Pod Insights Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Story of Birds (featuring Dr. Steve Brusatte) About this episode Daniel and Kelly talk to Dr. Steve Brusatte about his new book "The Story of Birds". We discuss if chickens are really dinosaurs, if we know what color dinosaur feathers were, and why birds survived the devastating asteroid collision with Earth while pterosaurs didn't.
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Transcript 13,256 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:43 Kelly Weinersmith? Imagine this. You're walking through the woods by yourself. You've been told there are dinosaurs afoot. You hear a rustling in the brush behind you, and the hair is on the back of your neck, stand on end. What made that noise? You start to break a sweat. You hear the noise again. And then, out of the woods comes...
2:08 Kelly Weinersmith? A chicken?
2:11 Kelly Weinersmith? Well, technically, a chicken is a dinosaur. And if you don't believe me, we have Dr. Steve Brusatti, author of the new book, The Story of Birds, on the show today to try to convince you. And while I have to admit that chickens don't really inspire the same level of awe in me as Ankylosaurus or T. rex, neither of those species survived the catastrophic collision of an asteroid with Earth during the Cretaceous period. But somehow, birds did make it through. So maybe birds are more interesting than I've given them credit for. And maybe those birders really are on to something. Let's see. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Avian Universe.
3:05 Daniel Whiteson? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And if I discover a new particle, it's not getting a Latin name.
3:10 Kelly Weinersmith? Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space. And I am part of the team that has described two species. And we gave both of them fun Latin names.
3:24 Kelly Weinersmith? Because they need them.
3:25 Daniel Whiteson? Hmm.
3:26 Kelly Weinersmith? They have to have names, man. Get over it.
3:29 Daniel Whiteson? Because biologists, when they talk about something, they have to start with a Latin name and then never use it again. They just dump it on your brain to tire you out before you even hear the interesting bits.
3:38 Kelly Weinersmith? OK, all right. So apparently, this is what we're going to be talking about. So here's the thing. Look, not all species have common names. Some of them just have Latin names. And so what are you supposed to do? Do you want me to just be like, Bug One? Like, that is their name.
3:53 Daniel Whiteson? Yes. Bug One is much better than going like, this thing gabba da gubba da, which I'm never going to use again. And you, but you had to hear anyway. And we'll just talk about is Bug One. I just find it confusing and not very helpful. But anyway, my question to you today, Kelly, is, what is your favorite bird?
4:10 Kelly Weinersmith? What is my favorite bird?
4:11 Daniel Whiteson? Yes.
4:12 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, what is my favorite bird? Uh, gosh, I don't know. I like a lot of birds. My favorite bird. And this is maybe going to be a surprising answer.
4:22 Daniel Whiteson? Uh oh.
4:23 Kelly Weinersmith? Is a bird that makes me happy when I am sad. And it is the turkey. And I was, I was once lost in the woods and I was supposed to be doing this like survey. And I was up on a military base and it was when the rattlesnakes, it was a rattlesnake survey and the rattlesnakes were breeding and I was all by myself and I wasn't supposed to be by myself. It's a really long story, but I was like, kind of freaking out. This was really early in my career and I came across a bunch of turkeys and they started doing their weird gobbling and the way they walk where they kind of like move their heads back and forth. They just looked so ridiculous that I literally, I just sat down and I watched
5:06 Kelly Weinersmith? them and I was able to regain my composure because I was like, you guys are ridiculous and I'm gonna be okay. And now that I live in the woods in Virginia, when it's in the spring, I get up in the morning before everybody else and I sit on the porch and I open my Merlin app, uh, which identifies bird sounds and I drink my coffee and there's all these cute little birds making all of their calls in the morning. And so it tells me, oh, there's an indigo bunting and there's the cardinal and stuff like that. There's a tufted tit mouse. And then out of nowhere, you'll hear
5:42 Kelly Weinersmith? and I will just crack up, you know? It's like, it's interspersed with all of this beauty. There's just this ridiculousness that always makes me smile. And so maybe my favorite bird is the turkey. And every year we name a Turk King. It's the big, the biggest male on the property. And so, yeah, I guess maybe it's the turkey. They're not the most beautiful. They look ridiculous when they try to take flight and maybe I, uh, I don't know, I see myself in them. I don't know.
6:08 Daniel Whiteson? And the turkey is the kind of thing that makes it hard to understand that birds are related to dinosaurs, you know?
6:14 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes.
6:14 Daniel Whiteson? You just don't have that gravitas, the aura of danger, you know, that you expect from a dinosaur.
6:21 Kelly Weinersmith? But what about you? What's your favorite bird?
6:22 Daniel Whiteson? Hmm. I love the crow. It's jet black. It's totally obviously evil. It's crazy smart. Um, there's something just really impressive and terrifying about crows. Crows I can see is like having a long lineage of killers.
6:38 Kelly Weinersmith? What? But they're not like dangerous or anything. They're just like, they're brilliant and beautiful and amazing. And they're not like out there stabbing people with their beaks. What are you talking about?
6:49 Daniel Whiteson? I mean, crows remember people who've been mean to them and they can like, take revenge. So yeah, be careful around crows.
6:55 Kelly Weinersmith? I think you're paranoid. They're not like, like, like messing with your brake pads or something, man. They're just like, they're just out there eating stuff.
7:03 Daniel Whiteson? No, I think there's some crow equivalent of Rape My Professor where they're like, this guy's a jerk and everybody should attack him or poke his eyes out or something. I'm always nice to crows. They're like the mafia, you know? You don't want to anger them.
7:16 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay. All right. Well, the reason we're talking about our favorite birds today is because my friend Steve Brusatti has a amazing new book out today called The Story of Birds. And we got him on the show today to tell us all about birds, bird evolution. And we had so much fun in this conversation today.
7:33 Daniel Whiteson? Even though we heard a few Latin names.
7:35 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh my gosh, get over it. All right, let's bring Steve on the show.
7:39 Daniel Whiteson? I never will.
7:42 Kelly Weinersmith? Dr. Steve Brusatti is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh. He's described over 20 new species of fossil animals. He writes bestselling popular science books and he's the paleontology consultant for the Jurassic World series. And when I told my daughter that, she thought that I was cool for the first time because I had just met Steve in person. His new book, The Story of Birds, A New History of Their Dinosaur Origin to the Present, comes out today. Steve, you are from the United States and you've moved to Edinburgh. How is the haggis?
8:17 Speaker 06 I like haggis. I had never tried haggis until I moved to Scotland. I'm from Illinois originally. I've been in Scotland for over 13 years now, teaching the earth sciences degree here at the University of Edinburgh. And I found that I quite like haggis, but even better than haggis, I must say, is vegetarian haggis, the one that's made with lentils and beans and all kinds of spices. It's really, really, really, really, really good with the added benefit that you're not eating lungs. So there you go.
8:45 Kelly Weinersmith? I had the vegetarian haggis. I loved it.
8:48 Daniel Whiteson? But I'm confused. What's haggis-y about vegetarian haggis? I thought it was all the organ meat that made it haggis.
8:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's a fair point. And I think, so they try to get the spice mix.
9:02 Speaker 06 Correct. I don't, the spices, I don't know. I'm not a Scottish chef, but I think it's a lot of pepper and mace and these kinds of spices. And they must put something in there to give you that tininess of organ meat. I don't know how they do it. It's alchemy. But if, if you're interested in Scottish cuisine and you want to try haggis, but you want some training wheels first, try the veggie haggis.
9:27 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. Well, also, welcome to the show.
