Stuff You Should Know - Pterosaurs: Not Flying Dinosaurs

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

Almost everything you know about pterosaurs is wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't flying dinosaurs and they weren't all pterodactyls. Which makes this a great episode for you to learn some new and amazing stuff about terrifying prehistoric beasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

He's just the two of us batching it today. Yeah. That's what my dad used to say if he had to take care of me while my mom was working. We're just batching it. Was that what he said? Yeah. I thought that was a relatively new term.

No, I mean, at least the early 80s. All right. Maybe my dad was like way ahead of his time. Why hasn't there been a movie called Batchin' It? I don't know. That seems pretty obvious. The fact that it was around as a word in the 80s makes me even more surprised

that there's not a movie called Batchin' It. Yeah. Like the protagonist has to put on like a car wash to save their business or something like that. Yeah. Owen Wilson. What did he do? Well, he would just be the star of Batchin' It,

I imagine, right? I guess so. Could that guy be any more charming than he is? He's pretty charming. Speaking of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a wonderful little beast named Ketzel Kolotus Northropi. Mm-hmm.

Are you familiar? Sure. So Ketzel Kolotus is named after the Aztec flying serpent god, Ketzel Kolotus. Yes. So it makes sense. But this guy was a real thing. Not to put down the Aztecs beliefs or anything like that,

but this is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the late Cretaceous period. And it's what you would probably call a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd be dead wrong, pal. Yeah. What it really is is a pterosaur. And there's a lot of misunderstandings

that we're going to sort through. But the most important point is that this beast right here is 20 feet tall. This tall is a giraffe. And it had a wingspan akin to about an F-16 fighter jet. And it was a bad mamma jamma. How's that for a lead in? That's good.

I like it. I didn't even use the way back machine. Just trimmed the fat, gone. Oh, you don't even need that old clunky thing anymore? We just use our imaginations. We're not actually in the Cretaceous period like we would be if we had used the way back machine. Oh, OK.

Yeah, these terra starts with a P, of course, a silent P. That is from Greek, meaning winged lizards. And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They were not dinosaurs. Yes, big, big distinction here. They're close. It's like a sister to a dinosaur, perhaps. They're from the same clodae, which is archosaurs.

But it's a really wide clodae. And all that means is that they have in the very remote past some single common ancestor with dinosaurs. Yeah, and they were around roughly the same time period. Oh, definitely. And went away in the same fashion. So it's normal, I think, for people to say, look at that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur,

even though neither one of those is necessarily correct. Yeah, so just to get this across one more time, pterosaurs were not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but they weren't dinosaurs. They weren't birds either. And to confuse things even further, there were birds around at the time of the dinosaurs and the time of the pterosaurs.

And to confuse things even further, there were such things as actual flying dinosaurs, we call them velociraptors. Right, and these vertebrates actually were flying long before birds and bats by, like, millions and millions of years. Yeah, I think this how stuff works article. This is a good one.

I got to give big ups to Clint Pumphrey. Yeah, pretty good. The pumps. Yeah, he sounds like an action how stuff works writer, Clint Pumphrey, chest, beef rock. You know? But he said, I think, 80 million years difference, 80 million years before birds.

That's a lot of years. It is. So there's a lot of confusing stuff flying around. And I think there's one other thing we should probably address right out of the gate is that you shouldn't call them pterodactyls, even though a lot of people do. Pterodactyls are actually a specific genus

of pterosaurs. So to call all pterosaurs pterodactyls would be incorrect. But you could call all pterodactyls pterosaurs, OK? Yeah, and technically, like, if you have seen this thing in movies a lot that they say, that's a pterodactyl, what you've probably been looking at this whole time is one of the species. And they're potentially up to 200 of these species.

Right now, I think they've identified about 130-ish. But a pteranodone, is that how you'd say it? Pteranodone? That's what I would have gone with. I like pteranodone. That's probably what you've been seeing in movies all this time that you've been saying that's a pterodactyl. If you look up an image search of the pteranodone,

you'll say that's a pterodactyl because I saw it in King Kong. Yeah, it's like this giant winged beast with kind of short stubby legs and a huge wing span and like a weird crest on its head and a long pointy beak. A pterodactyl, everybody knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be an idiot. Yeah, you saw it in King Kong in 1933.

