Ologies with Alie Ward - Paleontology (DINOSAURS) with Michael Habib

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

Did Ross Gellar ruin being a paleontologist? What's the hot goss on dino feathers? How did some dinos have four wings and which costs more: a used sedan or a dinosaur? Featuring guest Michael Habib of the Natural History Museum of LA County. Also covered: why Alie used to feel meh about dinos (DON'T JUDGE) and the realities of cloning. Oh and penis implants.Tees, mugs, totes available at ologiesmerch.comFollow Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow Alie on Twitter and Instagram Support the show on Patreon Music by Nick ThorburnEditing/production by Jason Scardamalia

So I'm going to be super, super honest with you, and this pains me to say because it's kind of a point of shame for me as a science enthusiast, but I don't really give a fuck about dinosaurs. At least I didn't for a long time. Flies, turtles, birds nests, plants, I'm down with all these because in my brain I'm like, we share the planet with them, I can look at them, I can watch how they grow, I can look at what they eat, how they get it on. Dinosaurs were always the wing of the museum that I was like, I don't know, I'm going

to go to the food court and eat a soft pretzel, but enjoy. So don't judge me because I know people love dinosaurs, people get crazy. And I read Jurassic Park in high school, I loved it. I was so into it that I was working in a stationery shop and I couldn't put it down so much so that on my watch two ceramic bunnies were stolen and I was almost fired. So whenever I think about Michael Crichton, I say to him, hey dude, nice work. Your book was so good. You distracted me from someone putting two football-sized porcelain bunnies down their

pants or under their shirt or something. But what I loved about Jurassic Park was the dinosaur behavior, but I wasn't really that stoked about fossilized bones. I just didn't connect with it until last year I went to this party that was kind of like a science salon and this week's guest stood up and he gave an informal talk about pterosaur wings and suddenly I thought, okay, I think I get it because I'd never really thought about dinosaurs in motion like that. Also side note for the truly self-congratulatory, you know that pterosaurs, the flying things

that are like Terry on Peewee's Playhouse are not actually dinosaurs, they're flying reptiles. I learned that this year too. But paleontology actually isn't even the study of dinosaurs. It comes from paleo, which means old, and onto meaning being. So it's the study of just old beings. So this guest sparked my interest in dinosaurs in a way that I'd never had before because the way he talks about them and how they move really puts life to them.

So he's a paleontologist and a research associate in the Dinosaur Institute at the LA County Museum of Natural History and he's also an assistant professor of anatomy at USC's Keck School of Medicine. So he has two jobs. One of them involves people who are no longer alive and I know it's irrational and like not super death positive, but I'm a little bit creeped out by cadavers. I'm just, I'm too sad about people dying. I want to hug them.

I also want to run a far away, trying to get over it. But our guest is hella chill about it. He spends part of the day cutting up cadavers, part of it being a paleontologist. Please enjoy Michael Habib. Okay. So what is this deal? This is my deal. Well, you're right.

Actually, I did cut up a cadaver this morning. Did you? Yes, actually a few of them. So that's, that's how my mornings often start. We had 188 medical students in a room with 35 dead people. Oh my God. So you get a cup of coffee in the morning and you sit down and you take apart a human being.

So that's, that's my, that's my deal for about half the time. Any other half of the time I go and play with dinosaurs. There is a wrong way to take apart a cadaver, isn't there? There are a lot of wrong ways actually. There are, there are more wrong ways than correct ways as it turns out. So. So you study movement of animals and that's kind of how you got into paleontology? What is, is paleontology only about fossils or is it just about living things of that

era? So paleontology, it doesn't necessarily have to be about fossils, but it historically kind of was. It was considered to be the study of fossils essentially, although it more literally is just the study of life in the past. And you mostly do that through, through fossils. I'm one of those paleontologists who does play with fossils. Here we go much further.

Let's define super quick what a fossil actually is. I didn't know this until just now. Fossils are any trace or remains like a cast or an impression or a substitution with rock or even the thing itself of something that was once alive. They have to be at least 10,000 years old to be considered a fossil. I don't know what they're called if they're younger than that, to be honest. And the word fossil comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, which is that kind of adorable.

I just pictured people digging around, being like, I obtained this by digging. It's a fossil. Speaking of old things, Michael didn't decide he wanted to be a paleontologist until later in life. I declared at age four that I wanted to be a paleontologist. Yeah, okay, just kidding. That's an early proclamation. You know, I like getting in early, that gives me time to procrastinate.

Why? So you waited from the age of four until what, 18 to enrolling college? That's a long, that's a lot of stalling. It really was. It really was. There were all kinds of things that I wasted time doing in the interim, such as growth and development. Right.

It's very strange. Learning to use a fork. Learning to use a fork, yeah. Well, what happened at four? Like when that declaration went down and you're like, mom, dad, sit down, I'm going to be a paleontologist. Like where were you in a museum? Oh yeah, absolutely.

