Ancient Antarctica

The frozen continent of Antarctica was once a land of forests, rivers and thriving ecosystems. And millions of years before humans ever existed it was home to a whole host of ancient creatures, from the first sharks to the earliest marsupials. Tristan Hughes is joined by paleontologist Professor John Long to uncover what the trilobite and dinosaur fossils buried beneath the ice reveal about this lost world and what they can reveal about Antarctica’s role in the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. MORE Megalodon Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/megalodon/id1520403988?i=1000717533274 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4pqz8iu1xyP5gUpRggP3jk The First Sharks Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-first-sharks/id1520403988?i=1000717380501 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tP0vxbYU0RAPRWLCzVuXR?si=DOKTqN0NT1Kx6UzzGk5DHA&nd=1&dlsi=d74b17ae2a914f8a Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS ad-free, early access podcasts AND exclusive subscriber-only Ancients episodes. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  This is Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad. Opill is the first over the counter daily birth control pill available in the US. Let's be real, getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now Opill is putting birth control in our control. Opill is a daily birth control that's FDA approved, full prescription strength and estrogen free, and 98% effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out Opill to see if it's right for you.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Use code GIGGLY for 25% off your first month of Opill at O P I L L dot com. That's code GIGGLY at O P I L L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yawi, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory are just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you is it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on spotify.com.

• 2:45Tristan Hughes?

  Antarctica. Today, it's the frozen, snow-covered southern continent. But for hundreds of millions of years, it was a cradle of life, full of reefs and rivers, of trees and temperate climates. It was the linchpin of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana, that millions of years ago connected Antarctica with continents such as South America, Australia, Africa, and India. Now, over the past century, paleontologists have uncovered some remarkable fossils from Antarctica, from trilobites and early invertebrates of the Cambrian period, get this, half a billion years ago,

• 3:26Tristan Hughes?

  to ancient sharks of the Devonian, almost 400 million years ago. They've also found evidence of dinosaurs, of early marsupials, and so much more. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the awesome story of ancient Antarctica. Our guest is Professor John Long. John is a paleontologist and world expert on early sharks and fossil fish, and he has been part of several expeditions to Antarctica over the years, discovering fossils in some of the most extreme locations on Earth. This was such a fun chat, and as you're about to hear, John's career, well, he's had quite the adventure.

• 4:14Tristan Hughes?

  John, welcome back to the show. It's good to see you again, my friend.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  It's absolute pleasure, Tristan. I love the show.

• 4:21Tristan Hughes?

  Well, last year we did the first sharks and megalodon. Once again, we're recording in the morning, my time in the UK. It's evening where you are. I have got a cup of tea. First things first, do you have a beer in hand as well?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  I've got a beer. Yep, it's beer o'clock here.

• 4:34Tristan Hughes?

  Beer o'clock, fantastic, tea and beer o'clock. As we delve into this cracking topic, Antarctica, okay, it's not rich in human archaeology and ancient civilizations, but it does have paleontology aplenty.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, it's a massive continent. You've got to think of the size of Antarctica. It's like one and a half times the size of Australia. It's about the same size as the continental United States. And it's mostly ice and rock and snow. But it doesn't have plants and soil. So where the rock sticks up, you get good exposure. It's great for finding fossils where you've got those mountains that stick up above the polar plateau. So just imagine a continent that the average height is 2.7 kilometers above sea level. That's the average height of Antarctica. So yeah, it's got a lot of rich paleontology, a lot of grape pickings, a lot of fabulous fossils.

• 5:31Tristan Hughes?

  And the power of the earth, I mean, you mentioned that some of those places, those rock faces are more than two kilometers high. To get a sense of the power of the earth over millions and millions of years, is it from that high up that sometimes you find marine creatures that were once living beneath the waves?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yes, the tops of the mountains are just whatever geological strata has been pushed up through the faulting, you know, think of Antarctica as the linchpin of this supercontinent called Gondwana, which was the largest continent of its time, you know, in occupying the south of planet Earth. And you've got, Gondwana is made of Antarctica, joined to Australia, joined to India, South America, Africa, you know, all in this one massive area. And Antarctica held it all together until it all started breaking up. So the paleontology of Antarctica is crucial to understand that quintessential origin of various animal groups that migrated from one part of the world to the other.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  You know, how do you find fossils, for example, in South America that also occur in Australia today? You know, that only Gondwana explains it.

• 6:40Tristan Hughes?

  Gondwana, well, we'll get more into Gondwana in a bit. But I mean, I mean, John, how long ago was it? Was it first realized that Antarctica was rich in fossils? That it could be this, this haven for learning more about prehistoric life?

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Well, Tristan, it goes back at least to the 1890s with some of the Norwegian expeditions. Larsen, you know, and the whaling that was happening there. And the whalers and people that went down there would exchange their fossils for tobacco and trade it with the brandy and so on, because only fossils were a good currency. People liked them as curiosities. But the serious collecting of fossils from down there really started with the scientific expeditions of the heroic age. Scott and Shackleton foremost amongst them. So as we all know, Scott went down there in the Discovery Expedition, 1904. And although they didn't get to the pole, they did collect some fossils on the way.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  But then Shackleton, who was on that expedition, ran his own trip back to Antarctica. And he came close to the pole. He came, you know, within a degree and a bit. And they collected some amazing fossils from the Beardsmore Glacier region. And they were the first ones to bring back fossils of Cambrian age, over 500 million years old. And what they found were the beginnings of what was, would be uncovered by later geologists as a gigantic reef that covered the entire of Antarctica 520 million years ago, called the Shackleton Limestone. And it's made of sponges and algae and various creatures that formed the first great reef in the entire world.

• 8:15Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. And on that expedition, the ill-fated one where Scott doesn't make it back, is it true, John, that amongst the, the finds that were with Scott and his companions, you know, that were later discovered, that they also found out that they were bringing back more fossils with them at the same time?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Yes, and it's quite sad, really. It's really tragic that towards the end of that expedition, as they knew they were, they were running out of food and they were running out of supplies and they, they kind of knew they weren't going to make it back at one stage. They were still dragging rocks with them right to the very end. So when they found their bodies inside the polar tent, you know, dead, there were rocks and specimens there and notebooks that, that kept precise records of what, where those specimens came from. And they would be intrinsically important for the concept of Gondwana. Because, you know, in amongst those specimens were fossil plants and remains of, of the flora that spread right across the whole of Gondwana,

• 9:13Speaker 04

  from Africa to India, Australia, South America. And the seeds of Gondwana were in those specimens for, you know, back in 1912. And they all died, but they brought those specimens back. British Museum and the British Antarctic Survey and places like that. They were eventually studied. And that's where the, the whole concept of Gondwana really originated from.