Saw the same thing in Jurassic Park 3 in 2001, right? Things hadn't changed all that much. But in that time span, it's actually kind of surprising because our understanding of pterosaurs had increased dramatically. And yet, we were still just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterodactyls, which isn't the case. Yeah, there was a paleontologist named

O.C. Marsh, who was a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Sure. He collected these first fossils in what is now and was then Western Kansas in the late 1800s, like 1870. And they've been, well, I was about to say they've been digging up lots of these since then. They sort of have, but not nearly as many as other types of fossils because these fossils are

really highly breakable and dissolvable. And they're tough to get ahold of and keep in one piece throughout the process. Yeah, we should talk about that. Like one of the reasons there is so little understanding of pterosaurs is because they don't fossilize very well. Because their bones were not designed to be fossilized, they were designed to allow these giant reptiles to fly.

Yeah, they didn't say like, oh, we need to be designed to leave our mark later. No. It's like, we want to fly. Right, exactly. So early on, I think the first pterodon or the first pterosaur specimen was found in the late 18th century in Germany. And by the time O.C. Marsh was digging them up 100 years

later in Kansas, they'd been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been abandoned because there were very few follow-up fossils that were identified. So when O.C. Marsh started to dig them up, this was a big deal. And because he was finding virtually all of the same species, the pteranodon, that became the common conception

of what the pterosaur is. But it was coupled with an earlier name, pterodactyl, that had been given to the entire species or the entire group by Georges Cuvier in, I think, 1812. Yeah, and that first fossil you were talking about, no one got credit for that for digging that thing up. But like you said, it was in Germany in limestone, like 150 million-year-old limestone,

late in the 18th century that eventually found its way to a man with a great name, Cosimo Alessandro Colini. That's a great one. Man, when I first came across this in this article, I was like, I'm looking forward to hearing Chuck say that guy's name. That's him. He was Italian, go figure, and he was a natural scientist.

And he, like many others to follow for a long time, didn't really know what it was since they found that in an ancient lagoon with all kinds of seafaring creatures, he, understandably, thought it was a seafaring creature. Yeah, and some of the best preserved fossils that we have of these things are found in things like lagoons where something happened to them.

They died suddenly, quickly fell into a body of water, which probably broke their fall a little bit. They landed at the muck and were covered up, potentially in some anaerobic state, and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what it takes to fossilize a pterosaur. Yeah, in Cuvier, who kind of got it all wrong by calling it a pterodactyl for everyone in the future,

he was actually the same dude, though, who did say, actually, I think those are wings, not paddles. And that was a big breakthrough. Yeah, and the reason he called them pterodactyls, it means wing finger in the Greek. So pterosaur means winged lizard. And pterodactyl means wing finger, because as we'll see, the front edge of the wing,

the leading edge of the wing, is actually an extraordinarily long pinky. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think so, too. That's a good way to lead up to a break, too, don't you think? Agreed. Let's go. All the stuff we live for,

trash and junk, stuff you should know. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast with Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. Okay, we're back.

I feel like we kind of jumbled things up like a bunch of teresar bones. Sure. So let's reset here, shall we? Should we reset with the head? Let's. The head crests. If you've seen a movie, like Jurassic Park,

and you saw what you thought was a pterodactyl, and he had that beautiful looking he or she, well, maybe he, cause now they think that maybe only the males had these head crests. These things were sort of one of the staples of many, if not all of these species, but they were all really different and some fantastic looking, and they're not exactly sure there's still a lot of debate

over what they use these big crests for. Yeah, they thought maybe they use them as a rudder in the air to steer with as they're flying around. It does make sense. Some people thought that they maybe used them as a marine rudder. Maybe they used them for defense, cause they were like made of horn and bone covered with skin,

and they think possibly they had coloring to them. Maybe they had feathers or light fur. They're not quite sure, but because there's just such a lack of understanding and because pterosaur fossils are so few and far between, it's still basically anybody's guess what they were used for. But then I think in Germany,

and I'm not exactly certain when this was discovered, but a female pterosaur was discovered, and it had a, I should say she had an egg in her overduck still. So it was the only pterosaur to ever be positively identified by sex in the history of the world. And she lacked that head crest. So it really lent support to the idea

that it was males only, kind of like how a peacock has the very bright feathers and the peahen does not. They think that maybe it's the same thing or more akin to like antlers in deer or moose. Their males are the ones that have the antlers and they think they use it maybe a little bit for defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm a dude

and I'm looking for some action, check out the sides of my antlers. They think it was probably the same with pterosaurs now. Yeah, and these things like, it's amazing when you look up these pictures. Some of them are just really fantastically colored. Some of them are really big, like that Tapahara Imperator.