9:30 Speaker 06 Yes. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about birds. Haggis. What are we doing here?
9:33 Daniel Whiteson? No, wait. I have one more ridiculous Scotland related question before we get started. Can you evaluate Kelly's pronunciation of the town in which you live?
9:41 Speaker 06 It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I didn't know how to pronounce it when I was actually quite embarrassingly, when I first came to the UK, I did a master's degree in Bristol, down in England for a couple of years, which was great. I learned a lot about paleontology there. A lot of what I study now is based on that foundation. I met my wife in Bristol.
10:01 Daniel Whiteson? Wonderful.
10:01 Speaker 06 But I also learned a lot about the English language, the Queen's English. And it took me a while. And I didn't know how to pronounce Edinburgh then. I think I do now. But undoubtedly, if, you know, real native Scottish folks are listening, they'll probably critique my kind of Chicago accent way of saying Edinburgh.
10:22 Kelly Weinersmith? We've both appalled them, I'm sure. But we're doing the best we can as, you know, people born in America. All right. So let's jump right into what would have surprised 12 year old Kelly, which is that birds are dinosaurs, like parakeets and chickens are actually dinosaurs. And I think childhood Kelly would have been kind of appalled by this. How did we figure this out?
10:51 Speaker 06 It is absolutely true. That's the first thing to say. This is true. It's not a rumor. It's not a conspiracy theory. And it's not something like scientists are trying to spin words or to get too cute or change the definition of a word you thought you do. It's true in an evolutionary sense. Birds are dinosaurs. Birds evolved from other dinosaurs. They are part of the dinosaur family tree. They have all of the classic features of dinosaurs, the things that make dinosaurs dinosaurs, which are things like a big open joint in the pelvis, where the thigh bone fits in, extra bones in the backbone that connect the hips to the body, those kind of things. So the way to think about birds and dinosaurs is how we think about bats.
11:36 Speaker 06 And you say, what is a bat? Well, a bat is a mammal. Of course, it's a mammal, right? It evolved from other mammals. It's part of the mammal family tree. It has all the classic mammal features. It has a hair and molar teeth and feeds its babies milk. Of course, it's a mammal. It's just a weird type of mammal that got small, evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. And birds are the dinosaur version of that. They are one peculiar group of dinosaurs. They got small, evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. And it's not like birds evolved from T. rex or Brontosaurus, any more than a bat or a human evolved from an elephant or a wow. It's just that birds are part of that broader dinosaur family, the same way bats or humans are part of the broader mammal family.
12:18 Daniel Whiteson? That was really fascinating. But to digest that, I think I need to understand a little bit better what exactly makes something a dinosaur? Is it the evolutionary tree? You're saying this whole branch and everything descended from it is a dinosaur? Or is it morphological? Like if it has these things as part of its body, then it's a dinosaur? Or is it both?
12:36 Speaker 06 It is both. It is both. And it's the same for if we ask what makes a mammal a mammal. Mammals are a group on the family tree of life. And that group is defined by the features they have or the features that their common ancestor evolved. Because a mammal can lose some of those features that makes mammals mammals. There are naked mole rats that don't have hair. It doesn't mean they're not mammals, but they evolved from the ancestors that did have hair. So when it comes to dinosaurs, dinosaurs, that's a group on the family tree of life. It's the group basically of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus. Those are two dinosaurs, the first two ones that were named and described by scientists.
13:17 Speaker 06 Back in the 1820s, they're the anchor points for what makes dinosaurs dinosaurs. And that broader group defined by those anchor points has a set of unique features that are not seen in other animals. Things like that big, open joint in the pelvis, which really is all about walking more upright. Dinosaurs walked more upright with their legs under their bodies compared to other reptiles that slither around or that sprawl around like crocodiles and lizards. And extra backbones linking the hips to the body column, those are the things that make dinosaurs dinosaurs. They might seem like subtle anatomical features, and in a way they are, but they are quite distinctive things.
13:59 Speaker 06 Very weird for a reptile. Dinosaurs are a type of reptile and they are unusual reptiles. And birds stem from that dinosaur group. So it's simply a fact of genealogy. It's the same way that I'm a Bruce Sadi because I was born to parents who were Bruce Sadi's part of the family. I have the classic, you know, features, physical features of my family due to the genetics of the family. And it doesn't matter if I move away to another country like Scotland, you know, my family's back in America. I'm still a Bruce Sadi, even though I'd change. And that's the same way we need to think about birds. Yes, I know it seems like a bird looks nothing like a T. rex or a Brontosaurus, but it's not that it evolved directly from those dinosaurs. It's that it's part of the broader group.
14:42 Speaker 06 And birds have become very specialized in their own right. They have changed, but they are still dinosaurs. Once you're in the family, you cannot leave. It's like the mafia and that's how we need to think about birds and dinosaurs. There you go.
15:00 Daniel Whiteson? So there's lots of times in science when humans draw really clear distinctions. And then when you look more carefully, you're like, hmm, this is kind of an arbitrary dotted line around something that's important to us. You know, in physics, for example, planets are like a kind of made up category, but emotionally they're important to us.
15:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
15:17 Daniel Whiteson? Is dinosaurs like that or is it really well motivated and clearly distinct?
15:21 Speaker 06 It's, I mean, it's both in a sense because of course there are historical conventions. What we consider a planet, there's a definition that has developed over time that astronomers have had to agree on as humans classifying things. And the same thing with species on the tree of life. So there of course is an arbitrariness about what names we put on things. But the key thing is for planets, I suppose that, you know, they are what they are. They're a certain size. They're made up of something. They're rotating around a star. I mean, those realities exist regardless of what you call them. And with the family tree of life, you can put whatever names you want on anything, but the reality is that life has evolved, it's changed over time. There have been ancestors that have
16:05 Speaker 06 given rise to descendants and those descendants that have given rise to new things. And whatever names you want to call any of this stuff, the reality is that the birds we see around us today, the ones I'm literally looking at outside my window now, there's some pigeons and some magpies here outside my window. They evolved from dinosaurs. Their wings, their feathers, their wishbones, all of those features that make them birds are things that dinosaurs first evolved and birds inherited from them. So that process of evolution, that historical story, that is what happened. That is the key. Call these things whatever you want, but the reality is that today's birds evolved from the dinosaurs of yesteryear
16:49 Speaker 06 and that makes them a part of the same family line.
16:53 Kelly Weinersmith? So if I'm thinking about like, you know, on the mammal family tree, some of our closest relatives that people, you know, can picture in their minds would be like the chimpanzees and the bonobos. If we're thinking about dinosaurs that people could picture in their mind, that would be some of the closest relatives of, you know, birds, you know, so that's not going to be, you said it's not T. rex, it's not brachiosaurus. Is it like a raptor? Because, you know, velociraptor has the word raptor in it. Maybe it's that. What, you know, what dinosaur that people could picture would be a relative of birds that would be pretty close?
17:30 Daniel Whiteson? And can we call it the velociraptor chicken?
17:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, you got it. The velociraptor chicken. Yeah, it is. It is those dinosaurs, the raptor dinosaurs, what technically we would call the dromosaurus and the truodontidae dinosaurs. But what we normally just call the raptors when we're chatting, the ones that are famous from Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, velociraptor itself being the real iconic one, they are the very closest relatives and basically the ancestors of birds. And this is one of the things we have to wrap our heads around. You know, when we hear the word dinosaur, the image that comes to mind for most of us and for me as well, somebody who studies these animals, the image that comes to mind is a giant reptilian behemoth, whether it's one of the long-necked dinosaurs, whether
18:14 Speaker 06 it's a T. rex the size of a bus, or one of those big stegosaurus with the plates on his backs, or the triceratops with horns, these sublime, almost monstrous giant creatures. But not all dinosaurs were like that. And it's just like with mammals today. Yes, we celebrate the elephants and the rhinos and the lions and the other big cats and the gorillas and so on. But the vast majority of mammals are actually quite small. And it's true with dinosaurs. There was a huge range of dinosaurs. Some were quite small. The raptor dinosaurs were some of the smaller ones. And it's from those raptors that birds arose.
18:51 Kelly Weinersmith? One of the things in your book that I found awesome slash unsettling was the description of the experiments where you've got like chick embryos and they've been genetically modified so that you can like see the like dinosaur stages. Can you tell us about those experiments?
19:11 Speaker 06 It is morbid stuff, frankly. I'm a paleontologist. I like digging around in the dirt and the sand and the rocks, looking for fossils. I'm not somebody personally who does these genetic experiments, but I have many colleagues that study what's called evo-devo, so blending together the study of evolution over time with the development of modern day organisms from embryo to adult. Because generally, as an embryo develops into an adult,
19:41 Speaker 06 They replay the tape of evolution, not perfectly, of course. But when we are a little baby in the womb, there is a period of time, a short period of time, where we have gills, we have tails, we lose those things, but we have those because our ancestors had those things. We have the genes for those things still inside our genome. So in that very coarse way, you're seeing the development of a human replay, in part, the evolution of humans from other animals. It's true with birds as well. If you look at how a little baby chicken or a little baby quail develops in an egg and goes from the tiny little speck of an embryo into a hatchling, you actually see
20:23 Speaker 06 this little bird go through dinosaur phases. And you can see it most clearly with the pelvis. The pelvis of a really young quail, for instance, it really looks like the big, bulky, muscular hip of a T-Rex. If you were just to show me an image of those bones as they're developing and tell me nothing about the size of those bones or anything about the scale of them, I would say, oh, that really looks like a T-Rex pelvis. Well, it's not. It's the tiny, little, developing pelvis of a baby bird. And then, over the next few days, the bones morph and they shift and they change shape
21:02 Speaker 06 and they sweep backwards into the more gentle, delicate, back swept pelvis of a bird. But you see this day by day, and it's like you're marching up the family tree of dinosaurs. It's incredible. Now, maybe that's a bit abstract, though. I think what's even more slam dunk for most people, if I talk about how birds develop, is the fact that birds today don't have teeth. No birds have teeth. Birds have beaks. This is central to being a bird, is one of those most birdy features of being a bird. And the ancestors of birds, of course, did have teeth. Raptor dinosaurs has some of the nastiest, feistiest, sharpest teeth around. So what we would predict, of course, is that during the course of the origin and evolution
21:46 Speaker 06 of birds, birds lost teeth. Well, do we have evidence for that? We do in the fossil record. We see primitive birds with teeth.
21:52 Daniel Whiteson? Wow.
21:53 Speaker 06 Fair enough. That's pretty cool. But these are long-dead fossils. What's even cooler, I think, and which really drives home the point, and which really, I think, more than anything, just proves in the most visceral way that birds are dinosaurs, is that you can tweak the genes of a growing chicken and make it grow little teeth in the egg. And those little teeth, they look just like the teeth of a raptor dinosaur. It's crazy. It is, it is, it is, it is freakish, honestly, when you look at it. You sense this Frankenstein monster thing. And it is quite monstrous, actually, because once that mutation is activated, those little chicks cannot survive to hatchling.
22:36 Speaker 06 There's something that is just completely fatal about that mutation. And maybe the geneticists know. I don't know. I'm not a geneticist. I've only learned about it from what I've read. But that's probably why no birds have teeth today. Those dinosaur genes for teeth are lurking in their genome, but they can't be activated because there's something fatal about it. But they are there, and you can see a chicken with little velociraptor teeth in the embryo. And that really should just go and prove it once and for all if anybody has any doubts about the bird-dinosaur link.
23:12 Daniel Whiteson? Wow, the toothy chicken, that's nightmare-inducing.
23:15 Kelly Weinersmith? Totally. Okay, so I've been around the right kind of nerds throughout my life to know that pterodactyls are not dinosaurs.
23:23 Speaker 06 Very good. Yes.
23:24 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes.
23:25 Speaker 06 Yes.
23:25 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes.
23:26 Daniel Whiteson? Wow, 100 points for Kelly. Look at that.
23:29 Speaker 06 Daniel, did you know this?
23:31 Daniel Whiteson? I knew it only because I read Kelly's outline.
23:35 Kelly Weinersmith? But did pterodactyls and birds, like, did they share the skies at the same time? Like, were there pterodactyls, like, taking birds out of the sky and eating them? Or were there birds taking pterodactyls out of the sky and eating them? Like, what, what did the skies look like?
23:48 Daniel Whiteson? And when are we gonna get a pterodactyl versus toothy chicken movie, right? I wanna see that one.
23:53 Speaker 06 That can be Jurassic World 17. I'll tell, I will tell the producers and the directors. We will get there eventually. I will do my best. It will be quite the movie, maybe not, you know, I don't know. That's more of the, maybe, B-list type of film. But, um, yeah, birds and pterodactyls. This is, this is really fun to think about. So you're absolutely right, Kelly. Pterodactyls, or pterosaurs, that's the more technical name, but it's the same thing. It means the same thing. They are not birds, and they are not dinosaurs. They're often mistaken as dinosaurs. You often see them in the dinosaur toy sets and on the dinosaur posters. And they often show up in blockbuster dinosaur movies. Sometimes when the characters mistakenly even call them dinosaurs.
24:38 Kelly Weinersmith? So disappointing.
24:39 Speaker 06 The science consultants don't always get to copy edit the scripts. This is just a little insight.
24:45 Kelly Weinersmith? It's not your fault. I get it.
24:48 Speaker 06 I'm just throwing everybody else under the bus. But, uh, so if you hear Jonathan Bailey say that, he didn't mean it, he didn't mean it, he didn't know. But it is kind of one of those factoids that I think a lot of people don't know. Why would you know? It's one of those pub quiz, uh, Trivial Pursuit factoids. It's my little boy's favorite factoid. He's six years old, and he loves telling all of his friends and his teachers, "Pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs. They're dinosaur cousins." And I mean, they're sick of it. I think every, every under-six, you know, child in Edinburgh knows this now, just, uh, from hearing from Anthony.
25:20 Daniel Whiteson? But isn't it sort of in the category of things where scientists have a very specific definition? And then the popular understanding is broader? Like, I think most people think of dinosaurs as like, big reptiles that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. In which case, pterodactyls are in that category, even if they're not in the technical definition that you gave. Sort of the way that, like, you know, astronomers differentiate between like meteors and asteroids. But like, normal people are like, "I don't care if streaking across the sky..." That's what I mean.
25:46 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, that is true. And there's other giant reptiles that lived during the age of dinosaurs, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, that also were not dinosaurs. There were a whole bunch of different giant reptiles that lived in the water. Pleseasores, ichthyosaurs, mosasores. I'm just ticking off the names because I know we want as many Latin names as possible.
26:07 Speaker 06 Our listeners interested.
26:09 Daniel Whiteson? Wow. Wow. Thank you for that.
