SciShow Tangents - Dinosaurs

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Kids month continues with maybe THE most-beloved-by-children scientific topic of all time: dinosaurs! Come on a journey back in time to learn about the giant guys who used to stomp around and eat each other all over planet Earth!And, as if that's not good enough, we're joined by Tangents editorial assistant Deboki Chakravarti! If you need more Deboki in your life, you can listen to her podcast, Tiny Matter, here: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/tiny-matters.htmlIf you know a kid who loves science, have we go the show for you! It's called SciShow Kids, and it has all the great, rigorously-researched content you expect from SciShow, but for kids! Plus, it has puppets! Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/scishowkids!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsto find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Tom Mosner, Daisy Whitfield, and Allison Owen for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Deboki: @okidoki_boki[Trivia Question]Mamenchisaurus pounds of plant life consumed per dayhttps://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/science/12dinosaurs.html[Fact Off]Prosthetic tails on chickens to study dinosaur gaitPossible supersonic whip-like tails in sauropods https://daily.jstor.org/apatosaurus-tail-break-sound-barrier/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2401127?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentshttps://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/dinosaurs-in-motionhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2830450/http://goriely.com/wp-content/uploads/2002-PRLwhip-1.pdf[Ask the Science Couch]Dinosaurs that have changed names (apato/bronto, triceratops/torosaurus)https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brontosaurus-is-back1/https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/571498https://peerj.com/articles/857/https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0081608https://gizmodo.com/the-first-scientific-name-ever-given-to-a-dinosaur-foss-5955550https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2018/08/31/why-do-scientific-names-change-kiokio-by-any-other-name/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your resident everyman, Sam Schultz, and joining me this week, as always, my steadfast friend, Sari Reilly. I'm your resident everyman sam schultz and joining me this week as always my steadfast friend sari riley i'm your friend oh i being your friend is lower pressure than me the science expert i love it i love it hello and as you can see if you're watching this which you can youtube.com slash size show tangents, Hank is not here, which can only mean one thing, Deboki is here. Yes, today we are joined by Journey to the Microcosmos writer and narrator, podcast host, and not to mention Tangents editorial assistant, Deboki Chakravarti. Hi, Deboki.

Hello. I'm excited to be here. What's your podcast called? Tell us. It's called Tiny Matters. You can find it wherever you find your podcasts. And then you haven't, do you have another podcast? You've done other podcasting projects. Yes. Yeah. In the past I've done other podcasting projects, but Tiny Matters is my current ongoing one with the wonderful Sam Jones. And yeah, that's,

that's been a lot of fun. So if you guys want to hear fun science stories about weird small things and how even those tiny things are super, important uh look for tiny matters deboki's a great follow she's always making content yeah she's a content factory i've never really thought of myself as a content factory but i sure am now that's good to know now i'm going to do my best hand impersonation and i'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to start with a very long prelude in which I say this. I'm building a patio in my backyard, and I have to dig a big hole to do it.

And as I'm digging this hole, I'm thinking, it's a very small hole, and I'm thinking, I'm, like, destroying the environment. It just feels weird. There's, like, bugs crawling around, and there's, like, rocks and, like, things you're pulling out of the ground. It feels weird there's like bugs crawling around and there's like rocks and like like things you're pulling out of the ground it feels feels weird so my question for both of you is all right have you ever dug a really good hole before oh man man if we were serial killers this

would be a really awkward question oh yeah this is a trap for you to book out there in the massachusetts woods yes in the house i grew up in the people who owned it before us had an above ground pool and immediately when we moved in we took it out because my dad was like it's a death trap the the stand that they used to get into it was already splintering. And so we just had this sand pit in our backyard. And I played in that so much. And so I definitely at one point buried some money in there that I then dug up later. And I'm pretty sure I just tried to dig to the bottom of it.

Just trying to find what's underneath all this sand. And I found a lot of cat poop and a lot of nothing. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. Imagine you were playing in it and cats are pooping in it. Yep, exactly. So it's still a death trap in my backyard. Deboki, surely you've had time to think of a big.

