No Such Thing As A Fish - 239: No Such Thing As The Queen Maaaaaaary

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Dan, Anna, Andy and Alex discuss why wombats have the best bums, how to build an extension on a cruise liner and Who Do You Think You Are?'s rejected celebrities.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Czenski and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Czenski. Yep, my fact this week is that the inventor of the Venn diagram also invented a machine that automatically bowls cricket balls.

Wow. Yeah, you can see how the two cross over because the Venn diagram is circular, well there are circles in it, right? And the cricket balls are circular I suppose, so I think that's where he got the inspiration. So does that mean that you could draw a Venn diagram of cricket related inventions involving balls in one circle and Venn diagrams in another circle and then in the middle you've got this guy who invented both. So that's not a Venn diagram because you've just fallen into the biggest Venn diagram

trap that the internet ever creates which is that really annoying thing where it has, you've just said this thing plus this thing equals John Venn but that's not what a Venn diagram is. Is that a U-lit diagram? No, it's nothing, it's just a thing the internet makes up. Okay, do I really have to explain Venn diagrams? Yes please. So I guess let's imagine you've got two circles and one circle is a set, so a category and

there's a bunch of stuff in that category, let's say animals and then you've got another circle which is another set. Things called Barney. Exactly and then you have, this is difficult because I don't know if we're counting Barney the dinosaur as an actual animal. I think we need a third Venn diagram circle which is fictional soft creatures. All fictional and real animals ever created. There we go, then you can get Barney in the middle.

So the thing in the middle has to belong to those categories so for your thing to work John Venn would have to be a type of cricket ball or whatever and a type of Venn diagram neither of which is. What about inventors of things that are round to do with round things and inventors of things that do with crickets? Love it. And he invented both because cricket balls are round and Venn diagrams are round. I don't know but they're not actually with cricket are they?

We've really got sidetracks. It's amazing that John Venn worked it out with this level of hockey. He didn't call them Venn diagrams and I didn't know. So they are a subcategory of Euler diagrams, things where you're representing information in circles but they don't have to be linked and then Venn diagrams are Eulerian circles but where there is an intersection between the two. They're Euler diagrams aren't they? I don't know.

I don't know his name is Euler. Yeah, you're probably right actually. But yeah, it is a thing that people confuse as well. I think the difference is that the Venn diagram, if you imagine the three intersecting things, it can include empty sections. So let's say you've got two circles and one of them is mammals and another one is birds and they're intersecting. You have to have that middle intersection even though there's no such thing as a bird

that's also a mammal. So he is said to have invented this diagram in 1881. That is the date that's put on the first time that he came up with the concept. So I was looking into 1881 just to see what other scientific inventions happened that year and it was an amazing year really. A lot of things happened. So Charles Darwin published his final scientific book which was called The Formation of Vegetable Mold through the actions of worms.

It's not exactly under the deadly hallows. The first modern Caesarean section was performed in 1881. Was it? Yeah. Alexander Fleming was born in 1881. And then lastly, Carlos Finlay, who was a Cuban doctor, was the first to propose that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes rather than direct human contact. That's a huge moment.

That resulted in a lot of lives saved. Imagine being a journalist in that year. It's a big year. A tiny baby who's been born in Venn penicillin. There are lots of really nice tributes to Venn, John Venn. So in the Cambridge College where he taught, there's a stained glass window which is a Venn diagram. It's got three circles of overlapping stained glass and in the middle it's much darker.

So it's kind of half double glazed and then half single glazed. And then a bit of it's triple glazed because there are three circles. Wow, that must be really warm. Yeah. So yeah, do you know what college he went to? Was it Gonville and Keys? Yeah, he went to Gonville and Keys and he did a couple of other things in his life. So first of all, I should explain, he did invent the odd thing and one of them was this

automatic bowling machine for cricket balls. And the weird thing about this was that he invented it and the Australian cricket team had come to visit Britain and they visited Cambridge where he was at the time. And he whipped it out. He was asked to get out his cricket bowling machine to entertain them. And it automatically bowled out Australia's best batsman four times running. Wow. So that was the glory days of English cricket.

