Science Friday - Jurassic World, Rhino Comeback, Uranus Collision. July 6, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

It’s the 25th anniversary of the debut of Jurassic Park. And with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom currently at the top of the summer movie food chain, its progeny continue to dominate the box offices. But even as the original Jurassic Park gave viewers the latest in paleontological science in dino looks, the research has progressed to include feathers and wildly different body shapes for old favorites like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Even newer research into dinosaur vocalization suggest they would have sounded more like modern birds than roaring lions. Paleontologists Julia Clarke and Ken Lacovara join John Dankosky to discuss. After the death of the last surviving male northern white rhino, the future looked dim for the endangered subspecies, which now numbers two infertile females. But scientists have been working on a number of methods to rescue the rhino after all. Collections of sperm and DNA could allow southern white rhinos, which are a closely related but a separate subspecies, to carry lab-created embryos to term. The icy planet Uranus is an odd place. It spins on an axis almost perpendicular to its orbit, with one pole pointed straight at the sun for much of the year. It’s also colder than expected and has an unusually-shaped magnetic field. One theory for how Uranus became such an oddball in our space neighborhood involves a massive impact strong enough to tip a young planet onto its side. A group of researchers ran the numbers on such a collision and simulated what the results might be if a planet one, two, or three times the size of the Earth were to strike Uranus in the early days of our solar system.  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 John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about efforts to save the endangered white rhino. Plus, science goes to the movies with a look at Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, and we want your questions about dinosaurs. You can call us at 844-724-8255. That's 844 SciTalk, or you can tweet us at SciFri. But first, the icy planet Uranus is an odd place. It spins on an axis almost perpendicular to its orbit with one point. pole pointed straight at the sun for much of the year. It's also colder than expected and has an unusually shaped magnetic field. Now, one theory for how Uranus became such a standout in our space neighborhood involves a massive impact strong enough to tip the young planet onto its side. In research published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, a group of researchers runs the

numbers on such a collision. Jacob Kegaris is one of the authors of that report and a researcher in the Institute for Computational Cosmology and the Department of Physics at Durham University in the UK. Jacob, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. So this idea of an impact causing the Uranus tilt isn't new, is it? No, that's right. So it's very hard to imagine, like you said, what could cause this odd tilt that Uranus has. And by far the most obvious idea is that something huge hit it and knocked it over. So this is not a new idea, but what we've been able to do with this research is use large supercomputers and new modeling techniques to try and understand more of the details of how this happened and some of the other consequences that this huge violent event

might have had on the planet. Before we get into more details about that violent event, I said some of this up front, but there's a lot that's weird about Uranus. Tell us what is unusual about this planet compared to the others in our solar system. Yeah, exactly. One quick thing to say is also that we might not even know that much about how many weird things there are, because compared with any of the inner planets, Uranus and Neptune and Pluto and so on, they're so far away. And specifically, Uranus has only been visited by the one probe, by Voyager 2 in the mid-80s. So we know a lot of weird things about it, but there could well be even more that we haven't had the close look at the planet to find out yet.

But anyway, to answer the question, obviously there's the tilt, which is odd. Like you mentioned as well, it's extremely cold. We expect that these giant planets, as they're forming, have a lot of heat in their center as all of this material is being squashed together as they form from the early solar system. And the energy that we see coming out the surface of Uranus is practically exactly the same as the energy it receives from the sun. It's as if there's nothing coming out from the middle. that's very odd. I think you also mentioned the magnetic field. And with something like the Earth

and larger planets like Jupiter as well, you expect a magnetic field somewhat like a bar magnet, just that classic shape of a North Pole and a South Pole and a nice uniform map of the magnetic field lines. But around Neurus and I think Neptune as well is somewhat similar, it's this completely different chaotic shape and there are loops going all over the place and it doesn't seem to either come from the center, and it's not even aligned with the tilted spin axis either. So those are a couple weird things, some of the aspects of the moons with small rings in the center, some normalish-looking moons, and then weirder moons further out. So the list goes on. So why is it so cold? I can, I guess, understand why an impact might knock a planet over,

but what makes it so especially cold there? Yeah, that's a complicated question. Again, is the short answer. And our research certainly doesn't go all the way to explaining it. But a few years ago, what people found was that pretty much the only way they could find to explain how cold it is, because like I mentioned, it's not been long enough for Uranus to cool down in a normal way over time. The solar system isn't old enough for all that heat to get out, we think. So what they found was that if you had some boundary layer that stopped the heat from the middle getting to the outside, that that would be able to explain the cold outside that we see on the timescales

