22. The dawn of dangerous seas in the Triassic

Suzy Rob. Are you particularly excited about the developments in Greenland? It is a bit alarming isn't it? Why do you think he's doing it? There's been lots of debate about maybe he wants. So we're recording this in January of 2026. And at the moment Donald Trump is making noises about wanting to integrate Greenland into the United States. Let's put it that is putting it mildly. This isn't the political podcast, this is a fossil podcast. But I guess there's been a speculation about what he wants from Greenland and it's obviously all the resources as the ice melts they're going to get all the lithium and all the gold or. Or Rob, is it all the fossils? Does he actually just want all the fossils? Oh, the fossils. Well, Iceland has been mentioned in this context but also Spiralbad in Norway, which is what we're going to be talking about today because there is a motherload of interesting fossils hidden under the ice and as it melts away we're going to see all sorts of cool stuff that you're going to tell me about today. Hey, I'm. Okay, so Suzy, before we get into it, so what have you been up to this week? The only thing of note that I did really was I played two games of indoor cricket on Sunday and I have discovered a range of muscles which I never knew existed but now really hurt. Well done. If it's hurting that means it's working, right? That's the mantra. Well, no pain, no game right, Rob. And we won both games, so happy day. Oh, excellent. I'm back on my bike and swimming again after a period of nursing, poorly ribs and overeating myself, so I'm trying to get back into shape. I mean, back into shape, in a sense that I'm a round blob sound, up on the bike, because the middle age man, let's recover my round shape. Anyway, let's get into the assours this week, right? So, well, okay, so it's not all about the assours, it's about the trastic. So, let's mention this one, Rob. There's a lot of fish. There's a lot of fish, but we've done the trastic more than any other period so far in our 21-22 episode run. Why is the trastic so exciting, do you think? I don't know. I mean, it's really long first, isn't it? It's 50 million years long. So, that's the thing, you know, it covers a lot, but also it is just a time when all sorts of weird things happened. It's bracketed by two mass extinctions. The end permeah mass extinction at the beginning, which we're going to talk about, the entriassic mass extinction at the end. And in between, there was all sorts of crazy weird reptile groups that evolved, went extinct, dominated terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and we're going to be talking about some of those today. So, I think it's that I think that there was all sorts of crazy things going on trastic. I guess because all those things are interrelated, right? All these weirdos turning up and diversifying is because of this massive extinction, the big one. So, can you tell us a bit about the end permean extinction, just as a bit of context? Yeah, so the end permeah mass extinction is 252. I think it's 51.9 million years ago. And it is the largest mass extinction, or thought to be the largest mass extinction that occurred, basically almost everything that was alive went extinct at the end of the permean. So estimates of up to 90% of all species that lived on earth went extinct. It affected the marine and the terrestrial realm. And it is thought to have been due to absolutely enormous volcanic eruptions in Siberia, known as the Siberian traps. And these are our vast outpourings of lava, which pump loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which effectively caused a kind of runaway greenhouse effect, right? So, you get all these kind of, you increase, you get carbon dioxide increase, and then that starts to warm things and then ice melts and that allows, you know, a permafrost melt, any permafrost there might have been at that time. And that, you know, allows things like methane deposits that are usually held in the permafrost to be released as well, and you get this sort of runaway global warming. So we had this, you know, very rapid global warming. And yeah, lots of things died. And then the sort of general belief is that ecosystems took really quite a long time to recover. So on land, you know, people are talking about kind of, you know, maybe 20 million years of recovery interval. In the marine realm, it seems to have been a bit shorter, but still, you know, maybe 8 to 10 million years, although I think what we're going to talk about today, maybe actually throw aside into some question. Yeah, I always tell my undergraduates that this is the big one. They dwarfs the one that's famous that website that I was, but it also could be changed life whenever, right? Things that happened before and after big change and the recovery is important. What's the way this paper comes into it? So what's the paper this week? So the paper we're going to talk about this week is called earliest oceanic tetrapod ecosystem reveals rapid complexification of triassic marine communities. And it was published in science, no less. And it actually got the front cover