think that people would have had the time to even think that. It would have been like purely react to. But but like, yeah, for me, imagine, imagine that. Imagine if for whatever reason civilization just crumbled, doesn't matter why, Just just imagine it. And then if you actually think about it, imagine if we had to like walk through the British countryside and you had to rely on either like hunting deer and in between those big meals where, yeah, you could gorge yourself on on deer, you know, when you could. But in between that, you're living off like handfuls of berries, maybe something like that. Yeah. That's, that's not satiating, you know, like imagine living off like a handful of blueberries and having to live off that for hours and hours and hours while you're walking miles and miles and miles in search of whether it's, you know, a good, a good habitat to, you know, set up camp or, or food, food to hunt. You know, like that's very, very draining and very tiring. Speaker 2 Well, that's why the collaboration would have been so important. Because if you think about if you get 20 of your buddies together and you can hunt down a mammoth, that's 2,000,000 calories. Can you imagine how many traps you'd have to lay or how many rabbits you'd have to kill to get the same amount of calories on your own? It's, it's just completely unaffected, you know? Speaker 1 You know what, it's funny you said that because that's just reminded me of a story I heard. And I can't remember who the guy was, but it was, I think it, I can't remember if it was a, it was a vegan or a vegetarian guy who wanted to go live off grid somewhere. I think it's just in, in North America and he went, he went out there and he used, you know, he started like growing his own vegetables and stuff. He very, very soon became starving hungry. So he thought at first he was like, OK, I think I need to do idiocy to our incorporating, you know, animal products into my diet a little bit, but I don't want to do anything drastic. So I think he decided at first to there was like a little pond near him. So he'd like eat like a frog like once a day. But then after about a month, he'd like pretty much just wiped out all the frogs in the pond. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 So then he was like, oh, OK, well, I've seen how I've just had not only have I like, wiped out the frogs in the local area, but just for like that small amount of meat, it's kind of like not worth it because it still wasn't satiating much. So then he like sort of like moved up the chain and eventually, like before long, he just became like a full on hunter and he was like hunting elk in that region because it's sort of like he suddenly realised that, yeah, 1 elk taking one, say, mature bull elk out of the population. If anything, it's it's doing the ecosystem good because it's allowing those young bucks to then, you know, grow up and, you know, the, the diversity of the genes and all the rest of it. But that one big elk could feed him for months potentially. And then he's supplementing his diet with the. So it's like, it's interesting how, yeah. As, as you were just pointing out, you know, it's like, actually it's like, what is better? You know, if you're just eating these tiny little, little things, not only could you wipe out an ecosystem, but it's actually not, it's not sort of not worth it. Whereas if you go for like a large large mammal. The Biomechanics of Giant Dinosaurs As you said, like how many tons you say like in a mammoth, like the meat is just, you know, it's such. Yeah. Speaker 2 It was I think, I think I think I reckon an average sized female like a birthing gauge dolls around 2,000,000 calories. So that could that could be, you know, a troop of 30 people for a month in in the harsh of winters. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Amazing, right? So what's your what's your next animal? What's your next notable animal? Speaker 2 We'll go with Brachiosaurus. We'll go with Brachiosaurus. Forsake of people understanding what we're on about. But you could go also Argentinosaurus, which is basically, yeah, the largest sauropod to ever exist. I find the way they sort of really push the limits on what is biomechanically possible via size regarding the law of our planet is almost impossible to sort of comprehend. I find that even weirder than the Anchor hours to a degree. You know, you get into a museum and you see these fossils on display, and it's it's like you walk into a building, you're like, no, that was a living, breathing animal. And then you go to the zoo and you see an elephant or a giraffe. You're like, OK, that's a big animal up close. You know, you see a video of it and you see it in person. You're thinking, OK, this is a big difference here. Yeah, definitely. So to comprehend what a sauropod, you know, you're talking 60 to 80 tons. They reckon some of the higher estimates of these animals and the way they could only exist through certain bird like adaptations, evolutionary adaptations like air sacs in the in the bones to make them lighter, things like that. Having a really small head with no big teeth or jaw movement because they would then swallow stones that would break a plant matter in their stomach so they didn't have to chew as much. All these little things that just, it's just so alien to anything we really know. And I think that's a really cool thing, obviously would have been really impressive to look at. And yeah, I often think to myself, if we could have effectively bring back dinosaurs, that would be one one of the top ones I'd want to see just to see how he walked around. Just just see it. I think it'd be interesting to see how right we got it with the, with the, Yeah, I mean. Speaker 1 Yeah, what a spectacle that would be. And so obviously there were some, some giant mammals, you know, that came about after the dinosaurs, ones that, you know, we're bigger than some dinosaurs, but not actually never reached the, the size of the of the biggest sauropods. But what is the reason that you know, in terms of like you know, generally regarded scientific consensus, what is what is the reason that sauropods that allowed them to get so big? Speaker 2 Well, they reckon the air sacs in the bones was a big one because it made them so much lighter but strong enough to be able to hold the body. There was something to do with the with being a reptile, how the eggs could basically create an incubation period that could then grow to a certain degree. They grew quite slowly. I think it took quite a long time to get to the sort of size they were at. But a lot of it's a bit ambiguous. They're not really 100% sure how we get to that size. It was, it was quite a few theories came out and not too long ago, decades ago, about how they were only probably underwater animals. They were just waded. Speaker 1 Around the water. I remember hearing that, Yeah. But. Speaker 2 Also that doesn't make sense either because the bones would be so light they would just float down the basically. So yeah, I think, I think it's to do with the bio sort of engineering is wrong word bio mechanics of the of the air sacs and that sort of thing. But really, I mean. Speaker 1 Is there something to do with like the oxygen content and the heat as well? Because isn't it like creatures, you know, for example, one of the reasons why they think they're like anacondas get so big in the Amazon, It's something to do with like the heat and the oxygen levels, something like that. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they're not too sure on that to be right. I think it was for debate because the idea was that obviously talking about the Carboniferous insects, they got big because of the oxygen, because they could run it through their system, because they haven't got lungs the same way as us. But with sauropods, it's not quite the same. There's it's a bit more complicated than that. So we wouldn't have had a direct correlation with oxygen levels equals bigger animals, for example, right. OK. But it would have gone a long way in helping them get the oxygen around a longer but like a larger body. So that would have been, you've got to think these these giant hearts would have been pumping blood 15 feet into the air sort of thing. You know the oxygen has to be at performing at its best to be able to do that. Speaker 1 On that, on that topic though, I don't know if it might be something you know, about more than me, you know, you hear. But obviously the the climate was very different back then. If you go say back to the time of their brachiosaur, was that, was that a Jurassic sauropod? Yeah, like a Jurassic error sauropod. You know, you hear people say like, oh, if I could go back in time and stuff, could could a human of theoretically survived if we say it, You know, if we had a time machine and you could go back to the drastic period, you know, in terms of like the the climate, the atmosphere, could, could a human survive it? Speaker 2 Would be it would be livable. You wouldn't you wouldn't combust like you would in space or whatever. It wouldn't be that extreme. But I think you would struggle with breathe. I mean, we, we have no way to understand, but you'd probably feel a bit high from the oxygen. I think that carbon would have been less. So you know, that would have probably helped a little bit. I feel like you'd probably been a little bit fit, fit, fit, fitter. You'd be able to get around sort of better, maybe a bit stronger because your blood's saturated more oxygen. Yeah. But we, we, we ought to survive. Smilodon's Hunting Prowess and Big Cat Fascination We just, we just don't know the sort of minor consequences, what that would be. Speaker 1 OK, interesting. OK, next, next animal. So we've had brachiosaurs. Speaker 2 I'm going to go with the Smileodon Populator, the biggest Smileodon that we've ever found. Speaker 1 Saber toothed cat. Speaker 2 That's the one, yeah. Just the idea that this animal, I mean when I watch videos of major documentaries of any animal, like a big cat attacking something, you just see that it's pure muscle, pure ferrosity. To think then that there's also an animal that existed that had twice super body strength of any lion or tiger today would have been taking down things like the giant ground sloth mass, potentially that sort of thing. To see that in action I think would have just been mind blowing. These giant savers, which would have been super brittle, but obviously a very specific need for them because they would just get to the jugular and just, you know, do the killing cuts with the 2 long savers. We don't really see that anymore with any of the new animals. So it seems to be something that was specific for larger animals that isn't a thing now. Speaker 1 Do they think that they how how did they use these massive teeth? Because I'm all right at thinking that they couldn't actually open their mouths wide enough to to bite with it. So would they they? Speaker 2 They wouldn't have chomped with it no it. Speaker 1 Would have been like stabbed with. Speaker 2 It they've been stabbed. Speaker 1 That's weird though, isn't it? Like pipe? Yeah, like almost like a walrus. Like how a walrus uses its test. So they would have almost like stabbed in the jugular and then eaten with their smaller teeth. Like they're more. Speaker 3 Imagining Ice Age Diego doing this. I only know these creatures such as Ice Age. It's so interesting and I'm just like, oh, imagine Diego just. Speaker 1 Yeah, to be fair, I've never, I don't know, I might have seen bits of Ice Age I don't know about. Speaker 3 Oh my God, this is the first one. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 It's a good series. I quite like it because it sort of made the Ice Age sort of like, very mainstream for children. Yeah. I feel like children had a much better idea about what happened at that time than they ever would have without, you know, fun animation. Speaker 1 It's piquing the interest of all these little kids that they're not. Speaker 2 Not necessarily scientifically accurate, no. They go back and see. Speaker 1 Dinosaurs, but it doesn't it doesn't have to be a first. It just needs to like spark that interest on and then, you know, you you know, the parents might go, Oh yeah, these animals actually lived. And then once that creates that spark, then it's what? Speaker 3 You know that happened with me. Speaker 1 Yeah, nice. Yeah, No, I I agree. One of my favorite animals alive today are the big cats just because I think they're, they're just so majestic, so impressive, something so awe inspiring about them. You know, when you see like a big Siberian tig or a big African lion or, you know, or like a a Jaguar, you know, any almost like any of the big cats. And The thing is, I think like what you were saying earlier on about how you don't appreciate, say, the size of like an elephant or giraffe until you see one in the zoo. I'd say the same thing about, you know, the big cats. I mean, there's a really nice zoo quite near here, Exmoor Zoo, right in the middle of nowhere in Exmoor. It's a lovely zoo and they have a, a Mountain Lion there, a Puma. And even that I was looking at its paws when I was last there and it was, I was lucky the day I went there, it was like right in front of me and its paws were like at least the size of, of my hand like that. And I was just thinking like with, you know, claws as sharp as a domestic house cats claws, which I've always had cats, so I know how sharp they are. Like that's, that's a terrifying creature. And that's only a medium sized big cat, but it's like, you know, its its head was noticeably larger than mine. As I said, the paws and it was humongous. That was the one thing actually that I really, it was quite notable to me actually, was the the size of the paws relative to the rest of the body. Their paws were massive. But then, yeah, as you said. And then imagine these, you know, smile Dome populator or or what you know, these the ancestors or the OR or, you know, the relatives of of these creatures. Yeah, fascinating it. Speaker 2 Would have been a spectacle to see because I, I, I consider the, the big cats are almost like the most efficient common day predator. They just, they just feel that they're built just for pure attacking and, and, and winning these sort of them engagements. And I obviously, like you say you have a cat. I, I, I play around with my cat. Sometimes it gets me or it scratch me and it'll catch me and I, you know, I'm OK, like, you know, it's not, it's not a massive issue. You scale that and you think, OK, like you say into the Puma, that that would take your arm off. It would take the skin straight off your arm sort of thing. And then you think a Saber tooth. Well, it wouldn't even, it would be a no contest. You'd be lucky to speak compared to them. Speaker 1 I think isn't there even or this actually this might have been this might have been the American cave line. Isn't there even evidence that they would have gone into caves while even like large bear species of the time would have been hibernating and then they would even have attacked them? Speaker 2 I'm not sure about that, but there's been there's been evidence that the mountain that sorry, The Cave lions were using the same cave systems as humans were. So we'd have been deep in these caves at the time, staying obviously warf the winter and navigating around these animals in the same cave system, knowing they're there around any corner, but doing our best to avoid them. Speaker 1 But saying about like, you know, earlier on, I said, like the lines are blurred between, you know, what is a monster and what is an animal in those days? That's like a horror movie. Now imagine being back in those days, right? So you've got no artificial light. You're just going on fire. Now imagine you're in this little cave system. You hear some like creepy noise. You turn the court, you know, you've got like a little torch just dimly lit. You turn a corner and there's this massive cave line, which, which like, you know, you know, they say like a lot of animals, you know, oh, they don't, they don't mean to kill you. They're just it's sort of like testing you out or it's fighting to see what you think it is. the United States, like about a lot of shark species and stuff like that. Bringing Back Giants and Ancient History But like with those big cats, it's like, Oh, no, like they know what you are and they oh, we'll just eat you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's there's no like, you know, mistaken identity or anything like that there. It's like, no, I mean, in, in right up to modern day, isn't there? You mean places like India, a lot of people, I mean, relative to say, population size of these cats get eaten by tigers and leopards. Yeah. On a regular basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Brutal. I mean, you see those videos sometimes that you have like, people riding on scooters or motorbikes and then a tiger will come out of them, miss them by like, you know, an inch. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a shame. I really enjoyed those videos. And now that these AI videos are coming out, I'm like, oh, can I believe it? Can I? Not a problem. It's taking the magic out a bit, a little bit for me. You know, there was one video that I saw where it was a guy on a bike and then a grizzly bear was chasing him. And I was like, that was incredible. I love that. And it's like, oh, it's, yeah, it's like. Speaker 1 Quite old one isn't there, which I I'm pretty sure is real because I think it's at least 10 years old and it's one of the guy on an elephant and the tiger jumps up you. Speaker 2 Just don't really see what happens after. Speaker 1 That, yeah, that one. But yeah, that that's, that's pretty crazy. The fact that there's a guy riding an elephant and I think India and this tiger literally jumps and it like jumps as high as the guy like. Speaker 2 The. Speaker 1 The, the, the, yeah, I mean, it's mad how high these animals can jump and also like the, the confidence as a predator as well. Obviously, you know, the, the size and, and power of an elephant, but it's still undeterred. It's still going for that kill, which is kind of scaring itself. You'd think that there'd be a, a, you know, you'd be fairly safe maybe on top of an elephant. The fact that it's just trying to like jump up there and knock you off and and eat you is is pretty scary. