The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2580 - Kenneth Lacovara

00:00:01 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

00:00:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:12 Kenneth.

00:00:13 Hey.

00:00:14 Dinosaurs.

00:00:14 Yes.

00:00:15 I reached out because I got so frustrated one day.

00:00:18 I went down this rabbit hole of all these people that don't believe dinosaurs are real.

00:00:22 Like, what the fuck?

00:00:25 And I understand if you have, you know, just a very limited understanding.

00:00:32 Of why some of the bones that are in museums are recreations and some of them are real.

00:00:38 And there's a lot of people out there that are saying some really stupid shit.

00:00:43 And so I really wanted to bring in an actual legitimate paleontologist who's a dinosaur expert that could help illuminate us.

00:00:49 Because I think there's a lot of wasted thinking and a lot of wasted talking about fucking dinosaurs.

00:00:55 It's driving me nuts.

00:00:58 I'm sure you must be inundated.

00:00:59 There's so many people that think dinosaurs never existed.

00:01:03 Yeah, well, there's a reason why my back hurts.

00:01:11 You know, first, like, I appreciate the skepticism.

00:01:14 Like, sure.

00:01:15 That's good.

00:01:16 And when dinosaurs were first realized as a thing in the middle part of the 19th century, it was good to be skeptical, right?

00:01:24 That's a big claim.

00:01:25 Well, there are a lot of hoaxes, too.

00:01:27 We should be clear about that.

00:01:28 There have been in the history of paleontology.

00:01:30 Especially in the early days, right?

00:01:31 Yeah.

00:01:32 But, you know, This would require this massive conspiracy from different continents, different countries, people that have never met each other, people that didn't live at the same time.

00:01:44 Yes.

00:01:45 I think it's hard to scale a conspiracy like this, right?

00:01:49 I have a friend who was on a ranch in Montana when a T Rex was discovered.

00:01:54 Yeah.

00:01:55 Well, I'm an eyewitness.

00:01:57 I've dug up many, many dinosaurs with my own hands.

00:02:00 I've got the scars to prove it.

00:02:02 But what I would say is, you know, Don't believe me, science isn't a belief system, right?

00:02:07 Go outside and dig up some fossils for yourself.

00:02:11 And the thing about paleontology is it's a science, and so we can make predictions and we can test those predictions.

00:02:20 So, depending on where you live in the world, I can predict whether you will find fossils or not.

00:02:26 And if you will find fossils, I can predict what kind of fossils you will find because creatures lived at different times, right?

00:02:34 And so, if you live in upstate New York, You're not going to find dinosaurs.

00:02:39 Your rocks are too old, but you will find some cool trilobites in your Ripterids and things like that, right?

00:02:45 If you live in Florida, you're not going to find many dinosaurs or a couple little pockets, but your rocks are too young in general, right?

00:02:53 And so you have to find rocks that are between about 237 million years old and 66 million years old to find non avian dinosaurs.

00:03:02 I say that because birds are dinosaurs.

00:03:04 And if you have rocks of the right age that are sedimentary rocks and you have exposures of those rocks, Go outside and find dinosaurs.

00:03:12 That's what I do.

00:03:14 Now, when were you first exposed to this dinosaurs are fake thing?

00:03:21 I don't know a particular time, but you definitely hear it.

00:03:25 But is this a recent thing?

00:03:26 This is what I'm confused.

00:03:27 I never heard this my whole life.

00:03:29 Like growing up, I never heard this.

00:03:31 Never heard it in high school.

00:03:33 Never heard it until fairly recently, like within the last decade.

00:03:37 Well, I think it's kind of tied to creationism, right?

00:03:41 Oh, okay, right.

00:03:42 There are people that think the earth is 6,000 years old.

00:03:45 Wait a minute, it's not?

00:03:46 Well, wait, hold on.

00:03:49 How old do you think it is?

00:03:50 Well, I think it's 4.567 billion years old.

00:03:54 I've got a book I need you to read.

00:03:57 So, when is this, but it has sort of ramped up, like the dinosaur skepticism is ramped up fairly recently, right?

00:04:07 I don't know.

00:04:07 I mean, I think there's just more people with a platform to say more things, right?

00:04:13 Right.

00:04:14 But I mean, personally, I don't hear it a lot.

00:04:16 Like, people don't walk up to me and say, hey, you're a hoax or dinosaurs aren't real.

00:04:21 Maybe they will now after the show.

00:04:23 Maybe they will now.

00:04:24 I'm probably going to make a lot of new friends now.

00:04:27 One of the things that I've heard you talk about that I think is really interesting for a lot of people is if you looked at the history of the Earth, the history of life on Earth, and you looked at it in terms of like a calendar, like as if it was, you know, first day is January 1st, like when do dinosaurs show up?

00:04:50 And you said they don't even show up until December 24th.

00:04:54 Yeah, it's amazing.

00:04:55 And so, you know, we kind of think we're what it's all about, right?

00:04:58 But if you start the Earth four and a half billion years ago on January 1st, It's not until Thanksgiving that we get complex life on Earth.

00:05:06 And by complex, I mean like little squirmy trilobites and things like that.

00:05:09 That's half a billion years ago.

00:05:11 So that's Thanksgiving.

00:05:13 The first dinosaurs show up in the second week of December and they persist for about 165 million years until an asteroid murders them the day after Christmas.

00:05:25 Right.

00:05:25 And so that's the whole run of the dinosaurs, second week of December to the day after Christmas.

00:05:30 And then our species, Homo sapiens, shows up 300,000 years ago.

00:05:35 That's about 20 seconds before midnight on the last night of the year.

00:05:42 That's so wild to think about it that way.

00:05:45 And the reason we can find so many dinosaur skeletons is because they were just here, right?

00:05:50 Like, if you see somebody at a New Year's Eve party and you want to refer to somebody that you just saw at Christmas, what do you say?

00:05:56 You say, like, oh, I just saw Bob.

00:05:58 Right.

00:05:59 I just saw him at Christmas.

00:06:00 And dinosaurs were just here.

00:06:02 It's only 2% of Earth history ago.

00:06:04 Right.

00:06:05 There's an issue with the fossil record in general, right?

00:06:09 And that issue is that it's very difficult to make a fossil.

00:06:12 Most things, when they die, will not make a fossil.

00:06:15 So, the vast majority of dinosaurs who died, there are no fossil records of.

00:06:21 I mean, imagine in your backyard today if a deer were to die there or a raccoon were to die there, there's almost no chance that it enters the fossil record, right?

00:06:21 Absolutely.

00:06:29 And so, the chance of any one individual becoming a fossil is almost zero, but it's not zero, right?

00:06:37 And we get to do the experiment.

00:06:39 There's a phrase I love, which is that unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot.

00:06:39 So many times.

00:06:47 That's great.

00:06:48 Yeah.

00:06:49 That's life and fossils in a nutshell.

00:06:52 Yeah.

00:06:53 Do you think that there are a bunch of dinosaurs, maybe some pretty extraordinary ones that we don't have a fossil record of?

00:07:00 Nearly all of them.

00:07:01 Nearly all of them.

00:07:01 Really?

00:07:02 Yeah.

00:07:02 I mean, dinosaurs are preferentially preserved in the fossil record.

00:07:09 And so the dinosaurs that we know the most about. Are the ones that live in places where sediment accumulates.

00:07:15 And whereas that's bottomlands, lowlands, right?

00:07:18 Like floodplains, coastlines.

00:07:20 So if you happen to live there, you have a better chance of making that transition from the biosphere to the geosphere.

00:07:27 But if you're a dinosaur that lives up in the mountains somewhere, like the dinosaur equivalent of a pronghorn or a bighorn sheep or a mountain goat, you're not going to get fossilized because mountains shed sediment, right?

00:07:38 Mountains are erosional, so you're not going to make a fossil there.

00:07:42 So there's probably whole environments that were occupied by dinosaur species that.

00:07:46 That we don't know about, that we'll probably never know about.

00:07:49 Right, so that's the thing for people to understand at home.

00:07:52 When a fossil is made, it's generally made because something gets trapped inside mud or trapped inside tar, like the debris of tar pits, something along those lines.

00:08:00 Well, those aren't really fossils, right?

00:08:02 We would call them sub fossils.

00:08:04 Sub fossils?

00:08:04 Yeah.

00:08:05 What is the distinction?

00:08:06 Well, they're not really very mineralized, right?

00:08:08 So it's still the original bone material.

00:08:10 Is that because of the age of them?

00:08:12 Yeah.

00:08:13 And they haven't, the mineralization process, what we call permineralization, occurs when you have groundwater that has minerals dissolved in it.

00:08:22 And then the minerals precipitate out in the pore spaces of the bone.

00:08:26 Think of like the stuff that builds up in your shower, right?

00:08:29 It's the same sort of process.

00:08:31 And so, to some degree, the bones then become a mineralic copy of their former selves.

00:08:37 Now, we used to think that was mostly the process, but now we know more and more that you can actually have not only original bone, but original soft tissue preserved in bones as well.

00:08:50 That's interesting.

00:08:51 And that's recently they found blood, right?

00:08:54 There's a report of that.

00:08:55 I think, you know, people are debating that occurrence.

00:09:00 My friend Mary Schweitzer, who's one of the founders of molecular paleontology, along with Beth Shapiro, who you've met from Colossal, I read that Mary is uncertain about that discovery.

00:09:13 She said that non mammalian blood cells should have a nuclear bulge and these ones don't.

00:09:18 And also that, you know, her criterion is that you report only if you can sample that exact structure, not a bulk sample, which I think it was.

00:09:27 So, I think it's possible.

00:09:29 I think it's well possible, but I think maybe the jury's out on that particular one.

00:09:34 So here it is here.

00:09:35 Scientists have discovered a trace of dinosaur blood preserved for 115 million years, shattering assumptions about how long biological molecules can survive.

00:09:44 Yeah, it would not surprise me at all, but I think that other scientists are going to be looking for ways to validate that claim.

00:09:56 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

00:09:57 And so this is the real problem with this whole Idea of Jurassic Park, right?

00:10:01 Like, we really don't have DNA from these things.

00:10:04 No, we don't.

00:10:05 We don't have any non avian dinosaur DNA.

00:10:08 We don't have any DNA that's that old.

00:10:11 The oldest DNA that we have from a single individual is a little more than a million years.

00:10:17 And environmental DNA, where you just sample the sediment and see what was in the environment, I think is about two million years.

00:10:22 Two million years is a long way from Dinosaurville.

00:10:25 Right, right, right, right.

00:10:27 You'd have to do some crazy science experiments with a chicken, right?

00:10:31 Like, if you wanted to make a dinosaur.

00:10:33 Well, that's another way of doing it is looking, you know, when evolution occurs, sometimes genes are, you know, left out of the sequence, but mostly they're just turned off.

00:10:44 So, something like a chicken has a lot of non avian dinosaur genes.

00:10:49 They haven't been active since non avian dinosaurs that are turned off.

00:10:53 And you could find those genes and potentially turn them back on again.

00:10:56 Or you could look for relatives that have genes that are missing from a chicken sequence and patch them back in.

00:11:02 It seems like you would be better suited starting off with like an ostrich.

00:11:06 Starting off with something that's already on the way.

00:11:08 You know, like a chicken, it's a little too small.

00:11:11 Ostrich, pretty big sucker, you know?

00:11:13 I think one of the things that makes a chicken attractive is because they're important commercially, there's just been so much work done on chickens.

00:11:21 Right.

00:11:21 So we know the chicken genome really well and know chickens really well.

00:11:24 And there's a lot of chickens available.

00:11:25 And there's a lot of chickens.

00:11:26 Yeah.

00:11:27 It's harder to find an ostrich.

00:11:29 Yeah.

00:11:29 So, you know, there was a thing that I saw on Instagram the other day, which is a bounty of amazing information.

00:11:35 I mean, you can't go wrong with Instagram.

00:11:37 But there was this guy who was refuting.

00:11:40 Was refuting evolution.

00:11:43 One of the ways he was refuting evolution, he was showing a teddy bear that had become fossilized because it had been exposed to some heavily mineralized waterfall or some shit.

00:11:56 He had this teddy bear and he's hitting the teddy bear with a hammer or a stick, making noise with it.

00:12:01 Look, this is hard as a rock.

00:12:02 This is a completely fossilized teddy bear.

00:12:05 Clearly, this is not millions of years old.

00:12:08 Evolution is fake.

00:12:09 It was really interesting.

00:12:12 There are circumstances where things can become mineralized much quicker, correct?

00:12:16 Aaron Powell They have to be.

00:12:18 So the process of fossilization is fairly rapid.

00:12:22 Otherwise, you wouldn't have anything left to fossilize.

00:12:24 Aaron Powell Okay.

00:12:25 Let's say if like Jamie dies.

00:12:27 Sorry, Jamie.

00:12:28 And Jamie dies in a mudslide.

00:12:30 Aaron Powell It could be anybody, by the way.

00:12:32 Aaron Powell Okay.

00:12:32 Sorry.

00:12:33 Let's pick somebody else.

00:12:34 Aaron Powell Some guy named Tom or something.

00:12:35 Aaron Powell Ari Shafir.

00:12:36 Aaron Powell My friend Aaron Powell Shafir.

00:12:37 What if Aaron Powell Ari dies in a mudslide?

00:12:39 Because he's most likely amongst us to die in a mudslide.

00:12:42 Aaron Powell He's closest to them at a more frequent basis.

00:12:44 He's always there.

00:12:45 He's always in this weird part of the world.

00:12:48 He's a traveler.

00:12:49 So, if he died in a mudslide, how long before his body would become a fossil?

00:12:55 It depends on the geochemical circumstances.

00:12:58 Best case scenario.

00:12:59 I mean, lots of minerals, lots of muck, lots of mud and stuff.

00:13:05 Months, years?

00:13:06 Yeah.

00:13:07 Months.

00:13:07 It has to happen fairly quick or other processes would destroy the body and the skeleton.

00:13:13 So, if you knew that he died in a mudslide, And you came back two years later.

00:13:17 You knew where he died, knew the spot, and you dug it up, you would find his fossilized skeleton a couple years later.

00:13:22 It would be what we would call a sub fossil at that point.

00:13:25 There would be mineralization that was happening.

00:13:27 Like the Liberia tarpets does.

00:13:28 And then by the time they turn into just a rock, which doesn't always happen, but some fossils have really just turned into minerals, that could be thousands of years or even longer.

00:13:28 Yeah.

00:13:41 But those initial processes that stabilize the organism have to happen really quickly.

00:13:47 Or the organism will decay away or weather away.

00:13:50 And this is the issue with finding fossilized things is that most things don't leave fossils.

00:13:50 Right.

00:13:57 Almost everything does not leave a fossil.

00:13:59 And the earth wants to consume.

00:14:00 Like there's a bunch of predators and a bunch of scavengers and a bunch of bacteria and a bunch of things and things decay and then you just have weathering and time, especially if the bones are exposed.

00:14:12 Yeah.

00:14:12 And then there's nothing pretty quickly.

00:14:14 You know, that's one way of just seeing how old the earth is, right?

00:14:18 Like if you have this.

00:14:20 This event that has an almost zero chance of happening, but we end up with a lot of fossils, it tells us that we have a lot of time with which to work, right?

00:14:28 Like multitudinous individuals over vast swaths of time leave an abundant fossil record, even though the chance of any one individual being fossilized is almost zero.

00:14:38 Isn't that crazy?

00:14:39 Almost zero.

00:14:40 Yeah.

00:14:40 So, what was the first dinosaur that was discovered?

00:14:43 And how did they make this distinction?

00:14:47 Because before even the term dinosaur, they just kind of referred to everything as a dragon, right?

00:14:53 Didn't they refer to them as dragons?

00:14:53 Like large reptiles.

00:14:56 Well, yeah, I mean, people have been finding fossils for as long as there's been people, right?

00:14:59 And they recognize them as different things at different times.

00:15:04 There's a fascinating area called folk paleontology, right?

00:15:07 And there's a woman, Adrienne Major, who's written a couple books about this.

00:15:11 And it's about ancient people or even historical people, they come across fossils and they don't know about dinosaurs yet, right?

00:15:20 They don't know about paleontology.

00:15:22 So people do what people do, which is we make stuff up.

00:15:25 We make stuff up, right?

00:15:26 We make up explanations.

00:15:27 And you can look at certain things like, you know, if you see some dinosaur vertebrae weathering out of the Gobi Desert, well, you might think they're dragons, right?

00:15:37 Or she contends that Protoceratops, which is a tiny relative of Triceratops, has a very pointy head with a beak, has a quadrupedal body.

00:15:49 Well, like head of an eagle, body of a lion, right?

00:15:52 The griffon.

00:15:53 Or she might say, you know, in During the Pleistocene, we have dwarving of animals that are living in Mediterranean islands like Sicily and Malta and Crete.

00:16:05 Well, if you look at an elephant skull and you imagine a dwarf elephant, the nose hole in an elephant, the nares, are coalesced into a single hole that's up here.

00:16:14 It looks like a cyclops, right?

00:16:16 And so that might be where a lot of these legendary animals come from.

00:16:20 But dinosaurs are first recognized from really scrappy remains that start turning up in Britain in the early part of the 19th century.

00:16:28 And they can't really tell what they are because their remains are so poor.

00:16:31 There's three that are initially named as separate species Megalodon, Hylaiosaurus, and Iguanodon.

00:16:42 And in 1842, a British anatomist named Richard Owens describes them as a group of crocodile lizards, which they're not.

00:16:52 And he gives them the name dinosaur.

00:16:54 And he doesn't even know that this is a big deal.

00:16:56 He buries it on like page 250 of the Mesozoic Reptiles of Great Britain.

00:17:01 Britain, and he just kind of throws a little line in there about there's this tribe of crocodile lizards, and we'll call them dinosaurs.

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00:18:00 So when you said Megalodon, I'm sorry, Megalosaurus.

00:18:03 Megalosaurus.

00:18:04 Okay, I was confused.

00:18:05 Definitely not Megalodon.

00:18:06 Megalosaurus.

00:18:07 What?

00:18:07 Yeah.

00:18:08 Okay, so is this one of the first jaws of Megalosaurus that was found?

00:18:12 Yeah.

00:18:13 Yeah, I imagine you find it.

00:18:14 How big is that?

00:18:15 It's a big dinosaur.

00:18:17 I'm not sure the exact dimensions, probably 25, 30 feet.

00:18:20 25, 30 feet long.

00:18:21 So that's a large jaw.

00:18:22 That's a chunk.

00:18:24 Yeah, it's big.

00:18:25 So that's what it looks like?

00:18:26 Well, I don't know.

00:18:27 Is that Megalodon?

00:18:28 I'm not sure that is.

00:18:29 That's a picture from the article about Megalosaurus.

00:18:31 Megalosaurus, sorry.

00:18:32 What's that, Jamie?

00:18:33 It's a picture from the article about it, same article that the other one was.

00:18:36 It looks like.

00:18:37 So if you look at the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

00:18:41 And so these are the first artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs based on these really scrappy remains.

00:18:48 And they just have no idea what they are.

00:18:50 They're made by really the first paleo artist named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

00:18:56 And they look like monsters because he doesn't know what they are.

00:18:59 They look like a CRISPR accident between a lizard and a pineapple.

00:19:03 So, what do they look like?

00:19:04 So, there they are.

00:19:05 And you can still go and see them today.

00:19:07 They're a little bit south of London.