of science while we were at GP in November. So much excitement. It was published here on the 13th of November. And the lead author is Aubrey Roberts at the Natural History Museum of Oslo. And she is publishing this alongside colleagues from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and the senior author of the studies, Yorn Hurum. And also from Oslo. And they have had this very long program digging stuff up in Spalbart, which is of course in the Arctic, it's an archipelago in the Arctic. And have you been we've been up there? They did. They these guys hosted the AVP, didn't they? The European. Yeah, I would love to go. From my PhD, I worked on fossils. A lot of my fossils from the Devonian are from Spalbart or Spitzberg. So I would not to come, but all the collections were in Sweden and Norway and some in London as well. So I didn't actually need to go because there's plenty already sat there. So just to pay a bit of context, this Spalbart is this archipelago, as you said, like high up in the Arctic, normally part of Norway. But not many people live there, but not a lot. But there's a Russians used to live there. There's a big Russian minority of Pyramidin. Lots and lots of fossils from some minor from the Devonian, but also these are from these Jurassic, but they also got Jurassic things and great place fossils. Lots and lots of exposure as well. So we're dealing with a bit like Greenland, I guess, in the sense that, but less ice. Also, it's said, no, you have to carry a mass of shotgun every time you walk around down there. It's the law. You have to have a shotgun on you to keep away the polar bears. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I actually, they've got some Jurassic, you know, but it's it's shallow marine. They've got dinosaur footprints. You know, I felt if they got dinosaur footprints, surely there must be some fossils, but nobody fossils of dinosaurs have ever been found in Spalbart. So many years ago, I tried to put together a funding application to go and look for dinosaurs there, but never got it. Never got any money to do it. So I'd love to go. No, never been. And I really wanted to go when Aubrey the leader through this paper was hosting E.A.V.P. But I missed, I couldn't go. I was doing something else. So yeah, I got it. Yeah, fascinating place. Well, we'll talk about what field work is like out there, I guess, in a bit, but I guess they've been going out there for many, many field seasons. There's no each and team. They have. Yeah, yeah, they have for a long time. And then actually, Aubrey once showed me a photo of them doing, I think she posts fairly regularly on on Blue Sky and things like that of them doing field work. And they it's incredibly cold, obviously incredibly wet and incredibly muddy. And they basically wear like full body waterproofs like hazmat suits, you know, hoods and everything. They just Harvard in mud the whole time. I've got to say, you know, I'm a fair weather geologist, Rob as you know, and I enjoy field work in the desert. So I was looking at this going, yeah, I don't know. I looked at some of the pictures and it looks so muddy. The pictures don't really get across the temperature as well. Like they're actually caked in mud and the specimens look so difficult to wear with in the sense it's in this massive. Well, so I think the number of field seasons they spend up there, presumably only in the summer. I mean, I'm actually if they can't go with the winter because it will stop the whole time as well. Oh, yeah, yes, we're talking about land of the bid nice sun here. So yeah, I guess that's the thing. Yeah, long field there. I'd worry about that if I went up there for a field season up there because I know what some geologists are like, oh, yeah, still like this girl. It's midnight pal. Can we go to bed? No, it's a good. There's a bit of that attitude with geologists there. Not me. Not you. No, no, no, no, no, I'm five me. Yeah, maybe 10 to five. So they've got the so I interrupted you were telling me about the paper. Yeah, anyway, well, yeah, let's we get we get cracking with it. We talked about the mpermium mass extinction. So this is kind of, you know, the background of what's going on in this paper. Yeah, and we we I mentioned that there's this idea that marine ecosystems might have taken some time to recover after the mass extinction up to kind of eight million years into the middle triassic, the middle part triassic. And during this interval, you know, obviously our marine ecosystems are totally decimated. So I guess there's a lot of kind of vacant ecological spaces, isn't that the thing to radiate into. And during this interval in the triassic is it's the first time that we see tetrapods. So animals with legs, animals that live on land with legs, invading shallow marine niches. So tetrapods start to go back into water at this time in the very early triassic. And initially, we just see them in kind of near shore and shallow marine environments and ecosystems. And it's mostly just amphibians, ten no spawn deal amphibians, which are not really like the amphibians that we have today. They're not, you know, don't think frogs. They're