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's just a position killer who knows exactly what it's going for. He doesn't really care about the elephant. He knows what's on top of the elephant, isn't it? That's that's the thing that it's going for. Speaker 1 Sure, right? So, smiled Unpopulator. What's the next creature? Speaker 2 We're going to go woolly mammoth, I think. Yeah, I think that. I mean, just the idea that we've got some of their DNA, pretty much the genome sort of basically complete is fascinating. I think we probably will see some sort of hybridised version of them alive through genetics in our lifetime, to whatever the degree that is. And I think it's really cool to think that there was an elephant that was just really furry adapted the world. I think there's something really aesthetically cool about that. Yeah. And it's kind of different to what we know today. Yeah. And yeah. I think knowing that other humans at one point were hunting these animals, living alongside them, you know, following their migration patterns, I just think it's just a nice thing to think about, yeah. Speaker 1 It is fascinating, isn't it? Obviously we think of elephants nowadays as like hot country animals in Africa, Asia. You don't, you know, in modern history there's never, there hasn't ever been elephants in North Northern Europe or anything like that as far as I'm aware. Unless. Speaker 2 The Romans took them there. Speaker 1 Yeah, Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or was that Hannibal? Yeah, Hannibal from Carthage. Speaker 2 Didn't he led? He led. Speaker 1 War elephants over Is it the is it Carthage Union mountains and almost wiped out Rome. He came really close to wiping out Rome with his war elephants. The Rome war elephants, he took, he took, he took African elephants over the Carthageian mountains, which were like covered in the snow and really high. That's one of the reasons the Romans thought it was, would have just been impossible to do so. So they weren't expecting it. And they came down Hannibal Barker. That was his name, wasn't it? And he came down with his war elephants and he, he came like this close to wiping out Rome. Oh my God. And I think that was like in the heyday of Rome as well. So that was an incredible feat. I I think it's, it's one of their best generals, something Scorpio or Scorpio Africanus. That was it was the one that ended up. So we're going right off to different types of history. Now you say I'm a history fan as well. Yeah, it was, I think it was actually called Scorpio Africanus after he beat Hannibal Barker. And they called him Africanus because he beat Hannibal, who was from Africa. But yeah, I think he was the he was like the amazing Roman general that ended up managing to gather the the remaining legions and eventually beat Hannibal Barker. But we're going off. But anyway. But but yeah, when it comes to like the woolly mammoths and stuff, it's it is kind of crazy that they, you know, that that they did all die out. I mean, I know obviously, yeah, we we haunted them a lot. But do you have a theory as to as to why they all disappeared from Northern Europe and from North America? I know a lot of people say you've got people like, oh, what's his name? Climate Change, Human Hunting, and Paleoxidon Cut something. Where is it? Randall Carlson. Yeah, yeah, he's got that extinction theory. Speaker 2 The younger dry ass impact hypothesis. Speaker 1 That's it, yeah. What are your thoughts on things like that? Do you think that that was I've? Speaker 2 Looked into it. So I've, I think if you if if we're going on basically the evidence, which I think is everything sort of got to go towards because I've got no original sort of ideas about any of this. I think the climate would have been pretty turbulent. I think there was about 8 to 10 pretty bad glacial swings before the Younger Dryas cooling and then finally sort of saw them off. So I think that it's quite strange that the the woolly mammoth could survive all the previous climactic survival issues. And then all of a sudden this one cooling period took him off. And I think he might have been a bit of real bad luck where the climate changes and the human sort of involvement just sort of saw them off. It just tipped the balance a little bit. And I don't think you have to like, it's not like this is like, you know, like the, the bison or the Buffalo of like America frontier. This is just like humans trying to survive. And you know, they're they're eating what they need to survive. They're not there's no abundance because they can't store anything. But if you think about elephants gestation period, you know, I think they're pregnant for nearly two years. So if you're, if you're like going back to the calorie thing earlier, how much effort you got to put in, you're not going to go for the biggest, baddest alpha male sort of elephants because that's going to just be a much difficult animal to kill. So you're going to go for the female and you're going to go for one that's going to be around reproductive age. So it's like every time you take one, you're taking a female out the reproductive cycle. And then if they're pregnant or anything like that, you're taking two years of progress there. And I think that has such a large knock on effect that all it took was a few dry periods where the grass or the forests came back a little bit too much and they couldn't quite get the grass or they couldn't quite navigate that. And after weeks, it wouldn't have been anything particularly fast. You wouldn't be able to notice this on the actual ground, the mammoths going till they're all gone. It would just be they would just slowly sort of the road over generations. And I think, yeah, I think a little bit of input from humans went a long way. Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think that completely makes sense. And I think, you know, I think the average, the average person that maybe isn't too into prehistory might think, you know, why why would of humans gone for such like a, a, a powerful, terrifying creature, you know, a creature that in theory could, you know, like stomp on you the way that we, we, we accidentally, you know, step on a step on a snail or something like that. But as we were saying earlier on with that guy that I was talking about who ended up sort of working his way at the food chain to eventually eating essentially that, you know, the elk rather than the frogs. Like really you're going to go for the animals that are going to give you the most bang for your buck. And also even in terms of just like practical things, like, you know, back before we had binoculars or anything else like that, you need to try and hunt an animal that you can see and that you can target maybe from a mile away on a hill or a mountain. I. Speaker 2 Think mammals have been easy to manipulate as well. You could divert them with fire and scaring them quite a bit. Obviously if you know where the cliffs are you can set up traps with some spikes. You can drive them anywhere you sort of need to. That would have been a good way to kill them, I think. And if you if you're killing off say a couple of mammoths, two or three at a go, that's going to have a massive impact on them. It's. Speaker 1 Yeah, and they're probably relatively slow compared to some animals as well. You know they're not going to dart off of 50 miles an hour like they. Speaker 2 Get tired because it's a lot of master carry isn't it? As long as they are, they will get knackered eventually. Speaker 1 It's almost like the polar opposite of say, why say, like rat infestations can be such an issue, isn't it? It's like, you know, because they can breed so quickly because they have so many. Yeah. And then, yeah, as you said, these, these giant creatures that takes almost 2, you know, two years to give birth just to maybe like, one animal that's like, you can see how things can go wrong very quickly. I always think one of the elephant species, I think most fascinating. I think probably just a bit of a typical bloke. Sometimes I just find the biggest thing the most fascinating. Was it paleoxidon? Yeah. Which they think is the largest ever elephant species. And then they think it's on, it's sort of between that and Paraceratherium, which is the largest ever rhino, which was like a hornless rhino. It's between those two of like what might have been the largest terrestrial mammal of all time. Is that right? Speaker 2 I think so. I'll probably, I think they're leading like 70% towards Paraceratherium. That's the paleoxidone, yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 Because I, I mean, that was a truly giant animal. If you look in size comparison chart to that. I can't actually work out how it's a rhino. When you look at it, obviously it's quite. Yeah, it's branched up at a certain point. I think they were about 20. They were around 20 million years ago in Pakistan. They found their remains, right. But I've seen the school of one of those in a museum and I was absolutely blown away. I could not believe the size of this thing. Speaker 1 Yes, it's great. It's one of the few mammals that were larger than quite a large percentage of dinosaurs even. Yeah, apart from, you know, the obviously the big, big sauropods that we were talking about earlier on and maybe a couple of other things. But yeah, like massive, massive creature. Yeah, as you said, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't really look like a modern day rhinos. It almost looks like a cross between like a like a horse and a rhino. Speaker 2 Ocopy. It's the great ocopy. Speaker 1 Ocopy. Yeah, I think it's Ocopy. I'm no expel. I think it's a carpy. But yeah. Fascinating creature. Evolutionary Battles and Non-Linear Progress Fascinating creature. OK, what's your next animal? Laughter. Woolly mammoth. Speaker 2 Let's go with Triceratops. Yeah, I like a Triceratops. It's the logo of the the Exington Wolfax page because it's so recognisable, so noticeable. And I, I quite like, because obviously when you watch nature documentaries now, it feels like most of the time the herbivore sort of run away or evade or something. So the idea that this herbivore could fight back and be like, you know what, I'm going to stand my ground. I've got defect. I know you've got some tools, but so have I. That sort of approach I think would have been really cool. I like the idea of being at, you know, being able to have watched the interaction between AT Rex and a Triceratops, really interesting big animal, you know, 8 to 1012 tons sort of thing. And just this absolutely magnificent head school. When, when I was in Melbourne, I saw they've, they've got a Triceratops down there and that's like a complete thing. It's got its own sort of separate section of the dinosaur area. And they put like an immersive situation in where you can hear the sounds of the forest. It would be around and hear the noise of it as it sort of and these light displays show the fossils against the wall and it was just a really cool animal seat up close. Just just getting the size in your actual head. Seen it in person, Incredible. I'd love to go and see one of those in real life if it was ever possible. Speaker 1 Yeah. I think when they about the size of like a modern African elephant sort of around on that, Yeah, yeah. But I think bigger skull relative to the size of the. Speaker 2 Body, I think it's got the biggest relative skull of all, or maybe absolute of all land animals. Well, yeah. Speaker 1 That's quite impressive in itself. I mean, an animal the size of an African elephant, but then having such a proportionately large skull. I mean, I guess it made sense because they had to, you know, to fight off things. Yeah, things. Speaker 2 Like neck, wasn't it? That's that's what it was doing, yeah. Speaker 1 Take the neck, yeah. Speaker 2 You know, you know, variations of like you said earlier, there was theropods all through, there wasn't just Tyrannosaurus, there was been serotypiens, the the Triceratops family, loads of variations of those. And it looks like to me there's just this constant arms race between herb of all credits and they're just like like trying to one up each other in any way evolutionary over like a really slow period of time. Yeah. You're just seeing the sort of how that expresses itself in the in these life forms is interesting because it's it's like medieval war almost. Speaker 1 But Oh yeah, for sure, like biology, it's a bit like when you know, you if you've ever done like a deep dive on on World War 2 and you see about how it was actually quite amazing how in a relatively short amount of time, the almost like the, the wasn't just like the battle between the men on the front lines. It was a battle of technology. You know, it's like the British invented the radar and the radar towers and the Germans were like, how are they? How do they know our planes are coming over here? And then, you know, and then you know, the, the amount of innovation that happened and you know, by the, by the end of the Second World War, the Germans had invented the first, you know, jet, jet aircraft, but it was too late and they couldn't manufacture enough. But all that stuff. And then obviously you had the, the, the atom bomb, all the rest of it's like, to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of, of history is, yeah, is when you have that arms race. Speaker 2 It's a greatest irony, I think, of our species, that we only innovate our at our best when we're at war. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, it's like one of those fascinating facts, isn't It's like when did the Wright brothers invent the aeroplane? And then within 10 years we'll be using them to got bombs and shoot yeah, people in World War One. Speaker 2 Well, they're it's. Speaker 1 Kind of crazy, isn't it? Such a short amount of time. Speaker 2 The Wright brothers and landing on the moon, something like 60 years or something like that. That's one for me where I'm like, oh, that was yes, that was a hockey stick sort. Speaker 1 Of that, it's maybe, maybe even. Yeah, no, yeah. It would have been about six years, wasn't it? Because it was very early 1900s, wasn't it? The Wright brothers? I don't know the exact year, but then was it 1966? Was it that? Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not great with dates to be honest, with things like. Speaker 1 That the only reason I think it might be was because I think I, I think I remember my dad saying that it was the same year that England on the football World Cup. So I think it was like, no, maybe notable for him for that reason. You know, like, I mean, talk about like a landmark year if you're, if you're an English guy, quite an interesting year, I guess, as years ago, but OK, Triceratops, what's what's the next animal? The Tasmanian Tiger's Demise and Colossal's Mission The thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, Yes, yes, I think that would be that, that to me that that survived you know, 40,000 years of living in Australia and it absolutely fine against the Aboriginals when they, they, they, they came, I think they were doing a lot of fire hunting. They were just burning airy down because it was so dry and the animals that came out exhausted, they'd just go and finish off sort of thing. So in fact the top thylocine survived that for like 40,000 years or whatever it was pretty comfortably. And then the Dutch settlers come and they take it out pretty much all down Australia and Tasmania. So it's got sort of last stand on that island. And the sort of cultural impacts I found quite interesting when you read about it because it was a menace and the idea was they wanted to eradicate it because they thought it was killing sheep. It wasn't. The poor husbandry of the land was actually causing the sheep to disappear. They were just going missing and stuff. It became a pest in their eyes. And as they were incentivizing these farmers to go and hunt and kill them, they were sort of realizing, oh, actually, this is probably something we need to sort of keep around. It's not actually a menace, but it was all too late. It's like they'd put this stigma. It's. Speaker 1 Like a witch hunt. Yeah, out there. Speaker 2 And by the time they sort of realized, oh, this is a bit of a problem, it was already too late. And the last one just died in a zoo in Hobart on its own. Speaker 1 I think there's black and white footage you can see of it, isn't it? Speaker 3 I've seen that people make sad edits of it on TikTok and I watch them. Speaker 1 They've they're another example of an animal, I think, that had a very large skull proportion to the rest of the body. Speaker 2 They had a giant gape on there. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, could. Speaker 2 Having that high escape with any carnival. Speaker 1 Wow, that's interesting, isn't it? Because it's a marsupial. Speaker 2 It's a marsupial carnival. Yeah, there would have been nothing really like you could. I mean, it looks a little bit like a dingo, but obviously that that convergent evolution sort of. Yeah, it's a predator, you know, a solitary because. Speaker 1 They would have been living alongside dingos, wouldn't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder how much that maybe contributed as well. Speaker 2 Well, they were very, they were very sort of solitary animals. You just, they would just disappear into the into the Bush and you would just never see them really. So anything came along that sort of disrupted that would. Speaker 1 Have. Yeah. And they think they were solitary animals. Not not pack animals like dingoes. They're a bit more like wolves in terms of packs, aren't they? This. Speaker 2 Would have been. So we'd probably got together to mate and then to rate the children. That's about it really. Yeah. But they've got, they've got, they've got obviously cells that exist of thylacine. So I think Colossal are going to try and bring that back at some point. The biggest issue they've got with that though, I think is I think the the common, the most recently common ancestor they've got alive that shares a path with Thyrosine because it was so unique, competitive for marsupials is a small animal that the size of a hamster and they're separated by 140,000 year old common ancestor. Wow. So there's nothing really alive now that can that can give birth. Speaker 1 That's quite a radical difference, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, a hamster like creature or anything of that. Speaker 2 The benefit with the with the woolly mammoth is you can put it in Asian elephants. It's probably going to be OK because they're quite similar. Yeah, the thylacine hasn't really got anything like that, which is quite an issue. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine because you've you've you I don't know if work is the right way, but you've been in contact with the Colossal guys, haven't you? Yeah. Yeah. Is that just basically because they recognised that you were doing this great content and they. Speaker 2 They started following me and then I spoke to them a few times. They keep me in the loop about sort of things if I want to post about it. So, yeah, I just sort of, I, I think what they're doing is good because, I mean, it's a, it's a point of contention. Like I say, it's a very, I'm in a very uncontroversial niche, but this one seems to ruffle a few feathers. Some people aren't happy with how they're sort of conducting their their research and that sort of thing. Speaker 1 What's sorry, What's the controversy there? Speaker 2 So they obviously they brought out the dire wolf, the puppies. There was some controversy about if it's actually a dire. Speaker 1 Wolf, yeah, I've sort of implemented because some people are saying it's not a dire wolf. It's like a new creature that's sort of like an imitation of a dire wolf. But I think that's kind of what's the term I'm looking for. I think maybe being a little bit pedantic. Speaker 2 I think so. And people don't like seeing anyone do anything a lot of the time. Like, I mean, obviously there's a lot of money and backing behind these and they're very media friendly and open to the media. So I think some people get like sort of Jurassic Park, John, John Hampton. Speaker 1 Yeah, sure, sure. But for. Speaker 2 Me, I think it's, it's, it's more, I mean, we've assigned these animals their species names, that sort of thing. So it's, it's things we're, it's categories, we're putting them in and then we're saying, oh, it's not in this category. So you're wrong. It's like, I don't think it's as bad as that. I, I, I think what we're doing is quite good. I think it's quite admirable because they've got conservation and helping the planet out and the best intentions of getting, you know, ecology back to where it needs to be or, or, you know, in a place where it's not. It's sad to watch it fall apart because for me, I feel like it's you can't reverse anything. You can't put it back in the box. But because we've changed the world and altered it so quickly in such a short amount of time, we need to start thinking about radical ways to help ecologies get back up. Because these sort of ecosystems require so long to, you know, become something, ingest state and then become a mature ecosystem that we can't just chop it all up and fragment it and then be like, oh, let's use the systems that they've been that they depend on. We're going to have to use a bit of science, a bit technology to sort of bridge the gap, I think. And the cloning technology is nothing new. We've been known, we've known how to clone animals since the 90's. The difficult part is obtaining the ancient DNA, the extinct DNA. But as far as I'm concerned, if people are going to do this, if the technology is so readily available, there could be countries all over the world who are doing this behind closed doors, keeping it all hush hush. Whereas colossal, they're, you know, they're out in the open, they're admitting what they're. Speaker 1 Doing they're trying. Speaker 2 To be, you know, trying to educate and inform people. So I think if it, if it's got to be done, which I feel like it has, like you've got to start really sort of taking responsibility for what we're doing to the planet. They're going to work right way about it, in my opinion. I think they're doing the right thing. Progress, Naivety, and Global Realities And obviously people who complain and nothing's perfect. Speaker 1 Sort of area. Speaker 2 But they, they, I think they're doing the best they can and I'm excited to see what comes out of them, to be honest. Speaker 1 I completely agree, man. I couldn't. I couldn't agree more. I mean, for all you know, I know it might sound a little bit like crazy conspiracy theory, but you never know, some some countries might even be able to like might be trying to like weaponize like, I don't know, you know, creatures or. Speaker 2 My, my, my theory is it's a little bit like, you know, controversial conspiracy theory stuff, but I mean, the technology to clone humans, it exists. You can't do it. It's the ethical considerations. Obviously it's, you know, in the West we're like very anti against it for obvious reasons. But you don't know what's going on everywhere else in the world. We don't, we don't, we don't know what's going on behind closed doors. And yeah, that sort of thing is could be a reality soon, if not if not already. And. Speaker 1 When you think about the fact that it's, you know, we know for a fact that say obviously not singling them out, but we know that on like, say like the, the Chinese black market, they're quite happy to, you know, buy and sell like rhino horns, things like that, even though they're endangered species. So it's like that's that's massively unethical. So if they're happy to do that, yeah, as you said, like, who knows what else is happening behind closed doors. Speaker 2 I, I think, I think as, as, as a collective society, the West we're pretty ethical and we sort of balance in how we sort of see things and we can take it for granted that everyone else is going to be the same. I. Speaker 1 Completely agree, but I think there's almost like a level of, it might sound like a negative word, but almost like naivety there, You know, like we just, we take for granted that, you know, we, we were brought up with these, these sort of like generally regarded like ethics and morals. And this is the standard. You fall below the standard. It's sort of frowned upon and you're expected to know and you're going to be sort of like scorned by society. Speaker 2 You're not playing that game. You don't care. Do. Speaker 1 You exactly, exactly. But as I said that the default that that's not really the default of of nature or the world. That's the society that we have created through civilization and through trial of error, trial and error and through hundreds and thousands of years of, of, of war and, and all sorts of things, you know. Speaker 2 I imagine it if you look back at the at the history and you see how reality was for so long, you have 75 years of peace in World War Two in the West and all that just becomes, you know, that's that's in a history book that doesn't apply to me. That we'll never go back to that because anyway is up for humans. Yeah. But that naivety to everything is always gonna go get better, I think. Is that. Yeah, part of that downfall to a degree. Speaker 1 I completely agree with you. And you know what, we've talked about this on the show before about how, like progress isn't necessarily linear or it's just not even necessarily, it's just not linear. You know, like life is sort of like this. Life isn't like that. You know, I think we we tend to think that that's the case. And I remember even I wouldn't obviously consciously think this, but I think when I was younger, I thought that as well, you know, because you just think medicine's better now than it was in the 60s. In the 60s, it was better than it was in the 20s, you know, flying cars. Yeah, exactly. But that's not necessarily the case. I mean, I think you can see examples of this, you know, all throughout history, if you want to go back far enough. I mean, think about say, the Britain that was under the rule of the Romans would have seen, would have seemed relatively advanced compared to say 300 years later when the Roman legions had to pull out of of Britain. There was sort of like a period of chaos. Obviously, we don't know exactly what went on. There's this whole legend of Arthur. We don't really know if that was the case, if if it was real or not. We'd think probably was. But you know, obviously not as romanticized. And there's a sort of fictional version that we know of. And then also we had this incursion of Angles and Saxons and Jutes. And then we don't really know exactly what happened. How much of it was there, like killing the native population, how much of it was interbreeding, how much of it was both blah, blah, blah, blah. You know. But we know that say, you know, well, while it was very Romanized, there would have been, you know, hot water, you know, like, you know, there would have been bars, there would have been sewers, there would have, you know, aqueducts, things like that. Speaker 2 Earbuds. I found out recently they had earbuds to clean the rears. Speaker 1 Really. Yeah, There you go. And, you know, might have, might have not been obviously advanced as it is today, but they had, they had surgery, you know, you know, they had the, you know, the ability to, to, to, you know, to, to amputate limbs if, if necessary or do you know, sort of rudimentary surgery. So yeah, it yeah, progress isn't always linear. But going back to going back to your, your animals. So we've had was it woolly? Oh, yeah, just just a comment as well. New Zealand's Colossal Flightless Birds and Predators You saying about the ethical reasons because weren't they saying because they're trying to bring back woolly mowers something eventually? Am I right in thinking that the next animal they're focusing on, is it the the giant mowers? Birds. Speaker 2 They have spoke about it, yeah. Speaker 1 Some of those birds are like, colossally huge. Speaker 2 Huge, absolutely huge. Like 9 foot 15 feet 15. The biggest ones, I reckon, yeah. Speaker 1 Can you? Can you imagine that? Speaker 3 I as we figured out the other day, I'm not very good with knowing this, so I don't know how big that is. Speaker 1 Well, yeah, Imogen is dyslexic, so you're not the best for numbers, but so, well, if you think that you're, you're about 6 foot so over, so twice your, your height would obviously be 12 foot. So imagine that over twice your height. So like, imagine, imagine that basically it would be like like a giant, like an insanely giant ostrich almost. Oh God. And similar in terms of it was like a flightless bird as well. OK, but they lived in New Zealand, right? Yeah, North and South Island in New Zealand and just these colossal birds. OK, so imagine just walking through the forest of New Zealand and just you just come across like a 15 foot tall bird. I think it's one of those things as well a bit what we'd say about earlier on about when you go to the zoo, you don't appreciate the size of an animal until you see one in person. But I mean that must have been must crazy to stand in front of one of those creatures. Speaker 2 I I, I fed an ostrich not too long ago actually, and it was really aggressive. And so it's only like a few leaves and stuff, but I was looking at its feet and thinking if that scratch me or kick to me, that would, that would RIP my stomach open. Yeah. So the idea of these birds in New Zealand would have been absolutely incredible. But like I say, they were quite a unique one because there was no real land predators in in New Zealand at the time, so they just fill that niche. So these birds would get so big because there was just nothing else stopping them basically. Speaker 1 Did they die out because of humans? Do you know? Speaker 2 I think oh I can't remember, sorry to put. Speaker 1 You on the spot? I don't. Obviously. I don't expect you to know everything. Speaker 2 I think they were going downhill pretty badly and I think we killed them off towards the end, yeah. Speaker 1 I think you see that with a lot of alike being similar. Speaker 2 To the day, I don't think it was like the western sort of people who came. I think it's the Polynesians who went to New Zealand who did it. They sort of lived there inside, sort of that in civilisation. Speaker 1 These animals, yeah, I think it's similar, isn't it, to the the dodo in terms of like because they didn't have natural predators, they didn't have that fight or flight response that we associate with a lot of animals. So you could essentially just walk up to it, donk it on the head, just just eat it. Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean the sailors comments on it were literally they were just so easy to kill. They apparently didn't take particularly nice. Apparently it's a really horrible tough gaming bird to eat because they just put up no defence developer. Why wouldn't we? And then by the time they'd even got back to the UK about like sort of legends about the the birds, they were already, they were already extinct. Speaker 1 Wasn't around that same sort of time as those giant mirror birds? But didn't they have the the world's largest ever eagle, the half steagle? Wasn't that also around? Speaker 2 New Zealand, yeah, yeah, that's they reckon they would have. They reckon the half steagle would have been the only one of the animals that could, you know, attack a mower basically like a young juvenile mower. Speaker 1 Isn't there even some evidence that they might have preyed upon humans? Speaker 2 Yeah, they reckon I'd have picked up small children and taken away old ladies and things like that. Think about. Speaker 3 Why do you look so proud about that car? Speaker 1 No, just look at. Speaker 3 It you're like, yeah, you're getting taken, she's gone. Speaker 1 I know, I just thought that you'd find that like, because that is a crazy thought, isn't it? Speaker 3 Scary. I'd just be like really scared that I'm going to get picked up and taken away. Speaker 1 Again, that's that's like a that's like a real life horror movie. Imagine that like walking through the you know, the forest. Speaker 3 Not even like like a kidnap. Like if it's a kidnap happy, you can try and, like, convince him to let you live. Like, oh, like, I'll just be like, really good. But it's like with an eagle. What are you going to do? Can't stop him. Yeah, but it's this. Speaker 1 Giant raptorial. The largest ever raptorial bird. Speaker 3 That talent in another life. Speaker 1 And it just, you know, these razor sharp talons, you know, literally descended from the dinosaurs, descended from like, you know, Raptors. Speaker 3 When we were on about what animals? Speaker 1 Were scoop your brains that you? Speaker 3 Would definitely be that. Speaker 1 Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I have the foot finesse. I think they, I think they still would have been quite graceful animals, you know what I mean? But yeah, that would have been impressive just to see flying through the sky and the idea that you would have had to have. Yeah. Because I think they found claw marks of the hast eagle inside human skulls haven't. Speaker 2 They that wouldn't surprise me. I didn't know about. Speaker 1 That, yeah, I think, I think they have, which is, yeah, quite, quite like a scary thought, really, to think that you'd have to be on on your toes about that. But yeah, with, with things like the woolly mammoths, I think isn't it like Colossal arguing that if we brought them back, for example, there are certain places in in the north of the world that just them sort of walking around would like release beneficial gases into the environment. It's, you know, something. Speaker 2 About that, it's still controversial. So they don't go with that main point. They don't they don't lead to that. It's it's, it's, it's up for contention at the minute basically, as far as I understand. But they, the mammoths would have been similar to how elephants are in modern Serengeti and that sort of thing. Ecosystem engineers, they would have cut down a lot of the larger plants that were sort of midway growing points to allow for other grasses and things like that to sort of like get to the nutrients. Restoring Ecosystems and the Albedo Effect It was create a bit more of a level playing field and keep forests at Bay. Pretty much, yeah. So the idea is that with the albedo effect, you know what that is? No. So what happens is when sunlight hits the polar ice, it reflects backwards. It's so bright and it goes back into space. So it keeps the planet a little bit cooler. And what happens is as the forests start to overtake the ice areas, they're quite dark. You know the pine tree? Dark. Speaker 1 Sort of makes sense. Speaker 2 So that absorbs way more light and as it was way more heat as as the as the planet source absorbs the heat. Basically that'll create a knock on effect, like a positive reinforcement situation where the trees make it a little bit warmer, so the ice recedes a little bit more and then the trees grow a little bit more. Obviously that bigger amount of trees makes more heat get absorbed into the planet's sort of atmosphere. That knock on effect basically, they reckon, may erode the ice caps completely back and then replace it with dark forests, absorb way more heat, basically making the planet a little bit warmer. So the idea is if you get a few mammoths up there and they trample down the baby shoots of the trees, the ice can stay there and the ice reverse back because then it's obviously going to be a little bit colder. So then there's less forest growing and then there's more ice and it's got even more ice reflecting more light. So it gets a little bit colder again. So that's the idea, but it's, it's a bit controversial because the idea of a few thousand mammals up in Russia reversing the, the planet's like sort of global sort of temperature is it's a lot to sort of comprehend. And there's obviously a lot of all the factors that play into that. It's not as simple as how I've just described it. That's the general theory. There is a place up in the Yucatan Peninsula called, sorry, not Yucatan. It's a place in Russia. And it's called Pleistocene Park. And that's basically, at the minute, I think I've got there some Bactrian camels, some bison, that sort of thing. All they're doing is they're building quadrants of land where it's quite condensed at the minute. So get all these animals to give to live there, breed all that sort of thing and trample down this very small area. And as it gets bigger and bigger, they plan to expand it and have more animals up there and eventually bring in predators like Siberian tigers and walks. So it'll be, you know, it'll be an ecosystem within itself, right? I think the idea is anything that does get brought back to life from the Pleistocene would get put there. And that'll be sort of areas of Rome. Like I say, I'm, I'm hyperboling massively here. I'm not sure on actual plans or anything. Sure, sure. But that is a theory people are putting out there. And obviously if you, if you have got all these mammoths up there and it does make a difference in that respect. I mean, just just just by getting the Pleistocene back to what it was, that'd be an amazing achievement because that, that was a, you know, a whole ecosystem that literally went round the top of the Earth because of the Beringa land bridge. It would have just been constant North America all the way down to Britain, pretty much Fascinating. Going backwards would have would have been just this one consistent massive ecosystem. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's crazy, isn't it? I think I've heard that they they're thinking of, at least they were. I don't know if they still are. I think of bringing some European bison even into some areas of of the UK I've heard that. Yeah, yeah. Just to help out. Speaker 2 There is something in Dorset, isn't it? Haven't they got, They've got, they've got Buffalo or bison or something down in Dorset. I think they've got two or three breeding females and then one male. So they're just down somewhere South now. I know, I know they've got something somewhere like that, right. There was talks of wolves as well in Scotland but I don't know about that one if that's going to go through. Speaker 1 Yeah, because I think a lot of like farmers in Scotland were kicking off and saying, well, yeah, it's all good and well, but what about like our livestock? We because they the they'd have to spend so much money. I mean, if some of these farmers have like 180 acres. To to build like essentially a wall all around their property would cost a fortune. Speaker 2 Comprehensible. Speaker 1 Yeah, it would cost an absolute fortune. So obviously there's there's very practical issues with that. Speaker 2 I think, I think if the government do want to do that with the walls, they had to take into consideration, is it worth giving them the cost back to the farmers of any animals they do lose for the ecological benefits of having the wolves here? Because there's nothing killing the deer at the minute. I think that's the problem. And the deer will just come and destroy everything else because they overpopulate. Yeah, they destroy how it has for other animals and that's what's causing the issues at the minute, I think. