SciShow Tangents - Fossils with Kallie Moore

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

Fossils: a profound link to our Earth’s past… some are profound... some are beautiful… some are poop! Kallie Moore, host of PBS Eons joins the Tangents crew to talk old stone bones, fraudulent fossils, and a dinosaur so well preserved, we may be able to figure out what its last meal was. Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! If you want more Kallie Moore, check out PBS Eons:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbAAnd if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Pseudofossils:http://www.dmp.wa.gov.au/Pseudofossils-1663.aspxUnderwater cave:https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/09/pictures/110927-crocodile-fossils-found-underwater-cave/http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstream/handle/2246/6440/N3779.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=yhttp://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6920Picture: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/09/pictures/110927-crocodile-fossils-found-underwater-cave/#/40959.jpgAmber:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00379271.2010.10697637https://www.pnas.org/content/112/32/9961?ijkey=4607330261d2012edc599837b06f71be63ebc148&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha[Fact Off]Opalized fossils: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/12/exclusive-sparkly-opal-filled-fossils-reveal-new-dinosaur-species-paleontology/Super preserved Ankylosaur:https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/https://www.livescience.com/65640-opal-dinosaur-herd-bones.html[Ask the Science Couch]Zircon:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/scientists-may-have-found-earliest-evidence-life-earthhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/09/news-earth-rocks-sediment-first-life-zircon/Tully monster:https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/tully-monster-still-a-mystery/https://www.isgs.illinois.edu/outreach/geology-resources/illinois-state-fossil-tullimonstrum-gregarium[Butt One More Thing]Fake poop:https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140729-dinosaur-coprolite-paleontology-dung-fossil-auction/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I am joined by Stefan Chin. Hello. What's your tagline? Creaky bones. Creaky bones. Sari Riley is also here.

Hello. What's your tagline? Your ghost with the most. Oh, thanks. And we're also joined by a special guest replacement, Sam Calimore. Hello. That was a very confusing way to introduce. Sam replacement.

Sorry, this is Callie Moore of PBS Eons and good fossil stuff on Instagram. That'll be my tagline for today, I think. Is that your tagline? Yeah, good fossil stuff on Instagram. And I'm agreeing. My tagline is, oops, I did it like eight extra times. What did you do? This is my tagline.

Every week on SciShow Tangents, we try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. And we're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks from week to week. We can't tell you who has the most Hank bucks because Sam takes care of that.

But I bet he'll still be winning even after this episode without him. Wait, so am I playing for Sam? Or am I starting my own? No, you get your own points. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by the name of the podcast, we might not be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, you can be Dr. Hank Buck. So tangent with care.

Now, as always, we introduce this week's science topic with a traditional science poem from Stefan. All over the world, even in the yard behind your home, you could potentially find a rock that used to be a bone. Or it might have been a plant, a tooth, or just poop. I mean, we've even found some bits of fossilized puke. Most of the species that have ever lived are now gone, and only a fraction of those have left their clues in the rock. But from those, we've learned about things millions of years in the past, like that tentacled sea cucumber that looks like something out of Lovecraft. Now, fossilization isn't quite like Han Solo getting trapped in carbonite. There are a few ways it can happen, but the conditions have to be just right for the remains of an organism to be preserved for such a long time, to eventually allow us to discover the Tully monster, Sue,

and so many trilobites. And it would be kind of cool to travel all the way back to see some of these creatures in their natural habitat. But then again, looking at the size of the teeth we found lying around, I guess I'm glad the only T-Rexes I know were dug up from the ground. Oh, that was so good. Snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. Our topic today is fossils. Callie, I feel like has some expertise. Don't want me to throw too much weight on your shoulders here.

But fossils are just like stuff that was alive but is rocks now, right? Yeah, that's part of it. That's part of it. That's not all of it. That's not all of it. So you're talking about just the body fossils. So things that were part of the body. Bones and teeth.

Oh, I guess. Yeah, yeah. But we also have trails, tracks, burrows, eggs, nests. And those are all traceable. Poopoo isn't part of a body bones and teeth oh i guess yeah yeah but we also have trails tracks burrows eggs nests and those are all trace isn't part of a body nope so it's a trace fossil okay coprolites and um we actually have depressions in sandstone that look like fluid evacuation and so we call them uro lights so we think that a little reptile would have just lifted up a plague. That's a place where somebody peed. Yeah. What?

