#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park

0:00:05 The following is a conversation with Dave Hohn, a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs,
0:00:12 co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of many scientific papers and books
0:00:20 on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. This was truly a fun and fascinating conversation.
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0:07:01 with folks who might find it interesting. And now, dear friends, here’s Dave Hone.
0:07:23 Let’s start with the T-Rex dinosaur, possibly the most iconic predator in the history of Earth. You have
0:07:29 deeply studied and written about their evolution, biology, ecology, and behavior. So let’s first maybe put
0:07:34 ourselves in the time of the dinosaurs and imagine we’re standing in front of a T-Rex.
0:07:36 What does it look like?
0:07:38 What are the key features of the dinosaur in front of us?
0:07:46 It’s gigantic. It’s almost trite now because everyone knows T-Rex is massive. But yes, if you
0:07:52 actually stand in front of one, you would be seriously impressed just how absolutely vast they
0:07:59 are. So I’ve got a copy of a T-Rex skull downstairs from my office. And yeah, I could fit comfortably
0:08:05 through its mouth. So it would be just about capable of swallowing me whole. And I’m a pretty big guy.
0:08:16 It’s a copy of the one that’s in the Smithsonian. And they get bigger than that.
0:08:18 You have a two scale copy.
0:08:18 Yeah, yeah.
0:08:25 It’s a car. So it’s just a giant mold made and then pull that like the dentist do your teeth,
0:08:33 but very, very big. So yeah, they are 12 ish meters long. So what’s that? 14 yards,
0:08:39 four and a half, maybe five to the top of the head standing up. So another six yards high and then
0:08:46 seven ish metric tons. What’s that about? Eight and a half short tons. So a colleague of mine,
0:08:52 Tom Holtz described them as an orca on land, but that’s it. It is a killer whale sized animal,
0:08:58 but on legs on land. And those are massive predators. So you’re looking at something
0:09:05 absolutely colossal. And I think that is what will stun you. I think people don’t realize how big a lot
0:09:12 of animals are, which sounds weird. But I used to work in a few zoos and something I think you notice
0:09:17 is when you go and see things like elephants or giraffes or rhinos, everything’s built to the scale
0:09:22 of the animal. The elephant house is huge. The doors are huge. The bars are huge. The food is huge.
0:09:29 And so you don’t see them in the context of something that you have a good frame of reference
0:09:36 for. And I learned this, yeah, when I was at London Zoo and was going into the basement of the old
0:09:41 elephant and rhino pavilion and a rhino stuck its head out from like this gap in the wall. And the head
0:09:48 was twice the size I thought it was once you stood next to it. And the same with an elephant. I once stood
0:09:53 next to an elephant closer than you are to me now. And you go, oh, oh, they are so much bigger
0:09:59 than I thought. And I think it’s similar in museums. Like, even when you get up relatively close to a T-Rex
0:10:05 skeleton, there’s a bit of space between you and it and then some bars. And then it’s usually raised up a
0:10:10 little bit on a mount it on a little mount to hold the platform. And then you stand back from that.
0:10:17 And you don’t actually get to stand like under them. And when you do that, yeah, you realize that,
0:10:19 yeah, the foot finishes at my knee.
0:10:23 So is a T-Rex bigger than an elephant? That’d be fair to say?
0:10:31 Yeah. I mean, a very large Savannah African elephant is five to six tons. And we’re looking at seven
0:10:43 plus and a biped and a carnivore. So yeah, you know, a big line, a big line is 200 kilos. So 430 pounds.
0:10:49 Yeah. Well, that’s what, that’s why I mean, it’s widely considered to be probably
0:10:52 the most epic predator in the history of earth.
0:10:56 Yeah. I mean, and I think more than that, it’s, I think it’s one of the most iconic animals,
0:11:02 period. I mean, if you’re, if you’re listing things that the average person has heard of,
0:11:09 lion, elephant, giraffe, tiger, hippo, rhino, there’s a few more, but T-Rex is coming somewhere up in that
0:11:18 list. That’s how prominent it is as an animal. So yeah, it’s, it’s almost inescapable as a
0:11:21 paleontologist. And then doubly. So for me, who works on dinosaurs and doubly. So again,
0:11:26 because I do work on tyrannosaurs that yeah, it just dominates conversations.
0:11:32 Well, some of the other features, maybe we can go through big skull, big head, small hands,
0:11:41 massive head, very kind of boxy. It’s very robust. Um, big forward facing eyes, massive eyes,
0:11:46 massive, I mean, tennis ball sized eyes. These things had amazing eyesight. Um,
0:11:54 yeah. Giant teeth as a cast of a Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth. Yeah, I know. So it, it, it looks a bit
0:11:57 bigger than it is. So this is all root. So this would be stuck in the jaw.
0:12:03 Right. But that part is that’s the two, the, the tip as you call it. And yeah, um, you know,
0:12:09 so that would comfortably go through pretty much any, and then you realize just how thick it is.
0:12:14 So this is a cast of a thing called Carcharodontosaurus from, um, Africa. You get it down in
0:12:22 Niger and a few other places like that. And they’re very, very big, not as big as T-Rex, but not a million
0:12:27 miles away. And then if you look at the teeth in profile, they’re a surprisingly similar shape
0:12:33 and not far off in size as well. And then you look at them that way on and you realize it’s
0:12:40 a third of the width. So this isn’t just massive, it’s thick. And of course being thick, it makes it
0:12:46 strong. And with that giant head, with all that extra bone and then all the extra musculature attached to
0:12:52 that giant head, they’ve got this uber powerful bite and the ability to just chomp through
0:13:00 basically anything it wants to. Um, so yeah, they, they are truly unusual in that regard,
0:13:05 even actually compared to a lot of the other very big Tyrannosaurs. They’re often a kind of step above
0:13:06 in their proportions.
0:13:08 So incredible crushing power in the jaw.
0:13:13 Yeah. And then as you say, like this really short bull neck, because you’ve got this massive
0:13:18 weight of this head up front. So you need to hold it up and not tip forwards. Um, really quite a
0:13:24 massive body. Again, there’s two or three other big carnivorous dinosaurs, which people argue are
0:13:28 maybe they’re a little bigger than T-Rex, maybe they’re a little smaller, but it’s always in terms of length,
0:13:34 which is one way of looking at things. You know, pythons are very long, but they’re nothing like as
0:13:41 massive as a lion or a tiger. Same thing. T-Rex is massive. It is built. So really big kind of barrel
0:13:47 shaped chest making the body very, very big as well. And so that’s why, yeah, there’s things like
0:13:53 Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus from South America. Maybe they get a bit longer, another meter or so in
0:13:58 length, but in mass, we’re talking about maybe only two thirds, three quarters. So T-Rex is just
0:14:05 massively bigger than basically any other big carnivore we know of. Um, and then yeah,
0:14:11 little arms, as you say. So this is a not great, but it’s a cast of a T-Rex arm. It’s not the biggest
0:14:17 animal. They do get a bit bigger than this. Um, but as I love showing it, it’s not a million miles off
0:14:26 the size of my own and I could do with a diet, but I don’t weigh seven tons. So yeah, it really is
0:14:32 really pretty small. Two claws, two fingers. Yeah. So two fingers, some, you’ll see sometimes that they
0:14:38 say there’s a third, this is a slight misnomer. So you do see this extra little bone here. This
0:14:43 doesn’t turn up in all of them and it’s an extra hand bone. So it’s these, the metacarpals, but it’s
0:14:48 not supporting an extra digit. So mostly functionality wise, it wasn’t very functional.
0:14:53 They’re not doing very much at all. Um, you know, you’ve, this is what’s called the delto pectoral
0:14:59 crest. It’s really important for basically big arm movements because it’s deltoids and pectorals. Um,
0:15:04 the radius and ulna are really quite thin, thinner than ours. The fingers are pretty stocky. The claws
0:15:10 look big and curved and they are, but other tyrannosaurs and indeed other carnivores generally
0:15:17 much more curved claws. And then they have, um, these little things. Oh, where can I say it?
0:15:23 There you see is a little mark. That’s a ligamentous pit. And so what you can imagine is
0:15:30 if you’re trying to hold onto something and something’s wriggling, you want grip and there’s a risk that you
0:15:37 just like dislocate your fingers. So we have ligaments that hold bone to bone. And if you just put it flat
0:15:41 to flat surface area, there’s only so much you can attach. Whereas if you turn that into a little
0:15:48 hemispherical dip, you get a lot more surface area for your area. That makes sense. Yeah.
0:15:52 So if you have a really big ligamentous pit, it means there’s a really big ligament,
0:15:56 which means your fingers are really strong and they’re really resistant to being wiggled around
0:16:00 and pulled as if, you know, you’ve grabbed something that doesn’t want you to kill it.
0:16:03 Well, T-Rex has probably the smallest ligamentous pits of any tyrannosaur.
0:16:09 So that kind of suggests it’s not doing very much. And again, when you look at the claws proportionally,
0:16:14 they’re not that big and they’re not that curved. So even though it looks like quite a wicked thing
0:16:21 to us, remember, put this on a seven ton animal whose individual teeth are the size of entire fingers.
0:16:24 Suddenly that arm doesn’t look like it’s doing very much.
0:16:25 What about the feet?
0:16:30 So massive, again, not surprisingly, you’re supporting a colossal amount of weight,
0:16:36 but they have this beautiful adaptation in the foot. So the equivalent bones in the foot,
0:16:41 the metatarsals. So for us, make up the flat of the feet, but these animals walk like birds.
0:16:45 They’ve got three toes on the ground, and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically.
0:16:49 And that overall extends the length of the leg. So you can walk a little bit faster. You’ve got
0:16:53 a slightly bigger stride length. Don’t worry, I’ve got the right bone here.
0:16:59 But they also have, yeah, there’s a good one. That one’s a great one.
0:17:05 But they also have this really neat adaptation in the middle bone. So you can see it on this one
0:17:09 quite well. And this is actually not a tyrannosaur. This is an ornithomimosaur.
0:17:14 So one of the really ostrich-like ones, Gallimimus from the first Jurassic Park.
0:17:19 It has the same thing. You can see the normal bones would be really quite long and square,
0:17:24 and then flat at the top. And instead, this thing shrinks in the middle and turns into this kind of
0:17:32 flattened diamond shape. And what that means is the bones either side kind of lock it. In fact,
0:17:37 at the top end, it actually tends to wiggle a bit. So it actually goes left and then right.
0:17:41 And of course, what that really does is then help these things lock together.
0:17:45 And so this is an adaptation to basically lock the foot and make it stable.
0:17:50 And we see it in a whole bunch of things, independently evolved. Early tyrannosaurs don’t
0:17:54 have this. Early ornithomimosaurs don’t have this. Over at Taurosaurs, the early ones don’t have this.
0:17:57 And the later ones acquire it. And a couple of other groups as well.
0:18:03 And it’s about making the foot stable. And what that really does is make the foot energy efficient.
0:18:10 So you can imagine, as an animal, we have some cartilage and we’ve got some ligaments and tendons
0:18:16 joining all the bones together and holding joints stable. When you push down, that’s going to compress
0:18:20 them to a little degree. And when you lift that weight off, they’re actually going to spring back.
0:18:25 You’re going to get a tiny little energy return. It’s the idea of those air solvers they put in
0:18:31 all the trainers and stuff in the 90s. It’s that same principle. And you will. You’ll get a little
0:18:36 bit of energy return. But of course, big force, particularly for a big heavy animal, it’s going
0:18:41 to take the kind of path of least resistance. And so if your bones are all kind of loose in the foot,
0:18:45 what they’re going to do is they’re going to tend to splay out and you’re actually going to lose that
0:18:51 energy. But if you lock the feet together, the bones can’t move. And instead, that’s going to
0:18:56 further compress those soft tissue bits and give you a bit more spring.
0:19:01 And this is all about, I mean, this is about the mobility, about the dynamics of the movement.
0:19:06 It makes you more efficient. It means you’re putting less energy into walk because you’re
0:19:09 just getting a little bit of spring of every single step.
0:19:14 I should say that I deeply admire people like Russ Tedrick, like the boss of dynamics teams,
0:19:21 like the Tesla Optimus robot teams that look at a bipedal and the quadrupeds robot movement.
0:19:27 And they tried to make human-like movement to, you know, basically efficient movement.
0:19:35 And so the question here is how the hell is a T-Rex, its size, bipedal, able to move as a predator?
0:19:38 It’s a weird body shape, is it not?
0:19:46 I mean, the big head makes it look more odd, but you look at dinosaurs as a whole and over a third,
0:19:51 probably 40, 45% is the group called theropods, which were all biped.
0:19:56 So T-Rex, Allosaurus, Philosoraptor, Spinosaurus, many, many others that people may have heard of.
0:20:00 They’re all bipeds built in this way. There’s a whole bunch of ancestral groups,
0:20:04 which were doing something very similar, including various crocodiles or relatives of crocodiles.
0:20:11 And then the birds are bipeds. Birds are actually doing it in a much weirder way than theropods are.
0:20:15 The theropods are basically a lizard on its back legs.
0:20:20 I’m oversimplifying a lot. I can hear paleontologists screaming, as I’ve just said,
0:20:24 it’s a lizard standing up. It’s not a lizard standing up, but they’re doing a lot of the
0:20:30 same stuff in the same way. And that is really functionally about where you put muscles,
0:20:37 because what you really want to do to walk forwards is you want to basically pull the leg back so that
0:20:42 you’re pushing the body off. And the way they do that is the musculature on the tail.
0:20:46 So we don’t have a tail. And indeed, mammals that even do have a tail, you know,
0:20:50 elephants and even lions, you know, it’s a piddly little thing. There’s not a lot of muscle there.
0:20:53 But if you look at a lizard, particularly if you look at something like a crocodile,
0:21:00 you see this massive, massive block of muscle sitting on the first third to half of the tail.
0:21:05 And that’s what dinosaurs are doing. It’s the same thing as lizards and crocs. They have this
0:21:10 giant set of muscles on the first half of the tail. That’s anchoring on the femur. So the thigh bone
0:21:16 on the back of that and muscles contract. That’s the one thing they do. But now you’ve got a giant
0:21:21 muscle. Yeah. And T-Rex, this, this muscle is like two and a half, three meters long. It’s going to be
0:21:28 like this wide in the middle. So when that contracts, the leg goes back, foot’s stationary on the ground,
0:21:32 so the animal goes forwards. So the tail is integral to movement.
0:21:35 So it’s a huge part of the biomechanics of the movement.
0:21:43 We do it with the butt. So we’re kind of weirdly how we organize our muscles. But this is generally
0:21:48 probably a better way of doing it because you can get a really long muscle. Of course, the longer the
0:21:54 muscle, the more contraction you can have. The hyper version of this is kangaroos. So kangaroos supposedly
0:22:00 get more efficient the faster they move. They get so much energy return that when they’re moving faster,
0:22:05 they get more compression from the landing, meaning they get more spring.
0:22:17 So we should be imagining this gigantic, thick tail, big body, big head, and biped. And how fast does it move?
0:22:21 So this is one of those things that’s gone backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards. There was a
0:22:27 paper arguing that we’d probably been overestimating various speeds, primarily based on footprints.
0:22:34 There’s been, I don’t know how many papers trying to do T-Rex speed. The most recent one that was
0:22:43 pretty detailed, I think had it clocked at, so I think it was 25 miles an hour. So 40 kph was the
0:22:48 very upper end of the estimate. So probably a bit less than that.
0:22:50 Well, that means it can move.
0:22:58 Yeah. So that’s the, but that’s the thing, like big things move quick. I’ve seen rhino and hippo going
0:23:05 at full tilt and yeah, they’re a lot quicker than you’d think. Um, and at least part of it is simply
0:23:12 stride length. When your legs are three ish meters long, it’s hard not to cover a lot of ground with a
0:23:19 single step. Um, and yeah, big, big theropods T-Rex is going to be a power walker. It’s not going to run
0:23:23 in the conventional biomechanical sense where both feet are off the ground.
0:23:24 So it’s not running as power walk.
0:23:28 Yeah. But when you’ve got a four or five meter long stride,
0:23:32 doesn’t really matter whether you’re airborne or not.
0:23:40 Power walkers. So you’re never, so running, there’s moments in time when both feet are off the ground
0:23:43 and you’re saying likely here, one foot is always on the ground.
0:23:45 Yeah. It pretty much has to be for loading.
0:23:47 Oh, if it’s just because of the mass of the thing.
0:23:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:23:49 Okay. All right.
0:23:51 I thought, you know, you know, that’s the origin of cinema.
0:23:52 What’s that?
0:24:00 This is, uh, Edward Muybridge. So the, the origin of cinema was a bet as to whether or not whilst
0:24:06 running a horse had all four feet off the ground. And no one really knew this for sure. And a guy
0:24:09 called Edward Muybridge, he was British, but he was living in the States.
0:24:15 He was a keen photographer and he basically did what people have seen the Wachowskis do for the
0:24:20 Matrix. He set up a whole row of cameras and set up a whole bunch of triggers and had a horse run
0:24:25 through them. So it took loads of photos and lo and behold, in one of them, the feet are off the
0:24:30 ground. The guy won his bet. But he also realized that we already had things like zoo praxiscopes,
0:24:36 you know, the little thing you spin with a, with a slit. And so you see that, right. So he did that with
0:24:43 horses. And now you have a moving photograph and that’s pretty much the origin of cinema was a bet
0:24:48 about biomechanics. Yeah. It’s always a good question and a bet. And there you go. Yeah.
0:24:53 Off to the races. Yeah. All right. All right. So we’re standing in front of this thing. Yes.
0:24:59 Uh, how screwed are we, you and I were back in the time of the dinosaurs. What’s the probability of our
0:25:04 survival? There’s two big things to weigh up, which are going to be interesting, which is would they
0:25:12 even consider us a potential meal? Because we know that animals that have never, animals have to learn
0:25:18 stuff. And so animals that have never encountered things before are often that they don’t have a
0:25:22 response because they don’t know what their response should be. We should say during that time,
0:25:27 there’s not something that looked like primates. No, absolutely nothing. We would look very weird.
0:25:34 We would look weird. Yeah. Um, so, you know, there’s lots of really cool records of, um,
0:25:40 particularly you’ve got down in, um, Indonesia and stuff where you’ve got these insane volcanic spires,
0:25:44 and at least to these tiny little valleys and people go in there and they go, yeah,
0:25:48 the animals walk up to us. They’ve never seen a human. They don’t know what it is.
0:25:54 So it might look at us and animals are fundamentally cautious.
0:26:00 It doesn’t know if we’re a threat. So maybe it might just find us weird or in some way,
0:26:07 shape or form off-putting. And so we may not even be considered on the menu. Um,
0:26:16 the other thing is we might be too small. Um, my suspicion is we’re not. So animals, carnivores,
0:26:23 typically take stuff that is much, much smaller than them. Despite basically every dinosaur
0:26:27 documentary movie ever shows T-Rex hunting an adult triceratops, which is like the same size
0:26:32 as it. Uh, and every documentary, you’ve got to have lions taking down a wildebeest or even a buffalo.
0:26:39 Like these are weird and rare outcomes. These don’t usually happen. The vast majority of active
0:26:45 predation is on stuff much, much, much smaller than you. I totted some of this up for a paper
0:26:49 I did on Microraptor, this really small gliding dinosaur from China, where we actually have a
0:26:53 bunch of specimens with various stomach contents in them. And we were coming up with numbers of about
0:27:00 like five to 20% of the mass being typical. So prey versus predator. And that’s actually
0:27:04 very similar to what we see with modern carnivores. And it’s not far off what we’ve seen,
0:27:09 even with things like tyrannosaurs, where you occasionally find consumed bones from prey.
0:27:16 So if we put the lower end of that as 5% of the mass of a T-Rex, we might actually be okay.
0:27:25 Um, if it doesn’t consider us worth the hassle, then assuming you’re encountering a big adult and not
0:27:30 a half-sized one that maybe only weighs a ton, then we might be all right.
0:27:35 What would be the survival strategy? So the, there’s a thing that you criticized
0:27:39 not being true that I guess in Jurassic Park, uh, not moving.
0:27:45 Yeah. It’s nonsense. They can see really well. Like I said, like T-Rex has giant eyeballs. People
0:27:51 don’t realize that because like whales and like elephants, it looks small compared to the size of
0:27:56 the animal. But what you’re in really important for vision is absolute size, not proportional size.
0:27:59 And absolutely their eyes are gigantic.
0:28:01 Probably the biggest on earth at that time.
0:28:06 Yeah. Uh, a guy called Kent Stevens did a paper. He’s got a really nice graphic of it. If you,
0:28:09 if you just put S-T-E-V-E-N-S, T-Rex.
0:28:15 There’s the one with the, there we go. That’s the one with the goo, with the googly eyes.
0:28:21 That’s a baseball or a tennis ball sized eyeball. And when you think about the incredible visual
0:28:28 acuity of something like an eagle, which has eyes not much bigger than ours, think about what that’s
0:28:34 going to do. And we, we absolutely know there’s been loads of studies on this in mammals and birds
0:28:40 and other things as well, that basically eyeball size correlates with visual acuity. And that can
0:28:47 fold in two different ways. It can be like general sharpness, like how well can you see a long way away?
0:28:51 So eagles and vultures, it’s really important, or it can be good in low light.
0:28:59 And I now discovered that there’s a nature was metal subreddit, which is gnarly, gnarly paleo things.
0:29:04 Yeah. Yeah. I come across it occasionally for dinosaurs. Let’s see what’s the top post of all time.
0:29:07 Oh, that’s a glyptodonted.
0:29:12 Our Argentinian farmer recently found it 20,000 years old fossilized.
0:29:15 So these are, these are giant armadillo like animals with club tails.
0:29:17 Interesting. Wow.
0:29:20 Oh, that’s black beauty. That’s at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
0:29:25 So giant eyeballs, they can either see very well, they can see a very long way in daylight,
0:29:29 or they can see very well at night. And my suspicion is it’s the latter. I think they’re
0:29:33 probably primarily nocturnal when, when they get that size.
0:29:36 Well, not moving might be a good strategy because it’s cautious because it doesn’t
0:29:38 understand what these primates are.
0:29:45 Yeah. But I think if it, if it starts coming towards you, if you’re truly in the open, then
0:29:52 you’re in real trouble. And I’m not sure you do. I mean, the one thing, the one advantage humans have
0:30:00 over almost anything else on earth, there’s a handful of exceptions, is we have range. I can pick up a rock and
0:30:06 hurl it with reasonable accuracy. Most things can’t do that. And animals probably don’t like being hit
0:30:11 in the face or hit in the eyes with a rock at a range. Because again, they’re not going to know how
0:30:16 it’s happened or how to respond to this. All they know is they’re taking damage and that’s bad.
0:30:16 Yeah.
0:30:18 And that might genuinely
0:30:25 be enough to do it. I wouldn’t want to try, but again, if I was dumped on a plane or a prairie with
0:30:31 nothing else but a T-Rex that was interested in me, it’s worth a shot. If you’re in the forest,
0:30:37 I would try and get behind a tree. They’re quite good at turning. There’s been a couple of nice
0:30:41 papers looking at the mechanics of the foot and the ankle and how quickly they could like,
0:30:48 pivot. But we’re much better because we’re just so much smaller. So it would be very kind of
0:30:54 Looney Tunes, but I think you could go round and round a big tree, but much faster than it could.
0:31:00 And so it’s going to get bored or lack interest sooner or later.
0:31:02 So let’s zoom out. What did it eat?
0:31:08 I mean, you could go for the classic joke of whatever it wanted, but the reality is
0:31:12 the relatively big herbivores that around at the time,
0:31:19 it’s probably largely leaving them alone because again, just the classic dynamics of
0:31:26 predators, even like, quote, super predators like Tyrannosaurus, they’re still real animals.
0:31:33 If you get injured and you can’t hunt, that’s probably the end of you. So you don’t want to tackle
0:31:40 an adult triceratops that weighs the same as you and has meter, meter and a half long horns on its head
0:31:48 and it’s potentially pretty aggressive. And then even the big, so the hadrosaurs, the kind of classic
0:31:52 duckbill dinosaurs, they’re not, they’re not present with any like obvious defensive. They don’t have
0:31:57 armor. They don’t have horns or spikes or anything like this, but they’re simply massive. Again, you know,
0:32:03 yes, T-Rex has got the teeth and the biting, even if they’re a bit rubbish, the claws on the hands,
0:32:08 but like just grappling another animal, which is the same size as it, there’s a risk you’re going to
0:32:12 get a foot trodden on that it’s going to get off some kind of body slam or whatever. And then even if you
0:32:19 do bring it down, you’re never going to eat it. Like if you bring down an animal that weighs five tons,
0:32:24 it’s nearly your own mass. You’re not, you’re not going to eat it before it goes rotten. That’s a huge
0:32:28 amount of kind of not like wasted energy, but you’ve probably put a lot of effort into this and you’re
0:32:34 not getting that much reward out. And again, there are, again, there are exceptions. You’ve got things
0:32:40 like lynx are the classic one. Lynx are not very big cats and yet they’ll hunt adult deer, way bigger
0:32:47 than them. Lions hunt things like buffalo, but they’re operating in a group, so it’s a bit of a cheat. So there are
0:32:51 some things that do this, but fundamentally the vast majority of carnivores tackle stuff that’s
0:32:57 way, way smaller than them. And that’s what we see. Um, every record we have of basically any large
0:33:04 carnivorous dinosaur where you have stomach contents where it’s like consume something or healed bite
0:33:09 marks. We get quite, we get quite a few. There’s a handful of them where there’s an obvious damage
0:33:14 to a bone in more than a couple of cases with a tooth broken off in the bone. And then the bone has
0:33:21 healed over it. So, you know, it got away that they’re juveniles. They’re relatively young animals,
0:33:29 and that’s what they’re targeting. Um, it makes ecological sense. It’s what modern animals do
0:33:34 for very good reason. Juveniles are relatively small and weak. They don’t have the horns or
0:33:40 frills or armor or shields and other stuff. They’re naive. They don’t, they have, you often have to learn
0:33:47 what predators are, or you have to learn how to avoid them or to check the wind or even physically
0:33:52 see them before, you know, see them kill something else before you know that they’re a threat. And
0:33:57 juveniles forage badly. Um, they’re relatively inefficient. So actually they need to eat more
0:34:03 for their size than an adult does. And then on top of that, they’re not very experienced at foraging in
0:34:08 the right areas. And even if they can find a good patch, the adults will often beat them up and
0:34:12 chase them off. You’re talking about juveniles across various species. Everything. This is just
0:34:16 a universal pattern of being a smaller animal versus a larger or a younger animal versus a larger.