00:19:09 And so, that was our first conception.

00:19:13 Owls, dinosaurs.

00:19:15 These are, I think, 1850s, middle part of the 19th century.

00:19:22 That's when they made these sculptures?

00:19:23 Yeah.

00:19:23 Wow.

00:19:24 Go back to the actual sculptures, Jeremy, please.

00:19:27 So, this is based on that 1842 report of what dinosaurs are.

00:19:31 So, that's what we think they are.

00:19:33 And then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found.

00:19:40 Guess where?

00:19:41 Where?

00:19:41 New Jersey.

00:19:42 Really?

00:19:43 So, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

00:19:43 Yeah.

00:19:48 If you look up.

00:19:49 No, look up Hadrosaurus.

00:19:52 And Hadrosaurus is found in a marl mine in southern New Jersey, a little town right outside.

00:19:59 Philadelphia.

00:20:00 And it's the first mounted dinosaur skeleton.

00:20:03 They have enough bones to mount.

00:20:06 And it's taken up to, yeah, that left picture, the black and white one.

00:20:11 Yeah.

00:20:12 So that's the first mounted skeleton of a dinosaur.

00:20:16 I think that's an illustration of the mount.

00:20:20 Yeah, that doesn't look like a picture.

00:20:21 Yeah.

00:20:21 So it's taken up to New York.

00:20:22 The same guy that did those sculptures in London then does this.

00:20:28 And so they're mounted in New York.

00:20:30 They're taken to Philadelphia.

00:20:33 And it's kind of the founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences, which fortunately just ceased being open to the public.

00:20:42 Fortunately or unfortunately?

00:20:43 Unfortunately.

00:20:44 Oh, very unfortunate.

00:20:45 Very unfortunate.

00:20:45 I was like, what?

00:20:46 Are you a hater?

00:20:47 No, I love the Academy.

00:20:51 So they are mounted, they're taken to the Academy, and it kind of creates this incredible public interest.

00:21:00 People are lined up around the blocks to see this dinosaur skeleton.

00:21:04 Kind of creates the dino mania that we still have in the world today.

00:21:08 I always say that England is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontology, but southern New Jersey is the cradle of dinosaur paleontology.

00:21:15 Interesting.

00:21:17 First, nearly complete skeleton found there in 1858, and then the world's first tyrannosaur discovered was not T Rex.

00:21:24 There's about 28 species of tyrannosaur that we know of.

00:21:27 First one discovered also in southern New Jersey, about a mile from the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum where I work.

00:21:34 Now, let me ask you this about the first dinosaur, Hydrosaurus.

00:21:36 Is that I say it right?

00:21:38 Hadrosaurus was the first nearly complete one.

00:21:40 How did they know whether it stood upright or.

00:21:44 I mean, they had it posed in this very looming.

00:21:46 Yeah.

00:21:47 They didn't, and they got it wrong, actually.

00:21:49 Yeah.

00:21:50 So you'll see those old reconstructions kind of have them making like a tripod, kind of like a kangaroo does when it's just hanging out.

00:21:59 And we don't think they did that today.

00:22:01 We would put the spine like parallel with the ground.

00:22:05 Trevor Burrus, could you just show us an image of what they think?

00:22:09 Hadrosaurus looked like?

00:22:10 Yeah, we have.

00:22:12 So that's the skeleton, and you think, like, what is an accurate representation?

00:22:16 Yeah, I think that's pretty good.

00:22:17 If you look at our museum, the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum and Hadrosaurus, we have a fleshed out reconstruction that I think is, you know, as accurate as we can be right now.

00:22:28 Well, isn't that an issue, though, with the fleshed out stuff you're just kind of guessing?

00:22:33 Like, I'm sure you've seen what a hippo skeleton looks like.

00:22:36 Yeah, like a monster.

00:22:37 Crazy.

00:22:39 Crazy.

00:22:39 Like you would never imagine.

00:22:41 It looks like hungry, hungry hippo.

00:22:43 Like, oh, you know, big, sweet, cuddly.

00:22:45 Right.

00:22:46 It's not really, but looks like it is in kids' toys.

00:22:49 Yeah, that's what you think it looked like.

00:22:51 Yeah, I mean, that is our best approximation.

00:22:54 But it's just a guess, right?

00:22:55 Because you don't really know what the tissue looked like.

00:22:55 Well.

00:22:58 Yeah, I mean, more than a guess, but it could have soft tissue features that we don't know about for sure.

00:23:04 The color, we're guessing.

00:23:06 That we don't know.

00:23:07 And so what we do is we look at modern analogs.

00:23:10 So what does a herd animal look like?

00:23:12 Or we have a baby hadrosaurus.

00:23:13 What does a.

00:23:14 A small forest herbivore looks like.

00:23:17 And for that, we used a baby tapir, right?

00:23:19 Because they have that camouflaged color.

00:23:21 So, color, we don't know about.

00:23:24 We don't know if they were shrink wrapped or real blubbery, that sort of thing.

00:23:28 And then they could have soft tissue structures that we won't know about.

00:23:33 Jamie, just for fun, pull up the hippo skeleton versus an actual hippo because it's so kooky.

00:23:40 That to me is one of the most drastic ones.

00:23:42 Yeah, or like a goose, right?

00:23:44 If you don't know what a goose looks like and you don't know the feathers, it looks like a little demon.

00:23:47 Well, even a rabbit.

00:23:48 Yeah.

00:23:49 Rabbits look crazy.

00:23:50 Yeah.

00:23:51 Yeah, there you go.

00:23:52 Like, look at the skeleton of a hippo.

00:23:54 How nuts is that?

00:23:55 It's bizarre.

00:23:56 It's wild.

00:23:57 You would imagine that would be like the most terrifying, ferocious, demon looking creature.

00:23:57 Right.

00:24:03 But then you see them, you're like, oh, hello, buddy.

00:24:06 Except they are terrifying.

00:24:07 No, they're fucking terrifying.

00:24:08 Yeah.

00:24:09 They're pretty amazing creatures.

00:24:11 Yeah.

00:24:12 And responsible for, I think, they're like the second most deadly animal in Africa.

00:24:16 You do not want to be around a hippo.

00:24:17 Yeah.

00:24:18 Super aggressive, giant, pig like thing.

00:24:20 Chase boats.

00:24:21 Yeah.

00:24:22 So, Obviously, if we had a hippo skeleton, we would fuck that up.

00:24:26 Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:24:27 And an elephant, like, would we put the trunk on an elephant?

00:24:30 I'm not sure that we would.

00:24:31 And then what do you know about an elephant if you don't know about the trunk?

00:24:31 Right.

00:24:34 Right.

00:24:35 So there's a lot we don't know about dinosaurs, but that's what keeps us in business, right?

00:24:39 If we knew everything, we'd stop.

00:24:41 Of course.

00:24:41 Yeah.

00:24:43 So how much do we know about skin texture?

00:24:47 Because there have been some fossilized impressions of the texture of the skin, correct?

00:24:52 Correct.

00:24:53 So, it depends on the group of dinosaurs.

00:24:54 So, hadrosaurs, which we know best because hadrosaurs seem to like wetland areas and so does sediment, we have tens of thousands of hadrosaur remains.

00:25:06 And we know them from their skeletons, we know them from their eggs, from their embryos, from preserved skin.

00:25:12 So, there are a few hadrosaurs that are preserved in 3D, and we can see their skin, we can see their gut contents.

00:25:19 In one case, we can see gut parasites.

00:25:22 Yeah.

00:25:22 Really?

00:25:23 So, you've got skin, you've got gut.

00:25:26 You've got gut parasites?

00:25:27 Not gut, but gut contents.

00:25:29 You can see like sediment, and they get pollen out of the gut of hadrosaurs, so you can see what plants they were eating.

00:25:35 What is the best thing that Jamie could look up?

00:25:37 You could find the most common thing.

00:25:39 There's a hadrosaur that goes by the name Leonardo.

00:25:43 So I don't give dinosaurs names, but I call Leonardo JDRI 115H.

00:25:49 Oh, like a prisoner.

00:25:50 Yeah.

00:25:51 Why do you do that?

00:25:51 You don't want them to be.

00:25:52 Well, because they're my specimens.

00:25:53 They're not my buddies, you know.

00:25:54 But if you look up duck bill dinosaur Leonardo, you'll probably find it.

00:25:59 Okay.

00:26:00 Yeah.

00:26:00 So when they found this, what year was this where they found this fairly complete version of it?

00:26:05 I think it was around 2000, maybe.

00:26:09 Wow.

00:26:10 I went out and saw it and did a little bit of work on it in 2003, I think.

00:26:14 That's really pretty complete.

00:26:16 When you see that thing, it's like being in a room with a dinosaur.

00:26:19 It's 3D.

00:26:20 Well, that's the issue that I have where people say there are no complete dinosaurs.

00:26:20 Yeah.

00:26:25 This is like one of the things that gets repeated in these dinosaur debunking videos.

00:26:30 They're like, guys, that's not true.

00:26:32 Well, we have.

00:26:34 They have really close to complete, like close enough.

00:26:37 Yeah.

00:26:37 It's much more likely that they're fucking real than everybody's in on this hoax.

00:26:41 Right.

00:26:41 And completeness is.

00:26:43 Look at that.

00:26:44 Is that like the tail?

00:26:46 Yeah, that's tail right there.

00:26:47 Whoa.

00:26:48 That's nuts.

00:26:49 So, what am I looking at?

00:26:50 Like, what is that feature?

00:26:52 Well, the tail there, it looks like you're looking at.

00:26:58 I think you're looking at some.

00:27:02 But you're a geologist, right?

00:27:04 Like, so what is this geological.

00:27:05 I'm a paleontologist as well.

00:27:08 But you are both, right?

00:27:09 Yeah.

00:27:09 I am both.

00:27:10 So, what is this geological feature?

00:27:13 Was that a mudslide?

00:27:14 Well, I mean, if I'm guessing, it kind of looks like.

00:27:19 Well, it looks real to me.

00:27:21 So it looks like those look like floodplain deposits to me.

00:27:24 And sometimes where you get those colors like the purples, that could be paleosols, which are ancient soils that are preserved.

00:27:31 But that's pretty typical of what a lot of the badlands in the U.S. looks like.

00:27:37 So that is really cool.

00:27:39 I'm not sure.

00:27:39 Imagine finding that.

00:27:41 Imagine stumbling upon that.

00:27:42 You're like, hey.

00:27:43 Well, I have.

00:27:45 Yeah, you have.

00:27:45 You don't have to imagine.

00:27:47 Yeah.

00:27:48 Exposed fossils protruding from a hillside.

00:27:50 In Alberta.

00:27:50 Wow.

00:27:50 Yeah.

00:27:51 There we go.

00:27:53 Complete with fossilized skin.

00:27:55 Alberta has some amazing dinosaurs.

00:27:57 Amazing dinosaurs.

00:27:58 So, how many of these do you think had feathers?

00:28:03 Well, that's an area of debate right now in paleontology.

00:28:06 So, birds have feathers, obviously.

00:28:08 Birds are literally dinosaurs.

00:28:11 It seems like the theropod dinosaurs.

00:28:14 I'm good for now.

00:28:15 Thanks.

00:28:17 The meat eaters, although they're not all meat eaters, but that group that T Rex is in, Velociraptor is in, they seem to be mostly feathered.

00:28:25 So they have at least a feathered ancestor.

00:28:27 Whether they retain their feathers or not is the question.

00:28:31 And then on the other side, we see some indications of things that have, we might call them feathers, or sometimes they call them branched integumentary structures, which means modified scales.

00:28:42 So it seems like dinosaurs on both sides of the dinosaur family tree.

00:28:47 Have some modifications of their scales that are feather like.

00:28:51 And so it begs the question is the ancestral dinosaur like that?

00:28:55 We don't know the answer to that right now.

00:28:56 Right.

00:28:58 There's a really cool exhibit in Montana, in Bozeman, at the museum there.

00:29:03 Yeah, Museum of the Rockies.

00:29:04 Yes.

00:29:05 Where half of the raptor is.

00:29:07 The raptor is the wrong size, though.

00:29:09 They made the raptor big, like a Jurassic Park raptor.

00:29:12 Well, some were big.

00:29:13 Really?

00:29:13 How big were they?

00:29:13 Yeah.

00:29:14 Well, like Velociraptor in Jurassic Park, they should not be big.

00:29:18 Right.

00:29:19 A Velociraptor has a skull that's about.

00:29:22 Yeah, it's like the size of a house catacomb?

00:29:25 It's like a pissed off turkey.

00:29:28 Okay.

00:29:29 If a velociraptor is in your kitchen, it's more of an opportunity than a problem.

00:29:33 Just throw some carrots on and have some velociraptor roast later that night.

00:29:40 So, why did they do that in Jurassic Park?

00:29:42 Why did they make the velociraptor so big?

00:29:44 I think they're just more entertaining than funny.

00:29:47 But there are dinosaurs in that group, like Deinonychus, that are big.

00:29:54 Like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

00:29:57 So there really were dinosaurs like that that were as big as that.

00:30:01 They just weren't velociraptors.

00:30:02 Got it.

00:30:03 Yeah.

00:30:03 And so this exhibit in Montana at the museum, what's interesting is it shows one possible option where they're the traditional Jurassic Park looking dinosaur, and then the other one is covered with feathers.

00:30:15 Yeah.

00:30:16 And so one side of this specimen or this piece, this exhibit, is feathered and one's scaly.

00:30:23 Well, it's feathered.

00:30:24 Is way cooler.

00:30:25 In the case of Velociraptor, we can actually see the quill insertion knobs on its ulna.

00:30:30 Right.

00:30:30 So we can see, just like you would see on a turkey or a vulture or something.

00:30:35 See if you could see the one, the side that shows the.

00:30:38 That's the exhibit.

00:30:38 There it is.

00:30:39 Yeah.

00:30:40 That's the exhibit.

00:30:41 That's fucking sick.

00:30:42 So I think, you know, that crazy looking feathered side, I think that's plausible.

00:30:42 Yeah.

00:30:47 Why do they have to have him humping?

00:30:49 Is that what they're doing?

00:30:50 He's catching it.

00:30:50 No, he's catching it.

00:30:52 Seems like he's not.

00:30:54 His face.

00:30:55 Look at his wig.

00:30:56 He looks like Rod Stewart's.

00:30:57 Yeah, that does kind of look like that there, doesn't it?

00:30:59 Yeah, the feather, that's like they went really far with the artistic recreation of their interpretation of the colors.

00:30:59 For sure.

00:30:59 Yeah.

00:31:07 And we don't know what color they were, but think about the world today.

00:31:11 There's a correlation between small things are more colorful and bigger things aren't.

00:31:16 Like, think about what color is a hippo and a rhino and a whale?

00:31:20 Polar bear.

00:31:21 And, well, they're a little different because they have the.

00:31:23 Grizzly bear.

00:31:24 Yeah.

00:31:25 Or brown.

00:31:26 Or, you know.

00:31:27 Yeah.

00:31:28 But big things, generally gray, right?

00:31:30 It's kind of disappointing.

00:31:31 Because it's expensive to make pigment, right?

00:31:35 Metabolically expensive.

00:31:37 And if you're really big, you're not hiding, you're not fooling anyone, you know?

00:31:37 Right.

00:31:42 And so I think.

00:31:43 Big creatures kind of come in the factory color, which apparently is like gray.

00:31:47 What about tigers, though?

00:31:49 Well, they're big ish, right?

00:31:51 They're not elephant or hippo sized.

00:31:54 They're pretty fucking big.

00:31:55 They're pretty big.

00:31:55 Look at Siberia.

00:31:56 But they have camouflage.

00:31:57 Perplexity says Jurassic Park was making, supposed to be using this dinosaur, but Velociraptor is easier to say, so they use that word instead.

00:32:05 Yeah, that's Deinonicus that I said is big.

00:32:07 Oh, that's so they really did make it accurate.

00:32:11 They just used the wrong name.

00:32:14 Hollywood sick, I guess.

00:32:15 Why?

00:32:15 Were people too stupid to understand the word dynamicus?

00:32:18 I don't know.

00:32:19 That's silly.

00:32:19 Michael Crichton might have been.

00:32:20 Velociraptor is a cool name.

00:32:22 It's very cool.

00:32:23 Yeah.

00:32:23 This is cool too.

00:32:24 Yeah.

00:32:25 That's the explanation I got here.

00:32:26 Yeah.

00:32:27 Yeah.

00:32:27 But use Velociraptor's more dramatic, easier to say name.

00:32:32 Right.

00:32:33 I don't know.

00:32:34 Yeah.

00:32:34 I think you could have said dynamicus and freaked people out.

00:32:37 I think so too.

00:32:37 And that first Jurassic Park movie, like that was state of the art science, except for that.

00:32:44 Um, But then they kind of got locked in and kind of frozen in time.

00:32:47 And so the movies become less and less accurate over time because they stick with like the 1993 models, whereas science has progressed since.

00:32:56 Interesting.

00:32:57 Interesting.

00:32:58 So, what did they screw up?

00:33:00 What's the difference?

00:33:01 Well, the one thing is like our knowledge of feathers and the theropod group of dinosaurs.

00:33:06 Like they never got on board with that.

00:33:08 Anything else?

00:33:11 You know, I mean, a lot of it can be covered by the fact that they're genetically engineered, right?

00:33:16 And so they're mixing.

00:33:17 Dinosaur times and places and things like that.

00:33:20 So, a lot of things that never live together.

00:33:21 And then it gets a little silly in the Jurassic World movies where they just start to make up dinosaurs that never existed, right?

00:33:27 Like, what is it called?

00:33:29 Indominus Rex, I think.

00:33:30 Right.

00:33:31 It's like when Fast and Furious, when they drove a car in space.

00:33:34 Right.

00:33:34 After a while, you got to go crazy.

00:33:35 Jump in the shark.

00:33:35 Right.

00:33:36 You have nine of these movies.

00:33:38 You got to get creative.

00:33:40 Now, they did do a good job.

00:33:42 My big baby, Dreadnoughtus, that I discovered in South America, was in Jurassic Park Dominion.

00:33:47 And I actually think they did a really good job of the anatomy of it.

00:33:49 And Dreadnoughtus was the one that was.

00:33:52 Absolutely enormous, but it had a tiny little brain, right?

00:33:55 Well, all of those big sauropod dinosaurs, sauropods like think brontosaurus, right?

00:33:59 The long neck, long tail, quadrupedal ones.

00:34:02 They had small heads and they had small brains.

00:34:05 You could probably fit, you know, two dreadnoughtus brains in a pint glass.

00:34:10 Wow.

00:34:11 And it's a 65 ton organism.

00:34:12 So they weren't thinking deep thoughts.

00:34:14 You know, I think their day is pretty much eat You know, sex every now and then, and that's about it.

00:34:21 Let me see what that image looks like again, Jamie.

00:34:23 The other one that you just showed, the first one.

00:34:27 So that's how big it was.

00:34:29 Yeah, it's big.

00:34:30 It's about 13 African elephants.

00:34:31 It's about nine T Rex.

00:34:33 Wow.

00:34:34 So, is that the biggest dinosaur we've ever discovered?

00:34:37 Well, you can define biggest in different ways.

00:34:39 You can say what's the longest, what's the tallest, or what's the largest mass.

00:34:43 So, this is in a group called the Titanosaurs, and the Titanosaurs are, in general, the most massive dinosaurs.

00:34:50 Look at that thing compared to a 737.