Yeah. And we have vomit and all of those things are. Do you have any fossilized animal houses? Is that a thing? Well, we have burrows and we found individuals in burrows. So we know that those were living in the burrow and they made the burrow. The scratch marks on the insides of the burrows match the claws and the teeth of those individuals in the burrow. So we know that they lived there.

I can't believe that I was so wrong. Most people think, what do you think of when you think of a fossil? You think of a skeleton, basically. But there's all sorts of things that are associated with ancient life that aren't part of the body. So if you think about an individual, you you have 200 some bones in the body. But think about how many steps that individual would have taken throughout their entire life. And so the chances of finding footprints are actually way greater than actually finding an individual. Well, except that bones last longer than footprints.

Sometimes, yes. Are there species that we only know of from like poop fossils yeah so a lot of times it's very hard to say whether this animal created this footprint or that poop or something like that and so a lot of times those get uh like they're called echinophosphores and so they a name. We name them and they're in the literature. But we don't know who it belongs to. So, yeah. So there are some that we only know from the traces only and not from a body fossil.

All right. But first, everyone, it's time for Traces. One of our panelists this week, Sari Riley, has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment. But only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to determine which is the true fact. If we get it wrong, Sari gets our Hank book. If we get it right, we get it. Sari, what's going on?

I'm going to try my best to fool Callie, but this is so stressful. I'm stressed out, too, because I'm like, what if I get it wrong? I lose my street cred. Yeah, I try to make it difficult for everyone, so. Okay. That's fine. All right. So because fossils need such specific conditions to form, the fossil record is really inconsistent for different creatures in different places. And for a while in the Dominican Republic and the whole island of Hispaniola, there weren't many reported bat fossils until scientists made a big discovery of hundreds of well-preserved specimens at an unusual site. And I'm going to give you three options. Two are fake.

One is real. So were they. Number one, overlooked in a bed full of pseudofossils, which are mineral deposits that form shapes that are mistaken for fossils. Okay. Number two, buried in sediment in a flooded cave, which can be dangerous for people to dive down and reach. Or number three, encased in Dominican amber, and particularly big globs of resin found in one section of a mountain range. Big globs of amber bats. So we have overlooked in a bed of pseudofossils.

So with the bats, that's fact. The definitely bats is fact. Yes, they found a bunch amber bats. So we have overlooked in a bed of pseudofossils. So with the bats, that's fact. The deviant bats is fact. Yes, they found a bunch of bats. But how were they found? They were found overlooked in a bed of pseudofossils, buried in sediment in a flooded cave, so they had to scuba dive to them, or encased in big globs of amber.

Lots of bats encased in big globs of amber. That sounds unlikely. Do you like the unlikely? Oh, you think it sounds likely? Oh, no, no. I think it sounds unlikely. I feel like I would, like hundreds of bats in globs of amber. But some bats are really small.

It's true. Well, I think I already know what I'm going to choose. Oh, wow. He knows. Which is the amber because I think it's so unlikely. It sounds the least likely, so I think that it's the truth. I feel like I would have seen them on eBay. Because I look at a lot of amber on eBay.

What's the coolest thing you've seen in amber on eBay? There's a lot of fakies. There's like, full scorpion in amber. Just like a plastic model. And some more plastic. I don't remember. There was some stuff that was, you know, like, $10,000 plus. Like, I think it was, like, a piece of a lizard.

Like, that's the really unusual. Like, vertebrates. You shouldn't be buying vertebrate stuff. You should limit yourself to invertebrates. Because, like, it's important to science. It shouldn't be buying vertebrate stuff. You should limit yourself to invertebrates. Because, like, it's important to science. It shouldn't be in private collections. They should be in a museum. Exactly.