0:34:23 So hunting young, uh, young things, young things is easier because they’re dumb, right? They’re dumb,
0:34:29 but they’re inexperienced, but they’re often, they’re often feeding in suboptimal areas. So this is the
0:34:33 place with all the best food. The adults will kick you off. So now you have to feed somewhere else.
0:34:37 Maybe the food isn’t as good in which case you need to eat more of it. So it takes longer,
0:34:42 or maybe it’s the one next to the edge of the forest where the T-Rex is hide, but either way,
0:34:46 you’re stuck there. And then you don’t really know what you’re looking for and you haven’t got the
0:34:52 armor. So guess who’s getting eaten? Like this is, again, there’s lots of exceptions. You can’t have
0:34:58 nature without things like that, but this is the absolute rule of thumb for how foraging and growth
0:35:06 and predation operate across everything from fish to fish as predators, starfish, praying mantis,
0:35:12 all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles. It’s how it works. So it’d be very
0:35:16 weird if it didn’t also operate for dinosaurs. And then, as I say, we’ve actually got the direct
0:35:21 evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents. They’re taking small stuff.
0:35:22 But Mark, give a lot of information.
0:35:23 Yeah.
0:35:25 That’s a powerful signal in paleontology.
0:35:29 Yeah, absolutely. I’ve done really quite a lot of work on it and they can
0:35:37 tell you an awful lot if you’ve got the right understanding of the burial conditions. The
0:35:41 weird thing that I think a lot of people don’t appreciate is you basically can’t take fossils
0:35:45 at face value, particularly when you’re trying to get into stuff like behavior and ecology, because
0:35:54 between the animal dying and the paleontologist digging it up, potentially quite a lot has happened.
0:36:00 And that’s where it’s really easy to start misinterpreting things. Because if you just go,
0:36:04 I had one like this not too long ago where I was an editor on a paper, and the authors have done a
0:36:10 pretty good job, to be fair. But it was this discussion of whether or not several animals were together at
0:36:17 the time of their death. It said multiple theropods together in this quarry. And it’s like, right,
0:36:23 but there was loads of debris and you had loads of things like fish scales and other small bones.
0:36:28 And it’s like, okay, but this looks like these animals died, potentially died somewhere else.
0:36:34 And then a flood or a river washed them into this bay or a channel, or then the water level dropped
0:36:40 and they ended up together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were together when they died.
0:36:48 And so just because you’ve got three animals together, what is potentially the story of how
0:36:48 they got there?
0:36:52 So you have to consider multiple explanations and then try to figure out what is the most likely.
0:36:57 Yeah. Or what can you test with various bits of evidence? So there was some
0:37:04 tyrannosaur-inflicted bite marks on a duck bill from Mongolia that I worked on years ago.
0:37:07 The first thing was from Mongolia, but it was held in Japan in a Japanese museum. I was working
0:37:13 with the Japanese on it. And I’m, I’m not a toponomist. So the study of like decay and
0:37:18 the history of specimens, and I am in no way, shape or form a geologist. I did zoology for my degree.
0:37:26 But the guys I was working with, like, they were really hot on erosion and damage. And they were
0:37:30 looking at some of the way the bones had been damaged. And they’re like, okay, we’re pretty
0:37:35 confident that the bite marks are sitting on top of erosion.
0:37:36 What does that mean?
0:37:42 So it means that the animal had died and it was found in a, it was found in sand covered, but in
0:37:48 what would have been a river channel. So this animal has died, washed downstream, ended up on a sand bank.
0:37:54 The sand is whipping past because I’ve been in a sandstorm in China and it is not fun. And that’s
0:37:57 starting to etch some of the bones and damage them.
0:37:59 And after that, there’s a bite mark.
0:38:04 After that, you’re getting bite marks coming in. So that can only be scavenging. That thing has been
0:38:10 dead and sitting out for days, possibly weeks before something came along and chewed on it.
0:38:12 It pretty much can’t have happened any other way.
0:38:17 And you have to take these really subtle signals to reconstruct the story.
0:38:22 But then you can start piecing some other stuff together. So in this case, the skeleton is
0:38:26 pristine. It’s one of the best hadrosaur skeletons out there. It’s certainly the best from Mongolia I’ve
0:38:33 ever seen. And all the bite marks on one bone, the humerus, the upper arm bone, every mark. We went
0:38:39 over the rest of the skeleton, nothing. And then the humerus is chewed to bits. There’s bites all over
0:38:45 it. But when you look, there’s two really distinctive patterns. There’s deep circular
0:38:51 punctures. And remember what the shape of this thing looks like at the ends. And then along the
0:38:55 delta pectoral crest, okay, it’s much, much bigger than a hadrosaur. But this bit, remember, that’s
0:39:00 where all the big muscles attach. There’s all of these types of, this is from a different bone,
0:39:07 different animal, but all these types of close parallel scratches. And so that looks like selective
0:39:14 feeding, because it’s using its giant crunchy teeth at the ends to get the bone off. And this
0:39:20 is off a buried skeleton. And then it’s got these, actually T-Rex has really small teeth at the front
0:39:26 of its mouth, right in the front where our incisors are. They’re called incisiform teeth. They look like
0:39:32 incisors. They’re a fraction of the size of the big ones. And they’ve got a really weird flat back.
0:39:39 And that’s what these are. It’s hiddenness with the front of the mouth and pulling.
0:39:43 – And that’s mostly for eating. – Yeah. And that’s why it’s just on the delta pectoral
0:39:47 crest, because that’s where all the muscles are. So it’s, I always liken it to getting something like
0:39:53 an Oreo and you take the top off and you scrape the cream out with the teeth. I think most people
0:39:59 have done that, right? But that’s what it’s doing. So it’s got this little row of teeth and
0:40:03 everywhere you get lots of muscle, you get little rows of teeth together.
0:40:08 – So there’s different bite marks for sort of fighting, killing, and then there’s different
0:40:12 bite marks for eating. – Yeah. So it kills and dismembers with the big teeth up the side.
0:40:14 – Yeah. – And then it feeds with the little front teeth.
0:40:16 – And all of that has evidence. – Yeah.
0:40:17 – In the bones. – Yep.
0:40:21 – What hunting strategy does it use? Can we figure that out?
0:40:30 – So that comes down to that foot stuff. They’re relatively efficient compared to a lot of other
0:40:34 things, and particularly compared to the herbivores. So that means they’re probably looking at long
0:40:38 distance rather than speed. And that makes sense, because even though the kind of stuff we’re talking
0:40:43 about, like I said, maybe they get into 20, 25 miles an hour, that’s pretty quick. But some
0:40:48 of the smaller stuff is going to be a lot faster than that. And remember, that’s a real upper estimate.
0:40:53 They’re probably not that quick. But yeah. – So they’re just jogging after you.
0:41:02 – Right. But they’ve got the distance. So yeah. So it’s much more a hyena or wolf-like strategy than
0:41:08 like a cheetah going for hyper speed or a lion going for a relatively quick burst, and it either gets
0:41:13 you or it doesn’t. And then the people kind of just go, well, like, but that’s ridiculous. Like,
0:41:18 they’re not even that quick. And it’s like, yeah, but if you’re hunting something big, that’s not
0:41:23 that quick either. And so that’s a misconception. Like when I’m talking about juvenile dinosaurs,
0:41:29 I don’t mean just out of the egg and weigh a kilo. Like a juvenile triceratops can still weigh a ton
0:41:36 and be the size of a rhino. They’re not that fast. And again, if you get a head start on them,
0:41:42 because as I said, I suspect they’re nocturnal. So, because that’s the other thing, it’s really hard
0:41:48 to hide a T-Rex. Even lions and tigers struggle to kind of hide in long grass. When you’re three and a
0:41:56 half, four metres tall, like you can’t hide. Maybe in a forest, but even then you’re probably going to
0:42:00 stick out and it’s going to be hard to manoeuvre between the trees. And we’ve got big tyrannosaurs
0:42:05 living in what we know to have been relatively open environments. Maybe there’s some stands of trees,
0:42:10 trees, but it’s not like a woodland or a forest or anything like that. So they’re living in the open
0:42:16 and surviving in the open. So they’ve got to have a way of doing this. And I think it’s either or some
0:42:23 combination of being nocturnal. So it’s relatively easy to, sneak isn’t quite the wrong word, but
0:42:29 approach things to cut the distance down for your initial strike and then just running them down.
0:42:35 Because yeah, maybe a one-ton triceratops or a one-ton hadrosaur is rather faster than you.
0:42:40 But if you’ve covered the first couple of hundred metres to get up to your top speed before they
0:42:48 start running, then you’re probably much closer to them. And then will they exhaust faster than you’ll
0:42:53 keep going? Well, probably not a hundred percent of the time, no predators that effective, but I suspect
0:42:58 that’s what they’re doing. And it fits with what we know of their size, their vision, they’ve got a very
0:43:03 good sense of smell. Again, that makes sense at night. It makes less sense if you’re diurnal and
0:43:08 operating primarily in the day, and you’ve got to hide this thing. And then we know they’re pretty
0:43:12 efficient versus relatively fast, but not that efficient prey.
0:43:16 Well, there’s a bit of a debate of scavenger versus hunter.
0:43:21 They’re obviously both. A, because we’ve got things like the bite marks I just described,
0:43:26 which is pretty much definitive scavenging. And then we’ve got the healed bite marks with T-Rex teeth
0:43:29 buried in bones, which is pretty much definitive active predation.
0:43:33 So we’ve got evidence of it doing both.
0:43:36 But can we possibly figure out what was the primary strategy?
0:43:41 That gets much harder. My guess is they’re probably still primarily
0:43:46 actively carnivorous. Because if you look at stuff that’s reliant on being
0:43:54 a scavenger, I mean, the true scavengers, like the vultures and condors and stuff like this,
0:43:57 you have to be ultra long distance, very energy efficient travelers.
0:44:03 You know, they’re soaring in thermals. They’re barely using any energy to fly.
0:44:06 It’s really hard to get very far.
0:44:10 How far were they spread? Where did they live?
0:44:17 So the ones we found, you’ve got them from Alberta down to probably New Mexico.
0:44:24 There’s some, I want to say there’s some tyrannosaurine, so very close to T-Rex teeth,
0:44:30 that may or may not be T-Rex in New Mexico. There’s similar teeth in Mexico proper down in
0:44:33 Coahuila. It’s about halfway down Mexico.
0:44:40 So Mongolia, you have a thing called Tarbosaurus, which is a very, very close relative of T-Rex. It’s
0:44:48 the nearest species or nearest genus that we have. But T-Rex is probably occupying almost all of Western
0:44:52 North America. So at times the East was kind of split off and separate.
0:44:56 But the entire surface of Earth had dinosaurs on it.
0:44:56 Oh yeah.
0:44:57 Most of it.
0:45:02 Yeah. We’ve got them in Antarctica. We’ve got them in Antarctica, even close to the mass extinction event.
0:45:08 Just an insane number of dinosaur species all over the Earth. Just the same kind of variety we
0:45:11 have in the animal kingdom today. You just have in the dinosaur.
0:45:16 I mean, this is, this is like how many dinosaur species were there? I mean,
0:45:23 I basically wrote an entire book chapter about this because there’s so many, but this would make
0:45:26 the number high, but this would make the number low, but this would make the number high, but this
0:45:32 would make the number lower counter versus counter arguments that you can guesstimate almost any
0:45:36 number and probably be very accurate or very far out.
0:45:40 Yeah. But we should say that a large number of dinosaur species are constantly being discovered.
0:45:48 Yeah. So we’ve named give or take in the realm of 1500, 1600 valid species. That is not everyone
0:45:54 agrees on every species, but most people would be satisfied with that number. But we also name
0:46:00 in the realm of 40 to 50 a year. And we’ve been doing that for at least the last 10, 12 years. That
0:46:06 number is rocketing up, shows no signs of slowing down. There’s loads of air. Like we still never really
0:46:11 explored India very much. We’re starting to find entirely new beds in places like Ecuador.
0:46:16 Um, Argentina, we know has a ton of stuff, but we’ve never excavated there very much.
0:46:22 Australia. We know there’s a ton of stuff we haven’t excavated there very much. Um, so there’s lots of
0:46:28 places even now to still go through. This is a good moment to take a brief
0:46:33 tangent and look at paleontology. So how, how do we, how do we find these fossils? What’s the, uh,
0:46:38 what’s the magic, what’s the science, the art the same way, more or less that people did in the
0:46:46 1750s or whenever you first start getting them that there’s for dinosaurs in particular, but this is true
0:46:54 of the vast majority of stuff. There’s essentially two ways of doing it. The simple one is where you have
0:47:00 quarries of particularly things like lithographic limestone. So the printing limestones or stuff that’s
0:47:07 very similar to that. Uh, sometimes that’s often volcanic. Um, you get these super, super, super
0:47:12 fine layers of sedimentation and that’s where you get these places of exceptional preservation. Whenever
0:47:17 you see like the feathers or almost always whenever you see feathered dinosaurs, it’s like, oh, we got
0:47:21 the skin, we got the claws and like the whole skeletons laid out. So Archaeopteryx being like the,
0:47:28 the first birdlings, absolute classic example. It’s from these beds. And there you find them by basically
0:47:33 splitting limestone. We don’t usually dig for them. It’s because there are quarry workers and people
0:47:40 who are already doing this because the stone is useful because there might be one decent fossil for
0:47:46 every, you know, few hundred tons of rock you shift. In which case you could get every paleontologist in
0:47:50 the world there for a couple of years and you wouldn’t find very much. You rely on the fact that there’s
0:47:54 hundreds of guys doing this constantly and then sooner or later they’ll find something and then
0:48:02 you’ve got it. That’s the super easy way. The only slightly more complicated way is you go to somewhere
0:48:08 where geologically we know it’s the right age and it’s the right kind of rock and ideally fossils have
0:48:15 been reported from there before. And again, you know, geologists map all the world’s geology years ago in
0:48:18 quite a lot of detail. There’s, there’s gaps, there’s places where we don’t have the details,
0:48:25 but in general, we know. And then you go there and then you walk around and you look and that’s
0:48:26 basically it.
0:48:28 And you’re looking for something that’s sticking out of the rock.
0:48:36 Yeah. So you always get the, so there’s this constant and I think, you know, borderline myth
0:48:43 of the idea that dinosaurs and mammoths and lots of other fossil things like entered lots of indigenous
0:48:50 cultures because it’s impossible that the guys were wandering around say Dakota and the Native Americans
0:48:55 didn’t come across some dinosaur fossils. That I’d agree with. It’s pretty much impossible.
0:49:01 They didn’t come across some dinosaur fossils. Did they come across a whole skeleton laid out on the
0:49:08 ground? No, because those don’t usually exist. Because even if they’re tougher or it doesn’t
0:49:14 matter if they’re tougher or weaker than the surrounding rock, dinosaur bones are, you know,
0:49:19 in some way, shape or form, they’re lithified. They, they turn to rock and they will absorb some of
0:49:25 the minerals from whatever they’ve been buried in. And so even in places like Mongolia and Northern
0:49:31 China, where I’ve been to where actually the fossil bone is quite a lot tougher than the sandstone
0:49:35 that it’s embedded in, like you can find a bit of bone and pull it out, like almost like rub it with
0:49:43 your hands and the sand comes off. There’s your bone. They will decay pretty quickly. You know, sandstorms,
0:49:50 you know, sand just etches stuff. The tiniest bit of moisture, particularly in winter, gets into the cracks.
0:49:56 Bones are incredibly porous. That freezes, that expands, that cracks. Bones just shatter. And yeah,
0:50:03 you find shattered bone on the surface everywhere. What you rarely find is a decent bone on the surface,
0:50:08 let alone a skeleton. So there has to be something that’s sticking out just a tiny bit so that you can
0:50:14 see it, but it’s still buried. Right. And it, and it happens. The, the, the greatest one that I saw,
0:50:20 or that, that I didn’t see it happened with a friend of mine when we were in, um, Northern China.
0:50:26 And he went, yeah, I can see a bit of a claw sticking out of a hill. And it was, it was like this, this,
0:50:30 this much you could see, you know, less than a centimeter coming out of a hillside.
0:50:34 And it’s like, so, you know, that’s the dream, right?
0:50:36 Dig a little bit. And there’s a little bit more, dig a little bit. There’s a little bit more,
0:50:39 dig a little bit. There’s a little bit more. Okay. And then the system we were running there is
0:50:43 some guys were searchers and some guys were diggers. So he and I were searchers.
0:50:47 So we’re told, okay, you guys, you guys, he found it. You found something,
0:50:51 go and look for something else. We’ll dig it out. And so we come back a couple of days later
0:50:54 and check in on the digging team. So what is it then? Oh, it’s a complete skeleton.
0:51:01 And it was, it was a thing, very, very close relative of, um, Velociraptor ended up naming
0:51:06 it Linheraptor. So the raptor from Linher, which was the nearest town. And it was, yeah,
0:51:11 the legs were a little messed up because water got to them and the end of the tail was missing.
0:51:18 And that was about it. So like 90 plus percent complete skeleton. And it had been found with,
0:51:23 you know, five mil, a couple of sixteenths of an inch of bone sticking out of a hill.
0:51:29 And that’s what you want because every so often behind that is a whole skeleton. If you’re looking
0:51:32 for skeletons on the surface, they’re going to be gone before you get to them.
0:51:39 And when it’s a near complete skeleton, you, you did a show of, uh, terrible lizards on, uh, Stan.
0:51:39 Oh yeah.
0:51:43 The T-Rex fossil that sold for 31.8 million dollars.
0:51:51 So that, that’s a nice sort of, uh, big adult T-Rex. So looking at a fossil like this.
0:51:51 Yeah.
0:51:56 So for 31.8 million dollars, what’s the excavation process for when you have a
0:52:01 claw sticking out, like you were mentioning and getting that whole thing out without damaging
0:52:02 the bones. What can you say about that process?
0:52:07 So it depends where you are. It depends how many people you’ve got. It depends on your
0:52:13 budget and it really depends on the rock. So again, like going into China and Mongolia,
0:52:20 where this little guy’s from, the bone tends to be relatively strong compared to the sandstone
0:52:27 that it’s in. That also, that means that a, it’s fairly tough and resistant. Um, but it also means that,
0:52:32 uh, it’s really easy to dig. Like again, I’ve, I’ve dug stuff by almost like pulling it with my
0:52:38 hands or like getting my fingers in, getting something like a chisel or a hammer. You can just
0:52:40 cruise through this rock.
0:52:43 But like, you have to be really careful not to touch the bone, I guess.
0:52:50 So it depends how, how strong it is. So again, so some bone is incredibly strong. Some isn’t because
0:52:55 they’ve all fossilized differently. Um, what we’re usually doing is applying glue to it though. There’s
0:53:02 this, um, wonderful stuff called Paraloid and it’s a special glue for fossils. And as I said, bones, super porous.
0:53:07 So it’s really good at sucking up liquid. Oh, so you’re basically filling it with glue.
0:53:11 So it like makes it stronger. Yeah. And Paraloid is really great because you can dissolve it with
0:53:16 acetone and it basically doesn’t react with anything. So you can fill your fossil with glue,
0:53:21 but then if you want to take all that glue out, you can pretty much just dissolve the glue back out again.
0:53:30 Very cool. Um, so yeah, what you would normally do is for, for something, say in China, um, where the
0:53:39 rock is relatively soft, uh, and the bones relatively tough and, um, where we don’t have any like manpower
0:53:45 and shipping problems, which is a real issue in other places, you basically map out where you think the
0:53:51 skeleton’s going. So, um, in the same way that you were doing it, like, you know, if you can imagine
0:53:56 like a cake or something and someone said, I put a toy dinosaur in there and you, you’ve,
0:54:00 you’ve got to find it without damaging it. So like, well, you’d stick your finger in the cake and just
0:54:04 kind of dig until you hit the edge of it. And then you go in somewhere else and go in. And that’s what
0:54:08 we’re doing. We’re just going in from kind of all sides. And once you’ve hit three or four bones,
0:54:14 you kind of know which way it’s, it’s going into the hillside. Usually sometimes they’re very weird
0:54:19 and mixed up. And then you can just like almost trace the outline of it. And then you’ll just dig
0:54:26 all the way around that, which might involve taking the top off a mountain depending on where you are
0:54:31 in the desert. It tends to be a bit easier, but yeah, we, we’ve had stuff where like the first three
0:54:36 days is just 10 people with pickaxes, just digging a hole to get down to the right level.
0:54:40 But sometimes the excavation requires like large equipment, right?
0:54:45 Yeah. We use jackhammers and stuff. We’ve, we’ve used a backhoe. We’ve just literally driven it into
0:54:51 the desert and just dug a big hole next to the, to the fossil. Um, and then the classic thing of
0:54:57 covering it in a plaster of Paris jacket, strip strips of burlap sacking, plaster of Paris and some water,
0:55:05 wooden beams. If you want to make something really big and really solid and just basically wrap it all up
0:55:12 and then take it out. And that’s again, that’s what they were doing 150, 200 years ago. That, that,
0:55:19 that hasn’t changed where it gets more complicated is if you’ve got really hard rock, very hard to get
0:55:24 through, particularly if the bone is fragile, then it becomes difficult because if you want to like get
0:55:29 a jackhammer in the vibrations means you’re going to shatter your bones before you’ve even cut through
0:55:36 the rock. So then you might be down to doing it manually. And then it was like hand, hand chip,
0:55:43 chipping it out. Yeah. The, the other, the other way you end up with that is like the classic Jurassic
0:55:49 Park thing. Like the, the, was it the second scene and they’re digging in the desert and there’s the whole
0:55:53 skeleton laid out and five or six guys all, all digging, digging around it and exposing it.
0:56:00 And that’s actually quite common in the States. And the reason is a huge amounts of those excavations
0:56:06 are being done on government land. They’re national parks or whatever, or, or, or protected land.
0:56:12 And very often the rules are you’re not allowed wheeled vehicles, full stop at all to protect
0:56:17 the environment. You can walk in and walk out, but you can’t drive. And it’s like, well, right,
0:56:21 when we’re in the desert in Mongolia in China or China and Mongolia, and we’re allowed to do this
0:56:28 literally. Yeah. My, my boss drove into town, hired a guy with a JCB. He drove out, picked it up with the
0:56:33 bucket and drove it back into town and put it on the back of a flatbed. And we drove it to Beijing.
0:56:41 If you’re out in a protected area and you can’t, you’ve got two choices. You can take it out by hand,
0:56:46 but that means it’s got to be light enough that half a dozen people can lift it, which if it’s a block of
0:56:51 stone, the size of this desk, you know, couple of meters by a couple of meters by meter high is
0:56:57 basically impossible. So that means you either got to carve chunks off. So take the head off, take the
0:57:02 arm off and whatever. And you can get it out that way, but it’s not ideal. There’s always the risk of
0:57:08 breaking. You’re losing some information. And if you want to make a really spectacular display,
0:57:15 you don’t want to join through every big bit of bone. You want to show the public one, one piece.
0:57:21 So the alternative is to get rid of every bit of rock you possibly can to make it light enough to
0:57:28 helicopter it out. And so normally, so in China, if we hit, yeah, if we hit that bit of bone going in,
0:57:33 we’re just like going in round the sides until we’ve hit it, take the top off, take the bottom
0:57:38 off and just take it. So the skeleton is completely encased in rock and it’s as safe and secure as it
0:57:42 can be. And then we’ll do the preparation work back at the lab.
0:57:46 That’s heavy though. That’s real. If you’re going to have to lift it with a helicopter and they’ve got
0:57:52 a weight limit of only a couple of tons or if it’s not, then you need to pay twice as much for a much
0:57:59 more expensive helicopter. Then you take off every gram of rock that you think you can to get the weight
0:58:05 down so you can ship it. So, so it varies massively. Yeah. Summing the size of Stan, that’s, that’s months
0:58:10 of work. You’re probably doing that across three or four years with a team of half a dozen people.
0:58:15 So can we just talk through, cause just using Stan as a case study, Stan was first discovered in the
0:58:23 spring of 1987 by amateur paleontologist, well, Stan, uh, Sakonson in the Hell Creek formation near
0:58:28 Buffalo, South Dakota. Yeah. But it was the Larson brothers from the Black Hills Institute who dug it
0:58:34 up. And so they’re, they’re a commercial outfit. So they dig stuff up to sell it. Um, but they also
0:58:40 make casts and sell them. Um, this, Oh, I brought my others. I do have a cost, a cost of one of Stan’s
0:58:45 teeth. Um, so like you can buy casts of Stan’s teeth. You could buy casts of the head. Um, you
0:58:49 could buy the whole skeleton. It’s a famous skeleton. You, you see Stan in a whole bunch of different
0:58:54 places. There’s a, there’s a stand just up the road from here at Oxford. Oxford’s got a cast of Stan.
0:59:00 Oh, um, I was just at Lime Regis, uh, the famous fossil locality in the South of the UK. A couple
0:59:05 of weeks ago, one of the fossil stores has a skull of Stan in the window. So Stan, Stan turns up again
0:59:10 and again and again. So the process is written here involved removing the overlying rock using heavy
0:59:16 equipment like a bobcat. Yes. We’d call that the overburden, the extra stuff. That’s all the rock
0:59:22 that’s sitting above the layer with our fossil in. And when you’re lucky, that’s a foot of sandstone and
0:59:27 you shovel it out in an hour. And I’ve seen guys in South America, there was a team in Argentina.
0:59:34 I think it was my old boss, Ollie Rauhut showed me this and they took like 20, 30 feet off the top
0:59:42 of a hill to get down to this fossil, you know, so sort of something, you know, probably half an
0:59:47 acre in size, 20, 30 feet of rock. It’s incredible. Yeah. I wonder if you could speak to some of these
0:59:51 other components, carefully extracting each fossil bone by hand with picks and brushes.
0:59:57 Plotting and diagramming the bones using a grid system at the dig site, wrapping the bones in
1:00:02 burlap and plaster for safe transport to the BHI lab. Some of the stuff you’ve spoken to. What’s
1:00:06 the, what’s with the diagramming? What’s with the plotting? So yeah. So you may well have seen
1:00:11 something like this for archeology shows or something like that. Um, nowadays again,
1:00:17 tech’s getting better. People are using drones and stuff for this or taking hundreds of photos and
1:00:22 then building photogrammetry models. You just got a 3d model in the computer, or just kind of modeling
1:00:25 what we’re looking at here. Yeah. But, but where you found everything. So it goes back to that stuff
1:00:30 we were saying about the process of fossilization or the, or the process of what’s happened to that
1:00:37 animal from death to discovery is okay. It right. A classic thing is bones being in a line.