26:12 Speaker 06 But yeah, but the fact is that, yeah, there were plenty of giant reptiles during the age of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs proper are only one group of those reptiles. And and there is this more vernacular use of the word dinosaur, which is fine. I'm not gonna scream at people the way that my son does. If they misuse the term, if they're acting in good faith. But the important thing for our story, though, is that pterodactyls are not birds. They are two very different groups. It's not that today's birds evolved from the pterodactyls or anything like that. Actually, pterodactyls took to the skies first. And pterodactyls were the first group of animals with bones ever in the history of the earth to evolve powered, flapping flight. And by that, I mean
26:58 Speaker 06 wings that they could actively flap that would provide the lift and thrust needed to get airborne and move through the air. There's plenty of animals that can glide, that can soar, talking about flying squirrels and flying fish and these kind of things. But it's only pterodactyls and then birds and then bats, those three groups that have evolved powered, flapping flight among animals with bones. The pterodactyls did it long before birds.
27:24 Daniel Whiteson? Hold on, you said animals with bones so that you could like exclude some specific group, like what insects or who else?
27:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, so I can exclude all the millions of insects and just consider them inconsequential. It's a trick. It's a, you know, a political trick I'm playing here. I'm glad you noticed that. Thank you.
27:39 Daniel Whiteson? All of our Beatle listeners are really offended. Yeah.
27:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, there's plenty of other animals, lots of insects that have evolved powered, flapping flight in their own ways. That's true.
27:49 Kelly Weinersmith? Let's take a break. When we get back, Steve is gonna tell us how the vertebrates, because who cares about the invertebrates? How the vertebrates went about doing this.
27:58 Daniel Whiteson? Invertebrates have Latin names too, okay?
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28:39 Daniel Whiteson? Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren. I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know, there's every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album, so, and you, you obviously
29:23 Daniel Whiteson? are an expert here. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:45 Kelly Weinersmith? And we're back. Steve is telling us about how the pterosaurs were the first to be able to actually fly, and he's gonna tell us how they did that.
29:56 Speaker 06 So the first pterodactyls took to the skies in the middle part of the Triassic period, back when all the land was gathered together as Pangaea, the supercontinent, this single giant slab of land. And this was the same time the first dinosaurs were evolving on that land. And so that meant that pterodactyls, they went airborne probably about 80 million years before the first birds did. Wow. So they were the pioneers, which also means they were there when the first birds evolved. The pterodactyls were the incumbents. And so really, when the first birds evolved, they were interlopers in a pterodactyl world. And they were insurgents. And it's not that
30:40 Speaker 06 they just took over the skies instantaneously. No, it actually took many, many millions of years for birds to gradually diversify and spread around the world and evolve into new species and start to push out the pterosaurs. And it was really a long evolutionary war of attrition. And by the end of the Cretaceous, a good, you know, almost 100 million years after the first birds evolved, there were still birds and pterosaurs living together, but things had changed. The very oldest true bird we have in the fossil record is Archaeopteryx from Germany. This is this famous iconic fossil, half dinosaur, half bird. It has feathers
31:23 Speaker 06 and wings and a wishbone, just like a bird, but it has teeth in its jaws, it has big sharp claws on its hands, it has a long tail, just like a raptor dinosaur. This is the most beautiful, perfect transitional fossil you can imagine. Evolution captured in action like a freeze frame. And when Archaeopteryx and its close relatives, the first true birds, took to the skies about 150 million years ago, they had to welcome themselves into this world of pterosaurs. And Archaeopteryx is a famous fossil, very famous, only known from southern Germany. It's been known for about 160 years. There are only about 14 or 15 skeletons that have ever been found.
32:04 Speaker 06 But in the same rocks, there are thousands of pterodactyl skeletons that have been found. That goes to show you how thoroughly embedded the pterodactyls were in the skies when the first birds evolved. But if you fast forward to the end of the Cretaceous, the next interval of time, the age of T. rex and triceratops, you still have birds and pterosaurs, but now there's all kinds of birds, including primitive ones that still had teeth and tails and claws, but also very advanced ones that had beaks and that had big chest muscles that they could flap their wings with for long periods of time and hollow bones and fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism and so on. There were many more birds than pterodactyls.
32:45 Speaker 06 And then that world was rudely interrupted by the asteroid, and that's what ended up properly killing off the pterodactyls. It wasn't birds out competing them or pushing them aside. The asteroid is what got rid of the pterodactyls. And if the asteroid never hit, maybe there would still be birds and pterodactyls living together today.
33:05 Daniel Whiteson? So I want to hear more about why the asteroid killed the pterodactyls and not the birds. But you said something fascinating. You said half-bird, half-dinosaur. But birds are dinosaurs, right? So what makes something a bird? What are the quintessential birdy features? What would your six-year-old complain about?
33:20 Speaker 06 Great question. This is, so when I was writing The Story of Birds, when I was writing the book, I often had Anthony's voice in the back of my head saying, "Make sure I explain this so I don't get the 'yeah, but what about this' question," if I was reading it to him. So when I say archaeoptery is half-bird, half-dinosaur, what I really mean is that it has advanced features of modern birds, things that it used to fly, like its feathers and wings. But it also had a lot of features of the raptor dinosaur ancestors of birds, like the teeth and the sharp claws and the long tail. So that raises the question, then, what makes a bird a bird? And, and look, I don't think anybody out there, not to offend anybody, maybe there's a few of you, but most people listening to this probably do not want a long, tortured
34:05 Speaker 06 discussion of names and nomenclature and how we label stuff and how one scientist thinks this, but another scientist has an alternative naming system and, you know, but. When it comes down to it, bird is a vernacular term. It's not a formal scientific term. There are plenty of formal scientific names. Avies and Avialy and Neornithes and these groups on the tree of life that have formal scientific definitions. But when it comes down to it, most scientists, not all, because we do use words differently, even those of us who specialize in studying these things. But most scientists, definitely most paleontologists would say, we're gonna start calling something a bird if it can do that most bird-like thing.
34:47 Speaker 06 And that is if it had wings that were big enough and that could move in the right way, that it could flap those wings and it could support itself in the air. It could generate lift and thrust. Archaeopteryx is the first fossil that we have in the fossil record that can do that. It had big enough wings that it could powers bodies through the air. And that's really a matter of physics.
35:09 Daniel Whiteson? But can pterodactyls do that also?
35:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, pterodactyls could, but they evolved totally separately from a totally different group, the same way bats did.
35:16 Daniel Whiteson? Right.
35:17 Speaker 06 So, so they're, and their wings are very, we know that because the wings of pterodactyls are nothing like the wing of a bird. A wing of a bird is an arm, a heavily modified arm. You have the normal arm bones, but the hand is all fused up. And the hand and the arm bones support an airfoil of feathers, of quill pen feathers. A pterodactyl wing is a single long finger, the fourth finger, the ring finger, that anchored a giant sail of skin.
35:44 Kelly Weinersmith? Crazy.
35:45 Speaker 06 Totally different. Now bats do something even more different. Their entire hand is expanded and anchors a skin membrane. So because the wings of the three groups are so different, that's how we know that they evolved differently. But to circle back to Archaeopteryx, it's the first fossil, the oldest one we know of, that had wings made of feathers that were big enough that it could flap them and keep itself up into the air. There were plenty of raptor dinosaurs that also had wings made of feathers, but they were small, too small. Which really means that wings must have evolved for something other than flying, which is a trippy thing to think about, of course, because we think, what do wings do in a bird? Birds use wings to fly, just like an airplane uses wings to fly.