But another thing he did, which I love, it's almost about the only other sort of thing that goes down in his biography, aside from all his mathematical stuff, is that he, with his son, compiled a book that was a biographical list of all known students, graduates and holders of office ever to go to the University of Cambridge from the beginning of history up until, well, he only got till 1751 before he died. So that was 136,000 biographies of people that he wrote. What a dull bug. Isn't that, how did he find out those little biographies of all of these people?

Yeah. It was incredible. School reports? Yeah, I guess so. They must have had some sort of records. I mean, if anyone's going to have records, it's going to be like a really old university that has had like a consistent way of doing things for years and years and years. I think they obviously had something, otherwise it was just him and his son going, what do

you reckon? Mike Smith did. Do you know something else that has a Venn diagram on it in tribute is if you live in Clapham in London, or you've ever been to Clapham, there's Venn Street, which you might know, it's got Venn Street records on it, which are you like, and that's named after not John Venn after his grandfather, who happened to be the reverend and erecting Clapham. And it does. So the sign for Venn Street also has a Venn diagram on it in tribute to the rector's grandson

who invented the diagram. If I was a town planner and I wanted to celebrate John Venn, I would build a sort of double roundabout check like a Venn diagram. If we really, I mean, there'd be quite a lot of accidents, probably. Yeah, the middle of the diagram, just because that has crashed. Just pile up. Cut the drove on this way, cut the drove on this way. OK, it is time for fact number two.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that if you want to increase capacity on a cruise ship, you just simply have to cut it in half and add a whole new chunk of ship. That's done. So weird. Yeah. I've seen an amazing video of it. What they do is they take these cruise ships and they dock them and they just literally

slice down the middle. It's obviously a spot where the original design says if you ever need to cut this into two, this is where it happens. Is it like a sort of scissor symbol in a docking line or whatever? And so they cut it in half and they separate it and then they just insert the chunk that they would like to go inside and push as if it's the meat to a ship sandwich, close it up and then it's ready to go and it's fully functioning. It's extraordinary.

The first problem I have with this is that all the rooms in a hotel are cruise ship and numbered. So you're going to get room like 17, 18, 18B, 18C because otherwise they're not going to make any sense. I bet they just renumber the rooms. Yeah, you can just take the numbers off, can't you? Probably. I'm sure they make removable numbers.

You do have to unscrew them, but they've got people to do that. In many ways, this is the smallest part of the operation. But they do, they rename the ship usually when they change it as well. I'd love it in the Queen Mary. You've got to come up with some of your fits on both sides. So yeah, I mean this was done with a ship which was called the Silver Spirit, that's one example, and they extended it when they cut it in half. They put in a 49 feet chunk into the middle of it on the subject of cruise ships and

slicing massive sections out of things. Disney owned a lot of cruise liners and they also have an island in the Bahamas. They bought it and it's one of their destinations for their cruise ships. But it's sort of like a very sort of shallow sandy island with a lot of shallow kind of beach around it. So it's too, you can't get the cruise ship anywhere near to it. It's not like a sort of a steep kind of cliff into the sea. So what they did was they basically cut out an underwater parking space for their cruise

ships. They just dug a massive trench that goes up towards the island so the cruise ship can reverse into it and get right to the island. And so if you look at it on Google Earth, there's just a kind of a rectangular dark patch of ocean right next to it. It's amazing. It's so cool. I'll post a picture on my Twitter feed.

I found a cruise ship for Dan. Wow. Because we've been thinking of sending you away for a while. Thank you. So have you guys heard of conspiracy cruises? Dan's nodding but he's not allowed to talk about it. Never heard of it. These are.

I can't believe this exists. Go to the website. It promises to deliver to anyone who's interested the truth about all these things and it lists the truths that it'll deliver. So it's the truth about global warming, fracking, HIV, vaccinations. Then it gets weirder and weirder. So fluoridation, forbidden archaeology, JFK, September 11th. You're welcome on to the ship by Captain Elvis Presley.