00:34:52 That's nuts.

00:34:53 So, what I would say about Dreadnoughtus is it's the most massive dinosaur for which we can confidently calculate a weight.

00:35:00 But there are other more fragmentary titanosaurs that are clearly in that same size range, but they might only be known by a couple of dorsal vertebrae backbones or a piece of leg or something like that.

00:35:14 And there's no math in the literature that turns a fragment like that into a mass.

00:35:20 The best way of estimating the mass is we know now from living quadrupedal animals.

00:35:26 Imagine, I say, Joe, build a table for me and I'm going to put 65 tons on it.

00:35:33 So, you would scale the legs to the weight that it has to carry.

00:35:37 And so, we know from measuring the minimum shaft circumference of the humerus, the upper arm bone, and the femur, the upper leg bone, that that dimension scales with body mass.

00:35:48 And it's a very tight correlation with modern organisms.

00:35:52 So, for Dreadnoughtus, we were fortunate in that we had the humerus and the femur, so we could make those measurements, pop it on that scale, and it comes out to be 65 tons.

00:36:03 And how much?

00:36:04 So you can see we have the humerus on the left and the femur on the right.

00:36:04 Yeah, that's it there.

00:36:07 Is that image that shows the skeleton, is that what we actually have of it?

00:36:12 We have a lot more, but that is from our paper, that image.

00:36:15 And it shows dreadnoughtus.

00:36:17 And then that bone tissue on the left there, you can tell if you look at an organism's bone tissue whether it's growing rapidly or not.

00:36:26 So, you know, if you're an adolescent, you can see it doesn't have very well ordered bone tissue.

00:36:34 Near the edge of it.

00:36:34 Because the way bone grows is first bone cells just kind of get thrown down in a mess.

00:36:40 And then later on, they get structure.

00:36:43 And so, in the case of Dreadnoughtus, at 65 tons, you can see there where that arrow is above that, very disordered bone cells.

00:36:53 So it was growing rapidly at the time of its death at 65 tons.

00:36:57 So we don't really know how big these things could get.

00:37:00 And the chance of you finding the biggest, right?

00:37:02 You're not going to find the biggest that ever existed.

00:37:04 Right, right.

00:37:05 That's the problem.

00:37:06 You know, that's one of the weird things about crocodiles, right?

00:37:06 Yeah.

00:37:10 Is that, and you would wonder, like, how much of that is carryover from dinosaurs.

00:37:16 They seem to just keep growing, and they don't seem to have, like, an age limit.

00:37:21 They die eventually, but they don't die like a dog does, where you can kind of predict, oh, you know, if, you know, Roscoe gets fed right and taken care of, he might make it to 14.

00:37:33 No, they kind of live for a long time, like hundreds of years, perhaps.

00:37:38 Yeah, well, um, Crocodiles have what we would call indeterminate growth, right?

00:37:43 They get bigger as they get older.

00:37:45 And then things like birds, mammals, we have determinate growth, right?

00:37:50 But crocodiles, who are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, right?

00:37:54 They're not dinosaurs.

00:37:55 They don't have a dinosaur in their ancestry, but they're cousins.

00:37:59 They have done everything.

00:38:01 They've done, you know, we know the crocodiles alive today, but there were crocodiles that were going down like the shark route.

00:38:07 They were going, it looked like they were going fully marine.

00:38:11 There was a pelican like crocodile that was in Egypt in the mid Cretaceous period and it had like hundreds of tiny little teeth, and we think it had a pouch like that.

00:38:23 What is that one called?

00:38:25 It's called Stomatosuchus.

00:38:29 Stomatosuchus, yeah.

00:38:31 Yeah, there you go.

00:38:32 Whoa.

00:38:32 Yeah, isn't that crazy?

00:38:34 Wow.

00:38:34 Yeah.

00:38:36 Now, why do we think it had a pouch?

00:38:39 Well, just the distance between the jawbones.

00:38:42 And it's just a lot of space there.

00:38:44 I don't know if you'll see a picture of the original fossil from, I think, 1911.

00:38:50 It's very interesting that people think of a pelican as being benign.

00:38:54 Yeah, or a pigeon.

00:38:54 Not if you're a fish.

00:38:56 Yeah, right.

00:38:57 I've seen pelicans eat pigeons, and you're like, what the hell?

00:39:00 Yeah.

00:39:00 I thought you guys were cool, and I thought you delivered babies.

00:39:03 So, in the Triassic, there were.

00:39:07 That's a stork, actually.

00:39:08 There were.

00:39:09 Whoa.

00:39:09 Crocodiles that were, you know, maybe even running on two legs.

00:39:13 Like maybe.

00:39:15 It's a little controversial, but maybe bipedal crocodiles.

00:39:17 Oh, fun.

00:39:18 Yeah.

00:39:19 Well, are you aware of one of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories?

00:39:23 I'm not sure.

00:39:24 One of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories is there used to be a race of lizard people that were highly advanced.

00:39:30 That lived along with the dinosaurs many, many, many years ago.

00:39:35 Yeah, we don't have their fossils.

00:39:36 Millions and millions of years ago.

00:39:37 No, we don't have their fossils.

00:39:39 We've been used to.

00:39:40 Yeah, bro.

00:39:41 I'm trying to warm them up to these ideas.

00:39:45 This is the one that ran on two legs.

00:39:47 Wow.

00:39:48 That's sick.

00:39:49 Postosuchus, you want to look for.

00:39:50 So it's sort of a T Rex style crocodile.

00:39:54 It's like Wally Gator from Hill.

00:39:57 Whoa, right?

00:39:58 Yeah, like that.

00:40:00 And crocodiles were in charge when the first dinosaurs evolved.

00:40:04 So, in the Triassic, the dinosaurs, the little dinosaurs that were trying to make it, they were living in the crocodile world.

00:40:10 And crocodiles are big and scary and were doing all kinds of crazy things.

00:40:14 That's wild to think of, that they were there before the dinosaurs.

00:40:17 Yeah, crocodiles are old.

00:40:19 That's so crazy, and they're still around.

00:40:21 Yep.

00:40:22 Are you aware of some of the really crazy stories from the Congo, from I think it was like the 1800s, where they claim to have seen 40-plus-foot-long crocodiles?

00:40:34 Question Like, is this a gross exaggeration?

00:40:36 They based it on the size of the craft that they were on the boat.

00:40:39 Is it gross exaggeration, or is it possible that there were dinosaurs or, excuse me, crocodiles that had reached that size that had been eventually killed off once people invented guns?

00:40:50 Yeah, I don't know.

00:40:51 I mean, we don't have any skeletons from modern crocodiles that are that big, but in the Cretaceous, there were definitely crocodiles that big.

00:40:58 There's one from North Africa called Sarcosuchus imperator that was like 35 feet long.

00:41:03 What a great name.

00:41:04 I know.

00:41:04 This is what he looked like.

00:41:06 Yeah, Sarcosuchus.

00:41:07 Sarcosuchus imperator.

00:41:08 Imperator, yeah.

00:41:09 Sark.

00:41:10 Sarkosuchus?

00:41:10 Imperator.

00:41:12 Mm hmm.

00:41:13 Yep.

00:41:14 And then there's one from New Jersey called Dinosuchus that is in that same size range.

00:41:19 So that's his skull compared to what?

00:41:22 That last skull that you just had, Jamie.

00:41:24 What is that compared to?

00:41:27 What is the one underneath the other?

00:41:28 Yeah, that's like a.

00:41:29 Yeah, some sort of modern crocodilian.

00:41:32 That thing's insane.

00:41:33 How big was that?

00:41:35 Well, look up Sarcosuchus and Staub, S T A A B. He's a sculptor, a friend of mine.

00:41:43 He did all of our work for the museum, but he made an amazing reconstruction.

00:41:47 That's it right there?

00:41:48 There's one of him sitting on its back, which is really cool.

00:41:48 Of this.

00:41:52 Ooh, that's pretty cool.

00:41:55 So that's how big these things were.

00:41:56 Really big.

00:41:57 They probably ate dinosaurs.

00:41:57 Really big.

00:42:01 And what year are we talking about?

00:42:02 When they lived?

00:42:03 Yeah.

00:42:04 This is in the mid 20s.

00:42:05 Cretaceous.

00:42:06 I think it's Cenomanian, so around 95 million years ago.

00:42:10 Why do we know why things were so big back then?

00:42:14 Well, no, but another way of looking at it is it's a different age of giants.

00:42:21 We live in an age of giants now.

00:42:22 The biggest animal to ever live is alive right now, right?

00:42:24 The biggest trees to ever live are alive right now.

00:42:27 Yeah, the blue whale and the redwoods.

00:42:31 So we have some really big things now.

00:42:35 Since dinosaurs went extinct, There was a hornless rhino called Paracerotherium that was like 20 feet tall, which was crazy.

00:42:46 But, you know, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, it's a long time and all kinds of things happened.

00:42:50 There were tiny little dinosaurs and some got really big.

00:42:52 And I think there was sort of this arms race between the big predators and the big herbivores.

00:42:56 Yeah, there's Parasaerotherium.

00:42:58 Whoa.

00:42:58 So, a huge, huge hornless rhinoceros.

00:43:01 Isn't that cool?

00:43:02 Wow.

00:43:02 So, this thing was basically trying to be a sauropod dinosaur, you know, after the dinosaurs went extinct.

00:43:07 And how do we know what this thing looked like on the outside?

00:43:11 How much of a version of this do we have fossils?

00:43:14 We don't have its soft tissue, so it's.

00:43:16 So, it's just guesses that it had all this.

00:43:18 Yeah, I mean, we can see that it's where its relatives are.

00:43:22 And so, you know, I guess you would look in that family to see what kind of traits they have.

00:43:27 But, yeah, look how big that thing is.

00:43:29 So, Some of it has it looking like a rhino.

00:43:32 Some of them have them looking like the skin of an elephant, but it's really just guessing.

00:43:35 Yeah.

00:43:36 Yeah.

00:43:39 When you said redwood trees are the biggest, here's another wacky conspiracy theory.

00:43:42 You'll love this one.

00:43:43 There's a lot of people that believe that there's evidence that enormous mountains that exist somewhere that have flat tops are actually the stumps of trees that were cut down by giants.

00:43:53 Wow.

00:43:54 Well, those would be some big trees.

00:43:55 There have been many, many YouTube documentarians.

00:43:59 Doing scholarly work on this particular issue.

00:44:02 Like that one right there.

00:44:03 Right.

00:44:04 I can tell you what that is.

00:44:05 No, no, no, you can't.

00:44:06 No, you're going to give us propaganda from the government.

00:44:10 What that is is a fucking tree, bro.

00:44:11 Right.

00:44:12 Well, yes, the government line would be that that is columnar basalt that formed in the throat of a volcano.

00:44:18 Show me the other one, Devil's Tower, in Wyoming.

00:44:24 That's from, famously, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is an amazing movie.

00:44:28 That's right.

00:44:29 And I think the Native American legend is that those are scratch marks from a giant bear.

00:44:33 Whoa.

00:44:34 Yeah.

00:44:36 So, how was this made?

00:44:38 Basalt, which is the rock that is under most oceans and it can also come up through volcanoes, when it cools slowly, it forms these hexagonal columns.

00:44:52 If you know the Palisades along the Hudson River right outside New York, columnar basalt, Giant's Causeway in Ireland, columnar basalt.

00:44:59 So, it's that.

00:45:00 It's slowly cooling basalt.

00:45:02 It has time enough while it's cooling to form those hexagonal patterns.

00:45:06 Oh, okay.

00:45:06 Interesting.

00:45:08 Sorry to divert you.

00:45:09 So imagine that that's just the throat of the volcano.

00:45:12 So imagine putting the volcano back around that.

00:45:14 It's pretty big.

00:45:16 So we had these enormous crocodiles that ate dinosaurs.

00:45:20 And what do we know or do we have an idea of what the shift was where dinosaurs started becoming enormous and ferocious?

00:45:28 Yeah, there's an extinction at the end of the Triassic period about 202 million years ago.

00:45:32 It's a climate crisis because of the opening of the Atlantic Ocean.

00:45:36 So we have Pangaea at this point.

00:45:38 And A lot of people think that Pangaea is how the continent started.

00:45:42 It's not.

00:45:43 It's just one moment in history when all the continents happen to bump into each other.

00:45:48 But Pangaea starts to rift apart during this time period, and the Atlantic starts imagining the Atlantic kind of unzipping from the top and the bottom, right, as the continents pull apart.

00:45:59 And we get this big, it's called a large magmatic province developing, which means lots of volcanic activity and not like.

00:46:09 Volcanoes like in Sicily that blast stuff into the sky, but more like oozing lava on the landscape, fissures, right?

00:46:19 This causes a lot of CO2 to hit the atmosphere, and we get rapid climate change, and we get the fourth mass extinction then at the time.

00:46:30 And that really knocks back the crocodiles and the dinosaurs, for whatever reason, kind of get the jump then after this.

00:46:37 Because usually after an extinction, there's a lot of niche space available.

00:46:41 So things go extinct.

00:46:42 Imagine those.

00:46:43 Like job descriptions becoming open, and now you can evolve into those roles.

00:46:48 And for whatever reason, the dinosaurs are the ones that bounce back better after the fourth mass extinction.

00:46:54 And so was it cooling because of the volcanic eruption?

00:46:58 In this case, it was warming because of the CO2.

00:47:01 We've had the first four mass extinctions, the first two were about cooling, the second two were about overheating.

00:47:09 And so for whatever reason, dinosaurs were better suited to adapt.

00:47:13 And so now we enter the Jurassic right after that, and the dinosaurs start to get big, they start to get really diverse in the Jurassic, and then in the Cretaceous, the last Of the three ages of dinosaurs.

00:47:13 Yeah.

00:47:25 That's kind of like the full flower of the dinosaur world.

00:47:30 And they're really numerous.

00:47:31 They're on every continent, including Antarctica.

00:47:34 And they're just in all kinds of forms.

00:47:37 It's just fascinating to me that 65 million years ago, the impact in the Yucatan that's the start of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

00:47:46 But yet the crocodiles, they make it through fairly well.

00:47:50 During that 65 million year, what is the difference between the kind of crocodiles that existed pre?

00:47:56 Impact and post impact.

00:47:58 Were they of similar size or had they already gotten to that particular form that they are at now?

00:48:05 The supergiant crocodiles weren't around then.

00:48:08 They were closer to modern ones.

00:48:12 Is this an assumption or is this based on what we found?

00:48:17 That's based on what we found.

00:48:18 It's possible that we could find super large crocodiles that were in the 60, 65 million years.

00:48:24 Absolutely.

00:48:25 We're learning a lot about this impact, which we now know is about.

00:48:30 66 million years.

00:48:31 And so an asteroid hits the planet, right?

00:48:35 It's maybe up to 18 kilometers across, going about 20 meters per second, hits the planet off the coast of the Yucatan, blows a crater in the Earth's crust that's about 110 miles across, initially by like 12 miles deep, right?

00:48:52 Imagine, like, you've been to the Grand Canyon, I'm sure.

00:48:54 That's a mile deep, right?

00:48:57 Imagine what 12 miles would look like.

00:48:58 That's crazy.

00:48:59 And like that.

00:48:59 Yeah.

00:49:00 And so imagine the volume.

00:49:03 Of rock.

00:49:04 I've looked it up.

00:49:07 It's basically about the area of Massachusetts times 12 miles.

00:49:09 So imagine that mass.

00:49:12 But you take that mass, it's pulverized and it may be millimeter sized pieces, but it doesn't matter.

00:49:17 It still has that mass.

00:49:17 Throw it up through the Earth's atmosphere.

00:49:19 You've given it a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy.

00:49:22 Now, when that stuff comes back in, it's got to balance the energy books.

00:49:26 And it does that mostly by friction with the atmosphere.

00:49:30 So, you know, you remember the films of the Apollo space capsules flaming back into the atmosphere, right?

00:49:36 So, Think about that day, trillions upon trillions of millimeter sized space capsules, each one flaming back into the atmosphere, each one heating up a little parcel of air around itself, such that we think that day, within an hour after the impact, temperatures got up somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven.

00:49:54 So if you're on the surface of the earth that day, you're literally toast.

00:49:58 So who gets through?

00:50:00 Well, little things on land that can burrow.

00:50:03 Who are good burrowers?

00:50:04 Little mammals, crocodiles, turtles.

00:50:05 Lizards.

00:50:06 Right.

00:50:06 The crocodiles are in the water.

00:50:10 Crocodiles are good burrowers.

00:50:10 And burrow.

00:50:12 And some birds.

00:50:13 All of the non bird dinosaurs, the non avian dinosaur egg nests that have ever been found are just some crater that some mama dinosaur scraped in the ground where she deposited her eggs right on the surface.

00:50:25 So 100% of their life cycle on the surface of the earth.

00:50:28 No place to hide.

00:50:29 Wow.

00:50:29 And so where'd the birds go?

00:50:33 Well, some birds are burrowers, right?

00:50:35 And so today we have.

00:50:37 Chickens aren't, right?

00:50:38 Chickens are not.

00:50:39 But we have burrowing parrots today, burrowing penguins.

00:50:41 You know, that's the only way they survived is by burrowing?

00:50:44 I think.

00:50:45 Burrowing?

00:50:45 Interesting.

00:50:46 I think.

00:50:47 Interesting.

00:50:48 Because that heat is, it's like those outdoor restaurant heaters.

00:50:52 It's radiative heat, not convective heat.

00:50:54 So it's line of sight.

00:50:55 So you got to get out of the line of sight of the sky.

00:50:58 And so you have to get underground somewhere.

00:51:00 Now, was there some big dinosaur in a cave by chance at that moment?

00:51:04 Like, yeah, sure.

00:51:05 But I'm talking about like a breeding population.

00:51:08 I think they're functionally extinct the day of the impact, which is shocking.

00:51:12 They're around for 165 million years, right?

00:51:15 Dominating the earth for most of that time.

00:51:17 If you were here the day before that asteroid hit, you would look around and you would say, Well, this is how it's always going to be, right?

00:51:23 These guys are always going to be in charge.

00:51:25 The next day, the asteroid hits, and I think they're functionally extinct that day.

00:51:30 Wow.

00:51:32 What do you think the historical depiction of dragons is all about?

00:51:37 And why is it so ubiquitous across so many different continents and so many different cultures?

00:51:43 Like, why do they have stories of these giant lizards, including historians that have accounts?

00:51:49 Like, doesn't her.

00:51:51 I think Herodotus?

00:51:52 Does Herodotus have an account of some sort of a dragon creature in Egypt that they killed?

00:52:01 I think there's like legitimate historians.

00:52:03 We're like, okay, well, he told the truth about all these other things, told the truth about like the labyrinths of Hawari or wherever it was.

00:52:10 But why?

00:52:11 What is that?

00:52:13 What are these stories of dragons?

00:52:15 Yeah, I don't know.

00:52:16 But you know, if you look at the skeletons of various animals, I mean, you can see many, many vertebrae.

00:52:22 The tail of a sauropod dinosaur, or the neck of a plesiosaur, or you find a titanoboa in Colombia, or if you just find a modern snake skeleton.

00:52:31 Look at this.

00:52:33 Herodotus described winged serpents, often retold today as an account of dragons.

00:52:38 The key distinction he said he saw heaps of bones, not living flying creatures.

00:52:42 The main passage is in Histories 2.75 to 76, what he actually wrote.

