Science Friday - Elephants Seem To Use Names For Each Other | Kids Discover Rare T. Rex Fossil

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

A new study used machine learning to analyze elephant vocalizations and identified “contact rumbles” that appear to function as names. Also, on a hike in the Badlands, a family found a dinosaur bone sticking out of a rock. It joined the few teenage T. rex fossils ever discovered.Elephants Seem To Use Names For Each OtherScientists have long known that elephants exhibit some advanced social behaviors that we humans find familiar, including tool use and funerals.And a new study from Colorado State a university offers compelling evidence that African savannah elephants might engage in another human social behavior: having names for each other. Researchers applied machine learning to a database of 600 elephant vocalizations, which included “contact rumbles,” vocalizations that researchers observed that other elephants responded to. The algorithm identified repeated sections of those recordings that might represent names.When the researchers played these possible “name” sections of audio to pairs of elephants—one of which was the suspected owner of the name—the appropriate elephant responded at a rate significantly better than random chance.Guest host Annie Minoff is joined by Tim Revell, deputy editor at New Scientist, to talk about this and other science stories from the week, including the possible effects a freezing interstellar cloud had on Earth a few million years ago, the biological effects of short term spaceflight on private citizen passengers on SpaceX flights, and a new species of pterosaur found in the Australian outback with a killer tongue.Kids Discover Extremely Rare T. Rex FossilFor one family, a summer hike in the badlands of North Dakota turned into the discovery of a lifetime when they spotted a fossil jutting out of a rock. Two brothers, their dad, and a cousin found the fossil, and with the help of some dinosaur experts, they eventually learned it was a T. rex.The fossil wasn’t just of any T. rex, but a teenage one. These fossils are incredibly rare—there are only a handful of them in the world.Guest host Annie Minoff discusses this dino discovery and what it means for science with 12-year-old Jessin Fisher, a budding paleontologist and one of the brothers who discovered the fossil, as well as Dr. Tyler Lyson, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado who helped excavate the fossil.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In the Badlands of North Dakota, a family made the discovery of a lifetime, with a little help from a paleontologist. You know, and I brush a little bit more, and then we see three teeth staring back at us, and we both exclaim, you know, we found a T-Rex. It's Friday, June 14th, happy Science Friday. I'm CyFride producer, Rasha Auretti. The fossil found by this family belonged to a teenage T-Rex, teen wrecks, if you will. They are incredibly rare, and scientists hope that this young specimen could help them piece together what T-Rex looked like and how it behaved growing up. But before we get into this dino discovery, let's round up this week's Science News. Here's guest host Annie Minnoff.

This is Science Friday. I'm Annie Minoff, a senior producer on the journal podcast and former co-host of Science Friday's podcast Undiscovered, and I will be filling in for Ira Flato this week. A new study out this week suggests that around two to three million years ago, our solar system collided with a gigantic interstellar cloud, and it could have changed the trajectory of life here on Earth. Here to fill us in on that and other science stories of the week is Tim Rebel, executive editor for new scientist. Welcome back, Tim. Hi, thanks for having me. So explain what was going on with this giant interstellar cloud. Yeah, so the first thing you need to know about this is that the sun has a sort of protective bubble around it called the heliosphere, and that's formed by solar winds pushing outwards. And this protective bubble extends to the edges of the solar system, and so it helps protect the planets within it from radiation.

But researchers have now worked out that about two to three million years ago, the sun passed through this dense cloud of helium called the local ribbon of cold clouds. I love that it has a name, just to pause on that, the local ribbon of cold clouds, all uppercase. It's an amazing name, isn't it? It sounds like something from, you know, a fantasy novel or a sci-fi. It's amazing. So it passes through this dense cloud of helium, local ribbon of cold clouds. And that caused the heliosphere to shrink so much that it no longer protected Earth. So it really shrunk in on itself. And then that meant that Earth was suddenly exposed to interstellar radiation in a way that it hadn't been before. And do we know what impact that would have had to have all that radiation coming at us?

