Julian Dorey Podcast - #327 - Paleontologist on Egypt’s Lost Creatures & DEBUNKING “Dinosaurs Didn’t Exist” | Ken Lacovara

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) HelloFresh: Go to https://hellofresh.com/JULIAN10FM and get *10 FREE MEALS* w/ a Free Item for Life! 2) BRUNT: Get $10 Off @BRUNT w/ code JULIAN at https://www.bruntworkwear.com/ JULIAN #BRUNTpod PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Dr. Kenneth Lacovara is a renowned paleontologist who discovered Dreadnoughtus, one of the largest dinosaurs ever unearthed. He combines cutting-edge technology with field science and serves as the founding director of Rowan University’s Edelman Fossil Park & Museum. Lacovara is also the author of Why Dinosaurs Matter and a widely viewed TED speaker. KEN's LINKS: FB: https://www.facebook.com/KennethLacovara WEBSITE: http://kennethlacovara.com/ X: https://x.com/kenlacovara IG: https://www.instagram.com/kennethlacovara/?hl=en Edelman Fossil Park: https://www.efm.org/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00:00 – Backyard Discovery, Edelman Fossil Park, Public Digs, Rowan School Built00:09:37 – NJ Dig Sites, Asteroid Impact, Pollen, Prehistoric Climate, Dinosaur Discovery00:11:07 – Birds & Crocs, First Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Eras, Africa Shift00:18:01 – Bipedal Dinosaurs, TRex Arms, Fossil Species, Science Debate00:36:38 – Scientific Process, Extinction, Pangea, Deep Time00:38:08 – Evolution Timeline, Wildlife Decline, Human Perception00:45:25 – Fossil Park Mission, Earth vs Mars, Ecosystem Roles00:50:21 – Jurassic End, TRex History, Jurassic Park, Chickens01:07:10 – Birds = Dinosaurs, Sea Life, Paleo Art01:15:13 – First NJ Discovery, Haddonfield, Dryptosaurus01:25:53 – Paleo Environments, Argentina, Spinosaurus, Patagonia01:37:19 – Field Connection, Best Moment, Big Discovery, Fossil Insurance01:47:11 – Naming Dreadnoughtus, 10-Year Process, Carl Sagan, Childhood Passion01:58:10 – Lost Dinosaurs, Whale Evolution, Pikaia02:07:26 – Climate Legacy, Tree Frog, Earth’s Age, Colossal02:13:03 – Joining Colossal, Fixing the Planet, Amazon02:23:00 – New Discoveries, Evolution & Continents, Geo-Biology02:33:08 – Dating Dreadnoughtus, Asteroid Impact Walkthrough02:42:53 – Asteroid Defense, AI & Paleontology, Meaning of Life02:54:04 – Climate Action, Early 2000s Bipartisan Support CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 327 - Ken Lacovara Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Take me back to that first day when you guys found something there. We were endeavoring to find what we're known as the Lost Dinosaurus of Egypt. No paleontologists had really worked within about 1,000 kilometers of that site called the Baharia Oasis. Perfect conditions for me. By the end of it, we have 145 bones of this giant creature. This thing is 10 tons heavier than a Boeing 737. 13 bull African elephants, 9 T-Rex. It's the world's second largest dinosaur.

Yeah, if you look there, monsters. Yeah. Now, in the case of T-Rex, those tiny arms make its more. murderous bite possible. So as its head got bigger, as its bite got stronger, its arms got littler. You can't have both. T-Rex is about the most badass thing that's ever walked on land. But if you look at the extinction of species, look up the fringe limb tree frog. That particular individual, its name is Tuffy, the last of his species. It's a lineage that survived all five mass extinctions, including the one that took out the dinosaurs, but it couldn't survive us.

Since 1970s, 72% of wildlife has disappeared on the planet. Have you had conversations with Ben, about the idea of potential introducing a dinosaur. Well. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

Ken, I had our mutual friend, Ben, Laman here a couple months ago, and he brought you up during in our podcast. He's like, yeah, it's my dinosaur guy. You got to talk to him. And I was like, fuck, yeah, I want to talk with this guy. And then he sent me your information and I realized you were in my old backyard. You're right down there at Rowan. I recorded the first 162 episodes of this podcast right there. I never had you in. I'm sorry about that. That's crazy. It would have been a much better commute. I'm also kicking myself, though, because you guys have built an unbelievable. I don't even know if you call it a museum. I don't even know if you call it a museum. I I don't know what you call it.

It's like a live dig place off of Exit 53 on Route 55 down in Mantua, New Jersey, literally in my old backyard of insane, like, dinosaur-fired. Can you just tell us about this? It's nuts. Sure. It's called the Edelman Fossil Park Inn Museum. It is about 20 minutes outside Philadelphia, about an hour and a half from New York. And it's located on 123 acres.

And there we have a four-acre, 45-foot-deep fossil quarry. that goes down to the last moments of the dinosaurs. Me and my crew have been doing research there for about the last 17 years, and in those 17 years, we have collected over 100,000 fossils representing over 100 species. 100,000.

Yeah. And each of those individuals is a literal victim of the asteroid strike that happened 66 million years ago, 1,500 miles away off the Yucatan Peninsula. So it becomes the best site in the world. it becomes the best site in the world to see the last moments

of the dinosaurs I got a million questions let's just start at the beginning how did you first discover this you said it was 17 years ago well I started working there in 2003 so more than 20 years ago 22 wow it was a working mine

it was a Marl Choir what farmers call Marl as in Marlton Marlboro places like that it's a green sand that forms only in marine environments and it's dug up and used as a fertilizer for for plants that like acidic conditions like tomatoes and peppers so they started that business there in 1926 and they ran with it for many many decades i started doing what we

would call salvage paleontology there which is it's literally just following the bulldozers around and seeing what they might dig up and i honestly in the beginning i didn't think much of the site because you can't do a lot of science if you can't set up the right context there, if you can't grid it out in one meter squares and excavate carefully. So it was a place where I could take my students and, you know, they could get some practice finding fossils and then I would go everywhere else in the world for my research. I'd go to North Africa and the Gobi Desert and Patagonia. But then in 2007, the quarry owner told me that the company was going to go belly up

and they were going to fill in the quarry and they were hoping to build a Costco there. A Costco? Yeah. On top of like the craziest what would be remains of dinosaurs. That's right. Wow.

And so I thought, wow, that'd be a shame to lose this. I do love Costco though. I just want to throw that out there. It's handy, yes. So I raised enough money to rent a corner of the quarry so that we could grid it out and start to excavate properly.

And once we started to do that, then I started to appreciate what we really had there. I saw that we had a lot of, a lot of articulated skeletons, meaning that they didn't get roughed up after they died. They didn't get washed in from elsewhere that they died there, and we're buried there together. And then we started to do elemental analysis. We started to look at things under the microscope, and we found the fallout from the impact rate that happened 1,500 miles away in Mexico.

And so at that point, I know we have this extinction layer, and I know it needs to be preserved. And us paleontologists, you know, we usually try to keep our sites a secret for obvious reasons. But I realize if we're going to save this site, we have to build a grassroots effort around it. And what's really cool about this site is that above that research layer that we manage and curate very carefully, there are layers of sediment from just after the last moments of the dinosaurs that are still full of fossils. And those fossils aren't especially scientifically useful. So their best purpose is really for outreach and education. So I team up with the township, Mantua Township.

We decide we're going to have a community dig day. We have no budget. We put a sign on the road. We send out some emails. I'm hoping maybe 75 people show up on a Saturday morning. Is this 2007? No, this is 2011. How did I miss this?

I don't know. I was like in high school. This was great. Oh, my God. So, 1,600 people show up on a Saturday. Wow. And we were not quite ready for that. It was a little scary.

But we got really good at running this community dig days when we would put out the alert. The 2,000 spots would sell out in like 14 minutes, and we'd have 9,000 people on the waiting list. And so that was proof of concept. I was at Drexel University at the time. I was trying to launch the project from there. I couldn't really get the traction that I needed. And I started talking to the president of Rowan University, Ali Hushman, who built that place from a sleepy little state college into an amazing, you know, world-class research university. And transformed the town as well in the process.

I used to have guests stay at the Marriott right there. Yeah, that's right. I remember when I was a kid, like Rowan, like you said, it was like this smaller, like kind of off the beaten path school, and now it's this sprawling, beautiful campus and everything and turn it into a whole college town. It's incredible, the transformation. So, Ali and I, we have breakfast at Angelo's Diner in Glassboro,

which is how you do it in New Jersey, right? That's how you do it. And by the end of breakfast, we decided that I was going to move to Rowan University. I was going to become the founding dean of the School of Earth and Environment, and we were going to work together to raise money to build this fossil park museum and by the land as well. So as soon as I got there, Rowan bought the property. He introduced me to two amazing people, alumni of the university, Gene and Rick Edelman. They stepped up and made an incredible $25 million contribution to this project. And then we hired architects and exhibit designers.

while I'm building the School of Earth and Environment, I did that for eight years. I left about two years ago. And we built a new school with a Department of Geology, Department of Environmental Science, Department of Geography, sustainability, and planning. And I left with about 36 professors there and 400 students. That's got to be cool to look back

on building something from scratch like that. As quickly as you did, right? I'm very proud of all of them. And then we broke ground on the museum about three and a half years ago and three months ago we opened this amazing $75 million $44,000 square foot museum with exhibits the likes of which the world has never seen three big exhibit halls a live animal center Discovery Forest which is very hands-on tactile place collections and conservation immersive free roaming VR beautiful museum store

a cafe, paleontology theme playground, about two miles of nature trails, and the quarry dig experience. So it's incredible. And people are now finding out about it, and they're coming from all around the country. We have people that are actually flying in from Europe just to do this experience. Whoa. Yeah. Now, how do you – can we pull this up, by the way, Joe? I want people to see this.

It's beautiful architecture. It's hidden by those trees when you come around that bend on the 53. That's why I didn't see it. but like you're building obviously something that's also family friendly and there's a lot there's a lot of ways to learn there and it's like amazing architecture but you have built it on top of a of a space that you are as i understand it continuing to find new materials on as far as you know you might have only tapped one percent of it at this point so how do you have something like that on top of you know a potential gold mine and not worry about if you're going to damage something and building it or you know you're what I mean? Well, we would never get that far. So, and there you see it. It's really gorgeous. It's beautiful. It was designed by an architect named Tom Wong. Anya had just crossed the Hudson here in New York. Shout out, Tom. And the building is based on a metaphor, which is the camera obscure, which is an ancient device. It's like a pinhole camera, the size of a room. An artist

would go inside, and they get a projection of the landscape on the wall, and they would paint on top of that. And so it's a device that can change your perception about the world, about the landscape. And that's what we're trying to do in this museum. You see the building is composed of a series of lenses. And in one direction, the other side here, in that direction, they look to the quarry. They look to the ancient. And we think about the ancient past. On the other side, we look to the present and we contemplate the future. And the answer to your question is there's so many fossils in this layer under the property. It's taken us 17 years to excavate 250 square meters out of a giant four-acre quarry. We have 123 acres, so we will never get to all the places,

right? So, I mean, you could excavate for many, many, many generations and not use all the land there. But it just blows my mind. This is in Manchua, New Jersey, where these dinosaurs were. all right like I said there's about 40 million questions in my head so we're going to be jumping around a little bit today and I'm sure we're going to have to have you back at some point here Ken but let's just start with the basics here asteroid hits approximately 66 million years ago the fall out from that how long did it take let's start there how long did it take for dinosaurs to officially be extinct after after it hit shockingly I think they were functionally extinct within an hour after the impact hour yeah so the the asteroid comes down it's about 11 miles across or 18 kilometers going roughly 45,000 miles an hour comes in from the northeast we think it hit in the springtime because of some fossil fish in North Dakota trapped in this layer and they have spring pollen in their gill rakers that's preserved yeah yeah pollen is is almost impossible to destroy apparently you if you want to get fossil pollen you take the rock

and you dissolve the rock with hydrofluoric acid, and the pollen remains. Whoa. That's how you collect fossil pollen. This is this stuff I know nothing about. That's like putting into perspective through everything the Earth has been through since then, 66 million years ago, the idea that anything would still exist, blows my mind. Well, 66 million years ago is not that long ago. Blink of an eye in terms of this rock.

So if you took the four and a half billion year history of the Earth, and you put it on a single calendar, year with the Earth starting on January 1st, and you run through that calendar. 66 million years ago on that calendar is Christmas Eve. Yep. It's crazy. So if you're at a New Year's Eve party and you talk about events that happen on Christmas Eve, how do you describe it? You say, oh, I just saw Bob on Christmas Eve, right? He was just here. Dinosaurs were just here. Sixty-six million years ago just happened.

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New subscribers only varies by plan. Once again, that's hellofresh.com slash Julian 10 FM to get 10 free meals and a free item for life. Check out that link in the description below. But we see how much can change. You know, you just, you can watch a time labs video right now. sitting outside for 30 days and it like disintegrates away so the idea yes you're 100% right that in the context of the history of this planet we're on it's a blink of an iago but there's still so much time where things could disappear and yet we have stuff that's preserved in that amazing of a capacity

it's amazing it's incredible to me that's right so so that asteroid hits um and it hit in mexico it hit off the coast of the yucatan peninsula off Mexico and in the Gulf of Mexico Dumb question, Ken, what did the continents look like again at that point? Were they all together still? The world is looking pretty modern by the end of the Cretaceous period, by the end of the times of dinosaurs. So if you looked at a paleogeographic map, in fact, you can pull one up. If you hit Paleogeographic map in Cretaceous, you will see that the continents are recognizable compared to their current forms today. They're a little bit different, like the Isthmus of Panama hadn't closed up yet and things like that.

That's a little too early. That's about a quarter billion years ago. Yeah. We were only 175 million years off. Yeah. Look up late Cretaceous and paleogeography. What's that? C-R-U-C-E.

C-R-E-T-A. So C-R-E-T-A. So Cretaceous is named for the White Cliffs of Dover. The chalk there is of Cretaceous age, Latin for chalk. is CREDA. So Cretaceous means the time of chalk. Oh, there we go. Whoa, yeah, you're right. And you can say, you know what's crazy? You can see how... Yeah, that's a little, I think that's Jurassic. It's a little earlier. I can't read it. But we're getting closer, right? You're

getting pretty close. All right. Yeah. So people, do you think people could get the idea from this? Yes. Well, you can see those continents are recognizable. Yeah. At this point. Is the blue, a dumb question, but is the blue representative of stuff that's still covered in water when we're looking on the continents themselves? The light blue is our shallow marine seaways. Right. So continental shelf and running up through North America, sea level got so high that the Gulf of Mexico came up through the middle of North America and connected to the Arctic Ocean. Whoa. So during most of the time of the dinosaurs, North America is two big islands, one in the west, one in the east. In New Jersey, we would be off the east coast of the eastern island of

North America. So Southern New Jersey, where our fossil park is, was in the ocean at the time. The coastline would actually be up into Pennsylvania, maybe 20 miles or so. It's been lost because Pennsylvania is erosional, and that sediment collects to form the coastal plain and the continental shelf. So there'd be marine creatures where the fossil park is. At the museum of the location in the museum, sea level would be about 70 feet over your head. And all the dinosaurs lived on land those big scary sea monsters like pleasiosaurs and mosesores they're not dinosaurs they're marine all right is that just like a is that semantics no it's not they don't have a dinosaur in their family tree you and i are mammals because we have the first mammal for an ancestor right if you don't

have the first dinosaur for an ancestor you can't be a dinosaur so they're a different their lineage branches off before there is the first dinosaur but they coexisted with dinosaurs yes Yeah, same thing with the terrors Like pterodactals, the flying reptiles Not dinosaurs your children's books have lied to you I didn't like that in Jurassic Park They were not friendly No, but they're not dinosaurs

They're flying reptiles They're whatever they are But I don't like them Yeah Left a bad memory You could leave a review I guess So what would the weather have been like In Mantua, New Jersey

Or around that area during before the asteroid hits because you and I both know we have winters now that get down 10 degrees and it snows and we have summers to get to 100 degrees but I've never really thought about like what I always assumed everything's warm with dinosaurs which is probably a dumb assumption but what was it like back then well it was warm the Cretaceous and the Mesozoic in general the time of the dinosaurs was a very warm period it's warm because there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere but that CO2 was accrued over millions of years not like what's happening today, which is like all at once, which is devastating. But the planet

warmed slowly over tens of millions of years, really. So at the time of the dinosaurs, it's so warm that there's no ice at the poles. And so all that ice that we have today, that water is in the ocean. And that's why sea level was so high. So it raises the level of the sea by about 300 feet. Antarctica is already at the South Pole at the Cretaceous. So it's there, but it's not glaciated. It's forested. And because it's at the South Pole, it still gets six months of darkness. So we don't have a modern analog for that environment.

So what's going on in the dark polar forest of Antarctica for six months a year? Nobody knows. It's crazy. You know, I liken it to, you've heard people talk about before how we've only discovered like 5% of the oceans or something like that. I would imagine when you're looking at periods that are also complete. passed you've only discovered 0.05% of what you know right I think that's probably I think that's right yeah it's I it would not be 1% it's a very very small fraction of a percentage now let's let's start here with with a fun one though

because I hear people talk about this now I have seen pictures of you with full bones of dinosaurs in fact we'll get to it but you discovered a literal dinosaur and got to name it which is really really cool it's a nice little flex on the resume right there but But, you know, there's people who are trying to say now, oh, this isn't real, dinosaurs don't exist. It wasn't, that wasn't in real time. Somebody made that up. So if you could disabuse people of that notion, how would you go about that other than showing them all of the pictures of bones that very clearly represent something that is not of this earth right now?

