Quirks and Quarks - Pumas vs. penguins, and other clever carnivores

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

From tiny T. rexes to a car-sized sea monster, we revisit some of our favourite stories about predators in their prime, like:Smaller tyrannosaur solves decades-long debate about the T. rexAmong Yellowstone’s top predators, wolves beat out cougars as the top dogBears with us. Tracking grizzlies in B.C.Cleveland’s ancient car-sized sea monster had bony fangs made out of its skullWild wolves run for their lives when they hear Big Bad Humans nearbyWhy penguin-eating pumas live closer together in Patagonia

What are we doing today? We're going to save some puppies. When there's a dog in need, Brady Olivera and Alex Blumberg are hitting the ground running. Catch the new series Must Love Dogs, a heartwarming show about a dog-loving couple, and Brady's life as a running back for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and a CFL All-Star. Must Love Dogs. Stream now on CBC Gem. This is a CBC podcast.

I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to the best of Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, ferocious animal stories from top to bottom, such as a collaborative effort to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear rainforest in British Columbia. We'll also hear about a car-sized sea monster that lived 360 million years ago in a shallow sea covering what's now Cleveland, Ohio. We'll walk with wolves in Poland, trek through Yellowstone National Park to hear how two apex predators interact, solve the mystery of the smaller Tyrannosaurs, and see how Pumas in Patagonia are making a comeback and living closer to humans. All this today on the best of

quarks and quarks. Nobody move a muscle. That's the sound of a Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park three, spotting a group of people and then stomping after them. They'd be an easy meal for the T-Rex if they're caught. It's just so massive, and the humans so pitifully small. But not all Tyrannosaurs dug up in what is now Western North America were as huge as the ones brought to life in Jurassic Park. Some were curiously smaller. And that became a real head scratcher for paleontologists,

who long wondered, are these smaller specimens simply young teenage T-Rexes? or a new Tyrannosaur species altogether. Well, now, after decades of debate, paleontologists think they've solved it, thanks to a spectacular game-changing fossil called the Dueling Dinosaurs. Dr. James Napoli is a paleontologist

at Stony Brook University in New York and the co-lead author on the new study. Hello, and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Dueling dinosaurs? That hints at some kind of drama here. this fossil? What's it look like? These fossils are absolutely incredible. They are two of the most

beautifully preserved dinosaurs I have ever seen. The Tyrannosaurus preserved on its back with its legs curled up. It's a very dramatic fossil. And what's the other one? The other one is a triceratops, and the triceratops is preserved more or less on its side. So were they

actually dueling at the time, do you think? We know that these fossils were buried at the same time as one another, but we don't know if they died at the same time. It's possible that they were both killed in some cataclysmic event. It's possible that they were actually fighting each other to the death and happened to die in a place where they could be fossilized. It's possible that the triceratops was already dead and it was being eaten by the Tyrannosaur when both of them were buried. We just don't know for sure yet.

So why then was this Tyrannosaur such a game changer? Well, this Tyrannosaur turned out to be the answer to a decades-long scientific debate, which is whether these fossils are juveniles of Tyrannosaurus rex, everybody's favorite dinosaur, or whether they were members of a completely different species of Tyrannosaur that's been called Nanoturanus. Nanoturanus? Yes. Small Tyrannosaur. Exactly, exactly.

And that tells you why we thought these might be juveniles of T-Rex. They're about half the size of T-Rex at maximum. Okay. So I'm trying to picture that. How big would it be if I was to stand beside it? If you were to stand beside this animal, it would be about seven or eight feet tall when its head was held up very high. And it may have been about 20 feet long. So I'm sorry, I'm American.

I speak in feet here. Meters-wise, I think there's two to three meters tall and about four to five meters long. So how did you solve the debate about whether or not it was a teenage T-Rex or a new species? We used a lot of different kinds of evidence to make that decision. The first thing that we looked at were just the features of its anatomy. We saw that its arms were abnormally long for a Tyrannosaur, much longer than the arms of even the biggest T-Rex specimens we've seen. Its hands in particular were very, very large,

and it had a huge hooked claws on each of its fingers. We also saw that it had a vestigial third finger, unlike T-Rex, which just has two fingers on each hand. In its tail, there were about 10 fewer vertebrae than T-Rex had. And in its skull, we saw many more teeth in its teeth. jaws and a bunch of features showing that the cranial nerves and blood vessels and sinuses were in different positions than they are in T-Rex adults. And so all of those things told us that we were probably dealing with a different species,

but what clinched it for us is that when we took a section of one of the leg bones and looked at it under a microscope, we were able to look at its growth record. So we could see a complete record of the animal's growth from its early childhood to its eventual demise. And what we saw is that at the moment it died, it was in the process of forming a feature of the bone microstructure that we call an external fundamental system, which just means that the lines of growth, just like the rings in a tree, were spaced very close together, telling us that it was achieving maturity as it died. So this is an animal that

