00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast. 00:00:18 Speaker 2: You can't predict anything. 00:00:20 Speaker 1: Brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's f I R S T l I t E dot com. Holy Smokes were joined today by paleontologists and writer Steve Brussati, who has this very popular science collection. And it started out with The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Correct, that's right, big time New York Times bestseller. 00:00:57 Speaker 2: It got on the list. It was a shock. I s a book on the bestseller list, which is awesome. 00:01:02 Speaker 1: And then The Rise and Rain of the Mammals just tells the story of the mammals. And then the new book out right now, the Story of Birds. 00:01:09 Speaker 2: And that's literally out like today, the day that really, yeah, this is the publication day, so i'mtulations, I'm honored to be here with you, and the day the book comes out. 00:01:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, I got an admission to make though, and I just had to come out and say it, I haven't read the books. 00:01:23 Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad, you're honest. If I could. 00:01:25 Speaker 3: Touch them though, and absorb all the knowledge. 00:01:28 Speaker 1: If I could touch them and absorb all the knowledge and then have that in my head, so I could be like that guy yep, and also like dominate that end of trivia, I will. 00:01:35 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of factoids and a lot of trivia in these books, but really they're pop science books, and they and and they're meant for everybody. You know, I'm a professor, I'm a scientist. I teach at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland alone from the Midwest here in America, and I do so much academic writing for my job. These books, I like to make them accessible to everybody and to be the kind of books that when I was a teenager growing up in Illinois, out in farm country, it was really through books that I got into science and nature and conservation. And so I try to write in this sort of style that can hopefully reach kids and reach people of all walks of life. 00:02:11 Speaker 3: Yeah, they make it approachable. 00:02:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So you teach at University of Edinburgh, Yeah, that's right. 00:02:17 Speaker 1: You're a writer, and also in your your bio you do some of the consulting. 00:02:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, on the. 00:02:22 Speaker 1: Jurassic we had years ago, we had the paleetages Jack hornern Yeah, who had like that same gig at a time. 00:02:30 Speaker 3: That's so, what's that like? Was that about? 00:02:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cool. So I've worked on the last two films after Jack ret hired. So I've worked on Jurassic World Dominion. That's the one that came out in twenty twenty two with Sam Neil and Laura Dern and Jeff Goldbloom and then Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard. You know that storylines converged in that film. And then I worked on the most recent one, Rebirth, which came out last summer, and that's the one with Scarlett you Hanson and Jonathan Bailey and Hersael Ali. Great films, a lot of fun. I mean, my job is really just to consult on the science. I'm the paleontology consultant. So I what it is, doctor, I knew knew. I don't write the script, I don't direct the film. I don't know, of course not. What it is is that I basically just have this line of communication with the directors, with the writers, with the artists that are designing the dinosaurs, and is a lot of phone calls, chatsover zoom, a lot of emails where they're showing me stuff as they're developing the characters and asking me questions about the real dinosaurs, and so they you know, they do care about accuracy and realism. Of course they're monster movies, but they really are interested in the science, and there's always been a great science and nature and conservation message through those films. So I'm just glad that they do it. I think it's super cool that these filmmakers, for you know, a multi billion dollar franchise, care enough about the science that they want a scientist on board to help out. 00:03:55 Speaker 1: You know what connects us in a weird way. You work down that movie. In that movie, Johansson whar's an f HF Chess Kidding, which is one of our companies. F HF Kidding American made chess harnesses, and she's got one on in the movie. 00:04:10 Speaker 2: That's cool. I thought you were going to say, Oh, we're both Steves, and we're both from the Midwest, and we're both Italian American. So that's so in that is that when is she wearing that when they're doing like the rock climbing. I never read my books. I've never watched the films. I'm trying to be honest. Man, No, that's cool. You have to you have to watch it and see because that's that's super neat. I mean they're very realistic with the costumes and with the set designs, and it's incredible. I mean they for Dominion, they had me take a lot of photos of some of our field sites where we're out collecting fossils and digging up dinosaurs, and they use those images to build this set of a dinosaur dig And when I walked on to the to the set, I mean I thought I was in the bad Lands. It was incredible. So the realism on these things is tremendous. When you have budgets something, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. 00:05:00 Speaker 1: So I'm the story birds. Let me let me ask you this question. I guess it's been over the last ten years. I don't know, you can crack me ten years, twelve years, fifteen years or something. It's like people have started to say, like, if you're looking at I like the hunt turkeys, right, you're looking at a wild turkey and paper like it's a dinosaur, man, you know, Like it was also like this idea broke right that when you're or you look at a sand hill crane, you know, in a sand hill crane walking along with his babies in tow and it's kind of hunting around, you know, and people will be like that, that's it, Like that is a dinosaur. 00:05:41 Speaker 3: They never went away. How accurate is that understanding? 00:05:44 Speaker 2: That's true, that's true. So modern day birds are dinosaurs. And what I mean by that is they're part of the dinosaur family tree. They evolved from other dinosaurs. They're just a strange type of dinosaur that got small and evolve wings and developed the ability to fly. They're the only dinosaur that lives on today. All the other dinosaurs died out when that asteroid smashed into the Earth sixty six million years ago. So really we need to think of birds how we think of bats. You know, what is a bat? Well, a bat is a mammal, like many of the mammals you have here. Why is it a mammal? It evolved from other mammals as part of the mammal family tree. It has hair, it feeds his baby's milk, it has molar teeth, all the classic mammal stuff. But bats are just unusual mammals. Yes, they're different than elephants or wells, or dogs or cats, but they're an unusual mammal that got small, evolve wings, developed the ability to fly. Birds are the dinosaur version of that. So when you're hunting turkeys, you're hunting dinosaurs. 00:06:39 Speaker 1: But if you took like if you took a wild turkey now, yeah, okay, or san Hill cran or whatever the hell one you want. You take a wild turkey now, and you brought that wild turkey back to sixty yeah, one million years ago, and cut that turkey loose, would it be would it be that there's something not quite right about that turkey? 00:07:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be a wild experiment to do. I mean, I think that if you took a turkey, or if you took something like a cassawaary, you know those giant flightless birds from Australia with the huge claws on their feet. I mean, to me, they look like raptor dinosaurs reincarnated. I mean, and if you know anybody out there listening who maybe is a bit skeptical of this dinosaur bird connection. I mean, first of all, just like look at a chicken and look at the scally foot of a chicken, it looks like a little foot of a tear, and believe it or not, it was that sort of similarity, that sort of obvious, in your face realism of bird feet looking like, you know, dinosaur feet that led the first scientists in the eighteen sixties to propose the idea that birds came from dinosaurs. So it's, oh, idea, it's been around, but you're right that it has no So it's I think it's percolated a lot more into like public you know, consciousness. And the reason I think there's probably a few reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that in the mid to late nineties, the first fossils of feather covered dinosaurs were discovered. Now, it's very hard to turn a feather into a fossil, you know, because a feather is soft, It's like skin or hair or muscle. You know, that stuff is hardly ever fossilized. When we find a dinosaur, fossil is usually the bones, the teeth, the hard bits that can get buried and turned to stone. And survive the rigors of millions of years. So feathers really challenging to fossilize. But in China there just so happened to be about one hundred and twenty five million years ago, these volcanic fields, and occasionally they would erupt and they would bury these entire ecosystems, kind of like when Vesuvius erupted, Yeah, and buried part dudes. Yeah, And so you get people in Pompeii that were just like freeze frames mid sex. Yes they're making breakfast or like they're walking the dog. And so it's like that with these dinosaurs, and that locked in the feathers. And this was the first time, this one in a trillion fossilization occurrence, the first time that we could see direct league that yes, a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And that really sealed the deal because this idea that birds came from dinosaurs, it goes all the way back to the eighteen sixties, all the way back to Charles Darwin himself when he was writing about evolution, but it really lacked that final you know, trump card, that final noll in the coft. 00:09:19 Speaker 3: How how clear are those feathers? 00:09:21 Speaker 2: Oh, they're incredible. They're beautiful. I have some images in the story Birds of some of the shows that shows them, and I've been really lucky. It's no it's in your face, I mean. And there's a variety of feathers. Some of the feathers are more downy, more fluffy, you know, like some birds have today, especially baby birds. Some are elaborate, quill pen feathers that form giant, you know, wings on the arm, sometimes even on the lakes. And they're beautiful. And I've been very, very lucky to spend a lot of time in China working with Chinese scientists who get these fossils from the farmers. It's farmers in northeastern China. And I love this because I come from farm country and they're growing some of the same crops that they, you know, grow in Illinois. They're growing corn, especially out there, and the farmers are out working the land and they're cracking open the rocks and they're finding these beautiful fossils. And I have seen I've seen farmers bring these into small museums in China and they show us, you know what this is, and it's a dinosaur gloriously covered in feathers really just like the feathers of modern bird. I mean, it is absolutely stunning. And I tell a story in the story Birds, and also a similar I tell some similar stories in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs because I touch on the dinosaur bird connection in that book. But stories of going to China, walking into one of these small museums, like opening a door, being confronted with this beautiful skeleton of a raptor dinosaur, like a velociraptor type dinosaur, covered in feathers. I mean, it is it is just astounding. 00:10:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, because yeah, when I was a kid, if you had a dinosaur book, everything was green and scaly. 00:10:53 Speaker 2: Yeah. Same here when I was growing, like in the late eighties and early nineties, back back home in Autawa, Illinois, run from in northern Illinois. In grade school, Wallace Grade School, I went to out in the middle of the farm country, literally in the library in town. I remember the books. I remember the dinosaur books. I wasn't that into dinosaurs as a kid. That came a bit later and I was a teenager, but I remember those books. And those books, I mean they would say things like we'll never know the colors of dinosaurs. It's impossible. Dinosaurs probably looks like giant, you know, overgrown crocodiles and lizards. They were probably covered in scales and were green and gray and just kind of dull and kind of plotting and kind of stupid. But that idea, that image of dinosaurs has really changed now and we know that a lot of them, of course, were covered in feathers. We can even tell the colors of some of those feathers, the melanin the pigments, the same pigments that give birds their feather colors. Today, we can find those fossilized and that tells us that they were brown, or they were black, or they were white, or they were ginger, or the feathers were iridescent like a crow's feathers. And we know that, we know a lot of dinosaurs were much more intelligent than we used to think. 00:12:02 Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you know that? Let me let me preface this. 00:12:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a I have a eleven year old, and well not just sing because I've been doing this the whole time. 00:12:14 Speaker 3: I've been a parent. 00:12:14 Speaker 1: Like we're away checking out, we're checking out whatever kind of new dinosaur thing is out there right right now. We're watching the Dinosaurs on Netflix, which is kind of excruciatingly narrated by Morgan Freeman. Yeah, a lot of the stuff in there, man, Like, I sit there, I was watching I'll watched it last night. My little boy laying in bed for bed before bedtime, and a lot of times I'm saying to him as we're laying there, I'm like, that's bullshit. 00:12:41 Speaker 2: Man, Like, I'm like, they don't, like, how do you know? That? Like one of the things that's good. I mean, we should be skeptical. 00:12:48 Speaker 1: You know, they have them that they constantly vocalize. They never shut up. So even if even if a t rex comes to attack something, he growls at it makes sense he growls on his approach. And he's like, well, how do you know. I'm like, because because there's just things that animals are like, and animals don't perpetually vocalize. But the biggest thing that I'm like, when I keep telling them, I'm like, there's a quote from my friend. I won't give the reason he said this. One time I told him something. He said to me, I don't know why that's not true, but that's not true. Okay, Yeah, well yeah, when I see those giant terodactyle things. Yeah, the proportions, the super thin neck, the giant head walking around on his elbows. 00:13:38 Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't know, I don't know, but that's not right. 00:13:42 Speaker 2: That one is right. That one is right because elbows. 