What is they telling the truth about Star Wars agenda? Do you know what that is? That's to do with the not the movies. It was a present bush. I think he was talking about it a lot. The idea of having satellites that were able to shoot down through the atmosphere. Basically militarizing space. Yes, exactly.

Got it. Okay. Oh God, imagine booking for the real truth about who Luke's father really was. Dress to see through fear. I think that person would get along perfectly well with everyone else on board. The good news is that you don't have to have any vaccinations before you go on one of these papers. It sounds so weird. Where does it go?

So it goes all over the place. They go to various places, I think. A commuter triangle. That's the one place it doesn't go. They're not crazy. It costs $3,000. Why do these people don't have this money? A popular mechanics journalist went on it because he said he read about it and thought it would be really fun.

You could go with some other kind of jokers and discuss stuff and said it was terrifying. So everyone's really serious there. It's taken it very seriously. He ended up being chased out of various conference rooms because I think they suspected him of something. I mean to flee down corridors from people chasing him and shutting himself in his room. You know they have, as well as conspiracy cruises, they have 80s music cruises. So they have whole cruises where just musical stars from the 80s perform. So there was a great write-up of one which mostly focused on Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet.

And he said, I saw an advert in the paper last year for music cruises. I couldn't believe it. There was Huey Lewis in the news, Pat Benatar, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Alfie Bow. I phoned my manager and asked, why am I not singing at sea? He said, don't worry Tony, I'm already on it. This does happen a lot now, not just for 80s stars. So the band Weezer have a Weezer cruise and they invite a lot of bands on. There's a comedy cruise as well.

It's just a bunch of comedians would go off on this cruise and they were the entertainment. That sounds like hell on earth. Yeah, it really does. I throw myself in. Actually speaking of comedians, there's a really good story about a cruise ship comedian from 1991. Have you guys heard of MTS Oceanus, which sank in 1991? No, no. So this was a huge cruise ship. It sank and the captain and his crew were the first people off the ship when it sank straight away.

Bad form. Very bad form. They didn't even make an announcement over the tannoy saying we've crashed. That's a real faux pas, yeah. So basically the passengers heard this explosion on the ship. Nothing happened for ages. So they went to check where the captain was supposed to be and he was gone. He left the ship unmanned and all his crew had gone.

And the only person left to save him was the ship entertainer called Moss Hills. And he saved everyone on the ship. This is a great story where he rescued for 571 people. So first of all, he worked out how to use a ship's radio to phone a May Day thing to say we're in trouble. He's a comedian. He's got microphone experience. Does that make sense? Is this thing on?

You haven't been on a cruise and there's a massive explosion. Maybe it was. He just performed some comedy and the other end thought, God, we better save those poor passengers. But yeah, these helicopters came and lifeboats were used to rescue them. And he rounded everyone up and got them onto the lifeboats and organised it. And he and his wife and his fellow deputy entertainer were the last people off the ship. Do you know what happened? So I was looking up ship launching ceremonies and these things happen with cruise ships as well.

The first water to touch the ship is caught, sealed in a bottle and then displayed in the captain's office. How do you catch? I don't know. What a great point. What if you try to collect the water and there's a fish in it? Do you think you tip the fish out or do you then? Because that would be quite a good outcome, wouldn't it? Because at least you don't have this tedious bottle of water in your captain's office.

You've got a dead fish. Lovely little memento. The environmental damage your massive cruise ship does to the ocean. Okay, fine. Looking on the bright side, are we? You mentioned ceremonies. I didn't know about the line crossing ceremony. Do you guys know about this? No.

This happens on all sorts of ships. Is that when you tend a really inappropriate joke on a cruise ship? And they're like, no, mate. No, the line crossing ceremony is not that. It is when you cross the Equator. But this is the thing that happens on a lot of cruise ships. They do this ceremony. And in a Navy, they do this ceremony.