died right on the cusp of full maturity at the cessation of growth. It was not able to keep growing up into a T-Rex not only because of all the differences we saw, but because it was done growing at all. Oh, I see. So it wasn't a teenager. That was as big as it was going to get in its life. Exactly. It wasn't a teenager. Now, in terms of years, it was close. It was about 20 years old when it died. But we've been previously assuming that these were teenagers in terms of their development and that they were far from their adult size. And we don't think that's true anymore. You say it had longer arms and bigger claws and hands and hands and hands and hands and hands of this animal probably tell us that it was still using its forelims in hunting to. So what would give this animal an advantage? So the long arms and hands and claws of this animal probably tell us that it was still using its forelims in hunting to some degree. Animals like T-Rex were much larger and had much smaller arms, and so we think they had switched over to hunting purely with their head and jaws. Nanoturanus probably was still using its hands to some degree. Nanoturanus also had the longest legs relative to the size of its body of any Tyrannosaur.

And so we think that this was a tyrannosaur that was more specialized for chasing down fast-moving prey. rather than T-Rex, which we think may have specialized in hunting slower-moving, more heavily protected prey, like T-Seratops itself. I've heard T-Rex described as a mouth with legs. I think that's a pretty good description, yeah. Would these two species have lived at the same time? Yes, they would have. So Nanoturanus and Tyrannosaurus Rex coexisted in the same ecosystems in Western North America. These are rocks of the Hell Creek formation, as we call it in the States.

It's equivalent with a few rock units in Canada, and so we think it's all effectively one ecosystem. And so they were probably, to some degree, competitors in that ecosystem. So does that mean there were even more Tyrannosaurus around than we thought? It does. And in fact, there's a twist that means there were even more than we thought when we were finishing the study. So as we approached the end of our research, we said, okay, we have Tyrannosaurus round, and we have nanoturanus, Lansensis is the species name. But we looked again at a famous fossil of nanoturanus

that's housed in the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Illinois. And we found that it had a number of subtle but consistent differences with respect to every other nanotaranis specimen that we had found. And as we found more and more of these differences, we just said we never would have thought this, but there's actually another species of nanotaranis that's been hiding right under our noses. And so it wasn't just one becoming two, one became three.

Boy. It was very exciting, yeah. That's another good reason that humans weren't around at that time, because if the big one didn't get you, a little one would. Indeed. And I think these little guys were much more in the size range where they'd look at humans as a good meal. We're probably too small for T-Rex to bother with too much.

But for a nanoturanus, I think we'd be just the right size. Well, now that you've settled this decades-long debate, what's it mean for our understanding of the Tyrannosaurus that roamed around was now called Western North America? Well, that's a really good question. In short, this changes everything we thought we knew about T-Rex. We had thought for a long time that T-Rex had such abnormal growth with its juveniles looking so different from the adults and staying as juveniles for a long time

because the juveniles were doing something completely different in the ecosystem, that they were hunting different kinds of prey to avoid competing with the adults. Now we know that that idea was based on. the mistaken identification of these fossils as T-Rex juveniles. And so that's only one of a multitude of scientific hypotheses that were based on something that we now know isn't true, and that need to be revised as future generations of paleontologists continue to question what we thought we knew about everybody's favorite dinosaur. Well, Dr. Napoli, thank you so much for your time, and congratulations on solving the puzzle.

Thank you so much, Bob. It was a pleasure to talk to you today. Dr. James Napoli is a paleontologist at Stony Brook University. in New York. The return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park is a good news conservation story about what happens when you bring a top predator back to a landscape. After being driven out of the area by 1920, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, and in the years since, they've continued to reclaim their place at the top of the food chain. But wolves are not the only apex.

predator in the park. Cougars share a similar story, where over a hundred years ago, they were killed in droves. And after protections were put in place in the 1960s and 70s, they've been making a slow comeback. So now Yellowstone is home to two apex predators, cougars and wolves. For the past nine years, researchers have been tracking these animals to see just how they interact within the ecosystem. And they found that when it comes to these apex predators, wolves are still the top dogs. Wesley Binder is a PhD candidate in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

Hello and welcome to our program. Hey, Bob, thanks for having me. First of all, how common is it these days to get two apex predators in a landscape like this? Well, it's becoming more and more common. We reintroduce wolves to Yelstone in central Idaho in 1995. more recently to Colorado, and wolves are quickly recolonizing large portions of the American West. So ecological communities with both wolves and cougars are becoming more common every year. Well, how many wolves and how many cougars are there now in Yellowstone Park?

We have about 100 wolves on average in Yellowstone National Park and about 40 cougars, at least in the northern part of the park. So during the winter, a lot of animals congregate in the northern parts of the park where there's less snow. And so that's where we do a lot of our work, including density estimates on cougars. And there really aren't that many cougars in the interior of the park. So all of our work is in the northern part where we have most of these wolf and cougar interactions take place. Well, how do you track them and keep track of their motions? So we put a lot of work into capturing and fitting these animals with GPS collars. So that leads to a lot of our predation work. These GPS collars send us their locations

in real time so then we can go hike out into the field, any place where they spend time and go look to see what they're eating there. And that also allows us to look at those data and determine when they're interacting with each other and what might be driving those encounters. Well, cougar's a pretty big cat. How do you put a collar on it? Yeah, so it's a pretty unique process. We actually hire a houndsman, so a guy who works with trained hound dogs who can follow the scent of a cougar. So those hound dogs will find a cougar track or will help them find a track. They follow it based on that scent until they catch up to the cougar.