00:13:46 Speaker 1: But I'm saying, like the racial headsize and next size and waiting size. 00:13:51 Speaker 2: No, it's totally weird, right, but that so, so you're right about the vocalizations and these things, and a lot of the films and a lot of the dinosaur documentaries. Yeah, the behaviors, we don't. 00:14:01 Speaker 3: Know, but you just said they're smart. 00:14:03 Speaker 2: Way, so I will say, so, how do why? Yeah? Yeah, so first I'll stick I'll stick up for the pterodactyls for just so they're totally weird. You're absolutely right. You look at one of these giant terodactyls, which are not actually dinosaurs, by the way, there's dinosaurs. They're super cool. 00:14:18 Speaker 3: They don't know this movie. 00:14:21 Speaker 2: Well, we find fo so we know those proportions are correct because we find fossils of these things. One of the best fossils we ever found. My crew uh at the University of Edinburgh. We work all the time on the Isle of Sky in Scotland, this absolutely beautiful, enchanted majestic island off the west coast. There's Jurassic Age fossils that about one hundred and seventy million years old, and one of my students, Amelia, she found a pterodactyl skeleton. So we have it all there in the rocks, the head, the neck, the wings. It has really weird proportions. So that's because we can see it seems to. 00:14:56 Speaker 3: Defy a physical reality. 00:15:00 Speaker 2: I know, I'm with you with the terod actor again, Irue. And so we also have footprints and handprints so we can see they walk like that. That's an example of something from the fossil record that doesn't live anymore. That if we didn't have fossils, we would have no idea they existed, and we do have the fossils, and the fossils show us they're weird. And the same is true with birds. So in the Story of Birds, I talk about some of these incredible birds that once live that don't live anymore. Terror birds, these top hunters, top predators that stood larger than a human, had a head the size of a horse, a big hooked beak. They don't live anymore. I mean, thank God, but we would never think something as weird as that could exist if we didn't find the fossils. There were soaring birds that had wingspans of over twenty feet wide that we you know, like double the size of an albatross, the biggest birds today. So there's a lot of things in the fossil record that we find as fossils that we go holy shit like. But to circle back, things like the vocalizations, the behaviors, those are often things that we don't know directly. So on these shows and these films, a lot of that those storylines and those behaviors are based on what modern animals do. But sometimes you're absolutely right, people like you that no modern animals will spend a lot of time out in nature confronting animals and trying to hide from animals and trying to sneak up on animals and trying to you know, protect yourself from animals, like you know, all animals behave. Yeah, and there are some things in those shows that, yeah, are wacky. An animal is not just going to announce itself by screaming and growling and roaring and it's hunting. I mean, come on, you don't do that when you're out hunting. 00:16:42 Speaker 1: So when you said you see signs, let me I don't want to. I want to talk about birds too. Yeah, but let me hear you one from this this thing I'm watching. Yeah, so this dude, there's this giant dinosaur and he comes out in the water and. 00:16:55 Speaker 3: He catches a fish. 00:16:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, and then he like lays the fish on the bottom of the ocean and then he hangs out. 00:17:00 Speaker 3: What is his beak open? 00:17:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's huge. Yeah. 00:17:04 Speaker 3: That says he's as tall as a draft or something. Yeah. Yeah, and he's got his beak. 00:17:08 Speaker 1: Open and he waits for a shark to come grab the bait and then catches the shark and swallows. 00:17:12 Speaker 2: You know, kind like that. 00:17:14 Speaker 1: When I sell that with my boy, I'm like, come come on, I mean, well, you don't know. I'm like, they don't know. 00:17:21 Speaker 2: We don't know. We don't know. And you know, I should say that Netflix show. You know, it's it's a very impressive show that the it's cool, yeah, and it's you know, I didn't work on I work on a lot of these shows as a consultant. I didn't work on that one, but I know that the the the producers and the artists and so on. You use my book quite a bit, you know. They marketed it is like rite the story of the rise and fall of the Dinosaure, so you know, and I had meetings with the producers and stuff. So I'm impressed with what they've done. I think it's a very good show. But you to make a show, to make something on T well, you know, you know, it is like to make a TV show. I mean, it has to be compelling, there has to be a storyline, things have to be doing stuff. And when it comes to these fossils, you know, we find a fossil and maybe that fossil tells us, oh my goodness, there's this weird animal with a bizarre head and neck and whatever. Okay, that animal existed, but what did it do, how did it move? What did it eat? Sometimes we might have some evidence, sometimes the last meal is found fossilized in the stomach. That happens sometimes, so we do sometimes get direct evidence for behaviors, but a lot of times we just don't. So we have to speculate a little bit. We have to draw parallels to modern animals. And this is more for the filmmaking. Again, it being a scientist but. 00:18:38 Speaker 1: What tripped me out? What tripped me out when I first kind of jumped in on you on this this and we can. 00:18:42 Speaker 2: Get back to intelligence by intelligence. 00:18:45 Speaker 1: And I'm not like, of course, I mean like sure, I mean, of course many of them must have been. But I'm saying, like, what would you ever look at? What would you ever look at to validate that? But because it's not a crazy premise, it's you know, like there's all these different ways we conceptualize animal intelligence. Most people would regard an earthworm as probably not particularly bright when it comes to problem solving. You look at corvid's like crows and ravens, who seem like very very curious. They're feathered apes basically interested in solving, interested in pattern recognition. So what would you ever look at to be like there was intelligence? 00:19:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great I'm glad you asked. It's almost like I've planted the question, but I didn't because we're studying this now in my lab in Edinburgh. It's actually one of the biggest things that we're studying. And we you know, we're paleontologists, we study fossils, but we're working with the bigger team of biologists, including biologists who study behavior and modern animals. So my good colleague Osvath and his crew in Sweden. They have a farm, Mattias and Helena is his wife. They have a farm. On their farm, they have a raven enclosure and it's a university research facility and so and I write about this in the story Birds in the last chapter I talked about like modern bird intelligence and cognition, and a lot of that's about their work. And they basically put the ravens through these exercises. They put mirrors in front of their faces, they give them stuff to make tools out of. They run these these different scenarios where you know, they take some food from a raven and see how it behaves and so on. So we work closely with them. We also work very closely with neurobiologists, with the people who actually study brains of modern animals. And there's so much to a brain, I mean, more than anything, just the neurons, those little you know, cells, the powerhouses, the little computer chips in the brain. So we put all this evidence together and we try to understand basically as much as we can about extinct species and their intelligence and their behaviors. It is limited But the biggest direct evidence that we have from fossils is we don't get brains fossilizing. Usually a brain is one of the softest, most supple parts of the body, and it decays through it. Oh yeah, and once an animal dies, I mean, the brain is one of the first things to go. But so for a dinosaur like a t rex that's sixty six million years old, I mean, you're not going to get a brain preserved as a fossil. But what you do get preserved as a fossil is the head, the skull, the bones, and the brain is inside the bones. The brain is in a brain cavity. Our brain is in a cavity in our head. So we can cat scan fossil dinosaur skulls the same way a medical doctor would use a cat scanner to see inside of our bodies if maybe something was wrong and they wanted to, you know, check us out and see what might be happening inside. We can use the X rays of the CT scanner to make a digital model of that brain cavity, and that's a digital model of the brain. And so that doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us how big that brain was, how big the brain was relative to the body, how big the different regions of the brains were. You know, there's the old factory bulbs in the brain that control the sense of smell. You know a lot of mammals today, you know, have very good sense of smell and some don't. And the eyes of the olfactory bulbs helps control that. There's optic lobes in the brain that help control vision. We have the ears, you know, that are not part of the brain. But we can also use the cat scanner to see inside the ears and see the cochlea. Where the cochlea was. The cochlea, that's that thing in us that's looping and kind of twisted. That's what heres. Sound relays sound to the brain. We know from modern animals. You know, the length of the cochlea correlates to the range of sounds that can be heard. So I think as you can start to see, we can build up a bit of a picture. No, you know, we can't put a t rex through a maze. We can't stick a mirror in front of a t rex and see if it would recognize itself. But we can cat scan a skull. We can build a digital model of the brain. We can measure the size of that brain. We can see what the regions of the brain were like. And so for something like t Rex, that tells us it had a pretty big brain for an animal of its size. You know, it wasn't like our brain. It wasn't quite that big. But for an animal, a reptilian type of animal of its size, it had a pretty big brain. Brain relative to body tells us a lot about intelligence. So it was fairly intelligent for a dinosaur. Its brain had huge olfactory balls, huge like off the charts for dinosaurs. So t Rex had a really good sense of smell compared to other dinosaurs. The brain had big optic lobes, it had good eyesight. The ear had a long coconate, it could hear well. So t Rex was a pretty smart, very keen hunter. And really, you know, we think of t Rex as this brute forced you know, brute force and a murdering dinosaur, the ultimate monster from Earth history, the size of a bus, had the size of a baptub, crushed the bones of its prey with its teeth. That's all true, But it was also really smart, and that's what I love about t Rex. It had the brawn and it had the brains. And we know this from the fossils. We're not making it up. We have evidence for it. 00:23:48 Speaker 3: You know, I paid a lot of attention to. 00:23:54 Speaker 1: Archaeology around ice age hunters in North America. And what's kind of interesting is the amount of conversations and books and things that are written about humans hunting for mammoths. 00:24:09 Speaker 3: But then you look at, like how many known mammoth. 00:24:11 Speaker 1: Kill sites there are, like really sort of like places where you have strong evidence that humans and mammoths were together at the same time. Is very small, maybe as few as like thirteen instances. How many like take you were just talking about t rex how many t rex pieces? 00:24:33 Speaker 2: Oh, yes, globally or whatever? 00:24:36 Speaker 3: Like how many are in the mix? 00:24:38 Speaker 1: Like you're taking the information from what size pool of evidence? 00:24:42 Speaker 2: You're right. When it comes to fossils, normally, our evidence is fairly limited. I mean, we are like detectives at a crime scene where there's maybe you know, one hair and one fingerprint and you know a few threads, and and you were trying to reconstruct, you know, a story out of it, something plausible, And some fossils are more common than others, and you're right with them. With the mammoths. I talked about this in The Rise and Rain of the Mammals, about the relationship between humans and giant mammals, and I'm sure we can dive into that, you know a little bit more as well. But there are very few places where there are mammoths that have spear points you know, from from human hunters, that are associated with the skeletons, or that have cut marks on the bone. They exist, but they're not as common as you would think. And that's because it's hard would common than you well, some people. Yeah, yeah. And when it comes down to. 00:25:35 Speaker 1: Put that to an archaeologist, I'm like, why aren't there more? He goes, My god, there's a lot. 00:25:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Which when you think about the odds of any single thing becoming a fossil, like, I mean, you and me are probably never going to become a fossil, Like we're probably not gonna die and get buried in sand or mud pretty quickly and then turned into stone and then preserved for thousands of millions of years. And then you know, some paleontologists or some hiker, some farmer who knows walks by and sees our bone sticking. I mean, that's what you need to get a fossil, and only a tiny fraction of individuals that have ever lived will ever turn into a fossil. And that's why oftentimes it's actually things like the footprints of dinosaurs that are more common than the skeletons, because when you think about it, you know, one individual has one skeleton, but how many footprints do we make in our lifetime? So for t Rex, t Rex is one of the better known dinosaurs because it lived right at the end of the Age of dinosaurs, so right before the asteroid hit, which means it's one of the most recent dinosaurs to today that has persisted, which just means there's been less time for its fossils to be eroded away. And it's found across western North America. T Rex is only from western North America. 