1:00:44 So you can imagine if, you know, bones are lots of weird shapes, but mostly, or there’s certainly lots
1:00:49 of bones, ribs, arms, and legs, things like this. They’re quite long bones. So if they’re in a current,
1:00:55 they will tend to spin in the axis so that they are facing the current. So if you’re finding all the bones
1:01:00 bones are in a line, that probably tells you that this thing has had quite a lot of water washing
1:01:05 over it. You’re then probably going to be missing most of the small bones because the big heavy bones
1:01:11 won’t be shifted by that current, but maybe the small ones will. Oh, so you actually model where the bone,
1:01:15 where you’re likely to find the bones, the big bones, the small bones. So it might, it might tell you
1:01:20 where to go and dig further down the hill quite literally, but it could also just tell you,
1:01:26 okay, this thing, there’s no way this thing died here. It absolutely got moved. So we need to factor
1:01:31 that in when we’re trying to interpret it. Or we’ve got this one weird bone and we can’t work
1:01:36 out what on earth it is. Well, maybe it’s from something else. Because if we know a whole bunch
1:01:40 of stuff washed together, maybe that’s a random bone from a different animal.
1:01:43 Yeah. Maybe that was eaten or there might be a different story if it was washed,
1:01:48 like you were describing. Any of that kind of thing. So that’s where you want to have
1:01:54 as much information as possible. It says here, once at the lab, the bones underwent more than 30,000
1:02:00 hours of cleaning, preservation, restoration, and documentation. And Stan’s skeleton is notable
1:02:06 for its high degree of completeness, about 70% by bulk, 63% by bone count, and the exceptional
1:02:10 preservation of its skull, which has become a scientific standard for the species.
1:02:17 Yeah. So there’s this unbelievably beautiful skeleton, Boreal Peltor. This is a helicopter lift.
1:02:23 Um, absolutely phenomenal preservation from, from Northern Alberta.
1:02:23 What is this thing?
1:02:29 It’s full name is Boreal Peltor Mark Mitchell. And it’s called Mark Mitchell. I named after Mark Mitchell,
1:02:34 the preparator who basically spent, I think Mark spent the thick end of two years on this.
1:02:39 Like this was his job and he did other stuff as well. He’s doing some other prep. He’s doing some field
1:02:47 work, but Mark basically went in every day, nine to five, cleaning the rock because the rock was hard
1:02:51 and the bone was soft and it’s extraordinarily well-preserved.
1:02:57 Boreal Peltor is a genus of plant eating armor, dinosaur, sure as hell looks armor. This is an
1:03:04 incredible preserved specimen, uh, from the early Cretaceous period, about 112 million years ago,
1:03:07 found in what is now Alberta, Canada. Amazing.
1:03:13 Yeah. So Boreal Peltor is one of the ones where we’ve even got some of the evidence of
1:03:17 patterning and it suggests that it’s darker on top and lighter underneath. So this illustration,
1:03:21 I think that’s, yeah, that’s Julius Cetone did that. He’s a Canadian paleo artist. And so that
1:03:24 color pattern is roughly accurate.
1:03:27 Oh, wow. So this is true to color. Yeah.
1:03:28 So we can figure out the colors.
1:03:35 Give, give or take some very large, um, uncertainties. It’s going to be something like this.
1:03:36 That’s so awesome.
1:03:37 Yeah. So these guys are.
1:03:38 That’s hard to eat.
1:03:43 Near enough armored pine cones. Yeah. Though it’s very much the adult condition. Uh,
1:03:46 the juveniles seem to be far less, if not unarmored.
1:03:47 We’re back to the juveniles.
1:03:52 Right. So, right. So, so, but that’s why we, that armor is absolutely going to be effective as
1:04:00 anti-predator, but it’s probably evolved primarily for combat and display between members of the species.
1:04:03 Because otherwise, if this stopped you being eaten, the babies would have it.
1:04:09 This fossil is considered one of the best preserved dinosaur specimens ever found with armor, skin,
1:04:14 keratin sheaths, and even stomach contents all intact. Incredible.
1:04:14 Yeah.
1:04:16 And so for that, he really did the work.
1:04:23 And also found miles and miles and miles out to sea or the, the paleo sea. So this is from a site which
1:04:28 normally gives us big marine reptiles. So, um, predatory plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs and then,
1:04:34 uh, uh, uh, mosasaurs and stuff like that. And then it turned up an ankylosaur. Well,
1:04:35 nodosaur in this case.
1:04:38 Yeah. Wow. This is incredible.
1:04:38 Yeah.
1:04:43 So, okay, let’s complete the journey of stand to the museum to like, you get,
1:04:46 you get to the process of cleaning everything, stitching it all together.
1:04:51 Yeah. Like Mark. And like that suggested, you know, that this can be even on an animal that
1:04:55 size, for our pelters, you know, four or five meters long, we’ve only gone to go to the front
1:04:58 two thirds of it. Yeah. This can be like needle level stuff.
1:05:00 That’s how you get to the 30,000 hours.
1:05:05 Yeah, exactly. That if it’s that quality and you want to get everything open and then something like
1:05:11 Stan actually really complicated skull, the skulls full of lots of little bones, the bones are really
1:05:17 fragile. So that just adds to the time. I mean, at least the ankylosaur, the skull is just this giant
1:05:22 solid block of bone, which makes life a little bit easier. So yeah, they’re going to put those hours
1:05:26 in and that’s really going to help them sell the animal, which is ultimately what happened. I mean,
1:05:33 Stan sat in the Black Hills Institute for decades. I mean, 87 and they sold it in like 2020. So they
1:05:40 had it for 30 years, uh, sitting in their kind of little museum. And then my understanding was
1:05:44 basically the brothers broke the company up and that’s why they sold it.
1:05:48 Yeah. But it was still incredibly surprising that it was sold for 31 million.
1:05:55 Yeah. I mean, far more than I think anyone thought it was going to, I mean, I, I like, and you know,
1:05:59 if you’re not buying like teeth or an ammonite in some small fossil shop, you know, when you’re
1:06:03 buying, talking about things like whole dinosaurs and whole tyrannosaurs, I think it’s a bit like
1:06:10 the art market in it’s worth what people will pay for it. And so, you know, plenty of T-Rexes had
1:06:16 sold for a few million dollars and therefore everyone thought it would might be five, you know, 10 would
1:06:24 be an absurd sum of money. And then yeah, it went for 30 and it’s like, okay, well two, I was going to
1:06:28 say someone wanted it that bad, but clearly not two people wanted it that bad. Cause if only one guy’s
1:06:36 prepared to bid 30, then it goes for, you know, a million more than the next highest bidder, but
1:06:39 presumably two people, if not three bid it to get that high.
1:06:44 Yeah. It was, uh, anonymous at the time, but now it’s, uh, Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and
1:06:49 tourism came out. I know they’ve got it. And, uh, and then that record has been since beaten,
1:06:56 apparently by, uh, Apex, the, the stegosaurus, which I still haven’t seen though. A friend of mine
1:06:59 has sent me some photos of this thing. Is it impressive to you? This thing?
1:07:03 Yeah, not especially. That’s why I can’t imagine that it sold for that much. It’s a really nice
1:07:09 stegosaurus. It’s pretty big stegosaurus. Well preserved.
1:07:12 I’ve seen other very good stegosaurus and I don’t understand why that’s worth
1:07:19 that much more than something like Stan, but it shows you the market. So, so we’re here in London.
1:07:23 There’s a stegosaurus called Sophie and the natural history museum in London.
1:07:28 Sophie is a young animal. So she’s not very big. I mean, it’s a sizable specimen.
1:07:35 I’d say five ish, six meters off the top of my head, total length, but Sophie’s like truly
1:07:40 exceptional. Like there’s a couple of plates missing, a handful of ribs, a couple of bones
1:07:46 in the tail. I think a couple of toe bones. Like this is by far the most complete stegosaurus out
1:07:52 there that sold for, I think 250,000 pounds. So maybe $400,000 about a decade ago.
1:08:00 So this has now gone up like a hundred fold for an animal, which is quite a bit bigger,
1:08:02 but is way less complete.
1:08:10 So I, for me, those two things kind of balance out because size is always impressive and that’s
1:08:14 what the public likes, but also a complete one is better than a half a one or two thirds of one.
1:08:21 So yeah. So how has the price gone up a hundred or from yeah, 400,000 to 40 million
1:08:24 in 10 years, but roughly the same thing.
1:08:28 A T-Rex is a little bit more epic than a stegosaurus.
1:08:30 Well, that’s the thing. T-Rex has a massive premium on it because it’s,
1:08:36 yeah, a stegosaurus is one of those top tier, you know, it’s, you can virtually do the less,
1:08:45 you know, T-Rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus. It’s in that first
1:08:50 six or seven. Okay. These days, Velociraptor, thanks to Jurassic Park, but it’s right. Right.
1:08:57 But you know, there’s, that’s the list of like seven or eight things that any random human who
1:09:00 doesn’t care about dinosaurs and doesn’t know anything about dinosaurs, but they’ve probably
1:09:04 heard of them. You know, Stegosaurus is in that list. I’m going to have an idea of what it looks like.
1:09:08 Oh yeah. It’s got like the big stuff stuck along the back. You know, you, you’d get that answer from
1:09:17 almost any, you know, 99% of people on the street, but yeah, it’s, it’s not a T-Rex. So how it’s worth,
1:09:22 yeah, 50% more. And it’s not even a particularly complete skeleton apex to my understanding.
1:09:30 Like I, I don’t, I don’t get it actually. Um, since we’re on the topic of money, if I gave you,
1:09:33 let’s say $10 billion, how would you spend it? You were forced out.
1:09:38 I forced you to spend it on dinosaur related things. How would you spend it?
1:09:44 Um, I mean, I’d probably drop half a billion or so on the best museum you’d ever seen.
1:09:48 So put together a museum. You’re like one of the great communicators, one of the great scientists.
1:09:54 And so like, you would want to push forward the, the whole field. And one of the ways to
1:09:55 do that is a great museum.
1:10:00 Yeah. But you want to, so it is twofold because yeah, there’s the communication and the education
1:10:05 part of it, which is something I’m, I’m massive on. And I think research is pointless if you don’t
1:10:10 communicate it at some level, not saying everyone needs to communicate everything. If you’re working
1:10:15 on the nuances of a calculation of the volume of a black hole or something, yeah, probably doesn’t
1:10:20 need a press release or a new museum exhibition, but fundamentally we should be talking about our work.
1:10:25 Um, but also you’ve got to store this stuff. Um, many fossils are fragile. They need to be kept not
1:10:32 necessarily in climate control, but at least you want a basement that is much more even than,
1:10:37 you know, just sticking it in a box in a warehouse somewhere. So you’ve got to be able to store this
1:10:42 stuff to be able to study it or it’s kind of pointless. Um, but with the rest of that money,
1:10:51 I’d buy a ton of land like the, the, you know, quarries that gave us Archaeopteryx in, in Bavaria
1:10:55 and have given us a ton of other stuff. I’ve worked on a load of pterosaurs, the flying reptiles from
1:11:01 there. These, these stuff are mostly commercially run or just straight up privately owned and not being
1:11:05 commercially run. Someone’s just inherited it. It’s just sitting on this stuff.
1:11:08 So if somebody is building stuff on land is, does that threaten like the damage
1:11:12 of, uh, of the, but the possibility of discovering something on it?
1:11:16 It’s, it’s more that they’re not necessarily exploiting it with fossils in mind.
1:11:20 Presume you have to balance the search efforts and then the land.
1:11:27 Yeah. But you know, 1 billion on its own would go a very, very long way, almost infinitely. If you’re
1:11:33 just creaming off the interest and then funding excavations and supporting scientists who already
1:11:37 embedded in other museums or other universities or other research institutes.
1:11:40 So the rest is for buying a plan so that those people can do that.
1:11:44 Yeah. You, you look at somewhere like, you know, Brazil and there’s, I can never remember the name of
1:11:49 it, but there’s again, one of these zones of exceptional preservation where superlative
1:11:54 pterosaurs, fish, we’ve had a handful of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other stuff has come out.
1:12:00 And it’s just a giant commercial mining operation. And yeah, when they hit a fossil, when they think
1:12:04 they’re close to it, yeah, they stop and pull it out and they’ll send it to a museum. And more
1:12:09 often they’ll sell it to a museum and museums only have so much money. Whereas what if I owned that
1:12:15 quarry? And then I made sure everyone who worked there was trained and got a bonus every time they
1:12:19 found anything. And then I just handed everything they dug up straight into a museum.
1:12:23 So there will be some element of a crowdsource paleontology.
1:12:28 Yeah. But it’s, it’s more that like no researcher ever needs to spend money to access that. No
1:12:35 museum needs to go and find a new donor to give them half a million to go and buy this one specimen,
1:12:43 knowing that it might still go. Yeah. To some Silicon Valley billionaire’s foyer or whatever.
1:12:48 It’s like, well, I own the land, so it’s mine. So problem solved. Like that, that’s what’s in my
1:12:54 head. It just would be wonderful to scale up the effort to where we can map out the whole sort of
1:12:58 story of this time, because it’s such a fascinating time in, in, in the history of earth.
1:13:05 I’ve jokingly written a couple of times about how all science funding in the world should go to
1:13:13 paleontology. And the idea being that like, yeah, if you want to investigate black holes or neutrinos or
1:13:24 chemical crystallography or pandogenetics or whatever it is, you can do that anytime you want.
1:13:30 Like that, that’s not going to change a million years from now, as it will from tomorrow.
1:13:37 But fossils are in places that erode. And if we don’t dig them up, they’re gone.
1:13:45 So we should dig all the fossils up now and then we’ve got forever to study them. But if we don’t
1:13:50 dig them up now, who knows? You know, maybe there was something twice the size of T-Rex and it sat on a
1:13:54 hillside for six months and then the wind got to it and it’s gone. And that was the only one that ever
1:14:01 preserved. Well, we’ll never know now. To be clear, this is a joke. I’m not suggesting we should stop doing
1:14:06 cancer research and physics and other things, but, but it is, we’re, we’re in a fundamentally different
1:14:09 field where our science is literally disappearing.
1:14:15 Yeah. I mean, there’s a, I know it’s a joke, but there’s some truth to it. And, uh, uh, on the flip
1:14:21 side, one of the things, one of the hopes is that technology will somehow ease the search and discovery
1:14:25 process. But as you said, so far, most of it, yeah.
1:14:29 Yeah. I mean, so far, yeah. You know, Jurassic park 93, you’ve got that little scene where they’ve
1:14:35 got the like thumper or something they call it. And it, it hits the ground and seismic.
1:14:39 And then they go, look, look, here’s the whole skeleton. Yeah. They’ve tried it. It doesn’t
1:14:46 really work. Um, we’ve tried looking for stuff with drones that helps you getting into some
1:14:52 inaccessible areas, but until the resolution’s probably better, you’ve still got that problem of
1:14:58 like looking, you know, with human eyes, which are binocular and being able to, you know,
1:15:02 just tilt your head completely changes how you see something in a way that flying over
1:15:09 just, just won’t. Um, I know they’ve tried looking so because the bones are porous, they tend to suck
1:15:15 things up. So actually dinosaur bones can be really radioactive if they’re in areas where there are
1:15:21 things like uranium. So yeah, there are drawers which have lead boxes around them and stuff like
1:15:27 this for dinosaur bones, or just sign saying, do not handle the very low level radioactive. Like
1:15:31 you’d have to like stick it in your pocket for six months to run any real risk, but the radioactive
1:15:37 much more so than the background. So can we do that? Hmm. Turns out not really. Um,
1:15:43 so again, maybe, maybe tech will advance, but for now humans are quite incredible.
1:15:47 Yeah, we are. But also paleo is kind of at the bottom of the
1:15:53 pile. You know, there’s not many of us. We don’t have a lot of funding. It takes real money to adapt
1:15:59 stuff. So, you know, like we’re scanning stuff with MRIs and things like that in hospitals, but it mostly
1:16:05 doesn’t work very well because the problem you’ve got is, like I said, the bones take on some of the
1:16:12 properties of the minerals in which they’re embedded, which means their density is really
1:16:18 similar. And things like MRIs or seismic activity is basically looking for differences in density.
1:16:23 Well, if it’s the same density as the, you know, it’s like I put some green plasticine in some blue
1:16:27 plasticine, there’s going to be a bit of a join and they’re going to be very, very slightly different.
1:16:32 But ultimately you’re not going to be able to detect that through most means if you’re looking
1:16:38 for density or mass or anything like that. Well, I personally think, uh, that there’s few things as
1:16:45 important to understand as the history of life on earth. There’s like books, right? There’s like,
1:16:50 or maybe you could think of as chapters. And then one of the chapters is the time of the dinosaurs.
1:16:52 Yeah. And then there’s a great extinction.
1:16:57 I mean, that’s, that’s not a million miles off to, I think Darwin had an analogy like that of we’ve,
1:17:03 we’ve, we’ve, we’ve got a few words on a few pages spread out, but between them,
1:17:07 you get an idea of what the story is and where it’s going.
1:17:13 I think what humans don’t quite realize is we may end up being just a chapter in a book.
1:17:20 It might be our extinction event, self-created, perhaps a nuclear war, perhaps robots take over,
1:17:21 perhaps we don’t know.
1:17:25 Well, or, or, or dumb luck. I mean, the dinosaurs were doing absolutely fine until a dirty great
1:17:32 rock hit them. And you, you can’t, you know, Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis movies aside,
1:17:34 there’s only so much you can do.
1:17:37 Hey, you take that back. There’s nothing they can do wrong.
1:17:41 All right. Uh, quick pause, bath and break.
1:17:42 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:17:48 Yeah. We’ve taken a few tangents, but let’s, uh, continue on the thread of T-Rex.
1:17:49 Yeah.
1:17:50 Go, go to the skull.
1:17:50 Yeah.
1:17:57 So, uh, the skull of T-Rex is iconic. You describe it as being incredibly robust and overbuilt.
1:18:01 Yeah. There’s a lot of bone on there. Uh, as I said, we mentioned a couple of other things
1:18:06 like Giganotosaurus. So this, you know, giant carnivore, uh, if you put Giganotosaurus T-Rex in,
1:18:10 that’s the one. So that’s the, that’s on my old blog. It’s not my image.
1:18:12 Um, what are we looking at on the left and the right?
1:18:16 So you’ve got T-Rex on the left in orange and Giganotosaurus on the right in red. As I said,
1:18:22 they’re pretty similarly sized, but just look at the robusticity. Like the front of the snout of T-Rex is
1:18:27 all bone. And yet the major openings is a thing called the Antorbital Fenestra, the opening in
1:18:31 front of the orbit is absolutely massive in Giganotosaurus. It’s like half the skull.
1:18:37 The opening at the back of the skull is much bigger. The opening in the lower jaw is much
1:18:42 bigger. And actually the jaw, what you can’t see side to side is much thinner. So the heads are the
1:18:48 same size and as animals, they are about the same linear dimensions, but you can just see there’s just
1:18:52 way more bone in the T-Rex. It’s incredible.
1:18:56 So this is like, it’s not overbuilt. It’s obviously it’s evolved that this is the right
1:19:00 amount of bone for the stresses and strains for what it’s doing and how it’s acting.
1:19:06 But you compare it to anything that’s not a very large Tyrannosaur and suddenly you see just how
1:19:12 much bone has gone into it. It is a very large, it’s an absolutely large head, but it’s a very
1:19:16 heavy head with a lot of bone. And a lot of that bone is there to resist all the forces of all the
1:19:21 muscles because it has this giant, super powerful bite, which again, you can see in the teeth.
1:19:25 So the bone and the muscles kind of evolved together and bigger and bigger and bigger.
1:19:29 So you need this kind of structure for the power that the crush has.
1:19:34 So one of the big things, uh, Tyrannosaurs have, uh, and this goes all the way down to the,
1:19:39 the earliest Tyrannosaurs were like our size, like little diddy things, like two, three meters long,
1:19:45 be a meter and a half tall. Um, but they have fused nasals. So the pair of bones that in us,
1:19:49 there’s not a lot there, but obviously in something like a dog or something like a baboon with a long
1:19:53 nose, it’s like the whole top of the snout. And there’s two, one each side. In Tyrannosaurs,
1:19:59 they fuse together. So they forms a solid bit of bone. So the whole top of the nose is solid.
1:20:05 And then that makes the skull just fundamentally more rigid and able to take more power through
1:20:09 it. The very early ones weren’t super biters, I suspect, but they do, but they do have the
1:20:16 little flattened teeth at the front. So I strongly suspect the fused nasals, at least originally is
1:20:20 for resisting that. Cause again, if you’ve got a long nose and you’re pulling with quite a lot of
1:20:23 force at the very tip, that’s going to bend your snout. So strengthen that.
1:20:29 Can you speak to the evolution from the smaller to the bigger of the T-Rex? Well, what were some of the
1:20:34 the evolutionary pressures? What’s the story of the evolution? So Tyrannosaurs go back to the
1:20:41 middle Jurassic. So Tyrannosaurs ran for a hundred million years. So about 160-ish, 165-ish million
1:20:47 years till the extinction. 66.5, I think is the current dating on that. So yeah, you’ve got a hundred
1:20:52 million years of them. And the middle Jurassic, annoyingly, is probably the bit of the Mesozoic,
1:20:57 so the whole dinosaur period, that we know the least of. Just by chance, we just don’t have many
1:21:05 rocks exposed of the right age that are fossil-bearing. But we got two or three Tyrannosaurs from that time.
1:21:11 And yeah, they’re really quite diddy. Yeah, they’d be chest high to us, two or three meters long,
1:21:18 including the tail, probably more like three, a lot of them. Little heads, long arms. They look like
1:21:25 every other carnivore going. There’s not a lot special to them at this point. They’ve only just separated
1:21:30 from their nearest groups, which is actually something like the ancestors of Giganotosaurus,
1:21:35 actually. They do have the fused nasals early on. They do have these special little teeth at the
1:21:41 front of the jaw very early on. They’re feathered early on. Definitively, we have
1:21:48 skeletons with feathers on them that are early Tyrannosaurs, at least until the early Cretaceous.
1:21:54 But yeah, they’re knocking around as relatively small animals in Europe and Asia. We have a couple
1:21:59 from the UK. We have a whole bunch from China. There’s stuff from Kyrgyzstan and places like this.
1:22:06 I think there’s a relatively early one from Russia. And then when they get into the early Cretaceous,
1:22:10 they start getting quite a bit bigger. So something like Euteranus, if you want to…
1:22:16 There you go. So Euteranus is fuzzy. We have three specimens definitively feathered.
1:22:20 It gets to six, seven meters long.
1:22:25 There’s something funny looking about the sexy, smaller, earlier version of the T-Rex.
1:22:29 But again, this is seven, eight meters, maybe weighs half a ton or a ton.
1:22:36 Like we are very much on the menu for an animal that size, and it’s massive and dangerous. Quite what
1:22:40 triggered them, there’s general patterns in evolution of size change. And one famous one
1:22:44 called Cope’s Rule, I’ve worked on a fair bit, which is the idea that over time, things tend to get
1:22:50 bigger. And they do for various different reasons. One of which is just pure, almost like diffusion.
1:22:56 If you start small and you evolve, well, you can’t get much smaller, but you can always get bigger.
1:23:02 So you naturally kind of diffuse away. Whereas if you’re a blue whale, you probably can’t get much
1:23:06 bigger and its descendants will probably end up being smaller. But there are reasons that bigger
1:23:11 things do better. You can hunt more stuff. You’re more energy efficient. You can move more efficiently.
1:23:17 You’re dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you’re trying to win a territory
1:23:23 or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there’s going to be selection
1:23:28 favoring them. But then big things don’t usually do well in extinction events. So that tends to reset the
1:23:31 clock by killing off the big stuff. And then smaller stuff does better again.
1:23:33 So mostly there’s evolutionary advantages.
1:23:39 But a fairly big one. So yeah, it’s the classic thing of there’s a day-to-day advantage of being
1:23:44 bigger. And that might last for a few million years, right up to the point that suddenly there’s
1:23:48 the biggest drought the earth has encountered in five million years. And then all the big stuff
1:23:49 just gets nailed.
1:23:53 Also, we should probably say, is this accurate to say that the bigger you get, the fewer of you
1:23:59 There are, yeah. There’s just less fundamental space. You know, there’s more mice than there
1:24:05 are elephants. There are more elephants than there are whales. Like there’s only so much biomass that
1:24:07 an ecosystem can support.
1:24:11 And bigger things are just worse at repopulating in extinction events, for example.
1:24:16 Yeah, right. So they’re less likely to survive because they need more fuel. You know, what would
1:24:22 feed a mouse for a year won’t feed an elephant for a week. And of course, the mice are going to have an
1:24:27 easier time finding a few little seeds than elephants going to find tons of food. And then they’ve got
1:24:33 less genetic diversity. There might be 5,000 mice, there might be 200 elephants. So who’s likely to have
1:24:40 more genes or who’s likely to have selection acting on those genes to produce a survivor? Well, the one
1:24:44 with five or 10 or a thousand times the population. And then, yeah, on top of that, you’ve then got the
1:24:51 very slow reproductive cycle, which then, again, gives evolution not a lot to work with. If, as an
1:24:55 elephant, you’re breeding once every five years. And as a mouse, you’re doing it once every eight weeks.
1:25:01 What can we say about the evolution of just the massive bone crushing power?
1:25:10 So that starts kicking in seriously, kind of euteranosizing up. So that’s when you start getting,
1:25:14 they’re not just bigger animals that are getting to a comparable size to the other big dinosaur
1:25:21 carnivores of the time, you start getting those bigger heads. But even then, relatively late in
1:25:26 tyrannosaur evolution, so getting into kind of the middle part of the late Cretaceous, you see a split.
1:25:32 And we have a group called the Aelioramines, which have really, really long, thin skulls. And they look
1:25:37 much more like a kind of, there’s a velociraptor, they look much more like a giant velociraptor
1:25:46 ish than a tyrannosaur. Still relatively small arms, but it’s a very long snout. And so this is a
1:25:51 fast biting animal with a relatively light bite. So it’s probably taking really quite small stuff
1:25:58 proportionally. And then the other side, you’ve got the tyrannosaurines, which are the really big headed
1:26:05 ones. And so that is a few ancestral things like Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus, both from Alberta.