And the cougar runs away until it gets tired and it runs up a tree. And so these hound dogs, they're very incredible creatures. They can go all day and they're very driven to try and catch that cat. But the cats just run up a tree and that gives us time to get to that tree, chemically immobilize it, climb up the tree once the cat is not really with it anymore, and then rope it up and safely lower to the ground where we can fit a GPS collar on it and then also do other things like take blood, take measurements, and collect samples.

You mean you climb up a tree with a cougar in it? That's right. And you hope the drugs are doing their job. Wow. That's amazing. That's incredible. Okay. So take me through what you found.

What are some of the interactions you saw between the cougars and the wolves? Yes. So what we found was that wolf theft of cougar kills accounted for about how. half of their interactions. So wolves and Yellowstone live in Paxa average about 10 individuals, and that means when these two different species interact, wolves dominate the interactions, and they can steal cougar kills. So wolves were very efficient at sealing these kills from cougars, and that's where a lot of their interactions take place. But what we found is that these interactions depended on the prey choice of cougars. So when cougars kill large prey like elk,

these interactions were more likely to happen because elk take a long time to eat. That gives wolves more time to find the cougars sit on those kills. In contrast, when cougars kill smaller prey like deer, these interactions were far less likely to happen. Wow. So the cougars and the wolves are literally fighting like cats and dogs. That is correct. And it's because when prey are killed, that resource becomes much more coveted.

It's much more easy to eat a dead elk than a live elk. But cougars are pretty big animals. Couldn't a cougar take a wolf? I mean, why are the wolves winning? Yeah, so I mean, we think one-on-one that a cougar would win those interactions. They're about the same size, and even male cougars tend to be quite a bit larger than your average wolf. And they have sharp claws and strong teeth and all the tools that would win a fight one-on-one. But it's because wolves live in packs.

When they have that numerical advantage, they win these interactions with cougars. Oh, I see. So the wolves are stealing the cougars kill. So what are the cougars doing in response to that? Well, they generally try to run away. And what we saw with our GPS data is that when there's good habitat nearby, whether it be trees or rugged terrain, the cougars can run off the kill but stay in the area. And we saw a lot of back and forth at these carcass sites. The problem for cougars is when there's no such terrain like that available.

So if there's no trees to climb or no rugged terrain to navigate, wolves will sometimes kill cougars when they cannot escape. Wow. So is this changing the cougars behavior in any way? It has. So previous research that was done in Yellowstone right after wolves were reintroduced showed changes in cougar space use. They needed to stay closer to this escape terrain, if you will, places with trees, rugged terrain so that if they were to encounter wolf pack, they could quickly get away. So the distribution of cougars in Yellowstone has changed in response to the return of wolves. And what about their prey? Yeah, so we have seen changes in the diets of cougars, and we think that's largely driven by a change in the elk population.

So in the mid-90s, there were a lot of elk and yellowstone, like the most we've seen in the last 100 years. And that population has since declined. So cougars and wolves have both changed their diets in response to that. So wolves are eating more deer and particularly scavenging a lot of bison. We have about 6,000 bison in yellow scum. National Park. And cougars are eating a lot more deer as well. So they now eat over 40% of their diet is deer, which means that this is a way for them to reduce their interactions with wolves

because there's less theft from wolves at their kill sites when it's a deer kill. Oh, I see, because the cougar can eat the deer faster before the wolf comes around. Yes, that's exactly it. So what then overall effect is this having on the ecosystem as a whole? Well, it's very interesting to look at all their predation changing in response to major changes to the prey communities. So we had, you know, really abundant prey species like elk that wolves and cougars were both primarily eating and they declined. But what's interesting to see with the diets of wolves and cougars is that they're both eating different things now. So cougars really are eating a lot more deer.

Wolves are eating a lot more bison. So they're kind of spreading out the effects of apex predators. on the landscape. Well, why is it important to know how these predators are interacting with each other in the park? Yeah, I mean, this is pretty important as wolves and cougars continue to recolonize large portions of the American West and other places in Canada as well. So we've had these large predators historically, and now they're coming back again, and we want to know what their impact is on ecological communities.

So a lot of people are going to be wondering how, you know, Apex Parenthooders, predators are going to affect large herbivores like elk and deer. But to answer that question, we need to know how these two apex predators interact with each other. Mr. Binder, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob. Wesley Binder is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University. Now to Bear Country in southwestern British Columbia. There, scientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nawa-Colese, Council have partnered to track grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest.

It's called the Bear ID Project. We caught up with the scientists in the field this summer and spoke with one of the First Nations members involved in the project. Hey, oh, hey bear. So when we're walking through the forest, if we don't have very clear sightlines of where we're going, we may just say, hey, oh, hey bear. It doesn't really matter what we say. It's more the tone of our voice.