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a good point. I mean, yeah, for people that don't know, I think up until about 1000 years ago, I think maybe a bit longer than 1000 for bears. But yeah, bears and wolves obviously are native to the UK. Yeah, Yeah. So you know, if you, if you lived here 1500 years ago, you would, you would have to, you could potentially. Speaker 3 See, lied to me. Speaker 1 You could potentially see a brown bear or or a wolf walking through the through the woods. Speaker 3 Or my mum always said when I used to be scared of bears, she'd be like, no, you're fine, bears aren't in England. Speaker 1 Well, they're not anymore. Speaker 3 They never were. I'm like ohh OK well you just lied to me. Speaker 1 I think, I think I looked it up once and I think the last, the, the last recorded account of a, of a wolf was about like 850 years ago, something like that. And I think with a bear, it's about 1400 years ago. Oh, this is very rough. I looked these up like years ago, but it's it's something. Speaker 3 Around So technically, I'll give her a, I'll say she lied to me. She was lying, technically. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. But still, I mean that that alone, you know, talking about how like fascinating like history is and all these animals even that I find fascinating because I think just because those animals, at least to me, seem quite exotic animals. You know, you think about you have to go to North America to see that you have to go to Sweden or something. Yeah. So the idea that they used to just roam around and I guess just because we're in Ireland, you know, because it we're, we're densely populated, I guess they've just haunted to extinction because they were they. Speaker 2 They've been a serious issue. You've got to think medieval England would have been, I mean, obviously trying to stab a bear, the sphere to shoot it with a gun. I'd rather shoot it than stab it if I had to. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Speaker 2 It's unfortunate that, that that had to happen, but it's, it's, it's the case. I, I get this question a lot on, on the Instagram page. I'm talking about Pleistocene extinctions where people say, oh, we're the worst, we've killed off this, we've done this, we've done that. I'm like, yeah, but if we didn't, you wouldn't exist. So it's like, what do you prefer? Like, because every action has consequences, but we had to, you know, we get criticised a lot. And I, I do think we've got a lot of faults of species, but we do get criticised a lot for basically playing the game to such a good degree that we've ruined it for every other animal. That's how I sort of see it, but we're only still playing by the laws of survival to a degree. We've taken it too far, I think now. And that's where we had to sort of say sort of like stewardship and be like, right. We, we, we have responsibility now and we have ethics and morality to sort of contend with. But overall, we have just become, you know, a very successful species in that respect. Population Bottlenecks and Cheetah Inbreeding And even with how good we are now, you know, a billion of that sort of thing, we're not guaranteed a future. You know, the, the, the, the most dominant life forms in any ecosystem generally are the most short lived because they have such an impact. They're so sensitive to climate changes and different changes. I think we're in that category to the highest degree. You know, I mean, we in the UK, we struggle with a bad snow day with the cars and travel sort of things. So I think if we do have an issue where it's, you know, the, the planet does decide, OK, we're going to start getting a bit more turbulent now, because we've had this sort of policy in period now the last 12,000 years, which have been really quite calm dramatically. There's been nothing that's been a massive issue for us seem to be coming out of like a big glacial period. And that's what the global warming basically is. We're losing the Ice Age coming out of that basically. But that had to happen so that we could become who we need to be. You know, all all these glaciers receded and he gave us fertile land to start looking at, you know, farming and that sort of thing. It was only possible because of that and because of the runoff and that sort of thing. So the, the car we've got now, it's, it's integral to what we are, but it, it's not, it's not guaranteed. And that's, I think, the scary part. Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think, I think sometimes maybe, you know, as a species, it's a little bit like what we were talking earlier on about like maybe like our civilisation and, and, and morals and ethics and stuff. But I think maybe we sometimes could be a little bit naive in terms of like, you know, we take for granted also, yeah, like how our our safety or, or how, how hard it would be safe for us to die out. And I don't obviously mean this to, I don't want to be sound like catastrophic or nihilistic because I'm not a nihilistic person. So, and I don't think it's helpful for anybody to take a nihilistic view of anything in life. It's just completely pointless and completely unhelpful to yourself and to civilisation. But at the same time, you know, we, we have to realise, as you said, a bit like what we said earlier about the woolly mammoths. I mean, yeah, we might not take us two years to, to give birth, but you know, nine months is relatively quite a long time to give birth to, to 1, you know, usually one child. Yeah, of course sometimes we will have twins or triplets, but it's, it's the exception of the rule, isn't it? So, yeah. And, and already certain populations across the world maybe for whatever reason aren't having as many kids as they used to. So there's many different factors. But yeah, a couple of little bit different tweaks can make a massive difference in terms of, you know, how, how well we're doing as a species. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's interesting really because like I say, the birth decline rate is obviously, I think quite a hot topic of contention. And we're the first generation sort of say, look, because every generation before has been like, you know what, life's hard, but you've got to have kids because there's a better tomorrow. Whereas now we're the first generation, especially in the West, where we're saying, is there any point in having kids because we don't know if there's a better tomorrow? And like you say that nihilism isn't great because it doesn't it isn't productive to getting a society going. I think in the age of a sort of individualist where it's like what's in it for me is the sort of approach that's come out of the culture in recent years that's stopping us from being like, we need to reproduce and carry on. So I don't think the human species is any real trouble from declining birth rates. I think it's in particular countries in general, like they one or two countries may really struggle that to import some people from the parts of the world or all robots will start taking up the work. That's that's that's what I see happening in the West, but. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. As far as a. Speaker 2 Species, I think, you know, I mean, you've got like, OK, things go pretty bad. Civilization could go haywire. You know, all these things are obviously always possible. We've survived worse things, you know, the Bronze Age collapse. We've survived the fall of Rome in sort of Leo. We're resilient. We just, we just, we just adapt till we get on. And it's it's, it's not on a sort of species scale, but it's the same sort of thing. It's been like, this is my environment. This is what we're going to do and if we're if we navigate it correctly, we can sort of get free. It won't be it won't be a perfect life. It won't be like ideal, but it's abiding and that's that's that's only the name of life really isn't it isn't life doesn't care or consider happiness. Life cares about. Did you reproduce some? Pass your genes on SO. Speaker 1 Exactly, exactly. And I think it wasn't there an extinction event once in the course of of human history where they think that we got down to like a number of even like a few thousand and we're all descended from a few 1000. Speaker 2 400, I'm not sure it's crazy concrete on that, but there would have been a few bottlenecks points. Yay. Speaker 1 Yeah, that that is mad. I can't remember what extinction event that was, but yeah, one about 1400 people think, I mean just just the town that we're in right now I think has about 20,000 people in and that's like just a moderately sized. Speaker 3 Like all related. Speaker 1 Well, I don't think technically I don't. I don't think nowadays it's like an inbreeding problem. So they want a big. Speaker 3 Inbred everyone. Speaker 1 That's an. That's an interesting take on it though. Speaker 2 I think that's actually happening with cheetahs in Africa now, right? Where they their bottleneck went down so low since conservation efforts have helped to actually improve their numbers quite a bit. They have inbreeding problems massively because the genetic sample was so small. Sure. Speaker 3 Sure. And they don't know that like it can cause troubles. They're just like. Speaker 1 Yeah, of course they're. Speaker 3 Just like, oh, it's just somebody else isn't. Speaker 1 It Yeah. Well, I guess that's that, but that's, you know, you're talking about taking stewardship and that that's where, you know, humans can really come in and do something really beneficial and like help out with that and, you know, maybe bring in, you know, bigger sample sizes. Speaker 2 Yeah. I'm not sure how they sort of tackle that one, really. Yeah, because there was an American cheetah that was. Yeah, I mean, that would have lived. I don't think it's even that much bigger or smaller. I think it was pretty similar in size sort of thing. There's probably a chance of bringing that back and sort of bringing in a bit more diversity in. But yeah, I don't know how you solve that problem, to be honest. There's a few I think. I think wouldn't. The problem is once obviously you get down to a certain level of genetics or material to work with, you then got to sort of go backwards. I mean, I don't know how much ancient or even older cheetah DNA we've got, so you probably need that to sort of make a massive impact. But yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, unless they can track certain genetic families and sort of put them away from each other saying come back round later on. But yeah, that's a difficult 1 I think. Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. Talking about that sort of North American cheetah, isn't there like a like a species or some species of, of antelope in North America that can just run ridiculously fast? And up until we knew about the North American cheetah, we there was like no really explanation for why they could run so fast. But it's because obviously they evolved to have to be able to escape from these cheetahs, who probably the top speed would have been comparable maybe to, to, to an African cheetahs. So that's just even even that's quite interesting, isn't it? Why have you got these animals that are like running like twice as fast as a bear can run? Because, you know, you don't need to. Obviously, like biology is quite efficient, isn't it? I mean, that's, you know, in terms of like, if you don't need it, then your your body will just get rid of it. You know, it's great. So the fact that you could be like, say over twice as fast as your, as the fastest predator around itself, you know? Yeah. So it's just quite, I just think things like that are quite interesting, aren't they? Yeah. Speaker 2 You can get lost in it. Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure, man. So your last animal, we branched off a lot then, but that was a really good, interesting little conversations there, man. But yeah, so I think woolly mammoth was your last creature of your most fascinating, now extinct animals. What's your next one? Australopithecus and the Last Common Ancestor We'll go with. Speaker 1 Australopithecus. Which one's that? Lucy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ancient hominid. Speaker 2 Yeah, several ones from Africa. Obviously we've only got very small evidence they even existed. I think. I think the Lucy story is pretty incredible. You know, she was, you know, I think she's as tall as like a 7 year old is pretty much and she fell likely and just got stuck in a cabin with a bit of water and the mood sort of preserved her to a really good degree for like 2,000,000 years. She was sort of just kept there. They found her in 1974 I believe. And just the idea that you had this hominy that sort of it could still branch out and still spend time in the tree, still probably mostly in fruit and nuts and bits and pieces like that. It was starting to walk with bipedal legs, a very, very uncommon thing, obviously in the natural world. And it had it had benefits around sort of like you could sort of scan the horizon it better. You could carry things in your SO. Speaker 1 Was she a Homo erectus? Sorry to interrupt. Speaker 2 She was Australopithecus. Speaker 1 Australia, so sorry you already. Speaker 2 Said that Homo erectus was the one that sort of manipulated fire. They reckon that was that was an in between sort of between human and Australopithecus. Speaker 1 So she was pre, She was pre. Speaker 2 She would do mostly monkey when you look at it like a homo erectus would have looked like a like a very monkey looking human, whereas right Ostropithecus look like a look at an ape. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Speaker 2 And yeah, just just nothing remarkable about her life whatsoever. Just a just a slightly intelligent bipedal ape walking around. And why? Speaker 3 Are you looking at me? Speaker 1 Sorry, what? I I couldn't. I'm sorry. Speaker 3 I was enjoying this the way the guy you can just see you. Speaker 1 Sorry, that was that was that was low hanging fruit. So I just couldn't help myself as soon as the idea in my head to just like look, I just couldn't help myself. Sorry, Imogen. Speaker 3 Yeah, you better be, you know I love you. Speaker 1 You know, yeah, sorry, Ronnie. Speaker 2 Yeah, like just just saying like, you know, they had they had no idea, no concept of what a celebrity was or civilization or anything that was coming ahead. They wouldn't know. They were like the precursor to what what they were sort of thing. And now all of a sudden her body's been flown around the world talking about endlessly. It's, you know, one of the most viewed fossils and discoveries of our of our time. And then that makes you think also now it's like that that was an animal that was ambivalent to everything, didn't know what was going on. And it's like, OK, and now we're in that situation. What's going to look back at us and be like, that was just a, you know, ape that just thought it knew everything because it had a few world wars and stuff, because it had technology and firms. It thought it was this incredible creature. And we look back at it now, almost like apathy, like oh how my sweet child, you knew nothing. Speaker 1 Everything's relative, isn't it? Everything's relative. Cool man. What's your next creature? Speaker 2 Luca, we'll go. You know, have you heard of the last universe of Common Ancestor? Speaker 1 No. Speaker 2 No. So you've got no idea what it is. Speaker 1 No, I don't. Speaker 2 Think we've got we've got absolutely no idea what it is, really what it looks like for anything we can pin back to a single point in life where the last universal common ancestor of everything alive today existed. We were in one life form, obviously talking billions of years. Speaker 1 Ago, Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. Speaker 2 And just to be like, is what was that the origin of life? And then it became one thing. Or is life started more than once? As far as we're aware, life's only even started once and continue from that one progression would have been Luca would be our last sort of like known on what we understand. And anything beyond that, we sort of it's just abstraction basically. So the idea that that one little thing, whatever it was allowed for all this, everything we spoke about, everything that's in my book, everything we've we've discussed today, it, it came from one insignificant BLOB of life pretty much. Speaker 1 That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. And that's what it would look like, would it? Just like a little BLOB we. Speaker 2 We don't know. Oh, we. Speaker 1 Don't. Yeah, we don't. Speaker 2 We it's, it's, it's, it's to be like chemical isotopes and bits and pieces of molecular evidence. We don't, we don't really have any idea what it would have sort of looked. Speaker 1 Like, that's crazy, isn't? Pterosaurs, Flight Mechanics, and Jurassic Park Accuracy It so sciencey, I forget that everything's all the science stuff. Yeah, yeah. Like, Oh yeah, Remember that word? Speaker 1 Man, it is. It is absolutely fascinating. Any any other any other creatures? Any other animals? Speaker 2 Got us in mind. The Quetzalcoatlas is always a favorite of mine. It's got to be, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea that there was a Pterosaurus, like a flying reptile in the Cretaceous period, that would have been the size of a fighter jet. It would have been, you know, if it was, if it was flying over you, you'd have heard a swoop. You'd have seen the shadow, could the you. And you'd be like, oh, my God, that's fine. And that really was, they reckon, the upper limits of. Speaker 1 Howard, if it's the largest ever flying creature, wasn't. Speaker 2 It if, if, if it could fly. We we're pretty confident it could, but we're just not sure. So it's certain on the degree of how it could because. Speaker 1 To take off. Speaker 2 Well, you know that during the the Cretaceous period, there was the huge inland sea in North America, OK. So that would have been like a huge shallow sea that could like most of the, you know, the middle States and that sort of thing wouldn't be particularly deep anyway because obviously America's underneath it. But obviously that would have created like large systems where wind would have caused up wells and bits and pieces. I don't fully understand it, but basically it would have been huge drafts that would have taken these bigger creatures. They may have like, jumped off cliffs and caught. Speaker 1 That a little bit, yeah. Speaker 2 But in terms, it wouldn't have been flight the way you see like a Sparrow fly for. Speaker 1 Example yeah, because to take off like by the bio mechanics of being able to maybe like run enough to then push off the ground enough to then yeah it would very biomechanic you have to. Speaker 2 Compare it to an animal in terms of structure. A lot of people use the giraffe to sort of show how it's big Tang lead. Tall, awkward, cumbersome maybe. Speaker 1 But imagine like a giraffe with wings trying to take off exactly. Speaker 2 Yeah, trying to eat you. Yeah. Speaker 1 Trying to trying to steal you. Yeah, yeah, because they have massive beaks as well, didn't they? Yeah, huge. Like like like I don't know how many feet long, but like what Like 10 foot long beaks or something like that. Speaker 2 Maybe about 6 foot 6 feet. Speaker 1 Yeah, Oh yeah, I'm being over the top, but still, that's crazy. That's. Speaker 2 Mad probably haunted fish if any of that. Streamlined, sort of diving for water and getting quickly sort of thing. So a long sharp beak would have been probably pretty useful. Speaker 1 Yeah, but it would have been quite a scary animal and I could imagine, I could imagine there would have been just just because of the animals that have been living alongside as well. I imagine relatively aggressive as well, so. Speaker 2 If it had to be survived, that would really. Speaker 1 I don't think if it was on land you'd want to get