You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast. Happy New Year, Will. Happy New Year, David. Happy New Year, everybody, and welcome to our annual traditional Common Descent Podcast end of the year Q&A, where we will spend a long time answering a deluge of questions submitted to us by our audience. It is the end of 2024. This is always a super fun way to wrap up a year. Thank you to everybody who has been listening to us throughout 2024. This has been a super fun year for the podcast. Welcome to all of our listeners who joined us this year, and as always an extra big thanks to our patrons, whose support allows us to do all the cool stuff. We've done this year, years before, and our cool plans that we have for the future in 2025. Yeah, this has been a very transformative year, and it looks to continue to be so going to the future. So thank you, thank you, thank you for that support. Let's answer questions. Will give us our first question. Okay. Our first question is from Adrian. What fossil specimen discovery or research study do you feel is the magnum opus of each era of time in the Phanerozoic, one for the Paleozoic, one for the Mesozoic, and one for the Cenozoic? Fascinating question. Hi, that's a really good. The first thing that comes to mind is just really famous fossil specimens. Absolutely. Like, Archaeopteryx seems like a very classic choice for Mesozoic, something trilobite-y, perhaps for the Paleozoic, although there also are studies that, especially for like the Paleozoic, where researchers have done grand overviews of climatological and biological change from the Cambrian through the Permian, and those kinds of studies also seem like good candidates for the magnum opus of that time period. That's kind of what I was thinking. I don't have any particular studies to quote and name right off the top of my dome, but those studies that are the culmination of decades of study and many other studies on this time, that take this massive amount of data that has been collected and says, "Alright, we're going to try to answer some big questions using all of these people's research." There's not a single one of those for each, but there's a bunch of those that happen. Yeah. But one of those feels like the answer that really has to be at where everyone's effort is almost represented in this study that takes just a massive bite out of the question. Yeah. Which does mean that Magnus Opa are continuing to be produced as time goes on. Absolutely. That was the other thought I had. It's like, if I had to choose from like, recent, you know, not even necessarily this last year, but like certain things where some of the Ediacar and Bioda in the like, the last couple of years have been fairly decently supported to be animals. Yeah. That's exciting. That's big news. Exciting. And so like some of those studies that are like, "Hey, this is going to change a lot of the ways we look at this stuff going forward now." Those also feel like like miniature magnum opa. In lieu of specific examples, Titanoboe for the San Azoic, Sanajev for the Mesozoic. And sadly, the Paleozoic is magnum opus-less. It's dainosuchus and purus horse. Next question is from Joe, who says, "You have been given an unlimited budget to make your own season of prehistoric planet. Which span of time do you choose? What taxa do you want to focus on and what kind of ecosystem/localities would you like to be represented?" Ooh, I feel like the first thing that came to mind, and not that this hasn't been done before, but with a big budget documentary, it's been a long time since I've seen something visit like the Permian. Sure. And Gorgonopsits and stuff in there. Yeah. And I talk about when land ecosystems started getting big animals and things like that. I feel like the rise of terrestrial ecosystems as we know them. That would be a very cool exploration to do over multiple episodes and actually go from the beginning of the Permian to the Great Dying, not in one one hour, but multiple sections. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. My cheating answer is if we've got an unlimited budget, then all of it. Day one, the sun. Yes. Next up, Rachel asks, "In an alternate universe where crocs and snakes never evolve..." The worst timeline. What animals would be the mascots of A.U. Commodus sent. Okay, this question came back around to fun. Yes. Bonus. What would their names be? Oh, no. What animals would we have ended up arguing about? I feel like the first two thoughts that come to mind are bats and whales. Bats and whales? Because those are often toward the top of my list. Yes. Those definitely are up there. I feel like if I were to have claimed a character, if there weren't crocs for me to throw my love at orangutans, like it doesn't come up super often, I love primates. Yeah. They get overshadowed so aggressively by the scaly animals, but I love primates. That might have been my passion animal if there were not big archosaurs still. Yeah. Or we could have ended up arguing about the best dinosaur, in which case, Deinonychus would have been one of them. Yeah, Deinonychus. I probably would have gone with Ceratosaurus to be... Sure, sure. Because that's my go-to childhood favorite for the one that's always enamored me. What's my favorite animals that aren't snakes? Mm-hmm. Oh, no. This is a horrible question. David is discovering he is one animal dimension. I don't have. I don't like any other animals. This is it. I want to think about that one. What would the orangutans name be? Ooh, yeah. What is a group of orangutans called? Because that's what that's where Batskin coil came from. That's true. That's true. It's the collective. Batskin coil was the collective terms for the audience. Yes. And they kind of accidentally ended up being the names of the mascots. I know most primates, it's true, but I don't think that's correct for a orangutans. Sure. Oh, what is it? I feel like I've... A barrel. Yeah. Barrel would be a great name. Barrel would be a great name. Oh, no. Barrel, barrel the orangutans. Barrel, barrel the orangutans. So much raw, barrel the orangutans. I don't know, I don't know for sure what mine. I'll have to think. It might be Bats. That's like the first thing that came to mind. Bats is good. But also reptiles are so cool. And so it may very well end up being like some lizard. Yeah, just a less sneaky squamute. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's the Sicilians, just be a Sicilian. And there's no name for a group of Sicilians, because the horror is this. Well, a group of Bats, I guess, like a colony? Yeah, a colony. A colony? Colony would be bad. Colony's not too bad. It'd be pretty good. Cave of Bats, Cave and Barrel. Cave and Barrel? It sounds like a shipping place. Barrel and murmuration. Yeah. Murmur, actually. Murmur. Murmur and barrel. That's pretty good. All right. Somebody out there are, please do. Murmur and barrel. It would make me so happy. That's very funny. Nathan asks, "Why have fish never gotten as big as white?" Whales. If you want to be a huge deep sea predator, like a sperm whale, surely it's a huge advantage to live down there and not have to return to the surface. Also, were mosasores also bigger than the biggest ever fish? Very good question. Two parts to that first question is, "A, we don't know why it seems whales just have outsized everyone else." Yeah. We don't know what it is that is working for them that no other ocean group has been able to achieve. B, there have been fish that have gotten real close to the upper-sized ranges. Not the upper-upper-sized ranges of whales. 50, 60 foot long fish. Yeah. Absolutely. There have been some prehistoric fish. And then, of course, the modern whale shark that are getting into whale-sized categories. But yeah, the whales are doing something. Something about whale anatomy is gaming the system in a way we haven't seen any other group do. And this feels more like the sauropods situation where it's not that everything else is lacking. It's that this group of animals is doing something different and special. They're weird for how big they're getting. That is unusual. Because a lot of the other big ones do kind of reach similar big sizes. Like mosasores, ichthyosaurs, and fish are reaching similar giant sizes. And then there's whales playing a different game. To answer the mosasores part, yes. The biggest mosasores are about the same size as the biggest. Yes. In that 50/60 foot range. Yup. Yup. Next question's from Ariane. I know that selective pressure can work to create signals of fitness. But can there be a selective pressure to signal a lack of fitness? For example, is it ever beneficial to signal something like, "I'm old, so don't mate with me because I'm less fertile to potential mates?" This is an interesting question. I think that I don't know that there are many examples of specifically signaling a lack of fitness. I think that that automatically happens as the flip side of signaling fitness. Yes. That I think the signal for "I'm old and maybe not the best choice" is that that individual isn't putting off the same signals as the younger or healthier individuals. Yeah. I do know that there are some that seem to kind of have a switch. Like lions' mains get worse if they get pushed out of their territory or losing fights. Their mains suffer due to that. I think it's stress related, but I don't actually know. So there are some that seem to kind of turn off. It happens that way. Yeah, and you do get a signal that that male is not doing well, so maybe they don't bet on them. I also know that there are some species, like certain lizards, will actually change color based on their status in their social group hierarchy. So those seem like things that can go back and forth. Yes. And I know there's also like certain, especially social animals where older individuals start behaving differently. They no longer compete for mates because now they're here as like a matriarch or something. And there are a handful of species where, for example, females undergo menopause. Yes, exactly. Which is a complete shift in the reproductive biology of that individual. So they aren't signaling lack of fitness, but they are taking themselves out of the race. Yes. They're entering a new role in that social group. So yeah, very good question. Diana asks, what's up with goats and their weird pupils? Goat pupils are great. I did send this question to Laura to get her answer for it. Yes. And I can read what Laura says. Absolutely. So our friend Laura from Episode 84, who is a paleopathology researcher and also a goat expert. Laura says, they're pupils being lengthened. So goat pupils, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, goats have horizontal pupils. So if you look at the eye, like a cat will have the vertical pupil in goats, it's like a rectangle that goes lengthwise across the eye. Laura says, their pupils being lengthened horizontally and shortened vertically gives them a wider field of vision for spotting predators while reducing glare coming in from the sun. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Great for prey animals. Also, Laura continues, may I just say, everyone judges goat's eyes, but you never see anyone talking about horses, sheep or deer, harumpf. Yes. Yeah. This is a pretty common feature in especially hoofed mammals. Yeah. It gives them a view of the horizon so that they can keep a much wider view around themselves and look for motion of a predator. I also know that with a lot of these planting animals, their eyes will rotate. Yes. And they go down to eat. That's the next thing that Laura said on the thing is that, and I don't know if I knew this because when I read it, when she said it, I said, what? Yeah. Yeah. Their eyes rotate so that the pupil is always horizontal to the horizon. Yeah. It's gyroscopically stabilized. You can find Laura sent me some images of like a deer looking up and around and then bending down to eat grass and the pupil stays horizontal. Yeah. So cool. So even weirder than you might have realized. Yeah. Yeah. Kylie says, yes, what did the last common ancestor between me and a turtle look like? The last common ancestor, assuming that Kylie is a human, now Kylie's name has a turtle. Yeah. So if you're a tortoise, if you're a tortoise, then it looked a lot like a turtle. Yep. Yup. Assuming you're a human, which isn't a subject, you know, maybe we're wrong, the last common ancestor between turtles and humans would be the last common ancestor between reptiles and mammals. Yes. Which would have been some carboniferous, early amniote thing. Yeah. Probably would have looked a lot like a lizard. Yes. That, it probably looked a lot like a modern lizard. Yep. That was a very popular body design back then. Yes. Something like hylonemus from the carboniferous, just little lizard shaped things. Yeah. So you can see the shadow of your shared ancestry and all of the lizards and salamanders running around today. Yeah. Desi asks, "How in the world do you keep on top of all of the discord threads? I feel like almost every post has a crocodile snake stamp within minutes of its posting. Do you guys do rotating shifts? Do you have it on all day at work?" I do not have it on all day at work, but I do have it open on my home computer and I don't get a chance to read everything because I'm a slow reader. But I do go in and if there's something that mentions me or like a picture that catches my eye, I make sure for a little crock to see that I approve. If I don't put it, that doesn't mean I don't approve, but I just probably didn't get a chance to read it. I am and have always been a compulsive social media checker. Yep. It's a flaw. It's a real character flaw. So I do check the discord very free, I comment and stamp on the discord far less than I actually check it because I don't want to leave evidence for people to see how often I actually check the discord. David is fitting much more what you're suspecting in your question. Yes. I'm making it seem like I'm doing what David's doing, but I'm not. Yes. So we'll check it less than you think and I check it more than anything. Anna asks, are you Team Nanotyranus or Team Juvenile T-Rex? What would change your mind one way or the other? Ooh, I like that second part. Yeah. So for those unfamiliar, there is a dinosaur named Nanotyranus, which there has been just unending debate as to whether or not it is its own distinct genus and species, or if it is a young Tyrannosaurus Rex. And part of that is because it is shaped very differently, it is very slim and more running adapted, it seems. Yes. So it seemed like it might be a cousin of T-Rex that just stayed small. Yes. But then others have said, well, maybe it's just a puberty T-Rex. Exactly. So the argument is, is this a juvenile T-Rex or is this a different species? I mean, the quick and simplest answer is, I don't particularly have an opinion on this. Yeah, not enough to actually weigh in. Yeah. I don't feel very strongly about it. I think I am more questioning on the nanotyranus than juvenile T-Rex. Yes. That seems to be where a lot of the research leans. And that's why I am that way. It also is arguably a more parsimonious, so it's an easier explanation. So yeah, I tend to lean that it's juvenile T-Rex. But no, if someone comes out with a paper and they go, hey, we compared this to a similar juvenile T-Rex and we found these indisputable differences. Yes, that would say, yeah, absolutely. If we found that or if we found a growth, like a series of younger members that are distinct from T-Rex young members. Yes, absolutely. And that would be the big, is if we find other growth stages of nanotyranus. Exactly. Well, I will say that I think the best answer to this question was given in a recent social media post by Astrid Lundberg, who said that the funniest answer would be that nanotyranus is a juvenile but of something else. Yes, yeah. Yeah. And then that thing turns out to be bigger than T-Rex, but it's called nanotyranus because that's the name that was given to it. It's a bit of juvenile V-Rex. So I'm team that. Yvonne Brunswick asks, "What kind of predator was sufficiently nasty that echidnas decided to grow defensive spines all over their upper side? What predator didn't notice the spines are only on the echidnas backs and their bellies are soft and chewy. And since many predators no longer pose a significant threat, why do echidnas still bother growing?" So first, the spiny back in gooey underside? Fairly common. Yeah. A lot of mammals do that. Turtles, armored back, soft underside and hedgehog. Yeah. That's a pretty normal thing to happen with a lot of mammals. And I assume part of that's mobility, that if you were hard on both sides, you'd run into the mobility issues that like turtles have. Yes. Turtles can't run and jump very well. Armadillos can run and jump. So you get the benefit of being protected as long as you have your feet on the ground. As for predators, there were tons of predatory marsupials, phylacines and other stuff. Also there were our big predatory lizards, you get monitors and snakes and stuff over there. And so, yeah, they were evolving with lots of predators around them that just now there's not many big mammal predators except for introduced ones. And you just have the reptilian ones left. As for which ones wouldn't notice, I don't know which ones would be going after echidnas more than others. Yeah. I don't think snakes would be a big fan of echos. No. I feel like some of the mammalian ones probably would because they seem like they'd be good at trying to flip it over. Yeah. Like a Tasmanian devil or phylacine, something in that vein. Yeah. Seems like they would be good for it. Sriya says, "I'm a middle school science teacher here in the US and a huge fan of the podcast. Why thank you." Well, thanks. "I'm also looking to start a science education podcast of my own. What do you think are the most essential things anyone looking to start their own science communication/education should know or be aware of?" Wonderful question. The first thing you should know and be aware of is that you can do it and you totally should. Absolutely. I think that doing up this is going to sound, I think, perhaps a biased perspective. Doing a podcast is a lot easier than it seems. Yes. You really just got to turn on a mic and then record it. There are places online where you can put it up for free. It's very easy to just get it started and then you can figure out the other stuff later. Well, the bar for entry is very low and then you can always improve and no one will ever complain about you improving. Yes. So it's more important to get started than to start exactly on the perfect right foot. It is also, I think, really important to keep in mind that even if you are the only one on your podcast, you're not doing it by yourself. There are plenty of people out there in the world who have technical expertise that can give you advice. There are services. There are people who offer the services of doing editing or creating marketing materials. Also, you have an audience. Our podcast runs on suggestions from the audience listening to what people are asking you for, to what people are saying, is a great way to get a sense of what people need. If you're a middle school science teacher, then I think you already probably have a really good handle on what your audience might require or might be interested in. Then also on the note of not feeling overwhelmed, it's perfectly fine to put limits and boundaries on. I'm only going to do episodes that are this long because editing something longer than that makes me want to pull my hair out or only going to do one a month or whatever schedule. But don't do what you think is the necessary amount, do what is the capable amount. That actually does dovetail nicely into the last thing I was going to say, which is do the thing that you enjoy doing. Yes, which is always key for science education. Yes. Not only does that make it sustainable, but as I was so fond of telling the tour guides at the museum when I would train them, excitement and enthusiasm are both contagious and the number one thing that people notice in science communication. And hard to fake. And hard to fake. It's hard to pretend to be interested in something. As many parents are well aware. If you are excited, by far the most common compliment I have seen to myself and other science communicators is you can tell how excited this person is. You can tell how enthusiastic they are. That's the number one thing to do. Lutely. Best of luck. Go do it. Go kick butt. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing it. Yes. Rowan asks, what is the selective pressure for humans losing their wisdom teeth? I understand that our jaw is too small for them, but how does our DNA know to turn off the gene for producing the teeth? That's a great question. So it's less that our DNA knows to turn that tooth off because in many of us it hasn't and it is actually now. It didn't turn off in me. It's now a problem because it was a problem for me. Basically the issue is that one, the human snout has, throughout our evolution, shortened quite aggressively. And even before, like our primate evolutionary history is full of lost teeth. Yes. We are quite reduced compared to earliest mammal ancestors. There's various reasons why that could be. It could be due to changing in our posture and the way our face is now adjusted. A lot of people attribute it to the way we started to enunciate and speak. That moving the tongue back allows us to make noises that are quite literally impossible for our primate cousins. It's also been attributed to changes in diet. Yep. Not only as we shifted from plants to meat, meat is easier to chew and eat, but also once we started cooking things that makes it even more easy to chew. Which requires fewer jaw muscles, which puts less strain on the jaw, which requires a less robust jaw. And all of these things can continue to compound and give us a very short jaw. So one, our jaw shortened, we ran out of room, we are in the next step of that continual process of losing teeth. And really what it is is that we don't need the wisdom teeth. And when you don't need a body part, then mutations can build up without consequence. Or at least with less consequence. Yes. See episode 206. Yes. Where we talked a lot about this. So that is really what the DNA is doing is not turning them off, but it's stopped paying attention to them. They aren't critical to be maintained because we don't need them to survive. And they would have been continued to select it against if we were dying due to impacted wisdom teeth, which would have happened to me. Right. Since we're surgically removing them, who knows if they'll ever fully evolve away because we're maintaining the ability to survive into old age with them. Sinclair asks, theoretically, if a group other than primates had been the ones to evolve sapiens, which group would you want it to be and why? Not based on what you think is likely, just what you want it to have been besides snakes and crocs. You all have our number. A little caveat right there at the end. What would be the funnest group of animals to have developed high society and culture and all these things? My answer is always the same and it's octopus. Yeah. That is always my answer. Sapient octopus would be so cool. I'm going to go and say bats again. Yeah. That would also be very good. That civilization would be so fascinating. Mm-hmm. Like what would a bat city look like? Would it be hanging? Yeah. That would be cool. Yeah. That would be pretty neat. Amy asks, "The show is coming to an end and you each get to pick one final episode topic. What topic would you go out on?" Mm-hmm. In my golden years, what will I want to talk about? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I feel like there's kind of a couple of ways to go of either a topic we wouldn't normally do or like a comfort topic. Yes. Like something snake or crocky or like the end of the universe. Yes, exactly. Like how does it all end? Or perhaps it would be a plants episode because we're tired and we don't want to do that much work anymore. Yeah, yeah. So we'll let Allie do it. Up next is Ava. Can you paint a picture about how the world would look if tectonics managed to keep one super continent? Would spinosaurs, crock, snakes, and turtles be sunbathing happily along the shores of the Tethys Sea while trilobites still roamed the ocean if they hadn't been stepped on by Godzilla? Of course, the asteroid impacts could not have been avoided, but besides that, what do you think? How would everything be or have been different? Interesting. The shape of the world biomes would certainly be very different when Pangaea was around. There was a very hot desert-y center and also like we talked about in a number of episodes, the potential like Pangaea and monsoon system, although I would go so far as to get a little sneaky with it. The Permian mass extinction is associated with intense volcanic activity that itself was associated with the rifting of Pangaea. Yes. So there is an argument to be made that if Pangaea had never broken up, there wouldn't have been a Permian mass extinction. Yep. In which case, we might not have gotten dinosaurs and we might not have gotten mammals when and how we did, so we might maybe gorgonopsids and stuff would have stuck around a long time. I think that's a very good point and as they allude to it, would these things be hanging out together if it's not that there would have been less evolution, but if there were not massive breakups into giant land masses, you wouldn't get things like Australia being super unique because everyone would have been able to mix a lot more, not uniformly. One end of a supercontinent is still way far away from the other end, but there would have been much more of a gradient of diversity instead of South America being super weird and by itself until it reconnected and India getting to be its own weird island. If that's not happening, there would be a lot more, probably at least, consistent to the history of life, which I don't know what happened, what patterns we would see with that level of consistency through basically all of Earth history. What would have happened is that the mascots of the podcast would have been an orangutan in the back. Yeah, that's the same age, this is the same one. Jesse asks, "Now that scientists have found a frozen homoetherium kitten, what is the next animal you would most like to see come out of the ice?" All right, what animals have we found frozen? We've got woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths and cave lions. I don't think we have bears. No, and we do have dogs, we've gotten frozen dogs, or canids before. Yes, I believe so. Yeah, because there was um, we got a name that was something funny, because they weren't sure if it was a dog or not, it was like Dorg. I can't remember if it was something like that, where they were like, it might be a dog, but we're not sure, and this is the word for friend in that language. My answer, which is the most disturbing answer, would be like Neanderthal. That would be like Neanderthal or Denisovan? I think that's to find a frozen ancient person. That's the answer, and for the couple reasons of we would learn so much. Yeah, we would. But also, I feel like that would be such a ridiculously huge step in humanizing, getting to see the face, even if it is a bit mummified, but getting to see the face and us getting to make artistic reconstructions that are just oh so much more informed. I'm going to look at this person and go, "Oh, that just looks like a person." That's just a person. If this person walked past me on the street, I wouldn't notice that anything was different. That would be powerful. Also, what they have, they're clothing on a jewelry or something. Yeah, I think that's the answer. Yeah. Tarantugai asks, "What's your favorite arachnid?" Spider-man. I like trapdoor spiders are super cool. Trapdoor spiders are very cool. I think I'm a sucker for jumping spiders. Oh, that is a great choice. Jumping spiders are a lot of fun. Yeah. Jumping spiders might be the correct answer. They're just so charismatic. Oh, scorpions are awesome. Scorpions are very cool. I don't know a lot about scorpions, but scorpions are extremely cool. Harvestmen also are way up there for me because they feel like a speculative evolution creature. Yes. What if a spider became a scorpion is kind of how they feel. That's not exactly what they are, but that's how they feel, and that's super weird and cool. What's a group of spiders called? Oh, I don't know. There's only a few colonial ones, a web. A web? There you go. Web the spider. Hehehe. Yet another David asks, they're multiplying. Yeah, we are Legion. That's funny, actually, because Legion's name is David. What clades of life below the kingdom level have risen the most in your estimation over the years since starting the podcast. Both of you have expressed a much deeper appreciation for plants and fungi since learning more about them, but I'm curious about particular classes or orders or families that you used to find unremarkable or uninteresting, but now consider fascinating. David said something like this about ichthyosaurs, and I'm curious what other groups have flipped for you. That's a good question. I'm having trouble thinking of ones that have flipped where I wasn't interested, but now I am. Right. But there's definitely ones that ping my radar in a way they never used to. For me, the absolute number one answer is Sicilians. I already thought Sicilians were cool. That episode has made me a Sicilians fan. Wales for me. Yeah. Because I've done, I did our whales, I did our tooth whales. I'm sure Bailene whales is in the future at some point, and it's gotten to the point where it's like, well, yeah, now I've done our, and it's why I pick whale news when it comes up and stuff, because might as well complete the collection is kind of how it feels. So I've, I've already done so much. I might as well do the third obvious episode that's left, and then continue to announce any news that comes out because I, I, why stop? So yeah, whales, I, I, I, not that I didn't like whales. Never was a big whale person. Yeah. Yeah. Pod. Pod would be the name of the whale mascot. Ooh, pod. My whale, if I had a whale mascot, it would probably be, who, orc is good, but I was, I was going to say mine would be an oracle. Oracle is good. I, who, I think I might be a river dolphin for me though. Oh, sure. Because there's, there's the gareels of the whales and I really like that. And there's, it's the fact that multiple of them have all done it and they're all equally weird. Yeah. Yeah. Pod the dolphin. Pod. That's a good one. Oh. Jessica asks, in the seven years you have done the podcast, have you received negative or positive construction, constructive criticism? Have you made changes to your podcast? Because of it. Yeah, absolutely. We've gotten a lot, we get tons of feedback from our audience, especially early on, we got a lot of constructive criticism in the sense of people who are like, this is a thing I like, please keep doing this. Yes. This is a thing I didn't like. Please don't do that. Yep. We have made change, most of the changes that we've made to the podcast based on audience feedback have been things we know the audience wants. Right. Ally became a regular recurring guest because she got such an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience. People really like, you know, spooky and silver screen science and spotlight. And so we keep doing those because people really like them. And we're able to gear those things in the directions that we know our audience wants us to do it. Negative criticism is honestly much rarer for us. We don't get a lot of negative criticism and comments on our stuff. Most of the time that we do, it's extremely rude or insulting or condescending. And so we just ignore it. And even when it's not particularly rude, very often, if it's like complaining about a way we do stuff, it is directly countered by people saying they like that exact same thing. Yes. So our typical way early on, I know we got comments from people who are like, I wish you wouldn't do the news section. Like I hate the news section. Did you move it to the end because you make it its own thing? But please put it on Patreon. But way more people were like, oh my goodness, the news is my favorite part. So the compromise we made is we put timestamps in the description. So if you want, you can skip the news. And we would get people who were like, could you do more news? And so we decided we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. We'll timestamp it, but we're going to stay right middle of the road. The only examples that I can think of where we got negative criticism that we did make changes for have been every now and then someone will reach out to us and let us know that us like a term we used or the language we used to discuss something was inappropriate. Yeah, problematic for usually a way that we weren't aware of or we forgot in the moment. Yes. And they'll call us on it. And then yeah, we make a point to go right, our bad. And it'll, it's, you know, there's certain ones that'll come up later and we're like, remember, not that this don't say this. So there are a few, if you listen through the whole catalog and you really pay attention, there are a handful of times where we have used a term or a name for something that we then don't ever use again, because someone emailed us and said, Hey, just so you know, that actually is an insult, or that actually the history behind that word is problematic. Yes. So those are absolutely things we've made changes for Melissa asks, if you could choose any organism for which we currently only have partial remains to be the next major fossil find of a complete and impeccably preserved specimen, what organism would you want it to be? Ooh, there's a, there's, there's so many that, that could be there. So I feel like it, obvious things would be like some basil, yeah, and early bat, yeah, early pterosaur. I don't know of a specific specimen where we have like part of an early bat that I want the rest of that one, but I'm sure there are examples where it's like, we have a tooth from a bat that should be at the age where they evolved. I'm gonna say, Charovipteryx, yeah, the delta glider, yeah, I would love like a bone bed with incredible soft tissue preservation of Charovipteryx, show me what that gliding membrane was doing. And that was the other thing I said is, or something that would be cool to see the rest of. Yes, absolutely. I like that one. That, that, I feel like that's a good answer. I'm gonna go with that too. What's a, what's a group of Charovipteryx called? Let us know audience and we'll put that in the list. A kite. A kite. A kite. Our next question, two, two questions. Come from Elle and Abby, Elle asks, what would you recommend to someone to begin studying natural history/paleontology? What steps did each of you take? I would imagine you should focus on the thing you are most interested in. However, I have ADHD/ASD and I enjoy everything I learn about all topics. Boy, that's real. And Abby says, I am currently an environmental science student, graduate student, looking to pursue a PhD in either ecology, conservation biology, or paleontology. It is rather terrifying to navigate on my own and without an extremely narrow focus within the field, as I would be happy to study anything at all within the realm of