that we think happens. So a potential aspect of this is one that you have some physical obstruction that stops the heat from moving out and also more complicated considerations of the entropy and how the heat transfers. But one of the simpler ideas that we can understand is that in big planets like this, the convection is a really important way of moving heat around. So actually moving blobs of hot stuff that can rise up just like air does in weather on Earth. Hot stuff rises, cold stuff sinks, and you can circulate things that way. So one of the things we found in our simulations, which we weren't exactly looking for,

but we hoped we might see, was that for some especially grazing impacts, all of the material from this impact of this Earth or larger size. thing that's smashing in could end up almost coating around the outside of the young uranus target it was hitting. And it's possible that this is the kind of thing that could make a layer to trap the heat in or perhaps mix up the temperature gradients inside and stop this nice convection from happening. So that's potentially some of what happened with the impact, the debris caused this.

What happened to all the other stuff that came off in this collision, both from the object that hit Uranus and also the planet itself? That's a really good question. So the first thing is we expect most of it stayed in the planet. You can get an awful lot of stuff spread over a big area, but most of the mass, most of the meaty bits of the planet, we think, stayed in. Part of the reason for that is that at these distances from the sun at this time, we don't expect an impactor to be coming in at huge speeds.

It's not going to be doing a hit-and-run collision and flying off into the distance. And also, in order to explain the rate of spin that Uranus had to knock it over and explain that most basic observation that we wanted to look at, you really need the impactor to end up stuck inside the planet so it can transfer all of the angular momentum, all of this ability to spin up the planet, transfer all of that to the end result. I can't remember if that was exactly what you asked, but that's the start. Well, no, that's a good start. And actually gets me to my next question. This idea of an impact, I think I'm thinking of two cue balls and a pool table hitting and bouncing off of each other.

But if two things that are roughly planet-sized collide, it's not going to be that quick. How long would the actual impact last as it drags across the surface of Uranus? Good question. So not that long you might expect, sometimes we talk about. about these astrophysical things and they're taking years or millennia to happen, this is going to be over a few hours, or maybe a few tens of hours, depending on when you decide to say that it's over. But certainly, unlike two kubles bouncing off each other, this is going to be an awful

lot messier. So planets this size, especially when they start hitting each other, everything's going to be hot and molten, bits are going to start flying off. Oh, that's what you asked by before. Yeah, so as well as everything's smushing and blotting. all over the place, you are going to scatter a lot of material out around in huge sprays, and that might be able to explain perhaps where some of Uranus' moons came from. When these huge things collide, sure lots might collect in the middle,

you're going to scatter debris over quite a wide area as well. The object that you surmise hit it was about Earth-sized? Probably, if not, actually quite a bit bigger. So we don't know for certain, of course. So what we did is we tested a range of impacts and masses. We looked at one about the same mass as the Earth, and then twice as big and three times as big. And in the early solar system, you expect to have probably quite a lot of this kind of object flying around. Before you have just the 10 or so big planetary things that we have nowadays,

earlier on the solar system was a much more crowded and violent place. And so all of these small things flying around could be caused. impacts like this probably on all the planets. So we looked at this range of possible masses, and one of the things we found, again, perhaps as a surprise, is that almost all of these masses are plausible. They might be able to explain the spin. And so that's partly why we looked at other things like the possible temperature effects and other complications to see if we can start narrowing down what the most likely impact was. But you say that probably in the early solar system, there was a lot of stuff, maybe planet-sized, that was circling around bouncing into

each other, not something that's coming from outside at a very high rate of speed, probably. Yeah, I think that's by far the most likely thing. So people have been talking a lot recently about, if I'm pronouncing that right, this visitor that we had from a different solar system from interstellar space. But my understanding is, we We currently know very little about that is the short answer, whereas we have good reason to think that there were lots of these impactors that were homegrown, as it were. So that's definitely where the finger usually points. How exactly did you go about modeling this? Good question.