1:26:11 But then Dasplidosaurus, a thing I named called Jucheng Tyrannus in China, and then Tarbosaurus and
1:26:17 Tyrannosaurus. And you’ve really only got three or four of these ultra giants, which are all kind of
1:26:25 10 meters plus in size, and then have the really broad skull with the real kind of excessive bite
1:26:31 force. But even things like Albertosaurus, which is, I mean, a big animal, seven, eight meters,
1:26:39 a ton or so. They’re not quite T-Rex, but they’re definitely more robust than the other contemporaneous
1:26:45 carnivores. So there is this progression of getting bigger, getting a bigger head, the teeth get bigger,
1:26:52 bigger, but there’s fewer of them building up the bone biting and the power. But with some
1:26:57 interesting evolutionary off branches in the way that, yeah, cats are largely much of a muchness,
1:27:03 but then you get things like bobcats and lynx, which are actually quite bulky, stocky little cats
1:27:06 that don’t have the long tail and are doing something quite different.
1:27:14 Can you just speak almost more generally? Because T-Rex is sort of one of the great apex predators of
1:27:19 history of Earth. How does the apex predator evolve? Like what, why did T-Rex win? Why,
1:27:22 why isn’t everybody, why isn’t there like a vicious race to the top?
1:27:31 I have a problem with the term apex predator because, um, ecologically apex predators are
1:27:38 generally defined as things that eat other predators. So a great white shark is because
1:27:43 it’s eating stuff like tuna and sea lions, which are themselves predators. So it’s a predator of
1:27:49 predators. Whereas people, people love saying lions are apex predators and they love saying T-Rex is an
1:27:55 apex predator. They’re eating herbivores. This is not some, this is not some weird and unusual thing.
1:28:00 They’re the largest predator in their ecosystem. Uh, and they are a giant one. Uh, my friend
1:28:06 Diana Nash has moved to using the word arch predator. So it’s like some kind of massive thing,
1:28:11 but avoiding the term apex, because I think that leads into a, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a subtle
1:28:16 terminology thing, but. Uh, an important one. I just learned something today. So I didn’t understand.
1:28:21 I thought I was, I was using the, the word apex predators. But that’s because everyone keeps using
1:28:25 it when I don’t think they should. And now you’re getting into linguistics and it’s like, well,
1:28:29 if everyone uses it to mean that, does it now mean that rather than what it should mean? And then I’m
1:28:34 probably losing that argument because actually you’ll probably find way more stuff calling it an apex
1:28:39 predator than you will an arch predator. But, but here we are. Arch predator. Beautiful. I learned
1:28:45 something today, but you’re saying T-Rex didn’t eat other predators. Well, it’s, it’s probably not going
1:28:50 to. So we can get into though. I’d prefer not to, cause it’s tedious. The argument of whether or not
1:28:54 there’s these small things, which some people have said is a different group called Nanotyrannus or a
1:29:01 different species called Nanotyrannus. But fundamentally T-Rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the
1:29:07 other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it because it is by far,
1:29:15 ludicrously by far, the largest carnivore in its ecosystem. So, so it doesn’t really have competition
1:29:20 actually. I mean, so, so this is a velociraptor skull. Um, there are, there are, there are some
1:29:27 carnivores that are a bit bigger than this, but not enormously. So, um, which we’re knocking around
1:29:35 is T-Rex that the skulls the same time. Right. But, but like you think about that and that’s like
1:29:42 going, go, that’s like going to Africa and going, okay, there are lions. What’s the next biggest
1:29:47 predator? And it’s like, well, there’s a weasel about this big. Yeah. Like it, it’s that kind of
1:29:53 size difference. And you don’t get that normally in ecosystems. So it didn’t have some of the other
1:30:00 big dinosaurs around it? Not carnivores. There’s huge herbivores, but there’s no huge carnivores.
1:30:03 Oh, I see. It would, it would eat those, the juvenile of the herbivores. Oh yeah. It’s going to
1:30:07 be eating triceratops and Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus. There’s even a couple of giant
1:30:12 sauropods knocking around in some places. It’s, it’s going to be hoovering them up, but like,
1:30:16 how often is it going to eat, again, velociraptor isn’t there, but how often is it going to eat
1:30:20 something the size of an adult velociraptor? I mean, they’re a fraction of our size and we’re
1:30:26 probably too small. This is like lions hunting mice. Like you’re just not going to, unless one
1:30:30 like virtually runs into your mouth, you’re not going to go and try and eat it.
1:30:36 So the question still stands about arch predators then, like, how does it, how do you win?
1:30:42 Yeah. Well, I mean, so, I mean, there’s, there’s no real winners. There’s just,
1:30:47 you know, turnover because ultimately the birds, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s still lost out when,
1:30:51 when things went wrong. And as we were just talking about, you know, things do tend to lose out when
1:30:59 they’re big. They’re just so much more vulnerable to extinction. Um, but clearly dinosaurian ecosystems
1:31:07 had much bigger herbivores and therefore by extent much bigger carnivores than any system we’ve seen
1:31:14 before or after. Um, even in relatively sparse ones like spits of the late Triassic. So when the dinosaurs
1:31:21 are really just getting going or the very early Jurassic, but you’ve still got some like multi-ton herbivores,
1:31:28 and then you’ve got some multiple hundred kilo predators. So about as big as elephants and lions
1:31:34 get today. And then once you’re in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, it is entirely normal to have
1:31:41 multiple species that are 10, 20, 30 tons plus as herbivores and anything up to five tons as a
1:31:51 carnivore. I mean, T-Rex is probably the biggest of them, but carnivores that exceed fully terrestrial
1:31:56 carnivores that exceed a ton. There’s dozens of species of dinosaurs.
1:32:02 Is it interesting to you that no other carnivore predator was able to develop in that environment
1:32:05 over millions of years? I mean, they’re probably just
1:32:11 ecologically dominant in the way that mammals are now. You know, crocs get bigger than lions and tigers,
1:32:18 but they’re fundamentally tied to the water, but you don’t see crocs roaming the Serengeti or anything
1:32:25 like that. But yeah, big, I mean, the really big crocs even now get to over a ton. So those are
1:32:31 very serious animals. And I think big polar bears are in the like 500 kilo range. Though again,
1:32:36 they hunt a lot of stuff in water and then things like grizzlies are at least partially herbivorous or
1:32:43 omnivorous. So there was a very large marine reptile, Mosasaurus. Did T-Rex ever come across that?
1:32:50 In theory, at least the really giant Mosasaurs are much bigger in the same way that unsurprisingly,
1:32:56 whales are much bigger than terrestrial carnivores now. Jurassic Park unsurprisingly has rather
1:33:02 exaggerated it. So the one from Jurassic World, it’s like twice the size it should be. But some of these
1:33:07 things were still like, you know, 15, 20 meters. But yeah, some of them are absolutely giant. We had one
1:33:13 dug up in the UK just a couple of years ago and I got to see the skull of it or a cast of the skull.
1:33:16 And yeah, it’s about the same size as a T-Rex skull.
1:33:19 If we take a ridiculous detour before we get back to science,
1:33:24 what creature in the history of earth would challenge a T-Rex in a fight, would you say?
1:33:25 On land?
1:33:26 On land.
1:33:27 On land.
1:33:28 I mean, nothing reasonably.
1:33:32 Like the, the, the really big ones are going to be.
1:33:38 The, the, the only other thing you can really add is the, I said, this might be a very British
1:33:43 adage of it’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.
1:33:48 Um, so yeah, maybe there’s something a bit smaller, which is just hyper aggressive and that
1:33:53 would be enough to win. Like the classic honey badgers chasing off lions. It’s not that a honey
1:33:57 badger would win in a fight, but if the honey badger is prepared to put up that much of a
1:34:02 fight and the lion really doesn’t want to get hurt, then, then he kind of technically wins.
1:34:07 You can’t imagine like, like any of the cats can’t like tigers. I know that can do, I mean,
1:34:10 the size difference, the power of the jaw, all that kind of stuff.
1:34:13 Yeah. But going to T-Rex, like what could reasonably challenge it?
1:34:17 There’s a couple of other giant tyrannosaurs. There’s a couple of
1:34:22 giant carcharodontosaurs from South America that are comparable in linear measurements.
1:34:27 But I’ll probably rather smaller and rather lighter, in which case your money’s going to be
1:34:32 on the bigger guy with the bigger bite. And that simply is T-Rex.
1:34:33 And the bite is important.
1:34:36 Yeah. I think it is because, yeah, these, these guys,
1:34:43 the carcharodontosaurs, they’re much more cutting and they’re really killing stuff,
1:34:49 probably by grappling with the arms, because they do have big muscular arms with big claws,
1:34:54 and then slashing away at stuff. So I think they’re probably doing something more like,
1:35:00 almost like wolves or hyena or hunting dog, where they’re harrying stuff and slashing at it. And
1:35:04 you’re basically bleeding them out and wearing them down.
1:35:11 So what about that strategy? So maybe you could speak to biting strategy. So a T-Rex is, I guess,
1:35:17 a relatively slow bite, but extremely powerful. What about animals that have very fast bites?
1:35:23 So it’s very simple mechanics. You know, if you have a very long jaw, you’re going to close faster,
1:35:29 but with less power at the tip than if you have a really short one that’s deep. And so that really
1:35:34 is it. But yeah, let’s say there’s, there’s things like Yayaramians. And then there’s things like,
1:35:38 yeah, Velociraptor and a lot of its relatives, really very, and not just small, but you know,
1:35:43 narrow. It is narrow snouted. There’s not going to be a lot of fundamental strength here. The teeth,
1:35:51 very numerous, very small. So they’re much more about grabbing something tiny, you know. Velociraptor’s
1:35:55 eating rat size stuff. That’s going to be probably its primary diet.
1:36:00 So I wonder if there’s a bunch of smaller fast biting things that could just bleed a T-Rex to death.
1:36:06 They’re going to struggle though. I remember doing some work for one documentary and they,
1:36:11 yeah, they literally wanted Velociraptor fighting a T-Rex. And I was like, you do know this is like,
1:36:16 we’re going to shoot some meerkats killing a lion. And it’s like, well, you can film it,
1:36:24 but no one would believe it because you know, these ankle high things trying to like savage a
1:36:28 shin bone. Oh yeah. I’m sure they’ll make some holes and it’ll lose some blood and it may not be
1:36:37 very happy, but I don’t think they’re going to win. The size of a Velociraptor was exaggerated by
1:36:42 Jurassic Park enormously. I mean, they get a bit bigger than this in terms of the skull, but yeah,
1:36:49 they’re kind of thigh high to me, like a meter or so to the top of the head, two meters long.
1:36:55 Whereas in the movies, they’re like standing taller than guys who are six foot. So it’s just
1:37:00 massively, massively scaled up. And then these kind of big kind of domey heads, then they’re not the
1:37:03 really long, narrow snout.
1:37:06 Maybe we could take that tangent. What does Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchise get
1:37:07 right and wrong?
1:37:09 I mean, get wrong a hell of a lot.
1:37:13 What, what are some of like really definitive things to you that are interesting that it gets
1:37:18 wrong? And also what are the things it, it, it gets pretty close to right?
1:37:23 Um, I mean, I just want to press with my answer. Cause I always, I always get asked about this
1:37:28 understandably. And it’s like, I, I get that it’s a movie, but if someone’s going to ask me,
1:37:31 what does it get wrong? I’m going to give them an answer, but I do get people going,
1:37:34 Oh, you’re just nitpicking. Oh, you know, it’s fiction. Oh, you know, it’s made up. Yeah,
1:37:37 I do know. But someone asked the question. So here’s the answer.
1:37:43 I should say that some of the things I’ve heard you describe, I feel like it’s the responsibility
1:37:50 of those folks to get it right. I think there’s, there’s something, um, I really deeply admire.
1:37:57 There’s a show called Chernobyl. It’s like, they don’t need to be that accurate, but they really,
1:38:04 it’s like the detail of the, the kitchenware in a room, like just to get the tiniest detail,
1:38:10 right? Who’s that for? I don’t know. Who’s that for, but that’s for the, that’s great art. That’s
1:38:18 for the, that’s the spirit of the thing. And like that, if you focus on getting those tiny details,
1:38:21 right, there’s some magical thing happens about the bigger story. Yeah.
1:38:28 If you don’t care about the details, the story gets corrupted. So I just want to say that some
1:38:33 of the things you describe, like how many fingers, uh, it’s like, that’s important to get that right.
1:38:37 Cause if you do some magical stuff can really emerge and it could become a legendary film
1:38:42 as opposed to just, uh, yeah. I mean, that’s my take again. I, you know, I’ve, I’ve worked on
1:38:47 documentaries where they’re claiming that accuracy is absolutely critical and a hundred percent
1:38:51 important and they won’t put anything on screen that I haven’t told them to. And then many of
1:38:57 those things turn out not to be quite as true as advertised once you get round to it. So I’m, I’m aware
1:39:06 that when even documentaries will take massive liberties, you can’t be too harsh on what is popular fiction.
1:39:17 Um, on the other hand, I am also aware that it is by far by a ludicrous degree, the most popular bit of
1:39:23 any kind of media that includes my work as it were, or something that I’m actively engaged in and know
1:39:29 about. And so whether or not it should have that influence for whether or not the filmmakers should
1:39:35 have responsibility, it does, it does have that knock on. Um, so, I mean, it’s simple as stuff as
1:39:39 Tirit’s can’t see if you can’t move. Yeah, it could. I don’t know where that came from.
1:39:44 As far as I can tell, Crichton just dreamed it up in, in, in the lost world, his sequel book,
1:39:49 he hints that there’s a research paper that says it. And that’s kind of where he got it from. Um,
1:39:57 there’s a second paleontologist character who’s advising Dodson, the evil in gen guy. And he says,
1:40:01 oh no, that’s from such and such is research. And like, I tried looking up as far as I can tell,
1:40:04 it doesn’t exist and never did. Um, so I think it’s just straight fiction and it’s like,
1:40:09 it works for the, it works for the book and it works for the movie, but it’s as far as I can
1:40:13 tell, it’s straight fiction and Crichton just made it up. If it’s buried in some bit of literature,
1:40:17 he’s done better finding it than I have. And I’ve had a really good look and I know how to look.
1:40:23 And I’ve never come across anyone who’s found it either. Um, but it does, it just like warps the
1:40:30 perception, you know, velociraptor, cheetah speed, pack hunters, super intelligent, giant sized
1:40:36 animals. And okay. 1993, it’s a bit more forgivable, but even then we were pretty confident they had
1:40:42 feathers. Is any of that true? Wait, so, uh, probably not the, the, the pack hunter aspect.
1:40:48 Um, so that’s something I’ve written quite a lot about. Um, the evidence for pack hunting in any
1:40:57 dinosaur at all is almost non-existent. Um, it, it basically doesn’t exist. And that’s going exactly
1:41:02 back to again, that stuff we’re talking about bite marks and toponomy and like the history of
1:41:08 specimens and how you interpret. So what kind of evidence would show like maybe bite marks from
1:41:13 multiple sources? So it’s, so it’s really, really tough. So the, the main one which was put forward
1:41:21 is there’s this famous, um, association in Montana of Deinonychus, which is often confused with velociraptor,
1:41:27 including in the books and FUFI, um, basically a bigger version of this that’s rather older from the, um,
1:41:32 early Cretaceous and a thing called Tenontosaurus, which is kind of iguanodontine. So iguanodontine,
1:41:39 spiky thumbs, basically otherwise a fairly run of the mill herbivore. And there are two sites,
1:41:44 I believe for this, but there’s one that’s much more important where you have a Tenontosaurus carcass
1:41:51 with Deinonychus carcasses. And so the interpretation of this is, well, this is a group that brought down
1:41:55 the herbivore. And of course the immediate kind of counter argument to that is,
1:42:01 well, why did they all die there? Like when, you know, when lions kill a wildebeest,
1:42:07 they eat it. They don’t all just die next to it. Or even if they did kill it and start eating it.
1:42:12 And then like, if they got into a fight and killed each other, well, lions as a species are not going
1:42:16 to hang around for very long. If every time they kill something, they get into a mortal fight and
1:42:26 kill half the pride. There’s nothing obvious that killed them. But it’s at least possible that this was
1:42:31 something like a predator trap. So predator traps are really neat. So La Brea Tar Pits is a classic
1:42:38 example. The idea is a herbivore stumbles into something like tar. You’ve got your deer or wildebeest
1:42:43 storm mammoth or whatever it is, waist deep in tar and going, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m making horrible
1:42:49 noises. And, you know, Smealodon walks over and goes, great, and wades out after it. And he’s now stuck.
1:42:54 And then the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And then lo and behold,
1:42:58 you now have something like La Brea, where they’ve got like, the numbers are something absurd. Like,
1:43:04 I think they’ve got like three mammoths and one ground sloth, and then it’s like a hundred
1:43:08 direwolves and 40 Smealodon. Because it’s just sucking the carnivores in.
1:43:09 Wow.
1:43:14 And you get these really distorted ratios. I don’t think that’s the case of the Deinonychus
1:43:19 to Nontotaurus stuff, because there’s ways that you can probably rule that out. But there are
1:43:24 probably places like this where it’s happened. Again, the other one is the Toxin one. Yeah,
1:43:29 Cleveland Lloyd, so it’s just coming up on your screen. That’s another one with loads of dinosaurs,
1:43:36 this Allosaurus. But we’ve definitely seen it with, I think this has come up with something
1:43:42 like lions or wolves. Like, they found loads of them dead by a lake, and it turned out, or this pond.
1:43:48 And this pond had got some really sort of nasty algal bloom toxin in it. And the interpretation was
1:43:53 the same kind of thing, is that a couple of deer were drinking, this stuff’s toxic and kills you
1:43:59 and kills you within minutes, keels over dies. Wolf smells dead meat, comes over, starts eating it,
1:44:05 has a drink, keels over and dies. And then it’s not getting, you’re just dying from the toxicity rather
1:44:11 than being like, physically sucked in and trapped. But the same effect can happen. And so you just end
1:44:12 up with a pile of dead bodies.
1:44:17 So I’m pulling up some stuff here. First of all, shout out to Perplexity, super awesome.
1:44:23 It’d be great if you fact check some of this stuff. So fossil discoveries, including parallel track
1:44:29 waves and bone beds containing multiple Tyrannosaurus suggest these large predators sometimes moved and
1:44:33 possibly hunted in groups. You as a person who wrote a book about the behavior of dinosaurs.
1:44:40 Yep. Let me deconstruct that like almost instantly. So it’s really easy. Cause this, this is my book on
1:44:46 dinosaur behavior. This is just the kind of thing I’m talking about. So the, the Tyrannosaur track
1:44:53 waves of a group of Tyrannosaurs is I think four or five tracks total. So it’s like two from one animal,
1:44:56 two from a second animal and one from a third animal. That’s not the end of the world. That’s
1:45:02 somehow how track waves formed. Like, you know, the rocks broken up, they stood on mud and then they
1:45:03 didn’t, whatever.
1:45:08 Just to clarify, track waves means footprints of multiple, maybe steps.
1:45:13 Yeah. One of them has got a left and right and the other two don’t. It’s, it’s very fragmentary,
1:45:17 but I haven’t, that’s not a problem with the interpretation. The problem is this is interpreted
1:45:25 as a group of them moving together. Well, why? Because they’re going in roughly the same direction.
1:45:34 Okay. And they’re roughly equal sizes. Okay. But like I’ve seen solitary animals moving in groups.
1:45:39 Um, a guy I know quite well in South Africa, I got a South Africa regulator for my teaching actually.
1:45:44 Um, and he’s one of the big guys at South African national parks. And he gives me the skinny on all
1:45:49 kinds of weird stuff. And he’s telling me a few years ago that one of his park rangers had observed
1:45:54 leopards hunting together in a group. Now, leopards are basically not just solitary. They’re like
1:45:59 anti-social. Like they beat the hell out of each other if they come near each other.
1:46:03 But I’ve also seen, you know, you, you get game trails are a thing.
1:46:10 The paths that single animals take. If a female is in heat, like males will track her down and follow her.
1:46:16 So you’ll get one set of footprints. And then a couple of hours later, a male will come past. And a couple of
1:46:20 hours later, another male will come past. And now you’ve got three sets of footprints all traveling in
1:46:27 the same direction on the same bit of path, but they live on their own, let alone hunting together,
1:46:33 which is a massive step above this. And then the one I’ve talked about quite a bit in my book is
1:46:37 Spotted Hyena, Krakuta Krakuta, which is the one, there’s a whole bunch of hyenas, but this is the
1:46:44 one everyone knows. They’re the big laughing hyena and can see plenty of Attenborough type documentaries of
1:46:49 them, seven or eight of them, or even 10 or 12 of them going into a herd and ripping apart wildebeest
1:46:53 or zebra or whatever it is. But actually, if you read the scientific literature, this is really rare.
1:47:01 They mostly hunt on their own. Now they do live in these social clans with hierarchies and complex
1:47:09 social interactions. They are very social animals, but they mostly hunt on their own. So even if you find
1:47:14 loads of track ways of the moving together, or as again, there’s one, if not two for tyrannosaurs,
1:47:19 we’ve got multiple tyrannosaurs together, and that’s been argued for pack hunting. At best,
1:47:25 that argues they might have lived together, but it doesn’t tell you whether or not they hunted together.
1:47:29 So how can we make a decision on one way or the other?
1:47:37 So I, I mean, I, I tend to be ultra conservative in this context, and I think we should probably avoid
1:47:42 saying things that we’re not quite confident about. I don’t want to ever go down the, we must have
1:47:47 really definitive 100% convincing evidence because this is paleo and we don’t have that kind of data.
1:47:53 But just as I talked about with things like the predator-prey size ratio stuff, there is data we
1:48:01 can start to use on living species about what tends to trigger hunting in groups or living in groups,
1:48:06 and what data there might be from stuff like brain sizes or other track ways. Or again,
1:48:13 we do have bite marks indicating prey size. If you start finding repeated attacks on big prey
1:48:19 from relatively small predators, that would be quite convincing. As you said, maybe we had bite marks of
1:48:26 multiple different sizes. Now that on its own, it comes hard because obviously scavenging,
1:48:32 um, you know, tyrannosaurs are an exception. Most dinosaurs, most carnivorous dinosaurs have pretty
1:48:39 similarly shaped teeth. So how easy is it to tell an adult from a juvenile from an adult from a different
1:48:46 species that’s just a bit smaller? Probably pretty tricky. I mean, for me, I think the,
1:48:51 the kind of gold standard, which I don’t think we’re ever going to find, but you never know,
1:48:58 you could in theory get a track way of something like a herbivore with a whole bunch of carnivore
1:49:04 tracks coming by it. We do have a couple like this, but they don’t have what I’d really want to see,
1:49:10 which is if you trace the footprints of the individual carnivores, and if A’s in early on,
1:49:16 A’s footprint go on top of B’s, but later on B’s go on top of A’s, they must have been there at the
1:49:22 same time. Cause there’s no way they could have been even minutes or hours apart. So if you had
1:49:28 that, then those two must be together, or at least within sight of each other. And one’s not turning
1:49:33 around and roaring or having a fight. If you can do that with seven or eight, all converging on one
1:49:39 herbivore and then everything goes manic. Well, that’s really pretty convincing.
1:49:45 It is so fascinating and awesome. But like the Sherlock Holmes aspect of paleontology,
1:49:50 like figuring out, cause you have very little signal and you have to figure out the puzzle of
1:49:54 it from that. And like, that’s, this is such a brilliant, you’re giving so many brilliant examples
1:49:59 of like, yeah, if A steps on top of B and then B steps on top of A, that’s a strong signal that they
1:50:00 were walking together.
1:50:06 I am a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan and he references Cuvier. So Cuvier is this legendary
1:50:11 French anatomist, uh, Baron Cuvier. Uh, he was the first guy to posit that things went extinct
1:50:15 working on mammoths. And he said, well, there’s nothing like this alive today. So extinction happens,
1:50:23 which before that we didn’t really know. And Holmes has a line about just as Cuvier can restore an
1:50:30 animal from the smallest bone. So I can restore the events from the smallest detail or I’m paraphrasing,
1:50:37 but I’m not far off. Yeah. There’s use to that. You have used an analogy that Conan Doyle specifically
1:50:41 used for Holmes going back to paleontology. I mean, it’s obvious. It’s clear. It’s right there. Yeah.
1:50:47 But that’s how on the nose you are with that one. So, okay. So basically you clarified and showed
1:50:51 all the things that Jurassic got right. Yeah. We got off topic before we even got onto Jurassic.
1:50:57 On just Veloceropter, you said that the, you know, yeah, the size, the pack hunting, all of that.
1:51:02 The pack hunting, just to round off on that, it’s like, I don’t know. Maybe, um, there’s actually
1:51:08 been some more recent stuff on Deinonychus looking at things like isotopes in the teeth and feeding
1:51:14 traces and some other stuff that’s hinting that maybe there is more going on there. Um, which is
1:51:19 great. I’m, I’m not anti the idea that this exists, but you, you absolutely get this buildup of
1:51:24 The idea that Veloceropter is a pack hunter comes from Deinonychus. And I think the evidence
1:51:30 from Deinonychus is really weak in exactly the way that, okay, lions are group hunters. We know they
1:51:37 are. Does that mean that leopards are and tigers and puma? No. So why on earth do you think that just
1:51:43 because Veloceropter, even if Deinonychus is, that doesn’t really tell you anything about Veloceropter.
1:51:49 Um, group hunting has all kinds of more complicated dynamics going on it than just
1:51:54 close relatives tend to do it. You can flip that around, you know, African hunting dog,
1:52:00 wolves, um, things like bush dogs. There’s various canids that all hunt in groups, but then you’ve
1:52:06 got things like main wolves, which are effectively solitary. Um, the hyenas spotted hyena are, yeah,
1:52:10 these super social animals, but the brown hyena, the striped hyena and the aard wolf are solitary.
1:52:16 So you, you just can’t do group versus solitary off
1:52:22 close relatives or anything like that. I am very sure a ton of dinosaurs were
1:52:29 aggregates, lived in groups to some degree, and I’m very sure some of them were social with complex
1:52:37 lives and hierarchies and even pack hunting. Which ones? I have very little idea because I think the data
1:52:45 is so sparse that we can’t really say it with any confidence for anything, in my opinion. I think that
1:52:50 can be got at. I think we need to start getting at it with the sort of stuff I’m talking about, like get a
1:52:55 better understanding of what drives sociality in lions versus tigers versus leopards. You know,
1:53:02 relatively close relatives who overlap, don’t forget, in India, leopards and tigers overlap with lions.