And in also like in Merchant Navy, they do the ceremony. And it's been happening since at least the early 1800s. And Darwin had it done to him, for instance. So on the Beagle, it's really funny to read his diary from there, because he really looked down on it and was like, come on, I'm a bloody scientist. I'm not down for all this kind of banter. It was an initiation thing where he had to do lots of, as he described it, extremely disagreeable and unpleasant things.

So there was a lot of simulating sex acts in the olden days and stuff, I think. Really? And what you're told to do is, well, first of all, you get kind of, well, what happened to Darwin is he got battened down in the hatchways in the dark until he was super hot. And then you get dragged up by the crew. And you have to go to the court of Neptune. So it's basically you have to go to Neptune and be accused of your crime.

And you're known as a polywog until you've passed the Equator successfully. And then you become, you know, a seasoned traveler. And yeah, so Darwin was trapped down and then dragged up onto the deck. And then he had buckets of water thrown over him. He was blindfolded. He was made to stand on a plank above this huge bath of water. And then they tipped him in. And he thought it was the actual scene because he was blindfolded.

Oh, probably, yeah. That's a funny trick to play. That is funny, yeah. On walking the plank, there's an Norwegian cruise ship, which has a walk the plank experience. They make you walk the plank. Well, I think you volunteer to walk yourself along. And it's an eight foot long plank, but you do it wearing a safety harness.

Oh, OK, yeah. Yeah. So you just slam into the side of the ship. OK, it's time for fact number three. And that is Alex. My fact this week is that Stephen Mangan, Michael Parkinson, Amon Holmes and Cherie Blair have all been dropped from the TV program. Who do you think you are?

Because their ancestry is too boring. Were they dropped mid-program? Yeah, pretty much. They were signed up to do it because the programmer approached you and said, would you like to do the program? And you sign up and say yes and agree to do all of the things. And then they start researching. And then at some point they went back to these people being like,

actually, you know what, let's leave it because it's going to be rubbish. The good news is that their full story has made a new series called Who Cares Who You Think You Are? It was very funny because it sounds like they have to be quite diplomatic when they tell them. So with Cherie Blair, one of the producers said, we spent hours locked in rooms with Cherie's publicist, secretary, manager, personal assistant. Eventually we had to say, you are very interesting, but we don't have a show. But it's amazing because Cherie Blair is a booth and she is a descendant of John Wilkes Booth. John Wilkes Booth.

Yeah, who killed Abraham Lincoln. Wow. Yeah, so it's not a direct descendant. It's John Wilkes Booth's uncle was Cherie Blair's direct ancestor. And surely there was nothing there alone. She was really disappointed, wasn't she? It is kind of sad. All these people were, in fact, I think she was disappointed.

I think Michael Parkinson might have said he was really sad as well. He said he was gutted. He said it's the one show that he would have been happy to have been on. The one show. That was the only show of all the celebrity-based programs that he actively wanted to take part in. Not even Parkinson. He didn't even do it. Jesus.

Steve Mangans is really funny because they found out that all of his ancestors were from the same place in Ireland. And the same very small place in Ireland. His mother and father grew up in adjacent villages on the west coast of Ireland. Wow. But they never met until they both happened to come to London and then meet each other there. I think that's so interesting that your whole family can be from one tiny spot. Yeah. I would love to see a program done on Japan's emperor, the imperial family in Japan.

Because they have a family tree that's traced back so far that it goes into mythological characters. At that point, I would say you've lost the trace. Yeah. But they believe it in Japan. So it's a part of the official family tree and it goes into effectively people who are up on clouds. But where's the crossover point? There must be a crossover point. Yeah, we know where it is.

Person, person, person, God. Yeah. 660 to 585 BC was the life of Jumu, who was an emperor. And it's from there. And his wife, Isukeyori, they both have family trees that disappear often to mythology with amazing cloud-flying emperors. I like the fact that you say it traces back so far that it goes into mythology. As if you actually think that if you go back far enough in history, you will come to mythological creatures. It's great to be the kids of the like, well, my father is a thunder-throwing god and my mother is from Suffolk.