I mean, I sure tried to think of one, but I can't think of that. Like all the holes I think of are like convers like conversational holes um oh and those are good those are not good holes to do yourself into the only hole i can think of is like from high school my freshman year we had some kind of archaeology project where we were given some sort of ancient civilization. We had to come up with artifacts, bury them, and then dig up somebody else's hole that they had made. And I don't know if this was the group that we dug up or if I'm just like remembering something that someone else dealt with and I decided that this was the hole that we had to dug up. But we dug up some hole where basically that group had decided

that they were going to bury a bunch of concrete bricks first so we were like we were like in at the top of this hill in our in our school trying to dig up a hole and we first had to uncover concrete bricks before we actually got to the artifacts we were supposed to be discovering what the heck were you just digging holes in the regular well we knew where we were supposed to go like they were marked off they told us plus it was pretty clear where other class like other groups had buried generations of holes had been done yeah yeah weird cool that sounds really cool okay well this is a podcast and this is how you introduce the podcast every week on tangents we get together and try to one up amaze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic our panelists are playing for glory and this week for deboki bucks

or is there a funner word for them bogue bucks yeah bucks bogue bucks excuse me bogue bucks which deboki will be awarding to us as we play and at the end of the episode either sari or i will be crowned the winner and for the whole month of july we will be celebrating the childlike wonder present in science with a bunch of topics inspired by the sort of junk the kids like like dinosaurs not to spoil the episode like spaceships like play which was our last episode stuff like that we're calling it kids month but that does not mean that you should watch tangents or listen to tangents with your kids because we're still gonna swear we're still gonna talk about probably poop and my kid gets kids like but we'll call it shit and kids can't hear that sarah loves to say shit that's me the scientific name for poop yeah but something you can enjoy with your kids is our sister show sci show kids which is a youtube

channel it's like sci show but for early elementary learners. And it's hosted by Jesse Knudsen Castaneda, who you might know from the channel Animal Wonders, and Anthony Brown, and Squeaks, who's this little robot rat puppet. He's not, if you're a kid and listening to this, he's real. He's not a puppet. So go check it out if you have kids in your life. But now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week from Sari. When I was young in days of yore,

a dirty and precocious child, I did not care about dinosaurs, ancient beasts, fearsome or mild. I liked to look at spittlebugs or leaves and dirt and sand and see, dinos were dead, so what? Big shrug. There was plenty of earth in front of me, so I didn't learn their names at all. No stegosaur or old t-rex, just Yoshi and some fireballs or myths of dragons when I wanted to flex. I see their appeal, don't get me wrong. All gruesome teeth and nests of eggs. Reptiles and birds combined so strong with colorful feathers or tree trunk legs the magic to me though deep in my heart is how i love things different from you for some it's code

or abstract art growing flowers or making stew so if dinosaurs are your thing let's go and if not don't worry we'll learn something fun because really there's so much to know and our journey with science will never be done you couldn't even pretend in a poem that you like dinosaurs no way sorry i've never related to you more yeah start out this episode on dinosaurs being like who cares about them you don't like dinosaurs either i just did not grow up a dinosaur kid I think they were cool like don't get me wrong like I have strong memories of like doing a diorama

about the iguanodon I think in second grade and that was like cool but they just weren't my jam I don't know. That's understandable. It's hard to grow up in Montana and not be a dinosaur kid because we have tons of museums and bones everywhere we love, is it myasauruses I think grow up in montana and not be a dinosaur kid because we have tons of museums and yeah bones

everywhere we love is it myasauruses i think is like our state dinosaur so interesting yeah were you a dinosaur kid then i was a godzilla while not strictly a dinosaur yeah pretty dinosaur no not really i i yeah i actually didn't really care about them either i know i had to like dinosaur toys and stuff but i don't remember like pouring over books, I actually didn't really care about them either. I know I had to like dinosaur toys and stuff, but I don't remember like pouring over books of, I didn't like any smart stuff when I was a kid. So I wasn't reading any books that could actually teach me anything. I was playing Mario and writing around on Yoshi.

Well, anyway, so as you've probably guessed, because we said it a million times, this week's topic is dinosaurs and Sari. What is a dinosaur? So this is something that i've also gone a lot of my professional life not exactly knowing this is a this is a useful episode for me too um because the the popular conception of dinosaur or like what i've carried with me through pop culture is that it's any sort of like big extinct reptile like animal and then there's a group of people

that are like well birds are dinosaurs too and i always was like that must be a loophole whatever i'm gonna not think about it for more than three seconds you got a real chip on your shoulder i think i'm playing it up a little bit for the episode but really like space kind of i just haven't been a i'm not a space person i'm not really a dinosaur person um you like all the boring science yeah small stuff what was your what was your science i think like plants and animals and things like that like i used to i worked at a science museum and ran the touch tank and that was really cool but yeah outside i would i like made a notebook for myself.

