HowStuffWorks via myPod
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Dr. Advait Jukar, our first ever guest, returns for another crack at the Ice Age franchise. In The Meltdown (2006), we catch up with the world’s most famous computer-animated megafauna as they flee climate change, and a snake-oil salesman, and vultures, and Mesozoic monsters, and in the end it turns out the stakes were never really that high. But if you like long lists of scientific names for animals, then you’re in for a treat!
Advait’s links:
Florida Museum of Natural History: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/
The Montbrook fossil site: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-vertebrate-fossils/sites/montbrook/
Win some SotSA Merch! Send your mistakes, inaccuracies, and corrections to us by email or social media:
Twitter: @SotSA_Podcast
Bluesky: @sotsapodcast.bsky.social
Facebook: @SotSAPodcast
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/sotsa/
Email: screensofthestoneage@gmail.com
In this episode:
The Channeled Scablands: http://www.sevenwondersofwashingtonstate.com/the-channeled-scablands.html
The fan list of species we’re using in this episode: https://parody.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Species_in_Ice_Age_2:_The_Meltdown
Sloths:
Megalonyx:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalonyx
Nothrotheriops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothrotheriops
Eremotherium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eremotherium
Paramylodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramylodon
Armadillos:
Dasypus bellus, the beautiful armadillo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasypus_bellus
Pampatheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampatheriidae
Holmesina (a genus of Pampathere): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmesina
Glyptodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyptodon
Sea Creatures:
Huphesuchus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hupehsuchus
Metriorhynchus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metriorhynchus
Dakosaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakosaurus
Brachauchenius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachauchenius
Globidens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globidens
Pacus: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/fish/pacu-fish.htm
Elephants:
Platybelodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platybelodon
Paracerotherium, the inspiration for Star Wars’ ATAT:
- Duration:
- 1h 3m
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Happalops and megalonics the cap bump my microphone and take that again. Happalops and megalonics whoops I left when I said it. Happalops and megalonics they are funny words. It's like have the lumps and whistles. Welcome to screens of the stone age the podcast where scientists review movies about prehistoric people. My name is Josh Lindel I'm a grad student studying Neanderthal teeth and I'm here with. I'm Dr. Kimberly Plump I am a bioarchaeologist I studied the human skeleton health and disease and evolution. I'm Dr. Ross Barnett pally Jeanette assistant interested in the DNA of extinct ice age carnivore and. And I'm Dr. Audvide Zukur and I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. I mostly work on mammals but I also gap on dinosaurs. Thanks for being here with us again at Vite I believe you are our first guest ever way back on episode five when we were covering the movie ice age. So naturally today we're going to cover ice age two and see if we have anything new to say about that one considering is mostly the same animals and mostly the same plot without the human child. Somewhat yeah it's hard to find a sequel when they're not actually labeled one two three four I think we all watched the meltdown. Hopefully we watched ice age the meltdown actually labeled with a number so hopefully we all watch the same one. Yeah so the the plot was slightly different I think the whole premise was still about finding your tribe and finding your friends and your herd. But it starts off with these animals on an ice blow and everything seems to be melting and I think the whole quest is to escape the melt waters but also to try to find more mammoths because it seems at least in the beginning that Manny is the last mammoth on the planet. And so they go off on this quest and they find another female mammoth who thinks that she's a possum because she's being raised by a family it's hilarious because she's trying to climb trees and I don't think that would work out too well or large elephant. But then they kind of go off and try to escape the melt waters and eventually end up finding dry land after getting on a large arc with the rest of these fairly anachronistic species and man should find a herd of mammoths but I think what they decide to do eventually is just to keep with their family. And I think that's the central message about family it's about finding your your people even if they're misfits alright so we normally start off with nitpicking inaccuracies I feel like the entire episode can just be discussing the the the ice age animals that are present in this because there's not really that much else to go on I guess we could talk about the environment we can certainly talk about climate change a little bit because I don't think it handles that very well. Even though it's the the sort of the main bad guy of the movie but do we want to just run off a list of all the animals that we saw and because pretty much everything is based on a real life animal there's nothing that's really made up right. Yeah mostly I would say there's some license taken as you might expect but most things have some kind of real world analog. I mean you want to go and Ross sure but just to reel them off sort of Tomler so style and in song but there's a good to don definitely there's a macra cania more a theorem dodos looks like there are also a chalice tears opossums as well which are real there's the vultures there are. Protocera today which are kind of weird deer things there are brown slots and we can talk a bit about slots in detail because that's something I went on a bit of a rabbit hole journey after watching this. There's saber tooth smile on in particular given the kind of anatomy that they've got there looks like there's keep buffalo. There are weird prehistoric like most of soars or crocodilians of some kind that have that melt out the ice what else we got some kind of horned beaver. Is that one real there are more beavers out there they're called my logolines but what's odd is that they typically have two horns and this thing just has one. I'm not sure where the thing so it's like a unicorn world I guess so yeah every so often you'll get like a deer with just one antler or something so maybe it's a genetic freak or. There's a saber tooth squirrel called scrat who I don't think has a direct analog in the fossil record as far as I know there are a lot of these like large squarely like things with saber teeth in the mess is also might be one of those might be inspired by that. There's one in Argentina all right I bet you fill in any gaps I've missed. Yeah