science, ecology, and evolution, so I would love to know more about each of your experiences in academia or any tidbit of advice you might be comfortable sharing. Great questions, absolute best of luck to both of you. Yes. I would love to say that the problems that you both have expressed, being interested in everything, being terrified at the choices and struggling with ADHD/ASD and not being able to focus on stuff, yeah, those are extremely common and relatable experiences, so so far you're doing it right. Yes, absolutely. My biggest, so both of these questioners have expressed that indecision of where do I focus, where do I zero in, and the answer is that realistically, you could study any number of things. Yes. Since you asked about personal experiences, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist when I went to college, and I went to college and I talked to professors and I talked to students to find out what the opportunities were, and I finally talked to a professor who said, "Well, we're doing fieldwork this summer, why don't you join us?" And that became my first fieldwork. And then I said, "Hey, everyone's doing cool research, can I do some research?" And my professor said, "There's a bunch of snakes and salamander fossils that no one's looking at. Do you want to do that?" And I said, "Yes." So I became a researcher of mostly later cenozoic small reptiles, because that was the opportunity that had presented itself to me and I enjoyed it. If the fossils that hadn't been looked at were bats and shrews, and I didn't hate it when I did that, I might have become a bats and shrews person. I think that when you are getting started and you're not quite sure what you want to do, the best thing to do, my best piece of advice is find a lot of opportunities, meet a lot of people, talk to a bunch of other students and professors, find out what opportunities are available for you to get involved in different aspects of what's going on at your university or what's going on near you. Get some fieldwork experience, get some lab work experience, get some research experience, and what will happen is you will fall in love with one of those things. The more people you connect with, the bigger your network of support is. The more opportunities you get, the broader your knowledge of the field and your experiences. And if you're still in school, there are tons of opportunities presented to students for scholarships, for academic organizations, for going to conferences, cast a wide net, indulge that, urge to want to study everything, and then you'll pick something and then you will eventually be 70 years old and you'll look back over your career as a scientist and you'll go, ah, if only I had studied this instead. And when you say that, you will be the same as every other scientist who has ever lived going, ah, I could have studied this, but this is what I got on and I was happy with that. Yeah. That is very similar to the thoughts I had, but my first thought was try stuff out and at least try something out like because everyone's in a different situation. Some people you may not have as many options as everyone else or in every school, like my school had biology major. Right. That was the only remotely close scientific pursuit because I was in tiny North Georgia. So there was not a lot. Yeah. I went to an undergraduate college with like 40,000 students. Yes. So I had the opposite situation. Yes, exactly. I was overwhelmed with choices. But try things out, find the thing closest to what you're most interested in right now that is where you can go, and then similar, what Davis ain't talked to people, I found out about ETSU's paleoprogram because I talked to my professors and one of them had gone there and knew that the fossil site existed, didn't know much about it. She was not a paleontologist. She was a modern zoologist through and through, but went, Hey, you like fossils. Did you know there's one, you know, an hour from here? I don't know. And so that is the two key things that try things out, whether it's a thing or trying out multiple things. And then ask for like what to pick what you both asked about that and this, and you know, this is probably different for everyone. So this, I can't say this is what will work for you to me and for me, it was less about what made sense and what felt right, that I didn't know I wanted to be an educator until I had done a bit of education here and there. And then finally paid attention and went, I'm more excited to give a tour than I am to go work on my thesis every time. Yes. And noticing that that purely just gut feeling of I'm excited when I go to do that, I get pumped when they're like, we've got a school group with 50 students from this science school. I go, Oh, it's going to be good. Those gators can wait. Yeah. And then I go, all right, I got to go take pictures of bones. It'll be cool stuff. But it's that felt like a chore and the other one didn't pay attention to those feelings. It's it is a okay to pursue those feelings and not the one that quote unquote makes the most sense. You can also change along the way, you know, absolutely. If you, you know, we know tons of people who started as paleontologists and then ended up over their career shifting into archeology or shifting into more modern biology, so as long as you're staying within that same realm, obviously it's hard to stop being a paleontologist and become a dentist. Yes. Although actually that's not, you know, not as hard as you think more overlap than you might think. But yeah, you you have that wiggle room over the course of your studies in your career. And it's also okay to mix and match, you know, Abby mentioned having major different topics and not sure which one to focus on. Very often you can look at, like, look at the ecology of paleontology and apply fossil information to modern conservation. Yeah. Our friend Jeff talked about that in one of our live chats about studying fossil bison to then inform modern conservation efforts. Well, and that's how I got my job at the aquarium in Tampa is when in the interview, I was interviewing and when I said, yeah, I'm a, my background is paleontology. I have a master's in paleontology. I've worked at a fossil site. They had a moment of, and you want to work in an aquarium, like, what does that have to do with an aquarium? I want every single animal in your building has a fossil record. Yes. And that's an aspect that I can happily talk about and bring into the aquarium that I bet isn't there yet. And that I was about to say, sometimes if you overlap multiple of your interests, that's how you make a niche for yourself. Yes, absolutely. You become the person who does those things. So look for the things that interest you in the other things that interest you and see if there's overlap in a way that you can bring them together and continue to ask people for input and advice and opportunities like you have done because that's the best way to do it. Well, because our experiences are two experiences from two people. Yes. If you ask two more people, you'll get two new experiences that may more closely mirror what you're going through. So please ask other people. And I know that as Elle specifically mentioned ADHD, ASD, which I know telling a person who is saying, I'm struggling with ADHD and ASD to go talk to other people is at times a large ask. But I promise you, if you go trolling around a science department, you will find so many other people with the same acronyms as you that, yeah, you're going to make friends. In fact, if you meet one that doesn't, we'd be happy, we'd be fascinated to learn that that. How did you get here? Really? That one of those is out there? They love at the museum every now and then I would talk to like a high schooler who would say, oh, I'd love to like work in paleontology or like volunteer in a museum like this. I'm a little worried because I have social anxiety or I'm autistic or I have ADHD and I worry that that would make it harder for me to sort of mesh in a place like this. And I got to say, you're going to fit right in. Yep. And best of luck to both of you. Yes, we are rooting for you here on the other side of the microphone. Go get them. Justin asks, I was wondering if I could indulge David's linguistic interest for a moment. That's me. How is the evolution of language like and unlike the evolution of living organisms? Yeah, David. Great question. Language changes in many, many of the same ways that biological things change. You start with an ancestral condition and then change from there. Language can diverge into new do multiple language paths. If the people speaking, it gets separated by mountains or something like that, you can study specific short term and long term changes in language much the same way that you can study them in biology. They're affected by a lot of the same factors. Like there are trends in language change associated with climate or geography. So there's a lot of overlap. The biggest way I think that they differ is that language can change in ways that organisms can't. You can hybridize languages in ways that biological organisms cannot hybridize. You can also intentionally change language. Yeah, exactly. Which you can't do, you know, I can't, most animals, humans are weird. Most species cannot intentionally program changes into themselves. Yes. And on purpose make changes to language. I can just make up a word right now and then define the word I just made up. Yes. And if other people start using it, it's part of the language now. If I say florp is the name for the group of Sicilians and everyone else starts calling it that. It's florp now. It's florp now. It'll eventually be in the dictionary. Florp the Sicilian. Yep. That's one of the mascots. Our next questions again are from Eshavaria and Aaron who ask what repercussions do you think this new political administration and their climate denialism will have on conservation efforts and paleontology. And Aaron says after the presidential election, I found myself thinking about how Trump decreased the range of both the bears, ears and grand staircase Escalante monuments and how these areas likely hold unknown paleontological gold that could be lost to science in the spirit of planning ahead, contacting representatives and organizing. Are there any other places that you know of that have been lobbied, lobbied for by industry or could have been on the chopping block during his previous term. Locals might want to get ready to fight as hard as they can to keep these special places intact. These are great questions and worth thinking about. So yes, it is as of this recording, the end of 2024, Donald Trump has just been reelected for a second presidential term here in the US, which is cause for concern for many reasons. So as Aaron in the question is alluding to, we actually talked in the news several years ago about the Trump previous Trump administration's reducing of the size of two national monuments in Utah, and we talked about it on the podcast because there was a big response from paleontologists concerned about the resources in that space from paleontology, that was actually part of a much broader endeavor by the Trump administration to reduce the sizes of national parks and protected spaces all across the country. This was countrywide, I believe the places most impacted by this tended to be coastal areas, and Alaska, there was a lot of discussion about that in Alaska. These reductions of protected areas were mostly in the service of freeing up land space for things like fossil fuel exploration and extraction. That was also part of a yet broader efforts by the previous administration to cut back on protections for endangered species and protected habitats and conservation areas to reduce regulations when it comes to carbon emissions and pollutants and stuff. Trump's first administration and this campaign leading up to the second administration have been very strongly opposed to environmental protections and regulations and stuff in the interest of loosening those regulations that prevent people from doing the things that they want to do like extracting fossil fuels. Anything that slows down industry in favor of the environment was being targeted. So, in terms of the impact on paleontology and conservation, obviously those are things that are going to have a significant impact on conservation science and paleontology and environmental science across the US, because those are things that are going to make it harder for science and those realms to get done, there is very likely to be reduced funding and support for institutions, especially government institutions, that are geared towards those things. I don't think that the Trump administration is going to be specifically anti-paleontology, no. But they are dismissive of climate science, they are broadly oppositional to a lot of scientific authority and a lot of scientific institutions, which are certainly going to affect the flows of funding and support to not only paleontology but other sciences. Paleontology especially tends to overlap with studies about climate change and studies of environmental science and conservation science. Yes. So, those are indeed likely to struggle somewhat under that. Yeah. The answer to what are the impacts going to be in those regards is probably bad in a number of different ways. Yeah. I think paleontology will get caught in the crossfire more than anything else. Yeah. That being said, I will say I think that the biggest impact that Trump's upcoming administration is going to have on paleontology isn't about scientific things, but about socio-political things. But Trump's upcoming administration is shaping up to look very difficult for a lot of specific groups of people. This Trump campaign, the election campaign over the course of this last year, and before that, has been extremely hostile towards immigrants. It's been extremely hostile towards trans people. They have been running on the promise of restricting rights and access to, for example, healthcare for people in those kinds of demographics, they have run specifically on the promise to roll back access to reproductive healthcare, especially for women. These are trends that are already showing up in legislation around the country and are going to continue to increase. They also ran on a campaign of vocal opposition to efforts to provide opportunities and support for marginalized communities, people of less wealthy backgrounds or people of various ethnic identities who might struggle in academia or in their careers. Those are the kinds of things that aren't specifically about science, but those are the kinds of people that do science. We know plenty of paleontologists who themselves are immigrants or are the children of immigrants. We know paleontologists who are trans, on some of whom are currently looking for ways to move to another state so that they can escape from some of this really harmful legislation. I have friends who are in paleontology who recently had a child using IVF, which is one of those within the realm of healthcare that is threatened by some of the changes that this administration has been talking about a bunch. So, I think that the administration is certainly liable to have direct effects on science, but more than that, life is going to be more difficult for people who happen to also be scientists. Yeah. We're going to see probably a significant rise in scientists struggling to find support in some areas, struggling with increased discrimination, struggling to get access to healthcare, struggling to find places where they feel safe or secure, as well as just lacking the emotional space to deal with their sciencey stuff. Absolutely. And to fight the tougher fight that's to come. Yes. Yeah. It is a multi-pronged attack on these institutions and these people. And as Aaron mentioned, we're going to need to prepare and be ready to respond and put up a defense, which I am no expert in exactly what all the best ways to respond are. But there's definitely simple things of being there for each other. If you can form, if you are in need of community, seek it out if you are able to provide a sense of community for those who need it, set it up and welcome those people. The piece of advice I always give is boycott when you can boycott because the people that are doing these things, all they care about is money. That's the only thing they're going to pay attention to at a lot of the time, boycott when you can boycott and do it as much as you can. Not when it's convenient, but when you absolutely can do it every time, boycott the things that need boycotting. There are also a lot of organizations and communities and groups around the country that are already preparing to support and to oppose these kinds of things. There are, so Aaron asked about specifically supporting certain areas. I don't know if there are particular like national parks or whatnot that are going to be under fire near you. But if you've got a museum or a national park near you, odds are it could use donation. There are also organizations that nationwide work to support the park service and work to support educational initiatives. There are organizations across the country that are working to provide not only community and emotional support for immigrants and their families or trans folks, but also financial or legal support. Yes. Some of these are organizations that we've mentioned and donated to on the podcast before. We've made donations to the ACLU, to, I believe we made a donation to Trans Lifeline. There are a lot of these communities and organizations. You don't have to start your own initiative. You can join. There are plenty that are out there that are looking for joiners to help out. One of the best pieces of advice that I think I can give is, you do what you can. Yes. One of the things that can be very difficult about a situation like this is that there are so many areas that it feels like will need help in so many communities that are going to need help and so many fights to fight. You do what you can. I pick the things that you feel like you have the bandwidth to focus on, focus on those, work on doing those things, knowing that there are plenty of other people handling plenty of other situations. Yeah. You can't do everything. You can't, you know, champion all issues. We are finite beings. Yes. Do what you are able to, do what you see the capability to do something about, and hang in there, take care of yourself, all that good stuff. Absolutely. One of the good side of all of this change and issues that are on the horizon is that it has galvanized lots of organizations and communities around the country. There are going to be lots of new groups for community support. There's going to be lots of protests. There's going to be lots of calling your representative and letting them know what their constituency feels about various topics. So it's going to, the next four years and beyond are going to be tough, particularly within our field of paleontology and in science communication and beyond for a number of reasons. But there's lots of us. Yeah. And we have strong voices and we have strong ways to organize and work together to make change. And thank you for asking those questions. I think that those are really valuable topics to talk about. Absolutely. Now, transitioning from that somewhat somber conversation slightly awkwardly back into science, Brad asks, given how amazing insects are, at most things they do, why do you think no insects have taken over any aquatic ecosystems? Some like dragonfly larvae are great in freshwater, but are there any adults that remain aquatic? Are there any insects at all in saltwater? Good question. It is kind of an oddity with insects that they don't seem to nearly diversify into aquatic habitats, even to the remote same amount that they do for terrestrial and aerial. They are mostly continental animals. Yes. There are numerous freshwater insects. So they are doing very well in freshwater habitats. There are plenty that spend their whole lives, including their adult phases, like water beetles are mature insects. That's the, you know, from like boatmen to like toe biters, there's a huge diversity of water beetles. So that's a whole specialization. There are plenty of other insects that larvae stay in the water. And many of those, the adults do move out of the water, but that's often because they are flying. Right. They're still near the water. Dragonflyers, as adults, dragonflies are still kind of aquatic insects. They tend to hide to the water. Stay around the water. A lot of others, like others, like mayflies come to mind, but I know there's another one that I'm trying to think of that. They spend their adult life still over the water and at its edges. So there are freshwater insects that have done quite well, but yeah, they haven't dominated the freshwater and saltwater wise, not, I'm sure, not none. I can't, I don't... There are, I think, some striders are marine, but very few insects are marine. Shocking that they're effectively compared to the diversity, almost a zero presence in saltwater habitats. And this is very reminiscent of things like dinosaurs, right? Or rodents are another good example. Extremely calm and extremely diverse, extremely successful, but they just don't do ocean. Yeah. And that it might be that there's some anatomical feature that they have that just makes it harder for them to get there. It might be that the thing that they would be doing is an ecological niche already occupied, so it's hard to break into it. Yeah. But yeah, something about insects just gives them a hard time doing ocean. I would not be surprised if the dominance of crustaceans factors in. But there are freshwater crustaceans and doesn't seem to be a barrier in that case. So yeah, maybe certain groups just have trouble evolving salt glands, like maybe salt glands are one of those things that you need some preexisting machinery to do easily. I don't know. Yeah. But the question and the answer is ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, one of life's great mysteries. Next up, Sebastian asks, what would you like to see in the upcoming Walking with Dinosaurs sequel series? I would love to see an exploration of modern dinosaur science. I'd love to see a focus on what has changed in our understanding of dinosaurs and the way that we study them since the original Walking with Dinosaurs. I think that more than any specific group of animals or something, I would love to see it act as a true update. This is what has happened over the last 20 or so years. This is where we're at. This is how we know this information. Mine is a bit more specific to the show aspect. I would like to see animatronics again. Oh, sure. That was one of the things that was arguably from just a cinematography, just as a piece of film, was what made the first Walking with Dinosaurs stand out so much and why its legacy has continued as a robotic dinosaur show. The animatronics were top notch. They were the best dinosaur animatronics, arguably outside of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, they were incredible, they were accurate, they were used to great effect for storytelling, they were blended with CGI in a similar way that Jurassic Park used, and it's part of what made that such a captivating series. A pre-story planet is beautiful and no shade on CGI, but there is something very special and very grounding and something that you can connect to when you know that that thing on screen is actually that you could go see it somewhere. I would love to see the use of animatronics again. I'm sure it would still be less that we'd use more special effects, but that would be great. David asks, speaking in the third person, "What are your thoughts on using speculative evolution as a vehicle for teaching concepts of evolution as a way to teach people who otherwise don't necessarily want to learn about evolution?" Oh, that's an interesting take to use speculative evolution to get around the resistance that some people might have to learning just straight evolution. I think there's a validity to it because speculative evolution is fun. Yes. It's a fun, we sort of gamify it a little bit with things like Spooky, where we're using those tools, but it's not a lecture thing, it's not something where you have to get into the details. Well, and I think you also can simplify it, you know, gamify it to a degree that is probably going to be less accurate, but accessible and more generally like maybe able to be synced up with more just general logic. One of the things that comes to mind is like Pokémon, where Pokémon has some examples where it's like, "Hey, in this region, this Pokémon lived differently because of these things. They're not saying the evolution terms, but an animal in a different ecosystem under different pressures developed different attributes and adaptations. That's evolution." So being able to put forth a, "I wonder what would happen if this environment, this kind of ewoks, lived in the desert? What would happen to ewoks if they lived in the desert?" And just asking that question and going, "Oh, yeah, I guess they'd have to like shave or something, you like trim their hair," you know, and that's getting those same problem-solving juices flowing that we would apply to evolution. I agree. Next question is from an unnamed elementary teacher. Which five species of Mesozoic reptiles would you consider your personal big five? Not necessarily favorites, but rather your most iconic, most charismatic, most representative of that era? You know the ones you'd want to put in the prehistoric toy set. Interesting. I mean, for me, if they're personal choices, Deinonychus is in there. On Mosasaur, I don't even care which one, just any Mosasaur is going to go in there. Probably got to pick a pterosaur, like a pterodostro. The filter feeding pterosaurs might be the ones that go in there because they're so funky and weird. Yep. I feel like that mentality is a good way to go about it, is the main categories. Yes. Dinosaur, pterosaur, marine reptile, I'd love to throw dinosuchas in there for crocs. Sure. I would put, I mean, there's so many good snakes to choose from, something like a Denalecia or Medsoia. Yeah, something like that. And then I guess... Charvipteryx. Charvipteryx. Yeah. If it's most iconic and whatnot, I feel like going for some of the big record setters also. Sure. Like an Argentinosaurus. Yeah. And, you know, quite a quote, quoteless or some other as darkid. Shownysaurus. Yes. Yes. Some of those that like, these are some of the most extremes that life hit during this time with our sincere apologies to all the turtle fans out there for not mentioning any of those. Nope. You know the sores are pretty cool. Levi asks, "Do you two think there are any ways that living together has impacted your professional or academic life podcast or beyond?" Yes. Many, many. Yeah. Absolutely. Because we started doing the podcast long distance, which, you know, worked out, but it definitely meant that when we were working on the pod, you know, not recording or not talking about the podcast, when we were just working on it, it was this very, they could be very isolated in the way we were both doing it. Right. It gets to be much more collaborative when we're in the same space. It's so much easier and nicer to just talk across a microphone. Yeah. Now, that being said, when we first moved into living together, it was the pre-COVID era and online recording and discussions and stuff weren't as good as they are now. Yes. Yes. Like nowadays it would be much easier to do it. Much simpler. It also made it much easier for us to discuss like the nuanced aspects of the podcast, both in like what we want from it, but also like how does our workflow working for each of us, you know, how is the schedule working for each of us? It's made it much easier to have those intimate conversations of is this working for each of us? Right. What do we need to change? What might we adjust? We need to be about each of these things while it definitely, and you know, we were also newer at it, but long distance it meant that we had to schedule every conversation and we had to. Right. It was harder to have just like a casual catch up on something. Yeah. And it very much could make them a bit more daunting to have important topics. Being in the same place, we also get to do things like public appearances together and we get to, it makes it easier for us to network and interact with colleagues and such. So like it's, I think it has been a vastly net positive. Yeah. There's definitely aspects of like we're roommates so every now and then we get on each other's nerves and we get in each other's way. And sometimes if the podcast is being like, if we're on a time crunch, stressful times for the podcast can become stressful times just in the apartment. Yeah. And don't talk to me when I'm making food because we've talked enough for my taste. We can't hang out this week because I have a lot of work to do. Yep. Yep. So there's definitely times it's complicated, but I think it's been, I am very glad we've gotten to have it because even if we go back to long distance, if we end up moving different places, I think we are going to be so much better at it because of the foundation we had during this. Agreed. Doug says, it's way far in the future and we have the ability to add flora and fauna to Venus where we will move our entire human population and all of our domesticated plants and animals and leave Earth to recover from millennia of exploitation. You've been pulled out of your cryo sleep to lead the species selection. What animals and plants do you populate Venus with to create a habitable, safe biome for the next generation of humanity? What does the ecosystem look like? It's like you reached into my brain, Doug. I love these questions. That's a really interesting, I mean just the, well, there's so much in Venus. You'd have to create a whole variety of biomes and stuff because Venus is going to have a diversity similar to that of Earth. Yep. And I assume we would have terraformed Venus. Sure. It's about terraforming Venus that's a lot of fun. And for anyone who's interested in these kind of things and wants to find more and know a good search term, seed planets is a calm, this type of thought experiment all over the internet. You can find tons of these. There'd be a lot of snakes. Yeah. You put snakes everywhere. Venus is hot. There's going to be great. Snakes are going to have a great time there. I think like, you know, there's the, depending on how we're doing this process, there's the, we could start with lichens and algae and you absolutely need to put all the microbes and stuff. Yeah. And depending on how fast we have to do it with that, we may have to do that and then wait a while, go back to cryo sleep and come back in when they've yeah, come back in several thousand years. Yep. But you know, basis of that stuff, I feel like there would be a strong, I mean, there'd be keystone species that we have to bring in, insects, plants, fungi, the cornerstone organisms of our environments. I feel like there'd be a strong argument to bring over certain charismatic and familiar basis. Yes. Making familiar ecosystems would be very helpful for us and other species to automate to it. For the morale of the humans that are being transplanted for the comfort. So like, things like raccoons and squirrels, which though maybe not critical to having a stable ecosystem, I think if you, if you move a bunch of people that were used to squirrels and then there's suddenly no squirrels, it would feel like a very quiet forest. Yes. That kind of stuff. So some of those animals would need to go. Yeah. It's birds. You have to have birds all over the place. I feel like that's another way to also look at is birds would be super useful because they would populate quickly. Yes. And they're also going to be seed dispersers and pollinators. So like, certain of those animals are going to be much faster at doing the job, like turtles will be great. Turtles are going to spread out very slowly compared to birds. So they're not going to be as efficient at seeding Venus. Yep. So I definitely think starting with a month, you know, lots of flying insects, birds, worms and stuffs, you're just going to have to airdrop worms from all over. You're going to have to worm it from orbit. Yep. Yep. Fish are going to be very poor. I feel like if we put an ocean on there, who's to say? Yes. Yes. Like I said, I assume we've terraformed this. At least we've got like lakes and stuff. Yes. I assume my assumption going into this, we've terraformed it. It's basically a second earth, slightly different, but because otherwise we can't do this. If it's not a second earth-ish thing, then we can't do any of this. I feel like fish that go between fresh and salt water would be really good ones. Oh, sure. Because that would move nutrients between these disparate stuff like that. Things that start getting the flow of nutrients going would be really important. Kraken asks, "What do you think the world will be like 65 million years from now, both in terms of geography and life forms?" Ooh. That is an excellent question. Biographically, all of the continents are gradually encroaching over the Pacific Ocean. I don't know that 65 million years is long enough for them to meet back up, but the Atlantic is getting bigger and the Pacific is shrinking. Yeah. So they might have evened out a whole lot by that time. I feel like the big question is, will humanity have survived? Right. What will we have done? Yeah. It will hit what we have done, but if we survive that long, I think that also will determine who we've kept around because right now we have a very strong habit toward trying to maintain in our conservation efforts of maintaining status quo. I think our presence would greatly affect the evolution of basically everything else, not only for us killing things off, but also keeping animals around and spreading them around. There's going to probably be lots of descendants of very common groups today, like descendants of birds and rodents, insects, obviously, will probably look basically the same as they do now. But be technically a bunch of different species than they are today. And this comes up all the time. I don't know whether it's reasonable to think that humanity would last that long or if we would still be humanity. Yeah. I mean, we certainly wouldn't most likely be the same species after 65 million years. Just due to genetic drift, just due to random mutations and genetic, we would be vastly genetically different. Whether or not we would look that different, I don't know because we're not under, I don't know what selective pressures would start to show over that long a time. So yeah, that's a hard one because we kind of break the rules. So a species surviving 65 million years is crazy. Right, that breaks the rules. But also. But we do that constantly. Yeah, we do. We do what we want. So I, it both feels irresponsible to say that surely we'd be dead and that surely we'd still be around. Well, we move to Venus. Yeah. So we are either all living on Venus or in Chryos and the Earth gets to heal from our impacts, and now there are giant, theropod-like birds hunting rodents we've taken over the niches of all of the ungulates. Yeah, if we move to Venus, I'm sure we would change a whole bunch because that would have majorly different effects. Yeah, Venus people. Mm-hmm. Venetians. Second asks, if you had to speculate what do you think is the advantage for home jellies to be able to fuse upon injury as per the recent paper, and why would they keep two butts? [laughter] So yeah, there was a paper that came out recently that found that comb jellies when injured can fuse together to create a double comb jelly. And the example that I think was in the study that a lot of the articles we're talking about is one that fused and retained two anuses from the two original bodies. I mean, the benefit I think is that you heal a faster that way. Yes. You don't have to heal yourself. You cover up the wound with the body of another comb jelly. And as for why you keep two butts, I assume that that's probably just because that's the uninjured part. Yes. I don't know that there's a selective advantage to having two butts, but that is probably not something that is beneficial. The beneficial part is that you aren't dying anymore because that injury has been rectified. Yes. And yeah, I think it's just having two butts is not a disadvantage. Yes. Yes, exactly. So you survive your injury. That's the advantage and that's all that matters. 