Yeah, no, not kidding. Yeah, for reals. Can you tell me about pseudofossils, Callie? So pseudofossils are things that look like fossils that aren't actually biogenic. Does this happen very regularly? Yeah. like fossils that aren't actually is this happen biogenically yeah so there's these things called dendrites and it totally looks like a leaf kind of fern pattern um it's black usually on a tan rock and a lot of people think that they're plant fossils but they're not it's just a mineral

deposit that happened to form in kind of a fractal type of pattern um there's also um this is kind of getting into the the butt for the end of this but there has been in washington there are these things that look like turds but they're mineral and they're not turds and nobody has found any plant or animal fragment bones or anything like it in him and so they think that that they were actually squirted out under pressure in some special environment. From what? Yeah. So if you get a flooded riverbank

and there's decomposing plants underneath the mud, it's going to release gas. And any crack or hole or something in the overlying mud will shoot it out kind of like a pasta shooter it's an earth poop it's an earth poop it's totally earth poop but these things you can see them all the time at rock and gym shows and if you ask the people like oh where are these from if they say washington that's your red flag of like oh these aren't coprolites these are these weird i want real poops i know you gotta you gotta get real poops so yeah so there are lots of things out there that

look like fossils that aren't fossils yeah okay and then we have buried in sediment in a flooded cave which i like because like depending on how old like obviously the sea level changes a lot water tables change and so like a thing that might once have been a really good habitat for bats might now be underwater. Maybe that's the answer. Well, I don't want to lead you astray, Stefan. You seem so confident as a person

who never searches for amber on eBay. I should have known this about you because you gave me a little mosquito in amber. Yeah. So, Stefan, you've been marked down for encased in big globs of amber. It happened. Final answer. All right.

I'm going to say buried in the flooded cave. I'm also going to go with cave. It is the cave. That's so real. I'm nervous. That was so, whoo. Yeah, all right. After we talked about it more, I was like, that's probably the one.

I'm going to stick with my answer. Brave of you. Taking one for mostly just Sarah. Yeah, for me. Give me a point. So tell me about these buried cave bats. It's in a place in the Dominican Republic called Legs Bat House Cave. That's a good name for it.

Yeah. Apparently underwater, because the geology of the dominican republic is so volatile that uh these underwater caves have some of the most preserved specimens and there aren't just bats in the cave even though there are hundreds of of bat bones um fossilized bones in there but they also found cuban crocodiles, so very well-preserved fossils of crocodiles down there and other reptiles and sloth remnants. So all these very big creatures. Bats are still extant on that island. They live there and they found 11 different species when they sampled bones from this graveyard type thing.

So do we have other truths hidden in your lies? Pseudofossils are a real thing, as Callie so greatly defined. And then Dominican amber is actually a real thing. Like the Dominican Republic has a bunch of amber and has, I think, the largest concentration of insects trapped in amber from the Americas. And they have found reptiles in it, specifically the Analyst's Lizard. Oh, yeah. The little guy.

One of those anoles. I've seen that guy. Yeah. I've seen him on eBay now. So when you said, yeah, amber vertebrates in amber. And I just didn't realize because you see so many insects and because it makes sense that smaller objects or smaller organisms would be trapped in plant resin more easily. But if there's enough resin around, then a whole lizard. Next up, we're going gonna take a short break and then

the fact off And we're back, everybody. Hank Buck, Total, Sarah, you got one point. I got one. Kelly's got one. Stefan's got one. It's a tie for wands. Ooh. What are we going to do now?

Keep doing the fact up. Yeah, keep going. Get the fact up. Find out who wins. It's time for the fact up. Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. Each of the people who are being presented do have a Hank Buck to award the fact that they like the most. And it's me versus Callie.

So I'm sure this is going to go great. And I guess we'll go first by the person who has like the most fossils tattooed on their body. I have none. Oh, really? I don't have any. That's a shock. I know. That is a really tough spot.

Like, I would have all of life tattooed on me. You can't pick. It's like, I can't pick. I can't pick. Oh, you can't pick. And what if, like... I got a lizard here from... That's on eBay.