00:26:52 Speaker 4: It's the the American tyrant dinosaur from the Age of dinosaurs from the Cretaceous, and here in Montana some of the best fossils of t Rex. 00:27:02 Speaker 2: The first fossils of t Rex were found right here in Montana in the early nineteen hundreds by the great fossil collector Barnum Brown. It was from Kansas and was collecting on behalf of the big natural history museum in New York, the American Museum of Natural History. He came out here, this was to southeastern Montana, the Hell Creek area, and he found the bones of this gigantic snarling primeval predator and they brought him back to New York and put him on display. And that's how t rex got its start. And since then some of the best fossils are found out here, but also across the border into the Dakotas. There are some found a bit north in Saskatchewan, and then there's some others that are found all the way south really down to New Mexico and Texas, and there are several dozen decent fossils of t rexes. And then you know thousands of individual teeth and bones and so on, so thousands. Yeah, So you know, and I've been out I've collected with crews out here in Montana. You know, not recently. When I was a student, I really cut my teeth as as a paleontologists coming out here and dig at dinosaurs because I went to school in Illinois, and from in Illinois, nobody's ever found a dinosaur in Illinois. I think a similar in Michigan where you're from, and it's just not doesn't have the kind of rocks you know to preserve dinosaur fossils, rocks of the right age. So I came out here and yeah, we'd find t rex bones, t rex teeth, and bones of triceratops and duck build dinosaurs and so on. They're actually not super rare, so we have a good amount of evidence. And that's what's really cool. I love it because we really are like detectives and we want as much evidence as possible. And yeah, of course we want to find complete skeletons, but sometimes, you know, a single tooth, a single bone can tell us something we didn't know before. And that's what makes paleontology so much fun. I mean, when we're out looking for fossils, we don't use any special tools. You know, we don't have sonar that we shoot into the rocks to see what's inside. I mean, we're we just go out prospecting, really gold prospect I mean we're just out walking around seeing what stick. 00:28:59 Speaker 3: Out, looking the surface, Yeah, looking at. 00:29:01 Speaker 2: The surface, and if we see something interesting, maybe it's something that's a different color, a peculiar shape, a different texture. You know, we'll go down and we'll look at it, and maybe ninety five percent of the time is going to be nothing, some smudge on the rock or some mineral crystal. But sometimes like this pterodactyl we found in Scotland that I was mentioning where our students saw this. You know, she saw this interesting color, very different from the rest of the rock. She looked down. It had a shape to it. You know, it looks like there was a beak and some teeth on the side, and that turned out to be ahead, which turned out to lead to a skeleton, and then we dug in further and took it out. So it's a real game of luck and chance and circumscis. You've got to be patient, you gotta be persistent, and you know, and I don't mean to be trite, just but it is a lot like like hunting or fishing. I mean, you know, you got to go out and you got to spend the time. You don't know what you do your homework. You know, you go to the right places where you think there are going to be fossils of the right age because they're the right kind of rocks and so on. Just like you got fishing. You know, you go to a place where you know there are fish, maybe your friends of fish there and they've had, you know, good luck. But then you just got to go and do it and put in the time, and a lot of time nothing happens. 00:30:06 Speaker 3: You know. 00:30:07 Speaker 2: Most of the days we actually don't find very much. But when we do, oh my god, the rush is incredible. And of course we always collect fossils as part of a team. 00:30:18 Speaker 1: You know. 00:30:19 Speaker 2: Nobody goes out and like digs up a brontosaurus by themselves. That would be impossible. So there's great camaraderie, great friendship on the field crews, and that's one of the most fun things about this science. You know, this isn't being an astrophysicist where you're in front of your computer, or a molecular biologist in the lab, or a chemist, no offense, those are great. I've studied, you know, a lot of these sciences myself when I was you know, in college, and I have friends that do these sciences and that's great, but those sciences aren't for me. I like the science of being out and looking for stuff, and anybody can do it, you know, anybody can do it. These farmers are finding fossils in China. There's farmers back home in Illinois that find Willie mate and says two tiers. And so that's what's awesome. So if you're interested in fossils, it really is like if you're interested in hunting or fishing, just figure out wherever you live, what the laws are, who owns the land, if you need a permit or whatever, and then just go out and do it. And that's how you learn. And it's so much fun. 00:31:18 Speaker 3: I want to I want to get to. 00:31:23 Speaker 1: With with the chick sloop strike or like the asteroid impact. Yeah that ever, you know, sixty million years ago, this thing hits kills all the dinosaurs or not? Right, Yeah, I want to get those birds. Yes, but let me ask you this though, who who is that dude? It was like a dude who was working I think in north North Dakota or something. He's kind of a controversial figure. Maybe that was that was feeling like he was finding right evidence of like the actual impact, yes, or animals animals that were killed yeah in the tsunamis. 00:31:59 Speaker 3: Yeah yeah yeah, like like like this freeze frame instant of when the chick sloop strike happened. 00:32:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's at this site in North Dakota. They call it the Tannas Site. And do you buy that, well, so yes and no. So definitely there are dinosaurs there, There are mammal fossils, there are a lot of fish fossils. They're preserved in these basically ancient river channels. And the age comes from very close to the end of the Cretaceous. We can just tell that from the rocks. And also there are remnants at that site of like stuff that the asteroid did. So yeah, so, I mean some of the deposits seem to be like, you know, these flood deposits, which okay, lots of things could cause a flood, but the asteroid would have. But the real calling card is there are these little tech tights and spherals. These are these the scientific terms for these things, but they're basically like little balls and little bullets of glass. So it's stuff that would have been when the asteroid hits. So the asteroid hit han Coon down in Mexico, which is, you know, several thousand miles from here, and that sound of bitch was like a mile oh it was a six mile wide. Rocks a six mile wide rock, which I know maybe sounds big, maybe doesn't, but that is a rock the size of Mount Everest. Yeah, it's it's the size of the city of Edinburgh where I live. If you look on the maps, about six miles wide, and it would have been traveling, you know, more than ten times faster than a speeding bullet. And I mean really, it was just a piece of space junk, right. It was like some leftover crumb from the formation of the Solar System, and it could have gone anywhere, but it's just happened to make a bee line for what is now Mexico, and it it punched a hole in the face of the Earth over one hundred miles wide. You can still see a lot of that crater. A lot of it's covered by the water the Gulf of Mexico, but some of it's still there on land. The force was tremendous. I mean, it released more energy than like a billion nuclear bombs put together, and so it did. 00:33:57 Speaker 3: The angle right. Yeah, people do came in on a shello. 00:34:00 Speaker 2: And you know what, I honestly that's where I lose track of things. This really gets in the physics of it, and you know. 00:34:05 Speaker 3: It had to do with like one net sucker hit. 00:34:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, what direction did it blast all that stuff exactly? 00:34:11 Speaker 2: And if it hit more direct or more at an angle, you know, that would have caused differences. I'm sure, I'm sure it did. But the physics of all that is a little bit beyond me. But in North Dakota, at this site, there are these little spherals and tech tights, and this is some of the stuff that would have been blasted up okay, and then basically vaporized or liquefied gone up into the atmosphere and then you know, what goes up must come down. Us have totally shoot off past gravity and so that stuff would cool, solidify into these glass bullets and rain down and this would have happened really all over the world, but it would have been there would have been more of this stuff the closer you got to ground zero and North Dakota and Montana, we're not that close to that. 00:34:54 Speaker 1: Thing and the direction, because if it came in at the right angle, maybe it like blasted all that junked out right. 00:35:01 Speaker 2: So that's what's found at this site, and there's also some other sites in Montana where you get these spherules that tells you that this was the asteroid. And by the way, yeah, and the chemistry of these things can be studied and they basically match the chemistry of the rock that was hit in the bedrock in the UK, and that's how we know that these little glass bullets were from that particular asteroid impact. So the site in North Dakota, it definitely was associated somehow with the asteroid. I mean, were these animals that were killed immediately? Did they die a few weeks later. That's where it gets a bit iffy. A lot of that site is still unpublished scientifically, so it's been talked about a lot in the in the press. It's been in the news quite a bit, sure, but there hasn't been a lot of science. But it's treated its controversial. Yeah, well it is. It is because although we can tell that it must be close to the asteroid, if the claim is that, you know, this was formed by the asteroid the instant the day, that's really tough. Because the fossil record and the rock record, you know, we can get really good preservation stuff, but figuring out you know, a single day sixty six million years ago and having the confidence, you know, we were talking about evidence for things like it can be very consistent, very plausible with the evidence, but it's hard to find that slam dunk evidence that yes, this was formed on this day. So that's the controversy. Nobody doubts that these are very latest Cretaceous fossils. Nobody doubts that this site has something to do with the asteroid and the extinction. But the claim that you know, this stuff was fossilized on the day, that one is what gets people debating, and scientists love to debate. We love to debate, of course we do. We love to others. Yeah, exactly right. I mean we're so skeptical in sciences all the time, not everything. 00:36:49 Speaker 1: If that thing hit today, yeah is it? Yeah in your mind, if that hit today, is it safe to say that humans would go extinct? 00:37:00 Speaker 2: I don't know about that. I mean, like most paleontologists, like, I'm much more comfortable looking at the past rather than predicting. 00:37:06 Speaker 1: The the climatic conditions after that. 00:37:10 Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's safe the way that you and you would be dead right now. 00:37:13 Speaker 2: I would have it, I know, I would have a tough time just because where we're sitting. Yeah yeah, yeah, oh yeah, So when the so First of all, when that asteroid hit like sixty six million years ago, that was not some normal asteroid. There's lots of asteroids buzzing around out there. Occasionally, you know, there's a meteor or something it hits the Earth, and usually they're pretty small. This was huge, and this was the biggest asteroid to hit the Earth in at least the last half a billion years. Like this was utterly terrible, bad luck, way out of the norm of Earth history. And you know, nothing can prepare for something like that. It's such an one in a trillion, out of the blue thing. And so you have these dinosaurs like t Rex and triceratops. They were there the day the asteroid hit. We know, they're fossils go right up to the layer from these spherals and the other chemicals and stuff the asteroid left behind. They were utterly dominant. I mean, they were ruling the food web, you know, the biggest mediators, the biggest plant eaters. Their kind had been around for over one hundred and fifty million years, but now all of a sudden, things went to chaos around them so quickly, so thoroughly, that they didn't have time to adapt. You know, the normal processes of adaptation and natural selection and genes changing a little bit through the generations. Now that can't work. I mean, you had to confront that asteroid with whatever hand to cards you had, and so seventy five percent of all species died. So when after that asteroid hit, your entire species had a one in four chance of surviving. It was utterly catastrophic. And it seems like the biggest thing is that if you were big, you died and destroy everything bigger than a husky dog died at least that lived on the land. Didn't matter what you were, if you dinosaur, if you were a crocodile, whatever. It was probably just because I think it's just a matter of food. I think when the asteroid hit, it unleashed, you know, earthquakes and wildfires and tsunamis and these hurricane force winds swept across the landscape, and then all the dust and the dirt and the grime from the collision went up into the atmosphere. The soot, like forests across the world just spontaneously combusted like global wildflire. All that soot went into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere has currents just like the ocean. So within really a few days or a few weeks, all that crap would have spread around the Earth and it would have blocked the sun out and the Earth would have went dark and cold. It would have been a global nuclear winter. And maybe it was just a few years long, maybe it was up to a decade or so long. You know, there are computer models that physicists have used to predict how long that winter would be. But plants would not have had sunlight, they couldn't make their own food, they couldn't photosynthesize. They would have died, and as the forest collapse, you know, they took the entire ecosystems with them. And so if you were big and you needed a lot of food, I mean, there just wasn't much food on offer. If you were smaller and you didn't need to eat as much, or you could eat a wider variety of food, very omnivorous, you would add a better odds to survive probably, And that's probably a large reason, maybe the main reason why t rex and trisarahtops died. But you had some of these small birds, and you had these small, little furry mammals, the ancestors of ours that made it through the asteroid because they were small, they could eat lots of different food, they didn't need to eat that much food. They could hide easily, they could dig burrows, they grew quickly, they reproduced quickly. That was probably the winning hand of cards to have when that asteroid hit. And if you wanted to be one of those one out of four species that survived, being small, not having to eat a lot, being able to hide, being able to grow quickly, those were probably your get out of jail free cards. 