Science Friday - Fundamentals of Physics, Giant Ancient Birds, 2021 Space Outlook. Jan 8, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Finding New Particles On The Frontier of Physics As a theoretical physicist, Frank Wilczek has made a career out of dreaming up new ways to understand our physical universe—and he’s usually right.  In the early 1980’s, he predicted the existence of a new quasiparticle, called the anyon—which was confirmed in experiments last summer. In 2004, Wilczek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution decades earlier to the theory of quantum chromodynamics. And in addition to the anyon, he has predicted the existence of a hypothetical particle known as the axion, a possible component of cold dark matter.  Wilczek joins Ira for a sweeping, mind-bending conversation about physics and the universe as discussed in his latest book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. Giant, Toothed Birds Once Ruled The Skies More than 62 million years ago, a few million years after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, a group of seafaring birds known as pelagornithids first appeared in the fossil record. They had long wings, and, unusually for a bird, teeth. They had a much  simpler structure than modern mammal teeth, known as pseudoteeth.  While alive, pelagornithids successfully took over the planet. Their remains have been found on every continent, and their existence stretched for more than 50 million years. New research, published in Scientific Reports late last year, reveals that by the time the pelagornithids had been around for 12 million years, they’d already evolved to gigantic sizes never seen since in birds. They had 6-meter wingspans, nearly twice the size of modern albatrosses. SciFri producer Christie Taylor talks to Peter Kloess, a co-author on the new research, about these giants of the past, plus the mystery of the pelagornithids’ disappearance. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, a conversation with Nobel laureate Dr. Frank Wilczek about the latest big ideas in physics. But first, if you like to follow space exploration, 2021 is promising to be a banner year. Some exciting missions are on the calendar. We're going to the moon, Mars, lots of countries and companies involved. There's a new successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and maybe even civilian space flights. Yeah, yeah. heard me right on that one. Joining me today to break down what's planned is Christian Davenport, reporter at the Washington Post. He covers the space industry. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Christian, let's dig right into this. A lot of things were derailed last year,

but we still saw some great things in terms of space exploration. But it looks like 2021 may even be a better year, right? Yeah, I mean, you're right. 2020 was just such a disaster, and space was a bright spot in a year where there were very few. But I think in 2021, that momentum that we've seen is only going to continue. As we mentioned, the restoration of human spaceflight from American soil. We hadn't seen that since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. That'll keep going. Private missions with private astronauts, possibly passengers, tourists, going to the edge of space and maybe even to orbit. Missions to Mars, the James Webb Telescope. So all sorts of exciting things. things on the calendar for 2021. Let's get into some of them in detail, because I know one big name that

emerged in particular last year was SpaceX. What do we know about their plans for this year? So, right, so SpaceX flew for the first time human spaceflight missions from the Kennedy Space Center, the Florida space coast that sort of sacrosanct a stretch of real estate in Florida for the first time in 2020. They've already got a couple more missions for NASA on the books for 2021, a crew two mission, which will have four astronauts on board going to the International Space Station. That's scheduled for some time in the spring, and then another one in the fall. So they're really hitting their cadence again. And again, NASA, people forget this, didn't have the ability to fly astronauts from U.S. soil since the shuttle went away nearly a decade ago. And SpaceX, Elon Musk Company, has

restored that capability, you know, almost single-handedly. I mean, with the help of NASA, but now they're doing it. But SpaceX is looking even beyond low-earth orbit, and they're trying out this new rocket and spacecraft they call starship. And it kind of looks, frankly, ridiculous. I mean, it looks like a grain silo that you'd see on a farm somewhere, but as they have shown, it can fly. And they've taken it on these, you know, short hops where they send it up 10, 12 miles into the air and then bring it back down. And this is a vehicle that they hope will send people to the moon and to Mars. And NASA has actually invested in it, giving them a contract for more than $100 million.