And how do they meet? And there's also the Guinness Book of World Records actually acknowledges the longest lineage of a family tree that is traceable. Yeah, it's called the Luri lineage. That's the Luri family. And it includes people like Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. I don't know who that is. One of the most famous men in history. And Martin Buber.

Every son just wants to suckle on his mother's boobies. Oh my God, this is crazy. This lineage traces back to Jaheel Luri, a 13th century rabbi in breast litops. In breast litops? Wow, Freud is just steeped in boobies. Although, of course, when you trace stuff back far enough, as we've said before, then you all unite around the same person. We're all related to Martin Buber. There was a lot of this mythology stuff in the past, wasn't there, as in there was a theory that the British royals were descended from Brutus.

Was there? Yeah, but Brutus, and it all dated back to the fall of Troy. That was the thing. There was a Brutus who, the Roman Brutus was descended, and not the Caesar Brutus, there was an earlier, more mythological Brutus, was descended from the people who left Troy, the Trojans, when they left after the fall of the city, and that through Brutus, that's how it descended to the English monarchs in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yeah, that was the myth. Well, Cherie Blair is related to Brutus, Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, who was named after Brutus.

Yeah, from the play. How many? And he was a very famous actor, and what's very interesting about him is that he also attempted to assassinate a president. A tried to assassinate a president? Well, he sent a letter to President Andrew Jackson. He demanded that he pardon two pirates, and there was a threat of assassination if he didn't, and he got caught for it. But yeah, isn't that weird? His dad was attempting to, yeah.

Well, like father, like son, you know what you grow up with. You're often influenced by it, aren't you? Just on Cherie Blair's family, Tony Booth was her dad. Yeah. Not a difficult one to trace back, obviously, but he was a famous actor. You have the discovery scene. Can't believe he didn't find out the Tony Booth thing, guys. It's right there.

He was an actor who was, he was famous, he was in until death there was part, and various other things. Weirdly, he had bit parts in EastEnders and Emmerdale, and he played the same character in both, which is a tramp who acts as a spiritual guide to one of the characters. Cool. Presumably the people who made, which was at Emmerdale and EastEnders. Yeah. Presumably the people who made, say, EastEnders, saw the tramp giving spiritual advice to one of the characters in Emmerdale and thought, we've got to get this tramp. Do you know what other films he did, Tony Booth, which I didn't know?

No. And it's just such a weird idea. It's saucy films, isn't it? It's such saucy films. Really? So he did the Confessions of series, which was in the 70s, and it was like Confessions of a Window Cleaner, which, embarrassingly, was the top grossing British film of 1974. Yes.

And it's sort of comedy sex films. Yeah, a lot of boobers in there. A lot of boobers. He was in all of these Confessions of a Driving Instructor, and the plot is, as you would predict, a window cleaner goes around shagging lots of housewives. And that'd be a threesome and stuff. But he's on the other side of the window. That's the tragedy of the window cleaner, isn't it?

Yeah, but he can drill a hole, because they have... Drills, famously, window cleaners. So what, the window's just cleaned, or shall I do the drilling service, too? Yeah, I can do it with some air. The latch mechanism's broken, so yeah, chill through it, thanks. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that wombats can kill predators by crushing them with their bottoms. So it does require quite a lot of setup, this prank, I'm going to call it.

Prank? A defence mechanism. Yeah, I wouldn't say prank. OK, fair enough. So there's an essay in the London Review of Books by our article, Catherine Rundle, which is all about wombats, and it's full of very interesting facts about them. So, wombats have burrows. They dig lots of burrows, actually, and they have very, very hard bottoms.

So we've mentioned before that sometimes they will plug the ground with their bums when there are predators around, and the predators won't be able to... Like a door, let the cock get past, yeah. And so, it turns out also that scientists have found shattered fox skulls inside wombat burrows. So if a fox follows a wombat into its burrow, the wombat will crush the fox's head against the wall of its own burrow and kill it. It's very, very hard. What a way to go.