00:40:58 Speaker 3: What was. 00:41:00 Speaker 2: Like? 00:41:00 Speaker 1: What parts of the Earth were you most likely to live? Were you most like? Where did most life forms survive? Or didn't it work like that? 00:41:08 Speaker 2: It's hard to tell. There probably was some geographical component of this extinction. Obviously, anything close to ground zero to the Yucatan I mean not only would have died, vapor I mean literally vaporized, just like turned to ghosts. I mean. And the physicists have again computer models of this that show that maybe within you know, a thousand miles or so of that ground zero, everything gone. 00:41:34 Speaker 3: Everything gone. 00:41:35 Speaker 2: There would have been other parts of the world, I mean, you know, all things considered. The farther you were from ground zero, probably the better. It does seem like from the fossil record that some of the survivors, some of the groups that then start to thrive, like some of these small mammals which then become really big and really start to diversify and take over the world soon after. Because now the dinosaurs are gone, you know that some of them may have come from northern Asia. Okay, Uh, that that's one idea. It's hard to be sure of that because the fossil record is is kind of limited, but that this could have been like you know, refugium like some some some you know, place where far from the from the worst of the of the carnage, that animals could have survived, and then from surviving there, once the sunlight came back, you know, they could have spread around. That probably did happen. Uh, we just don't know. We need to know more about the whole world and and the fossils we have of that age happened to be concentrated in certain places, as fossils often are, and some of the best fossils are from right here in Montana. We have, you know, the very last dinosaurs and the mammals that took over all the way down south to New Mexico, And that's where I've worked quite a bit with with Tom Williamson, who's just retired as the curator at the museum in Albuquerque. Tom and his sons, Taylor and Ryan. He even their twins, and he brought him out starting when they were like six years old and taught him how to collect fossils, and they collected incredible I talk about him in the book I have. I have pictures of them, uh in in the bird book because they've collected some of those important fossils of the birds that survived the Asteroid. They were like twelve years old. It was incredible. 00:43:05 Speaker 1: What did those so tell me about what dinosaurs survived? Okay, so if we chase on this idea that like that that that was the birth of birds. 00:43:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, what did they look? 00:43:21 Speaker 1: Who were they like? Who were they what did they look like? If we saw them today, would we be like, oh a bird? 00:43:26 Speaker 2: Yeah we would, we would. We'd recognize them immediately because they are the modern style birds. The only dinosaurs that survived the Asteroid were birds that had beaks instead of teeth, that had big wings, big chest muscles. You know that when you know you're out hunting turkeys, and you're cooking a turkey, all that meat in the chest that connects to that big breastbone. That is something modern birds have. Those are the airplane engines. That's what's control the wings of birds. Now. Turkeys, you know, don't fly particularly well, but they can fly. Birds that fly a lot, they have even bigger muscles, so beaks, big chest muscles, big wings, really lightweight skeletons, really hollow bones, and really fast growth and reproduction. So most birds made it, Yes, that's who made it, and so birds today, like, it's actually really hard to see a baby bird, like even if you're a keen bird watcherll, Okay, you know it's maybe breeding season and okay, the eggs are being laid, but you have such a narrow window to see a baby bird because they grow so quickly from a hatchling into an adult, sometimes within a matter of days or weeks in some species. 00:44:30 Speaker 3: Yeah, it takes a trained eye, you know. 00:44:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredible. And this is all because modern style birds can grow really fast, they have really high metabolisms, they're warm blooded. So those were the only dinosaurs that survived, So of course we need to look at the victims a bit to get a sense of how the victims and the survivors differed. So, of course, among the victims were things like t rex and triceratops, and the duck billed dinosaurs and the dinosaurs with dome heads, and the dinosaurs that were armored, and like the dinosaurs, the classic canonical dinosaurs, they probably died because they were too big, they just couldn't get enough food. But there were also lots of other birds that were flapping and flying and fluttering around over the heads of t rex and triceratops on the day the asteroid hit and most of those birds did not survive either. Some of those birds still had teeth, they still had like raptor dinosaur claws on their hands, they had long tails, basically primitive birds, like holdovers from the dinosaur ancestors of birds. And they all died. They all died except for modern style birds. And so we think that it is being able to grow really fast and reproduce really fast in the modern style birds that came in handy. I mean, if the world goes to hell and it takes you twenty years to go from a baby into an adult, like it did in a t rex. I mean, come on, you're in trouble. But if you can go from a baby to an adult within like a few weeks, okay, the generations turnover really quickly. Of course, these birds had big wings and big flight muscles. They could fly really well, which means they could escape from localized dangers. Oh there's a flash flood coming this way. Oh there's a forest fire. And the beaks we think are important too, because a lot of these birds that had these beaks they could eat seeds, which seems kind of trivial. You know, a lot of birds today eat seeds. We just kind of think it's normal, but in fact it's quite hard to subsist on a diet of seeds. It's a pretty peculiar diet. And these birds with beaks could do it. And we know that in some cases we have the last meals preserved in the stomachs. We know that some of these early birds eat seeds. Now, when we see it in the modern world today, if there's a forest fire, if there's a volcano that obliterates an island, stuff will grow again. And why is that It might take a year, it might take a few years, but seeds can persist in the soil. Seeds are really hardy, and so back when the asteroid hit, if you were the type of animal that ate part of a growing plant, you ate leaves, you ate fruits, you ate stems or whatever, you'd be in trouble because the forest collapse, The trees died, the other plants died when sunlight was shut off. But if you could eat seeds, you could eat basically the last surviving food, soores. It wouldn't get you through forever, but it might get you through a year, two years, three years, and so that could have been there get out of jail free card. But really I like to think about it, as you know, when that asteroid hit, this was so sudden, so unexpected, totally out of the blue, just this bolt from the heavens. Nothing had a chance to prepare for that. That's not how evolution works. So the earth became this fickle casino. It became a game of chance, and really you had to confront that asteroid with the hand to cards you were dealt. And some animals had just a bad hand to cards. They were big, it took them a long time to grow. They needed to eat a lot of food. But other animals had good hand to cards. You know, the dinosaurs like t rex and triceratops, they had the dead man's hand. The birds, the little mammals, they could grow fast, they could eat lots of different foods. The birds could probably eat seeds with their beaks, they could hide easily, and so on. That was a winning handed cards. So maybe didn't guarantee your survival. You're at the poker table. It's if you have a good handed cards, it doesn't mean you're gonna win. So got to play the game. But that was probably what allowed those particular dinosaurs, of all the dinosaurs, just modern style birds to survive. And it allowed our ancestors, our tiny furry ancestors, to stare down the asteroid as well. And thank god they did, or else we wouldn't be here. 00:48:36 Speaker 1: Now, what about all those big like those pterodactyle birds, m h, not birds, they're not birds, But they didn't they were gone. 00:48:46 Speaker 2: No, they were gone. So they died with the asteroids. 00:48:48 Speaker 1: Because they were more When you came talking about beaks and teeth, ya think of a merganzer's bill, Is that the kind of truth you're talking about? 00:48:55 Speaker 2: No, so, no birds today have real teeth some birds do have serrated bills, but it's the keratin of the bills that's serrated. There are some fossil birds, like these giant soaring birds that had twenty foot wingspans. They actually had a bony teeth like their jaws were like saw blades, but it was bone. No birds have teeth like us that have enamel on the outside and grow from a tooth socket, but of course dinosaurs did. Now, when a bird develops in the egg today, it starts to grow teeth very early on, and then the beak starts to grow and that stops the teeth from developing, and the teeth never developed. But some of these developmental biologists, the kind of biologists that you know oftentimes are looking for cures for cancer and these kinds of things, trying to understand how different genes control growth. They can actually make a bird grow teeth in the egg and they look like the teeth of little raptor dinosaurs. So that's some of the modern day evidence. You know, this was unknown to Darwin. Darwin and his contemporaries didn't even know what DNA was. But this is some of the modern day evidence that drives home that point that birds of all from dinosaurs. You can make a chicken grow little dinosaurs teeth in the in the egg, but but they they no modern birds have have teeth that they can't really grow them to completion. There's something about these little teeth that just doesn't work anymore. They start to grow, they fade away. If you make them in the lab grow, they can grow a bit, but then the bird dies in the egg. But there the genes, these dinosaur genes are lurking in the genome of modern birds. Now terodactyls. That's about terodactyls. So terodactyls are they're not dinosaurs, they're not birds. They are a group of reptiles that flew. They're close cousins of dinosaurs. So it's fine. Most people think they're dinosaurs. And you know, it's funny. They had like they had like a beak structure they did. That's where you get into this thing that's that's confusing. I should say it's confusing, but I guess I don't know. It's not the right word for it. Amazing confusing whatever is that. 00:51:05 Speaker 1: So many things can arrive at the same solution by different paths, Like meaning, a bat Okay, here's a mammal with a wing. A flying squirrel is somewhere in the process of developing. 00:51:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they don't flap their wings like a bat, so they don't have the powered flight that a bird or a bat or they're on their way to figure something or another case. 00:51:30 Speaker 1: You have the structures of fish fins, but then you have marine mammals that have like fins and structures. But they all got there these very different paths, right, So when you look at those those like from all the kids dinosaurs books and stuff, you see like the pterodactyls, like he's got a bill or a beak flies around, right, But it's just like coincidence. 00:51:57 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's what we call convergent evolution. And it's just because if you live a certain lifestyle, let's say you fly, I mean, there's only a certain number of ways that a body can fly, especially if you're gonna flap your wings. So a bird, a bad at pterodactyl just basically, by like the laws of physics, they're gonna end up looking somewhat similar because they're all flying. Same with swimming, you know, you're gonna swim with flippers or fins, you're you're not gonna swim if you know, if you're gonna live your life in the open ocean, you're not gonna swim with the type of arm we have. So evolution over time often converges just you know, in a sense it's coincidentally because nothing an evolution is planned. But really it's because of natural selection. You know, if you're gonna fine tune an animal to be an ever better swimmer or flyer or what have you, there's only certain ways that's gonna work, just with the physics emotion. So you do get distant relatives often re evolving the same features because they're living similar lifestyles. And pterosaurs, the pterodactyls and birds are a great example. You know, they are not particular closely related. They evolved flight independently of each other. It was actually the terotactyls that did it first, way back in the Triassic period on the super continent of Pangea, back when all the land was one. That's when pterodactyls took to the skies and they evolved a really strange type of wing that is not made of feathers but is made of skin. It's like a giant seal of skin that attaches to one super long finger, the ring finger, so like et you know, the long finger, and it's this this sal of skin that attaches to it. That's how they fly. Now. Birds, of course, fly with wings made out of feathers. Bats fly with a skin wing, but one that attaches to the entire hand. So each of them have wings. Each of them flap those wings, but each wing is subtly different, and that tells us they evolved independently. They evolved for flying, Yeah, they were optimized for flying. Yeah, but each one had a slightly different ancestry, and that's why the wings are slightly different. Now with the tterodactyls, then the birds came onto the scene of one hundred and fifty million years ago. That's when we have the oldest fossils of birds that still look like they're half dinosaur. They have teeth, they have big claws, and by that time there had already been tarodactyls for like eighty million years, So birds were interlopers into this pterodactyl world. And then for the next you know, many tens of millions of years, they competed, I mean, they competed. 00:54:22 Speaker 3: For supremacy style. 