Well, I'm pretty sure my back hurts because dinosaurs exist. So I'm positive about it. You know, I don't know where to go with that. We, I, you know, I have found hundreds of dinosaurs, you know, not all big, complete skeletons, like some, but, you know, pieces of dinosaurs, hundreds. They existed. It's an entire branch of science with thousands of scientists, and we know a ton about it. And so, you know, the things that we argue about with dinosaurs is, you know, exactly who was the closest cousin of this other dinosaur and, you know, did the little dip in. its shoulder you know was it a little bit more pronounced or a little less pronounced i mean it's a

it's a very sophisticated and nuanced field and you know to start with a question like you know if somebody says like there weren't dinosaurs that's kind of like telling a planetary scientist like there's there's no jupiter it feels a little flat earth to me like when like when people say that because there's just when i see things that have such significant evidence and it's and it's like where do we get all this stuff from you just can't on a thin air. Yeah, so I can tell you one thing, which is one way to demonstrate it, is so now there's a field called molecular paleontology. Molecular paleontology. Yeah, and so we can, and we do this in my lab, we can demineralize dinosaur bones and recover routinely now. They're

proteins and blood vessels and bone building cells. Proteins have hereditary information in them. It's not as robust as DNA, but you can sequence proteins and make family trees from them. And this was started by a friend and colleague of mine, Mary Schweitzer, who was, she used to be at North Carolina State. And we've exchanged lots of grad students and done some of this work. You can sequence these proteins. And then if it was contamination or something, it could fall out anywhere in this giant database of proteins. But if it's really from a dinosaur, it's going to fall out next to their closest living relatives, which are crocodiles. Crocodiles aren't dinosaurs, but they're the closest living relatives. They look like it. And birds. Birds are literal dinosaurs. Literal.

Literal. And we sequence these proteins and they fall out between birds and crocodiles. And so we have molecular evidence that these things are what we think they are, that they are dinosaurs. And of course, we have the skeletal evidence as well. And we can see it. And, you know, the geological record is like a layer cake, right? Except you don't get the whole cake anywhere, right? You get this piece of the cake here and this piece of the cake there.

but we know when dinosaurs first appeared we know how long they persisted we know exactly when they end and it doesn't matter if you're in afghanistan or antarctica or new jersey or china they always start and end exactly where we know them to start and end right like they they behave geologically they're predictable um it's obvious that that's the story yeah now when how approximately how many years ago did we did the first dinosaurs that we know of walk the earth um dinous the first dinosaur is about uh 237 million years ago okay so that's the triassic period triassic period yeah the the the mezoic which is the time of dinosaurs is triassic the now famous jurassic and the cretaceous okay now how do we again a million

questions how do we mark off those arrows what what behaviorally or that we can observe from dinosaurs makes it change officially from one error to the other. They're all defined by extinctions. And there's a commission called the International Commission on Stratigraphic Nomenclature. What a name. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to get them some rebranding. Yes, they could use it.

And it's a large group of scientists. And they define these, there's eons and there's ears and there's periods. and they're epics, and they're all, they've all fit inside each other. And they define what the boundaries are based on the extinction of certain organisms or the extinction of groups of organisms. And the big boundaries have to do with big extinctions. So the end of the Paleozoic, the start of the Mesozoic, which is the time of the dinosaurs, that happens when we have the world's worst mass extinction.

It happens about 250 million years ago. It's 255. it's the end of the Permian period, we lose 95% of species on the planet. So if you're a geologist or a paleontologist and you're working in rocks that are around that boundary, it's very easy to tell which side of the boundary you're on because 95% of the species disappear above that. When the dinosaurs go extinct 66 million years ago, that's the end of the Mesozoic era and the start of the Cenozoic era, which we're still in. Again, it's very easy to tell you're at that boundary because 75% of the species go extinct.

But the 75% that was going to be my next question. The 75% that goes extinct includes all dinosaurs except for birds. That's right. Okay. Yep. Fascinating. So when dinosaurs were first on the earth because like most of us out here are looking at this from a layman's perspective and we think about, oh, Jurassic Park, T-Rex running around, raptors, all that. But when they're first on the earth, what were some of the, I don't know, recognizable dinosaurs that we might know today that existed in that?

I forget the name of it. The Triassic period. We're actually sitting on the Triassic here at Hoboken. We're sitting on the Triassic? Yeah. What does that mean? Well, the Triassic is the time when the supercontinent of Pangea breaks up. Right.

That's what I was looking for earlier. That means the Atlantic Ocean basically starts to unzip, right? And there was a time when you could stand here in Hoboken and look about a mile across the ocean to Africa. that's so cool and so you know the the palisades which go right up the river here those are basalt flows basalt comes from magmatic eruptions of ocean type magma and that happens here when the Atlantic Ocean forms

when Pan Gia rifts open and all the gas that was released during that rifting caused the world's fourth mass extinction. So the evidence of the fourth mass extinction is in the palisades along the Hudson at the top of New Jersey and the evidence for the sixth mass of the fifth mass extinction is at the fossil park in southern New Jersey. Not to be confused with my vinnies and carmines out there

who are looking at other types of extinctions that happened in the palisades. That's right. He's got to throw that out there. It's been a few since then. Wow. So it's crazy because you would, You just wouldn't think that. I mean, look at, look at the wall right here.

What's right across the river, this is what we have here now, and the idea that there were, like, dinosaurs running around here or were close where it was underwater and the lands over there and the dinosaurs are right there. It's just crazy. At that time, 255 million years ago, this was an apocalyptic hellscape. This volcanic fissure, it was just... It still is.

All right, so the Triassic period, though, the very first one, what types of species? Let's start with dinosaurs. What types of species exist? Dinosaurs are about the size of a house cat. Oh, wow. So they could be a pet. They could menace nothing bigger than a bug at the time.

Wow. They evolve into probably the hardest time on Earth since there's been complex life on Earth because we've just had this horrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian period. Almost everything is dead. Complex life on planet Earth almost goes out of business. And the first thing that kind of gets the jump, you know, back are crocodiles. And so we're kind of living in a crocodile world in the Triassic period. There's an eight-foot-tall bipedal crocodile in the Triassic period.

So it's running after you. It's like wallie gator from hell. Yeah, thanks. And so dinosaurs evolve into this world, and they don't really make a lot of headway because of the crocodiles dominating everything. So they're small, they're kind of spindly. The oldest one we know of at the moment is Nyasosaurus from Tanzania. Can we pull that up, Nyasosaurus?

Yeah. Let's do that. But it's tiny. And they stay that way until the fourth mass extinction, which we have the evidence for right along the Hudson here. And for some reason, that kind of knocks back the crocodiles. And the dinosaurs are the ones that get the, well, no, that's kind of a crazy. I think that might be a crisper.

accident right there. Like a watermelon and a lizard or something. That's what I was looking at Ben. I'm like, don't you, don't you open Pandora's box too bad with here, my friend. He's like, going to come out with like, oh, it's a velociraptor, sorry. Yeah, it's twice the start now. It's, it's NYSSA. NYSSA.

We got it, Joe. What are we looking at? Yeah, we've got to make sure we get it. Get it right so people aren't seeing the new demon from hell. my ASS. Yeah. Okay. Right. But it's a little spindly dinosaur. And you said it's like approximately this size? Yeah, there we go. Um, which one do you want? I think that the picture on the upper right looks right down. So this thing would have been about this big you're saying? Yeah. I mean, roughly the size of a cat. Right. And so, you know, they're not, they're not too tough.

Now his front, his legs are on the ground bipedal and then he's got hands, but he's still hunched over in like the position of a cat at the time yeah um early dinosaurs were all bipedal um these kinds and um the thing that is different the thing that makes dinosaurs dinosaurs and separates them from their reptilian kin think about a lizard they have um they have a very sprawling languid posture with elbows and knees bent um belly on the ground tail dragging behind a lizard is always like a half a push up away from taking a nap right that's not dinosaurs dinosaurs dinosaurs have their legs under their body yes their their ankles are hinged for straight ahead forward motion they have very strong hips they have at least three sacral vertebrae that connect one side of their hip to the other so it makes

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Why evolutionarily do so many of them have like almost no arms? Like we make the joke about like T-Rex arms, but it's a scary T-Rex and its arms are like in here as opposed to like humans that are out here. Well, some do, some don't. I mean, if you look at in that same group of dinosaurs that T-Rex is in called the Theropods, look at something like a therazinosaurus. DeraZinosaurus. Yeah.

Now, a therazinosaur. Sounds like a drug. They could be like 17 feet tall, fully feathered, not a bird, but a fully feathered non-avian dinosaur. Yeah, look at that middle picture. Big pot belly, and then they have like these meter-long

Edward Cisorhands Clause. So it's a nightmare, basically. Whoa. And so you can see some dinosaurs that were by people had very long. arms. Others had very short arms. Now in the case of T-Rex, people make fun of its little arms, you know, like if you're happy and you, I'll never mind. Or, you know, T-Rex can't answer the phone and all this stuff. Well, those tiny arms of T-Rex make its murderous bite possible. Because if you're

going to have the strongest bite that any land animal has ever had, you need really big jaw muscles. And if you're going to have big jaw muscles, you need a big head to strap those jaw muscles on to, right? So you need a big skull. If you're going to have a really big skull, you need really big neck muscles to hold up your really big skull, and neck muscles and arm muscles compete for muscle attachment space on the shoulder girdle. So you can't have both. So as its head got bigger, as its bite got stronger, its arms got littler to allow for that muscle attachment space. So the next time you make fun of its little tiny arms with the two little witchy fingers on it, think again because that's what made its killer bite possible it automatically has it whereas i got a

deadlift to get this right here pretty much pretty much wow now how did they go i mean obviously that story makes total sense and and we see where it ends up because we know a lot now but evolutionarily when they were first discovering like the t-rex or something which i don't even know when that is maybe you can enlighten me 1905 19505 okay how do they, what do they do to determine that story that you just explained scientifically? Is it just like deductive reasoning or do they find other pieces of evidence that show like, oh, their shoulder muscle developed this way or their traps develop, whatever they're called, develop this way over these 300 million years? How does it work?

Well, that particular story that I told is the work of my friend, Dr. Michael Habib in Los Angeles, who's a biomechanics genius, I would say. And so that's his hypothesis. But, you know, when we look at dinosaurs, we mostly have their bones, although in some cases we have other parts that survive and we recover. And bones have muscle attachment scars on them. And from those muscle attachment scars, we can estimate the size and the power of certain muscles. And so it helps us reconstruct these creatures. It helps us reconstruct how they move.

And it's also, the bones are the primary defining features for us. And so, you know, if we're in today's world and we want to know, like, is this a species or is this a species, well, you know, we look to see who can produce viable offspring with each other. In the ancient world, we don't know that, right? We just don't have that evidence. And so the definition of a fossil species is that it has to be, it's, you have to have a morphological definition of that species made by a competent paleontologist that can later

be recognized by another competent paleontologist. And to define a new species, you have to find a feature in the skeleton or the fossil that hasn't been seen in any other animal that's closely related. We call these a tapomorphies, but it's just a fancy name for a novel feature in the skeleton. You need at least one. It's maybe not great practice to define a new species based on just one. But when you assemble a group of them, then you have a clearly defined species that another paleontologist, maybe 100 years from now, could recognize if they find the same species. It's like a constant building upon a peer review in a way over time. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And like in any science, you know, paleontologists can be a quarrelsome lot. That's what we're

supposed to do in science as we challenge each other, right? That is correct. It's all it's supposed to be. Yeah. Because in science, what we say is, if you listen closely, you will almost never hear a scientist say that they have proved something. We don't really use that term very much. What we say is that we have failed to falsify something. Failed to falsify. Yeah. And so you create a hypothesis and then you try to poke holes first in your own hypothesis

and then you publish it and you let all the other scientists try to poke holes in your hypothesis. And if it withstands all that, then we say we have failed to falsify that hypothesis, which means we have gained confidence in that hypothesis. Sometimes hypotheses become, they're tested so frequently and we have so much confidence in them that, you know, historically some become laws like the law of gravity, which is really just a hypothesis. It's a prediction, but it's a prediction that's so good

that people are willing to strap themselves to rockets and shoot themselves into space based on that hypothesis. Yes. And so that's essentially how science works. So nobody says, you know, we've proven the law of gravity. You would say that we have immense confidence in Newton's gravitational formula because no one has ever falsified it. You know, I've had the privilege of having some pretty amazing scientists in here

over the past, especially a couple years. Started with Michi Okaku and eventually had in Brian Keating. And recently I had in Claudia Duram, who wrote a, what was a controversial paper, on gravity. back she was working on this for years and years but i think like when it really blew up was like 2018 and she for one was even saying like oh the gravity we know is in everything right i found this i'm gonna state it all wrong so go to listen episode 311 but you know she's like uh or 310 i i stated i found that gravity is according to what newton has but there's a molecule or something that is also missing and here's why it makes sense mathematically and i bring this up because

to me the beauty and also madness of science is that literally the most brilliant people in the world are usually the people who are in that space it's amazing what they're able to do you can look through history look at the einsteins look at the newtons go all the way back to galileo and just see the pieces that they were able to put together that we could later build on but the the madness of it is that in a way they're always figuring out the latest thing that can't be falsified so that someone else can build on top of that and eventually at least falsify a lot of it if not all of it to get to the next step that then follows that process to get all the way to eventually the top which is trying to figure out the meaning of life and everything and yet

we will be able to look back on scientists who maybe objectively got most or all of what they discovered wrong as the people who actually trailblazed us to get to the answer it's like this amazing catch 22 or paradox do you ever think about that with what you do in paleontology? Oh, it's exactly right. When you, when you, if your work is falsified, you're making progress. Yes.

Right? There's an example. There was a guy named Bishop Usher. He was the primate of Ireland, which I learned as a religious title, not his Simeon origins, but he was. We got to check that with YouTube monetization. Just be clear.

He was like, he was an archbishop. Yeah. Ireland. And he decides, this is in the 1600s, I believe, he decides he's going to figure out how old the Earth is. And he has no tools, right? Geology hasn't been invented. It hadn't been invented at all. Not really. No. That comes around, James Hutton published his theory of the Earth at the very end of the 1700s. So we don't have geology. We obviously don't have any kind of lab tools to date rocks or anything like that. So he doesn't have much to work with. He's an archbishop, so he's got the Bible, right? So he does some historical research, and he figures out the date

of King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible. And so he's got a starting date there. And then he goes back through all the bagots in the Bible. So he works his way back through the generations, back to Adam and Eve. And he determines that the earth was created in 4,000, or BC on October 23rd around 6 p.m. on a Saturday. Oh, we landed it on the time, too. Yeah. Wow. Now, you can laugh at that, especially because it's absurdly specific.

But what Usher did was he created a testable hypothesis. Yeah. Right. And we have tested that hypothesis, and we have falsified it. But it was a credible piece of scholarship, I think, and we falsified his hypothesis. and that's what we call progress. Did he say how he got the time? Did he ever, like, give a good answer?

I don't know how he got the time of the day. I'm not really sure. God feels like a post-happy hour kind of guy, right? Maybe. That might be it. Yeah, we weren't drinking at five and creating the earth. We waited until after everyone left the bar. That makes sense.

No, but it's almost like an extreme example, but it's another great example of what I'm getting at. And so, I mean, scientists are people. We have our time and our careers and, you know, maybe our ego is invested into things, but... They have ego in science. They don't have that. A few of them do. Yeah, not me personally, but some of them, you know.

But, and so this is hard to do. But the proper response of a scientist, if your idea is falsified, you say, like, great, we've made progress. Yes. Right? And it's the ultimate, again, that's like another paradox with human nature, because your ego is, like, Like, but does that mean I'm full of shit? Which is not the case, but that's how things will get painted. Like, oh, you were the guy that was wrong.

But that's the whole point. You're supposed to try to explore the unexplored and figure out what that is. I think we should celebrate that. I said on, I think, the Discovery Channel, like 25 years ago, you know, that we would never recover ancient molecules because of all these reasons why they would never survive. They would they would degrade over time. Well, we did. We did. Can you explain that?

And I was wrong about that. And so, you know, I'm a scientist. Thank you for coming clean. Well, scientists change their view when they get new information. That's right. That's what makes science different than politics. That's what makes science different than religion, right? I mean, how many times have you had a political argument with somebody where, like, you have, like, this killer fact, and it doesn't change a thing, right?

Or how often does an event happen in the world or a new discovery in the world, and how often does that change religion? It doesn't, right? But it does science, because that's what science is, right? And that's what makes it different. Yeah, and I wish everyone could think that way because we've seen, you know, especially over the past couple decades, people from outside the space, I might add, in many cases turn science into like the new religion and stuff like that. And the whole, again, it takes things and suddenly defines stuff as law.