So the basic idea is not that complicated. In the same way as, say, you wanted to program a video game. If you want your character in a game to be able to jump and then fall under gravity, you need to teach that computer how gravity works. You need to say, here's the equation. This is how fast you accelerate towards whatever is big. So in our simulations, we need to tell it how gravity works, and we also need to tell it how these materials behave,

how rock and ice and hydrogen atmospheres and so on behave when they're squashed or heated. And that's a difficult thing to do, but the idea is fairly simple. We want to test these hypotheses, hypotheses that we have, but we can't just make a planet in the lab and hold it in our hands and smash it together and see what happens. So using computer simulations, we can put in the physics that we understand as best that we can and let it run to see the computer solve

these equations and tell us what happens next. So in just a little bit of time we have left, why do we care about this? Obviously, Uranus is interesting. It's unusual, but what can we learn about everything else from what we learn about Uranus? Yeah, so like you said, it's always nice and exciting to answer the simple questions about we look up at the solar system at our planets around us and how did they get to be the way they are. So that that's the immediate motivation. Like I mentioned, we think that giant impacts like this were common, both in our own solar system for explaining things like where our moon came from or, well, you can go through a list of almost every planet in the solar system and something probably happened. but also we think they were common in all solar systems. So nowadays that we're really starting to find so many of these exoplanets,

planets around distant stars and other solar systems, not only do we think impacts were important for how all of them formed, but a lot of them seem to be really quite similar to Euritin Neptune. So that immediately makes us keener to understand everything that we can about these close-to-home examples of this kind of ice giant planet so we can get a better handle on how those other ones that we start finding involved. And we've got to leave it there with Jacob Kegaris. Thank you so much for your research.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Earlier this year, the world mourned the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhino. Only his daughter and granddaughter remain of the subspecies, both unable to give birth to young. But researchers hoping to save them from extinction

have been working on assisted reproductive techniques with some help from the southern white rhino, a closely related subspecies. Our research team in Italy, writing in nature communications this week, reports successfully creating hybrid embryos using northern white rhino sperm and southern white rhino eggs. Note that I said hybrid here, so how could this help to save the northern white rhino? Here to explain the how and why of all this is Terry Roth, director of the Center for Conservation and Research for Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. Welcome, Terry, to the show. Oh, thanks, John.

So let's start with this process. How hard is it to create embryos like the ones that the team in Italy is reporting working on? Well, you know, it's interesting, and it varies by species, but in the rhinoceros, it actually has been extremely difficult to develop embryos in the lab and in vitro system. So the progress they've made recently is really quite commendable. I think in the past we've only been able to produce a couple of embryos, and they only developed to two to five cells in number, and these are very well-developed embryos. So it's a big advancement. Is this type of assisted reproductive technology being used in preserving other endangered species?

To a very small, limited extent it is, and it's being investigated for a number of other species. But these folks are kind of taking a high-tech approach, and so a lot of what they're doing has not yet been applied. to the endangered species. So why exactly do we need southern white rhino genetic material in this? Explain what we need here. I think a lot of people get tripped up on that a little bit. But there's two parts to this. In one part, it's just scientists like to work on something that's a little bit more plentiful

to work out the kinks and approve kind of proof of concept that this can be done. So I think in this case, of course, no rhino oocyte is available in large number. but there are more southern white rhinos clearly than northern. So by working with the southern white rhino, they're developing the protocols that they think will work pretty well when applied to the northern white rhino. But the second piece to it, and I think this is what the scientists are hopeful about, is that these hybrid embryos do carry the genes of the northern white rhino,

and we all are hoping that we can save some of those genes. And so even by producing hybrids, we've at least rescued some of the gene pool. And the idea would be long term to try to invert, those hybrid offspring with each other to eventually dilute out the southern white rhino genes and concentrate the northern white rhino so that we have more of a northern white rhino population at the end of the day. Now that is going to be full of challenges because, of course, you're going to be inbreeding significantly, and that often leads to inbreeding depression. But you also say it's going to take some time, right? I mean, this is not something that's going

to happen over the course of a couple years. It will take some time, definitely. I think the are hoping to produce their first offspring in three years. And I think even that is optimistic, but that's only a start, because we're going to need numerous offspring. And like I said, then they are going to have to breed together successfully. And in the past, breeding the northern white rhino in a managed program has failed. So there's some challenges just in doing that as well. I've said subspecies a few times.

The northern white and the southern white are closely enough related to create these hybrids in the first place. So tell us more, Terry, about the urgency to save this northern white rhino. If these animals are genetically so similar that they can be bred in this way, why is it so important to save this northern subspecies? Yeah, you know, geneticists are, there are some geneticists that disagree that they're subspecies and actually claim they're almost so different you could call them species. So given that, we have to believe that there has been enough selection pressure on the northern white rhino. to make them pretty different from the southern white rhino, at least in their ability to adapt to the northern habitats where they live.

