Ep. 871: Are Birds Actually Dinosaurs?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and author, Steve Brusatte https://www.instagram.com/steve.brusatte/. Topics discussed: The Story of Birds https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-story-of-birds-steve-brusatte is out now!; Steve's other best selling books on The Rise and Reign of Mammals https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-rise-and-reign-of-the-mammals-steve-brusatte?variant=40073694543906 and The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dinosaurs-steve-brusatte?variant=40999820165154; why birds are dinosaurs; the odds of something becoming a fossil; the physical traits, adaptations, and eating habits that helped early birds survive; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 2:52Speaker 02

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• 3:04Steven Rinella?

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• 3:27Steven Rinella?

  Holy smokes, we're joined today by paleontologist and writer Steve Brusatti, who has this very popular science collection. And it started out with the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, correct?

• 3:38Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 3:39Steven Rinella?

  Big time New York Times bestseller.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  It got on the list. It was a shock. A dinosaur book on the bestseller list, which was awesome.

• 3:46Steven Rinella?

  And then the rise and reign of the mammals, which tells the story of the mammals. And then the new book out right now, The Story of Birds.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  And that's literally out like today, the day that we're taking.

• 3:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is the publication day. Yeah.

• 3:58Steven Rinella?

  Excellent. Congratulations, man.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  I'm honored to be here with you on the day the book comes out.

• 4:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got an admission to make though. And I just had to come out and say it. I haven't read the books.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Well, I'm glad you're honest.

• 4:08Steven Rinella?

  If I could touch them, though, and absorb all the knowledge, if I could touch them and absorb all the knowledge and then have that in my head, so I could be like that guy.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

  And also like dominate that end of trivia, I would absolutely do it.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of factoids and a lot of trivia in these books, but really they're pop science books and they and they're meant for everybody, you know? I'm a professor, I'm a scientist, I teach at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, along from the Midwest here in America. And I do so much academic writing for my job. These books, I like to make them accessible to everybody and to be the kind of books that when I was a teenager growing up in Illinois, out in farm country, it was really through books that I got into science and nature and conservation. And so I try to write in this sort of style that can hopefully reach kids and and reach people of all walks of life today.

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like make it approachable.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 4:57Steven Rinella?

  So you you you teach at University of Edinburgh?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Yep, that's right.

• 5:01Steven Rinella?

  You're a writer and also in your your bio, you do some of the consulting.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  On the Jurassic Park stuff.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 5:07Steven Rinella?

  And years ago, we had the paleontologist Jack Horner on.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:11Steven Rinella?

  Who who had like that same gig at a time.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  So what's that like? What's that about?

• 5:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's cool. So I've worked on the last two films after Jack retired. So I've worked on Jurassic World Dominion. That's the one that came out in 2022 with Sam Neill and Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and then Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard, you know, that storylines converged in that film. And then I worked on the the most recent one, Rebirth, which came out last summer. And that's the one with Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali. Great films, a lot of fun. I mean, my job is really just to consult on the science. I'm the paleontology consultant.

• 5:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  So I, what it is is-

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  You're not the story doctor?

• 5:49Speaker 04

  No, no, I don't. I don't write the script. I don't direct the film. I don't, you know, of course not. What it is, is that I basically just have this line of communication with the directors, with the writers, with the artists that are designing the dinosaurs. And it's a lot of phone calls, chats over Zoom, a lot of emails where they're showing me stuff as they're developing the characters and asking me questions about the real dinosaurs. And so they, you know, they do care about accuracy and realism. Of course, they're monster movies, but they they really are interested in the science. And there's always been a great science and nature and conservation message through those films. So I'm just glad that they do it. I think it's super cool that these filmmakers for, you know,

• 6:32Speaker 04

  a multi-billion dollar franchise care enough about the science that they want a scientist on board to help out.

• 6:39Steven Rinella?

  You know what connects us in a weird way? You worked on that movie. In that movie Scarlett Johansson wears an FHF chest harness,

• 6:48Speaker 04

  No kidding.

• 6:48Steven Rinella?

  Which is one of our companies, FHF Gear.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  No kidding. So is that?

• 6:51Steven Rinella?

  American made chest harnesses and she's got one on in the movie.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  That's cool. I thought you were gonna say, oh, we're both Steves and we're both from Midwest and we're both Italian American. So that's so in that, is that when is she wearing that when they're doing like the rock climbing?

• 7:03Steven Rinella?

  Never watched it. I just know it happened though.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Never read my books, never watched the films.

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  Well, yeah, like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be honest, man.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  No, that's cool. You'll have to, you'll have to watch it and see, cause that's, that's super neat. I mean, they, they're very realistic with the costumes and with the set designs. It's incredible. I mean, they, for Dominion, they had me take a lot of photos of some of our field sites where we're out collecting fossils and digging up dinosaurs. And they use those images to build this set of a dinosaur dig. And when I walked on to the, to the set, I mean, I thought I was in the Badlands. It was incredible. So the realism on, on these things is tremendous. When you have budgets of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, you can do that.

• 7:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So on, on the storybirds, let me, let me ask you this question.

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  I guess it's been over the last 10 years. I don't know. You can correct me 10 years, 12 years, 15 years or something. It's like people have started to say, like, if you're looking at, I like to hunt turkeys, right? You're looking at a wild turkey.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  And people are like, it's a dinosaur, man. You know, like it was all sudden, like this idea broke.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 8:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  That when you're, or you look at a sandhill crane, you know, and a sandhill crane walking along with his babies in tow. And it's kind of hunting around, you know, and people will be like,

• 8:22Steven Rinella?

  That that's it. Like, that is a dinosaur. They never went away. How accurate is that understanding?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  That's true. That's true. So, modern day birds are dinosaurs. And what I mean by that is they're part of the dinosaur family tree. They evolved from other dinosaurs. They're just a strange type of dinosaur that got small and evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. And they're the only dinosaur that lives on today. All the other dinosaurs died out when that asteroid smashed into the earth 66 million years ago. So, really, we need to think of birds how we think of bats. You know, what is a bat? Well, a bat is a mammal, like many of the mammals you have here. Why is it a mammal? It evolved from other mammals as part of the mammal family tree. It has hair, it feeds its babies milk, it has molar teeth, all the classic mammal stuff. But bats are

• 9:09Speaker 04

  just unusual mammals. Yes, they're different than elephants, or whales, or dogs, or cats, but they're an unusual mammal that got small, evolved wings, developed the ability to fly. Birds are the dinosaur version of that. So, when you're hunting turkeys, you're hunting dinosaurs.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  But if you took, like, would it, if you took a wild turkey now, okay, or San Hill crane, whatever the hell one you want, you take a wild turkey now, and you brought that wild turkey back to 61 million years ago, and cut that turkey loose, would it be, would it be that there was something not quite right about that turkey?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, that would be a wild experiment to do. I mean, I think that if you took a turkey, or if you took something like a cassowary, you know, those giant flightless birds from Australia with the huge claws on their feet. I mean, to me, they look like raptor dinosaurs reincarnated. I mean, and if you, you know, anybody out there listening who maybe is a bit skeptical of this dinosaur-bird connection, I mean, first of all, just like, look at a chicken, and look at the scaly foot of a chicken. It looks like a little foot of a T-Rex. And believe it or not, it was that sort of similarity, that sort of obvious, in-your-face realism of bird feet looking like, you know, dinosaur feet, that led the first scientists in the 1860s to propose the idea that birds came from dinosaurs. So, it's, it's been around, but you're right that it hasn't.

• 10:30Steven Rinella?

  It's been around since the early 2000s.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  I think it's percolated a lot more into like, public, you know, consciousness. And the reason, I think there's probably a few reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that in the mid to late 90s, the first fossils of feather-covered dinosaurs were discovered. Now, it's very hard to turn a feather into a fossil, you know, because a feather is soft. It's like skin, or hair, or muscle, you know? That stuff is hardly ever fossilized. When we find a dinosaur fossil, it's usually the bones, the teeth, the hard bits that can get buried and turned to stone and survive the rigors of millions of years. So feathers, really challenging to fossilize.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  But in China, there just so happened to be, about 125 million years ago, these volcanic fields, and occasionally they would erupt and they would bury these entire ecosystems. Kind of like when Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii.

• 11:25Steven Rinella?

  Buried all those dudes.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so you get people in Pompeii that were just like, freeze-framed.

• 11:29Steven Rinella?

  They're like mid-sens.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Yes, they're making breakfast, or like, they're walking the dog. And so it's like that with these dinosaurs, and that locked in the feathers. And this was the first time, this one in a trillion fossilization occurrence, the first time that we could see directly that, yes, a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And that really sealed the deal, because this idea that birds came from dinosaurs, it goes all the way back to the 1860s, all the way back to Charles Darwin himself, when he was writing about evolution. But it really lacked that final, you know, trump card, that final "now in the coffee".

• 12:03Steven Rinella?

  How clear are those, how clear are those feather fossils?

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Oh, they're incredible, they're beautiful. I have some images in the story of birds, of some of them.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  It shows one of those fossils.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  That shows them, and I've been really lucky.

• 12:12Steven Rinella?

  And it's like, it's just, there's no argument.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  No, it's in your face. I mean, and there's a variety of feathers. Some of the feathers are more downy, more fluffy, you know, like some birds have today, especially baby birds. Some are elaborate quill pen feathers that form giant, you know, wings on the arms, sometimes even on the legs. And they're beautiful, and I've been very, very lucky to spend a lot of time in China, working with Chinese scientists who get these fossils from the farmers. It's farmers in northeastern China. And I love this because I come from farm country, you know, and they're growing some of the same crops that they grow in Illinois. They're growing corn especially out there. And the farmers are out working the land and they're cracking open the rocks and they're finding these beautiful fossils. And I have seen, I've seen farmers bring these into

• 12:57Speaker 04

  small museums in China and they show us, you know, what this is and it's a dinosaur gloriously covered in feathers.

• 13:05Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Just like the feathers of modern birds. I mean, it is absolutely stunning. And I tell a story in, in The Story Birds and also a similar, I tell some similar stories in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs because I touch on the dinosaur-bird connection in that book. But stories of going to China, walking into one of these small museums, like opening a door, being confronted with this beautiful skeleton of a raptor dinosaur, like a velociraptor-type dinosaur, covered in feathers. I mean, it is, it is just astounding.

• 13:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because, yeah, when I was a kid, if you had a dinosaur book, everything was green and scaly.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, same here. When I was growing, like in the late 80s and early 90s, back, back home in Otto, Illinois, where I'm from, in northern Illinois, in grade school, Wallace Grade School I went to, out in the middle of the farm country, literally, in the library in town, I remember the books. I remember the dinosaur books. I wasn't that into dinosaurs as a kid. That came a bit later when I was a teenager. But I remember those books and those books, I mean, they would say things like, "We'll never know the colors of dinosaurs. It's impossible. Dinosaurs probably looks like giant, you know, overgrown crocodiles and lizards. They were probably covered in scales and were green and gray and just kind of dull and kind of plodding and kind of stupid." But that idea, that image of dinosaurs

• 14:21Speaker 04

  has really changed now. And we know that a lot of them, of course, were covered in feathers. We can even tell the colors of some of those feathers, the melanin, the pigments, the same pigments that give birds their feather colors today. We can find those fossilized and that tells us that they were brown or they were black or they were white or they were ginger or the feathers were iridescent, like a crow's feathers.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 14:42Speaker 04

  And we know that. We know a lot of dinosaurs were much more intelligent than we used to think.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, how do you know that?

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:48Steven Rinella?

  Let me preface this.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:50Steven Rinella?

  I have a, I have a 11-year-old.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  And well, not just since I've been doing this the whole time I've been a parent like we're always checking out, um, we're always checking out whatever kind of new dinosaur thing is out there. Right. Right now we're watching the dinosaurs on Netflix, which is kind of excruciatingly narrated by Morgan Freeman.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:13Steven Rinella?

  A lot of the stuff in there, man. Like I sit there, I was watching, I was watching it last night, my little boy laying in bed for bed, for bedtime. And a lot of times I'm saying to him as we're laying there, I'm like, that's bullshit, man. Like, I'm like, they don't like, how do you know that? Like,

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's good. I mean, we should be skeptical, you know,

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  Well, they have them, they have them that they constantly vocalize.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:36Steven Rinella?

  They never shut up.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:38Steven Rinella?

  So even if, even if a T-Rex comes to attack something, he growls at it. He like,

• 15:43Speaker 04

  That doesn't make sense, right?

• 15:45Steven Rinella?

  He growls on his approach. And he's like, well, how do you know? I'm like, because, because there's just things that animals are like, and animals don't perpetually vocalize.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:54Steven Rinella?