And then you're not questioning, you know, whether or not we can test something. And it exists across all elements of science. And I talk with all the guys I bring in here about it because it's so, it's so counterintuitive to me. It's like, we should constantly be testing questions. And if something is then proven is like, oh, that's not right, then great. We've made progress, just like you said. Yeah. So going back to dinosaurs, though, and we were talking about the fourth extinction when that happened.

What, you might have mentioned this, but I just want to make sure we rehash it. What exactly caused the fourth extinction where I think you said 95% of species were wiped out? In the third, 95% of species. And the fourth, it was about 75s, bad. So this is like 250 million years ago, 255 million years ago? The fourth was 200. The third was 255. That's the one I wanted to ask about.

Let's start at the third. So what caused the third extension? Yeah, we call this the Great Dying. There's a couple things. Actually, there's a lot of things that are going wrong on the planet at this time. One is that people think, you know, a lot of people know the word pangia, right, the supercontinent. and they think that that's how continents started. It's not how continents started.

It just happens to be like a moment in time when all the continents happened to bump into each other. Right, right. And so they were separate before, and there were different continents before. There were different oceans before. But at one point in time, all the continents bump into each other

and we have Pangea. That's hard on life. Continental climates are extreme. Think about the middle of Siberia. It could be 100 degrees in the summer and it could be minus 50 degrees in the winter. Right. So continental climates are extreme. And then when the continents are all together, all the organisms have to compete with all the other organisms. You know, some of the problems we have with invasive species today. Well, that's because an organism from over there is now competing with the organisms over here. But when the continents push all the organisms together, it's just hard on life. So we're in a rough time to begin with. And then these giant volcanic fissures in what is now Siberia open up and issue forth vast quantities of greenhouse gases. And we get into this, like, runaway greenhouse effect and the planet just heats up tremendously and the combination of all

those things is just too hard on life and 95% of species perish whoa yeah and so we were pointing out that a lot of the species that perish include dinosaurs and this was during the era where the dinosaurs were like cat like size you said not yet you've moved ahead one yeah we don't have dinosaurs yet so why you're here can you got to keep me on order yeah so this is a world before dinosaurs. This is the end of the Paleozoic. Okay. So pre-Dinosaur world, and this sets the stage for the dinosaurs. Okay. Have you ever seen those little cute fossils called trilobites? They're very common. You buy them in rock shops, and you can go on, you can find trilobites. Maybe I've seen one.

I just can't remember the term. Look on Etsy, and you'll see, like, jewelry made of trilobites, but they go extinct at the end of the Paleozoic and lots of other things do. There you go, trilobites. So they had a great, yeah, yeah, I've seen that. run across the Paleozoic, and then they can't hack it when this happens. And lots of other things go extinct as well. Got it. But it set the stage for the dinosaurs. It set the stage, eventually for the dinosaurs.

Kind of set the stage more for the crocodiles, and then the next one set the stage for the dinosaurs. Okay. And the crocodiles, these are the ones that are bipedal you were talking about? Somewhere. There were other ones that, you know, were quadrupeds, but they were huge and scary. And, yeah. Now, how, like, because I've talked with some.

other people about this about how we as humans look at time i was talking with gnostic informant about this i don't know the exact term but it's almost like there's an exponential correction that we do in our heads and what i mean by that is we look at something that's attainable to look at meaning like we have video of it for example of like the 1940s and it seems very long ago but then as we go farther maybe we go 200 years back before that we view that on a similar layer as we viewed the past 80 years And then from 200 years, we look at the 600 years before that, and we view that, like, almost in the same time period to the point that, you know, we could be talking about something to happen in 65 AD and compare it to something that happened in 168 AD. And in our heads, we're like, oh, it's similar time. Right.

It's like five generations apart. Yeah. And shit changed and everything. So when we're looking at evolution, I get caught in that trap all the time because you almost like picture like, oh, just walked out of the water and boom, there it is. But how long after that extinction? Like, what was the process of the first crocodile forming and how long did it take to grow to size? You know, on a human time scale, it's an immense amount of time. I mean, you know, you think about events that happened here on Earth 1,000 years ago, and it seems so long ago.

But it's nothing. But it's nothing, geologically, right? A thousand years is like, you know, 500 oak trees. Right. right um so you know it's that to us to our perception these things move at a rate that's not perceivable right geologically you know when you look at the whole fossil record you can see things that look like they're happening very rapidly but you know our senses are tuned for the here and now right like we are we're very good at perceiving threats food and mates right yes we're not so good at

perceiving things that unfold over years, definitely not decades. It's one of the reasons why people aren't, I think, as alarmed as we should be about the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. I mean, we go outside and today seems a lot like yesterday, you know, and this summer seems a lot like last summer, but it's not. We're just not built to perceive the kinds of changes that are happening in this world. And, you know, what really scares me, like a less than a year ago, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report, and now I'm talking in numbers of animals, not species.

Since 1970, in terms of larger creatures, not insects or microbes, since 1970, 72% of wildlife has disappeared on the planet. Crazy. 72%. How is that not on the front page of every newspaper every day? because people are still getting their Chick-fil-A and, you know, doing their thing and going about their 9-5. We're not perceiving it.

But, you know, I notice it when I was starting my career, right? And I was a young paleontologist, and I go out to places like Wyoming in the summer, and I'd get a pickup truck, and I'd drive across the state. I'd have to stop and squeegee the grasshoppers off my windshield about every 20 minutes because you couldn't see you otherwise. I was out in Wyoming a couple summers ago and drove across the state. I don't think a bug hit my windshield. Whoa. That's bad. That's bad.

If the insects aren't thriving, nothing else is going to thrive. But these changes happen so slowly on a human time scale that we just, we don't see them. Yeah, and I think also the really unfortunate stuff that happens with this is you get, we're so flawed as humans in the process as well. And so you'll get people to take advantage of these things and who don't really even give a shit about anything that's happening. and they'll try to say, well, more for me, less for you. And that's something like when you're trying to have a good conversation about, well, what is going on with our climate?

What have we done since the Industrial Revolution that's affected our atmosphere and different aspects of like how this place works? You know, it ultimately comes back to, well, the buck's going to stop with either totally free corporations doing whatever they want or the government shutting everything down and telling every people what to do. And both extremes piss off a huge symbol. to the population no matter where you go and we kind of live in this world where it flips back and forth like that and so I I worry that like we can't have these conversations because people

either like completely say all true or all false and you don't you don't get anywhere with it because it's also like a lot of people out there who aren't scientists as well and you know they're trying to make a decision on what that is and I don't think that that should be room for scientists to say well we're the only people that are allowed to talk about this to be clear but I also think like we have to get back to the like well what is the empirical evidence here what has change what is what's something that's a part of you know just a phase of change that happens over time versus things that look permanent that we're doing that could be causing an extinction and then somehow you got to start that conversation with people and you know think about a thousand years from now which is as you

just laid out beautifully it's very hard to get people to think about a thousand seconds from now you know now they're going to think about a thousand years it's tough man yeah well you know i mean sciences in economics. It's not economics, right? So we don't necessarily have the answers there. It's not politics. We don't necessarily have the answers there. But we have the data. And we know how the world works better than anyone. I mean, think about it. How does every single disaster movie start with a scientist being ignored? That's right. Right? It's true. It's very true. Or I am legend with a scientist telling everyone that we cured cancer. So what we try to do at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum is give people a deep time perspective and a deep space perspective. Because when you start to look at it that way, if you pull back in the Apollo 8 mission, the first one to go to the back side of the moon, astronaut Bill Anders took that famous Earth rise picture. We see the Earth rising up over the moon. Yes, iconic picture.

It's credited with really kicking off the environmental movement. But when you see the planet that way, there's no us and them, right? And there's no anywhere else either. We live on this tiny little rocky lifeboat in space. And, you know, I try to get people to think. I gave a talk last night, and, you know, I asked the audience, like, imagine, yeah, there it is. Imagine you're adrift in a little lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with like four or five other people. Like, how much are you going to care for that lifeboat?

How much are you going to think about it? How much you're going to doad upon it? How quickly will you be to repair it? How much are you going to love that lifeboat? Well, you pull back into space and get that picture. That's our situation. We live on this tiny, little, lonely lifeboat in space. And I'm sorry, Elon Musk, there's no planet B.

We're not going to put a million people on Mars. You know why? It'd be very cool, though. Because Mars is terrible. Now, we're going to go to Mars. We're going to plant the explorers flag on Mars, you know, the Explorers Club flag. But Mars doesn't have niceties like drinkable water and a breathable atmosphere and a magnetosphere to protect us from the sun's deadly radiation.

We have an entire continent on Earth, Antarctica, that we don't even have a breeding population of humans on. I looked it up. There's been 11 babies. born in Antarctica. 11. 11. Yeah. Were they born in the Nazi bunker that allegedly exists there?

I don't know about that. Oh, uh-oh. But I have heard of the... I've heard of the McMurdoom Marriage, the Tarmac Divorce. I think it probably relates to that. I don't know what that is. You know, it's long winter in Antarctica, so I think people, you know, get busy. It's an interesting point, though, because there are places that we don't even, we can't even

have it here and we're trying to figure out how to do another planet. Right. love the idea. Like, it's great to shoot for the moon. Yeah. But this is our home. And, you know, we have this planet that we are exquisitely adapted to and for. And it suits all of our needs. It has everything we need. And why? Preserve this little lonely lifeboat that we have. Because it's really all we're ever going to have them. And we're not going to send, you know, a rocket ship to another star system and colonize that because we can. If you, if you want to, well, here, if you go to, like, if you want to send an intergenerational mission to, say, a planet going around

Alpha Centauri, or Beta Centauri, it's a little closer. Well, those people are going to leave Earth and never return, right? And so it's a multi-generational mission. How does speciation happen? It always happens in the presence of geographic separation, right? Go back to that biological definition of a species. It's a group of interbreeding organisms. When they get on that spaceship and they leave and they take their genes with them, never to mix with our genes again. At that moment, there are different species. That's so interesting. I never thought of it that way. So, yeah, we could send another species to another star system, but it's not us anymore. So I don't know, maybe this will come back parallel. Maybe you can shoot me down and it's not, but like you've seen the movie

Interstellar before. So technically, Matthew McCona, he leaves the Earth, only a certain, I forget what the exact time was, but only a certain amount of time in his life passes, not a ton of time. But when he gets back to Earth, it's now been 80 years, right? So, he was in a time warp. And so I've always looked at it with the, if I'm just looking at it definitionally, the argument there is that he's actually an alien because he's returning to a place that he did, that he's never been to before in a way. You know what I mean? Because his time didn't pass but theirs did and i think what you're getting at with the interspeciation and what a gene pool would do if it left here is a similar idea it's like yes let's say there's men and women on that

flight right and they go there and maybe they breed together in their new place they are going to at some point be starting a new species there because it's a different environment different adaptation happens maybe there's interbreeding with whatever's there and now you get a whole new type of world even just random genetic drift. I mean, their, their genome is just going to go to a place that ours are not, right? And so, you know, eventually, given enough time, we wouldn't be able to breed with them. Right. Which makes us a different species. And time could be 300 years or 300 million years. It's hard to say. It'd be more than 300. It'd be a long time. It'd be a very long time. But it would happen. Because we started this conversation talking about how long it might have taken crocodiles to form into a crocodile after that third extinction. And it's like, Like, again, this is where you get into hundreds of millions of years. It starts as a little bug or whatever in the post-apocalyptic world and then eventually works his way up to this, what did you say, 15-foot bipedal thing running through the woods?

I mean, yeah. I mean, in the case of us vertebrates, we go back to a very particular lineage of essentially little wormy-like creatures that eventually develop. It's called a noticord. It's like a stiffened central nervous system. and then that eventually becomes ossified to form a spinal column, right? And then that's when we have vertebrates. And then that's, so we wouldn't go from like a bug to a crocodile,

but we go from this, this, these precursors of vertebrates through vertebrates to, you know, all the creatures with bones. Over a very long period of time. Yeah, that's hundreds of millions of years. Yeah, hundreds of millions of years. Yeah. So dinosaurs, going back to that, you said they were like apt to form during this period. this is when they form into like the cat like cat size creatures and how long was that period before

the fourth extinction or fifth extinction whichever long so dinosaurs form near the near the end of the triassic period that's about 100 i'm sorry that's about 237 million years ago um and then really that dinosaurs kind of become what we think of as dinosaurs in the Jurassic period that's when they become very biodiverse. That's when they start to conquer new lands. That's when they get really big. That's when we see the first giant dinosaurs. What percentage of the planet of species do you think dinosaurs were at the time based on all the other species that were there? Is it 40%? Is it 10%? Do we know? Well, big creatures are never a large percentage of the species. Most species are bacteria. That was a dumb way of asking that. Excluding things like insects or very small things as far as like in what? we would now term like mammals or stuff like that like what percentage of larger animals yeah in terms let's call a macro fauna yeah let's say that um a very high percentage i mean dinosaurs on land right dinosaurs dominated the terrestrial ecosystems for the better part of 165 million years

our ancestors are little shrew like mammals um we evolved first about 20 million years after the first dinosaur so so out of that 165 million year run we're there for almost all of it, our mammalian ancestors. Not humans, but the mammalian ancestors. Your great grandma was a little shrew-like creature back in the Mesozoic. They have a tough time competing with dinosaurs. So mammals, for the most part, they go nocturnal. They all stay small.

They're living really in the hidden and forgotten recesses of the dinosaur world, hoping never to be noticed. That goes on for an unimaginable amount of time. and then the dinosaurs are wiped out in a cosmic accident and the surviving little tiny mammals can now walk out under the blue sky and they don't have the threat of dinosaurs anymore and they quickly, quickly evolve into the mammalian fauna that we see today.

It's not long before we see the first proto-primates, it's not long before we see proto-wales and the earliest artiadactyls, things with hooves, and all of a sudden, think of an ecological niche as like a job description and all of a sudden, like, you know, the Great Depression comes. Like, all the jobs are just wiped off. Yeah.

And now all of a sudden we're in an economic boom, and now there's all these unopened, these unfilled job positions, and mammals quickly evolve into all of those. And we have this burst of radiation. It's called an adaptive radiation. And all of a sudden, it's the age of mammals. Now, to go back for one second, though, because there were three official eras of dinosaurs before the asteroid hits.

The second one is the Jurassic one, and you said that's the one where they start to get really big and did, like, the dinosaurs who recognize it. How did the Jurassic end and what did dinosaurs look like on the other side of that for the third period? Did they kind of have to start over in size? No, there are, there's extinctions that happen at the end of the Jurassic that we use to define it, but they're more minor extinctions. It's not one of the big five mass extinctions, so it's not a huge cataclysm. These are more subtle changes that are happening. But enables paleontologists to know you're in the one period versus the next. Okay.

But it's not so earth-shattering, like the big five. But the species basically survived then in that case. So you might have a T-Rex in the Jurassic period, and you still have a T-Rex? Well, T-Rex are only at the end of the Cretaceous period. So couldn't even get that right, damn it. Species generally, I mean, as a rule of thumb, high amount of variability in this. But as a rule of thumb, species persist about a million years before they turn. turn into something else or maybe go extinct.

Where did the T-Rex come from? Let's unwind that one. Asia. Yeah, but yeah, but where, like, what did it start as, or maybe not start as, but like, what would we know it to have evolved from? Well, there's, first we have theropod dinosaurs, and these are among the earliest forms of dinosaurs. But then later, much later, there's a group of dinosaurs that we would call the tyrannosaurids, which are, and there's, There's over two dozen of those known now, and it seems like the precursor of the North American Tyrannosaurs came over from Asia.

Asia was connected about where Alaska is to North America. And then T-Rex shows up right at the very end, evolves right at the end. So dinosaurs lived at different times, but T-Rex happens to be alive when the meteor hit. You know, it's founded in Montana and Wyoming, but also Texas. And so there was, there were probably T-Rex that saw the asteroid coming in and died that day. Triceratops was alive at the moment that the asteroid came in. Other things like, you know, allosaurus, stegasaurus, Brontosaurus, they're Jurassic. They were not around for this event.

Oh, they were already gone. So they were killed in the previous extinction? Well, they're Jurassic. They not necessarily killed an extinction, but, you know, species last for some time. and then they either turn into something else or they go extinct. Was the T-Rex like the king of the jungle at that time, would you say? T-Rex is, you know, obviously the most famous dinosaurs, not even close. And honestly, it's worthy of its extra measure of fame.

T-Rex was huge. It was powerful. It was fast. It could smell really well. It could see you if you were moving or not moving. That's a Jurassic Park myth, right? So T-Rex is about the most badass thing that's ever walked on land. What are some, you know, Jurassic Park is obviously like a supernatural movie and all that.

So I'm sure as a paleontologist, some of it makes you bang your head against a wall. But what are some themes there that they really did get right? Well, so first, I love the Jurassic movies. Oh, you do? They're fun summer monster movies. Good for you. I like that. And like, if they inspire you, then go to the library and get a book about dinosaurs.

and learn something, right? But there's a whole generation of paleontologists a little younger than me that have their origin story with when Jurassic Park came out in 1993. That's cool. And I'm sure every time one of those Jurassic movies comes out,

there's a new batch of paleontologists that are born as a result. And, you know, in geneticists as well and probably all kinds of other scientists. So they're great and they're fun and, you know, I love them. They get a lot of the science wrong. But, you know,

Is there stuff they get right? Yeah, I think so. But there's some stuff that, like, you know, you know how big a Velociraptor skull is? No. It's about like that. And they made it way bigger. Way, way bigger. Right.