What a way to go. Yeah. Well, the roof, yeah, apparently with dingoes, they'll just slam them up against the roof. Incredible pranks. I'd love to see Harry Hildo the voice-over. And you've been crushed. They're so good with their bums, though, because they can... Like, this classic QI fact is that the wombats have cubic feces.

And then I didn't even know this. They stack that. Like, they stack their poo, and it's supposed to be scientists think it might be some sort of, like, status symbol to sort of put your poo in a high tower. Which you can do because they're square. Because they're square, yeah. So they do up to 80 to 100 a day, or per night, rather, and they're for display purposes, effectively.

So they don't want them rolling off rocks when they put them up on a rock for it to be seen. Yeah, it's to mark territory, isn't it? Yeah. To attract people. And they get rough on the baby wombats, because the wombats obviously are marsupials, and as we've said in a previous podcast, the babies face backwards in the pouch. And so what this means is they're always pooing. And the baby wombats face is usually poking out of its thing, the pouch just below its

arse, and it's just shoved in this poo all the time. No. Yeah. That's not good. As that baby, you've got shit in your face, 80 to 100 times a day. The head is just poking out, isn't it, behind the back of the mother. But the weird thing is that they don't have cubic anuses. They don't have square anuses to produce the cubic poo.

There's a mystery. It's not really mystery, because we know how they make it. Oh, we do know how they make it. We do know how they make it. So it takes them 14 to 18 days to digest food. It's very, very long. So by the time it gets out of them, it's really compact, and it's had all the nutrition taken out of it.

It's very efficiently done. And they have ridges in the first bit of their intestine, which shapes the food as it's being digested into these cubic shapes. And then they have also have special bones in the bottoms to keep the poo in the cubic shape. Wow. It's like an inbuilt cookie cutter. It is.

It's holding the... It genuinely is. In December, they do Christmas trees as well. It would be great if they could vary it like a balloon magician. Imagine if we could do... Come to your children's parties. She's booked the wombat again. What I like about wombat is you can see pictures of them where when the young wombat that's

in the pouch is almost mature enough to leave, it's probably poking its head out and it grazes, so it'll be eating grass out of the back, and the mother will eat grass out of the front. And it just looks like it's a two-headed wombat. That's incredible. Wow. Amazing. You must have seen them, Dan, because you're Australian.

Yeah. I've seen them in captivity. They're so beautiful. They're my favorite animal, I have to say. I saw one for the first time this year. Yeah, really. That was amazing. Oh, when we went to Oz, yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Australian zoos, apparently, they have the second highest danger rating, so the only things that beat them are lions and bears. And then as a zookeeper, the next thing you've got to be terrified of is the wombat for a large guinea pig. It's quite weird. Yeah. And they run so fast as well.

Yeah. They can run as fast as you say in Bolt. Faster, faster. For longer, yeah. So, I think they can run at 25 miles an hour, and his top speed is about 27, but Usain Bolt can run at 27 miles an hour, give or take, for about, what, nine seconds. Wombats can run at 25 miles an hour for 90 seconds. So, if they were trying to catch him, they would.

We don't know whether or not Usain Bolt could keep that up for longer. That's just what he... That's where he has to stop. No one's ever put him on a longer track. He's done a 200 meter, but that's a different discipline. You're running at a different pace there. That's a good point. So, if he reaches a...

If we just said, just keep going when you get to the end. Are you saying you think he could run at that speed for a kilometer? Well, a minute and a half would be, because that's what a wombat can do. I'd be curious to know what his deceleration was. Would you... What you think he might just be choosing to run 200 meters a bit slower, because never mind, I'll win anyway. I was hoping that we glossed over my theory, but no, thank you for bringing that back up.

Yeah. I was looking up other animals that use their arses in interesting ways. There's a type of caterpillar called the skipper caterpillar, which does the thing called scat firing. So, it's able to launch its poo out of its back end, kind of a high speed. It was... I think scientists think it was genetically evolved as a way of just getting your poo away from you, just for hygiene reasons, but it's also pretty good for shooting wasps that come

to an issue. Wow. Isn't that great? Yeah. So, it's like a paintball gun or something. Exactly. Clay pigeon shooting. Yeah.