  But the biggest thing that I'm like, when I keep telling them, I'm like, I, there's a quote from my friend, I won't give the reason, I, he said this one time, I told him something. He said to me, I don't know why that's not true, but that's not true.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah.

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  When I see those giant pterodactyl things.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:15Steven Rinella?

  The proportions.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:17Steven Rinella?

  The super thin neck.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:18Steven Rinella?

  The giant head walking around on his elbows.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:22Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. But that's not right.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Uh, but that one is right. That one is right because.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Elbows, but I'm saying like the ratio of head size and neck size and wing size.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  No, it's totally weird, right? But that, so, so you're right about the vocalizations and these things. And a lot of the films and a lot of the, the dinosaur documentaries, yeah, the behaviors, we don't know.

• 16:45Steven Rinella?

  But you just said they're smart. That's why, that's why I'm jumping your case.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  So I will say, so.

• 16:48Steven Rinella?

  How, why?

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So first I'll, I'll stick, I'll stick up for the pterodactyls for just a minute. So they're totally weird. You're absolutely right. You look at one of these giant pterodactyls, which are not actually dinosaurs, by the way, they're cousins of dinosaurs.

• 17:00Steven Rinella?

  I lump them all together because they're alive together.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Super cool.

• 17:02Steven Rinella?

  I don't know because of this movie.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Well, we find fossils. So we know those proportions are correct because we find fossils of these things. One of the best fossils we ever found, my crew at the University of Edinburgh, we work all the time on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, this absolutely beautiful enchanted, majestic island off the west coast. There's Jurassic age fossils that are about 170 million years old. And one of my students, Amelia, she found a pterodactyl skeleton. So we have it all there in the rocks, the head, the neck, the wings. It has really weird proportions. So that's real.

• 17:38Steven Rinella?

  But there's like a

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Because we can see it directly.

• 17:40Steven Rinella?

  It just seems to defy a physical

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:43Steven Rinella?

  reality of

• 17:44Speaker 04

  I know. I'm with you with the pterodactyls.

• 17:46Steven Rinella?

  Again, I want to repeat, I don't know why it's not true.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  No, no. And so we also have footprints and handprints. So we can see they walk like that. That's an example of something from the fossil record.

• 17:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  That doesn't live anymore. That if we didn't have fossils, we would have no idea they existed. And we do have the fossils and the fossils show us they're weird. And the same is true with birds. So in the story of birds, I talk about some of these incredible birds that once lived that don't live anymore. Terror birds, these top hunters, top predators that stood larger than a human, had a head the size of a horse, a big hooked beak. They don't live anymore. I mean, thank God. But we would never think something as weird as that could exist if we didn't find the fossils. There were soaring birds that had wingspans of over 20 feet wide, that we, you know, like double the size of an albatross, the biggest bird today. So there's a lot of things in the fossil record that we find as fossils

• 18:40Speaker 04

  that we go, holy shit, like

• 18:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  But to circle back, things like the vocalizations, the behaviors, those are often things that we don't know directly. So on these shows and these films, A lot of that, those storylines and those behaviors are based on what modern animals do. But sometimes, you're absolutely right. People like you that know modern animals and spend a lot of time out in nature confronting animals and trying to hide from animals and trying to sneak up on animals and, and trying to, you know, protect yourself from animals. Like you know all animals behave.

• 19:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  And there are some things in those shows that, yeah, are wacky. An animal is not just going to announce itself by screaming and growling and roaring when it's hunting. I mean, come on, you don't do that when you're out hunting.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  But that's what I'm saying. So, so when you said you see signs, let me, let me, I don't want to, I want to talk about birds too.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:31Steven Rinella?

  But let me hit with another one from this, this thing I'm watching.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:34Steven Rinella?

  So this dude, there's this giant dinosaur and he comes out in the water and he catches a fish.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:40Steven Rinella?

  And then he like lays the fish on the bottom of the ocean and then he hangs out with his, with his beak open.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:47Steven Rinella?

  But he's huge.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  He says he's as tall as a giraffe or something like that.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:51Steven Rinella?

  And he's got his beak open and he waits for a shark to come grab the bait and then catches a shark and swallows it. And I'm kind of like, that, when I saw that with my boy, I'm like, come on, come on.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  I mean, that is.

• 20:03Steven Rinella?

  Well, you don't know. I'm like, they don't know.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  We don't know. We don't know. And I, you know, I should say that Netflix show, you know, it's, it's a very impressive show.

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  The, the CGI they've done. It's, it's cool. Yeah. And it's, you know, I didn't work, I work on a lot of these shows as a consultant. I didn't work on that one, but I know that the, the, um, the producers and the artists and so on, you, you use my book quite a bit, you know. They've even marketed it as like, right, the story of the rise and fall of the dinosaurs.

• 20:27Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  So, you know, and I had meetings with the producers and stuff. So I'm impressed with what they've done.

• 20:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  I think it's a, you know, a very good show. Um, but you, to, to make a show, to make something on TV, well, you know, you know what it's like to make a TV show. I mean, it has to be compelling. There has to be a storyline. Things have to be doing stuff.

• 20:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  And when it comes to these fossils, you know, we find a fossil and maybe that fossil tells us, oh my goodness, there's this weird animal with a bizarre head and neck and whatever. Okay, that animal existed. But what did it do? How did it move? What did it eat? Sometimes we might have some evidence. Sometimes the last meal is found fossilized in the. That happens sometimes. So we do sometimes get direct evidence for behaviors, but a lot of times we just don't. So we have to speculate a little bit. We have to draw parallels to modern animals. And this is more for the filmmaking again. Being a scientist is different.

• 21:22Steven Rinella?

  What tripped me out, what tripped me out when I first kind of jumped in on you on this, this

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And we get back to intelligence, by the way.

• 21:28Steven Rinella?

  You said intelligence. So, and I'm not like, of course, I mean, like, sure. I mean, of course, many of them must have been. But I'm saying like, what would you ever look at? What would you ever look at to validate that? But because it's not a crazy premise. It's, you know, like, there's all these different ways we conceptualize animal intelligence. Most people would regard an earthworm as probably not particularly bright when it comes to problem solving. You look at corvids, like crows and ravens who seem like very, very curious.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  They're feathered apes, basically.

• 22:00Steven Rinella?

  Interested in problem solving, interested in pattern recognition. So what would you ever look at to be like, there was intelligence?

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great, I'm glad you asked. It's almost like I planted the question, but I didn't because we're studying this now in my lab in Edinburgh. It's actually one of the biggest things that we're studying. And we, you know, we're paleontologists, we study fossils, but we're working with the bigger team of biologists, including biologists who study behavior in modern animals. So my, my good colleague, Matthias Osvath, and his crew in Sweden, they have a farm, Matthias and Helena is his wife, they have a farm. On their farm, they have a raven enclosure. And it's a university research facility. And so, and I write about this in the story Birds, in the last chapter, I talk about like, modern bird intelligence and cognition. And a lot of that's about their work. And they basically put the ravens through

• 22:50Speaker 04

  these exercises. They put mirrors in front of their faces. They give them stuff to make tools out of. They run these, these different scenarios where, you know, they take some food from a raven and see how it behaves and so on. So we work closely with them. We also work very closely with neurobiologists, with the people who actually study brains of modern animals. And there's so much to a brain. I mean, more than anything, just the neuron. Those those little, you know, cells, the powerhouses, the little computer chips in the brain. So we put all this evidence together and we try to understand basically as much as we can about extinct species and their intelligence and their behaviors. It is limited,

• 23:31Speaker 04

  but the the biggest direct evidence that we have from fossils is we don't get brains fossilizing usually. A brain is one of the softest, most supple parts of the body and it decays. You can run your thumb through it. Oh, yeah. And once an animal dies, I mean, the brain is one of the first things to go. But so for a dinosaur like a T. rex that's 66 million years old, I mean, you're not going to get a brain preserved as a fossil. But what you do get preserved as a fossil is the head, the skull, the bones. And the brain is inside the bones. The brain is in a brain cavity. Our brain is in a cavity in our head. So we can CAT scan fossil dinosaur skulls, the same way a medical doctor would use a CAT scanner to see inside of our bodies if maybe something

• 24:13Speaker 04

  was wrong and they wanted to, you know, check us out and see what might be happening inside. We can use the x-rays of the CT scanner to make a digital model of that brain cavity. And that's a digital model of the brain. And so that doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us how big that brain was, how big the brain was relative to the body, how big the different regions of the brains were. You know, there's the olfactory bulbs in the brain that control the sense of smell. We know a lot of mammals today, you know, have very good sense of smell and some don't. And the size of the olfactory bulbs helps control that. There's optic lobes in the brain that help control vision. We have the ears, you know, that are not part of the brain, but we can also use the CAT scanner

• 24:55Speaker 04

  to see inside the ears and see the cochlea, where the cochlea was. The cochlea, that's that thing in us that's looping and and and kind of twisted. That's what hears sound, relays sound to the brain. We know for modern animals, you know, the the length of the cochlea correlates to the range of sounds that can be heard. So I think as you can start to see, we can build up a bit of a picture. No, you know, we can't put a T. rex through a maze. We can't stick a mirror in front of a T. rex and see if it would recognize itself. But we can CAT scan a skull, we can build a digital model of the brain, we can measure The size of that brain, we can see what the regions of the brain were like. And so for something like T. Rex, that tells us it had a pretty, pretty big brain for an animal of its size, you know, it wasn't like our brain, it wasn't quite that big.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  But for an animal, a reptilian type of animal of its size, it had a pretty big brain. Brain relative to body tells us a lot about intelligence. So it was fairly intelligent for a dinosaur. Its brain had huge olfactory bulbs, huge, like off the charts for dinosaurs. So T. Rex had a really good sense of smell compared to other dinosaurs. The brain had big optic lobes, it had good eyesight. The ear had a long cochlea, it could hear well. So T. Rex was a pretty smart, very keen hunter. And, and really, you know, we think of T. Rex as this brute forced, you know, brute force and murdering dinosaur, the ultimate monster from earth history, the size of a bus, had the size of a bathtub, crushed the bones of its prey with its teeth. That's all true, but it was also really smart.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  And that's what I love about T. Rex, it had the brawn and it had the brains. And we know this from the fossils. We're not making it up. We have evidence for it.

• 26:32Steven Rinella?

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• 27:15Steven Rinella?

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• 27:42Steven Rinella?

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• 28:27Steven Rinella?

  You know, I pay a lot of attention to archaeology around Ice Age hunters in North America. And what's kind of interesting is the amount of conversations and books and things that are written about humans hunting for mammoths. But then you look at like, how many known mammoth kill sites there are? Like really sort of like, places where you have strong evidence that humans and mammoths were together at the same time is very small. Maybe as few as like 13 instances. How many, like you were just talking about T-Rex.

• 29:09Steven Rinella?

  How many T-Rex pieces?

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Ah, yes.

• 29:14Steven Rinella?

  Globally or whatever, like how many are in the mix? Like you're taking the information from what size pool of evidence?

• 29:22Speaker 04

  You're right. When it comes to fossils, normally our evidence is fairly limited. I mean, we are like detectives at a crime scene where there's maybe, you know, one hair and one fingerprint and, you know, a few threads and you were trying to reconstruct, you know, a story out of it, something plausible. And some fossils are more common than others. And you're right, with the mammoths, I talked about this in Rise and Reign of the Mammals, about the relationship between humans and giant mammals. And I'm sure we can dive into that. You know, a little bit more as well, but there are very few places where there are mammoths that have spear points, you know, from, from human hunters that are associated with the skeletons or that have cut marks on the bones. They exist, but they're not as common as you would think. And that's because it's hard.

• 30:07Steven Rinella?

  Well, some people would say they're more common than you would think.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Well, some people, yeah, I, yeah. And when it comes down to it, it's just.

• 30:12Steven Rinella?

  When it comes down to preservation.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:13Steven Rinella?

  I, I put that to, I put that to an archaeologist. I'm like, why aren't there more? He goes, my God, there's a lot.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, because I.

• 30:19Steven Rinella?

  Well, he's like 13 as a time.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which, which, when you think about the odds of any single thing becoming a fossil, like, I mean, you and me are probably never going to become a fossil. Like, we're probably not going to die and get buried in sand or mud pretty quickly and then turned into stone.

• 30:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  And then preserved for thousands or millions of years. And then, you know, some paleontologists or, or some hiker, some farmer, who knows, walks by and sees our bones sticking. I mean, that's what you need to get a fossil. And only a tiny fraction of individuals that have ever lived will ever turn into a fossil. And that's why oftentimes it's actually things like the footprints of dinosaurs that are more common than the skeletons. Cause when you think about it, you know, one individual has one skeleton, but how many footprints do we make in our lifetime?