65 million years from now, the earth will be overrun with two butted creatures. Big House asks, how likely is it that a long lasting clade is unknown to us in the Mesozoic? How likely is it that a family of archosaurs other than dinosaurs or pseudosuchians dominated ecosystems but left no trace? Are there researchers who try to find or quantify these blind spots? A very good question. And one where being able to say for sure is difficult because we're dealing with the unknowns of unknowns. Sure. How likely is it that a wide ranging long lasting dominant group has just fully escaped the fossil record or our notice? Probably not very. Yeah. Just because... We have a pretty good Mesozoic fossil. Yeah. And if they are that successful and that prominent, they should have bumped into environments that fossilize well and yielded some members that are big enough to fossilize well. And if they're long lasting across the Mesozoic, that's just too many opportunities for both of those to overlap a few times. Surely, we would have found something somewhere. But there's almost also surely lineages that, yeah, have gone pretty much on notice small lineages, isolated lineages. Ones that live in environments that don't fossilize as well. So, and some of those could be long lasting, like I'm sure there's insects that were super long lasting throughout the Mesozoic that we know very little about or nothing about because they only lived in certain habitats or had bodies that just did not lend themselves to fossilizing. So yeah, there's probably certain lineages, but big vertebrate lineages, you know, things with bones, that that feels like that'd be very hard for us to have missed that significantly. Yeah. Next up is from Brian. All angiosperm trees are highly similar with the same arrangement of tissues, looking more like each other than their herbaceous kin. What does it say about angiosperm evolution that more than 200 plant families have adopted the tree growth form in such a standard way? This is an excellent question that I could answer, but instead I'm going to read what Ally said when I asked her to answer this question. Oh, thank goodness. She said, "Much like how there is only one way to be a parasitic plant, there seems to be one best way to use the building blocks of their ancestry to become a tree." I think the answer, Ally says, may be physics. Given the structural needs of trees on top of the structural limitations like cell walls, other options might not have been able to meet the minimum requirements. Make sense? Yeah, that's the best way to be a big tall plant. The same way that the best way for vertebrates to fly is by flapping their arms. Absolutely. That just the starting place makes this the easiest and most obvious end point. Anna asks, "If either of you could be any spooky or cute E character you have discussed on the podcast, which one would you be and why?" You'd be a friendly dragon. Yeah, that's what I'm going to say. That's what I'm going to say. That's who you would be. Give me my little pet nomadic humans. Yes. Let me take care of them. I will guide you to the watering hole and chase off the predatory dragons. The predatory dragons. The werewolves that are stalking you. Yeah. Now do me, who would I be? Let's see. One of the first ones that I don't know why this one came to mind, but one of the ones like are sirens or one of those that are a little bit more because the sirens are creepy and subtle in a non-monstery way. Sure, sure. It's got a more of a finesse. That's the word I'm looking for. They have finesse. That is a better term than creepy and subtle I do like that. Yeah, they're all monstery, they're all going to be, you know, bad in some way. But like, all right, listen, if you hear me singing, it's not the other way. There's another one that I'm trying to think of that I know I think fits better, but I'm having trouble remembering which one it is. I think there's a different one, but that's the first one that came to mind. I'll take it. Harrison asks, do you like Star Wars? If so, what is your favorite Star Wars creature? I'll answer this one. I think this one's for me. I assume this is Ford. I assume that the... Yeah, it's a big fan of the podcast. We've really had a... This is great. Hey, Han. Yeah, Star Wars is okay. I like Star Wars pretty good. I've seen all the movies and I do enjoy a Star Wars here and there. I never fell in love with Star Wars, but yeah, I like Star Wars pretty good. My favorite Star Wars creature, I mean, there was a snake in the episode nine and that was pretty cool. And also, not Wampas, what are the big hairy things? Bantas. Bantas. There you go. Bantas are super cool. Bantas are great. I like Bantas a lot. They're a ton of fun. Will, do you like Star Wars? I like Star Wars. I've been a big fan of Star Wars for most of my life. I still enjoy it. I'm not as gung-ho as I used to be. I'm more selective with which parts of Star Wars I imbibe as much, but yeah, I love the creatures. My favorite Star... I love the Rancor. I love a bunch of the classic ones. Rancors are great, but my favorite has very unsurprisingly often been the crate dragon. Yeah. That's what I figured. I'm a huge fan of what they did within a Mandalorian because that was awesome, but specifically in Star Wars Field Guide, their version of the crate dragon was this long-necked monitor lizard with a dozen legs that use those legs to swim through the sand, and there's a great picture of it having unearthed a Sarlak from its pit, and that it's like, yeah, they were burrowing predators, but they also dug after their food, and one of their food items were... Sarlaks. Sarlaks. That's awesome. It looks so cool. That's that specific version of the crate dragon, which has gone through oh so many versions. Speaking of nerd stuff, Jeff asks, "As a fellow Dungeons and Dragons player, I would love to hear about your favorite D&D characters of all times." Details. Yay. Oh, one. So I mean, I like so many of my characters so much. One of my favorites that I played for not as long as a lot of the others, but scratched more of the will itches than most of my other players have ever done. So it was in one of the games, David Diemd, and it's a character called Miggs, who was a changeling, so could take the shape of other humanoids. And the class I went with was one that my friend, Josh, who is my roommate in college, who is a big-time DM and D&D content creator. He makes third-party D&D stuff. And the class that was, oh, what was it? The morph. Morph, I think it was the morph, which was basically trying to take the druid wild shape, but so that you could be Beast Boy. Yes. None of the druid magic. Yep. All animal forms. So you can shapeshift with very similar rules. You got to progress a little bit faster than druids did and what you could turn into. And you got more shifts, but the key thing that they could do that made them Beast Boy Ask is if you turned into an animal, but you didn't take damage, you didn't lose that shift. So you could use it for utility shifting. I could turn into a dog and sniff things out. And if I didn't get damaged, I could just turn back into a person. Yes. So you can transform again. You could use it outside of combat without losing your two wild shapes, which is the biggest downside of druids. Here you had like three and you could use it whenever you wanted, as long as you didn't get hurt being able to be that character, let me do all the animal stuff. But it also gaslighting is bad. Yes. Don't do it in real life. In fiction. It's so much fun. It's so much fun and I'm good at it. And I like it. So I got to be a character that I could just walk into a building and decide who I was going to be in that building. I could be a person. I could be an animal. If I was running from the guards and they turned the corner to see a rat or an old lady and it was like I was immune society had no grasp on me. And so we would just go places and I'd be like, all right, David, I have a mustache now, I'm about five, six, I have brown hair and now I talk like this and I'm ready to play some cards. And it would be so much fun for me as a DM because you'd have a moment where a character would come back and like interact with the party. And I would be like, now this character now looks over at Miggs and you would go, ah, and I'd go, oh, right, no, he doesn't, he doesn't recognize Miggs at all. You look completely different. I had to keep track of who I was to who. I was like, last time we went here I was this person so I need to remember that if we go back there. I've also, I've played a handful of characters. I really enjoy them all, sticking with the theme of sneaky conniving characters. Will for a while ran a Star Wars 5E campaign and I played a character named Dino who was this very rogue-esque character who was a um, although this is one of the new races that was, I can't remember their name, introduced in the Han Solo movie, it was the pilot for this ship. Sort of chimpanzee looking blue chimp with forearms, yes. And Dino was great because Dino A, having forearms is super fun to just to describe what you're doing. But Dino was also a character where my absolute favorite thing about Dino is that Dino had a minus one to persuasion and a plus five to deception, yes, which meant that even in a situation, regardless of the situation, it was better for Dino to lie. That was the playing a character where everything I say is a lie because that's my far better stat. That's how you function in the world. And getting to play this character where we would, I remember there was a moment where we had to go through customs, like we had to carry this thing through customs. And I walked up to the guards and I gave an explanation for what it is. They were like, "We have to scan that object." And I said, "Yeah, it's just this." And one of our friends who was playing was like, "No, no, no, because that's not like, no, that's a bad lie because if they see x, y, z." And I was like, "Don't worry, I've got three more lies." That's lie number one. That's lie number one. I've got a tree, I've got a branch in my head. If they scan it and find that there's something weird in it, then, "Oh, we picked it up from these other people." They must have put something in. Don't worry, I'm so many steps ahead. It was so much fun to play a character who perpetually had a lion and escape plan. Yes. Dino was super fun to play. It was great. Zellma says, "One of my favorite episodes was the one on turtle evolution. The mystery of their origins really captivated my mind. Have we learned/clarified any more about turtle origins?" Great question. Not really. No. So, we've got a handful of fossils that give us an idea of early turtle, early stages in turtle evolution. You know, Tosaurus is up there as a probably turtle. There are some really early turtles from the Triassic. A lot of genetic research has been done that seems to more and more consistently be placing them close to dinosaurs and crocodilians in that Arcosaur realm. Other than that, turtles are about as mysterious today as they were when we did that episode. That was episode 60. Like, I think I would be surprised if they do another jump across reptile family tree like they've done in the past. I think they're pretty stable where they are. I'd be very shocked if suddenly it was like actually back with lizards, you know, or something like that. The next big discovery is going to be an early turtle. Yes. Like, more early turtle fossils is really going to be what it takes. Yeah, absolutely, but yeah. Turtles keep being weird. You keep being weird, you guys. Stephanie asks, "What underrated ancient animal would you want to see as a Lego set you could build?" I'm going to answer this one, I think this one for me too. Oh, it's such a good question. So my brain goes two directions because there's the Lego minifigures, like, they've made figures of the dinosaurs. Sure, sure. They made a figure for a saber tooth cat. They've done a mammoth figure. They keep adding dinosaurs as they keep making Jurassic sets. So I'm a sucker for Lego figures, there's something about that minimalistic, slightly geometric, biological form that I very much like. I think my answer for one of those would be the same as it is for Pokemon, which is giant sloth. Sure. I think a giant sloth would be so cool and so much fun. Buildable one, because they've made lots of buildable dinosaur sets almost always T-Rex focus. Sure. Absolutely. I feel like a buildable, like a good buildable sauropod with a flexible neck would be so cool. That would be very cool. Opposables. Because they've made a brachyosaur figure, but it's not very poseable. Sure. Opposable, like, yay, I'm pulling my hands up about two feet apart. About one yay. About one yay big so that it's roughly similar in size to the T-Rex with the Jurassic Park Gate so that I can have them next to each other. That would be very cool. Yeah. And any other herbivore would also be cool, but something because they've made Lego triceratops, but it's an alternate build from the T-Rex, but T-Rex is always the main one. I want them to make a stegosaurus or triceratops. That would be cool. All right, now someone do that because now I want it. Emily asks, "What's a book each of you would recommend to your listeners? Would be science related or fiction or just anything you think is cool?" Great question. I will simply share the books that I read most recently. I read a book. This is a, I'll give you a nonfiction and a fiction. I read a book called Pests by B. Brookshire, which was super fun. It was a really cool exploration of what animals are pests and how those pest statuses develop. It was a book whose contents were constantly at the forefront of my mind during this year's spooky episodes, thinking about how do you evolve something to be a pest for humans. Very fun. And then more recently than that, I caught up on the Numinous series, which is a group of science fiction books by Lindsay Ellis, which starts with Axiom's End. And this year she came out with the third book, which she has described. She described once in a YouTube video the series as, she's half jokingly as being a cross between War of the Worlds and Beauty and the Beast, which I think is a great description. And I really enjoy them. I think that they're super fun. I generally, as a rule, don't read. There aren't even any pictures. It's very hard for me to get into a chapter book because I'm a slow reader. I'm probably dyslexic. And so it takes a lot. But my favorite books that I've read, that looking over on my shelf that I can recommend, if you haven't ever read Dracula, it's really good. Dracula's super good. That's my original. Favorite chapter book. If I had to pick a favorite chapter book, that's it. And if you've not read the Dinotopia books, read the Dinotopia books because they're the prettiest pictures and a cool world and cool story. Yeah. Like, yeah, that's all I got. I'm about to start reading Stealing From Wizards, which Ryan Consell wrote, which I'll report back on. Michael asks, "What is your view on the BBC series Primeval? And if those portals were real, do you think they would completely damage the biosphere of the planet or act in a similar way to natural disasters?" Ooh, I love this question. As far as the series goes, fun series, interesting series. It's not my favorite ever because there are parts that I found very draggy. I think I really, really like the premise of Primeval and there are parts of Primeval that I quite enjoy. Overall the show is fine. Yeah. I like the premise a lot. There's a selection of the characters I really liked. Some of the characters are a ton of fun. And then, yeah, the story, usually pretty good every now and then I had found myself going, "What? How are you already there? How are you always a step ahead? Why are you better at time-traveling than why is the bad guy inherently more competent than the good guy?" You know, so that's our stuff. But I love the question of what the effect of the portals would have. And one of the things I think they did a couple of times a little bit but then come up super often is if a portal like that opened and stayed open for even a day or two, I think climatic stuff would be weird because... Oh, sure. If a portal opened right here next to us, but 10,000 years ago, suddenly- It's gonna be chilly. Yeah. All of our warm air is gonna get sucked because it's warm air expands and it's going to suddenly get siphoned into this ice age portal and the temperature is gonna drop locally. And if that's happening regularly, that could mess things up. They did it a little bit with the carboniferous atmosphere or- Yeah, with the big worms. With the big worms. They did it a little bit with the Hesperornis where the water, the ocean was coming through it. Yes, and like flooded a basement. Stuff like that would be happening a lot where it's like, yeah, did the seed used to be here? You know, the sea level is higher? You're gonna suddenly get an influx and stuff like that I think could cause weird weather and crazy stuff. And if it's happening constantly across time, would it start to even out things across when entropy be taking place across our timeline and would it be messing up Earth's history? Yeah. Fun. Next up, Lachlan asks, "Out of all the extinct Australian marsupials, which is your favorite, I'm a polar Kesti's guy myself, such a goofy looking critter." I think that the giant sthenarion kangaroos are super cool. Yeah. Also, diproded on just for being a big cool herbivorous marsupial. Yep. Very cool. It's probably the cliche answer because it's the big predator. But thylacolio mostly because we don't have a mammal predator that is that shape is exactly like those teeth, nor the way your paws are, and you're like, "I want to know how you were hunting. Were you doing something weird?" I wanted to… Yeah. That one's cool. Sal asks, "Where are plant pheromones created and released from since plants don't have endocrine plants? What actually produces the plant pheromones and what receives them?" Well, here's what Allie said. Oh, thank goodness. Leaves and roots are the main ways plants interact with the world, so that is where pheromones are released from and received. For leaves, this is either through the stomata or diffusion through the cytoplasm. Pheromones released from the leaves are commonly produced in the chloroplasts. That's interesting. Interesting, huh? Roots release and receive pheromones via exodates, which are fluids that they excrete. On a cellular level, there are a variety of receptors and transmitters in these organs that make this happen and we can't forget the importance of fungi in the process. So there you go. Neat. No endocrine glands, but they all… they still secrete and absorb things. Yeah, not so different, you and I. You, Y-E-W. Christian asks, "Would you consider doing a discussion on the implications of catching Pokemon to their wild populations? The exotic pet trade is an issue in our world in relation to wildlife conservation, which Pokemon or types do you think would be most affected?" I often wonder this when I'm playing a Pokemon game because I am removing so many Pokemon from the natural habitat. And from the physical world as you put them into the digital world? Yeah, so just like dramatically reducing biomass out in the world, which apparently isn't a huge problem in the Pokemon world either because there are just bajillions of Pokemon or because somewhere in the world, Pokemon are being released at the same. The secret behind Team Rocket is that's what they're doing. They're conservating their eco-terrorists. Yes, they're stealing Pokemon and then releasing them back into the wild so that you can continue to catch Pokemon. Or all Pokemon breed light lot bunnies. All Pokemon are just like, "Well, and the question of what types of Pokemon would be most affected?" The ones that don't reproduce very much are tons of Pokemon whose egg hatching time is very low or very high and there are lots of Pokemon who don't have a lot of potential breeding partners based on what egg group they're in and who grow very slowly. So like dragon type Pokemon, which are already super rare and have a very low growth rate and their eggs hatch very slowly and they can't breed with very many things and there aren't usually a lot of other dragon Pokemon around, that that's why they're so hard to find. Yep. As people keep going out there and catching gibbles and frigibaxes and dretinis and now and they have to put them in the safari zone where they're protected species because otherwise we're going to run out of dragons. I was also thinking that the ones that are desired for competition, like ideal ones for that because it's how people make money in that world. Yes. And strong ones. Aesthetic because that's in our real world. There's not a lot of EVs out there hanging out in the world, which is something that has been actually canonically introduced to Pokemon here and there, that there are some Pokemon whose wild populations have been reduced because they get captured or hunted too much. And this is the evils of catching a bunch of Pokemon just for a specific nature. I, it's very funny because I've never gotten super into shiny hunting, just because it's not a thing that I want to spend all that much time on, but also there is a little part of me all the time that's like, "What are you taking hundreds of Pokemon out of the environment?" At least the people who are shiny hunting for starters and stuff are restarting the game every time. Yes. So you're not, at the end you're only taking one out of the environment, which was already taken out of the environment by the professor before he gave them to you. Responsible shining hunting is catch and release. Yes. Although shiny hunters are also doing a lot of breeding so they are, they are introducing lots of new Pokemon. That's true. Are they, are they following breeding guidelines for genetic diversity? Now this would be a fun dragon con. It is responsible Pokemon breeding. There's a lot of rules in AZA. How does shiny hunt responsibly at home, my goodness. There's going to be some inbred shinies if you're not. Lucy asks, "Which animal extinct or alive would you have wanted to be involved in naming?" Ooh. I'd love to have been involved in naming Beelzebufo just so that I could take partial credit for it. Yes. Yes. Yes. That would be a good one. Getting to name a weird croc. Sure. Because so many of them get fun, because it's usually something Succus. And so it's a very simple of something up front that captures their weirdness, crocodile. And so it's, that would be a, it's figuring out a way to give them the fun name for whatever weird thing they have. That would be fun. Caleb asks, "Apart from our intelligence and use of culture as a form of adaptation, what is something about humans that makes us really weird compared to other animals?" The thing that always comes to my mind first is humans are a species that relies very heavily on shared fictions. Yeah. This is, and this is an extension of our communication systems. We have a communication system that is detailed and specific enough that we can describe very specific things and systems and we can communicate very complex ideas. And it means that in modern times, but also going all throughout recorded human history, we build our communities around things that don't exist, but that we have all agreed exist. This shared imagination, like countries and governmental systems and spiritual systems. I always think of it as, you know, when you're a kid and you play tag and you designate something as base, like this tree is base. And I can't, if I'm touching this tree, you can't tag me. And there's nothing special about that tree. It's just a tree. There's a hundred trees around here, but as long as everyone playing the game has agreed that that tree is base, that tree holds significance, real impactful significance. It could change it anytime because all it would take is for everybody. As soon as the game ends, that tree is just a tree again. That's how all of human culture is. As long as we all agree that this is true, it remains true until we decide it's not anymore. And that is a very distinctly human thing that we do. Yeah, no, I like that. The one that comes on for me is kind of a silly one, but it is one that stands out to me. We are an oddly small and non-aquatic or burrowing, mostly hairless mammal. Yeah. Most hairless mammals are big or underground or in the water. Yep. And we're not any of those, but we are still mostly hairless. Like we're not alone, like there's lots of pigs that are not nearly as haired. But yeah, it's kind of weird. Very naked mammals. Yeah. In a situation where it doesn't seem to have an obvious reason, we kept putting clothes on. Yeah. So that's always just stood out to me of like, is it because we started doing stuff? Or was there some weird genetic thing that leaned us toward that? Why did we get rid of all of our hair? That's weird. That's a weird thing we did. Epic says, Garic proposes. A mass extinction hits, wiping out the vast majority of tetrapods, including humans. But you are magically able to secure one genus each of mammal, bird, non-avian reptile, and amphibian to survive and radiate into the new geological era, forming the basis for all future tetrapod life, which for genera do you choose? Assume abiotic factors are congenial to your choices, and that any species required for their diet survive just long enough to allow your chosen genera to transition to eating new food? You may both answer in a shared universe or different ones. Oh man, this feels like there's two routes to go, the responsible route, and the funny route. Yeah. Listen, snakes are a terrible choice for this. Yes. But I don't want to choose snakes anyway. This is a situation where I want to choose Crocs, and I don't think they're a bad choice. Crocs are not a terrible choice. They can diversify into a bunch of cool directions. They've done it before, and so I think they would be good at giving us small members, big members, marine members, and land and herbivorous and carnivorous. They would be able to fill in a bunch of gaps. So I definitely, that's obviously going to be one of mine. Some sort of like ground-dwelling bird that maintains a range of locomotive capabilities that can then give rise to a variety of land and air specialists. I think if I picked a bird, mine might be Crocs because they're decent on the ground, so I could absolutely see them become flightless if they were driven that way, but they're still flier so they can spread well and they're adaptable in their behavior. They're omnivorous. They're omnivorous. They're problem solvers, and so they can start to fit into the new problems. Mammal, if I'm being practical, and I think this is also fun because I think about this often, rat. Yes. That absolutely. Because once again, generalists, they'll spread, they reproduce fast. But also, what's the future of rat evolution going to look like? I want wolf rats. Absolutely. And I want rat cows. Like, oh, that'd be so cool, that'd be great. And then amphibians again, now we have a choice between the practical answer and the funny answer and the funny answer is frogs. Yeah. Frogs would be so much fun to be the seed. It would be so, that would be really great. If they would absolutely just give rise to salamanders again. Yes. Just tadpoles that hold on to their tails, like some groups of frogs would just be salamanders shaped again. 100%. But you'd also get, like, big, ambush predatory frogs and I would we get herbivorous frogs? I'm sure we would because we would get tadpoles that maintained herbivory into adulthood. Which means what you would get is fully aquatic descendants that are basically just giant grazing tadpoles. Yes. It was like manatees. Yes. You'd get manatee tadpoles. This is great. Oh, man. All right. So, this is what's happening on Earth while we're on Venus. Yes. And then, somewhere else in the multiverse, there's an orangutan in a bat. Well, we brought them to Venus. We brought them to that chat. There you go. That's what happened. That's us in the ship watching this mass extinction happen. Good luck. Say bye, barrel. Next up, Zach says, "I entered college to become a paleontologist, but somehow came out as a parasitologist. I was wondering what is your favorite fossil parasite?" Ooh. The one that we talked about in the third fungus episode where it was a fossil fungus, a fossil parasitic fungus that was infected by another parasitic fungus. That's pretty good. Auto mushroom. Yep. So cool. That's pretty good. I really liked, I think this was a news that came up in, which was the shark copper light with tapeworm. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was really cool. Yeah. There was also that one study about the insect pupae with parasitoid wasps inside of them, which is very cool. Yes. It's really cool. I'm trying to think if there's like a fossil specific or something. There's that might on a feather and amber, which is extremely cool. That's a cool one. That's hard to beat because that's just the parasite, like that one's really good. We do also, this is stretching it a little bit, but we do have genetic evidence of viruses in ancient creatures, like ancient people and stuff. I also love thinking about what parasitic things there would have been that wouldn't have been, like how many kleptoparasitic pterosaurs were there? Oh, sure. Like, they were stealing food. Yeah. They were stealing food and, you know, and like oxpecker type animals where you're eating stuff off the animal, but every, also every now and then you're drinking its blood. Yes. Like, I would love to know how many of those there were. Celine asks, "Since we keep learning what the best environments to form fossils were in the past, do we know what places today are the most likely to create future fossils?" Ooh, excellent question. Many would be the same. Pons, lakes, the coastline, shallow ocean. So those things are where water is moving sediment and organisms are dying in regular time so that they can get buried frequently. Those would all be the same. There are definitely some that are probably becoming less so, like permafrost. Yep. If things continue the way we are, we're going to lose a lot of the permafrost. Yep. So we're not going to be able to preserve things into the future in those areas that way anymore. If there... I'm trying to think if there's any new ones that like with... I mean, graveyards are probably doing a great job preserving fossils. I'm sure... And I bet it depends on the graveyard. Yes. There are places I bet it's just like forests where you're just fertilizing the ground. In fact, that's going to get broken down in a thousand years that there's not going to be anything left. But some of them, just with the amount of graveyards that are on the planet, surely we're burying some in soils that are going to preserve well. Yeah, other than that, I can't think of anything like human related that for sure would give rise to fossils. I was trying to think of any of the places we've built our cave-like. Yeah, I'm sure there are some like tunnel systems, like subway systems and stuff. I wonder how mines, old mines if those would be places that fossils form. We also have made like artificial lakes and stuff like that, which would be great places for fossilization. Chorries. Mm-hmm. So yeah. Cool. Questions from Mark with the new Monster Hunter game coming out, do either of you play? And if so, what's your favorite monster and how do you feel about how they do ecology and monsterification? I don't play Monster Hunter. I do not either. I also don't really know anything about Monster Hunter. I know a little bit. Yeah. I've delved into it partially because I've just like looked up a bunch of the creatures and I watched the, um, oh, I don't remember the YouTube, what the YouTube channel's called. It's the one who did the, the, the guy to all of the D&D classes and then he also did-- Oh, Z-Bashu? Uh, not Z-Bashu. It's, it's similar animations, but it's the, it's the fireball, only fireball, always fireball. Okay. Uh, guy. He also did all the weapons for Monster Hunter. So I learned about them all through that. And I, Monster Hunter seems really cool. It's not quite my gameplay, so that's why I haven't played. But you, the premise being you hunt monsters, get parts of them and make weapons out of the monsters. Yup. I like the designs of a lot of the monsters. There's definitely some that, the ecology is cool, but every now and then when I'll see a monster and be like, oh, cool design, and then I'll read what the ecology is. It utterly clashes with the design and so that, that, they, there's definitely a little bit of the design and the ecology seeming to happen separately because like one of them was a wiver and style thing with tusks and it's a burrowing monster. It's like, but you have bat wings. What are you doing underground? So it's an interesting thing. I definitely like some of the ecologies where they happen at their found in different locations and we'll have different behaviors and so I know that like they behave differently and interact differently. So you have to take that inspiration when you hunt them and I like that. That's very cool. And I've watched videos of it and it makes it very much the interactions with the monsters seem organic. So I appreciate that and the only one I can say is probably my favorite, which is not for any of those interesting reasons and I always forget its name, but people will know it is the big dragon, the big like boss dragon from a few of the different games. It starts with an F I think or an R is an R in there. That's the wiver in one, the big dragon bad guy. There's a big dragon that is like evil that it is destroying parts of the world by existing. That's the poster child is Rathalos, which also super cool. I like the big one that's a big European dragon with a big long neck and is just a European dragon because I'm a sucker for European dragons. So that's my favorite. Speaking of European stuff, Andrea from Italy asks, what's your favorite fossil slash ancient animal slash anything from Italy? Oh, I know that there are Italian fossils that I sure there's that the duck there's the from Gargano. Yes. With the club, the club wings. Yes. That's what I was. Yeah. Very cool. There's also the, um, the Sicilian, uh, a