Yeah, if you look up one pterosaur during this episode, make it this guy. Yeah, this is cool. This thing looks like it literally has a sailboat sail on top of its head. And like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like what the artist's conceptions are, it just must have been something to see.

Yeah, that Niktosaurus is pretty interesting too. This one didn't seem to have any sort of a, it looked like a sail without the sail. Like, what do you call the frame of the sail? I'm sure there's some great name for it. The timber. Sure. But these, I mean, they liken it in this article,

the pump does to television antennae and they are really big and look only clunky to me. Yeah, I mean, it'd be good for skewering, I guess, but it could also be terrible for skewering. Like if you were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could probably catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get the fish off because these antennae were just way too tall and long.

Yeah, and then this pterodustro is really, you should look that one up too, it's pretty amazing. This one looks like if a dinosaur mated with a pelican and a toothbrush. Yeah, so one person described it as a toothbrush with wings. Yeah, like the lower jaw has like a thousand really long, small, needle-like teeth

and it looks like this big toothbrushy underbite. Yeah, and it does, like when you look at it, you're like, oh, it's clearly gotta be related to a pelican. Again, it's not. Pelicans and birds were around during the time of dinosaurs and if birds are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs,

but it does look a lot like it and it makes sense that it would because from what we're learning about pterosaurs now these days is that a lot of them were ocean going, that they had the goods to fly across an entire ocean over the course of a few days, like maybe an albatross would and that they would fly low, some of them and skim the surface of these ancient oceans on earth

and scoop up marine life with their jaws, with their lower jaw, just like a pelican would. So what's even more interesting about that besides the idea that this is going on 100 million years ago is that pelicans are not related to these things. So that this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more than one time. You know what I'm saying?

I find that fascinating rather than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that. Actually, they didn't. That's just two different branches of the same tree developing into something very similar. Evolution and isolation, isn't that what they call that? Yeah, or no, convergent evolution.

Oh, okay. I think, yes, it is. It's convergent evolution. When like a trait or a behavior or characteristic develops separately among different branches of the tree rather than developing once and then descendants all have that same trait. Yeah, and although they did certainly love

a good seafood meal, they used to think that was sort of all they ate and now new research suggests that they do eat or did eat all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs. Yeah, the way that they describe them now is that it's just like birds, right? You've got birds that eat all sorts of different things, that fill all sorts of different ecological niches.

That's what they're coming to the conclusion about with pterosaurs, which I mean, Chuck, this is like a huge sea change from what it was even back in the 1950s or 60s or 70s. And we thought there were just a few species. And it turns out there were a ton of different ones and a lot of variety and a lot of diversity and now we're starting to kind of get a handle on that.

Yeah, and they think they were probably able, after they hatched, to fly pretty quickly, to take care of themselves pretty quickly. And like you mentioned, they're flying, they believe now is, they were kind of built for the long haul, weren't super fast, but could like a long distance jetliner. Right, but some of them were small,

some of them were small as songbirds. And I imagine they were flitty. Yeah, I can't remember the name of one, but there was one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny little flying pterosaur. Could you imagine anything more frightening than what you would call a pterodactyl the size of a robin?

Yeah. Or imagine a hundred of those. Or it could look kind of cool, like the little UFOs and batteries not included. Remember those? I didn't see that movie. Do you remember like the ads or anything from it though? No. It was basically cocoon, but set in a tenement

and with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay. It was very similar though. I think Don Amici was in both maybe. Yeah, why not? He had that market cornered. If you can get your hands on Don Amici, you put him in your movie buddy.

Yeah, for sure. So, okay, where are we at Chuck? Well, I think we can go, we can hop over to the fact that for many years, people thought, we've already mentioned birds, but bats was the other thing that people confused them with. There was an anatomy professor named Samuel Thomas von Summering and in the 1800s,

he incorrectly suggested that these were bats. Another paleontologist named Harry Sealy even wrote a book called Dragons of the Sky in which he said birds were the descendants of these. And it's understandable why these dudes were wrong. They were doing the best they could. And when you look at those wings, it looks, you know, that membrane,

it looks like it would be a bat's wing, but there are some differences. Yeah, there's some big differences. And you, like a bat in particular, I could see confusing it with, right? Like an ancient bat, because with a bat you have four digits and three of those digits form the bones in the wing.