1:53:07 The asiatic lion is still there. Um, so you can talk about ecosystem structure and prey size and
1:53:13 prey type and all this stuff. We can, maybe, maybe we can start piecing that together a bit better
1:53:19 and then apply that to stuff like the trackways and the isotopes and all the rest of it, um,
1:53:25 bite marks and these mass mortality sites. So I think it can be done, but personally, like what were
1:53:30 pack hunters? No idea. I don’t think, I don’t think any of them were in the sense that I don’t,
1:53:36 think we’ve got good evidence for any of them, but there probably exists on earth definitive
1:53:41 evidence one way or the other. Yeah, probably for some of them. I mean, I think it’s well within
1:53:48 their scope. One of the papers writing about this, ironically arguing against pack hunting in Deinonychus,
1:53:53 um, said that, well, it’s probably not the case because you don’t really see pack hunting in birds.
1:53:58 And so if you don’t see it in birds, then dinosaurs being their ancestor, if birds can’t evolve it,
1:54:04 maybe dinosaurs couldn’t have evolved it, which I’m not sure is a great logical argument because of the
1:54:10 complexities of social behavior anyway. But then there are a couple of birds which actively hunt in
1:54:15 groups, uh, things like the giant ground hornbills, um, Ethiopia and South Africa are a really good
1:54:22 example of that. So, so that point is incorrect. And then we see, if not true sociality, we see
1:54:28 cooperation in crocodilians and we’re seeing degrees of social behavior in things like iguanas.
1:54:33 So the idea that like, well, birds are super advanced and dinosaurs can’t do it because the
1:54:37 stupid reptiles are too stupid and therefore dinosaurs are more like them, which isn’t quite
1:54:42 what they’re saying, but it’s sort of the unwritten idea. Well, we have social behavior and cooperation
1:54:50 behavior in crocs and in lizards. So that really gives you the impression that dinosaurs theoretically,
1:54:55 at least are perfectly capable of that. So there’s pack hunting, but there’s also sociality,
1:55:01 which is such an interesting idea is how did they live? And this is something you look at that
1:55:07 paleontology doesn’t often touch is like the lives. Yeah. Because, you know, animals are doing
1:55:12 complicated things. So, you know, in the case of lions, a large part of this is down to territoriality
1:55:18 and the males ultimately are defending the territory and that’s effectively protecting the females.
1:55:23 But of course, what they’re mostly protecting them from is other males. So there’s a ludicrous
1:55:29 bit of self-interest. But that’s effectively how it’s operating as a system. But it could just be
1:55:35 predatory type. Cheetahs are my go-to example for this. So cheetahs are the weird ones compared to the
1:55:42 other cats because females are solitary, but males are social. So brothers will, when, you know,
1:55:46 if the female has five or six cubs, the brothers will stay together in a group and then the girls will go
1:55:51 off on their own. And if you’re, if you’re the only brother or the only survivor, you will usually hung
1:55:56 up, hook up with a gang of other males. So cheetahs are pack hunters if you’re male and a solitary
1:56:03 hunter if you’re female. So it’s not about territory defense or occupation for them. It’s about prey type.
1:56:08 Is it possible to know the sex of a T-Rex or any of the other dinosaurs? Like what,
1:56:10 what can paleontology show us?
1:56:15 So in theory, yes. In practice, it’s way more complicated. So unless you get very lucky,
1:56:21 we have a handful of specimens that still have eggs inside them. Instant giveaway. But that’s like
1:56:28 two or three. Um, what you can look for is both reptiles and birds have a thing called medullary
1:56:35 bone. And when you’re laying eggs and you need a lot of calcium very quickly, because that eggshell
1:56:40 goes on basically like kind of like the last minute during egg development. So you need a lot of calcium
1:56:46 very quickly. So during the laying season, these animals grow this really weird kind of bone texture
1:56:52 on big things like the femur and the humerus, like really big bones in the body. And that’s,
1:56:56 it’s got a weird texture because it’s full of blood vessels and it’s full of blood vessels so that you
1:57:01 can basically apply a lot of blood supply to it quickly, suck up some of the calcium from that bone,
1:57:09 take it through the system, put it on the eggs, lay your eggs. We can find that. So if you have a
1:57:13 dinosaur bone and it’s the right kind of thing, so you can’t do it on like a finger or a claw or a bit
1:57:18 of rib, but nice big bone, you could cut a chunk of that out, grind it down to the point that it’s
1:57:23 virtually transparent, fraction of a millimeter thick, put it under a microscope and have a look.
1:57:29 And if you see the right bone texture, that’s, there’s some exceptions, but that’s very probably
1:57:35 medullary bone and you have yourself a female. So the instant assumption is, okay, so you can tell
1:57:42 female from male. No, we can tell laying female from everything else. So males won’t have medullary
1:57:47 bone. Young females won’t have them. Females outside of the breeding season won’t have it.
1:57:52 Females inside the breeding season, but maybe they’ve been really sick this year, don’t have it. Or they
1:57:59 laid their eggs early and now they don’t need it anymore, won’t have it. So occasionally, if you cut up
1:58:06 a bone, which of course we try not to do that much, you can get the signal of medullary bone and infer that
1:58:11 you have a female in the breeding season. But there’s no like large bone structure differences.
1:58:20 Well, maybe there is, but we haven’t seen it. You look at things like, um, kudu or, um, black buck and
1:58:27 all kinds of antelope or even most deer. And the males have horns or antlers and the females don’t.
1:58:33 And then you look at something like triceratops and all the ceratopsians, it’s a big clade of,
1:58:40 oh, must be 40 species by now. And every single one of them has the frill and has some kind of horn
1:58:47 somewhere. You don’t have the hornless ones or the frillless ones in the way that we do with
1:58:53 a lot of these. I’m trying to figure out how, is there, how many of the species is it obvious
1:58:59 that there’s a, like, like pelvis differences, all that? So pelvis differences works on like humans and
1:59:05 apes and maybe a couple of other mammals, but it’s mostly not very good because we, it’s because we
1:59:11 give birth to such a gigantic baby with a gigantic head compared to our sizes that women have different
1:59:16 pelvises to men. And then there’s size differences. Like the skull is not as reliable as the pelvis.
1:59:20 And then again, you just need to look at, you know, humans are always slightly dodgy with this
1:59:25 because of, you know, our evolutionary history and cultural history. But like, you know, there’s,
1:59:31 there’s population differences. You know, you, you, there are, there are main female lions in
1:59:38 places. There are mainless male lions in places. Um, reindeer, uh, female reindeer have antlers in
1:59:42 winter. So Rudolph was a girl because every illustration of Santa and his reindeer ever has,
1:59:47 they all have antlers and that’s, that’s a female reindeer, not a male if it’s winter.
1:59:52 So basically we don’t know much about the dating and the sex lives of T-Rexes.
2:00:01 Well, not much, but you can make some inferences. So for example, um, all tyrannosaurs, uh, have at least
2:00:05 some kind of crest on the head. The early ones have like this midline, it really doesn’t work on a
2:00:09 human. They have like a midline crest running along the top of the nose that sticks up.
2:00:16 The later ones largely don’t, but they do have this weird armored structure along those fused
2:00:22 nasals. And then they have little horns over the eyes. Those, as far as we can tell, don’t really have
2:00:30 any kind of obvious mechanical function and loads like outside of the feathered dinosaurs, the vast
2:00:35 majority of dinos of carnivorous dinosaurs have some kind of crest or display feature on the head.
2:00:40 When you say display feature, meaning for sex appeal to attract mates or something like that.
2:00:47 So I, I’ve always favored the term socio sexual selection to cover both sexual display and sexual
2:00:52 dominance and communication. Um, but also social ones, because those two things are hard to tell
2:01:00 apart. Female lions find males with darker manes sexier, but male lions find males with darker manes
2:01:04 more intimidating. So one of them is sex, but one of them is social.
2:01:08 Nice. I mean, I guess it goes hand in hand. Sure.
2:01:13 It can, but then you get things like the other one I go for is, uh, black swans, these beautiful
2:01:18 Australian birds. They have these really weird curly feathers on their wings and males and females both
2:01:24 have them. And males prefer females with curlier feathers and females prefer males with curlier feathers
2:01:32 as an obvious sexual link, but then females fight to females fight over the best nesting spots and the
2:01:34 females with the curliest feathers tend to win those fights.
2:01:35 How does that make sense?
2:01:40 This gets into classic sexual selection theory. It’s, it’s what’s called an honest signal.
2:01:47 You couldn’t have those curly feathers if you weren’t able to support them because they’re their primary
2:01:53 feathers on the wings. And what it actually does is it makes it harder to fly. So you’re basically going,
2:02:00 look how tough I am. I’ve grown this big and I can fly and carry on with my giant curly feathers
2:02:07 because I’m really tough and I’m in good shape. And it’s the same with the lion. The reason you get pale
2:02:12 lions in the South is because it’s close to the equator because it’s too hot. So there’s the trade-off because
2:02:19 if you have a really black mane, yeah, all the males know your rock and all the females know you’re super sexy,
2:02:25 but you just die of overheating. The trade-off is if the heat’s going to kill you, you’re probably better
2:02:32 off being a bit paler and surviving in order to reproduce than you are being jet black and just
2:02:35 dying instantly as soon as it gets hot.
2:02:36 So there’s trade-offs there. Okay.
2:02:43 Yeah. And that’s probably what’s happening with the theropods. The, all the little crests and horns,
2:02:49 ceratosaurus, dilophosaurus, tyrannosaurs, allosaurs have big crests over the eyes and all kinds of others.
2:02:56 My, I’ve written about this. I think this is the trade-off. You’re going for the sexiest look and the
2:03:00 sexiest look is the biggest horns or the biggest spikes and whatever’s on the head. Probably also
2:03:06 then with the brightest colors and the most display patterns. But also this, this gives you a way to
2:03:11 your prey. If you’re trying to hide or you’re trying to sneak up on something, being brightly colored or
2:03:17 having stripes for all this extra stuff on your head, you, you, you get spotted. But then that’s
2:03:24 the trade-off is if I’m this big and my horns are, my horns are this big and this red and yellow, and I
2:03:29 can still, whoop, I can still run those guys down and hunt them and kill them and eat them.
2:03:30 Yeah.
2:03:36 Then look how great I must be. Whereas that little guy, he’s only got weedy little crests and they’re,
2:03:42 and they’re really dark because he’s so bad at catching stuff. He doesn’t have the extra energy
2:03:48 to grow big crests. And so, and that’s why, but when you’re a herbivore, you don’t have that pressure,
2:03:52 particularly something like this is protoceratops, but something like triceratops and these guys,
2:03:56 they’re living in big groups. You can’t hide from a predator when you’re a group of 20 animals that
2:04:04 are 10 tons each. So who cares? You just grow the biggest signal you can possibly grow. And lo and
2:04:06 behold, they have giant frills and giant horns.
2:04:13 What can you say about beauty in evolution? So something that’s, maybe you can educate me,
2:04:17 but something that’s not quite an honest signal, that’s just pure beauty, like peacock feathers.
2:04:23 So there are things which we think operate closer to that. So there are, these are the two kind of
2:04:28 classic ideas of sexual selection, and both are probably true to certain degrees in various different
2:04:33 species. One is the honest signal, or it’s the kind of a handicap hypothesis, because you’re holding
2:04:39 yourself back whilst proving you can still do it. I ran the marathon, you know, carrying a couple of
2:04:44 weights, you’re obviously stronger than the guy who ran the marathon without. And so that’s why it’s an
2:04:48 honest signal, and it’s why it’s a handicap. But the other one is what’s called the sexy son’s
2:04:55 hypothesis. And the idea is, a female might just find a male attractive for no other reason than random.
2:05:04 There is some component of her brain or whatever it may be that that just looks cool. And you can
2:05:09 actually sort of get this as a human, like forget, forget human beauty. You can, you can look at a
2:05:12 bottle and go, that bottle’s kind of nice. And that bottle’s kind of ugly.
2:05:16 Where do you put like, like birds are interesting with this. Well, where do you put peacock feathers?
2:05:22 So they’re, they’re probably more handicap hypothesis because the colors that go into
2:05:28 them and the sheer size and shape. And these things basically can’t fly. Um, they’re really
2:05:29 vulnerable to predators.
2:05:33 Can the handicap hypothesis explain just how beautiful peacock feathers get?
2:05:40 So probably not entirely. There’s, there’s almost certainly randomness going on in there
2:05:44 as well. And then the eye spots, we know that eye spots are attractive, are probably encoded
2:05:49 in some way. Um, but yeah, so going back to the sexy sons, the idea is females prefer something
2:05:54 different for whatever reason. And there might actually be some reasons females prefer things
2:06:01 that are different. Different usually means separate and outside. And that usually comes with
2:06:03 it variation, like inherently.
2:06:07 Oh, so variation is evolutionary a turn on.
2:06:08 Yeah, basically.
2:06:12 Wouldn’t that, man, you’re rolling the dice though, aren’t you?
2:06:17 Yeah. Well, you, so you, you’ve, you’ve got to remember again, it’s really easy to look at
2:06:23 that sort of thing with a human perspective where, uh, maximum reproductive output. I think the,
2:06:28 the record there’s, there’s some obscure, there’s something like 66 children, which is probably
2:06:34 apocryphal for a Russian woman who had loads of triplets and quads, but like humans don’t have
2:06:42 many offspring, but most animals lay dozens of eggs or hundreds of eggs or thousands of eggs at a
2:06:48 time. So actually, so diversity pays off more there. So diversity can pay off. We, we think that’s
2:06:53 probably a major part of the reason that sex evolved in the first place is it’s gives you
2:06:57 resistance to changing environment and it gives you resistance to parasites and diseases,
2:07:02 which often reproduce way faster than you do. You know, bacteria can divide in a few hours. We
2:07:09 reproduce every 20 years. That’s quite a difference. If we were all asexual clones and you’re vulnerable
2:07:14 to some disease, you’re probably going to get wiped out. Look at the, you know, Irish potato famine,
2:07:20 something like that. Um, so different may be appealing simply because it is different. It’s
2:07:27 giving you variation. Um, and there’s at least some evidence for that. There’s, um, sword tails. So
2:07:33 anyone who keeps little fish, uh, if anyone’s who’s a tropical fish, uh, keeper, uh, sword tails are really
2:07:38 quite common little tropical fish that you can get in all kinds of aquarium shops. And they’re a very
2:07:43 boring fish shape, but the lower lobe of their tail has a big spike on it. And that’s the name.
2:07:49 And they’re really close relatives of a group called the mollies, which basically don’t have that. And
2:07:54 in the wild, there, these are Amazonian fish. They don’t usually encounter each other, but even if you
2:07:58 go and get not even the domesticated form, cause these things have been bred for, you know, decades at
2:08:03 this point, you can go and get some wild mollies and give them a wild male sword tail. And they think
2:08:09 he’s so much better than all the male mollies. They will go for that one and they will preferentially
2:08:14 mate with that one. We don’t know the exact mechanism, but it appears to be, it looks similar
2:08:20 enough that I recognize it as a potential mate, but different enough that this is exciting. And then
2:08:25 this is where the sexy sons kick in because the females are now assuming those animals are successful
2:08:30 and they can hybridize, or maybe it’s just a male who just happens to be a little bit blue or a little
2:08:36 bit red or whatever it may be. Um, well, the female offspring, the daughters are probably going to
2:08:43 inherit mother’s preference. I really like red and the males are probably going to have red in them
2:08:49 because their dad had more red. So guess what the next generation does? There’s more red and the
2:08:54 females like more red and you don’t have to come back much further. And suddenly all the males are bright
2:09:02 red. And that’s closer to beauty than I think almost anything else would be with still a naturalistic
2:09:02 explanation.
2:09:07 We kind of started talking about beauty from how much, uh, social life.
2:09:08 Yeah. A T-Rex might have.
2:09:15 A T-Rex might have. So, uh, uh, just to kind of take that to a place of what we know and what we don’t
2:09:22 know. So can we kind of know something about their, uh, their social life, where they lived, how they lived?
2:09:28 So the very fact that they have these apparently socio-sexually selected signals, the little crest
2:09:35 and stuff in the head. So there’s a branch of sexual selection called mutual sexual selection.
2:09:40 And the black swans are an example of this. The classic sexual selection is, yeah, your peacocks
2:09:46 and your lions and things like this. Males are bigger and more flamboyant and whatever it is.
2:09:51 And they’re doing all the competing, but you get mutual sexual selection. And this is really common
2:09:56 in a whole bunch of things that people are familiar with, but don’t know loads of seabirds, um, starlings,
2:10:01 the common starling that we have Europe and has been introduced into the U S parrots, various other
2:10:09 things where basically males and females invest similarly in rearing the offspring. And so the idea
2:10:15 generally both with handicap and sexy son, but particularly with handicap is the idea is the males are proving
2:10:18 their worth. They’re basically saying, I’m the biggest, strongest, healthiest. I’ve got the best genes.
2:10:24 I should be the father of your offspring. They go around showing off and then mate with as many
2:10:30 females as possible while the females then do all the work and make the nest and look after the chicks
2:10:35 and yeah, or rear them or give birth or whatever it may be. Yada, yada, yada. And so the idea with
2:10:41 mutual sexual selection is, well, what if there’s not much food around? Things like puffins, uh, you know,
2:10:44 penguins in the Arctic, you know, where the male sits with the egg and the female
2:10:50 toddles off, gets food and then comes back two months later or whatever it is. Um, on their own,
2:10:58 they can’t rear the offspring. They have to have a male investment. Well, now suddenly the male’s now
2:11:02 putting loads of effort in. So the male’s now in the same position that a female would be in under
2:11:08 the normal conditions. You don’t want to be the sexiest, toughest, biggest male, and you can only
2:11:13 mate once. All right. There’s, there’s various cheats, but we won’t get into that just yet. You’re only
2:11:16 going to mate once and you’re going to put all your effort into helping rearing offspring rather
2:11:21 than chasing down as many girls as possible. Are you going to go for the biggest, fittest female
2:11:26 as well? Are you going to go for the small weedy one that doesn’t look very well? You go for the
2:11:33 best one. Well, how do you know that? Well, cause she’s got a crest as well. And so suddenly you now
2:11:38 get mutual ornamentation, just like the black swans, where the males are checking out the curliest
2:11:42 females and the females are checking out the curliest males. And you’ll see they mutually
2:11:47 pair up. This is what we see with things like starlings. Males like the brightest females,
2:11:52 females like the brightest males, they tend to form pairs. The darkest and least bright ones
2:11:55 are obviously kind of left with each other at the bottom of the pile. They tend to pair up.
2:12:01 But it means that when you get signals in both males and females, like every triceratops or every
2:12:09 tyrannosaurus, it at least hints that they’re going down this route and that they might cooperate for
2:12:15 reproduction. Wow. Another like weak signal that tells a part of the story. Yeah. And the problem
2:12:20 is it’s compromised by lots of things. So that goes back to your earlier question about telling males and
2:12:25 females apart. The vast majority of dinosaur species, like 90 plus percent are known from a single
2:12:31 specimen. And a specimen is not necessarily very complete at all. It might be a couple of bones. It might be
2:12:38 one bone. It might be a tooth in a couple of cases. The actual number where we’ve got a decent number
2:12:46 of real whole skeletons that we can actually compare to each other, less than 10, probably more like five
2:12:55 or six. Can I ask you a weird question? If you were to, uh, let’s say all humans died right now,
2:13:01 press the button, gone. How much of human civilization would you be able to reconstruct
2:13:05 from just the skeletons that are in the ground? Like you just started collecting skeletons. There’s
2:13:12 a lot of them. There’s billions of them. Would you be able to start telling a story like urban
2:13:17 centers? Yeah, probably. You could probably reconstruct a lot, right? And if nothing else, just the,
2:13:25 you know, superlative brain cavity will tell you quite a lot, you know, must have been very,
2:13:28 very smart with the brain that big. You can probably reconstruct some of the behavior,
2:13:32 a lot of the behavior, social behavior, a lot of the stuff. And you’re, you’re going to see stuff
2:13:37 like, you know, it’s the famous one of, I think it was a Neanderthal. There was a famous question
2:13:42 of like, you know, at what point do you think society exists? And it may have been one of the
2:13:47 leakies, but the answer was basically this skeleton, because it was someone with a re like a properly
2:13:55 busted leg and then it fully healed. And it’s like, if that person was on their own, just dead, someone
2:14:01 had to look after them for months to get that level of healing. You only do that to someone you’re
2:14:06 really devoted to and probably a group of people because even one person can’t look after one other
2:14:14 person. Right. So that’s your society. And yeah, you think about the pathology of skeletons in the
2:14:20 human race. How, you know, how many of us have broken a bone? Most, most adults have probably
2:14:25 broken a couple of bones, even if it’s just a finger or, or a nose or something. But then you
2:14:31 think about what medicine has done and you would be able to see treatments of complete compound
2:14:36 fractures of guys who survived horrific car crashes and treatments of cancer, bone cancers and stuff
2:14:41 like that. You would see that. Well, how’s that happening? Either they’re magic or they’ve got some
2:14:47 kind of, in which case they’d probably cure it instantly or there’s some kind of technology in
2:14:54 society supporting that change. That just hints at the fact that the, the evidence collection and the
2:15:01 reasoning mechanism that paleontology and archeology uses is really powerful. Yeah. So it could be very
2:15:05 effective even, even just with a small amount of data. I mean, you could put it, but it’s the right
2:15:09 amount of data. That’s the thing we can, we can find dozens of skeletons that we can’t do very much
2:15:14 with. And then the right one that, you know, things like stomach contents, you know, that’s a super
2:15:18 or bite marks. That’s a super powerful bit of data, but it doesn’t turn up that often. So it’s not like
2:15:23 you can get it off every skeleton. And that’s the thing. It’s, it’s the, it’s the pool of data. And I
2:15:31 think that’s what people miss. We, we, as paleontologists, um, we get caught up on single
2:15:39 superlative specimens and then try and take them as a, like a silver bullet almost. So Microraptor,
2:15:43 I mentioned this before, a little flying dinosaur, crow size or gliding dinosaur, crow size thing from
2:15:50 China. We’ve got at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents.
2:15:55 Um, there’s one I’ve described with a little mammal foot inside it. There’s one with a bird inside it.
2:16:00 There’s one with a lizard inside it. And there’s one with a fish inside it on their own. And this
2:16:05 happened for at least two of the papers describing these things. It’s like, it ate fish. These are
2:16:14 fish eating animals. No, that one ate one fish once. That one ate one bird once. That one ate one mammal
2:16:21 once. And that one ate one lizard once. So what have we actually got here? I suspect we’ve got a group of
2:16:25 generalists and we just happened to have found them eating different things at different times, but
2:16:31 equally it’s also possible at least that, yeah, this is one of these things and it had learned to
2:16:35 eat fish when the others hadn’t. And actually this was most of the fish eaters and the others ate
2:16:40 whatever they could get. Maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest. Maybe one found it dead on the
2:16:50 ground. You don’t really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating, but potentially misleading.
2:16:54 The way you’re describing it now, it seems like yes, it’s potentially misleading, but there’s
2:16:59 in your whole way of being and the way you’ve been talking about this stuff, I can see that
2:17:05 it’s not just the direct evidence you’re mentioning. It’s like, it’s a bunch of intuitions you build up.
2:17:10 It’s like you’re stitching together a bunch of little things. It’s the Sherlock Holmes things. It’s not just the
2:17:17 clearly this one piece of evidence. It’s like, okay, what do I know about the general other dinosaurs around
2:17:23 the area? What did the different animals, how animals usually behave about this period about the environment and
2:17:30 all of that comes together. And then. Yeah. And that’s so one thing I’ve definitely written about, um, is yeah, the, the
2:17:38 independent lines of evidence. Can you get stuff that is as far as possible, truly independent
2:17:45 from the other data? And does it give you the same answer? And then when it does, that’s incredibly
2:17:52 powerful. Um, so Spinosaurus or the, the Spinosaurus as a whole is my go-to example for this. So the
2:17:57 guys, the famous big sail back and the weird crocodile like head, uh, though some of them look rather
2:18:02 different to that. And if you look across all the species and specimens that we have incredibly
2:18:11 fragmentary and very badly known, but they’re all basically associated with, um, when you look at the
2:18:17 gestalt, you see a whole bunch of stuff for these things. So they do have a surprisingly crocodile like
2:18:22 head and crocodile like teeth compared to every other carnivorous dinosaur. And when you do the
2:18:28 mechanical analysis, you see, they function in a very similar way. And indeed teeth, oh, here’s a
2:18:35 spinosaur tooth, uh, with very nearly circular cross-section, really distinctive, similar to
2:18:42 crocodiles, similar to dolphins, similar to fish eating fish. So points to fish, crocodile like head
2:18:48 points to fish, crocks eat other stuff too, but still, um, they’re usually found in or near aquatic
2:18:53 systems. Now fossils in general tend to turn up in aquatic systems because you’ve got to be buried to
2:19:00 become a fossil. So water association is common, but even so that’s true. They turn up in places where
2:19:06 lots of other dinosaurs don’t tend to turn up, including carnivores, which suggests they’re eating
2:19:13 something else. Um, if you look at the isotopic signature of the teeth, um, often it correlates with
2:19:18 crocodiles, fish, turtles, and stuff that lives in water and doesn’t correlate well with other
2:19:25 land-living dinosaurs that lived in the same time and same place. So you put all of that together
2:19:31 and it’s really hard to argue, oh, in addition to the tiny detail of baryonyx, the British one
2:19:37 was found with fish scales inside its chest cavity. So you put all of that together and yeah, I’m not
2:19:43 saying it only ate fish. I’m sure it ate big shrimp and turtles. And we know they were predating on
2:19:47 terrestrial dinosaurs and pterosaurs because again, stomach contents and teeth and stuff.
2:19:53 But fundamentally this is an animal or a group of animals doing something different to the other
2:19:59 carnivorous dinosaurs. And it’s probably linked to water and it’s probably linked to fish as a
2:20:04 predominant way of living. We should mention that you’re working on a book out in early 2026.
2:20:09 Um, so in the UK, it’ll be out in November in North America, January or February, 2026.
2:20:12 It’s, it’s called Spinosaur Tales, the biology and ecology of the Spinosaurus.
2:20:16 And, uh, written with Mark Witten, who did that picture.
2:20:17 It’s a beautiful creature.
2:20:21 Which I think is in there. He, Mark’s done a ton of new artwork. He, he helped write the book,
2:20:23 but he’s also the, the artist.
2:20:25 I mean, can you describe a little bit more about this creature? There’s a,
2:20:29 there’s a bunch of stuff like what you just mentioned. There’s some debate.
2:20:33 Weird. Is it, is it how, to what degree is it aquatic?
2:20:36 So what, what, not very is my take.
2:20:38 So does it live in the water? Does it step in the water?