We were in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. You know what I told my parents I wanted to be when I was three? And you, what do you want to be when you get big? A porky pig. A porky pig, Allison Ward. Porky pig, side note, was a cartoon character who wore an open blazer with no shirt. He lacked pants. There were probably museums for that.

You never know. Yeah. It's just called restaurants, I guess. So what was your, what was your path like when you actually got into the study of it? How much education does it take to be a paleontologist? Well, you know, the answer is it varies because it depends on really what you're doing in paleontology, what kind of paleontologists you want to be. In Michael's case, from the time he set out to be a paleontologist, he finished kindergarten,

grammar school, then middle school, then high school, got an undergrad and master's degree in biology, then another five years to get a PhD in functional anatomy. And then off to join the quote unquote real world, which if you're a paleontologist, who takes apart dead people for living at a medical school is not an accurate term. I don't know what the real world is. I've never played in it. I've seen it through windows. It looks scary.

I've decided to avoid it for the time being. So you've never walked into an office every day in a tie? I don't think I've ever walked into an office in a tie. Right. Yeah. I'm still stuck on the fact that like you spent your morning taking apart dead people. Like I know that we're here to talk about paleontology, but from the anatomy perspective, like when did you go down the path of teaching anatomy?

What is it like for you in terms of like confronting mortality because I mean, paleo, you're dealing with ancient things. So do you ever have any weird existential crisis about like death and impermanence or anything? I think I got most of it out of the way when I was young. I was a precocious youngster and by that I meant, I had a lot of questions about mortality at an uncomfortable age. It was uncomfortable for my parents. If you want to be really good at vertebrate anatomy, the model system is basically humans.

It's like, you know more about your car if it sucks because you have to fix it more. Do you know what I mean? We tinker in the human body so much to fix it that it's like, well, yeah. Have those implants redone a few times. We see some really interesting prostheses actually in the lab. Oh, do you? I bet LA cadavers are like pretty tight. I bet they still look pretty sharp.

I'm so sorry. The conversation accidentally went from automotive analogies back to the generous and probably very attractive people who have donated their bodies to science and the curious things. Michael sees with body donors. The type of sort of implant they saw most often? Yes. Penis implants. No.

Where? More in LA? Even between Baltimore and LA. You are kidding me. Honestly, I did not know that that was a thing. We had one donor with one of the old models that was pumpable. Whoa. No.

Usually they're just silicon implants. But any case, so yeah, we've seen a lot of penis implants in the lab. But this deep knowledge of anatomy informs your work as a paleontologist a lot. You tend to study a lot of wing movements of pterosaurs, which are not dinosaurs technically. That's true. That's true. So yeah, it's weird. So the guy who makes doctors in the morning studies pterosaur wings in the afternoon go

figure. I've been called a physicist in denial by actually Caltech physicists, which I consider to be a compliment, particularly in that crowd. That's some complimentary shade. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'll take that in particular interested in how that gives you motion, how animals move around by taking, is what is really a pretty limited number of different kinds of materials

to work with and make them do amazing things. We have enough trouble making high performance aircraft, good sail planes and everything that can go hundreds of miles with fiberglass and carbon fiber and all kinds of metals at our disposal. And animals only have a handful of materials really to work with. Oh, that's thoughtful. I guess. Yeah.

I mean, for hard tissues, you basically get your bone, cartilage is reasonably, can be reasonably stiff, enamel, you know, handful of other things and a bunch of soft stuff that's basically density of water. And it gives you some really, really high performance stuff. I mean, some of the animals I work on, some of these pterosaurs had wingspans 10 and a half meters. It's about 35 feet. Wingtip the wingtip.

35 feet. Yeah. These things could kick ass and take names. These are powerful flying ground launching badasses and they're just doing it all with the basics of vertebrate anatomy. Do you have to study aeronautics as well as physiology to try to determine how that would give a pterosaur the ability to fly? So I do have a joint background in fluid dynamics, which is the study of how fluids move.

Just five minutes ago, I learned that fluids are not just liquids. Fluids are anything that has no fixed shape and yields to external pressure, which totally changes the meaning of bodily fluids for me. They could be a liquid or a gas. Let's change the subject. Do paleontologists love puzzles as someone who has to put bone fragments back together? Do you like puzzles or do you hate them? I love puzzles.

A lot of paleontologists love puzzles. Okay. I'm not sure they all do. I think for some paleontologists, it probably feels like taking your work home with you. Right. You know, you get home and I don't have any kids, but I can imagine some that do, you know, they come home and their kids like, Hey, do you want to build this puzzle with me?

Like, Oh God. What amount of time do you spend in the field as a paleontologist and how much of that is back in a lab or looking at spreadsheets or measuring fossil densities and stuff? So in terms of the amount of time, like how much of the year I'm in the field, it's a good chunk of the summer. That's usually when I do all my field work. So basically July and August, a good bit of it. I'll be in the field mostly in New Mexico.