stegadon. Yes. That's the tiny island stegadon elephant. That's super cool. There was also a paper not too long ago about early hippos that from near Rome. Oh, right. Which is very cool. I forgot about that. Yeah. All those things. All those are great. The, the island's stegadons. My, probably my personal favorite. That's the one that I think of most often when those kinds of animals come up next from Eric, what would life on earth look like today if plate tectonics slash mantle convection never strengthened enough to generate large igneous provinces? Mmm, the world without large igneous provinces, uh, climate would be different. Oh, yeah. That is a lot of big climate perturbations happen, uh, with the release of gases and large igneous provinces. The physical shape of the world would also be different because large igneous provinces are the word large igneous province refers to vast geologic formations. Mmm hmm. But also large igneous provinces are implicated in a lot of mass extinction events. Yes. So the trajectory of evolution and extinction on earth would likely be different, right? The Permian mass extinction might not have been as severe if there was not that massive outpouring of volcanic material. Same thing with, yeah, all the other extinctions that are potentially associated with large igneous provinces. Also if the plate tectonics didn't get as active, that would change our geologic record in the fact of like the sea floor wouldn't be recycling as quickly. So we'd have older sea floors. Yeah. I'm betting we'd have a lot more rocks from the early ages of earth because they wouldn't have been cycled as much. So there might not be as much a history of exchange between different land masses up mountains might not, yeah, you wouldn't get as tall mountains. Yeah. If the rising is much slower or happening less often, if the rate of rise of mountains is being outpaced by erosion, yes, then you're not going to get tall mountain habitats the same way. So yeah, be very different looking earth. We're creating a lot of alternate universe earths, this Q&A. It's all the same one. It's all happening in that one on that one earth. By the end of this Q&A, that earth's going to be like, stop, please stop speculating about us. We can't take it. Alex asks, would proto seratops be a good pet dinosaur? What would your choice be for a good non-bird dinosaur pet? I, I think proto seratops would be a good farm animal. Yes. Because proto seratops is decently sized. Yeah. It's like the size of a big pig. Yeah. And like that, so it would be hard to be a pet in a house because I mean, I think total length, they're pushing like seven or six or seven feet. Yeah. That's, that's not a small animal. They've also probably had a nasty bite with that beak. So well, and like we don't tend to keep big ish herbivores as pets like that. They don't really have pet pigs and sheep and stuff like that in your house very often. Yeah. Like it happens, but that's just not the, the norm. More often those are like farm animals. Yes. I think if you were to go for something in a similar category, like cedicosaurus, which was smaller, yeah, would also be popular because it was more decorated, at least from the physical stuff we know about it. So that, that one probably. I maintain that the best non avian dinosaur pet would be small Therapods. Yep. Just like a little like a Velociraptor or smaller or micro raptor thing, which is just going to be small and cute and fuzzy and it's going to curl up in your lap and they would be just like cats. I assume they, like I assume that if I had to bet that there, they would be like a mix between a parrot and a cat. Yes. If you like having a bird with the movements in some personalities of a cat, but acts like a bird at times, like so it'd be this weird interesting mix. Yeah. It's like when people have kept foxes and I've, I've seen them emphasize they're not dogs. Yes. You, they are a fox. They're their own thing. Kind of dog-ish. Yes. Listen, kind of cat-ish is good enough for me. It's, the internet will love it. That's. Petra asks, you've been doing this for a while. Has there been any new findings that shifted our understanding of a group so dramatically that it would change the main message of an episode? Hmm. That's a good question. I don't know that the main message of an episode would change. Yeah. Because things don't, just, just don't tend to update and change quite that dramatically. Yes. I think there are definitely areas where discoveries have been made that would be worth talking about. Like if we did the Ediacaran episode again. Yeah. Like that's one, the main message I think is still the same, but there's a lot more to talk about. Yes. That's more recent stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. That kind of stuff. And like there's also a lot of specific categories in certain episodes where, you know, we focused in because of a big question that was still at the time a mostly unanswered question and it has been partially answered since then. Right. Like the one that comes to mind is the evolution of Balene. There's been more studies on that since we did the whale evolution episode and there seems to be a bit more stronger leaning in certain directions than there was when we did that episode. I don't think there has been an instance over the time we've done the podcast where I've heard about a discovery and gone, oh, dang, if only we had had that before that episode came out. I don't think there's really been one of those because we tend to keep the episodes relatively broad. Yes. Partially for that reason. Yes. Absolutely. We don't want to go into super detail in part because that's going to change. Yeah. You know, we try to keep the messages fairly broad so that it is a bit more evergreen. Absolutely. Braden asks, "From the most up-to-date science on the matter as well as your personal opinions, should Sorrow Faginax be within the genus Allosaurus?" This is a recent paper that I think this is actually at a SVP presentation that suggested that Sorrow Faginax is actually just Allosaurus. Oh, gotcha. I will admit I did not read very much about it. Much like the nanoturannus t-rex thing, I don't have particularly strong opinions about it. Yeah, that's one of those where even though Allosaurus is super famous and I don't actually know a ton of detail on like Allosaurus or closely related Allosaurus. If you showed me one, I'd be able to go, "Yeah, that's probably an Allosaurus because you've got the face, you've got the ridges, you've got the hands." I assume you're an Allosaurus and usually I'm right. Who's related? I don't actually know who's related to who. It's the same thing if you were like, "What about this Tyrannosaurus?" It's definitely a Tyrannosaurus. It's one of them. It's got the... Sure is one. Big head. It's fine if I remember correctly, Sora Faganax is only known from limited material. And I think this study was reanalyzing some of that material as maybe not being distinct. So it's one of those dinosaurs that we just don't, there's not a lot to go on. So I have no strong feelings one way or the other. Well, and it's often when we come to situations like this where if we had living versions, we might end up being like, "Alright, there's subspecies or something." Where there are differences, are they significant enough for them to be split and when you're dealing with fossils, it's really hard to find where that line is sometimes. The only place where I have a mild opinion about it is that if they got synonymous, the name Sora Faganax is cool. Yeah. It kind of be a little bit of a shame to lose the name Sora Faganax, but that is very fair. Next question is from Oliver who is six years old and asks, "How big is a T-Rex?" That's a great question. It is. The simplest answer, the easiest way to think of it is a T-Rex is about the size of an elephant. Yeah. Different shape. Different shape. So it's longer than an elephant, but weight wise and overall, it would have stood a similar height as an elephant. It would have weighed, if you put it on a scale, T-Rex probably weighed five or six or seven tons, which is similar to elephants today. It had a long tail, that would certainly be the big difference. Yeah, it was way longer than elephants are, but that's because elephants are kind of box shaped. And they don't have a big long tail and T-Rex is more like a T. It's got long legs and a long body, so it's a different shape. T-Rex could probably step over a small car without a lot of trouble. It could certainly look up into the window on the second floor of a building, especially for like reared back a bit, so the elephant sized. Yeah. Which is a pretty cool concept to have a big predator, a big meat eater, as big as our biggest plant eater now. That's pretty cool. Absolutely. Good question. And thank you for asking. Captain Plakaderm asks, "I'm very, that's another one of the mascots, also Captain Plakaderm." Captain Plakaderm. I'm very excited to see if humanity can find some sort of alien life somewhere in our solar system. How would both of you react if for some odd reason the first organism we catch a glimpse of looks like the most generic and basic earth fish we can imagine? I, for one, would be extremely surprised. Let's say we just pull a trout out of Europa's open. We drill a hole in Europa's ice and just pull out a barracuda. It's just a silicand. They're like, "What do you give me?" You're really taking a lot of our arguments about how things work. That would be, if we fascinating, it would be incredible. I would also be very surprised. It would, almost surely, it would still not be related to life here on earth. Yeah, it would have to mean one of two things. Either some other group of life has convergently evolved the fish shape very exactly, which honestly wouldn't be all that surprising. Absolutely. Tons of aquatic things have developed fish shape. They would just be, by far, the most extreme case of convergent evolution conceivable in our understanding of evolution. It would shift how we understand evolutionary dynamics by wide margins, or somehow fish got panspermied across the solar system, which would make me believe a lot more in those UFO hearings that keep happening, which would have to require really one of two things. Either an asteroid impact hit the earth and blasted a chunk of rock with some water inside of it. Well, it hit one end of a sunken tree that another fish was sleeping on. Catapult of fish. There are earth meteorites on Mars. Yep. This can happen at chunk of earth can it land somewhere else, which seems extraordinarily unlikely. Yes. No way. There are aliens, which some aliens came to earth, and they said, "We are here to study the most fascinating and interesting and successful species." And they looked at earth and they went, "Well, obviously these." Yep. And they picked up some fish, and then they were flying away, and I don't know, maybe one of them jumped out the window and landed in Europa. These are slippery. Are they stopped? Stop. Yeah, it woke up. No, it's not dead. And it's flopping around. Or that was like where their base was, and a fish got out. I mean, according to the most recent hearings, they're from the ocean, you know, the aliens that are surely real. I guess that's, I mean, if the rift that opens that allows connection between the alien world and here is at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, I mean, if it's a Pacific Rim rift, maybe they also opened one on Europa. Maybe that's the other side of the rift. Yeah. That's where they're from. Okay. So it's just a wormhole. Pacific Rim. They just went to Europa. I guess that's another option is that there's a wormhole at the bottom of the ocean, and a fish swims in, and it shows up in Europa. There's a frog on the log, and there's a frog on the log, and there's a hole in the ground, and there's a fish in it. Georgia asks, "What modern or fossil species of animal or plant would be right at home in the Avatar, the Last Airbender universe? And what would that animal or plant be culled, for example, sloth bear?" Platypus. Platypus, yeah. A beaver duck. Yep. Yep. Yep. Platypus would work very well. Gliptadonts. Gliptadonts would be. Turtle something? Yeah. Turtle bear. Everything. There's a lot of bears. Yeah. Turtle bear. Or like turtle beaver. Yeah, something weird. Oh, the horn beavers would be rhino beavers. Rhino mouse? Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Tapers could be like elephant pigs. Yes, that's true. That's pig-a-fence. Pig-a-fence. [laughter] Oh, Koleka-theres. Yeah. Koleka-theres would be per-pig. Horse-ape. Horse-ape. [laughter] Yes. Ooh. That would be a very good one. Love it. Also, like, all the ocean creatures that we already call that way. Absolutely. Lionfish. Batfish. Zebrafish. Yes. [laughter] Absolutely. And also, let's not forget bear. Bear. Bear. They do great there. Royalty and fast. Royalty. Just incredibly sought after. Ujoo asks, "What is your favorite? Non-reptile." Arangitan. Yeah. See, this is back to the same question. I don't know if I don't know what my favorite non-reptile is, but I have a favorite non-reptile. I am my favorite non-reptile is named Nora. [laughter] How's this? I can make you feel bad and just name all the other animals that are my favorites. [laughter] Listen, I go for quality over quantity. I like ants. There are so many snake species that I don't have to choose other, you know. I suppose if your favorite animals only have like 25 species, you've got to fill out your list. It gives you time to experience more things. Like 4,000 favorite animals are all... [laughter] I got them. They're all set. I know, I know all of them. Chris asks, "Given the preservation bias, what percentage of life do you think has been found in the fossil record? This can be broken down by time period or by environment?" Uh, so little. Yeah. Very, very small. Like, there's definitely some situations where we have a decent percentage of what would have been living there. Like, especially in very recent time periods, like Northern environments in North America from the late Ice Age, we have a much better representation as opposed to like the early archaean where the percentage is almost zero percent. Yes. Exactly. And in some places it is zero percent. Yeah. Fully. Absolutely. There are absolutely environments throughout history, especially early in the geologic record where we have no fossils. Yes. Absolutely. You know, distant and rare ecosystems, deep sea vents and stuff. Yeah. Most of those we have no clue what was happening. And even environments, there are a lot of singular habitats where just like that, the deposit that was left from that has been eroded away by glaciers or by wind or whatever, that habitat has a zero percent fossil record because it doesn't exist. So like, we get, you know, you get things like Burgess Shale and other, uh, Loggerstauten that are super well-preserved and probably preserve still not like 80 or 90, but... Sure. But... Like a solid five. We're still pushing higher, but yeah, I, I don't know what percent I would put. And if you're including, if you're including all organisms, including like tiny stuff in plants, that's part of why the percentage will be so low. Right. Well, and it also depends on if you're asking percentage of species or percentage of individual organisms. Yeah. Because that's also going to be very different. If you're like, I think there are certain category, like if you're wanting to look for the highest percentages, well-preserved ecosystems and well-preserved fossil sites, you know, that have maintained since then and vertebrate species, there are some of those where I bet we have, I don't know, like half at times of what vertebrates we're living there. Sure. But that's probably about as good as you can get. And that's looking at a specific group, because while you're getting those there, you're probably not getting the plants. You're probably not getting the insects. And so if you're looking for that, I think that's the highest way you could get a good percentage. Yep. If you want, if you're going for high score, Manrock asks, what's the coolest fact you learned about during the COVID lockdowns? Ooh. I thought the first thought that brought to mind was how the COVID vaccine worked. Yeah, I was going to say I learned a lot about viruses and vaccines. Because usually when we learn about vaccines, it's a weakened form of the virus introduced to your system, either dead parts of the virus or a genetically modified version of the virus that is non-infectious. Right. It triggers your immune system to fight it, but it can't actually hurt you. Yes. There are versions where it's like, yeah, we beat up the viruses. They're still alive. Yes, but we can't do anything. We've broken them. And other times it is, no, we just replicated this part of the virus that is the part your immune system would go after. This one was similar to that where it was we, the vaccine was specifically the part of the virus that our immune system can lock onto. So it wasn't, because a lot of times it's like the DNA, but this was a specific part of the virus. So that way, if you see this attachment point, it means these viruses are here and you need to go get them. That was interesting. Learning about the vaccine was cool. I also am thinking about what episodes of the podcast came out in mid to late 2020, so as we've certainly learned a whole bunch of cool stuff to do in those, and that included like frogs and marsupials and venom and poison, and parasites episode was in there. Yeah, I think that during parasites, I don't think I realized how much of life are parasites. Yeah. That was when I was like, I knew they were common and then started reading the numbers. It was like, surely you're wrong. And it's like, no, probably almost most of things are parasites. Yeah. What? So those were cool. Yeah. Next question is from Scott, does a snake poop in the woods? Your favorite reptiles, snakes, and crocodilians often swallow whole vertebrates, swallow vertebrates whole. What happens to the bones of the consumed beasts? How do bones exit a reptilian colon? I imagine that passing the femur of a deer, for example, through a cloaca would be uncomfortable indeed. Indeed, it would, Scott. The answer is that they don't. No. Crocs and snakes both share the fact that they have an extremely effective digestive system. Yeah. Bones tend not to make it all the way out. Bones that sit, partially that comes down to just the systems that work in the digestive tract. Also, they both, I believe, generally speaking, tend to have long digestion, like stuff stays in their digestive system for a while, which helps it to break down further. Snake and Crocs both poop. They do indeed poop in the woods. Crocs less than snakes, generally speaking. You are unlikely to find bones in the poop of a croc or a snake. They're both powdery is the way I often think, like they come out as a poop, but if you were to poke and prod it, it doesn't mush the same way like a mammal poop. It's like oars or a dogs or a cats. They kind of disintegrate and I think, to my knowledge, a lot of that powderiness is the bones and stuff. Yeah. They dissolve them down. Dissolve down to calcium powder. There's very little that Crocs and snakes aren't good at digesting. There are some things that will, I think, like keratin stuff tends to make it through. Some snakes do actively, they will spit out some stuff. Yes. Generally, only for sure examples that I know of are egg eating snakes, which will spit up the eggshells. Do any of the crustacean eating snakes get rid of the exoskeleton? I don't know if they, like, spit it up. There are some snakes that will dismember their prey a little bit. We've talked about this with snails and with crayfish, and there will certainly be parts they leave behind. Yes, that's true. They don't swallow a snail shell. They pull it out of their shell. There's that fantastic group of snail eating snakes that saw the operculum off of the snail, but generally speaking, snakes either don't swallow it if it's something they can digest or just digest it or egg eating snakes, which crack it and then spit out the eggshells. Yep, yep. I know that Crocs can also regurgitate stuff they don't like, but to my knowledge, then mostly it's just down and then it will be digested by strong acid and pulverized by rocks. Yes. Because they swallow gastralids, so it'll be churned up in their stomach that way and yeah, just not much makes it through. I know there was one study that put, like, temperature gauges and got them to swallow it so that they could see, are you maintaining a higher temperature than the, how good is your thermal regulation and that, yeah, typically they can maintain and that those things had a life span because they got destroyed in the stomach after a time. Yeah. So if you want to get rid of gum, you know how to do it. Please do not feed gum to anybody, any living thing. LeggioGlory asks, "If you were in a D&D-like world as an adventurer, what class would you want to be and what class would you be based on your personality?" I think we should answer "want" for ourselves and then "would" for each other. Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean, the shortest answer is "I wouldn't be an adventurer." Yeah. Absolutely not. That sounds terrible. Me? I would not be an adventurer. Right. But if I were, I think, and this is partially because it's the one I played most recently, but an artificer, I do really like being an artificer, so that might be the one I say for my want to be. I think that my want to be would be different from my want to play. Yes. Because I love playing, like, I love a warlock, and that seems like not the thing you want to be. Yep. But, like, being a rogue would be super fun. Just being sneaky and dexterous and climbing all over things and using sleight of hand. That would be super fun. Yeah. I would be fun to be a rogue. Absolutely. Also, you're the one that walks out of the dungeon. Yeah. Yep. You get to go home and find a new party. If will, based on Will's personality, I mean, artificer is also a pretty good choice for just based on your personality. Not bad. Yeah. Artificer. I think a wizard is a tempting one, but wizard is also, I think, very scholarly in a way that I think artificer makes sense for you because it's much more hands-on and experience based. Yep. Yep. It could also see you being something like a paladin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not so much from, like, the religion, paladins are also often portrayed as religious entities, but just that, like, devotion and standards and rule, like Batman, as a code, and being very, like, protective and paladins are often, like, orators. Mm-hmm. That I could also see paladin being a good fit. You're not, like, a go-out and punch people. No. Kind of human. And paladins are very go-out and punch people, so cleric might also be, actually, you could be a cleric of the forge domain. Yeah, that's true. And then now we've got both. That is a pretty good, that is probably the more accurate. Yeah. There's also clerics of the knowledge domain and nature, so, oh man, you might be a cleric. That's probably. Probably. That's definitely a plain zod back in the day. Yes. Was one of my most me moments. I think a David in the D&D. I would be the BBEG. Yeah. You're the DM. Oh, yes. Yeah, I'm the DM. Yeah. I am the Oathbreaker paladin, and I fight against the party. The first two classes that come to mind is similar to, similarly, as you said, wizard. Were you, especially because that's about your ability to memorize would work really well? That's an intelligent score. Yep. That's really good, especially for preparing spells and that's very good for that dynamic. I tell you every spell in that book. Absolutely. What page is it on? It's on page five, it's on page 23. So that fits very well with you. It's also got very much the, there is the scholarly aspect, but it's also has that slight collection of lore and collecting spells, learning about the histories of spells. But the lore side also makes me think of Bard. Ooh, oh yeah. I think you have a, you're very Barty, you're a storyteller, you're a writer, and you have a lot of bardic qualities. Yeah, I do like bard. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's. Well, and there's like the college of lore. That's what I, yeah. Bards, yeah. Exactly. So that one I think is my, the one I actually would fall to is I think you've, you're very, very bard-esque. I do like it. Yeah. So artists, the fan art barrel has to be a clarity and murmur is a bard, like a wizardly bard. Yes, yes. We're Baskin Coil because that would be phenomenal. We just need to hire a full-time artist to make like web comics and Baskin Coil going through. And it would just be clips of stuff we've said in our episodes and that the inspiration for a web comic. Yep. Should be listened to this clip. That's a minute long and then here's a web comic that demonstrates that and it's Baskin Coil. Yay, a salmented enthusiast asks, "Why don't you guys do more fish episodes?" Genuine question, I'm new here. This is a good question. There are two main things that govern what episode topics we do. One is that how much they're requested. Yes. And two is how interested and excited we are to do those episodes. And comfortable. And comfortable. And both of those regards fish are underrepresented. Yes. We've gotten tons of requests for fish episodes. We've done a number of fish episodes. But the list of fish requests on our request list is dwarfed by the number of dinosaur requests or mammal requests. Fish just aren't as popular among the kinds of topics we talk about among our audience. They're also not as comfortable and familiar and exciting for us to talk about. It's one of those where we have to do a bit more basic background research when we do one of it just because I worked it in the aquarium. But that was a very short list of fish. So I know those fish. Well, and there's also, you know, there's an extreme skew. When we pick episodes, we look at the list and then we pick things that we're excited about. Yes. And both of the kind of people that we are much more likely to feel that excited, "Ooh, I'm ready to do that one" about mammals or reptiles or something like that. So fish do end up being underrepresented among our episodes. Which is one of the reasons why it's so nice to have people like Shay, guests who can come in who not only are more comfortable and knowledgeable about fish, but are excited. Like, yeah, Shay was excited when Eels was an option. And so that was great. Absolutely. Our next question is from the European pine martin. Which episode in your backlog has aged the worst from a scientific standpoint and is in the biggest need of a remake? Not because of inaccuracies or mistakes made at the time, but because new research has proved that what was said in that episode is wrong or misleading. Ooh, which one is the most? That's a good question. Just statistically speaking, probably the earliest ones. Yeah, some of the earliest ones. I'm trying to think of which topics we did earlier on that were more budding fields of research potentially. Oh sure. Well, like conservation, paleontology might be one that they're, I don't know the things were wrong or misleading, but now it might feel incomplete. Yes, that like, I'm sure there's been a ton of context added to the things that were said in that episode that now are missing from it. Yeah. There's not one that jumps out as like, yeah, there's been such major things that have come out that. Yeah. Again, we try to keep it pretty broad. Yeah. But yeah, I would love, this is one where I would love to know if anyone else out there who has listened to the older episodes more recently, if any of them jump out to you as like. Yeah. Or like, 'cause, you know, our news is that comes up where we will do news based on old topics and I'm sure there's been a few where we've done a news and it absolutely made you go, oh, that's different than what they said in that episode. The one that I think about most often in this regard is episode five which was the KPG mass extinction. Yes. Not necessarily 'cause I think we've learned a whole bunch more, but that we might have framed it differently or focused on different aspects of it if we had done it either with more up to date knowledge or more importantly, as more experienced doing the podcast. Yep, yep. Yeah. You led us know which of our old episodes is in most need of an update. Here's one that I'll ignore it. I'll say, and I think of every now and then, are but we digress on mermaids. That would have been a spooky. Oh, yeah, it would have been a spooky. Maybe someday. Maybe someday we'll do a spooky, official spooky for it. Every now and then I think back to that and it's like, ooh, we jumped the gun a little bit. It's important we did it 'cause it led to. Yes, it's pretty spooky. But it is weird. Yeah. It's a little outline. Yeah. A little unsatisfying for me every now and then. Maybe, maybe we'll, maybe someday. Sophie's Burlfriend says, "I recently got a job feeding mosquitoes at a lab at my university by sticking my hand in their enclosures." That'll do it. What are some of the weirdest jobs both paid and volunteer that you guys did as first years slash undergrads? My favorite example of a thing. This wasn't really a job. In summer, I think this was 2008. I was out doing field work in South Dakota and then I went and did yet more field work in Colorado and in between my trips, I hung out in Denver at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and I went to the, I had nothing else to do. So I went to the museum and I said, "Hey, I will volunteer in your lab. Please give me things to do." And the first thing that they gave me to do was they sat me down at a table with a bunch of empty glue tubes and said, "Here is a small vat of acetone. Here's a bunch of empty glue tubes and the caps of the glue tubes have gotten all gunked up with glue. They need to be cleaned." So my job was, you know, I put on gloves and I had tweezers and I was dipping the caps of the glue tubes in the acetone to clean them. But they had sat me right in front of the window where like guests can come up of the museum and like peek in and see what you're doing. And I was like hunched over this fluid and I had these gloves and tweezers and I'm sure it looked like I was doing something very important and official and I remember sitting there doing it intentionally not making eye contact with the people who would come up to the glass thinking, "Boy, I hope nobody asks me what I'm doing." Because this is an extremely boring answer. This is important work. Yes. Yeah. I'm not devaluing that work that I was doing. You're maintaining lab equipment. Absolutely. That is, if you can't, you don't have glue tubes, you're not getting your work done. Yep. But I would not have been enthusiastic to talk to guests about it. Yep. Oh, that's great. My weirdest job in undergrad, I worked in the beetle lab on campus, which was our head of biology was also part of the Chestnut Blight program where we were raising beetles that would eat the aphids that cause chestnut blight. Sure, sure. And we were raising them in these enclosures at the beetle lab and feeding them branches of chestnut with blight on it and then had to count up the beetles that were being raised. And so I'd go in and I'd put new branches in the beetle enclosures and then I would take a, when one of the enclosures had incubated long enough, I would pull it over and I would go in with a little siphon thing that you have a straw that you suck on and a straw in that you aim and filter so that you don't inhale and you, and it sucks the beetle into the canister. It's a classic insect catching tool. And so I would sit there and go, and count with a clicker as I sucked up the beetles and then I would go to the gauze that we would put in there and have to get a rough count of the eggs that they had laid on the gauze and I would mark those down. And so I sucked up beetles and then fed them. This is the life of scientists. Speaking of beetles, Alfonso asks, what is your guy's favorite insect and why? Ants! Dragonflies. Ants are my favorite. For extended answers, go listen to episodes 149 and 181. Yep. They're both cool, both off. Dragonflies are so cool. Yeah. They're just aerially super impressive. I'm a sucker for swarms. Yeah. Nope. I sympathize. I love them. Amanda in South Dakota asks, has there been any follow-up on the Therapod-looking teeth found in the Packy Cephalosaur juvenile noted in episode 47 news? So I have no idea what this is referring to, so I went back and looked at the news for episode 47 and there was a Packy Cephalosaur jaw that had oddly pointy carnivorous like teeth in the front of the mouth. That was noted as like, oh, this is weird. And the answer is not to my knowledge. I don't think anything further has been done with that. I think it was a juvenile Packy Cephalosaurus, but I think that it was very limited material so we don't have much more. So in order for there to be more, we'd have to find more fossils to see if this was a consistent feature and if they were doing something unusual with their front teeth. But no, as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been any update on that. Dan Yell the Bug lover asks, how many Lagerstetta have we identified and what is your personal favorite? Oh, I don't know how many. Lots. Like hundreds. Yes. There's a lot of Lagerstetta fossil sites. Oh, what's my favorite? That is a good question. Yeah. I mean, the Burgess Shale is classic and awesome. Yes. The Messle Pit has a special place for since doing the episode 160 on the Messle Pit. Also it's got like super cool snakes and bats and the Messle Pit might be the answer. Messle Pit's my answer because it has some of the prettiest crock fossils in existence where like, yeah, entire Crocodilium bodies. Same thing with snakes. Yeah. Crocs also all the osteoderms are in place on those. Yeah. So it's like, other than the fact that there's no skin on the face or tail, it just looks like a crocodile asleep in some mud. The Messle Pit is also where that one three and one snake fossil comes from with a beetle inside of a lizard inside of a snake. Yeah. So Messle Pit episode 160. Next questions from Aki. What was the role either inferred or speculated of sauropods in seed dispersal and perhaps even pollination during the Mesozoic? A great question, probably substantial. Yeah. We know that sauropods ate lots of a variety of different plants. We know that from coprolites and from just the kind of plants that they live near and they're feeding adaptations, sauropods probably would have been effective dispersers the same way that elephants are in that they can take in lots and lots of food and travel long distances. That's really the big benefit of large animals like that is that they eat a whole lot and then move a long distance and drop things off later. I don't know how much we know about sauropods eating like fruits, which is where seeds tend to be held. So sauropods typically we talk about them eating leaves and things. So I don't actually know if they would have been going after fruits. If there were fruits in their ecosystem, I can't imagine they weren't eating. That seems like a pretty obvious thing to go for. And they would have picked up pollen just like any large animal picks up pollen walking around today. Yeah. Absolutely. And I assume it would depend sauropod to sauropod, like some were probably better seed dispersers than others. It would depend on the ecosystem. I also would be shocked if there were not symbiotic and like parallel evolution happening with- There are trees that rely on sauropods. Yes, absolutely. So probably a lot of that that are dynamics that no longer exactly exist anymore. So we might not be able to fully understand what was happening with all of them. I think there might have been certain trees that only grew at specific heights because those were the ones that would get eaten by sauropods. And if you're shorter than that or taller than that, you're not getting eaten. Like if they were eating like ferns, I wonder were any of them specialized with their spores that would be like unleashed to go through the digestive tract of a sauropod. There are lots of animals that disperse plants like that today. Exactly. So like that would make tons, because that's eating the leaves and you'd be getting the dispersal material, so make sense. Sen asks, would it be cannibalism if it were an animal who ate another animal of a different species but the same genus or family? Say a raven eating a sparrow or a human eating a Neanderthal. Very good question and I like the examples you use because knee jerk reaction is raven eating a sparrow. No, that's not cannibalism. Those are two different kinds of birds. And the Neanderthal feels a bit more like cannibalism. And that is a good point to be made about cannibalism. We talked about this in the cannibalism episode, 188. That term, it is a useful term and it is important but also it is sometimes kind of arbitrary when it's just like crocodiles are cannibalistic but that's because anything that's in that size range is on their menu. Right, well and the term cannibalism often is defined as eating the same species but we don't always use the term to mean that. Yes, and so yeah, there's definitely situations where it might lean a bit, especially if they're different species but still very similar animals like a crow and a raven are, that is a bit more cannibalistic because you're kind of eating your own kind of animal. So that is a bit different. Crow and sparrow, those are size category differences so it makes sense that a sparrow might be a prey item. If you're similar animals and human and a Neanderthal, that's not a prey animal. Yes, well this comes up with snakes a lot. Yes. You'll hear like king snakes referred to as cannibalistic because they eat like rattlesnakes or copperheads even though king snakes and copperheads are not remotely closely related as snakes go. But they are. That's like a human eating a lemur. Yes, exactly. Calling it cannibalism, well that's not because cannibalism isn't really defined by how related you are. Yes. It's more, it's vibes based. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Anthony asks, what's your opinion on tales of chimer? Thanks for asking. I have no opinions really on tales of chimer. I'm not really familiar with tales of chimer. I don't think I know what tales of chimer are. It's like a seed planet speculative evolution kind of, I think it's like a book series. Gotcha. This comes up on the discord a bunch, links get shared and such. I think I have seen those before. Yeah, I think from what vaguely I'm aware of, I think those kinds of concepts are very fun and cool. I like, I think tales of chimer is a thing where it's the background for a story that's like Pandora in Avatar where that's not really the speculative ecology isn't necessarily the focal point, but it is an important part of the premise. And that I think is super cool. I think it's really fun when authors put some scientific thought into the setting of their story that they want to tell. Yeah. It's a way to create a unique place to tell your story. Yeah. And it's something that you don't have to do, but I appreciate it. Like Lord of the Rings doesn't have that to my knowledge that Toki never spent a bunch of time thinking about what's the ecology of Middle-earth like. Exactly. Which obviously you don't need to, but I do appreciate it when it's in the same way that I appreciate that he made languages and he came up with the detailed cultural systems. I like that level of detail. I was like Peter Jackson's King Kong where Skull Island, though very monster-ified, there is thought put into how these animals got to be the way they are. Yeah. Which is cool. Franco Speaks asks, "Even though the prevailing consensus is that they were due to sexual selection, would you deem it possible that the weaponry and armory of most herbivorous animals in the fossil record, like Saratopsians and Kylosores, Theres Inosaurs, etc., could have served as effective deterrence or anti-predator implements even if secondarily?" Absolutely. Yeah. Like for sure, it just like armored and armed animals today, like deer and bovids and antelope mainly have their horns for butting heads with each other. Right. Or showing off. Yeah. Which is like why deer antlers show up during the mating season. So, they don't have them all year, so they're definitely not mainly for defense because if it was mainly defense, they'd be good to have all the time that there are predators around. Yes. But, there's a video that I got on my feed just the other day of a, I think it was a ram that decided to butt heads with a deer and the deer full on just uses it to defend and chase off the ram. Yup. And it's like, yeah, they will absolutely use it to protect themselves. When you have it, you use it. Yup. So, yes. All of those, and it's probably a dual selection with many of them that this was heavily for sexual selection but also if it means you survive a predator attack, that's another level of selection that's going to be put on it. Well, and it's a lot of the same function. Yes. Right. A lot of these animals, the function of these features is predominantly to attack or defend. Yes. Or intimidate. Once they're in place, it doesn't really matter all that much. Who you're attacking or intimidating or defending from. Yes. I, I know how to use my antlers to attack somebody. I'll use it on a wolf. I'll use it on another deer. I'm not picky when they're in place. Absolutely. Chloe asks, in a recent episode you mentioned watching Dungeon Meshy, I was wondering if you would be willing to share your takes on how the show handled dungeon ecology and the speculative biology of the monsters. Well, Chloe, I will not be sharing any takes because I honestly don't know anything about doing it. I know the name of it and that's all that I know, but I know you actually are familiar with it. I liked it a lot. Dungeon Meshy, also a delicious in dungeon is the, the American title. Oh, okay. Yup. So, I watched it American English dubbed because the dwarf is voiced by Proxidi. And I wanted to hear someone ranting about food because I'm a big fan. Dungeon Meshy, super fun anime, like fun characters, super silly. I enjoy it just as an anime regardless of the animal stuff. It is a fun anime in my opinion. The ecology stuff was really cool in it. They have really cool stuff. They have speculative biology for a bunch of monsters because the whole point is they're eating the monsters. So they kill a monster and then go through like here's what animal it is more like and come up with like their mimics are hermit crabs that are inside chests and stuff like that. So they do some different things like that, but then they'll also go through and be like, you know, eating a hippogriff is interesting because the meat's different depending on which, or a cockatris was the one they did, the meat's different depending on which part of the body you eat. And stuff like that. Oh, that's fun. But they also have the ecology of dungeons in their world where dungeons form where like concentrations of certain kinds of magic form and then dungeon creatures start appearing and a dungeon it has like a life cycle that this ecosystem forms when the right set of natural resources and effects and situations overlap and combine and you get these areas where these unique creatures start appearing and forming and living. That's very cool. It was neat. It's a neat concept that dungeons aren't just leftover places like you need the space, but then if the right things happen, you'll get it filled with monsters, yes. And they talk about like the levels are different because different animals and different predators and stuff live so they'll displace each other. So that's why it gets harder as you go down because the ecosystem is changing. So it's a cool. It's fun. That's cool. You'll like it. That's cool. All right. Maybe I'll check it out. Big fan. Milu asks, what's your best animal impression and please perform it, please. Ooh, best animal impression. I had to immediately be like not from a thing because like right, you know, like an animal. Yeah. It's an asunder being birthed from the rhino is not an animal impression. What's my best? Ooh. I learned how to do, which owl was this, a barred owl from my professor in college who was a big bird, a fan, and it is real Sesame Street fanatic. I'm trying to remember if this is barred owl or a great horned owl. This might be great horned owl. And I got to use that at a bird sanctuary and get them to hoot back. I think it's great horn. I think that's great horned. Ever since I was a kid, one of my like specialty noises that I made is a noise that I've always called the horse noise, which is, I can't smile, serious, be serious for your horse noise. That's always been a go to, I just do that randomly for a minute. I do remember once a number of years ago being in the car and on a whim doing that chimpanzee hoot. Yes. Yes. That they did. And I won't like fully replicate it here because A, I might not be able to do it and B, it's really loud and gorgeous and we are in the apartment company. But I remember being very impressed with myself. It was like, yeah, that was very good. I've definitely done my fair share of chimpanzee hoot and primate noises. Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to think. I feel like there's another animal that I've done, that I used to do, but I can't think of it. You also take very well to doing the croc, bellow, like rumble noises. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I also, like it's not perfect, but the baby, baby croc noise in there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Another noise that I used to do, and I don't know if this is my best animal impression, but I used to do that, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Which is the, specifically, this is a specific frog impression. This is the Goliath frog being held by Jeff Corbine. Yeah. Yeah. That frog. Yeah. Meow. Meow. Meow. I'm, who wouldn't make that noise while being held by Jeff Corbine? My Jeff Corbine. My Jeff Corbine. In the strong firm grip of Jeff Corbine. Next up, Michigan. I haven't heard you guys talk much about studies estimating the population levels of extinct animals. Is this something that is done much? What methods are used to estimate these numbers? Long story short, I may be confronted with a situation where I am wandering through the Cretaceous North America soon, and it would probably be really useful to know the number of T-Rexes I can expect to encounter. We haven't talked much about studies like that because there aren't many studies that can do that. It's very difficult to estimate ancient population sizes. There was a paper a few years ago, very famously, that did this with T-Rex. And the way that they did it was they came up with a model that they fed parameters like what sort of territory they might have had, how their growth rate, how long does it take them to grow up, how much food would they need, what sort of things would they be eating, how often do they reproduce, all of these sort of life history statistics based on evidence from the fossil record, as well as comparing with similar animals today, and then ran that into a model to say, all right, with all of these in mind, what is a reasonable amount of population? That was the paper that came up with a lifetime number for the species, where it was like some number of like seven billion T-Rexes or something over the course of two or three million years that they existed. So it's a very difficult and inexact. Even that paper was like, yeah, we got a huge range of estimates. This is mostly just to try out this technique to do a test of this methodology. I think that the short answer to your question on your imminent journey through the Cretaceous of North America, I would guess that most likely you're going to run into one. I can't imagine that T-Rexes were in bundles. If they were maintaining any sort of territory, probably you're going to come across one, maybe some juveniles if there are young ones around too, but you're probably not going to run into hundreds of T-Rexes. And if they do live in family groups, you'd probably still hit one of like it's like lion prides, where when they're studying lion prides, they can go, this is this pride. We've named it, there's not another one just next door because a lion pride needs a certain amount of space to be able to occupy and feed. If another one's next door, they fight because that's too close. So yeah, probably spread out. I love those studies, but they are one of those where it's we're having to make so many assumptions. Yes, this is like the Drake equation. Yes. So there's so many assumptions down the list of this. And with each one, we potentially deviate another degree further from the correct answer. So yeah. So best of luck, report back on how many T-Rexes you encounter. Bring back a tooth. Bring back a tooth. Quags asks, "I'm finding conflicting information on whether placardorms are a true clade or just a group of convergent armored fish. Also, since we are descended from fish, that means we are fish, politically speaking, are placardorms a clade and are humans placardorms?" Very good question. To my knowledge, placardorm, there is a real clade in there, but I think it's fairly messy as to exactly where everything shakes out right now. I don't know if placardorms are polyphyletic, which would mean that they are actually multiple different groups that we're artificially joining together. But I do think they're parafyletic, which means that they are some of a real clade. Yes. Like, probably as we continue to go, we will refine it and some will get moved out to other groups and things like that. To my knowledge, there is a legitimate organization there, and the term placardorm will probably stick around. I have no ability to say how solid or how many, or that's everything I know about placardorms was in that episode. That was a long time ago, 2009. Yep. So I don't remember most of it. I know that there have been some hypotheses that placardorms might include the ancestors of other fish, in which case, possibly, we are placardorms, but I don't know that it's currently grouped that way. Placketorms are generally considered a separate branch. Yes. And it's one of those where, depending on exactly where placardorms fall into things, because that general grouping of fish is often where it is considered the first jawed fish showed up. And if that is Placaderm that that falls into, then all Jod vertebrates that follow would be descended from that. - Yes. - I don't know whether or not the first Jod members are true Placaderms or not. That's beyond what I know of their taxonomy. So maybe, and boy, if we are, I'll take Dunk Lasius as great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, Uncle Rant. - Absolutely. - 'Cause that's worth it. - Ryan, the biochemist asks, of all the spookids you've evolved so far, how dare you come up with such a cute term. - Those are good names. - Which do you think would win in a cage match? Are there any animals, real or mythological, that you think could take the winner? Which would win in a cage match? - It is important to ask where the cage is. - Yes. - Because we do have a bunch of marine spooky creatures. - Absolutely. - And like our Leviathan is a giant predator. - Yes, it's a big fish. - Also our East Asian dragon is a very large, very intelligent and possibly social aquatic animal. So that one would have a pretty good chance. That being said, we did entertain the possibility of horde mimics. - Yes, yes. - Which based on the biology of our mimics from spooky, I have a hard time, anything standing against that. - They are the cage. - They are the cash. (laughing) So our mimic might win the cage match. - That would be pretty good. Somewhat surprisingly, at least for how we compare to them, the friendly dragons, if they are big desert elephant- - Bird dwellers. - Bird, like they might be a tough animal, even if they aren't aggressive. - Yeah. - Like for our land-based animals, they might be our heaviest that I can think of. - Yeah, we made space for our European dragons to include like dinosaurs- - Yes, exactly. - But yeah, those two, I think, are certainly the big land animals. - Yeah, those are probably the largest. - Our owl bear is also- - That's true, that one. - Quite large and with claws and a beak. - That one might be a good contender. - That's a big, that's a big, bad animal. - Like, and we made it that it's like that those claws and those muscles were for like tearing into termite mounds. - Yeah. - And even though ant eaters are not famously aggressive animals, I have heard many people who work with them, they will mess you up because their hands are can-openers. - Yep. - They don't look, but they have so much muscle inside those hands. So that one would, if you got grabbed by the owl bear, it would probably do a number on most of the others. - Yeah. We also have some like the fairies, which employ disease. - Yes, absolutely. - Which obviously gives them a bit of an edge. I do think that probably one of our dragons or the owl bear, although our, well, in our terrace was also a big, dangerous, that's true, that's true, that one. - Very hippo-like. - That one would be hard to take down. - Yeah. - That's a shell. - Yeah, an aggressive territorial displaying gliptadon. - Yeah. - Would be really hard to do much against. - Even the owl bear would have a hard time against that. - Yeah, that one might be just for the fact of staying power. - Yeah. - I don't know who else that we have that could do much to that. - So yeah, on land, I think our terrace might be the male specifically. - Yes, yes. - That might be the one. - And as far as real animals, I mean, mythological, yeah, sure, there are tons of mythological creatures. - Yeah, absolutely. - Yoming under the world serpent. (laughing) - I don't know if there's much real animals that would take on our hypergliptadont that we evolved. - Yeah, I don't like, how would, how would a T-Rex with bone crunchy, like, how would it do against something like that? - I think that a T-Rex could get through the armor if it really tried, but if the thing is a lie-- - And struggling and swinging with its tail-- - And it's got those big tusks. - Yeah. - All right, it's gonna be hard to take. I don't think that a T-Rex would risk that fight for very long, like, and if in a cage match scenario where they must fight, I don't know that it's gonna survive, like, it's gonna get probably pretty injured. - Yeah. - So that tail and those tusks are gonna do some damage. Also, it has claws, it's a digger. - Yeah, so. - I don't, I, if we find out what was hunting real gliptadonts and if they had special, like, if there's something that has specializations-- - Arctodus was out there flippin' gliptadonts over. - Then, maybe that, but yeah, that would be pretty solid. All right, now I know who to put my money on of our spook kids, I was not prepared. - Juniper Jane asks, "How big are dinosaur feathers? "Can I make a dress or a skirt out of them? "Which feathers would be the best to use?" - Ooh, I mean, they range just, like, with birds today. I don't know what the biggest dinosaur feathers we know of, but I'd assume they're on ovioraptorids. - Yeah, there are some on ovioraptorids and I believe some therosinosaurs that have, like, long ribbon or strap-like feathers that aren't very broad but are long-- - Yes. - That you could make, like, I'm imagining like a hula skirt that's made out of those feathers. - Yep, yep, so yeah, some of those, especially 'cause some ovioraptorids were fairly big dinosaurs. - And those would have had, like, asymmetric, like flight feathers-- - Yes. - Broad, wide feathers. - So those probably would be getting up to some of the biggest bird feathers today. - I would imagine you have at least a similar diversity as you see in modern birds. - Almost sure. If only just due to the bigger size range that dinosaurs hit. Like, we have dinosaurs in feathered groups that are from the size of some of our small, like, crow-sized birds-- - Yep. - Up to therosinosaurs and stuff, like, giant dinosaurs. - It's totally enormous. - So, for sure, we must have had feathers ranging all the size of the other day and probably sizes and shapes we don't have the day. - So, if you lived when Michigan goes on that trip to Cretaceous North America, if you managed to hunt down some of these big celerosaurs, not only do you get a lot of meat, but you can make clothes out of the feathers. - I now want a Dinotopia character that is a dress designer and their dino partner is a feathered theiropod. - Yeah, the sheds feathers. - That they use their shed feathers in their dressmaking. - That'd be super cool. - Oh, please submit plans for, like, design concepts for your dinosaur feathered clothing. - I'm picturing you as a Dinotopia person now, Jennifer Jane. - Monica asks, what are your favorite pterosaurs and why? - Ooh, I think pterodoster is probably my favorite one. Filter-feeding flamingo pterosaur. - That's pretty cool. - Awesome. - Pretty cool. - Also, Quetzalcoatlus is a very obvious choice, but yeah, it's, I can't truly mind-bogglingly huge animal. - I like all the bigger ones, mostly because I am so curious to know what it looked like when they walked around. - Yeah. - 'Cause, like, in prehistoric planet, they showed them and you had their wings fold up fairly tight to the arm, and it's like, is that how much they folded up? Did you have wings sticking out? Were you clumsy, were you graceful? I wanna know, but my favorites, I'm a big fan of, like, the Rampherinkids. - Yeah, sure. - Rampherinkus, and even, like, other early ones like Dimarfordon, the small batty ones with teeth and stuff like-- - Well, like, and your Ignatans are super cute. - Like, picturing them-- I picture when they moved, like, climbed around, like, that they must've kind of looked like a flying squirrel, like, the way they-- - Yeah. - Like, would've moved around on a tree or something, and just a very entertaining movement to me. - Jonah asks, "Can you do a super quick "speculative evolution on the Tyranids "for Warhammer 40k?" (laughing) "Super quick, Will." - Oh. - Yes. - Some day we'll do a Warhammer 40k season, spooky, and we'll look and go nuts. - All right, so, starting from scratch, 'cause I've never considered this before, you know. - Well, you just off the top of your head. - There are a group of ants called Weaver Ants that weave leaves into their nest, and they do so using the silk of their larvae by wielding their larvae like a glue gun, which, to my knowledge, is the only example of one cast member of a species using another member of its species as a tool. - Yes. - They are what the starting point for Tyranids would probably have looked like. And then you would have gotten more specialized individuals to where your jaw is shaped like the larva, and some of your larva never mature, and now you have gluing members that their job is to do that job, and then you can get to where there's ones that start to develop into new jobs, like how there's insects that can spray stuff for defenses, and now you have your guards, whose weapon is a larva specialized to spit acid or whatnot, and their mouth is formed to do that, and that's it. And then you get that increased diversification, so something like that is what I would picture for Tyranids. There is no method, really, to evolve their super gene splicing ability to just be able to dissolve the genes of other species and incorporate them. That's a level of magic crisper that I do not have an evolutionary explanation for. But for the bio-weapons and the caste system aspect, that's what I would go with. Sounds good to me. Next up, KitKat, what is one personal accomplishment from this year that you'd like to brag about? That is a very sweet question. This year, I left a job that wasn't the right job for me, and have replaced it with a successful and workable assortment of various science communication projects and jobs, which is lovely. It's been, that's been a great, a great update. Yeah, I'm very happy about that. I think for me, it would be that I and together with the help of David have found a lot more balance with how I conduct myself and manage stuff with the podcast. That there were aspects that I was stressing about that was not ideal and struggling with that was an ideal, and that over this past year, things have taken more and more steps to being a more stable and functioning way, which has been good for the podcast in my work life, but also just my mental health. Yeah, also the podcast, this has been a great year for the podcast. Yeah, this has been an exciting year. We also, there's a bunch of other things. A spotlight this year was an incredible accomplishment. Very happy about that. Oh, this is one that I know that you share this. This year at DragCon felt like the first one where we were basically over our imposter syndrome and really connected with the science track. Absolutely. And that was pretty magical. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, so that's been great. This summer I came out as non-binary. Yeah, that was a, that was a new thing for me. So that's been an accomplishment. (laughing) So it's been pretty good year 2024. Good stuff happening. Not too bad. Bridget asks, I recall you guys mentioning that Allie was a patron and listens to the podcast. Does she listen to episodes that she's also in? I remember from a previous Q and A that you guys said you don't listen back on recordings which made me wonder if Allie does the same. Ooh. Great question. I asked Allie. And Allie said, I used to listen to my episodes because I wouldn't remember exactly the jokes or references I made in an episode. I would often mentally make the joke again moments before my past self did on the podcast. Yeah, that's the same thing happens to us. Yeah, I do that while editing. She continues. Now I don't have time to listen to as many podcasts as I used to. So I only listen to the news for episodes I'm in. Otherwise I skip them. (laughing) Very fair. Tim asks, if I were trapped with a green anaconda or a large species of croc, what would give me my worst chances of survival and what weapon would I need to make it out alive? Mm. The best, the best thing you could have with you to make it out alive trapped in a room with an anaconda would be like a small pig. Yeah. Like the carcass of a small pig. Yeah. Just do that. Yeah. 'Cause once it's got that, there's no reason for it to be interested in you. And honestly, if you were like a full grown human being, you're pretty safe in a room with an anaconda. Yeah. Even the biggest anaconda, especially if you're looking at it. Mm-hmm. If you keep an eye on it and just like go to the other side of the room, you're fine. If you're in a room with a large croc and if we're going with the large croc of-- Sure. Salty. Salty, the best weapon I would suggest to survive that situation would probably be a scissor lift. 'Cause if you can get tall, then they can't get to you and you're safe. Yeah. I don't know that I'd want to be in a room alone with a big saltwater croc with any weapon and that'd be my guarantee. And this is one of those where unlike most of them, it very likely will be very interested in you. Sure. Well, they're very territorial. They're very territorial. They are one of the few predators that on a rather frequent occasion sees us as prey. Yes. They're known to stalk humans for food. So if you get out of their reach, then you'll be good. That would be, and your worst thing to do would be to-- Take a nap. Yeah. I was like, yeah. And I grew with an anaconda. Your worst thing to do would be to take a nap. Yep, so most other big crocs, a hefty stick. Oh, sure. A hefty stick would be able to determine most others. If you're trapped in a room with an American alligator, you sit on it. Yeah, right? Just take a seat. Like, most others are not meaning be quite as aggressive. Salty, that one would be tougher. The big stick would also probably get the grain anaconda pretty well, too. Yep, yep. Like, if for some reason it is really wanting to pick a fight and you just jab it in the nose, you're fine. Yeah, like, that's what handlers use for crocs is they have a big stick, so you can put it between you and them, and it's just enough of a barrier that you can keep moving. Yep. But yeah, that one's a trick of your one. Nick asks, what are some of your favorite museums/zoos/equariums/nature centers, et cetera? Any hidden gems? My personal favorite museum, because it's the one I grew up with, is Fernbank from in Georgia. That's my-- and I also kind of listed as a gem, like, hidden gem, sort of. Sure. Because it's not one of the big national ones that gets noted very often. But it's a great little museum. It's really sweet. It's got a lot of great exhibits to it. A bunch of it's dated, but it also is just-- I think it's delightful. Yeah. There is a Nature's the Western Carolina Nature Center in Asheville is a lovely little Nature Center. And it's not little, little. It's fairly sizable as nature centers go. But I love that. That place is super fun. Yeah. A couple of real cute red pandas. Next question from Amy. Do each of you have a favorite artist or art style? Hmm. That's a good question. I don't really have a favorite art style. I have a bunch of friends who are artists, who are some of my favorite people. Yes. I think that Rob Soto is one of my favorite artists. Yes. He did the art for our logo and such. I'm always excited to see Gabriel Legito's paleo art, who is on the podcast back in episode 64. I tend not to get focused on specific art styles. My social media feeds are full of paleo artists. Yeah. And I love to see different artwork and different styles. I follow a bunch of mostly fan artists. I'm a sucker for good fan art. I love seeing characters I like in different scenarios and in different settings and different stuff. That's tons of fun. There's a whole bunch, and unfortunately none of their names are coming to my brain right away. So if I remember maybe I'll post some of them on Discord or something, one of my favorite art styles is minimalism. Oh, sure. I like minimalist-- I don't have many, but there's a-- like a dragon con very often, there'll be lots of minimalist posters, like movie posters. And it just will be fairly simple shapes to represent ghost busters or things like that. And I really like minimalistic design of stuff. There's something I like about telling a lot with little. And it's why I think I like LEGO so much, because LEGO is reduced detail. So you have to be more creative in the way you show that detail, because you can't have a keyboard, because it's too tiny. So if you want to represent a computer, you have to get the shape and vibe of a computer so someone can look and go, oh yeah, I like that. I like that aspect. Fun. Betty asks, has there ever been a time when we, science, learn something about index fossils that caused us to have to go back and revise the ages on a bunch of things? Ooh. That definitely happens where we will refine the dating on a fossil and go, oh, actually, now that we've gotten-- we've got better material for this species or whatever. And turns out the radiometric dating is actually half a million years older or younger than we thought it was. So since we used this one to form the edge of this specific age range, that should be shifted, or we need to find a different index. So that definitely happens. I don't know how drastic, like what the most drastic event in that sort of scenario is. Yeah, I don't know of any specific examples where a major change happened. Another thing that can happen is we can have a fossil that we use as an index fossil, and then it turns out that it has a wider time range than we realized. We find another fossil site that has the same species at it, and we do high precision dating, and it turns out that it's outside the range we thought this index fossil was. And so now all of the places that we've used that index fossil to say this time range, they might still be in that time range. But now it turns out it could also be half a million years earlier than that. And we didn't realize that. That's when you'll often have to go, all right, we need to double check those. Is there any other index fossils available? Can we date anything from there and get something that doesn't rely on this one that's not as reliable as we thought it was? And this is the kind of-- we talk about this a lot with the geologic timescale-- is that we are constantly adjusting and refining. These are the kinds of adjustments and refinements that are often made. I don't think there's ever been a real example where it was like, we thought this fossil was Cretaceous, and it turns out it's triast-- Yeah, exactly. That's the kind of thing that-- certainly not for an index fossil. But those little adjustments on very fine scales, that does happen fairly frequently that we have to make little refinements. This is an art project that I bet would be also time consuming to put together. It would be cool to have a time lapse of the adjustment of date ranges of the timeline and watching it just wiggle and undulate as time frames are slowly narrowed in on. That'd be pretty cool. That'd be very cool. I bet that would take so long to put together. Yes, absolutely. Next questions from Jackson. What was the most disconcerting thing you learned this year? The one thing that made you shut her when you heard it or just gave you the heebie-jeebies. Hmm. I know that I have an answer to this. I think I know what your answer is. What do you think my answer is? The de-gloving tales on those scaly tale rats. That's right, episode 203. That was the worst thing. I did really not enjoy that. No, it was really bad. Yeah. Where these rats have osteodermned tails so that the skin can easily be de-gloved off and then they will gnaw the now exposed muscly tail off so that it doesn't get infected. Yes, yep. Also, during the episode 202 for fungi, I learned that there are fungi that will bore a hole into the side of a fly without killing it so that when it flies around, the fungus can drop spores. Yeah. Also, the horror story that I told you about the paper that I identified trapdoor spider burrows with fungi growing, pushing the trapdoors open that have infected the spider. Those are pretty. Those are pretty good. Rough way to go. Ernesto asks, "What are the chances that different speciations identified in the fossil record are just instances of dramatic sexual dimorphism, like in elephant seals, or extreme age variation?" There are definitely cases where that is probably still the case for some species that we have. Yeah. We've talked about this with lots of dinosaurs where what we thought were two different species because they looked very distinct and were different sizes turned out to be a group that changes drastically as they grow into adulthood and get ornamentation and stuff on their head or body that really changes the way they look. Yeah, I don't know of any examples offhand where that has happened with sexual dimorphism that has been confirmed. Yes. But sexual dimorphism is very hard to confirm in the fossil record anyway. It's really tough to be able to say, for sure, that's what's going on. I think it's worth pointing out that those examples are relatively few and far between. Yes. It is not likely that there are many of those. Yes. It is for sure likely that there are some of those out there. Yeah, I'd be shocked if there aren't still some remaining for us to go, "Oh, we found the teenager. This is a baby that's an adult." Especially for insects and vertebrates and stuff that are out there. And so I would not be surprised if it's happened with sexual dimorphism. But I get no examples that I know of. And I also want to be surprised if that one might be a bit easier to distinguish since you don't have the size difference that typically goes with ages, that usually you will both look like adults and-- Yeah, the elephant seal example is a very rare case. Yeah, exactly. So if there are dinosaurs that had that situation, probably it will give us some difficulty if we come across it or have already come across it. But we don't know if that's happened with them. Yeah, I bet there's a bunch of bugs out there that that is the case with. Oh, yeah, I bet so. Tin asks, "Has there been a definitive answer reached in regards to whether or not feathers are basal to archosaurs?" Thanks for asking, Tin. No, they're sure hasn't. This is pretty much the same. I mean, we did an episode about feathers 183 right at the beginning of this year. And that that's pretty much where we're at. We know that there are feathers on at least one corner of the dinosaur family tree. It seems very likely that multiple lineages of dinosaurs are feathered. And so feathers might be basal to dinosaurs. It seems quite likely that pterosaur fuzz is the same structure as feathers, in which case feathers would be basal to archosaurs. So that seems likely, but we don't know for sure. And probably we won't know for sure unless we find a middle early triassic archosaur with feathers on it. Yes. So stay tuned for that. Someday that'll happen. And then the feathers episode will be the answer to these questions asking about which episodes are outdated. Oh, for sure, yeah. That would do it. That'll make it, that'll be pretty definitive. That'll be a big one. Thomas asks, "What are y'all's favorite and least favorite things about living in Tennessee? Besides working at the Gray fossil site?" Oh, my favorite thing. 