so there was this this large elephant like thing called paddy billet on which they reconstructed completely inaccurately I don't think we had those in the previous movie right no. No I think they're new so you've got those you've got these terrible birds you've got bronpornis think it's the brown bird. Kind of walks around two legs there are terra tons which are the vultures let's see what else am I missing because the marathoners there is an armadillo there's an anteater I thought the Cape Buffalo was a muscocks but it could be wrong it's kind of hard to tell what these things are but given the ice age theme it would make sense that it's a muscocks. A couple of kinds of slots right so you've got said and then you have the smaller slots yeah which kind of all form of cult of said it's it's the fire king. Yes and then you have those two strange reptiles that are found frozen in the ice but the whole meltwater theme seems to come from the mazula floods I don't know if you're familiar with those events. So there was a giant ice dam in North America the end the glacial period just up north in Oregon and once the last place of maximum started to give way into the warmer Holocene this ice dam started to melt and you have these massive floods which would go down the Columbia Valley. Through the the Willamette and then open out into the Pacific and they were so big that they call us these things called the scab lands in Oregon and Washington is these massive scours and gouges on the landscape and people didn't quite know what they were until they realize that it's actually caused by these. Massive floods from these these ice dam bursts so that's a that's a real thing which had happened about 12,000 years ago or so and it seems to have occurred with a frequency of every 50 or 100 years until the ice and finally. Completely melted so that was one of the things that I thought was the least realistic about the movie because they're living in a big. I mean certainly it's less realistic than you're describing in real life but they're living in a big bowl which is dry land surrounded by a wall of ice with seemingly an infinite ocean around them and that seems very unlikely to me. Yeah it's like a volcanic island which is out of that lake or something. No there seems to be a lot of volcanic activity with all the geezers and stuff that that go on right and it's said get his hair singed like a lava or something. Like Indiana Jones that I've just I've had a look I don't think from looking at the the image I don't think. Why I thought it was a cake buffalo doesn't really look like a musk ox but maybe one of the extinct musk ox like a bacteria or something like that which has kind of like modern day musk ox they have a kind of helmets they're they're kind of cast it's very close to the side of the head. Where is the one in the film they kind of come out quite a bit like like a buffalo which the extinct forms do so yeah maybe that that would be a good good call for that one. Yeah I think that might be the first time that we've seen and extinct musk ox on this over screen hopefully not the last yeah we do often talk about how North American or like shows that the North American Ice Age kind of always ignore buys and or things like that even though that would have been something that was really common so it is interesting to see the musk ox or whatever it is featured a little more prominently. But I mean this this was my overall is that I really like ice age one I went to ice age two in the cinema hoping it would be as good I was really disappointed by it just not being anywhere near as good and I forgave the first one mostly for it's mixing up of biography timelines. You know everything essentially having sort of you know dinosaurs in with mammoths and you know light up turns in with more aetherium and all these kind of weird. Just like it's all the past we can just put it all together and that's that's one thing that you know people that don't know any better can get really confused by. And the guy dinosaurs lived at the same time as mammoths in that film yeah or dodo is lived in North America it's in the film art dinosaurs in the third one. They are there's a t-rex in the third one well they find us underground yeah is there a t-rex operation and you it's frozen it's frozen in the ice I think all right yeah and the third one they find like an underground dinosaur world that's like a capsule time. Right it's like King Kong right yeah I think in the King Kong and Godzilla films there's like this whole world of giant apes on the ground yeah the land the time forgot land yeah. It's interesting to see the opossums in this one of which is voice by Sean William Scott because he we just seen him in evolution not too many years ago so that's two films that have stiffler in them. I don't know that we've to watch for this for this channel which is not an awful lot but it's still a bit weird. Okay so I found a list of species in this movie but it's from a pair it's from a fandom site that is just called the parody wiki which I don't know what this is supposed to be a parody of but anyway it's clearly a fan made list of species so I thought we could kind of go down it and decide whether or not we agree with this list because I think we're going to disagree on some points. And it doesn't point out who is who exactly but it starts off with mammoth is prima genius mega theory on the American and smile it on fatala so obviously that's our three main characters Ross is shaking his head I think you're shaking your head at mega theory on the American. Yeah so this is this is the rabbit hole that I've entered round so said this law he's medium size first law he's not enormous he's obviously fully grown. But he has his clue is close to finding pictures he has three fingers and a thumb claw so the minimum he's got four. The land is four fingers now the problem is I went through like trying to find images and information about the hand structure of of extinct slots and it was it was pretty tricky I'll put it that way but size wise he fits megalonics which is a very common widespread. Mid sized ground sloth found from Alaska down to sort of Mesoamerica but megalonics has four fingers and a thumb so it can't be that. Also size wise he kind of fits not their theory ops which is another kind of mid sized North American ground sloth but they were the only have two fingers and possibly a thumb. So we're I mean we're the sloths fingers side is not something that is constant among the family even constant in the genus so for instance I was quite shocked to find the area theorem which is one of the biggest. Genera grants loss these guys were super big and some of the species have. Like a room a theorem lori already has two fingers and a thumb whereas a room a theorem you my grand has four fingers and a thumb so I mean that's crazy that's like you know if. Let's think like a dog or a wolf had four fingers and a kyote had two fingers mean that would that be really weird I think anyway the ones I find that did fit where megatherium is right in terms of finger size so they they have. Megatherium American has three fingers and a thumb so that fits with said but it's just much