It's really gross looking. Like, what if they do it wrong? Like, what if there's something wrong? Oh, yeah, if it's scientifically inaccurate. Yeah, you know. It's just like... It's tough. It's tough. They have to back check scientifically inaccurate yeah you know and it's just like it's tough it's a fact check their art

while they're doing it oh man and like do I want a dinosaur am I gonna be a dinosaur person or do something different like it's been

that's it's been rough actually trying to figure out what I want to what ancient life goes on my body there will be some

at some point but I don't know you have to find like a paleontologist who like has a second career as a tattoo artist. Yeah, who's not going to mess up. Yeah. Yep. All right. I'm going to make you do it first anyway.

Okay. You want me to go first? I'll go first. Okay. So what type of substance do you most generally think of when you find a fossil? Like if you were going to go out and hunt for a fossil, where would you look? Rocks. Rocks.

Yeah, like rocks. I was right. Yes, yes. Rocks. Limestone. Mudstone. Any of the sedimentary rocks, basically. So that is all good and well, but there are very, very rare instances where you can actually get opalized fossils.

Okay. What is that? I know what an opal is. I mean, I know what an opal looks like. I don't actually know what it is. So, all right. Everybody envision an opal in your brains. Now, take a vertebrae and make it into opal.

And so the Field Museum has an 822 carat mold of 115 million year old plesiosaur vertebrae yeah but it gets even better from there so there's been lots of things found opalized you can have bellum knights which which are these internal rods of squids, gastropods, bivalves, and then the vertebrates. So I already mentioned one of them. But two of the ten known species of dinosaur from Australia are opalized. Huh. Like exclusively? Exclusively opalized.

Wow. Yeah. So some of the most famous opal in the world comes from Australia. And so this is usually where you find these opalized fossils is in Australia. And so Eric, the seal-sized pliosaur, which is a short-necked plesiosaur, is one of the most complete opalized skeletons in the world. Basically, like the whole thing is there and it's all encrusted or replaced with opal. So just shiny iridescence blues and greens

and reds and wonderfulness the right lower jaw of another one that i'm not going to say is about a hundred million year old dog size ornithopod that one is super cool it's a little tiny jaw and the little leaf-shaped teeth again it's all replaced with opal. So your next question may be, how does this happen? Yes, it is. So opal is an amorphous mineral. That means it has no crystal form. So like quartz is a six-sided crystal structure. That's how you find it most of the time is in this six-sided hexagonal structure.

Opal is not like that. It basically just fills cavities. And that's how you get an opal structure. Opal is not like that. It basically just fills cavities, and that's how you get an opal deposit. So acidic groundwater can dissolve a fossil, and it leaves this cavity in the perfect shape of said fossil. And so this silica-rich fluid, so opal is a silica mineral, it goes in there and it fills that cavity and solidifies as the opal. So that's how you have an opalized cast. So the whole thing is opal. It's just in the shape of the bone or jaw or entire organism.

But if the organic material doesn't fully dissolve, you can actually get a silica solution will soak into it. And so it's basically like mineralized wood, for example, except it's a bone. And so the internal structures of the bone have been replaced or filled in with opal. And so you can have a crust of opal on the inside, a crust of opal on the outside versus this opal mold, opal cast of a bone or something like that. That's wild. They are amazingly beautiful. They are considered national treasures in Australia for obvious reasons. There's an entire museum dedicated to opalized fossils. Wow. I would love to go there someday.

Where is it? In Australia, probably in New South Wales. So my fact, I have a fact too. I just want to keep hearing Callie tell me everything. So I brought you all a picture. And I want you to look at it and tell me what you see. I'm going to put this on SideshowTangents.com. You can check it out.

What do you guys see? Anything? If you saw that in the holes in the rock. If you saw that in a cliff face, what would you think? I don't know. Maybe like a big plant that just kind of flopped down. So this is a picture of a wall of an oil sands mine in Canada in the Alberta tar sands area where they dig out fossil fuels, basically, and process them into various fuels and et cetera. And a miner hit this and he said, that looks weird.

