The terrifying physics of prehistoric sea monsters

While dinosaurs roamed the earth, giant monsters roamed the sea. Mosasaurs were like the deadly T-rexes of the ocean: They grew up to the size of a bus and chased down their smaller prey. A recent study in the journal Current Biology https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(26)01214-5?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982226012145%3Fshowall%3Dtrue details just how exactly they might have done that. And the answer is fast – way faster than humans can swim – and sneakily. Interested in more animal or paleontological news? Email us what you want us to talk about at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Okay, Scott Detrow.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I'm going to start us off with a question.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  How much do you know about real life sea monsters?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Like, are we talking Loch Ness? Are we talking Kraken? What? I hear real life and sea monster. I don't know which direction we're going.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  Okay, Scott, you're kind of on the right track. But in this case, yeah, we're thinking a little more realistic, prehistoric even. Does the word mosasaur ring a bell to you?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, kind of like, like, I do know there were these big sea dinosaurs, kind of, at one point, right?

• 1:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so Scott, they were not dinosaurs.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Sorry to tell you. They were more like giant sea lizards. And we know from paleontologists that their heyday was during the late Cretaceous period. So around the same time that, you know, T. rexes were walking the earth.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait. One of these things shows up at Jurassic World, right?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yes, in both the Jurassic Worlds. And there's this super dramatic feeding scene.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And I talked to a paleontologist who said between the first Jurassic World and the second, the filmmakers actually changed some of the mosasaur's design to keep up with current science.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I could talk about, even though Jurassic World is not as good as Jurassic Park, that's okay. I could talk about this the whole time, but is, are we just going Mosasaurus day? Are there other topics?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  We're going to talk about mosasores. We also have a story about elephant carcasses and how they help shape the ecosystem of the savanna.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  And there's another study that we're going to look at about long COVID and how the microbiomes of people who have it might differ from yours or mine.

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  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from the UK.