too big megatherium is almost as big as a room a theorem. So we're talking kind of you know elephant to giraffe size which is definitely not what said is. I can't yeah the one species that does fit is power my lead on. I've been able to figure out so power my lead on has three fingers and a thumb it's mid size it's found in the Americas but yeah it does I don't know unless I've it has any. Better in the me that's that's where I got stuck power my lead on. That sounds reasonable to me and it's a slot but my lead ons do get large you know it they got to be about the size of a cow a lot of things it's. The diminutive compared to all of those cool so in terms of size I think you're you're right that's about the size of not with theriops which were about the size of black bears. Or people so not terribly large but you have the problem with the digits that yeah so that was frustrating. Well okay so based on context they have willy mammoth megatherium and smile it on right at the beginning so I think they're calling said the megatherium but they do have a few other. Sloths later on this list including half a lops and megalonics and you mentioned megalonics did you mention half a lops. No haplops I think is the is the dwarf slot because haplops are only like three feet long so they might be the cult of said sloth. I'm not sure what the list means here because I didn't think I saw any sloths other than Sid and the the female equivalent and then the small ones so was there a third kind of sloth actually in the movie that anybody noticed. No but there might be one that's just like in the crowd that we wouldn't notice right. Mm-hmm maybe I'm just going to say this is not a perfect definitive list following that we have Chronopio which is supposed to be Scrat except that on our last episode we called Scrat a where did I have this open. Pseudotherium are Argentinists so what do we think about that I think they both fit the description I don't think Scrat's like a real thing and they're both from the Mesozoic I think. Yeah as we talked about last time when they made the movie Scrat was just a fictional saber tooth squirrel but then they later found things that looked kind of like a saber tooth rodent and so they sort of retconned it so. Scrat is obviously not supposed to be based on anything in 2006 when this was made but we can find things that's kind of fit. Yeah shoehorn and I would say that I think our identification is better like Chronopio just looking at the at the skull outline it doesn't look very scrap like where a pseudotherium does that kind of long thin with the two saber tooth right at the right at the edge of the upper jaw. That sort of looks quite a lot like pseudotherium to me. Yeah I can buy that. So we will say Scrat is pseudotherium next on the list we have Alpha Dawn I think that is supposed to be the possums. Yeah Alpha Dawns are these things called Meditharians it's the larger group that marsupials belong to and they lived in the lake. Cretaceous and they go extinct at KPG when the asteroid hits. So again a very inachronistic. Be sure he's here yeah and I mean it could be that the the it was a crash and eddy that the guys in the film they look just like. Modern north american opossums don't they they play dead like north american opossums and they discovered recently interesting fact is that the north american guys are called opossums. Whereas the Australian guys are possums and although they're both marsupials they're very different in terms of their ancestry. So don't call the north american once possums. They do call them possums in the movie and I think we settled last time that despite the global mix of animals we're probably looking at north america for the setting of these movies right. Yeah. Seems plausible there's a bunch of things here that are only found in the america's things like sinus speris which is a photo spread from my scene. It's a strange deer like thing with uh with the horn coming off of its snout and anc where like things. And the the clip to dance and the sloths which are only in the anteater as well I guess yeah. Okay on this list we have the next one only says giant armadillo it doesn't give us a genus and species but I'm pretty sure this is referring to that snake oil salesman does anybody know exactly what he's supposed to be. I think there's a few options it could be um dasipus bellas which is the beautiful armadillo which is like just a bigger version of some of the armadillas that there are around just now or I mean could you be a pampathyr. Which is going to be a pampathyr they're quite large but then you also have giant armadillas around which are also pretty huge. But he has he's able to curl himself into a ball which makes him definitely an armadillo rather than a clip to done I guess yeah. Some uh behind the scenes for the listeners here at the end of this episode when i'm editing it to write the show notes i'm going to have to listen over and over for every one of these fucking names. To see if i can find a web page for it figure out how to spell these names that we're saying all out. I kind of try and google them when I can but then some of them like I can't I'm not going to try and spell it. Yeah if you want to pampathyr look up whole nesena okay. Then you get a bunch of those down here in Florida. Uh so everybody check out the show notes because i'm going to have a link to hopefully every single animal we talk about because I know this is a podcast and you can't see what any of these are this isn't necessarily the best medium for discussing all these different species that you've never heard of before. Everyone's heard of home zina what are you talking about Josh. I don't know to make the listener feel better i haven't heard of most of these either so. Okay uh on list we have next art vark which gives the genus and species name orictus afro that's probably just the modern version i guess yeah that's. I don't think that's an artwork though i think it's an anteater in the film which is what they're calling an art vark if you look at the coloration it looks way more like an anteater than the tail as well looks like an anteater. One of the uh goofs that you can find written about this movie when you're looking for that kind of thing is that the. Antieter is depicted as having a mouth underneath its snout with the nose at the tip but anteaters have a tiny little mouth at the tip of their snout so i think what happens is the. Antieter has its nose in the water but it's breathing through its mouth in the air or something like that but anteaters that have that long tiny snout and the mouth is only at the end of it they don't have a large mouth underneath because they. Only need a small mouth for eating ants okay the next two on the list uh are the two sea creatures that come frozen come out of the ice when the ice melts. They have character names even though they're never spoken in the movie they're named Cretaceous and maelstrom i don't think anybody speaks those in the movie right now. There's a lot of discussion online about what these two guys are but generally uh most sources say that Cretaceous this is the. Fishy one with the sale on its back but also the front legs with