• 31:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  So for T. rex, T. rex is one of the better known dinosaurs because it lived right at the end of the age of dinosaurs. So right before the asteroid hit, which means it's one of the most recent dinosaurs to today that has persisted, which just means there's been less time for its fossils to be eroded away. And it's found across Western North America. T. rex is only from Western North America.

• 31:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like a Rocky Mountain dinosaur.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  It is. It's, it's the, the American tyrant dinosaur from the age of dinosaurs, from the Cretaceous. And it's here in Montana, some of the best fossils of T. rex. The first fossils of T. rex were found right here in Montana in the early 1900s by the great fossil collector Barnum Brown, who was from Kansas and was, was collecting on behalf of the big natural history museum in, in New York, the American Museum of Natural History. He came out here. This, this was to, to southeastern Montana, the Hell Creek area. He found the bones of this gigantic, snarling, primeval predator. And they brought him back to New York and put him on display. And that's how T. rex got its start. And since then, some of the best fossils are found out here, but also across the border into the Dakotas.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  There are some found a bit north in Saskatchewan. And then there's some others that are found all the way south, really down to New Mexico and Texas. And there are several dozen decent fossils of T. rexes. And then, you know, thousands of individual teeth and bones and so on. Thousands of teeth and bones. Yeah, so, you know, when I've been out, I've collected with crews out here in Montana, you know, not recently. When I was a student, I really cut my teeth as a, as a paleontologist coming out here and dig at dinosaurs. Because I went to, to school in Illinois and from Illinois, nobody's ever found a dinosaur in Illinois. I think it's similar in Michigan where you're from. It's just not, doesn't have the kind of rocks, you know, to preserve dinosaur fossils, rocks of the right age. So I came out here and yeah, we'd find T. rex bones, T. rex teeth and bones of triceratops and duck billed dinosaurs and so on.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  They're actually not super rare. So we, we have a good amount of evidence. And that's what's really cool. I, I love it because we really are like detectives and we want as much evidence as possible. And yeah, of course we want to find complete skeletons. But sometimes, you know, a single tooth, a single bone can tell us something we didn't know before. And that's what makes paleontology so much fun. I mean, when we're out looking for fossils, we don't use any special tools. You know, we don't have sonar that we shoot into the rocks to see what's inside. I mean, we're, we just go out prospecting, really gold prospect. I mean, we're just out walking around seeing what's sticking out of the rock. Looking at the surface. Yeah, looking at the surface.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  And if we see something interesting, maybe it's something that's a different color, a peculiar shape, a different texture. You know, we'll go down and we'll look at it. And maybe 95% of the time it's going to be nothing, some smudge on the rock or some mineral crystal. But sometimes, like this pterodactyl we found in Scotland that I was mentioning, where our, where our student saw this. You know, she saw this interesting color, very different from the rest of the rock. She looked down and it had a shape to it. You know, it looks like there was a beak and some teeth on the side. And that turned out to be a head. Which turned out to lead to a skeleton and we dug in further and and took it out. So it's a real game of luck and chance and and circumcised. You've got to be patient, you've got to be persistent and you know, and I don't mean to be trite. Just but it is a lot like like hunting or fishing.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, you've got to go out and you've got to spend the time. You don't know what you do your homework, you know, you go to the right places where you think there are going to be fossils of the right age because they're the right kind of rocks and so on. Just like you go out fishing, you know, you go to a place where you know there are fish and maybe your friends have fish there and they're they've had, you know, good luck. But then you just got to go and do it and put in the time and a lot of time, nothing happens. You know, most of the days we actually don't find very much. But when we do, oh, my God.

• 34:52Steven Rinella?

  Gets exciting.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  Rush is incredible. And of course, we always collect fossils as part of a team. You know, nobody goes out and like digs up a brontosaurus by themselves. You know, that would be impossible. So there's great camaraderie, a great friendship on the field cruise. And that's one of the most fun things about this science. You know, this isn't being an astrophysicist where you're in front of your computer or a molecular biologist in the lab or a chemist. No offense, those are great. I've studied, you know, a lot of these sciences myself when I was, you know, in in college. And I have friends that do these sciences and it's great, but those sciences aren't for me. I like the science of being out and looking for stuff and and anybody can do it, you know? Anybody can do it. These farmers are finding fossils in China.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  There's farmers back home in Illinois that find woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. And so that's what's awesome. So if you're interested in fossils, it really is like if you're interested in hunting or fishing, just figure out wherever you live, what the laws are, who owns the land? If you need a permit or whatever, and then just go out and do it. And that's how you learn and it's so much fun.

• 35:58Steven Rinella?

  I want to um, I want to get to.

• 36:03Steven Rinella?

  With with the the Chicks Loop strike or like the asteroid impact.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:07Steven Rinella?

  That every, you know, 60 million years ago, this thing hits, kills all the dinosaurs.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:11Steven Rinella?

  Or not, right?

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:12Steven Rinella?

  I want to get to that.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  For those birds, yes.

• 36:14Steven Rinella?

  But uh, let me ask you this, though. Who? Who was that dude? It was like a dude who was working, I think in North, North Dakota or something. He's kind of a controversial figure, maybe. That was, that was feeling like he was finding.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:29Steven Rinella?

  Evidence of like the actual impact.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:34Steven Rinella?

  Or animals, animals that were killed.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:38Steven Rinella?

  In the tsunamis.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:40Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, like, like, like this freeze frame instant of when the Chicks Loop strike happened.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. That's at this site in North Dakota. They call it the Tanis site and.

• 36:50Steven Rinella?

  How much, do you buy that?

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Uh, well, so yes and no. So definitely, um, there, there are dinosaurs there. There are mammal fossils. There are a lot of fish fossils. Um, they're preserved in these, um, basically ancient river channels. And the, the age comes from very close to the end of the Cretaceous.

• 37:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Uh, and we can just tell that from the rocks. And also there are remnants at that site of like stuff that the asteroid did. So.

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there are.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, some of the deposits seem to be like, you know, these flood deposits, which okay, lots of things could cause a flood, but the asteroid would have. But the real calling card is there are these little tectites and spherules. These are these, the, the scientific terms for these things. But they're basically like little balls and little bullets of glass.

• 37:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  So it's stuff that would have been when the asteroid hit. So the asteroid hit, uh, near Cancun down in, in Mexico. Uh, which is, you know, several thousand miles from here.

• 37:44Steven Rinella?

  And that son of a bitch was like a mile wide, right?

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Oh, it was a six mile wide rock.

• 37:48Steven Rinella?

  Six mile, okay.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  A six mile wide rock, which I don't know, maybe sounds big, maybe doesn't, but that is a rock the size of Mount Everest. Yeah. It's, it's the size of the city of Edinburgh where I live. If you look on the maps, about six miles wide. And it would have been traveling. You know, more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet. And I mean, really, it was just a piece of space junk, right? It was like some leftover crumb from the formation of the solar system. And it could have gone anywhere, but it just happened to make a beeline for what is now Mexico. And it punched a hole in the face of the earth over 100 miles wide. You can still see a lot of that crater. A lot of it's covered by the water of the Gulf of Mexico, but some of it's still there on land. The force was tremendous.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  I mean, it released more energy than like a billion nuclear bombs put together. And so it did cause.

• 38:36Steven Rinella?

  People kind of argue about the angle, right?

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, people do.

• 38:38Steven Rinella?

  Did it came in on a shallow angle?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  And you know what? Honestly, that's where I lose track of things. This really gets into physics of it and you know.

• 38:45Steven Rinella?

  Because it had to do with like when that sucker hit.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:48Steven Rinella?

  What direction did it blast all that stuff?

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Exactly. And if it hit more direct or more at an angle, you know, that would have caused differences. I'm sure, I'm sure it did, but the physics of all that is a little bit beyond me. But in North Dakota, this site, there are these little spherules and tectites. And this is some of the stuff that would have been blasted up.

• 39:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  And then basically vaporized or liquefied, gone up into the atmosphere. And then, you know, what goes up must come down. Unless it would totally shoot off past gravity. And so that stuff would cool, solidify into these glass bullets and rain down. And this would have happened really all over the world, but it would have been, there would have been more of this stuff. The closer you got to ground zero and North Dakota and Montana, we're not that close to the Yucatan.

• 39:33Steven Rinella?

  It's a directional thing.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  And the direction.

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  Cause if it came in at the right angle, maybe it like blasted all that junk that way, you know?

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Right. So that's what's found at this site. And there's also some other sites in Montana where you, where you get these spherules. That tells you that this was the asteroid. And by the way, yeah, and the chemistry of these things can be studied and they basically match the chemistry of the rock that was hit in the bedrock in the Yucatan. That's how we know that these little glass bullets were from that particular asteroid impact. So the site in North Dakota, it definitely was associated somehow with the asteroid.

• 40:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  I mean, were these animals that were killed? Immediately, did they die a few weeks later? That's where it gets a bit iffy. A lot of that site is still unpublished scientifically. So it's been talked about a lot in the, in the press. It's been in the news quite a bit.

• 40:24Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 40:24Speaker 04

  But, but there hasn't been a lot of scientific research.

• 40:27Steven Rinella?

  But it's treated as controversial.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it is. It is because although we can tell that it must be close to the asteroid. If the claim is that, you know, this was formed by the asteroid, the instant, the day.

• 40:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  That's really tough because the fossil record and the, and the rock record, you know, we, we can get really good preservation stuff, but figuring out, you know, a single day 66 million years ago and having the confidence, you know, we were talking about evidence for things like it can be very consistent, very plausible with the evidence, but it's hard to find that slam dunk evidence that yes, this was formed on this day. So that's the controversy. Nobody doubts that these are very latest Cretaceous fossils. Nobody doubts that this site has something to do with the asteroid and the extinction. But the claim that, you know, this stuff was fossilized on the day, that one is what, what gets people debating. Scientists love to debate. We love to debate. Of course we do. We love to poke holes in each other's.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're so skeptical as scientists all the time about everything.

• 41:28Steven Rinella?

  If that thing hit today.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:30Steven Rinella?

  Is it, in your mind, if that hit today, is it safe to say that humans would go extinct?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  I don't know about that. I mean, like most paleontologists, like I'm much more comfortable looking at the past rather than predicting the future.

• 41:47Steven Rinella?

  But we know a lot about the climatic conditions after that. I mean, I think it's safe to say that you and me would be dead right now.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  I would have a, I know I would have a tough time.

• 41:55Steven Rinella?

  Only just because where we're sitting.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. So when the, so first of all, when that asteroid hit like 66 million years ago, that was not some normal asteroid. There's lots of asteroids buzzing around out there. Occasionally, you know, there's a meteor or something that hits the earth and usually they're pretty small. This was huge and this was the biggest asteroid to hit the earth in at least the last half a billion years. Like this was utterly terrible, bad luck, way out of the norm of earth history. And, you know, nothing can. Prepare for something like that. It's such a one in a trillion out of the blue thing. And so you had these dinosaurs like T. rex and triceratops. They were there the day the asteroid hit.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  We know their fossils go right up to the layer from these spherols and the other chemicals and stuff the asteroid left behind. They were utterly dominant. I mean, they were ruling the food web. You know, the biggest meat eaters, the biggest plant eaters, their kind had been around for over 150 million years. But now, all of a sudden, things went to chaos around them so quickly, so thoroughly, that they didn't have time to adapt. You know, the normal processes of adaptation and natural selection and genes changing a little bit through the generations. No, that can't work. I mean, you had to confront that asteroid with whatever hand of cards you had. And so 75% of all species died.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  So after that asteroid hit, your entire species had a 1 in 4 chance of surviving. It was utterly catastrophic. And it seems like the biggest thing is that if you were big, you died. And everything bigger than a husky dog died, at least that lived on the land. Didn't matter what you were. If you were a dinosaur, if you were a crocodile, whatever it was. Probably just because-

• 43:45Steven Rinella?

  Why do you think that is?

• 43:46Speaker 04

  I think it's just a matter of food. I think when the asteroid hit, it unleashed, you know, earthquakes and wildfires and tsunamis and these hurricane-force winds swept across the landscape. And then, all the dust and the dirt and the grime from the collision went up into the atmosphere. The soot, like forests across the world just spontaneously combusted. It's like a global wildfire. All that soot went into the atmosphere. And the atmosphere has currents, just like the ocean. So within really a few days or a few weeks, all that crap would have spread around the earth. And it would have blocked the sun out. And the earth would have went dark and cold. It would have been a global nuclear winter. And maybe it was just a few years long, maybe it was up to a decade or so long.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  You know, there are computer models that physicists have used to predict how long that winter would be. But plants would not have had sunlight. They couldn't make their own food. They couldn't photosynthesize. They would have died. And as the forests collapsed, you know, they took the entire ecosystems with them. And so if you were big and you needed a lot of food, I mean, there just wasn't much food on offer. If you were smaller and you didn't need to eat as much, or you could eat a wider variety of food, very omnivorous, you would have better odds to survive, probably. And that's probably in a large reason, maybe the main reason, why T. rex and triceratops died, but you had some of these small birds, and you had these small, little furry mammals,

• 45:12Speaker 04

  the ancestors of ours, that made it through the asteroid, because they were small, they could eat lots of different food, they didn't need to eat that much food, they could hide easily, they could dig burrows, they grew quickly, they reproduced quickly. That was probably the winning hand of cards to have when that asteroid hit. And if you wanted to be one of those one out of four species that survived, being small, not having to eat a lot, being able to hide, being able to grow quickly, those were probably your get out of jail free cards.