00:52:49 Herodotus says he traveled to a place in Arabia opposite the Egyptian city of Bhutto to investigate reports of winged serpents.

00:52:55 When I came thither, oh, I want to be able to say that.

00:52:59 When I came thither, I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantities so great that it is impossible to make report of the number.

00:53:07 Then he recounts the local explanation.

00:53:09 Each spring, winged serpents flew from Arabia towards Egypt, but Ibis birds intercepted and killed them at a mountain pass.

00:53:18 This, he was told, explained why Egyptians honored the Ibis.

00:53:22 What is an Ibis?

00:53:24 An Ibis.

00:53:25 It's like, I think it's Ibis?

00:53:27 Yeah, it's a.

00:53:28 I think they call them friend of the farmer in Egypt.

00:53:30 They're kind of field birds.

00:53:32 They have a long, curved beak and they follow the plows and get dressed.

00:53:36 Crazy.

00:53:37 They kill dragons.

00:53:37 These serpents are like water snakes.

00:53:40 Their wings are not feathered, but mostly like the wings of a bat.

00:53:44 You know, there's a lot of bad zoology back in history.

00:53:44 Yeah.

00:53:49 But is it possible that this tiny one was a real creature, a winged serpent?

00:53:54 And we just don't have any skeletons of them?

00:53:58 We don't have any skeletons of them.

00:54:01 So, this is just pure speculation.

00:54:01 Right.

00:54:02 Explicitly identifies these with the serpents that he said to invade Egypt.

00:54:08 Collectors supposedly drove them away by burning storax and aromatic resin.

00:54:12 So, an example is in Sicily, every spring, farmers find megalodon teeth in their fields, right?

00:54:25 Because there's old marine deposits there and they have shark fossils in them.

00:54:31 And when you get the freezing and thawing in winter, the The stones, or in this case, fossils, work their way up to the top, right?

00:54:39 And so they could clear the field one year and they come back, and the next year there's these fossils in them.

00:54:39 To the top, right?

00:54:44 And they had no concept of deep time.

00:54:47 They had no concept that this could have been a marine environment.

00:54:50 So what did they call them?

00:54:51 They called them serpent tongues or glossopetrae, they called them.

00:54:54 Serpent tongues.

00:54:55 Serpent tongues.

00:54:55 So they thought that there were serpents that would lose their stone like tongues for some reason.

00:55:02 And they would find those.

00:55:03 And so people were trying to make sense of their landscape, right?

00:55:07 And they find these things and they don't understand deep time.

00:55:09 They don't understand.

00:55:11 Geological processes, obviously.

00:55:13 And it becomes folklore.

00:55:14 And so they try to make an explanation.

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00:56:00 There's also an issue with the depictions of things that we know currently exist.

00:56:05 Like when I was in Italy, I was in Ravello, and there's a really old church in Ravello.

00:56:13 And the church is, I think, a thousand years old.

00:56:16 And what's really crazy is it is on the base.

00:56:19 It is built on top of an even older church.

00:56:23 So they have like a glass floor and you can look through and see the original church, but it's like really old.

00:56:28 Like they don't know how old it is.

00:56:30 But one of the cool things on the wall, and I took a photo of it, it's on my Instagram, was of a whale.

00:56:37 And it's a tile artwork of a whale.

00:56:40 And it's from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale.

00:56:43 And you see this artwork and like what they thought a whale looked like is crazy.

00:56:48 Yeah.

00:56:49 It had giant teeth and it looked like it, I think, did it have wings?

00:56:53 Yeah.

00:56:54 That's it.

00:56:55 Yeah.

00:56:56 Kind of wings.

00:56:57 So that was the tile artwork.

00:57:00 That's the picture that I took that's on that church in Rivello.

00:57:05 That's wild.

00:57:06 Look up.

00:57:07 Isn't that crazy?

00:57:08 Like, that's what they thought a fucking whale looked like.

00:57:10 It looks like part lion or something, part bear, part fish.

00:57:15 Look at Steno and Shark.

00:57:18 And you'll see this is kind of the first illustration of.

00:57:25 Steno?

00:57:26 Yeah, Steno.

00:57:27 Is that all one word?

00:57:29 S T E N O.

00:57:30 And shark?

00:57:32 Yeah, and then look up shark.

00:57:33 Yeah.

00:57:34 Nicholas Steno and shark.

00:57:35 And so he would find these shark teeth.

00:57:41 And so this is his illustration of what a shark looked like, he thought.

00:57:46 But what he was doing here, Nicholas Steno is sometimes called the father of geology because he was the first one to say, no, these are not these serpent tongues.

00:57:56 They look like shark teeth.

00:57:57 And so they must have been in the mouth of a shark, even though we're finding them on land.

00:58:01 Right.

00:58:02 And so he actually came up with three laws of geology, which we still use today.

00:58:07 They're very simple the oldest stuff is on bottom, the youngest stuff is on top.

00:58:11 If you see a valley and there's the same rock on both sides, you can imagine that they were once connected.

00:58:20 And so he's the first one to really start to turn geology into a science, but it had a really slow start.

00:58:26 And this is, you know, Pretty far in our history.

00:58:29 What year is this?

00:58:30 He is, I think, you can look it up there.

00:58:33 I think he is 1500s, is that right?

00:58:36 Now, we knew about sharks back then.

00:58:38 1600.

00:58:39 We knew about sharks.

00:58:41 Yeah, but people didn't understand how there could be sharks on land.

00:58:44 Right.

00:58:45 Shark fossils on land.

00:58:46 And so, like, the antiquity of our planet is a fairly recent discovery.

00:58:46 Right.

00:58:51 There's a guy named James Hutton, who's a man of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he's what we could really call the first geologist.

00:58:59 And that's not until like 1795, I think, is when he published his book, The Theory of the Earth.

00:59:08 And he did something that just Makes me love geology forever, which is he figured out that we live on an old planet with a hammer and a rowboat.

00:59:18 And so he went to this place called Sickar Point, S I C C A R Point off the north coast of Scotland.

00:59:27 It's like geology church for me.

00:59:27 I've been there.

00:59:30 And he looked at what he could tell were ancient beach sediments and they're tilted and they're cross cut by other beach sediments.

00:59:39 And then that whole thing is tilted and then the whole thing is uplifted into a cliff coast.

00:59:44 And he realized that.

00:59:45 Well, you know, I'm an old guy and I've never seen any changes like this happening.

00:59:49 And so it must take a really long time to deposit these sediments for them to lithify.

00:59:55 Yeah, that's it.

00:59:55 It's gorgeous.

00:59:57 So look there.

00:59:57 So you have those vertical beds, see on the right hand side.

01:00:02 Well, imagine you have to turn those over so they're horizontal because sediment is deposited horizontally, right?

01:00:08 You can't deposit it like that.

01:00:10 So imagine you have a horizontal beach, it's building up layer after layer.

01:00:15 That gets lithified, meaning turned into stone.

01:00:18 That whole thing gets turned vertically, and then you see where it's cross cut there.

01:00:23 That means waves came across there, cut through it, and then a whole other layer, when that was horizontal, is deposited.

01:00:30 Those are lithified, turned into stone, and then the whole thing is rotated again to the orientation that it has today, and then uplifted into a seacoast.

01:00:37 And he realized that couldn't happen in just a short amount of time.

01:00:41 How did he formulate this idea?

01:00:44 Did we have an understanding of volcanic activity back?

01:00:49 Not well.

01:00:50 And so Hutton actually, you know, part of what he did was he looked at the formation of granite, and granite was thought to be back then like a sedimentary rock where the particles would accumulate.

01:01:00 And he collected evidence that no granite forms from molten rock, and it's part of a rock cycle.

01:01:05 And so he really founds an idea that we call uniformitarianism.

01:01:11 It's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the past.

01:01:15 So we can see processes in action today and imagine how they might have built the world.

01:01:21 In the past.

01:01:23 God, imagine being an academic back then or whatever it was, a scholar, and trying to.

01:01:31 You can't really coordinate with other people about this because how few people even understand what the hell you're talking about?

01:01:37 What a small group of human beings that are even pondering these things in the 1600s.

01:01:43 Is that what you said?

01:01:44 Yeah, well, 1700s.

01:01:46 1700s.

01:01:46 Yeah, and it was so unorthodox.

01:01:49 So the most learned people in Europe at the time thought the earth.

01:01:52 Was 6,000 years old.

01:01:53 Isaac Newton thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

01:01:56 Yeah, when Darwin got on the HMS Beagle, he was a young Earth creationist.

01:01:56 Did he really?

01:02:00 He thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

01:02:03 And so this guy is like really swimming against the current here.

01:02:07 And he has to worry about being like locked up.

01:02:10 Like you could be.

01:02:10 No, not at that time.

01:02:11 This is, you know, Scottish Enlightenment.

01:02:13 So there's all kinds of ideas flying around.

01:02:15 And he actually wrote this as he was dying.

01:02:19 Oh, good move.

01:02:20 Yeah.

01:02:22 So he didn't live long.

01:02:23 You're on the way out.

01:02:24 And you publish the good stuff.

01:02:24 Yes.

01:02:25 And he was, because of that, I think it wasn't really a very polished piece of text and it's very hard to get through.

01:02:33 And then his ideas were picked up by an Englishman, Charles Lyell, who was a good writer and who wrote the Principles of Geology.

01:02:43 Hutton's work was the theory of the Earth.

01:02:45 And so Captain Fitzroy gifts young Charles Darwin a copy of the Principles of Geology as they're about to go on their voyage.

01:02:55 And Darwin was a member of what was called the Venarian Society, which is this basically young Earth society of scientists.

01:03:03 But Darwin, ever a sponge for information, he reads this.

01:03:06 As they're sailing from England to St. Jago in the Cape Verde Islands.

01:03:12 And he starts to have his mind changed.

01:03:15 And he gets there and he starts to see evidence of geological uplift and processes of cycles.

01:03:22 And then they get to Montevideo in what's now Uruguay.

01:03:27 And he holds up the whole expedition because he thinks there's a mailboat coming behind them that might have the second volume of the Principles of Geology.

01:03:33 And it does.

01:03:34 And he soaks this up.

01:03:35 And then by the time he gets down to Patagonia, He's paraphrasing Lyle.

01:03:40 We would say today, plagiarizing Lyle.

01:03:43 And he's become this advocate for this uniformitarian principle that the present is the key to the past.

01:03:50 And what Hutton wrote is the earth shows no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

01:03:56 And now all of a sudden, Darwin goes from thinking the earth is 6,000 years old to thinking about deep time, to having this vast tapestry.

01:04:03 And that gives him the intellectual space to imagine evolution through natural selection.

01:04:09 Wow.

01:04:12 Just imagine being an intellectual back then where there's not a lot to go by and trying to formulate, trying to look at all this stuff and go, what is going on?

01:04:22 Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

01:04:24 And everybody wants to think there's a dude and he just told Adam, name all these things and that's it.

01:04:30 It was hard.

01:04:31 I mean, and you know, it's not that long ago.

01:04:32 Like Thomas Jefferson didn't know the earth was old.

01:04:35 Thomas Jefferson never heard the word dinosaur.

01:04:37 You know, it's not that long ago.

01:04:40 Yeah.

01:04:40 That's crazy.

01:04:41 That's hard to believe.

01:04:42 Yeah.

01:04:42 But obviously.

01:04:43 This is a thing that has happened all throughout human history.

01:04:47 Like, there's a new discovery.

01:04:49 Oh, look, we figured out fire.

01:04:50 Oh, look, we figured out shelter.

01:04:52 Oh, look, we figured out hey, this is a shark tooth.

01:04:56 Why is it in this field?

01:04:58 Hey, why is this land going like this?

01:04:58 Yeah.

01:05:01 It's just so interesting to think that these people were the first people to try to put this puzzle together and how few people they had to collaborate with.

01:05:10 Like, how few people, like now today, if you talk about volcanoes or geologic activity, everybody knows about it.

01:05:17 Mm hmm.

01:05:18 Back then, like how many people?

01:05:19 Except those dumbasses on the internet who don't think dinosaurs are real.

01:05:22 Well, they still think volcanoes are real.

01:05:25 They still know some things.

01:05:27 They still understand, like, the shifts of tectonic plates and the things that we know, why earthquakes happen.

01:05:33 Most people are aware of those things.

01:05:35 But if you're an intellectual back then, there's probably so little to go by.

01:05:42 You're trying to come up with some completely radical theory of how things got to the position that they're in right now.

01:05:49 And you start to try to explain it to people that are young earth creationists.

01:05:54 You want to bring up natural selection and random mutation and all the different things that he's trying to put into people's heads.

01:06:02 Yeah, that's why Darwin was so reluctant to publish.

01:06:04 I mean, it's science is by nature conservative and it's hard to push the boundaries, right?

01:06:11 As it should be, yeah.

01:06:12 And so it took Darwin 25 years to publish his thoughts and he was very insecure about it.

01:06:20 He was worried about the ramifications for his family.

01:06:22 His wife Emma was a very devout Christian, and he was terribly concerned about it.

01:06:28 About it.

01:06:30 He was an insecure guy.

01:06:32 And at one point, he didn't think that he had the intellectual standing because he wasn't really an expert in any one particular topic.

01:06:39 So he decides he's got to become an expert.

01:06:41 So he takes nine years off from writing Origin of Species to become the world's expert on barnacles.

01:06:47 And for nine years, he studies barnacles in his study.

01:06:50 That's dedication.

01:06:52 His little son, Frankie Darwin, has a friend over one day and turns to his friend and says, Where did your dad do his barnacles?

01:06:58 Because he just thinks that's what dads do because that's all Charles Darwin does for nine years.

01:06:58 Right.

01:07:03 That's crazy.

01:07:04 Why barnacles?

01:07:05 I don't know.

01:07:06 I don't know.

01:07:06 Maybe it was just like an open niche for him.

01:07:10 Huh.

01:07:11 Yeah.

01:07:12 When my son was like four or so, he had a friend over the house and he turned to his friend and said, Where's your dad keep his dinosaurs?

01:07:23 That's what dads do.

01:07:24 Yeah.

01:07:24 Wow.

01:07:25 I mean, we're really so fortunate that civilization has lasted as long as it has.

01:07:32 Hopefully, we don't screw this up, but that we have accumulated so much information.

01:07:37 Because if we had to start from scratch, if there's some sort of massive natural disaster and we had to start from scratch within a few hundred years, we'd forget most of this.

01:07:47 I always think about who would I take with me if I had five people to start civilization over?

01:07:52 One of them would definitely be a metallurgist because how would we ever figure that out again?

01:07:57 It's just amazing that we figured that out.

01:07:59 Right, right, right.

01:08:01 How to make an alloy.

01:08:03 Yeah.

01:08:05 Or we're going to beat these rocks out of a mountainside and And put them in fire and get copper.

01:08:10 You know, I mean, that's.

01:08:11 How do you harness electricity?

01:08:12 How about that guy?

01:08:13 Yeah.

01:08:14 Bring an electrician.

01:08:14 Bring him too.

01:08:15 Bring an engineer who understands how to make a generator.

01:08:18 Yeah.

01:08:19 Or a refrigerator.

01:08:21 Most people are fucked.

01:08:21 Right.

01:08:23 If that happens, most people are fucked.

01:08:25 We're just so fortunate that in this volatile world that we live in that's filled with the potential for natural disasters and now man made disasters that we have managed to stay alive for so many hundreds of years and figured out how to write things down and now.

01:08:40 We got to the point where there's YouTube videos about dinosaurs being fake.

01:08:45 Which is why it's really interesting to me.

01:08:48 I'm really always interested in people that have very steadfast beliefs that they hold despite the evidence.

01:08:55 Because I've been guilty of that in the past, and I try not to be.

01:08:55 Yeah.

01:09:00 But I think that is a thing that people have where if they have an idea and they have openly espoused that idea, they will defend it and they will find ways to defend it, even if it's not rational.

01:09:12 Like they become married to it.

01:09:13 To that idea.

01:09:14 That idea is their identity.

01:09:15 Yeah.

01:09:16 And it's the opposite of science, right?

01:09:16 Yeah.

01:09:18 And I mean, scientists are people and flawed, but you'll rarely hear a scientist use the word prove, right?

01:09:27 What we say is we have failed to falsify, right?

01:09:31 Leaving the possibility open that it could be falsified in the future.

01:09:35 I heard your episode with Brian Cox.

01:09:38 He's great.

01:09:39 And he was talking about like a scientist should be happy when their ideas are overturned.

01:09:44 That means we're making progress, right?

01:09:46 Now, in reality, scientists are humans and there's some ego involved and it's hard, but he is correct, right?

01:09:51 I mean, that's how you make progress.

01:09:54 You hypothesize, you test, and if you falsify that hypothesis, then you say, okay, that's not it.

01:09:59 Now let's find out what it is.

01:10:01 Right.

01:10:01 The problem is sometimes it progresses one funeral at a time, right?

01:10:04 That's right.

01:10:05 That was Max Planck said that, I think.

01:10:05 Yeah.

01:10:06 Yes.

01:10:07 That's the issue is that people have egos.

01:10:10 And again, if someone has been teaching for a decade or so this one particular thing and all say, oh, that's horseshit.

01:10:16 And you think, oh, my God, I lied to all those kids.

01:10:18 No, I didn't.

01:10:20 This is our shit.

01:10:22 And you start drinking and yelling.

01:10:24 When I was a young geology student, I had some old professors that were like pre plate tectonics.

01:10:32 That really only happened in the 60s.

01:10:32 Whoa.

01:10:34 Really?

01:10:35 Yeah, it's new.

01:10:37 And so they were hanging on to this old idea called geosynclinal theory, which I can't explain to you because it doesn't make sense, right?

01:10:43 It was super complicated because it doesn't make sense.

01:10:46 And they were still trying to shoehorn that into our understanding of plate tectonics.

01:10:50 And so it's just, it's really hard for people sometimes to let go of their ideas.

01:10:54 That's wild.

01:10:55 So, as recently as the 60s, That's when the transition was happening.

01:11:00 Yeah.

01:11:00 Wow.

01:11:01 And how did they figure that out?

01:11:04 It kind of goes back to this U.S. naval officer and Princeton professor, Harry Hess.

01:11:09 And during World War II, he was working with the Navy to develop magnetometers that would help detect submarines, right, U boats and things.

01:11:20 And they were getting all this background signal from the ocean itself.

01:11:28 Is magnetized, and he started to map this out, and it seems to be magnetized in stripes, right?

01:11:34 And so, what are these stripes?

01:11:36 Well, he found out that because we didn't really know the bathymetry, right, the form of the bottom of the ocean, and we started to see that there's mid ocean ridges, like the Mid Atlantic Ridge, and these stripes of magnetism are parallel with those.

01:11:49 And so, he hypothesized that new crust is being created at the mid ocean ridges, which is true, and that the magnetosphere of the earth periodically flips.

01:12:01 And if it's in one configuration, the rocks will be polarized and what we would call positive.

01:12:05 If it's in the other, they would be negative.

01:12:08 And so, as the magnetosphere periodically breaks down and flips polarity, you can see that recorded in the rocks.

01:12:15 And that became the idea of seafloor spreading, which is the motor that then pushes ocean crust, but also pushes continents around the world.

01:12:24 And before that, like the idea of continental drift that's the older term that was proposed in the 20s, I think, by Alfred Wegener.

01:12:32 People just kind of laughed him off the scientific stage because they said, Well, how could continents move?