I don't know why he thought that looked weird, because to me it looks like a rock wall. But he said, that looks weird. And he called his supervisor over and he was like, we need to stop. Let me know what you think of this. And they were like, that's something weird and maybe special. So it turns out they stopped digging that guy. And instead of like taking one more swipe with his scoop, which would have completely destroyed this, they found one of the most important scientific finds

of recent paleontology. So this was fascinating to read about. When you find a fossil, it isn't just important that it's like scientifically important and that it's preserved well. It's also important that it's somewhere you can get at it. Yeah. So if you like find a fossil that's like 30 meters up a cliff, like it's going to stay 30 meters up a cliff. Like you're not going to do anything about that. Also, oftentimes when you find fossils, they are eroding out of the rock face already. So like you'll get like a lot of the bones will be like all around and you know you'll have to try and put them all together and the ones that are still in the wall those ones will all sort of

maybe be together and you can figure that out but this he had scooped out a fair bit of the back half of an ankylosaur and saw this uh looked weird and stopped it turned out that because it was in a mine, it was surrounded by equipment that is designed to dig stuff out of the rock. And so they were- Huzzah! Yeah, whereas usually you'd have to like, are we going to drive a backhoe out

into the middle of North Dakota? Oh my gosh. You're not. So they were able to just dig this thing out of, and like very, very carefully dig it out. So the miners did it or did they bring in people to help? The miners know how to operate their equipment. Well, obviously.

They brought it. So yes, they called the people. They called the paleontologist. The paleontologist came out and like, this actually looks really important. We don't really know what it is, but we want to remove it. They dug around it and then like the paleontologist sort of supervised the whole process. Gotcha. They surrounded it in plaster,

put it on two big boards to lift it out, and it crumbled. It just fell apart. And so then they had to put it all back together. Luckily, it fell into, like, pretty big chunks. Okay. That's my fact. They destroyed the most important scientific find.

That grad student got in big trouble for not jacketing that fossil well enough. But it's just a big rock, you know? So anyway, turns out one of the most well-preserved fossils of all time. They've now actually scraped away a lot of the, what is it called? Matrix? The matrix. That's what I was looking for. And check this thing out.

It's soft tissue preserved. So it's like, you can see its face. You can see its cute little face. It had 20-inch spines on its shoulder. We'll put a link to the National Geographic article where they have some really dope photos of this thing. But it's like looking at the dinosaur. I've never seen anything like this,

and I was sort of shocked that I didn't know about it. And so this level of soft tissue preservation is really unusual. And yeah, it's all because, like, some guy who had a big backhoe, like, stopped and didn't take the next hunk of... Did they search the previous hunks that he had pulled out?

Well, they, like, once he stopped, they did a whole survey of all of the pieces that were at the base of the cliff um and just because you get information about like what other food or a plant stuff might be around apparently it died very fast it was buried very fast it was buried in slushy, oily, or not oily stuff, but slushy stuff and never decomposed at all and fossilized all the way in. That's wild to look at the face of a dinosaur like this. Borrelia peltia. Borrelia peltia? Yeah, that is a really neat fossil. And you're right, the getting buried quickly part is the key to this soft body preservation for sure.

Right. You know, not having all your flesh rot away. Yeah, it helps. All right. Assign your Hank bucks. This is such a hard decision. I'm glad I put up a showing. I know.

There's a lot of good, sweet fossils out there. I've learned so much this episode. I'm going to give mine to Callie because she's been teaching so much science this whole episode. Yeah, I mean, Callie deserves some Hank bucks. Yeah. It's true. It's not just a fact. Not only did I learn about opalized fossils, but you had, like, bonus facts on top of that.

And also bonus facts on top of my facts. Yeah. you had like bonus facts on top of that. And also bonus facts on top of my facts. I do agree that Callie had a lot of, has had a lot of facts, but on the fact off fact alone, I like the, the ankylosaur.

Just like that is such a detailed. So good. Like cast. It's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. I could kiss that. A little nose boop. A little nose boop. So I'm going to give it to Hank.

Hey, all right. There you go. Scientists will need a little sign. Please do not smooch the ankylosaur. We're having a problem with people smooching the ankylosaur. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds, which this week I'm not sitting on, so it's great.

I'm very relaxed. It's just Callie this week, really. She's the most honed. This is what I've trained for, you guys. Stefan, what is our question? At Bree Beecher asks, what is the most controversial fossil discovered? The most controversial fossil ever discovered.