claws. They generally say it's some sort of an ichthyosaur uh this uh list calls it a symbol spondylus uh and i think we're all going to object to that thing being called an ichthyosaur right. Yeah well yeah because ichthyosaurs didn't have hands yeah they had flippers well this thing probably is if you're just going by the morphology right so it's got this long snout it's got. Hands and paddles is this thing called hufusuchus h-u-p-e-h-s-u-c-h-u-s and it's sort of like an ichthyosaur but not quite um and they lived in china but uh cusuchus was a filter feeder. That's very interesting i haven't seen that one suggested most of the sources online that object to it being called an ichthyosaur are calling it. Metriorhynchus which is a crocodiliform. This hufusuchus looks like it's got longer front limbs and very diminutive back limbs which is close to what the one shows in the movie so that's pretty cool. Neither of them have a sale on their back though like a like a spinosaurus kind of a sale which is what it shows in the movie. One of them also it seems to have very gary-all like features which would suggest that it's a fish eater that long and then snout. It wouldn't be able to eat a mammoth or a slaw. Well yeah even in the movie the way the characters are depicted they're both about the size of many. One's a little smaller and one's a little bigger but neither of them are going to eat a mammoth right they're both aquatic things they're probably designed to catch fish that. Could fit inside their stomach and so it's a little silly that they're trying to catch Manny while he's in the water. Okay the other one according to this list is a brachalkenius which is a pliosaurid and this is what most lists call it although some more thoughtful discussions object and suggest that it is a globidens which is a mosa-saur do we have any feelings about that one? Yeah so I thought about this quite a bit I don't know why but I did it's kind of like rossa-smock slaw shake rabbit hole. Based on the shape of the skull it looks like this thing called docrosource which is a marine brach d-a-k-o-s-a-u-r-u-s and it is a fairly large brach with flippers and sharp teeth which could have taken down large game. brachalkenius has a longer snout and I've seen the actual skull of brachalkenius and it doesn't look anything like what they've shown in film. Interesting so according to Wikipedia docrosaurus is in the family metrio ryancidae which is what most people are calling the other one with the long skinny snopes so that's pretty interesting but they do have blunt faces which is what makes me think it's actually tapasauvers. Yeah this one has an unusually blunt face in the movie. Yeah okay let's run down the rest of this list we've got red-bellied piranhas in this movie that's a little strange they try and eat scrap don't they and there's acorn. Yeah it kind of seems like they're mostly after the acorn yeah oddly enough. Well I mean the piranhas are part of a mostly vegetarian grouping aren't they? The close relatives of piranhas are they called paku or something? Pakus yeah so. And our piranhas only found in South America? Yes. I guess a lot of the animals we're looking at are only found in South America too so that's not that weird. But mammoths aren't, okay we've got a platy belladon which we've already mentioned this is kind of an elephant but it's got a very we talked about these in the Skyrim video we did you call them shovel tuskers right? Is that the one? They are shovel tuskers they're probably the most extreme example of a shovel tusker because the mandible does look like a literal shovel. The way they've depicted them in the film is kind of odd they look like AT-ATs from Star Wars with the long legs and sort of the short head. I'm just kind of strange because then AT-AT was based off of the pariserotharium and not after a large elephant but beyond that bit of nerd trivia the older depictions of platy belladon had them with these short crunks that would kind of fit on top of the tusks but I don't think that's how it would work because they have to drink water and the mandible would get in the way of them doing anything like grabbing food or drinking water so they would have had to have a longer trunk. A slightly related nerd fact is that there is actually a creature in Star Wars that's based on platy belladon that isn't the AT-AT but there's a character called Ephant Mon who is one of the background aliens in Jabba's Palace and he has sort of shovel tusks and the trunk there we go we're just trying to nerd each other now. But yeah it didn't even have tusks the one in ice aged at the the platy belladon did it? They were just at the at the tip of the lower jaw which is probably what they look like in real life. It didn't have upper tusks though did it? No no it didn't have upper tusks. Now there is this this anibela don't come from china called a fanibiladon which doesn't have upper tusks but it has lower tusks so it could be that but that's a newer species that was found. Was it found since 2006? Yeah I'm pretty sure the fanibiladon was found. Okay so we have more ethereum which I believe is the tapers. They're not tapers they're elephants. Yeah they're kind of an ancestral elephant type thing. I feel like we talked about this last time I was like oh they're just tapers but they're not tapers they're more ethereum. And they probably didn't have trunks so there's this thing about animals with trunks is that their nostrils have people all the way back on top of their skulls and the nostrils of my earth are the tips of their snouts. Like what you might see in the dog or a cat which would imply that they that they didn't have long. We've got Brontotherium or megasarops which is sort of a rhino with a with a U-shaped horn on the tip of its nose. We only saw I think some of the kids at the beginning were these things right? I think there's more of them in the first film. There's quite a few yeah yeah. Brontotherios. We have it's calling it a megaloceros giganteus which is the the giant deer or the irish elk but the the antlers on this one were not palmates like you'd expect. They were very slender right? So Ross you're shaking your head is it something else? It's everything else. This is the one that I sort of thought it might be one of the protoceritids which are deer like and have that weird kind of horn on the nose but they don't have much of a kind of antler. They're not very antlery so it's maybe just a kind of extrapolation from that. Yeah that's what I thought as well. It's definitely not megaloceros. It's not a giant deer. Okay we've got Gliptodon which is like the big mammal turtle. This one featured pretty prominently because one of them actually got eaten by the sea creatures which is possibly one of the only times an animal actually dies in the ice age movies. They die all the time. We have macrochenia. We talked about them a lot last time. They're kind of like camels with a little bit of a trunk the way they're depicted here but my girlfriend thought they were dinosaurs in this movie. So here's this this thing with macrochenia there might actually be cavar from macrochenia. There was this giant wall of cavar that they found in the Amazon