And I would just go around our backyard and write down what I saw. So probably like zoology-ish. Hey, we have an episode about that on SciShow Kids. I teach your kids how to do that. Well, I just did that by myself because I'm a big old nerd. But it's not a loophole, right? They are birds. Yeah, they are birds. and that's what's weird um so

it's like i i was reading a bunch of articles about this if you took something like a crow and you took something like from the late triassic uh but we'll just use whatever dinosaur if you take like a t-rex and you take a, and then the ways in which they are evolutionary related, that creates like a circle, like the clade of Dinosauria. So it's not necessarily reptilian in nature. In fact, it's more like bird-like, vaguely reptile adjacent. But the traits that they have in common are most often like the stance of their hips and legs and how they are more straight down rather than splayed out like a crocodile.

Or the fact that they lay eggs. Or different skin coatings, like whether it's scaled or feathered or things like that but like some sort of tough keratinized coating it is like an evolutionary grouping that extends from hundreds of millions of years ago to the present day because birds are in this group of dinosaurs but if you want to talk about extinct dinosaurs, then you should say non-avian dinosaurs, which is like a handy way to exclude birds. And then the common ancestor where birds diverge from dinosaurs, which is like a very weird thing to wrap your head around because of this pervasive narrative of dinosaurs as giant lizards or giant reptiles. Which is part of their name, right? Yeah. Getting to that next part of their name, right? Yeah.

Getting to that next part. Getting to that part, yeah. Dinosaur comes from Greek dinos, which means terrible, powerful, or wondrous, and soros, which means lizard. And so the earliest bones that were found by English-speaking scientists, rich white dudes mostly they were like ah this looks like a lizard that we'd see nowadays but big um and so the first three

specimens that were named were a megalosaurus which meant great lizard an iguana plus don uh don like orthodontics tooth don is in tooth and then the hyliosaurus which means uh of the forest lizard so really we were like okay it's a big lizard an iguana lizard or like a has an iguana tooth and then a forest lizard and all these are kind of the same thing so we were very pro lizard when it came to early dinosaurs all right well i think we know what dinosaurs are even if we don't care about them we still know what they are and that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show and i will now hand the reins over to deboki for almost the whole rest of the episode. Deboki, what game are we playing? We are playing Truth or Fail Dinosaur Edition. So you know

scientists they find these fossils, they look at animals today, they do some comparisons and they come up with stories about what might have happened. They come up with their theories, their hypotheses for what kind of life dinosaurs lived. So today, I have three tales for you of possible dinosaur behavior that scientists have devised based on their fossil findings. But only one of them is true. Which one is it? So story number one, scientists studying the texture of a Tyrannosaurus skull found that it contained many, many nerves that respond to tactile sensations, leading them to hypothesize that Tyrannosaurs have sensitive snouts that they use to kiss. Ooh. Oh.

What? Story number two. noted their footprints were often followed by a distinct imprint of the tail's club into the ground, causing them to hypothesize that the dinosaur used its club tail like a walking stick to keep balance. And then story number three, paleontologists uncovered a cave in Patagonia that held more than 100 Mesaurus eggs surrounded by fossilized poop containing egg fragments, leading them to believe that the cave belonged to a mystery dinosaur that stockpiled young Mesaurus eggs for food. So to recap, we have fact number one, Tyrannosaurus had sensitive snouts for kissing. Fact number two, Ankylosaurus hiked around with their club tails as a walking stick.

And fact number three, a mystery dinosaur species hoarded Mesaurus eggs for future snacks. Isn't Ankylosaurus the big guy, the turtle shell guy? Yeah. Why would they need a walking stick? They got four legs. It's hard. It's hard to be a big dinosaur. You know, you got to figure out your balance.

You don't want to flip over. For sure. Once you flip over as a big guy, then I feel like that's it for you. R.I.P. You're quite low to the ground. I feel like you know the answer to this, Harry. I don't. Or you're just jumping to Deboki's defense for no reason.