'Cause we're all my friends are. Yeah, people I like are here, I'm close to family. That's also very nice. I'm not close to family, which is a thing that I like about Tennessee. I like the weather of Tennessee. Yeah. I'm a fan of the weather. It's, you know, it gets warm in the summer, but it's not blistering hot. And it gets cold in the winter, which I like, I like cold weather. But not miserably cold. Yeah, so I like the weather of Tennessee. Yeah. Anna loves the mountains. So she likes it here. Sure, the mountains here are very nice. Least favorite thing, hmm. This area, this isn't an all across Tennessee thing, but this area is a little bit more, I'm gonna say homogenous. Yeah. I miss, you know, I grew up outside of New York City. Yes. One of the things that I really like about a bigger city is the diversity of foods and opportunities and events and the things that there's just, there's a lot more diverse things to interact with. It's more culturally diverse. This area is, I mean, we're in a college town part of Tennessee. So it's not like it's all, you know, it's not wall-to-wall mayonnaise. Yeah. Yeah, that there's, you know, when, you know, people come to visit and they're like, "Oh, I love Indian food." And I get to go, "Cool, here's the Indian place." Yep. It's just a little bit more restrictive on those sorts of options. Yeah. You said it better, but that's exactly what I was trying to think of how to say that, and I felt this especially while job searching and going, "What other science education opportunities "are there near around?" None, you say? Okay, and yeah, it's a bit homogenous, a bit restricted. Also, while all my friends are here, the person that I like the most is not here. Yes, which is very far away. Also the same. So that is a con. That is Tennessee, you'd be better if you had wonderful ladies, specifically two of them. Specifically these two. (laughing) Next question's from Luke. If you could choose a prehistoric animal to make a movie around, what would it be? Any thoughts on the plot around this animal? Ooh. Hmm. I'm trying to think of underrepresented. I feel like it would be very easy to make a fun prehistoric kids movie about some sort of underrepresented ancient mammal group. Yes, 'cause then you could start it out as a baby. Yeah, and it's cute. Like a ground sloth? It's super cool to have like a ground sloth story. I feel like a Call of Duty would be-- I was also, yeah. That would be really good for that. So that would be good. If we're doing like monster movie or something, like creature feature, I kind of, it wouldn't be that different of a movie, but like a Mosasaur movie, which would be like most sea monster movies. Sure, it's just Jaws, but with a Mosasaur. But how many movies have you seen a Mosasaur in? Yes. Listen, I can see the movie poster now. Right, like I've seen two of them-- Oh, but you do Deep Blue Sea, but with Mosasaur. Yeah, something, stuff like that. And that's what I was thinking is you can make it cool where it's like they're inquisitive or they're, you know, that do something cool like that. You can also do Lake Placid, but with Dinosuchus. Yeah, yup. Yup. I think if I were to do one, I would like to do a terrestrial croc. Oh, yeah. Something like that would be cool. And 'cause probably most of the terrestrial crocs could still swim. Oh, sure. So it'd be great to have that moment where like, it swims up and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Be careful, but we should be good here. And then it just walks out toward them. Well, we talked about this in some discussion we had about Spinosaurus. And I sort of pitched the idea of a monstery creature featuring movie with Spinosaurus would be really fun because it can do both aquatic and terrestrial. So you can have like, that you encounter it and it is the lake monster and you're like, whoa, we gotta get out of here and you leave and you go to the next lake and then it follows you. Yes. And you're like, oh, nope, still here. It's still here. It left the lake and came over to this one. Yup. That would be very cool. That would be a fun one, like, 'cause so often we try to use big theropods like Kaiju. And I think that one would be much better for like campers. Yes. That accidentally realized and go, whoa, all right, let's get out of here and drive away and get to a spot and then are being stalked by this big predator. That's good. And I like that because then you can make Spinosaurus creepy and Spinosaurus is weird. So I feel like it should be creepy. Yes, absolutely. Like Spinosaurus would be like a weird creepy monster. It'd be like being stalked by a really big bird, like waiting bird. That would be disconcerting. Yeah. Alternatively, you do a honey, we shrunk ourselves kind of thing, or shrunk the kids and you do a lot of little stuff. Yes, absolutely. I like it. Noah asks, both non-avian dinosaurs and birds belong to the group Arcosoria. Non-avian dinosaurs are reptiles and birds are avian dinosaurs. I have been told that birds aren't considered reptiles. Is this true and if not, why aren't they? Good question. When we say reptiles in the colloquial term and even in many scientific discussions, typically it's not including birds in that reference, but taxonomically based on the tree of life, yes, indeed birds are reptiles. Yes. So much like we are technically in the fish branch, birds are in the same branch as reptiles. The way that I like to describe the answer to this one is the science is clear, but the language is missing. Yes. Reptiles is kind of an inexact term. Well, just like if you said we are a fish, that is true from an evolutionary standpoint, but that is fully an unuseful and unhelpful sentence in basically every other context. Well, and it's like asking, you know, is our sandals shoes? Yes. Well, I mean, yeah, but also we have different words that-- They're sandals used, yeah. So it's much more about language than it is about our understanding of the science. Well, it's kind of got the sandals shoes and the soup and cereal. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Depending on how you're defining it right now, and it's just as arguable to say, no, they're soup and cereal. Yes. There's not categories that they overlap in. So yeah, understandably confusing. Ali asks, I just listened to the episode on the Messinian salinity crisis, and the part about the Zanklian flood reminded me of how when I was doing undergrad in Portland, Oregon, in ecology classes, we heard a lot about how the Missoula floods shaped the geology and ecology of the region. I was wondering if you could please give us a spur drip comparison of the Zanklian and Missoula floods. This is a great question. Now, Wikipedia tells me that the largest of the Missoula floods is estimated to have discharged about 10 cubic kilometers per hour, which it does not give in spur drips, but it does say 13 times that of the Amazon River. And I remember when I looked up spur drips at the Amazon River, this charges about 0.2 spur drips. So 13 times that is 2.6, so 2.6 spur drips for the largest of the Missoula floods. The Zanklian flood has been estimated to have been up to around 100 spur drips. So bigger. Still a bit bigger. Bigger and that. Every time. Horrifying. Wacky. Horrifying. That's the other-- there's a disconcerting thing for you. I was-- I was disconcerted. My castness in that episode is not put upon at all. I was legitimately that blown away. That is 100% authentic a god. I partially kind of for real was like, OK, stop joking. Now shush. Now say the real numbers. Felix asks, what is the difference between phylogeny, cladistics, taxonomy, systematics, and classification? I prepared for this, so I could go ahead and do it. I appreciate it. I know some of this, but I don't know that I'd have a satisfying answer. Classification is the very broad term that is just how we categorize things. In biology, it's how we classify just different groups of organisms by whatever feature we are using. Taxonomy is specifically naming and categorizing of those classifications. In science, this is assigning names and labels to the relationships between organisms. Phylogeny refers to the evolutionary relationships between different organisms. In theory, their actual family relatedness, systematics is the methods and techniques that we use to interpret phylogeny. To figure out the patterns of relatedness across organisms. And cladistics is a modern framework of systematics. It is a model that we use to investigate relatedness and phylogeny of organisms. On to be honest, you don't actually need to know what the difference between these words are. Most of the time, we kind of use them interchangeably, but that is sort of the classification is very broad. Taxonomy is naming and categorizing. Phylogeny is actual relationships. Systematics is the study of those relationships. Cladistics is the modern method of systematics. - Yeah, and a lot of times in modern studies and our modern science, our taxonomy is using phylogeny to interpret and inform its new classification and naming that it does. So they aren't done in bubbles. We're referencing. So a lot of the time, if you overlay that taxonomy over a phylogeny, they're gonna look the same. - These are all terms that are names for different parts of the same overall process. - Yes, exactly. But valid question and I understand it. - Absolutely. - It gets confusing. - Next questions from Kitsune. Is the idea that turtles might be the only surviving lineage of the paroreptiles still seriously considered? Or are paleontologists generally convinced that the genetic data better supports the idea that turtles are derived, diapsids, and closer to the archosaurs than lepetosaurs? - Great question. Yes to the second part. - Yes. - I don't think that it's been a serious supported consideration for turtles to be paroreptiles for a long time. Early on, turtles were considered to be kind of an early branch of reptiles. - Off on their own kind of. - These days, with some fossil evidence, but especially genetic evidence, consistently puts turtles as a closer relation to other modern groups of reptiles, either within archosaurs or near archosaurs, usually. - Which, great for them. - Great, good for them. - They've gotten, I mean, you've moved over to the right side of things. - Lepetosaurs are already full of really cool animals. - Archosaurs could honestly use some spice it up. So yeah, turtles are probably archosaurs or near archosaurs. That seems to be where the data is headed. I think we have fully left behind the idea that turtles are basal reptiles. - Yeah, I haven't heard that in a long time. - CJ, the Red asks, do you play any tabletop RPGs other than Dungeons and Dragons? If so, what? - Not, not many. - Not, we've tried out a few. - Yes. - Played others, most of the ones I've played others with have been with David. - Yeah, like Star Wars 5E was a mod of D&D effectively. We toyed around a little bit with the Fatecore system. - Yep, yep. - We've messed around with some other systems. - We played that Pokemon on the one. - Yeah, there was a Pokemon tabletop United, which was impressively put together for a fan creation. I enjoyed it, but it was dense. - It was dense, it was very dense. - So yeah, haven't played a ton. I know there's a bunch of really neat ones out there and I've heard about a bunch of cool ones, but it's definitely a bit of a creature of habit thing that I know 5E, we know 5E. So if we're gonna play another game, it's just so easy to throw it in 5E, absolutely. 5E D&D for anyone who's wondering what I'm referring to. Nancy asks, would sushi made in the Paleozoic, for example, the Devonium, taste different from that from current oceans? - Great question. Yeah, for lots of reasons. I actually talked to Nora about this and got some insights from somebody who thinks about food more than I do. Obviously different species are gonna taste different, but also the environment affects the taste of food that you get from that environment. - Which makes perfect sense. - That's the case with wine and honey and even livestock, like beef tastes different depending on what sort of food it had, what sort of environment it had. The quality and the water, like the mineral content of the water, the pH of the water, all of these things can affect the taste of seafood that lives and grows up in that environment. Nora also made the point that preparation techniques affect taste. And chefs are probably gonna be not very familiar with Devonian animals. So yeah, that would certainly, the first time you try to eat it, it would taste different than the hundredth time. - Yes. - Because by the hundredth time, we start to figure out what we're doing. - Yeah, I bet there'd be some very interesting new flavors 'cause there were some very interesting and different ocean creatures. - Now there is a perhaps disingenuous reading of this where the answer to would sushi made in the paleozoic taste different from that, from current oceans? And the answer is yes, sushi made in the paleozoic would be horrible. - I wouldn't eat it now. - That is extremely expired. - Yes. - That's a rock, don't eat rocks. (laughing) - Unless you're someone who needs gastraliths then. - You could do better than that. (laughing) - I can't find tasty rocks in that. (laughing) - Our next question comes from Serpentine, who asks, can you speak on the subject of science communication and the current prevalence of misinformation in pseudoscience? E.G. for starters, do you think misinformation and pseudoscience are really bigger problems now than in the last, say, 50 odd years, or does it just feel like it? What are our responsibilities and challenges as science communicators to combat this? Any advice for psychomers or ordinary science literate people? Are there any positive developments or hopeful signs in the fight against misinformation and pseudoscience? - That's a very good question. And it's, some parts I think are hard to say for sure, like whether or not it's a worse problem now. - Yeah, I think it's at least a more noticeable problem. - Yes. - The internet has really made it much more apparent. - It's an easy to do. But on the flip side, good information is easier to access than it has ever been in human history. So probably the ratio is still pretty even, if not hopefully skewing toward the dissemination of good information. I do think one of the things that the internet has done that is unique now in the topic of mince information pseudoscience is that not only can it be spread more easily with less effort and more widely and quickly, but it can unite. - Yes. - People can gather around misinformation. - So you can get flat earth organizations in a way that would have been much more difficult to happen just because it would have taken more effort to organize. So you can get these sub-sex of people that can make a blog or a YouTube channel dedicated to and form a community around a pseudoscientific or misinformation idea. - Right. That being said, on the flip side, those things are also a lot easier to find and discredit. - Yes. - Right. Whereas before the internet, if you made a little flat earth society in your hometown, only the people in your hometown have access to that. And if none of them is going over there and challenging that, then it's going unchallenged. - Yes. - But on the internet, nothing goes unchallenged. So there is more opportunity for discussion and exposure of those things. - I think it's also a good thing to note that much like when we discuss fandom media, that how prominent pseudoscientific groups like that and similar ones are, like there are definitely ones that are a problem, like anti-vax movement is a legitimate concern. But there are some others that make a lot of noise and get talked about a bunch, but are not actually a huge portion of this community and are not actually gaining as much traction as it makes it seem. - Right. - So much like if you ask nerds how controversial the Star Wars sequels were, - Very, yes. - If you ask anyone else, they'll go what controversy? - What are you talking about? - They were fine. - Yes. - I like the part with the lightsabers. Like they don't, it's not actually as big a deal as it seems when we're zoomed in on it. - Well, this happened with when Pokemon Sword and Shield came out and for several months, every single social media post about Pokemon or by the Pokemon company was flooded with comments about the quote National Pokedex controversy. And then the games came out and they were the best-selling games of Pokemon of all time since the first ones and nobody cared about them. Because it's, small groups can make lots of noise on the internet and it can make them seem much more prominent than they actually are. - Yeah. And it's easier to get like spikes in PR when Netflix decides to air a documentary encouraging that discourse and that idea. But that's, if you still ask most people, they didn't watch that documentary. And even if they did, they weren't swayed by it. - And I think that it's, it can be very disconcerting as we were sort of discussing earlier. That, for example, here in the US, we are about to have a president who is openly dismissive of climate science, openly rejects medical science and vaccines and such and is, in many ways, is anti-science and is a just, frankly, impressively good at misinformation. - Yep. - But even that isn't unique to this time period. - No. - Like we have had presidents and world leaders all throughout history who have been vocally anti whatever science topic or important information was relevant at the time. - Well, and probably most of our presidents did not believe in evolution and many science-- - Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. - It just wasn't a public topic of discourse back then. - Yes, and what has been a public topic of discourse has shifted over time. - So I don't know that it's worse these days necessarily and I don't wanna downplay the issues that there are with it nowadays. - Absolutely. - As to the question of what are our responsibilities and advice and such, I think that one of the most important responsibilities that we have is to keep in mind that different people have different experiences and resources when it comes to exposure to misinformation and pseudoscience. This is something that I would talk about at the Museum a bunch, that sometimes people are gonna come in here and ask a question or make a comment that is seemingly antagonistic towards the science that we're doing. And sometimes people are just being jerks and if they're being jerks, then they're wrong and you do whatever you have to do to avoid that situation. But a lot of the time people aren't asking a question to start a fight, they're asking a question 'cause they're genuinely confused or curious. This might be the first time they've heard this piece of information that you're sharing that it is important to meet our audiences where they're at and to be understanding of the fact that a person with a misconception is a universal descriptor. - Yes. - It is so easy to just get the wrong idea about something. - Absolutely. - It's not your fault that you have been given misinformation or misleading information. - On the note of talking about the internet's effect on it, this is something that I've been practicing and trying to keep in mind when I'm on the internet and I come across some bogus posts. Remember that going into the comment section and arguing with them just boosts the viewability of that post. - Yep. - Don't engage. - Yep. - The only times I will do it is if I think something truly damaging is being said and I'll put a comment to the other commenters. - Mm-hmm. - Just so everyone knows, that's not actually true. This is the case. And then I block that user. - Right. - That's what I do is I put an informative comment up and then I block that user so that they will get no more of my views. Don't engage. That's just gonna promote many people who are promoting pseudoscience aren't doing it because they actually dislike science or even believe the pseudoscience, it gets them what they are looking for and it's either attention or money. - Yep. - So just like on the earlier topic, boycott what you can boycott and that includes views to problematic profiles or people that you fundamentally disagree with. - As far as hopeful things, there are more resources for education and scientific connection and such now than there have ever been. - I mean, our whole spotlight series. - Yes. - Was kind of a testament to that silver lining of the situation. - Absolutely. If you find yourself in a position where you're like how do I explain X to so and so, there are a thousand resources on the internet where scientists and science communicators have put together answers to that exact question. We are not, we are legion indeed again. - Yes. - Next questions from Ollie. What's your best guess about why we haven't seen any alien civilizations in the night sky? The origin of life is rare or life doesn't tend to make it into space or they're out there but we just haven't spotted them yet. - Yep, one of those certainly one of those answers. I mean, my guess is we haven't seen life out in the night sky 'cause it's not there. - Yeah. - We say that there isn't life anywhere but that there isn't life anywhere that's visible to us. - Yes, that's what a lot of, I think if I'm a right, this is the Fermi Paradox is the term for this, of why haven't we seen evidence for aliens? If they are, if there have been civilizations out there should they not have left evidence? - Right. - Based on the age of the universe. One of the ideas that often comes up for that is that if life is statistically not a super common thing to happen, there could be as advanced as us or super advanced life out there but our universe, according to our current understanding of it is infinite. - Right. - The current model of the universe that we understand is that the universe goes on forever in all directions for all time as far as time functions under our understanding. They're probably so far away that they're effectively in another reality to us that we will never make contact with them. In general, the universe is expanding too greatly for us to travel ever fast enough to ever reach them or their information or like to reach us. That's the one that I tend to, that makes the most sense to me. I don't know that that's the one that has the most support. I don't. - Well, the reality is that there isn't one that has more support because we don't. - We have no information. - We have no information. We have no data on this. - But that one makes a lot of sense to me and that's typically what I give to people when they ask of like, are there any limits? - Probably too far away for us to ever meet. - Yeah. - Maybe not and maybe if we come up with sci-fi technology like wormholes and hyperspace. - Yeah, we can jump through time. - Who knows, in 65 million years. - There you go. - When we get to see what those, not quite humans, but something new. - Barrel and murmurs go traveling in a pod through a wormhole. - Who knows what we can do? But yeah, I assume that if there are civilizations out there, they're just too far away for us to have made any contact with each other. - This is discussed in depth in that book series that I referenced. - Yeah. - In the Alice's series. Ed asks, what are the largest possible terrestrial and marine tetrapods? How close are the biggest sauropods and blue whales to those limits? - I mean, as far as we know, those might be the limits. It also might be a thing of degrees, like maybe bigger as possible, but maybe it's like by ounces and inches. - Right. A little bigger. - Yeah. - Well, that's the thing we've talked about there, like sauropods, the biggest sauropod sizes were reached by multiple groups of sauropods. - Yes. - And the biggest whale sizes have been reached a number of times. Technically blue whales are the biggest, but they're in the same general size class as other groups of whales. - So it does seem like those might be the limits. - Now, as we also said with those two groups, they seem to be weird. - Yes. - Among vertebrae and among animals. So maybe in the next 65 million years, we will find a new group that from rodents or from those giant land tortoises from the future as well. - Like we may find a new lineage, a new group starts to diversify and become a new identified kind of animal. And they have hit on a new magical mix of adaptations that allows them to hit sizes unfathomable at this point. - Right, for now? - Yep, those are probably near the limits. - And there's no way for us to predict what the possible limits could be because we still don't know why those two are able to and have gotten as big as they got. - Next up's Eli, are there any examples of Pokemon evolving convergently with other Pokemon? How would you design convergently evolved Pokemon? - Great question. Yes, in two respects. One, well, okay, so now we're gonna go. Assuming that Pokemon fit the same general phylogenetic breakdown as real life animals, which is debatable, I mean, there are bats and birds in Pokemon. - Yes. - Which suggests that they have convergently evolved wings from their front limbs the same way that animals here in the real world have convergently evolved those structures. - And that does definitely seem what's suggested by the way Pokemon discusses us. - It is, yes. - There's a bunch, there's a bunch. We don't have time for it right now, but there's a bunch of comments throughout the Pokedex that heavily imply that biological evolution is happening in the Pokemon world roughly the same way that it happens here in the real world. There are also a number of Pokemon that are said to be inanimate objects given life, which is a thing that seems to have happened convergently in multiple groups. But also, not ninth gen Pokemon introduced specifically convergent Pokemon examples, notably with Diglett and Doug Trio and Wiglett and Wug Trio and Tentacle and Tentacle and Toad School and Toad School, which are on purpose groups of Pokemon that are designed to look extremely similar to each other, but to have very different biology and ecology. Diglett is a mole and Wiglett is a garden eel. - Yes. - And that is intentional, that they're trying to drive home that point of convergent evolution. - Toad School's my favorite. - Toad School is so, it's so good. - It's little running animation and makes me happy down to my core. - I've always really liked Tentacle and Tentacle. - Yeah, they're great. - They're really cool Pokemon and the expansion is great. - The slapstick cousins. - Yes, yes. - It makes me so happy. - Absolutely. - 38 asks, do you think creationism will make a comeback in the near future? And if so, without delving into partisan politics, are you concerned that they could get a favorable court ruling? - I don't know. The intensity of stuff like that shifts in wanes increased and decreased over time. Like it's not been as consistent a pushback and as a regular thing all the time. - Yeah, well, and creationism here in the US is often more of a political thing than it is actually about science or even about religion. It tends to be a hot topic kind of concept. - I don't know if we're gonna see a comeback necessarily. - Yeah, I honestly don't feel like I have enough knowledge on the current environment in it to predict. - Yeah, I do think that it is reasonable to expect that we might see looser regulations about it in the near future because at where we are currently in the US, our current court system is quite likely to rule in favor of things like that. The upcoming administration plans to radically reshape or dismantle completely the Department of Education. - Yep. - So it could very well be possible that we will see changes to educational systems and regulations that are more permissive of creationism and other similar topics. - I don't know how much that would translate to a comeback in people's belief in various, because that's another thing that has been shown in research that education doesn't always correlate with people's beliefs in certain things. Like we talked about that one recently, that evolution education wasn't seemingly correlated with religiosity. - Yes. - And how religious people were based on how much they've been taught about the science. So it's hard to say the broader impacts of that. - Yeah. Like it's something that I definitely could see. Well, and there definitely could be like in the future resurgence of different flavors of it 'cause that happens all the time with philosophical things like that where ideas go through phases of popularity in society. - Right. Well, that's what intelligent design was. Intelligent design, the movement of intelligent design was effectively a reskinning of young earth creationism for a time period and a discourse that had moved on from the term creationism. - Yes. And so I want to be surprised as we see something like that where it's not necessarily a resurgence, but a rebranding. - Yeah. - And it gets noisy for a while, and then will probably happen again in another 50 or 20, 30, I don't know what the period is, another period of years, so. - So yeah. - Yeah, I don't know quite what to expect. - I don't feel confident to, I feel no confidence to predict anything politically. That is definitely one of my areas of least knowledgeable. - Next question's from In All of Mytism, who asks, "Imagine a world where 25 to 50% "of modern bird diversity is replaced by pterosaurs." - Great world. - Given our knowledge about pterosaurs today, how would you classify them with the perspective of a biologist in the pre-fossil era? - Ooh. - Interesting. I expect that they would be pretty evidently reptiles. - Yes. - Like I don't think that you would end up identifying them as mammals or anything like that. I might probably they would just be classified as weird birds. - Yeah, I would say like in the early, early, like zoological days. - Right, like what would Aristotle call them? - Yeah, and plenty of the elders. - Yeah, like probably they'd call them birds. - Yes. - 'Cause they would be fuzzy, egg-laying fliers. - Or maybe weird bats. - Yeah, but they do lay eggs. - They do lay eggs, that's a very good point. - And I think that people, even way back when, were observant enough. - Yeah, that's a good point. The eggs would be distinctive enough. So yeah, probably weird birds, but I think it would be as soon as comparative anatomy started getting into play, I think very quickly people would go, no, not birds. - No. - 'Cause they're very much not birds. - Yeah, I don't know how long it would take them to get connected with other reptiles. 