36:27 Speaker 06 But that doesn't mean wings evolved for that purpose, because birds use wings for many other things, too. They use wings to protect their eggs in the nest. They use wings to keep themselves warm, like a coat. They use wings to display, to attract mates, to intimidate rivals. And so we actually think that the first wings in dinosaurs probably evolved as display structures, made up of these feathers that had originally evolved as integument, as a coat, a coat of little hairy bristles to keep these dinosaurs warm. And then some of those dinosaurs modified those simple feathers into wings made of quill pens, but those first wings were quite small, used for display.
37:11 Speaker 06 And then only later on were some of those display wings co-opted to form an airfoil. So in that way, the origin of flight in dinosaurs really was an accident. And that's true, really, of all evolution, when you think about it. There's no grand plan about any of this, but something as profound as flight, such a new, powerful, revolutionary behavior, it just kind of developed when it could, because you had these small dinosaurs, that their bodies had gotten small for who knows why, maybe just to hide more easily, or because of their metabolism, or whatever. Those bodies had feathers on them to stay warm. Some of those feathers were elaborated into display billboards to attract mates and intimidate rivals.
37:56 Speaker 06 And at some point, if those billboards became big enough relative to the size of the body, just by the laws of physics, if those dinosaurs were moving them around a little bit, they'd generate a bit of lift, a bit of thrust, and that's when natural selection could take over and modify those wings into ever better airfoils. And that's really probably how flight developed. And things like feathers and wings, they did not evolve for flying. There was no grand plan there, but they came together to form a flying machine. Way I like to think about it is we think about airplanes and aircraft that humans have invented. Okay, the Wright brothers, they made the first airplane that could fly, but they didn't invent the propeller. They didn't invent the the wheel. They didn't invent the wing.
38:38 Speaker 06 They took these components and put them together in a new way, and evolution does the same thing. And with dinosaurs and birds, you had all this evolution of dinosaurs. And what emerged from that was this peculiar group of small, feathery winged dinosaurs that could flutter about in the air, and that is the origin story of birds.
38:57 Daniel Whiteson? I love understanding how these things come together and why the transitionary pieces of it exist for other reasons. Super fascinating. I also want to understand a little bit more sort of the story in your mind of how flight itself began. Like, I get that you have these proto-wings which develop for other reasons, but it's not like some Tuesday afternoon, a dinosaur was like, oh, if I do this, wow, now I'm soaring through the skies, right? Is it like little hopping and little gliding, which then gives them some benefit? And then they get better and better at that and stronger and stronger?
39:28 Speaker 06 It's a great question, and I will be direct and upfront and say we don't know the answer to that. We have some different theories, some different ideas, but ultimately, this was something that happened over 150 million years ago. We weren't around to see it. What we do know is that feathers first evolved as very simple little hair-like structures. So they could not have evolved for flying because, I mean, we can't use our hair to fly, so these dinosaurs couldn't have either. We also know that the first wings were too small to be used for flying, just by the laws of physics. And so wings must not have evolved for flying either. So those are things that we do know with quite a lot of confidence from the fossil record.
40:11 Speaker 06 What we don't really know is the exact setting, the exact situation, where these feathery winged dinosaurs started to move those wings in a way that they could get lift and thrust. Was it that they were running quickly on the ground and they were using those wings to maneuver and to turn and to brake? And they started to get a little bit of lift and started to defy gravity? Or could it have been they were living in the trees and they were jumping between branches and they were using those wings as a parachute to manipulate gravity? Right. Or could it have been something totally different? I mean, some birds use their wings to swim. Who's to say some dinosaur with little wings wasn't using them as paddles in the water? And that generated some pressure from natural selection.
40:56 Speaker 06 I mean, we don't know for sure. And I think we have to be humble in the face of the fossil record that when it comes to exactly knowing how certain behaviors originated, oftentimes we're not going to know. But we know the components. We know the general story. The general story is the things like feathers and wings, which birds need to fly today, they did not evolve for that purpose. They evolved for something else initially, and they were later repurposed by evolution. And that's, I think, the best we can really do at this point. Now, of course, we always need more fossils. And if we ever can confidently find fossils of those very first dinosaurs that we're moving about in the air, that would tell us more. You know, where those fossils are from. Were they animals living on the ground? Or do they come from a forest and they were in the tree?
41:41 Speaker 06 You could start to narrow it down if you had a perfect fossil record, but we're far from that. That's why we're always looking for more fossils. In the last year, there have been some really exciting new discoveries in China of fossil birds, basically the same age as archaeopteryx, about 150 million years old in the Jurassic period, but they're quite different from archaeopteryx. So there are new fossils out there that are emerging as we speak that are not challenging the overall story that birds evolved from dinosaurs or that feathers and wings evolved for other reasons before flight, but are helping to refine those hypotheses that we have about exactly how flight evolved. So there's a lot of exciting work still to come as all of these different farmers in
42:23 Speaker 06 China and young students and scientists in China are going out, finding fossils and studying these new fossils.
42:29 Kelly Weinersmith? I don't want to get us too far off track from getting back to the like, how did the birds survive the asteroid? But-
42:35 Speaker 06 Oh, that's right. That's what we were going to talk about.
42:37 Kelly Weinersmith? Right, but, but, but, but I was so excited when reading your book that we actually know what color some of these feathers were, not just on bird- But on like, you know, earlier dinosaurs. Can you tell us a bit like, how do we know what color they were when we actually can't see the color in the fossils?
42:53 Speaker 06 It sounds impossible, doesn't it?
42:54 Kelly Weinersmith? Right, it does.
42:56 Speaker 06 And I remember when I was in school in the late eighties and early nineties, you know, growing up in in Ottawa, Illinois, middle of farm country, my charming little hometown. I remember learning in school, these lessons on dinosaurs, and we would be told things like in the books, you know, that there's some things about dinosaurs we'll never know. We'll never know what colors they were. Were they green? Were they brown? Were they purple and pink polka dot? And we just won't know because color doesn't preserve as fossils. Well, the most dangerous thing you can ever say is that we will never know. Right. Especially to a scientist. And so I try to never say that because you don't know what you're gonna find. And what happened was about 20 years ago, there was a student, a really remarkable student, Jacob Vinthers is his name.
43:41 Speaker 06 He's now on the faculty in Bristol, but he was a student at the time and he was studying this fossil squid. And he noticed that near this fossil squid was this patch of really dark black stuff. And he said, you know, the obvious thing, is this stuff ink? Is it ink? I mean, it, you know, it makes total sense. And maybe if it was the senior professor looking at that, maybe they would have been embarrassed to say, but he was a student. You know, completely open mind, completely uninhibited. Is it ink? Fossilized ink? And so how could he tell? Well, he looked under the microscope, high powered microscope, and whoa, lo and behold, it looked just like modern squid ink when he looked under the microscope. Because it had these little bubbles inside, these things called melanosomes, which hold pigment.
44:25 Speaker 06 And you can tell different colors are formed by different types of melanosomes of different size and shapes. Not all colors, but colors like black and brown and gray and ginger and some of the iridescent shiny colors. And so he realized that in some cases, you can get these little pigment vessels preserved for tens of millions of years as fossils. Which then led him and others to say, well, wait a minute. If we can see this in a squid, what about some of these dinosaurs with feathers that are coming out of China? Let's look at the under the microscope and lo and behold, there were melanosomes in the feathers, not in every feather, but in the best preserved ones. And they could map those melanosomes, the size and the shape of them to known colors. Because this is all just physics. It's optical physics.