Wow. Imagine. Poo wasp shooting. We had evolved to be able to shoot pigeons with poo as they approached us. I think clothing would have evolved differently to allow you easy access to a weapon. Yeah. Yeah. But it's amazing how it works.

Poo comes out in pellets, and so they come out, and then they get sort of stored inside a special launch pad, an anal kind of launch pad, and then it pumps up the blood pressure. Like, you know, when like in a computer game, we're like, yeah, and then kind of like launches it like a passport. Wow. That's incredible. So, they poo inside themselves, and then store it up for launch? Yeah.

Into the... Like, what's it called? Like, into the chamber. Yeah. So, you've got a false bottom, or you've got a second bottom. Exactly. Second bottom. Inside your first bottom.

That's the first... They're all magicians. Wow. That's extraordinary. That's incredible. That's really amazing. So, there was a... I'd rather like this.

So, there used to be a giant wombat, which weighed three tons. It was about the size of a rhino, and it lived until really recently, so we think it only died out around the time that humans first reached Australasia. So, there's a big question about who killed the giant wombat, and whether it was us, basically. Okay. Sounds like it was us. Yeah. It does sound like it was us, but maybe it was environmental, or maybe it was climate

factors or something like that. It was probably us. It was probably us who killed all the giant wombat, but they were alive until about 50,000 years ago. Yeah. So, it's really recent that we had these things. As big as rhinos. As big as rhinos.

Yeah. Imagine that. That's crazy. And their hindquarters were very developed for their size, so they had, like, super anuses. Oh, man, you could build a pyramid out of the squares coming out of that. Wow. Yeah.

They were online saying, what if a marsupial had evolved into a horse-like creature? How would that have affected it? It was just a discussion forum saying, wouldn't it have been cool if we could have domesticated the giant wombat and use that in equestrian ways? Yes. But they are very hard to domesticate. And also, if you're wrong... That meant they're extinct by 55,000 years.

I reckon we'd be overrun with them and living underground, and it would be a nightmare. Riding them, presumably, you'd have to face backwards because of the pouch thing, which I think would be quite difficult. Are you proposing that you get into the pouch? I assume that's how you'd ride it, right? No, you get on it. No, you get on top of it. I do think.

What if it had a... We'd run into a pouch. Yeah, that's a good point. Also, we've established you'd just be having like shit all over your face all the time. It's not ideal. No. Yeah. Is there an animal living currently that has a pouch big enough that a human could

sit inside it? I don't think so. A living species. I mean, the kangaroos probably got the biggest pouch. Even quite large kangaroos can't fit. You can fit a baby in there. Speaking from experience. You can fit a baby into a kangaroo's pouch.

Yeah. But they're gross and disgusting and you wouldn't want to... We're talking about just, you know... Theoretical. You have a baby. I have a baby. That's all I'm saying. You could definitely fit a human baby into a kangaroo's pouch.

I don't think so. The largest kangaroos that go into pouches are definitely the size of human babies. Actually, you're right. Babies are small, aren't they? No, you're right. Joey's can be massive. Yeah. Joey's can be massive.

They stay in there for ages. Either way, I'm calling social services before you get a chance to try it out. Okay. That's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Alex. At Alex Bell. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

Or you can go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish. Or go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. On it, you'll find everything from a link to our newly released book, The Book of the Year 2018. It's also got tour dates. You can get tickets for all the upcoming live shows that we're doing. Has a link to all the previous episodes from our podcast, and it has anything else you might want.

Photos, contact details, a behind the scenes documentary called Behind the Gills. It's an awesome place. And it was built by Alex, who's joining us on this podcast today. Thank you very much, Alex. Okay. We will be back again next week. We'll see you then.

00:31:56,980 --> 00:31:57,980 Bye.