• 9:37Tristan Hughes?

  That's so interesting because that's something I knew nothing about. You hear about the ill-fated expedition, you hear about the race with Amundsen and so on. You don't realize that that period of time is actually so critical for people realizing how rich in fossils Antarctica was for learning about the deep past. And John, over the 20th century, more and more expeditions, scientific expeditions have gone there to find out more. And as time went on, including yourself, you've been able to go there several times over the course of your career to look for fossils.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've been very lucky, Tristan. I mean, I first went down there in 1988. Originally, I was at a conference in 1985 in New Zealand and I met an amazing woman, Margaret Bradshaw. I dedicated one of my books to this woman. She won the polar medal from the Queen, actually, for her many expeditions to Antarctica searching for fossil shells and trace fossils. So Margaret didn't have any experts in New Zealand on fossil fish, and that's my speciality, Devonian fishes. And they were mapping this vast area of the Devonian, the old fashioned way with sledges, where you'd be dropped in by Hercules aircraft to a remote part of the Trans Antarctic Mountains. And then you'd have your sledges and your skadoos to pull them along.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  You'd put up a base camp and you'd go out and work and then, then move along. And so she invited me to come down in 1988. That trip didn't work out the way it was planned. They were held up with storms and bad weather in the mountains. So I flew down to the, the base down there, Scott Base. In New Zealand and basically they couldn't actually get me out to those mountains. So I spent that whole month in the dry valleys and other places, but without Margaret's expedition. So we planned the whole thing again and I went back again in ninety one, ninety two. And that was for me, the big expedition. We spent three months down there sledging through virtually unknown territory.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  They'd been to one or two of these sites before, but we eventually made it to a whole area of the Trans Antarctic Mountains that no one had ever mapped or studied before. And fossil sites were everywhere, hazards were everywhere, crevasses, avalanches. It was just one of the most spectacular and frightening things I've ever done in my life. Because every day you're just blown away by the sheer beauty, the transcendental nature of these mountains that just poke up above the clouds, they're so magnificently tall. And then other days you find yourself, you're in a crevasse field and you have to sort of walk out slowly with, with a crevasse probe, prodding the earth in front of you like, like a minefield, you know, to get out.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  And every day was an adventure. So I kept a diary and eventually I wrote this up as a, as a mona-, you know, an account of the, the dangers and also the highs of discovery of this, this whole expedition.

• 12:27Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing how you know still parts of our world, there is that proper sense of exploration and adventure. And I think fossil hunting in Antarctica really defines that. This is polar Indiana Jones, health and safety nightmare you must have been, John. But we'll delve into a few more of those stories as we go along. Um, one question I'd love to ask though is when you're looking for fossils, whether it's in a crevasse or on a rock ledge, how do you look for them? I, I guess it's more than just, there's no fossil metal detector equivalent where you can detect fossils beneath the ice. I mean, how do you extract and look for fossils in Antarctica in a place like that?

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Well, it's actually very easy Tristan, because as I mentioned earlier, there's no soil or plants in Antarctica. It's just bare ice and bare rock. So fundamentally, when the, when you come to a mountain range that sticks up above the polar plateau, you've got pure layers of, of clean rock. And if you're looking in sedimentary rock for fossils, all you don't want is those layers covered up by snow. So there've been recent snowfalls, the whole outcrop could be covered up by snow and you can't find anything. But the strong winds, especially the storms, the catabatic winds that, that accumulate by gravity, flowing from the, the central part of Antarctica, which is much higher than the edges.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  You get these massive catabatic winds that cool the area, they blow the snow away. And you get sometimes just clean pristine layers of rock bristling with fossils. And it's like a kid in a candy shop, you don't know which one to dig up first, you know? Or you've got limited time, although twenty four hours of daylight means you can go nuts. And some days we'd be up the top of the mountain, working to three o'clock in the morning in bright sunlight. And then we'd just get so tired, we'd have to go back to camp and sleep and eat. But yeah, it's, and other days we'd have storms where we'd be holed up for three or four days in our tents, waiting for the storm to blow away. So it's this boom or bust kind of mentality when you're down there.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  It's easy to find the fossils because you don't have these blockages of plants or soil covering up the rock down there. But then you've got to hammer them out with a hammer and chisel, the old fashioned way. We don't have power tools down there, you know, in these remote locations.

• 14:42Tristan Hughes?

  No, you say the old fashioned way, as you say, I mean, you're, you're looking for the fossils just with your eyes, you know, with your expert eye recognizing them on the rock face. And yeah, as you say, just then using a hammer and chisel to get them out one by one by one. Old fashioned, but it's how you do it down there. That's very cool.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  How we did it. And we can only carry a limited amount of fossils as well. So we had a system whereby we had a skidoo, alpine skidoo, pulling two sledges. One would be just fuel, drums of fuel. The other would be our food and our supplies, our camping gear, et cetera. And as we ate the food, we'd get an empty box that we could fill with fossils and samples. But we couldn't carry any more or any less. So we were limited. By the end of that three month expedition, we had all the empty food boxes basically filled with our best fossil samples.

• 15:29Tristan Hughes?

  All right. Well, now let's explore Antarctica itself, back millions and millions and millions of years ago. And let's revisit that, that key word you mentioned near the start, John, which is Gondwana. So set the scene for us, how long ago was Antarctica? How long ago was Antarctica formed and how does that link centrally into this idea? This mass that is Gondwana?