like, they're quite. They're most one metal. Yeah, they are, aren't they? And they've got like these bizarre heads, they're sort of triangle, aren't they? Like heavily ornamented triangles. They just have these two kind of circles on top, which are their eyes and their flat. I don't know whether they're flat because they're fossils or or they're flat because they were just flat. I think they might have just had flat heads. I think when you think about pivions, you're thinking of something small or fragile that you could just kick away. I would not want to be a tennis fondle or dark night. Some of them are pretty, you know, for ocean looking. Large and teething. Anyway, so what happened in the, you know, first of all in the Triassic, as you see these amphibians, these ten-lost fondles in the in shallow waters, and then later on, after something that the authors in this study called the late Smithian Biotic Crisis, which occurred about one and a half million years after the mass extinction. So 249 and a half million years ago, there was this thing that happens, don't know why, but it after this, we then see kind of things like ichthyosaurs, which are what we're talking about, well, they are in a minute, and soroptoridians, we can talk about actually then kind of radiating out of shallow marine environments. These are reptile groups rather than amphibians, and actually kind of becoming big predators in oceanic, pelagic type environments. And kind of the prevailing, this is the prevailing story, and that they didn't really do this until, until after the, the Smithian, the late Smithian Biotic Crisis, and you know, into the middle Jurassic, basically. So ichthyosaurs, Rob, tell us about ichthyosaurs. You are the fish, they're the same thing, aren't they? ichthyosaurs look like a dolphin, but they are marine reptiles. So you often see them in dinosaur books and movies and whatnot, they're not dinosaurs, they're their own lineage from something a bit lizard-y, but they're very much a dolphin, but a lizard version, I guess, is the way to say it, is it a terrestrial tetrapods that is moved back into land and have filled that role of being a sort of predator in the ocean, and they dominate the ocean and spoil the Jurassic, well, the latter for the Jurassic, Jurassic and Gratations. Yeah, they're quite, they're funny aren't they, because they sort of, to some extent, spring into the fossil record fully formed as well, right? So where they fit in kind of reptile evolution is a bit of a mystery, isn't it? Yeah, and that always annoys me in a sense that there's such a massive, important fossil group that we don't, you'd have thought we'd have a clear idea about where they actually sit in the evolution tree. They're a lizard-y, stakey, the top thing, is my recollection of this, right? Yeah, so, well, apparently some very recent studies have actually placed them within our chasaurimorphs, or as a sister-taxer to our chasaurimorphs, so the. So my information's out of date? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I think I would say that the jury's still out on that. Okay. So reptiles, you've got two big groups of reptiles, you've got the things, the lapidosaurs, the lapidosaurimorphs, which are things like lizards and snakes, and then you've got the arcasols, which today are represented by the crocodiles and birds, but of course in past, were also represented by the dinosaurs, and then you've got these marine things that are really tricky, turtles are another one. Oh, that's not good too. That's a whole other can of worm. It is a whole other can of worms, and you know, I guess the sort of, yeah, the. the. theosaurs and also the sauropter regions, so things like pleasier soils, which are the kind of long neck marine reptiles, they have. they were always kind of thought to be marine lizards, basically, weren't they? Like, closely related to lizards or something like that, but actually, recent, some recent analysis suggested that they're actually. they might actually be more closely related to crocodiles and they are to lizards, so. But yeah, we don't know. Part of the problem is because we don't have the very earliest record of them, which is the context of what this paper is. Absolutely, absolutely. And actually, there was a paper by the authors of this study, the same authors in 2023, so the. this was. they were traditionally thought to have evolved, you know, in this early triassic interval. So part of the issue, you know, it could be that what we see is. is after the impermium mass extinction, we have some very rapid kind of radiations of tax, or I guess it's a. they can eat a logical space, a bit like we see at the end of the critatious, potentially, where we see very, very rapid explosive evolution of mammals and birds, and it could be that we see the same sorts of things with ictusors, but actually the authors of this paper, the same authors, based on fossils from Spalbad, from the same rocks as we're talking about today, actually described a relatively derived large body dictusor from about 250 million years ago, which is just just after the entrastic mass extinction, and that. and because it's relatively