00:54:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, and then the asteroid came down suddenly out of the blue, and it killed off almost all of the birds. But a few of these modern style birds with beaks and you know, fast growth and so on, survived. The asteroid killed off all the pterodactyls. We don't know why exactly. Most of those pterodactyls were bigger, and I think that probably has something to do with it. There weren't like the equivalent of pterodactyls like all the little song birds and so on that we have today, and some pterodactyls were giant, So I think that's probably one of the reasons. But it could have also just been a bit of dumb luck, you know. I mean, things went to chao. This was one bad day that then compounded over the days and weeks and months. But maybe the terrorisaurs just had a bad break. But they're gone. They're gone, and now birds are alone in the skies. Bats would come later from some of the mammals that survived, and that's why for the first ten million years or so after the asteroid, birds evolve like crazy, and that's where we see the first fossils of most of the modern birds that we know, and that's where the DNA when we build family trees based on DNA, because you know, this story isn't just about what fossils we happen to find. That's part of it, but we can learn so much about the history of life and evolution by basically doing like what they did on the Springer show. You know, you get the DNA, you want to know what's related to what, and you could build these family trees that tells us, for instance, that birds are reptiles. When you build a family tree from DNA, the birds slot within the reptiles. They are right up next to crocodiles. Crocodiles are the closest living cousins of birds. So that really proves this idea that goes back to Darwin. They had no idea what DNA was back then. But along with like you know, the the genes in a bird that can grow teeth, and these are all the more modern recent things that tell us that Darwin and his contemporaries were right that birds really are highly modified reptiles that came from the dinosaurs. 00:56:15 Speaker 3: How big was the biggest bird that survived that strike? 00:56:18 Speaker 2: Probably quite small. That was probably part of it as well. We have a few fossils. 00:56:22 Speaker 1: Either bigger, chi bigger, probably smaller, so there are the biggest bird was smaller in the chicken. 00:56:28 Speaker 2: Probably, so there were other birds living then that were bigger than chickens, but it seems like they vanished. Now. Bird fossils are rare, you know, birds that have delicate bones. It's harder to turn a bird into a fossil than it is like a big t rex or something like that. So we're always dealing with limited evidence. But there's a few places in the world that have really good fossils of birds from right before the asteroid. One of them is in the Netherlands and in Belgium, you know, not just a bit south of where I live now, just so happens, and there's some of the birds preserved there, and they're tiny. They have beaks, not teeth. They grew really fast, they had big flight muscles, but I mean their heads were just maybe you know, less than an inch so you could have held these things in your hand, they were really small. We also have good fossils from Antarctica, and I tell this story and in the book, in the story Birds about some of my colleagues, Julia Claric and Matt Lamana. They're very adventurous paleontologence, and they bring teams of themselves and their students down to Antarctica to look for fossils. And I mean that's dedication. 00:57:27 Speaker 3: I mean, I do fieldwork and stuff stuff down there. 00:57:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's stuff down there, and there's stuff down there, and they find birds that were living within the few million years before the asteroid, and these are modern style birds. They actually are close relatives of chickens and ducks. You can tell that from the bones. We don't have the DNA, but the bones make it very clear. They have chicken and duck features of their wings and of their legs and of their heads. And they were small, so that was part of the picture too. They had beaks and could eat seeds, they could fly well, and they were small. And it seems like the survivors also lived in or near the water. They were not perching birds, they weren't nesting in the trees the forest collapsed when the asteroid hit. Living in the water helped too, so as I think we can see, it was probably just a lot of things compounded together that gave them the better odds to survive, but from those tiny survivors very quickly in the next interval of time after the Cretaceous, the next interval of times called the Paleocene, and this is when mammals really take off and you get mammals that get up to the size of cattle, you know, after one hundred and fifty million years of tiny mammals living with dinosaurs never getting bigger than a badger. And it's because t Rex is gone. Triceratops is gone. But birds do something similar, and you start to see the major modern groups of birds appear as fossils. The DNA tells the same story that they were originating around that time, and this is where you get, you know, the ostrich group and the penguin group, and the distant ancestors of songbirds and of you know, hawks and eagles and so on, and of everything in between them. There's over ten thousand species of birds today and a huge amount of that diversity was established really early on as these few surviving tiny birds with their beaks that could make babies and grow you know, to an adult within years. They looked out on this world where there's no big dinosaurs anymore. And the trees are starting to grow. 00:59:27 Speaker 3: I wonder if they had it in them to feel optimistic. You know, this is. 00:59:33 Speaker 2: I'll tell you though. They did have pretty big brains we can tell from the cat scans, and so that was probably part of the picture as well, having bigger brains and higher intelligence and keener. 00:59:42 Speaker 3: Right decisions as well. 00:59:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, be more adaptable, more resilient. 00:59:46 Speaker 1: You know what I think about when I'm think about all these animals from back then, Like I was image, you know, if you cut a big old backstrap out of like a but you know, it seems like but those tear actyls, man, they seem like it doesn't seem like to be the worst kind of meat on the plant. 01:00:05 Speaker 2: Tarotactyl would be probably one of the worst things you can eat. Hardly A lot of them made fish, so they would have been pretty disgusting. As you know, we know when we eat things that are like But if you. 01:00:14 Speaker 1: Could have if you could know like what a dinosaur steak like from a like an herbivore dinosaur, yeah, steak would be like or if you could cook up a bird back then would be like is it just like chicken? 01:00:27 Speaker 2: Now? I love it, you know, it's funny. And I know, you know we're talking about this because you know this is your your show, this is Meat Eater Podcast, but you wouldn't believe it. I get asked that question quite a bit. What they what they would have tasted like? And what do you think? So I think so, first of all, probably like animals that live today, the ones that eight plants would have tasted a lot better than the ones that they meet. 01:00:47 Speaker 3: So do you think they had like red meat or they had like chicken meat? 01:00:52 Speaker 2: I don't know. So you know, they weren't mammals, they wouldn't have had the same kind of meat as mammals. I think, like you know, ostriches and EMUs like those are probably the best comparison for what a dinosaur would be, because you know, they are dinosaurs and they're big dinosaurs. 01:01:06 Speaker 1: I sometimes picture all the meat on one of those things being like snap and turtle. 01:01:09 Speaker 2: Meat, yeah you know, yeah, yeah, turtle meat and and and like alligator is another one. So you know, alligators and birds are the closest relatives of modern day dinosaurs. And you know, you eat gator meat, it oftentimes tastes like chicken. Now, sometimes that's because it's farmed and they you know, feed them chickens. But generally, you know, you can get a bit even wild gator. I've had it, you know, down in the Louisiana and it's like that, that's kind of chickenese, kind of pultry. Yes, so probably a lot of dinosaur would be like that. But yeah, go after the triceratops steak the Brontosaurus burgher you. Fred Flinstone was. 01:01:43 Speaker 3: What I was watching that deal with my little boy last night. 01:01:45 Speaker 1: There was a scene where they he kills this that this t rex kills his big dinosaur and he drags at home. Yeah, so those little kids can eat it and they're snacking on it, and it was real dark beef, like. Yeah, that's another thing around, Like, I don't know that. 01:02:00 Speaker 2: No, no, I would, And you know, I'm not going to say they're wrong, because this is getting really kind of far from the fossils. I like to try to stick as close to the fossils as I can. 01:02:09 Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes you kind of wonder, right, Yeah. 01:02:12 Speaker 2: So I truly, honestly, I know it's maybe a bit of a glib thing. We're talking about lot the dinosaurs have tasted the like and which steak, what do you want to eat? 01:02:18 Speaker 3: Okay differently then we like then never mind what they taste like. But like what what you know? I mean, it's a thing you can't tell. 01:02:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, we can't tell because you're. 01:02:27 Speaker 1: Saying like for a long time we didn't have feathers and man feathers. But like the qualities of the qualities of you. 01:02:35 Speaker 2: All we can do there really is look at modern day birds and crocodiles and alligators as the closest relatives and make this probability argument that a lot of dinosaurs would have had similar sort of meat and not just meat, but you know when it comes to organs, internal organs and tendons and ligaments and and all these things that we just don't normally get as fossils. Looking at the modern animals is that are closely related to dinosaurs is our best approximation. But it's not. Again, it's not slam dunk. You know, it's a guide. It gives us some you know, degree of plausibility. But these are things we ultimately don't know, which which I which makes it fun and shows like that, and especially when we do the Jurassic films where we don't have to be as concerned with total scientific realism because they're monster movies. You know, we can have fun with some of that stuff. 01:03:25 Speaker 3: You know. 01:03:26 Speaker 1: Another one I always wonder about in your guys world is how do you ever get a sense of population dynamics? 01:03:33 Speaker 3: Meaning like picture that picture. 01:03:35 Speaker 1: That today you were out, Like, let's say you go through the big valleys around here. 01:03:42 Speaker 3: Okay, here and there is an eagle nest. 01:03:45 Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, but you could feasibly spend a day looking for a bald eagle nest and not find one. Yeah, here and there, Yeah, you'll find an osprey nest. Yeah, okay, Like if you look really hard, you'll you'll never You'll probably never find If I gave you a week during peak time and I said find me a hummingbird nest, you wouldn't find it. 01:04:09 Speaker 3: Yeah, okay. 01:04:10 Speaker 1: But then you go to other places, right, like like shoreline rookeries and stuff, you know, other places you'd be like, well, there's thousands of them. 01:04:19 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:04:19 Speaker 1: Or you go to a giant bridge and cliff swallows you'd be like, oh no, I'm looking at hundreds of cliff swallows. 01:04:26 Speaker 2: Yeah. We have in Scotland, we have these, you know, ganic colonies out on some of the rocks, you know, right near Edinburgh. Yeah, I mean it's I mean hundreds of thousands maybe in one place. Yeah. 01:04:35 Speaker 1: So how do you ever, like, if you imagine the years after and you have these surviving birds, is there ever any way to get a sense of like population dynamics? Meaning was it that you would that you could boat down the coast for days and not see anything and then find some little nesting colony? 01:04:57 Speaker 3: Right? It was that bad? 01:04:59 Speaker 1: Or you think would have been that the skies were full of thousands of them? 01:05:03 Speaker 2: I honestly don't know. I think the fossils don't give us that information, and I don't I'm not saying it's impossible. I never like to say as a scientist that something is impossible to know. That's the worst thing you can say as a scientist. But I think it's it's highly unlikely. It's just the it's not like we have a snapshot of an entire community, an entire landscape with. 01:05:25 Speaker 1: Mere but with this stuff with mitochondrial DNA will start telling like you be like, yes, well you can start telling like this thing came out of a population that's right. 01:05:35 Speaker 3: With blank number of reading age females. 01:05:39 Speaker 2: So when you have the DNA and this, and this comes into play with human evolution for sure, because when you study the mitochondrial DNA of modern day humans of us, the geneticists are able to tell that the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is you know, consistent or indicative of some kind of bottleneck. I don't remember all. 01:05:55 Speaker 1: The like seven like the seven Daughters of Eve, like Western Europeans. Yeah, yeah, I'm probably mutilating this, but yeah, it might be an old idea, but at a time, no, there's something that there was like that all Western that Western Europeans went through a bottleneck of seven females. 01:06:12 Speaker 2: And I'm not sure because it's not my field, but I've read a lot of when I was writing the Mammal Book, I read a lot of this, and yeah, that we might be wrong about the details, but I think that's still true that there were definitely these bottlenecks and the evolution of Homo sapiens, and that does explain why human genetic diversity. I mean, there is a lot of genetic diversity in one sense, but really, you know, if you take you or me, or you take you know, somebody from South America or Africa or China. I mean, our genes are really similar, really similar because of those bottlenecks. With other mammals, you can do similar things. And I've seen people do this, like with wooly mammoths and sabertoothed tigers, to try to understand what those last populations were like at the end of the last spasm of the ice age. You know, how many mammoths were left? 01:06:56 Speaker 1: Do they collapse and like you track along and be like these ones came from very small, dwindling populations. 01:07:03 Speaker 2: And people have done that for sure. With the last surviving mammoths as far as we know, lived in Wrangel Island. There's little Russian islands four thousand years. This is you know, it's time people are building pyramids. It's not you know time back in the in the Midwest where there were you know, great Native American tribes that were building you know, civilization. I mean there were still mammoths on this island, and those mammoths lived so recently that the DNA, or at least a lot of it's still there. I mean DNA breaks down really quickly, so we don't have any t rex DNA or any tri serratoze. 01:07:34 Speaker 1: So that's what you would draw, like, that's what you would need to draw. 01:07:39 Speaker 2: Yes, populations have rigorous, a rigorous basis for that and and and so we can't really do that with t Rex. You know, what were those populations of t rex like before the asteroid hit? Now I say, we can't, we can't do it in that way. There have been some ecologists that have published quite esoteric studies estimating the size of t Rex populations based on how many fossils we know and how those fossils are distributed in the amount of time. But it's a statistical exercise and the airbars hit I think, so, I don't remember the details. This is work that There's a very eminent, more statistical minded paleontologist named Charles Marshall in California and he led a team that did this and it was actually a big research paper they published in Science in the Premier journal about ten years ago or so. And I think they estimated something like, you know, a million. I mean, I could be butchering a population, but like a million at a time, like standing population of t Rex. But you know, and they were very upfront about the biases. But it was more of like a thought experiment, like what scienceists like to do. Sometimes we're in the pub and we're sketching on the back of a Napolis. 