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Well, Antarctica has always been part of this supercontinent of Gondwana. And when that formed is, is, you know, there are other parts that were Rodinia before that. But fundamentally it was locked into a major supercontinent from at least five hundred and fifty million years ago or longer. And as Rodinia, this other massive continent sort of broke away from Gondwana and it, it formed its core. Then we have this supercontinent that stayed together virtually until about fifty to thirty eight million years ago, when the last remnants of it broke away. And those last remnants were Australia and New Zealand, joined to Antarctica.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  So the other big super continents like Africa, South America and India had broken off at different stages. Mostly during the age of dinosaurs, they all started to break up and start drifting away. And then we're left with just Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand as, as this one landmass. And then Australia and New Zealand kind of break away together. And then New Zealand breaks away and yeah, thirty eight million years ago is one of the estimates that we, we say was the last remnant of that Australian continent drifting away from Antarctica. And then the polar seas could form a current all the way around Antarctica for the first time.

• 17:13Tristan Hughes?

  So before that time, so hundreds of millions of years ago, for instance, when you do have Gondwana as that supercontinent, where Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa, South America, even parts of Europe, if I'm not mistaken, are connected together to Antarctica as the linchpin, as you say, this southern continent of Gondwana. During that time, that southern continent is not always a tundra wasteland. The climate changed a lot in that time.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about Antarctica is it's mostly been for all of its life, a normal continent with, you know, once plants evolved and covered the land, Antarctica had a rich flora of plants from the very first forests on earth that were down there in Antarctica as well. With fishes in the rivers and amphibians eventually invading the lands, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, a whole lot. It's only the last, say, seven million years or so, then Antarctica has become a frozen wasteland. And up until then, it's been just like another continent, like Africa or Australia even.

• 18:17Tristan Hughes?

  So the fossil records in Antarctica, I appreciate there must still be so much to find um, for, for tens, many hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. But how far back currently does the record of fossils of life go in Antarctica?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Well, there are some microfossils found in proto-resoric rocks that could be over a billion years old.

• 18:38Tristan Hughes?

  A billion, gosh.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Over a billion, but they're just microscopic sort of fossils that have been found by dissolving the rocks up. But in terms of actual macrofossils, the, the real fossil record of Antarctica starts with this reef, the Shackleton limestone about five hundred and twenty million years ago. And it's, you know, a whole host of trilobites, little bug like creatures that live on the bottom of the sea and shells and bolus and things like that, corals, sponge like cup shaped things called archaeocythads that build this reef. Yeah. So that's the beginnings of the Antarctic fauna, if you like. But it's kind of at the time, a sort of a global fauna in the Cambrian that we also get in Australia and Europe

• 19:22Speaker 04

  and North America and places like that, but with unique species to those regions. But you know, reef then would have looked the same as a reef in any, any continent of that age, basically.

• 19:32Tristan Hughes?

  And the Cambrian period that you're describing, John, we did an episode not too long ago all about it. It's popularly nicknamed Biology's Big Bang. So this time where you see this great explosion of different life, of complex life. And you mentioned perhaps the most famous type of animal from it, the trilobites.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:49Tristan Hughes?

  And, and this idea, when, when you say a giant reef, should we be imagining, as, as you say, a reef today? Maybe not the Great Barrier Reef, but, but, but full of life, shallow, teeming with life. And with Antarctica, would it be stretching on for hundreds of kilometres over and over and over?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Maybe a thousand kilometres. I mean, it covered the whole of Antarctica from the east to the west. It was the first great reef on earth, for God's sake. This is huge. I mean, you know, Antarctica is the beginning of these giant reefs forming. They would later change in their construction, you know, eventually ending up with coral reefs today. But in the Devonian, they were built of other kinds of, you know, sponges and, and sponge like algae and stuff. And reefs have changed all through time, but the first ones were these archaeocythad reefs. So like a sort of a hollow cup like sponge like thing.

• 20:39Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know much about the life that was there beyond the trilobites? Have they, if it was, you know, the first reef in the world and so massive, surely it must have been almost kind of the crucible for so much life during that time?

• 20:52Speaker 04

  That's true, but we've also got to remember that it wasn't unique to Antarctica. This Antarctic reef was probably one of the biggest in the Cambrian, but we also get them in other parts of the world with diverse foral assemblages. But, you know, Antarctica's got a rich diversity of invertebrate life at that time. There's arthropods, there's remains of different kinds of mollusks and all sorts of creatures that lived in the sea at the time, but nothing gigantic or spectacular because creatures weren't that big in, on this Antarctic reef at the time. They were mostly small critters.

• 21:28Tristan Hughes?

  And the type of rock that you look out for to identify that, okay, this is probably from Cambrian times, you mentioned that it's the Shackleton limestone. I mean, how common is it to find that type of rock layer, you know, when you, when you're searching Antarctica today?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Well, you've got to go to the, the far kind of east of Antarctica to get the outcrops of the Shackleton limestone, and these are places without any bases nearby. So you basically need a really big aeroplane, like a C-130 Hercules,

• 21:57Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  long range tanks to get there. We didn't go that far, but we did have a Hercules drop us off because we were so far away from the base that was beyond helicopter range. So it's kind of neat being in your own Hercules with just four people and your sledges to, you know, fly to a very remote part of Antarctica. I think it's spewed out the back of this thing and then away you go for three months until they pick you up. But no, back to your question about the Shackleton limestone, because it has been eroding for so long, the original first pieces of it that Shackleton's expedition brought back were in glacial moraine, which means they're bits of rock that have been broken up and, and, you know, encapsulated within a glacier and then melted so they

• 22:41Speaker 04

  could find the rubble around that melt zone and pick up bits of this limestone which originated on the other side of Antarctica.

• 22:47Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. Okay. Once again, the shifts of the earth, the movements of the earth right there. It also sounds for you saying, John, if we were to do a documentary in the future about paleontology in Antarctica, and we want to do episode one on the Cambrian,

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:01Tristan Hughes?

  we would be going to the most remote parts possible to find those fossils. I love the fact that the oldest fossils, the macro fossils you have from Antarctica are almost, I know it's not the case this will explore, but from the outset, it seems the most difficult locations to reach.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  They are. Yeah. Those eastern Antarctica areas are very hard to get to. Very few people have been there. And that's why, as you said, there's so much potential to find new things in Antarctica because, you know, like in terms of Devonian, the, the fishers I study, with people that get there once every like 20 or 30 years kind of thing.