derived, it pushes back the origin of ictusors, potentially even into the into the late Permian. So it might be that they, you know, that the. we're looking in the wrong place for the the origin of the ictusors, and they might actually be late Permian, or, you know, have a. - That would be a bit of a shock, wouldn't it? But that's interesting idea. - Anyway, yeah, so we should talk about this paper though. - Yep. - So this paper, it reports the earliest known oceanic tetrapod community, so the first in the fossil record. And there's some great names in this paper. There's. it's from the Viking Holger, the Viking Holger's formation, on Marmia fly it in central Spitzberg, and I've probably pronounced all of those words wrong, so I'd like to apologise to all of the authors for that, but it's quite fun Viking Holger. So this formation, it's already famous for its fossils, it's got lots of ictusors in, it's got bunch of fish and stuff like that, but this particular new discovery is a concentration lagerstata, so that's like where you have loads and loads and loads of bones and or fossils, fossils, other thing, all together in one place, so they're incredibly kind of densely packed. It's a bone bed, and they call it the grippier bone bed in this paper, so I'm not going to continue to call it the Viking Holger all the way through, I'll just call it the grippier bone bed, it's probably best for everybody. And this bone bed comes from. I mentioned this late Smithian Bartik Crisis and this bone bed comes from immediately after it, so it's about somewhere around 249 million years old, so within two million years of the mass extinction. There are some invertebrates that they found in it, not very many, but some of the invertebrates they found indicate that it was an outer shelf setting, so it's a deep marine environment, and that's how they can tell that this is an oceanic community. So elements in the bone bed are very disarticulated, that's a thing about some of these concentration lagerstata, they're often not, you know, in not preserving beautifully, articulated remains here. Have you looked at figure two Rob in the paper? Yeah, I have, yeah, we've got. This is what Chubbordman maybe think about how much hard work this must have been, so they've got absolutely acres of fossils preserved in this bone bed, but it's all disarticulated and tiny bits and pieces, so they've got vertebrae, we've got teeth, we've got, you know, bits of bones, but not very rare, are they actually anything complete? So this must have, as a consequence, taken absolutely ages to undertake this work, because if you've got all these disarticulated vertebrae and teeth and jaw bones and whatnot, going through and identifying each one of them, we're just going to slow painful work. I really want to take my hat off to these guys. Absolutely, and I mean, we're just preparing them out as well. I have actually seen some of the material, some of the the rock, and you know, there's lumps of phosphate and chunks of bone, it's all washed up, and it's, yeah, I mean, also the amount of like anatomical expertise you have to have, because there's all sorts of things in here, isn't there? I mean, you've got everything, they've got lots of different sorts of fish, they've got sharks, condracthians, they've got rapines, fish, they actinopteridians, lobefin fish, the sarcopteridians, so they've got some bits of sea lacanthan, even lungfish here, right, which I was surprised about, because I thought lungfish were freshwater, but maybe they weren't in the early Jurassic. They've got temnospondyls, ocasauromorphs, ictusores, they've got loads of poo, they've got loads and loads of poppouralites, and the invertebrates are mostly preserved in the poo, I think, from what I could tell. But yeah, and you know, bits of bone, as you say, isolated vertebrae, yeah, really difficult material to work with, and actually, I think I remember Aubrey presenting on the ocasauromorph material here a couple of years ago, SVP, and saying, "I've got some vertebrae, I think they're ocasauromorph, not really sure what they are, anybody got any idea, let me know." And I suspect that was actually some of the material from this bone bed that she was working one at the time, but yeah. I think a thing that is really interesting, for me, obviously, is that there is this apparent ocasauromorph material. So, as we said earlier, ocasauras are related, the group today that are represented by burs and crocs, but they also have a whole bunch of other taxa that are extinct, and this is the oldest ocasauromorph, marine ocasauromorph, I think, in the fossil record. So, is that right? I think it is, or at least pelagic one. Certainly, it's the first in the trassic, so quite an interesting animal. But they've got it then. What is this ocasauromorph? Well, they don't know. Obviously, they have a really name, they don't name any taxa in this paper, which I think is probably wise, isn't it? I mean, they say that they've got things that they can refer. They call it like vanclevia, like. Yeah. I see, so they've got just, they've got some vertebrae in it, and it's an helium, and so bits that. Oh, yeah, man, this