which shows ground sloths and things that might be macrochenia with a trunk. And that's really new isn't it? That's only in the past couple of years that they found that so that's pretty exciting. Let me see if I can find what it's called because I did tweet out a link about it the other day. These macrochenia are strange that they've got their nostrils on top their skulls which would imply that they don't have trunks but this war suggests that they've had a trunk. So what would the trunk be for if they didn't have nostrils? Their skulls are really weird. They kind of look like whale skulls but their nostrils right on the top. But they don't seem to have the muscle attachment points for much of a trunk. So the pallyard of them and they're kind of walking with the BBC adaptation they gave them trunks but I've seen them with kind of like fleshy airbags on the top and all sorts of weird things. They were just weird. I mean I've found that the site is called Serenia de la Lindosa this huge Amazon cave art site and it's really really cool. There's a lot of work gone with it just now I think but if it can be dated properly then not just macrochenia and giant sloths but also native horses so like some of the extinct forms of horse that lived in the Americas like Epidion perhaps or Equis Neo-Jes things like that. There's all sorts of really interesting art on here and we don't have the kind of or if we did have it hasn't survived. The art that we were lucky enough within the old worlds like in Africa, Asia, Europe, of extinct species there's quite a lot of art but the Americas there's like a couple of bit supportable art that have been found but no kind of rock art so yeah it's really exciting. I think there's also a hunting senior on this cave wall right where you find a hunting ground sloth? Yeah yeah so the one there's like it's shown beside it's one of the enormous sloths so it must be like erymotherium or megatherium with young beside a whole bunch of people that are kind of they're not they're not petting it put it that way. Next on the list we have a teratornis which I believe is the vultures. We have a chalecotherium which it's prominently featured farting into a log for some reason that thing was pretty interesting to me I don't know anything about that can you tell me about that thing? Yeah so those things are related to horses and rhinos it sort of looks like a strange log child with a brown sloth and a gorilla and a horse. They've done these long overseas snouts and they're actually quite common in the Americas and I'm not sure and in Africa and China as well and they persist all the way to the middle Pleistocene in China which is quite interesting but some of them walked under their knuckles some of them walked just on their on their hands but they had claws and they could like pull their paws back. They're gonna walk on their palms fairly strange animal. I guess like the like antitures and some of the ground sloths they can sort of knuckle walk that protects their claws from getting blunted on the ground. Yeah it really does look like a fictional animal it doesn't look like a real animal at all. No even this call. There's one with a dome head that was found in North America. Weird. It's called Tylocathlonics. Tylocathlonics. Yep. And what was that dome for? Who knows I mean my interpretation of absurd things coming out of animals heads is that it's for sex. Mine is bigger than yours. It's like human chin. Yeah. Those sexy, sexy chins. Okay we're almost to the end of this list. We have Baptornus which is some kind of aquatic bird I think. Yeah that's the one sort of dive. I assume they were Pelagornus or some other kind of Cretaceous flightless bird. But yeah whatever. There's a giant beaver Castoroidy's Ohioensis but that doesn't have a horn on its nose like this one did. And it's also huge it's like the size of a bear whereas those ones are all bear sized. Is this something else? I think the ones in the films are the Myla Galleins. They're the horn. I didn't get it like Castoroidy's. Yeah. But Castoroidy's would have looked like a giant musk rat because it didn't have a flat beaver like tail kind of had like a long rat like tail. And the one in the movie had a flat tail right? Yeah. Which the myla Galleins also don't have so I don't know. I feel like a lot of this is artistic license. Moving on the list we've got a musk ox, Ovibas muskatus. I think that's the the modern musk ox. That is the modern musk ox. I think this one looks more like botherium which is the extinct kind. It's also a very fun name to say. We have a Gastornus which are the large flight flightless birds. We have a couple I mentioned already Hapalops and Megalanix. And we've got Emphychinus which is some type of hedgehog I believe. Is that an extinct one? I think it is. But there are lots of modern hedgehogs so it could be anything. There's a dung beetle Scarabaeus zembezianus which I guess is probably the extant one. And finally we have Cyndiocerus which is a deer with a nose horn. I think Ross you are identifying it as something else. The deer with the nose horn. Well the protocerata day is the family that Cyndiocerus belongs to. So that's all the list here. It's not complete. This list is not complete because there were dodos in the movie which they are not including on this list. So I don't know if there's anything else that was in the movie that was missed on this list. Rather's cuckulatus. That's the binomial for dodos if you want to drop that down at home. There's apparently only one piece of artwork of the dodo that was made while the artist actually saw the bird. It was made by a painter in a Mughal court because there was a Mughal king who had a dodo in his menagerie and is this old Indian miniature painting which shows what the birds would have actually looked like. Everything else is based off of sailors accounts. I'm going to argue be there. There are some that are not just off. Let me just get my sources. Here we go. It's just got a pile of books on this behind you. I've got other ones about just about the dodo as well. Let me just make myself seem a bit more and there we go and that one as well. Lovely consult my dodo books but I think there's definitely other ones that were taken of recently killed birds and other ones of like crude but done from life from people in Mauritius. So I'll just find some for you just now. But I know the one that you're talking about I bet that that's a really beautiful image that the one from the Emperor's court because at that time dodos were so weird that they were given to whole munchs of important people just to kind of carry favor with them. And a dodo for those of you who don't know is a giant flightless pigeon. Yeah. So here's some from a ship's log that's done from life or recently dead. It's quite well done quite natural looking. It looks far more athletic than the other depictions. Here's some other kind of ones from the same journal of sort of living or recently dead. I'm aware that this is not fantastic. This is a great podcast. Yes, but that's the image that I've been talking about right there. Oh yeah, beautiful. Yeah. I'll see if I can find copies of these online that I can link in the