Hey, oh. Hey, bear. So it's just to let anybody in kind of the local area around us know. We're not trying to push all the bears in the forest away from us. It's just that close proximity. Hey, bear. Gaila Kessler, my name is Melanie Clapham. I'm a conservation scientist when now we'll call us council.

I'm also a co-director of the Berry Dee Project. Some nice tracks there. So we use camera traps primarily as our main kind of source of data. So we put camera traps in areas that we think are important to us. And this is where we work quite closely with guardians to help us understand where could these areas be. Oh, yeah. Wow. Gaila Kessla, I'm Tashina James Matalpe. Hello, my name is Tishina James Matalpe.

I am a member of the Klauetsu's First Nation. and my role is a guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanakola's council. Let's move over to the camera. How guardians have helped with this project going into the woods is from the beginning on, you know, choosing where they were going to set up the cameras because the guardians have been the eyes and the ears out in our territories for a very long time. And so they have just the knowledge of where they, see bears and where they see the signs of bears. And we also know from knowledge passed down that

there's certain plants that, you know, in the springtime, when we can, you know, see and smell skunk cabbage, then the bears are probably going to be coming out really soon. The camera's still up, so that's good. So we record 20 seconds short video clips so that we can detect grizzly bears as they pass by the camera. And it helps us then to understand their use. over time. I'll just get the iPad out if you want to start. Yeah, I'm doing the camera. And also it helps us understand their presence over space as well. So we can put a few cameras in a few different places in one river system. We can put cameras between river systems that we think are important to try and look at their movement between them. So cameras on. And so it gives us a nice picture. And if we

collect this data over multiple years, we can look at whether that changes over time. time as well. There's 302 triggers on this camera. Oh, nice. Oh, that's good. And then after that comes kind of the processing and the analysis of that data that's collected. So we are harnessing AI to help us to kind of speed up the next step so that we can really get into those questions that are important to understand more about bears and the questions that are important for the nations that we work for as well. Oh, cool. There was a mum with two cubs down here. Oh, nice. running past the camera. Oh, cool. For us, it's important to learn about the grizzly bears, specifically for when it comes to decision-making and protecting important areas that the bears live in

so that they can continue to live and thrive in these areas. Oh, yeah, to first-year Cubs, hey? Cubs for a year. Great. We can say, okay, we're interested in the presence of females with Cubs on the landscape. So we can go back and we can say, how many females? of cubs did we see that year? And what was the salmon like the previous year? Because we know that salmon has a huge influence on how many cubs we see. And if we can recognize individual bears,

we can kind of track that over time and we can say, well, did those cubs survive or not? Okay, onto the next camera. And yes, we can observe really interesting behavior. Sometimes we see breeding on the cameras as well. It's always fascinating to look at the date and time stamp on a camera trap video because sometimes what we actually see is that there was a bear in this area 10 minutes ago, half an hour ago, very close in time.

Oh, there's some scat there too. That looks fairly fresh, hey? Yeah, definitely. But we don't always know until we look at the footage how recent, you know, that site has been visited by a bear or a cougar or, you know, whatever else. Was the camera active? The camera was active. How many triggers? 270? So I think we're often in very close proximity, especially because we're going into places

where we actively set a camera up because we think there are going to be bears and, you know, are there all hard life? Right, well, we'll take those back then and have a look. Generally, bears don't just move through the landscape, making a lot of vocalizations. Okay, let's see what we've got. Oh, there's a bear. Oh, nice. Vocalizing. Wow. If we hear vocalizations, it's usually a female to her cobs or vice versa, or maybe a breeding pair together. So that's usually most of the time the only cases where we would hear a bear making noise. You know, sometimes if you've seen videos of interactions between bears, they'll do this thing called jarring, where they're kind of interacting directly with one another and they'll kind

of raw almost. You know, it's kind of like a roar. But they'll only really do that during interactions. What we see sometimes in films and things where a bear standing on its back legs and roaring into the sky, that doesn't happen in nature with bears. Oh, look, female with cubs. Oh, cool. And it's still exciting, especially if we recognize the bears. Oh, we know that female, don't we?

Definitely. So for example, like if it's, you know, if it's the springtime and we see a female that we recognize and she's got, you know, new cubs. That's always really exciting. Oh, there's the cub investigating the camera. And we're at the point now where we've been observing them for so long that we're starting to see like multiple generations of bears. Rubbing on the cap.