01:12:36 What's the mechanism for that?

01:12:37 So they didn't have a mechanism.

01:12:39 And then Harry Hess comes up with the mechanism.

01:12:42 And that's when plate tectonics started to really become the.

01:12:45 It's almost like the discovery of DNA and biology, like plate tectonics and geology just kind of makes everything make sense.

01:12:52 That's one of the big things that a lot of people are terrified of is a pole shift.

01:12:57 Yeah.

01:12:58 We don't know really how quickly that can happen.

01:13:01 It happens.

01:13:03 If I'm right, on average, about 800,000 years, but sometimes it can be millions of years, sometimes it can be less.

01:13:11 What happens when the magnetosphere breaks down and reconstitutes?

01:13:16 Is that a couple of months?

01:13:19 Is that a couple hundred years?

01:13:21 In that time, I think we lose our protection from the magnetosphere and the gamma rays.

01:13:29 So, yeah.

01:13:31 So, if this happens every 800,000 years, when was the last time it happened?

01:13:35 About 800,000 years ago.

01:13:37 Fun, yeah, but highly variable.

01:13:40 So, I don't like how you're saying that, yeah.

01:13:43 Now, when I was working down in Patagonia for many, many years, um, that was before we really repaired the hole in the ozone layer, which is a great environmental success story.

01:13:53 We did that, um, but I was under that hole, and it would be a chilly day, I'd be working in my parka, but my skin felt like it was in a microwave, it was just like really weird heating of your body, which is why I go to the dermatologist twice a year now.

01:14:09 Did you get sunburn, yes.

01:14:12 But it just felt different, Joe.

01:14:15 It's not like when you go to the beach today.

01:14:17 This just felt like you were being baked.

01:14:19 It felt different.

01:14:20 Australia had an issue with that, right?

01:14:21 Yeah, they're pretty far south.

01:14:23 I was further south in Patagonia.

01:14:25 They had a bunch of, the last time I was there, they had these things that they would have the ads everywhere for skin cancer.

01:14:32 I was like, this is weird.

01:14:34 And then someone explained to me, yeah, Australia's had a problem with the ozone layer over Australia.

01:14:39 Yeah, I think their lifestyle is pretty outdoorsy too.

01:14:41 Very much.

01:14:42 Yeah.

01:14:43 So what do we know about pole shifts?

01:14:47 We know that the poles are moving right now.

01:14:51 They are.

01:14:52 And what is the speed they're moving at?

01:14:55 The magnetic pole moves, right?

01:14:59 I don't know the speed.

01:15:00 You can look up maps and see where it was at different times.

01:15:03 But it's currently moving.

01:15:05 It's always moving.

01:15:06 Right.

01:15:07 Yeah.

01:15:07 And it kind of moves in a poorly shaped circle.

01:15:13 And I don't think this isn't my field, it's more geophysics.

01:15:20 But I don't think we fully understand what causes the magnetosphere to break down.

01:15:26 And regenerate, right?

01:15:27 I mean, basically, we have a magnetosphere because we have a solid iron nickel core surrounded by a liquid iron outer core, and they rotate at different speeds.

01:15:40 And so you have, you know, metal rotating inside metal.

01:15:42 That's basically a generator, right?

01:15:45 So that generates the magnetosphere, which is a very good thing to have.

01:15:50 But I am not sure exactly what causes it to break down over time.

01:15:56 So when it, You said it's moving in a circle.

01:15:59 Is it akin to like the precession of the equinoxes?

01:16:04 It's not related to that.

01:16:05 Not related, but moving in the same sort of way, like a wobble.

01:16:07 It's not a perfect circle.

01:16:09 You could look it up, but there's a map of where the magnetic pole is over time.

01:16:16 What evidence do we have that shows that every 800,000 years ago this happens, and what is the devastation or what is the result of this shift that we can observe from 800,000 plus years ago?

01:16:30 So, in the right geological circumstances, and you need a really quiet body of water, so that could be in the deep sea or it could be in a deep lake, if you get fine grains of iron rich particles settling, right, magnetic particles, they will orient themselves to the poles as they settle.

01:16:51 And so you get rock layers that have a polarity to them.

01:16:54 And geologists will go out and they will drill in mountainsides and they have to keep their core oriented and then they will test the.

01:17:03 The magnetic direction of those rocks.

01:17:07 And you can see over time that they shift from one way to the other.

01:17:10 And now, what happens in that interval when it's switching, I don't think we know that.

01:17:15 I think it's a pretty short interval, and we probably don't have a fossil record that records that time very well.

01:17:21 So, explain what that means, though, that it shifts.

01:17:24 So, north becomes south, south becomes north.

01:17:27 You could say that, yeah.

01:17:29 So, just whoop.

01:17:30 And we don't really know what effect that has on the earth, on the climate, on.

01:17:30 Yeah.

01:17:36 I don't think it's well known.

01:17:39 It's not known to be, but I do not think it's well known.

01:17:42 Is there a way that we could figure that out?

01:17:46 Could we put that into perplexity?

01:17:47 See if perplexity has an answer for what the fuck happens?

01:17:50 Because that sounds crazy.

01:17:51 That sounds like it could be the end of civilization.

01:17:54 Well, it's a small interval of time, and it's very hard to catch a little interval of time in the fossil record, right?

01:18:01 A small interval of time that occurs every 800,000 years.

01:18:05 Or so.

01:18:06 Or so.

01:18:07 In some cases, like at the very end of the Cretaceous, there's about a 5 million year span where there's no magnetic.

01:18:12 Oh, interesting.

01:18:12 Flip.

01:18:13 Do we know why?

01:18:15 No.

01:18:15 I don't know.

01:18:17 But that's not great for me, right?

01:18:18 Because we use these flips.

01:18:20 Use these flips is kind of like imagine you have like a geological strata is like a pole and you have these stripes on the pole and they have different widths.

01:18:31 Well, you can find your piece of the pole here and somebody else has a piece of the pole there and you can match them up and say, oh, there's the layer that's the same from Africa to South America.

01:18:40 Well, at the end of the Cretaceous, it's like five million years and no flip.

01:18:44 So, and that's mostly where I work.

01:18:46 So I can't use that tool.

01:18:48 I don't have anything to match up.

01:18:49 Interesting.

01:18:50 And how'd they figure out that it didn't flip during that time period?

01:18:53 Because when you find rocks of that, Age that are deposited in those quiet environments, the pole is just always facing the same direction.

01:19:01 For five million years.

01:19:02 Yeah.

01:19:04 And is there any kind of a working model of the potential disaster that would incur?

01:19:12 Not that I've seen.

01:19:13 That would occur?

01:19:15 If you had a guess, like if you had to say, what could happen if the pole shifted tomorrow?

01:19:21 Well, it's interesting.

01:19:22 I mean, I would guess, and this is guessing.

01:19:25 That we would probably have an increased rate of cancer.

01:19:28 We would maybe also have an increased rate of mutation.

01:19:31 And so maybe this is something that historically has been like a spur to evolution.

01:19:37 But I can't imagine anybody would think of it as a good thing.

01:19:41 Let's see what our AI sponsor says.

01:19:43 Perplexity says yes, a magnetic reversal could affect life, but the evidence does not support it causing a global catastrophe or mass extinction.

01:19:51 During a reversal, Earth's magnetic field weakens and becomes more complicated.

01:19:56 But it does not simply disappear.

01:19:57 The atmosphere and remaining magnetic fields continue to protect the surface.

01:20:02 What could change?

01:20:03 Radiation exposure.

01:20:04 Weaker field lets more charged particles penetrate closer to the Earth.

01:20:08 Some additional radiation could reach the surface, but the atmosphere remains a substantial shield.

01:20:13 A reversal would not leave life directly exposed to space.

01:20:17 Ask Perplexity this What is the most potentially catastrophic version of a pole shift that has been proposed?

01:20:31 So, ask that follow up question.

01:20:32 Interesting about navigation.

01:20:34 A lot of birds and some creatures in the sea use the magnetosphere for navigation.

01:20:39 So, that would really mess them up.

01:20:42 Would you say proposal or something?

01:20:44 Yeah, well, outcome of a pole shift that's been proposed.

01:20:54 Now we're going to get to the truth.

01:20:56 Worst case scenario.

01:20:58 This is where it gets scary.

01:21:00 This is.

01:21:01 For a magnetic reversal, we've kind of been discussing one of the most catastrophic proposals is a global environmental crisis.

01:21:07 Severely weakened field allows more energetic particles into the atmosphere, damages the ozone layer, increases harmful ultraviolet radiation, and contributes to ecological disruption and extinctions.

01:21:18 Researchers proposed this scenario in a 2021 study, but its sweeping consequences remain disputed rather than established.

01:21:26 The Adams event hypothesis, oh, I don't like that, examined the Lashamps. Excursion about 42,000 years ago, a temporary magnetic reversal rather than the last lasting reversal of about 780,000 years ago.

01:21:43 They proposed that the weakened field combined with unusual solar conditions triggered this chain of events.

01:21:49 More energetic particles ionized the atmosphere, changing its chemistry.

01:21:52 Ozone depletion increased the ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface, changes in atmospheric circulation.

01:21:59 Okay, so there were some changes and some issues.

01:22:02 These stresses contribute to the disappearance of Australian.

01:22:06 Megafauna and Neanderthals.

01:22:08 The authors also speculated that increased UV exposure encouraged humans to seek shelter in caves.

01:22:15 That big cave we've talked about with like 20,000, 30,000 people lived in it.

01:22:15 Hmm.

01:22:19 Right.

01:22:20 Right.

01:22:21 Darren Kuyu, you mean?

01:22:22 Yeah.

01:22:23 You know where that?

01:22:24 No, I'm not.

01:22:25 Darren Kuyu is a very weird archaeological discovery in Turkey where a guy was.

01:22:25 Okay.

01:22:32 His chickens kept going missing through like a hole in the wall.

01:22:35 And this guy breaks into this hole in the wall and then realizes it's kind of the beginning of a tunnel and then follows the tunnel in and finds an underground city that goes, what does it go?

01:22:46 Like 100 meters into the ground?

01:22:48 It's suitable to house.

01:22:51 20 plus thousand people, and including there's air holes to the surface, there's places where they believe they had grain storage.

01:23:02 They have no idea how old it was, they have no idea who built it, they have no idea why.

01:23:07 But maybe some of the speculation is that there was some sort of a natural disaster, or maybe even more likely, some human invaders that they were trying to avoid.

01:23:18 So this is Darren Cuyu.

01:23:20 Wow.

01:23:21 And I think.

01:23:22 Was this found in the 90s, Jamie?

01:23:24 It says 63.

01:23:26 63.

01:23:27 So this guy, like, just say, what's this?

01:23:30 And then finds this thing.

01:23:32 It's carved into the ground.

01:23:32 There's no record of it.

01:23:34 I mean, it's all carved into stone.

01:23:36 It's really crazy.

01:23:38 And when you learn how big it is, can you show, like, an image of the one there?

01:23:43 That's what it looked like.

01:23:44 So this is a representation of what is actually underground.

01:23:48 Like, how nuts is that?

01:23:48 Wow.

01:23:49 That's amazing.

01:23:50 That these people lived there for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, because they really don't know how old this is.

01:23:56 And this is underneath them the whole time, and no explanation.

01:24:00 Also, no historical record.

01:24:02 That's wild.

01:24:03 I think last time we talked about it, they've only uncovered a portion of it, right?

01:24:08 Right.

01:24:08 So far, they know that it could house 20,000 people.

01:24:12 It might be more of it.

01:24:12 But who knows?

01:24:13 And then there's another one that's similar to that in China.

01:24:16 The China one's really weird.

01:24:17 There was a guy who had a pond, and he was draining his pond.

01:24:21 And then upon draining his pond, he realized that there was some sort of an opening in the ground.

01:24:26 And then went through this opening in the ground, and there is this enormous underground chamber that's carved out of stone with staircases, and it's bananas.

01:24:38 And unfortunately, since the time of this guy's discovery, some people, it seems like they've carved other intricate artwork into the walls that probably weren't there.

01:24:38 Wow.

01:24:49 So you have more than one timeline that's dealing with this.

01:24:54 And when was this discovery?

01:24:55 Yeah.

01:24:58 Yeah, I think it's 92.

01:24:58 92?

01:25:00 Right, Sarah, it says, yeah, that's it.

01:25:02 So look how nuts this is.

01:25:05 So, no historical record.

01:25:07 Like, China has some of the most amazing historical records because it's an ancient civilization.

01:25:12 And this guy found this draining a pond.

01:25:16 What does that say?

01:25:18 It says they kept draining ponds and they found two dozen more like it.

01:25:23 Like, so this is a huge underground complex that, and if you look at all the machine lines on the walls, Like how it's been carved, like what tools were they using?

01:25:34 Like how did they do this?

01:25:36 What was the engineering involved?

01:25:38 How did you get all the stone out of there?

01:25:39 No record anywhere mentions who made them or why.

01:25:42 That's wild.

01:25:43 Wow.

01:25:44 I started my career working in the Baharia oasis of Egypt.

01:25:48 And, you know, we were there for dinosaurs.

01:25:51 But since we worked there in 2000, 2001, they started finding mummies there.

01:25:57 And these were like Roman era mummies.

01:26:00 And they have found thousands of them since then.

01:26:02 And they now call it Valley of the Golden Mummies.

01:26:05 Wow.

01:26:06 And so during Roman times, you know, Egypt was ancient to them.

01:26:11 And it was very fashionable to be buried like an ancient Egyptian.

01:26:15 And there were thousands of these then.

01:26:17 Wow.

01:26:18 That's cool.

01:26:18 Yeah.

01:26:20 My friend David Cho, he did a thing back in the early Vice days where he went into the Congo looking for a dinosaur because there's like people in the Congo that swear that there's something that lives deep in the Congo that, the way they describe it, it sounds like some long necked dinosaur, brontosaurus looking thing.

01:26:39 Are you aware of that?

01:26:40 I'm not, but I'd like to take a look at it.

01:26:43 Yeah, me too.

01:26:44 But you never heard that rumor?

01:26:46 See if you can find what the hell that's supposed to be.

01:26:48 There's a name that they have for it.

01:26:50 Yeah.

01:26:52 You want to try that name?

01:26:53 Mokali Mbembe.

01:26:56 So, the way they describe it, and by the way, these are people that have no access to history books.

01:27:03 These are people that, like a lot of these villagers, they have no access, no contact with the Western world when they were describing this, which is really weird.

01:27:11 So, they're describing a brontosaurus.

01:27:13 And at least this is how people have drawn how they described it.

01:27:20 So, in the 1980s, Roy Mackle, microbiologist from the University of Chicago, conducted multiple expeditions to locate the animal, and eyewitness testimony described it.

01:27:32 The head was distinctly snake like, a long thin tail, and a body approximately the size of an elephant or at least that of a hippopotamus.

01:27:40 Legs are short, with the hind legs possessing three claws.

01:27:44 The animals are reddish brown in color and have a rooster like frill running from the top of their head down to the back of their neck.

01:27:52 However, no expeditions have found evidence of the animal other than eyewitness testimonies.

01:27:56 Now, it's interesting to me, that sounds like it has feathers, right?

01:28:00 That sounds like some sort of a feathered dinosaur that they're describing that lives in the water.

01:28:08 And the problem with the Congo is the Congo is huge.

01:28:12 It's enormous and it's really dangerous.

01:28:12 It is.

01:28:15 Like getting in there.

01:28:15 Really dangerous.

01:28:16 Yeah.

01:28:17 Yeah.

01:28:18 And if you go there, you know, especially now, there's like an Ebola outbreak.

01:28:23 Yeah.

01:28:23 And then that's probably the easiest thing to deal with.

01:28:26 There's like some serious war going on there.

01:28:29 Very, very dangerous place to be.

01:28:31 Yeah.

01:28:31 So, not a whole lot of people going out looking for that dinosaur.

01:28:34 No, you know, the thing that I always think about when you hear about like these cryptobiological species is there has to be a breeding population of them to exist, right?

01:28:44 Right.

01:28:44 Like, there can't be one Loch Ness monster or one Bigfoot.

01:28:48 There has to be a breeding population.

01:28:50 And, you know, if that's a thousand, like, you're not going to miss a thousand plesiosaur sized creatures in the Loch Ness, right?

01:28:58 Right.

01:28:58 They're just not going to miss it.

01:28:59 And you're probably going to have evidence if there's.

01:29:02 A thousand, you know, giant apes walking around Washington.

01:29:07 The Loch Ness one is look, you ever been to Scotland?

01:29:10 I love Scotland.

01:29:11 Best place to hike.

01:29:11 Awesome place.

01:29:12 People love to get hammered and they love to tell stories, okay?

01:29:16 And when you live next to a giant lake, that whiskey's pretty good.

01:29:20 And you're worried about kids drowning, you make up stories about monsters.

01:29:23 And then also you're bored.

01:29:25 So these stories about monsters, they get more exaggerated and more fantastic.

01:29:29 And, you know, absolutely.

01:29:30 But Colin, come over here and tell your story.

01:29:33 And the guy tells this fucking crazy story of a.

01:29:35 A monster that he saw when he was fishing one day.

01:29:38 Of course, it's fun.

01:29:40 Especially when you're dealing with people back then.

01:29:43 I mean, this originates back when there's no books, okay?

01:29:46 And then you get to books, these stories have been told forever and ever, and you don't really know what the fuck is in that water because there's no way to know.

01:29:53 You don't have a submarine, no one goes in there.

01:29:55 A lot of unknown.

01:29:57 That makes sense to me.

01:29:58 Bigfoot also makes sense.

01:29:59 The woods are big, who knows what's out there?

01:30:03 It's when people who live in an environment talk about something.

01:30:08 I watched a documentary.

01:30:08 It was kind of a sad documentary of this guy who was looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon.

01:30:17 And he was convinced that he was going to find a giant sloth in the Amazon.

01:30:20 This was going to make his career.

01:30:22 But it just goes over the period of time where he continues to look for this sloth.

01:30:26 And all these people keep saying, I saw it.

01:30:28 He's like, Where is it?

01:30:28 I saw it.

01:30:29 And he keeps looking.

01:30:31 And he's years in.

01:30:32 And he realized, Oh my God, this might be bullshit.

01:30:34 I might have wasted years of my academic career searching for an animal that's long extinct.

01:30:40 Although, you know, there's a lot of unexplored parts of the Amazon, right?

01:30:40 Yeah.

01:30:43 Or little explored.

01:30:44 And like, when was the Okapi discovered?

01:30:48 Wasn't that in the 60s?

01:30:49 What is the Okapi?

01:30:49 I mean.

01:30:51 It's a.

01:30:52 Big plant eating animal in Southeast Asia.

01:30:56 But, you know, I mean, it's rare to find a big unknown animal today, right?

01:31:01 That's your copy?

01:31:02 Oh, I've seen that before.

01:31:03 Yeah, that thing's cool.

01:31:04 And I think they weren't known until, you know, last century.

01:31:08 That's nuts.

01:31:09 And so, you know, I mean, there are definitely things out there to be discovered, but you have to be skeptical when it's in a place like Scotland or Washington State.

01:31:20 Oh, yeah, for sure.

01:31:22 But the Congo.

01:31:23 Yeah.

01:31:24 I mean, every time biologists go to a place like the Congo or the Amazon, they find new species.

01:31:29 Now, most of those species are like beetles and things.

01:31:32 Right.

01:31:32 But who knows what's out there, right?