So that's going. In addition to all of that, if that weren't enough, they're putting up this constellation of satellites, literally not hundreds, but thousands of satellites in orbit around the Earth to beam the Internet down to these ground stations to help serve areas in rural communities that don't have access to broadband. And they've already got a thousand of these satellites on orbit. They won last year a contract from the FCC of more than $800 million to help them proceed with this program. So that's yet another thing that SpaceX is doing in 2021.

Yeah, some amateur astronomers are not too happy about that, but that's a different topic. Let's move on to Boeing. It contracts with NASA to bring astronauts to the International Space Station. But as we know, there have been a few hiccups with Boeing, right? Yeah, I mean, so they have the contract along with SpaceX to build and design a spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. When these contracts were awarded in 2014, I think everybody thought that Boeing was going to be the first to fly. They were the big contractor.

They have all the heritage and the expertise. and SpaceX was sort of the new kid on the block. But Boeing has stumbled along the way. I mean, they had a test flight at the end of 2019 where their spacecraft, the Starliner, ran into trouble almost as soon as it reached space. This was a test flight without any astronauts on board. It was supposed to go up and dock autonomously

with the space station. But instead of that happening, they had the software problem, which the spacecraft thought it was at an entirely different point in the mission. It was 11 hours off. And they had to ultimately, cut the mission short, bring the spacecraft home within a couple of days, and they spent basically all of last year trying to investigate what went wrong with their software. And now, in March,

they're going to redo that test flight, again, without any astronauts on board. And if that goes well, which for them, it really needs to, NASA will allow them finally to put their astronauts on board. And in addition to that, they are the prime contractor on NASA's business. big moon rocket, the space launch system, which has been, you know, cost overruns and delays for years and years and years. But it's finally at the point where NASA is saying, you know, we're getting close to flying this. And this would be the rocket that would take NASA's astronauts to the moon. But again, Boeing has to prove that they can finally fly this rocket, you know, once and for all. Speaking of cost overruns and delays for years, it's a good segue into the James Webb

telescope. We've been talking about the possibility of this going into space for years, but this may be the year it actually gets launched? Yeah, I mean, actually people are expressing this confidence that this is the year. And in October, it will finally be ready to launch. It's a $9 billion telescope, a successor to the Hubble telescope to look deep into the cosmos. And, you know, this is one that will not be an Earth orbit like Hubble, but actually a million miles away from Earth. And, you know, it's going to be a big deal for astronomers. But I think people are confident that this is the year that Web finally gets into space. Hope they get a good Wi-Fi connection out there.

Let's talk about that. There's really interesting stuff going on with Mars. There's not one, not two, but three missions to Mars planned for February alone. Yeah. And NASA is sending Mars Perseverance, the rover that will touch down in Jesro Crater, you know, looking for traces and signs of life. So that's really exciting. I mean, you know, anytime you land a robot on Mars,

it strikes terror into the hearts of our good people at NASA's JPL. But this time they've got not just the rover, but this helicopter called ingenuity. So, you know, it's sort of a right brother's moment for powered flight, but on the surface of Mars. So that will be really cool too. And it's not just the U.S. that's going there, right? We have the United Arab Emirates.

Yeah. And so you've got a trio of spacecraft that could be landing on the red planet all in February. So setting up a real cadence of trips to Mars, you know, which is you've got that window where you can only go to Mars about once every 26 months when Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun. So we saw some people take real advantage of that. I mean, speaking for a minute about what we were talking earlier with SpaceX, you know, that's why Elon Musk founded SpaceX to ultimately get people. people to Mars. And he is now hoping to send starship there, you know, with people within six years or so. Now, Elon also, he always has these grand pronouncements. But it's interesting to see how Mars is sort of back in the news and back in the headlines again. You mentioned this at the beginning,

something that some people in our audience might like to try. And that is possibly going into space on a civilian space flight this year. Tell me about this. So there are actually three opportunities to do that now, which is kind of incredible if you think about it. There's Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which for years has been working on a suborbital space plane to take paying customers to the edge of space. Now, again, this is suborbital where you go up, shoot straight up, you know, scratch the surface of space, you know, some 50 to 60 miles high and then, you know, have five minutes of weightlessness and can, you know, see the black sky of space even in the daytime and the curvature of the earth and all that and come back down. But Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin also wants to do that.