Could we screw the cameras to the trees, isn't it? Some of the most delightful videos of bears that I've seen have been just bears doing bare things that you just don't even realize that's a part of their. personality or the way that they act. We have one bear camera that's set up and this one bear goes in front of it very regularly and he digs his hands into the ground and he does it in the exact same spots every single time he walks past this bear camera. So if you were to go there, you'd see these big like holes in the ground that as he's continually just like walking by

and just seeing things like that that you wouldn't see a bear. doing that out in the wild face-to-face because they're not comfortable enough to do that in front of a human. So that behavior, well, we call it stomping. Some people call it like the cowboy walk as well. Usually it's very close to a scent marking tree. So we think that it is tied to like scent communications. So they grind their feet into the ground and it creates these depressions. Sometimes they'll urinate at the same time and kind of grind that all into the ground as well. And it creates this kind of of pathway and then the next bear, usually a male that comes along will then put his feet in the exact same places and kind of stomp and put his scent over the top of the previous

males that was there. So we think that they're communicating in that way. I think the benefits that we get from bringing different kind of ways of knowing and different approaches to understanding grizzlies and the land in general, they come together and they provide us with a much richer data sets than necessarily what we would get kind of independently. So the cameras are given us that kind of 24-7 view of the landscape of what's happening on the landscape. And the knowledge that we can get by working with guardians can help us to understand the context of that information.

It's honestly a huge honor to be able to see how they interact with the land around them and get a glimpse into the lives of bears. even though we're not there to see it every day. It's like they're there doing their thing without humans, even though we're still there to see it. That was conservation scientist Dr. Melanie Clapham and Tashina James Matalpi from the Kloitsis First Nation and the Bear ID Guardian Logistics Coordinator for the Nahuacola's Council.

I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to the best of Corks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Hi, everybody. I'm J.B. Poisson and I host Front Burner. How many podcasts have you heard where people are searching out facts on the fly? Or where they just talk in circles and two hours later, you're not really sure what you just learned. Well, Front Burner is not that. Five days a week, you get one story a day.

It's deeply researched about 20 minutes long, and hopefully we answer all the questions that you want to ask. We do lots of Canadian news, but a wide range of topics too. Find and follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. There we go. Where do you think you're going? Oh, my goodness. Look at this, y'all. Big perch!

A big perch is a decent catch on Lake Erie by today's standards. but fishing in the same place around 360 million years ago might have brought up a much more terrifying and awesome beast, the Dunkalostias Terelli. It's a type of armored fish we've known about for a while now from other fossil finds around the world, but the Dunkalosteus species from around modern-day Lake Erie have largely been an anatomical mystery, until now.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has many of these Dunk Colostius-Torrelli giant head fossils on display, and Russell Engelman wanted to investigate. He's from Cleveland and has always wondered about these monsters fish. He's a Ph.D. student in biology at Case Western Reserve University and the lead author of the study of Cleveland's famous sea monsters. Hello, and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hello.

First of all, just describe what the fossils at the museum look like. So, Duncalostias is a type of fish known as an Arthur Dyer, and this is important to understand what they look like. So an Arthur Dyer is kind of like a shark in that most of their body is composed of cartilage, but then they have a layer of armor covering their head and parts of their torso. And what would happen is when these animals died, usually most of their body would rot away, but this layer of bony armor covering most of their body would preserve. And that's what we'd see in these museums. They would take these armor plates and put them back together to get an idea of what this fish looked like. Oh, so they're fish heads that you have. They're heads, but they're also a lot of the torso.

There's a pair of ball and socket joints that look like a door hinge at the back of the skull. And this is where the skull meets the spine. So there's a portion behind that that's equivalent to like chest and trunk armor. Now, what was it about these fossils that captured your attention? They're from Cleveland. so I was interested in stuff from my hometown, and I've also been very interested in the anatomy of these fish. Again, they have that very strange armored anatomy.

Their jaws are very strange. They don't necessarily have teeth in the way we think of them, but they have these mouth parts that are formed by the bones wearing against each other to form these sharpened blades made from their own jawbones, as well as these large bony fangs, which are known as odontoid. How big can these fish get? probably you're looking at an animal that's about three and a half to four meters long.

The margins of error maybe could get up to four and a half meters, but like you're talking about an animal a little bit smaller than a car. I mean, these are big animals. No kidding. Yeah. Boy. So why did you want to take a closer look at them now if the museum has had these fossils for a while? Well, so this is a persistent, this is a problem with a lot of paleontology is you'll get these fossils that are well known,

But then it turns out that they're just not really well studied. These Cleveland Museum specimens were collected as part of the 1920s construction boom in Cleveland. That was when Cleveland was called the sixth city. It was like the sixth biggest city in the U.S. So there's lots of housing going up and they'd run across these bones all the time. But what happened is the guy who oversaw the collection of it basically sat on these fossils for most of his career and they never got described. Wow. So once you started investigating this further, what did you find out about it?