01:08:47 Speaker 1: Thought experience, and you know what you know, I'll say, as part of the thought experience is no way. 01:08:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean what what why? So? 01:08:53 Speaker 1: So? 01:08:53 Speaker 2: What's so? What's your what's your gut feeling? 01:08:55 Speaker 3: Why? Why would I give that gut feeling? 01:08:57 Speaker 1: Because I would just look at general large predator populations. Yeah, like like just the large predators are generally pretty scarce. Yeah, oh, yes, like how big? I don't know, because the other thing you look at is carrying capacity. But we don't really probably don't understand the land the carrying capacity of the landscape, not really do understanding the vegetative regime exactly. 01:09:16 Speaker 2: So there are some studies that have been published by ecologists, you know, hardcore ecologists that understand the modern world, and they're kind of dabbling in dinosaurs doing their own thought experiments, but trying to understand carrying capacity. And it's tough because, yeah, the vegetation back then was very different from the vegetation today. The climate was different, the temperature was different. We also don't really know much about the fine details of the metabolism and the growth of these dinosaurs. We debate where they warm blooded or not, you know, and it's not either or you know, you can have degrees of metabolism. So all that stuff factors into carrying capacity. 01:09:55 Speaker 1: So it's really yeah, that's a tough one, really because even if with carrying I ask you questions is like, even if you go to you go like the oceans today, you know, and you look at the bio mass per unit of space that comes out of you know, stuff at like the fiftieth parallel versus the bio mass or unit of space that comes out of sort of like the oceanic desert. You know, so you can't They're so radically different it's probably impossible. Note, but I gets an interesting thing. We can move on from this after this question. But I guess you could look at let's say you go to to before the strike. Yeah, okay, and you sort of and you take any gap of time, right, you take a gap of time of a millionaires or five million years, and you go like, how many fossils were we generating per unit of time? And then if you go post strike, do you wind up? Do you look in the fossil record and be like, you know what, there were so few animals alive that from sixty to fifty six to forty six million years ago or whatever, there are no fossils, meaning because the chances of making a fossil are so slim that if you had so few species left on earth that like the fossil lottery, yes, isn't paying off? Yes, And then in some way you might look and be like there just really wasn't much around, you know. 01:11:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, And people do this. There are paleontologists who are very statistically inclined that build these statistical model I mean it's actually quite similar to how people build like you know, polls for elections or predicting the stock market, like that kind of of statistics. Like it's quite rigorous and quite robust, but also, as we know, it's not always correct. You know, it's trying to predict things based on limited evidence. There is this argument that that individuals were so rare right after the asteroid. Yeah, that that's why we don't have tons of fossils. Because people often ask, well, if this asteroid came down and cause this extinction on some whose day morning, you know, why don't you have all these bodies being preserved as fossils, and what it comes down to it is just, yeah, the fossil lottery. I mean, to turn something into a fossil, it needs to die, it needs to be buried in sand or mud, it needs to be turned into a rock, and then that rock has to be accessible on the surface of the earth today for some scientists to walk by and see the fossil sticking out. So even at any given moment of time, even if a lot of things died at once, just the odds of any individual getting buried by sand or mud and turned into a fossil it's low. And this is part of the you know the same thing when we talk about wooly mammoths. You mentioned mammoths that have been found with direct evidence for human hunting. There's not tons or maybe some archaeologists say there actually are, But it gets down to, you know, what we expect, and even if humans are killing these mammoths and leaving evidence behind spear points and projectiles and so on, just the odds of getting that stuff turned into a fossil is low. So it is very hard. It's very hard. We can do these statistical studies and we can make predictions, but ultimately we're dealing in this in these cases when we want to understand populations, it's just it's really challenging with fossils. Again, I'm not gonna say impossible, but challenging, really challenging, and I think we need to be very skeptical as scientists anytime somebody makes a bold claim about you know, these populations of dinosaurs were this big, or they did that, or it was this ecological reason that they collapsed. Sometimes also, let's face it, bizarre things happened. The passenger pigeon is a great example of that that went extinct. You know, the last one died in a zoo, you know, in the nineteen hundreds, really just a few decades before there were billions of these things living across North America. And yes they were overhunted by people in the eighteen hundreds, but also there was a genetic crash. They went through some kind of bottleneck, and I mean it just wreaked havoc on them. They collapsed as a population. Very hard to know that kind of thing from fossils, not having the genetics and only having limited fossils preserved here and there. So I think we just have to be always mindful that we can learn a lot from fossils. Fossils can often tell us, oh my god, there's this strange group of podactyls we would never know existed if we didn't have their fossils. And they could fly, and they could grow in this particular way, and they lived in these particular places, and they fit into the family tree this way. Those are things that we can get quite readily from fossils. But you know, details of behavior and population size and these kind of things, it's tough. So we you know, it's it's like we're squinting at the heavens, looking at the stars, making constellations out of these limited you know, limited limited stars, trying to find patterns. But that also makes I think it makes any science fun, honestly, when there's mysteries and there's uncertainties and you're trying to push the evidence as far as you can go. But we're studying intelligence and cognition and extinct species, like that's what we're doing now. Like I'm under no illusion. I don't think we're going to figure out, you know, how many neurons there wasn't a brain of a t rex or could a t rex recognize a self in a mirror? You know, those are very specific things, but we're pushing at the boundaries and we want to know as much as we can know from the fossils that we have from cat scanning them and looking at the brains and the regions of the brains and comparing to modern animals and so on. So all science is really about, you know, pushing the boundaries and knowing as much as we can know with the evidence at hand, and then trying to find new evidence to test that, to overturn that, to buff up our ideas or what have you. 01:15:33 Speaker 3: What's the biggest Like if you look at you yourself and your own research, the research of your community, hit me with one or two of like the biggest questions you have right now, Like the things that are not things that you can't answer, but the things that you're optimistic that would find an answer that sort of like professionally keep you up at night. 01:15:56 Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a lot, you know, there is so much we don't know, and we're learning more and more all the time, and we really are in a golden age of paleontology. People are finding more fossils than ever before, especially when it comes to dinosaurs, there's about fifty new species found a year. It's like once a week, somebody's finding a new species, and it's because more people are looking. 01:16:15 Speaker 1: I want to pause my question because I forgot to ask you a question preceding this. 01:16:18 Speaker 2: Okay, I thought of earlier. 01:16:20 Speaker 3: So hold that. 01:16:20 Speaker 2: Okay, I'll hold that thought. 01:16:22 Speaker 3: But it's it's it's buddies with that question. 01:16:25 Speaker 2: Okay, So is it? 01:16:26 Speaker 3: Here's the question, is it whatever? 01:16:30 Speaker 1: Are fossils ever of such value that that people would industrial scale surface mine four fossils? Or is that because you said it's like looking at the surface or people luck into it. Are there any cases where like like engineers industrial scale surface mining, strip mining four fossils. 01:16:53 Speaker 2: Yes, okay, with things like coal, Okay, coal is a fossil. It's fossilized would basically for trees, and of course that's been industrially mine forever because that's economic fossils. No, So so there are other things. I mean, oil comes from ancient organisms, and there's you know, ancient sea planket and formed chalk and formed you know, the diatamous earth that's used. So there's economics various things that we use economically that have huge outsize importance in our world and our economies are actually fossils. But I know that's not what you're at. You're asking if you know, industrially, you'd strip mine the whole area to find the t rexes or something like that, and the answer is not really, at least not yet. It Recently there have been a lot of these auctions of fossil dinosaurs skeletons, and some of them are bringing pretty big prices Mongolians. Yeah, the Mongolia ones are tree because that's illegal, so there's a black market there. But the ones that and you do see some of these up for auctions sometimes and those are seized oftentimes by the government, either either here or in Mongolia. But if you find a fossil here in the US, I mean, if it's on your land, you'd do what you want with it, right, I mean, this is this is our culture, and so you know, traditionally a lot of ranchers here out west. You know, scientists would say, I want to look in your land and we're looking for dinosaur bones. And you know, sometimes people would say no, of course, but a lot of times people say, yeah, go out, you know, it's it's we got all these acres and these are just bones that put in the museum, and that's great. It's been wonderful. I mean, I know, you know so many of my colleagues have discovered amazing fossils because they built these relationships with ranchers out here and across the West. Things are changing a bit though, because some of these fossils are being put up for auction and going for thirty million dollars, forty million dollars. This stegosaurus went for over forty million dollars. So, of course, if this is your land and there's some fossils on there, even if you like the scientists, if you have a chance to make forty million bucks, of course, that's. 01:18:50 Speaker 3: What I'm saying that you would like that. You would that you would. 01:18:52 Speaker 1: The same way people prospect for gold, you would prospect for this ya. 01:18:56 Speaker 2: And so there are commercial fossil hunting outfits and they're quite common here out in the American West, that go out and look for fossils and there's so they can sell them. And there are ranchers that buy ranch land not for their cattle. They might use it for their cattle as well, but because it's land that has the right kind of rocks to find fossils. So there is a market for this. Ye, there definitely is a market for this, which you know has its pluses and minuses. As an academic scientist, you know, I hate it if there's a fossil that's so important and so beautiful and it would be so good at a museum and it would be so good at inspiring people and educating kids, if that disappears into some rich guy's vault, you know. But at the same time, look, this is law. We're not going to change. Nobody wants to change the law. And to have the government here like sees a fossil from your land, you know. So that is the economic reality, but it's not industrial schedule. It just would be really hard to like strip mine an entire ranch in the hopes you might find a fossil here or there, because they're still rare enough. It's not like f finding, you know. I mean, it's usually not like finding a coal seam or a vein of oil or something. You know, you might find a bone bed of fossils where you have a lot of skeletons preserved together because there was a flood or something that killed the whole herd of dinosaurs. You probably could industrially mind those, but otherwise most fossil dinosaurs, at least are so random, one here, one there when they're that it would be hard to do that. 01:20:27 Speaker 3: Okay, So let's get back to the question of. 01:20:29 Speaker 1: What what are the What are the not the fantastical things that you'll never know, but what are the kind of things, like the big questions you have that you could see like a pathway to answering when when you look at the whole collection of your work, the story of the mammals, the story of the dinosaurs, the story of the birds, where are the pieces where you're like, I see how we get to there, but I don't understand how we got from. 01:20:54 Speaker 3: The their to there. You know. 01:20:55 Speaker 2: You know, there's a bunch and in each one of the books, I actually kind of here and there highlight a few of them. I thrown them in there because I want people reading the books to understand that we don't have all the answers. You know, I can write this these books, and I can tell you the story of dinosaurs and birds and mammals and their evolutionary trajectory and where they came from, and how they change does the world change. And it's a nice story. It's a story backed up by evidence by fossils by DNA, but it doesn't mean we know every chapter in that story. There's always debates and mysteries and uncertainties, and there's so much we don't know, even though we're finding more fossils than ever before. And one of the big ones is what I'm studying now the cognition and intelligence of dinosaurs and other extinct species. That's why we're doing this project with my colleagues, with Mattias and Helena and Sweden and Pavela and Christina are colleagues in Prague who are neurobiologists. And then Larry Whitmer is a great