show notes. They're quite commonly available online so it should be able to find them. But how do you feel about the white dodo loss? I mean, it's almost certain. You think it's just a solitaire? I think it could be just, I'll be no dino. I'll be no dodo because I mean that's something that happens fairly calmly in birds and also in other records of extinct birds that had kind of white worms as well. Certainly in the in the masquerines, there's other. The dodo is just on Mauritius. Then you've got the solitaire on Rodriguez, which is related but quite distantly. And the white dodo is sort of talked about, but I mean, it could be a bunch of things. Could have just been a badly prepped bleached dodo skin could be all sorts of things. And yeah, with sort of 400 years of time, it's going to be difficult to sort it right now. That was a comprehensive exam question for me from the PhD committee. That was the let's see if we can stump him in question. Holy cow. That's nasty. Now here's another one. How did you answer it? I actually anticipated that because one of my committee members I talked about it. And so I read up on the white dodo. Beautiful. That's another one. That one's probably from life. That's such a random question to ask. Like your PhD wasn't on dodos, was it? No, but it was on extinct megafauna. I guess they kind of wanted to ask about quittery extinctions elsewhere and see if I knew about birds in addition to mammals. That's pretty tough. You don't have to be an expert on everything to get your PhD. Yeah. It's true. You just have to have done a good dissertation. Right. Yeah. Well, that was the qualifying exam question that wasn't in final PhD defense or anything. It was mostly a fun question at the end of the of the quarrels where they're just trying to poke at you and see how far you can go. It's all academic hazing. Glad that. Yeah. I think I probably would have failed out as a paleontologist then. So I think those are all of the inaccuracies, right? In the film, at least in terms of the show. There's no other ones. We could talk about the depiction of climate change because I found that pretty disappointing in this one. They just don't really talk about it, do they? I mean, it's central to the plot and yet they really don't talk about it, right? The whole the plot is that the ice is melting and it's going to cause a flood that's going to kill everybody. And then many denies it at first. He's a climate change denier. And then somehow is convinced. I'm not sure how. But he saw evidence. So that's a good thing. Yeah, I guess so. An empirical mammoth. And then they don't really talk about it at all until Sid meets all the other sloths who worship him as the fire king because he knows how to make fire, which by the way, this whole Sid fire king subplot completely incidental to the plot and you could take it out and not lose anything. Now, this is I don't I don't know if we want to get into it until right at the end. But I hated this movie. This was one of the worst movies we've ever seen. You could cut an hour out of this movie without losing any of any of the plot. I was so bored by this movie absolutely is like a notch above neander gin. One of the worst movies we've ever watched. I can't disagree. I mean, it's disappointing, especially because the first one's so good. Yeah. And there it's it's you know, it's disappointing, but it's not it's not as bad as the movies we've watched. Sorry, go and rest. This movie has a 6.8 out of 10 on IMDB, which baffles me. It's like I didn't particularly like the first one, which I know is something we got into on the the first episode. But compared to this one, that first one was a perfectly acceptable movie. This one is like there's basically no plot. The plot is running away from climate change, but then they don't even really flesh out the climate change. And then the climate change isn't enough of a bad guy. So they add in these prehistoric fish, which don't do anything plot-wise really, except that they help get the the the possum mammoth out of a trap at the end. Because Manny uses them, he manipulates them, but like he could find another way to do that. And then the vultures are also kind of a bad guy, but not really. And they also don't do anything. They have a whole musical number singing a song, which by the way, I hate it's that food glorious food from some musical cannot stand that song. I don't know why it shows up in so many places because I hate that song just like musically. I just so so you cut out on also the really amped up scratch in this movie. He takes up way more screen time, which I don't find that interesting. So cut out scrap, cut out the vultures and their musical number, cut out the prehistoric fish, cut out the subplot with subplot is generous here, the the fire king thing with the sit and the other slots. If you cut all that out, you've got a half an hour worth a movie. And yeah, I was so bored by this movie. Well, how did I get into this? We're talking about climate change. The only reason we find out how climate change is happening is because they're going to sacrifice Sid to a volcano because they're like the volcanoes are causing the ice to melt and like that's not this is not helpful to anybody. Children can understand a little bit of nuance. I know it's a children's movie. But you know, if you tell them that climate change is happening because of volcanoes, then how are they going to understand climate change that's really happening in the world, which is obviously what this is about, right? So like you could you could you could do a little bit more nuance in that I feel I feel like saying, Oh, volcanoes are hot. They're melting the ice. It was just really lazy in terms of, you know, putting any real moral into this movie, right? Yeah, it's bad. I mean, I watched this on 1.5 times speed, which is always my kind of metric for whether it's a good film or not. And I knew it was a bad film already because I've been so disappointed seeing it in the cinema. And yeah, they don't really, I mean, it's not even climate change. It's just local flooding that they're worried about. Yeah, but it does sound like including food glorious food in the musical number kind of tipped you over the edge. It's going to be in his manifesto. Yeah, I was totally tuned out for that montage. I don't know if anything important happened while they were listening. I was I was just yelling at my girlfriend beside me that whole time. I completely stopped watching the movie. But it's just it's another one of those walking films where it's just they go on a on a walk for reasons. And we've seen so many times on our kind of bingo card of prehistoric tropes. But yeah, it's really boring. It is not it's the worst of the Ice Age movies. I give you that. But it's not as bad as a lot of the movies we've had to watch. Wait, is it is it worse than three? Because three was pretty bad. I laughed more at three. It did have a big primate in it. Yeah, for me, it's just about the jokes. I I didn't think most of the jokes. There are a few good laughs, but not very funny. Ice Age two. Just a couple of good ones. Like I like when Eddie and Chase wake up and it's flooding and one of them's like, I