• 23:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you mentioned Devonian. So what do we mean by Devonian? How far forward are we going in time for this next key stage of, of life in Antarctica's story?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  All right. So the Trans Antarctic Mountains are made up of what's called the beacon supergroup, which packages of rocks of different ages. And they kind of range from, they start at the sort of the Salurian, perhaps Devonian boundary about 420, 30 million years ago, and they go right through to what's called the Carboniferous or the Coal Bearing Age. And then there's an unconformity and then you get more rocks, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, et cetera. But that first package of Paleozoic rocks called the beacon supergroup ranges in age for over a hundred and sort of 50 million years, but the bulk of it, the thickest section of it is Devonian rocks, which come from Devon originally. That's where they were first

• 24:26Speaker 04

  named in the UK. But the Devonian, think of it as a big time period of rocks. It's like 60 million years of time. It started 420 million years ago, roughly, ended roughly 360 million years ago. But it changed the earth forever because before the Devonian, we had mostly jawless fish in the oceans, you know, a few spiny shark-like things. During the Devonian, it was the jawed fish that really took off and populated the oceans and rivers and lakes of the world, including sharks, armored ancient grotesque beasts called placoderms.

• 25:02Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, you love the placoderms, John.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  I do. I love placoderms. They were gigantic predators. And also the first bony fish that had advanced forelimbs with, with proper bones to support arms and legs that would eventually take over land as early tetrapods or amphibians. But at the same time going on with that, we've got the invasion of land by insects and arthropods. We've also got forests developing for the first time on earth. So instead of, you know, mosses and, and, and lichens covering the shores at the beginning of the Devonian, we've got forests over 30 meters high or a hundred feet high by the end of the Devonian. And this is pumping lots of oxygen into the atmosphere, making

• 25:46Speaker 04

  insects get bigger and arthropods get gigantic and tetrapods able to breathe air on land. So that's all happened in the Devonian. It changed the earth forever and really was the heralding the modern world in terms of, you know, what would, what would inhabit life on earth and in the oceans.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  This is Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over the counter daily birth control pill available in the US. Let's be real, getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now O-Pill is putting birth control in our control. O-Pill is a daily birth control that's FDA approved, full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98% effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out O-Pill to see if it's right for you. Use code GIGGLY

• 27:29Speaker 02

  for 25% off your first month of O-Pill at O-P-I-L-L dot com. That's code GIGGLY at O-P-I-L-L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  Ready now beats ready someday. If you've been waiting for the right time to buy a new home, this could be it. For a limited time, Eastwood Homes is offering a 4.99% interest rate on select move-in ready homes. That means your new home is ready. Your opportunity is here and there's only one thing missing, you. Don't wait for someday. It's time. All that's missing is you. Eastwood Homes. Built with care. Visit eastwoodhomes.com today. Restrictions apply. See new home specialist for details.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 28:18Speaker 07

  Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 28:30Speaker 07

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:42Speaker 06

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 29:02Tristan Hughes?

  So is the Devonian the first period you can see in the fossil record where you get a sense of, yes, we'll explore these sharks, this amazing marine life still beneath the waves, but also for the first time getting a sense of life on land as well. So we get a more kind of, dare I say, complete picture of Antarctica at that time?

• 29:21Speaker 04

  That's correct. Antarctica had these massive deposits of freshwater, river deposits called the Aztec silt stone. And below that, it had some layers of shallow marine kind of older sediments that had lots of trace fossils and sometimes mollusks and things like that. But really this thick package called the Aztec silt stone is one of the richest deposits in the world for freshwater fishes of that age. You know, it's got something like up to 70 different species occurring in it and many sharks, many types of placoderms, bony fishes, even remains of jawless fishes. You know, so it's got, got a diverse assemblage that probably occurred over five or six slices of time, you know, where the foral assemblages change.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  And you know, think of gigantic rivers as big as the bloody Mississippi or the Nile. And they're depositing enough sediment that that's burying these fish. And you're getting the first really big fish on earth appearing in these river sediments like placoderms and sharks that are up to maybe three to four metres in length and giant bony fishes with teeth three inches long, you know, almost like half the size of a T Rex tooth. Um, eating these other big fish. So it was a really dynamic ecosystem.

• 30:42Tristan Hughes?

  And John, at this time, so we still got Gondwana and Antarctica is the linchpin of this great southern continent. You've got Rodinia further north, but Antarctica at this time, yeah, is is temperate. It's good. It's full of rivers. It's full of large forests starting to emerge on the land as well. All of this diverse life and you get it surviving. You mentioned when we talk about the Cambrian that you had this particular type of rock, the um, the Shackleton limestone. But you mentioned Aztec silt stone. Is this the type of rock you're now looking for? Wherever you go saying, if you find it, you're like, right, we're in the Devonian period.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in on our big expedition of nineteen ninety one, ninety two, we were tackling an area that had just discovered that there was Aztec silt stone there by an earlier geological party. And we were the first team of paleontologists to go in and actually explore those unknown mountains. And basically collect fossils from that Aztec silt stone from a whole range of new sites, including mountains that hadn't been climbed before. We're the first people to climb some of these mountains like Mount Goodmanson. And I'll tell you a really interesting story, a parallel with H. P. Lovecraft. Now, do you know H. P. Lovecraft, the Gothic horror story he wrote in nineteen thirty one called At the Mountains of Madness?

• 31:58Tristan Hughes?

  I'm sorry, John, that's my lack of culture showing I don't, but you can explain it, explain it.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  All right. So nineteen, this guy's wrote the Dunwich horror and and the Amityville horrors and things like this. He was one of the world's best classic horror novelists of the day. So he writes this story called The Mountains of Madness, set about a fossil hunting expedition that flies down to Antarctica in the nineteen thirties. Well, they come on a boat, they bring planes and then they go to the most remote part of Antarctica where there are mountains. And as they go further and further deeper into this unknown area, they uncover the elder ones, the the the alien ancient civilization that's been there and they either all get eaten or go mad.

• 32:42Tristan Hughes?

  Are you sure this isn't Alien versus Predator? Uh?