45:10 Speaker 06 And so, OK, this feather has melanosomes in it that the size and shape of ones that we know give a brown color in modern birds, or they give a ginger color. And so from there, they were able to start to tell the color palettes of some of these dinosaurs. And what that does tell us is that some of these dinosaurs with feathers, that they were not birds yet. They were not, they didn't have big wings. They weren't flapping those wings. They couldn't fly. But they had quite elaborate feathers, feathers that were very colorful, really ostentatious patterns to them. Almost certainly, they must have been using these for display, to attract mates, to intimidate rivals, the same way that so many modern birds do with their feathers. So it was this realization that helped build this hypothesis
45:55 Speaker 06 that wings first evolved for display and were later co-opted as airfoils for flying. We don't know again for sure that's exactly what happened. But the fact that you have small wings in these dinosaurs, too small to fly, and those wings have these really gaudy color patterns to them, it just makes sense that they were using them for display. And I think this is incredibly exciting.
46:18 Kelly Weinersmith? It's so cool.
46:19 Speaker 06 It's so neat, isn't it? This is science. This is-
46:21 Daniel Whiteson? It's wonderful when physics comes to the rescue, right?
46:24 Speaker 06 Physics came to the rescue.
46:25 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, you were waiting for that, Daniel. Oh, my goodness.
46:29 Speaker 06 And it's not the first time in paleontology physics has come to the rescue, I must say.
46:34 Daniel Whiteson? It happens in every story.
46:37 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, don't-
46:37 Daniel Whiteson? But just to be clear, we're not seeing the colors in the fossils, right? We're seeing traces of different shaped mechanisms that produce those colors. So it's one step indirect.
46:47 Speaker 06 In most cases, that's, that's true. But occasionally, sometimes there's so many melanosomes that are so well preserved, probably because the feather was buried really quickly, that you actually see bands of color in those feathers. They wouldn't be exactly like in the living bird, but, but they're there, visible to the naked eye, these bands of different colors, which is just fascinating, just incredible.
47:11 Daniel Whiteson? I love that you call it ostentatious. Like if you got into a time machine and went back and saw the first birds, you'd be like, I'm sorry, that's a bit much, isn't it? Tone it down.
47:20 Speaker 06 It would be, it's like Liberace, you know, John Schill from the seventies. Like, that's how I imagine these things, just full on, just total, total, full on, just going for it, just visual display, boom, in your face, trying to get noticed, trying to show how attractive they are, or how scary they are to their rivals. That was probably what drove much of the evolution of birds initially.
47:44 Daniel Whiteson? So you're saying that birds through their whole history have been absolutely fabulous?
47:48 Speaker 06 They have been, and they remain absolutely fabulous. Absolutely.
47:53 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, we are gonna take a break, and when we get back, y'all are gonna be so proud of us, because we are actually going to answer the question we set out to answer like 15 minutes ago. What determined who survived the giant Cretaceous asteroid?
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48:47 Speaker 02 Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.
49:05 Speaker 03 That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. To find your creativity and to believe in yourself, because somewhere in the midst of it, I stopped believing that my voice mattered, and that I could find it again. That's a challenge. I was not feeling very confident creatively, only, again, defiant in my belief that what this is about is express something honest, say something honest.
49:41 Speaker 02 Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app.
49:46 Kelly Weinersmith? YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
50:00 Kelly Weinersmith? We are back. And 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid struck the Earth during the Cretaceous. We had pterosaurs, we had dinosaurs, we had birds, which we've learned are also dinosaurs, but are maybe not what we first think about when we hear the word dinosaur. Steve, who survived and why? Or first, actually, what was it like when that giant asteroid struck the Earth?
50:24 Speaker 06 Hell. It was like hell. Total hell on Earth. And with no hyperbole, I mean it, it was probably the single worst day in the history of Earth. This was not a normal day. This would have started like any normal day. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of the outer reaches of space, came this six-mile-wide rock, just fell out of the sky. And the animals that were living then had no idea it was coming. They had no way to monitor the motions of the heavens.
50:50 Daniel Whiteson? You know, I've read some reconstructions of this asteroid, and there's some that suggest that it did two passes, like it made a near miss of the Earth and went around the back of the sun and then came back and hit the Earth. So if dinosaurs had done their astronomy, they would have had some warning.
51:07 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, but Daniel.
51:08 Daniel Whiteson? Fund science. That's the lesson. Fund your scientists.
51:12 Speaker 06 So hopefully, we've learned our lesson there. And hopefully, the next time an asteroid confronts us that it does a double pass, just to show us it's there. But imagine, though, so T. rex was there the day this happened. Okay, Triceratops was there. There were giant duck-billed dinosaurs, and long-necked dinosaurs, and all kinds of dinosaurs there. We know that from the fossil record. We have fossils of these dinosaurs going right up to the layer in the rock that is marked by all the chaos of the asteroid. And just imagine, your kind, your dinosaur family, has been dominating the world for over 150 million years. You've been at the top of the food chain, different species in different places, but top of the food chain, the biggest meat eaters, the biggest plant eaters, all kinds
51:56 Speaker 06 of diversity. And then, all of a sudden, this rock falls out of the sky. This thing is traveling, you know, well more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet, probably much faster as the physicists here could. Could tell me. And when it hit the earth, it released more than a billion nuclear bombs worth of energy. It punched a hole in the face of the earth over 100 miles wide. And that's the crater that we can still see part of in Mexico. Most of it's covered by the Gulf of Mexico, by the water. But some of it does lap onto the land in the Yucatan, near Cancun. This was catastrophic. This was the biggest asteroid that's hit the earth in at least the last half a billion years. This was not a normal visitor from space.
52:41 Speaker 06 And the energy it released was so profound that it triggered earthquakes and wildfires and tsunamis. And you had all this destruction in the minutes and the hours after the asteroid. And a huge number of animals would have died if you were outside and exposed to the fires and to the scalding rain of all the stuff that was liquidized by the collision that then fell back down as these scalding glass bullets. And then there was acid rain that came down a little bit afterwards. And this was, this was a disaster movie. This, this was, I mean, the weirdest, worst, kitschiest disaster movie you've ever seen, even worse probably than that. And the worst part, though, was not the immediate carnage.
53:25 Speaker 06 It was what happened over the next few years. Because all the soot from the wildfires, from the smoke, a lot of the dust and dirt and grind from the collision, the pulverized rocks and so on, went up into the atmosphere, spread around in the currents of the high atmosphere, and blocked out the sun for at least a few years, maybe up to a decade or even a bit more.
53:48 Daniel Whiteson? Wow.
53:48 Speaker 06 And so the earth would have gone dark and cold.
53:51 Daniel Whiteson? Even in Proto-California?
53:53 Speaker 06 Everywhere, probably. There could have been little bits, you know, poking through, poking through. But it seems like, really, this was a time of coldness and darkness. And we see it in the rock record. We can see some of the, the chemical proxies that tell us about temperature. You can see how temperature took a nosedive. You can see all, a lot of the soot and stuff from the wildfires actually in the rock record, right marking that extinction. So if the earth went dark and cold, even if it was just for a few years, I mean, plants would not have had sunlight to photosynthesize, nor would the phytoplankton in the ocean. And so ecosystems would have collapsed as sunlight was starved from, from the plants and the plankton. And these ecosystems collapsed like houses of cards.