Was that a titanosaur? That's the titanosaur project. Yeah. Can you reveal what you're working on with that? Sure. Sure. So basically, basically whatever you find, it's not like you went out there and we're going to find a titanosaur.

Yeah. Actually, we kind of went out there going, I really kind of hope we don't find a titanosaur because. Really? Well, I mean, not, not, we were being glib about it, which is what makes it funny. But like, there was a part of us that was like, I really hope we don't find things super huge because then we're going to feel compelled to excavate it and it's going to take forever. And of course, what we found was two individuals of the group that includes the largest land

animals of all time. Oh my God. In fact, one of our, one of our specimens may be the largest dinosaur from North America. That's huge. Literally. Yeah. So it's just, I mean, these, you know, these are animals that at mid-sized titanosaurs like 30 tons plus.

Oh my God. And a big one's like 60 tons plus. How many feet? The big guys you're looking at a hundred feet ish. Wow. How many times bigger than an elephant are these guys? Big, a big bull African elephant, which would be the largest living land animal. I think the record is like 6.2 tons or something like that.

Oh, really? Like five and change. Okay. So if a big titanosaur is regularly hitting 60, that's 12 times. So these titanosaurs are like if 12 elephants stacked under one giant overcoat and pretended to be a person. That's so huge. So.

This is so exciting. I'm sweating. This is so, wait, what happened when you were in the field and someone's like, oh, we got a bone over here. Like what, what is that moment like? Well, it depends on what the bone is. And in the case of the titanosaur project, you know, you see some bone going to the hill and our first thought was, oh, that looks really exciting.

We can see some interesting morphology and you can tell it, it's what we call pneumatizes. We can tell it had, was it, the animal had all these air sacs in it. And we're thinking, oh, wow, that's cool. That could be like a big predatory dinosaur because they have a lot of air sacs in their bones too. And we started excavating around it and we're like, this doesn't really look like it would fit. What could this be?

You think it's, because this is a pretty big element is you're going to the hill and you're thinking that it's like a relatively big part of a small animal. And then at some point your brain switches and you realize you're doing the small part of an enormous animal. Oh my God. And there was that moment where there actually was a particular rod of bone that we started to see as we started to work around it with our tools that we realized meant that this was a vertebrate from the neck, a neck bone.

I love this part so much. I literally just looked at it and went, oh, shit. Of course, one of the poor volunteers there was like, what, what did I break something? I'm like, no, no, this just went from a one season project to an eight season project. And like, why? I'm like, well, if this is articulated. In paleontology terms, articulated means found all in the same place, just a bunch of bones, kicking it together in order, having a bone party under some dirt.

If there's more of it, I mean, I was, and now at this point I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe it'll just be the one element it wasn't, of course. Oh my God. And then, you know, we've got, we've got a, you know, 40 ton plus animal in the hillside. And then you start looking at the hillside and you go, actually, I think it might kind of just be the hillside. Oh my God. The hillside is just a mountain underneath.

It's just kind of, yeah, it's just kind of sediment loosely sitting on top of the tinnitus. Who gets to name it? Well, that depends. So we don't know whether or not we will be naming it because we don't know if it's a new species yet or not. There is a type of tinnosaur from North America that is named, just one, which is interesting because the rest of the world, there's a ton of these things. They're like one of the hot groups of dinosaurs to work on these days.

Like we went from not knowing much about them 20 years ago to suddenly, this has been this explosion. So sauropods are those really long necked, kind of round, bellied, plant munchin' cuties. Apparently 20 years ago, we didn't know much about them because our equipment for scanning and for transport sucked. There's better equipment in tech these days to work with things this big. Half a century ago, someone finds a tinnosaur coming out of the hillside, it's like, well, that's pretty.

Yeah. Moving on. Do we just have better vehicles now? We've got good vehicles. It's more commonplace to be able to use a helicopter. I mean, obviously half a century ago, people could use a helicopter, but it was just, they were not something that was regularly available to the kind of budgets that we work at to lift heavy jackets.

P.S., when he says heavy jackets, he does not mean woolen coats. The jacket is that big plaster lump. They smooth around excavated fossils to protect it and support it when they're storing it or delivering it. Frankly, it looks like a very fun rainy day craft project. And if you Google dinosaur jackets, I dare you, I dare you not to go down a rabbit hole looking at children's hoodies and wondering if you can fit into the largest size offered. Even if you don't get to name the species, you get to actually be like this one's Gary

or whatever. So, yeah, so you get nicknames. So, yeah, so the naming process, so that if this thing's up in a new species, we will give a new technical name in a publication and I'll be myself and my colleagues will name it. But in terms of nicknames, those kind of just happen organically and archery titanosaurus actually have nicknames. Oh, what are they?

They are Daisy and Duke. Look at that. And it's usually the students that are naming these things. Where do they come up with Daisy and Duke? It has nothing to do with jean shorts, does it? Like Daisy Dukes, Daisy Dukes for those unfamiliar are a type of micro pant fashioned from truncated denim trousers. They are beneficial in warm climates.