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• 3:39Speaker 01

  Okay, Scott, so let's recap what we know about mosasores, just to make sure.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, let's recap. One, ancient marine lizards. Two, not dinosaurs. Three, they did live at the same time as the T. rex. Four, Jurassic World. Five, pretty big.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  You could list things all day for me, Scott. Yeah, very big. Some of them grew to be the size of a city bus.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have evidence that some adapted to freshwater environments, but most of them hung out in the ocean. They were marine predators, and now paleontologists think they know how fast they actually were in the water.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I mean, how fast were they?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Okay, so some mosasores with the longer tails could go up to around 15 miles per hour by doing something this study calls a slam start.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Say it with me.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Slam start.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Slam start. I love it.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  So it's like a swimmer pushing off of a pool wall. So Scott, imagine you're in the water, just checking out some coral.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Scuba diving, whatever.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Snorkel, you know? You see a mosasaur.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Then suddenly, it dramatically curls its tail, it lunges forward, and it is now 75% closer to you than it was one second ago.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Terrifying. No, thank you.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay, so yeah, that's Kirsten Formoso, a paleontologist at Rutgers University. And she and her colleagues are out with a new study in the journal Current Biology, which claims the sea monsters were ambush predators.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Tell me how this all works. How do you go from fossilized bones to suddenly being able to model an extinct animal's muscles?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so the closest living relatives of the mosasores are snakes and monitor lizards like the Komodo dragon today. And if we assume they inherited their movement from their mosasaur ancestors, then they can model that movement in larger bodies.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Specifically, the researchers used physics models to reconstruct the way the animals probably moved. Sort of a new trend in paleontology. I talked with another paleontologist and roboticist about this, who did not work on the study, Asia Carter at Carnegie Mellon University. She's excited to try these models herself.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  So like, if I want to study some other aquatic animal from another time period, I can use this method.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  And Asia says these models are ushering in a renaissance in paleontology, where we can start to understand prehistoric animal behavior, just like how we study animals living today.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  That is super interesting.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And yet, we must move on. From mega sea monsters to mega land animals, let's talk elephants. Last time we talked about elephants, I did an elephant noise.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  You're not going to do it again.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Let's just remember it and move forward.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  We got one for you, Scott. Good news.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I don't know if you remember this other story a few years ago, where there was this big to-do about whales and what happened after they died.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Researchers shot this video when they found remnants of a baleen whale. They realized the carcass had transformed into this super nutrient-rich habitat unto itself. Dinner is served. Do we have any bone-eating worms? Supporting all sorts of animals, sharks, crustaceans, tiny worms.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yes, the whale fall, or the carcass had been devoured by other sea creatures?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. So researchers above water have been obsessing over what happens to land's largest creature, the elephant, after death. So scientists working in South Africa's largest national park, Kruger National Park, tracked dozens of elephant carcasses that had been lying on the savanna for anywhere from eight days to nearly eight years, some freshly rotting, others skeletons that had been picked bare.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  We talked to the lead researcher, Courtney Reed, about this. She's with UC Santa Barbara and Princeton, and she said something unexpected happened. First, elephants create what they call cold spots, where the diversity of microbes and plants goes way down.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  Right, like, if you think about an elephant carcass, when it initially dies, right, it just flattens everything.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Okay, but then, over time, she and her colleagues found that the remains created these unique nutrient-rich hotspots on the savanna. And this lasted years after the elephant bones or bodies showed above ground.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  It's really cool to see these, like, herds of impala and other animals come through and choose selectively, like, go for that really, like, green nitrogen-rich grass right on top of that carcass site, as opposed to, you know, the other grass that was available just 10 meters away.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  They publish these details in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Is any of this surprising? Like, this feels kind of circle-of-life-y, right?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Like, we know about fertilizer and how that general process works. Like, this kind of makes sense to me.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the surprising part was the benefits lasted really long.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  It really adds to the idea that elephants have outsized impacts as ecoengineers in life, dispersing seeds and trampling trees, and afterlife, too. So here's ecologist Andrew Davies from Harvard, who wasn't involved in the study.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  This is the first paper that I've sort of seen that sort of shows that these roles are special, not just in life, but also in death. And the uniqueness of these creatures extends beyond what they're doing while they're alive.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Elephants are already facing threats of extinction, so for him and others, it highlights the unique importance of elephants even more.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  All right, let's shift to our third topic. Let's talk about the microbiomes of people with long COVID.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so a quick refresher, Scott. All of us, you, me, Gina, anyone listening, we all have these vast ecosystems of bacteria and viruses and other things that live inside of us all of the time. And generally, they help us stay healthy.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the microbiome that people are probably most familiar with is all the good bacteria that live in the human gut, that helps us digest our food, extract vitamins, and many other things.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. This is why a lot of people take probiotics, right?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and as anyone who's gotten sick or has had to take antibiotics knows, the microbiome can get knocked out of whack. So this new study in the European Respiratory Journal focused on a microbiome that's less well-known, in the lung.

• 9:17Speaker 07

  Your lung also has good bacteria, and your lung also has a microbiome. So does your nose, so does your mouth. And that can also be disturbed when you have an illness like COVID.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  This is James Chalmers. He's a respiratory physician and professor at the University of Oxford. And he's part of the research team that's been monitoring people in the UK who are suffering from long COVID.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And their new study found that people who had the worst symptoms six months after a COVID infection had the least diverse microbiome in their respiratory tracts of all the people they were looking at. And that people who primarily dealt with respiratory issues had different microbial makeups than people with, you know, brain fog, for example.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And that could explain why they're still sick?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  So this is an association, Scott. So they can't say whether these people already had a different microbiome before they got infected, which is what made them susceptible to long COVID, or if their microbiome changed as a result of an infection.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And so while this doesn't solve the question of what's causing long COVID, the researchers say it's a good place to keep investigating, because we know microbiomes can be tinkered with.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, interesting.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Well, Scott, thanks for spending some time with us today. It is always great to have you, man.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I like to be here. Thanks for having me on again.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  You can hear more of Scott on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Tyler Barlow. Alana Gordon reported this story on elephant carcasses. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Antalyatta.

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  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Becky Brown and Anlee Wong were the audio engineers. I'm Nate Rot.

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  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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