Well, what I found out that was kind of surprising is that there really hadn't been a lot of research that was done on the skull anatomy of this fish. There had been bits and pieces here and there. But the thing is that we, the orthodier paleontology had advanced by leaps and bound since then. There were several really nice monographs that really detailed how these things heads were put together. and then in like the 1960s there was this site from Australia these things were were basically preserved right as they died so all the bones were in place perfectly preserved three-dimensional and they often preserved quite a bit of the cartilage that was left with them as well

so now we had these perfectly preserved arthritis that even in some cases had bits of the muscles still attached to them and we understood what their jaws looked like a lot better but no one had really taken what we learned and then went back and said okay what does dungalostias look like now that we know what to look for. So what did you find? Well, we found that the jaws of Duncalosteus had a lot more cartilage than had been suggested

by previous authors. When people see Duncalosteus, they often think the jaws are all there is, but it turns out about like half of the jaw is actually composed of cartilage. So if you look at the jaw bone, at first glance, it looks like there's no way for the jaw to actually connect to the skull. And that's because there's a cartilage on it that rarely preserves. and that's where the actual the joint

where the skull and the jaw would connect together goes. And the same thing with the chin. They look like the jaw bones

look like they don't go together at the chin, but there's actually a big fist-sized chunk of cartilage that sits in between the jawbones

and actually connects the two. What's really weird is that this big, bony lower jaw, unless you count the cartilage, it doesn't actually have any connections with any other parts of the body.

What about teeth? Well, and that's, so that's what's kind of complicated is this group that Don Colossius belongs to. A lot of the members in it have what look like teeth, and it was debated for years whether or not these things were actually teeth. And it turns out that, yes, Duncaloastius doesn't really have teeth, but it's not because they're super primitive. It's that their ancestors had teeth, and don't Colosteus had little vestigial teeth in the sense like humans have a vestigial appendix.

Okay. So how then do they choose? What's the jaw do to cut into meat, for example? So in placoderms, they only have one set of teeth. And what happens is in the big ones, as the teeth wear down, the jaw bones begin to scrape against each other. And they begin to sharpen against each other. And so by the time, in Duncoelopsias, by the time these animals are, in fact, juveniles, the teeth are almost all gone. And the whole mouth is composed of these sharpened blades and spikes made of bone.

and that's what's used to like bite into prey or cut into prey. Oh, wow. So just the top end of the jawbone is like a knife edge. And that's one big piece. Yep. Why have so many of these dungalosteus fossils been found in Cleveland specifically? What was the environment like 300 million years ago? Well, so 300 million years ago, Cleveland was located about at the latitude of Rio de Janeiro.

It would be subtropical, you know, like the climate you'd see in. Brazil. And what had happened is there is this little narrow inlet of the ocean that extended inwards all the way up to about where Lake Ontario is today called the Cascasia Sea. And this is a very narrow inlet of the sea, kind of like, say, the Chesapeake Bay, that was kind of off to the side. And because of that, it had a stagnant basin with the bottom layers of the water having no oxygen. And what this meant is there is no bacteria and scavengers to break down things after they died. So when these fish were swimming around, like they lived everywhere. We have done Colossius fossils from Morocco and Poland and Russia. But in Ohio, the conditions were

right that when these things died, they'd fall to the bottom of the basin and their bodies would not immediately rot away or get eaten by scavengers. And that meant they got preserved relatively well. Boy. Well, with an animal that large living in the sea back then, do you know why it went extinct? So, Duncan Colostius lived during the Devonian period. At the very end of this period, we had a major mass extinction of life. Your listeners may be familiar with the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. That's one.

There's the Great Dying. That's another one. There's actually five of these in Earth's history. And the Devonian extinction is weird because it's actually a two-part extinction. And the second part, that's the grand finale to the period, is called the Hangenburg event. And in fact, in Cleveland, at the very top of the rock layers that have been, Dunkalostias, there's a chemical signature of the Hangenberg event.

So Dunkalostias is like T-Rex, and it lived right into this extinction, and this extinction happened, and all the placiderms wiped out. And these are, these were the dominant group of fish of the time, they all just disappear off the face of the earth. Mr. Engelman, thank you so much for your time. Yeah.

Mr. Russell Engelman is a PhD student in biology at Case Western Reserve University. From Peter and the Wolf, the Three Little Pigs, and Little Red Riding Hood, the idea of the menacing, scary, big, bad wolf has been quite common in our folklore over the years. It makes sense that our ancestors would warn each other to stay away from wolves. After all, they are a predator, and we should give them their space. Well, new research on wild wolves in Poland has found that they and their prey are afraid of us big, bad humans,

and restrict themselves to the darkness of night if we're nearby. And that's a good thing. Dr. Leanna-Zanette is a professor of biology at Western University in London, Ontario. She led the study. Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Oh, thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Why do you want wolves to be afraid of humans? Because the fear that wolves have of humans,

that is exactly what protects us from wolves, right? When wolves are afraid of humans, then we are safe because they don't want to be anywhere near us. So having wolves fearful of us, that that has its uses. So do we have any reason to believe that they're losing their fear of humans? So the partial recovery of wolf populations, particularly where they've been exterminated in Europe and the United States, has led to increased human wolf encounters. And this is often ascribed to legal protection, which has led to wolves losing their fear of humans. That sort of thing, that perception has contributed to the EU's parliament's downgrading of the listing of wolves in May of 2025 from strictly protected to protected, right?