You guys got an egghead kinship that I don't appreciate that much. Have I been saying ankylosaurus or ankylosaurus? I've always said ankylosaurus, but that's probably from a cartoon that I saw. So I don't know. T-Rexes, do they like each other? They had to like each other sometimes to have babies, I guess. Everyone's, every animal's got to like another animal at some point. I feel like this would be kind of cute. You can't high five them. They can't hold hands. So they got to smooch. Do other animals do anything like that? I guess like birds do pair up and they must be affectionate with each other somehow. I would imagine.

In some way. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. That's the other thing. I haven't spent very much time around birds, so they're mysteries to me too. Okay, well, what about egg snacks? I was going to say, would you store eggs as snacks? Oh, yeah.

Okay, now what a dinosaur? This one could be based on the fact that people have eggs in their fridge. Now that I think about it. I opened up my fridge and wrote a fact. Yeah, you were like panicking about it last night in the middle of the night. You were like, ah, stress eating. Open your fridge. Ha ha. I bet that's true.

I don't think that one's real. I don't think that one's real. That one's just stockpiling. I don't know. I don't feel like I've heard of a lot of animals that stockpile things that aren't nuts. You know? And eggs get bad. But if they're not, if you're eating them with baby and and all then you you can keep them for as long as it takes to incubate which could be months that's a good food source a little protein in there i feel like of all of these and this is not the way that i like to do this but the one that i feel like you couldn't make up or like that you wouldn't make up is the walking stick one that one's just too weird so i feel like i'm

gonna go with that one even though i can't figure it out in my head that makes it maybe more likely to me interesting maybe they're like walking sideways and they're like i don't know i don't know i was caught between the the kissing t-rexes and the egg snacks so i was hoping you'd choose one of those so i could choose the other one. But I'm going to go with the T-Rexes kissing because that seems like the most fun. Yeah, it definitely is the most fun. It's also the most correct.

Oh, no. Yes! Yeah, so in 2017, some researchers, they were studying this Tyrannosaurus skull. It belonged to Despletosaurus hornieri, which is a member of the Tyrannosaurus family. It's smaller than a T-Rex, but still pretty big. Its skull is about a meter in length. And so they wanted to see how the skull's skeletal texture compared to crocodiles and birds and figure out how do the tissues compare, to crocodiles and birds and figure out, you know, how do the tissues compare? How do the scales compare? And so on top of finding evidence for certain like textures of skin and horn structures

and flat scales, they also found that the skull had a lot of openings for a type of nerve called the trigeminal nerve, which relays the sensation of touch on the snout back to the brain. And so the number of openings they found was actually really similar to that of crocodiles, which are really sensitive to, you know, things touching their snout as well. And one of the things that crocodiles do apparently is they have a very elaborate courtship experience, including from when I was looking it up, they like will like rub jaws and stuff. And so that's... They kiss each other too? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if they think of it that way,

but it probably sure looks like it in a very weird crocodilian kind of situation. So that's why the researchers hypothesized that, hey, maybe these T-Rexes, they had, like Sari said, or I think it was Sari, they can't hold hands. I don't know if that's why they would do it, but neither can any other animal. An know, maybe. I mean, I don't know if that's why they would do it, but. Neither can any other animal. An otter can.

They link up. They're like, I'm hanging out. I'm the whole hand. That's true. Us otters and like monkeys and apes. That's it. Nothing else can hold hands. So that doesn't seem like a really very good reason to me.

But I think when you link that up with the fact that they do have very sensitive nerves in their face or they have a lot of sensitivity in their face because of these nerves that that could suggest that maybe this is part of their behavior so there there were other reasons you know maybe this is also a way for them to detect prey all that stuff but i think the best reason the best possible reason is the t-rex kissing well good, good for them. Yeah. So then are the other stories that are based on things that were almost there, but not really. So for the Ankylosaurus, I was looking at the study of a Struthiosaurus astriacus fossil from Austria, which is, I believe, a specific species of Ankylosaurus. And the researchers were looking at the brain case of the dinosaur, and they found that

it had these small regions that were usually, in brains, they're associated with things like fixing your eyes when you move your head around, also things like parts of the inner ear, which help us with audition and with balance. And they found that these areas in this particular species were really small. So it probably couldn't hear very well. And also, it probably moved pretty slowly. And so in that case, the researchers hypothesized that maybe this particular species would have preferred a more solitary lifestyle just because it couldn't engage in these particular ways.