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Wonderful book, only a novella, call that The Mountains of Madness. So when I went down there on that trip in nineteen ninety one, a good friend of mine that knew this book gave me a copy and said, here, take this and read it while you're in Antarctica. So we read a couple of pages aloud each night from that polar tents. There were four of us on that expedition. Margaret Bradshaw, whom I mentioned before, Freya Harmsen, an American geologist who came from New Zealand originally. Brian State, our survival expert, myself, also fish expert. So two guys, two, two women, two polar tents, we'd get and cram into one tent, we'd read this aloud. We eventually discovered that we were heading to this place that Lovecraft put an imaginary latitude

• 33:29Speaker 04

  and called the Mountains of Madness, but we were heading exactly to where we put this imaginary fake geographical point. So we named our mountains the Mountains of Madness. As we got deeper and deeper into these mountains of madness that no one had ever really gone to before, that the northern part of the Cook Mountains. We discover all these amazing sights and had all these amazing adventures. So when I wrote my book in two thousand and two called Mountains of Madness, it was a parallel story with H. P. Lovecraft. As they sink into the doom and terror of internal, internal Antarctica, we were experiencing our own emotional roller coaster as well as we read there.

• 34:07Tristan Hughes?

  So one of the best locations in the world to find Devonian fossils, this age of prehistoric amazing fishes, the first George sharks and so on. Is from a place that you and the team called The Mountains of Madness.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  We did indeed. And it was such a beautiful area as well, but totally unpredictable in terms of weather and and hazards, because no one had been in there. They didn't have maps showing you where the crevasses were or where the dangers were. You just had to deal with it on a day by day basis.

• 34:39Tristan Hughes?

  And what types of fish and life and on land animals and fauna did you find at this particular location?

• 34:47Speaker 04

  We were finding a whole range of sharks for the first time that hadn't been found there before. Now, some earlier geological expeditions, twenty years before ours, had found some partially articulated sharks, you know, small things about up to, you know, half a metre long. Uh, but we were finding really large shark's teeth, quite big ones that are getting up to like twenty five or thirty millimetres high. And this was really exciting for me because I realised that up until that point, most sharks known anywhere on earth were really tiny, just tiny little teeth. And suddenly there's this massive increase in sharks in the, and also in freshwater.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  So it's, you know, the first major invasion of sharks into a freshwater environment, large river system. So these sharks would have been maybe three to four metres in length and we were finding these, not just one, but several species of these sharks of different sizes from there. So that was very exciting. We found lots of new remains of bony fishes, early sort of rayfin fishes that were a bit like trout today. Lung fishes that breathe air, tetrapod-like fishes called tetrapodomorphs. I like, you know, you have this thing called osteolipus in the United Kingdom, these, these sorts of fishes. So it was very exciting. We just collected everything we could and brought it all back and then studied it and

• 36:09Speaker 04

  prepared it and processed it in the labs when we got back. But we named at least a dozen new species of of ancient fishes from that, from that expedition.

• 36:17Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, I love that. That part of thing is you can name so much stuff, can't you, John? You have the, you have the, the power to name all of these species that you find and also these mountain ranges as well. Yeah. It sounds like Aztec silt stone is more easy to find in the geology than the Shackleton layer, John. I mean,

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:37Tristan Hughes?

  Is it easier and and are there more ranges that you can go to and then easily spot, right, that is Devonian rock over there?

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Well, the Aztec silt zone was originally named from a type section that looked like an Aztec pyramid. But it has all these multi-coloured layers of red and green and yellow and grey coloured rocks, which represent this ancient flood plain and river deposit. So you've got channels full of conglomerate or coarse sort of boulder type conglomerates. You've got mudstones that are red because they're oxidised and others that are anaerobic green, you know, mudstones as well. So all these coloured layers of rock meant they were easy to spot from the air and and to spot on a map with aerial photographs. So we knew that where we were heading, we, all we had were compasses and maps in those days. We didn't have GPSs or anything.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  But you could visually spot them through binoculars that over there, beyond that horizon is is a bit of Aztec silt stone. So let's go there and collect fossils.

• 37:36Tristan Hughes?

  So I know you've been to many, many different sites and recorded many Devonian fossils from them. But I want to highlight a couple that I know have great stories around them. The first, just because I love the name, John, the Fish Hotel site.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yes. I named that one.

• 37:51Tristan Hughes?

  What is this?

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Well, this is in a completely unexplored part of the uh, the mountains we reached on that expedition and the northern Cook Mountains, very close to the Mountains of Madness of Lovecraft's location. And we just found these layers of rock packed full of impressions and bones of these Devonian fish. It's like actual bone beds with bones on top of bones, just just packed full of, you know, thousands of pieces of bone everywhere. And so a lot of it was mushed up bits of bone, but occasionally you'd find more complete material and bits of skulls and things like that. So I noticed that every one of these beds forming this part of the Aztec silt zone was full of fish remains.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  So because all the beds were full, I said, let's call it Fish Hotel.

• 38:39Tristan Hughes?

  And so you found placoderms there. Also this species, forgive me if I butcher the pronunciation, Bothriopolis.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Bothriolipus, yes.

• 38:49Tristan Hughes?

  Bothriolipus.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Bothriolipus was the rat of the Devonian. They were like frigging everywhere. They, every Devonian river deposit in the whole world has got Bothriolipus in it. Even in the UK, you've got about a dozen species from your deposits around Scotland and and northern England. But Gavin Young, one of my mentors, who went down to Antarctica in nineteen seventy one, seventy seventy one expedition, collected many Bothriolipuses and named something like a dozen species from Antarctica as well. And we found some more uh, remains that of of of material that could also represent new species, but we've never got around to describing them because they're so difficult, because they're so alike. They will look similar. You know what I mean?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  So you've got to be a real Bothriolipus expert within the Devonian fish world to to name a new species of Bothriolipus.

• 39:42Tristan Hughes?

  But there is an Antarctic version. That's good to hear.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:45Tristan Hughes?

  So Antarctica at that time, full of life, these rivers, these lakes, all of these early sharks. We've explored the origins of sharks, the first sharks in our previous chat together and a bit on the placoderms, the i, the armoured fish as well. But there is one particular shark that you have discovered from Antarctica that is almost the meg of the Devonian. Uh, so John, what is this shark that you discovered at a place that I know is is close to your heart called The Portal?