told you not to drink before going to bed. Yeah, that was a good one. That was funny. The other thing is at the end, the plot and the climate change message is totally undercut because like throughout the whole movie, we're like, you're in a bowl, an ice bowl, and it's going to flood and you have to get to a boat. And I'm like, okay, great. What's going to happen at the end of this? The bowl is going to flood and then they're going to be in the middle of a vast ocean with no land. So how are they going to get out of that? So they get to the boat. The flood happens. All the animals are on the boat, which is a absurdly large tree bark. Like we I was going to try and do some math, but I ran out of time to try and figure out if this tree was even remotely biologically possible. I don't think so. I think it's possible in Tolkien's universe. Yeah, it's a tree large enough to hold all of the megafauna in the entire valley, right? Mozark. So they get on the tree. The flood happens. The tree floats in the water for a bit, but then the ice cracks and the water drains out immediately. And then they go back to the land they were already on. And like, that's not how climate change is going to work because it's going to be a permanent change that we have to adapt to. The movie totally undercuts that climate change message, but also the threat of the entire movie, because I thought they were in a bowl that was going to flood. But apparently there's only an ocean on one side. And I guess the whole thing slopes downhill or something. And so that it can just drain through and out the other side. And I guess that entire ocean drained directly through their valley out the other side and then it was totally gone. Like it destroyed the stakes that the stakes of the movie were huge all the way through until at the end when they're just gone. And so I mean, like I said, I really hated this movie. In a way, though, that kind of, to my mind, makes it more realistic. What they've done is they're sort of downplaying the threat. And then they're watching it kind of just move on to be somebody else's problem that strikes me as quite realistic. In terms of the way climate change is actually being approached. Ignore it and then hope that it'll siphon off and become somebody else's problem. That's the economic solution, right? Yeah. Future people will be wealthier and more equipped to deal with the problems. Absolutely. And it's scratch. The capitalist pursuing grafting to get more nuts that actually solves a problem. Okay. There's so many problems with this movie that we didn't even discuss because they're not even worth mentioning. But now that you mentioned capitalism, the snake oil salesman is selling snorkels at the beginning to say, for what? What are they paying for these snorkels with? They don't have a money economy. What is he selling? How can he be selling something? Animals don't have money. That's not a dress. What was he even doing? I'm sorry, man. I think, yeah, food glorious food has really, yeah, it's done a number on you. Animals can't talk. They're bartering in English. Josh, to me, what do you want? He was not this angry. Can't talk. This is a thing we see in all these movies is all the good animals can talk. Why can't the Cretaceous and Jurassic sea monsters talk? They don't have words. Why can't they talk? Even Diego, the former predator, could talk. But why can't the bad guy animals talk? That's something we see in a lot of these animated movies, though. Maybe they just don't want to. Prison and ice, when language is invented, that's why. We've watched some horrible movies chosen by Josh, and he's just always like, "Oh, yeah, it was not good." And then I say to you, he just rages. Something breaks. It's like a damn burst. The vitriol is coming at. We are very few movies that we've watched. That I would rank below this one. Neandergente is worse. I mean, there's a lot of the old between the '60s and the '80s, which are just sort of a meandering quest like this one also is, right? They're kind of boring, but they didn't make me angry the way this one did. Clearly. Coming back to the frozen lizard, I'm sure y'all have talked about this in the past. You can't freeze things in chunks of ice. You can't freeze things from the mesozoic in chunks of ice because the ice didn't exist. It didn't exist in Antarctica until 30 million years ago, it didn't exist in the Northern Hemisphere until a couple of million years ago. Yeah, I think we talked about that in the first Ice Age episode, too, because there's the Tyrannosaurus, but there is no period of time. There's no place on Earth where there could have been ice that was solid ice from dinosaur times to the present times or until the Ice Age. Also, if you've seen what happens to your meat in the freezer, that was exactly what happened all over these things in the ice. Yeah, I mean, you see even the sort of plasticine mummies of things that have been in the permafrost, they are not good. They are kind of all messed up and definitely are not coming back to life. There is a woolly rhino mummy discovered just this week by some gold miners. Even as a zombie, is that thing going to come back to life because it is messed up? We've even watched a movie about a zombie mammoth that came back to life from the ice, and Josh was not that angry about it. Well, it was possessed by an alien. So, that made total sense. I mean, it's kind of a common team, right? So, Ensigno Man has Brandon Frazier locked in a muck of ice, and they've fallen out. It's definitely on our bingo card. Yeah, we didn't really do bingo for this one, but it's definitely, we play a bingo game where we check off all the tropes that show up in all of our movies. Frozen in Ice is a huge trope for Ice Age or caveman movies. Going on a quest? Or a place, or biodegraders, animals? Out of time animals? Yeah, it definitely checks off a few of the bingo things. Something else that annoyed me was when these reptiles eat the glitched on. They kind of suck it out like turtles, but that's not how a glitched on works. It's got a carapace, but it doesn't have a classroom. You can just go through the belly if you want to. I don't think it's a very good point. That's always done with turtles as well, but the turtles shell is its ribs. Yeah. Same as the gliptadont. The backbone is the gliptadont. It's huge. It's almost as if they were taking liberties with anatomy. I mean, it's disgraceful. Well, you guys know how I feel about this one. Do you have anything else to say about it? Yeah, it's not as bad as you make it out to be, but it's just not very good. It's a cartoon is fine. It's for kids. Just switch off your mind and enjoy a sloth that has the power of fire. You know what we didn't mention is there's a kind of a good, I'm not going to say feminist because there's only one female character in the entire movie. But there's this whole plot where Manny thinks that he's his species is extinct and then he meets a female mammoth and he's like, everyone's telling him, oh, you can repopulate the earth. And it's like they're meant to be together because they're the last two. And he sort of fumbles his way into this conversation with her about, hey, like, oh, we're