is just unscoring how hard all of this would have been to just do this work. How tough to all breathe the team. Good lord. Fifty isolated vertebrae and a singolilium from this animal. Other occurrences of them are thought to be from the middle triassic. But ectusors are the most abundant tetrapods, and there's loads of them from this bonebeds. And actually, grippias, as I said, it's called the grippier bonebeds, and it's. That's named after one of the ectusors that they find here, and it's known, grippias known from these rocks anyway. And they've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of animals. this thing, which is mental right, hundreds of elements of Hick this was and they've got some Hick this was that they were thought to are known from later in the Triassic but weren't known from this early. So they've got this great big thing called Symbol Spondylus which is five meters long. So yeah, really some great big stuff going on here too. So a whole range of different things. And then they use this because they've got so much they're able to essentially suggest a kind of food web and or trophic pyramid that be kind of tearing structure of the the. They've got a variety of different things that they could say that they've got some smaller things that might have been eaten the invertebrates than things eating them and things eating them including some massive chunky ones at the top of the food chain. Yeah. Well yeah and they've got they've got some like durifagus fish haven't they? So some fish that were probably crushing invertebrates and then they've got some fish that were probably eating other invertebrates and other fish and things like that as well haven't they? So yeah they what I think is the really key thing here is that they're able to show that they've got this kind of structure to the ecosystem. So they've got three three tiers four tiers as you say and at the very top they've got this five meter longick this or Symbol Spondylus which they say is the the oldest known marine reptilian macro predator. That's a record. So that's fun. And they compare it then to a whole bunch of other kind of triassic foreigners that are found. So I'm looking at figure four or are you looking at figure four? Yeah so I was trying to dig into this earlier because that's kind of what the important to this paper is. So it's an awful lot of work they've got this lovely new deposit, loads and loads of the diverse stuff predators you know macro predator you know a whole ecological diversity including some archa soils as you pointed out and igreous soils from some of the earliest things ever. But the important bigger macro picture is comparing it with the other triassic deposits. One of which I was quite familiar with is it also created that was stir that came out two years ago was this one from China. So this one from China was the day formation or greenling. So that one I'd already tried to cover for a little I tried to create this all YouTube channel to reflect 60 second pay go. And that was one of the two papers I covered for a gay book because it was too difficult. I have now noticed that someone else has come up with this 60 second pay go to the court said they didn't even use the same name per pay to the well done. I mean I did two videos like it. Oh my god. Yeah. So was it one minute pay go I can't remember but the point is I find you go ahead do it. Why not go and check them out and see what they've got to say. But in this paper they had this new deposit from China which had a big diversity of the fish and they were able to make the story that this was covered very quickly. Okay. And that one was important because they indicate that they within the fish only they had this trophy structure. So that's an interesting point of comparison with this particular one because this one has the fish but also all these other tetraport type version. So this is an interesting comparison point. But really I guess the actually what this isn't playing is that the action and the trace is happening much earlier than we thought originally right that's that's the main take home message right. I mean that that is the take home message and you know I think if so what they've got a figure here where they're showing what the kind of make up of all these other assemblages and there are assemblages known from earlier you know they have this one what's WCG the Wurdy Creek group which I think they said was from Australia was that right which is you know immediately after the end permeamass extinction and they actually do have older foreigners older marine foreigners but they're all dominated by fish. So they're you know they've all got as I said at the beginning you know they've got lots of acts and up to regions in as that that one you were just talking about the day daygie they form a foreigner and some of them also have these temnospondils that we talked about beginning but this is the oldest one the gripper bone bed is the oldest one that has ictusors so reptiles in it and an oxal yeah an oxaliform so yeah that's that's the key thing here that's what's different right is it's the oldest one that's kind of got