So a Velociraptor. They got to sell a movie. They're going to. Is little. A Velociraptor is more like a pissed off turkey. Oh, right? Yeah. Like, it's, it'll get you.

Well, I mean, I mean, you can take a turtorapter. You can take a turkey. I'm sure. You could take it. You could take a velociraptor. If there's a velociraptor in your kitchen, it's more of an opportunity than a problem. You just like open up a can of cranberry sauce and preheat the oven and, you know, yeah. It's going to climb in. Well, you'd have to do something. But, you know, it's probably good eating. Probably tastes like chicken. You're probably good eating chicken. Probably tastes like. You're telling me chickens are a little velociraptist. Well, chickens are dinosaurs. So we literally know what dinosaur tastes like. They are. I eat chicken every day. So I mean a dinosaur. You're eating a dinosaur. Yeah. dinosaur flesh courses through your blood chickens chickens are not the brightest though like they are not yeah i have chickens they're really dumb oh you have some yourself do you like cook them or no no they're pets we have pets oh they have names oh sorry we bury them when they die oh yeah so sorry but they're dumb they're really dumb so we have um imagine we've got that our deck is here uh-huh and then the chicken coop and then the door to the chicken coop is on the far side so i'll go go out on the

deck, and I'll throw pizza crust in the backyard, and they can't figure out how to get to it, even if their doors open. They'll, like, bang their heads on the fence, and then they start to walk to their gate, and they look around, and they're like, but the pizza crust is getting smaller, and then they run back to it, and it takes them, like, it's like a Rubik's cube. It takes them, like, 10 minutes to figure out that they have to go away from the pizza crust before they can get to the pizza crust. They are not smart animals. Are they nice to you? Like, do you get to pet them, or? Only, we've had chickens for a long time. I've only had one that, like, made friends with me because...

If they were bigger, they'd probably eat chicken. It remembered that I gave it some goldfish crackers on the deck, and then it would come up, like, every day looking for some goldfish crackers, and it would sit and would sleep next to me while I'm, you know, reading a book or something. Yeah, they're nasty. I mean, you ever seen a cockfight? No, I never have. Listen, I've seen it in movies.

That's enough for me. That's actually the first time anyone's asked me that, but I've never seen it. They can, they can, it wasn't a pause, but still, Like, they can go out and I always think, like, they're like this big. Oh, yeah. And we cook them all the time. They're really mean to each other, especially if one of them gets injured and they see the red of the blood, like they will just attack that poor chicken. Yeah.

You can see. It's like the fucking hunger games out there. You can see. I made a slow motion film of our chickens running across our front yard, and I put the Jurassic Park music in. It's on my Instagram feed. And they're dinosaurs. I mean, you can see it. When you see these chickens in slow-mo going across our front yard, dinosaurs.

They look like a raptor in a way. That's crazy. Yeah. So were there any dinosaurs? Let's look at the Jurassic period. Were there any dinosaurs that we can use science to determine, I don't know, by brain size or things that we find that you would characterize as very intelligent? Well, yeah.

I mean, we have some alive today. Crows are super smart. parrots are super smart pigeons pigeons they certainly have an unbelievable sense of direction I have an ongoing feud with my buddy Mark Gagnon he thinks pigeons are like not smart at all but I'm like they're a top 10 smart animal pigeons will literally Crip walk out here it's crazy like going side the side very yeah no they're remarkable animals really yeah so they're a dinosaur yep

pigeons are dinosaurs a ruby-throated hummingbird is a dinosaur a flamingo is a dinosaur mosaurs is not a dinosaur pleasaurs not a not a dinosaur teradactyl's not a dinosaur when did the teradactyl go stink at the asteroid too terrors did yeah the larger group yeah so they're not dinosaurs what what did we characterize them as again well they don't they don't have like a very marketable name they're they're in a group called the the terosauroria and then they have um ornitha Ornithyra is the bigger group that they're in.

So dinosaurs and pterosaurs are united in a group called ornithadira. Ornithadira. And there's nothing that still exists of that. Birds. Birds aren't pterosaurs, but the group ornitha dira includes all dinosaurs and the terosaurs. Wait, hold on. Back that up. I've got to make sure it went in my brain, right? Say that again, if you don't mind? So you can unite any two creatures in a larger group.

Yeah. Right? Like us and an earthworm are in the... a really big group called animalia, right? We're both animals. So any two creatures are in some group together. So the group that pterosaurs and dinosaurs are both in is called ornithadira. Okay. So it's a part of a larger tent. Yeah, that's the larger tent. So we can trace birds to them, but birds are traced to both. But at the top of that tent where you have the ornithaidaira and the dinosaurs, the ornitha dira were totally separate from the dinosaurs and cannot be traced. Well, think of, here's the dinosaurs, here's the terrors.

Yep. Right. This is Ornithidira. And then dinosaurs branch, and there's lots of branches here, right? Got it. So Dinosaurville here, terosaur land here. Understood. Right. Okay. Now, what other, you know, large species, maybe we can actually talk about what you

already hinted at earlier with what was going on in the seas back then, but during the Jurassic period, what other large species besides dinosaurs were existing and thriving? Well, on land, there's not anything else that's really big besides dinosaurs. And then in the ocean, at various times, large marine reptiles have evolved. But, again, they're not dinosaurs. But, you know, pleasiosaurs, which are, like, whale-sized creatures, they look like the non-existent Loch Ness monster. The pleasiosaurus. Can we pull this up?

Yeah. Let's see this. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, let's pull that first one, Joe. Top left. So that's a Pleasiosaur right there.

Yeah, so there. Whoa. Yeah, so those are really scary sea monsters, and they were real. And then the Moses. Where did we find their fossils? Did we find any of that, like, on land because it used to be where sea is? That's right. We find them in marine deposits that are on land now.

Got it. And so originally they were found in northern Europe, like in the Netherlands. and in southern england yeah and the the dorset coast is a great place for that pull up the mosesaur the mosasaurus that is the all-time apex predator ever of of the oceans how big are we talking they could get to be like 55 feet long so oh so there you go that second picture is a good one there um it's like a killer whale meets a great white, meets a T-Rex of the sea. Yeah, I mean, so they're 55 feet long. You know what a Komodo dragon is?

Yes. It's a Marine Komoto dragon, essentially. Yeah. You ever seen those things? Eat a goat. Oh, yeah. They're monsters. Yeah.

So imagine a Marine Komoto dragon. Post-traumatic stress back here. As long as a school bus, paddles for limbs, six-foot jaw, and then they have a second set of teeth at the top of their throat that points backwards to keep you from swimming back out. I hope you're just dead before you get there. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like they already get you, you're dead. I'm not trying to swim back out. Yeah. Whoa. Is that it eating supposedly like a great white shark? Well, they didn't exist then, but for size comparison. Lots of big sharks. I don't know if you can see those back of the throat teeth.

They're called the pterogoid jaws. So, oh, look, the upper left hand picture shows those extra set of teeth in the mouth. That's a dragon of the water. Yeah, right there. If you zoom into the mouth, you'll see those extra teeth. All right, let's see how close we can get there, Joe. Oh, yeah, I can kind of see it already, but I don't know if people out there can see it. It's in the bat.

You're saying it's like, yeah, whoa. So maybe my favorite fossil that we found at the fossil park is we found one of those teragoid jaws with all the teeth in it. And what's amazing about our location. So, again, the fossil park site was underwater in the Cretaceous period. In our second gallery called Monster of Seas, everything in that gallery was found on the property in a layer that goes about 65 feet under your feet where you'll be standing there. And these creatures lived here. So when you see our giant Mosesaurus, if you can pull that up, if you look, if you search for.

Like the word Moses? Like the word Moses? Yeah. Moses and Moses and Oris on the one. Is that why they named it that? No. Because of my, no. You'll see a 55-foot-long mosaure.

And, like, in the fullness of time, it's nearly a statistical certainty that a mosaer of that size was in that position, right? Where you see it in the museum today. Yeah, there's our mosasors. Oh, that's yours right there. Yeah, that's the museum. Whoa. And that's actual size. Actual size.

And there was almost certainly one right there, 66 million years ago. So we have an amazing paleo-art. that did over 50 full-scale reconstructions for us like this. It took him in his studio outside Kansas City more than three years. He's a paleo artist. Paleo artist. His name is Gary Stab, S-T-A-A-A-A-B. He's the world's greatest paleo artist.

He used to win the National Geographic Paleo Art Award every year until finally they made him a judge so somebody else could win. Whoa. So he does an unbelievable amount of research. How does he go about, I mean, this is such a broad question, but how does he go about doing that like he gets maybe not even a full set of bones but he gets enough to have an idea of a structure

and then I mean how accurate is it I guess is the question it's as accurate as it can be as it can be so Gary first starts with a tremendous amount of research and you know he would never call himself a scientist but he's a damn good scientist and he

he has an unbelievable breath of anatomical knowledge and so he starts with that and then he will make a one-tenth scale clay macket of that. And we iterate on that to get the pose right and everything. And then he scans that and he uses a CNC machine to cut about eight inch foam slices.

And you can imagine how many there would be in a creature like this. Glues them all together and then puts resin or something on the outside and then starts to sculpt all the scales. And he'll say, you know, you start at the tail and then a couple hundred thousand scales later, you're done. He makes the eyes himself. He makes the teeth himself. And then he paints the whole thing.

He puts in pathologies and scars and things like that. That's amazing. And they're unbelievably lifelike. That's amazing. I got to come visit this. You have to. This is so cool. I can't believe this was right there.

Right there. The whole time. It's behind the Chick-fil-A. I know. God damn. He's like, yeah, there's a massage parlor in the back. That's not true. Wow.

So this would have been swimming. Yes. right approximately where it is and you would have been dying yeah yeah now take me back to that first day when you guys found something there because you've been doing this all your life i do want to come back to like how you even got into this as a kid we'll get there but like what what was found and did you have like the doctor house moment where you just like look up and you're like holy shit i didn't i've had that moment elsewhere in the world oh you have all right we'll get that have but here you know it was It was like a muddy pit that was being mined for Marl Sand.

You know, when they were mine in it, it was always kind of a jumble. And I didn't think much of it. This is back in 2003. And I thought, well, you know, I could bring my students here. They could find some fossils. That'll be cute. And then I'll go everywhere else in the world to do my research, you know. So it wasn't until, you know, as I said before, when the quarry owner told me that they were going to go out of business, that I managed to secure a corner of the quarry.

and when we started to excavate methodically, then I started to see what we had there and it's scientific importance, and then I knew I had to find a way to save the site. Right. So when you started to figure out, maybe the question isn't the first moment there, but when you started to figure out, like, oh, my God, we just found a dinosaur bone there,

you've got to be thinking, oh, my God, I grew up in Linwood, New Jersey. This is like 50 miles from where I grew up, and this is where it happened, right? Well, it didn't surprise me to find a dinosaur bone there because people don't know this, but Southern New Jersey is like the cradle

of dinosaur paleontology. And you knew that before all this. I knew that, yeah. So dinosaurs were first recognized from really scrappy remains in England. And so in the early part of the 19th century, bones start turning up about an hour south of London

and the Tillgate Forest and other places. They can't really tell what they are because the remains are so scrappy. And that's how they get the name dinosaur. in 1841, a British anatomist, Richard Owens, gives them that name. He buries it on like page 240 of the Mesozoic reptiles of Great Britain, because he doesn't even think it's important. And he says there's a new tribe of crocodile lizards is what he calls them, and he gives them

the name dinosaur, which means terrible lizards. So he thinks there that's just these big puffed-up lizards. If you look at the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, these are the first. first reconstructions of dinosaurs made for a big exposition in Great Britain in the mid-1800s. And they look like monsters, right? They don't really know what they are. So that's- Dinosaurus do look like when you look at them. It's like what you think would come out from under your bed. Yeah, but these look like not good monsters. Oh, not the fun kind. Not the fun. Not the fun. Just like kind of gross monsters. You said it was Crystal Palace?

Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Yeah. 1841, and then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found. Yeah, those are the, they still exist in a park south of London. Oh, oh, I didn't really, they're full sculpture. They're sculptures, yeah, by a guy named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Yeah, they look like giant iguanas. Yeah, in fact, one of them is called iguanodon. Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay. Yeah. So that was our, 1858. Look how, like, brutish and primitive they look. So that's our first conception of dinosaurs, 1851. And then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found. It's called Hadrosaurus, and it looks like dinosaur, and we can start. We get our current image, like the first iteration of that, of what dinosaurs are really like.

And that's found in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Come on. In 1858. That's not why they named a Hadrosaurus, right? It is. I mean, in the paper, he says it's the Greek Hadro, which means bulky, so it's, It's bulky lizard, but really it's got to be a double entendre, right? All right, so Hadrasaurus, what period did they exist in? Jurassic.

Late Cretaceous. Late Cretaceous. So similar to T-Rex? Yes, similar to T-Rex. Got it. How big were these things? They were big. Well, you see the human for scale there.

I mean, they're elephant-sized. Yeah, maybe a little bigger, really. So World's First Nearly Complete Dinosaur skeleton found in southern New Jersey in 1858. And then, as we spoke of, everybody knows T-Rex. But T-Rex isn't the only Tyrannosaur. There are over two dozen types of Tyrannosaur. T-Rex isn't the first discovered. The first-discovered Tyrannosaur is found in Mantua Township,

South Jersey in 1866. Come on. It's a dinosaur called Dripdosaurus. Ken, why were you not just, like, before you even found this land, why were you not out there with like a dinosaur detector? You know, like they have the gold detectors? If I were you, I would have been out there every day waiting for a beep going, got one.

I don't have a dinosaur detector. All right. Actually, we should have gotten you one. It's called a shovel. Right. Yeah, I would have been out there with my shovel. Because if I knew that they had found that kind of history there, I'm like, there's got to be more. Yeah, so there's gyptosaurus.

Do we have the history, Joe? Hold on. Go back to discovery and species, if you don't mind. All right. So up until 1866, theropods from the Americas were only known from isolated teeth discovered by Ferdinand Van Hayden during geological survey excursions in montana during the summer of 1866 workers from the west jersey moral company uncovered an incomplete theropod skeleton and a quarry near barnsborough new jersey by the barnsborough win probably right yep yep with sediments belonging to the

master chishian age new egypt formation in august 1860s that's a little bit wrong but yeah that's a what's wrong well i would call it the hornerstown formation or actually no No, that's the Navasink formation there. Navasin. But it's the Mastrichtian period. And then August 1866, paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, what a name? I used to have his job. You had his job?

At the Academy Natural Sciences. Wow. Yeah. You got a resume. Edward Drinker Cope, by the way, didn't drink, which is a little disappointed. I know. Yeah. Teetotaler?

Yeah. That's unfortunate. All right. When he arrived, he was thoroughly surprised by the skeleton's completeness and uniqueness, calling it the finest discovery i've yet made the skeleton was then deposited there it is at the academy of natural scientists sciences in philadelphia under the catalog number whatever that is wow yeah yeah lots of other new species a new species of mosesaur species of mosesore was discovered in swedesborough southern new jersey other dinosaurs found in you know the mill

pond and mulca hill were used to live dinosaurs found there there was there was something like a a gallimimus found there. So there's this swath of Cretaceous that outcrops from about Freehold, New Jersey, you know, Springsteen land. Comes down through Cherry Hill, through Mullica Hill, goes kind of out past

like Salem and then goes... It's going down 322. Yeah, basically. And then, you know, like down I-95. Oh my God. So if you live on that stuff, there's a good chance you can find dinosaurs I mean to me when you say something like that

that is akin I'm not even just thinking about the wonder of like the science just look at it monetarily that's akin to like having a gold mine down there I mean this stuff's got to be worse well I guess if you sold them

I've never sold a fossil in my life and never will no not one not even on like Craigslist nope and never will I bought a few But I won't sell it. Oh, you bought a few?

A few, like, small things that I needed for teaching or something. Okay. You know, the commercial trade in fossils is very harmful to paleontology. Because what happens? Well, when I started my career and I would go out to places like Montana and Wyoming, I'd pull up on a ranch and I'd find the rancher and I'd say, you know, hey, I'm a paleontologist. Do you mind if I poke around? I'm looking for fossils and they'd be like, yeah, sure, go ahead, we don't care.

in Jersey that would have been like fuck off yeah pretty much yeah um and then um you've heard of the terex name sue right it's at the field museum now is a huge controversy it's it's a sorted sorted tale but someone elizabeth weiss i think was talking about that when she was up here yeah but there was i mean it's a whole big story but eventually um macdonalds bought sue for eight million dollars, they thought they were doing something good and donated it to the field museum. Well, guess what? That set the market. Oh, no.

And now every rancher who lives on, you know, dinosaur age material thinks they've got their retirement sitting, you know, underground. So now you walk up to a rancher and, like, you know, you can't do it. You can't get on the property. And then commercial collectors go out and they dig up dinosaurs and they auction them off, you know, Christie's and Barclays and for tens of millions of diamonds. You know, here's the thing. Let's look at two things that are found that are considered incredibly economic, incredible economic opportunities.