Therefore, if we want rhinos back in the northern habitats of Africa, we're probably going to be better off to have northern white rhinos that we can put in those habitats. I think there's probably a good chance southern white rhinos could adapt, but we don't really know for sure, and we don't really like to take that kind of a risk. So I think that's why folks really want to save the northern white rhino. and it's also the principle of the matter.

We should not be letting species go extinct on our watch. It's on our watch, but it's also because of us. I mean, tell us a little bit more about why the Northern White Rino is so endangered. Yeah, you know, the Northern White Rino was actually on its way to becoming a conservation success story in the late 1990s, early 2000s. There was a population of them in Garamba National Park, and it was protected by rangers who were supported by the International Rino Foundation. and the numbers were increasing. And we believed at one point we were up to at least 30 rhinos, which is a low number, but they were increasing and they were reproducing and they were doing well.

And then civil unrest broke out. And at that point, things got so dangerous in the territory that the rangers had to be removed from their work because their lives were at risk. And once they were pulled out and the protection stopped, the rhinos were decimated by poaching and just by the civil unrest that was going on in the country. So really, in most cases, that's the kind of thing that's driving rhinos to extinction more than anything else. It's the loss of habitat, and it's the poaching and the killing for various reasons. When we get to a point where we're using these kind of high-tech reproductive technologies,

we're kind of acting as a triage unit. It's a last gasp, and we really don't want to get to this point with these animals. But that's such an important piece of this, though, if we are successful in getting the northern wild. white rhino to breed again, and we're getting more of them back in, but we're not able to protect the species, then what happens? I mean, that's part of conservation as well. It absolutely is, yes, yes. This reproductive technology is just one tiny piece of it, and it can play an important role, but it can't alone save the species. We need to have the habitat where the species can live. We need to be able to protect them. Right now, we are facing an approaching

epidemic in Africa that's just been out of control now for the last. last eight years. And it's extreme. It's to the point where the animal populations that used to be increasing are now plateaued, and pretty soon they're going to start to decrease, and so we're going to start losing them again. That's the thing we have to really get a handle on, and that requires a lot of work by a lot of countries. Even though it's in Africa, it's not just Africa's problem. The consumers are in a lot of other countries. Does this effort, on behalf of the Northern White Rino, does it point us in a direction to protect other species? And we talked about this a little bit, but I'm wondering how widely this can be applied to species beyond the rhino.

It's a good question. You know, some of the techniques that have been used in this research have really only had some success in mice so far. So these scientists have taken those techniques and, you know, they're starting to apply it to the rhinoceros, but every species is extremely different biologically. And so it's going to be more challenging. We're pretty certain of that and whether or not it can ever succeed in the rhinoceros and how that applies to other endangered species, I'm not really sure. It could be a stretch to say it's really going to be a panacea. I don't see it as such. In just a minute, we're going to talk about Jurassic World and de-extinct dinosaurs. You mentioned this before, the idea of our obligation to bring things back

from extinction. I'm wondering if you've thought widely about this, if indeed the northern white rhino goes away completely and we're able to bring it or other species back. Is that something that if we have the power to do, we should, Terry? You know, you could go either way with that question. On the one hand, with the Northern White Rhino, because it actually still is here, and it hasn't been that long. I mean, it's probably been functionally extinct for five to ten years, but we've still been living with it.

There still is habitat that would support it. I believe it's worth doing what we can to save the Northern White Rino. On the flip side, I don't think it's worthwhile putting a lot of resources into trying to bring back things like the woolly mammoth and the dinosaurs. We don't have the proper habitat. Too much time has gone by. Too many things have changed. And the amount of resources and effort that would go into an effort like that and the likelihood of it paying off, it's really pretty questionable. Terry Roth is Director of the Center for Conservation and Research for Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden.

Terry, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it. You bet. Thanks, John. Spectacular science shocker ever filmed. The science fiction. That sound signals another edition of Science Goes to the Movies. 25 years after the original Jurassic Park debuted, another sequel is out in topping the charts. It's Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. Dinosaurs are again facing extinction, this time from a volcano on their island home.

How many can you save? 11 species, blue is the last of her kind. Oh, we'll hear more about blue. But what do real paleontologists think about these on-screen dino stars? Where you're here to talk about it. Yes, that alert means, you guessed it. We're going to be talking spoilers here. So if you don't want to know how it ends, you can plug your ears or turn off the radio, start your weekend early.

Now on to my guests. Julia Clark is a professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome, Dr. Clark to the show. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, Go. And Kenneth Lakovara is Dean of the School of Earth and Environment and the director of the Edelman Fossil Park of Rowan University. He's also the author of Why Dinosaurus Matter. Welcome back to the show, Kenneth.