01:31:34 Yeah.

01:31:35 Well, that's what's interesting.

01:31:35 Yeah.

01:31:37 Like, you know, they have found those particularly large chimpanzees in the Congo.

01:31:41 There's a tribe of very large chimpanzees.

01:31:43 Like actual chimps, not the.

01:31:45 Yeah, there are actually chimps.

01:31:46 Bonobos live there, too.

01:31:47 Yeah.

01:31:47 Right.

01:31:47 Yeah.

01:31:48 They call them beele apes or the Bondo ape.

01:31:48 Not bonobos.

01:31:51 And it's just a much larger chimpanzee.

01:31:53 Yeah.

01:31:54 Interesting.

01:31:54 And they ground nest, they ground nest like gorillas.

01:31:57 It's really weird.

01:31:58 The locals call them lion eaters.

01:32:00 They have two versions of the chimpanzees.

01:32:02 They call them tree beaters and lion eaters.

01:32:05 It doesn't really mean they kill lions.

01:32:07 They call them lion killers, but it's probably an exaggeration.

01:32:11 Although they did catch one eating a leopard, but they don't know if this one was.

01:32:16 And this is like scientists.

01:32:17 There's a guy, a Swedish wildlife photographer, Carl Ammann, I believe is his name.

01:32:23 He started looking for these things in the 1990s, and he got a bunch of camera trap photos of them, just particularly large chimpanzees.

01:32:30 Some of them.

01:32:31 As big as six feet tall.

01:32:33 They even shot one at an airfield.

01:32:36 There's this photograph of these two guys with one they shot, and it's a chimpanzee that's the size of a gorilla.

01:32:42 It's really weird.

01:32:44 And so, this is a real animal.

01:32:46 There's video of them.

01:32:47 They have fecal samples.

01:32:48 They have bones.

01:32:49 They have all kinds of things.

01:32:50 There's really some confusing bones, too.

01:32:53 One of the skulls has a crest like a gorilla's, which would indicate massive mandible muscles.

01:33:00 So, they thought maybe it was a hybrid of a chimpanzee and some other ape.

01:33:05 But now they think it's no, it's just one weird group of chimps that seems to be quite a bit larger than the regular chimp.

01:33:11 So you can find that photo of the dead one at the airport because the dead one at the airport is kooky.

01:33:17 These dudes behind it, and they shot it at an airport.

01:33:20 And you look at it, you're like, what?

01:33:22 That is so big.

01:33:24 That's the biggest chimp I've ever seen in my life.

01:33:27 And so the point is these things were just rumors for a long time because this is such a remote area and because it's very hard to get funding to go look for some.

01:33:39 Crazy monkey that no one is sure is real or not.

01:33:43 You have to convince your university.

01:33:45 It's very hard to get money for discovery.

01:33:47 I mean, I faced that early in my career.

01:33:50 Like, you know, it's always, well, how do you know you'll find something?

01:33:52 Like, I don't know, but I do know how to find it.

01:33:54 Look at that photo.

01:33:56 Wow.

01:33:57 Isn't that crazy?

01:33:57 It's big.

01:33:58 That thing's huge.

01:33:59 It's really big.

01:34:01 Like, how weird.

01:34:02 So, I mean, there's things that are real that don't seem like they should be real.

01:34:06 You know, like the hobbit people they found on the island of Florence.

01:34:06 Yeah.

01:34:09 Yeah.

01:34:09 Amazing, right?

01:34:11 I just had a whole podcast about that the other day.

01:34:11 Yeah.

01:34:12 Yeah.

01:34:13 That's so cool.

01:34:14 And I remember when that came out, there was immense pushback, right?

01:34:17 And they said, no, it's got to be a pathological individual.

01:34:20 And then they started finding more and more.

01:34:22 And now it's, you know, and now I think it's convention that that was a species that existed.

01:34:26 Aaron Powell, Jr.

01:34:27 And then they found him.

01:34:27 Yes.

01:34:29 Was Gregory Forth, is that his name?

01:34:31 Aaron Powell, Jr.

01:34:32 Brilliant guy who was on, who was explaining, he was one of the people that went over there.

01:34:36 He had actually heard about them from the people that lived on that island in the 1980s, long before it was ever discovered.

01:34:44 And then got eyewitness accounts of people who claimed to have still seen them on the island as recently as like a couple months before the discovery.

01:34:54 Yeah, it was really kooky stuff.

01:34:56 And then there's people that have, there's a depiction that these guys had that went to the island or a description of a tall monkey that they had encountered that was walking on two feet in 2019.

01:35:09 Really weird.

01:35:10 That is weird.

01:35:11 And they found bones that indicate that they lived or a similar type species lived in the Philippines, they found them in China, they found them, the Homo nilidae, right?

01:35:22 Yeah.

01:35:23 Yeah.

01:35:23 There's another one in Africa.

01:35:24 Yep.

01:35:25 Really wild stuff.

01:35:26 So it's like a recent discovery.

01:35:27 Yeah.

01:35:28 It's cool, you know, that there's so much still to be discovered.

01:35:33 We're really seeing like the hominid group is more like a bush now.

01:35:38 Yeah.

01:35:39 It's rare that we are the only species of human alive on the planet today.

01:35:43 Usually there's a bunch.

01:35:44 Right.

01:35:45 Yeah.

01:35:46 Like the Denisovans and all these different ones.

01:35:46 Yeah.

01:35:49 Yeah.

01:35:49 We're learning so much more about them.

01:35:51 You know, and there's so much good Neanderthal research happening right now, and they're no longer portrayed as like these brutish cavemen.

01:35:59 Like they were making stone tools.

01:36:01 They, you know, it looks like they had art, maybe burials.

01:36:05 I think there's some evidence to that.

01:36:08 And they were us, they're in our genes as well.

01:36:11 You know, one of the things that I think I'm happiest about.

01:36:15 Have you ever had your DNA run by like 23andMe or one of those?

01:36:18 Yeah.

01:36:19 So according to 23andMe, I have more Neanderthal markers in my genome than 99% of their customers.

01:36:27 Wow.

01:36:28 That's crazy.

01:36:29 I'm 57%.

01:36:30 Yeah.

01:36:31 Yeah.

01:36:32 My wife said I could have saved you 100 bucks.

01:36:36 But that's based on the old idea of Neanderthals being dopes, right?

01:36:39 Yeah.

01:36:39 Right.

01:36:40 They did have larger brain capacity, right?

01:36:42 They had larger brains than we do.

01:36:43 Yeah.

01:36:44 They were a little more broad shouldered, definitely stronger than we are.

01:36:49 But, you know, to some degree, they're still with us.

01:36:52 I think, you know, you heard, you heard, uh, Beth Shapiro says on your show that if you took the Neanderthal genes that are in humanity today collectively, you could put back together almost the entire Neanderthal genome.

01:37:06 Yeah, which is wildly unethical.

01:37:09 Well, yeah, yeah, it would be.

01:37:10 And we should not do that.

01:37:11 Or should we?

01:37:12 I mean, if I lived in China, I mean, I think I'd propose that to the government.

01:37:18 You know, I'd be like, listen, let's fuck it.

01:37:21 Yeah, that would be a supremely bad idea.

01:37:23 I don't know.

01:37:23 Would it be?

01:37:24 Maybe they'd be happy you did it.

01:37:25 Hey, thanks for bringing me back.

01:37:27 Yeah, I don't know.

01:37:28 We have a lot of problems already today, I think.

01:37:30 Well, isn't it interesting that we are so enamored by our ability to manipulate science and manipulate matter and life that we're willing to bring back the mammoth?

01:37:42 Everybody thinks that's a good idea.

01:37:44 Like, there's zero pushback if you decide to bring back the mammoth.

01:37:47 People are like, yeah, definitely should do that.

01:37:49 They brought back the dire wolf, right?

01:37:50 Yep.

01:37:51 No problem.

01:37:52 Yeah.

01:37:52 I mean, a few people are like, that's not really a dire wolf.

01:37:54 But if they brought back a Neanderthal, everybody would be like, hey.

01:37:57 I think so, yeah.

01:37:59 You can't do that.

01:38:00 That's us.

01:38:01 Isn't that weird?

01:38:02 It's weird.

01:38:03 I mean, I think Colossal is doing amazing work.

01:38:05 Oh, they definitely are.

01:38:06 Yeah.

01:38:07 Shout out to Ben Lamb.

01:38:08 Ben Lamb.

01:38:09 Ben Lamb's great.

01:38:10 I'm an advisor to the company.

01:38:13 And so it's just fascinating.

01:38:14 I go there and I feel like I'm in a movie.

01:38:16 It's incredible.

01:38:17 It's very Jurassic Park.

01:38:18 You've been there, right?

01:38:19 Yeah, I took my daughter.

01:38:20 Yeah.

01:38:20 It's incredible.

01:38:21 It's really awesome.

01:38:23 Like they're trying to bring back the thylacine, which is crazy.

01:38:26 Yeah.

01:38:27 But bringing back a Neanderthal would be a giant problem.

01:38:30 That's like a movie.

01:38:31 I think.

01:38:32 That's a terrible movie.

01:38:32 Nobody I know wants to do that.

01:38:34 Nobody you know that wants to talk about it.

01:38:36 I bet people have thought about it.

01:38:37 Well, working long hours in the lab, drinking coffee, go outside for a cigarette.

01:38:41 You know, it would be.

01:38:42 Fucking cool.

01:38:44 I don't know.

01:38:45 I hope not.

01:38:46 Bring back the fucking Neanderthals.

01:38:48 If you got, if someone found Denisovan DNA and they found out that Denisovans actually had a very large cerebral cortex and were probably smarter than us, would it be cool to bring them back?

01:39:01 Well, not to me, but you know, there are people out there.

01:39:06 Why not?

01:39:07 Well, I like the way nature does it.

01:39:11 Oh, okay.

01:39:12 Except when it comes to animals that aren't as smart.

01:39:15 And then we're willing to bring them back.

01:39:16 Isn't that interesting?

01:39:17 Well, you know, my view of like the things that Colossal is working on, like the mammoth and the thylacine, the marsupial wolf and the dodo and the bluebuck.

01:39:29 I mean, these are creatures that recently went extinct largely at our hand.

01:39:34 And so this is still their world.

01:39:36 You know, people conflate the idea of mammoths and dinosaurs.

01:39:40 Mammoths were just here.

01:39:41 I mean, the last mammoths went extinct about 3,000 years ago.

01:39:45 Right.

01:39:45 They were on an island, right?

01:39:46 Wrangell Island off Siberia.

01:39:48 So 3,000 years ago, that's a world that has pyramids and written stories and beer, right?

01:39:53 Like, if you're in a world that has beer, that's our world, right?

01:39:56 And they have a place in that world.

01:39:59 Their ecosystem is still here.

01:40:01 They're just absent from it.

01:40:03 Yeah.

01:40:04 I get it, but still, let them stay dead.

01:40:09 Why do you have to bring them back?

01:40:11 Well, put it this way.

01:40:12 I'm just playing devil's advocate.

01:40:14 Yeah.

01:40:14 Clearly, I want them to bring them back.

01:40:16 I think it's cool.

01:40:16 Let's say, I don't know.

01:40:18 Pick a species, pick the cheetah.

01:40:20 Okay.

01:40:20 So the cheetah goes extinct on Monday.

01:40:23 And if I said, Joe, I could bring back the cheetah on Tuesday, would you do it?

01:40:28 Hmm.

01:40:30 Me?

01:40:31 I mean, it's only been one day.

01:40:32 They've been gone forever.

01:40:33 Yeah, I think cheetahs are cool.

01:40:34 Yeah.

01:40:35 Yeah.

01:40:36 What if it's a year later and I said, well, I could bring back the cheetah now, a year later?

01:40:43 I would say, yeah.

01:40:44 It's still the same world, right?

01:40:45 Right.

01:40:46 What if it's a thousand years later?

01:40:48 Well, now you're messing with reality because the ecosystem is adjusted and changed a bit.

01:40:53 I mean, you know, a thousand years ago is, you know.

01:40:56 Where interestingly enough, we have a few animals that have adaptations that exist because of animals that were eating them that were extinct, like the pronghorn.

01:41:08 Yeah.

01:41:09 North American pronghorn is fast as shit because they're running away from cheetahs that no longer exist.

01:41:14 That no longer exist.

01:41:15 Yeah.

01:41:15 Isn't that crazy?

01:41:16 But like a thousand years ago, that's like William the Conqueror, right?

01:41:19 Like that's the same world.

01:41:20 That's this world.

01:41:21 Yeah.

01:41:22 So, you know, where do you draw the line?

01:41:24 Right, right, right.

01:41:25 I draw the line.

01:41:25 Like, you know, during the time of humans, that's still basically this world, and they have a place in this world.

01:41:32 Well, that was the Mr. Fourth when we had the conversation about these tiny hominids.

01:41:38 One of the things was, what would you do if you found them?

01:41:42 Are you allowed to catch one?

01:41:45 Like, is this like a kidnapping a human?

01:41:45 You know what I mean?

01:41:48 Yeah, I think it would be, yeah.

01:41:50 They're people.

01:41:50 Right.

01:41:51 Kind of, but they're covered in hair and they don't have stone tools.

01:41:55 And we don't even know if they have a language.

01:41:57 Right?

01:41:58 So is it a monkey?

01:42:00 But anything smarter than a monkey would be like, leave it alone.

01:42:00 I mean, right?

01:42:03 Leave it alone.

01:42:04 But if it's a monkey, like, yeah, put it in the zoo.

01:42:06 Like, no problem.

01:42:07 You go to the zoo, the monkeys are there.

01:42:09 But something just a little smarter than a monkey, like, oh man, that's fucked up.

01:42:12 Yeah, I think so.

01:42:13 You know, like you go to a zoo and you look at a gorilla and, like, there's somebody home.

01:42:16 Oh, I don't like it.

01:42:17 Right?

01:42:17 I don't like it.

01:42:18 There's totally somebody home.

01:42:19 I do not like primates at the zoo.

01:42:21 It drives me crazy.

01:42:22 I went to the Denver Zoo with my kids, and there was this, this was quite a long time ago.

01:42:22 Yeah.

01:42:28 There was this one particular area where they had all the primates caged, and this one monkey was wailing, just screaming.

01:42:36 And I think he was just frustrated.

01:42:39 Just living in hell.

01:42:40 He's just like, rah!

01:42:40 He's in prison.

01:42:43 And I'm like, I don't like that sound.

01:42:45 That sounds like pain.

01:42:46 That sounds like suffering.

01:42:47 Like, why the fuck do they have?

01:42:48 Can't we just make it 20, whatever it was back then, 2020, whatever it was?

01:42:53 Can't we just have video of these things now?

01:42:57 Do we need to have them locked up like this?

01:42:59 It seems, especially these little tiny ass cages.

01:43:03 It's one thing if you have a giant enclosure and they get trees and free food and no eagles eating them.

01:43:10 Great.

01:43:11 Right.

01:43:11 Fun times.

01:43:12 But the actual little zoo cages with a primate in it is really fucked up.

01:43:17 Yeah, it is.

01:43:17 Yeah.

01:43:18 I remember in grad school, I went to the National Zoo one time because it was free and I was in grad school and like that's what I could do.

01:43:25 I saw this elephant.

01:43:25 It reached through the bars in its enclosure and it grabbed this pointy rock and it started scraping the sidewalk with it.

01:43:32 And then it scraped its leg and then it set the rock down and it felt the sidewalk and it felt its leg and it was comparing the two.

01:43:41 And you could see like it was really thinking about it.

01:43:44 It was a smart being there.

01:43:47 It's trying to measure the hardness of things and see if it could dig its way out.

01:43:47 Right.

01:43:52 Maybe, yeah.

01:43:53 Yeah, maybe.

01:43:54 Maybe thinking of there's got to be a way out of this.

01:43:57 That's hell.

01:43:59 It's great when you have kids because they get to see animals.

01:44:03 But there's something really dark about a lot of those places.

01:44:07 One cool one is the San Diego Zoo.

01:44:10 Have you ever been to San Diego?

01:44:11 I have been.

01:44:12 Zoos do so much great conservation work.

01:44:14 They are really some of the engines of conservation that are keeping species that are right on the brink from teetering over.

01:44:21 I think the San Diego Zoo is largely responsible for the.

01:44:24 Emerging recovery of the California condor.

01:44:27 You know, they were down to 22 individuals, I think, in around 1970.

01:44:32 So they collected all of them from the wild and had a very careful breeding program to try to get them through this genetic bottleneck and they started releasing them.

01:44:40 And now there's a new population of California condors in Zine Canyon in Utah.

01:44:45 And so I think there's only about 550 of them alive right now, but they're, you know, they're up from 22.

01:44:50 They're moving in the right direction, which is great.

01:44:53 Yeah, no, that is cool.

01:44:54 And that's an example of zoo conservation.

01:44:56 You know, they do great work.

01:44:57 In general, they also have large enclosures.

01:45:00 Yeah.

01:45:01 They do.

01:45:02 It's a very nice zoo.

01:45:03 And you can go in like one of those jeeps and you drive around and animals come up and you can feed them.

01:45:07 It's pretty weird.

01:45:09 They don't seem to be tortured.

01:45:10 I always say that like the animals that seem the happiest at the zoo are giraffes.

01:45:15 They don't seem bothered by the zoo at all because they're just like another day with no lions.

01:45:20 Just wandering around.

01:45:20 Yeah.

01:45:22 They're the only animal at the zoo that they will let you feed them.

01:45:25 A baby can feed them.

01:45:27 Like a child, a small child can hold up a leaf of lettuce.

01:45:31 And they'll come over with their crazy tongue and wrap it around the lettuce, and everybody screams, Oh, we're gone.

01:45:36 I don't get the impression that giraffes are like the sharpest knives in the drawer.

01:45:39 They definitely aren't.

01:45:40 No.

01:45:41 Well, they fight with their heads.

01:45:43 You ever see they fight?

01:45:44 Yeah, it's like a bad idea.

01:45:46 They whip their necks.

01:45:47 It's crazy.

01:45:48 That's what those little horns are for.

01:45:50 Those little things that they have are to fuck each other up with.

01:45:54 Did you see Apple TV's Prehistoric Planet with David Attenborough?

01:45:58 No, I did.

01:45:59 So, like, great CGI.

01:46:02 But they had my dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, in there.

01:46:04 He's in episode two.

01:46:05 And I had the thrill of hearing Sir David say Dreadnoughtus, which is my ringtone now, by the way.

01:46:11 Oh, that's cool.

01:46:12 But they had a fight scene of Dreadnoughtus who were like slapping each other with their heads like giraffes do, which I think they would absolutely not do.

01:46:21 Their necks are really long and lightly built, filled a lot with air, and their heads are tiny.

01:46:26 Like a giant Dreadnoughtus has a head that's not much bigger than a horse head.

01:46:30 Why didn't they consult with you or someone like you?

01:46:33 Well, that's a good question.

01:46:36 I'm not sure.

01:46:36 It seems like a.

01:46:37 Some producer got involved, some jackass.

01:46:39 So they had a very good paleontologist, Darren Nage, who is in England.

01:46:45 But Darren sends me a message a couple weeks before it debuts, and he says, Kenneth, I have to tell you something.

01:46:53 We wanted to portray this idea that dinosaurs must have had amazing soft tissue structures that we'll never know about.

01:47:00 So I decided to give Dreadnought pop out neck bladders like a grouse.