within sort of 30 feet of 1. Speaker 2 Unless you add a bit of like chainmail on it. Speaker 1 Yeah, even that I wouldn't want to test my luck, maybe, you know, because I imagine the amount of force it would be able to produce with its, you know, razor sharp beak. That's that's a that's a large animal, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Yeah. What another interesting fact, the fact about Quetzalcoatlis. I think it's named after an Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl. Yeah. Who was like the serpent God of the Aztecs, which I thought was just a cool little fact. Sometimes I just love why animals are named what they're named, you know? It's like sometimes a little story. Speaker 2 The story behind it was always something interesting to know. It's a problem. You become this sort of like ultra ultra hobbyist, I call it, you know, where you just go so deep on something that you like Because I feel like you were sort of restricted back in the day to how five could take something with the insect. Now you can just there's rabbit holes you can just keep going down and you don't, you don't stop pretty, do you? And that's how you get all these people because no one's got the same ideas or opinions anymore because everyone's just going ultra niche on their hobbies. I know all this about fixing animals. What do you know about or football or nothing to talk about, you know, I mean. Speaker 1 Yeah, no, no, I think, I think that's a good point. I've never really thought about it like that before, but I imagine, yeah, it probably was a little bit easier just to have a conversation. You know, if you say went in the pub in the 60s, people would have known majority of the same thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're all have been consuming the same media or or, you know, your hobbies would have been a lot more likely to to coincide. Whereas as I said, nowadays it's like very, very niche people. It's like, you know, it's like the opposite of being a Jack of all trades, you know, isn't there like another what they think what like flying reptile from a dinosaur period they think would have almost been about the same size as is it? Is it Heptyopteryx or Heptyopteryx? Speaker 2 I know which one you're talking about, I'm only going to try and pronounce it. I've seen it. I've seen it written down. I think it was a bit maybe wider but not as long sort of thing, but very similar. Speaker 1 But but still like a a colossal I think. I think it might have been Heptyopteryx, but I might be completely. Speaker 2 I'll go with that. That sounds about right. Speaker 1 I might have been completely off on that, but yeah. Speaker 3 Why are the names all so confusing? Speaker 1 Well, I think it's, I think one of the reasons is because whenever we talk about say like dinosaurs, for example, we're using sort of like the, the Latin name, whereas so obviously, so obviously we have Latin names for all modern animals. Yeah, like say like a lion is like Panthera Leo, but you, but you don't. But you don't go, oh, there's a Panthera Leo, just go. What's a lion? Speaker 3 I don't say that because I didn't know. Speaker 1 Or we know it was. Or we would just say, oh, we're humans. We don't go say like, oh, we're Homo sapiens and sort of things. Speaker 2 Yeah, like Tyrannosaurus Rex, you go T Rex like. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 Yeah. Oh, I didn't realise they were the same animal, did you not? No there. Speaker 1 You go well, This is why George is here. She's. Speaker 3 Realizing how stupid I. Speaker 1 Am This is why George said no, you're not stupid. You're not stupid. You're a lot younger than us for a start as well. I didn't, I didn't know half of what I know now when I was your age. And I'm, I'm still, I'm still not saying I'm the sharpest knife in the drawer. Speaker 2 You want to catch up, just make sure you spend the next years, 10 years chronically online Yeah, get your screen time up to 11 hours a day. From Instagram to Documentary Aspirations That's what you. Speaker 3 Need. Oh God my. Speaker 1 Screen level she's already. Speaker 3 On my screen time in lockdown was like for the week was well over 100 like hours it was like. Speaker 2 So much it's funny you say that actually, because that was one of the determining facts of me being like, I need to find a way to put this somewhere because I was just checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and I got the week summary being like, you've been online for 9 hours a day. And I was like, that is just. So I basically bought a lot of books of Amazon Natural History ones and I sat in the garden in the sun and just read them. I kept my phone in the house. I've got my screen time down to one hour a day. Amazing. And I was like, OK, great. And all this stuff where we're going to put it. Oh, my phone back out now. Then it just seemed completely negated all that. So amazing. It's nice. I had a couple of months where I had pretty low screen time, but after that it's been just I mean the the page and everything itself just sort of requires the time I'm I'm. Speaker 1 Oh, 100%. Speaker 3 I wish I did that. Speaker 1 So are you like, are you making, we'll get back-to-back to the animals, but are you making? Is this essentially your career now? Speaker 2 I'd like to see where the book goes, to be honest. I mean, I've got a sort of, you know, be able to survive and that sort of thing. I, I basically got a geography degree from John Moores in Liverpool and I did my dissertation on sort of like the Holocene sort of sediments in the River Mersey. And you can see that when agriculture came in and that sort of thing, analyse that. And then I wanted to do a master's degree in paleontology and I was, I was also working as a chef at the time. And I was like, I don't want to be a chef forever who's got a PhD in paleontology or whatever and can't do anything with it. So I sort of panicked at the about the age of 24 and got a city planning masters. And then I got into that job and the company I work for were great, loved little people working there sort of thing. But I was like, this just isn't for me. This work. I, I don't, I don't enjoy this. I don't enjoy the policies, the development sort of side of it. It's just very, it just means nothing to me. So then I thought, if I can make a go write in a book and making deep time engaging and accessible to people and provide a bit of value, maybe that'll be enough to see me through. And then obviously I'd like to sort of look into like YouTube and videos and do bits and pieces. Speaker 1 I'm kind of surprised you haven't already started a YouTube. Speaker 2 It's been difficult really. So I've been travelling the last couple of years, so I've been in and out of hostels and I haven't really had sort of like a, a base to sort of sit myself in. So for me, I sort of said, well, you've sort of got a good idea of where to go around the world. You've worked out now you can navigate different countries on your own. You're actually pretty nimble and you can get in and out and sort of, you know, see what you need to see. So yeah, if all goes well with the book, I would like to sort of like, start producing sort of like deep time documentaries going, yeah, you know, doing. Because what I find and no discredit to anyone who's doing this online is anyone who's doing prehistory sort of YouTube videos or content, it's sort of then talking and then there's like pictures on a slideshow coming across sort of thing. Whereas I feel like I'd want to be a bit more immersive with it. I don't want to take people to say, say, if I did a documentary sort of short video on the Tasmanian tiger, I'll go and I'll go to Tasmania. I'll get some drone shots of like the, you know, the landscapes go from museums and see the the old footage and that sort of stuff. So. Speaker 1 Have that have that old school production value that that's one good thing about sort of you know, when say when I grow up is you know yeah, I think YouTube is fantastic in terms of the the amount of content available. But as you said, they don't have that same high standards of, you know, if you mean if you watched whether in. Speaker 2 That Geo document. Speaker 1 Yeah, you're watching that Geo don't whether it was Steve Irwin or or David Attenborough, whoever might be back in the day that the production value was so high and it was a question and we are missing that a little bit. I think so you know. So it's you know, it's really important that we keep that alive. I think that's why I'm sure you know who like Forrest Galante is. I think that's one of the reasons that he's good, because he because he has. Speaker 2 Spoke quite a few times. Oh, really? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Well, see. Speaker 2 Share some like share some most of sometimes I I did a post about the woolly mall of DNA being found because they they very recently found, you know, cub's stomach pretty well preserved woolly rhino DNA. So that's wow. Speaker 1 Very. Speaker 2 Exciting a massive step forward because that was the one that they just didn't really have the DNA on like the woolly mammoth. They've got a lot of DNA on the woolly rhino wasn't the case and now this has given a massive jump because it hasn't. It hasn't died yet if whether it hasn't. Speaker 1 Eroded. That's, that's fascinating. Did you know that woolly rhinos used to exist? Speaker 3 I've heard of that before. I have. I have heard of that because I just assumed there was probably woolly hippos as well. Speaker 1 No, I don't. Speaker 2 Think so, but there were hippos in the Thames. Really. Last ICE Asia. Speaker 1 They. Speaker 2 Find they find Hippo. Speaker 1 Bones. Were they quite similar to modern day hippos? Speaker 2 Basically the same ones. Wow and. Speaker 1 Now they're just very cool. Yeah. The, the the woolly rhinos, the largest ones, I think it was the lasmotherium. Yeah. I think it was larger than the largest rhino species that are alive today with a massive, massive horn, like even larger than that. Yeah, like a white rhino horn. Or a small caveat. Speaker 2 Technically the Paraceratherium was the biggest problem. If we're going to get 10, no, no. Speaker 1 No, no, you're 100% right. You're 100% right. Yeah, no, but yeah, 100% right. But yeah, the, the, the woolly rhino. Cool animal cook. Very, very cool animal. Yeah. That's so cool that you've tried a little bit. Forrest Galanti. I'm a big fan of his work. My my daughter absolutely loves his his YouTube channel and I like watching it with her as well. But what you know, to be fair to Forrest Glanton, not only does he really know his stuff and you can tell him he's almost like a bit of like AI guess maybe comparable maybe to like a Steve Owen of today, something like that. Call him something like that. But he does also keep the production value very high. You know, he actually goes out to places with his camera crew and he visits all these amazing places. As you said, it's not just like a slideshow of of of like. Speaker 2 Pictures missing 100%. I mean you're probably guilty as it's just as much as me. If you can't sleep, whether you go on YouTube and it's like Oh yeah, 4 hour documentary. The incomplete history of the Roman Empire. OK, I've always seen to that. That's fine. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just. Speaker 2 Someone talking, there's a few pictures going past and that sort of thing. But I think for for people to really understand the deep time sort of stuff in an accessible way, you need to be there. You need a bit of like motion graphic, CGI stuff. And I'd really like to sort of produce something along those lines, but without using AI to generate it because 1, I don't think it's particularly useful. I think people are quite mixed about the ethics of that. Speaker 1 Yeah, I I am myself, yeah. Speaker 2 Exactly. And and two, it's it doesn't get the specificity you'd need for any of this sort of stuff. I mean, I've seen people generate dinosaur images and it's just basically a, you know, an algoration of all the Jurassic Park screenshots that Google can find creating basically the same sort of T Rex looking dinosaur no matter what you put in. So I don't think it really has any value for what I do. So I'd like to sort of really just have like, you know, get in touch with actual artists, CGIVFX artists put together some like, you know, sort of like, you know, Netflix style CGI of these animals interacting boots on the ground bit of, you know, footage of being there and explaining what this sort of world would have been like. And really, really just making it entertaining to I I consider it infotainment. Fighting Imposter Syndrome and Social Media Noise It's it's something you learn about, but I want people to have a good time while they do it as. Speaker 1 Well, yeah, of course. Speaker 2 That's that's the hardest part because it's, it's meeting people where they're at with their prehistory sort of understanding, which is a big part of why the book is sort of there. So it's like the the idea would be is you could read this book and you've got a pretty decent grasp of what what went on. And it's not the the last thing I want to do is write like just another textbook like this was the pre Camry and this happened next billion years ago, that sort of thing. Now this this talks you like a conversation. It's like I'm having a conversation with you now, but I'm just going absolutely in from start to finish, pretty much. Speaker 1 That's amazing, man. It's rare. I mean, I think everything's in motion, isn't it for you? I mean, your, your pages exploded. The fact that you're, you know, you're in contact with people like Forrest gallanting and and colossal occasionally. It's kind of, it's quite amazing really. Speaker 2 I, I have fun, like I say, I mean, I, the idea that I could be the kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs and that sort of thing and then now somehow wedge myself in there just by posting consistently is a bit, is a bit crazy. But I'm glad people found me to be honest, because like I say, anything I sort of post online is stuff that I'm just reading about anyway. I'm glad that I can share it with people because I I saw niche pages online, like I'd see like random like Marvel superhero pages get like, you know, X amount of likes and that sort of thing. And I'd be like, people must like deep time. People must like this sort of thing the same as me. People are into dinosaurs. You go to any book shoppers, dinosaur books and colouring things and that sort of stuff. Yeah, for kids. So I was like, you know, I'll start posting, see what happens. But I did not expect it to go the way I did with half a million people following me and that sort of thing. Yeah, like, it's been really cool. Like, I mean, like I say, I mean, I want to name drop, but like beg Real started following it at one point. Wow, a couple of years ago and I was a bit like, Oh my God, I've watched this guy's TV shows for years. They saw his DVD box sets and everything. Speaker 1 Me too, man. Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, like he's liking my post and stuff. I'm a bit like, you know, this is. Speaker 1 Dude, that that is a that is like a pinch yourself man. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's awesome. And like I say, connecting people are these sort of things. If I could find a way to make it a sustainable career, then I'll my my sort of agreement with people is if you facilitate me making this my career, I will dedicate myself to providing content indefinitely, pretty much because this is all I want to talk about. You know, I, I, when I did a planning degree and did a planning job, I came back from work and I was knackered. All I wanted to do is unwind or whatever. Whereas I'll talk about this for how many hours you want to talk about it. I'll go back and I'll make some posts tonight. Wait, it doesn't bother me. I don't, it's almost like it's, you know, renewable energy pretty much in terms of me discovering this sort of thing. So I'd like to be, I'd like to be on the front line with all the new, all the new things coming out. So my idea was like if I build the foundation and get people to trust me, anything new that comes out in the future, which is again maybe controversial, there's a bit of like problems, you know, if we're talking about the missing link or whatever, sort of big discoveries on that sort of level and has the public a bit divided. I'd like people to be out like, right. I'll give you an objective sort of look at it sort of thing. I'm not going to try and sway you with anything religion or sort of dogma or anything, no personal beliefs or anything like that. So that's my sort of objective really. Just get the information out there that I already find very valuable to myself. Speaker 1 That's amazing man and yeah it's great. I mean we've always, we've been talking for almost 2 hours now and I could have you know, I could happily talk for for another two hours, but we're we're in no rush. As I said, I'm literally going to play this show out like completely live and also go out on the Internet as well. There's still some interesting things I want to ask you, but any any other animals that you would include in your sort of like notable animals since the dawn of time notable for whatever reason. Proto-Mammals and Continental Drift It can just be for absolutely any reason. Speaker 2 I like the Dimetrodon because that one's like a sort of jumping in point for people because everyone grows up thinking they've got a Dimetrodon toy, it must be a dinosaur and you're actually 6 year old boy. I'm going to tell you a big deep story about It's not a dinosaur now and ruin your afternoon. Speaker 1 Because they were from the Permian. Speaker 2 Yeah. So they're, you know, completely different, sort of like sort of. Speaker 1 Weren't they essentially A proto mammal? I think they might have been a proto. I mean, yeah, don't, don't hold me to that. Speaker 2 It's it's the it's the arcasaurs. I think that they they came out around the sort of time the Triassic. So it may have been an Arcasaur yeah descendant, but. Speaker 1 I think, I think I I read that you could even technically say that they are a cousin of of us of modern day mammals. Speaker 2 It's not. It's not a mammals per SE, it's the. Speaker 1 A proto mammal, Yeah. But like, you know, but yeah, it's like, yeah, we're not like a well, I'm just trying to, I don't know quite enough, but I don't know if we're like a direct descendant of them. But most, if not all mammals alive today are related to them in some way. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Even the radion of their like explosion through different times because if you think about the Triassic, Jurassic extinction period, the dinosaurs in the Triassic were nothing special. They were like the mammals of the Cretaceous. They you know, they would just get on their feet. You had the archosaurs that were reigning supreme, these big reptile things, and then that extinction event from the Triassic to the Jurassic gave the niches open for the dinosaurs to obviously just diversify into what the reasons they did. Then Pangaea splits up at the same time as well. So then you've got all these different parts of the world of different ecosystems. Speaker 1 To explain to people what that is. So basically, obviously we have, you know, several continents on the planet today. Pangaea was what the world used to be like, one massive super continent. Yeah, one God, and it was called Pangaea. So you in theory, you could have walked from one side of the Earth right to the other side. They would have been completely inhibited, inhibited by uninhibited by sea. Speaker 3 Oh my God. Speaker 1 Yeah, interesting. Speaker 3 You were sick. Speaker 2 Because of the land being connected, the weather systems were really like uniform right? So be just barren desert all through most of the interior bit, which would be unbearable, and then just horrible storms and wet on the coast. It would be now in between almost Wow. And then obviously when the content split up and became Gonduana and Laurasia, that's when you started getting this variation. These ecosystems became branching off and then the dinosaurs diversified and became like sort of a a result of that. And that's where you get all the variety. You do Jurassic that wasn't there before. Speaker 1 Even that I think sometimes people can get a little bit confused sometimes like, well, what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur? Because you said obviously a Dimitrodon's not a dinosaur. But I mean, to a lot of people that Dimitrodon would look like a dinosaur. But we were saying, you know, it's like like a like a proto mammal, which is kind of like a very early prototype mammal, which looked way more like a reptile than a, than a mammal we'd see it as today. But I mean, yeah, so like dinosaurs are basically like a type of reptile, aren't they? So there's obviously the way there's, there's several different types of reptile alive today. You know, you've got like the crocodilians, you've got snakes, you've got turtles, tortoises, lizards, but they're all reptiles. And the dinosaur would have been like a reptile, but they were their own subspecies of reptile. T-Rex Discoveries and the Impact Event Is that a good way to good way to explain it? Speaker 2 Yeah, I'd say so, because I think a big misconception people have, and I think this is the Jurassic Park effect. Basically, they think that the prehistoric periods would have been 8 or 9 common dinosaurs they can sort of think of, and then nothing else, pretty much. But you'd have had birds, insects, you know, all these sort of things, reptiles, amphibians, the same as we do now, but just in just completely different volumes and forms, like things you couldn't comprehend really. And like you say, we, we, we do know a lot about these time periods. Consider how far where they are. There's also a lot we don't know. Like I say, I think it's something like 98% of things haven't fossilized. And it's like, for example, the T Rex, that was the most successful North American parade. So pretty much that time period, full stop. They reckon there was something like 2.5 billion of them ever because they just lasted for so long. And when they did last, there was about, you know, roughly based on sort of like how they, they, they calculated based on like how many lines in Africa and this sort of thing working out how big a predator is in this ecosystem. They reckon at any time in North America, there would have been 20,000 tyrannosauruses knocking about and they live for X amount of million years that time period. And that's where you get the 2.5 billion number from. So it's, it's, it's rough, but the idea that could even be the case. And we have less than 50 complete what you didn't consider complete skeletons in existence. Speaker 1 Just goes to show what we were saying earlier on about, you know, you need such specific environments to successfully fossilize an animal for well over 60 million. Speaker 2 Years. Well, a massive part that would have been the extinction event that killed moth, the Paleogene, the Shiksulub meteorite, because obviously. Speaker 1 That New Mexico, Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Yucatan. So that would have basically caused such an abrupt change to things that things preserve very quickly and very easily. So that's where we get a lot of like T Rex and Triceratite, right? Speaker 1 So a lot of what a lot of what we have were killed out on by that impact by that that asteroid we would've. Speaker 2 Just fossilized and preserved very quickly, conveniently sort of thing. Speaker 1 Yeah, right, right. Didn't they find a, was it like a FEMA fairly recently of what might be the biggest T Rex ever? Did you hear about that? Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was, that was cool because it's like, isn't it Like it's not even like half a foot longer than say, Stan or whatever, or is it Cope or Sue? Yeah, Sue. Yeah. It's like quite notably bigger. Can you remember what they've named it? Because I remember. Speaker 2 I heard I've done a post on it by a comment the name. Speaker 1 But I think it's not, we don't have too, we don't have too much definitive evidence on it, I don't think because a looks like the femur is a little bit damaged. So even the estimates might be a little bit off. It might have been even bigger potentially. But then obviously people are getting excited now and then they may be exaggerating people. Speaker 2 Exaggerating, they always get the upper limit and then that gets like knocked on and people say this, this and that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think I it would be if I could go and see one animal from prehistory, I think someone said to me, no, like hopetically, we'll take you right back to this period. And you can see in real life it would have to be the T Rex because I think it's one of the most well studied dinosaurs we've got. Just by how much evidence we've got, how close to how close do we get? Everything we talk about that we seem to know so much about that, you know, we've put in in place for science. Let's put it to the test. Let's get that. You know, if I could actually watch it and be like, OK, did it, Were we right? That would give us such a good incentive an idea of like how close are the things as well? Because there's obviously the controversy about if they had feathers, if they were chubbier and had a bit of, you know, sort of a reptile look. So, and I, I think obviously the more we get right, the more we understand, like I say, I mean, I think they found imprints of blood vessels and blood cells in these recent bones of T Rex. So it's like we're getting more and more information, molecular stuff coming out in bits and pieces. So being able to print to the test like did we get it right or not would be a cool thing for me to see. Speaker 1 Definitely. Did you hear? I don't know how accurate this is. I could be before all I before all I know it might have actually been sort of like made-up, but didn't they? Didn't they through like a 3D printer like put what they thought was like the larynx or something of from from our our knowledge of of animal anatomy and from our most complete skeletons we have of T Rex. Didn't they like build like a larynx, put it through like a 3D pincer and then blow some errands or something? And then they've recently come out with like what they think are the most accurate sounds of AT Rex. Did you hear about that? Speaker 2 You, you're, I'm just thinking about Jurassic Park free when you say that. I haven't. I haven't heard anything recently that did that. Speaker 1 I think I say, I think that they, they've done that. And I think because also you think about Jurassic Park, say one, they they it's, they basically they roar and it is a menacing roar, but they don't actually think they would have sounded anything like that. I'd be interested for you to do some research in this and let me know how credible you think this is, because I think it's one of those things. I came across it, I got all excited and I heard it, Yeah. Speaker 2 I've heard similar videos and basically, oh, this is what AT Rex sound like. And then you read the comments and people say, no, actually this is all wrong for this and this reason. So there are things like that that always comes. Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't, I don't know how it is, but it sounded kind of like a giant evil goose. More like that than than the sort of the Jurassic Park roar that we think. Speaker 2 Would make sense. I mean, the Jurassic Park, if you look at the behind the scenes and the sounds they use for certain animals, it was animals that had like nothing to do with stuff. I mean, the velociraptor was a was a dolphin underwater and things like that. So it's. Speaker 1 It was more what completely made-up movie magic more than anything. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's like the what they say, what they call velociraptor in Jurassic Park isn't actually a Velociraptor, is it? Is it a Dynonicus? Dynonicus, Yeah. Which was like a another Raptor, but it was just a larger Raptor. But they didn't think that Dynonicus sounded catchy. Speaker 2 Velociraptor is a ballast name, you call it. Speaker 1 Is, but wasn't the actual velociraptor Raptor like not that much bigger than a Turkey or something like that? Yeah, a bit. Speaker 2 Bigger than a Turkey. Imagine like a really nasty Turkey, which is like Nipurang. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 So like, yeah, I mean, as as awesome as Jurassic Park is, it's not the best source of pure information. Speaker 2 It isn't, but at the same time, I could bring in awareness, isn't it? And I've always said as well, the, the, the, the, the cultural pull of dinosaurs is clearly something that resonates with so many people because I mean, every time I make a Jurassic Park film, it can be completely, it can be terrible. And I still make a billion dollars, like people want to go and see dinosaurs and it gets people in in seats and thinking about these sort of things. But yeah, as a point of reference, I mean, it's it's it's it's a doorway in. And it's at the same time, it's entertainment as well. Like, I mean, if if you did go down the whole route of everything's got to be scientifically accurate, you wouldn't get interesting films. It's like hardly anything. Which it's like the Odyssey. There's all those photos leaked by this guy's massive helmet. And it's like, oh, it should be the accurate version. It's like the accurate version. Ancient Sharks, Whales, and Deep Water Fears It sucks. It doesn't look like the Odyssey version that Nolan's put together looks a lot better. So, you know, I mean, sorry, I want to be entertained. Speaker 1 Yeah, say, you can put calls in anything. I mean, it's like, you know, I absolutely love the Lord of the Rings movies, but there are some absolute purists that are like, well, you know, they're not unlike, They're not enough like the books and for whatever reason, you know, But for me, who I remember going to the cinema when I was 11 years old. Speaker 2 I've been like. Speaker 1 This in my life, my life's changed forever. Speaker 2 You know, you've said this, can I, this is for you as well. Can I just do a quick public announcement Because this, this is for me one of the best things I've ever found and I wish more people knew about it. There is an audio book version of the Lord of the Rings by a guy called Phil Dregesh. And if you're into Lord of the Rings at all, it's not anything that's brought out that can be paid for. It's easy. He didn't for the love of the game, he just created 48 hours of this audio book himself. He's like an, he's a voice actor of some sort and he's basically got the entire Peter Jackson cast nailed. So he does the entire Lord of the Rings book in all their accents to a very convincing degree. Adds the Howard Shore soundtrack and the sound effects like the sword swinging and the Ringgrave screaming, that sort of thing. I would go as far as saying it's the best piece of content on the Internet I've ever found in my life. I was, I've been falling asleep for two years. So anyone, anyone who can't sleep and like Lord of the Rings, get that? Speaker 1 One please forward it on to me. Man, that sounds amazing. And what what? That must have been insane amount of work for that guy. Speaker 2 Oh, it massively, like I say, I mean, I he keeps getting taken off Spotify and YouTube because obviously it's not, it's conflict of all these bits and pieces, but he's not making any money off it. But you can find it online. There's I think he's got a website. So you type in field of Grech, Lord of the Rings, you'll you'll find it. But yeah, that's one of the things I feel like more people should know more about because it's a good bit of media. Speaker 1 That's amazing man, that's amazing. Any other animals you want to mention? Speaker 2 Megalodon. Actually, yeah, I think Megalodon save the best of all. I knew that one. Yeah, really. Speaker 3 Yeah, I've heard of that one before. It's that there's a movie. It's got a movie. Speaker 1 With Jason Statham, yeah. Speaker 2 I've only even watched the 1st 10 minutes of that. I haven't watched the whole. Speaker 1 Thing I haven't seen him either no, but yeah fascinating creature one of the things I find most fascinating about them but before you you tell us more about it is I love the the idea that they were around at the same time as Liviat and Melville and the sort of the dynamic between them and because obviously it's kind of up to sort of educated guesses and what we know of modern whales and modern big sharks you know you know to to sort of like get an idea in our heads of maybe a relationship isn't the right word, but what the the the relationship would have been like between those two like was there a more dominant one how wary were they of each other did one was it like 1 preyed on the other one and the other one was like sort of running scared a bit like we see with modern day great whites and and orcas or you know you know I think I think that's fascinating what do you think yeah I've. Speaker 2 Actually, I've actually got sort of like AI have many vignettes in this, in this book where it's like me talking about interactions with animals that, you know, we we, we can guess that we've got no proof of, but the science works out. They could have been in the same area at the same time. So I need to talk about an interaction between a a megalodon and a libertarian. Speaker 1 I don't know how to pronounce it. I was. I was just guessing. Speaker 2 It's only pretty convincing there that way. Thank you. Yeah, I've got an interaction with those two and sort of talking about that and the dynamics of these oceans and that sort of thing. Because the, the the whales now are bigger than they would have been at any point in history. They've sort of got to the biggest point they can. And they're sort of obviously dying off now because I think obviously human intervention sort of causing issues, but they required such nutrient rich seas to get to that size eventually that it would have been, you know, I mean, you can't even imagine what would have been there, especially in the seas. Like, I mean, we've got a pretty good understanding of it, but a lot we don't know as well. Speaker 1 I think it's quite scary for me. I think, I think I've got, is it thalassophobia? It's like the only one, yeah. It's the only fear I really have. I'm not really like inherently scared of anything else in a kind of a well, I guess, you know, the idea of a phobia is that is that it's an irrational fear. I don't think. I don't think it's an irrational fear. Speaker 2 You for a reason. Speaker 1 Yeah, but I think there's something insanely menacing, at least to me, of the idea of being, you know, lost in open water. You can't see land in any direction, and the idea there might be some sort of creature sort of circling beneath you. That, to me, is a terrifying thought. Speaker 2 I'm not a huge fan of deep water in general. I mean, I would like to go and cage dive with sharks at some point. That'd be like a bookie list sort of thing for me. So I just want to see a great white in the wild. I feel like it's it's I'll be a very humbling experience to be like, I have. No, there's nothing I could do to stop this thing eating me. But yeah, the idea that you've got this creature that is the great white, you know, the most, you know, a fishing killer machine of the waters, you know, they're older than the rings of Saturn. That's how old sharks are. They just existed for so long that they that really had to evolve massively. Speaker 1 Yeah, they predate trees. Speaker 3 I always find it crazy that like NASA went from exploring the ocean to now trying to get us out of this, this like Earth. It's like now they've they've gone from the ocean. Did they So. Well, yeah, they, they, I swear they originally. Speaker 1 Were it's a space. Speaker 3 Crew in the ocean and then they started exploring space, I don't think. And it's almost, it's almost like they've gone from exploring the ocean to then trying to get us out. And it's like, what have they found? Speaker 1 That's very that's very that's very conspiracy. I don't think it was NASA specifically because I don't, I can't remember what NASA stands for, but it's like a space program. It was my space. It's like a space. It was a post World War 2. The S in NASA most likely stands for space. So. Speaker 3 Maybe I've been. Speaker 1 Tricked then I think you were probably tricked. You probably yeah, two gullible. You watched a YouTube video. Maybe that was a bit of a conspiracy theory one, but no, yeah, as you were saying about like, yeah, about the the I think sea creatures, for some reason I find more scary than than land creatures. Speaker 2 You're not in your natural habitat. You know we're not, we're not supposed to be there. You know we can. We can swim and we can flap about in the in the shallows, but we're not supposed to be in deep water. Speaker 1 I mean, a fish out of water, so to speak. Yeah, Please go back to like, you know, Megalodon though, and, and, and why you've picked that animal as one of your most fascinating creatures and expand on that because. Yeah, fascinating. I. Speaker 2 Think the great white shark is one of the most fascinating animals alive. I just, you know, Jaws really sent shockwaves into my sort of psyche as a young kid. And just the idea of this animal like you, like I say, it'd be nothing, You know, even, OK, if a Tiger's going to beat you, there's a slim chance you could get away. Like, you know, you'd be able to navigate the land or, you know, crawl somewhere or something, you know, 1% chance sort of thing. But with a shark like a great white, you just think there's actually like a 0 percent chance of getting out of this. And the idea that this thing is so scary, so terrifying, you know, like you say, you saw what George did to entire nation in the 70s, get him out of the water for how long? And then there was an animal that was basically built exactly like this. It looked a little bit different, a little bit a little bit bulky, I think like a short of snout or something. But it was, you know, the size of the bus and it would have been so efficient and killing these prehistoric sea turtles that would have been absolutely massive, these leatherback turtles and all sorts of things. And it was just ruthless and it was so dominant. It had a cosmopolitan approach around the world. It just lived in sort of shallow wish to deep areas all around the world. It would basically have nurseries in shallow waters where babies could eat small animals. And it was so efficient and it was so dominant and it still died out. It still couldn't navigate the climate changes of the future. And the only reason we know it exists is because we find it's it's teeth. Obviously they they pop them out and they have those rows of teeth and they leave no skeleton to speak. It's all sort of cartilage stuff, yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, like mix fish. Yeah, so. Speaker 2 Then that to me is like, well, the, the imagination opens up then because obviously we've got pretty good ideas of what it looks like, you know, we've based on, you know, the macro shocks of what it is on similar living ones and that sort of stuff. But so overall, it's still a massive mystery. Like what? What was this? What you know. Speaker 1 A truly terrifying creature. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Because there's there's, there's, it's up to debate, isn't it? So there's, there's disagreements about how long they were, how big they were. Some people think they were 45 feet long. Some people think they could have even been 60 foot long. Or I think maybe even over 6 foot. Some people think. But either way, a colossal creature, like truly terrifying. Yeah. Speaker 2 It just, it shows you as well, like the sort of nutrient cycles the seas are providing to like, so, you know, you gotta think that thing's at the top of the food chain compared to what we've got now. So that would have been an absolute hierarchy of animals, just that would just eat each other. And yeah, just fish. Eating fish, basically. For how many millions of years? Speaker 1 I'd love to know, like all of the, you know, I mean, like with most things, I'm sure it was a combination of factors, but why exactly they died out? Speaker 2 They they think it was climate change. Speaker 1 They think it was predominant climate. Speaker 2 Change. They think it was the cooling of the sea and it couldn't, it just couldn't adapt to that basically. Speaker 1 So they think that they were more like what? Like tiger sharks, bull sharks? Are they like the warmer waters? Speaker 2 I like the warmer waters and I think it was, I think the combination of the temperatures. So they had to sort of retreat from there like sort of global reach and then the food chain was affected massively by the cooling waters and then that couldn't sustain such a large animal. So that's the big thing with top predators. It's not necessarily direct impacts on them. It's like lower down things are happening and changes are happening and because they require so much energy, they just can't meet those demands. Speaker 1 And I guess when you've got great white sharks and orcas, which are kind of fitting the same niche as them, but just because they're a bit smaller, because they're a bit more adaptable, they can survive and the megalodon cannot. Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like when you look at like the megafaunas or anything like that that died in the Ice Age, it was anything like over 40 kilograms that became a real point of contention for extinction, whereas anything under that sort of had a much better chance of surviving. And same, same as the, the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. We were just, you know, well, we early mammals were just very, very, you know, efficient. You know, we had milk we could provide to the young. We could, you know, just hibernate or a lot of them. Speaker 1 Burrow. Yeah, exactly. So a certain level of protection, yeah. Because I think the largest mammal around the Cretaceous was only about the size of like a badger or something. Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah, it's OK. I mean, survival of that point when the plants were hit by an impact meteorite like that is. Yeah, it's a game of inches of millimetres, you know what I mean? It's it's survival hanging on by the smallest threads. Probably things around the world did sort of survive, but that that if if I could go back and watch any historical thing in time, including human stuff. Post-Impact Diversification and North American Predators I mean, you've got ancient Egypt and the Romans, but I think I'd lean towards watching that meteorite hit the peninsula just just, you know, as long as I don't get hurt, of course, if you I'm, I'm a shadow on the on the earth. I'm at this point. Yeah. But to watch that go on, I think would be absolutely incredible because I mean, I sort of, you know, you can watch these documentaries and they sort of show you what happened and they tell you, oh, it was like 100 million atom bombs going off at the same time, sort of energy, yeah, sort of thing. Speaker 1 It's hard to put that. It's hard to actually imagine that this. Speaker 2 Is the thing I, I sort of compare it to, you know, when you're on holiday and you see an amazing view and you take photos, you can show all your friends. It's amazing. I wish they were here and you go back and show them the photo and it just looks, yeah, I feel like these documentaries probably the same as that. It's like, show me this amazing sort of CGI rendition of what's going on, actually be there and sort of see what happened. I think. I mean, unbearable, the energy hitting the planet and how it would have, would have been insane. And it's so it's so crazy that like the way it hit the planet and the sort of material it hit the planet at is what caused so much of the damage. Because it was, it hit a bit of rock in Mexico, which was like gypsum, sort of very gaseous, sort of it creates a very fine dust. And then it hit the Earth at like a sort of 13 to 16° angle. So very sort of like almost like a skim. So as it hit the earth, it basically created like a Frisbee effect and it just sort of sprayed the Earth. And that's when all the sort of rock went into the atmosphere. But if that would have hit a deeper part of the ocean, the dinosaurs may have survived. It would have still caused obviously huge issues, but the degree of what sort of problems it caused on that tick today, we're just all just little factors that if it was a little bit different, if the Earth, if it hit four hours earlier, 4 hours later and hit a deep pot of water, it could be completely different. We, we, we the. Speaker 1 Butterfly facts. Yeah, yeah. The butterfly, yeah. Speaker 2 That's that's a bit of a weird thing to get into. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we probably would have never evolved. We wouldn't have been able to, because every time a mammal would have got big enough, they would have been eaten by all that. So who would never have been able to diversify the way we did? Speaker 2 Apparently we we, well, we, I keep saying we're mammals. We developed pretty rapidly as soon as the sort of niches were open, taken. We once, once the planet recovered and we sort of got the life, had bearings on it again, we just went everywhere pretty much, and that was the success. Speaker 1 We've, we've basically filled all the niches that the dinosaurs had before, whether it's giant herbivores like Paris, Eratherium or the elephants or it's the, you know, I mean, I know that for a while they were like terror birds, weren't they? Which were kind of, I guess would have been filled the same sort of niche that Dynonicus and and Uteraptor and things would have filled. I mean, the dinosaur age. But you know, once they died out, I don't know if it was, I don't know why they died. I don't know. If you do know why the terror birds? The terror birds? Speaker 2 I think there is competition from because the when the North and South, North and South America when they sort of collided and became too conjoined continents pretty recently after basically the a lot of preyters from the North American sort of ecosystems, they came down South and then they just completely out competed most of the terror birds. So what? What? Speaker 1 Animals would they have been? Speaker 2 Smiled on Saber tooth. That sort of thing, yeah. Speaker 1 Well, cats, you know, Cats and birds, you know cats usually win well. Speaker 2 The only reason the terror birds managed to even get that that far, really, was probably because there was no other actual proper predators knocking about in South America for a long time, Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, fascinating man, So interesting 11 animal that I'd really like to see. Giant Apes, Missing Links, and Fossil Hunting I've always really liked bears. I'd love to have seen them like a short faced bear. Yeah. Yeah. To see to see one of them. I mean, I, I I don't think this is just like a theory, but don't they think that one of the reasons that may be that humans didn't populate North America until a bit later was just purely because the short faced bear was such an efficient predator? Speaker 2 It would have just, I've, I've, I've heard some because of the Baringa Lamb Bridge was obviously a bit the, they reckon that might have been quite bad for bears. It's, it's funny though, I've never really seen any museums that have much about these, these short faced bears or anything like that. And I was in Canada in 2019 and I went to a gift shop and it was like, I need to get a key ring from home or something like that. I turn around, I've just got this Kaiba statue, like it's a real fossil. Wow, $50,000 or whatever. But you can just buy it in the gift shop. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford it. So I didn't, I didn't buy it. Yeah, that was, that was a, that was a female. So it was obviously the sexual dimorphism was a lot different and that was would it, would it have? Speaker 1 Still been that the males had been bigger, like with most mammals. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I think, I think the feet, they reckon it was quite a big gap to be honest. Speaker 1 Right. OK, Yeah. Speaker 2 But this, this was still a pretty imposing fossil or skeleton, I guess. And yeah, I think that'd been absolutely incredible to see. The biggest, the biggest obviously would have been ginormous. I mean, look at polar bears now. You would have still been bigger than a polar bear. Quite, quite a bit. Speaker 1 So. Speaker 2 Do you imagine that killing things and obviously activity hunting and stuff would have been incredible to say? Speaker 1 Oh yeah, You know, you're talking earlier on about smiled unpopulator, about how you just wouldn't have really been able to do anything, you know, Same, same thing, isn't it? Yeah, like fat, fat chance. Speaker 2 The only chance you've got if it's not interested, that's that's the only chance you've. Speaker 1 Got you've just got to hope. You've just got to hope. Any other animals you want to mention? Speaker 2 Go with Archipatriotics for the last one, which what's that? That's the one they found where it's like the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. It had feathers. There was a, there was one found in in Germany, I think. And that was basically like imprinted. It was so well preserved. You can see the feathers and that sort of thing. I think you had you had a lot of these proto feathers as well sort of thing. So they could basically say for, for, for fact. Now at this point, OK, birds and dinosaurs came from the same sort of family. There was something going on there. So that was basically the biggest indicator that we that we would start looking at these birds, these reptiles as more like, instead of like terrible lizards, more like, oh, they're a bit more bird like. So I think a lot of research coming from that originated there. And that's that's just a nice sort of little snapshot thinking that it's only, it's only a small discovery idea in, you know, it's one small species. But what we can sort of extrapolate from that as being, you know, invaluable. Really. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, So it's fascinating, isn't it? Because I remember that's a relatively new discovery, isn't it? I think when I was a child, there wasn't really that much talk that birds were dinosaurs. I can't remember when that came about. I don't know if it was when I was a teenager or something, but all of a sudden it seemed like it was quite fresh off the press, like, because I feel like before that we thought of like the closest descendants of dinosaurs, the closest things we have now that were most like dinosaurs would be like crocodiles and all that. And all of a sudden people were like, those are dinosaurs. Speaker 2 You can see it in the media. I mean, you've got like Victorian sort of depictions of dinosaurs. They were like slow, sluggish lizards and that sort of thing. And then in like sort of colonial times, they were sort of seen as this like, you know, cautionary tale of like, oh, if you're a slow lumbering lizard, you won't adapt. You know, that's that's that's how countries can go if we're not careful. When the Tommy like sort of World War 2 was around. So that was sort of like a metaphor they used then a little bit. Speaker 1 Even the name like Iguanodon, which was one of the first dinosaurs that was categorized. Like, when you think about it, they named it after an iguana, but it was nothing like an iguana. Yeah, but to this day, obviously, it's still called an iguana. Darn they. Speaker 2 Put the thumb on its on its. Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think there's like an old, isn't that like an old Victorian little dinosaur park that you can walk around in London at? Speaker 2 Crystal Palace, I actually, when I got back to the UK, it was the first place I wanted to. So I had you there and unfortunately they're doing reconstructions. Oh, no repairs on it. So I didn't get to see any of it. But yeah, I think as soon as it gets a bit warm, I'm going to go back down and have a look. So I think there's some good content to be made there because, yeah, definitely that's that's it's a very important part of our heritage, you know, finding these 100% bones in in the ground and being like, oh, well, let's try and sort of see what we can do with them. And to go from what we had to what we have got now, I think it just shows how how well we're doing it sort of like understanding reality and what's around us. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't we? Whether it's like, you know, Crystal Palace and the, you know, the, the Iguanodons there or like the, the sculptures that look absolutely nothing like what we nowadays think in Iguanodon look like, Oh, you hear about the bone wars, don't you, America? They're really fascinating. And I remember hearing as well that they think that the, the myth of the Cyclops in ancient Greece came about from mammoth skulls that were dug up. And when a, any type, pretty much any type of elephant dies and you know, obviously the flesh rots away and the, the tusks tend to fall out. When you actually look at an elephant's skull without the tusks, it looks very much like a human skull, like the molars look very much exactly the same as the molars in the human's mouth, but just obviously much bigger. But obviously where their, I think where their Tusk trunk trunk grows, there's like a big hole in the head. So you can see why an you know a Greek. Speaker 2 Makes makes complete sense. It was. It must. Speaker 1 Have been a giant one eyed man all. Speaker 2 Sorts, I mean, I, I think when you think about how much this would have come from myths of extant animals would have been no structural any way to sort of identify what any of this was. The human imagination is pretty powerful. So it can create pretty interesting stuff like the Gigantopithecus, the giant ape thing that's listed in southern China. They thought their teeth were just dragon bones. They were being sold in a in a Chinese chemist's shop and someone in the 50s I think bought them and was like, I need to analyse these. Turns out it's a giant 100,150 thousand year old giant. Speaker 1 Because they were, they were like very huge apes, weren't they? By far the biggest. Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, by far. They would have looked a bit like an orangutan, but it would have been, you know, about 1212 feet tall probably. That's that's. But it would have been colossal, Yeah, lumbering sort of thing. But then it makes you think really, because it's like, if that can exist and it, you know, that that was clearly a very successful animal, we've got 2 teeth to show for it. Because obviously the southern Chinese rainforests will eat absolutely everything up and just swallow things. You won't get much out of it. That's why it's harder to find evidence of prehistory in tropical regions, because the rainforests will just swallow it up. But to know we get these two teeth and we find out about this incredible animal that existed, I just think that the, the, the, it really is open what sort of can be found in the next couple of years. And I think with everything we've got going on, we've got Lidar scanners. They've been using mushrooms as well to sort of navigate and understand parts of where fossils will be going to be buried because certain fossil, certain mushrooms grow around where there's like fossil evidence. Basically somehow they've connected this and they can actually see when they scan with drones and stuff now. So I think in the next couple of years we're going to have some really exciting things to talk about and hopefully much bigger picture to paint or a more more detailed picture to paint. Aggression, Social Structures, and Human Parallels Man, I hope so. That's so cool. I mean, just just sorry, just to dwell on Gigantopithecus for a second, you think about how like impressive and and strong like a like a silverback gorilla is in person. I obviously I don't know what they're enough to be would have been like comparative, you know, compared to something like a silverback. But just surely for for a 12 foot or potentially 12 foot ape, you know, scaled up to that size for that sort of muscles, they must have been a fearsome beast, like as close to King Kong as you can get in real. Speaker 2 Life, I mean, it depends how it's sort of existing, because obviously you imagine the grid is quite an aggressive animal, whereas an orangutan's a bit more docile, isn't it? So? And if, if you're that big and you're in, you know, because I think it would have lived sort of around similar apes and smaller apes, nothing would have been quite as big. Nothing's going to to bother it really. I mean, so yeah, it depends on how it came about. But that's the thing. It's like is, is there a gorilla sort of hybrid sort of similar thing knocking about elsewhere that we just never, never knew about where it's more it's a, it's a big eight that's more syllaback sort of aggressive. Speaker 1 Orientated. Do we know? Do we have any idea? I mean, I assume from what the mole is, it suggests more like vegetation, but it'd be interesting to know, you know, was it omnivorous or was it, I don't think it was something you think they. Speaker 2 Don't think it was carnivorous at all for what they understand because. Speaker 1 Obviously quite a big spectrum isn't there of like a aggression when you see with like the great apes. I mean like chimps are very scary purely. But, you know, they might be the smallest technically of the great apes, but the most aggressive, the ones that are most almost like what I in some ways show, show in some ways they almost like display the worst attributes of humanity almost, I think. Speaker 2 I would say so. I feel like we get most of our worst attributes from them. I think it's really interesting. You've got the bonobos, which are very sort of, you know, matriarchal. They're like