And you got one little digit wiggling free so a bat can climb around with its index fingers, right? Yes. With a pterosaur, you have three digits that are free. And then the pinky, the fourth digit is the one that forms that long, sometimes 10, 20 feet long bone that's the front edge of the wing.

Yeah, that's crazy. But they had three fingers free. And this is really significant because before they used to think, and if you go back and you look at how pterodactyls were drawn in like the middle of the 20th century, when they weren't in flight, they were probably standing on their back legs.

And they realized that this is probably not how pterosaurs stood. That instead, because their forearms were far more powerful than their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that they walked on all four legs using, putting most of their weight on their front legs with their front forearms with their three free digits.

And their wings tucked off to the side. And they look kind of like a cartoon bulldog walks is what I'm seeing. That's what they think now. Like a cartoon bulldog, not a real one. Right. Well, I mean, a real bulldog doesn't walk quite like a cartoon bulldog.

Cartoon bulldogs more exaggerated and pronounced. You know what I mean? Sure, it's a cartoon. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll do that. And then we'll talk a little bit about how they fly and other good stuff right after this.

Pterosaurs. Who the stuff will you learn from Josh and Chuck? Stuff you should know. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right.

All right, so you mentioned they were quadrupedal. Four-footed. Four-footed. And initially they thought that they would like birds because we see birds do it. And it's probably, especially back in the 1800s, it was maybe they were all working off the notion of the easiest solution is probably correct.

Yeah. Because they would see a bird hop off those back legs and think, well, this is clearly what pterodactyls did. Yeah, and I never thought about that, but that's exactly what a bird does. It jumps up in the air from its back legs and flaps its wings and then provides lift from that point on using its wings.

Yeah. I never really thought about that, but that's how birds fly. Yeah, they hop around. And if they want to, and it's funny, one of the other articles you sent, one of those guys believed, the Palaeontologists believes that it even evolved into flying,

that they used to hop around on four legs. And eventually they started jumping higher and higher and then started flapping. And then before you knew it, they were flying. Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to gliding to flying. And they don't know. Again, they haven't found what you would call a proto pterosaur, like whatever was the link between ancient reptiles

and pterosaurs. But that's kind of the current guess right now, is that they evolved from some small light lizard that was good at jumping. Yeah, and one of the big keys in finding out, and I don't think you said this, how strong their arms were. Yeah. That sort of was a big breakthrough,

because when you think of like, you think it all comes from the legs because they're jumping. But because they found more fossils, they realized they were quadrupedal, and they said, man, they actually have incredibly strong arms and shoulders and these little tiny feet. So not only are they quadrupedal, but a lot of that initial hopping lift

may come from the arms and not the legs at all. So they think now what they do is basically push themselves off their front arms and legs to an extent, and just basically hop up into the air and then start flapping their wings, rather than like a bird jumping off of their back legs. Is that what you mean? Yeah, and then, but most of that

comes from the arms and shoulders rather than the feet. And the feet, I think, just sort of drag behind, and perhaps maybe helped with steering. Is that right? Yeah, and so you can actually divide pterosaurs into two groups, depending on when they were around. One started around 150 million years ago,

and then one came later. And the first groups had long tails. So if you look at old drawings of pterodactyls, you'll frequently see them with kind of like a long forked devil's tail, you know? And it's actually kind of accurate, they think, that the original ones had longer tails to learn to steer in the air,

but then as they got more and more adapted to flying, gracefully, they lost their tails. So the later ones, the ones that were around when the Cretaceous period ended suddenly, mostly called Ozdar kids, which is not an easy word to pronounce. No, it's not. That they had lost their tails

because they had developed other methods of changing how they fly mid-flight. Right. So because the wing membrane was connected to their ankle from their shoulder, with their finger kind of providing the front of the wing, if they altered the angle of their wrist bone, or they moved their ankle in and out,

it would change the actual dynamics of their wing and they could dive and lift and do all sorts of other things. Which is, this is a big sea change in our understanding of pterosaurs too, because they used to think that they basically had to run and jump off of a cliff to gain flight. Or hang like that.

Yeah, because they were so weird looking and so weirdly developed in different ways. Huge heads, enormous beaks, big head crests, small puny little withered feet, you know? Like... Mr. Burns hands. Or yeah, that's a good one. Or David Cross in the Titanic segment on Mr. Show.

Yeah. You're like that, right? That's like a pterosaur's legs. So it didn't make any sense how they flew, but now that we're starting to learn more and more about them, we're like, oh, actually they had a lot of really, really interesting adaptations. Not the least of which was their bones.