They haven't announced any prices yet, but they hope to start flying people this year, as does Virgin Galactic, which is charging $250,000, although that might go up. But in addition to those suborbital space tourism flights, SpaceX is now working with a company called Axiom Space to train civilians to fly on their dragon spacecraft were trips to the international space station. Now, that's much, much more expensive. These are trips, you know, for a 10-day stay on the space station would cost, you know, an estimated $50 million or so. But, you know, this is due in part to a change in NASA policy under the leadership of NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein, because NASA prohibited tourists and private citizens going to the International Space Station from

U.S. oil. It had been done before. There have been a handful of private citizens, very wealthy people who have gone to the space station before, but they've gone on the Russian Soyuz rocket. So this will be the first time an American company does that from U.S. soil. And you may have seen the news that there are reports that Tom Cruise may go up on a SpaceX rocket through Axiom to film a movie on the International Space Station. Do I don't think that's quite going to happen this year. The International Space Station might be on its last legs a while ago. They extended it to 2020. Now the life expectancy is 2024. China is planning to place a space station in low orbit. Could this possibly go into space this year?

Yeah. I mean, so China's moving ahead and has big ambitions in space and is planning their own space station and plan to launch the first segment this year. And it comes at a time when people are wondering about the international space station. How much longer can it stay up there? I mean, it's had humans on there living continuously for, well, now 21 years. And, you know, it sprung a lake last year. It's getting older. Space is harsh. There are plans.

There's talking Congress of extending the life at the space station to 2028, but you're hearing people on NASA and the incoming Biden administration and the aerospace industry in general start talking about what's going to come next. and what's going to come next, at least the current plan, is a commercial habitat. I mentioned that company Axiom Space before that wants to put together the flight of the private citizens. They also are developing a private space station, and there are a few companies that want to do that. The problem is, though, that Congress hasn't been funding this. And so there is some real concern that there could be a gap in low Earth orbit.

If there's no space station, there's no backup because effectively NASA is barred from partnering with China in space. So if they have a space station, it would seem unlikely that NASA's astronauts would be able to go there. Well, I see that decision might come back and bite them. No, it could be a real problem, and that's one of the things people are increasingly concerned about. Well, we'll find out what happens.

It'll all be very exciting. We'll follow it with you, Christian. Well, it's going to be a great year. I tell you, it's such a fun time to be a space reporter. Christian Davenport, having fun as a reporter at the Washington Post covering the space industry. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thanks for having me. After the break, a mind-bending conversation about physics to start the new year off right.

We'll talk with physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilcheck, author of Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality. Coming up, stay with us. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I am Iraflato. In 1982, theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek predicted the existence of a new quasi-particle, the anion. And last summer came news that scientists have finally found evidence of it.

As a theoretical physicist, Wilchek, has made a career out of dreaming up new ways to understand our physical universe and being right about them. In 2004, Wilchick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution decades earlier to the third. theory of quantum chromodynamics. And in addition to the anion, he has predicted the existence of a hypothetical particle, the axion, a possible component of cold, dark matter. Dr. Frank Wilczek is the Herman Fishback Professor of Physics at MIT, an author of the new book Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality. Dr. Wilcheck, welcome back to Science Friday. It's wonderful to be here. In your career, as I mentioned, you predicted some of these things decades ago in the 70s and the 80s that only now are getting proven by experimental physics.

In fact, there were two experiments last year that proved the existence of the anion particle. What is the anion? Okay, so for many years, people thought that there were two kinds of particles that were, two families of particles, I called them kingdoms of particles that were possible. These are called bosons and fermions. And photons are examples of bosons. Bosons like to do the same thing. That's why you can have lasers where photons are all of the same color and moving in the same direction.