'Cause I could see that being a difficulty to go, like how birds it took a while for people to go, actually these are reptiles. Technically speaking, it might take a while to realize that that's a ancient lineage of still related to birds, reptiles, which would probably be one of those fun stories that gets told of what we used to think they were birds, realized they weren't, then realized they were actually a group off of the lineage that led to birds. Isn't that a fun coincidence? Jamie asks, from the episode speaking with conservators and those about particular fossil sites, it sounds like fossil preservation and preparation methods can be very specific to the kind of materials the fossils are preserved in. How easy is it for skills and methods to transfer if a conservator goes to a different institution? How much onboarding or training is required specific to that site? How much information or technique sharing is possible across different sites? That's a great question. I can't answer it in super detail since I spent very little time in the prep lab, but it is absolutely true that the techniques can vary and be extremely particular to different and specific fossil sites. - Yeah, there are definitely things, or if you've done it in one place, you at least have the foundation of knowledge, but there have been people who have come, for example, to the gray fossil site lab who I know Sean has said he has had to un-teach them some stuff. - Yes, exactly. - You cannot treat these fossils the way that you did in your last lab because they are different, they are preserved in a different way, they are different type of fossils and such. - And I'd also assume that there are probably fossil sites that are almost identical. - Oh, for sure. - Are you digging in a desert on this country or this country? The rocks are pretty much the same, the fossils are very similar, your techniques will be pretty much identical. Here are some specific quirks of ours. - Yes. - But then you get stuff like Saltville, where these fossils are preserved in briny, soaked mud. - And that's a problem. - Yeah, and we are still figuring out how to best handle those. The techniques for those fossils are unique to, that fossil site may be in the world. I don't know if there's any other briny mud fossil sites. - Probably, yeah, probably otherwise. - Probably, but I don't know of them. So it varies and I'm sure there also is a aspect of, you know how to be in a lab. - Yes, absolutely. - Like some of those skills probably are pretty universal. - Well, and I would imagine that it would be like, you know, being a home repair person and going to different countries or parts of the world, or it's like, yeah, you know the basics of home repair, but the climate is different here and that has different effects. The building materials are different here, the buildings are a different age here, and all of that is going to have an impact. So you know how to do home repair, but you can't just take all your skills one for one. - Yes. - And techniques over to this new place. - Yeah, good question. Justin asks, for over 200 episodes and nearly eight years, you guys have used the word Fortnite at the end of each episode without making the world's easiest joke about, you know what? My question is, how many years at the monastery does it take to develop that kind of willpower? Does it come before or after snatching the pebble out of the old dude's hand? (laughing) - Justin, I'm gonna be 100% honest with you and probably very disappointing to you. It has never even occurred to me to be a bad joke. (laughing) - I have not, not once has that crossed my mind. - I played Fortnite one time. I downloaded it. - I've seen clips of Fortnite. - I downloaded it and played it one time. Did not do well. - Sure. - Because I'm too old to play online. And that's about the extent, 'cause I have not even really watched many clips. - Yeah. - I see the toys and the toy aisle next to the other action figures. So, yeah, not a lot of willpower required because it's not a reference that's in our repertoire. - Nope. - Our podcast is about 50% willpower. (laughing) You know, we've got plenty of it. - I appreciate your confidence in us. (laughing) - I really do, that is a very, very encouraging that we give off that motif and vibe. - I don't know. - I'm still trying to get the pebble out of the guy's hand. - I don't know if a person who listens to this podcast could come away thinking that we have willpower to not make pop culture references. (laughing) - Alexandra asks, if you could take a trip to any fossil site in the world, where would you go? - I mean, Messle Pit, we-- - Messle Pit, Burgess Shale? - Burgess Shale would be very cool. - Very cool. - I'm tempted to say something like the Nara Court Caves. - Yeah. - Not because I'm like, die hard when I go to Nara Court, but then I get to go to Australia. - Yes, be very cool. I think though, the one that I actually want to see the most is Ashfall. - Oh yeah! - I've never gotten to see Ashfall. - That is extremely doable. - Yeah, I would-- - You just go. - I would love to go see Ashfall. - Oh yeah, it's good, Ashfall. - 'Cause that's surreal looking. - I've also, I have been near the mammoth site so many times I've never been to the mammoth site. That'd be a good one. - Catherine asks, are there any interesting fun facts that you wish to share can be as weird as you like? - Oh man, that's a tall order having to choose. - Lego is the biggest tire producer in the world. They make more tires than anybody else, and they've made more tires over time than any other tire maker in the world. - The Sinclair Oil Company's mascot is a dinosaur in part based on the fact that it used to be a much more common misconception that fossil fuels were actually made of dinosaurs. - Yes, yep, yep. - And they're not? - Yep, most fossil fuels have basically zero dinosaur in them. - That's like every few years I see the post go round of dinosaurs to oil to plastic, to plastic dinosaurs. - Yep. - And I always go, oh, no, no, that's not it. It's very hard to come up with an interesting, weird, fun fact on the fly. I'm really good at connecting them to conversations that are already happening. - Yeah, Gojira is a mixture of the two Japanese words for gorilla and whale, and the skin of Godzilla was meant to resemble the radiation burn scars of the victims, and that's why he looks the way he does. So he has always been meant to represent the scarring of radioactive damages. - His roar was made with a glove in resin drawn down a- - A violin strength. - I think violin or like viola or cello, I can't remember which, and then slowed down. - Yeah, the name Godzilla is one of those, there's probably a term for this, but when we take a word from another language and then have to come up with an English way to spell it that kind of makes sense to us, because Godzilla is Gojira, and in English we turn that into Godzilla. - Yes. - Like the Ozarks Mountains. - Yes, yeah. - The Ozarks Mountains are French. They are Le Montagne, Oz Alk. Alk is like arches. - Yes. - A-U-X space, A-R-C-S, I think. Oz Alk, but us Americans wrote it O-Z-A-R-K. - Yep, we sound it out. (laughing) - We sounded it out, and that's where the word came from. (laughing) - That's also thought to have been where some very similar, where the word crayfish came from. - Oh. - The French word for crayfish is clavis. - Clavis. - And it is thought likely that French speakers in places like Louisiana. - 'Cause yeah. - Were saying clavis, and English speakers went crayfish, and that became the word crayfish. - That's fantastic. I like that a lot. - Yeah. The last one I thought of, which is my weirdest one, since you said can be weird, is in Alien, there's the scene when it zooms in and the Alien's lips peel back to reveal the teeth before it opens mouth and its inner mouth comes out. Those lips are made out of condoms. - Oh yeah, that one, yeah, I knew that one. - That's how they got that texture, is those are cut condoms, and that's how it gets that translucent look. - Yeah. - Did you know that in that scene in Lord of the Rings, when he kicks the helmet? TJ asks, how far ahead do you pick episode topics and how long does it take to research said topics? - Ooh, good question. Typically, so our set model is that we want to have our next episode that we're supposed to do and a distal episode is what we call it. - Usually like we have the next three episode topics that we're gonna do, so generally our episode topics are chosen between like one and two months out. - And it'll vary, sometimes we have it farther out if we have a guest episode that comes in and goes, oh, okay, well, if there's gonna be guest episode then, I'll keep the episode I pick, but now it's gonna be almost three months out and whatnot. Sometimes we're closer up and we have our next episode and then we will figure out the next one after that one. As far as how much time it takes, we give ourselves like a week. As we say, the general schedule's about a week for note-taking and outline organization. I'd say for me, it's more like a week and a half that is about the time. And if I get started early, then it can be stretched out over, but usually it takes me about that long. - Yeah, on top of all the other stuff that we're working on. - Yes, exactly. If we were only doing that, then within a week is probably how long it takes. - Yeah. - Katelyn asks, you frequently talk about how weird various groups of animals, plants, fungi, et cetera are. What would you say is the least weird group? - Hmm, we talked about this not too long ago and I think there is a case to be made for like rodents. - Yes. - Not that rodents aren't weird. - 'Cause boy are they weird. - But, or like salamanders feel distinctly not weird. - Yes, yeah, they are very er, once again though. - Once again. - So weird. - They are so weird. - There's lungless salamanders. - Also, there are giant salamanders. There are salamanders that grow up and leave the water, but then continue to grow up and go back into the water. - There's the projectile tongue salamanders, which are, watch a video of them. They do their projectile tongues like cartoon chameleons and frogs, which don't do their tongues that way. They actually go, but I do think that like salamanders or like taeids, lizards, are like the very basic tetrapod body form, which feels fairly regular to me. - Which I think is making the good point of like, the answer to that question would depend on what time period you're asking it in. - Yes. - And like, fish could also be, like. - Right, fish are either extraordinarily weird or extremely normal. Trout is a pretty, pretty, unweared animal in many ways. Still super weird in lots of other ways, but also a fairly standard animal. If you asked us back in the Mesozoic, or back in the Cambrian, trilobites would be the not weird-- - So normal. - So normal. - It also very, you know, the trend really is, when we learn about it, if you ask us right now, trout are not very weird. But if you ask us after we do a trout episode, we'll be able to tell you all the ways that they're super weird. - Well, and like, trout have like, gill rakes, where like, that's, they have rakes, and like, literally rake-shaped bony things on their respiratory system, so that while they're breathing, they can catch food out of the medium they're breathing with. That would be like, if we had forks in our lungs, that caught food while we're eating, while we're breathing. - Yes, that's weird, but also for fish, not weird. - Super, super basic fish. - That's a very common thing to do for fish. - And the real answer is, life's weird. - Life is so weird. - A bunch of proteins got together and decided to move around and do stuff. That's weird. - Adam asks, do you have any favorites or fun facts involving animals that evolved to live alongside us in some way, like bugs that live in our houses or parasites that only feed on us? - Ooh, I know that there was a cool story. I don't know what kind of birds they were. They were a cliff-nesting style bird and they were nesting under bridges. - Sure. - And because of that, they were flying around cars a whole bunch and they were getting hit by cars, but they were starting to evolve shorter wings to be more maneuverable flyers, to live around traffic. And the rate at which that evolution was happening was very fast and we were able to watch it happen over the case of like, I think it was like 12 years that the study was happening or something that the proportion in the population was shifting very quickly. - I think that we often think about when we construct cities and stuff. It's really bad for wildlife, which, yeah, it is. But I always, I think that it's very interesting that there are always certain species for which urbanization is actually really good. Pigeons, so benefited by the construction of cities. Pigeons who are cliff-dwelling nesting birds who said, well, you've built a whole habitat that's just cliffs with no predators in it, fantastic. And then on the other hand, things like falcons, which do great in cities because other predators aren't there competing with them anymore. So they have free reign and they can hunt within cities and they do a really good job there. - Yeah, also city-dwelling raccoons that have learned how to cross the street by checking traffic and stuff. - Yes. - There's some cool examples. Next question's from Steph. If someone were to visit Eastern Tennessee to see the grey faucet site, what other sites or sites nearby would you recommend to science and nature nerds? - Oh, good question. Bayes Mountain is very cool. - Yes. - It's a nature center over in the mountains around here. The Asheville Nature Center, like an hour and a half away from here, so it's not very close. In the other direction, also about an hour and a half away from here is the Knoxville Zoo, which is a lovely place to go see if you are a science and nature person. Also, there's lots of hiking trails. - There are lots of hiking trails around here. - Naturey places through the mountains. - Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's about the, like if you're willing to go a little, like further out in here in Tennessee, Chattanooga Aquarium is here in Tennessee. - Is like two, two and a half hours from here? - Yeah, I think, you know, may pushing three maybe. - It might be, yeah, might be closer to three. - But is, in my opinion, my personal favorite aquarium. I think that's the best aquarium I've ever been to. So if you're willing to make a trip, you can go to the faucet and then go to Will's favorite aquarium. (laughs) If you're coming to the faucet site, let us know. We'll say hi. - Yee. - Lydia asks, if you could prevent one extinction event from happening, which one would it be and how might that change Earth history? - That's a very good question. - I mean, I'm gonna cheat and I'm gonna say this one. - Yeah. - The one that's happening right now. - Yeah. - And it would affect Earth's history by saving the future. - One extinction, now if we're talking about like, one extinct, one mass extinction or one like organism. - Sure, sure, that isn't specified. - Yeah, if we're going just like one extinction event. - Yeah, I mean, I would, you could do me a roulette wheel of extinct crocs in that state. That one, whichever one it lands on, I want a weird croc, Barosuchus, one of the terrestrial crocs. - Yeah. - Just 'cause I wanna know what you're like. I'd say one of the big ones, but I also feel like you probably needed such a specific ecosystem. Like, Perosaurus could not survive in modern Amazon because the wetlands that it was living in were so much wider than what the Amazon river, like the Amazon river is awesome, but it is not a widespread wetlands the way what it was living in was. So those would just die off again. - Yeah. - Janelle asks, when was the land fully colonized by life up to the mountaintops? Were there things that had to evolve first, like cold hardiness, or was it a matter of lichens gradually expanding their range and beginning to make soil? How long before mountaintops were, quote unquote, normal? - That is an excellent question. We don't know for sure because mountaintops don't tend to preserve a lot of fossils. Absolutely. It would have required particular adaptations that it's very possible that those adaptations developed at high altitudes and then translated to high latitudes or vice versa. I think normal, I would be surprised if plants hadn't made it up about as high as they could go by the carboniferous into the Permian, probably. Modern ecosystems wouldn't have existed in mountaintops until Permian then Triassic because we just didn't have big herbivores and stuff. - Yep. - Until then. So I think that probably in the carboniferous, you would have had vegetated landscapes up in mountaintops. Somewhat like we have today. And then probably into the Permian and Triassic, you would have had animal ecosystems similar to what we have today in the mountaintops. - I think that makes sense. - Hannah asks, how big could Megalodon get? - The upper estimates, typically around like 40 to 50 feet long, there are definitely estimates that are lower than that, more conservative ones that are like, I think like 37 and stuff like, like that tend to be more close to 40, but not reaching up into that upper 10. I don't know the weights right off the top of my head. I'd have to look those up. But typically around then, around those sizes, which even at the lower estimates would still make it significantly larger than the whale sharks today. - Yes. - So very big, very big shark. Biggest fish we know of to have ever lived in it. But by a wide margin, most of the time, which is another one of those of why? - Yes. - What are you doing? - It's weird. - Our next questions from Rebecca. You're always really clear that with trace fossils, we can't identify the species that left the trace. And that's why there are separate ichnospices. But I've also heard discussions of ichnophossels that were associated with a known species. Could you talk about the process of how that might happen? Do you have to, for instance, find the animal that left the footprints right next to those prints in order to conclusively make that connection? Or are there other ways of doing it? - Great question. Yes, generally speaking, you find ichnophossels separate from body fossils. You find footprints, but you don't find a skeleton, or you find a skeleton and you don't find footprints. There are cases where we can get a really good guess at what the ichnophossel goes to. For example, you might have an environment where you have really big dinosaur footprints, and you also have a pretty good skeletal record, and there's only one big dinosaur that fits those footprints, where we can say, all right, most likely this is the animal that left those footprints. There are also cases where you can find traces and the body in the same place. There are famous examples of this with trilobites. These are sometimes called morticnias, death traces, where you'll find a movement trace that ends in the body of a trilobite. - Yep. - That it crawled along and then stopped and died and became a fossil there. There are also examples of fossil animals being found inside their own fossil burrows. - Yes. - And that, you know, that's another one where sometimes it's not easy to tell, did you dig this burrow or did you just move into this burrow, but at least in some cases, there have been small mammals or invertebrates found inside fossil burrows that seem, by all accounts, to have been dug by this animal. - Well, it's like we talked about that with paleocaster where they were found in the burrow and there were scratch and tooth marks on the burrow that match paleocaster's teeth and claws. - Yes. In those cases, the ichnofossil still gets different species because that's how we do things. - That's how we do it. That's the process, that's the tradition. But yeah, you can get now and then fossils of both together. - And you'll very often have instances where a general group is associated to the, like a coprolite where we'll say, this is pterosaur coprolite because of where we found it, that's the only animal that makes sense could have been making this kind of coprolite. Which species we don't know. - Yes, but one of them left it. So you can get kind of degrees of association sometimes. - Next up, Travis asks, what would be the best way to arrange a burial to mess with future archeologists and/or paleontologists? - Hmm, put a bunch of fossils in it. - Put a bunch of fossils in it. If your wine mess with future archeologists, carve your own religious icon and have yourself buried with it. - Hmm, there you go. - And get a bunch of friends to do it. And then they will be trying to figure that out for a long. - Or heck, if you want to save time, just go to a graveyard and carve a symbol into a bunch of graves. Please don't desecrate graves. No, people look very poorly upon that. (laughing) Get buried in a zoo. - Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that would be very confusing. - Yeah, if you were able, like trying to make sure something fossilizes is the tricky part. - Sure. - Bury yourself an amber. - Yeah, there you go. (laughing) - That'll throw 'em for a loop. (laughing) I like that one. - Next up's from Jim. If you went back in time to freshman year and had the opportunity to pursue a radically different major or topic of study, what would it be? - I would have done linguistics. - Probably theater. - Yeah. - Yeah. - That makes sense. - Yeah, I was very close into pursuing some sort of performance. - This is that AU. - Yep. - Yep. - Yeah, barrel and murmur aren't even for common descent. They're different, they're a music pun. - Yes, absolutely. (laughing) - Sam asks, this is another serious question, how can paleontologists help to end the genocide in Gaza? - That is a good question. - The same way as anybody else. - That's exactly what I was trying to, like any person, the same efforts, helping those that, you know, sending help error aid or money to those that need it. - That needs donations. - Donating money or time volunteering. - Yep, yep. - With things sharing up-to-date and accurate information. - Yep, if you are in areas where protests are happening and you are safe to do so or feel able to do so, I don't know that there's anything paleontology specific, like I don't know enough about that area of the world if there's any connections that would give a special avenue through paleontologies. - No, it's a group effort. - Yes, absolutely. - It's a collaborative effort. - Which is, like with the previous questions about geopolitical situations in paleontology, the answer is that paleontologists are people. - Yes. - And we are affected by and we can do the same things that all other people can do. - Absolutely. Ender and Lily ask, what is your least favorite depiction of dinosaurs in popular media? - Huh. - Ark. - Arks? - Ark gets on my nerves a lot. - Yeah, I get that. - Partially because it's not a great representation but also because it absolutely-- - Messes up. - Messes up Google searches? - Yep, yep, that one's rough. This one's not like a recent depiction but it's recent for me because this last year I've gotten into Magic the Gathering and it has lots of really cool dinosaur cards and lots of oh so dumb looking, like some that are dumb, some that are just like, you know, dinosaur beached and it's just some monster. Others that are like ugly and I hate them. I hate them. They don't make it into my dinosaur deck. - Yeah. - I've skipped over cards that I know are tactically good cards 'cause the dinosaur looked bad. Kraken asks, what's your favorite thing about giant ground sloths? - The two things that jump to mine is osteoderms. - Yep. - And that there are burrows in South America that may be giant ground sloth burrows based off the claw marks in the burrow. - Also I think chest ethereum has been found in caves that are full of its poops. - Yeah. - That's pretty good too. - Oh, ground sloths. - Nani asks, if you two had been guests on another paleo podcast, Spotlight 2024, what angle or take on Sycom would your episode have focused on? - I love that. That's such a good question. - Now, if we're being technical, I chose what angle and take each of the episodes focused on. - Yes. - So it wouldn't be up to us. - But if you were to have had us on. - If I had us on. - What angle from our podcast would you think would be the thing to focus on? - I think the angle of Sycom that we the two of us really enjoy thinking and talking about is, I guess two things come to mind. One is the actual like process and practice and thought that goes into it. The performance and the skill of Sycom. I love analyzing our own science communication. - Absolutely. - Why did we make the decisions that we made, those kinds of things? And then the other one is talking about the ways that you make Sycom your own. - Yes, yeah, I like that. - How do we make Sycom work for us? How do we encourage others to make Sycom work for them? The philosophy of Sycom, I guess. I think we both really enjoy. - I think if I were a guest on a type of episode, one of the things I would have wanted to make the point to say, because I think back to the question we got asked by Blaine at that one presentation, that stuck with, I'm very glad he asked that 'cause it's stuck with us of being mindful that it's very easy to over-represent your expertise when you're a general Sycom person. 'Cause we'll get questions every now and then where it's like, you did an episode on seahorses. What do you think about this specific evolutionary thing about seahorses and it's like, I don't. Everything I know about seahorses is in that episode. That's the entirety of my knowledge and I don't even have most of it anymore 'cause that was years ago, I don't remember, I don't remember almost anything I said about the fossil record of seahorses. - Yes. - That's completely gone from every now. So I would have wanted to harp on that a little bit of like, it's a trap it's easy to fall in with regardless of how you handle yourself, so you need to be mindful that that's gonna happen. - And the lovely thing is that most of the stuff that we would have wanted to talk about, we did. - Yes, we got to. - Across our episodes. - Absolutely. - And I think that that was really great. You old the Belgian asks, do we have direct evidence in the fossil record for an increase or decrease in the number of neck vertebrae? Are populations adding or deleting vertebrae or are they splitting slash merging them to increase or decrease the number? And why is it that mammals tend to keep stable at seven while other tetrapods seem to be very flexible with it like sauropods? - Very good question, and the point you hit on at the end is really one of the key factors. It depends on which group you look at. Mammals seem to be very stable. Maybe that's because of something about the way our neck anatomy functions for most mammals. It might be genetically that we are just not predisposed to copying or deleting them as freely. - I've seen a couple of papers published recently that have pointed out that the genetic systems that underlies the development of neck vertebrae also seems to be related to susceptibility to certain diseases. - Yeah. - So changes in that system might be linked to disease incidents. So it might be that we keep our neck vertebrae stable because adding neck vertebrae makes it more likely that you get cancer or something. And that's just a happenstance genetic connection there. - It's not impossible for mammals 'cause sloths have an unusual number, but it's just very uncommon. While others, it is very easy for them to change their number of vertebrae. - And we do find examples of that in the fossil record of groups gradually getting more or less neck vertebrae over time. Typically they are just adding or subtracting. - Yes. - We don't see splitting or combining really ever to my knowledge. - Next question's from far too critical. Have you ever considered doing episodes on singular species? That was basically the case with human evolution, but what about an episode solely on the evolution of the domestic dog or lion? - Good question. Yeah, we could certainly consider it. As we've mentioned a couple times in this discussion, usually we try to keep things relatively broad, partially that is because we don't want to get too into the weeds of the technical stuff. And another part of that is that we want to satisfy a variety of requests. So oftentimes if we get requests for specific species and we don't feel like that species is going to fill out an episode in our format very well, we'll loop it into a discussion about the overall group. - Yes. - I think we had requests for T-Rex specifically. - Yeah. - That we just loop that into the Tyrannosaurs and we had a section of that episode talking about T-Rex. - Well, that will happen a lot of times with like specific fossil individual, like species or genera will get requested and we'll do the episode on the group that includes them. And that will be one of the fossil examples we talk about. - Yes, exactly. - We'll make sure to hit on Dinosuchus during the Alligators and Caymans episode. That was one of the specific requests. I could see if we did do species specific, it wouldn't be main series probably. - Yeah, I could see a side series when we do that. - Because doing a single species for the length that we do in normal episode would mean we'd have to get into a lot of really technical stuff and not all species would give us the same amount of stuff to work. So like I think it would work better with a different format. Evan asks, "It first became tradition every fifth episode to do a topic on extinction. After the first hundred episodes, the topic switched to plants. Now that you've passed 200 episodes, are there any plans to change up topics again? It'd be a cool tradition to keep running. How about doing a fish or ocean a theme every five episodes? Perhaps with Shayne Maiden. Regardless, you're not allowed to get rid of Allie, she and her plants are a must have recurring guestie. We agree Allie is sticking around. - Yep, we talked about that. We talked about, are we gonna switch it up? Is this a new tradition that every hundred? We are going to have a new five tradition. And we ended up deciding, we're gonna keep doing plants partially because we did not have any other major idea for what the five. - Sure. - Like we didn't have anything else that jumped out as the obvious. - Yeah, nothing was, we were itching to do a theme that needed its own special pattern. And there were still so many plant requests. - Yes. - And people love Allie. So it just made sense to just make that the new thing for fives. - Yes. - In perpetuity for now. - Now that does not to say that we couldn't choose a different number and say, all right, three is our now some other thing. - Zero's. - Every multiple of 13 is now gonna be some blah, blah, blah topic. - But we don't have any plans or ideas for what that pattern will be. - Not just yet. - Feel free to inundate us with suggestions. - Next question's from Ella. What are your favorite speculative paleo art tropes? - Ooh. I love when paleo artists take just super weird behaviors from modern animals and then do art of ancient animals doing that. - Yes. - I think that's so much fun to just explore the possibilities of here's a dinosaur doing a bird of paradise mating dance. - Yep, yep. - We don't know that they did that. They might have done that. Here's what it would have looked like. I think that's so much fun. - I think one of my favorites, it's very similar. It's also behavioral, but it is interactions. - Oh yeah. - Of like, you know, common ones are like hunting interactions 'cause hunting is the exciting thing that we typically depict from nature. But I also love when it's just like this young dinosaurs curious about this small mammal and is sniffing at it. - Or like this little dinosaur's chasing butterflies. - Yeah. Like those things that absolutely that must have been happening 'cause young animals do that all the time or this animal got too close to this herd of this other animal wasn't attacking it, but it's just a single, you know, Ankylosaur walking by a grouchy group of Saratopsians. - Yeah. - And yeah, that happens. I like those interesting interactions. It brings a lot of life to, and often I like when they're a bit mundane. - I love, I love paleo art of sleeping animals. - That's what I was gonna say. - Yes, like a sleeping t-rex, fantastic. - That is very fun. - I made a TikTok video about paleo art of the saber kitty and I made a comment about how, 'cause there were a couple of things, a couple of artists had done art of the cat with an adult, and I forget who did this, but one of them was like an adult licking the cub to clean it. And I said that as far as I'm aware, no one has yet done a paleo art of the saber kitty doing a big stretch. (laughing) - Which I would love to see. - Yes. (laughing) - Were there big stretches if there was no one around to say to say big stretch? - Oh big stretch. (laughing) - Yes, I agree. - Greenie asks, how do we know Stegosaurus had plates and not a sail type structure between the plates? - Good question, we don't know for sure that there wasn't like extra soft tissue that might have been present. - Sure. - Something that extreme probably would show some heavier evidences on the bone. - Right, and those bones are not structured the way that sail supporting structures are in other animals that we see. - Yes. So probably not something that extreme, but there also could be soft tissue features associated with those plates that aren't showing evidence directly on the bone. - Right. - So they definitely could have a significantly different shape in life than what we can just see. - Yeah, but there's no evidence on those plates that there would have just been like a hump or a sail or something. - Yes, exactly. - When we see sails in animals, they're supported by struts. - Yes. - Like the sails of fish, like what we see in things like Spinosaurus and Oranosaurus. - Next question's from Peter. What are your thoughts on popular science communication where the science is sometimes a bit shaky? Are they doing good by creating the new generation of scientists by making them enthused? Or are the occasional incorrect details a problem? - This is a great question. - And it's sort of case-by-case a lot of the time. - Yeah. - Generally speaking, minor incorrect details are not a big deal, right? The best science communication projects in the world have minor incorrect details or things that are eventually out of date. We have gotten things incorrect throughout the history of the podcast consistently. That's not really a huge problem because A, it's unavoidable. And B, that's not really what people are taking away from the experience most of the time. I think that when the shaky science gets, becomes problematic is when it's misleading. - Yes. - Is when it's giving the wrong idea about something. So like, I think that for example, if we're talking about the bone wars, if you're talking about the bone wars and you like say that this dinosaur came from this state but actually it was found in this state or you get the names of the people who were working together wrong, that's not really a big deal. But if you're communicating about the bone wars and you comment that all of the unethical things that these scientists were doing were the norm back then. - Yes. - That is now misrepresenting the field of science in a way that can actually be harmful to people's understanding about that topic. And I think that's where if people are, if you're getting people excited for bad reasons, for reasons that are misleading or misrepresenting, I think that's when the shakiness of the psychom starts to become, starts to outweigh the benefits of getting people enthused about it. - That is very much along the lines of what I was gonna say that I'm perfectly fine with small mistakes and I'm perfectly fine, even with all right, you're being a little generalistic or you're being a little big vague. But you're getting still in good points across and interesting stuff. The times it gets to me that even when it is that small stuff is when, and definitely sometimes I'm probably assuming, I may be wrong, but when I get the feeling that this person knows better, 'cause you said too many things that were specific and accurate and then you played fast and loose with a couple of key things for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of amping up what you're talking about, when it's selective incorrectness and it feels like it feels more likely that it's on purpose than by accident, even when it's small stuff, that irks me. 