54:38 Speaker 06 The plant eating animals didn't have anything to eat. They died. The meat eaters didn't have anything to eat. They died. And 75% of all species died. Three out of every four species, period, did not make it through and died quite quickly. We don't know if they were all dead within a year or five years or 10 years or whatever, but we do know from really well dated fossils that within a few tens of thousands of years at most after the asteroid, 75% of stuff was gone, including all the pterodactyls, including all those reptiles that were living in the water, including the ammonites,
55:18 Speaker 06 those beautiful coiled shelled sea creatures, and including every type of dinosaur except for one peculiar group of birds. And these were the modern style birds, the ones that had big wings and huge chest muscles to power those wings, the ones that had beaks instead of teeth, the ones that had really lightweight hollow skeletons, the ones that grew super quickly that went from a hatchling to an adult within a year at most. Only those birds survived. There were a bunch of birds that still had teeth and claws and long tails that were there flying over the head of T. rex the moment before the asteroid hit, and they would not make it through. So the question really is, why were those birds so special?
56:03 Speaker 06 And I think when it comes down to it, they just held a winning hand of cards. When something changes so quickly, when the environment changes so quickly, you don't have time to adapt the normal processes of natural selection through random mutations, shaping your genome over the generations. You have to confront that disaster with whatever hand of cards you're holding. And dinosaurs like T. rex and triceratops, they had been utterly dominant for tens of millions of years, but now all of a sudden, they were in trouble because they were big. They needed to eat a lot of different types of food. Some of them needed to eat a lot of plants, hundreds of pounds of plants a day. It took them a long time to grow from babies into adults. It would take a T. rex like 20 years to grow into an adult.
56:48 Speaker 06 That's a long time to survive if the world has gone to hell. And they couldn't hide very easily. How could a T. rex dig a burrow to hide itself away? Or how could a triceratops just go and find a cave to hunker down in? It'd be really tough. So the animals that survived were ones that tended to be smaller, that could hide away more easily. They're ones that grew quickly. They're ones that reproduce quickly. They're ones that didn't need a lot of food. And when it comes to birds, one particular thing that allowed them to survive, it seems, was their beaks. Because this was just some little trivial factoid about these birds. There were plenty of birds that still had teeth, but some birds had beaks, all right. But when it came to that asteroid changing the rules of the game,
57:32 Speaker 06 all of a sudden, basically, everything's dying. The forests have collapsed. There's no more leaves and stems and fruits and flowers to eat. All that stuff is gone. The plant-eating animals, they die. The meat-eating animals, they die. What is left? Well, one of the things that survives longest, and we see this today, if there's a volcanic eruption or a wildfire, everything might be obliterated, but seeds can survive. And they do survive quite long. They won't survive forever. But if you have to get through a few years or so, if you can eat seeds, that can be your ticket to survival. And those birds with those beaks.
58:09 Daniel Whiteson? I can eat seeds. I love seeds.
58:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, so there you go. So remember this. We gotta remember this. When the nuclear apocalypse comes for us, eat your bird feed.
58:21 Daniel Whiteson? That was such an inspirational speech.
58:23 Speaker 06 It might be what gets us through.
58:24 Daniel Whiteson? You were the president in Independence Day saying, if we can eat seeds, we can all survive.
58:30 Kelly Weinersmith? I got chills.
58:31 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, me too.
58:33 Speaker 06 So if you take anything away from this conversation, any of you guys? Well, first of all, if you take anything away, go out and of course, buy my book, okay? And leave five-star reviews online, Storybirds. Anyway, take that away. But the second thing, takeaway, eating seeds can help you survive an apocalypse. And it probably did at the end of the Cretaceous. Something as trivial as that, which seems so trivial that in the moments before the asteroid hit would have meant nothing. It's just something you ate. It's like that's what your species was adapted to do and that's what you ate. Other things ate leaves and other things ate fruit and other things ate meat. But then everything changes. Seas were the only thing left. And all of a sudden, that was your ticket to survival.
59:12 Daniel Whiteson? But what's the connection between seeds and beaks? Because again, I can eat seeds and I don't have a beak.
59:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, we can eat seeds ju- just because we as humans are so omnivorous. Um, and our teeth are quite good at eating lots of different things. But actually, we're quite unusual to be able to eat so many things. And it's not that like, uh, you know, no other dinosaurs could ever eat seeds. But beaks are really optimized for cracking seeds. They're like the best way you can eat seeds. We could eat more seeds if we had a beak instead of our teeth. So, and then of course, things like T. rex would not have been eating seeds.
59:45 Daniel Whiteson? Right.
59:46 Speaker 06 So it was just one of those things. It's not that birds were the only animals that could eat seeds. Some of the small mammals probably did as well. That's probably why they made it through. Uh, but it's just probably one of the reasons. And when it adds up to it, it's really, again, the hand of cards you're holding. It's birds, some birds, again, most birds died. All the ones with teeth and long tails and claws. They died with T. rex and triceratops. It's only the modern style birds that survived. And they had beaks, they grew fast, they could fly really well. So they could escape any local danger fairly easily. They were small, they could hide away fairly easily. They lived on the ground or in the water. They didn't live in the trees. So when the forests collapsed, they weren't nesting in those trees. Their homes didn't disappear.
1:00:30 Speaker 06 So all of those things, when you add them together, it just gave birds a royal flush. And, and that's what they had to confront the asteroid with. And they made it through. But if small little things were different, little twists of fate or circumstance playing out in the minutes, the hours, the days after the asteroid. Everything could have been different. And who knows what the modern world would have looked like? Who knows what would have made it through to survive to repopulate the world?
1:00:58 Kelly Weinersmith? So I, you know, I read this other really great book called The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.
1:01:03 Speaker 06 Oh, that's a fantastic book. That is so good.
1:01:06 Kelly Weinersmith? Five stars. Five stars.
1:01:07 Speaker 06 Five stars. It's maybe the second greatest book in the world, except for the story of birds. You can guess who wrote that book.
1:01:13 Kelly Weinersmith? The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is also in the ranking there.
1:01:17 Speaker 06 They're great, but you know what? None of them won a Royal Society Book Prize. So you have the title here. So of course, all of your readers know your book is City of the Mammals. I don't have to pitch it.
1:01:27 Kelly Weinersmith? Well, the story of birds is going to be this year's winner. That's what I'm predicting.
1:01:30 Speaker 06 Well, I hope you're on the panel.
1:01:32 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, thanks, thanks.
1:01:33 Speaker 06 I hope we remember to submit it to the prize. That's the first thing to get a prize.
1:01:37 Kelly Weinersmith? There you go.
1:01:38 Speaker 06 Send it in.
1:01:39 Kelly Weinersmith? Send it in. Okay, but, but to get back on track. So, you know, there were mammals who made it through. And there were probably some like, you know, there must have been some like reptiles who made it through.
1:01:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:01:49 Kelly Weinersmith? Is eating seeds like a common denominator for all of the animals that made it through that weren't birds?
1:01:57 Speaker 06 Not for every animal that made it through. So about 25% made it through. And there were some other ways that you could make a living too. Some of the animals that survived, things like crocodiles and turtles. They lived mostly in swamps and in ponds and in rivers, in shallow water, in ecosystems that did not have plants or other photosynthesizing organisms at the base, but instead were detritus-based ecosystems. So it was basically eating decaying crap that's at the base of those food webs.
1:02:30 Kelly Weinersmith? Buffet time.