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yes, well, um, the portal is, yeah, very emotional place for me to even recall talking about it. Um, I was on that expedition, it'd been snowing for ten days and we had this massive push, we were holed up for about ten or eleven days, not being able to move anywhere. And it was near Christmas and we'd left all our food and everything in another depot. So we were slightly running out of food and not being able to get back to our depot. And things got really, really lean around Christmas that year. Like, we didn't have much to eat. We had just little bits of, uh, we had one miniature bottle of Scotch that we shared around all four people for Christmas Day.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  But eventually the weather cleared and we did this massive push to the portal. About sixty kilometres of sledging all day. Um, you know, we get there, we set up camp. And the next day, I wanted to go out searching this mountain where twenty years earlier, Gavin Young had found one or two interesting shark's teeth, but no one had been properly collecting there. And I said to the leader of the expedition, Margaret Bradshaw, can I go out by myself? I just want to go out and get to this mountain and look at some fossils. They were all exhausted from the, from the big push the day before, and it was lightly snowing. And I said, no, we, we, we're going to rest, but you can go out, just take it easy. You know, you've been down here on two months already, you know how to handle yourself.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  So I set off with a full backpack, lots of food, radio, water, you know, in thermoses, equipment, rock, hammers, everything. And I started walking away from the camp. I noticed that the snow got thicker and thicker, it was almost up to my waist. And then eventually I felt a hollow and I, I sort of broke through a crevasse and I thrashed to one side. And it basically got away from the crevasse, but I was on my side, deep in the snow. I got up and I looked back and it's virtually bottomless hole there. Or I just broke through a crevasse, but I was able to thrash to one side. Anyway, I was very shaken by that, but I basically very cautiously and carefully,

• 42:25Speaker 04

  step by step, got onto the first ledges of rock on the portal. And I started looking for fossils and I realised that it'd been snowing so heavily for the last 10 days that there was a huge build up of snow right up the, the scarp. Eventually I, I got to a ledge where I was looking for fossils with my head down and I saw bits of snow whizzing past me. I looked up and there was this wall of snow coming down at me, like in a, a small avalanche. It hit me and knocked me over and buried me up to my neck, which was kind of comical, but also scary at the time. Anyway, it's very emotional, like I cried and I, I let myself, my emotions overran me a bit at the time.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Eventually pulled myself together, got up onto the ledge and found some really good fossils, these big teeth of portal Otus, this giant shark that I would later call portal Otus. And I made my way back to cab, tracing my footsteps, but they're going wide around the crevasse. Told everyone what happened and they, uh, I gave me a medicinal whiskey or two and, you know, I, I slept. But the next day we decided we'd get onto that mountain to collect more fossils. So we have a survival expert, Brian State, who basically grabbed a crevasse probe. And then he traced my footsteps step by step, so we can find a safe access route onto that mountain. And he found in tracing my footsteps that I'd actually walked over seven crevasses and I'd only broken through one.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  So we had to find a completely wider route back to the campsite after that. We did get some good fossils and I eventually named that giant shark, portal Otus, Bradshawite after Margaret Bradshaw. And I named it Other Species after everyone on the expedition. But yeah, still to this day, it, um, it's a very scary place for me to recall. It took me eight, eight years before I wrote down these memoirs and wrote, to write this book up. But, um, yeah, it was probably the closest I've ever come to losing my life. And I ride a motorbike too, so.

• 44:22Tristan Hughes?

  John, I'm sorry to bring up that memory because I know, yeah, it's obviously still very shocking and especially recounting it. And, and I think it also does harken back to as cool and as fascinating as extraordinary this chat is and kind of this exploration that's still going on with fossils down there. It's still unknown territory. It is still, you know, very, very dangerous to find these fossils. And no doubt there have been accidents in, in the past and, and that unfortunately probably will be in the future.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:49Tristan Hughes?

  But it is quite something that, you know, tied to that story, John, is the discovery of one of the biggest, if not the biggest prehistoric shark from the Devonian period?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, at the point when we described this shark and I, I named it, I worked with Gavin Young, been there 20 years earlier, we wrote it, wrote the paper up together. Portal Otus was the biggest shark known from the Devonian at that time. Nothing had a tooth anywhere near as, like an inch high or 30, 30 millimetres high. So it was a big shark and it was the biggest predator in that ecosystem of the time.

• 45:25Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  You know, in recent years, they're starting to find remains of very big sharks from other parts of the world, Morocco and not Northern America as well, but they have not been published yet. I'm just saying, so at this moment, as we're speaking, it is still the largest known shark from the Devonian, full stop.

• 45:45Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, it's a certainty surely, isn't it? That more extraordinary new species of fish, of sharks, of early life from the Devonian will be uncovered from Aztec silt stone layers in Antarctica in the future? If it was almost a certainty, right?

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and you know, after that big expedition of, um, 1991, 92, I've been privileged to go back on two more expeditions quite recently, like 2016, 17, 2018, 19 with Professor Neil Schubin of the University of Chicago and his team. And we didn't go back to the portal, but we explored a lot of the, the earlier sites in the Aztec silt stone where geologists, not paleontologists, had found fragments of fish, but no paleontologists have been back to those sites. And we quarried some of these sites and found beautiful complete skulls of new species of stem tetrapod fish, fish that would give rise to the first land animals.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Um, a lot more placoderms, a lot more rayfin fishes, like early trout-like fishes. So we've got a bunch of new stuff that we're currently riding up, that we haven't even published yet from those sites as well. So yes, as you're saying Tristan, it goes to, without saying that if any, any paleontologist that's trained in, in these sort of fishes can get back to those sites, they will find more material, absolutely. We just walk around and we find layers and we dig into them. And eventually you see bits of bone on the ground everywhere. You know, you're close to a bone bed layer where you can actually find sometimes whole complete fish, not just fragments or teeth, but articulated complete fish as well. It's an amazing environment to find fossils in.

• 47:24Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you mentioned animals there, John, so let's move on from the Devonian. And, and what's the next kind of part of ancient prehistoric Antarctica story where we see Antarctica once again teeming in life? What's the next big stage of prehistoric life in Antarctica following the Devonian?

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Well, I think we have to jump to the Triassic period.

• 47:45Tristan Hughes?