this evidence of ictusors and coming out into the into the kind of pelagic realm and dominating these communities so yeah what the authors are saying from this paper is although this bone bed is immediately after this smithy and barcic crisis it because it's so well structured and so well tears I think their argument is that you know already it's evident that maybe this late smithy and barcic crisis had less impact on marine communities and was previously realised and actually there were you know well structured fully functioning oceanic communities within two million years of the impairment mass extinction and this really causing to question this idea that you've got this very long recovery interval from the past. Had you had you I hadn't heard of the smithy and crisis before this paper have you? No and actually we're struggling with the I've heard of the smithy and in the spathion but they're not formal stratigraphic terms so I was actually kind of struggling with the dating of these and where they are and I suspect maybe are they just boreal or they just known from kind of the boreal realm and not not known globally so no I hadn't I hadn't but it's about three million years after the big extinction right and the and so I guess the old expectation was there wasn't a lot happening in that three million years of work for a gap. I think it's two million years with 49 years that right okay sorry yeah 249.6 but it looks like there's a lot of e-lifters in activity happening in that period that we need to get a hold on and actually we can maybe learn the story as you were saying earlier we need to learn the story from the end criticist one right the birds and mammals but the amount of data we have now showing that that wrapped out the diversification was super super rapid which makes it really really hard to reconstruct the phylogenies and the the rates and the recovery right we got a lot of good data about that almost pointing out that it might be unsolvable because it happened yeah so quickly absolutely yeah it looks like the same thing might be happening here I think that's a good point of comparison that you made earlier that I'm repeating what you said yeah I mean I you know that that might be the key to why we can't why we don't know what the origin of some of these marine reptile groups are right is because they they radiated it explosively yeah I mean the other thing the the authors do touch on a little bit but not in any depth because obviously this is a science paper and that is limited by the length is whether there's any sort of sampling bias or kind of environmental bias going on in these earlier marine foreigners so where we have these very fish dominated foreigners and then suddenly we see an atheist or dominated foreigner I mean this is a relatively unusual fossil deposit isn't it I mean I have this kind of very dense conservation and a lot of data now I don't know anything about these other foreigners but you know are we are they similar or you know are we missing part of the cast of characters that lived in these ecosystems because we're we're not you know they're not preserved in in the same way that we're seeing in the grippy bone bent so is it yeah certainly is it a sampling thing yeah certainly given the autonomy of this space the preservation of this place is the bone bed so so it's all potentially I mean they don't they say that it hasn't been that much sorting so that they can but that wouldn't provide to me there's at least some level of transport and disserticulation which presumably means there's a bias about the sorts of things that are not preserved like oh indeed they highlight the fact that what loads of bones from vertebrates but not a lot of invertebrates which is yeah sort of false-hunting preservation isn't it yeah so the ecosystem is therefore in balance right you don't have an ecosystem there's just predators that needs to be subpray in there as well so that indicates that there may be a missing part of the story and yeah whether or not that's happening elsewhere I don't know but that's also the adverb you got to take the rough with the smooth right the advantage is you've got absolutely loads of stuff for a unique window so that's that's the plus but the negative might being there is potentially you know filtered but I mean I guess the other thing is that there may well be other deposits out there like this that people have just gone no too hard loads of its bone can't cope with it and you know actually I guess a message from this paper is if you you know if you're willing to put the working and figure out what all these little bits are then actually you know the rewards are pretty high right that you could get out of it yes I'm not about to I mean we should maybe learn a lesson from all breeze perseverance and hard work but I'm not sure I've made the same stuff as all breeze scrambling around in the mud in the Arctic for years on years slowly piecing this together I'm not sure I've got the metal but maybe I would do if it was a pay off I mean obviously the pay off is huge right that's that's the thing here that's the thing exactly yeah yeah so interesting but I thought