Thank you. Great to be here. If you have some favorite dino moments from this film or other questions for our guests about dinosaurs, our numbers 844-724-8-255. That's 844-Sai Talk, or you can tweet us at Cy Fry. All right. Well, Julie, I'll start with you. we gave away a little bit of the plot here. We'll talk a little bit more about what happens to these dinosaurs.

What do you think of the film overall? Two claws up, or not so much? You know, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. To me, it was a gothic throwback to the moments of Ray, Harryhausen, stop-motion dinosaurs, except they weren't stop motion anymore. So, okay, so maybe a little bit of, of a throwback for you. Kenneth, what about you? What'd you think of the movie overall? Well, you know, I look at these things as fun summer monster movies. And, you know, as a monster

movie, it was great. It was pretty fun. I wouldn't look at it like a textbook, but it's a good time. Okay. Maybe not like a textbook. What were some of the highlights for you, Kenneth? What were some of the things that stood out? Well, I study the sauropod dinosaurs, the really big ones, and it's always a thrill for me to see those fleshed out. And I try to imagine what it would be like if I could actually stand next to one of them. But I also really liked what Julia mentioned, the kind of gothic setting of some of these where the dinosaurs kind of looked like gargoyles.

I thought that was pretty cool. How about you, Julia? Some things stand out to you? Well, in addition to kind of the optics of the film, I really enjoyed the kind of closing commentary by the Jeff Goldblum character, where he talks about something that's actually really true, this idea that there have always been crises,

there have always been, you know, not all the time, but throughout Earth history, there have been periods of rapid global change. And kind of, I like that closing reminder that we're in one now. And I actually didn't expect it. And it was nice to hear the end of the movie for me. I'm wondering, Julie, if we can start with how the dinosaurs looked. I mean, we're talking about stop action dinosaurs in those old movies we used to watch.

Obviously, the computer generated effects make them look much better than that. But they don't necessarily look like how you think dinosaurs looked, including the fact that they didn't have feathers. Yeah, I know. It's challenging for me because the thing that's supposed to be so, you know, distinct about dinosaurs is that they were once alive. They're real creatures. and they're not, you know, dragons or gargoyles,

but the way that they just haven't been updated. And to me, a feathered dinosaur or dinosaurs with like a wide variety of body coverings can be scary. You know, I think we just have to look to something like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. You know, a great movie can be made with very scary feathered dinosaurs. And so I would have loved to see. some really creepy, fuzzy and feathered dinosaurs in, you know, in a more updated look. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

And we're talking with Julia Clark and Kenneth Lockavara about the new Jurassic Park movie. There's some things, Kenneth, that you might change about the way the dinosaurs looked. You mentioned seeing these gigantic herbivores standing over you. Is it what you would have expected to see if you were there? Well, you know, I think they do a pretty good job with most of the dinosaurs, particularly the large one. I agree with Julia. It would be great to see feathers on ones that we know now had feathers. But, you know, when they portray the giant sauropods, like they had a Camarasaurus in there and a brachiosaurus, and they always kind of portray them as these passive lumbering kind of dopey creatures.

and these dinosaurs would have been fierce and nasty. You know, the most dangerous animals in many places are the herbivores. If you go to Africa, the hippos are the most dangerous, large animals there. They're herbivores, of course, so they don't want to eat you. They just want to kill you. More people are injured in Yellowstone by the bison than by the grizzly bears. So you don't want to be anywhere near a giant sarapod that weighs tens of tons. these animals would be aggressive and territorial and super dangerous to be around.

But also on the flip side, an awful lot of the super predators that walk the earth right now, they don't spend their time looking to eat humans. They're kind of just sitting around, and if they're hungry, they might eat something that walks by. I don't know, Kenneth, this would flip the monster movie, though, on its head if the herbivores were the ones that could trample you and the velociraptors just sort of sat around until they, you know, got a bit peckish. Well, true. But, you know, predators, they also tend to. be very cautious. If you're a cheetah and you break a toe, you're probably going to starve to death.