I actually don't know. I'm assuming that that was the joke. But I went out on a scouting trip to check some map info and came back to the quarry and discovered that my two undergraduate students had named them Daisy and Duke. And apparently there had been some multi hour conversation in which this had occurred. To this day, I don't know exactly what went down. I don't know what they came up with. I decided that if I asked, I might receive information I didn't want.

And so it was better just to let it go. That's wise. The idea that there is a titanosaur in a hillside named after Jorts is thrilling to me. So when might Daisy and Duke make their museum debut? Please put shorts on them. There's only so much exhibit space. Here's the deal with museums. It's actually like the shoe department at JCPenney.

What you see on the floor is a representative fraction of what they got in the back. So you may see a cool dinosaur or like a weird old knife or a clay jug, but the museum has literally millions of specimens on site archived for research. The LA County Natural History Museum, for example, has 35 million artifacts in storage. But if you did get to name it, genus and species, any idea where you would start? There's weird rules about names and stuff because we might actually be giving it the name. I can't say it.

Right, you can't say it. But we have a potential name in mind for what one of the two specimens in particular is probably a new species. Yeah, I squealed. What I can say is it's a cool name that came out of conversations in part with the native people who live in the area. That's awesome. I don't mean the abrasive white men.

I mean, actual native people. And we were in four quarters, so we're near, we get a little bit of everything. So it is, the dig site is near four quarters? It is. It is. A species name, we don't have anything necessarily in mind, although I suspect what my proposal would be is that we name it after the donor that funds the expedition because it is a privately funded expedition.

That's so baller though. To fund a dinosaur dig, if I were Jay-Z, I'd be like, screw a yacht, I'm going to fund a dinosaur dig. If I had like Beyonce money, I'd be like, let's go dig up some bones. The funny thing is, you don't need Beyonce money in order to do it. Really? How much money does it cost to dig up a dinosaur? This is the most fun game I've ever played.

Let's have fun with this. How much do you think a field season for us costs? Oh gosh. Well, it depends on if you have interns, if you have to pay them, or if you just have to buy them like a bottled water. We have a combination of paid employees from the museum as well as volunteers. Okay. Let's just look at just the field season.

Let's assume that salaries for the museum employees is just part of it. Part of their yearly work and everything. So just the additional money for the supplies, the trucks to get people out there, to feed them, keep them safe, make the jackets. Pay attention for some huge revelations. Get transport the specimens. I would say $800,000, $4 million, $1 billion, less than $10,000 a year. You're kidding me.

Are you kidding me? So you could buy a Toyota Camry used or a dinosaur expedition? That's right. What is this? Why haven't we all done this? A good question. There you go. I'm getting shrill.

I'm so excited. Yeah. I've yet to run anyone who underestimates the cost. They always overestimate. Oh yeah. It's just this thought that there must be pouring billions of dollars and telling tells you now. No.

No. No. No. There's no way that anyone could think it was less than $10,000. That's amazing. No. They can obviously climb in from that, but you're still talking about tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands or millions.

So less than a wedding these days. People drop some cash on their way. They drop some cash on their way. My parents said they went to two weddings last year. They were each cost over $65,000. Are you serious? Yeah. You could buy a goddamn dinosaur vertebrae for that.

The whole dinosaur maybe. Yeah. Pretty much. I mean, that's six and a half field seasons. The average American wedding costs around $30,000 and the average amount it costs to be a guest in someone's wedding, like getting there, buying nylons with no runs in them, presents is $888. Everyone, start eloping so we can reallocate that money to digging up more cool dead stuff.

So do you have a favorite dinosaur? Do I have a favorite dinosaur? Yes. I have a couple of favorite dinosaurs depending on what kind of favoritism one has in mind. The one that really has a place in your heart. You know which one it is. There's one that you really like the most. Sure.

So growing up, so the one that makes me think, ah, childhood, is this thing, Denonicus, which is very similar to Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame. Incidentally, the real Velociraptor was about coyote-sized and feathered, not giant and scaly. Dino enthusiasts love to note that the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park were not historically accurate. Denonicus, which means terrible claw, was much closer to what was portrayed as a Velociraptor. And I thought this was just someone sleeping on the job. But the confusion is said to have originated from Denonicus originally being labeled as

a subspecies of Velociraptors. Either way, these things should have had feathers. So imagine a giant clawed bird wanting to murder you. That's upsetting. It's not as upsetting to some people though as a movie getting facts wrong. Some of them are. I've seen some people get really upset about it. I don't get that upset about it.

But yeah, it's essentially if they're essentially fantasy creatures. But Denonicus was particularly important historically because it was one of the first dinosaurs that was specifically used in some of the original hypotheses about the origins of birds, especially being dinosaurs. Really? By the way, all birds are technically dinosaurs. And that may be a thing that you've accepted and you've processed in your heart or mind, but it still wears me out.