We can only really guess. It took about 10,000 years to return, so it had quite a long time to have an impact. And this was at a time where on Earth there was woolly mammoths and giant sloths walking on the planet. And we know that radiation is often linked to mutations in DNA. And that's also the driver behind evolution. and so potentially being exposed to a lot more radiation from interstellar space could have affected evolution in quite a significant way. And we're going to stick with space for this next one because you've brought us a story about a study that looked at space tourists,

so private citizens who've been on SpaceX flights. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is actually a story that's not just space tourists, but also astronauts in general. And it's about this thing called a space biobank. And that's basically a big collection of blood samples, tissue samples and medical information, with all of that coming from people who've been to space. And so, as you say, some of those have been private citizens, but also some of them have been

professional astronauts. And the idea of this space biobank is to really try and pin down the hazardous health effects of going to space, of which we already know there are quite a few. So the study is initially about bringing all of this data together, but it has got some early findings that I think are pretty interesting. So one thing they found is that a lot of the changes recorded on a SpaceX mission that involved private civilians, the changes that were recorded to people's immune systems and their DNA when they had immediately come back from space, within a few months, they had actually returned back to normal. And one of the things that they were able to conclude from that is that actually maybe the risks to civilians of going to space are very similar to

those of professional astronauts who, you know, this highly trained elite group. And so maybe as we explore the possibility of more civilian space trips, that's something that's super interesting to know. So for this next story, we're going to head to the Australian Outback, where scientists have found an impressive dinosaur skeleton. Tell me about that. Yeah, this is an amazing find. So it's strictly speaking, it's a terosaur, which is a type of flying reptile that inhabited Earth around the same time as the dinosaurs. And normally with these, we just find the odd bone or two. but what's been found now in Australia is a 100 million-year-old pterosaur fossil that constitutes about a quarter of the animal.

And it's the most complete pterosaur ever found in Australia. I was reading that pterosaurs are sometimes called demonic pelicans. Is that what they looked like? Yeah, demonic pelican is a good word for them. This one they found here, it's a new species of pterosaur, one that we didn't know about before. And they think it had a 15-foot wingspan. Wow. And as you say, would have looked a bit like a pelican.

demonic pelican in the fact that it had a mouthful of spiky teeth. And then in particular with this new pterosaur, they think that it had a massive muscular tongue that it would have used to catch and hold down prey, which personally does sound quite demonic to me. So to catch and hold down prey with the tongue and then get it with the bitey teeth? Is that the idea? Yeah, the very fierce teeth. I mean, we think they probably ate things like slippery animals like squid and fish. And so that double combo of having the extremely muscular powerful tongue and a whole bunch of sharp teeth, I think would have been quite hard to fight against. Yikes.

Okay. So from one slightly disturbing story to another, Tim, a lot of us have heard about this double cicada brood that's happening in the U.S. right now, but there's this really odd fungus that is infecting some of these cicadas. Tell us about that. Yeah, I read about this in the Washington Post. They've got this great story about this fungus. and in their words, they're saying it's leading to sex-crazed zombies.

Fun? Yeah, fun indeed. So this fungus, it's been known about for some time, but it's only really in recent years that we've begun to understand it. And there are some pretty outrageous details here. So I must warn you to brace yourself. Okay. The fungus itself, it grows inside cicadas,

and then it causes their genitals and rear ends to fall off. The fungus then replaces these parts with itself and then produces mind-orferred. countering chemicals to make the cicadas continue to look for a mate despite the fact that they can no longer reproduce. So the cicadas, they then attempt to mate with males and females. They pass on the infection to others that way. But also, as they're beating their wings when flying about, they deposit powdery spores onto the ground that can then infect cicadas years later when they emerge. Wow.

Yeah, it's really wild. And that particular part of the process has led to them gaining the nickname Flying Salt Shakers of Death. I mean, just to add insult to injury, not only do they eat away the genitals, but then they hijack the brain so that you keep trying to have sex. Is that right? That's right. They produce this kind of anphetamine that has that mind-altering effect is really quite incredible. So on the one level, this is clearly horrifying to have a butt-eating fungus infect you, but you also kind of have to marvel at all of the different ways that species have developed to reproduce. I mean, it's really kind of clever. Yeah, it's certainly inventive, I would say. I feel like with these things often, if you wrote them in a horror novel, you wouldn't believe it.