So that was the inspiration for that. I would love it if it did use its club tail as a walking stick but no evidence he has four legs but but imagine if you could just like stake a your tail down onto the ground and you would just not have to worry about falling over or like if you need to round a corner really fast yeah stick it down and then you could grab yourself around. I think that's what you said. We really innovated on nature. Yeah.

This is what we've done. If we had a club tail, this is what we would do. Please evolution. Just like give an adaptation. I'm ready for my tailbone to come back. Exactly. But digital no more.

And then the last story, the egg story is not as far as i could tell i i did not find a story about dinosaurs stockpiling eggs but i did find this really cool study about uh mesaurus patagonicus which is this early jurassic plant-eating dinosaur and in 2013 researchers had found a bunch of their eggs and fossils in southern Patagonia. And one of the things that they found is that these fossils and these eggs were distributed by age. So the younger dinosaurs and the eggs were kind of in one area. And as you got older, there were these groups of juveniles whose fossils were grouped together. And then the older, like the adult dinosaurs, were kind of off on their own or in pairs.

And so they hypothesized based on this that this dinosaur was living in this surprisingly complex social structure within its herd where there's like a nesting site where these younger dinosaurs are. Then there are these schools of young mesoruses. And then the adults are like going off and doing things for the herd.

They had kindergarten. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like kids tables. like kids tables like okay kids eat your dinner brought it back for you exactly ah well okay we all learned something here today yep and uh we i came away from it not very good with zero points and sari has one point and now it's time to take a short break. And then it will be time for the fact off. And we're back. And now it is time for the fact-off, where Sari and I have brought science facts to present to Deboki in an attempt to blow her mind.

After we've presented our facts, Deboki will then judge them and award us Boke Bucks any way that she sees fit. But before that, Deboki, do you have a trivia question for us to decide who goes first? I sure do. Sauropods were giant, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs that could grow to 150 feet in length and 70 tons in weight. In 2012, an exhibition on the world's largest dinosaur at the American Museum of Natural History featured one of the smaller sauropods called

Mammanchisaurus. Mammanchisaurus. Who's naming these things? I don't know. I really should have looked up a lot more pronunciations. I very much overestimated myself. This sauropod was about 60 feet long and about 13 tons in weight. So that's about 26,000 pounds or 11,793 kilograms. So how many pounds of plant life did this particular sauropod likely consume in a single day? Oh I hate questions like this because I'm gonna say something so stupid and everyone's gonna laugh at me. Nobody really knows. That's why i love questions like this here's my logic that's also based on nothing but i just i just string it together so but everyone will be like sari's so wise she went to mit yeah so she must kind of know what she's talking about okay i think they

got a big mouth i think each chomp of a leaf is like half a pound of leaves. So really it's how many chomps they could get in in a given day. This is not the logic I was expecting. I'm really enjoying this. Oh, yeah. This is how I arbitrarily do it in my head all the time. So like let's say you bite some leaves. So two bites is one pound.

Let's say you bite, I think it's like 150 pounds. I could see them taking 300 bites. Gold? Are you accounting for their chewing? No, just like just the initial chomp. They probably more jaw movements across a whole day and like walking around finding more leaves. But I think they get in their leaf collection bites get around 150 pounds okay sam doing some math uh how many minutes are in a day oh my gosh

what did you say again say 150 pounds going to say 151 pounds. That's my favorite logic. So basically your logic is you think that Sari is underestimating. I think she's lowballing it. Yeah. Well, she is in fact massively lowballing it. Oh, no. The correct answer is 1,150 pounds of plant life. Oh, look who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Yeah. I was very fascinated by the use of chewing as a possible way to figure out, like as the source of your logic, because this is actually like a really fascinating part of trying to understand how they could live because they got to eat a lot of food in a single day. So the thing is that apparently they did not bother with chewing. They didn't really have