Yeah, I mean, are all of their bones hollow or just those wing bones? All of them. Wow, I mean, that made them incredibly light, obviously, but that also ended up being one of the problems in trying to get fossils of these guys because they just, they were very highly destructible. Non-fossilizable.

Non-fossilizable? Do you remember our fossil episode? That was like one of the better old ones, if you ask me. Yeah, I agree. I learned, I learned a lot on that. Yeah, we should trot that out in the selects soon. That was a great idea. That'd be a good one.

They also thought if they were on water, like they had just had a little snack on a lake, that they would use those wings as paddles and just get going that way, pushing off the surface and then flapping until they were, you know, shaking it off 20 feet above the water. Right, exactly. A lot like marine birds do today, right?

Mm-hmm. So those bones, like you kind of hit it on the head, they are, or they were extremely light, right? They were about a millimeter thick, something like the thickness of a playing card I saw. That's nuts. It is, super nuts, especially considering that these things were holding up

like a bird that was up to 20 feet tall, right? Mm-hmm. Or not a bird, a pterosaur. Yeah, not a pterodactyl. Man, I just averted so much email, Chuck. Like a millimeter thick bone wall, but the way that their bones were made, they were made of cross sections of basically like plywood.

So they were really strong. And then if you cut their bone in two and look down the hollow tube, you would see that there are little struts crisscrossing to provide even more internal support for those bones. It's amazing. So you could have a 20 foot tall pterosaur that could actually fly because it was that light.

I saw one of that as dark kids was something like had a 20 foot wingspan, but it probably didn't weigh any more than 20 pounds. Yeah, and some of these, I mean, what were the largest ones, like 35, 40 feet in wingspan? Yeah, so about like 10 to 15 meters in wingspan, like the size of like a jet plane, like a fighter jet.

I just flew on my first private jet. Oh yeah, how was it? You know what? First of all, I've always wanted to fly on a private jet, but never thought I would have cause to. Cause you know, unless you're extremely wealthy, you only do that if you get invited to for some strange reason.

Like you don't just book it. You should be on high alert if some wealthy person invites you on their private jet. And it was as awesome as you think, and the most awesome part of it was the just the sheer lack of hassle. Yeah. Like you, like I parked my car

at the little tiny airport here in DeKalb County, walked across the parking lot and into the lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain. And he was like, are you Chuck? And I said, yes. And he said, right this way. And he walked out the back door and there's a plane. And they say, watch your head.

You get on it and he says, are you ready to go? That's, was it just you? No, no, no. That was like five of us on an eight seater. Everybody was waiting for you. Yeah, I was the last person to get there. And I was a little stressed, but then I thought, wait a minute, that's the other perk

is they don't leave you. Yeah. Like they're, I mean, there's a schedule, but it's not like really late. But it was cool. I mean, they're the one we were on was, I mean, it's not roomy. So it's not like Air Force one or anything.

Like you feel like you can just walk around, but like when I was standing, I'm five foot 10. And if I said completely straight, my head would brush the ceiling a little bit. And you're just like, private GS. But no TSA, like you just, you just walk on, they fly you there and then you get off and you're right there.

It's like this, just the lack of hassle. And all I could think of was like, man, it must be great to be a billionaire. Sure. And never have to deal with an airport again. Yeah. But yeah, it was kind of cool. But then also once you're up there,

you're kind of like, eh, well, you know, it's not like life changing. Yeah, you me actually, I've never flown on one. You me flew on one and she said, basically the exact same thing you did, that just the lack of hassle and how fast you get somewhere is just beyond amazing. Yeah, I mean, it takes away hours and hours

of airport crap. I know. You start to develop like that terrible sensation where your eyes hurt for some weird reason, even though you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like there's a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to leave behind. Yeah.

And it also, when you're going to take off cause just, cause it's small, it feels like you're going as fast as you're going. Whereas in a jumbo jet, it really doesn't. Right. Like I was kind of like, man, we're going fast. So, oh, hey, so speaking of you me and flying, I have an update.

Okay. Do you remember the story about the Russia visas that we failed to get? Oh, sure. I told her that, I told that story and she was like, you said we forgot? And I was like, yeah, we did, right? And she's like, no, we asked like five different people,

five different times and we're told we didn't need visas. So I wanted to let you know, Chuck, that we actually are as buttoned up as you think. We were just misinformed. We got that great email from a new listener that was like, listen to some dumb story about some guy and his dumb visa. I was like, oh, welcome to the show, brother.