And then nature has gone and done it anyway. So this might be my favorite story from this week. It turns out that elephants might have names for each other. Yeah, I would also say this is my favorite story of the week. It is an absolutely incredible finding. We can now say that we believe that elephants give each other unique names. And that's thanks to an analysis of the cause of African. African savannah elephants. And the analysis it used machine learning, a type of AI. And the way they did it was that the AI was trained using a whole bunch of elephant rumbles. These are these kind of low frequency calls that elephants make. And the AI was able to guess correctly which call responded to an individual elephant about a third of the time, which, you know, is not amazing, but it's certainly better than chance. But the real clincher in this study was the researchers then use this new information to play those sounds.

that they thought corresponded to individual elephants out of a speaker. And then they saw that the individual elephants responded very strongly to their own names, moving closer to the speaker or responding with their own greeting rumbles. It's just such an amazing finding. So they would play the name like, Henry, except I guess it's a rumble. So it's more like, and Henry would be like, yeah. Is that the idea? Yeah, that's exactly the idea.

And there would be a group of elephants. And it would be that one individual that would suddenly get, up or turn its head and be interested in what was coming out of the speaker as if it was corresponding specifically to them. Is it possible that we could use this machine learning technique to find out other things about elephant language? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the hope is that we can unpick this even further. So one thing we don't know yet is that if the elephants have a name that all the other elephants then use, or whether it's that individual elephants have individual names for other elephants, a bit like everyone having a nickname. And perhaps that's something

that AI could work on. I mean, other than humans, elephants are the first species where we're seeing that this could be the case. But to me personally, it seems unlikely that it's only elephants. Right. AI could be key to us understanding whether this is something that is more widely distributed across the animal kingdom. Totally fascinating. And as our last story, we have some news for fans of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, of which I am one. Some of you might remember that his famous, I guess, maybe I should say infamous ship, The Endurance, was discovered recently. And now we have found another one of his ships, right?

Yeah, that's correct. So this ship is called Quest, and it's been found off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. And it was the ship that Shackleton actually died on, but not in kind of infamous way, like on Endurance, the story around that. Instead, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and then the ship never quite reached its destination, which was meant to be the Antarctic. And Quest then had a life after Shackleton. It continued to be used. It was used by the Canadian Navy for a period, and then Norwegian sealers. And somewhat ironically, in the early 60s, 1962, it then collided with some thick sea ice piercing the hull and sending it to the deep, which was, I'm sure you remember the same thing that happened to endurance. A team now led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, they've been on the hunt for where this ship actually lays, and they use ships logs, navigation records, photographs and documents to really narrow down where to look.

And then when they got there, they used sonar. And amazingly, almost exactly where they had predicted, they found the ship about 1,200 feet underwater, though they are keeping that location secret for now. I think what's interesting often with these ships is just how intact they are. afterwards. So they have taken some pictures of the ship and explored a little bit of it so far. And it seems to be sitting basically upright on the seafloor. Apart from having a fairly sized hole in the hull, it's got a mast that is a little bit broken hanging over one side. But other than that, it seems to be completely intact. Well, thank you so much for bringing us these stories, Tim. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Tim Revell is executive editor at New Scientist. And one last thing before

the break. This week, Dr. Ed Stone passed away at the age of 88. He was the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served as the project scientist for the Voyager missions for 50 years. We spoke with him in 2013 about the Voyager legacy. Time after time, our view had to be so greatly expanded. I think that's the biggest, broadest impact of that part of the Voyager mission. Now we're on a totally different mission, which is the first to leave the social. or bubble and begin to sail on the cosmic sea that's between the stars. Because that's what most of the Milky Way is, is the sea between the stars. It's not the not the stars, but the sea between.

That was Dr. Ed Stone, one of our many conversations with him over the years about Voyager. He died earlier this week. For one family, a summer hike turned into the discovery of a lifetime. Two brothers, their dad and a cousin, were out for a walk in the badlands of North Dakota. when they found a fossil jetting out of a rock. With the help of some dinosaur experts, they would eventually learn that it was a T-Rex. And not just any T-Rex, but a teenage T-Rex,

an incredibly rare find. There are only a handful of these fossils in the world. Here to discuss this dino discovery and what it means for science is Jessen Fisher, one of the brothers who discovered that fossil. He's a 12-year-old budding paleontologist in North Dakota. It is so great to have you with us, Jessen. Yeah, you too.