And fermions refuse to do the same thing. And that's largely responsible for the hardness of matter, the periodic table, and the existence of white dwarfs and neutron stars. But when I looked at the so-called proofs that those were the only two possibilities, I was not convinced. And thinking it through, I realized that the proof worked if you assume we live in a space of three dimensions. And if you had a world of two dimensions, there were additional possibilities. This third kingdom is much more various than bosons or fermions in principle, and it's called eneons.

Enions are particles, quasi-particles, so they're emergent concentrations of energy that basically have a kind of memory. They're a much richer kind of behavior quantum mechanically than bosons or fermions. And in fact, there are elaborate plans on the drawing board, to use these memories in quantum computers. But clear experimental demonstration came for the first time only last spring and summer and two very beautiful experiments. Could there be particles that we don't know about?

Because, you know, we have all of this dark energy and dark matter, and it makes up 95% of the universe. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. There could be additional particles that interact very weakly with the particles that we use in biology, chemistry, and engineering. So that's definitely true. And in fact, I think it is true.

That's the axon that you mentioned earlier, I think is very likely to be the dark matter. And one of the things I'm most actively involved in now is trying to design axion antennas. And it's not only me, it's thousands of people now are hot on the trail of axions, using the equations to think of different kinds of antenna designs, different kinds of receivers, different kinds of observatories that will be capable of detecting this very, very weakly interacting,

but all-pervasive cosmic medium. Gravity still remains difficult to unite with the other forces of nature in terms of quantum mechanics, right? There's supposedly the existence of a graviton. Do you have to detect a graviton also? Well, no one has. It's very challenging. It's known that and that's known. And you face the same kind of problem.

We know what the equations are and you can sort of gauge the difficulty of it and try to make detectors that would be sensitive to gravitons. I'm cautiously optimistic about that. It's very, very difficult. LIGO, for instance, is not detecting distinct effects of single- gravitons, but only sort of the integrated effect of many gravitons acting together to distinguish that they really come in discrete units. Seems to be very difficult, but not impossible, I would say. And that's one of the envelopes I'm trying to push now. You spend a lot of time in your book talking about

artificial intelligence, its relationship to human beings. I think mind is an important frontier of physics in several ways. One is that now that we have such a secure, powerful knowledge of ordinary matter, how it works, high on the agenda becomes either fulfilling or disproving what Francis Crick called the astonishing hypothesis, that mind emerges from matter, that the human mind really is a phenomenon of the matter that makes the human brain, that we should understand in molecular terms. And now, nowadays also to understand, to understand certain parts of physics, human brains need a lot of help. So the way we really solve the equations in powerful ways are to turn them over to computers. So if we just had to rely on

human brains, our understanding of how protons are made or how events emerge at the LHC with all their structure, for instance, would be totally impractical. It's beyond human abilities. So the relationship of mind and information and physics is getting closer and closer and more complicated. And to me, the depth of it is, well, it's unfathomable and we're getting down into it now in a totally new way. Do you have any fear that we might approach something called the singularity, the point in which artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent and people basically work for the AI. Well, I do think that the advantages of artificial intelligence over, let's call it,

biological or natural intelligence, are so profound that in the long run, the vanguard of mind will not, certainly not be unaided human brains. In fact, it already really isn't. The best human brains get a lot of help from computers. Cyborgs or maybe, and, you know, maybe even autonomous artificial intelligence is eventually. But I don't think it's going to be a singularity. I think it's not going to happen that one night you go to bed and your computer is kind of dopey. And the next morning you find that it's telling you what to do

and turning you off or something. I think if there's going to be a more of what we would call a crossover in physics, a gradual enrichment, I like the concept of an ecological. of intelligence, where there will be different kinds of minds that relate to one another and learn about each other and co-evolve. In the book, you take time to point out two dangers on our planet, climate change and nuclear weaponry. And you say these dangers can be avoided. Why did you feel it necessary to take this side trip? Because those are dangers that originate from deep understanding of the physical world. Nuclear weapons, of course, emerged from deep understanding of

sub-nuclear physics, and climate change is a consequence of the industrial processes that science allows you to produce. It never hurts to remind people about that. And if you're thinking about the future, which I try to make a point of in the books, I think it's really important to think about part of the future is making sure that there is a future that, or what could go wrong. Going back to the preface of your book, you say that writing this book changed my perception of the world. How so? Yeah, well, as I was writing the book, I had a grandson, and I watched how he was constructing the world. You know, the babies at first, they don't even know there's a world of objects out there.