• 45:38Steven Rinella?

  What was, like, what parts of the Earth were you most likely to live? Were you most, like, where did most life forms survive, or didn't it work like that?

• 45:48Speaker 04

  It's hard to tell. There probably was some geographical component of this extinction. Obviously, anything close to ground zero to the Yucatan, I mean, not only would have died, would have vapor, I mean, literally vaporized, just like turned to ghosts. I mean, and, and the physicists have, again, computer models of this that show that maybe within, you know, a thousand miles or so of that ground zero, everything, gone.

• 46:14Steven Rinella?

  Everything gone.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  There would have been other parts of the world, I mean, you know, all things considered, the farther you were from ground zero, probably the better.

• 46:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  It does seem like from the fossil record that some of the survivors, some of the groups that then start to thrive, like some of these small mammals, which then become really big, and really start to diversify and take over the world soon after, because now the dinosaurs are gone, you know, that some of them may have come from Northern Asia.

• 46:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  That, that's one idea. It's hard to be sure of that, because the fossil record is kind of limited, but that this could have been like, you know, refugium, like some, some, you know, place where far from the, from the worst of the Of the carnage that animals could have survived and then from surviving there, once the sunlight came back, you know, they could have spread around. That probably did happen. We just don't know. We need to know more about the whole world and the fossils we have of that age happened to be concentrated in certain places as fossils often are. And some of the best fossils are from right here in Montana. We have, you know, the very last dinosaurs and the mammals that took over all the way down south to New Mexico. And that's where I've worked quite a bit with with Tom Williamson, who was just retired

• 47:24Speaker 04

  as the curator at the museum in Albuquerque. Tom and his sons, Taylor and Ryan, he they're twins and he brought them out, starting when they were like six years old and taught them how to collect fossils and they collected incredible. I talk about them in the book. I have pictures of them in the bird book because they've collected some of those important fossils of the birds that survived the asteroid. They were like 12 years old. It was incredible.

• 47:45Steven Rinella?

  What did those so tell me about what dinosaurs survived. Okay, so if we if we chase down this idea that like that that was the birth of birds.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:00Steven Rinella?

  What did they look? Who were they? Like, who were they? What did they look like? If we saw them today, would we be like, oh, a bird?

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, we would. We would. We'd recognize them immediately because they are the modern style birds. The only dinosaurs that survived the asteroid were birds that had beaks instead of teeth, that had big wings, big chest muscles. You know that when you know you're out hunting turkeys and you're cooking a turkey, all that meat in the chest that connects to that big breastbone. That is something modern birds have. Those are the airplane engines. That's what control the wings of birds. Now, turkeys, you know, don't fly particularly well, but they can fly. Birds that fly a lot, they have even bigger muscles. So beaks, big chest muscles, big wings, really lightweight skeletons, really hollow bones and really fast growth and reproduction. So

• 48:50Steven Rinella?

  Like, that's who made it?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Yes, that's who made it. And so birds today, like, it's actually really hard to see a baby bird. Like, even if you're a keen bird watcher, okay, you know, it's maybe breeding season and okay, the eggs are being laid, but you have such a narrow window to see a baby bird because they grow so quickly. From a hatchling into an adult, sometimes within a matter of days or weeks in some species.

• 49:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like it takes a trained eye, you know?

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's it's incredible. And this is all because modern style birds can grow really fast. They have really high metabolisms. They're warm blooded. So those were the only dinosaurs that survived.

• 49:23Steven Rinella?

  Why is that?

• 49:24Speaker 04

  So, of course, we we need to look at at the victims a bit to get a sense of how the victims and the survivors differed. So, of course, among the victims were things like T. rex and Triceratops and the duck billed dinosaurs and the dinosaurs with dome heads and the dinosaurs that were armored and like the the bigger dinosaurs, the classic canonical dinosaurs. They probably died because they were too big. They just couldn't get enough food. But there were also lots of other birds that were flapping and flying and fluttering around over the heads of T. rex and Triceratops on the day the asteroid hit. And most of those birds did not survive either. Some of those birds still had teeth. They still had like raptor dinosaur claws on their hands. They had long tails, basically primitive birds, like holdovers

• 50:09Speaker 04

  from the dinosaur ancestors of birds. And they all died. They all died, except for modern style birds. And so we think that it is being able to grow really fast and reproduce really fast in the modern style birds. That came in handy. I mean, if the world goes to hell and it takes you 20 years to go from a baby into an adult like it did in a T. rex, I mean, come on, you're in trouble. But if you can go from a baby to an adult within like a few weeks, okay, the generations can turn over really quickly. Of course, these birds had big wings and big flight muscles. They could fly really well, which means they could escape from localized dangers. Oh, there's a flash flood coming this way. Oh, there's a forest fire.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  And the beaks, we think are important too, because a lot of these birds that had these beaks, they could eat seeds.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Which seems kind of trivial, you know, a lot of birds today eat seeds. We just kind of think it's normal. But in fact, it's it's quite hard to subsist on a diet of seeds. It's a pretty peculiar diet. And these birds with beaks could do it. And we know that in some cases, we have the last meals preserved in the stomachs. We know that some of these early birds ate seeds. Now, when we see it in the modern world today, if there's a forest fire, if there's a volcano that obliterates an island. Stuff will grow again. And why is that? It might take a year, it might take a few years, but seeds can persist in the soil. Seeds are really hardy. And so, back when the asteroid hit, if you were the type of animal that ate part of a growing plant, you ate leaves, you ate fruits, you ate stems, or whatever, you'd be in trouble

• 51:46Speaker 04

  because the forests collapsed, the trees died, the other plants died when sunlight was shut off. But if you could eat seeds, you could eat basically the last surviving food source. It wouldn't get you through forever, but it might get you through a year, two years, three years.

• 52:00Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  And so, that could have been their get out of jail free card. But really, I like to think about it as, you know, when that asteroid hit, this was so sudden, so unexpected, totally out of the blue, just this bolt from the heavens.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Nothing had a chance to prepare for that. That's not how evolution works. So, the earth became this fickle casino. It became a game of chance. And really, you had to confront that asteroid with the hand of cards you were dealt. And some animals had just a bad hand of cards. They were big, it took them a long time to grow, they needed to eat a lot of food. But other animals had a good hand of cards. You know, the dinosaurs, like T. rex and triceratops, they had the dead man's hand. The birds, the little mammals, they could grow fast, they could eat lots of different foods, the birds could probably eat seeds with their beaks, they could hide easily, and so on. That was a winning hand of cards. It maybe didn't guarantee your survival. You're at the poker table, if you have a good hand of cards, it doesn't mean you're gonna win. Still gotta play the game.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  But, that was probably what allowed those particular dinosaurs, of all the dinosaurs, just modern style birds to survive. And, it allowed our ancestors, our tiny furry ancestors, to stare down the asteroid as well. And thank God they did, or else we wouldn't be here.

• 53:15Steven Rinella?

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• 53:58Steven Rinella?

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• 55:06Steven Rinella?

  Now, what about all those big like, those pterodactyl birds?

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 55:11Steven Rinella?

  Where they're not birds.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  They're not birds, but yeah.

• 55:13Steven Rinella?

  But they, they didn't, they, they were gone.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  Nope. They were gone. So they died with the asteroid.

• 55:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause they were, and then when you keep talking about beaks and teeth, like, think of a merganser's bill.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:23Steven Rinella?

  Is that the kind of tooth you're talking about?

• 55:25Speaker 04

  No. So no birds today have real teeth.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So they have serrated bills.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Some birds do have serrated bills, but it's the keratin of the bills that's serrated. There's some fossil birds, like these giant soaring birds that had 20 foot wingspans. They actually had bony teeth, like their, their jaws were like saw blades, but it was bone.

• 55:44Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  No birds have teeth like us that have enamel on the outside and grow from a tooth socket. But of course dinosaurs did. Now, when it, when a bird develops in the egg today. It starts to grow teeth very early on.

• 56:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  And then the beak starts to grow and that stops the teeth from developing and the teeth never develop. But some of these developmental biologists, the kind of biologists that, you know, oftentimes are looking for cures for cancer and these kinds of things, trying to understand how different genes control growth.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  They can actually make a bird grow teeth in the egg and they look like the teeth of little raptor dinosaurs. So that's some of the modern day evidence. You know, this was unknown to Darwin. Darwin and his contemporaries didn't even know what DNA was. But this is some of the modern day evidence that drives home that point that birds evolved from dinosaurs. You can make a chicken grow little dinosaur teeth in the egg. But, but they, they, no modern birds have, have teeth. They can't really grow them to completion. There's something about these little teeth that just doesn't work anymore. They start to grow, they fade away. If you make them in the lab grow, they can grow a bit, but then the bird dies in the egg.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  But they're there, the genes, these dinosaur genes are lurking in the genome of modern birds. Now, pterodactyls, he asked about pterodactyls. So pterodactyls are, they're not dinosaurs, they're not birds. They are a group of reptiles that, that flew. They're close cousins of dinosaurs. So it's fine. Most people think they're dinosaurs and, you know, it's funny and that's fine.

• 57:21Steven Rinella?

  They had like a beak structure.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  They did.

• 57:23Steven Rinella?

  That's where you get into this thing that's, that's confusing. I shouldn't say it's confusing, but I guess, I don't know. It's not the right word for it. Amazing, confusing, whatever, is that

• 57:35Steven Rinella?

  so many things can arrive at

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:37Steven Rinella?

  the same solution by different paths, like meaning a bat.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay, here's a mammal with a wing. A flying squirrel

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:45Steven Rinella?

  is somewhere in the process of developing flight.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, they don't flap their wings like a bat, so they don't have the powered flight that a bird or a bat or a pterodactyl.

• 57:55Steven Rinella?

  But he's like on his way to figuring it out.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Years or something, yeah, yeah.

• 58:00Steven Rinella?

  Or in another case, you have the structures of fish.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:03Steven Rinella?

  Fins.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:04Steven Rinella?

  But then you have marine mammals that have like fins and structures. But they all got there, these very different paths.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  Right? So when you look at those, those, like from all the kids dinosaur books and stuff, you see like the pterodactyls, like he's got a bill.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:22Steven Rinella?

  Or a beak. He flies around.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:24Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 58:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:26Steven Rinella?

  But it's just like coincidence.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's what we call convergent evolution. And it's just because if you live a certain lifestyle, let's say you fly. I mean, there's only a certain number of ways that a body can fly, especially if you're gonna flap your wings. So a bird, a bat, a pterodactyl, just basically by like the laws of physics, they're gonna end up looking somewhat similar because they're all flying. Same with swimming, you know, you're gonna swim with flippers or fins. You're not gonna swim if, you know, if you're gonna live your life in the open ocean, you're not gonna swim with the type of arm we have.