You got gold and you got oil. Those are just two. Gold, we put on jewelry. It's like a fashion symbol, a lot of other things as well. It's a store of value. Oil is obviously something that helps run the world, so you're on oil. You can sell that. But shouldn't there be some sort of, I don't know, like,

public interest protection on history per se there should be and there there are laws like that in most countries so where i worked in argentina for for so many years it doesn't matter if it's on public or private land when you put your finger on a on a dinosaur fossil it becomes property of the federal government of argentina at that moment i'm not even see here's the thing i'm not even saying it has to be property of the government but it should be in the interest of something that's not economic like protectionism you know what i mean meaning if there's history to be uncovered there people like you a professional should be allowed to come in and there should be a law that says you're allowed to come in to excavate that and then you're not let's say you're not allowed to make

money on the private market from that that would that would be perfectly fair to me i agree and you know the one of the problems with private collecting is that you know it's driven by money and so they're interested in getting that bone out of that skeleton out of the ground as quickly as possible when i'm excavating a dinosaur i spend as much time on the sediment that surrounds the dinosaur as i do on the fossils themselves because the sediment preserves the paleo environment the paleo environment yeah so you know was it a floodplain was it a coast was it a mangrove ecosystem but you know imagine if you were an alien and you came by earth and you beamed up a lion but you didn't know anything about the african savannah what do you know about a lot

It's just a thing in space. You know nothing really, right? So you pluck these dinosaur skeletons from the ground, you don't do the paleo-environmental work, you don't really know anything about these animals. That's where the story is. Yes. You're basically able to paint the context and setting by doing that, essentially. Yeah, and you start to understand the ecology and, you know, in the climate and all kinds of other things.

So it's really, I mean, I excavate so methodically, you know, 17, you know, 17, you know, and you know, and the climate, you know, and the climate and all kinds of other things. Exactly, you know, 17 years to go 250 square meters. 250 meters and 17 years? Yeah. So. What is it, just for the layman out there, which is me, what does that look like? Like, are you going in there? That each day you have a specific, like, I'm going to get through these two inches and here.

Well, we grew it out in one meter squares. Some of my excavators that have been trained on the team, you know, are more experienced and can go faster than others. I mean, some people might spend weeks on a, on a single year. square meter and you know we work with you know we'll go through with like I like to use a flathead screwdriver with my thumb on top and just kind of go through by feel and you know and then we will use like a putty knife and paint brushes and dental picks and it's meticulous work now that's for the kinds of deposits we have at the fossil park it's different like where I work in

Patagonia the way I prospect is with pickax and with the Yeah, and a pickax is a skill. Like I used to teach my grad students, like the proper way to swing a pickaxe. You know, it's like swinging a baseball bat. There's a whole form that goes into it, right? And the way you prospect with a pickax is by sound. So when you're hitting the rock, it sounds one way. If you hit a fossil, it rings a little bit.

And if you're good, you only hit the dinosaur once. That's what I would think. Like, something like that sounds like a risk of damaging a bone or something. bone or something well that's why they make a product called paleobond paleobond made just for us paleontologists because how does that work that's basically super glue every now and then you break a fossil and you glue it back together now you so you spend a lot of time down in argentina you said you were living down there at one point i lived in a cumulatively i spent more than a year living in a tent in a tent yeah in patagonia yeah southernmost

Patagonia outside a little town called El Calafate. It's very far south. Now, over what time period were you doing this? My first expedition down there was 2004, and I ran expeditions there 2004, 5, 6, 7, and 9. What drew you to that area? Well, I had been working in the Sahara Desert of Egypt, in a very lonely place called the Baharia Oasis, which is basically nowhere. It's halfway between the Mediterranean and Sudan, halfway between the Nile and Libya. And I'd gone there with a team of colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, and we were endeavoring to find what we're known as the Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. There were four species of dinosaurs that were found around 1911 by a German paleontologist named Ernstromer von Reichenbach.

And he excavated these fossils. He seems like he was a good guy, actually. He was early enough. He eventually got these fossils to the Bavarian Museum of Paleontology in Munich, and they were on display there for decades. And then in April of 1944, they were bombed by a British air raid, and the museum and those fossils were destroyed. Now, most dinosaur species are known from a single specimen.

so the species were gone to science and they became known as the lost dinosaurs of Egypt so for decades paleontologists tried to get back in there they would write the authorities in Cairo never get a response in the 80s they would fax in the 90s they would email and nobody ever got a response and then me and this group from from UPenn we got some money from a film company to to go find the lost dinosaurs of Egypt film company yeah um like a high Hollywood film company? Yeah, there's a two-hour documentary that was on A&E called The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, and it was actually in part funded by Andrewian, Carl Sagan's widow, who in Carl Sagan

was like, my hero. That might be in the title of this episode, just to let you know, it's pretty fire. Lost dinosaurs of Egypt? Yeah, people are clicking on that. Well, that's old news for me, though. So we don't get an answer either, but we've got the money, and so we figure, well, screw it, we're just going to go. So we go to Egypt, we find the head dude's office, we see.

sit in his lobby for four days, smile politely and drink tea. I was never more caffeinated while he walks in and out, completely ignoring us. And then finally he stops and signs our desert permits just to get us the hell out of his office. Previous to that, I had worked with the family of that old paleontologist Ern Stromer, and I had access to his field journals and his maps. Did they have, did he have pictures of this stuff, though, too, I would imagine? Well, he had some photographs that I found later in the, in the museum. It's destroyed in 1944, so I imagine someone took a picture in the museum, right? Yeah, I found them in the attic of the museum, actually.

There's some photo. If you look up Stromer Spinosaurus photograph, you might find it. Because that at least gives you something to work with. You can see the outline. Well, we had his technical papers, so we had a pretty good idea of what it would have looked like. So we go there. Yeah, those pictures there, I found those photos in the museum that you see published there. And that's the Spinosaurus in question right there from Egypt?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe they built the pyramids. Probably not. Yeah, probably. Yeah. I can hope, though. So I find Stromer's Spinosaurus Quarry, and I find 100-year-old German newsprint, like, things don't, you know, degrade too much in the desert.

I find sardine cans. I find burlap. I find plaster. He doesn't leave a single bone behind. But in the course of prospect in the Bahraea oasis, we find a new species. we find a new species of dinosaur that we named Perala Titan. We publish it in 2001 at the time. It's the world's second largest dinosaur.

Perala Titan. Perala Titan means tidal giant. The geology that I did there showed that Perala Titan lived in a tidal mangrove forest, very far from the mainland. So this is the first like mangrove living dinosaur that we knew about. Is that it? It sort of, yeah. did you come up with the name yourself or the team did i did yeah so you've named a few dinosaurs

i had named a few yeah yeah so that's 2001 um early in 2001 and and then 9-11 happens and now it doesn't look like we're going back to egypt and there was actually some terrorist activity in the baha rio oasis um and so i i set my sights on on southernmost patagoni because it's a place i can that has rocks of the right age, there's sedimentary rocks, so you can form fossils, and there's vast exposures of those rocks, like badlands. Imagine the badlands of South Dakota, like times 25. Right. And better yet, no paleontologists had really worked within about a thousand kilometers of that site, which means you have a very good probability of finding new species if you're finding stuff there. So, like, perfect conditions for me. You lived in a tent, you said.

Yeah. Yeah. So I get down there. The first field season is really rough. There's a dirt road that I have to travel on four hours outside of town. And then I don't have any way to get across this river. There's no bridge. So I have to raft across this roaring glacial stream. Every time I want to get to the site or every time I want to go back to town for supplies, we find some huge, huge bones that year. But I have no way to get them out of the desert. So I hire a couple of gauchos and their horses. and we cover these bones in burlap and plaster to protect them and then i got this this piece of corrugated uh metal and we make a sled out of it and we pat it out with prairie grass and we strap the bones to it and the galchos drag the bones with their horses out of the desert that way and that was our first field season um it's a movie that's a movie it was a that's a wild sight the wind in patagonia is ferocious like you can't keep bees in patagonia because they just go away yeah um And there were always scorpions under my tent. There were oftentimes Puma tracks outside my tent in the morning.

I was just going to bring up Pumas. They roam that land like crazy. Yeah, they're very shy, though. The Galtos have hunted them mercilessly. Oh, so they don't come after you at all? No, no. I've saw tracks many, many times. I never saw Puma itself. Yeah, I was watching. I love those Netflix documentaries like Our Planet and all that.

So I sit up a night watching up. I was watching an episode on the Puma's down in Patagonia. It's such a Patagonia. It's such a strange landscape because, you know, you picture, I don't know, something more simple like a desert, like the Sahara. It's just a lot of dirt and it's hot and everything. And then Patagonia has these valleys and then roaming hills and it's got some vegetation. It's so beautiful. It's amazing.

If you just search my name in Patagonia, you'll probably see a bunch of pictures. What a flex. Just search my name. Sorry. I'm like Mr. Patagonia. I'm the mayor, actually. There we go. Yeah, there's probably some landscape picture.

Well, there's that, what, fourth one is me laying next to a big bone of dreadnottis there in the field. We're going to talk about that. That's the one that we found. Quick question. I always talk with, like, some of my authors that I bring on about this. I actually had David Gran in here recently who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, which later became that Scorsese movie. He wrote Lost City of Z before that. He writes stories a lot of times that take place

in wild, exotic places. And the latest one he wrote was called The Wager, which is about like, basically like a Lord of the Flies type situation in the 18th century down in this area of the world. And so one of the things I love about David and a lot of great authors is they go to these places and they live in it for a while.

And as like the true kind of hemming way model they'll walk through it and they will feel the stories of the people around them that were there sometimes you know 500 years before a thousand years before whatever it is and start to get that emotion of the setting do you get that when you're digging for in this case something that's hundreds of millions of years old like do you have a similar type of like you can almost see the dinosaurs around you what it might look like i do i do um i think most geologists and most antologists have like one foot in today and one foot in the ancient past and you know when I'm walking in a forest when I'm driving around when I'm at a place like my field site in

Patagonia I'm not always here I'm often time back then right and I can see in my mind's eye what it would have been like and um you know and it's very when I fly I always want the window seat of course and just I'm just imagining the past earths that we're flying over and You know, you can see that when you know the history, right? So for me, it's, you know, it's an emotional, it's maybe akin to a spiritual sometimes feeling. It's very sublime, my best moment in the field, which I am sure I will never top. This is like peak dreadnottis, right? so we have we have most of this enormous skeleton exposed it's just it's an unbelievable find i never

thought i would see a site like this in my life right so this is exposed there's an a periodic comet that comes through so so not like haley's comet that we can expect every 76 years this is one that we didn't know about right and we definitely didn't know about it because we're in communicata we're out there in the field and this one was only visible from the southern hemisphere it was called comet mcnott um So we don't know what's coming, but we see this little fuzzy thing in the night sky, and then the next night it's changed position, and I'm watching this thing, and then the tail starts to grow, and then pretty soon this huge naked eye, you know,

a comet with a huge tail. And I remember one night I had sent the grad students down, and they were starting to gather firewood and, you know, get dinner ready. And I'm sitting there, and I've got a bottle of Jameson whiskey, and I'm sitting on a rock, and I'm looking at this gargantuan dinosaur. or a skeleton of this giant comet hanging over it and i thought man it's just never going to get any better than this whoa yeah i felt that yeah i just i feel like i was there with you yeah that's so cool now this dread not us though we keep talking about this yeah how did your first i mean i mean

we saw even one element of the picture there with you with a huge bone this is obviously dinosaur that once you discovered it you were able to name it we can get into that but what what was the first moment where you thought we might be tapping on something new and then what was the first moment where you're like okay this is definitely something we haven't seen before yeah so the first thing i saw was um about a tea saucer size uh area of bone it turned out to be part of the femur the largest bone in the body um when you're prospecting for dinosaurs a lot of people think we just dig a hole and hope to get lucky that would almost never happen right so what you do is you get yourself in the right geological situation,

and you just walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock. And so I saw a little bit of this femur. We start to uncover it. At the surface, it's usually pretty easy to uncover it because the sediment on top is weathered. So pretty soon we have this, you know, more than six foot long femur. And the year before, we found a seven foot long femur,

but it was isolated. So I'm thinking like, okay, here we go again, another isolated bone. But pretty soon we dig a little bit more. There's the tibia. there's the fibula there's some some back vertebrae dorsal vertebrae and by the end of the first day we have 10 bones exposed now these oh you did that in one day yeah because the sediment is so soft on the top um for these big sarapod dinosaurs so the you know the long neck long tail quadrupeds think brontosaurus for shorthand right they're called the saropods their skeletons are usually the most fragmentary because imagine you're the size of a house right and you fall over and you're on something like a floodplain, at that moment, very little of your body is in contact with the earth. So very little of your skeleton has a chance to make that transition from the biosphere

to the geosphere before it's scavenged away or weathered away. And so a lot of times you find a sauropod dinosaur and it's, you know, one, two, or three bones. So already we have ten bones. Already we have a really great result. And then we start to dig deeper. As you go deeper, the rock is less weathered so it becomes harder and harder until it's like concrete and we're using pickaxes which is you know almost all the rest of our time yeah um and by the end of it by the end of five field seasons we have a hundred and forty five bones of this giant creature 16 tons of fossils is what we took out of the desert 16 tons 16 tons um we get it eventually into a shipping container it takes me three and a half years to work out the export permits for the government of

Argentina. That was a nightmare. A real nightmare. I remember finally, you know, I get the permits. We get, I have to pay for the customs officer to come to this stancyia to watch us load the bones and he's doing all his paperwork. You couldn't pay someone off, Ken. You're from New Jersey. Come on. I can send a couple guys down there. I've shamed my state. I know. And then we get down to the port and this guy starts taking little pieces of the plaster jacket, right? And then he takes me in the little room and he's got this pieces of plaster and he puts it in a tube and he shakes it up and he says no cocaine you know and he shakes it up no heroin and like he thinks this is funny i don't think this is very funny i've got a 17-month-old boy at home at

this point i do not think this is very funny um and then they send a drug dog through the container and and the drug dog was like apparently a high-ranking dog because he had the vest and lots of patches and and i'm thinking like you know at this point it's been five years i've spent all my research money i've lived in a tent for more than a year and now it comes down to the opinion of the dog right but the but the dog was good we got two paws up this is kind this is kind of like a genius drug running operation though if you wanted to imagine that you could just like if the cartels are out there listening not to give you guys a new idea but you know you could just like get some drugs into dinosaur bones get it out of the country and well apparently they

thought of that which is why they had the dogs in there so and then they tell me i need an insurance policy. Oh. So I'm in this little dusty town called Rio Gajegos. I'm in a phone booth. There's literally wild dogs trying to get into the phone booth. And I'm on the phone calling Lloyds of London. Oh my God. Lloyds of London has heard everything, right? Yeah. So somebody answers the phone. I say, I need an insurance policy on a dinosaur. And he says, for how much? How do you even put a price on that, though? I just, I can't. I can't. I put the price of $2,2004 million. I didn't want to pay that much for insurance. So basically, I told him $25,000, which is like, $25,000. How big was this dinosaur again? You sow 16 tons of bone? If this dinosaur was ever put on the market for auction, and it never will be, it would be probably $100 million. $25,000. Well, I mean, it's not like I could go out and buy a replacement, and I didn't want to pay a lot for insurance. So I got you. I told them $25,000. I got you. um so then i finally get the dinosaur up to my lab in philadelphia it's too much material for

anyone lab to process so i keep a third in my lab and i send a third to another museum a third to another museum and we have like a hundred volunteers working on these fossils day and night for a couple of years to carefully unopen those jackets and to clean off the remaining rock and to help stabilize the bone the jackets i'm sorry what does that mean the plaster jackets the plaster and burlap jackets and then we unite all the jackets back in my lab and it's just unbelievable I mean every I had a big lab and like every space is taken up by Dreadnoughtus bones every drawer every shelf the countertops wrapping around like 30 feet of all this wind 30 feet of all that way you might be able to find

that if you googled Dreadnottis and Drexel which is where I was a red like D-R-E-A-D yeah the name means fears nothing Dreadnought Yeah, why did you name it that? Well, so Dreadnoughtus in life, all fleshed out, would have weighed 65 tons. Yeah, look at that picture there. There we go. So that was in my lab back in the day. Look at all the bones that are in there.

Whoa. Yeah. So you got the spine back there, it looks like behind you? That's the tail. To my right on the table are its dorsal vertebrae, so the mid-back portion is huge, huge animal. So in life, this thing is 65 tons. 65 tons is the mass of 13 bull African elephants. It's the mass of 9 T-Rex.

It's 10 tons heavier than a Boeing 737. But this was an herbivore, not a... You can only get that big if you eat plants. Right. All the food. Wait, you can only get that big if you eat plants. Sure. Well, look at the big animals today.

Look at elephants and hippos and, you know, whales, and plankton. They eat low on the food chain because that's where the energy is. Each level of the food chain is called a trophic level. And when you go from one level to the next year, you leave about 90% of the energy behind. So if you want to be either really big or really numerous, you have to eat plants because that's where all the energy is.

I never thought of it that way. Yeah. There's a lot of vegans out there right now going, we're on to something. There we go. Yeah. So these giant sauropod dinosaurs, well, first of all, with the mass.