01:47:06 He says, This was my decision, and I realize you'll have to answer the neck bladder question for the rest of your days.

01:47:13 And it's true.

01:47:14 If you could bring that up, Jamie, Prehistoric Planet Dreadnoughtus.

01:47:18 And so, where?

01:47:19 Why did he make that?

01:47:20 I don't know.

01:47:21 And so, everywhere I go now to give a talk, I have to answer the neck bladder question.

01:47:25 And this was just one guy's idea?

01:47:28 Yeah, yeah.

01:47:29 And so they.

01:47:29 Did you have a conversation with him saying, I don't think that was a good idea?

01:47:33 Well, it was too late.

01:47:34 He was telling me like two weeks before the show.

01:47:36 Why would he do that?

01:47:38 Why would he do that to my dinosaur in particular?

01:47:40 I'm not sure.

01:47:41 But yeah, there we go.

01:47:42 So, yeah.

01:47:43 And so in the show, they go like, and as part of their mating ritual.

01:47:47 Oh, come on.

01:47:48 That's like so creative.

01:47:50 I'm such a creative guest.

01:47:53 I'm giving a talk in San Antonio tomorrow, and I guarantee I will get the neck bladder question.

01:47:59 Look at how it's like said, almost like it's fact here.

01:48:02 Yeah.

01:48:02 Despite its external bulk, the internal physics of Dreadnoughtus relied on weight reduction.

01:48:06 Its vertebrae were pneumatized, containing a complex system of air sacs and blood.

01:48:11 Well, that part's true.

01:48:12 Heavy bone with air, but not the outside.

01:48:14 Not the outside.

01:48:16 Those big white things, he just made those up.

01:48:19 Made up.

01:48:20 Yeah.

01:48:20 And like even the distance between them, the size of them, all just creative.

01:48:25 Yeah.

01:48:25 No evidence for that.

01:48:27 That's really kooky.

01:48:27 That's kooky.

01:48:28 But these big dinosaurs do have pneumatized skeletons, which means that they have air bladders that go through their skeletons.

01:48:34 Their skeletons are very honeycombed, so they lose mass, but they don't lose a lot of strength.

01:48:39 And if you're that big like a bird.

01:48:39 Okay.

01:48:41 Like a bird.

01:48:42 Because birds are dinosaurs.

01:48:43 Right.

01:48:44 So, if you're the size of a house, if you took elephant anatomy and scaled it up to Dreadnoughtus size, I think its proteins would start to denature, which means cook, right, inside of its own body.

01:48:55 And so their big metabolic challenge is shedding heat.

01:48:58 So, how do they do that?

01:48:59 Well, one thing is that long neck and long tail gives them a lot of surface area per volume so they can shed heat that way.

01:49:05 Like elephants' ears.

01:49:06 Yes, but like super long, right?

01:49:08 Dreadnoughtus had a 40 foot long tail and a 30 foot long neck.

01:49:12 But then they have these pneumatic invasions.

01:49:14 They get more and more pneumatized over their.

01:49:17 Growth, the growth of an individual.

01:49:19 And we're not sure, but it seems likely to me that those pneumatic tubes that go through their skeleton are connected to their lungs.

01:49:29 And they have what we call bird style lungs, which kind of should be called dinosaur style lungs because they had them before birds.

01:49:37 But the way a bird and a dinosaur breathes is in this two step process.

01:49:42 They don't have bellows lungs like we do, where we always mix good air and bad air.

01:49:46 Dinosaurs don't do that, and birds don't do that.

01:49:48 So that when they take a breath in, it doesn't go into their lungs.

01:49:51 It's staged in this lower air bladder.

01:49:54 And then when they breathe out, that air goes across their lungs only in one direction.

01:49:59 And then the next time they breathe in, that air that just went across their lungs gets staged in an upper air bladder.

01:50:04 The new air comes into the lower air bladder.

01:50:07 And next time they breathe out, new air across the lungs, that old air then is expelled.

01:50:12 Whoa.

01:50:13 Yeah.

01:50:14 So it's a really efficient way of breathing.

01:50:16 And as a result of this, birds are really good in what we call hypoxic conditions, right?

01:50:21 Low oxygen.

01:50:22 That's why, like, the barred goose can fly over the Himalayas, right?

01:50:25 No bat can do that, but a barred goose could do that.

01:50:28 Oh, wow.

01:50:29 Yeah.

01:50:30 And so, this might be a way if it's connected to the pneumatic invasions in their skeleton where they can dump heat into their environment.

01:50:39 We were in Scotland, and there's this lady that was, she was a, what is it called when a person trains birds?

01:50:46 Oh, right.

01:50:49 Whatever it was.

01:50:50 A person that trains birds.

01:50:52 And you had the glove, you put the glove on, and you had an eagle.

01:50:54 And the eagle landed on my arm, and I was shocked at how light they are.

01:50:58 And it's because of the bones.

01:51:00 Yeah.

01:51:00 And birds have a lot of, Yeah, but they have all kinds of weight saving adaptations.

01:51:04 Hollow bones, they've lost their teeth, right?

01:51:06 Teeth are heavy.

01:51:07 So birds just have beaks.

01:51:09 And this happens, you can see in the Cretaceous period, the birds starting to lose their teeth.

01:51:13 So there's birds alive at the end of the Cretaceous, like one called Hesperornis, which looks kind of like a coomer ant today.

01:51:20 Looks very, very modern, but has teeth still.

01:51:23 And then there's birds like the shoebill that seem like they're from like 100 million years ago.

01:51:27 Yeah, that's crazy.

01:51:28 They're like, oh, those things are so weird.

01:51:30 Yeah.

01:51:31 And then they start cracking, they slam their jaws together and make that nutty sound that sounds like gunfire.

01:51:36 And you know the Hotsen?

01:51:39 It's a bird when it's born, it has claws, like, you know, harking back to its non avian dinosaur days, and they climb around.

01:51:46 Really?

01:51:47 Yeah.

01:51:48 When it's born?

01:51:49 There it is.

01:51:49 Yeah.

01:51:50 That's a real live bird?

01:51:52 Okay.

01:51:52 Yeah.

01:51:53 That's a dinosaur.

01:51:54 That is 100% a dinosaur.

01:51:56 Is that an actual picture?

01:51:57 I just typed it in.

01:51:57 Is that AI?

01:52:01 Yeah, it's cool.

01:52:02 That's an actual picture of it.

01:52:03 That's wild, isn't it?

01:52:04 What a freaky looking thing.

01:52:06 Yeah.

01:52:06 Heartless looking demon.

01:52:08 Look in his eyes.

01:52:09 Reptiles.

01:52:09 You know, that's the thing.

01:52:11 Dinosaurs, chickens, we keep chickens.

01:52:14 They're insensate.

01:52:15 You know, you look in their eyes and it's just like.

01:52:17 Oh, there's nobody there.

01:52:19 There's no.

01:52:20 What's that, Jimmy?

01:52:20 Stink bird.

01:52:21 Stink bird.

01:52:23 Why is a stink bird?

01:52:24 Do they think that predators won't eat it?

01:52:26 Whoa.

01:52:27 What?

01:52:29 I want to take a whiff.

01:52:30 Yeah.

01:52:31 But you can see, like, if you look at that thing or you look at chickens, have you ever seen, like, chickens running in slow motion?

01:52:38 They're dinosaurs.

01:52:38 I have chickens.

01:52:39 Yeah.

01:52:40 I've seen chickens eat, my chickens eat a mouse.

01:52:43 Yeah, mine too, and frogs.

01:52:44 Oh, frogs.

01:52:45 Yeah.

01:52:46 But it's incredible how ferocious they are.

01:52:48 Record them running in slow mo.

01:52:50 It looks like Jurassic Park.

01:52:52 It does.

01:52:52 It's amazing.

01:52:53 Yeah.

01:52:53 Right.

01:52:54 Yeah.

01:52:54 It does.

01:52:56 It's very interesting to watch how predatory they are when they do get a hold of something like a mouse.

01:53:02 Yeah.

01:53:02 Because, you know, I've shown videos on this podcast like countless times where people don't know them.

01:53:07 Like, you ever see what a chicken does to a mouse?

01:53:08 And they show them.

01:53:08 Yeah.

01:53:09 They're like, what the fuck?

01:53:10 Like, there's a cat playing with the mouse and the chicken snatches the mouse from the cat and just destroys the mouse.

01:53:15 They're vicious.

01:53:16 They're terrible to each other.

01:53:17 Like, if one gets injured, they'll just peck the wound.

01:53:17 Too.

01:53:19 Oh, yeah.

01:53:20 They're chickens.

01:53:21 Chickens are little dinosaurs.

01:53:21 Oh, they're heartless.

01:53:23 Yeah, they're mean.

01:53:24 They're mean.

01:53:25 That's what pecking order is all about.

01:53:26 That's a real thing.

01:53:27 Yeah, it is.

01:53:28 And you got to separate chickens.

01:53:29 It's a real problem.

01:53:30 Yeah.

01:53:30 They kill each other.

01:53:31 Yeah.

01:53:31 We only get hens, so we have eliminated some of that stuff.

01:53:34 We only get hens, too, but we fucked up this time.

01:53:37 And one of our chicks was a rooster.

01:53:39 So now we have a rooster.

01:53:40 Yeah.

01:53:41 We had a rooster before.

01:53:42 We had to get rid of him because he started attacking people.

01:53:44 But this guy's cool.

01:53:45 We get him from this site online, and you can pay an extra 25 cents to have them sexed.

01:53:51 Well, we paid that too.

01:53:52 They just fucked up.

01:53:53 We've had 20.

01:53:56 We have right now 20 chickens.

01:53:58 And over the course of the times that I've had chickens, we've probably had 50 or 60 all told forever.

01:54:06 You know, when a bunch of them die off and get new ones.

01:54:08 This is the only time they ever made a mistake.

01:54:10 It was only one mistake.

01:54:11 And we were looking at this one chick.

01:54:12 And as he was getting bigger, we're like, why is he bigger than everybody else?

01:54:16 And why has he got that little fucking thing in his nose?

01:54:18 Like, I think that's a rooster.

01:54:20 And my wife was the first one to figure it out.

01:54:20 Right.

01:54:23 She's like, he's a rooster.

01:54:24 And then as he just, you know, A few months in, you're like, it's clear.

01:54:29 He's way bigger than them.

01:54:31 And he starts, well, there he is.

01:54:34 Fuck, we got a rooster.

01:54:36 But this guy's keeping it together.

01:54:37 We've had him for a year now, and he doesn't fuck with anybody.

01:54:40 He's really chill, you know, luckily, because the last rooster had a go.

01:54:43 Yeah.

01:54:44 I think he probably became soup.

01:54:46 I don't know what happened.

01:54:48 Gave him to one of my guys.

01:54:49 Our chickens have names, so we don't eat them.

01:54:51 Yeah, we have names for our chickens.

01:54:53 We have names for some of them.

01:54:54 Once it got over 20 with some of the new ones, a lot of them haven't been named.

01:54:58 Right.

01:54:58 A couple names we've recycled.

01:55:01 We've had a couple of Frenchies.

01:55:04 Well, it's a great way to get free food.

01:55:07 It's not free, obviously.

01:55:08 You have to pay for chicken feed and all that stuff, but it's like karma free protein.

01:55:12 The eggs are great, aren't they?

01:55:13 Once you have pastured, grass fed chicken eggs, you can't go back to the store bought ones.

01:55:18 Well, it's just they're so fresh.

01:55:20 You know exactly where they came from, you know exactly what your chickens are eating.

01:55:24 There's no concern whatsoever.

01:55:25 And it's also like it doesn't harm anybody.

01:55:28 I put them raw in my smoothie every morning.

01:55:30 Wow, you're brave.

01:55:32 Well, you know.

01:55:34 Have you ever been to the Explorers Club dinner?

01:55:36 What is that?

01:55:37 You know, the Explorers Club in New York, right?

01:55:39 I've heard of it.

01:55:40 Yeah.

01:55:40 I'm not totally sure.

01:55:41 So it's like the global center for exploration.

01:55:46 Okay.

01:55:47 We have a dinner every spring, and it's a huge event.

01:55:50 There's like 2,000 people that come, and the appetizers, famously, are insects.

01:55:59 Wow.

01:56:00 And so you get scorpions and tarantulas and the silkworm.

01:56:06 Grubs and some things, you know, crickets I like.

01:56:10 There's potatoes.

01:56:11 There's potatoes.

01:56:12 Yeah.

01:56:12 My very first Explorers Club dinner, I think in 2003, no, four, Buzz Aldrin's wife was feeding me scorpions on a stick.

01:56:22 I was like, what the hell is happening to me?

01:56:22 Whoa.

01:56:25 It was wild.

01:56:26 Yeah.

01:56:27 You should come sometime.

01:56:28 So the club itself is up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

01:56:32 It looks exactly like you think it would, right?

01:56:34 Oh, old wood and.

01:56:36 Lots of taxidermy, old wood panel, all these artifacts.

01:56:40 Every.

01:56:41 That's ever walked on the moon has had an Explorers Club flag with them.

01:56:45 Oh, wow.

01:56:46 Neil Armstrong had a flag in his sleeve.

01:56:46 That's cool.

01:56:49 And that's in our archives at the Explorers Club.

01:56:52 And is it just like people that explore everything all over the world, archaeologists, paleontologists?

01:56:58 Like, what is it?

01:56:59 Yeah.

01:57:00 Different people take these weird trips?

01:57:02 Well, it's hardcore explorer researchers.

01:57:06 Those are fellows.

01:57:07 Members are people that have done a lot of exploration for good causes.

01:57:13 And there's also friends, they're supporters of the Club.

01:57:16 You know, I got to meet Sir Edmund Hillary there before he died, which was incredible.

01:57:21 He told my wife and I the story of climbing Everest.

01:57:23 Like it happened last weekend, like we were the first people he ever told.

01:57:27 Wow.

01:57:27 It was amazing.

01:57:28 I've gotten to meet, I was, honestly, I'm still processing this, but I was lucky enough to receive the Explorers Club Medal in 2019, which, like many of my heroes, had received that in the past, including the Apollo astronauts.

01:57:42 And it happened to be the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

01:57:46 So I got to go to a lunch with.

01:57:50 Basically, all of the living Apollo astronauts.

01:57:53 And we were sitting at a table with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, my son, who was like 10 at the time, 9 or 10, was sitting next to Fred Hayes from Apollo 13.

01:58:04 And I kept leaning over to him saying, like, burn this moment into your memory so you remember it when you're 90 years old because these are the first people to leave the planet, first people to walk on the moon.

01:58:13 It was incredible.

01:58:15 So, when you're at this Explorers Club, how come they can't just give you wings?

01:58:19 How come they have to feed you bugs?

01:58:20 Is it just a novelty?

01:58:22 It's kind of a tradition.

01:58:23 Yeah, it's a tradition.

01:58:24 Like you go to the Explorers Club bar, and there's always a martini glass filled with crickets for bar snacks.

01:58:30 Just to be silly.

01:58:32 Yeah.

01:58:32 Right.

01:58:32 And so, who's funding all this?

01:58:34 How does this place stay open?

01:58:35 Sounds like a pretty extravagant organization.

01:58:37 Well, you know, there are dues, and a big portion of their yearly budget is made from the Explorers Club dinner, which has become.

01:58:46 So, it's a big celebration.

01:58:46 Oh, okay.

01:58:48 It's a big celebration.

01:58:49 You know, celebrities go.

01:58:50 Well, I mean, it is so important that people are willing to take these crazy trips.

01:58:55 Yeah.

01:58:55 Like Gregory IV going to Flores and all these different places where people go.

01:59:00 Without that, our limited, currently limited understanding would be so much smaller.

01:59:05 Yeah.

01:59:06 And a lot of what the Explorers Club does now is to fund young explorers, to fund conservation projects.

01:59:13 We have a program called the EC50, which every year is about 50 up and coming explorers.

01:59:21 And it plugs them into the kind of networks they need to get their expeditions funded and to get You know, all the logistics done.

01:59:29 It's also a place where, like, if you're stuck somewhere in the world, you contact the club, and there's a good chance that, you know, there's somebody that can help you or even, like, put a rescue mission together.

01:59:38 Oh, wow.

01:59:39 Yeah.

01:59:40 Well, that's probably very important.

01:59:42 When the submersible, the Titan, imploded, the club was in the process of putting a search mission together when it was found out that it was destroyed.

01:59:55 Yeah.

01:59:56 I wanted to bring us back to.

01:59:59 Dinosaurs and the original hoaxes.

02:00:02 It seems like this is part of the problem with the conspiracy narrative that's online is that there were quite a few people that were profiting off of dinosaur bones hoaxes in the early days of dinosaur discovery.

02:00:16 Yeah.

02:00:17 So, how did that all start?

02:00:19 And what was the financial motivation to do this?

02:00:24 Yeah, I think so.

02:00:27 There have been cases where fossils are fabricated.

02:00:30 More recently, in the last 20 years, Some really good fossil hoaxes have been made in China, but they've been discovered by paleontologists.

02:00:42 Sometimes it might take a little bit of time, but paleontologists uncover that these things have been fabricated or patched together.

02:00:51 What were the original hoaxes, though?

02:00:53 I'm not really sure.

02:00:55 Because I know there was a controversy.

02:00:57 There were several people that kept discovering dinosaur bones, and then it turns out there was sort of a competition.

02:01:04 Amongst these guys to understand.

02:01:07 Oh, are you maybe talking about the famous bone wars between Cope and Marsh?

02:01:11 So those are real fossils, but they had this horrendous competition with each other.

02:01:16 It was a Yale professor, Othniel Marsh, and somebody from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Edward Drinker Cope.

02:01:24 And this is in the latter portion of the 19th century.

02:01:29 And so they're like paleontology is new to the world, it's new to North America, and every time they go out and find something, it's a new.

02:01:38 Species, right?

02:01:38 Because nobody has ever done this.

02:01:40 So they're building these tremendous lists of species.

02:01:42 They end up out west in Wyoming, like sabotaging each other's quarries.

02:01:47 There's quarries.

02:01:48 I think there's gunplay at one point.

02:01:50 It ends up with congressional hearings in Washington.

02:01:53 It becomes scandalous and very widespread.

02:01:56 But they were dealing with real fossils.

02:01:57 They just hated each other.

02:01:59 And they were in this incredible competition.

02:02:01 Cope challenged Marsh that he said, when we die, let's donate our brains to science and see who has the bigger brain.

02:02:08 That's the kind of a-holes these dudes were.

02:02:12 It's insane.

02:02:12 They're nasty people.

02:02:15 And all of this starts right where the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I work, is like, Right there, about a mile away, there's a marl pit where that first ever discovered tyrannosaur is discovered.

02:02:27 And so Cope is notified by the miners that there's something there.

02:02:33 And he goes and he sees this tyrannosaur and he excavates it and he describes it.

02:02:37 And at this point, he wants the approval of this great Yale professor, Marsh, right?

02:02:43 So he invites him down.

02:02:45 When Marsh is in that quarry in Mantua Township, New Jersey, he takes the quarry owner to the side and cuts a secret deal with him.

02:02:51 So, that all the fossils they found henceforth would be shipped up to the Yale Peabody Museum and not go to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

02:02:59 And that starts this battle between them.

02:03:03 And then there's a famous story that Cope had this elasmosaur skeleton, which is like a big plesiosaur.