• 58:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  So evolution over time often converges, just, you know, in a sense, it's coincidentally because nothing in evolution is planned. But really, it's because of natural selection, you know, if you're gonna fine tune an animal to be an ever better swimmer or flyer or what have you. There's only certain ways that's gonna work just with the physics of motion. So you do get distant relatives often re-evolving the same features because they're living similar lifestyles. And pterosaurs, the pterodactyls, and birds are a great example, you know, they are not particularly closely related. They evolved flight independently of each other. It was actually the pterodactyls that did it first, way back in the Triassic period on the supercontinent of Pangaea, back when all the land is, was one.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  That's when pterodactyls took to the skies and they evolved a really strange type of wing that is, is not made of feathers, but is made of skin. It's like a giant sail of skin that attaches to one super long finger, the ring finger, so like ET, you know, the long finger. And it's this, this sail of skin that attaches to it. That's how they fly. Now, birds, of course, fly with wings made out of feathers. Bats fly with a skin wing, but one that attaches to the entire hand. So each of them have wings, each of them flap those wings, but each wing is subtly different. And that tells us they evolved independently. They evolved for flying, yeah. They were optimized for flying, yeah. But each one had a slightly different ancestry and that's why the wings are slightly different.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Now with the pterodactyls, then, the birds came onto the scene about 150 million years ago. That's when we have the oldest fossils of birds that still Look like they're half dinosaur. They have teeth. They have big claws. And by that time, there had already been pterodactyls for like 80 million years. So birds were interlopers in into this pterodactyl world. And then for the next, you know, many tens of millions of years, they competed. I mean, they competed for supremacy. Flying around together, yeah. Yeah. And then the asteroid came down suddenly, out of the blue. And it killed off almost all of the birds, but a few of these modern style birds with beaks and, and, you know, fast growth and so on, uh, survived. The asteroid killed off all the pterodactyls.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  We don't know why exactly. Most of those pterodactyls were bigger. And I think that probably has something to do with it. There weren't like the equivalent of pterodactyls, like all the little songbirds and so on that we have today. And some pterodactyls were were giants. So I think that's probably one of the reasons. But it could have also just been a bit of dumb luck, you know? I mean, things went to chaos. This was one bad day. Yeah. Then compounded over the days and weeks and and months. But maybe the pterosaurs just had a bad break, but they're gone. They're gone. And now birds are alone in the skies. Bats would come later from some of the mammals that survived. And that's why for the first 10 million years or so after the asteroid, birds evolved like crazy. And that's where we see the first fossils of most of the modern birds that we know. Okay.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  And that's where the DNA, when we build family trees based on DNA, because you know, this story isn't just about what fossils we happen to find. That's part of it. But we can learn so much about the history of life and evolution by basically doing like what they did on the Springer show, you know? You get the DNA, you want to know what's related to what? And you could build these family trees. That tells us, for instance, that birds are reptiles. When you build a family tree from DNA, the birds slot within the reptiles. They are right up next to crocodiles. Crocodiles are the closest living cousins of birds. So that really proves this idea that goes back to Darwin. They had no idea what DNA was back then. But along with like, you know, the, the genes in a bird that can grow teeth.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  And these are all the more modern, recent things that tell us that Darwin and his contemporaries were right, that birds really are highly modified reptiles that that came from the dinosaurs.

• 1:02:45Steven Rinella?

  How big was the biggest bird that survived that strike?

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  Probably quite small. That was probably part of it as well. We have a few fossils.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  Like bigger than a chicken or not bigger than a chicken?

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Probably smaller. So there are-

• 1:02:56Steven Rinella?

  The probably biggest bird was smaller than the chicken?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Probably so. There were other birds living then that were bigger than chickens.

• 1:03:01Steven Rinella?

  But they vanished.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  But it seems like they vanished. Now, bird fossils are rare. You know, birds have delicate bones. It's harder to turn a bird into a fossil than it is like a big T-Rex or something like that. So we're always dealing with limited evidence, but there's a few places in the world that have really good fossils of birds from right before the asteroid. One of them is in the Netherlands and in Belgium, you know, not just a bit south of where I live now. It just so happens. And there's some of the birds preserved there, and they're tiny. They have beaks, not teeth. They grew really fast. They had big flight muscles, but I mean, their heads were just maybe, you know, less than an inch. So you could have held these things in your hand. They were really small. We also have good fossils from Antarctica. And I tell this story in the book, in the story Birds, about some of my colleagues,

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  Julia Clark and Matt Lamanna, they're very adventurous paleontologists and they bring teams of themselves and their students down to Antarctica to look for fossils. And I mean, that's dedication. I do fieldwork in Scotland-

• 1:03:58Steven Rinella?

  And there's stuff down there.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's stuff down there. And there's stuff down there, and they find birds that were living within the few million years before the asteroid. And these are modern style birds. They actually are close relatives of chickens and ducks. You can tell that from the bones. We don't have the DNA, but the bones make it very clear. They have chicken and duck features of their wings and of their legs and of their heads. And they were small. So that was part of the picture too. They had beaks and could eat seeds. They could fly well, and they were small. And it seems like the survivors also lived in or near the water. They were not perching birds. They weren't nesting in the trees. The forest collapsed when the asteroid hit.

• 1:04:42Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  So living in the water helped too. So as I think we can see, it was probably just a lot of things compounded together. That gave them the better odds to survive. But from those tiny survivors, very quickly, in the next interval of time after the Cretaceous, the next interval of time is called the Paleocene. And this is when mammals really take off and you get mammals that get up to the size of cattle. You know, after 150 million years of tiny mammals living with dinosaurs, never getting bigger than a badger.

• 1:05:11Steven Rinella?

  Yes. Now, it's great, yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  And it's because T. rex is gone, Triceratops is gone. But birds do something similar and you start to see the major modern groups of birds appear as fossils. The DNA tells the same story that they were originating around that time. And this is where you get, you know, the ostrich group and the penguin group and the distant ancestors of songbirds and of, you know, hawks and eagles and so on and of everything in between. I mean, there's over 10,000 species of birds today. And a huge amount of that diversity was established really early on as these few surviving tiny birds with their beaks that could make babies and grow, you know, to an adult within years. They looked out on this world where there's no big dinosaurs anymore and the trees are starting to grow again.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  I wonder if they had it in them to feel optimistic.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  You know what?

• 1:05:59Steven Rinella?

  This seems bad, but this is gonna actually work in our favor, dude.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  Who knows? I'll tell you though, they did have pretty big brains. We can tell from the CAT scans. And so that was probably part of the picture as well, having bigger brains and higher intelligence and keener senses would have helped as well. Yeah. Be more adaptable, more resilient, you know?

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  You know what I think about when I'm thinking about all these animals from back then? Like, I always imagine, you know, if you cut a big old backstrap out of like a brontosaurus. But you know what it seems like? But those pterodactyls, man, they seem like they'd be a shitty tasting bird.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  Oh, they'd be terrible.

• 1:06:33Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't seem like it'd be the worst kind of meat on the planet.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Pterodactyl would be probably one of the worst things you can eat. There'd be hardly any meat on there. Yeah. A lot of them ate fish, so they would've been pretty disgusting as, you know, we know when we eat things that are like primarily fish.

• 1:06:44Steven Rinella?

  But if you could have, if you could know like what a dinosaur steak, like a from a, like a herbivore dinosaur steak.

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  Would be like, or if you could cook up a burger back then, would it be like, is it just like chicken now?

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Oh, I love it. You know, it's funny.

• 1:06:59Steven Rinella?

  You guys should work on.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  And I know, you know, we're talking about this because, you know, this is your, your show. This is Meat Eater Podcast. But you, you wouldn't believe it. I get asked that question quite a bit by journalists. What they would have tasted like. And I mean.

• 1:07:10Steven Rinella?

  What do you think their flesh was like?

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  So I think, so first of all, probably like animals that live today, the ones that ate plants would have tasted a lot better than the ones that ate meat. So you would probably.

• 1:07:18Steven Rinella?

  Do you think they had like red meat or do you think they had like chicken meat?

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  I don't know. So, you know, they weren't mammals. They wouldn't have had the same kind of meat as mammals. I think like, you know, ostriches and emus. Like those are probably the best comparison for what a dinosaur would be because, you know, they are dinosaurs and they're big dinosaurs.

• 1:07:36Steven Rinella?

  I sometimes picture all the meat on one of those things being like snap and turtle meat.

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, yeah, yeah. Turtle meat and, and, and like alligator is another one. So, you know, alligators and birds are the closest relatives of modern day dinosaurs. And, you know, you eat gator meat, uh, it oftentimes tastes like chicken. Now, sometimes that's because it's farmed and they, you know, feed them chickens. But generally, you know, you can get a bit even wild gator. I've had it, you know, down in Louisiana. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of chickeny is kind of poultry. So probably a lot of dinosaur would be like that. But yeah, go after the triceratops steak, the brontosaurus burger, you know, Fred Flintstone was right there.

• 1:08:14Steven Rinella?

  Watching that deal with my little boy last night, there was a scene where they, um, he kills this, this T-Rex kills this big dinosaur and he drags it home.

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  So those little kids can eat it and, um, they're snacking on it and it was real dark beef like.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Steven Rinella?

  That's another thing where I'm like, they don't know that.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  No, no, I would. And, you know, I'm not going to say they're wrong because this is getting really kind of far from the fossils. I like to try to stick as close to the fossils as I can.

• 1:08:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you got it. Makes you kind of wonder about it all though, right?

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, but truly honestly, I know it's maybe a bit of a glib thing we're talking about. One of the dinosaurs have tasted like and which steak would you want to eat?

• 1:08:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, okay, put it in a different way then. Well, like then never mind what they taste like, but like what would, you know, I mean, it's a thing you can't tell.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, we can't tell.

• 1:08:57Steven Rinella?

  Because you're saying like for a long time, we didn't have feathers and we had feathers, but like the, the qualities of. Like the qualities of flesh. We just don't know.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  All we can do there really is look at modern day birds and crocodiles and alligators as the closest relatives. And make this probability argument that a lot of dinosaurs would have had similar sort of meat. And not just meat, but you know, when it comes to organs, internal organs and tendons and ligaments and all these things that we just don't normally get as fossils. Looking at the modern animals is that are closely related to dinosaurs is our best approximation. But it's not, again, it's not slam dunk, you know, it's a guide. It gives us some, you know, degree of plausibility, but these are things we ultimately don't know, which, which I, which makes it fun.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  And with shows like that, and especially when we do the Jurassic films where we don't have to be as concerned with total scientific realism. Because they're monster movies, you know, we can have fun with some of that stuff.

• 1:09:55Steven Rinella?

  You know, another one I always wonder about in, in your guys' world is. How do you ever get a sense of population dynamics? Meaning like picture that, picture that today. You were out.

• 1:10:11Steven Rinella?

  Like, let's say you go through the big valleys around here. Okay, here and there is an eagle nest.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Steven Rinella?

  But you could feasibly spend a day looking for a bald eagle nest and not find one.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Steven Rinella?

  Here and there.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Steven Rinella?

  You'll find an osprey nest.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Like if you look really hard, you'll, you'll never, you'll probably never find, if I gave you a week during peak time. And I said, find me a hummingbird nest.

• 1:10:39Steven Rinella?

  You wouldn't find it.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but then you go to other places. Right? Like, like shoreline, rookeries and stuff. You go to other places, you'd be like, well, there's thousands of them.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  Or you go to a giant bridge and cliff swallows. It'd be like, oh no, I'm looking at hundreds of cliff swallows.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have in Scotland, we have these, you know, Gannet colonies out on some of the rocks, you know, right near Edinburgh. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, hundreds of thousands, maybe in one place. Yeah.

• 1:11:05Steven Rinella?

  So how do you ever, like, if you imagine the years. After and you have these surviving birds.

• 1:11:14Steven Rinella?

  Is there ever any way to get a sense of like population dynamics? Meaning was it that you would that you could boat down the coast for days? And not see anything and then find some little nesting colony? Right? It was that bad? Or you think it would have been that that the skies were full of thousands of them?

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  I honestly don't know. I think the fossils don't give us that information. And I I don't, I'm not saying it's impossible. I never like to say as a scientist that something is impossible to know. That's the worst thing you can say as a scientist. But I think it's it's highly unlikely. It's just the it's not like we have a snapshot of an entire community, an entire landscape with fossils.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  But they said with the stuff with mitochondrial DNA, we can start telling like, you can be like, yes, well, you can start telling like this thing came out of a population with with blank number of breeding age females.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Yep. So when you have the DNA and this and this comes into play with human evolution for sure. Because you, when you study the mitochondrial DNA of modern day humans of us, the geneticists are able to tell that the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is, you know, consistent or indicative of some kind of bottleneck. I don't remember all the details.

• 1:12:25Steven Rinella?

  Like the seven, like the seven daughters of Eve or be like Western Europeans.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:31Steven Rinella?

  I'm probably mutilating this, but it might be an old idea, but at a time.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  No, there's something.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  There was like that all Western, that Western Europeans went through a bottleneck of seven females.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  And I'm not sure because it's not my field, but I've read a lot. When I was writing the mammal book, I read a lot of this and yeah, that we might be wrong about the details, but I think that's still true, that there were definitely these bottlenecks in the evolution of Homo sapiens. And that does explain why human genetic diversity, I mean, there is a lot of genetic diversity in one sense, but really, you know, if you take you or me, or you take, you know, somebody from South America or Africa or China, I mean, our genes are really similar, really similar because of those bottlenecks. With other mammals, you can do similar things. And I've seen people do this, like with woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers to try to understand what those last populations were like at the end of the last span. of the Ice Age, you know, how many mammoths were left? Do they collapse?

• 1:13:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and you could track like you could track along and be like, these ones came from a very small dwindling population.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  And people have done that for sure with the the last surviving mammoths, as far as we know, uh, lived in Wrangle Island, this little Russian island.

• 1:13:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, dude, up till 4,000 years ago.

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  4,000 years, this, you know, it's time people are building pyramids.

• 1:13:45Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that wild?