So predators are, you know, cautious animals where herbivores tend to just kind of blunder into situations. And they can sustain pretty serious injuries and still, you know, eat grass. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Julie, you want to pick up on this? Because the way that the dinosaurs actually act in the movie isn't necessarily the way that we'd see them act in real life if they were walking around? Well, I completely agree with Ken. I think that one of the biggest things that kind of deviates from what we know about dinosaurs or what we know about animals generally is the behaviors. And I, you know, what calls out to me is the examples where right, you know, just right before the large carnivore is going to eat somebody, it just yells out, you know, it's sort of like as if you're

going to be like, wow, a cheeseburger, you know. And, you. it's really not something that we see in nature and we don't see this sort of like anger. I mean, animals can be aggressive, but there's not the idea that they're going to warn you. They're about to consume you. You know, that would be a very maladaptive trait. Well, actually, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some of the noises that the dinosaurs do make. It's something you've been studying.

And we're going to figure out if they sound too realistic or not. You can call us with your dinosaur questions. 844-724-825. That's 844-Sy-4-4-Sy-Talk. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. We're talking about movie dinosaurs with real paleontologists. The new Jurassic World movie's been stomping all over box office this summer with more roaring T-Rex and bright velociraptors, genetically engineered surprise as well. There's a volcano threatening the last dinosaurs on Earth. A rescue mission turns into an evil plot. I won't give away the whole thing, but I will

tell you, there are some spoilers ahead with our guest paleontologists, Julia Clark and Kenneth Lockavara. We'll get to some of your phone calls in just a moment, or you can tweet us at SciFri. So, Julie, I've been looking forward to this. Your research includes the evolution of sounds that these animals made. We've got a sample of some sounds from the dinosaurs in the movie. There's a big carnivore and then the T-Rex heroically saving our main characters. Okay, so what do you think about that? How do they do? Oh, my gosh. I was trying to like decode or break down some of the sounds that I heard and there's just you know there's some of it almost reminds me of like a Star Wars movie you know some of the same sounds

mixed in there at the end but it's like kind of there's some crocodilian undertones and then there's this roaring kind of mammalian overtone to me I mean and that's not a technical use of undertone and overtone but there's they're just um you Yeah, you know, I think what seems to me about these sounds is that they're a little too familiar, you know? I think we need to have sounds that we need to expect these sounds to be perhaps a little bit more unfamiliar in, you know, if we were to really journey back to the Jurassic world. Well, I mean, how do we know anything about how dinosaurs would sound in the first place? I mean, do we have any tissue that would suggest what noises they make? Oh, that's a, yeah.

Well, this is an area of research that we're really just getting started with. And in many ways, we thought we'd never know the sounds that dinosaurs made. And I think that we're going to get a lot closer to that. And what do we look at? Well, we really have to understand how living dinosaurs or birds make sounds. So we need to understand not just our songbirds that we know a lot about, but we need to look at weird earlier branches and birds, such as ostriches and emus and other things that they can tell us about how living dinosaurs make sounds.

And then we also are looking for fossil records of parts of the sound-producing structure and trying to get at what these structures might have been like. And in fact, just a couple years ago, we found the first fossil. fossilized evidence of a vocal organ from the age of dinosaurs. So hopefully, paleontologists are all out there digging through their collections, and maybe we'll find more such evidence to kind of get at this story. Well, you mentioned ostriches and crocodiles. Let's actually listen to these animals to see how they sound, and maybe this gives a little

bit better blueprint for how our dinosaurs would sound. First, an ostrich. Interesting. Okay. And now a crocodile. Yeah, they're fun sounds. You know, it's like, what do you guys make of those? You know, how do they sound compared to the movie?

I don't know, Kenneth, what do you think? You listen to those sounds. The crocodile sound to me actually sounds a lot like some of the dinosaurs in the movie. I didn't really hear the ostrich in there. Yeah, I think it does. And, you know, I'd love to see those sounds scaled up to T-Rex size. And, you know, as Julia was saying before, like feathers can be scary. Crocodile sounds can be scary.

I think we need a new scary. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, well, I was just going to add, like, I think what a lot of people don't realize is both of those sounds were produced with the animal's mouth closed. So that's a very big difference from the majority of those large raptors. You know, we saw a lot of their saliva. We saw a lot of when they, you know, a lot of the inside of their mouths while they were making these sounds. Yeah, Rachel tweets at us, whenever a dinosaur yells in the presence of characters, I always assume the noise. is pretty loud, would it deafen humans? We don't know how loud the dinosaur sounds are, but as you say, Julia, they probably wouldn't be roaring with their mouths open either. They'd be making grunting noises

or rumbling noises with their mouths closed. Well, there's actually one thing that we know kind of generally across animals, which is that the frequency of the sound they produce has an inverse relationship to how big they are. So, for example, in general, large animals make low, frequency sounds and a little mouse makes a very high frequency sound.