02:03:10 And Marsh, like, ostentatiously corrected him, taking the head of it and putting it on the other side because he got the animal backwards.

02:03:20 So, just trying to embarrass each other and sabotaging each other.

02:03:24 And they were not nice guys.

02:03:26 It's just weird when that kind of behavior happens amongst the people that are supposed to be the intellectuals.

02:03:34 Yeah.

02:03:35 Yeah.

02:03:35 There's clearly like huge egos on both sides.

02:03:39 But they have found so many fossils that like I have to refer back to them constantly.

02:03:44 And when you look at a species name, you know, in public, it'll just have one name like Dreadnoughtus, but it'll usually have in science, it'll have the genus, the species, and then in parentheses, like the discoverer and the year.

02:03:57 And like, I'm always having to write down Cope and Marsh because they just found so many North American species.

02:04:03 Wow.

02:04:05 So they weren't involved in any hoaxing?

02:04:07 No, no hoaxing.

02:04:08 It was, you know, they got some stuff wrong and they were very, very driven to name new species.

02:04:14 So some of the species that they published have since been knocked back.

02:04:19 And, you know, other paleontologists will say that's not really a different species.

02:04:23 That's already this, that's the species that was already known.

02:04:26 Okay.

02:04:27 So I'm confusing this with something else then.

02:04:29 Like, wasn't there a bunch of Cases once they started finding dinosaurs of people hoaxing dinosaur bones?

02:04:37 I'm sure there have been.

02:04:38 I'm not really aware of the history of that.

02:04:42 Find out what's the most famous or notable hoax of dinosaur bones.

02:04:49 Already on that.

02:04:50 Thank you, sir.

02:04:51 Don't really get a good answer, though.

02:04:54 When I asked it the first time, most successful hoax, it brought up something about the China thing.

02:04:59 So I re asked.

02:05:00 I said, what are the original hoaxes?

02:05:02 First thing it brings up is something about fossils, which isn't.

02:05:05 Dinosaur bones.

02:05:07 And then in 1845, there's some sea monster bones.

02:05:12 Then the Cardiff giant.

02:05:15 That's not a dinosaur.

02:05:15 Oh, but that's a man.

02:05:16 Right.

02:05:17 Okay.

02:05:20 So, one of the issues is that a lot of the bones that you see, like if you go to the Museum of Natural History, those are not real bones.

02:05:27 Well, it depends.

02:05:29 So, sometimes the actual bones are mounted.

02:05:32 For small fossils, you might have the whole thing.

02:05:35 For big ones, you almost never find a Big animal that's complete.

02:05:39 So, when you see a T Rex at the museum and it's a full T Rex with the claws out, how much of that is an actual T Rex?

02:05:46 Sometimes zero, right?

02:05:48 Sometimes the entire thing is a recreation.

02:05:50 Well, sometimes, yeah, because they have the original one in collections.

02:05:53 Right.

02:05:54 And so that's more common now because it's not great to mount the bones of a big creature because two things.

02:06:00 One is that you have to do things to the bone.

02:06:02 You have to put like metal clamps on them.

02:06:03 Back in the old days, they would drill holes in them, which is terrible.

02:06:06 But also it inhibits study, right?

02:06:08 And so if a paleontologist wants to study like the fourth cervical vertebra, now it's up 40 feet and you need a scissor lift or you can't.

02:06:19 Look at the ends of it because they're covered up by the other bones.

02:06:22 So, best practice now, you know, really is to keep the stuff in the collections and to mount the recreations.

02:06:28 Like at our museum at the Edelman Fossil Park, we have like a Dryptosaurus that's a 3D print.

02:06:36 We do put smaller skeletons on display because if we wanted to study them, we can easily take them out of the cases and study them.

02:06:43 But it's not, you know, you should, and we do, we list if something is a replica or if it's the original material.

02:06:51 Was that always the case?

02:06:53 It's not always the case in museums even today.

02:06:54 That's where the conspiracy weirdos get fixated like that's not even real bones because it's not.

02:07:02 It's actually a recreation of the real bones.

02:07:04 But the real bones allegedly do exist somewhere, but oftentimes not all of them.

02:07:10 So some of it is speculation in terms of what they've added to it, correct?

02:07:15 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

02:07:16 Depending on the creature, some of it can be.

02:07:17 So the best practice if you're going to mount the real bones is to make the Replicated pieces a different color, right?

02:07:25 And you see that done in a lot of museums.

02:07:27 So it's easy to tell, like, those are the original bones, and those are the ones that they've added for the sake of completeness.

02:07:32 And how do they make the distinction?

02:07:32 Right.

02:07:35 Like, how do they estimate what the other bones were if we don't have a complete fossil?

02:07:39 We use what we call phylogenetic bracketing, which simply means you look at the creature that you have, you find relatives on this side, relatives on this side.

02:07:48 Anything they hold in common is probably something that was held by the group in the middle, right?

02:07:54 Like, in the case of Dreadnoughtus, we didn't have the skull.

02:07:57 Right, we had just a little bit of pre maxilla and a single tooth, so we looked to a close relative that was found in central Patagonia that was really known only from the skull called Sarmientosaurus, and so we use that in our reconstruction as the skull of Dreadnoughtus, like as a stand in because we didn't recover the skull.

02:08:16 As far as the neck, the neck was like 40 feet long, but we only have two vertebrae from the neck.

02:08:21 There's a dinosaur from northern Patagonia called Futalognosaurus that is known mostly from its neck, so we use.

02:08:29 Those other vertebrae as a stand in for the ones that we were missing.

02:08:32 But from the rest of the skeleton, we had almost all of that, right?

02:08:36 And almost all of the tail.

02:08:38 So we know that part really well, whereas there is some uncertainty with the neck and the skull of Dreadnoughtus.

02:08:46 That's cool.

02:08:47 So, where, if you were going to look for a new undiscovered dinosaur species today, let's imagine that you talk to the king of the world and he gives you an unlimited budget and says, I think, Kenneth, that there's more out there.

02:09:02 And I think you can find it.

02:09:04 Where would you go?

02:09:05 Yeah.

02:09:05 Well, there's way more out there for sure.

02:09:07 For sure.

02:09:07 So, you know, we all kind of use the same formula.

02:09:11 You have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what you're interested in, right?

02:09:15 Those rocks have to be sedimentary rocks.

02:09:18 And then today you need exposure.

02:09:19 And so that's why you see us paleontologists mostly working in badlands and deserts.

02:09:24 It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in those environments, it's that that's where we have access to the rocks today.

02:09:30 And then the fourth thing, which I like to have, is to get as far away from other paleontologists as possible.

02:09:36 Right, because you have a better chance than at what you're discovering being something new to science.

02:09:42 New to science.

02:09:42 And so I've kind of made my career by going to the places where people weren't willing to go to before.

02:09:48 Like the southernmost Patagonia is a super harsh environment.

02:09:52 Even in their summer, it's cold and it's terribly windy.

02:09:56 My first year down there, I provisioned cereal for the crew to eat for breakfast.

02:10:01 Can't eat cereal for breakfast in Patagonia because it blows off your spoon before you can eat it.

02:10:05 Oh, wow.

02:10:06 So it's like that.

02:10:07 And so you get those three things, the first three things, and you will find fossils.

02:10:12 You get the fourth thing, and there's a good chance that.

02:10:14 What you find is new to science.

02:10:16 So, the places where I would go and largely have been are Patagonia, it's just an incredibly rich treasure trove for dinosaurs.

02:10:28 Several different areas in China are incredible.

02:10:31 The American West is still terrific, you know, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah, still fantastic.

02:10:39 I would love, like, if I had not only that funding, but like, If you could wave the political magic wand, I'd love to do more prospecting in North Africa.

02:10:51 I'd love to go to Libya and Algeria.

02:10:56 Because in the Cretaceous period, it's this coastal environment.

02:11:00 Sea level is very high in the Cretaceous, and there's a mangrove ecosystem that cuts through basically the middle of what North Africa is now.

02:11:08 That's where we found Peralatitan, which at the time was the second most massive known dinosaur.

02:11:13 That's where famous Spinosaurus is from.

02:11:16 And I'm sure there's lots of other.

02:11:19 Dinosaurs there in this like equatorial Tethys Seaway.

02:11:23 Before the Mediterranean, it was open on both ends.

02:11:25 It's called the Tethys Seaway.

02:11:27 So that's an area that I would really like to prospect.

02:11:30 That sounds amazing.

02:11:31 It'd be a shame if you didn't.

02:11:33 The ultimate thing, like if you want to talk about like your super duper magic wand, would be Antarctica.

02:11:39 Right.

02:11:39 Really?

02:11:40 Yeah, because Antarctica is already at the South Pole during the time of the dinosaurs, but it's not glaciated and it's this boreal forest, but it still gets half a year of darkness.

02:11:51 And we don't have an environment on the planet today.

02:11:54 Like that, right?

02:11:55 There's no modern analog to a forest that gets half a year of darkness like that.

02:12:00 And we know there were dinosaurs there, and we don't know really hardly anything about them.

02:12:05 There's a little bit of outcrop on the Antarctic Peninsula and on Vega Island off of that, and paleontologists have found some dinosaurs there, but it's a whole continent, and there's got to be thousands and thousands of dinosaurs and new species under that ice cap, and we have no idea what's down there.

02:12:22 When you've been on these expeditions, you must have had a few sketchy experiences.

02:12:27 Oh, yeah, for sure.

02:12:29 What's the sketchiest?

02:12:31 Well, it depends.

02:12:32 I mean, falling is a big health hazard to us.

02:12:36 Probably the time that I thought I was about to die was I was on the Montana Wyoming border.

02:12:43 I'm not actually sure which state I was in at the moment, but I had a slab of rock tied on my back that had pterosaur tracks on it, you know, flying reptiles.

02:12:52 And it was probably, I don't know, 75 pounds.

02:12:54 And I'm climbing up this rock face.

02:12:58 And I should have had ropes, but I thought, like, ah, it's not that big.

02:13:01 You know, it was like, 20 or 30 feet.

02:13:01 I could do it.

02:13:04 I get about halfway up and the rock starts breaking off in my hands.

02:13:07 And I'm like, oh shit.

02:13:08 And so I look down and I can't see where to put my feet to go back down.

02:13:14 So now I'm hanging on the side of this outcrop and I'm thinking, like, this is how it's going to be, you know?

02:13:20 Wow.

02:13:21 And so I hung there for I don't know how long.

02:13:23 It seemed like a long time for me.

02:13:24 And I said, well, I'm just going to have to try.

02:13:26 And so I start going up and the rock is breaking off in my hand.

02:13:29 I'm going up and it's breaking off in my hand.

02:13:30 And I finally, you know, roll over the lip of this cliff and I was shaking.

02:13:36 When I got to the top of that, I thought that was going to be the end of me.

02:13:39 Yeah, with a 75 pound rock on your back, that's crazy.

02:13:42 There have been times in Patagonia where, you know, my first field season at the Dreadnoughtist site, we had to get there by rafting down this roaring glacial stream, and we had to take all of our supplies across the river by stream, and then we would jacket these dinosaur bones in burlap and plaster.

02:13:42 Yeah.

02:13:58 I had no way to get a vehicle there, so I hired a couple of gauchos and their horses, and we would take these plaster jacketed bones, put them on a sled, padded out with prairie grass, and tow them out of the desert with horses.

02:14:10 And I knew I wasn't going to have like a real project unless I could get a vehicle there.

02:14:14 And all the locals were saying, there's no way to drive there.

02:14:17 But on the last day of that field season, I went off by myself, which I would kill my grad students if they did.

02:14:22 But went off by myself in the pickup, went way up north down this old rickety bridge across the river, and spent the whole day picking my way through the Badlands and showed up that night in camp with the pickup truck.

02:14:35 But there were a couple of places where I would put the wheels of the pickup over the hill.

02:14:40 I'm just seeing sky.

02:14:42 Right.

02:14:42 And I would get out and like look, and then I get back in and I'm seeing sky.

02:14:47 And I drive over the edge and lock the brakes and bounce down the hill.

02:14:51 And then you have to keep it straight or you're going to roll.

02:14:54 Right.

02:14:54 And that's how we got there.

02:14:55 And then when I get back.

02:14:56 So you didn't have a spare tire?

02:14:58 I had a spare tire.

02:14:59 And Sandtracks.

02:14:59 Yeah.

02:15:00 This is what it looks like.

02:15:02 Yeah.

02:15:02 So this is the Dreadnought site here.

02:15:04 And you can see it's a really, you got a truck there.

02:15:07 I got a truck.

02:15:08 Yeah.

02:15:08 Imagine driving through what you see.

02:15:11 Wow.

02:15:11 Behind me there.

02:15:12 And so it was hairy.

02:15:13 And then when we came back the next year, I had a little bit of money and I hired a guy with one of those like road scrapers.

02:15:20 And we scraped like a 15 kilometer long road in the ground.

02:15:24 It wasn't a good road, but it was a road.

02:15:26 And that's when I knew we were going to have a project.

02:15:29 But you know, there were moments then.

02:15:31 And then one time in Egypt, there was a Bedouin who thought I was a grave robber.

02:15:37 And so he's on one of these little like Bethlehem donkeys.

02:15:41 They're almost comical because their feet are almost touching the ground.

02:15:44 But he's coming at me and he's got like a scimitar.

02:15:47 And you can see a long way in the desert, like a mile away.

02:15:50 And I'm kind of like, okay, can we get this over with?

02:15:53 Because it's taking a long time for him to get there.

02:15:55 And so he hops off the donkey and he's yelling at me.

02:15:57 And I have an entrenching tool.

02:15:58 You know what that is?

02:16:00 It's like a little army shovel, but you can fold the handle at a right angle.

02:16:03 And I always have one of those with me because it's a great climbing tool and a digging tool.

02:16:07 And you use it for camp things, but also it's a weapon.

02:16:11 And so I'm looking at this guy.

02:16:12 If he moves with that scimitar, then I'm coming across with my entrenching tool.

02:16:17 But I very slowly showed him my other hand.

02:16:20 I went down very carefully and got my walkie talkie and I lifted it up.

02:16:24 I got my Egyptian colleague on the walkie who's like five miles away and he explained who I was and what I was doing.

02:16:31 He thought I was a grave robber.

02:16:32 And then he said, Ah, and I'm a doctor?

02:16:34 And I said, Iowa.

02:16:35 And then he knew what I was doing.

02:16:37 And then he was like my buddy after that.

02:16:40 Oh, that's lucky.

02:16:41 Yeah.

02:16:42 So there are moments.

02:16:44 Everybody has them in the field.

02:16:46 But there are so many more great moments.

02:16:48 Like everywhere I've gone in the world, The world is just full of nice people, you know?

02:16:53 And I've just met so many great people and made so many great friends.

02:16:56 In that same oasis that I was working at in Egypt, in the little village, like there's no supermarket, right?

02:17:03 So there's like the orange stand and the bread stand and the cucumber stand.

02:17:06 And so I had left my expensive camera at one of these little stands.

02:17:12 I think it was the orange stand.

02:17:14 And I was out in the desert for like three days and I wasn't even sure I left it there.

02:17:18 And this camera is definitely worth more than these people make in a year.

02:17:21 Right.

02:17:22 And I come back, and this guy sees my Jeep coming down the little dirt road, and he runs out in the middle of the street, and he's got my camera, and he's jumping up and down, and very happy that I'm coming back so he can give it to me, you know, and like just so nice.

02:17:35 And in Egypt, you have to be careful about complimenting people because if you say, like, oh, that's a nice sweater you're wearing, like, boom, off comes the sweater.

02:17:44 Here, take my sweater.

02:17:45 And then you have to explain that, well, it's not my size or whatever.

02:17:50 These kids in this mud brick lodge where we stayed for a couple of months, they always have a surplus of teenage boys to do every little job, right?

02:17:58 And I taught them how to play American football.

02:18:02 And so they liked me.

02:18:04 And on my birthday, they gave me a water buffalo.

02:18:06 Right, which is worth a fortune to them.

02:18:08 They gave me a Gamusa, a water buffalo, and I had to explain to them, and we named it Daisy.

02:18:13 I had to explain to them, you know, I can't take Daisy on the plane, so could you take care of this for me when I go back to America, you know?

02:18:20 And like everywhere I've gone, there's just been such nice, generous people.

02:18:24 That's awesome, man.

02:18:25 Yeah.

02:18:26 Well, listen, thank you very much for coming here.

02:18:28 Thanks for all your work.

02:18:29 Thanks for all your courage to make these excursions and expeditions and bring back all that information.

02:18:36 Yeah, I forgot.

02:18:37 Can I give it to you?

02:18:37 I've got something for you.

02:18:38 Sure.

02:18:39 Yeah.

02:18:39 So this, um, So, at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I am in New Jersey, we have an extinction layer there, right?

02:18:48 And we have collected over 100,000 fossils representing over 100 extinct species right in that layer, the last moments of the Cretaceous period.

02:18:57 So, this is a tooth from an extinct crocodile called Theracosaurus.

02:19:03 And this individual is from the extinction layer, meaning this very individual died in the world's fifth mass extinction.

02:19:11 The asteroid murdered that actual crocodile.

02:19:14 Wow.

02:19:16 That's cool.

02:19:17 That will stay right there.

02:19:18 Yeah.

02:19:19 So I want you to have that.

02:19:19 And I also brought this.

02:19:22 This is from our research collection, but this is a tibia of a species of crocodile.

02:19:31 Do you know what gavial crocodiles are today?

02:19:33 Or gharials are also called those narrow snouted ones in India.

02:19:37 Okay.

02:19:38 So this is a Cretaceous gharial crocodile, but that dude is another victim.

02:19:45 Of the asteroid strike.

02:19:46 And so that's like the wonder of this place.

02:19:49 And so you can go there and, like, it's the best window we have in the planet in that pivotal, calamitous moment that wipes out the dinosaurs and really makes the modern world as we know it.

02:19:58 So, how old is this?

02:19:59 That's 66 million years old.

02:20:01 Holy shit.

02:20:02 And we find that with the fallout from the material that got blasted out of the crater.

02:20:07 And the best thing about this place is that, you know, obviously we manage and curate that research layer very carefully, but above that, we have a layer.

02:20:14 That's still full of fossils, and we invite the public to come in and dig from those layers.

02:20:18 And every kid, every grown up that goes in there who tries a little bit and who's not afraid to get their hands dirty, I hope you do it with us someday, finds a 66 million year old fossil with their own hands that they get to take home.

02:20:28 How many fossils are there?

02:20:32 Millions, probably.

02:20:33 Millions.

02:20:34 Wow.

02:20:35 Yeah.

02:20:36 This is awesome.

02:20:37 Yeah, isn't that something?

02:20:38 Very.

02:20:38 Yeah.

02:20:39 Thank you very much.

02:20:40 Thank you.

02:20:41 Thanks for being here, man.

02:20:42 I really appreciate it.

02:20:42 It's a pleasure.

02:20:43 And your book, Why Dinosaurs Matter.

02:20:46 Go get it, folks.

02:20:47 Is there an audio book?

02:20:48 There is, and I read it.

02:20:49 Yes!

02:20:50 Yeah.

02:20:50 That's what I want to hear.

02:20:51 Yeah.

02:20:51 Beautiful.

02:20:52 Thank you.

02:20:53 Appreciate you.

02:20:53 It's been fun.

02:20:55 Thank you, everybody.

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The Joe Rogan Experience - November 12, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2580 - Kenneth Lacovara

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