2:20:44 Yeah. So I think it’s basically a big wader. It’s a poor analogy, but it’s a very weird giant
2:20:46 stalk. Oh God.
2:20:46 Or heron.
2:20:47 What’s giant?
2:20:54 Um, yeah. So potentially bigger than T-Rex linearly, not in mass again, really quite narrow chest versus
2:21:01 that T-Rex barrel, but potentially 15 meters long. So bigger than any T-Rex we found, at least in terms
2:21:02 of length.
2:21:05 Can you describe what it looks like though? I mean, there’s some iconic features to it, right?
2:21:13 Yeah. So this really quite long head, um, with a kind of wavy jawline, like, like animals have,
2:21:18 you know, most carnivores have straight jaws. This one has a kind of, um, somewhat wiggly jawline.
2:21:23 It really narrows at the front and then opens up again into like a little, it’s called a rosette.
2:21:28 So you got like a little semi-circle and then a dip and then the jaws go back and then the teeth
2:21:34 line waves up and down. These really conical teeth, which doesn’t sound very exciting, but it makes them
2:21:39 different to every other carnivorous dinosaur. Like no other thing has a conical tooth, which is a
2:21:46 classic fish thing, or at least biting hold of something that wriggles. Um, the nostrils are not at
2:21:51 the tip of the nose. They’re pushed back at least somewhat. It has a bunch of crests on the head.
2:21:57 It’s got quite a long neck. Spinosaurus, and at least a couple of the other closest relatives to
2:22:01 it, a thing called ichthyovenata from, uh, I can’t remember if it’s Thailand or Laos. I think it’s Laos.
2:22:07 It has this giant elongated bit to the top of the vertebrae. And so it gives it this giant sail along
2:22:15 the back. Spinosaurus, at least possibly ichthyovenata, probably not any of the others. Then has this weird,
2:22:21 like thin, like mute-like expanse to the top of the tail, giving it kind of like a giant or paddle
2:22:30 appearance. Mostly they have very large arms with giant claws on the hands. Um, and Spinosaurus at least
2:22:37 appears to have really quite short legs, but the others don’t. Um, but again, so Spinosaurus is like
2:22:42 totally iconic, but if you look at something like Baryonyx from the UK or, um, Suchomimus from Niger,
2:22:46 it’s still got the same head. It’s still got the same neck. It’s still got the same arms,
2:22:50 but it doesn’t have this sail and it doesn’t have this tail and it probably doesn’t have short legs.
2:22:57 So Spinosaurus is super weird and exaggerated version of what is already a kind of super weird
2:23:03 group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then as you kind of hinted at like
2:23:11 super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it’s a diver or a really good swimmer.
2:23:16 And I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.
2:23:19 So your book is going to be, you’re going to start some shit with your book.
2:23:23 It’s going to be, I think I already have, to be honest, like I’ve written,
2:23:29 I’ve written three major papers and one in particular with my colleague, Tom Holt,
2:23:36 where we frankly savaged the idea that it’s a good swimmer. Um, and then other people have since,
2:23:40 including actually some of the authors who were on the original paper claiming it did swim well,
2:23:42 have now effectively reversed their position and said it didn’t.
2:23:46 So the Jurassic Park three fight between the two.
2:23:47 Yeah.
2:23:49 It’s famous. Uh, in real life encounter, who wins?
2:23:56 So probably still T-Rex. I mean, the, the Jurassic Park Spinosaurus was pretty good for its time. Um,
2:24:01 because some of the stuff that I’ve just talked about, particularly the short legs were suggested
2:24:08 way back in 1910, 1912, but it was really uncertain. Um, now it appears to be more likely the case than
2:24:15 not the tail was unknown at this point. So it was given a very generic tail. Um, but the crocodile
2:24:20 like head is pretty good. The neck’s a bit short. The sail is a bit too, like, it’s almost just like
2:24:25 a semi-circle stuck on the back. And it’s a bit more complicated than that. Um, but personally,
2:24:31 I’m quite a big fan of the Jurassic Park three Spinosaurus. I think for its era, it’s really quite good.
2:24:39 Um, it is massive. So there is this, um, they’re from, I gotta say Morocco because Spinosaurus is found
2:24:45 throughout North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt. There’s a massive pair of jaws or snout that’s in
2:24:52 a collection in Milan. That’s absolutely outsized, just like an absolute giant. And that points to a
2:24:58 truly monumentally sized Spinosaurus, which is where all these upper estimates of 15 plus meters come from.
2:25:04 It’s just this one set of jaws, but yeah, it it’s about right, but it’s just a bit too muscly and a
2:25:10 bit too bulky. Um, but in gross appearance, it’s pretty good. Does it have a chance against the T-Rex?
2:25:17 No, because it’s got this unbelievably long, thin jaw, which was much stronger than something like
2:25:24 baryonyx is fundamentally not that strong. The, the jaws are very long and thin. And then the teeth are,
2:25:31 yeah, they’re big, but they’re not big, big. Um, you know, the, the, the whole, like it grabs the T-Rex
2:25:38 neck and then like snaps it. Well, Spinosaurus actually, it’s neck is really strong going up and
2:25:44 down and he’s very weak rotating or going side to side. So it’s got the weakest kind of possible neck
2:25:50 to like rotate and snap the T-Rex. And then T-Rex has got like the strongest neck of anything. So you’ve
2:25:57 got like the weakest jaw with the weakest spin versus the strongest neck. So no, I don’t buy it.
2:26:03 So that brings it back to the topic we touched on a little bit. What are, you’ve mentioned a bunch
2:26:09 of the stuff that the Jurassic Park series gets wrong. Uh, maybe you could speak to more things,
2:26:16 but also what does it get right? So a lot of like very, in some level generic, but quite
2:26:23 important things it gets right. T-Rex is about the right size and shape and is massive. And you don’t
2:26:27 actually see it run. You see it power walk. If you watch the Jeep chase again, you’ll see it only ever
2:26:32 has one foot on the ground. The weird thing for me is how much some of them vary. So like I’m a big
2:26:38 pterosaur guy. I do lots of work on pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, the pteranodons in Jurassic
2:26:43 Park to the lost world. You see them very, very briefly in one of the last shots and they’re okay,
2:26:48 but they’re not great, but it’s clearly a bit of a throwaway shot. The ones in Jurassic Park three,
2:26:54 I think are mostly excellent, really, really good. And then the ones in Jurassic world are
2:27:00 terrible, like a massive regression. There’s loads and loads of details that are right in JP three that
2:27:05 are completely wrong in Jurassic world. And you’re like, why did you take a really good model and make
2:27:14 it much, much worse and less accurate? I don’t understand. Um, and I, again, it’s fiction at one
2:27:23 level who cares, but like, as you said, like, I don’t think the weird thing for me is I don’t think
2:27:31 it would affect how they’re perceived by the public. Some things I get like, for example, in Jurassic
2:27:36 world, the pteranodons pick people up with their feet and fly off with them. Pteranodons feet don’t
2:27:41 work like that. It would never be able to do that. And it would never have the lift, but I get for dramatic
2:27:46 purposes, you might want to show that. Okay, fine. You know, this is your big sequence. You need that.
2:27:52 But for the rest of the animal, it’s weirdly inaccurate. And I don’t think the public would
2:28:00 know, and they might well care if it was much more accurate. And I don’t think it would be any
2:28:06 harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate. Um, I’ve spoken to a colleague of mine
2:28:11 who I won’t name just in case I get him into trouble. Um, who’s a big dinosaur nerd, but also
2:28:18 a big creature creator and designer and has done a whole bunch of proper Hollywood A-list movie stuff.
2:28:25 And I asked him about this and I went, okay, but like, is it just easier to take the model that you’ve
2:28:30 got and mess around with it than to, if I came in and said, you need to fix that, you need to fix this,
2:28:33 you need to fix this, you need to fix that. And he basically went, no, it’s about the same amount of
2:28:40 effort. It’s not like we don’t have the director or the producer or the lead designer going, no,
2:28:44 I want that arm a bit longer. I want that tail a bit brighter. Can you add a few more bits there?
2:28:50 I don’t like those scales. So he said, we’re doing that constantly anyway. So doing it to one set of
2:28:55 design specs versus another set of design specs is no more hassle. In other words, he said, it’s no
2:28:59 harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate. And it’s like, if that’s truly the case,
2:29:07 then just make it right. And then you can claim a level of accuracy and engagement that you can.
2:29:12 I mean, it’s interesting. There’s, there’s a thing called the Jurassic Foundation after the
2:29:17 first Jurassic Park made an absolute fortune. Spiel, I think it was Spielberg directly may
2:29:22 have been through universal, but anyway, they set up the Jurassic Foundation and it’s a small fund of
2:29:26 money for research on dinosaurs and related animals and academics can apply for it. My PhD,
2:29:31 one of my PhD students got some money from the Jurassic Foundation. Like, that’s great. He didn’t
2:29:35 have to do that. He went, paleontology’s helped give me this. I’m going to give back a bit. And
2:29:41 after what must be 30 years now, it’s probably funded an awful lot of research and help young
2:29:48 researchers get a start. So there’s a level of engagement there that I think hasn’t been in
2:29:56 subsequent films, which you can kind of see for once it goes from being a one-off to being a franchise
2:30:01 and it’s changed hands. I mean, how many different directors has it had now? You know, Spielberg did
2:30:06 the first two and then done about the next five must be two, if not another three more people,
2:30:10 you know, and 30 years later, it’s, it’s all changing.
2:30:16 Yeah. But that’s the path of creating a legendary film that depth of accuracy. And it’s not that
2:30:22 difficult to work, but it’s also, it does something to the, to the whole artistic creation. If you create
2:30:26 a culture of where the details really, really matter. Yeah. And, and, and again, there’s,
2:30:30 there’s some oddities. So like Gallimimus, I’ve mentioned it earlier. So one of the
2:30:37 one of the Mimosaurs, the model for Gallimimus in Jurassic World is nearly identical to that from
2:30:43 Jurassic Park. One of the differences, which you can barely see on film, but I know this is true
2:30:47 because I found it in like Jurassic World Kids book because I flicked through it when it came out.
2:30:52 It’s a closeup of the head with an arrow to the teeth. Gallimimus doesn’t have teeth. It’s got a
2:30:59 beak. So someone has taken the original model and actively spent time adding teeth to an animal that
2:31:04 didn’t have them. I would understand it. I’m not saying I agree with it, but I’d understand if it,
2:31:09 if it was a rule of cool and like, yeah, but it would look so much better with all these gnarly big
2:31:14 teeth and whatever. And it’s like, you can’t even see it in the final thing. They’ve got tiny little
2:31:19 heads in the film. All they do is like run past the camera briefly. It’s not like they’re a big
2:31:25 carnivore and they’re engaged in like one of the big battle. Like why, why? It’s not like you can’t
2:31:29 even barely see them. Uh, well, yeah. And again, just to linger on it,
2:31:35 there is a lot of value to authenticity in all walks of life. And one of them is accuracy.
2:31:42 When you’re talking about dinosaurs, it’s so valuable and so worthy and it’s respectable for
2:31:47 the long life of a film to be accurate. I just wish, I hope they do that. There’s certain directors
2:31:54 that really dogmatically push that. Alex Garland comes to mind. You know, he, he did whenever he
2:31:59 integrates like quantum computing or AI into a film. Nolan with the black hole in Interstellar
2:32:04 ended up publishing a paper on the calculation to visualize it. I mean, that’s legendary. That’s
2:32:09 great. Exactly. And like, you think that has nothing to do with the story, the narrative of the film,
2:32:17 but it does. It like permeates everything. If you get that black hole right, that everybody else steps up
2:32:23 their game and really, really tells a story in this way that reverberates through time and it like really
2:32:29 moves people. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, as I say, I, I, I wish it was better. I mean, the, the only thing
2:32:35 I’d, I’d flip it around. It’s a joke I’ve made more than once, but like, just, just don’t take it as a
2:32:40 documentary. No one wants to watch his James Bond and goes, that’s how international espionage works.
2:32:46 You know, he’s got the laser watch and the exploding car. And he’s like, maybe treat it a bit as
2:32:54 fiction. I, I, I’ve heard from a friend of mine who worked at the Royal Terrell Museum, which I’ve
2:33:00 mentioned before in, in Alberta, which is an absolute phenomenal place. Um, and she said after the first
2:33:10 one, genuinely like it was not common, but more than once people were annoyed that they didn’t have
2:33:15 the real dinosaurs out back because they’d seen them and they knew that the real ones were out there,
2:33:22 which is a testament to industrial light and magic and Stan Winston, but also slightly horrifying that
2:33:28 anyone watched Jurassic park and literally thought that music also, why do you go to a museum? You go to
2:33:33 the zoo, if it’s alive there, you will also meet, uh, what is it? King Kong and God. Yeah. Yeah.
2:33:39 Uh, I don’t think we’ll quite touch on this. I really want to ask you about, uh, intelligence.
2:33:44 What we know about the intelligence of let’s say T-Rex, we talked about his big head. What do we know
2:33:51 about? Not much. So there’s, there’s a T-Rex brain or at least a very rough cast of part of one.
2:33:58 That’s the actual look. Yeah. This is so dinosaurs, in fact, most reptiles, I wonder if you can see it
2:34:05 on the Velociraptor. Not really, unfortunately. Um, it’s elongated. Yeah. But it’s more that they
2:34:12 have, we are weird in that we have a brain that basically fills the inside of our skull. What most
2:34:19 animals have is actually a little kind of sub skull inside the main skull, which is called the endocast
2:34:28 or endocranium. And the brain is in that. Um, and even then it’s not like full of brain because we’ve
2:34:33 packed an awful lot of brain into our limited space and they then have quite a lot of goo and fat and
2:34:37 other stuff around it. Um, but it means for dinosaurs and then deep reptiles and birds in general,
2:34:44 in the old days, you could basically cut one open, but now we’ll CT scan through them.
2:34:52 You can take an internal mold of the endocranium, the brain case, and then whatever filled that would
2:34:56 have been the brain and its surrounding tissues. And that’s how you get something like this.
2:35:02 In this case, someone literally cracked open an old skull and basically took an internal mold in the
2:35:07 same way that you do an external mold for the, for the skulls. And that tells you quite a lot about
2:35:13 certain things. Um, so for example, you’ve got a bulb at the front, which is the olfactory bulb.
2:35:17 So brains are very stereotyped. Again, ours are super weird. So you have your olfactory bulb at the
2:35:22 front and behind that you have the optic bulb or the optic lobe. So roughly how big they are will tell
2:35:28 you roughly how much of the brain is devoted to, for example, sight and smell. So if it’s a lot,
2:35:34 it’s pretty good. If there’s not much, it’s not very good. That goes quite a long way already. Um,
2:35:39 one thing we’ve done in the last few years is you can also get into the, it’s not shown here.
2:35:45 I wouldn’t be part of this, uh, but the inner ear and we can CT scan into the structure of the bony
2:35:51 inner ear. And from that, you can actually get an idea of what frequency of sounds the inner ear was
2:35:57 structured to be pitched to, which is, doesn’t actually tell you very much, but it’s phenomenally
2:35:58 cool that you can do it.
2:36:03 We should say you also have quite a bit of a background in biology. So you try to reconstruct
2:36:07 biology from, go from paleontology to biology.
2:36:12 Yeah. I, my, my go to one liner is I’m a zoologist, but I work on dead stuff.
2:36:19 My degree was zoology. I, my official job title now is reader of zoology. I teach zoology. I don’t
2:36:26 teach paleo. Um, so yeah, living animals was always actually my primary interest and I kind of fell
2:36:32 led to paleo, but then I wanted to drag that with me because I’d been trained in behavior and ecology
2:36:35 and it’s what I was most interested in. So then applying that knowledge and understanding
2:36:37 to these animals.
2:36:40 So to some degree it is possible to reach towards the biology.
2:36:42 Absolutely. Yeah.
2:36:46 So with the ear, that’s interesting. The brain, you can know something about the brain.
2:36:50 Yeah. But then, but then when you get into intelligence is when it gets really awkward because
2:36:56 working out exactly which bits of this are probably linked to like the main fundamental process
2:37:03 and what you link to actual intelligence is tough. Um, on top of that, we don’t really
2:37:06 know what’s been the big challenge of the last couple of years of this question. Was T-Rex
2:37:11 and other dinosaurs super intelligent of neuron density? How many basically nerve cells can
2:37:16 you pack in per bit or volume? Because birds have some weird tricks, which means they get
2:37:23 a lot more brain per volume. Um, just how much of the brain case was brain and how much
2:37:28 was like goop around it, we know varies. So you get them kind of fairly big upper and lower
2:37:32 band. And then the other big thing we always have to do is factor in size.
2:37:38 Big animals need bigger brains to operate them. So whales have really big brains, but whales weigh
2:37:43 tens of tons. They’re not smarter than us. So you have the, the classic thing is I think,
2:37:49 or the, um, encephalization quotient, which is at a very simple level, it is the volume of brain
2:37:56 scaled against the size of the animal. So we have huge brains compared to how big we are. So we’re
2:38:01 massively up the chart. And then you do have a few things with worms. I should probably stick to
2:38:08 vertebrates, but some stupid stuff, which has a surprisingly small brain for its size. Most
2:38:14 things that aren’t primates and things like crows and parrots sit very neatly on a couple of different
2:38:18 curves. There’s a curve for reptiles, a curve for birds, a curve for mammals and things like this.
2:38:26 Um, and basically that’s it. But also actually our understanding with mass estimates for dinosaurs is
2:38:33 good, but not great. And so you could easily be out by, you could easily be out by like 20 or 30%
2:38:39 on the volume of the brain inside the brain case. And then you could be out by 20 or 30% on your mass
2:38:47 estimate. Well, now suddenly it’s very easy to make the brain too big and the animal too light and it’s
2:38:50 super smart or make the brain too small and the animal too heavy. And it’s super dumb.
2:38:55 Um, that’s awkward, unfortunately.
2:39:00 So apparently there’s, uh, some controversial paper that suggests that T-Rex is, uh, has primate level
2:39:00 intelligence.
2:39:07 Yeah. And then that was shot down within a few months by a team of paleontologists and a couple of other
2:39:09 neurologists who really went to town on it.
2:39:13 Just counting the number of, trying to estimate the number of neurons.
2:39:20 Yeah. It was the neuron density thing. And yeah, I, I, I’ve unsurprisingly support the revised one,
2:39:25 which was done by a whole bunch of, yeah, the Caspar paper. Um, I’ve spoken to Caspar about it,
2:39:25 a couple of the other authors.
2:39:34 So they, uh, scaled down the number of neurons from 3 billion down to 250 million to 1.7 billion,
2:39:36 which is similar to crocodiles.
2:39:41 Yeah. Which is kind of what you’d expect. I mean, a couple of other people at various times have
2:39:46 suggested they’re really smart. And again, you know, birds have this thing of, they have this weird
2:39:50 thing of neuron folding and they can basically pack in a lot more than you’d expect. You know,
2:39:56 that’s why crows are that smart, despite having tiny brains relatively even compared to their overall
2:40:06 size. Um, but I’m being obviously overly facetious, but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big
2:40:13 is the animal versus how big is its brain, that’s most of a T-Rex brain. It’s a fraction of the size
2:40:21 of a chimp brain and chimps don’t weigh seven tons. So you, you, you know, it’s a kind of Hitchens like
2:40:27 extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but like you just look at it and go, that’s about the
2:40:32 proportion we’d expect for a croc. Now crocs are smarter than people think, but they’re sure as hell not
2:40:38 monkeys. Um, you’re gonna have to really come up with something much more convincing than, oh, well,
2:40:43 if you just pack them and if you scale them this way. A bit of a ridiculous question, but is it possible
2:40:50 to find evidence of tool use? I mean, in theory, it depends how you, quite how you define a tool. So
2:40:58 birds building nests is arguably tool use to a certain degree. I’m aware of, I suspect it turned out
2:41:05 not to be the case. I was, I was shown a very rough, not very well prepared fossil
2:41:13 20 years ago now, no, 15 years ago now where someone said, we think this might be a early bird
2:41:19 nest and therefore potentially even a dinosaur nest and nothing’s ever been published. So my guess is
2:41:24 once they excavated it and had a good look at it, they went, nah, it’s nothing really. I mean, I guess
2:41:29 the question is how would you know? Yes. It would be difficult unless it’s obvious widespread
2:41:34 primate. Yeah. But even then, like, you know, sapient, like, you know, chimp, chimps make loads
2:41:39 of tools, but it’s mostly made of wood and they’re mostly just breaking stuff. And then that’s the odds
2:41:46 of that preserving a very low. You do get things like chimps and otters, sea otters. They have their
2:41:52 favorite anvil and hammer stones to break stuff open. But again, the reason they picked that stone is
2:41:57 because it’s really heavy and good at breaking oysters or breaking nuts. It’s not going to leave
2:42:02 or probably not going to leave stereotypical points on the rock. And even then you could just go, well,
2:42:08 maybe it, you know, just got bashed up in a river or something.
2:42:12 So in your book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, you, uh, you kind of conclude that there’s a lot
2:42:18 we might not know. What’s the particular lost behavior that we don’t know about that you think
2:42:24 may be out there? Something like midden use. It’s a whole bunch of animals and birds who
2:42:29 basically crap in the same spot. They, they have this spot and that’s where they go. So
2:42:37 rabbits do this, sloths do this, um, aardvarks, even things like wildebeest and zebra, not zebra,
2:42:41 impala would tend to go back to the same place every day.
2:42:47 But the fossil record of, so coprolites, fossilized feces and fossilized waste from
2:42:52 dinosaurs, it exists, but it’s extremely rough because of course this is the stuff that’s
2:42:57 already been digested and broken down. It’s already kind of gooey and broken up and doesn’t
2:43:03 have a lot going for it. Um, if they do it in water, it’s going to dissipate instantly.
2:43:07 If it rains, it’s probably going to fall apart. Things like dung beetles and flies will break it
2:43:12 down. Even if it gets covered by sand or whatever from a sandstorm, it’s probably still going to
2:43:19 compress and separate. So are you ever going to find it? Maybe go, going back to our trackway stuff,
2:43:28 but even if you do what species left that, we know a big herbivore did this, but was it triceratops or was
2:43:32 it an ankylosaur? Those animals are very different things doing very different things. And it would tell
2:43:34 you different things about their behavior if we know.
2:43:38 Yeah. So one, one, one piece of behavior I forgot to ask you about. Uh, so a T-Rex
2:43:40 engaging cannibalism.
2:43:46 Yeah, almost certainly. Well, certainly I think we’ve got, um, there’s a T-Rex bone with a T-Rex
2:43:53 embedded tooth in it with overgrowth. Yeah. There’s, I think it’s, I want to say it’s an
2:44:01 Albertasaur rather than T-Rex, but there is a, there is a Tyrannosaur jaw in Alberta with a T-Rex
2:44:07 tooth stuck in it and you can pull the little tooth out. Um, and then there’s a T-Rex foot bone
2:44:12 with these distinctive feeding traces on them. And this actually goes back to that early point about
2:44:18 T-Rex being weird, being the only big carnivore. It’s an environment because if this was even Mongolia
2:44:24 at that time, but anywhere else, there’s three or four or five big carnivores. And so you find a bone and
2:44:29 it’s chewed up by a big carnivore. We don’t know who did it, but when you see a big bone chewed up
2:44:36 in a T-Rex ecosystem, well, you know, if it’s anything bigger than this, you know, it was T-Rex.
2:44:44 And so when it’s a T-Rex bone with T-Rex bite marks. Yep. QED. Yeah. So it must have been.
2:44:47 That’s fascinating, isn’t it? That they would attack themselves.
2:44:58 Cannibalism turns up in a whole bunch of stuff. Um, but it’s not, it’s very rare as like a fairly
2:45:05 habitual behavior. So, but there’s several reasons you might be engaging in or, or rather teeth marks
2:45:10 might tell various stories. So it could be just fighting for dominance, right?
2:45:15 It could, but it’s unlikely. And in this case, so again, we see there are loads of facial injuries
2:45:20 in Tyrannosaurs, in carnivorous dinosaurs generally, but particularly Tyrannosaurs, they have really beaten
2:45:27 up heads like half or even two thirds of adults have scarring and facial injuries, but you see healing
2:45:33 on it. Whereas this foot does not show healing and it’s got multiple different bites. The idea that
2:45:39 you’d bite a foot whilst fighting someone and then go back and bite that one foot again, that’s pretty,
2:45:44 not impossible, but pretty unlikely. So it looks like it’s eating, not fighting. Yeah. And they’re more
2:45:50 like the feeding scrape traces than they are the big puncture wounds. So again, not impossible, but very
2:45:56 weird for that to occur as a fight. Um, so yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re fighting. They’re
2:46:01 fighting probably quite a lot. Um, but whether or not you actually eat something that you’ve
2:46:06 killed or that you stumble across as a body, it’s definitely happens occasionally. Otherwise we
2:46:11 wouldn’t have the record of that, but there’s a reason carnivores often don’t eat carnivores
2:46:17 and particularly don’t eat their own species, which is parasitism. You know, carnivores in general
2:46:23 are loaded with parasites because they spend their whole lives eating food, which has parasites and
2:46:28 stuff in it. And so they tend to accumulate a lot of them. What’s the one thing that’s going
2:46:33 definitely going to have the most parasites in it that can infect you as, for example, a lion.
2:46:39 It’s another lion that eats the exact same stuff that you do. So whilst it is food and particularly
2:46:47 if you just won a big fight, you might want to eat in general, cannibalism is pretty rare
2:46:52 because it’s generally not a good idea if there’s other food available. But yeah, if you’re starving
2:46:56 to death or, you know, the other guy ripped your leg half off and you don’t think you’re going to walk
2:47:01 for six weeks, not that you think, but you know what I mean? Like, and now, and now there’s a body in
2:47:04 front of you is two tons of meat. Well, maybe you should tuck in.
2:47:11 This is so fascinating. Like once again, figuring out this puzzle and like, what does cannibalism tell
2:47:16 you? You’re piecing together the story of T-Rex, their, their life, their hunting life, their social
2:47:21 life from their evolution to their biology, to their behavior. It’s so fascinating.
2:47:25 Yeah. We, we try to, but the thing is it’s, it’s, it’s always getting better, which is,
2:47:31 so that’s the, what I tried to finish on in my book on behavior is I felt I’d written a couple of
2:47:35 hundred pages of, we keep screwing this up. We’ve overstated this. I think people have
2:47:39 misunderstood this, this, you know, the trackway stuff. And it’s like, this is not as confident
2:47:44 as we think. You need to look at these alternate explanations. This behavior shows that that behavior
2:47:48 probably doesn’t correlate the way you said it does. Yada, yada, yada. And it’s like, I now feel
2:47:52 like I’ve just written a book trashing my entire field and all my colleagues, at least many of my
2:47:57 colleagues. And then, then you, you flip it on its head and going, we’ve got techniques
2:48:05 that were undreamed of 10 years ago. We’ve got data streams that were undreamed of 10 years ago.