  The dinosaurs, okay.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  About 252 to 201 million years ago. And this is the time when the first dinosaurs, the first mammals, the first crocodilians, uh, the first pterosaurs, flying reptiles, all appeared at the same time. But from American expeditions there back in the 1990s, they collected the first dinosaur, theropod dinosaur, called Cryolophosaurus, but they're also finding remains of mammal-like reptiles or early mammals as well that would define the Gondwan and fauna, such as the thing, a pig-like mammal-like reptile called Lystrosaurus, which is known from Africa, it's known from India, parts of it are found in Australia, South America.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  And so these initial finds were, were, were cementing the concept of Gondwana uh, more so than just the plants to find animals that could actually walk from one part of the continent to the other. These are not things that can swim across oceans. So it does, you know, adds to the sort of the fact that this, this is universal Gondwana fauna that covered all these continents and you're also finding them in Antarctica, um, as well.

• 48:56Tristan Hughes?

  So I've got so many questions from that. First of all, John, the big time jump we've done, why we've gone from the Devonian to the beginning of the dinosaurs, the Triassic. So we've kind of gone over periods like the Carboniferous and the Permian.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:09Tristan Hughes?

  Why is that? Why does there seem to be an absence of fossils from those, you know, tens of millions of years that those big time periods?

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Well, we do have some Carboniferous coal measures that have some plant remains, but not much else. And then there's a sort of a gap in the fossil, in, in the sedimentalogical record. There are some Permian plants found in Antarctica and there's a good flora of these different kinds of plants. But I'm just jumping to where we have the first sort of animal remains.

• 49:37Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  You know, to keep on time, if you like.

• 49:39Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough, fair enough. Um, and you mentioned the dinosaur there. What, I've, I've, I'm not going to pronounce the name because I've forgotten it. Um, but what is this type of dinosaur that we have?

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Well, this is a meat eating dinosaur. It's a bit like Allosaurus, which is a smaller version of T. rex. But it's a funky Elvis Presley kind of dinosaur because it has these big wavy crests above its eyes, a bit like Elvis's swept back hair. And it's called Cryolophosaurus. So it was probably about

• 50:07Tristan Hughes?

  Cryolophosaurus.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  seven or eight metres in length, so from a fairly complete skull and partial skeleton from the top of Mount Fitzpatrick, which is about four kilometres high. So when Bill Hammer and his team from Augustan College collected it back in the nineties, the helicopter pilots were, were, were really frightened to even take a helicopter up that high. You know, it was really dangerous to get, the air's so thin up there. They did eventually get a helicopter up there and then they had to load it up. And of course, coming down is a lot easier with, with, with a payload. But they collected these blocks of rock that had the dinosaurs and mammal remains and amphibian remains. So they got quite an interesting fauna of animals that lived about 230 million years ago from Antarctica.

• 50:53Tristan Hughes?

  And that period as well, you mentioned Lystrosaurus already, that another good friend of the show, Henry G, has described as a mix between a can opener, a pig and a golden retriever.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  I know Henry well and I've got a golden retriever too.

• 51:08Tristan Hughes?

  But they are also, yes, they're not the big kind of carnivores. They're not like Cryolophosaurus or anything like that. But they're also one of the big survivors. And is that even potential that they were, they even hibernated as well?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  It is, yes. There is one theory about Lystrosaurus that they lived in burrows. Yeah, it's not my area of expertise, Lystrosaurus, but I just know the remains have been found there and been described.

• 51:31Tristan Hughes?

  All right, John, let's go on to the dinosaurs. So you've got that big carnivore, that Allosaurus-like dinosaur. But what other dinosaurs have been discovered from Antarctica?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Well, I had some long-necked plant eaters called Platiosaurs there as well. That's known from some isolated remains. And that's basically all we've got from that Triassic deposit and some, some remains of pterosaurs or flying reptiles, you know, bat-like reptiles called pterosaurs. But we've got to go then jump into the, the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous and late Cretaceous, which take us from 200 million years ago, the end of the Triassic to about, you know, 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic, and then to about 80, 90 million years ago in the late Cretaceous, where we get other assemblages of dinosaurs and land animals on Antarctica. But these are on the, more on the islands.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Seymour Island, James Ross Island, on the other side of Antarctica, from where I was working around the Ross Sea. So these have produced amazing deposits with not only dinosaurs, but marine reptiles, sharks, lots of plants, lots of shells, you know, rich deposits that recreate an age of dinosaurs in Antarctica. And some of these discoveries, although the first ones were made back in the late 80s and early 90s, quite recently, a bone was found in the geological collections of the British Antarctic Survey that showed they had a long-necked sauropod dinosaur, you know, like a Brontosaurus type of thing. That was actually found in 1985 and they didn't know they had it until this year, 2026.

• 53:09Tristan Hughes?

  So that's why the news story has broken this year. That's, yes, it was big, wasn't it?

• 53:14Speaker 04

  But it just shows the value of collections, whether they be in museums or geological surveys, that geologists go out, they collect what they see, they put it in the collection. And no one might see that or know about it for years, for decades even. But it's still there. And then you realise, wow, we've got this dinosaur that lived in Antarctica we didn't even know about. It's fantastic. And Titanosaur, which is a group found in South America and also Australia. Our, you know, sauropods are dominated by these Titanosaurs. Whereas in North America and England, you've got other kinds that are more typical like Brontosaurus, Diplodocus type of dinosaurs.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  This is Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad. Opill is the first over the counter daily birth control pill available in the US. Let's be real, getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now Opill is putting birth control in our control. Opill is a daily birth control that's FDA approved, full prescription strength and estrogen free, and 98% effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out Opill to see if it's right for you. Use code GIGLY for

• 55:16Speaker 02

  25% off your first month of Opill at O P I L L dot com. That's code GIGLY at O P I L L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.

• 55:43Tristan Hughes?

  And they're just walking from, as you say, from where South America is, all the way to Australia. They're connected the land bridge. Antarctica is still that lynchpin, as you said earlier. And that brings you nice into that next kind of type of animal, which is very recognisable to you in Australia, which are marsupials. Do we have dinosaur age marsupial discoveries in Antarctica?