Yeah, you should probably listen up. There's the exit door. Was that that guy, that one guy? Uh-huh. Oh, okay. Yeah, he's very turned off by your aside about your visa story. Yeah, whatever.

So anyway, thanks for indulging the private jet convo. Yeah, I'll bet that guy loved the private jet aside. It'll probably never happen again, but it was basically like riding around on a terrasaur. So that's how I wedged it in there. Nice work. That is nice. So I'm trying to think of what else,

like terrasaur's kind of bring out the little entertain year old to me. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my little outdoor archeologist boots. I see that. And white pull up crew socks. And I'm just a total little nerd. You keep dusting everything in here too.

I'm not even like one of those dinosaur nerds, but just getting into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that to you too? It just kind of draws out like the little kid? I think so. And I think probably because at least when I was, and you and I were growing up, I feel like public schools just like,

did such a poor job of talking about these periods. Oh yeah. You know? Yeah, I remember that. But I also remember dinosaurs being kind of huge in the 80s. Yeah. At least they were in Ohio.

Does that in Ohio thing? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic Park obviously changed everything as far as, but when was that? 90s. Yeah, early 90s. Yeah, but I feel like dinosaurs

were pretty popular among the kids before that. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I hit my head and don't realize it. I don't know. I know kids, I mean, my daughter loves dinosaurs, so it's a thing. Yeah, it definitely is a thing. And it's getting to be even more of a thing.

The more we learn about pterosaurs too, which is somebody called the 21st century, the golden age of pterosaur research. So they're expecting big things from the field. Yeah, and like you said, hopefully they can find that proto pterosaur, and that's when the community really gets all excited, when they can make those links.

Hey, you know, let's speak into the community. I read this article in National Geographic, and God bless him. I can't remember the guy who wrote it, but it's called Why Pterosaurs Were the Weirdest Wonders on Wings? Yeah, that was a good one. It's a great article.

And the guy basically just got into all like the dirty laundry of the pterosaur paleontology community. And apparently they're very well known among paleontologists for just despising each other. Like the pterosaur paleontologists don't like each other, talk smack about each other publicly, and just snipe at one another a lot, which just makes the whole thing

even that much more fascinating, you know? Like they're real competitive and real back-bitey. Interesting. Yeah. And in this case, that's a good thing. Yeah, because they keep pushing one another. Agreed. You got anything else?

No. Are we done with pterosaurs? I don't have anything else I don't think. Okay, well, if you want to know more about pterosaurs, go to your local Natural History Museum and say, hey, tell me about that pterodactyl. See if you can stump them. And since I said stump, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this one, which one is this one? Oh, Footbinding. I believe we did this in a select episode. It's one of our older ones, but a really good one, I think. Agreed. And this goes like this. Hey guys, I'm a soon-to-be grad student from Guangdong, China, and have been a listener for a couple of years now.

This is my first time riding in, and it's about Footbinding. I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering she told me that her grandmother had bound her feet. I asked if great-great grandma had trouble walking, and she said she had never even wobbled a little bit, because it turns out she never made her own little shoes.

She just bought toddler shoes for herself. Nice. That's called making lemons. No, that's called making lemonade out of lemons with your feet. That's right. She said, great-great grandma came from a wealthy family and bound feet for more of a symbol of your family wealth,

meaning you don't have to do farming chores, and catering to the male foot fetish at that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born, but we do know that when her daughter, my great-grandmother, was born in 1914, she made sure that her feet were never bound. She also put all of her kids through high school, which was very remarkable back then.

Oh, yeah. Footbinding is certainly not something that I am proud of, to think that I'm just five generations away from having to get my own feet bound, as opposed to sitting here writing you guys right now. It just says, to me, how far we've gone. Thanks for the show. By the way, in the draft podcast,

Josh was having trouble pronouncing Q-I-N-G, dynasty. Yeah. Q may be roughly pronounced as T-S. Not exactly the same. So just say, sing next time, that would do. I don't even think I tried that one. I tried every other phoneme, except for sing. And this is best regards from Ruawee.

Thank you very much, Ruawee. That's pretty cool. And nice sense of perspective, too. If you want to get in touch with us with an awesome story like Ruawee did, you can catch up with us on social media. Just go to our website, stuffyshino.com, and you will find all of our social media links there.

And if you want, send us a good old-fashioned email. Wrap it up, smack it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcasts at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

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