They see these raw impressions on their retina and have a lot of work to do to start to interpret those signals from the external world as distributions of objects in space with more or less reproducible or predictable behavior and so forth. So as I was thinking about, I was writing a book that I wanted to help people explore their reality. and get the deep insights and the wonderful insights, the mind-expanding insights that fundamental understanding can give, I was inspired to the idea that it's a process of being born again, that now a baby constructs a world model based on the local environment here on Earth, which is in the universe very rare and kind of limited.

That's very untypical and not the deepest, layer of understanding that we attain when we start to inquire using microscopes and telescopes and spectrometers and accelerometers and magnetometers and all the instruments that science brings to bear on the study of reality and of course also logical thinking and critical thinking. So the concept of being born again came alive for me. You also write that in studying how the world works, we are studying how God works and thereby learning what God is. Do you think physics reveals God? God is a word that's used in many, many different, with many, many different meanings.

It struck me also in this book and earlier investigations throughout my career in the history of physics that the scientific heroes like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, all of them were deeply religious people. And Einstein, in a different way, he was not adherent of any conventional religion, but he talked freely of being sort of an admirer of Spinoza, and I guess you could say a kind of pantheist that believed in the harmony of the world. And so I think all of those people had a similar attitude. I like to think that they had a similar attitude to what I have,

which is that one way of getting to the kinds of questions that religion addresses and the kinds of feelings it inspires is to examine how the world works and understand it deeply. to understand what God is. You know, God is revealed through his or it's or hers work, and I don't know, I think there's no more convincing way. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Nobel laureate Frank Wilcheck

about his new book, Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality. I want to move on to the Big Bang. You talk about the different ways of determining when it happened and what it was like. How do we know what occurred almost 14 billion years ago, what we call the Big Bang? Well, it's very much like how you reconstruct a crime. But usually you look for telltale clues of what happened. You know, if there's blood or there's DNA or some remnant of what happened, in principle, it's just that.

you have a theoretical guess for how the early universe behaved. You work out its consequences, and among the consequences are certain regularities or certain features you can potentially observe in today's world and see if they're there or not. And then so you make a theory of the case and a theory of what the crime was and gather evidence and it either strengthens your theory or makes you corrected or even discarded. What there's tremendously powerful evidence of, many, many lines of evidence, and a few of which are mentioned in the book, is that about 13.7 billion years ago,

the universe was much, much hotter, much, much denser, and much, much more uniformly populated with matter than it is today. And since then, the matter has been expanding, cooling, and little inhomogeneities in it have undergone gravitational processes to congeal into stars and nebula and planets and so forth. So we have a broad brush history of the universe and a lot of evidence of different kinds that gives a good description of what actually happened. Something that gets asked all the time is, what preceded the Big Bang?

Well, tell us what came before it? Well, I mean, we don't know. We have very secure evidence, I would say, for the equations up to a certain point, which roughly speaking was when the universe was about, a microsecond old or even a little bit less. What do I mean by a microsecond old, if I can't say what the beginning was. What I mean is that if you ran it back one more microsecond

and the equations would break down. We don't have evidence for what happened before that. So we can make these models, but eventually when the matter, if we run things backwards, the matter is getting hotter and denser and the interactions are getting further and further. from our everyday experience.