much in the way of teeth or strong jaws. They really kind of just had incisors in the front of their mouth, which they use to like cut up the plants and get it into their mouth. But really, they're just relying on their gastric juices to take care of everything from there and so one of the interesting things is that this also made their head relatively light given how big they are because they're just like their focus is just getting the food in um rather than like chomping and eating everything right away so you know that's common or did every then most leaf eating guys do that or i don't know if that's common or did every then most leaf eating guys do that or i don't know if how many of them did that because i think this is probably like part of their evolution and part of how they were able to get to a certain size yeah but i don't know to what extent that necessarily was

widespread around other dinosaurs so yeah so sam sam was the winner by one less than sari so uh so sam can decide who goes first i think uh i think i'll just go first the tyrannosaurus rex a 20 foot tall bloodthirsty killing machine its giant jaws capable of delivering almost 12,800 pounds of force, making it potentially the hardest-biting land animal of all time, built for carnage. The chicken, around about a foot and a half tall, sort of grumpy little guys, their beaks are capable of delivering quite the little pinch. Built to walk around, eat some bugs, and get deep fried.

Surely there's no way these two animals are related, right? Eh, wrong. get deep fried surely there's no way these two animals are related right wrong test done in 2008 on molecules of collagen recovered from t-rex fossils the mighty beast was found to be most closely related to the humble chicken uh which is you know not really ideal for t-rexes who used to basically rule the earth but it's kind of awesome for us because dinosaurs aren't alive anymore so identifying animals that are closely related to them can give us insight into how they might have lived and moved when they weren't just a big pile of bones in the ground. And we have looked at birds to make these inferences,

but in 2014, a team of researchers sort of took umbrage with the comparisons due to one key difference between chickens and a lot of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, like T-Rexes, have a big old tail and chickens don't. And they pointed out a big old tail would change an animal's center of balance substantially in ways that could entirely change how the animal walks. So they did the obvious thing. They stuck a contraption made of clay, velcro, and a big old stick onto a chicken's ass to mimic a tail so they took and they hatched a bunch of chicks and then they raised them uh outfitting them as they grew with a series of fake tails that matched how big they were and they increased it in size as the chickens grew

and what they ended up with was a whole bunch of chickens that did not walk like normal chickens so modern birds tend to have like a really crouched stance and they power their walk with their knees. But these T-Rex tailed chickens did things differently. They power their steps with their hips and they also stood quite a bit taller than a regular chicken. And honestly, they sort of looked cooler than a normal chicken befitting of their dinosaur roots. They kind of look like a corn dog with a chicken on it. I didn't realize chickens use their neck this much to walk. Like, I've never watched a chicken really just...

I feel like I've looked at a lot of chickens in my life, and I've never really noticed that either. Very neck-centric fellows. Yeah. And it's subtle, but once you notice, like, how much cooler the T-Rex chickens are walking, it's like, all right. I mean, it could just be the tail.

I can see. Well, it's all the tail. That's what balances them out. That gives them a cool balance. And it's just all right i mean it could just be the tail i can see well it's all the tail that's what balances them out that gives them a cool balance and it's just a nice accessory but as always we gotta ask uh why the hell did they do this and i think the answer partially is there's just a lot of people out there who really want to know how dinosaurs walked around and uh what the researchers pointed out in this study is that the experimental chickens actually ended up walking more like a mammal than a modern bird which means that looking at how birds walk is probably not the best way to figure out how dinosaurs walked uh which is information

that we'll probably use to build a robot or something i don't really know did they say anything about whether or not the chickens liked having a tail? I don't think they really noticed that they did. It didn't seem to imply that any of them had a problem with it. And they were otherwise fine? They didn't have to worry about... Does their tail make it harder for them to poop? Is it fitted inappropriately? I would assume so.

They made special custom tails for each one. Yeah. So I would imagine that they cut a pooper into each one. But I actually don't really know where chickens poop from. They're cloaca, right? But they wore it forever and they grew up. So they weren't just holding it in. That was very fascinating.