2:48:08 And we’ve actually got a much better understanding of living species. And then on top of that,
2:48:15 we’re just constantly finding new animals. You know, we have not just new species, which are
2:48:18 often, I think, a lot less important, but just new specimens of ones we know. Because again,
2:48:23 it’s building up that database, you know, we drifted off to about sexual selection, but like,
2:48:27 yeah, you, if you want to know growth, one or two animals doesn’t tell you how an animal,
2:48:33 a species grows, 50 or a hundred does. And then that reveals a hell of a lot more about things like
2:48:38 sexual dimorphism and growth rate and how vulnerable juveniles are and population structure, maybe how
2:48:45 they’re reproducing. So I’d like to think I knocked down, I think I knocked down a few towers that probably
2:48:51 a few people were fond of, but I think we have the raw materials to build much better, stronger edifice
2:49:00 of behavior. Um, but as you say, it’s, it’s always going to be based around often very piecemeal
2:49:05 evidence and like possibilities and probabilities rather than certainties.
2:49:09 Well, let’s talk about a sad topic extinction. Yep.
2:49:14 How did the dinosaurs go extinct?
2:49:21 Mostly, probably pretty quickly, but it really is the answer that I think most people are now probably
2:49:27 familiar with, which is it’s an asteroid impact or, uh, some kind of extraterrestrial body
2:49:33 hit just off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, about 66 million years ago.
2:49:40 That basically atomized the asteroid, but also importantly, the bit of the ground it hit or
2:49:45 below the seabed that it hit was basically the worst kind of rock. And so it put up this
2:49:50 enormous ash cloud. And basically you have a nearly instantaneous nuclear winter.
2:49:57 I mean, immediate devastation, you know, anything immediately next to it is obviously just like
2:50:01 vaporized. Uh, but you know, this is the sort of thing that it’s like hot enough to set fire to
2:50:07 the atmosphere. I think the one I read was it’s something like a piece of rock about the size of
2:50:12 Mount Everest traveling. It’s something like 10 times the speed of sound. So just the momentum
2:50:19 between that speed and mass thing is just, you know, beyond extraordinary.
2:50:22 But I think what does a lot of damage is the change in the climate.
2:50:27 Yeah. And so, so every, there are five recognized mass extinctions in the history of life on earth.
2:50:33 And all of them are ultimately some form of climate change. Um, whether it’s volcanic eruptions or
2:50:40 hyperoxygenation or an ice age or whatever, it’s, it’s, it’s climate changing too quickly for things to
2:50:47 adapt to. And that starts, you know, that just cripples entire populations and entire species.
2:50:53 And then if you do enough damage to enough things, you start getting ecosystem collapse.
2:50:58 You know, that this moth has died out. Well, it turns out that moth is the primary pollinator of this tree.
2:51:03 Well, that tree produced nuts. And that was the entire winter survival store for this squirrel.
2:51:10 Well, that squirrel was the main food of this cat. And now suddenly the moth going has killed four
2:51:16 other things and, and everything that’s attached to that. Um, and so that, that’s really what did for
2:51:23 them. And sadly, the big things, well, everything dies, but the big things have a lot of trouble
2:51:29 recovering. Yeah. So, I mean, this, this is, you know, a classic example. So, oh, well, you know,
2:51:33 what is paleontology good for? Well, one actually really is extinction, which is very relevant
2:51:40 right now in that we have a very good handle on when you have extreme climate stress, what tends to
2:51:46 suffer more and what tends to suffer less. And as we say, big, big things fundamentally do. They require
2:51:52 more resources. They require more area of land. You need to roam further, which means, you know,
2:51:58 if you’re a mouse and you happen to have a little bit of land and that bit doesn’t get hit, you’re fine.
2:52:02 Whereas if you’re an elephant and you need all of this land and even a chunk of it goes wrong,
2:52:07 well, that’s probably maybe not enough for you to survive anymore. So yeah, big things suffer
2:52:15 disproportionately badly from these things. And mostly as well, we think, um, terrestrial things
2:52:21 generally do worse than things in water because water is a great equilibrating medium. You know,
2:52:28 it takes ages to heat up. It takes ages to cool down. Um, yes, if you live in, uh, specific coastal
2:52:34 conditions or something, maybe you can’t travel that easily, but you know, whales can go from pole to pole
2:52:39 quite happily and plenty of other fish do too. So if it’s too hot or too cold or too nasty here,
2:52:44 you can just swim somewhere else. Whereas if you’re an animal and you hit a desert or you hit a mountain
2:52:50 range or you hit a river, you stop moving and you’re trapped and, and then you die. So dinosaurs, well,
2:52:57 yeah, the, the worst possible combination, they were mostly big and they were mostly on land and
2:53:01 yeah, it’s not really surprising. They did very badly out of it.
2:53:07 And then some species did survive. Uh, I guess, I think you’ve said that it’s, it’s very possible
2:53:12 that some dinosaurs even survived for a time that we might be able to discover downline.
2:53:20 I’d be amazed if they didn’t. I mean, there’s been various reports over the decades of the, the KPG
2:53:26 or KT extinction, the Cretaceous paleogene or Cretaceous tertiary extinction of, of dinosaurs surviving
2:53:32 and none of them have held up. It’s usually been, um, bioturbation. So literally things like prairie
2:53:37 dogs digging. And of course they’ll dig a tooth up and then move it through the layers or things like
2:53:44 this or plant roots can, can move stuff. Um, or just soils can get churned up, but I would be
2:53:49 shocked if they didn’t not, not like, Oh yeah, the dinosaur survived and the lock next monster and
2:53:55 stuff like that. But, but, but like, yes, it was a global devastation. Yes. It’s what ultimately killed
2:54:01 the dinosaurs, but I’d be amazed if there wasn’t some equivalent of Hawaii or New Zealand or some other
2:54:07 tucked away Island or Valley where actually dinosaurs were fine for anything from a few hundred thousand
2:54:13 to a couple of million years. But on a global scale, it’s a dot on a map and the odds that we’ll ever
2:54:20 uncover any rocks, fossiliferous rocks of that age that we then have access to, that we then find a
2:54:27 dinosaur in that we can then date properly, I think is almost non-existent, but it would just be weird
2:54:32 if they didn’t survive somewhere for a bit or even quite a few of them in places.
2:54:34 It’s a small local population.
2:54:40 We see it all the time. You know, the lemurs in Madagascar, all the stuff in New Zealand,
2:54:46 there’s tons of weird archaic stuff hanging around in Hawaii, you know, Galapagos finches and tortoises,
2:54:50 the tortoises that you don’t see anywhere else in Australia with the marsupials. They’re almost,
2:54:57 and then the monotremes are almost unknown outside of there. This, this is pretty normal bit of biology
2:55:03 for animals that were so dominant globally. We know there were patches that were largely unchanged.
2:55:08 Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the mammal surviving and the crocodile surviving and the bird surviving and
2:55:13 every, and newts and frogs and everything that did survive. I’m sure a few of those patches had some
2:55:17 dinosaurs in them, but it, it is ultimately what killed them.
2:55:23 What do you think is the chance that they would have survived? So you take some local populations and they flourish.
2:55:29 It’s happened. Look at, look at Australia. Um, you know, the, the marsupials have done pretty well
2:55:37 there, um, for a very long time. You can imagine if the next mass extinction, you know, flattens a large
2:55:44 chunk of Indonesia, for example, kangaroos could Island hop pretty easily, make it to mainland Asia.
2:55:51 But then, I mean, to then lead, you take the dinosaurs, a small fraction survives,
2:55:53 and then they eventually repopulate the earth again.
2:55:58 I mean, that’s extraordinarily unlikely because once your population has been crashed like that,
2:56:03 you do have the problems of things like inbreeding, or maybe you’re a great specialist to a certain
2:56:08 area or you’re surviving because you’re isolated. You’re in a, you’re in a valley or you’re on an
2:56:13 island and then dispersing again becomes really, or breaking out into those areas becomes much,
2:56:18 much harder. So like the great predators, like a, even though the T-Rex is such a great predator,
2:56:23 that doesn’t, that doesn’t give you. Yeah. Because, because you’ve still had the extinction
2:56:29 event and the environment is no longer what it was that you evolved into. Um, and when, once those
2:56:32 systems start to recover, those other animals are going to adapt much better to them.
2:56:40 How does that make you feel that, that, um, this stupid asteroid from nowhere?
2:56:44 Well, I mean, at one level, I probably wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t.
2:56:48 So, I mean, that’s, that’s an interesting question. I mean, do you think, um, there’s several ways of
2:56:54 asking that question, but if dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, do you think humans would still be able
2:56:59 to evolve? I mean, my guess is probably not. I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s quite
2:57:06 the, um, what was it? Oh, Simon Conway Morris had that book. It was an inevitability of man that like,
2:57:12 even if you rewound it, everything would come back. I’m, I’m not, I don’t think it’s that far. Um,
2:57:19 I certainly don’t think it’s, um, anything like quite like the butterfly effect of, you know,
2:57:24 if one mammal had been trodden on by one T-Rex, then humans would never have evolved either.
2:57:29 We should say that the, uh, ancestor of the primates or the closest, there’s a lot of debate
2:57:37 around this. Uh, it’s a kind of tiny creature purgatorious that was our ancestor. Yeah. So this
2:57:39 is us. This is what we evolved from.
2:57:43 Yes. Uh, Scandentia, I think it’s the group basically. Yeah. I mean, there were, there were
2:57:49 probably primates around in the Cretaceous. Some of the molecular clock stuff suggests that primates
2:57:56 were around alongside the dinosaurs that we’ve never found, um, any osteological evidence of that,
2:58:00 but yeah, there, there, there’s been a backwards and forwards amount. Were dinosaurs already on their
2:58:06 way out or were they a bit limited by the very end Cretaceous? I think the more recent analyses have
2:58:09 shown that’s probably not the case. So in other words, they were basically doing
2:58:14 fine, um, right up to the extinction event. And so, yeah, if the asteroid hadn’t hit,
2:58:21 there’s no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline. Something else
2:58:27 may have hit. There may have been, um, you know, some other environmental disaster or something
2:58:35 may have happened, or maybe they’re more vulnerable to stuff, um, than we know of, but there’s no,
2:58:42 I don’t think there’s any really good reason to think they wouldn’t have carried on relatively well.
2:58:48 I mean, even post dinosaur extinction, you had a window where the mammals and the birds were
2:58:53 pretty competing. There was a lot of big birds getting going and various big carnivorous terrestrial
2:59:00 kind of hyper-predatory ostrich-like things like the Phosphoracids. Um, so there’s no guarantee that
2:59:06 mammals would have even taken over post the dinosaur extinction. Um, since initially they were in a bit of a,
2:59:11 uh, a fair bit of competition. So this is just going to, based on current scientific understanding,
2:59:16 human evolution would be highly improbable if dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct 66 million years
2:59:21 ago because dinosaur dominated ecological niches. For everything, basically. I mean, that’s the thing.
2:59:28 You look through, yeah, the Mesozoic, the late Triassic dinosaurs are there alongside a whole bunch of
2:59:34 other big and unusual and interesting reptiles and, and some other early pre-mammal like things that
2:59:38 are closer to mammals than, than the reptiles. But once you’ve gotten into the Jurassic, you’ve now
2:59:47 got a solid, like 120, 130 million years where almost anywhere on earth, if you saw an animal bigger than
2:59:55 like a raccoon, it was probably a dinosaur. That’s how incredibly dominant that, you know, as dominant,
2:59:59 if not more dominant than modern mammals. But is it fair to say that they were mostly
3:00:07 dumb? I don’t think so. Cause I think, I think that comes down to a, that bit of kind of classic,
3:00:15 almost Victorian speciesisms. And you get these insane hypotheses, like dinosaurs as a species or
3:00:21 as a lineage became senile. So they forgot to breed. It was literally a suggested idea. Uh, you know,
3:00:25 the mammals ate their eggs and all of this kind of stuff, you know, dinosaurs only lived alongside
3:00:30 mammals for a hundred million years. Be weird if they all went extinct at the same time because
3:00:36 suddenly egg eating evolved. Um, you know, you, you’ve got problems like this. Um, but also again,
3:00:43 that, that general speciesism, which, you know, even goes back to stuff like Linnaeus and his taxonomic
3:00:50 ranks and even stuff like Aristotle. You’ve got like, you know, humans are superior in some way and we’re
3:00:54 superior to the other mammals. And of course, mammals are closest to us. So they must be quite
3:00:59 good. And then they’ve got to be better than lizards. And then lizards have to be better than
3:01:05 frogs and frogs have to be better than fish. So that, that gets you into the, well, reptiles must be
3:01:07 stupid. And, and then not.
3:01:13 I wonder if a human intelligence level organism could have evolved from the dinosaurs.
3:01:18 I mean, it’s, that’s been hypothesized plenty of times. Dale Russell, Canadian paleontologist,
3:01:25 the famous guy came up with this human like truodontid that was done for a, um, TV documentary.
3:01:30 I think the one that Christopher Reeve narrated that I think is a remake, but I’ve seen the original
3:01:36 that Dale had made for his TV show. And it’s still, uh, it’s sitting in the collections of the
3:01:42 National Museum of Nature in, in Ottawa for Canada. It’s really, really cool. It’s like this five foot
3:01:44 dinosauroid. That was it there on the screen.
3:01:48 Model of the hypothetical dinosauroid and displayed at the dinosaur museum.
3:01:52 Oh, Dorchester. That’s in England. Yeah. I knew there was a couple of copies of it.
3:01:57 Trudon always comes back as like the most intelligent dinosaur because it has really quite a big brain for
3:02:03 its size. It does have a high encephalization quotient. So it’s always been like tagged as like a very good
3:02:07 candidate for being the smartest dinosaur. And basically he just could hybridize that with a
3:02:12 human. But of course, why would these things end up as like plantigrade quadrupeds? And why would
3:02:16 they go back to five fingers? And actually I think he’s only got three to be fair, but he’s got very
3:02:21 human like feet. Why has it got no tail? What, why would those things suddenly disappear? There’s no real
3:02:29 reason other than just kind of human exceptionalism, but like, I mean, you could argue some parrots,
3:02:38 some crows are phenomenally intelligent and show extremely clever behaviors on a par with apes.
3:02:42 So at some level, some dinosaurs were extremely intelligent.
3:02:48 I mean, yeah, this is a whole nother conversation, but all the tiny details that lead to the explosion
3:02:54 that is in the, our evolutionary tree that is homo sapiens. Like what is it? Opposable thumbs,
3:03:00 right. Is it the invention of fire and the meat eating? Is it? Yeah. This is some other sociality
3:03:04 and so many nation pressure. And then the changing and changing environment. I mean,
3:03:09 the shrinking of the forest, pushing apes out of the trees into the environment or into the open
3:03:12 environment. And probably the same kind of story could be told about the dinosaurs or about,
3:03:19 about anything really. Yeah. I mean, I mean, if you have 160 million years and a global domination,
3:03:24 I mean, this is the thing you talked about like lost behaviors, but like the lost lineages,
3:03:28 I wrote about this in one of my books and like, you want to fight, you want a weird animal.
3:03:34 You go to a volcanic Island, like you go to New Zealand, you go to Hawaii, you go to the Galapagos.
3:03:37 And yet those are the places that basically don’t really form fossils.
3:03:44 So you think the dinosaurs we know about are strange. What was the stuff knocking around
3:03:51 there? We’re never going to know, sadly, but for everything you think weird, you know,
3:03:55 you think birds are cool. Think about penguins compared to your average bird.
3:04:03 They live on an ice shelf for six months of the year and can’t fly and massively modified skeletons.
3:04:09 And, you know, you’re compared to your average bird. Penguins are unbelievably weird. So yeah,
3:04:16 take an average dinosaur and take it to like penguin level, ostrich level, evil hummingbird level
3:04:21 evolution. There’s going to be weirder stuff out there than we found much weirder.
3:04:26 If you travel back in time, you probably, your mind will be probably blown by the weirdness.
3:04:33 Yeah. Because those things are almost always in small isolated places that don’t preserve
3:04:38 fossils very well. And so the odds of us ever coming across them, I mean, you, you see it to a degree.
3:04:44 So you’ve got, um, the stuff that comes out of, uh, like what is modern trans or was Transylvania,
3:04:50 uh, hat’s egg that that’s, that was a series of islands in the Mediterranean at the end of the
3:04:56 Cretaceous. And some of the weirdest dinosaurs are from that chain of islands. And that’s not very
3:05:01 isolated compared to, again, something like Hawaii or New Zealand, but it’s fitting the exact pattern.
3:05:09 You, you get dinosaurs on islands, they turn weird. Um, we, we see that. So again, dinosaurs were real
3:05:17 animals. Like again, sounds, sounds really painfully obvious, but they, they weren’t monsters. They
3:05:23 followed the same rules might be pushing it, but certain like guidelines, like ecology operates
3:05:29 in certain ways. If you’re bigger, you need more food, but you’re more efficient. You just are.
3:05:35 That’s pretty much just physics and scaling. So big dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of bigger
3:05:39 animals and small dinosaurs are going to fall the, follow the rules of smaller animals. They just will
3:05:46 quite how they violate it in certain ways by having unusually long necks or unusual physiology or
3:05:51 eating an unusual diet, or because there was a weird plant that was alive then that isn’t now or
3:05:58 whatever it may be. There’s obviously a huge amount of variation and uncertainty, but fundamentally we know
3:06:06 what makes animals and ecosystems work and dinosaurs are animals in ecosystems. They’re not that strange at some
3:06:15 level. And therefore reconstructing their actual biology is challenging, but far from impossible.
3:06:19 Strange question. So as everybody knows, dragons are obviously real.
3:06:27 I’ve been asked that on live TV before, only not with the sarcastic tone.
3:06:30 Do you dare disagree with this notion?
3:06:35 Yes, I, I, I, I do. They don’t. And again, they’re real to me.
3:06:41 So that’s fine. But again, you know, we, we kind of touched on it, but I, I, I think there’s probably
3:06:49 very little of any kind of paleontological law that ended up in things like Chinese culture with the
3:06:53 Chinese dragons and all of that stuff. You know, that one comes up repeatedly. The only one I do know of
3:07:01 again from Alberta, um, is Buffalo stones, uh, that then apparently some of the Native Americans had,
3:07:08 which are actually bits of ammonites. So ammonites, the curly spiral shelled cephalopods are related to
3:07:13 octopus and squid. Um, so they have all these little segments to the shells and the right species. And when
3:07:19 they break open, they have like two little pairs of legs and then a bulge and then a little bulge.
3:07:26 And it looks very roughly like a bison. And apparently these were thought to be like somehow
3:07:30 miniature bison. Uh, they’re very rare because ironically, although the dinosaur bones were
3:07:35 extremely common, um, it was very swampy. And so you didn’t actually have a lot of sea coming in.
3:07:40 So you didn’t tend to get things like ammonites and ocean going animals, and then the shell would
3:07:45 have to break in the right way. But apparently for the local tribes, sadly, I can’t remember who it is
3:07:51 in that bit of Canada. Um, but yeah, these were, these were quite valued. Um, if you got a Buffalo
3:07:55 stone and I’ve seen a couple of them and yeah, you have to squint a bit, but as a little Buffalo,
3:08:01 it’s not far off. Um, but yeah, but that whole, like, were they finding mammoth legs and were they
3:08:06 finding T-Rexes and was this inspiration for this animal or this mystical animal? I don’t think they
3:08:08 were because you just don’t tend to find them.
3:08:12 So where, where do you think like, you know, cause dragons show up in a bunch of different
3:08:12 myths.
3:08:16 Well, right. But that’s the thing, they turn up in British mythology and we barely got any
3:08:20 dinosaurs here at all. You, you, you only, you only find them when you start digging for coal
3:08:21 mines, which we weren’t doing in.
3:08:27 Is it basically dramatization of like, uh, of snakes and lizards and stuff like this?
3:08:31 Yeah. And just general exaggeration and, and welding stuff together. I mean, that’s one thing you
3:08:37 could put, I guess, potentially argue is that, you know, yeah, we find tyrannosaurs in North
3:08:40 America and in East Asia. In fact, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in the end Cretaceous,
3:08:45 which is often very common because it’s a relatively recent in the grand scheme of things in the history
3:08:51 of the world. The fauna of East Asia, China, Mongolia, Eastern Russia is very similar to what
3:08:58 you get in Canada and the USA and down in Mexico. And so you find the same rough stuff. I mean,
3:09:02 they’re not exactly the same, but you get ceratopsians, you get tyrannosaurs, you get the
3:09:06 big edge dark interosaurs, you get ankylosaurs, the armored ones, this, that, and the
3:09:12 other. So if these were influencing all those different cultures, why don’t Chinese dragons
3:09:18 look like Mexican dragons or equivalent of thunderbirds or whatever? Well, cause it probably
3:09:23 wasn’t influencing them. If they were all seeing the same skeleton, they’d probably all produce the
3:09:25 same kind of mythical animals. They all produce different ones.
3:09:28 You have to understand paleontology is not perfect. So they were just misinterpreting.
3:09:34 Misinterpreting. Yeah. Um, I mean, uh, dragons aside, I’m sure like we said with weirdness,
3:09:40 there would be creatures that would be remarkable, right? You look at it and you, you might as well
3:09:45 be seeing a dragon. It could be, I mean, there’s creatures alive in the sea today.
3:09:50 Yeah. I mean, if you, if you, if you dredged up a colossal squid, I think you’d have, you know,
3:09:55 or, or even just doogongs and manatees. I mean, they’re really quite strange.
3:10:00 And if you allow yourself to marvel at the small things on earth, like I was in the Amazon jungle,
3:10:07 like the insects, they’re just like, what is happening there? There’s so many things going on.
3:10:13 And there’s, uh, they’re like hairy and colorful and, and probably poisonous and they have teeth
3:10:20 and what in there. And all the little weirdos I’ve, I’ve set several times. I’ve pitched a book
3:10:25 to publishers where I want to write a book that basically makes the point that there is
3:10:31 almost nothing. I mean, you can always dream up something totally ludicrous. There is basically
3:10:35 nothing in science fiction that doesn’t already exist on earth in some way, shape or form.
3:10:40 Yeah. That is why I often think about alien civilizations and aliens out there. And I’m
3:10:45 very certain, very certain that there’s aliens everywhere throughout the observable universe.
3:10:52 It’s very strange. We haven’t seen them, but it’s, it’s fun to marvel at what they possibly look like
3:10:57 because there’s a huge variety of organisms and species here on earth. And you just expand that
3:11:03 out to like more and more earths. And you can just imagine there’s a lot of weird.
3:11:08 that’s the thing. I think most people, you know, understandably I’m a, I’m a biologist and
3:11:14 I particularly pride myself on finding out about particularly weird animals, but yeah, I think
3:11:18 people would be stunned about some of the weird stuff that’s out there, um, that they just
3:11:26 wouldn’t realize a real, you know, things like velvet worms. Um, you know, it’s just blow your
3:11:32 mind. Uh, you know, or Sicilians and stuff like this and that, and their reproductive behavior.
3:11:37 It’s just jaw drop. I mean, I love teaching about them. I do a class on diversity of life
3:11:42 and I do, I was about eight weeks of vertebrate diversity and I love just dropping things in
3:11:45 and the students are like, what do you, what do you mean that exists? What do you mean? Something
3:11:50 like that’s normal for this group? Yeah. Yeah. They do that.
3:11:54 Well, what from that, like that class, but everything you’ve studied with the dinosaurs,
3:11:59 what have you learned about the evolution of life on earth, that mechanism?
3:12:09 It’s, it’s really good. It sounds, it sounds obvious, but it’s, I think the bit that still
3:12:15 fries my brain is just like the raw numbers, because I think we’re very bad at considering
3:12:20 like I regularly talk about, Oh, this is 70 million years old, but this is 78 and this
3:12:25 is 104. And people are just like, Oh my God, how on earth do you deal with those numbers?
3:12:32 And I don’t, they’re just numbers because I can’t conceive of it really any better than you
3:12:39 can. They are astronomical. Yeah. Last Thursday was quite a long time ago. 66 million years is
3:12:47 mind boggling. Like I, I, I can’t fathom it. Um, but that’s it. I think the evolution thing is a,
3:12:52 my suspicion is quite a lot of it happens. It’s not quite Stephen Gould punctuated equilibrium,
3:13:00 but I think stressful events probably prompt a lot more than less stressful events and, you know,
3:13:07 population crashes and all these things that then odd things survive. And then that’s changing your
3:13:11 unit component and all the rest of it. But you’ve, you’ve just got to remember that it’s just,
3:13:19 it’s almost a numbers game. Um, you know, it’s that bad analogy of like, Oh, evolution is just
3:13:22 rolling dice and hoping you get all sixes. And it’s like, no, a friend of mine said, no, it’s rolling
3:13:27 dice, but it gets to keep the sixes. And then suddenly getting a hat full of sixes isn’t that hard,
3:13:34 but also you’re in the context of even rare species, you know, ultra short stuff that like we’ve
3:13:40 nearly killed off, but like very rare species have populations in the thousands or hundreds
3:13:46 of thousands and are probably around for hundreds of thousands of years. And very few, you know,
3:13:52 other than a few things like whales and apes and elephants mostly have dozens or thousands of
3:13:57 offspring at a time. So a few thousand animals that have a few thousand offspring at a line for a few
3:14:04 hundred thousand years. Yeah. It’s billions and billions and billions of them. And that’s the rare
3:14:09 stuff. You look at Mola Mola, the ocean sunfish though. I think, I think Mola has just been split
3:14:14 up into like five species. It’s one of the weirdest looking animals. It’s love it. Love it. Love it.
3:14:20 Love it. Love it. I mean, what a, what a fish that is. Swims with a giant dorsal and I think it’s a giant
3:14:25 anal fin and then they flap alternatingly. Does it have a face? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A little
3:14:30 one at the front. Eight jellyfish, super open oceanic and they get really big. You see that one
3:14:35 with the diver, but I think these are the record breeders for animals and they have something like
3:14:41 a hundred million eggs at a time. Whoa. Don’t quote me on that, but it is something in those kinds of
3:14:50 numbers. So yeah, that’s, you don’t need a very large population of sunfish to start having an awful lot
3:14:56 of numbers. Are you going to Google it and see if you can find it? Uh, number of eggs or something.