So if you scale that up to something that are these largest terrestrial animals that ever lived, you know, we did sort of back of the envelope calculations and this is not, you know, we need to take this further to really make it science, rigorous, but you would be almost below human hearing for animals of the size that certainly Kens, creatures, you know, know, get to where if you were just looking at what living animals, kind of that inverse scaling relationship. So, you know, could they deaf in humans? We might even have acoustic, you know, sounds that are fairly rare today. That would be perhaps much more prevalent in this, you know, Jurassic or Cretaceous world. I want to get to some phone calls. Finn is calling us. Finn is in

Sayatville, Arkansas. Hi there, Finn. You're on the show. Hi. Hi, there, Finn. What's your question? What dinosaurs. Do all dinosaurs have big teeth? Oh, do they all have big teeth? Okay, so that's a question for Kenneth.

How about you, Kenneth? Do all dinosaurs have big teeth? Well, they don't all have big teeth. In fact, the biggest dinosaurs have some of the tiniest teeth. And so you can tell a lot about what an animal, including dinosaurs eat by looking at their teeth. And so, you know, T-Rex has these giant nine-inch teeth that are very fat and scary.

But if you look at those super-massive herbivorous dinosaurs, like the titanosaurs, they have tiny little teeth. They're not much bigger than pencils, and they don't do any chewing with these. They just use them like the tines on a garden rake to just strip vegetation from the landscape, and then they gulp it down whole, and their stomach is the size of a horse,

so they let it sit in there for weeks or months and let the bacteria do all of the work. So when you look over the whole range of dinosaurs, you'll see all kinds of teeth, and those different shapes or morphologies can all be traced back to the kinds of food they were eating. So, Ken, when you see in the movie, the dinosaurs that you study,

ripping off the tops of trees, the foliage, and then chewing, that's probably not what they were doing. Yeah, they were. weren't chewing in the real Cretaceous. They're just pulling the vegetation away from the plants or the stems and

gulping it down whole. I did notice in the movie actually it looked like a brachiosaurus was chewing and they wouldn't be doing that because they have such huge stomachs they can just process all the food after they swallow it. Julia, did you have any problems with how the eating of the dinosaurs was portrayed?

Well, you know, Ken makes a great point about these large herbivores and chewing is just not a thing in nearly all dinosaurs. But the thing that really got me was the gooey, slippery, you know, kind of super slimy saliva and the tongues. So these were pretty mobile tongues. They were a little frightening. And then this saliva that at one point gets on the Chris Pratt character looks to me like

something that you'd buy at a novelty store. You know, and I certainly have never seen the majority of reptiles, including birds, do not produce that. So that's not really directly related to eating, but maybe to the other, well, parts of eating saliva. Yeah. Well, Finn, thank you very much for your question. Actually, we've got another question from McKenna in Wilson, North Carolina, who's also asking a question about how dinosaurs eat and maybe what they eat.

Hi, there, McKenna, you're on the show. Hi, this is actually her. mother, we're a little anxious about being on air, but I'll try to translate her question for her. That's fine. I'm anxious all the time. Go ahead. We wanted to know if we would really make a good meal for these carnivorous dinosaurs. Are we too bony? Yeah. Or are we too bony? See, that's the important question. Thank you very much for your question, McKenna and Mom. So I don't know. Are we too bony? Who wants to answer that? Well, you know, yes, for the carnivorous dinosaurs. I mean, you're made of me.

and dinosaurs are made of meat. And so you would be an excellent meal for them. And for a big thing like a T-Rex, they would probably gnaw on us like M&Ms. Would they like it, though? I mean, would we be the type of food, Julia, that they'd be seeking out? You know, I'm with Ken on this one.

I think a large carnivore in, if it's hungry, is going to go for us, certainly. If we're in this imaginary landscape, we are going to be a beautiful prey choice. That said, I think these animals seem to be hungry all the time. And you see them eat like four or five humans in one scene. And I just feel like they would probably be satiated and decide to go lounge on top of something, you know, rather than continuing to consume more humans.