And I will always think of that video now. Sari, what is your fact? So like we've talked about, one of the trickiest things about studying animals that have been dead for hundreds of millions of years is that we have to make so many guesses from fossils or comparisons to modern creatures. No wonder that Deboki and I have the same opinion about dinosaurs and what's cool about them is that we have to make guesses. I just thought that's very funny. we wrote the same introductions to our things but we also have the power of math to help

us specifically computer models let us simulate the physics of things like bones and muscles and see what movements might have been possible for different dinosaurs. For example, sauropods, like we just talked about, are those huge herbivorous dinosaurs like Tropius in Pokemon or an Apatosaurus in the late Jurassic period. Wait, what? I mean, it's Tropius. You know what it looks like, Sam. It's Ruby and Sapphire. Okay, I'll look him up while you continue.

And we've made assumptions that they use their long necks for things like reaching thousands of pounds of tasty leaves or seeming sexy to mates. But what about their just as long tails? Modern day animals use tails for things from communication and balance to self defense and temperature control. And just looking at fossils, paleontologists had guessed that sauropods use their tails as sweeping weapons to fend off foes, whether they were thin and whip-like or had a club at the end. And many sauropod tail bones are forked in a way that could have protected nerves and blood vessels as the tail flesh flailed around. Like forked at the end?

Like forked along it. Oh, okay. So like the vertebrae themselves were forked so that the nerves and blood vessels could be nestled inside like a protective little cave as they ran down to provide like blood to the tail flesh and in 1997 a computer scientist teamed up with a paleontologist to model the thin whip like tail of an apatosaurus louise and learned that it could hold up to the stress of being flung around just like a bullwhip, even so fast that the tip could reach the speed of sound. And they calculated that the collision of that high-speed tail whip would have caused just as

much damage to the tail as anything it hit, so it probably wasn't being used as a weapon, and instead hypothesized that the tail was another way to attract mates by making a loud, possibly even a supersonic noise, whether it was whipped through the air or smacked against water or some other way to like make a loud noise. And not to poke holes in my own fact off, but I gotta be honest here. In 2002, a paper was published talking about the physics of bull whips and supersonic cracks. And it found that the looping shape of a cracking whip is what causes the sound. So like that, the bending motion of the whip is what matters as opposed to just the sheer speed at the tip of the whip. So the tip of a whipping bull whip that makes a crack is actually going quite faster than the speed of sound and it's that loop that

needs to be at the speed of sound. And I don't think they calculated that in this computer model of an Apatosaurus tail. In any way it's just speculation but mostly I just think it's cool that humans have basically been dinosaur nerds and writing

the scientific equivalent of dinosaur fan fiction and imagining what kinds of sounds they make and things that they do to woo each other since we've discovered fossils interesting not real though sorry maybe they did model it they rottled it for real but i don't know if it actually makes a big cracking noise. I think that's why the latest news on this was 1997. So you said this paper came out after the bullwhip, the other one? Before. Before, okay. So the Apatosaurus tail paper came out in 1997, and the bullwhip paper came out in 2002.

So I think they were completely separate yeah like in 2002 that group was just interested in the physics of whips yeah but i remembered it independently of this and was like ah damn i gotta look it up to tell my fact truthfully and then it contradicted it and i was like well too late to change now. Wait, you did that research yourself? Yeah. You could like publish a paper now. Debunking. Is that how it works? I guess so, yeah. I could write a critique of it.

I haven't published in academia in years. At the very least, you could publish this podcast. It's the same thing. That's the exact same thing in this language at all. It's your reviewed podcast. We are the reviewers. We've agreed, S all. We're a viewed podcast. We are the reviewers. We've agreed, Sari. You're correct.

Well, I will say that for today, I do love a good fact check, but I do have to give it to the chicken tails. I will never forget watching chickens with fake tails across them. This video entitled Chicken Walking Like a Dinosaur.

cross them this video entitled chicken walking like a dinosaur which means that sam gets a point the rare bokeh buck yes yes and we're tied right yeah so you guys are tied one bokeh buck to one bokeh buck i don't know how hank does this but i think you just get to decide who wins now yeah so you got to decide if sam's chicken fact was more impressive like overall you could give me a hundred book yeah you could give i mean i have to say it's only worth one then we can talk yeah so i always think whenever i write any torf that they are deeply easy to figure out which one is the truth because i always think of myself as terrible at lying and i rely heavily on on Hank to sell the lies which he is very good at so I I would I would have to give maybe I'll maybe I'll give two book bucks I'm not

gonna give a hundred to one but I'll give two book bucks to Sam's chicken tails because again the chicken because you have bad self-esteem is that, because I don't believe in myself. Though I'm tempted to also give Siri a point for not talking herself out of the correct fact. No, no, no. That's what's so hard. Too granular. Too granular. We can't get into that. Let's move on to the science test.