But again, you know, it is a perception. And there has been no manipulation, no experimental test of whether or not. that's actually the case. And whether or not increases in human wolf encounters is a result of legal protection allowing the emergence of fearless wolves. Well, take me through your work. How did you study whether wolves are actually afraid of us or not? So with our collaborators, we worked in this area called the Tukala Forest. It's in Poland. So it's in the EU, and the wolves at the time were strictly protected. and they're coming back, right?

And so wolves are incredibly elusive. They have huge home ranges. And so another one of our collaborators has been working on the wolf populations that have been coming back here since the 1990s, and he's been working on them for decades. He's been putting up camera traps, and he's done genetic analysis,

so he knows that there's about 15 different wolf packs in this area. And he also, through the camera trapping, knows where the wolves are likely to be. Right? So that's really, really important for this kind of study where you've got to get animals on camera so that you can gauge their behavioral responses. And so in the end, we ended up with 10 packs, right, which is quite a lot. And it was over a huge area. So it was 1,000 kilometers square and we conducted this for 15 weeks. Wow. Besides the camera traps, what other equipment did you use? Yeah. So we use what we call our automated behavioral response systems. And there are systems that we designed in our lab. They consist of just an off-the-shelf camera trap that then is connected to a custom-built speaker.

We stick this on a tree, and for the wolves, it was at these crossroads, because we know that wolves really like to use roads. And they're put in a tree, and then the idea is that when the wolf and or its prey comes about 10 meters from the camera, that begins the camera. That starts the video, and three seconds later, that starts our speakers, which then plays one of our treatment. It's only a 10-second sound, but from that sound, we're able to gauge the animal's response to each of our treatments. So in this case, we had humans, we had dogs barking, and we had a control, which was birds. Oh, okay, so those were the three sounds that you were playing. So just people talking and dogs barking and birds. So how did the wolves react to those different sounds?

Well, the wolves were terrified of humans. They were two times more likely to run when humans were being broadcast compared to the control. And they also were two times faster to just completely abandon the site. So they just took off. And if you're able to see some of the videos, you know, it's really pretty amazing because the birds are playing and the wolves kind of look at it, which is good because, you know, we know that they hear the vocalization. But then they just continue on with their business and they hear a human. a lot of the times, they don't even bother looking in the direction of the speaker, right?

They just bolt it out of there. Boy, and these are wild wolves. Yeah. Did any other animals react to these sounds? Yeah, so we were interested in the wolves, but we were also interested in their prey and their responses. Because the only sort of hint of evidence that we have about wolves and fear is that in areas where humans and wolves overlap, wolves become nocturnal. And the one exception in this study was where wolves were almost all diurnal. And this happened to be a place where there are absolutely no humans because it was

the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone. So no people, so there's nothing for the wolves to fear. So what our results suggest is that, you know, nocturnality is associated with fearfulness. But the other hypothesis is that maybe, you know, their prey are fearful of humans and so they're becoming more nocturnal, which would then mean that the wolves would have to track their prey into the darkness. But that's not what we found. We found that they are absolutely, both predator and prey are 100% fearful of humans. And because of that, it sort of traps them in the night so that they're restricted in their activities to nighttime so as to avoid that lethal predator, humans. Well, what does this all mean about how we should deal with wolves moving forward?

Yeah, so when we think about humans, we know that humans are uniquely lethal, right? And we also know that humans are unique in terms of having surrounding us, you know, super abundant, super high quality food. And so the reason that wolves might risk an encounter with the human is because of that reward. And so instead of thinking of it as a problem about fearless wolves, we had to start thinking about hungry wolves. That the issue here is that wolves are hungry, right? And so the take home then would be to basically not feed the wildlife, whether that be livestock, whether that be our garbage, whether that be, you know, livestock, circuses, left around, etc.

So the wolves aren't really attacking humans. It's not like Little Red Riding Hood. It's thereafter our garbage or our sheep. That's right. The thing is, too, that we can live with wolves, right? I mean, people do. In Canada, we have 60,000 wolves. Like many places, we tried to exterminate them, but we failed.

And so, you know, they're still across 80% of their historic range. And so, you know, we know in the main how to deal with wildlife, right? Like we know, we understand that the mechanism is food conditioning. And so you don't bring, when you're out hiking, you know, camping, you don't bring food back into your tent, right? Because you're just asking for trouble. But in a lot of places where they've been exterminated, they haven't had to worry about these things. They haven't have to worry about bringing their livestock, you know, into a barn at night or, you know, putting a fence around them. or worry about where they're going to put their garbage

or whether they're going to dispose of a livestock carcasses because they haven't had to worry about it. Dr. Zaneth, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Lianna Zanette is a professor of biology at Western University in London, Ontario. In Argentina's Patagonia region, Pumas used to be the apex predator.

But as the story so often goes, a hundred years ago when humans came through, establishing sheep farms in the region, they wiped the Pumas out to protect their flocks. And with the big cats gone, certain smaller animals, like Magellanic penguins, thrived in their absence. But in the past few decades, thanks in part to some strong conservation efforts, Pumas have made a comeback. And recently, researchers studying the effects of this rebound, notice that the recovering Pumas have changed their diets, preferring to feast on penguins and adopting some unusual behaviors along with it. Dr. Mitchell Serota is an ecologist at Duke Farms in New Jersey. He was part of the team.