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  It's it's nuts, you know, time back in the in the Midwest, uh, where there were, you know, great Native American tribes that were building, you know, civilization. There were still mammoths on this island, and those mammoths lived so recently that the DNA, or at least a lot of it's still there. I mean, DNA breaks down really quickly. So we don't have any T. rex DNA or any triceratops.

• 1:14:04Steven Rinella?

  So that's what you would draw, like, that's what you would need to draw.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:14:09Steven Rinella?

  Dyna- like, population dynamic stuff from.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  Have rigorous, um, a rigorous basis for that. And and and so we can't really do that with T. rex. You know, what were those populations of T. rex like before the asteroid hit? Now, I I say we can't, we can't do it in that way. There have been some ecologists that have published quite esoteric studies, um, estimating the size of T. rex populations based on how many fossils we know and how those fossils are distributed and the amount of time, but it's a statistical exercise. And the airbars on that are probably huge.

• 1:14:42Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the ballpark.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  I think so. I I don't remember the details. This is work that there's a a very eminent, um, um, more statistical minded paleontologist named Charles Marshall in in California, and he led a team that did this. And it was actually a big research paper. They published it in Science, in the premier journal about 10 years ago or so. And I think they estimate it's something like, you know, a million. I mean, I could be butchering this.

• 1:15:02Steven Rinella?

  Like a population of 1 million.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  But like a million at a time, like standing population of T. rex.

• 1:15:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Um, but, you know, and they were very upfront about the biases, but it was more of like a thought experiment, like what scientists like to do. Sometimes we're in the pub and we're sketching on the back of a napkin or something.

• 1:15:17Steven Rinella?

  It's a great thought experience. And you know what I, you know, I'll say as part of the thought experience, there's no way.

• 1:15:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, why? So what's your gut feeling?

• 1:15:25Steven Rinella?

  Why would I give that gut feeling? Cause I would just look at general large predator populations.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Steven Rinella?

  That like, like just that large predators are generally pretty scarce.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:36Steven Rinella?

  But it'd have to be like, how big? I don't know. Because the other thing you look at is carrying capacity. But we don't really probably to understand the land, the carrying capacity of the landscape.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Not really.

• 1:15:44Steven Rinella?

  Without understanding the vegetative regime.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Exactly. So there are some studies that have been published by ecologists.

• 1:15:50Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  You know, hardcore ecologists that understand the modern world. And they are kind of dabbling in dinosaurs, doing their own thought experiments, but trying to understand carrying capacity. And it's tough because yeah, the vegetation back then was very different from the vegetation today. Uh, the, the climate was different, the temperature was different. We also don't really know much about the, the, the fine, uh, details of the metabolism and the growth of these dinosaurs. We debate where they were blooded or not, you know, and it's not either or, you know, you can have degrees of, of metabolism. Uh, so all that stuff factors into carrying capacity. So it's really tricky.

• 1:16:26Steven Rinella?

  That's a tough one.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  It's really tough.

• 1:16:28Steven Rinella?

  Cause even if, with carrying capacity questions, it's like, even if you go to, you go like the oceans today.

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, and you look at the, the biomass per unit of space that comes out of, you know, stuff at like the 50th parallel versus the biomass or unit of space that comes out of sort of like the oceanic desert. You know?

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Steven Rinella?

  So you can't, I mean, they're so radically different. It's probably impossible to know. But I guess an interesting thing, we can move on from this after this question, but I guess you could look at,

• 1:17:02Steven Rinella?

  let's say you go to, to before the, the strike.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And you sort of, and you take any gap of time, right? You take a gap of time of, of a million years or five million years. And you go like, how many fossils were we generating per unit of time? And then if you go post-strike, do you wind up, do you look in the fossil record and be like, you know what? There were so few animals alive. That from sixty-six to fifty-six to forty-six million years ago, or whatever. There are no fossils, meaning because the chances of making a fossil are so slim.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  That if you had so few species left on earth, that like the fossil lottery.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:17:46Steven Rinella?

  Isn't paying off.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:17:47Steven Rinella?

  And then in some way, you might look and be like, there just really wasn't much around, you know?

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and people do this. There are paleontologists who are very statistically inclined that build these statistical models. I mean, it's actually quite similar to how people build like, you know, polls for elections or predicting the stock market. Like that kind of of of statistics, like it's quite rigorous and quite robust. But also, as we know, it's not always correct, you know, trying to predict things based on limited evidence. There is this argument that that individuals were so rare right after the asteroid.

• 1:18:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  That that's why we don't have tons of fossils, because people often ask, well, if this asteroid came down and caused this extinction on some Tuesday morning, you know, why don't you have all these bodies being preserved as fossils?

• 1:18:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  And when it comes down to it is just, yeah, the fossil lottery. I mean, to turn something into a fossil, it needs to die. It needs to be buried in sand or mud. It needs to be turned into a rock. And then that rock has to be accessible on the surface of the earth today for some scientists to walk by and see the fossils sticking out. So even at any given moment of time, even if a lot of things died at once, just the odds of any individual getting buried by sand or mud and turned into a fossil, it's low. And this is part of the, you know, the same thing when we talk about woolly mammoths. You mentioned mammoths that have been found with direct evidence for human hunting. There's not tons, or maybe some archaeologists say there actually are, but it gets down to, you know, what we expect. And even if humans are killing these mammoths

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  and leaving evidence behind spear points and projectiles and so on, just the odds of getting that stuff turned into a fossil is is low. So it is very hard. It's very hard. We can do these statistical studies and we can make predictions. But ultimately, we're dealing in this, in these cases, when we want to understand populations. It's just, it's really challenging with fossils. Again, I'm not gonna say impossible, but challenging, really challenging. And I think we need to be very skeptical as scientists anytime somebody makes a bold claim about, you know, these populations of dinosaurs were this big, or they did that, or it was this ecological reason that they collapsed. Sometimes also, let's face it, bizarre things happen.

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  The passenger pigeon is a great example of that, that went extinct. You know, the last one died in a zoo, you know, in the 1900s, really just a few decades before. There were billions of these things living across North America. And yes, they were overhunted by people in the 1800s, but also there was a genetic crash. They went through some kind of bottleneck, and I mean, it just wreaked havoc on them. They collapsed as a population. It would be very hard to know that kind of thing from fossils, not having the genetics and only having limited fossils preserved here and there. So I think we just have to be always mindful that we can learn a lot from fossils. Fossils can often tell us, oh, my God, there's this strange group of pterodactyls we would

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  never know existed if we didn't have their fossils. And they could fly, and they could grow in this particular way, and they lived in these particular places, and they fit into the family tree this way. Those are things that we can get quite readily from fossils. But, you know, details of behavior and population size and these kind of things, it's tough. So we, you know, it's like we're squinting at the heavens, looking at the stars, making constellations out of these limited, you know, limited, limited stars, trying to find patterns. But that also makes, I think it makes any science fun, honestly, when there's mysteries and there's uncertainties, and you're trying to push the evidence as far as you can go. When we're studying intelligence and cognition and extinct species, like, that's what we're doing now. Like, I'm under no illusion, I don't think we're gonna figure out, you know, how many

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  neurons there was in a brain of a T-Rex, or could a T-Rex recognize a self in a mirror? You know, those are very specific things. But we're pushing at the boundaries, and we wanna know as much as we can know from the fossils that we have, from cats scanning them and looking at the brains and the regions of the brains and comparing to modern animals and so on. So all science is really about, you know, pushing the boundaries and knowing as much as we can know with the evidence at hand, and then trying to find new evidence to test that, to overturn that, to buff up our ideas or what have you.

• 1:22:03Steven Rinella?

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• 1:22:46Steven Rinella?

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• 1:24:10Steven Rinella?

  What's the biggest, like, if you look at you, yourself, and your own research, the research of your community?

• 1:24:19Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with, hit me with one or two of like the biggest questions you have right now. Like the, the things that, and not things that you can't answer. But things that you're optimistic, that would find an answer that sort of like professionally keep you up at night.

• 1:24:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there's a lot, you know, there is so much we don't know and we're learning more and more all the time. And we, we really are in a golden age of paleontology. People are finding more fossils than ever before, especially when it comes to dinosaurs. There's about 50 new species found a year. It's like once a week, somebody's finding a new species and it's because more people are looking.

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  I want to pause my question because I forgot to ask you a question preceding this.

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:24:56Steven Rinella?

  That I thought of earlier. So hold that.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  Okay. I'll hold that thought.

• 1:24:59Steven Rinella?

  But, but it's, it's, it's, it's buddies with that question.

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  Okay. So.

• 1:25:03Steven Rinella?

  Is it, is, here's the question.

• 1:25:06Steven Rinella?

  Is it, would it ever, are fossils ever of such value that, that people would industrial scale surface mine for fossils? Or is that, because you said it's like looking at the surface or people luck into it. Are there any cases where like, like engineers, industrial scale, surface mining, strip mining for fossils?

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  With things like coal. Okay. Coal's a fossil. It's fossilized wood basically from trees. And of course, that's been industrially mined forever because it has economic.

• 1:25:42Steven Rinella?

  Targeting fossils.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  No. So, so there are other things. I mean, oil comes from ancient organisms and there's, you know, ancient sea plankton formed chalk and formed, you know, the diatomus earth that's used. So, so there's economics, various things that we use economically that have huge outsized importance in our world and our economies are actually fossils. But I know that's not where you're at. You're asking if, you know, industrially you'd strip mine a whole area to find the T. rexes or something like that. And the answer is not really, at least not yet. It recently, there have been a lot of these auctions of fossil dinosaur skeletons. And some of them are bringing pretty big prices.

• 1:26:22Steven Rinella?

  Like coming out of Mongolia and stuff.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. The Mongolia ones are tricky because that's illegal. So there's a black market there, but the one. Ones that and you do see some of these up for auction sometimes and those are seized oftentimes by the government either either here or in Mongolia. But if you find a fossil here in the US, I mean, if it's on your land, you do what you want with it, right? I mean, this is this is our culture. And so, you know, traditionally, a lot of ranchers here out west, you know, scientists would say, I want to look in your land and we're looking for dinosaur bones. And, you know, sometimes people would say, no, of course, but a lot of times people would say, yeah, go out, you know, it's we got all these acres and these are just bones to put in the museum. And that's great. It's been wonderful. I mean, I know, you know, so many of my colleagues have discovered amazing fossils because they built these relationships with ranchers out here and across the west.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  Things are changing a bit, though, because some of these fossils are being put up for auction and going for $30 million, $40 million. This stegosaurus went for over $40 million. So of course, if this is your land and there's some fossils on there, even if you like the scientist, if you have a chance to make 40 million bucks from a fossil, of course.

• 1:27:27Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm saying. You would like that you would that you would, the same way people prospect for gold, you would prospect for that stuff.

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  And so there are commercial fossil hunting outfits, and they're quite common here out in the American West that go out and look for fossils and there's so they can sell them. And there are ranchers that buy ranchland, not for their cattle, they might use it for their cattle as well, but because it's land that has the right kind of rocks to find fossils. So there is a market for this. There definitely is a market for this, which, you know, has its pluses and minuses. As an academic scientist, you know, I hated if there's a fossil that's so important and so beautiful and it would be so good at a museum and it would be so good at inspiring people and educating kids if that disappears into some rich guy's vault, you know. But at the same time, look, this is law. We're not going to change. Nobody wants to change the law

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  and have the government here like seize a fossil from your land. So that is the economic reality. But it's not industrial scale. It just would be really hard to like strip mine an entire ranch.

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  In the hopes you might find a fossil here or there.

• 1:28:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  They're still rare enough. It's not like finding, you know, I mean, it's usually not like finding a coal seam or a vein of ore or something.

• 1:28:44Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  You know, you might find a bone bed of fossils where you have a lot of skeletons preserved together because there was a flood or something that killed a whole herd of dinosaurs. You probably could industrially mine those, but otherwise, most fossil dinosaurs at least are so random, one here, one there, one there, that it would be hard to do that.