But yeah, they would just swallow, you know, they're basically a bite and swallow kind of. of thing. And, you know, they're not going to try to pick little pieces of our deliciousness off, you know. Kenneth, where are some of the new insights into dinosaur science coming from right now? We have this image in our mind of paleontologists out digging up bones, but there's a lot going on in the lab, too. What are we learning? Yeah, there's a lot going on in the field and in the lab. We're discovering about a new dinosaur species a week now in the field.

and our lives in the field are pretty much like they were 100 years ago. We're living outside. We're living in tents. We're using pickaxes and rock hammers and chisels. But now in the laboratory, really, everything has changed. And, you know, we regularly use 3D laser scanners. In my lab, we use 3D printers to print dinosaur bones at a 1 tenth scale and turn them into robotic mechanical models of limb joints

so that we can test our biomechanical hypotheses. I'm just going to stop you right there. Sure. You're 3D printing bones of dinosaurs to create robot dinosaurs? Yes, to create robot parts of dinosaurs. We haven't yet created a complete robot dinosaur, but, for example, we've created a robotic forelim of a dinosaur that I found in South America, Dreadnoughtus, and we've attached wires to the muscle attachments.

hooked up to little servo motors driven by a program that one of my students wrote. And we can test the energy that goes into the system and the energy consumed in the movement. We also have a little artificial cartilage in there. And our guiding assumption is that the more efficient we make this model, the closer to the truth we're getting about how dinosaurs actually moved. And so we can do this in the robotic realm, and that's great because that thing has agency, right? really in the world and it has all the forces that act on everything applying to it. But then we can also take that and use advanced medical modeling software and do a similar

set of experiments in the virtual world. And we have to simplify those a little bit because they are computer simulations. But the advantage of that is we can do thousands and thousands of iterations. So we can kind of get an independent validation by using the robotic models and the virtual models. I'm John Dengkowski. and this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Julia, I'd love to know what sort of innovations are happening in your world in the lab.

It sounds pretty exciting what's happening in Ken's world. I'm sure it is in yours, too. Well, we share a lot of similar technologies, so I would say that the availability of, you know, cat scanning or x-raying bones, you can do surface scans, but you can also x-ray whole animals. and the techniques that are really kind of moving fast and being developed and being iterated a lot now are around imaging soft tissues and their relationship with bony parts.

And this is, you know, what is going on in my lab. So we're trying to look at living animal muscles and how they attach to these fossilizable parts because in the fossil record, I'm not going to ever find a complete. well, I never say never, but a complete vocal organ. But what I might find are the support structures for the squishy bits that produce the sound. And so what I want to do is understand how those relate so I can maybe predict properties of the squishy bits that don't really fossilize well. And so that's the kind of key work that we're doing is looking at crocodile vocal organs, bird vocal organs, which are very, very different. and trying to see, you know, understand how these vocal cords that produce sound relate to these fossilizable parts.

Okay, we just have a couple of minutes left, and we've established a few things. Maybe the dinosaurs don't sound exactly right. There's no feathers in the dinosaurs. The velociraptors are probably a little too big for real velociraptors. But I'll start with you, Julie. I mean, what would you do? If you were making a movie about dinosaurs coming back to life, and what are some things you do differently? What's the movie you'd tell?

Well, I think I would go, you know, I love the kind of, I love Ray Harryhausen, who I keep mentioning, but is this early innovator in bringing dinosaurs to life. But I want to see us move past that. I want to see, you know, something that's incorporating a lot more accuracy in terms of, you know, because the important thing about dinosaurs is that they were once alive. They're real animals. And so that's what's different from a dragon or anything, you know, cool that we can dream up in our imagination. And that's part of their terror is that they were real.

And so I think a movie like The Birds, by contrast, where it was just seagulls and crows that went, you know, had this malicious attempt and started attacking people is actually just as scary a film. I'm not trying to see another movie about seagulls and crows, but I would like to see more, you know, real animals that are truly scary. So I think that would be cool. Well, Kenneth, you just have a couple seconds left. What would you do different? Well, I agree. Dinosaurs were real.

They dominated Earth's ecosystem for the better part of 165 million years, and there's no reason to gild that lily. They're more diverse, more unbelievable, really, than, you know, we could have ever imagined. And so, you know, you make a realistic dinosaur, and you've made a really scary beast that's going to make a good move. star. Kenneth Lackavar is author of Why Dinosaurs Matter. He's Dean of the School of Earth and Environment, director of the Edelman Fossil Park of Rowan University. Thanks so much, Kenneth. You're welcome.

Thanks to Julia Clark, a professor of vertebrate, paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you so much, Julia. Thank you. B.G. Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program, we'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to your podcast. Maybe you can listen again after you watch the movie. If you got a smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday any day of the week. Just say Science Friday. Say how to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. Our address, SciFry at ScienceFriday.com. Send feedback and tell us what you'd like to cover as well.

Ira is back next week. I'm John Dankoski in New York.