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Well, they're not kind of the age of dinosaurs. They're a little younger, actually. They're in the layers above. They're the EFC deposits. But yes, we do have marsupials. We have Antactidaeops and some other, so possum-like remains of marsupials found in, again, by American researchers, Judd Case and Michael Woodburn. And that's really interesting. It's, it's almost like what you'd predict to find there, knowing that Australia is rich in marsupials. Antarctica is the neighbour of Australia locked into Gondwana, whereas the northern hemisphere continent is separate, where the placental mammals are abundant, you know, the mammals that give birth to live young. So the interesting thing is that

• 56:48Speaker 04

  sometimes Antarctica proves a point, even when the fossils don't come from Antarctica. So Australia has platypuses, right? And we have echidnas, we have monotremes, the only egg-laying mammals on the planet. And they're meant to be really archaic. You know, we have fossil remains of some of their jaws and teeth from Victoria, where I am now in Australia, southern Australia, that date back 120 million years. But recently, you know, the last couple of decades, they found a tooth of a platypus. Get this, in South America. And they called it, the, the name of it is called Sudamericanum, I mean, South American creature, you know. And so we've got them in Australia, we've got them in

• 57:30Speaker 04

  South America. How can you explain that logically? And the only way is that they must have transgressed across Antarctica to get to those two extremes, when then the continents broke away and you've got populations of platypuses living in South America 60 million years ago, and in Australia from like 120 million years ago, and they're still living there today. So that predicts that we will find them in Antarctica one day if we keep looking.

• 57:57Tristan Hughes?

  John, it's really exciting. I could ask so many more questions. I've got things here on my notes, like the earliest modern bird found from Antarctica, too. Pleistocene in the seas, following the dinosaurs. You mentioned those marsupials already and earlier, how Antarctica is still linked to Australia and South America for a bit of time. In those tens of millions of years after the dinosaurs, I'm just going to do a quick kind of, let's do a quick fire round. I'm going to put animals your way. Like yes or no, whether they were there. Prehistoric penguins?

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Yes, gigantic penguins up to 1.7 metres tall.

• 58:31Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. Prehistoric dolphins?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Yes, about 3.5 million years ago, we had dolphins in Antarctica, Australadelphus. Because Pleistocene, 3.5 million years ago, was about 2.5 to 3 degrees warmer in the seas. But today, it's too cold for them to go down that far.

• 58:50Tristan Hughes?

  So they were there. Prehistoric whales?

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Yes, we had this giant filter-feeding whale called Linocetus. It had teeth, but early filter-feeding whales still had teeth on their jaws as they were developing baleen. And that lived about 35 million years ago. And it served for a whole, complete skull. It's a beautiful specimen.

• 59:10Tristan Hughes?

  There you go. I mean, I could ask so much more. To finish it off, John, when does Antarctica, in millions of years, when does it become the isolated, frozen world that we know it today? When does that kind of that final age of great diversity of life in Antarctica come to an end?

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Well, it starts splitting away from Australia about 50 million years ago. And by about 38 million years ago, that, that break is there. And so suddenly we go from paradise full of life to polar ice full of death. And basically, the Circum Antarctic Current is the death knell for Antarctica, because then there's no more warmer currents coming down from the north around a bigger landmass. So as a smaller southern landmass, it's completely engulfed by cold polar currents. It gets colder and colder and colder. And about seven million years ago, the very last forests in Antarctica die. And after that, that's it. So only animals can get down there, like whales or fishes that live in the sea

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  and so on, that can survive in Antarctica. And some seabirds, of course.

• 1:00:14Tristan Hughes?

  John, this has been such an amazing conversation. I know we could have explored so many more sites that you've visited, especially focusing on that age of fishes, the Devonian. But it is, it is such an, an amazing, a unique, you know, the only place in the world, this continent, this tundra waste land continent, that is so rich in paleontology. And there must be so many more discoveries waiting to be found there in the many, many years ahead.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  There will be, absolutely, Tristan. And as long as governments can still support Antarctic science, and that is the really big question. It's expensive and it's very, it takes a lot of logistics and planning to get people down to Antarctica and then get out to these remote places to look for fossils. As long as people still value the knowledge that paleontology can bring to society today, then hopefully they'll still keep funding expeditions to go down there.

• 1:01:05Tristan Hughes?

  Well, John, I've loved this and I've loved all the stories you tell. You're a brilliant storyteller and you've got so many more stories still to tell us, which we're going to be exploring in a special bonus episode that we're recording right after this one, putting the spotlight on you and your amazing career. But that's to come very soon. John, last but certainly not least, you have written several books on Antarctica. They are called, and on fish, on sharks, they are called?

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's the Shark Book, of course, The Secret History of Sharks, talks about Antarctic sharks. There's Mountains of Madness, A Journey Through Antarctica, or the US copy is A Scientist's Odyssey Through Antarctica. This is all about my expedition exploits and adventures. It's out of print now, but you can get it online. But basically, and the, the book on the paleontology of Antarctica, a popular book called Frozen in Time by Jeff Stillwell and John Long, is available through CSIRO Press Australia, came out in 2011.

• 1:01:58Tristan Hughes?

  Brilliant. John, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  My pleasure. It's always fun talking to you, Tristan.

• 1:02:08Tristan Hughes?

  Thanks so much for joining us today on The Ancients. I hope you enjoyed that awesome episode on ancient Antarctica with Professor John Long. Now you can hear more from John on The Ancients. We recorded two episodes with him last year, one on the first sharks, that was quite the topic, and another on the biggest shark of all time, the real life Meg, the Megalodon. We'll put links to those episodes in the show notes. And if you're a subscriber, well, we've also got a special extra episode with John, where we shone the light on John's amazing career, full of great stories of John coming to the Natural History Museum in London, then going back to Australia and really advancing

• 1:02:53Tristan Hughes?

  the field and cooperative paleontology with First Nations communities and so much more. It is an amazing story which we cover with John on our bonus episode of After Ancients with him. So if you're a subscriber, you can check that out. If you'd like to listen to that episode and you're not a subscriber, well, you can join up, you can sign up and become part of the Ancients team. We'd love to have you on board. Now, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd also be kind enough to give us a five star review, if you're feeling kind, well, we'd really appreciate that. And if you want even more history, well, History Hit has hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, plus early access, ad-free podcasts and exclusive

• 1:03:38Tristan Hughes?

  subscriber episodes of The Ancients. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next one.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  This is Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the US. Let's be real, getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now O-Pill is putting birth control in our control. O-Pill is a daily birth control that's FDA-approved, full prescription strength and estrogen-free, and 98% effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out O-Pill to see if it's right for

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  you. Use code GIGGLY for 25% off your first month of O-Pill at O-P-I-L-L dot com. That's code GIGGLY at O-P-I-L-L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.