And Dr. Tyler Leeson is also with us. He's curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado. Welcome. Good to be here. I'm going to start with you, Jessen. Can you tell me about that day when your family discovered this fossil? What happened? So we went on a hike because my dad wanted to.

He likes hiking. He and my brother were going to go up on top of the hill. and just look up there. So I heard dad call her names. So I went up there and my cousin followed. The second I got up there, he asked me, what is this? And I said, it looks like a leg bone of a dinosaur. Wow.

So can you describe what you were looking at? What were they showing you? They were showing me this leg bone. It was about four foot long, and it was flaking at the top with some other bones here and there. But that's all you could see. We took some pictures and sent up to Tyler. So Justin's dad, Sam Fisher, and I went to high school together. And several years ago, he started sending me pictures of he and his boys and his nephew out looking for fossils.

And he'd send me pictures of them holding petrified wood and rocks and other things. And then in July of 2022, he sends me this picture of his youngest boy lying down next to the leg of this dinosaur, which was just awesome. I mean, what a remarkable find for Jessin and Liam and their cousin Caden. And many of the articles I've seen about this story say they stumbled on it. And that's just not at all true here because they were out looking for a dinosaur. and that's what they found. And Justin was able to identify it and then send pictures to me.

And so that's how I got involved. And so from this photo that you received, Tyler, did you know it was a T-Rex just from the photo? Yeah, based on the photos, I could tell that it was a dinosaur, just like Justin had, you know, just like he knew. And I could tell it was a large dinosaur.

So really the only dinosaurs that are that big from this part of the world are T-Rex, triceratops, or the duck-billed dinosaur and monosaurus. And based on the sort of the knee joint where the femur and the tibia were articulated, it looked more like a duck bill dinosaur to me. And I can send the photos to a few colleagues to consult with them and they agreed. And it wasn't until we got on the site. And when I actually saw the bones and the way in which it was flaking and kind of breaking up into like sheets of glass almost,

that's pretty characteristic of meat-eating dinosaurs. So I then started to have a hunch that it might belong to a T-Rex. So take me to that moment where you kind of had the aha, this is a T-Rex. What was going through your head? Yeah, well, so we were out there and we had a giant screen films with us. And so they were out doing a documentary on T-Rex. So it was just a remarkable thing the way everything aligned. All caught on camera.

It was, yeah, it was all caught on camera. So, you know, Justin and the boys, they lead us out to the locality. And then the film crew, they set some stuff. establishing shots. And so then, you know, Jess and I are like, are you guys ready? Like, we're going to start digging now. And everybody's like, yep, okay, you know, go for it. And so then he and I go to a certain spot and start digging. And I, we were digging in an area where I thought we'd find some of the neck bones, some of the cervical vertebrae, just the way in which the skeleton was kind of laying in the ground. And so he and I were digging in this little hole and

we're digging with holes and we're brushing, we're digging and brushing. And then we hear a clink and and I brush and Justin gasps. And you can hear this on, you know, on camera. And he's like, what's that? Is that a claw? And I'm like, I kind of go, you know, and I brush a little bit more. And then we see three teeth staring back at us. And he and I like lock eyes.

And I just sort of whispered T-Rex. And we both exclaim, you know, we found a T-Rex. And it was an awesome moment because we had, you know, like, we had a bunch of people out on the Out. crop like 15 interns. Of course, the family was out there. Danielle, the mom here, she starts crying. I mean, it was just an emotional, emotional moment and just so much raw excitement. And what's great is all of that was captured on camera. So it's part of this documentary called T-Rex. Jess, when you talk to kids at school and you say, I discovered a T-Rex, did they believe you?