And we don't have a lot of relics, a lot of clues from experiment about what was going on at those times, but most of the men have been obliterated and most potential evidence have been obliterated in the subsequent history. So we don't have a lot of observational handle on that era, and our equations, become singular. They eventually break down. They become infinity equals infinity, basically,

when you extrapolate down to the very, very earliest times. So we need new equations, or we need new concepts in order to continue. And those are very much debated. There's no consensus about it. my own favorite idea is that the concept of time breaks down. Back then, the matter was very different, and it may have been impossible to make anything that functioned as a clock, and so time operationally would cease to exist. That's my favorite idea, but nobody knows, really. And so that's an interesting frontier of physics, of course, tantalizing.

but let me emphasize that we can understand a lot without understanding everything. What a way to start off the new year. You have given us so much to think about. This has been a joy, and thank you. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Frank Wilcheck, 2004 Nobel laureate in physics. He's the Herman Feshback Professor of Physics at MIT, an author of the new book, Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Physics. And if you'd like to read an excerpt of his book, you can find one on our website at Science Friday.com slash fundamentals. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, what fossils are telling us about the evolution

of ancient giant birds. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last week, we celebrated the annual Christmas bird count and the way citizen scientists out in the field or at home can help us understand the extinction threat that climate crisis poses to our feathered friends. This week, we follow. up to talk about the birds that are already extinct and the mysteries scientists are trying to solve about their disappearance. Science writer producer Christy Taylor is on the case. You won't see a paligorniphyde bird today, but a long time ago, they were everywhere, at least as far as the fossils suggest. These long-winged flyers lived millions of years ago

in the gap between the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and now. In fact, they were around for more than 50 million years and grew to truly gigantic sizes compared to modern birds. And then they too disappeared. With me today is Peter Close, a PhD candidate in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He's also at the Museum of Paleontology there, and he's co-author on some new research looking at fossils from the museum that say something about just how quickly these birds became the giants that we know them as. Welcome to Science Friday, Peter. Hi, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you. I feel like the first thing we need to talk about is introducing our main character, which in this case are these birds called the Pelagornethids.

I'm picturing like huge albatrosses right now, but I don't think that's quite right. So tell me about them. Well, thinking of albatrosses is actually a great place to start in the sense that they have these long wingspans. As they would have been flying through the air, they would have kept their wings out, soaring long distances covering vast tracts of water. Where they differ from albatrosses is their most prominent feature. These polygynithids are also known as bony tooth birds. And as that name implies, they have these projections out of their jaws that, at a very superficial level, look like teeth. So if you think of an albatross on steroids with teeth, you're actually in the right ball.

all part for getting a mental picture of this group. Wow. And they lived a pretty long time ago, right? So we're talking millions and millions of years ago. Oh, yes, yes. The oldest member of this family of birds dates to about 62 million years ago. It comes from New Zealand. And the youngest members of this group are in that three to two million year age range. So this group existed for at least 60 million years of Earth history. In this paper that we're here to talk about today, you and your co-authors took a look at a couple of fossils from these pelagornithids, and you learned something new about them. How did that work? So my colleagues and I were looking around the University of California Museum of Paleontology and came across these specimens that had been collected decades before in the 1980s from Antarctica. And one of these specimens was a fragment of jaw with those very iconic pseudo-teeth, as we call them, or false teeth.

And so we knew that we had a polygarnithid here on our hands. But in digging into some of the history of that specimen, we also started looking at the other related polyglodythid specimens from Antarctica. And the combination of those specimens showed us that, the evolution of gigantism in this whole family occurred earlier than was originally thought. How much earlier? So we're talking about 50 million years ago. And if you think about it in the context of that oldest known polygernethid from about 62 million years, that puts this instance of gigantism occurring about 10 to 12 million years after the oldest known individual.

So that gives us this notion that this group of birds grew to gigantic sizes not too long after they first appear. And when we're talking about the difference between sort of like a regular-sized pelagornifid and this giant size, what is the difference we're talking about? How many feet? Yeah. So when we're talking about that oldest polygynithid from 62 million years, this is a bird with a wingspan that's estimated about three feet. So something like your modern gull. There are plenty of individuals that, you know, we could call large in the right around four meter wingspan. So that's about 13 feet.