women orientated who sort of run the societies and then they like they, they solve all their problems with sex, but have all these like, you know, crazy, sort of like situations in the zoos in that way. You've got to be a bit careful with your kids. And then so you've got that way of sort of solving conflict. And you've got the other type, which is the chimpanzee, where they just RIP each other to shreds. Terrifying pictures. Yeah. If you ever read Our Inner Ape by Franz de Waal. OK, that one's a good one, which shows you like the darker side of apes and stuff. That's a really cool book. Quite, quite graphic. Speaker 1 It's essentially like gang warfare, isn't it? They have sort. Speaker 2 Of gang, they'll go for you like your digits and your sort of genitals because they know they what it means to that. Speaker 1 They know that. They know that we're similar to them. They know that what matters to them matters to us. So they know they go for our genitals, our face, our fingers, I mean. Speaker 3 If you're in a fight with them, you do the same to them. Speaker 2 No, you're not. You're not. You're not ripping. Speaker 1 No, I mean, I can't remember how many times stronger a chimp is than a human, but it's quite. Speaker 2 It's it's like you wouldn't be able to do much with them. Speaker 1 I think like every chimp is like a strong, the world's strongest man or something like that. Just an average the. Speaker 2 Question. The question always is could the best MMA fighter in the world or the best jitsu guy in the world take on the bang average ape and it's like chimpanzee and it's like they just couldn't. Speaker 1 Well, I think obviously like one of the main things is that is because of teeth. You know, if you think of like a like a like a lot of of fighting between humans, whether it's punches, kicks, chokeholds, as soon as you have the ability to just go and just bite the arm off. Speaker 2 Yeah, what are you going to do? Speaker 1 Yeah. Do you know what I mean? And I think the I think that the the speed and the ferocity and the tenacity of the chimp would be very overwhelming to the average civilized human who is used. Speaker 2 To playing by the rules. Speaker 1 100% shake your hand first. I think it would be. It would be over in like 20 seconds. Yeah. Yeah, it would. It would run in the room, jump on you, RIP you apart, and before you even even realized what had happened, you'd either be maimed and disfigured for life or dead. Yeah, I think you know so, yeah. Speaker 3 I'll stay away from it then. Speaker 2 But I. Speaker 1 Remember hearing that even in some parts of the world where their territories overlap, chimps are even targeting gorillas now. Have you heard about that I? Speaker 2 Haven't heard about that, no. Speaker 1 Yeah, apparently because they've always been quite wary of of gorillas historically because they know that one-on-one they would lose, but there's just gangs of like 30 chimps that will just target overwhelm like like when you see like an Ant taken out of praying mantis, they just just overwhelm the the the race wars before GTA6, you'd have thought. I think obviously that's that's sort of that's sort of like the the gorillas weakness in a way, isn't it? I guess it's like one-on-one, they could be any ape, but. They they, they don't live in massive. Speaker 2 Societies, they're like, they're like polygamists. So they'll have like 1 silverback and he'll have like 3 girlfriends if you call him that, he has his children and that's it. Then they're very, very territorial. But it's interesting because if you look at their testicle size, it's it it tell tells you that they're polyamorous because they don't have sperm competition whereas chimpanzees and bonobos do when their sperm compete in polyamorous societies, whereas the silverback it doesn't need the infrastructure to be. Speaker 1 So you basically actually saying that silverback riders don't have as big balls? Speaker 2 Pretty much as chimps, yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, boy, you learn something every day. Speaker 2 Interesting fact, yeah. No, that is because they, they compete externally with the world. They they'll tell everyone else to get out the way that you're not coming in My, my, my partners where the, the chimpanzees, the bonobos. It's a bit more, you know, behind the sort of scenes. Speaker 1 It's a bit sneaky. Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. So that's so their sperm has to have extra sort of like weapons to, you know. Revisiting the Ultimate Ocean Predator Showdown Yeah, I can see that Fighter the rivals away. That makes sense. That makes sense. Any any other animals you want to discuss? Speaker 2 Weekly there, I think. I think. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's, that's, that's quite good. Yeah, yeah, I've got a couple more questions to ask if that's cool before, before we wrap up. I made some notes last night. Let's have a look. Oh, just by just by the way, before we do move on as well, in your opinion, when Megalodons and Liviat and Melville, however you pronounce it, came across each other in the wild, who do you think would have been the more dominant one? Who do you think would have walked away? The victor, that sort of thing? Speaker 2 I would go with Livia Ton the whale just because I'm looking at great white sharks and orcas and great white sharks and dolphins. And I feel like there's it wouldn't be too dissimilar to suggest that there would have been just scalloped versions of that. And the intelligence of AI feel like the, the shark is pure instinct where the there's clearly is some sort of cerebral advantage with the with the with the whale. So I'm going to lean that way. That doesn't mean I'm right though. There could have been plenty of interactions where Megalodon takes out a Livington. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think, I think I'm pretty sure we know, don't we, that just like modern day sperm whales and like most cetaceans, that liviarten was a social animal. So it did live in groups. Yeah. So obviously numbers. Speaker 2 Definitely noted young as well. So that's something you. Speaker 1 Protect, you know, obviously numbers the bring advantage. I guess the only caveat to that is orcas on average are 10 foot longer than a great white, whereas megalodons if anything were a bit bigger than of Oliviart and I think. Speaker 2 I thought a pretty similar size, that's why it was sort of, I mean towards the whale. I'll bow to you or not. I'm not sure though. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. But let's just say they were similar size. I mean, I'm sure it would be a little bit more competitive between great whites and orcas now if they were the same size. But I mean, you know, big, big male orcas can get over 30 foot long, whereas a 20 foot great white is is more the exception, isn't it? That's a, that's a very big great white. It's a 20 foot long great white, whereas it's not uncommon for a for a big a big orca to, to get over 30 foot long. Yeah. Did I say orca before or did I say said orca? Yeah. OK, I was just checking. Yeah, very interesting. Gaining Perspective and Pursuing Passion Let me what does, what does the future hold for you, man? I know you've already touched on this a little bit. So you want to do you want to do your obviously you're bringing out your book soon. Remind us what that's called again? Speaker 2 It's called the bone beneath us, Extinction, evolution, and the fragile age of humans and. Speaker 1 You'll be able to get that in in Waterstones online. Speaker 2 Yes, so if you go on to my profile and it seemed animal facts on Instagram, all the links are there. But yeah, if you go on Amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith and Barnes and Noble, anywhere else you buy books really, you'd be able to find a copy and pre-order it. Speaker 1 Amazing. And obviously you want to start getting more involved in like documentary start style projects. Is that really your your focus and your aim moving forward? Speaker 2 I think so, yeah. I mean, I still plan to travel for a couple of years. I've not lived in the UK for three years now and I've quite enjoyed sort of just seeing the world and sort of getting new perspectives on things. And I can keep doing what I'm doing on the road. So it's not been any friction there at all. Speaker 1 Any notable stories where Where have you been travelling out of interest? Speaker 2 So I started in Egypt, did the Batman or the backpack, the Nile, and then we went from Cairo to all of Asia. We did a few months Indonesia, then we went to Australia for two years. I was in Sydney for longer than he was. He sort of went off his girlfriend and then got we meet up every so often something but like they're doing their own thing and like I'm just sort of navigating what I'm doing with all this sort of stuff really so. Speaker 1 Any, any sort of like big takeaways or any, any sort of like life lessons, big takeaways or notable things that happened while you're travelling. Speaker 2 It's, it's hard for me 'cause I don't want to fall into that sort of generic, I'll go see the world. It makes you a better person sort of mentality. I don't think it does, I really don't. I met some terrible people travelling so, so, but no, it's, I think, I think it's very important to get out of your comfort zone and to find other cultures and places you don't belong and sort of just see the similarity of the differences. I quite look at going to different countries and thinking, what do they do well? What do they do less well than us? Because I think it gives you a perspective. I, I I'm. Speaker 1 Looking at it objectively. Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of how the UK sort of got in a few in the last few years sort of thing. I'm. Speaker 1 Not sure if anybody, regardless of what your views are specifically. Speaker 2 Fair enough, but going away and spending time in other countries has made me appreciate these other countries. But also I come back and I'm like, oh, there are things I did miss. So it's given me new perspective on where I live and where I'm from and MyHeritage and that sort of thing. And it's, it's just, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been a great journey. And without getting too generic and sort of like, I'll go follow your dreams, that sort of thing. It's, it's helped me sort of decide what I want to do in life. I realised working in a cubicle wasn't for me and I said I'll, I'll happily live a reduced sort of income or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just standards of living pretty much. I mean, I was sharing a room with 88 blokes and bunk beds for like 6 months. So, you know, I can, I'm pretty flexible. But yeah, following this and following my sort of passion has been the, it's been the most rewarding thing I've done in, in years. So I plan to just see it through as far as I can. And if I can sort of find a way to make it sustainable and financially viable, then yeah, I'll just, I'll, I'll carry on going. Speaker 1 Well, it seems like the wheels are emotion, man. I say, I say it's, it's been cool for me, man, to to meet you today, to be following you for as long as I have. And then, you know, to meet you today to have the amazing discussions that we've had. And then, you know, to hear that, you know, we're talking with the Klosswell Lab guys or Forrest Gallante, that that's very cool for people like me and you that are really into this sort of thing. I mean, that's that's got to be amazing for you. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's fun. Like I, I, I've still got massive imposter syndrome, I think. Like I don't see myself as like the easing animals guy. I'm just like, well, I'm just, I'm just relaying information. I'm not saying anything breakfast. I'm just relaying information. I already know. But yeah, I think I need to sort of like find a way to sort of like own it a bit more. And then, yeah, you know, some people have confidence in what I'm saying that I, I, I'm confident as well. So that's, that's a big thing for me, making sure people feel like they're getting the right information from me and I'm not sort of just short coding things or making it simple. Speaker 1 I think sometimes isn't it, it's interesting to get caught up or it's easy to get caught up into like, you know, why, why did my channel blow up? For example, you know, if you're, if you're yourself, why did my channel blow up or whatever, like, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, man. You're clearly doing something right. And I and I wish you absolutely nothing best in your journey. Man. It's been awesome to to follow your page over these years. I've always as somebody that's very, you know, I said been a lifelong fan of all of these subjects myself. I've always known that your content was very, very good content. And I think that you can, I think that you can like pick up on sincerity. So you can pick up on a page that maybe thinks, oh, I could, I could get a viral page from doing this. But it's just like copy and pasting stuff in Wikipedia and somebody that genuinely has a love for that. And I think that if you do genuinely have a love yourself, you want to follow other people that genuinely have a love for it. Speaker 2 Yeah, Thank you. I appreciate that because all I wanted to do is just be authentic and sort of say, you know, because obviously Instagram wants everyone to sort of be the next or, you know, create a sort of thing and follow these sort of paradigms. I've got a sort of a certain way they want people to sort of grow up and blow up and that and as a result, a lot of good page. You just get lost in the sort of noise now because people are putting out, you know, AI generated content or they're putting out stupid content that just gets a few cheap laughs and that takes precedent over actual more meaningful content, because social media isn't a meaning intended sort of platform. It's not it's not long form intended. It's it's dopamine hits and constant relays. And it's hard to try and fight that when what you've got is quite a nuanced and in, in, you know, in depth subject and you've got to sort of try and make it bite size to fit the algorithm's expectations, which I'm not a huge fan of. But like I say, as long as the people out there are enjoying the contents, I'm I'm, I'm letting people know something they didn't already know. I'm making it a way that people can just understand, then I'm happy. Personal Insights and Podcast Wrap-up I'm happy to keep going with it. Speaker 1 Awesome man awesome. So just to finish, these are some quick fire questions. These aren't really anything to do with what you you do. It's I always like like to do this when we have guests on because I feel like you it, you just get to know somebody on a different level. So it's just whatever first comes to mind. Favorite colour? Speaker 2 Green. Speaker 1 Me too. Favorite movie or movies? Speaker 2 Lord of the Rings. Speaker 1 Oh man, favorite bands or musical artists? Doesn't have to be 10. Speaker 2 A couple if you like Falling In Reverse Slipknot Trivium. Speaker 1 My man, I don't. I've actually heard of Falling In Reverse. Are they a metal band? Speaker 2 Not many people have. They are a metal band. They're they think he's out of the Las Vegas, but he's a quite controversial guy from what I understand. Speaker 1 Oh really? I'll have to check out some of them, some of their music, because I actually have a he was. Speaker 2 Escaped the Fate lead singer before. Speaker 1 And they, I don't think I've heard of them either, but I do have a rock and metal show on the radio as well. So I'll. I'll play something. You should. You should, Yeah. Maybe you suggest some of the? Speaker 2 Trials. He squares quite a bit. So many. Speaker 1 I saw that we can add it out, swearing there might even be some clean versions online. I expect, because I expect I don't. We're the first radio station in the UK to play them but. Speaker 2 To be honest, I don't hear that anyone in the UK really. Yeah, really don't. Speaker 1 But that's cool. I mean, yeah, I'm always up to listen to some some new content, man, So that's awesome. Favorite food? Steak. That's nice. Nice. It's. Speaker 3 Just Callum. Speaker 1 Callum 2.0 going. Speaker 3 To be besties. Speaker 1 Or I'm George 2.0, maybe night owl or early bird. Speaker 2 Early bird. I used to be a night owl, but I'm an early bird now. These days I like I like a morning. Speaker 1 Nice night out or night at home? Speaker 2 Night at home these days, Yeah, you used to be a bit of a night out guy, but night at home these days? Speaker 1 Nice. Would you rather go to a party or have solid one-on-one time with somebody? Speaker 2 Very contextual, so of course I like one-on-one. Time's cool, yeah, I like getting deeper people. I hate the sort of small talk or how's the weather sort of shit. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right. No worries, No worries. I yeah, I agree. I think, I think some of it, as you said, it's contextual. I think for me even it's even like age based a little bit. I know that when I was a teenager, when I was an imaging age, I was so extroverted, so extroverted and I just wanted to be, I was like, where's the party at? I'm going to be there. Nowadays I just, I'm just not so interested. I think it's probably like an age thing. Speaker 2 Energy. I find it's just when you when you've got stuff going on, you know, raising children or managing a house or something like that, these things just fade into the background. Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think it's, it's like a reactionary thing when you look at a party and you're young, you're like reacting to everything. And it's all just like barrels of laughs and silly situations that you're constantly reacting to and laughing about. Where I think, you know, at this stage in my life, I'd rather have a, an interesting deep conversation with somebody. But to do that requires time. And if you're only having 5 minute conversations with, say, there's 10 people in a room, how can you really break past that surface level interaction with somebody? Speaker 2 You get a job like this, don't you? Then you live in your dream. Speaker 1 Well, exactly. Yeah, it's a yeah, exactly. But any random facts about you that might surprise people? Any interesting hobbies, anything like that that might surprise people about you? Or any facts at all? Any instance in your life? Speaker 2 This is OK. I fall asleep to time lapses of Lego sets being built if I can't sleep. Speaker 3 I love that. Speaker 2 Knocks me out like a mallet honestly. Speaker 1 That's amazing, man. Speaker 3 That's amazing. I love that. Speaker 1 All right, there we go. I think we'll think we'll leave it at that. George Wakeman, thank you so much for coming on. Man, You're having me. Speaker 2 It's been a. Speaker 1 Pleasure. If you've just tuned in, you've missed the beginning. Yeah, George has got a book coming out. We just talked about that. Go follow him on Instagram. Extinct animal facts, Anything you want to quickly say or or any just to wrap up. Speaker 2 No, I'm good. I've had a great time here. Thank you for having me. Speaker 1 Man, thank you so much George, it's been an absolute pleasure. Cheers everyone. You've been listening to Pandora's Box on AW radio. We'll be back same time next week. Thanks for coming on George. It's been a pleasure man. Cheers mate.