Hello and welcome to our program. Hi. Thanks so much for having me out. First of all, tell me about the Pumas. What led to their populations rebounding? Yeah, so there was some really strong conservation efforts down in the region in the past several decades. As farms have become less productive, they've been purchased by conservation NGOs like Tompkins Conservation and sent over to Park Service for Management. And over time, these Pumas have naturally recolonized these areas where they're extracurated from and their populations have rebounded. Oh, so the Pumers just came back on their own, no captive breeding or anything like that. Exactly. No captive breeding, no reproductions, just passive. rewilding. Do you know how many Pumas are there now? No, we don't have a good number of the exact

population size. What we were doing for this study was actually looking at density, specifically density around the penguin colony itself. So we found that there's 13 puma's per 100 square kilometers. 13 per 100 square kilometers. That's not very much. For Pumas, it's a massive amount. It's actually what we believe is the highest population density of Pumas across their entire range. You can find Pumas all the way from Canada, all the way down to South America, and there have been several studies looking at population densities of Pumas across their range, and we believe this is the highest population that's ever been documented. Now, historically, before they were wiped out, what were the Pumas eating?

So Pumas across their range can consume up to 200 different prey species. So it's not really surprising that they have different diets shifts across their range. across Patagonia, Pumas specialize on Guadankos, which are a large llama-like herbivore. But as Pumas came back to Montalien, they switched to praying on penguins. Now, why was it such a big deal that the Pumas were eating penguins? It's actually not. So to us, at first glance, you know, it's an interesting natural history note that Pumas are praying on penguins. So it's not surprising to us, but really what matters here,

is the impact of this interaction. This new food source is really shaping how Puma's move across the landscape, how they interact with each other, and their population size. The Penguin Colony is a small area on the landscape. It's only a two-kilometer stretch of beach, but it's an extremely abundant prey source for Puma. So it's really shaping how they're moving across the landscape because there's one fixed point source for prey

that the Pumas need to be going back and forth and concentrating their movements around this one small area. Now, is it unusual for Pumas to be interacting with each other? Yes, actually very unusual. So Pumas are what we believe are classically solitary predators. They have wide-ranging movements where they defend their territories. So these classic solitary carnivores that we often think of, but this really abundant food source allows them to relax their territory,

relax aggression so that they can share this abundant and concentrated food source. Wow. So were they actually cooperating with each other to hunt penguins? They're not cooperating in a sense. It's very easy to hunt a penguin. Penguins aren't well adapted to evading terrestrial predators. So they're pretty easy prey for pumas. But you can think of it almost in a bear analogy. Bears and salmon are a familiar example of how food can bring predators together. And a penguins appear to be doing something similar for Puma is creating a hotspot that changes behavior. across the landscape.

Oh, I see. So the animals were sort of tolerating each other rather than just cooperating. Exactly. Well, how did you look into this interaction further? Yeah, so my first field task was to go down there in late 2019 and set up a camera trap array across the entire park. And really, the intention was never to better understand this interaction between Pumas and penguins.

Really, what we wanted to do was surveyed Kuma population following decades of restoration at this site. But immediately it became obvious that this Puma penguin interaction was much larger and much more important than we get previously thought. So immediately in the camera traps that were adjacent to the penguin colony had really high detections of Puma's near this penguin colony. So every day we would go and check those cameras and we would see multiple detections, multiple images of Pumas on these camera traps. Well, what were they doing?

How do you hunt a penguin? This is a penguin colony where there's 40,000 breeding pairs. So that's at least 80,000 individuals at a given time. So it's a really concentrated, really abundant prey source. And these penguins, they're not well adapted to evading pressure predators. So really, what the Kuma's do is they walk up and they snatch them. Easy pickings. Exactly.

So what downstream effects do you think this could have for the whole ecosystem? Yeah, the next step of this research is really to understand what these behavioral changes mean for the rest of the ecosystem, especially Guanacos, which are the primary large herbivore across Patagonia. Because Pumas and Guinacos form the dominant predator prey relationship in the region, changes in how Pumas move and hunt could change how Guanacos are moving across the landscape, how they're foraging, and that can have important implications for the restoration of this ecosystem. What's the take-home message here for conservation? Yeah, our study shows that restoring wildlife in today's changed landscapes doesn't simply rewind ecosystems to the past. It can create entirely new interactions that reshape animal behavior and populations in really unexpected ways.

Well, it also seems to underline the importance of keeping top predators in an ecosystem. I'm thinking of the wolves in Yellowstone example. Yes, absolutely. we're finding that these change ecosystems don't necessarily have the same effects that we expect them to once we restore them. Dr. Sarota, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Dr. Mitchell Serota is an ecologist at Duke Farms in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. And that's it for the best of Quarks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quarks at cbc.ca. Our webpage is cbc.c.com. slash quirks, where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the

CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, Sonia Biting, and Olivia Diring. Our senior producer is Hannah Hogue. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.