Okay. And then our giant individuals, which the specimens that we are, we identified from Antarctica and some other specimens from around the world, these ones are getting up to six meters in wingspan. So that's about 20 feet long. Yeah. Yeah. Another way to think about it is if you took a two-story building, turn it on its side, and that's about 20 feet long. So the evolution of that giant size, that six-ish meter wingspan occurred, yeah, about 10 to 12 million years after the first polyglarynith had known. And you figured this out just from like a jawbone and part of a foot, right? I think. think you said, how do you look at fossils and place them in time in that way, especially when you weren't the one who found them? So these specimens, as I had mentioned, they were collected in the 1980s, a team primarily from the

University of California at Riverside in Southern California. They travel to Antarctica, and there they were observing the geology as well as collecting lots and lots of fossils. While they were there, as they're looking at the geology, they're taking lots of field notes. They're getting a sense for basically where in time these specimens are coming from. And it's those notes that came back to the United States with these specimens. In 2003, the collection from UC Riverside made its way up to Berkeley where I'm at right now. So to place these specimens in time, that's where we go back to the field notes, to understand what geology was that team looking at and, and, you know, what stratigraphic horizons were they

working in. So the footbone, the one that comes from a giant individual from about 50 million years ago, in previous papers, the specimen had been described before, but it had been placed higher in the geologic section, which we can just think of as meaning younger in section. And my colleagues and I, when we went back to the original field notes, that's when we realized that it should have been lower in the section or older in time 50 million years ago. So you keep talking about pseudo-teeth. What are pseudo-teeth and what makes them different from teeth, teeth? Yeah, so when we talk about polygyronithids, we use the term pseudotief, which means false teeth. These are not true teeth as you or I have or any of us have in our jaws at the moment.

Our teeth are made of material such as enamel and dentin and some other things. And they're rooted with tooth roots into sockets in our jaw. These polygynythids didn't have any of that. These bony projections, I mean, as I just said, they're bony, they are fused directly to the bone and the jaw. And they're not made of enamel and dentin. They're composed of bone. And much like bird beaks today would have been overlaying with a keratin sheath. And keratin is the same material that we have in our fingernails and our hair.

So instead of making teeth of enamel and dentin, these pseudocethids have pseudot teeth of bone and keratin, a much different configuration than we've got now. And I want to go back to the part where these bones were in a museum collection. And I think we think of all of the new science in fossil. finds coming from those sort of dramatic, you know, you dig it up and you immediately sort of look at it and understand it. But this was a situation where, you know, the science was kind of sitting in a museum waiting to be, waiting to be found there. Is that common in your field? Yeah, I think that can be pretty common.

I've participated in many dinosaur digs, and those are certainly wonderful places to make discoveries. Generally, when we think of museums, we're thinking of those public exhibits and the displays. What we see on display and in exhibits really only represents a fraction of what most museums have in their collections. I couldn't even begin to throw out a number because it will differ for each museum. I'm picturing like the big room at the end of Indiana Jones, like giant warehouses full of just dinosaur bones. That scene in Indiana Jones, at least for some museums, is not. that far off. Some repositories just have shelves and shelves and rows upon rows of crates and casts and sediment that needs to be worked through. That's one of the beauties of museums

is that you have this wealth of material that curators and collection managers, museum staff, they only have so much time during the day to work on these things. While they're making their own discoveries, there's many more specimens that are left sitting for decades, just waiting for some grad student like myself to come along and to work on them. Museums are wonderful. From the public side of things, we can make discoveries in the exhibits, but from the research side of things, the collections are just full of opportunity. I can't help but go back to the fact also that these giant birds were found in sediment

in Antarctica. I forget sometimes that there's rock in Antarctica and that there's a whole fossil record there. What else was going on in Antarctica 50 million years ago, you know, when we had these giant birds? What was that part of the planet like? So this is 50 million years ago. This is within a period that we call the Eocene. During the Eocene, the entire planet was much warmer than it is today. But in particular, in Antarctica, if we think of Antarctica today, we're thinking of large ice sheets and penguins.

in large flocks puttering around and ice flows. But in the Eocene, the Antarctica was much, much warmer than it is today. Fossils have been found of marsupials and relatives of sloths and anteaters. Wow. The birds that were there, you know, outside of our polygynithids, penguins were there just like they are today. But you also had ducks and large ostrich relatives, just. in the beginning part of 2020, the first fossil frog was discovered.

Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty warm climate if you have amphibians there. Exactly. Yeah. To have a fossil frog there, it had to have been so much warmer than we think of today. Just a reminder that this is Science Friday, and I'm Christy Taylor. In case you just joined us, we're talking about giant birds of the past and what fossils are teaching us about them.

And Peter Close, what else do we need to know about this? these giant toothed birds that used to live in Antarctica. Well, I would also point out that they're not just found in Antarctica. Amongst all the many things that are exciting about this group, aside from the pseudotete, aside from their giant size, one thing that always strikes me, we have, we as the scientific community, have found their remains on every major landmass of the planet today. Wow. This group was existing all over the planet for about 60 million years. To me, that's a very successful group of organisms.

And birds are no longer 20 feet long, or 20 feet wide. Birds no longer have these pseudo teeth that you keep talking about. What happened to them? We don't entirely know. As I had mentioned, the youngest known specimens come from that 3 to 2 million-year-old period. This is a period of time at the end of the Pliocene into the beginning of the Pleistocene. In this three to two million years, temperatures took a dramatic decline and facilitated the glaciation that we think of when we think of the Pleistocene, the Ice Age, if you will. So one of our current hypotheses for what happened to these Pallagrinithids relates to climate change.

As these temperatures took a sharp decline, these Pallagrinithids, however successful they may have been prior to that, couldn't handle the change and when extinct. We keep mentioning albatrosses as sort of like a size comparison. Are they related to like are albatrosses the descendants of these birds or is there another modern bird that they might have sort of left their genetic remnants in, I guess? That's a very complicated question to answer. Originally, based entirely off of the shape of their bones, it was thought that polygynithids were related to albatrosses and even pelicans, other soaring birds,

you know, birds that travel long distances. But in the last couple decades, with more specimens being revealed, more specimens being studied, our current hypotheses are placing them, in fact, closer to ducks, if you would believe that. What? So this group didn't, they didn't begat ducks. but ducks are considered one of, potentially one of their closest relatives. There are some other hypotheses. They may be related to the group that includes ducks and chickens.

But yeah, that's currently where our thinking is. Somehow 20 foot wingspan toothed chicken doesn't quite have like the same ring for me as albatross. Well, as these birds are found in. marine and near shore sediments, places you don't necessarily see chickens today, it makes more sense to draw the analogy to albatrosses because albatrosses are seabirds. These polygynithids definitely would have been seabirds as well. All right. So we have these questions still about what happened to them. What is the fossil that's going to give us the answer? I mean, skeletons most certainly are valuable. And with polygynithids, these are birds. And if, If you think about birds, you may have heard that they tend to have hollow bones, the preservation of them tends to be a little spotty.

That's why with the Antarctic material that my colleagues and I worked on, that's why we're dealing with a fragment of the jaw and a fragment of the foot. Finding entirely intact specimens is incredibly rare, but they do exist. There's one from South Carolina that I'm thinking of. There's one from here in California. Chile is another place, another great specimen comes from. So they do exist. But to be honest, to answer that question of where is the next great polygyronithid discovery and is it going to be a skeleton or a fragment?

The sky's the limit. It could go either way. I see what you did there. This is such an excellent mystery, Peter. And I just love this visualization of these birds. Good luck finding more birds in your future. And happy new year, Peter. Thank you very much.

And have a happy new year as well. Peter Close is a PhD candidate in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He's also at the Museum of Paleontology there. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, what questions do you have about the COVID-19 vaccines, how they work, how they're being distributed? Tell us your questions about coronavirus vaccines. That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.