I had so many questions on top of that question. Yeah. My main question was, when are we talking controversial fossil? Because like basically everything that was found in the Victorian period was controversial. Like we didn't know how to put them together. that was found in the Victorian period was controversial. Like we didn't know how to put them together. Like heads were put on the ends of tails

and backbones were broken to create upright postures and all sorts of stuff. And so like if we narrow it down just to like modern times. Right now. Today, what is the most controversial fossil of today? My thought was currently

the most controversial fossil would be the four billion year evidence of life oh yeah yeah so so they have these little minerals called zircons you can check out an eons episode all about this um and inside these zir, they're like time keepers, basically. They're little capsules of awesomeness. And when you look at the carbon isotope ratios, it skews closer to the life side of carbon isotope than non-life side of carbon isotope. And so that one single mineral grain's worth of carbon isotope is now being very hotly debated on whether it is actual a sign of life or if it's just something weird or what. Because we know of life about 3.5, 3.7 billion years that's not so controversial. But that one zircon has caused a lot of issues per chance. So that was one of my top ones. That was one of my top ones, too.

Also, the Tully monster made my list. So in 1958, a scientist named Francis Tully discovered this weird fossilized shape. It has a really long proboscis. And scientists have been debating back and forth, like, is it an invertebrate? Is it atebrate? Is it a vertebrate? People have come out with different theories about, well, it's a relative of the hagfish or a lungfish or something like that.

These illustrations of the Tully monster, man. I love it so much. We talk about Tully in one of our episodes. Yeah, we've got it. Yeah. I just like it because it looks like, he looks a little bit like you know a squid wearing glasses with instead of a mouth it's got

like the kind of arm that would pick up a toy at a movie theater. Crane arm. It looks like a kid drew on a scribble on a piece of paper and was like this is my monster now. Yeah. Very spore. Yeah.

If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions you can follow us on Twitter at I'm on star now. Yeah. Very spore. Yeah. There we go. If you want to ask the science couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Anna Wilson, 630, at Ramen King, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. The final Hank Buck scores for you, everyone. Sarah, you've got one.

Stefan, you've got one. Callie and I tied with two. Thank you, Callie, for joining us. You can find more of what Callie is doing along with me and our friend Blake DiBastino over at PBS Eons to learn more about the deep, deep, deep history. It's at youtube.com slash eons. And you can check out her Instagram at fossil underscore librarian to see what else she's up to. If you like the show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. Please. Thank you. Very helpful

for us to know what you like about the show. Second, tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, tell people about us. And if you want to read any more about today's topics, you can check out SciShowTangents.org to find links to all of our sources. I said .com earlier, but it's.org. I'm sorry.

Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Stefan Chin. I've been Sari Reilly. And I'm Callie Moore. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the Amazing Team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes with

Hiroko Matsushima. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And 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 lightened. But one more thing. So we talked a lot about poop today. Sure did.

And we also discussed some pseudofossils. So I want to talk a little bit about the longest coprolite or pseudopoo that has ever been found. We which it is no we know now but it was after the fact so this thing is 40 inches whoa this 40 inch so-called poo was put on an auction block and sold for over ten thousand dollars and then scientist was like wait a second oh no that's not real that's a fake turd so it was an earth turd it was it came out of the same unit that you find the fake turds from so somebody spent 10 grand on a 40 inch pseudo poo waspoo. Who was it? I don't know. But look, people pay $10,000 for Gucci belts. So if you're gonna

pay $10,000 for an earth turd, I'm not gonna judge you. No, go ahead. And somebody made some money off of it. But yeah, they're roughly

6 million years old from the Wilkies formation in Washington State. So from the licensing. I mean, it's still like, if it's still millions of years old

and it's like an earth squirt, like, that seems, it's worth $10, old and it's like an earth squirt that's worth 10,000 I got stuff to tell you about rocks man pick up any rock if you want something that's 6 million years old I got some things to sell you I know that's like a drop in the bucket too

6 million that was like yesterday so yeah so there you go there's some pseudo poo for you That's like a drop in the bucket, too. I mean, six million. That was like yesterday. So, yeah. So there you go. There's some pseudo-poo for you that's worth 10 grand.