Some did, some did not. Most of them did. not. They thought you were pulling their leg? Yeah. They've already seen the trailer, though, so most of them believe me, some still don't. And Tyler, why was finding a younger T-Rex in particular so exciting to you? Yeah, but there's about, you know, over 100 T-Rex specimens known, but most of those are based on a handful of bones. That's what makes it most of those animals. And there's only maybe 30 that are relatively complete, and by that, by 20 or 30 percent, percent complete. And then of those, there's only five or six that are juveniles that are held and publicly available in various institutions. And so they're quite rare. They're very rare to find a

small Tyrannosaur. And so while it would be really cool to have like the biggest T-Rex, scientifically it's much more important to have a juvenile because it's another data point to help determine whether or not there's one Tyrannosaur in this area during this interval time or whether there's two nanotranus and T-Rex. So there's a whole taxonomic debate there that this will shed some light on. And then also, you know, if we want to understand how T-Rex grew from sort of a chick-sized animal into the around 8,000 pound beast that it eventually became, we need to, of course, have smaller individuals to see, you look at rates of growth, skeletal maturity, and other interesting questions like that.

And what do we know exactly about the life of a teen, Rex. I assume they were angsty and preferred not to be seen with their parents. I think that is almost a guarantee. Yeah, I mean, you know, they were sort of long-legged animals, sort of these, again, awkward-looking creatures almost. They looked very different than an adult. An adult was very, very bulky, but the juveniles, the teenagers would have had really long legs, much more gracile, likely eight slightly different. things than the adults did. And undoubtedly, like you said, were, were angsty and did not want to be seen with their parents. So, Jessin, I heard that you helped name this dinosaur that you found.

What did you name it? We named it the brother because me and Liam are brothers, which makes up half the equation. And our cousin is such a close cousin that we consider him a brother. So finding this Dinosaur is like adding another brother to the family, basically. I love that. And dad wasn't sore about losing out here. No, he was not. Tyler, how did you excavate this fossil? And where is it now? Yes, so the boys and I, we excavated the dinosaur. So they were there for the entirety of the dig.

And so we first used picks and shovels and a 70-pound jackhammer to remove the overlying overburden, the rock on top of the dinosaur. And then we traded in those big tools for smaller like awls and brushes. And we carefully outlined the skeleton on the sandbar because this animal was buried in this ancient river system. Kind of the bones that we have are washed up onto a sandbar. So we outlined what we were starting to refer to as the bone bar. And then we just dug around it, dug around it, and then started to dig underneath of it. And then we encased it in burlap soaked in plaster.

like several thousand pounds or at least 1,000 pounds of plaster to provide a protective casing called a plaster jacket. And we rolled this 6,000 pound jacket into a helicopter net. Wow. Yeah. So a little bit a logistical nightmare, right, or some logistical challenges. And so this was a very nerve-wracking day for me and my crew and maybe for Justin and the family. So what was it like working with these kids for you, Tyler? Yeah, for me, this is one of the most special finds and excavations that I've got to be a part of, simply because it reminds me a lot of my childhood. I roamed the same badlands that Jessen and his family roamed.

We grew up in the same town, tiny town called Marmuth, North Dakota. And, you know, I had really great mentors growing up. And that really pushed me to go into paleontology. And I have no doubt that I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for them. So I'm really, really happy that there's other kids in the area, Justin particularly, who's interested in paleontology and where I can help be a paleontological mentor. So I don't know, for me, it's sort of the full circle of mentorship and particularly special. So, Justin, do you think you're going to be a paleontologist when you grow up?

Are you thinking more accounting? What are you thinking? I'm most definitely going to be a paleontologist because it's been a lifelong dream of mine. Is there a dinosaur that you'd love to find now that you found T-Rex? Is there another one on your bucket list? A bigger T-Rex? A bigger T-Rex. And Tyler, if someone wants to watch this documentary that was made about this discovery,

where could they do that? Yes, so this film is going out for international distribution. It'll be, it'll go out on over 100 cities. worldwide on June 21st. And so it'll be airing at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on June 21st. And on that same day, we're opening up a new experience here at the Denver Museum that features Jessin's find. So we've brought the dinosaur back and we've built a whole lab around it.

And guests of the museum will be able to come in and interact with the scientists and watch as they uncover more and more of the skeleton. Well, this is just an incredible story. And Jessen, I want to wish you all the best on your future finds. Thank you both so much for joining me. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Jessen Fisher is a budding paleontologist in North Dakota. Dr. Tyler Leeson is a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Kathleen Davis. Diana Plasker. Beth Ramey. Danielle Johnson. On Monday's episode, we dig into the science of teenage angst with a science advisor for the new film Inside Out 2.

Catch you then. I'm Cyfry producer Russia Reedy.