'Cause now you're wielding misinformation purposely. - Yeah. - And I now no longer trust you, even if it is fairly minor stuff. - Well, and I think that's another error is if a channel or something like that is getting things wrong in either a careless or flagrant way, then it breaks trust. - Yes. - If we say something on here that is so obviously wrong but our audience is like, I can't believe you got that wrong, that naturally leads to, well, what else are you wrong about? And I think little things are very excusable. - Yes. - That's just a mistake. And if we do get something egregious wrong, we try to correct it. We try to, oh, hey, that was wrong, let's correct the record. I think if you're not doing that, then it makes it hard for people to trust you and possibly more broadly, recent references of science information. One, and times where I've seen it is where like, they'll be good on almost all the facts and then they will stretch the cool one. And that feels like you did it on purpose and you were trustworthy enough that you're gonna fool most people. - Yeah. - And now it feels like you're fooling people, not just accidentally. And that, that personally, I can't, I can't abide, even when it's probably harmless. I just can't gel with that. - Beth asks, how did you start going to Dragoncon? - I started going when I was itty bitty. Back in, I think middle school was the earliest I went to Dragoncon. I'm pretty sure it was middle school, if not early high school. And I went with my dad first. My dad found out about it, learned about Dragoncon and went, hey, there's this nerd convention. You want to go? - You're one of those? - Yeah. And we went for just a Saturday, the first time. And I think the next couple of times, it was just for a day. And went to the dealers hall and went to panels. And it was much smaller. The dealers hall was in one floor of one building. It was itty bitty, by comparison. And I loved it and then I didn't go much until I got to go again in college. And then I started trying to go as often as I could. I couldn't always go. And then we started going for the podcast. And now we've had an in to go and a legit reason to go for pretty consistently for the last handful of years. - I started going when Will started taking me. - Yep. (laughing) - Next question's from a pro city. What has most surprised you about doing this podcast for this many years? Or what have you learned doing this? This is very open-ended because I was wondering what expectations you had way back when compared to now. - I think that we have been surprised, I have been consistently surprised by our own success. - Yes. - That I think that... And I don't think that it's, you know, that sort of feeling of like, "Wow, people want to listen to us." I think that I am often surprised to find that we are good at this. And not like I didn't expect us to be good at this, but I find these days, I am very relaxed about certain aspects of podcasting that I would have expected to still be challenging or difficult. - I think the version of that that hits me the most is, I, there were a bunch of things that we were aware we weren't doing since the beginning of one. We never did much advertising. We've only done parts of the social media. You know, there's a ton of very, a lot of other online presences are much heavier on social media than we are. We weren't doing ads and promotions and stuff like that. And a part of me felt like, well, these are all things that I know other things like us are doing on the regular. - These are things that real podcasters do. - So surely the fact that we're not doing them should be a hindrance. And we were very conscious about not doing some of those of, we chose not to do many of those. And we're like, that it's okay, though the other things that we gained from not doing that is more important. But there's always a part in that it's like, yeah, but probably we're making it harder for ourselves in a lot of ways. - Yeah. - And that still, that might have been true. Maybe if we had done certain things, we'd be like, oh, wow, we'd be in a very different place. - Absolutely. - But it hasn't been this huge stumbling block that I kind of assumed it would have been. - Yeah. - And that's pretty incredible. - I find that I continue to be surprised when other people come to us asking for insights or assistance as though we're experts about podcasting and science communication, and then even more surprised when we have answers to those questions. - Yep, yep, yep. - That is something that, 'cause I don't feel like we ever became experts, but we are now experts at this. - Well, doing the podcast has been yet another window into how the world works. When you're a kid, you assume all the adults know what's going on, and you don't, and that the adults are running the world the way adults must be doing, and it must be just above your understanding because you are about a child, and then you become an adult and you go, oh, I still don't know what I'm doing, and I'm the same age my parents were when I thought they knew what they were doing, so they didn't know what they were doing. - Yes. - And then you continue to grow up and you get into professional situations and you go, all human endeavors are super messy and super disorganized in some way, and you hear it from one story's come from the making of a movie, and it's like, that sounds like it was chaos all two years you were shooting that movie, and then the actors are like, yeah, that's how movies happen. Movies are just these very messy, constantly moving thing, and then through teamwork and lots of shots and editing, a seemingly perfect product gets put out at the end, and everyone else can't tell. - Yes. - This is what professionalism feels like. - Yep, and I think that's, to answer your question of what we've learned, I think that's the biggest thing I've learned is we don't feel like we know what we're doing, but we're doing the job that we're doing it well and to the degree that is a completely satisfactory for what we're doing, and that all applies to so many other things. - Yes. - Like if you work in a school, you'd, as a kid in school, it seems like the school is this iron, you know, this very solid foundation, and then you beteach and you're like, does anyone have paperclips? (laughing) We don't have any paperclips in the whole building. (laughing) James asks, if you could domesticated one animal, extinct or extant, to serve as your noble steed, what would it be? - I mean, I'll give you one guess. (laughing) - I feel like I would want triceratops. - Triceratops would be pretty sick. - Like a big tank, yeah. Like that, I would be the coolest person at the party. - Yeah. - Riding in on a triceratops. - It would be pretty awesome. - Parking it outside. - Yeah. - Throwing the keys to the ballad. (laughing) - Parking this over by those bushes. (laughing) - Like, terrestrial crocs would be cool, but also, we've never made a predator a steed. - Yeah. - So that would be-- - Seems dangerous. - Weird, and like, yeah, I don't, I just don't know that they have the build to take the weight. Urban wars are just more robust, typically. Urban wars are also often easier to handle and maintain. They're easier to feed. - This is, this is a weird one, but, and I don't have, I'm blanking on my names. I have almost the name in my head. But one of the fossil cousins of giraffes with those really ornate ossocomes-- - Oh yeah, like the Shiva Theoreans. - Yes, yes, thank you. - And those. - Shiva Theorean was what I was trying to think of. That, that would be like-- - That'd be cool. - I want to come into a city on King Ali. - Yes. - I want to come in with this ornate head crest that they had, 'cause some of those were crazy. - Yeah. - And like, the rains coming down like banners. - Or like, megaloceros. - Yeah. - The giant horns. - Yeah. - If I were going to have a noble steed that I also wanted to strike fear into the hearts of the people in front of me, I would go with an intilla don. - Yes. - Yes. - No one better mess with me. I can't control this thing. (laughing) We are on a razor's edge at all moments. (laughing) - Next question's from Anna. If you were going to make your own Jurassic movie, what would be the main things you'd do with the movie in terms of plot, science, scientist, portrayal, et cetera? - Ah, I would put science for front and center. - Mm-hmm. - That's my favorite thing about the original Jurassic Park is that the main characters are scientists exploring science as they're going through this realm. Some of my favorite things, especially in the first two Jurassic Park movies, are the parts where paleontologists are observing the dinosaurs and comparing them to the information that they gleaned from the fossils. - Yeah. Like adjusting things right there in the moment goes. - Yeah. - Evidently, we were right about this, that's different. And I think that my favorite thing about the second book is the exploration of the ecology of the dinosaurs similar to what you were talking about with dungeon meshy, where it's the quest to understand the ecology of these animals that has built up on this island is core to the central premise of the movie. So I guess I would make a movie, you're asking a movie where they're cooking the dinosaurs. - I think I would make, I would start back after the second one roughly. And I would pursue a plot point that gets brought up in the book that is what they kind of started, they tried to do with dominion and explore the dinosaurs getting off the island and getting out into other ecosystems. But good. - And actually go through like how humans are interacting with that fact of like, how are they encroaching into human and wildlife interactions? Are we seeing situations where they're causing problems in the ecosystem? Are we seeing situations where they are not doing well? I feel like that could be good. You could tell a lot of really cool like conservation plot stories and like human nature pressures of these farmers want to shoot the dinosaurs because they're killing their herd or eating their crops. - Or eating their crops. - Or just sauropods walking through are destroying huge areas of their farmland. - I think it would be super cool to do like a series. And I feel like Cam Cretaceous might have done a little bit of this. - Yeah, a series of much smaller stories of conflict between invasive dinosaurs and people. - And I think if you were to do it movie style, I feel like you could do it from like a, we're trying to establish a new, what's the word I'm looking for? Protocol or law or some sort of like the protection or what the handling will be. And if you need a villain, you can have a corporate organization that's wanting to hunt or utilize the dinosaurs for some capitalistic gain and explore the concept of invasive species and this question of, and then you can get philosophical with do these animals have rights? What they tried to do in a- - In fallen kingdom. - In fallen kingdom where it's do they have protective rights? - Right. - Are they endangered species or are they accidents? - Right. - Or you can explore things like the real life situations where you have an invasive species and it's causing problems, but the town loves them. - Yeah. - And it's like, yeah, but we're the town where the dinosaurs live, so you can't get rid of them. So now what do you do about that? I think there's all sorts of cool angles you could do. - And you could still have awesome action scenes where it's like part of what you're trying to do is to show the community that relocation is valid, but you're also in the process of perfecting how do you relocate dinosaurs? - Yes. - So you have to have moments where they wrangle a stegosaur and it's a stegosaur, so it's harrowing and we have to, there's a problem allosaur that has killed a lot of livestock and killed a kid or something or killed a farmer and a person has died, we have to actually do something definitive about this dinosaur, but now we have to hunt down a predator. And so you can absolutely have action scenes in that. And it just, that's the question we come across with lions and tigers and sharks and crocodiles of when dangerous animals, threatening animals come close to humans, where do you draw the line between human safety and security and the protection of the animals with the added level of, these are exotic animals that we don't understand fully yet and have questionable validity as natural animals. - Emily asks, why do my twin sister and I always sneeze at bright lights? - Ooh, yeah, I do that too. - Me too. (laughing) - That is called photic sneezing and there's a, I think, a longer term. - The photic sneezing reflex or something like that. - And I looked it up briefly because I have the answer I learned, but to my understanding, that's one idea of what it is. - Yeah, to my knowledge, we don't fully know why it's happening. - The explanation I used to hear was that it's a genetic condition, which has been all the evidence points to that it's genetic. - It's terrible. - Yes. The explanation I heard, which it sounds like is still one of the considered possibilities, is that something about the way we develop and our genetics dictates things for us, is that a nerve passes by our optic nerve a little closer than in other situations. And so bright lights and that stimulation basically causes a cross-wiring a little bit and causes that sneezing sensation. - Yeah, I've heard the explanation that it's not, it may not be that it's like multiple nerves near each other, but that a specific bundle of nerves is involved in both. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That one way or the other, what's happening, seems to be that the sensation of not just bright lights, but a change in light level. - Yes. - That sudden bright lights is kicking off a nerve system that causes you to sneeze. - Yeah, that triggers the same nerve reflex that causes sneezing. There are evidently other causes, like that can trigger it, that shouldn't cause a sneeze, but do, I can't remember what all those were. - I think one of them was like being hungry or something like that, but that cause are eating, something like that that can cause sneezing. - But almost every time, and I would love to hear if you like comment on our discord or something, it's always twice for me. - Interesting, I usually, I don't have it quite that consistent. - I sneeze twice almost every time I go out into bright sunlight from inside. - I've heard that it ranges from one to 10. - Yeah. - That it often comes in bursts. - Yes. Do you have a specific, do you and your sister have a specific number? - Do you both have the same number? - Yes, yes. - That would be fascinating. - I would love to know. - Jackie asks, "I've heard you all talk about plenty of the things that have surprised you about the podcast over the years, but what about the other direction? Any long shots you've had faith in the whole time that came to fruition?" - Hmm, I feel like the whole podcast is kind of that. - Yeah. - That like, this is a thing that we very much felt like, yeah, we could do this. And then we did, and then it worked out. That often happens with guests. - Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. - I've had this conversation a few times recently with a number of people that have been guests on the podcast, who themselves were a little bit uncertain, but I would have to tell them, I am 100% confident that this is gonna go well, because I know our podcast, and I know our hosts, and I know our audience, and I know enough about you, the guests, to know that this is gonna be fine. - I feel like this is not quite a perfect fit for what Jackie's describing, but a little bit, I feel that way, with like silver screen and spooky, where wasn't so much that went into that being like, "Yeah, this is gonna kick butt, and everyone's gonna love it." But there was no doubt going into it. I'm like, "We're gonna do this." "We're gonna do this because we wanna do it." - People are gonna like it or not. - And surely they're not gonna hate it. Like, "Yeah, so we're gonna keep doing it." And then it's worked out perfectly since then. - Yeah. - A little bit that. - Patreon feels this way. - Yes. - But very much of like, are these the gifts, the rewards that people are gonna want? Are people gonna wanna support us for these things? And it turns out the answer is yes, lots of people wanna support us. - Yeah, we, people wanna support us and the things we picked way back when. - Did people like them? - Worked, worked for people. Next up, Cheryl asks, "We are likely entering a mass extinction event. Why does no one talk about the part that human overpopulation has been one of the main causes of this?" - That's a good question. And I would suspect one reason is that the other issues of human overpopulation supersede it very often, like gets the focus of lack of resources and stuff for people, so that gets, when that topic comes up, that's the focus of it. - Sure, sure. - A lot of the time. - Well, and I think that it's important to distinguish between the impacts of human population growth and overpopulation. - Yes. - Right. - Population growth is something that we talk about all the time. We talk about farmland or urban areas expanding or deforestation because we need more resources for a growing population. Those are all impacts on nature of growing populations in various areas and how those affect the wildlife around us. Overpopulation specifically implies a threshold that has been surpassed. - Yes. - Overpopulation, the idea there are too many people and that is a topic that has been addressed scientifically. There are papers out about that and research that has gone into it. That overpopulation in particular doesn't get a lot of direct discussion, I think for two main reasons. One, because there is not a scientific consensus that overpopulation is a thing. - Yes. - That is not, there isn't solid evidence that there is any such threshold of maximum human capacity on Earth or that we have surpassed whatever that threshold might be. Most of the issues that are often pointed to as a overpopulation issue are more, kind of like what you were just saying, about how we manage our populations and resources, how we interact with the environment around us. It's not that there are too many people, it's that we're just not handling the number we have in the most responsible way that we can. - The other issue with overpopulation is that overpopulation is tied very tightly to issues of discrimination and eugenics. - Yes. - When you get into questions of if you are starting with the basis of there are too many people, then the solution to there being too many people is to reduce the number of people and there are no ways to do that on purpose without violating human rights and committing genocide. So overpopulation is a concept that is best friends with eugenics and systemic racism and such. And so overpopulation is both scientifically shaky as a premise and sociologically problematic as a concept when it gets discussed. And it often tends to distract from those actual problems which are how do we manage our populations? How do we provide for our populations? And the people in them. A lot of the places in the world where human population is encroaching on nearby environments or having a negative impact on nearby environments often is related to areas that are lacking in certain resources or certain protocols or certain information that they could be using to better manage those interactions with the environment. - So I think the question of human population management and growth in relation to environmental crises is discussed quite frequently. I think the term overpopulation doesn't get used very much because it is just a problematic term. - Yeah, I think it's also important to note and not that you were saying the Cheryl or that you have this view, but that it is also easy to accidentally conflate human population and the environmental crisis that we have been in for so long and is continuing to happen. It is easy to make a similar comparison to how recycling should be the responsibility of us individuals when the corporations, if we all got our carbon footprint down to zero as working class, it would not make a noticeable dent in the current environmental crisis because we are a blip compared to what corporations are doing and what industry and a lot of the mass extinction is perpetuated by massive overfishing and commercial farming and pollution on a global scale by factories, things that don't actually have to do with the population, but with capitalism and industry and a misuse of the environment by extremely powerful groups and individuals, which are also the kinds of groups and individuals that benefit very nicely from discussions about overpopulation because they tend to be in categories of people that aren't considered the problem groups when these discussions come up. - Yes, so good question, but it is very easy to make some misconnections between those topics. - Yes. - Our next question is three questions in a trench coat. The first one's from Amanda. You can quickly recall episode topics and numbers when a previous episode topic is mentioned. Is that real or edited in later? Lucas asks, when referencing a prior episode, how does David always know what episode number to say? I believe that you guys always put it in the notes, but sometimes it feels like an episode number is cited in an off script bit. And Anna asks, David, what memory technique do you use to remember episode topics? It's impressive. - Well, thank you, everybody. No notes, no editing, I just know them. - Yep. - They're just in there. I know the episodes, it is very rare that I will put it in the notes in front of me. It is, I don't, I guess I shouldn't say it's never been edited in because there have been at least a couple times where I said the wrong number and then a minute later I go, hang on, we have to rerecord that part. Because I said the wrong number and we have to put it back. - Yes. - But no, usually I just have the number off top of my head. The memory technique that I use is just knowing them. - Having played Pokemon since I was a child. Now I just, it's just a list that I go over, over and over and over again and I've looked over the list and I've thought back on episodes enough that they stick. I'm just really good at remembering numbered lists of things. - Oh and it's a thing. - It's just a little skill that I have. - You've done and like you do as a past time when you're passing time and just entertaining yourself. - I love playing around with numbers and lists and stuff and I've been doing that since I was a kid. - Smash brothers and stuff. - Absolutely. The best thing that Smash Brothers ever introduced was in Smash Brothers Ultimate where they gave numbers to all the characters. And I was like, "Great, I know all the characters now." - Thank you. - You gave them all numbers. (laughing) Next up we've got another pair of questions. Buddy asks, "To get a peek behind the curtain, what's the process for creating each episode? Do you do a rehearsal run through? Have you ever had to scrape a taping and start over?" And Bridget similarly asks, "What order do you guys record your episodes in? News first or news last?" I remember some episodes you guys mentioning that the main topic was already recorded before the news. Is that normal? - Good question. First part of the answer is it has changed. - Yes. - As we've done the podcast, we used to do it in one go, we do news, take a break, do our first section, take a break, do the next section. We then switched to where we do our discussion and our news separately. And typically we do discussion first and news after because mainly that gives us more time for there to have been news for that news section. And so it makes more sense for it to be at the end in case newses pop up. It also gives a chance that if we're in a tight schedule, I can start editing the chunkier bit. If need be, I typically edit it together just because it's easier that way, but it gives that option in case I need the chance. As far as our general process, we take note, whichever one of us is leading that episode or if we're how we're doing the episode, notes are taken, outlines made, we sit down and we'll usually do a go over of the sections and this is my plan. - Here's the line that we're gonna go through. - So you know what, we're gonna talk about this here so you don't have to worry about the fact that it's not gonna be brought up at the first part. So if there's anything weird like that, then we just record the episode. - What you're hearing in the episode is more or less the first take. - It's 90% it is the first take. - Sometimes we have to start a sentence over 'cause we stumbled or something. - There'll be sections where we go, oh, actually, I don't wanna say this here. - Yes, let's rearrange this. - Or we'll have moments where we go, I forgot to say something. I'm gonna say it here, edit it in up front. - But for the most part, you're hearing what happened when we spoke, minus all of the coughs and hums and pauses and stuff. - And me going, "David, how do you say this?" - Yup, which happens a lot. - We don't do a rehearsal. I will sometimes rehearse little parts to myself when I'm putting the notes together, I'll be like, "How do I wanna say this?" - Yup. - We have never had to stop a taping and start over. One time we did fully re-record an episode discussion because it was bad. - Yeah, it just didn't feel good. - That was episode two and we've never done it since then. And one time we lost an episode recording. - Yup. - That was episode 19 where it just, the file got messed up. - Yup, we just had to re-do the episode. But now for the most part, you hear what happened. With the Q and A's like this, it's even more so. - Oh yeah. - Because it's far less planned. - And surprisingly enough, way less editing when we do ones like this. - Yes. - Because in our main episodes, we don't script it, we outline, but we have points we're trying to hit. We have facts, we need to get accurate and report correctly on. So there's lots of moments of. So talk about, so on the topic and like trying to get the wording right. - Right, right. - Or going through and going, no, wait. - I miss the thing I'm gonna say this. - Said the wrong number. - Yup, yup. - I said the wrong units or the wrong blank. - This is much more off the cuff. We don't have to worry about sticking to the outline or getting our facts straight. We're much more open about like, I don't actually know this one. Here's my thought, go look it up. - So 90% of what I'm gonna be cutting out of this at it is just coughs. - Yes. - That's gonna be the vast majority of what I'm cutting out is just (coughs) So yeah, that's the basic procedure for most, if we have a guest episode, it's still basically the same. We just go over things with the guests and then we do the recording situations just different, but the process is still mostly the same. Next question's from Z. I've often wondered how you decide who covers which topics. Some of them are pretty obvious, like will doing a lot of fish stuff, David tackling Mosasaurus, et cetera, et cetera. But what about the ones you both want to lead on? I imagine episodes such as Tyrannosaurs, Urbovores and other exciting popular or just downright awesome topics would be worth fighting for. - I don't know that we've ever actually had like a conflict about this. At worst, there have been times where like you'll choose a topic and I go, oh cool. I also would have been happy to do this, but it's gonna be fine. I don't think there's ever been one where you took a topic and I was like, no, that was the one that I wanted. - Yep, yep, we've had ones where we've joked about that of like, I was thinking about doing this and it's like, ooh, that is a good one. I had maybe been eyeing that one, but I think part of it is there's so many topics. - Yeah, there's so much. - That also we're both on the episodes. - Yeah, I'm gonna get to say cool stuff. - Yes. - If I have a particular thing I wanna share, then if David already has it in his notes when it comes up, I just get to get enthusiastic about it and be like, yes, I also saw that thing and it was super cool or if he doesn't bring it up, I go, I had a thing, I had a thing, I wanna add my thing and I get to add something in. So yeah, not really, there are some topics that like, not officially, like nothing's stopping me from doing a dinosaur one, but we have roughly agree that it's like, yeah, David does the dinosaur topics. - And if you wanted to do a dinosaur episode, you totally could. - And like, David absolutely could do a fish topic, but-- - I don't wanna. - I tend to gravitate there, land masses was one of mine that I did for a while, but then I kind of-- - Where's fossil sites I tend to do? - So there's definitely some topics and then the rest is just pure vibes of like, I'll see when I go, I don't wanna do that one. And like, I tend to do a lot of the anatomy ones, but David has done anatomy ones before, so like it's-- - It's really just what we feel like. - Yeah, there's no system system involved in splitting them up. - All right, we are just about at the end of our road here. So let's do a couple more questions before we wrap this up. Aporva asks, this is very similar to that question we answered before, but we can add a couple things here. If we co-existed with dinosaurs or archosaurs in general, dinotopia style, what species would be your steed? I stand by my triceratops. - I think that's a good one. - Answer. - If it's dinotopia style, 'cause that's-- - That does change the situation a bit. - Because, and specifically, dinotopia is inherent in it, a utopia. It is peaceful. - Yes, yes. - It is peaceful. There's no warring dinotopia. - I don't need you to be intimidating on my intilla don't. - I've always, I don't know why. And I think it was actually a clip from Ark that sparked this. Parasarolophus and other hydrosaurus, but parasarolophus feels like it would be a very cool, like long travel, like pack animal and travel companion. - Yeah. - Just the picture of like a merchant riding a parasarolophus with like their stuff hanging off their big hips was very cool. So that one's, I like that one a lot. - I do like, I feel like a big hydrosaur is a really cool choice. It's got multiple modes. - Yes, yeah. - I can get you on the second floor if I need to. It can stand up on the hind legs. - It just, and I get to feed your little shovel mouth. It'd be very cool. - Yeah, that is a very, that is a very cool choice. I like that. - Good one. Let's do one last question. - Our last question is from dance. In the Common Ascent artwork, David is usually depicted as a snake and will a crocodile. - The alligator technically. - Yes, very true. If Allie ever made it into any of the artwork, what would she be represented as? - This is a great question and a great one to end on. I also pitched this to Allie and she had to say this. I'm going with first thought, best thought, Venus flytrap. - Yeah. - In terms of being vaguely person shaped, I think it's the best option. Plus, who doesn't love a carnivorous plant? Insects, I suppose. (both laughing) What is a group of Venus flytraps called? - Oh, good question. - A garden. - A garden? - Garden is garden the orchard. - Oh, I see. An ambush. (both laughing) - A minefield. Danger, danger the Venus flytrap. Well, if ask Allie, what is the collective noun for Venus flytraps? - Yeah, 'cause I don't know when you see them growing in a group, is that one plant, is that multiple plants? - Yeah. - 'Cause I know there are terms for-- - And I know you do get multiple mouths on the same plant. - So I don't know when you see them, how many plants is that, and are they growing off of each other, or is there a term for the way they're growing? - Now, I didn't ask Allie what her alternate universe choice would be if Venus flytraps didn't exist. So that's one that we just don't know. - Yeah, maybe a lichen. (both laughing) - Rude. - Something weird. Would her caveat be that it's a non-angiosperm? - Oh, she'd be like a conifer. - Yeah. - Or a fern. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. - That'd be pretty good stuff. - Things to ask her on the next five or so. - Well, yes, well, listen, next year for the Q&A. - Oh, yeah, we'll answer these follow-up questions. - Listeners, thank you so much for all of these fantastic questions. We never have enough time to get through all of the ones that were submitted, so our apologies if we did not get to your question. This has been a ton of fun, as always. This one feels like it probably will continue the trend of these getting longer every year. - Probably. - When we did, as soon as we decided we were gonna take a break for dinner in the middle, I was like, this is gonna be a long one. - Yep. - This one's gonna go long. - Yep. - Excellent. Our audience deserves it. - It's gonna be fun. Now I gotta edit it. I always forget every year until we sit down. - You do have a lot of work. - I go, oh, right. At least, it's easy to edit. - It is very easy. - It's very easy. - 2024 was a very exciting year here at Common Descent. We explored a lot of new things. We made a lot of really great content and we had a lot of really wonderful engagement with our colleagues, with our listeners, with our supporters. We have plans for 2025 that we are very excited about. 2025 is gonna be a big exciting year. There's a lot of old things we're gonna return to, like spooky, silver screen, dragon con. And then there's some plans for new things that we're gonna be trying out. It's a very exciting time for the podcast. Once again, an enormous thanks to everybody who listens to the podcast, everybody who leaves us comments or sends us emails or submits questions for things like this, an enormous thanks to people who share the podcast with their friends and spread the word of the podcast, a shout out to all of our fellow paleontology and science podcasters, our spotlight guests, and beyond who are out there doing incredible work that either compliments the work we're doing or does stuff better than what we're doing, an incredible community of people, and of course, a massive thank you to our patrons without whom we would not be able to do any of these things who really support not only the podcast, but us, our livelihoods, are supported in large part by Patreon, and we greatly appreciate that. - Absolutely, the amount of support we get from you all is literally awe-inspiring. I am blown away by it often, and many a time have moments where I will read something or hear something or have interaction and it fully rejuvenates me in that moment. - The end of the year Q&A, we have a section where people can just add other thoughts. We don't read those here on the Q&A, but we do read all of them, and they're lovely, and we love reading those. - Thank you for those. I read them the other day before recording this. When I was in a down mood, and it helped boost me back up to have the energy for recording this and bring the joy that is appropriate for what we get to do here and what you all allow us to do. - Early in 2025, we will be celebrating the eight year anniversary of the podcast. Send us your suggestions about how we can celebrate eight, what is special about eight and what fun stuff we can do for that. - All octopus and spiders. - Only 90 degrees until the podcast never ends. And continue listening, continue engaging and all that stuff. We hope that you all have a lovely new year and a lovely start to your 2025, and that's all I got. That's it. I've talked, my voice is starting to go. We've been talking a lot. - There it is. Time to hit the old dusty trail. - Sign off phrase. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to the Common to Send podcast. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and check our WordPress blog for pictures and links after each episode. Huge thanks to our patrons whose support helps keep this podcast running and who get access to bonus goodies on Patreon. The song you're hearing is called on the origin of species by protodome, which we found at OCremix.org. Thanks again for listening. We hope you'll join us next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