• 1:29:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so let's get back to the question of what, what are the, what are the, not the fantastical things that you'll never know, but what are the kind of things, like the big questions you have that you could see like a pathway to answering? When you, when you look at the, the whole collection of your work, the story of the mammals, the story of the dinosaurs, the story of the birds, where are the pieces where you're like, I see how we get to there, but I don't understand how we got from there to there.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know? You know, there's a bunch, and in each one of the books, I actually kind of here and there highlight a few of them. I throw them in there because I want people reading the books to understand that we don't have all the answers. You know, I can write this, these books and I can tell you the story of dinosaurs and birds and mammals and their evolutionary trajectory and where they came from and how they changed as the world changed. And it's a nice story. It's a story backed up by evidence, by fossils, by DNA. But it doesn't mean we know every chapter in that story. There's always debates and mysteries and uncertainties, and there's so much we don't know, even though we're finding more fossils than ever before. And one of the big ones is what I'm studying now, the cognition and intelligence of dinosaurs and other extinct species.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  That's why we're doing this project with my colleagues with Matthias and Helena in Sweden and Pavel and Christina, our colleagues in Prague, who are neurobiologists. And then Larry Whitmer is a great paleontologist and Ryan Ridgely, and then our students, you know, I've, so, so my students, I'm, I'm going to shout out the names because I think it's important that, you know, you give the students the credit because they're doing the work. I got Adam Manning and Millie Mead and, and soon Fraser Weston, studying in my lab, the brain. The cognition, the intelligence of extinct species. We are pushing, like, we, we know there's a limit. We know that we're not going to be able, you know, again, to say T-Rex had this number of neurons. Mm-hmm. Or T-Rex could recognize itself in a mirror. But what we want to do is push our knowledge of dinosaur brains to the absolute limit.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  How many dinosaurs can we CT scan? How many brain models can we build? How many ones can we measure? Map this all out on the family tree. Look at the trends in brain evolution. And tie what we can see in dinosaur brains to what we see in the brains of modern mammals. And, and not just modern mammals, but, but modern birds and modern crocodiles and all kinds of modern animals. And the hope is that here and there, maybe that there's some feature of a brain, some physical feature, some lobe of a brain or something, that in modern animals, that if they have that lobe of the brain, they can do a certain behavior. And then if we identify that in a fossil, we can say, oh, that extinct species could do that, too. We know that it's kind of pie in the sky. We know that we're running up to our limits of understanding.

• 1:31:46Speaker 04

  But that's why we're doing it, because it's exciting and it's fun. And it's not just describing dusty old bones. It's trying to understand them as living animals. So that's a big one. And I highlight that in the story of birds. I talk about how we're doing this project and we're doing it now. And we don't have all the answers, but we're getting them. I mean, literally, like, you know, this morning before doing this, you know, my, my students are, they're seven hours ahead, you know, in Scotland. They're sending me updates about what they're doing this week and the things they're, they're, they're, they're learning as they're looking at CAT scans of dinosaur brains. So that's one. There's, there's a handful of others. And we don't really know why dinosaurs were able to outlast the crocodiles and the salamanders and the other creatures that were evolving around the same time as them, way back on the supercontinent of Pangaea.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  We know there was an extinction. The supercontinent broke apart. And that's why we have separate continents today. That's why South America and Africa look like two puzzle pieces. They did once fit together. The ocean now separates, of course, the continents, but back before the water rushed in, the earth would have bled lava for like 600,000 years. And this led to runaway global warming. There's tons of carbon dioxide and methane, these nasty gases heated up the atmosphere really quickly, and that caused an extinction.

• 1:33:00Steven Rinella?

  Like continental drift was faster than it is now?

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  No, it's probably, it does speed up or slow down over time, mostly based on what's happening deeper in the earth, like in the mantle of the earth, as you have these convection currents. But by and large, continents move about the speed our fingernails grow, which is slow, but over the course of millions of years, you know, that compounds and it adds up. But this extinction, we know it happened about 200 million years ago as Pangaea split. We know there was climate change. We see the effects of that in the fossil record, but also the rocks. You know, there's a lot about the carbon and oxygen signals in the rocks that can tell you things about temperature and precipitation. So we know there was this extinction. We know that before there was this extinction, there were a whole bunch

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs were pretty small for the first few tens of millions of years that there were dinosaurs. Most of them were the size of you and me. Some got up to the size of horses, some maybe to the size of a giraffe, but there was nothing like a brontosaurus, nothing like a T. rex. But the world was dominated instead by these giant salamanders the size of cars and by all kinds of crazy crocodiles, you know, not just like the crocs and gators today, but some crocs that ate plants and some that had sails on their backs and some that had beaks and some that walked only on their hind legs. And then this extinction happens as the supercontinent breaks apart and these volcanoes erupt.

• 1:34:23Steven Rinella?

  And they blink out.

• 1:34:24Speaker 04

  And they blink out. Only a few crocs survive. Those are the ancestors of modern crocs. And this is why crocs really only live in the tropics or the subtropics today. Some amphibians make it through, but not the enormous car-sized one. But dinosaurs make it through. And only after that extinction, a good 50 million years after the very first proto dinosaurs walked on Pangaea, do you get these big meat eaters and big plant eaters and the ones with horns and spikes and duckbills and dome heads and armor and so on. So we don't really know why. I mean, why did dinosaurs survive? We don't have a good explanation. It was a time of chaos, of course, and carnage and rapid change. Maybe some of it was dumb luck, but there must have been some hand of cards those dinosaurs

• 1:35:09Speaker 04

  were holding that allowed them to survive. We don't know. People have different ideas. Oh, the dinosaurs could move faster, or the dinosaurs had higher metabolism, or they grew faster, or they were smarter. I mean, maybe, maybe, but the evidence is so limited. But we will find that out. I have no doubt that we will get a good understanding of that. We just need some brilliant young paleontologists to come along with a fresh set of eyes and think about it in a new way.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  Let me back up to a quick question. How old was a old T. rex if you had to guess? How many years old?

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  Oh, like when it died? Yeah. So we can often tell with dinosaurs because dinosaur bones have growth rings in them like tree trunks. So not every bone does, but a lot of bones do, especially the ribs and the limb bones. So if we find a T. rex, we can cut it open and we can see how many growth rings there are. And we can, we can make plots, graphs, showing how they grew over a lifetime. We can count the number of growth rings and we can make an estimate for how big that T. rex was and we can make a growth curve, just like you might for a modern, you know, population of deer or turkey or what have you. It's very important for conservation to understand how the animals are growing. So T. rex is one of the better understood ones because there's actually quite a lot

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  of fossils. And what we see in the growth lines is there's barely any T. rex skeletons that have more than 30 growth lines.

• 1:36:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:36:33Speaker 04

  So, you know, I just turned 42. I would have been long dead if I was a T. rex.

• 1:36:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  And so, you know, and that's just what it was. So it lived pretty fast and died pretty young. Still, it took, though, if we look at those growth curves, it probably took about 20 years or so for a T. rex to go from a baby to a full grown adult. So that's T. rex. Other dinosaurs would have lived shorter lifespans and others would have lived longer.

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  Some have been longer, but yeah, just ballpark.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. So some of the long neck dinosaurs, you know, the huge ones. I mean, some of these things got to be bigger than Boeing 737 airplanes, heavier than a Boeing 737 airplane. We're talking 50, 60 tons, even more. Argentinosaurus, Patagatitan, they have great names. And they only probably lived to be about 50 or 60 years old. It's not that they like lived for centuries and grew a little bit every year.

• 1:37:23Steven Rinella?

  The thing I was, the thing that, this isn't a question, but it's the thing about those that blows my mind. Is like, imagine the, the habitat impact.

• 1:37:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Steven Rinella?

  Of just the feet.

• 1:37:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Steven Rinella?

  Jimmy, like you imagine, like what, like when, when an animal goes through the woods and it leaves like an observable path.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:47Steven Rinella?

  Like how Jimmy, you can't even imagine i- if you, if it went through a thicket.

• 1:37:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Steven Rinella?

  The thicket's gone.

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like you can't, you can't picture like what it's doing or how it's like occupying the landscape, like things that would seem like a barrier aren't a barrier.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Steven Rinella?

  It would just be like crushed.

• 1:38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's, it's impossible to imagine, man.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Steven Rinella?

  It's impossible to imagine.

• 1:38:09Speaker 04

  It's, it's impossible to imagine, I would say almost, because we have one line of evidence in the fossil record, and these are the footprints and the handprints that some of these dinosaurs leave behind. And in fact, in Scotland, on the Isle of Skye, where we do a lot of our work, yeah, sometimes we find a pterodactyl, sometimes we find some dinosaur bones, but most of the fossils are actually footprints. They are footprints and handprints left behind as dinosaurs were doing their thing, frolicking around on the mud flats, on the beaches, in the lagoons, back 170 million years ago, when Scotland was subtropical. And so we have some evidence. And some of these footprint sites, I mean, they are just littered with dinosaur tracks, tracks stepping over other tracks. We have tracks of long-necked dinosaurs.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  You know, these ones were probably weighed probably about 15 tons, so big, you know, three elephants put together, but not anywhere near as big as the biggest long-necked dinosaurs. These footprints are the size of car tires. I mean, every time their hand or foot touched the ground, they left a hole the size of a car tire. And, you know, there would be flocks of these things. So sometimes we, the ground is just totally chewed up, mashed up by just dinosaur footprint over dinosaur footprint. There's even, and I kid you not, there's a scientific term that geologists use to describe this kind of rock that is chaotic, chaotic rock, because you have all of this, these dinosaurs stepping in the sand and mud and messing up. It's called dino-turbation.

• 1:39:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no kidding.

• 1:39:38Speaker 04

  Yes, it is a word and it's a serious word. You see this in academic papers and it's just a rock that has been so thoroughly obliterated by the footfalls of dinosaurs that it leaves a telltale sign. So imagine, yeah, they're walking through a forest, you know, they would have left their their mark. Now, of course, I, you know, they wouldn't have just destroyed everything. I mean, no ecosystem could be in harmony. So there must have been ways that everything coexisted.

• 1:40:02Steven Rinella?

  I got two questions left. These are both going to put you in, uh, these are both going to put you in like where you have to theorize.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  Okay, then I'm gonna have a nice drink of tea, okay, to get in the mood.

• 1:40:10Steven Rinella?

  Good. Here's one. So you, after your, your whole career, you've looked at

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  all these extinction events, species that rose and vanished, okay? Based on what you've seen and based on what you know about all the different ways things have blinked out.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Steven Rinella?

  How do you think?

• 1:40:33Steven Rinella?

  Like, give me a couple. When we go.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Steven Rinella?

  When we humans go and we're done, what do you think it is?

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Well, totally speculative because I have no evidence for any of this, but it's fun to chat, yeah.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  You've looked at a lot of things that went away and you understand all these different things like, like impact strikes from asteroids.

• 1:40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Steven Rinella?

  Seismic activity, climate changes, whatever. Okay, like, what is, if you imagine, like, what is the thing that gets us?

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  I think there's a few ways it could happen. Obviously, and, and this circles back to, you know, something you were alluding to a little bit ago in the conversation. If there was a six mile wide asteroid that hit the earth, I mean, we would be in trouble.

• 1:41:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  I would think, you know, we, we, the dinosaurs didn't know that was coming. The dinosaurs didn't have an ability.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  We would know for a while.

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  We would know and we would hopefully be able to do something about it.

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever seen the movie Melancholia?

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  Uh, no, but I've seen Armageddon.

• 1:41:27Steven Rinella?

  Melancholia is the thinking man's Armageddon.

• 1:41:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll have to watch that. That'll be up for the plane ride home, maybe it's on. Um, but, uh, but if that happened, I mean, we would, it would, it would hurt us bad. It would hurt us bad. Even if we were able to, to stop and if we were able to totally stop it, fine. But if that asteroid hit us and we had to deal with it, that would be really bad. Um, I will. Never downplay the technological thing. I mean, could we kind of nuclear war ourselves to death? I mean, yeah, probably.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  Could AI get super intelligent and decide it doesn't want us anymore and wipes us out? I mean, those are getting so out there that I don't know.

• 1:42:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, because then you just start on, people would just start unplugging shit.

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Steven Rinella?

  So it's like unplug everything that you can unplug and then the problem would go away.

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I'll tell you what worries me. An asteroid doesn't really worry me because we would know that it's coming. You know, there's no volcano big enough that would just wipe us out in an instant. The AI stuff, as you say, like, there might be a dystopian future there, maybe, but you're talking about total extinction. Really? And so what worries, what worries me.

• 1:42:30Steven Rinella?

  Before we're gone, there'll be where there's just handfuls of us left here in there.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. What worries me is there could be a human population crash.

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  And what happened to the passenger pigeon might happen to us. And again, that was that bird. It was maybe the most common bird in North America.

• 1:42:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's this, there's this idea that there, there had to be a lot of them.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, there were tons.

• 1:42:50Steven Rinella?

  There was no version where there was a few.

• 1:42:51Speaker 04

  No, and exactly. And I mean, there were so many, they would block out the sun for minutes on end when a flock went by. And this is, you know, this isn't imagined. I mean, this is within recent human history. I mean, there are writers from the, the 19th century that would talk about these flocks of passengers. And yeah, and you can, you can hold, there's a lot of taxidermy specimens, you can hold them. And they, they, they were, there were so many of them. I mean, if you were around in the mid 1800s, I'm sure you would say, oh, these birds are so common. I mean, nothing would ever happen to them. But they, they not only collapsed, they, they went totally extinct and they did so within really a few decades. And it was because, yes, you know, they were overhunted and yes, land use was changing.