Birds are the dinosaurs. There's also a bad ass of huge claws and fast and could leap and all that kind of good stuff. So obviously as a kid, I was like, ooh, I like the one that can go and assassinate things with great purchase. If now these days, I might very well say and have said that my favorite might be chongeraptor. Chongeraptor. Now, what a weird thing.

First off, it's C-H-A-N-G-Y-U raptor. Find it, Google it. It took me a while. It was a non-bird flying dinosaur, but it looks fucked on like a bird. It's a bird with wings on its hind legs. It has four wings, four wings, and a tail that was like a foot long, big claws and teeth. What the hell, man? Which is not something you hear a lot about.

No. Now, Michael was on the team that first analyzed and published the paper naming this a new species. So, you know. So that one has a special place in my heart for that reason. How do you feel about the feathered tail that was found recently in Amber? Very cool. I actually had a little heads up that that was coming.

You did? Is there like a text thread that all the paleontologists of the world run? No. No, no, no. By the way, I have found out by hanging around scientists that they do have text chains and they do talk about nerdy news. I was added to one with some scientists and field scientists called scorpions on our faces and I love it.

Now, a little background on this. Last year, a paleontologist was trolling some amber markets in Myanmar and saw this apricot-sized piece of plant resin for sale as like a jewelry piece, whatever. The seller said there was like maybe a plant stuck in it. Yeah, no. It was actually a whole baby dinosaur tail feathered. Like the best episode of Antiques Roadshow ever. They named it Eva.

Eva is 99 million years old and probably got her tail stuck in TreeSap and died there, which is currently making me want to cry. So, RIP, little feathered buddy, and thank you for not ending up as a random, chunky pendant. That's a really neat find. It is the beginning of what you'll probably, you'll be seeing more things like that in the future. Are we going to be cloning anything?

No, you're not going to be cloning anything from this because while it more or less looks exactly like it just was preserved yesterday because the soft tissue is there. Wow. That doesn't mean that the molecular structure is completely unaltered and DNA has a reasonably short half-life, so you would just get gobbled a gook out. Like you could probably get DNA, but not, it wouldn't mean anything. Okay. DNA doesn't have to break down much and it would be very broken down and stuff.

You might not even get any, but you might be able to get a small amount, but it wouldn't matter. DNA becomes incomprehensible very quickly because it only has a four-letter alphabet. So if you only have four letters in your alphabet, your words, if you will, have to be very lengthy. So if you break them even a few times, it means nothing. If you saw the movie, Gattaca, which was from one million years ago, aka 1997, it's about genetic engineering and I always thought it was so clever that Gattaca was spelled using only the letters of DNA sequencing, so G-T-C-A. Isn't that cool?

Anyway, back to old sap chickens. Those specimens are going to be very interesting for understanding anatomy of early feathers, for example, but you're not going to be cloning anything out of that, unfortunately. Although how cool it would have been if Michael Creighton had known about those sites or if those had been available when he was writing. Right. He wouldn't even have to use the mosquito thing. I know.

He could just, because that wouldn't actually work, but it feels very plausible when you read the book, which is the whole point science fiction. He found a really nice way of suspending disbelief, but if this stuff had been published, he could have just been like, oh, and they found a bunch of stuff with a hammer. Yeah. They found a whole dinosaur hammer. They found a whole hand. Yeah.

And they just made one. That would have been great. Although I have to say the mosquito intermediate thing was clever. Yeah, it is clever. It was a very, very clever conceit. Clever girl. How do you feel about pop culture and its treatment of dinosaurs? Do you feel like it's good that it stokes people's interest or do you feel like there's

too much mythology and too much fiction? Well, I think it's both. I mean, most of it is nowhere, even in the ballpark of Acure, but on the whole, I think the advantage is outweigh the disadvantages. I think for the most part, it's awesome. I think it's great. You know how many scientists would kill to have their field as popular as paleontology? I mean, it's, I mean, how petty would I have to be to complain?

People were really interested in what I do, but sometimes they get it wrong. You know, like that would be, that would be awful. Yeah. I would just say we... You'd be a real jackass. I'd be a real jackass. Although, how did you feel about Ross on Friends being so pedantic and exhausting? Did you ever feel like he got a bad rap?

I think he earned it. He's obnoxious. Well, okay. You know, and he's supposed to be, I mean, the character's supposed to be obnoxious, right? I mean, he's supposed to be obnoxious, and David Schwimmer did a great job at the character. And interestingly enough, there is a paleontologist named David Schwimmer. Are you serious?

He was in fact serious. David Schwimmer is a paleontologist at Columbus State University, and he authored a paper called Giant Seelacanthus dobi from the upper Cretaceous of North America and its bearings on the phylogeny of Mesozoic Seelacanths. He recently posted about working on a study of some, quote, mystery coprolites. The coprolite is a fossilized turd. From the exhaustive Google image searching I've done, Dr. David Schwimmer appears to have a salt and pepper goatee and a short, wiry ponytail.