1:02:31 Speaker 06 After that asteroid hit, perfect. It was a global buffet if you were in those ecosystems. So you had fishes that would eat that stuff, and then the turtles and crocodiles would eat them and so on. So that was another ticket out of the chaos. So it wasn't just only eating seeds was the only way you could survive, but it was one pathway to survival, and there seemed to have been others. But there were limited pathways to survival. And really, nothing bigger than like a Siberian husky dog made it through, at least on land. So size, even if you could eat seeds and you were bigger, you were probably in trouble because Took you too long to grow into an adult. You need to eat too many seeds to power your metabolism.
1:03:14 Speaker 06 So being small, really more than anything, was the number one thing you needed to be to survive. And I mean really small, like something that could fit in the palm of our hands is the best, probably body size to be that or smaller. And we had ancestors, we had tiny little shrew sized furry mammal ancestors that also stared down the asteroid, made it through, and that's why we're here.
1:03:36 Kelly Weinersmith? We've been having too much fun, so we don't have time for my questions about the terror birds, or the demon ducks, or loss of flight.
1:03:44 Speaker 06 That is a shame. They're gonna, you know what they're gonna have to do?
1:03:47 Kelly Weinersmith? Get your book.
1:03:48 Daniel Whiteson? Read the book.
1:03:49 Speaker 06 Absolutely. We always need to leave people wanting a little bit more from these conversations. So the second half of the book is all about what happened after the asteroid, and how modern day birds established themselves. So many of the birds we know today, the familiar birds, songbirds and parrots and different types of water birds and penguins and, and hawks and so on. They established themselves very quickly after the asteroid as part of the recovery. This was in a wide open world. Endless opportunities were out there and evolution went into overdrive and you had all these new types of birds. So I tell that story in the book. And, and evolution went so wacky that you got these incredible birds like terror birds,
1:04:30 Speaker 06 which stood taller than a human, that were basically like a T-Rex reincarnated. These things became the top predators in South America. They had heads the size of horses, big, sharp beaks, not for eating seeds. No, no, not these beaks. These are for ripping flesh.
1:04:46 Daniel Whiteson? Heads the size of horses heads, or heads the size of horses?
1:04:49 Speaker 06 Heads the size of horses heads. Yeah, yeah. Not a head the size of a thoroughbred, but a head the size of a thoroughbred's head.
1:04:58 Speaker 06 But still, pretty terrifying.
1:04:59 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
1:05:00 Speaker 06 And so I talk about these, you know, elephant birds and demon ducks. Imagine a duck supersized by a hundred times the size and it's demonic, but not really because it was a plant eater. And these things lived in Australia for tens of millions of years. Until quite recently, our human ancestors ate their eggs. We find cooked demon duck eggs and archaeological sites and campfires. So we had human ancestors and cousins that confronted some of these birds. And there's so many more. There were once birds that soared on the thermals of the world like giant kites with wingspans of over 20 feet wide. A huge, fantastic aviary of extinct birds are out there. We only know them from fossils. I try to do them justice later on in the book. So there's a couple of chapters on those.
1:05:45 Speaker 06 And then, of course, about how some of those birds lost, gave up the very essence of birdness. They gave up flying, you know, and ostriches and cassowaries and emus and penguins and so on. They gave up flying so they could become adapted to other niches in the ecosystem. So they could become bigger, so they could become giant bulk feeding plant eaters. So penguins could go into the water and become big fish eaters and so on. There's a lot more, but again, I need to leave you all wanting more. So it's all in the story of birds. I promise it's all in there. And there's a whole lot of great stories about all the amazing things birds have done. And I think when it comes down to it, we, we just need to appreciate birds. They're fantastic diversity.
1:06:30 Speaker 06 There's over 10,000 species of birds today. That's about double the number of mammals. So yeah, okay, dinosaurs died. Dinosaurs went extinct. It's now the age of mammals. Well, there's still like double the number of dinosaurs as mammals in the world today by that metric. And so when you look out and you see a magpie or a pigeon or a sparrow, I mean, you're looking at a real, true dinosaur that's made it to the modern day. And I hope that comes through in the book. That's what I really want to convey.
1:07:01 Daniel Whiteson? Well, I have a question for you from my wife, who's a biologist. She wants to understand how birds prepare for migration. Apparently they put on a huge amount of muscle and their stomachs shrink to almost nothing. So her question is, what's the secret? And how do we follow the bird dinosaur diet ourselves?
1:07:19 Speaker 06 Well, we're out of time here, so I don't know. I it's I don't know. There's so much about birds I don't know, especially when you get into the amazing things birds do today. Once you get into their migrations and their feats of cognition and intelligence and their songs and these kinds of things, I know a bit. I write about a little bit towards the end of the book about a few of these things. But there's so much I don't know. I have no idea how birds are able to prepare for these migrations. It is otherworldly to me, but it's one of those things that we just must admire about birds. So I'm sorry to let your wife down there. I don't have any like top nutrition tips of how to be a bird to, you know, marshal the power of migration
1:08:02 Speaker 06 to become more fit and energetic. If you find out, let me know.
1:08:06 Daniel Whiteson? That's just an idea for your next book. Well, then let me ask you a different question. If you went to an alien planet, right? You're on board the ship or landing on a planet. We think there's life on there. Are you expecting there to be birds or life in the air? How broad do you think this sort of evolutionary niche is?
1:08:24 Speaker 06 Well, I'd be curious to hear, you know, Kelly's view on this. Does somebody actually know something about about outer space and different planets and life, potential life on other planets and settling other planets? I mean, when it comes down to, we just don't know. We've never found any fossils, definitive fossils of any life anywhere else. But I'm guessing that at some point in our lives, there's going to be a fossil from Mars that is found. Until then, though, we just don't know very much. But I would think that if you do have other worlds out there that are anything like Earth, there's going to be stuff flying around. This is a whole environment that's there to be colonized, if you want to think about it that way. And over time, evolution, it expands. I mean, it fits organisms
1:09:08 Speaker 06 to their environment. If there's opportunities, evolution will, not in any sort of direct, planned out way, but it will, over time, really just fill the space and find ways to exploit resources and environments and ecosystems. And the air is vast. There's air all around us. And that's just a place you can live and a place that you can get shelter and a place where You can start to form ecosystems and communities. So yeah, I would expect the, the air elsewhere would be settled the same way if there's liquid water elsewhere or dry land elsewhere, that it would be settled in a similar way. But who knows really? Kelly, I don't know. What do you, you know what you're talking about. I'm just blathering on.
1:09:48 Kelly Weinersmith? I don't know. Daniel always ends our interviews with a question about, do you think you'd find the same thing on an alien planet? And so I will say nothing. He, this is Daniel's prerogative to ask our interviewee this question at the end. And so I will just say that Steve, it was amazing having you on the show. I loved reading the story of birds and the illustrations were great and the photos were fun. I highly recommend that everyone head out and get the story of birds, which comes out today.
1:10:14 Speaker 06 Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. This was so much fun. We could have done this for hours, but we'll have to it again.
1:10:20 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes, we will. Yeah. And, and I have a bunch of listener questions that I think you are the guy to answer. So I hope you'll come back.
1:10:25 Speaker 06 Well, let's, we will circle back. Absolutely. Keep track of those questions. I love just being thrown random questions. Like the stuff Daniel's been asking me. So let's, let's do it again.
1:10:37 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. Well, I'll hold you to it. Until next time.
1:10:47 Daniel Whiteson? Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.
1:10:55 Kelly Weinersmith? Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.
1:11:00 Daniel Whiteson? He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.
1:11:10 Kelly Weinersmith? You can email us at [email protected] . We really do want to hear from you.
1:11:15 Daniel Whiteson? And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.
1:11:26 Kelly Weinersmith? And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
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