• 1:43:33Speaker 04

  And, and all of this prairie land, like back home where I'm from in Illinois, uh, you know, was being, uh, you know, converted to, to farmland. And there, there was runoff and pesticides and, and that all played a role. But what really did it was, it seemed that they went past some threshold and there was some genetic bottleneck. And something happened with their genes. There wasn't just enough variety anymore. They weren't reproducing enough anymore and generating new types of individuals that were more fit, that could deal with the changes. And they just crashed. They just crashed. And, and, and I'm not a geneticist, so, you know, the geneticist might understand it. And they would understand it much better than me, but it does seem like there's some kind of mystery there. Like, we know there was a crash, but.

• 1:44:13Steven Rinella?

  Pathogen, if some pathogen carried off.

• 1:44:17Steven Rinella?

  Ninety percent of humans.

• 1:44:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:19Steven Rinella?

  That's a pathogen carries off ninety percent of humans, the remaining ten percent. There's just something we don't understand and they don't thrive.

• 1:44:25Speaker 04

  And I think that is the most likely scenario, that that something, yeah, whether it's it's a virus, whether it is, I don't know, something from AI or I don't know, some aliens come down, who knows? But something decimates a lot of humans, you know, it doesn't totally kill us off, but it kills a lot. And then we have these, this constellation of different populations that aren't really meeting and reproducing and generating new genetic diversity and we just crash. And I think that is one likely scenario. Now, a good friend of mine.

• 1:44:55Steven Rinella?

  My money is on pathogens.

• 1:44:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my, so a good friend of mine, Henry G is his name, he's a senior editor at Nature, you know, the prominent scientific journal, he's a great science writer and he wrote a book called The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. So his publisher back in in the UK, we have the same publisher and editor, so we love supporting each other's books and I loved, you know, he said it to me before it was published and I read it, oh my God, and he talks about this stuff, you know, about how human populations could crash and how having little genetic diversity, you know, among these, these last remaining populations could cause us to die off. And that's getting kind of, kind of scary, but I, let me just say one thing, though, this may be a bit more general about the lesson that I take from dinosaurs.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  And that lesson really is that you can be dominant, your group can be dominant, you can be around for a hundred and fifty million years, like the T. rex and triceratops and brontosaurus dinosaurs were. You can be the top meat eaters, the top plant eaters, you can have a great diversity of species in the food chain, you can live everywhere around the world. But then if something happens where the environment changes really quickly, for them it was an asteroid, but who's to say it couldn't be maybe, not a volcano that obliterates everything, but a volcano that causes sudden climate change, or it could be the climate change that is happening now, that we just let that run wild, but that something happens and climates, environments change so quickly

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  that the dominant things don't have time to adapt and they just so happen to not be suited to this new world. And that's what I worry about a bit with humans, you know, we are incredibly successful, it's more than eight billion of us around the world, we live everywhere, but we're so recent, we're, the oldest Homo sapiens is like three hundred thousand years old.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  And. We're so well adapted to this world, this world that's coming out of an ice age, this world of pretty nice climate, you know, world of pretty clear, consistent coastlines and rivers that can be navigated and floods that can be dealt with. And as weather patterns change and climate changes, and climate always changes by the climate is always changing in the history of the earth. I mean, come on, what's happening now is, you know, it's not like this is the only time temperatures have gotten warmer. No, no, of course not. But what's happening now is it's happening very fast and it's happening to us. And so we have come up, our societies, our culture, even our physical bodies have evolved and developed in this world that we know.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  So if things change really quickly, that could put us in trouble. And there are plenty of species that are a lot older than us, that are probably better adapted, more resilient. And so that's where I start to get concerned, that simply if the pace of change is too fast, whether it's global warming, whether it's an ice age coming in, whether it's some big volcanoes, whatever it is that can change the status quo, if it does it really quickly, well, the dinosaurs tell us that even the most dominant and successful animals, if you give them a lot of change too fast, that they can quickly get on the back foot and they can be gone soon.

• 1:47:57Steven Rinella?

  You use the word concern.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Steven Rinella?

  But like, I don't feel that way.

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:48:04Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I do about my kids.

• 1:48:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:07Steven Rinella?

  Right? And I guess their kids, but you know, when I get like way out.

• 1:48:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Steven Rinella?

  I guess in a way, in the sort of geological time we're talking about, I don't find myself rooting. I don't find myself rooting for the humans of 10,000 years from now. Like, I'm not rooting for them. Maybe I should, but here's my last question. Cause your work explores all these times when you've had, as I said up earlier, explores all these, these like mass extinction events, right? Where everything gets carried off and then the earth rebuilds and things are carried off, the earth rebuilds. I like to tell my kids. I'm like, man, someday, someday, we won't be around to appreciate it.

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  But someday we're gonna be gone.

• 1:48:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:54Steven Rinella?

  And this earth is gonna be full of insane, crazy animals.

• 1:49:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:49:01Steven Rinella?

  That you can't imagine. And I don't like, I don't know who it'll be. Maybe there will be beetles. There will be beetles bigger than elephants.

• 1:49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  Who knows, right? Yeah, nobody. Yeah. How can you predict?

• 1:49:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they'll be. Go away. We'll go away and, and even if, even if there's a nuclear holocaust and we carry away all large mammals and carry away all these complex life forms, like

• 1:49:28Steven Rinella?

  at some time in the future, there will be just, the earth will be again, full of like crazy stuff. How long, like, when you look in the past, like, how long do these things take? If you look at these various times when the earth became just wiped out.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay, like the Chicksaloope strike, the earth gets like wiped out. How long is it before you'd go and be like, the earth is like kicking ass again? You know, and you got big stuff, small stuff and green stuff and.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  Usually what we see in the fossil record is that the, I mean, first of all, the earth always bounces back. And so when, when I talk about concern about modern climate change and environmental change, I'm more concerned for us.

• 1:50:11Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:50:11Speaker 04

  Our species and not just our species, but our civilization.

• 1:50:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:16Speaker 04

  The way we get on with each other. I'm more concerned with that than with the earth. The earth is gonna be fine. You know, the earth, that's not to say it's a good thing. I mean, other species will go extinct if climate changes quickly. I don't want to be flippant about it. I mean, it's much better that these things don't happen, but the earth will be fine. When the asteroid hit, 75% of all species died. I mean, there were entire zones like near the, the, the impact where everything was vaporized. I mean, that was as catastrophic as things can get. And what do we see? We see in the fossil record that at least within a few thousand years at most, you have forests again.

• 1:50:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  You see new mammals move in within a few thousand years. That's when you get the. First primates, by the way.

• 1:50:59Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:50:59Speaker 04

  Our ancestors are only there making their appearance right after the dinosaurs go extinct, but really soon after, within tens of thousands of years at most. There are fossils from right here in Montana that show that. Within a few hundred thousand years, you have all kinds of crazy new mammals, you know, mammals the size of pigs, mammals that are digging and mammals that are climbing trees. Within a million years, you got these cattle sized mammals and mammals have gone on from there. The earth can recover really quickly and you don't know what the recovery's gonna be.

• 1:51:27Steven Rinella?

  That makes me optimistic.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it makes me up to, and you know.

• 1:51:29Steven Rinella?

  Cause I'm rooting for the earth, dude.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  Exactly, me too. And so I have a six year old, you know, my son Anthony. And so, you know, we don't quite talk about things this deep, not yet, but he's getting more interested in the world.

• 1:51:38Steven Rinella?

  How old is he?

• 1:51:38Speaker 04

  He's six.

• 1:51:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I used to trip my kids out by telling them bad stuff like this and I kinda quit. Well, I didn't quit, it just got older, Roger, and telling bad stuff.

• 1:51:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:51:45Steven Rinella?

  I used to tell them bad stuff when they were real little, like I'd be like, the sun will like eventually burn out.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Steven Rinella?

  And then they started tripping out, but I meant like next week, you know?

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  This is what Anthony does to me though, cause he's really interested in outer space right now. So he watches a lot of these shows and, and, and so he'll tell me, do you know the sun's gonna burn out in so many million, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of years. Now, come on, son, you know, live your life first. But no, but I'm, when we start to have these conversations, I try to convey that, you know, the earth is, is more than just us. Obviously, we care about our species as we should, but the earth is so old, four and a half billion years old, the earth is. There has been this fantastic menagerie of species that have lived over time. Species have risen and fallen and, and there've been crazy things, like you're earlier, pterodactyls. If we didn't have fossils, we never know, we would never believe something like that existed. And there's a whole bunch of things like that. So the earth is wonderful.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  And that's why we should conserve as much of it as we can and understand nature as best we can and be in nature. I think, you know, many of us aren't in nature enough. For, for listeners of this show, you know, you guys are probably out in nature a lot. For the average person, I mean, even me, you know, at home, I mean, most of the time I'm just at my desk, I'm at home, I'm writing, I'm teaching my classes. I don't get out enough. But I think we all just need to get out more and appreciate the earth and appreciate our part in the earth and where we fit in and to take pride and joy in this glorious world around us. And absolutely, we should be rooting for the earth. And that means we should make our impact minimal, but at the same time, you know, we're not just some average species. I mean, there are eight billion of us. We're going to put pressure

• 1:53:19Speaker 04

  on the earth. You know, we have to, we have to build houses. We have to get around, you know, we can't stop doing these things, but we need to find better ways to live in harmony. And I'm very, I'm very optimistic. Ultimately, I am optimistic because we, we're smart. We have huge brains. We have consciousness. We can work together in groups. We can solve problems. I mean, there were humans that, you know, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years ago, like ancestors of ours that figured out language and built boats and reached islands. I mean, this was the edge of the known world and they did this. We are capable of incredible things as a species. And just watching recently, you know, the Artemis mission, going beyond the moon, farther than any humans have gone.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  Like, that's awesome. We are capable of amazing things as a species when we put our mind to it, when we work together, and when we support science, when we support education, when we put the money into things like launching that mission, or money into conserving things. Even something as simple as making sure the bald eagle and the California condor don't bite the dust. I mean, those are incredibly successful. We want to do something, we can.

• 1:54:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26Speaker 04

  And the dinosaurs couldn't do that. T. rex couldn't do that. T. rex couldn't have the brain power to do that. But we can. So ultimately, I'm concerned about climate change, environmental change, but I remain optimistic that we, we can do something about it and we can adapt. And that's what gives, that's what gives me hope.

• 1:54:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, Steve Brusatti, thanks so much for coming on the show. Brand new book, The Story of Birds, A New History From Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present.

• 1:54:56Steven Rinella?

  If you want to go in order, you'd go Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs?

• 1:55:00Speaker 04

  Well, because I'm promoting the new book, you know, we gotta sell these new books.

• 1:55:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay, don't do that. Start with this and then go back.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Steven Rinella?

  Read this and then go, because they're all freestanding books.

• 1:55:09Speaker 04

  They are. They're freestanding books. They're all, you know, the dinosaur one tells the story of dinosaur evolution. The mammal one tells the story of mammal evolution, including our ancestry. So honestly, the mammal one might be, you know, of quite a lot of interest to a lot of your listeners.

• 1:55:22Steven Rinella?

  Start with the birds.

• 1:55:22Speaker 04

  But start with the birds and it's the newest one. And so it's right up to date. But really, they can be read in any order. And again, they're not textbooks. They're not academic books. I try to make them really accessible and honestly, like the, you know, the, something that makes me more happy really than anything is I get random emails or, you know, DMs on Instagram or social media from people that read the books and it's great. And if you read the books, anybody that's, that's, that's listening, please do reach out. I love hearing from people and I'm easy to find online. But quite recently, I've gotten, I got a message from a long haul truck driver here in the West who had the dinosaur book on audiobook as he's doing these late night drives.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  I got a message from, from a kid who was like in his early twenties in the military, who was stationed abroad, who was reading the dinosaur book just to pass the time. Like, that's awesome. I just, it is so cool. So that's the books, these books are for everybody. I really try to do, make them accessible. And I would say if you've never read science books before, you know, they shouldn't be too scary. And there's a whole genre of pop science really that you can explore out there that isn't scary, that is accessible. There's a lot of great science writers and I've mentioned, you know, a few like Henry G.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  But there are many others too. And just, you know, start reading around and seeing what interests you. And that's what I try to do in these books is tell some good stories about these fantastic animals that have lived over time and how they paved the way for the world today.

• 1:56:45Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:56:47Speaker 04

  My pleasure. This is awesome. Thank you.

• 1:57:16Steven Rinella?

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• 1:58:00Steven Rinella?

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• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves?

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, BetterHelp is making therapy more accessible so more people can keep moving forward, one conversation at a time. Better is personal. Therapy should be too. Visit betterhelp.com to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.

• 1:59:31Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.