He looks like your aunt's cool boyfriend and the kind of person you want to sit around a campfire with, drinking a fresca, and talking about the best sunsets he's ever seen. Oh, God, does he love it or hate it? I don't know, probably a little bit of both, in my guess, but... God, I hope he's met David Schwimmer. I hope they hug. I want them to hug. Did you have any heroes that were paleontologists growing up?

Do you have a paleontologist just mentor or hero, or someone who maybe died that you never got to meet? Well, you know, I had a few heroes grow up, but actually I had one in particular that comes to mind. This is actually a really cool story. One of my heroes growing up was a paleontologist who worked in Baltimore named David Weissampel. And I went, he was giving a talk at a nature center near where I lived at the time. He was like, okay, I was like nine or 10 or something.

And I got super excited. I'll never forget that day. It was all adults and me. I was the only kid at this thing. And I asked more questions than everyone else combined, and he just rolled with it and he talked to me afterwards. And he basically just, not only did I think paleontology was awesome, but after that day, I decided paleontologists were just awesome people.

Oh, that's so great. You know, this heartwarming story. So anyway, so that gave me this awesome additional passion for the field that what makes the story really cool is fast forward a little over a decade later, he became my PhD supervisor. Seriously? Did he remember you at all? He didn't until I jogged his memory once. He's like, yeah, there's this kid and he's like, wait, I'm like, that was me and, oh,

that's adorable. Which is really, which is pretty cool. That's like the end. That's like the ending scene of some movie that like works out. Everything worked out. Okay. Everything worked out. Okay.

Yeah. I basically feel like I get paid to do my hobby, which is awesome. What's your least favorite thing about the job? And then we'll follow that with your favorite thing. So like least favorite quick thing about the job, least favorite thing about the job is the same least favorite thing that a lot of people would probably say about their job, which is even though there's less bureaucracy and less paperwork than a lot of jobs, there's still enough of it to be annoying.

Yeah. What about flies on the digs? We don't have a lot of problems with them in New Mexico, but the other place that I do field work these days is in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, which is an amazing place. It's incredible. But when we go there, typically in August, the mosquitoes are just terrible. It's terrifying.

You can see the swarms from a distance because it looks like smoke hanging over the grass. Man, I love bugs, but not en masse like that. Yeah. Give blood, go to Alberta. One day they're going to find one of those mosquitoes in Amber. They're going to clone you. You're going to be like, ta-da, we made it another. Well, what's your favorite thing about the job?

That one's hard just because the job actually is super fun. I love field work. I love opening drawers and new museums and the collections when I go places to travel to do research. I really do enjoy teaching. Now, of course, what I'm teaching isn't really a paleontology, but I love anatomy in general. I love teaching anatomy, and then a friend's dad had up years ago at a social gathering. Her dad came to me and he said, he'd give me a little bit of a hard time.

And he goes, so you're an academic, right? I'm like, yeah. What do you actually make? What do you... It's like salary wise? No, no, he meant like, isn't like, what do you produce? What do you make? Like, what do you make?

And... I think that seems a little rude. Oh, he was doing it. He was being rude. He was being rude, I think on purpose. And I took a quick second and said, I make doctors. Face. What did he do?

Did he start crying? No, he turned around, popped it from the beer and handed it to me. That's amazing. He was like, check me. It was just pretty good. But I do love that component. I love training, you know, future physicians. There's just so much talent and brain power just wandering around at all times.

Right. You can sit down in the Starbucks at USC and you just start talking to people and you're like, learn five new things before noon. That's a lot of quality noggin's in one area. I have some rapid fire questions for you from listeners. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners. We're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors?

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This ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay, your questions. Some of them might be ridiculous. Some of them might be too difficult to answer. I'm not sure. But okay, I'm just going to start. David wants to know any thoughts on what color dinosaurs were?

Any new thoughts on what color dinosaurs were? It depends on how new you're looking at. But within the last handful of years, yes. There was a significant breakthrough in it's still a little bit controversial, but seems to be accurate in looking at the impressions of feathers in particular, because feathers store their pigments, some of their pigments in these little kind of little capsules basically that do preserve in some of these fossils and these really well preserved fossils. You need a microscope to see them, but they're there.

They're called melanosomes and they store melanin or melanins, I should say, which is a family of different pigments. And of course, the original pigment isn't in them anymore, but the shape and size of the melanosome tells you what kind of melanin it had in it. So they can use microscopy, advanced microscopy and imaging techniques on those feathers to determine where certain melanins were located. Ooh, what is microscopy? It's just looking at things with a microscope.

Okay. That means they can get some of the blacks, grays, dark browns and reddish browns, but they can't get other colors. So we have some idea that some of these things had bold patterns, but we don't know how bold the colors were. Interesting. Okay. Tony wants to know, if dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds, does that mean that dinosaurs

tasted like chicken? They probably did taste like chicken. Yeah. So the way they're putting it is birds are just weird dinosaurs. Yeah. And they probably did. But keep in mind, the closest living relatives of birds are crocodilians. And if you've ever had alligator, it tastes a little like chicken too.