So, you know, if you're nine times the mass of a T-Rex, what have you to fear except maybe gravity, right? So the name Dread not fears nothing. When did you come up with the name, like during this process? During this process, we were working on the data that would become the paper, and we had a terrible snowstorm one day, and I couldn't go to work, so I sat on the couch that day, and I wrote out about 30 possible dinosaur names, Latinized them, hung in on the refrigerator for two years,

and every time we'd have guests over the house, I'd give them the paper, and I'd say, you know, just check the ones that you like. Oh, that's cool. And Dreadnoughtus was the runaway winner. It's such a hard name. It sounds like an album cover. Yeah. Dreadnoughts.

It's kind of badass, isn't it? Yeah. I feel like that could definitely pass for a few guys, right? Lil Wayne's got a new name for the next one. So how many years was that process where you sent it out to three different places and then brought it all back for one again? It was five years. Five years. Five years in the field, five years in the lab.

Yeah. And then we published it on September 4th, 2014. Now, how does that... so you name it because you discovered it's never been discovered before you're checking all the sources there's never been anything like this so you publish a paper and you're just allowed to name it and now that's what it's named that's how that's literally how it works yep that's so cool yeah that's how it works for fossil species for living species there's a commission on zoological nomenclature and they have to approve the name we don't have that in paleontology and i actually wish we did

because there are some crappy dinosaur names out there what's the crappiest I hate to say, because, like, I know all these people. But there's one that really bothers me. There was a beautiful spinosaurid dinosaur found in Brazil, and it was found in a very hard ironstone, so it was very difficult to work with in the lab, and they named it Irritator. Irritator?

Like making it all about them. Yeah. I mean, a rebrand might be in order. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the thing that gets me about this. That irritating that irritator? Yeah. God, it's so, like, menacing. So, you know, here's this dinosaur species that evolved and lived under its own auspices

and did amazing things while our ancestors are these little shrew-like mammals trying to stay away from them. And now we evolve into what we are. They're extinct. And now, you know, me, my, you know, this evolved little shrew is now in charge of their legacy. Yeah. And I feel like that is, no pun intended, a grave responsibility. I agree with you.

And so for the dinosaurs that I've named, I wanted to come up with names that, like, is meaningful to that animal that tells you a little something about them that honors their legacy, which is why I think we need a naming body for paleontology, so we get names that honor the creatures. I nominate you for president. like this i think you'd be really good they could put the uh it can it can be housed at the new museum sounds like you put an office wing there right we could do that that's not a no he's thinking about he's like he's going to go back to ben lamb going how much we need for this ben pay up let's go so you discovered this one you've discovered other ones that you've named as well what are what's your favorite one besides shred notice that you found uh besides dread notice um well you know probably my first love Paralotitan from Egypt that was really special I was part of a team that

discovered that and that was super exciting for me that was you know that was my first big expedition I was a first year professor you know I got my first publication was in the journal science that was that's a home run for a scientist and we had that documentary narrated by Matthew McConaughey narrated it yeah oh that's hard yeah so that was a really really good out here yeah and it was living while you were dying apparently it took like three times as long as they expected to do the voiceover because he's a perfectionist well yeah and maybe you know and you know what he might have been you know oh right listen i that's exactly what i want matth and connor he's doing a dinosaur voiceover i need him high as a kite and have it a good time

and making sure he's getting the vibes so he said my name probably a hundred times but i'm Yes, and he doesn't remember my name. I need that podcast. Dr. Ken Lackavarra with Matthew McConaughey, dinosaurs. I'll bring the bong. We'll make sure he hits that before. I'll have no idea what you're talking about. We'll have a good time.

I'm worried about it. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, you've been around doing this for so, so long, but, like, I'd ask you about it earlier and said we were going to come back to it, I should say. You know, were dinosaurs something you were just really fascinated with as a kid? Did it go back that far? They were, yeah. You know, I grew up, you know where it is, and so I grew up in Linwood, which is on the coast, you know, near Atlantic City, near Ocean City, where there's sand and mud, right?

There's no fossils there. There's not even proper rocks, right? So I don't know these things are in the world. And I grew up in a very blue-collar family. My father was a carpenter. My parents were older when they had me, so they're actually like World War II generation. So neither of them finished high school because of World War II. I'm first-generation high school.

Wow. We didn't have books around the house. I certainly didn't know a scientist. The only people I knew that went to college were my school teachers. So a woman brings in a box of rocks and minerals and fossils in my Cub Scout meeting. And this just excites me terribly, right? I didn't know about these things before. And I think I got a hold of the little golden guide to geology

because I wrote an essay in second grade about igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary rocks and I wrote that sedimentary rocks are the best kind of rocks because you can find fossils in them. And now that I have a PhD in geology, I can confirm that they are the best kind of rocks. So I determined to be a paleontologist and a geologist at that age. But I have no idea how to get from A to B. And then, you know, that dream kind of starts to fade and I kind of start to think, well, that's probably not for people like us. And it turns out I was pretty good at playing the drums and I threw myself in the drumming and like I mean through my my wife says my motto is why do it when you can overdo it so like all I do now is play the drums and in high school I just I do this to the

exclusion of everything else my high school guidance counselor when I went into him to talk about choosing a college he's looking at my stuff and he he's shaking his head puts down my folder and says can I really don't think your college material you should probably consider a trade right Because all I do is play the drums. And I had a really good memory so I could get by. Like, I don't think I ever brought a book home because I'd just play the drums. So then I overdid it.

And I don't know if you've ever heard of competitive drum corps, but it's like the World Series of, I think like the World Series of Marching Band, but like super hard, super, you know, amount of dedication required. Like the movie Drumline kind of thing? Yeah, but harder, more technical. Not as flashy. It was Nick Cannon.

So I kind of flip out, and like, this is what I'm doing. I move out to California to be in the world's best drum corps called The Blue Devils. I play with them. We tour the country. We go to the International. In the Blue Devils, I was 20. Okay. I started touring the country to drum chorus when I was 17.

So, like, I'm just drumming. I come back, and I'm gigging around, you know, Atlantic City, Summers Point, places like that. I end up as the house drummer, the Golden Nugget. casino in Atlantic City. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I play hundreds of shows in the opera house there. I'm up on stage with the singers and the dancers. It's a thousand-seat theater. We do eight shows a week. I'm wearing a tuxedo every night, and things are going great. And then something happens. Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos, comes out. And I read it. And I feel like he has written it just for me. and he's answering all the questions that I had about how the universe worked,

and I thought, I got to find a way to become a scientist. I got to find a way to get back to my childhood passion. So I decide on this secret plan, right? Because it's too audacious, it's too ridiculous at this point in my life to tell people that this is my plan, right? And so I get myself back in school. I was taking what they call a gap year now. Back then it was just called dropping out.

So I get myself back in school. which is Glassboro State College, Rowan, right, which is Rowan now, where I work. Now I'm super serious. I get stray days. It gets me into a good grad program at the University of Maryland. I get my master's there. That gets me into a really good Ph.D. program and geology at the University of Delaware, and I get my Ph.D. there.

And then I get unbelievably lucky and land a job at Drexel University right out of the gate. How many years did that take, doing college, master's, and PhD? about 10 yeah wow yeah and then I so I'm ready to start this this class that I'm teaching it's a night class I show up this is 1999 this is before I became full-time faculty but I'm teaching as an adjunct there so I show up for my first class I'm in my little professor suit I got my little professor case you know and there's a sign on the door that the class is canceled because of enrollment so now I'm like oh shit I'm in Philadelphia I'm all dressed up I got nothing to do I see I

see a sign on a kiosk that there's a lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences that night from the eminent paleontologist peter dotson he's going to talk about the possibility of dinosaurs in egypt so i figure okay i'll go to that so i go there i listen to his talk and then i go up to him afterwards and i say you know dr dodson it's it's really nice to meet you but i got to tell you something your geology is all wrong and he's like what are you talking about you told him he was wrong I did. I said, like, I can see from your slides, those images of the rocks that you're calling river deposits are not river deposits. Those are coastal deposits, I'm sure of it. And he said something to the effect of, well, if you think you could do a better job, Kit, why don't you come to Egypt with us? And so I met with this crew the next day. And by the end of lunch, I was going to Egypt to look for dinosaurs. And this is where we get into this sitting outside the office. Now, Peter is a great friend of mine. I saw him like two weeks ago. That's cool.

It's a funny story. Yeah, we've been all over the world together, but that's how it started. Now, you were saying after 9-11, you couldn't go back over there, obviously because of all the connections and all that, but have you been able to go back there now and do some work? I could. I haven't been back there since because my research just went, you know, elsewhere. What is the status of the lost dinosaurs or anything related to them as compared to like 2000 or 2001?

Spinosaurus, the most famous of the lost dinosaurs, has since had new specimens discovered in Morocco. And so there are about six, I think, fragmentary specimens that have been discovered. They've been the subject of great debate. They were reconstructed as a quadrupedal meat-eating dinosaur. And there aren't any other quadrupedal meat-eating dinosaurs, and this has been a huge controversy in paleontology. part of it is that those that reconstruction is based on like six different individuals and they have different proportions so you know it's really hard to say there weren't other quadrupedal meeting dinosaurs all the mediators are bipedal yeah interesting yeah because you would think about like you know I can only compare it to what we have now but like lions and stuff like that obviously quadripetal yeah interesting so here it is 168 million year old plant eating dinosaur fossil found yeah that would be a rock But if you look up Spinosaurus in Morocco, you'll see it. Spinosaurus in Morocco.

Let's pull that up and see what we get. And so there are new reconstructions of it now. Some of them show it bipedal. Some of them show them quadrupedal. Many of them show it to be adapted for like coastal life, maybe a swimming kind of dinosaur. I do think that's true. A swimming dinosaur, meaning it would so it's similar to a hippo in that way.

It goes and swims. It doesn't live under there. That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, probably a very strong tail. It has a very weird, long, thin, like, crocodile-type skull. It looks more like a crocodile than a dinosaur. Do we have an estimate?

I keep thinking of this today. Do we have an estimate on... I don't even care which period, whether it's Jurassic or crustacean or whatever, but do we have an estimate on what the maximum population of dinosaurs was on the earth at a given time? You mean number of species? or numbers of individuals?

Numbers of individuals. Oh, it would have been, imagine, you know, before people fanned out across the world, like the abundance of mammals on the land, the herds of, you know, a million bison and, you know, passenger pigeons that would block out the sun for a day. And it would have been like that, right?

Probably even more. So there would have been just, you know, you know, millions and millions. maybe billions of dinosaurs on the land at one time yeah all right joe just got this up should i should we scroll the top joe on this article all right yeah so that's second picture fossils confirm enormous river monster rome morocco that is a that looks like a dinosaur crocodile right there well it has a very crocodile it's it's called convergent evolution so when two different species are adapting to similar situations oftentimes they they begin to look like each other right they

begin to have morphological similarities again over hundreds of millions of years though well millions of years i'm sorry millions of years yeah yeah i mean just think of um the dorsal fin of a whale that's you know the back fin of a whale and the dorsal fin of a fish they don't get them from a common ancestor they involve them because they're they're solving similar problems in their environment right what do we know like whales today that exists are such amazing creatures what what do we chart them back to obviously they're not dinosaurs but Whales are super cool. So whales are adiadactyls.

They're in the same group with all the hooved animals, like deer. Interesting. Yeah. So they first evolve, if you look at, if you can look up, Pachocetus, like Pakistan, or ambulocetis. Try Pachocetis first. So there's a group of hooved animals that are carnivores. They're living on the south shore of Asia, you know, roughly 38, 35 million years ago.

And they're becoming more and more aquatic in the way that maybe a sea otter is becoming more and more aquatic. And you can imagine in a million years maybe a sea otter is a fully aquatic animal, right? And we have this beautiful transitional record of whales now becoming more aquatic. And then we start to see something like basilocetis, which looks like a whale, but it still has some lakes. You know, and then we eventually see those get smaller and go away, and then whales. And so the first whales are the tooth whales, and we have tooth whales today in the group called Adonta Cedes, like the killer whale and the sperm whale. And then later the baleen whales evolve, the big ones like the humpback whales and the blue whales that have the baleen for filtering out plankton. But, yeah, if you look there, see that third picture.

I think that's probably Paxetus there. Is a whale is related to that? That is a whale. Yeah, and so that's how they start. How big is that the Pakistan? That's like wolf size. And it gets to a whale. Yeah.

Now, here's the thing that I love about geology and deep time, is that it's all so contingent. So you kill off that thing on the southern shores of Pakistan 38 million years ago, and today there are no whale. And the planet looks entirely different as a result. It affects the whole food chain. It would. Yeah.

That asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, like all asteroids, like all the planets, it formed when the solar system formed four and a half billion years ago, go out to the asteroid belt four and a half billion years ago and hit that asteroid with a piece of popcorn, and then 66 million years ago doesn't hit the earth, and the dinosaurs don't go extinct, and they lasted for 165 million years and wind on another 66 million years more. And we're not here. We never have them.

And we're not here. If you can Google something called Pikea. So P-I-K-A-I-A, I think. Got it. I'm really testing your skills here, Joe, aren't I? Yeah, there we go. Check out that first picture. The first one right there? Yeah. So Pikea is from the Cambrian period. So it's about a half a billion years ago, really old. So pre-dinosauri. Way, way, pre-dinosaurus, right? And so this is a time when we get, it's called the Cambrian explosion. We get like the phyla that we have today. Like we're in the phylum cordata, right?

So the phyla that we have today, they all appear in the Cambrian. And we get, life is mostly small and kind of slimy then, but we get the first macro predator. It's this meter-long thing called anomelocarrison. It's got a hard body and it's free swimming in these big pincers and this terrible mouth. So if you went back to the Cambrian, and looked around, you'd see something like Anomlo Carus, and you'd say, bingo, that's going to be the winner. That's going to be the thing that shapes the future of the earth.

But there's a little Pikea that exists at the same time. Pikea is about a centimeter and a half. It's tiny, it's soft, it doesn't look tough. You would never, ever put your money on Pikea. But it has some interesting features. It has bilateral symmetry. Bilateral symmetry. This side looks like this side.

Okay. It has its sensory organs concentrated anteriorly, right, at one end. It has a one-way digestive system, which I happen to think is the best kind of digestive system. Agreed. Right? Does that sound like anybody you know? Humans. Yep.

It sounds like everything that has bones. Yeah. Sounds like vertebrate animals. And so if little Pikea doesn't make it out of the Cambrian period, there will never be fish, there will never be whales, there will never be dinosaurs or turtles. chickens or wombats or hoary bats or you or me if that thing fails in the cambrian period that's how contingent it all is it's the butterfly effect of life it is at any one moment in time there are infinite number of futures yes but we only get one do you ever get stressed out thinking about where it all comes from um not where it all comes from where it's going is what stresses me out

because you know the chance of us is almost zero but it wasn't zero and we got that one path that led to us and you know because of many many accidents and what are we doing with our great good fortune now we're using the atmosphere as a garbage can and we're killing off life on earth and we need these things to persist into the future and i feel so terrible that the the planet that we're leaving for our past for our children and our grandchildren is not the one that we've been so privileged to enjoy. It's a depopurate, degraded planet that we're passing off to them, and we're passing off these problems to them. It's the species thing, too.

I mean, what was that number you gave me earlier? 72% since 1970? Well, that's individuals. But if you look at the extinction of species, the most optimistic estimate that I can calculate is that we're losing a species on planet Earth roughly every other day. That's the best case.

Worst case is about one every 13 minutes. So the truth is probably somewhere in between there. Take the, if you look up the fringe limb tree frog. Fringe limb tree frog from the cloud forest of Panama. A remarkable little creature with parasols on its limb so it could glide from tree to tree across the misty forest canopy. Yeah, look at that very first picture. Now, that particular individual that's in that picture, I happen to know, its name is Tuffy.

And Tuffy lived in the Atlanta Botanical Garden until the ripe old frog age of 12 when he died. And Tuffy died. He was the last of his species. That's a species that has had an unbroken chain of ancestry stretching back 3.8 billion years to our microbial forebears. It's a lineage that survived all five mass extinctions, including the one that took out the dinosaurs, but it couldn't survive us. How do we, can, how do we go 3.8 billion years back? Like, what's the, can you just walk me as a layman through the, through the science of that? Yeah.

That got us to determine that. That's unbelievable. Yeah. So if, so the early earth forms from a giant solar nebula, right? It's a cloud of dust and gas in space. Almost all of that material goes into the sun, which causes the sun to ignite. What's left, like the 1% that's left, are the planets.