paleontologist, and Ryan Ridgeley and then our students, you know, so my students, I'm going to shout out the names because I think it's important that you know, you give the students the credit because they're doing the work. I got Adam Manning and Millie Mead and and soon Fraser Weston studying in my lab the brains, the cognition, the intelligence of extinct species. We are pushing, like we know there's a limit. We know that we're not going to be able again to say t Rex had this number of neurons, or t Rex could recognize a self in a mirror. But what we want to do is push our knowledge of dinosaur brains to the absolute limit. How many dinosaurs can we see t scan, how many brain models can we build, how many ones can we measure? Map this all out on the family tree, look at the trends and brain evolution, and tie what we can see in dinosaur brains to what we see in the brains of modern mammals, and not just modern mammals, but modern birds and modern crocodiles and all kinds of modern animals. And the hope is that here and there, maybe that there's some feature of a brain, some physical feature, some lobe of a brain or something that in modern animals that if they have that lobe of the brain, they can do a certain behavior. And then if we identify that in a fossil, we can say, oh, that extinct species could do that too. We know that it's kind of pie in the sky. We know that we're running up to our limits of understanding, but that's why we're doing it, because it's exciting and it's fun, and it's not just describing dusty old bones, it's trying to understand them as living animals. So that's a big one and I high like that. In the Story of Birds, I talk about how we're doing this project and we're doing it now and we don't have all the answers, but we're getting them. I mean literally, like you know, this morning before doing this, you know, my students are they're seven hours ahead, you know, in Scotland. They're sending me updates about what they're doing this week and the things they're they're they're they're learning as they're looking at catscans and dinosaur brains. So that's one. Uh, there's a there's a handful of others. And we don't really know why dinosaurs were able to outlast the crocodiles and the salamanders and the other creatures that were evolving around the same time as them way back on the super continent of Pangaea. We know there was an extinction, the super continent broke apart, and that's why we have separate continents today. You know, it's why South America and Africa looked like two puzzle pieces they did once fit together. The ocean now separates, of course the continents. But back before the water rushed in, the earth would have bled lava for like six hundred thousand years, and this led to runaway global warming. There's tons of carbon dioxide mething. These nasty gases heated up the atmosphere really quickly, and that caused an extinct. 01:24:23 Speaker 3: Connell drift was faster than it is now. 01:24:26 Speaker 2: No, it's probably it does speed up or slow down over time, mostly based on what's happening deeper in the Earth, like in the mantle of the earth, as you have these convection currents. But by and large continents move about the speed our fingernails grow, which is slow. But over the course of millions of years, you know that compounds and it adds up. But this extinction, we know it happened about two hundred million years ago as Pangaea split. We know there was climate change. We see the effects of that in the fossil record, but also the rocks. You know, there's a lot about the carbon and oxygen signals in the rocks that can tell you things about temperature and precipitation. So we know there was this extinction. We know that before there was this extinction, there were a whole bunch of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs were pretty small. For the first few tens of millions of years that there were dinosaurs, most of them were the size of you and me. Some got up to the size of horses, some maybe the size of a giraffe. But there was nothing like a brontosaurus, nothing like a t rex. But the world was dominated instead by these giant salamanders the size of cars, and by all kinds of crazy crocodiles, you know, not just like the crocs and gators today, but some crocs that ate plants, and some that had sALS on their backs, and some that had beaks, and some that walked only on their hind legs. And then this extinction happens as the super continent breaks apart and these volcanoes are there, they blink out, and they blink out. Only a few crocs survived. Those are the ancestors of modern crocs. So this is why crocs really only live in the tropics or the subtropics today. Some amphibians make it through, but not the enormous car size one, but dinosaurs make it through, and it only after that extinction a good fifty million years after the very first proto dinosaurs walked on Pangaea. Do you get these big meat eaters and big plant eaters and the ones with horns and spikes and duckbills and dome heads and armor and so on. So we don't really know why, I mean, why did dinosaurs survived. We don't have a good explanation. It was a time of chaos, of course, and carnage and rapid change. Maybe some of it was dumb luck, but there must have been some hand of cards those dinosaurs were holding that allowed them to scribe. We don't know. People have different ideas, Oh, the dinosaurs could move faster, where the dinosaurs had higher metabolism, Where they grew faster, they were smarter. I mean maybe maybe, but the evidence is so limited. But we will find that out. I have no doubt that we will get a good understanding of that. We just need some brilliant young paleontologists to come along with a fresh set of eyes and think about it in a new way. 01:26:59 Speaker 1: Let me back up to your quick question, how old was a old t rex? If you had to guess how many years old? 01:27:06 Speaker 2: Oh like when it died? Yeah, so we can often tell with dinosaurs because dinosaur bones have growth rings in them like tree trunks. So not every bone does, but a lot of bones do, especially the ribs and the limb bones. So if we find a t rex, we can cut it open and we can see how many growth rings there are, and we can we can make plots graphs showing how they grew over a lifetime. We can count the number of growth rings, and we can make an estimate how big that t rex was, and we can make a growth curve, just like you might for a modern you know, population of deer or turkey or what have you. It's very important for conservation to understand how the animals are growing. So t rex is one of the better understood ones because there's actually quite a lot of fossils and what we see in the growth lines is there's barely any t rex skeletons that have more than thirty growth lines. Okay, so you know, I just turned forty two. I would have been long dead if I was a t rex, and so you know, and that's just what it was. So it lived pretty fast and died pretty young. Still it took though. If we look at those growth curves, it probably took about twenty years or so for a t rex to go from a baby to a full grown adult, So that that's t rex. Other dinosaurs would have lived shorter life spans and others would have lived longer. 01:28:22 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:28:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, so some of the long necked dinosaurs, you know, the huge ones. I mean, some of these things got to be bigger than Boeing seven thirty seven airplanes, heavier than a Boeing seven thirty seven airplane. We're talking fifty sixty tons even more. Argentinosaurus patagatite, And they have great names, and they only probably lived to be about fifty or sixty years old. It's not that they like lived for centuries, for a little bit every year. 01:28:46 Speaker 1: The thing I was the thing that this isn't a question, but it's the thing about those blows my mind is like, imagine the habitat impact, Yeah, of just the feet, Yeah, Jimmy, Like you imagine like what like when when an animal goes through it was and it leaves like an observable path, Like how Jemmy, you can't imagine if you if it went through a thicket. 01:29:15 Speaker 3: Yeah, the thicket's gone? 01:29:18 Speaker 1: Yeah do you I mean, like you can't you can't picture like what it's doing or how it's like occupying the landscape. 01:29:23 Speaker 3: Like things that would seem like a barrier aren't a barrier. 01:29:26 Speaker 1: Things it would just be like crushed. Yeah, you know, it's one that imagine. Man, it's impossible to imagine. 01:29:32 Speaker 2: It's it's impossible to imagine. I would say almost, because we have one line of evidence in the fossil record, and these are the footprints and the handprints that some of these dinosaurs leave behind. And in fact, in Scotland on the Isle of Sky, where we do a lot of our work. Yeah, sometimes we find a pterodactyl, sometimes we find some dinosaur bones, but most of the fossils are actually footprints. They are footprints and handprints left behind as dinosaurs were doing their thing, frolicking around on the mudflats on the beach in the lagoons back one hundred and seventy million years ago in Scotland's subtropical And so we have some evidence and some of these footprint sites, I mean they are just littered with dinosaur tracks, tracks stepping over other tracks. We have tracks of long neck dinosaurs. You know, these ones were probably weighed probably about fifteen tons so big, you know, three elephants put together, but not anywhere near as big as the biggest long neck dinosaurs. These footprints are the size of car tires. I mean, every time their hand or foot touched the ground, they left a hole the size of a car tire. And you know there would be flocks of these things. So sometimes with the ground is just totally chewed up, mashed up by just dinosaur footprint over dinosaur footprint. There's even I kid you not, there's a scientific term that geologists use to describe this kind of rock that is chaotic chaotic rock because you have all of this these dinosaurs stepping in the sand and mud and messing up. It's called dino turbased. Yes, it is a word, and it's a serious word. You see this in academic papers. And it's just a rock that has been so thoroughly obliterated by the footfalls of dinosaurs that it leaves a telltale sign. So imagine, yeah, they're walking through a forest. You know they would have left their mark. Now, of course, you know they wouldn't have just destroyed everything. I mean, no ecosystem could be in harmony, so there must have been ways that everything coexisted. 01:31:25 Speaker 1: I got two questions left. These are both going to put you in. Uh, these are both going to put you in like where you have to theorize. 01:31:30 Speaker 2: Okay, then I'm gonna have a nice drink of tea, Okay to get in the mood. 01:31:34 Speaker 3: Here's one. 01:31:34 Speaker 1: So, after your whole career, you've looked at all these extinction events, species that rose and vanished. Okay, based on what you've seen and based on what you know about all the different ways things have blinked out. Yeah, how do you think, like, give me a couple when we go, when we humans go. 01:32:02 Speaker 3: And we're done, what do you think it is? 01:32:05 Speaker 2: Well, totally speculative because no evidence for any of this. 01:32:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, looked at things that went away, and you understand all these different things like like impact strikes from asteroids, yeah, seismic activity, climate changes, whatever. Okay, Like what is the if you imagine, like, what is the thing that gets us? 01:32:26 Speaker 2: I think there's a few ways that could happen. Obviously, and and this circles back to, you know, something you were alluding to a little bit agoing the conversation. If there was a six mile wide asteroid that hit the Earth, I mean we would be in trouble. I would think, you know, we the dinosaurs didn't know that was coming. The dinosaurs didn't have an ability for a while. We would know, and we would hopefully be able to do something about it. 01:32:46 Speaker 3: Have you ever seen the movie Melancholia? 01:32:48 Speaker 2: No, I've seen Armageddon. 01:32:50 Speaker 3: Melancholi is the thinking man's arm again. 01:32:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll have to watch. That'll be up for the plane ride home. Maybe it's not. But but if that happened, I mean we would it would It would hurt us bad. It would hurt us bad. Even if we were able to stop. I mean, if we're able to totally stop it, fine, but if that asteroid hit us and we had to deal with it, that would be really bad. I will never downplay the technological thing. I mean, could we kind of nuclear war ourselves to death? I mean yeah, probably. Could AI get super intelligent and decide it doesn't want us anymore and wipes us out. I mean, those are getting so out there that I don't know. 01:33:26 Speaker 3: You just start people would just start unplugging shit. 01:33:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'd unplug everything that you can unplug and then the problem go. 01:33:32 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:33:32 Speaker 2: But I'll tell you what worries me an asteroid doesn't really worry me because we would know that it's coming. You know, there's no volcano big enough that would just wipe us out in an instant. The AI stuff, as you say, like there might be a dystopian future there maybe, but you're talking about total extinction really, and so what is what worries me? 01:33:52 Speaker 3: But before we're gone, there will be where there's just handfuls of us. 01:33:55 Speaker 2: Left here and there. Yeah, what worries me is there could be a human population and what happened to the passenger pigeon might happen to us. And again, that was that bird. It was maybe the most common bird in North America. 01:34:08 Speaker 1: Yea, there's this there's this idea that there there had to be a lot of them. 01:34:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, there were. 01:34:12 Speaker 3: There was no version where there. 01:34:14 Speaker 2: Was a few, No, and exactly, and I mean there were so many they would block out the sun for minutes on end when a flock went by. And this is you know, this isn't imagined. I mean this is within recent human history. I mean there are writers from the the nineteenth century that would talk about as flocks pastors and yeah, and you can you can there's a lot of taxidermy specimens, you can hold them. And they they were there were so many of them. I mean, if you were around in the mid eighteen hundreds, I'm sure you would say, oh, these birds are so common. I mean, nothing whatever happened to them. But they they not only collapsed, they went totally extinct, and they did so within really a few decades. And it was because, yes, you know, they were over hunted, and yes, land use was changing, and all of this prairie land like back home where I'm from in Illinois, uh, you know, was being you know, converted to farmland, and there was runoff and pesticize and that all played a role. But what really did it was it seemed that they went past some threshold and there was some genetic bottleneck and something happened with their genes. There wasn't just enough variety anymore. They weren't reproducing enough anymore and generating new types of individuals that were more fit that could deal with the changes, and they just crashed. They just crash. And I'm not a geneticist, so you know, the geneticist might understand it, and I would understand much better than me. But it does seem like there's some kind of mystery there, Like we know there was a. 01:35:36 Speaker 3: Past gen if some path that gen carried off. 01:35:41 Speaker 1: Of humans, yeah that I think jin carries off ninety percent of humans. The remaining ten percent there's just something we don't understand and they don't thrive. 