So there you go. So there's what we call a phylogenetic bracket of tastiness there and technical about it. And yeah, so I imagined it would taste pretty much like chicken. Your typical dinosaur would probably be mostly more dark meat than white meat. Because they had more hemoglobin for moving? Sort of. It's very close. So what turns the dark meat dark is something called myoglobin, which is for storing oxygen

in muscle. My bad. And it's only you. No. You're on the right track. Okay. And that's used particularly in what we call aerobic muscle. So muscle that uses a lot of oxygen is high endurance muscle.

So it's this oxygen storing protein, myoglobin, that makes dark meat dark, which is why legs, which move around more, are dark meat and chicken breast, which just sits there not flapping as white. So good luck ever looking at a roasted dinosaur the same. Adam has a question. How do you know when to switch brushes when you're digging out a fossil? How do you know when to switch brushes? When the one you currently have is unusable.

Okay. Yeah, it's, as we've already discussed, paleontologists are cheap and we will use them until they're basically worn to hell. And then you just, do you have to get the finer and finer brushes when you're getting tiny grains of sand off? You don't usually have to reduce the brush size much. Maybe a little bit. It's more things like, anything sharp, chisel sizes, things like that.

If you're doing some more detailed work, you have to go to a smaller tool. Brushes, any kind of broad soft paintbrush will kind of do certain brush types are better than others. But you know, it's not, it's not like, it's not like painting where you're going out to detail work. You're just not taking off each individual grain of sandy. You have some loose stuff and then you brush it out of the way and you have some more loose stuff and you brush out of the way.

The thing is to not damage the fossil. I always picture you guys going down to like a watercolor, two hairs on the brush, like delicately. It's good to know that you guys are just like, no, just get the dust off. I've used dental tools to etch stuff around a fossil before. That seems fun. It is for a while and then it starts to become tedious, but it's mostly fun. Yeah, I obviously love it.

But yeah, we don't go to tiny brushes. TJ wants to know how many of the fossils on display at museums are actually replicas for casts? Right, right. So it depends on what museum you're at and it all depends on the large part of what age the museum is in order that the exhibit is in particular, when it was built. If it's a really old exhibit, say it hasn't been changed since the 1920s, it's likely mostly original material because during that time they didn't do as much casting.

They didn't mind drilling through some of these things to put them on exhibit. And then as you got into the mid to late 20th century, that fell out of favor because they didn't want to put holes in the research specimen. But now, if it's a really recent exhibit, ironically enough, you're going to see more original stuff on display again because we have better armatures now, what we call cradle armatures. Armatures are the metal cradles that hold the bones in place externally. That lets you remove pieces for research and put them back, do whatever. More importantly, you don't have to drill the shit out of fossils to wire them together,

which is very old school. Now, what percentage of each of the specimens original is a whole nother ball game? You very rarely find a complete skeleton. So there's a few different ways of ending up with a complete skeleton for exhibit. One is you create a composite from multiple originals of the same species that are all similar enough in age and size that it'll more or less work as an average individual. So where your display isn't a single individual ever lived, but it's sort of an average of four or five individuals that were very similar.

So it's like a frankensaur? It's like a frankensaur. And then if the thing's really incomplete, and this happens quite often, you found it, you do have enough to know what it is, you have enough to know it's a new animal or have you, but you only have, say, 15% of the skeleton. You will then fill in the rest of the casts. But the museums are trying their best. So do some placard reading.

It's interesting to see trends in paleontology. I don't know, it's interesting to see paleontology itself evolve. Steven, one of our audio engineers, really, really, really big dinosaur nerd, like super big. You may know Steven Ray Morris from Being America's podcast, Darling, and from his own programs, such as The Purrcast, which is about cats, and See Jurassic Right, which is his podcast devoted solely to the movie, and it involves his own childhood Jurassic Park fanfic, which is lit as fuck. Well, I know I had a question.

I have a question about the Toro seratops and the Triceratops controversy. The controversy here is that sometimes dinos get mistaken for other ones, and dinosaur ghosts hate this. If the Triceratops is just a juvenile Torosaurus, or if they decided if it was actually two different species. Right, so that is actually still an ongoing debate. The majority of paleontologists that work on horn dinosaurs consider them still to be separate species,

but there is one research team that has published data indicating that they think that Triceratops is actually what we call a junior synonym. That is, it's really just a juvenile of another animal. I'm personally not entirely convinced, but it's a neat idea. But right now, I'd say the majority opinion amongst paleontologists is still that Triceratops is a valid name, but we'll see how it plays out. Thank you. No worries.

Do you have a hot goss on a brontosaurus? I'm a brontosaurus. So the short answer is brontosaurus is a valid name again. Do you like petty gossip? Okay, then this is a beautiful story. So in the late 1800s, two rich dudes, Othniel, Charles Marsh, and Edward Drinker Cope had a mutual reciprocal hatred for each other.