it was an interesting little paper and obviously front cover science lovely paleo art so you know yeah you got to put that on the on the lips in website Rob you got to yeah I will I'll buy some nice images they've got so side note this is thinking about our listeners at home most of the papers we do have been open access and we talked about that before that means anyone could download it this one's behind a paywall so if you're not an institution you may struggle to get a handle on it so I'll try and provide some links if you're not at a university institution for like some extra contexts some pictures and files so there's a nice coverage by the nutrition museum and I found some slides that you and Haram had put together of showing loads of pictures of their field work so I'll try and show that because that that's nice because he's got loads of pictures of this bottle this is included so how do I pronounce his name you're with Haram yeah so he's got a presentation online so you'll know you've already run away from the region yeah so they've got loads of pictures of the field work and the specimens which I think would be probably the bit that people would find more interesting anyway I'll make sure I share that yeah great so I normally ask you what the takeer message is what I mean but we've already covered that I guess what do you think the takeer message is well I think it's that you know ecosystems appear to to have recovered marine ecosystems at least much, much faster than previously realized and that we actually had, you know, these fully functioning oceanic reptile dominated ecosystems within two million years of the end permeamass extinction. So maybe we need to go back and have another look at other places around the world in this gap to see whether there's any evidence of them of this early these early communities anywhere else. Yeah, and it does seem to be quite global, right? So, you know, on that little figure they showed where they compared all these different ones are some in Madagascar, some Australia, some in the Arctic. So this indicates that there's plenty more to be discovered out there. Just get digging. That's easier said than done though, right? That's as evidenced by the idea that this takes years of efforts to get to that point. Yes. More thank you, Sexy, for bringing me lots and lots of tiny bits of triaxic stuff. I guess that's not the, not necessarily the fossils themselves are underwhelmed, but their implications are massive. Yeah, what's nice to do is that it's like, you know, it's nice to have a mix between beautiful beautiful specimens, which we have done. Yes. Yes. And some of these kind of, you know, less beautiful specimens, but big implications. Yeah. So thinking ahead to next time, I think we might be doing a little coverage of a couple of our own papers that are coming out at the moment next time. But we were going to ask our audience to participate in choosing the next paper for us next time. That will be helpful because it's quite a lot of effort, Rob, to go and find you with this paper. So maybe if somebody else could just tell us what to talk about, that'd be great. Well, well, this is making it even more effort because I've had to select a short list that people could choose from. Whether we work on this, the people to make their own suggestions to us. So you can contact us via various different channels. We're going to share it on our YouTube channel and our Blue Sky and Instagram. I don't know where people hang out online nowadays, up to Twitter's devolved into a purely horrible hellscape. But you can vote and let us know which one you want or make suggestions. So let me see if I can bring up a short list of our right. So coming up on this list of things that we might be interested, do we want to know about mass extinctions, triggering the radiation of Jolus and Jord versus British and the Devonian or Salaria, sorry, I should say, yes. Oh, you're going to do all new is for each of them. Long next in the earliest sauropodamor for the Traastica Vagintina, more Traastica, so cut. Oh, sharp, evolution dynamics. You know, is it the young species that goes things? Why and how? Brain mammal endocarths show that evolution to smell and correlate with genomes. Oh, that sounds interesting. That's on the short list for now. That's probably enough to choose from. Oh, we might be back before so fails as well. We've got a few fossil fails lined up, haven't we? Yeah, that's so that those are separate ones. Yeah, well, I'm not going to ask people if they want fossil fuels because I want to take fossil fail, so I think you want to do fossil fuels. Definitely might as well. Okay, well, check us out on those various different channels and I'll see you next time, do you think? See you next time, Rob. The fossil fuels was recorded by a proper censor and she's an amade man. We want to hear what you think. You can let us know your thoughts on the papers that we have discussed and you can make suggestions for papers for us to talk about on our social media channels. You can find our email address links to our Instagram, boost our YouTube channels on our website, fossils.lipsin.com.