Yeah, you've got to be kinder to yourself. Be proud of your torf, Devoki. No, I'm going to stick with sam gets two and sarah gets one oh that means it's time to ask the science couch where we ask a science question from our audience to our finely honed couch of scientific minds quill on discord asks why do species names keep changing which i guess is in reference to brontosauruses. Are they real anymore? Are they not real anymore? Apatosauruses, is that the same thing?

Yeah, so I think in general, species names are changing all the time across biology. For everything that's not even just dinosaurs. Not even just dinosaurs. Yeah, not like the big ones like a lot of them the mammals because there are so few mammals relative to everything else we kind of got those wired we got them locked down people are pretty easy to look at a mammal and be like that's a skunk that's a bear that's a chipmunk yeah but once you start getting into like beetles or like

invertebrates other other kinds of invertebrates that are all kind of blobby you're like that beetle is slightly less green than this other i don't know what that means yep then it's harder to sort out the evolutionary relationships or know if one species has actually been discovered a long time ago and had a different name and so like by principle the person who named it first like that name should carry through so the the story behind brontosaurus and apatosaurus is that brontosaurus was first named in 1879 um by charles marsh as of the bone wars fame oh yeah yeah one of the one of the guys who yelled a lot and was rude

and stole a lot of fossils and crushed his rivals fossils and stuff like that he was like i found an animal it's a brontosaurus sure and then 1903 another paleontologist named elmer riggs like after finding more fossils thought that brontosaurus was actually a species of apatosaurus like apatosaurus was the genus level that's the the those are the fossils that had the common traits and what was found as a brontosaurus fossil was actually just a subset of those traits um instead of calling a brontosaurus then it was um an apatosaurus excelsius and so they were like only apatosaurus exist brontosaurus don't except for like this thing i guess brontosaurus could be a common name for an apatosaurus excelsius but then more recently

it's gone back and forth but i think like in the 2015s is the latest paper where there are enough fossils found that brontosaurus and apatosaurus are now both considered genuses of dinosaurs with different species so like there are there are enough separate characteristics of them, whether it's like the longness of their necks or the girthiness of their hips or whatever, to say that they're slightly more separate and not one species like nested under another. So they're both real. And that's that.

That's like the... What a nice ending for everyone. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week, or join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at Ryan Laser, at What Ethan Loves, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode.

Deboki, thank you so much for being here. We talked at the top of the show about where we can find you. Anything else you want to plug at the end here? I mean, I just, I remembered halfway through the episode that one of our, our first episode of Tiny Matters was about dinosaurs. So you should check that out after, after listening to this. What the heck? Yeah, but they have small bits of them that are very important for reasons we get it to if you like the show and you want to help us out it's real easy to do that first you can go to patreon.com slash size show tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes we're gonna do a live stream bonus episode that happened a couple

weeks ago at this way who knows if it even worked but hopefully it did and we had a lot of fun second leave us a review wherever you listen it's super helpful it helps us know what you like about the show and finally if you want to show your love for scishow tangents just tell people about us thank you for joining us i have been sam schultz i've been sari riley and i'm deboki chakrabarty scishow tangents is created by all of us and produced by me sam schultz our editor is seth glicksman our story editor is alex billow our social media organizer is paola garcia prieto our editorial assistants are deboki All of us and produced by me, Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakrabarty and Emma Douster.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Mendes. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and Hank Green. We couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. But one more thing. Around 230 million years ago, a dinosaur relative called Ciliosaurus opalensis took a poop that became a fossilized coprolite. Modern day scientists analyzed this poop rock using synchrotron microtomography and found lots of tiny, almost perfectly preserved beetle carcasses, along with some fibers that could be fungi or algae.

This tiny beetle is the first insect species to be described from a coprolite, so they named it Triomyxa coprolithica after its poopy grave. Would it be embarrassing or cool to have, like, to know that some scientist was looking at poop that you took a long time ago? That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, I would want to have eaten something cool, though. Yeah. Are there things you would not want them to find in your poop it would be like oh this person swallowed their gum a lot