They tried to outdo each other in terms of paleontological supremacy. And they would sabotage each other's work. They would publicly discredit the other one. One of them, Marsh, put the wrong skull on a nepotosaurus and called it a brontosaurus. In the end, we got a lot of fossils, a lot of knowledge out of their rivalry, but they both went broke in the process, just Google bone wars. It's like a Bravo show, but with more monocles.

But here's the update on the brontosaurus. The original material that was named brontosaurus was then later found to have been comprised of multiple animals of different species. And so it was decided that brontosaurus was not a valid name, because, well, it's all known stuff. You can't combine them and say it's a new animal. Researchers recently went through that material again with better knowledge, more data than we now have

because over time you get better and better knowledge of what's out there. They cross-compared a bunch of stuff and what they found was that, yes, a lot of that material was already known species, but some of it didn't match anything and therefore was in fact new. And that means the original name holds. That's some good breaking news on the brontosaurus front. Yes. I feel like between Pluto and brontosaurus

a lot of people got really confused about who was what and what was happening. Just over 10 years ago, just to catch you up, Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet because it doesn't have enough game compared to the objects around it. That is a very casual explanation. Like Pluto somewhere just butt hurt, just crying into a wine cooler, being like, what am I? What am I, right?

Well, okay, last question. This is actually from Leela Higgins, who is an entomologist at the Natural History Museum. She wants to know, how does studying ancient fossils help the world today? That is a good question. There's a couple of different answers to that one. One answer would be that knowledge for its own sake is kind of helping the world. On a more practical side, if the question is really,

what sort of practical applications does it have? I'll be honest to say that some of it doesn't have any, but some of it does. If you want to know, for example, what kind of shit goes down when global atmospheric energy, i.e. surface temperature changes very rapidly, you need to go into the fossil record. This shit has happened before. It's not like the Earth has never seen rapid warming or rapid cooling or things before. It did.

That's one of the reasons why biologists, for example, get scared when you look at the growing temperature spike. It's because, oh yeah, we've seen this in our records. Right about the time a whole bunch of shit died, right? And it's not, of course, because stuff gets too warm. It's because of the rate, right? And if you want to know how fast things have to change to be disruptive, you have to look at the fossil record.

For more info on this, look up Hugh Jass Meteor that slammed into an area of present-day Mexico over 65 million years ago and changed the climate leading to mass extinction of 75% of the animals and plants on Earth, a.k.a. the KT event, K-T. And then lastly, in my particular case as a biomechanist, I do work with engineers on robotics applications. For the most part, if you're interested in an animal model for instance, if you want to make a running robot or something

and you want to look at inspiration from biological systems, living things are the first place you would normally go because you can get a lot more data from them obviously. However, 99.9% of all things that have ever lived are extinct. How weird is that? 99.9% of all things that have ever lived are extinct. Just do you, cut bangs, text your crush, we're all going to die. So if you limit yourself to just looking at those things, you're only getting a small fraction of the possible solutions to moving around

or eating or whatever things that you want to model. So looking at other ways it's been done is very informative. Well, I think that's kind of the basis of why people are curious about science is that the past can hopefully or possibly inform the future. So you always have a vested interest and knowledge because it kind of plots your course going forward, it seems. That's exactly it. That was a much more succinct way of putting what I rambled on about.

Well done. The idea of us having an unmanned aviation that's in the shape of a pterosaur, just like a robotic pterosaur, can you work on that? I could probably work on that. I don't know how useful that would be, but we could probably work on it. That would be pretty funny. A writable robot pterosaur that you can use to get to work. Can I have it?

Delay traffic? Yeah, is that okay? We'll see what I can do. Put it on your to-do list. To very gingerly stalk Dr. Michael Habib, find him on the Twitters at AeroEvo, A-E-R-O-E-V-O, because aerial evolution is his bag. To see photos of his field work in the museum,

but probably not cadavers, follow him on Instagram. He's at Habibinator, just as it sounds. This podcast is on Twitter at oligiespod and on Instagram at oligies, and I'm on both of those as Ali Ward. If you like this podcast and you like not having to listen to a bunch of ads, consider supporting it for about the price of a coffee per month on Patreon. I'm putting this out myself because I love doing it. Hopefully you like it.

So join the community on Patreon. Thank you to everyone who's already supporting on Patreon. I want to hug all of you. And thank you to anyone who's bought merch at oligiesmerch.com. And to my friend Katie for her amazing animation she's making, which she'll see soon. And for the feedback she gave me in helping shape the show. Dude, you roll.

And to my folks who dug up that old tape, who I guess that makes it kind of a fossil. It was obtained by digging. And who listened to this, even though the language and subject matter can be not safe for parents. But above all else, remember ask smart people dumb questions before a future urologist is dissecting you or a meteor crashes into the planet and kills us all.

Next week, gemology. So then we like get outside and then it's like the deepest, biggest boom you've ever felt. And it was just like boom. And I was like, oh my god, this is scary. Okay, say goodbye everybody. Bye. you