Almost all of that goes into Jupiter. And then there's a little bit left that forms the rest of the planets and the asteroid belt, which is probably a failed planet. It's a very turbulent time in the solar system. And in early Earth, it's called the Age of Bombardment. And so there's all this. leftover debris in the solar system, often crashing into the earth causing sterilizing level impacts, right? So we can't really have life on earth from four billion, four and a half

billion years ago until 3.8 billion years ago. That's when the age of bombardment ends. That's when it's possible to have persistent life on earth. When do we see persistent life on earth? 3.8 billion years. As soon as it becomes possible for life, we get life. And we can trace this scientifically back to that first cell you're saying we can trace all life back to the first bacteria something that we call the the last universal common ancestor or lucca right and so we can see that we can see in our DNA that we're all related right you and i share i don't know if this is exactly the number but roughly like 40% of our DNA with a carrot right and so all life on earth goes back to a common universal ancestor which was a bacterium right and so that's 3.8

billion years ago so so tuffy there a fringeland tree frog is part of a lineage not a single species but part of a lineage that stretches back 3.8 billion years and its portion of that lineage survived all that time all five mass extinctions but couldn't survive us and what specifically led to its extinction in this era do you think in this case it was the a terrible fungus called the kitrid fungus which is very rough on amphibians and um the kitrid fungus is getting into places where it never could before mostly because of logging and roads that now cut through the rainforest and and now it's able to get into these places and it's actually one of the things that colossal bioscience is working on is to um create um genetically resistant

amphibians because we're losing amphibians that are just a heartbreaking right yeah and and that was actually something really that gave me a lot of hope from a conversation with with ben and matt because on the surface you see how colossal is marketing you know oh we're going to bring the woolly manis back oh we just brought back to our wolves but if what they're saying is true and they can develop genetic you know i'm just going to make it simple for everyone out there genetic material that can be relatable to species that exist today to help them the one example they painted that was really incredible was the elephant in how they may be trying to design DNA for a woolly mammoth in doing so they can relate that to the family tree of elephant and be able to stop i forget what the

official term is a terrible virus that yes it's it's like herpes for elephants or something right it kills 20 percent of elephants or something like that if they can use that data to then stop something like that boom you have real conservation which is very cool Yeah. The thing is, is that, you know, we're out of time. So these aren't either or questions. It's a yes end. Right. And so we have to do everything we can all at once because we're out of time. What got you involved with Colossel? When did you first hear about it and what drew you to it? I had read about the work for quite some time. I actually was introduced to Ben at an Explorers Club event in the Azores. Yeah. Yeah. And so we hit it all. off right away. I wanted to be part of it. He invited me in, and so I'm on the scientific advisory board. And it's just fascinating. But beyond that, I think it has, I think it has the chance

to do like immense good in the world, and that's why I'm part of it. Yeah, I think, you know, people, including me, are always going to get nervous when you do things that obviously haven't been done before, but you're also, you know, you're making DNA sequences. It's like, are you playing God or doing things like that. But again, if it's scientifically relatable to things that can be currently adapted to our environment and help what, you know, you say we're out of time with right now, then I think you have to look at it. I think that, you know, innovation, if you can use business and innovation to do that, do it. Because, you know, we've had, we have so many people around the world who have worked in conservation all their lives, who have been screaming

out for help. And a lot of people don't listen because it's not in their backyard. You know, my buddy Paul Rosalie comes to mind. I've talked about him a bunch before. He's lived down in the Amazon for 19 years. And, you know, he has attention now in the last couple years, you know, got to do a bunch of podcasts and things like that. But for years, he's like, guys, they're burning this place down. Some of the species you were just talking about, he's watching this die all the time. And when I went down there to visit him and see this up close, it's like, you get it.

Right? But most people aren't going to get down there to visit it. So they hear about it and they go, oh, that sounds terrible. and they go about their day. Yeah. You know, and yet you're talking about something in that case, forget even just the individual species. The Amazon rainforest provides 20% approximately of the world's oxygen. So if that place, you know, got to a point of no return exponentially to where you can't save it,

you can't just replant trees and stuff like that, you're potentially affecting the biosphere. Maybe I don't want to be like overdramatic, but potentially irreversibly. Well, the thing about the Amazon, and it's true, it would be irreversible. The Amazon makes its own weather. It's so enormous that it actually creates the climatic conditions that make it a rainforest. And at some point, a smaller Amazon rainforest can't make the weather anymore. And we don't know what that point is. So it's not linear.

It's not like we can take a chip away here and a chip away there and we're still good. At some point, the system switches states and then we lose it all. And that's a scary, scary thought. And, you know, you mentioned like some people will say, like, well, you're playing God. Well, do they ever say that when we're using our technology to do harm? You know, when the Australian government issued a bounty on the Tasmanian tiger and people went out and shot every single one. Were they playing God then?

Were they accused of that? When we chop down the Amazon rainforest, is that playing God when we use the atmosphere or is a trash can? Is that playing God? Why can't we use our technology for good? Yeah. Yeah, I think the question. becomes, again, maybe we've all seen too many movies, but it's like, the first person's like,

I got it, you know, and then suddenly it morphs into, sorry, it's zombies, you know, so I, like, naturally my head goes there on some of that stuff. Well, you know, people like him what colossal is doing to Jurassic Park, right? Yes. But I think what is underappreciated, and, you know, people will conflate like woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, it's all old. Willie mammoths aren't old. They're not old.

They're not old. They're not old. Well, the last population of mammals. when it stings on Rangel Island off Siberia, 3,300 years ago. Yeah. 3,300 years ago is a world that has pyramids. It's a world that has written stories.

It's a world that has beer. Right. If you live in a world that has beer, you're living in this world. Yes. Right? So they have a place in this world. It's still their world. The Dodo. Their world still exists.

The Tasmanian Tiger, we have movies of them. Yes. Right? That's this world. world so you know i kind of take the the the pottery barn philosophy on this like you broke it you bought it you know so like yeah why shouldn't we fix these problems because we clearly clearly created them are you because you are the dinosaur guy you know and involved with this and as you just pointed out what they've been talking about at colossal are all stuff that are of this world have you had conversations with Ben about, you know, not tomorrow or something, but about the idea

of potentially producing a dinosaur? Well, I don't think it's possible. So you don't think it's possible. DNA is a water-soluble molecule. Okay. And the oldest DNA recovered so far from an individual is about 800,000 years and the oldest environmental DNA, meaning you get the sediment and you just analyze whatever's in that, is about a million and a half. A million and a half years. nothing is a long way from dinosaurville right right so i don't know that we'll ever recover sequencerable dinosaur DNA i mean i would never say never but it doesn't look good right so what what draws you to colossal if it's not i mean that may be way oversimplifying you as a scientist so i apologize if i am but what draws you to that if it's not directly related to to dinosaurs is it

just the idea of like, hey, there's some really cool technology that can help with conservation, which is something that you look at and are above with? Yeah, it's ecosystem restoration. It's environmental justice. It's conservation. You know, these techniques that are being developed to maybe bring back the mammoth are the same ones that we need to help species that are on the brink today. Yeah. Now, evolutionarily, this is the, we had some conversations about this when Ben and Matt were in here, but I need to have more too because it's really complex and you're a scientist so you could definitely help with this but evolutionarily if i am able to figure out the DNA sequencing of a woolly mammoth right

and i'm able to then create it i can't let me give this example actually this is a little better so if you're like a like a large elk and you over millions of years adapted so that you could jump 30 feet or whatever it might be to run away from whatever predators coming after you that's an evolutionary thing that did affect you physically obviously to be able to do that but you have something wired in you to run from this thing and to make this action jump 30 feet laterally to get away from it if i build a woolly mammoth and let's pretend for a second it's an elk it's not but just bear with me on this i can build it to have the DNA to look like it's supposed to look but Is there really a way that I can build in the evolution of knowing I got to jump 30 feet to run from this predator?

It depends. I mean, some behaviors are hardwired. Like, songbirds are born with like a bass song. You could raise them in isolation in a laboratory where they never, ever see another bird of their kind, and they will still have a rudimentary song of their species. And then there's culture, right? And birds will teach each other variants of that song. And a song bird in New Jersey might sing that song differently than the same species of bird in North Carolina. Right.

Right. And so there's learned behaviors and there's genetically hardwired behavior. So it just depends on where that behavior resides and the portion of it that is genetic and the portion of it that is acquired. Got it. Right. Okay. So the dire wolves that they just made, that's like the first. kind of main iteration of this where they're able to take existing gray wolf DNA and morph

that enough to get something that may have existed whatever it was 10,000 years ago. Yeah, I mean, the first iteration was really the woolly mice that they made where they took mammoth genomes. I think they made eight substitutions to get some of the phenotypical traits, meaning like the morphological traits into those mice but it's a similar process with the gray wolf to the dire wolf and you know i don't i don't know if people really appreciate like what a technological breakthrough this is what they're doing and again it's the same technology that they're developing that we need for conservation today and it's not you know it's not an either-or and it's not like you know

I know from philanthropy in my business, you have to raise a lot of money. It's not like you get to decide what happens with the donor's money, right? Like they get excited about a thing and it's not like, well, I'm gonna use it for this thing. Instead, no, you can use it for the thing that they donated for, right?

And it's the same with investors. Like it's not like, it's not like they could have, it's not like Ben would get an investor to invest in this, this, this, and this. It's like they got excited about this thing. So it's kind of a species argument to say, well, why don't you use that money for this or why don't you use that money for that? That money is not available for those things, right? Not that those things aren't worthy,

but let's go raise money for those things too. Yes. You know, and then let's use this technology to help solve all these other issues because it's very powerful technology. Absolutely. Now, what are some of the latest, I guess, news and tidbits or discoveries, I should say, that have been made in your field within dinosaurs like what has there been any other new teams that have been finding new dinosaurs in the past few years and what have they found always um so if you go back a hundred years ago there was a new dinosaur species published about once a year um go to the 1970s it's about a half a dozen a year now there's a new dinosaur species published about once a week whoa yeah so it's hard to keep up really

Because the world is freer, people are more mobile, there's more people, right? There's 8 billion people on the planet, and there's always going to be like some tiny, tiny fraction of people that are paleontologists. But now that fraction is just, you know, from a much bigger number. Sure. So there's more paleontologists than have ever been. It's easier to get around the world. There's more places we can get to, so there's more eyes on the ground. And we just find a hell of a lot of dinosaur bones now.

And if you look at the rate of discovery, we're still in the steep. part of the curb. Like, there's no indication that, like, we're getting near peak dinosaur. We're not. So it's still largely untapped. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this could probably go on for pretty much as long as humanity persists. Is there, are there any places right now that you're itching to go to? Sure. Yeah. Love to get back to Patagonia. I know there's more bones in the ground there. China has been amazing since it really opened up to paleontology in the 90s, the stuff that comes out of China is just absolutely mind-blowing. Wow, so they opened it up to you guys.

Yeah, I've done some work in China, and it's incredible there. Where in China? I was in the Gobi Desert within sight of Mongolia, and then I was in a tiny, tiny little village called Changma, which is in the foothills of the Himalayas between the Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Desert. It's as far from an ocean as you can get in the world.

And we found some incredible 95 million-year-old bird fossils there what kind of what kind of birds uh it's a bird called gansis if you saw a gansis today you know in a little pond off the garden state parkway you wouldn't think anything of it it's so modern birds got super modern a really really long time ago why is that um i i don't know but it's um i mean there's no real why in evolution i mean evolution happens because it does so they just have meaning you know to go back to the core they haven't changed a fucktonn since that period, whereas a lot of other things have gone through massive changes

or new things have formed. Yeah, it looks like a duck. Yeah, right. Yeah, so, I mean, that doesn't look like, you know, super primitive or super ancient, right? Yeah, I think we've got a couple of those out here in a home. Yeah, exactly. You could imagine that here in this world,

except if you look very closely, those birds have teeth, which is a little different, right? Yeah, and there are some other, or there are many other different. is really with today's birds. But, you know, as I said, the Cretaceous period, the end of the time of dinosaurs, it's getting pretty modern. The continents are recognizable.

There's ducks at the end of the Cretaceous. There's probably parrots at the end of the Cretaceous. Wow. There's, so it's, you know, the mammals are what's, you know, a lot different because they're little shrew-like creatures. Yeah. But things are starting to get modern.

flowering plants in the Cretaceous period. Now, what it is, so it, over hundreds of millions of years moved from like Pangeo where everything's together to now, we're towards the end of the Cretaceous period, and it looks at least similar to what we have now. But that means that, as you said earlier, the, looking from Hoboken and a mile away is Africa, now it's, you know, thousands of miles and everything. So how does that affect, are there dinosaurs that in that movement suddenly became sea creatures? No, not sea creatures, because they stay on the land.

The land is like rafts, right? They just follow the land. But if you look at the breakup of the continents and if you look at the family tree of any group, really, it's the same, right? Because it's, remember, it's separation that causes speciation. Yes. So as the continents separate,

those species go in their own directions, and as those bits begin to fragment, you see that reflected in the phylogenetic trees as a result. So we know that something like, a T-Rex could have only existed in these places versus in those places. Right. Yeah, you're not going to find a T-Rex in Africa. They had no way to get there at that point.

And you said the climate, I'd ask this earlier, but the climate is roughly during these periods, very warm everywhere, so Mantua is not getting the snow. No, although the Appalachians at the time, weren't these like little embarrassing nubs of mountains like we have today? You call them embarrassing. The Appalachians? That's a shot at the Appalachians. I'm sorry, but for mountains, all right.

They're just catching some strays right now. Come on. Let me call them charming. Okay. How about that? That's nice. Yeah. I hear the government has doomsday bunkers there.

So, you know, but, you know, I mean, as far as mountain ranges go, it's not the Rockies. Bless their hearts. I got you. So they were there and then. But in the Cretaceous period, the Appalachians were like the Himalayas. Oh, they were way higher. They were like 25, 30s. thousand feet high. How'd they shrink down? Well you know why I know that is if you take all of the

sediment that makes up the continental shelf and all of the sediment that makes up the coastal plain like New Jersey and North Carolina take all that sediment pile it back on top of the Appalachians you've got something that looks like the Himalayas. So it basically and I'm fast forwarding the environment here but it's like it just washed away. Yeah the earth theological processes always try to make high stuff high things low and low things high right so they they erodeway mountains and they fill in low spots right so that's always what's what's happening and so the appellations get lower and all that stuff goes out in the ocean and fills up that hole no i've been thinking this question all day but i'd love to just get some definition here because you're a paleontologist meaning you study fossils to try to discover dinosaurs and

an old species but like you've also mentioned you have and to do what you do you have to have an expertise in in geology too so you're a geologist my PhD is in geology okay so that's wow so you're you're you have to be multiple things really to do what you do paleontology is the intersection of geology and biology okay so paleontologists there are real no PhDs in paleontology paleontologists usually get a PhD in biology or geology got it And then they morph them. Now, I got a PhD in geology, but when I was a professor for 18 years, I was a professor of biology. So it's in between there.

Okay. Now, another thing is, like, you talked about down in Patagonia when you were discovering Dreadnoughtus, I got the name right, right? That's it. So you said you noticed like a fibula or tibia or something? The first thing was a femur. A femur, that's right, sticking up from the ground. the first thought that comes to mind is like how how do you have something that's

200 million years old whatever it is and yet a remain of it somehow is still above the ground like you would think that just the movement forget whether it goes low or high with wherever the land is you would think just a movement of sediment would make that thing sink you know gravity over times and be way deeper how does it stay so high up well it wasn't So erosion is the paleontologist best friend.

That's why we want to work in places like Badlands. So Badlands is a place that gets like, it's the sweet spot as far as rain. If you get too little rain, like if you're in a true desert, that's generally under nine inches per year, there's just not enough water to do any work and there's not a lot of erosion. If you get too much rain, then you get too many plants

and you can't see the rocks. So if you get, you know, something like maybe 15 inches or 20 inches of rain a year, you don't get very many plants, but you get enough water working to erode the hillside. So the bones are under, you know, they might be under hundreds of feet of rock, but then those hillsides start to erode. And every year they touch new bones. Every year they expose new bones. And when the bone is exposed at the surface, it quickly becomes destroyed. It starts to weather. Yes. And so the paleontologist, after, you know, in the case of Dreadnoughtus, it's about 77 million years old.

So Dreadnoughtus and me had to get to the same spot on Earth within maybe a 10-year window or we would never get to see each other. Wow. Yeah. That feels like the vine, right? Well, the thing is, is that we get to do this experiment so many times because the Earth is very, old and life has been multitudinous. So the improbable becomes the probable over geological time. Another way of saying that is unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot.

Unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot. Yeah. I see what you're saying. I understand that. So meaning there's a lot that we'll never know about that just got lost because you didn't find it in that 10-year period. That's right. And I have seen, you know, what we call ghost fossils, which means... ghost i got there a little too late i can see the crumbled like weathered rind of where there used to be bones maybe 10 years before and i just got there too late and now it's just like this stain in the rock where they used to be that's got to be frustrating yeah it is or i've i've had some bones that like i just knew i would never be able to collect and i just kind of like see you know like yeah now how were you able to date the dreadnoughtus to 77 million years exactly so you don't date the fossils themselves that's that's for archaeology right and so everybody most people have heard of

carbon dating right we don't use that carbon dating doesn't go back far enough okay the half life of carbon 14 is 5,730 years i think somebody will check me on that yeah i'm gonna take your word for But after 5,730 years, half of the C-14 is left, and then after another of those time periods, half is left. And so that's so rapid that you can only use it back to about 50,000 years or 60,000 maybe tops. Not good enough for you. And that doesn't do anything for paleontology. So that's great if you're studying, you know, Roman remains or something. What we do is mostly what we call biostratigraphy, which is we look at the other fossils that are in the sediment.