the last two. Maybe we need to get together. And she's like, no, I'm not really into you. And like, that was kind of nice because it sort of subverts that idea that you have two characters that have to they have to go together because the movie says they do, right? But then it subverts at that at the end when there's a whole herd of mammoths, they don't have to be together. They can choose any mammoth they want or she could choose a possum since she's still a possum, right? But no, they have to get together at the end because they are the main characters, right? So it almost did a really good job with a message there and then sort of undercut itself by putting them back together at the end anyway. Well, but they liked each other. Yeah. They kind of didn't like each other most of the movie. A choice on both ends, right? A lot of movies we watch. It's not necessarily a choice on for both. Well, that's true. You also liked her big buck. Yeah, especially for 2006, I know we're a lot more body positive than we were 20 years ago, but there was a lot of fat shaming in this movie, though. There was a lot of like, yeah, it's weird that there was so much fat shaming in the movie. But then I guess that's why it was a joke because she asked for a compliment and he said you have a big butt and we're like, Oh, he insulted her big butt. And then she actually thought that was a nice compliment. So I guess it was only funny because we were living in an age of fat shaming where it was subverting the expectation in that way. Not that there still isn't fat shaming in movies today, but you know, less than there was 20 years ago. Yeah. I would like a cult of sloth. Yeah. I think it would be great. It was like a bunch of tiny sloths worshiping me. Yeah. And I'm arguing to a vote to do. Yeah. You skip to the end to the part where they don't want to throw him in the volcano anymore and just do whatever he says. Okay. Physics. They throw him into a volcano and he's got some sort of a, he's tied up in a rope. He's falling the rope unwinds and catches on the wall on the way down. He unwinds and falls and bungee cords back up above the point where he fell from, above the cliff where he fell from, higher still and into the sloth effigy. You can't, you can't fall down and through the force of elasticity, spring back up higher than when you, where you started from. That annoyed me too. But you're, you're forgetting this. Well, Josh, that he's got lots of air trapped in his fur, which is getting heated by the lava, turning him into a hot air balloon. We're also in a cartoon universe here. So physics doesn't apply. Like, you're going to write a cartoon. It's bunny and the coyote and stuff. No, see, Bugs Bunny and the coyote makes it feel like a universe where the physics are different. This movie doesn't tell us that the physics are different, except when it wants us to laugh at a Bugs Bunny style joke, which is why I can't suspend my disbelief for it. There are very, they're very clear cut rules about where and when I can suspend my disbelief. And this movie breaks them. Right from the beginning, Scrat does not obey the law of physics. When he is falling off the cliffs, he's very clearly suspended in midair until he realizes he's just suspended in midair. Which is a long cartoon world, right? So it's a cartoon. Scrat is a universe set outside of the central universe of the movie. He exists in a bubble of cartoon physics outside of the movie. Well, maybe he was around an affecting Sid when he was getting thrown into the volcano. Have you all seen Space Jam? Because Michael Jordan defies the laws of elasticity in that. And he's in the normal world. He just has to listen to bugs. Yeah, it must be that cartoon bubble. He's just affected by the kind of reality distortion field that surround these other characters. Okay, I'm giving this movie a two out of ten. What are what are our other ratings for this movie? Say six. I'd go four. I'd go four as well. I think there's a lot of missed opportunities in the movie, but I like to see these animals. I like that they're weird mammals. They're on screen, which normally don't get screened in time. It is nice that they use lots of real animals. That is the one bonus to these Ice Age movies is that they're a little bit of artistic license with some extra nose horns here and there, but overall mostly real animals, which I mean, it's not like kids can really learn that much because they don't use the species names or anything, so you'd have to do our work here and go through all these one at a time and have a degrees in paleontology to figure out, but still, it is nice to see them compared to something like the crews, which really upset Ross because all the animals were entirely fictional, which was not necessary. They could have very easily used real animals that were more interesting than the fictional ones they created. But again, you could have done this with actual late Pleistocene animals from North America, and there's a whole menagerie of them that would have fit all of these categories. You could have had tapers instead of the marathairs. There are seven kinds of elephants in North America that late Pleistocene. So lots of things that you can put in. There's a stag moose, so you don't even have to use a mega-loss risk. Totally. I mean, that's what I think was better about the first one is that it seemed to have more of a sense of place. There were kind of anachronisms, but they weren't so obvious and noticeable. And there's no humans in this film as well, which also feels a bit weird. I don't think there are humans in any of the other unsage films. The first one, yeah. They found a baby in the first one, but not in the others. I thought that was the most fun part about I say one is that there's a person who's trying to interact with these animals. It's all about the people in the world. Well, Advite, do you have anything you want to plug here, social media, any projects you're working on that you want to tell people about? Well, I got a new job, so I guess I could plug that. I'm the assistant curator of Earth with paleontology in the Florida Museum of Natural History. I started in July. I'm super excited to start to build a lab, to manage my collection, and to keep working on these great extinct megafauna, especially from the southeast. We've got this great site out here in Florida called the Montbrook site, which is an elephant graveyard. I think they've brought something like 300,000 fossils out of the site, which includes things like gothathers and vineaus and horses, lots of fish, crocs, saladators, things like that, and the site keeps on giving. We have an active volunteer program here from later on in the autumn all the way through the spring until it starts to rain. If any of y'all are in Gainesville, in Florida, if you want to volunteer, come on by the Montbrook site. I don't think I've ever wanted to go to Gainesville before now, but yeah, I wanted to do that. It's really easy to dig because it's a giant sand pit so you can go through with a screwdriver or a crowd and just pull these bones out. Wow, that's a good plug. Yeah, come visit. Yeah. 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