01:35:48 Speaker 2: And I think that is the most likely scenario, that that's something. Yeah, whether it's it's a virus, whether it is I don't know, something from AI or I don't know some aliens now who knows? But something decimates a lot of humans, you know, it doesn't totally kill us off, but it kills a lot and then we have these this constellation of different populations that aren't really meeting and reproducing and generating new genetic diversity, and we just crash. And I think that is one likely Syrian now a good friend. 01:36:18 Speaker 3: Of mine, how money is on path? 01:36:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, so a good friend of mine. Henry g Is his name. He's a senior editor at Nature, you know, the prominent scientific journal. He's a great science writer and he wrote a book called The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. So his publisher back in the UK, we have the same publisher and editor, so we love supporting each other's books, and I loved it, you know, he said it to me before it was published and I read it. Oh my god. He talks about this stuff, you know, about how human populations could crash and how having little genetic diversity, you know, among these these last ruinning populations could cause us to die off. And that's getting kind of kind of scary. But let me just say one thing though this may be a bit more general about the lesson that I take from dinosaurs, and that lesson really is that you can be dominant. Your group can be dominant. You can be around for one hundred and fifty million years like the t rex and triceratops and Brontosaurus dinosaurs were. You can be the top medats, the top plant eaters, you can have a great diversity of species in the food chain. You can live everywhere around the world. But then if something happens where the environment changes really quickly. For them, it was an asteroid, but who's to say it couldn't be maybe not a volcano that obliterates everything, but a volcano that causes sudden climate change. Or it could be the climate change that is happening now that we just let that run wild, But that something happens and climate's environments change so quickly that the dominant things don't have time to adapt, and they just so happen to not be suited to this new world. And that's what I worry about a bit with humans. You know, we are incredibly successful, with more than eight billion of us around the world. We live everywhere, but we're so recent. We're the oldest Homo sapience is like three hundred thousand years old. 01:38:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, and. 01:38:04 Speaker 2: We're so well adapted to this world, this world that's coming out of an ice age, this world of pretty nice climate, you know, world of pretty clear, consistent coastlines and rivers that can be navigated, and floods that can be dealt with. And as weather patterns change and climate changes, and climate always changes by the climate's always changing in the history of the Earth. I mean, come on, what's happening now is you know, it's not like this is the only time temperatures have gotten No, no, of course not. But what's happening now is that it is happening very fast, and it's happening to us. And so we have come up. Our societies, our culture, even our physical bodies have evolved and developed in this world that we know. So if things change really quickly, that could put us in trouble. And there are plenty of species that are a lot older than us that are probably better adapted, more resilient, And so that's where I start to get concerned that simply if the pace of change is too fast, whether it's global warming, whether it's an ice age coming in, whether it's some big volcanoes, whatever it is, that can change the status quo if it does it really quickly. Well, the dinosaurs tell us that even the most dominant and successful animals, if you give them a lot of change too fast, that they can quickly get on the back foot and they can be gone soon. 01:39:19 Speaker 3: You use the word concern, Yeah, but like I don't feel that way. 01:39:27 Speaker 1: I mean I do about my kids, yeah, right, And I guess they're kids. But you know when I get like way out, yeah, I guess in a way, and the sort of geological time we're. 01:39:38 Speaker 3: Talking about, I don't find myself rooting. 01:39:41 Speaker 1: I don't find myself rooting for the humans of ten thousand years from now, Like I'm not rooting for them. 01:39:48 Speaker 3: Maybe I should. 01:39:49 Speaker 1: But here's my last question, Because your work explores all these times when you've had, as I said up earlier, explores all these these like mass extinction events right where everything gets carried off and then the Earth rebuilds and things that carried off the Earth rebuilds. I like to tell my kids, I'm like, man, someday, someday we won't be around to appreciate. But someday we're gonna be gone, and this earth is going to be full of insane, crazy animals that you can't imagine. 01:40:25 Speaker 3: And I don't like, I don't know who it'll be. 01:40:27 Speaker 1: Maybe there will be beetles, there will be beatles bigger than elephants, Like I don't know. 01:40:33 Speaker 2: Who knows, right, Yeah, yeah, how can you predict. 01:40:35 Speaker 3: Will go away? Will go away? 01:40:38 Speaker 1: And and even if even if there's a nuclear holocaust and we carry away all large mammals and carry away all these complex life forms, like at some time in the future there will be just the Earth will be again full of like crazy stuff. How long when you look in the past, like how long do these things take? If you look at these various times in the Earth became just wiped out? 01:41:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, like the chicks loop strike, the Earth gets like wiped out? 01:41:11 Speaker 1: How long is it before you'd go and be like, the Earth is like kicking ass again, you know, and you got fixed up and small stuff and green stuff. 01:41:19 Speaker 2: And usually what we see in the fossil record is that the I mean, first of all, the Earth always bounces back. And so when I talk about concern about modern climate change and environmental change, I'm more concerned for us, sure, our species, and not just our species, but our civilization, the way we get on with each other. I'm more concerned with that than with the Earth. The Earth is gonna be fine, you know, the Earth, And that's say it's a good thing. I means other species will go extinctive climate changes quickly. I don't want to be flippant about it. I mean it's much better than these shirts don't have. The Earth will be fine. When the asteroid hit, seventy five percent of all species died. I mean there were entire zones like near the impact where everything was vaporized. I mean that was as catastrophic as things can get. And what do we see. We see in the fossil record that at least within a few thousand years at most, you have forests again. Okay, you see new mammals move in within a few thousand years, that's when you get the first primates. By the way, our ancestors are only there making their appearance right after the dinosaurs go extinct, but really soon after, within tens of thousands of years at most. There are fossils from right here in Montana that show that within a few hundred thousand years you have all kinds of crazy new mammals, you know, mammals the size of pigs, mammals that are digging in, mammals that are climbing trees. Within a million years you got these cattle sized mammals, and mammals have gone on. From there. The earth can recover really quickly, and you don't know what the recovery. 01:42:49 Speaker 3: Is going to be. 01:42:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes me up to you know, for the earth exactly mean too. And so I have a six year old, you know, my son Anthony, and so we know we don't quite talk about things this deep, not yet, but he's getting more interest in the he's six. 01:43:01 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:43:01 Speaker 1: I used to trip my kids out by telling them bad stuff like this that I kind of quit. 01:43:06 Speaker 3: That's gold. I tell them bad. 01:43:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, Well I tell the. 01:43:08 Speaker 1: Bad stuff and they're real little like i'd be like the sun well like eventually burn out. 01:43:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they started tripping out that I'm late next week. 01:43:16 Speaker 2: This is what Anthony does to me though, because he's really interested in outer space right now. So he watches a lot of these shows and and uh, and so he'll tell me, do you know the Sun's gonna burn out? And so many million you know, tens hundreds of millions of years? Now, come on, son, you know, live your life first. But no, but I'm when we start to have these conversations, I try to convey that, you know, the Earth is, it's more than just us. Obviously, we care about our species as we should, but the Earth is so old four and a half billion years old. The Earth is, there has been this fantastic menagerie of species that have lived over time. Species have risen and fallen, and they've been crazy things like you're earlier tarodactyls. If we didn't have fossils, we never know, we never believe something that that existed. And there's a whole bunch of things like that. So the Earth is wonderful and that's why we should conserve as much of it as we can and understand nature as best we can and be in nature. I think, you know, many of us aren't in nature enough. For listeners of this show, you know, you guys are probably out in nature a lot for the average person. I mean, even me. Yeah, man, most of the time, I'm just at my desk, I'm at home, I'm writing, I'm teaching my classes. I don't get out enough. But I think we all just need to get out more and appreciate the earth, and appreciate our part in the earth and where we fit in, and to take pride and joy in this glorious world around us. And absolutely we should be rooting for the earth, and that means we should make our impact minimal. But the same time, you know, we're not just some average species. I mean, there are eight billion of us. We're going to put pressure on the earth. You know, we have to we have to build houses, we have to get around. You know, we can't stop doing these things. But we need to find better ways to live in harmony. And I'm very optimistic. Ultimately. I am optimistic because we we're smart, we have huge brains, we have consciousness, we can work together and grow. We can solve problems. I mean, there were humans, you know, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years ago, like ancestors of ours that figured out language and built boats and reached islands. I mean, this was the edge of the known world and they did this. We are capable of incredible things as a species. And just watching recently, you know, the Artemis mission going beyond the moon, farther than any humans have gone, Like, that's awesome. We are capable of amazing things as a species when we put our mind to it, when we work together, and when we support science, when we support education, we put the money into things like launching that mission, or money into conserving things, even something as simple as making sure the bald eagle and the California condor don't bite the dust. I mean, those are incredibly successful. We want to do something we can and the dinosaurs couldn't do that. T Rex couldn't do that. T Rex couldn't have the brain power to do that. But we can. So Ultimately, I'm concerned about climate change and environmental change, but I remain stimistic that we we can do something about it, and we can adapt. And that's what gives That's what gives me hope. 01:46:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Steve Brussadi, thanks so much for coming on the show. Brand new book, The Story of Birds, a new history from their dinosaur origins to the present. If you want to go in order, you'd go rise and follow the dinosaurs. 01:46:23 Speaker 2: Well, because I'm promoting the new book. You know, we got to sell these new books. 01:46:27 Speaker 1: Start with this and then go back. Yeah, read this and then go because they're all free standing. 01:46:32 Speaker 2: They are. They're free standing books. They're all you know, the dinosaur one tells the story of dinosaur evolution. The mammal one tells the story of mammal evolution, including our ancestry. So honestly, the mammal one might be, you know, of quite a lot of interest to a lot of your listeners. 01:46:44 Speaker 3: Start with the birds. 01:46:45 Speaker 2: Start with the birds, and it's the newest one and so it's right up to date. But really they can be read in any order. And again, they're not textbooks, they're not academic books. I try to make them really accessible and honestly, like the you know, the something that makes me more happy really than anything is I get random emails or you know, dms on on Instagram or social media from people that read the books, and it's great and if you read the books, anybody that's that's that's listening, please do reach out. I love hearing from people, and I'm easy to find online. But quite recently I've gotten I got a message from a long haul truck driver here in the West who had the Dinosaur Book on audiobook as he's doing these late night drives. I got a message from from a kid who is like in his early twenties in the military, was stationed abroad, who is reading the Dinosaur Book just to pass the time, Like that's awesome. I just it is so cool. So that's the books. These books are for everybody. I really try to do make them accessible. And I would say if you've never read science books before, you know, they shouldn't be too scary. And there's a whole genre of pop science really that you can explore out there that isn't scary, that is accessible. There's a lot of great science writers, and I've mentioned you know a few like Henry g there are many others too, and just you know, start reading around and seeing what inch And that's what I try to do in these books, is tell some good stories about these fantastic animals that have lived over time and how they've paved the way for the world today. 01:48:08 Speaker 3: All right, man, thank you so much for coming on pleasure. 01:48:12 Speaker 2: Thank you