3:15:04 Yeah. 300 million. Oh, I undercut it. A single female can release up to 300 million eggs at one
3:15:09 time during a spawning event. Boy, these eggs are incredibly small, measuring about 1.3 millimeters
3:15:14 in diameter. That’s still a lot of eggs though. When you think about it. It’s not that small. Yeah.
3:15:20 Right. 300 million of, of one mil is still quite a bit. Uh, fertilization is external.
3:15:27 Females release their eggs into the water where males then fertilize them. Wow, man. There’s a lot
3:15:33 of different ways to have sex. I guess this is, but, but, but, but that’s, that’s the bit of evolution
3:15:40 that I think I understand why people don’t get it. We are mostly talking about millions in population
3:15:48 times millions of years times thousands of offspring. Yeah. And it’s kind of a numbers game. Well, how could
3:15:52 this evolve? Well, the right selective pressure. And when you’ve got a hundred billion offspring,
3:15:58 probably a few of them have. And when you focus in on a single species and trace its history,
3:16:03 you can see how effective evolution is natural selection is. And then you just have to like
3:16:08 go across species. Yeah. But, but it’s also a massive compromise, which is the bit that people
3:16:14 always miss. You know, it’s Darwin’s line. It’s descent with modification. Yes. Over time,
3:16:20 you can end up with extraordinarily weird things, but mostly what’s happening is you’re changing
3:16:27 something fairly simple. You’re, you’re making edits to the existing plan. Um, which is why you
3:16:32 don’t have animals with tentacles. They, they have legs, which have joints, which have fingers,
3:16:36 and they all have one bone, then two bones, then a bunch of little blocky bones, and then a few more.
3:16:41 And then the little ones that make up the digits for hands and feet. And basically everything has
3:16:46 that because you’re modifying that pattern. And occasionally you get something weird, like,
3:16:51 um, most of the modern lungfish basically reduce those down to, well, they, they had a more simple
3:16:55 plan to begin with, but reduce it down to a stump. And then they’ve got something like a flaily tentacle,
3:17:01 but yeah, you know, snakes have got rid of them or the various legless lizards and things like that.
3:17:10 And again, Sicilians and, um, all the rest, but yeah, it, you’re, you’re subtly changing certain
3:17:15 things in certain ways is mostly what’s going on. And then those build up over time, but also against
3:17:20 that compromise of there’s things that do and don’t work. There’s things that are interlinked. And so you
3:17:27 can’t modify a without modifying B modifying a will kill you. Therefore B never modifies because the
3:17:34 two are genetically linked in some way, or yeah, like the compromise of the lion’s mane, making it
3:17:39 darker, makes you sexier, but more likely to kill you. You, you, I think people think evolution is like
3:17:46 perfecting things in some way. And they’re not that they’re bodge jobs. You know, that’s why we have
3:17:51 a blind spot in our eye, but things like squid don’t, but that process nevertheless does have
3:17:57 inventions in it. You have Tiktaalik, you have a fish that learns to breathe that calls out,
3:18:02 but it already had a swim bladder that it was probably processing a minimal amount of oxygen
3:18:05 through. And the swim bladder evolved for a certainly different function.
3:18:10 Yeah. But that’s one of the powerful things about, uh, uh, evolution is switches the function.
3:18:14 Yeah. It develops it for one function, but once you, once you get there, you’re like,
3:18:19 okay, this could be used for another function that, that leads to something that we in retrospect
3:18:24 can see as a major invention, which is a fish that’s able to crawl on land. And all of a sudden
3:18:31 we have, we have, uh, cities and rockets and, uh, yeah. Tiktaalik specifically, like there’s
3:18:37 something really mind boggling about a fish that crawls out of the sea. And you’re just the
3:18:38 image of that.
3:18:42 Yeah. But again, you’ve got stuff that’s not a million miles away from that. You have things
3:18:49 like frogfish, which are fully Marine, but kind of clamber through seaweed and stuff. And
3:18:55 they’ve got pseudo functional limbs. So again, cause it’s that Tiktaalik is not weirdly derived
3:19:01 frogfish, but it’s not like it’s a fish that suddenly came on land or a fish that suddenly
3:19:05 evolved legs. There was already that selective pressure that was pushing it into a new opportunity,
3:19:11 which gave it and, and then on and on and on. And that’s what keeps going. But it also brings up
3:19:15 another thing going back to dinosaurs, um, and the behavior stuff, which again, I think has been a
3:19:23 problem is, um, the functionality thing and how there’s always been, I think this big perception of
3:19:29 single traits, having single functions, which isn’t how a huge amount of biology works for some. Yeah.
3:19:35 Like eyes are used for seeing, they don’t really do anything else. Um, but I think there’s a lot
3:19:39 of, again, it comes down to a lot of the sexual selection stuff, but things like horns on Triceratops,
3:19:43 that’s probably quite good for fighting off predators, but it’s also quite good for fighting
3:19:49 other Triceratops. And then things like elephants dig with their tusks as well as fight other elephants,
3:19:55 as well as fight lions, as well as stripping the bark off trees. So you’ve got to be very careful
3:20:01 how you think of functionality in two different ways. One way is what possible things could that
3:20:09 thing do and what possible things could have been the main selective pressure before. So you think
3:20:13 about elephant tusks, as I say, they do all these different things, but when an elephant’s just got
3:20:19 the tiniest little nubs, like the first elephant whose teeth are growing the wrong way and have pushed
3:20:25 out of its jaw and now it’s got a couple of little spikes, it can’t really dig a hole with
3:20:31 them. It’s certainly not digging for water. They’re probably not great against a predator because you’d
3:20:36 basically have to get on your knees to try and lean over and try and stab it a bit, but you can show
3:20:40 off to the girls and you can immediately fight another elephant who’s head to head the same height as
3:20:47 you and you’ve got a massive advantage. So evolutionarily, they probably started as some
3:20:54 kind of sexually selected feature. But now, functionally, they’re probably compromised by the
3:21:00 fact that having the best fighting tusks, but also having the tusks that are best at digging up water to
3:21:07 keep you alive during a drought is putting selective pressure on that. And those are,
3:21:13 although sexual selection appears in both ends, those are two different things. Digging for water
3:21:18 is critical, but it’s probably not what started it. And I think that’s where we get trapped with things
3:21:23 like, say, the paddle tail of Spinosaurus or stuff like, or, you know, or T-Rex arms. It’s like,
3:21:29 well, why are T-Rex arms like that? Well, maybe we need to consider what a slightly longer arm is like,
3:21:33 or what it was being functioned for in its ancestors or how it works in other species,
3:21:39 or what else it might do, rather than every paper is like, did it do this? Or did it do this? Or did
3:21:44 it do this? It’s like, you know, it could be all of them. That’s a very different question to try and
3:21:49 answer, but people don’t tend to think of it. And it ends up being very binary. And again,
3:21:54 biology is not like that because it’s a compromise. And it may be wiser to then look at the evolutionary
3:21:58 origins, how it first sprung up. Yeah. If you, yeah. You know, what, what does a,
3:22:04 miniaturized version of this look like and what might that function for, or how does it function
3:22:08 in ancestral forms? You know, a really good example of that is giraffe necks, which have been argued
3:22:14 about, you know, forever and a day, it was giraffe necks are to help them feed up high. And then in the
3:22:19 late nineties, early two thousands, a couple of papers coming out going, actually, maybe it’s sexual
3:22:25 selection and competition. And then that drove down into arguments about, well, what does a short neck
3:22:28 look like in the acarpi? It’s nearest relative and what a short legs look like and how do they work?
3:22:32 And plus a whole bunch of other studies. And ultimately it came out that we were right the
3:22:37 first time. This is all about feeding, but it’s a really interesting way of thinking about it and
3:22:44 looking at it. Got to ask you the ridiculous question. Uh, we do have dinosaurs here on earth
3:22:50 today. They’re birds. Yep. Um, 10 and a half, 11,000 species of dinosaur are birds, dinosaurs.
3:22:56 Yes. Yeah. There’s not, it’s, it’s just a yes. Yeah. It’s how many people know this by the way?
3:23:01 So there’s, there’s an interesting one. I did a radio show, uh, probably seven or eight years ago now
3:23:06 with a couple of, you know, drive time afternoon, nothing serious, nothing science or anything like
3:23:11 that. And I mentioned something like this. And one presenter was, Oh my God, what do you mean?
3:23:14 birds are dinosaurs? And the other one is, what do you mean? You don’t know birds are dinosaurs.
3:23:23 So it’s hitting that tipping point of common knowledge. I think where no, does it, does it,
3:23:28 does everyone know, but no, but I think an awful lot of people know and are now kind of used to it as an
3:23:32 idea. So what’s evolutionary, the connection between birds and dinosaurs? I mean, they literally are in
3:23:39 the same way that we are apes and mammals. Birds are dinosaurs. The direct, if you trace back the
3:23:45 evolution of all the birds, so hummingbirds and albatross and ostrich and kiwi and parrots and
3:23:51 pelicans and penguins and whatever else, and take them down to their ancestral point and then go back
3:23:58 quite a few more million years, their nearest relist to them is a dinosaur. It is actually something very
3:24:04 close to Velociraptor, um, or at least a small version of Velociraptor. So they, birds have literally
3:24:09 descended from dinosaurs. Therefore they are dinosaurs. We have literally descended from other
3:24:15 apes. We are apes. It is that form of evolutionary connection. Throughout that whole process, did they
3:24:21 have feathers or did feathers come and go? So feathers are in Tyrannosaurs. So feathers, feathers go back at
3:24:29 least. So ironically, because the fossil record is very incomplete, um, most of the things that are closest
3:24:35 to birds, we know from the early and late Cretaceous. So the last kind of 50 million years of
3:24:43 dinosaur evolution up to the extinction. And actually birds almost certainly go back another 50 million
3:24:50 years. So birds did not appear as a result of the dinosaurs going extinct. Birds lived alongside the
3:24:56 dinosaurs for a hundred million years. This was, this is, the birds were not new on the scene and it’s
3:25:00 like, Oh, the dinosaurs dies. And from the ashes rose the bird. No, they’ve been knocking around
3:25:04 forever. They just survive because they’re small. In a very large part. Yeah. That’s, that’s almost
3:25:10 certainly what really helped them. Um, but birds took a kicking in the Katie extinction. So did mammals.
3:25:15 Loads of bird lineages went extinct and only a handful got over the line, but they did. But yeah,
3:25:22 we have feathers in, as I said, we’ve got middle Jurassic Tyrannosaurs that are 165 million years old. So a hundred
3:25:27 million years before the extinction that have feathers, simple feathers, they’d be like those
3:25:33 you get on most baby chicks. So they’re not with the big kind of classic pickup of feather in, you know,
3:25:39 in the street or on a field of the big vein up the middle and then the kind of paired flat pieces. Um,
3:25:45 this would be much more like a hair, but we have them. We’ve got something which is very close to a bird,
3:25:51 but might not quite be a bird with modern, but with modern feathers. Um, in the middle Jurassic,
3:25:56 we’ve got definitive stuff like Archaeopteryx in the late Jurassic. And then into the early Cretaceous,
3:26:02 we have a series of fossil beds in China, which are just heaving with them. So yeah. And there’s
3:26:07 Tyrannosaurs have feathers. Velociraptor and the dromaeosaurs had feathers. Troodontids had feathers.
3:26:12 Um, ornithomimosaurs we’ve mentioned, they had feathers. And so did a whole bunch of other groups as well.
3:26:19 There’s about eight or nine kind of major groups, kind of the size of something like,
3:26:26 yeah, literally like carnivores or, um, deers, you know, some massive groups, about eight or nine of
3:26:33 them were fully feathered as far as we can tell. So feathers massively predate bird origins, but it was
3:26:38 a major part of their evolution. Do I understand why feathers evolved with the function, the, the,
3:26:44 the sexual selection? Yeah. It’s probably a fundamental twofold one, which is feathers
3:26:49 insulate you. They keep you warm. And most dinosaurs were, it’s an archaic term, but it’s
3:26:54 what most people know, warm blooded. So they were much more like us and birds. They had a stable,
3:26:59 high body temperature, regardless of the environmental conditions. And so if you’re burning a lot of
3:27:03 calories to stay warm, you want to kind of keep that heat and feathers really help you do that.
3:27:09 And then the other thing is, yeah, the obvious thing is sexual selection and communication. Feathers do
3:27:14 stuff that scales can’t. You can shed them in winter and change color and come back as another one.
3:27:19 That’s quite a handy trick. Um, you can change them between juveniles and adults. So baby birds have
3:27:23 one type of feather, adults have a different one. We know of dinosaurs that do that. Well, we’ve got
3:27:28 adults and juveniles with different feather types preserved in the fossils. Um, yeah, you can produce
3:27:32 all kinds of weird colors and displays. You can, you can erect feathers, you can hold them up and fan
3:27:37 them out like a peacock or a pheasant, whereas scales, you can’t really do that a bit, or you need a huge
3:27:44 amount of bone like protoceratops. So there’s two good reasons that they would probably evolve and
3:27:50 exactly pulling them apart or which is more important. And again, they’re, they’re, they’re probably
3:27:54 bifunctional. As soon as you start making feathers and making them more colorful, well, you’re staying
3:27:58 warmer. So that’s an advantage. Or as soon as you start making feathers to make them warmer,
3:28:02 it probably won’t be long until someone evolves them to be a bit brighter red. And then we’re back
3:28:06 to, Oh my God, red. Right. But, but that’s what’s happening. And then they’re going to,
3:28:08 they’re probably going to push each other potentially.
3:28:13 I mean, it is true that the birds went real crazy with the feather and the colors and the prettiness.
3:28:15 Yeah, they absolutely do.
3:28:21 I mean, maybe there’s something about feathers that allows for that efficient sort of, uh,
3:28:22 diversification of fashion.
3:28:28 I think, yeah, I think it gives them opportunities that, that scales and solid structures simply
3:28:33 don’t. I mean, the sole ability, I mean, I say like, you know, peacocks and pheasants,
3:28:36 they are a massive disadvantage to males when they’ve got these extra plumes on them because
3:28:40 they’re so big and heavy. Peacocks can barely fly. But the fact is you can still kind of fold
3:28:45 them up into a fairly neat package and kind of hide if you really wanted to. Whereas if you’re
3:28:49 something like triceratops, that billboard on the stuck of you, on the top of your head
3:28:56 is not only enormous, but also bone, it’s massive, it’s heavy, and you’ve got to lie around the whole
3:29:01 year. Whereas peacocks at least can go, well, all the girls have settled down on their nests now.
3:29:04 I’m just going to get rid of all this extra weight and dump it.
3:29:13 looking at the entire history of Earth, what is studying hundreds of millions of years of evolution,
3:29:19 studying this epic age of the dinosaurs, what has that done for your appreciation of what makes
3:29:24 Earth beautiful? Do you ever just like sit back and like, holy shit, this is incredible.
3:29:40 Yeah, I do. But I guess maybe not much more so than I would anyway. As in, I already, because again,
3:29:47 I don’t really think of myself as a paleontologist in a lot of ways. It’s not that I don’t love my work,
3:29:55 I’m a biologist and this is what I’m looking at, but I’m fascinated and amazed by lungfish and flying
3:30:02 frogs and caterpillars and onycopherons and butterflies and a million and one other hagfish
3:30:06 and things that I think are cool and interesting and fascinating and I could happily read about them
3:30:15 or watch them in a zoo or a documentary or whatever it may be, almost every bit as much as I would with
3:30:20 dinosaurs. I probably appreciate the dinosaurs and pterosaurs in a very different way because I have
3:30:25 such a greater intimate knowledge of the science in a way that I try and read the lion literature
3:30:30 because I’m really interested in predation dynamics, but I can’t keep up with it whilst doing all the other
3:30:35 stuff as well. Predation dynamics. Well, right. So like the difference of like, what prey are they
3:30:39 taking? Why? At what percentage? What influences? How are they competing with leopards?
3:30:42 Well, there’s a literature, body of literature on this? Yeah.
3:30:47 All right. Yeah. People are studying lions and what they hunt and what they eat and where they do
3:30:52 it. There’s a, there’s a whole bunch of stuff on particularly the, the African carnivores because
3:30:58 there’s so many of them and they’re so big and their populations aren’t terrible compared to like South
3:31:04 America or North America or, or a lot of Asia, for example. Um, but yeah, going back to your question.
3:31:09 Yeah. I like, I could appreciate all of it. It’s all cool. Some of it is definitely more awesome
3:31:14 than others. I work on some of the giant pterosaurs, the ones with 10 meter wingspans.
3:31:22 Yeah. And it’s, it’s hard. Like, uh, my partner’s family’s from Uganda and we was in, we were in
3:31:28 Uganda last year. I was watching, um, Maribu Stork Circle overhead and you’re like, wow, these things
3:31:34 are huge and amazing. And then I’m like, the wingspan’s about a fifth of the stuff I work on.
3:31:40 Actually, these are quite piddly in the grand, you know, like an airliner going overhead. And
3:31:47 when you think about it in that context, yeah, I mean, cause, cause that’s it with the, you know,
3:31:52 I know people tend to be obsessed with size and you kind of get it. Like blue whales are fundamentally
3:31:57 cooler than smaller humpback whales, even if humpback whales are cool. Like it’s hard not to be impressed
3:32:04 by Pythagotitan or Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops or Quetzalcoatlus or any of these like ultimate giants.
3:32:08 There’s a reason we love great white sharks. There’s a reason we love giant squid. It’s a reason we love
3:32:15 lions and grizzly bears and stuff, but the dinosaurs do kind of do it better than anyone else or, you know,
3:32:20 and the, you know, marine reptiles and the flying reptiles. It’s just so insane.
3:32:22 Yeah. Both size and diversity.
3:32:29 Yeah. And, and longevity as well. I mean, you, you look at, you know, elephants have come and gone and
3:32:33 you know, the whales, okay, the whales have reached superlative sizes, but they’re relatively new on the
3:32:40 scene. Um, could easily have gone extinct in the last century, but yeah, you know, there’s truly
3:32:45 titanic dinosaurs for at least a hundred million years. It’s a long time. It’s hard. It’s sometimes,
3:32:52 as you said, it’s very hard to load in just how long that is. They really dominated earth for a very
3:32:57 long time. And, and almost absolutely everywhere. There’s a handful of places that we found where
3:33:02 appears that dinosaurs didn’t really get in and something else kind of took over, you know, like
3:33:08 a bit like Australia with the marsupials versus the, the other Eutherians. Um, but yeah, fundamentally
3:33:16 it was a dinosaur planet for after the, the Triassic less so at the end of the Triassic when
3:33:20 they’re first getting going, but yeah, Jurassic and Cretaceous. Yeah. It’s, it’s 140 ish million
3:33:23 years of, yeah, just absolute dominance.
3:33:29 I think it’s hilarious and just perfect that there’s a giant, uh, dinosaur head next to you
3:33:31 and you didn’t mention it once during this conversation.
3:33:37 Yeah. I thought we’d get, I mean, giant, he’s an absolute ditty one. Um, yeah. So this is
3:33:41 Protoceratops Andrew’s eye and I’ve done loads of work on Protoceratops. It’s from Mongolia.
3:33:46 This is a latest size juvenile. So I’ve, I’ve got a big head and the big head’s kind of like
3:33:48 this, but I really couldn’t fit it in the bag.
3:33:50 So this is to scale.
3:33:54 This is, this is a cast. So this is not, this is not a, this is not original, but someone has
3:34:01 molded and copied it. So it’s not even, it’s not carved. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a cast and a mold
3:34:05 taken. So yeah, this is a hundred percent accurate to the original specimen or at least
3:34:06 extraordinarily accurate to the original specimen.
3:34:07 It’s a young guy.
3:34:14 Yeah. Um, but yeah, I mean, a full size, it’s going to be like pig or sheep size. So big,
3:34:20 but not massive. Um, but I’ve got it partly because it’s affordable because I can’t afford
3:34:24 to buy the big skeletons and skulls. Um, but I’ve done a huge amount of work on it. And in
3:34:30 part, it goes back to those earlier conversations about populations. And if you really want to understand
3:34:37 animals, you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these
3:34:43 animals looks like. And protoceratops is, I would argue, probably the only dinosaur where
3:34:48 we can really do that, or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal
3:34:55 as an analog. We’ve got well over a hundred good skeletons, though not probably only about
3:35:00 70 or 80 in really accessible museums, but still a hell of a lot. We have everything
3:35:05 from here’s a tiny baby on. This is a really cheap and nasty 3d print I had made, but that’s
3:35:11 a hatchling sized one or not much bigger than a hatchling sized one. All the way up to the
3:35:17 big adults. We’ve now got embryos as well, which we didn’t have, um, until about 10 years
3:35:22 ago. So we’ve got embryonic animals all the way up to big adults. They’re all pretty much
3:35:28 from one place in, um, Mongolia. And they are, as far as we can tell from a relatively
3:35:32 narrow window in time, only about a hundred thousand years, which in the grand scheme of
3:35:37 things is very close. So you’ve got one population from one place from one time with a hundred
3:35:43 animals from embryos up to big adults. So now if you want to look at, as I do something like
3:35:48 sexual selection and when does growth of the signal kick in and at what size and what evidence
3:35:52 for dimorphism, well, suddenly you’ve got a population. You’ve got something you can work
3:36:00 with. And that’s why proserotops is so important. And I think way more important than even a lot
3:36:04 of my fellow paleontologists realize. And I genuinely think we should be pouring a lot more research
3:36:09 into them because they can tell us stuff that pretty much no other dinosaur can.
3:36:12 because they have the population data. So you can, you can ask a lot more.
3:36:17 We can treat it as a population. So going way, way back to a conversation about telling males and
3:36:23 females apart. And I said, big problem is population data, or at least the number of specimens that you
3:36:29 have when mostly you’ve only got one, two or three. Um, I did a big study on this a few years ago and
3:36:35 Gary was the really long snouted crocodilians from Nepal and India and Pakistan with a giant bulge on the
3:36:40 end of the nose. And even though the males are all bigger than the females and the males all have this
3:36:45 weird nose growth, though, that’s mostly soft tissue, but they have a weird depression in the jaw
3:36:51 in the, in the end of the snout where the nostrils sit. We got a sample size of something like about
3:36:58 110 animals. So these are very, very rare animals. So we had to ransack every museum worldwide. I was
3:37:04 sending my students sending emails to huge numbers of people. Have you got one sitting in your collection
3:37:09 lost? Can you get it for us? Can you take these photos or these measurements? We can measure it. We put the
3:37:16 data set together. And then we found that actually, apart from the very biggest males, it’s really hard to tell
3:37:22 males and females apart. And this actually really closely matched, um, some modeling data that I’d done with a
3:37:29 colleague, Jordan Mallon in Ottawa, um, looking at this for alligators and, and trying to compare it to,
3:37:36 to dinosaurs. Cause that though we talked about mutual sexual selection before, um, mutual sexual
3:37:40 selection in particular, you tend to get things that are extremely similar. Males and females are very hard
3:37:46 to tell apart, but there’s also, there’s a gradient, you know, all the way up to things like peacocks, all the
3:37:52 way down to, you can’t tell them apart like parrots. And for some features, when they take time to get
3:37:58 growing or because dinosaurs grow over a very long window and are sexually mature over a very long
3:38:06 window, you run into the problem that a big female will look like a small male and we can’t sex them.
3:38:10 And lo and behold, this is what you get with the gharials. The really big males are obvious cause
3:38:17 they’re so much bigger and they’ve got this big depression in the, in the snout, but medium sized and
3:38:27 big females look like medium sized or smaller males and very small males. And so, yeah, that’s basically
3:38:31 what we have with dinosaurs, even with protoceratops, where we’ve got a data set of like a hundred
3:38:38 papers have come out saying there’s very mild sexual dimorphism or there isn’t sexual dimorphism.
3:38:46 sexual dimorphism could be very strong in protoceratops, but we can’t find it because we can’t tell the males
3:38:53 from the females because we haven’t ID’d enough through something like medullary bow. And so you’re
3:38:58 in this horrible situation where, cause going back to the T-Rex thing is like, well, maybe it’s mutual
3:39:04 sexual selection and therefore they’re cooperating and that would be cool. But also maybe males are much
3:39:09 bigger, but we can’t tell cause our data set’s too small. In which case they’re not under mutual
3:39:16 sexual selection and we’ve got it all wrong. Ah, it’s maddening because it’s so, if these were living
3:39:24 animals, you just watch them or you just genotype them or you sex them and you just know. And we just
3:39:29 don’t. But on the other hand, we do have the mechanism to do it. There are a handful of places where you get
3:39:34 a bunch of protoceratops together where it’s a mass mortality site. Well, let’s go and drill every
3:39:39 bone because if that’s the breeding season, we might find seven or eight females. And then the others are
3:39:44 pretty much by default males. If we know it’s the middle of the breeding season, cause all the others
3:39:50 have medullary bone. And now you know where your male female split is. Now let’s analyze those two
3:39:55 data sets and then maybe we’ll see a difference and maybe we won’t. Yeah. I love how that, that frustration
3:40:02 is sort of a catalyst for figuring out. You’re like searching for a place, a piece of evidence
3:40:07 that just shows you clearly. There are ways in. Yeah, there’s ways in. This is the thing. Yeah,
3:40:11 there are ways in. And maybe we’ve got to get lucky because maybe it’s not the breeding season
3:40:16 or maybe that was just happened to be a group of all males and therefore we’re not going to get the
3:40:23 signal we’re looking for. But there’s enough of them and they’re common enough. And yet still digging
3:40:28 in Mongolia, we keep finding new species. We keep finding new cooler stuff. But I’m like, can we dig up
3:40:35 some more protoceratops? Because actually, however cool these new things are, genuinely, if you want to
3:40:41 know what dinosaurs are and how they worked, another hundred protoceratops will actually probably tell
3:40:46 us a lot more than 50 new species. However cool 50 new species might be.
3:40:52 paleontology is an incredible discipline. It really is Sherlock Holmes territory. So
3:40:58 this was an incredible conversation. I’m really grateful for all the work you write that you put
3:41:04 out there. The podcast is incredible. I just thank you. Thank you for being you and thank you for
3:41:08 talking today. Well, thank you very much for having me. I hope I haven’t worn out my welcome
3:41:13 with dinosaur stories. We’ll talk for many more hours. Thank you, brother. Thank you, Dave.
3:41:18 Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Dave Hohn. To support this
3:41:23 podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this
3:41:30 channel. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. Extinction is the rule.
3:41:38 Survival is the exception. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
3:41:39 Bye.