Remember I said it's really important to look at the sediment, the study of the sediment. So the sediment will have micro fossils in them, and the microfossils are what we use to tell time. Because you have these species of things called maybe foraminifera or diatoms, these little microscopic single-cell. organisms and elsewhere in the world those species maybe have been sandwiched between two volcanic layers and it's the volcanic layers that we're able to date because they have the right kinds of rocks we do what's called potassium argon dating with the volcanic layers and so we'll know from like this place in the world that this species of microbe lived at this time and from this place in the world another species lived at this time and another place they lived at this time

put all those together and then these two or these three can only live together in this thin slice of time, right? And we have this mapped out all over the world. So then you find these micro fossils in a site, and you see, well, I found this, this, this, and this, and it might be 12 species. That could only be this thin slice of time. And that's mostly how we date the fossils themselves.

It's not direct dating, but it's biostrategography based on work elsewhere in the world. It's like deductive reasoning, basically. Like, okay, understood. That makes sense. Now, we got off it earlier. You've talked about it a little bit, but when the actual extinction event happens

with this asteroid that hits approximately 66 million years ago, you said it hit in Mexico and, what was it, 11 miles wide or something? Okay. Yep. So the force of that, I think you also said what that was. It was so strong that it shook the Earth effectively to its core. Am I saying that scientifically correct? In New Jersey, we would have felt a magnitude 10.3.

earthquake oh the earth can't make a magnitude 10.3 earthquake rocks aren't that strong you can only make an earthquake that big if the earth is rung from the outside like a bell yeah so effectively all life dies immediately not all life i mean we're here right yeah yeah let me restate that effectively almost all dinosaurs die immediately and they all the rest of them die within approximately how much time after that so let me take you through it um so So the asteroid hits off the coast of Mexico, blows 110 mile crater in the Earth's crust by 12 miles deep. Imagine what that weighs. That's roughly Massachusetts times 12 miles deep, right?

Pulverize it, but you still have the same mass, even though those particles might be a millimeter across. Take that mass, throw it up through the atmosphere. You've given that mass a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy. That's got to balance the energy books when it comes back in. It does that mostly from friction. you've seen images of like the Apollo space capsules flaming back into the atmosphere yes well imagine that day trillions upon trillions of millimeter size space capsules each one flaming its way back into the atmosphere and each one heating up a little parcel of air around itself so the result is that day global atmospheric temperature in the first hour gets up somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven I said that online and somebody commented Americans will do anything to avoid the metric system but it's a good analogy I like visuals that's good we'll stay with that meanwhile so if you're a dinosaur living on the coast of

New Jersey you don't know anything's wrong right you don't see the asteroid coming in it's over your horizon but then I've I worked with a scientist who works for NASA on these calculations eight minutes and 37 seconds later that magnitude 10.3 earthquake comes through if you're a big dinosaur you're knocked off your feet you probably die that way because if you're giant like dreadnoughtus if you're 65 tons you don't get to fall down even once if you fall down you're dead um then which is fall down in general yeah yeah i mean if you're 65 tons you're gonna break when you fall down right you're going to burst i mean you're the scientist i i think wow their ribs are big but they're only that thick and you know they're going to pierce lungs pierce organs um so

earthquake in half minutes out 17 minutes out is when the sky falls that's the most deadly moment that's when that ejecta comes back in and it gets to like toaster oven to pizza oven if you can't get underground you're dead right and it's radiative heat not convective heat so radiative is like those heaters they have at outdoor restaurants right it's line of sight heat if you go around the corner you don't feel that heat anymore right so you got to get away from that line of sight all of the non-avian dinosaur egg nests that we know about. So non-avian means regular dinosaurs, not birds, right? All of those nests that have been found,

and paleontologists have found thousands of them are all a crater that some mama dinosaur scraped in the ground, and she laid her eggs right on the surface. So 100% of the life cycle of non-avian dinosaurs on the surface of the earth, no place to hide. Who gets through? Little mammals, good borrowers, some birds are burrows we have burrowing penguins burrowing owls burrowing parrots today right burrowing swallows so some birds get through little lizards turtles crocodiles good burrowers right so they some of them can get underground then there's a there's a hot air blast that comes through in new jersey it would be about two and a half hours afterwards it's going to knock down 90% of the trees and also scorching hot winds and then in new

Jersey, roughly a 72-meter tsunami washes up onto the shore. It grabs the barbecued dinosaur bodies, the down trees, the sediment, and it hauls it all out to sea where it starts to sink. Now, if you're in the ocean, you're okay at that moment. In fact, you might even, you know, have a party because all this dinosaur barbecue meat is like washing out to sea. The ocean's not heating up from this, though? It's too fast and it's not persistent enough to do that. But then all that dust and gas shrouds out the sun. And pretty soon the phytoplankton in the ocean can't do its thing in the food chain. It's really short in the ocean. It's like two to three weeks. So pretty soon that ripples up to the apex predators and they've got nothing to

eat. So these big gluttonous monsters like mosasurs, they start to starve. And at the end of it all, the largest animal that lives on land, and remember, like yesterday we had T-Rex and T-Sarotops, So the largest animal that lives on land is about the size of a raccoon. And then the largest animal that's left in the ocean is like the size of like a regular shark would be today. So it's devastating. And then that dust and gas shrouds out the sun for, we don't know how long, probably years. We're in this asteroid winter for years. You say years are we talking like in our terms?

Yeah, years in our terms. Like we don't know how long maybe two, three, five years. We're not sure. but what we do see is a huge spike in in fungus spores during this time so the world is dark there's lots of decaying plants lots of decaying animals fungus seems to be going crazy at this time and so just imagine this like dark rotting world this post-apocalyptic earth where the dinosaurs gone but then you know the sky's clear our little mammalian ancestors come out of their hidey holes under the blue sky and and

pretty soon like the world is ours and we start to evolve into whales and elk and the temperatures normalized and that the temperature settles down it's still warmer than today but it it settles down and then you know we we gradually move towards today's world now what so if something like that occurs over years and it's so hot there's no glaciers right by the end of that it's just well that the heat only is like that day okay But the sun's blocked out, so maybe that would help. So basically, we go from, you know, pizza oven to refrigerator. Right.

Okay. It's too much for most. Yeah. Okay. So it evens back out. That is a, that's a crazy story. It's a horrendous scenario, isn't it? It's the worst day in the last half billion years.

And again, you could have thrown a kernel of popcorn at that asteroid. And it never happens. And it never happens. That's right. That's how contingent. It all is. Do you think we are developing the science enough that if we were able to determine that an asteroid's going to hit us in like a million years, we could already stop it right now? Yes and no.

So we're getting better at knowing where the big ones are. There's still a lot of little ones. We're not tracking. And if we knew a big asteroid was coming to hit the planet today, we don't have the space program that could go out and meet. it and stop it we could see that we could if we wanted to i mean the technology definitely exists right now but we're just not doing it which seems like a bad idea yeah space feels like i'm so fascinated by space and obviously like i've scientists in here who has spent their life on it but it feels like

the thing that's now coming back with people but we got like we used to be so fascinated with and then there was like a lull there people are like oh yeah yeah we did that been there done on the end. It's like, dude, it's so big. Planetary protection seems like it should be a pretty high priority. Now, do you think for your field or even planetary protection, stuff like that, but I'm really thinking about this, like when you took me through the example of how you date stuff and how you're able to, even like you said DNA can't be really saved after a certain number of years or whatever. I wouldn't say can't, but we haven't discovered it.

Yeah. Do you think something like AI might be able, and that's a very hypothetical question, but might be able to help fill in some of these gaps in your field? Probably. You know, who knows how this is going to play out? That's all very early. I could imagine, I mean, so far, I don't know of anybody who has found a dinosaur in any other way than boots on the ground, eyes on the rocks. But I could imagine having AI process, maybe drone imagery or satellite imagery, and training it to see things that maybe we wouldn't recognize. Sure. I could definitely see that. My friend Sarah Parquette, who's an archaeologist, is already doing archaeology from space. Archaeology from space?

Yeah. She crowdsources people to help look at. at satellite images and they don't know where they're looking at she takes she takes away the location information because she doesn't want these places to get looted right but she crowdsources them and then people are trained on on you know the signs to look for that that show that there might be an archaeological remnant there but I could see doing that not with crowdsourcing volunteers but doing it with AI and teaching it to look at you know

when I go to a new place it takes me usually about three days to get my eyes on to get what I would call search image and at first you feel kind of blind and then you get to a new place and you start to recognize the the preservation pattern that the geology is imprinting on the fossils and then once you get that it's it's like it just snaps in the place and you have like fossil radar and you start to see the fossils everywhere if I could be trained to do that then why not AI right yeah and then obviously it's a much bigger scale because there's one of me and there's you know a i is yeah it gets it gets it gets weird because again we don't know what it looks like yet and we don't know what it scales to it's a it's an untapped technology in that way but it's like would it be able to actually factually fill in gaps because of its computing power like would it be able to i'm gonna this probably makes no sense scientifically but just bear with me would it be able to take elephant DNA and morph that not only into woolly mammoth DNA, which is what Ben's working on and utilizing AI to do that, but then be able to morph that into a T-Rex DNA.

I don't, that seems very unlikely, and you already even said today, like that seems unlikely, but like, who the hell knows? What could happen? And it's so you could produce the same morphology through many different genetic pathways so i don't think we could say that you know we could that we could predict a t-rex genome what a i could probably do in the future is predict a genome that would make the morphology of a t-rex but it might not be the t-rex right right it's just a genome that functionally does that it's a replica yeah yeah the facsimile i would say i got you yeah now in all those science that

you've been involved in for decades now and you know looking back 3.8 makes me feel old i i mean but no seriously like looking back as many years as you're forced to in your field it's it's it's incredible but it gets to the roots of the planet we live on i mean we're not just talking about human history here we're talking about well beyond that to where this little rock and space happened to actually come together and you've talked about the space forces that did that billions of years ago but you know do you believe in like a creator or that it came from somewhere what do you think about the origin of it all well i think it's pretty evident that um in the case of the earth i mean the earth creates itself right we know the processes life is of the earth

you know the earth gave birth to life we know those processes and i think you know you know I think probably the universe created itself. From nothing? Well, it's a very philosophical and physics-based question. I mean, if the universe is in a point of singularity, like what does nothing mean? Like, where would nothing be? Right.

Right. You can't picture it. If you think of, like, where did the universe start? Well, everywhere. because everywhere was in that point of singularity, right? I mean, the tip of your nose was the center of the universe, right, as was everything else. But, you know, if you want to think of it like something came from nothing, well, that something could be the universe or it could be God. If you say God came from nothing and God created the universe, that's three steps.

If you say the universe came from nothing and created itself, that's two steps. In science, we have a principle called parsimony. And parsimony is that we defer to the simplest explanation because that gives us the best chance of being correct. Like you could say, you know, I can't find my car keys. Now, one explanation could be that aliens came down from another planet and had a particular interest in your car keys and beam them up to their spaceship and made off.

them or another explanation could be that you forgot them on the table. Simpler one. Both are viable explanations, perhaps, but one is much more simple and has a much better chance of being correct. It was the principle of parsimony can be condensed, called Occam's Razor, and William Occam said, I forget the actual Latin words, but the translation is that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, right? So in other words, don't make things up. Like the more steps you put in the process, each one of those steps is an opportunity to be incorrect. So the fewer

the steps, the better your chances of being correct. And the principle of parsimony is like at the root of science. It's the basis of science, which is that you always defer to the simplest explanation. And so that's what I would do when it comes to, you know, where did the earth come from? Where did life come from? Where did the universe come from? I would defer to the simplest explanation that represents the data. So as a scientist looking at the simplest explanation, what do you think the meaning of us being here is, or do you think it's totally random? I don't think there is an extrinsic meeting, like a meaning that is a meaning that is a imposed from the outside, right? I think each of us has the opportunity to decide what's

meaningful. And, you know, we're of this planet, we're of life. I don't think a bacterium is asking that question, right? So what's the meaning of life to a bacterium? Well, I don't think that's, I don't think that question is appropriate. I don't think it applies, right? Bacteria exists. because bacteria exist. But we've evolved to something that can think about that. We can contemplate it, but that doesn't mean that

that we have a purpose any more than a bacterium has a purpose. I think that we can make meaning in our lives and we can assign purpose to our lives. And I mean, I feel like I have a purpose here on this planet, but I don't feel like

that's a preordained purpose that comes from the outside. Just as I feel about hope, I mean, knowing what I know about the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, it would be very, very easy to sink into despair. I don't have empirical hope. What I do have is the choice of hope.

And I choose every day to wake up and be a hopeful person because I don't want to live a life without it. Yeah. If I'm in that little lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and it springs a leak, I'm going to be hopeful about that situation. I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to try to fix that situation. I'm not going to throw up my hands and say, like, well, we're screwed. I'm just going to sit here until I die. Not going to do that. Even though it might be a hopeless situation, I'm going to choose to have hope. Yeah, you seem like a very optimistic guy. You have a very good vibe about you. You don't seem like someone who's like, we're all fucked. you know what would be the point yeah right i'm gonna fight until i can't fight and i think we all have to do that i think hope is a choice and and i don't think we have any other choice i i agree with you i think that's i think that's the right way to look at especially like you said if you know a lot about things going on and you don't like some of the trends i mean you can sit there and just

complain about her you can try to be a part of the solution and have that hope that the that the shifts you're looking for will happen It's a good way to look at it. What I would say when I travel and I speak to people, I mean, you know, I try to impress upon them the seriousness of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and the fact that we have to act now. And what I would ask of people, what I would ask of your viewers is, you know, think about what's the hardest thing that you could do personally to push back on the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. And that's different for everybody. If you're a single mom trying to make ends meet, you know, maybe that's not a lot right now. Little changes that up and certainly voting is a powerful force.

But if you're out there listening and you're a person with knowledge or a network of people to get things done or money or influence, then, you know, think about what's the hardest thing you can do? find that thing and do that thing because we're out of time i i think that's and i think it's going to be on people to do that because i think one of the worst thing that that has happened with our environment is that it has turned so strongly political so i always use as an example you will have countries like china and russia who respectfully don't give a fuck about the environment like they're going to do what they're going to do they don't they're not democratic countries, they're not, you know, they're worried about power, they have despots running their country, and yet they, just those two, for example, comprise such a large part of our earth

that if they're not following laws, then nothing good is happening, right? So when you see some of these, some of the legislations come through where it's like countries in the Western world are like, we're going to sign up to do this. Well, if China and Russia aren't doing that, you're not getting anywhere. So what happens is it politically turns people off and makes it a political issue rather than a human issue and a big thing that i like to do with my show is when there are stuff that are that are clearly human issues that shouldn't be in my opinion fought at like a ballot box it's something we should all get behind you got to get those voices in here to figure out ways to do that and that's why i really like what paul rosalie does paul rosalie doesn't even know who's running

for office here paul rosalie's in the amazon actually doing the damn thing and getting people to care about it coming on podcasts like mine and joe rogan and all these different shows and spreading the word and then there's also the people you know hopefully like a ben who is you know this brilliant businessman who's started many companies he has a lot of wealth and now he's developing a company that's a doing something very cool but b can use that cool thing to have real scientific effects in the real world and i will say something i i do really admire about ben is that he has brought on so many people like you from all different kinds of backgrounds who have you know whether it be from paleontology on your end or you know someone like

Forrest Galante who just loves looking at species around the world. I was just talking to him today. He's going to come on the show. Great guy. But, you know, all these different people are coming together and you want the same thing. That's a beautiful thing to me. So I think you're leading by example in that way. And I think hopefully people listening to this podcast can, you know, if there's people out there who are passionate about this and are inspired, you know, they can study to do the types of things you do or find a way to pitch in and figure out ways that we can all work together to save this little rock that we're spinning on.

Absolutely. And you know, something really sad has happened, which is the science has become politicized. Yes. And it's not political. I promise you there are not Democratic thermometers and Republican thermometers, right? There's just thermometers. And we know how this stuff works. And it affects everybody. We're living on the same planet. And I don't know why it's a political issue, honestly. I don't know how it got to be that way. I do. I see how it happened. I don't, I believe in a uniparty system. I know for her. I know for fact all these people have steak dinners together on K street that they think it's funny a divided society is a compliant society and this has been manufactured for years and years and years and years and I can point back to when that happened and it's gotten worse than even I thought it would but I agree with you it must be maddening to be a guy in your position and see that happen there's politics like play your games with something else right this is the future of the planet that we all live on that

your grandkids are going to live on just as much as the next person's and you know it wasn't that long ago, like in the early part of the 2000s, I remember there was a PSA with Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich sitting on a bench talking about climate responsibility. Like, what happened to that? Why can't we have that

again? Yeah. God, what a funny world. So much has happened since then. It's crazy. Well, listen, Ken, this was awesome, man. I love talking about anything science, but like I said, we hadn't done a dinosaur podcast. So it's cool. It's so cool to also have

someone like yourself who's literally in our backyard here in New Jersey doing this. So we're going to have to do this again at some point if you're down. You should come down and do one from the museum. How about that? I'm definitely coming down to the museum to look at that. Me and D for coming down. I know my dad and my mom and dad live down there. They'd love to see this.

So I definitely got to visit that place. It looks incredible. You will find a fossil. I guarantee it. That would be. That's a bucket list kind of thing. Let's do it. Thank you so much, sir.

I appreciate it. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links are in my description below