The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte New from the author of acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs ("A masterpiece of science writing" —Washington Post) and “one of the stars of modern paleontology” (National Geographic), a sweeping and revelatory history of mammals, illuminating the lost story of the extraordinary family tree that led to us We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals. Indeed humankind and many of the beloved fellow mammals we share the planet with today—lions, whales, dogs—represent only the few survivors of a sprawling and astonishing family tree that has been pruned by time and mass extinctions. How did we get here? In his acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs—hailed as “the ultimate dinosaur biography” by Scientific American—American paleontologist Steve Brusatte enchanted readers with his definitive his - tory of the dinosaurs. Now, picking up the narrative in the ashes of the extinction event that doomed T-rex and its kind, Brusatte explores the remarkable story of the family of animals that inherited the Earth—mammals— and brilliantly reveals that their story is every bit as fascinating and complex as that of the dinosaurs. Beginning with the earliest days of our lineage some 325 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the astonishingly diverse range of animals that dominate today’s Earth. Brusatte also brings alive the lost worlds mammals inhabited through time, from ice ages to volcanic catastrophes. Entwined in this story is the detective work he and other scientists have done to piece together our understanding using fossil clues and cutting-edge technology. A sterling example of scientific storytelling by one of our finest young researchers, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals illustrates how this incredible history laid the foundation for today’s world, for us, and our future.

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Now back to the show. Today we have an amazing author on the show. Oh, did I mention Goodreads? Goodreads.com for Chess Chris Foss. We have an author on the show. We should always mention that because their books are great. Today we have an amazing author on the show, as always, brilliant minds. This one is going to be really brilliant because he has a PhD behind his name. And clearly I don't his new book that just came out june 7th 2022 i i have the p part but not the hd but it's mostly because i'm 54 and old you can figure that joke out that's an old that's an old

person joke the rise and reign of the mammals a new History from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us. Steve Bruchati is on the show with us today, and he's going to be talking to us about his newest book. Steve, did I get your name right? Yeah, you're good. You're good. I just want to make sure I hit that right. I am seriously starving right now on intermittent fasting, and so I can't feel my legs.

He is a PhD, of course course and an american paleontologist who studies at the university of edinburgh in scotland he is the author of the international bestseller i'm not sure that was a scotland accent the rise and fall of the dinosaurs they must have elected somebody that brought them all down the paleontology advisor on the jurassic park i'm sorry jurassic world film franchise he was uh helping out on the most recent one he was named more than he has named more than 15 new species i have a few for him on that i found on tinder including the tyrannosaurus the tyrannosaur i'm clearly not a scientist, Pinocchio Rex, well, we're going to have to learn about that, the raptor, and several ancient animals.

His research and writing has been featured in Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, and other publications. Welcome to the show, Steve. How are you? All right. Thanks, Fitz. I'm very good. I'm joining them from Scotland here, from Edinburgh, where I'm very lucky to teach at one of the world's great universities. And I'm one of those people that has a great job at Dig Up Dinosaurs and Mammals and other fossils for a living, write books, consult on films. It's a whole lot of fun. I was looking forward to talking.

That's talking fossils. There you go. Let's talk. So do you have a dot com or anything you want people to find you on the interwebs, Twitter or anything? That's why is Twitter. And it's just my name at Steve Brussati, B-R-U-S-A-T-T. Easy to find more. And if you like to in your Twitter feed, people self-promoting their books nonstop, then please follow me on Twitter. And just a quick question before we get in the book, because it's stuck in my brain now. What is a Pinocchio Rex? Does his nose grow? Is he made out of wood? What's going on there? It's a cheeky nickname for this dinosaur. So a few years ago, some construction workers in

southern China were digging the foundation for a building and the backhoe hit this really hard stuff. They thought maybe it was a water main or an old pipe or something like that. But it turned out to be the skeleton of a Tyrannosaur, a cousin of T-Rex, living in Asia at the same time. T-Rex was living in North America. And I was invited to help study it. I had my Chinese colleagues. And so we gave it a new name.

We called it Chonjasaurus sinensis. That's the formal name, a bit of a tongue twister. So we thought it needed a nickname. And Pinocchio Rex came to mind because this thing has a really long note. Just think T-Rex, but with its skull stretched out. So that hence the nickname. Whether it was a liar, I don't know, but it definitely had a long note. Probably.

I guess Amber Heard was taken. Let's see. You know, no comment on any American jokes right now. Except that I left the country to get away from that kind of a circle. I'll own that joke to myself. I'm not sure what it means anyway. So let's see. Let's see.

So tell us about the new book. What motivated you to write this book? Of course, you've written several books, haven't you? Yeah. So the new book's all about mammals. It's called The Rise and Reign of the Mammals as you mentioned. And it's a

325 million year evolutionary story. It goes back to the time that our ancestors split off from the rest of the family tree of life. They left the reptiles behind and they started that march towards. And so we are a mammal. This is our story. This is our deep ancestry this is our

our origin story and so what i try to convey in the book is how how our family has survived and endure over so many millions of years how we lived alongside the dinosaurs our furry little ancestors lived alongside the dinosaurs for 150 million years. These mammals had to survive in the shadows. They had to survive underground. They had to survive at night in this world dominated by T-Rexes and Brontosaurus. But in doing so, they developed so many sublime adaptations, hair to keep themselves warm, milk to feed their babies, big brains, high intelligence, keen senses. These are all

things we have today because we inherited them, ancestors. So we have a rich, rich, rich origin story. That's what I want to get across in the book. And I want to tell the story, not just of us, but of the 6,000 other mammals alive today, bats and whales and elephants and monkeys and dogs and cats, all of these amazing animals that we all. So this is our history then. Now, I was having trouble. There's like, I can't find references to the Bible in here because this is like 240 million years old and stuff in here.

What part of the Bible does this take place in? Genesis or? Well, you know, depending on your belief system, all of this might be compressed into a few lines of Genesis. For Christians, that's actually true. You know, you take the Bible as allegory. Now, if you take the Bible literally, you're going to have a bit of a different worldview than those of us who study fossils.

And if anybody like that is listening, hey, look, check out the book if you're at all interested in just learning about paleontology, whatever your background is, whatever your mindset is. And, you know, take a look at what evidence we have, how we find this evidence. I think you'll find it interesting. But no, you're not going to find a lot of mention in the Bible in the book, although we do talk about some interesting stories from history, you know, where some scientists and even some preachers in the past discovered mammal bones, petrified skeletons, what they made of those bones. This was the foundation, actually, of paleontology. People a few hundred years ago encountering these petrified skeletons and trying to figure out what to make of them.

Oh, wow. Wow. Crazy. So let's talk about the book. The book's got, I should mention, it's super thick and it's got tons of great pictures and drawings in here. It's really interesting, especially since I can't read and I just like pictures for the most obvious reasons, but tell us some more details about what's in the book or maybe some tease out some things that might stick out. Ooh, look, here's a, these are always a favorite kind of a saber tooth.

Oh yeah. One of my favorites, the saber tooth tiger. I'm going to grab a copy of the book. So it looks like this, by the way. That's the cover. There you go. The Riding Rain Mammals. Beautiful artwork, by the way. There's an artist named Todd Marshall who did the cover, and we have new artwork from him in every single chapter.

So you want to see things like woolly mammoths, saber tooth tigers, all kinds of other fantastic mammals that used to live. Todd has drawn them in the book. He's a rock and roll artist. He actually got started as an artist in the rock scene in the 80s in LA. He's been a video game artist. So he's brought these animals to life. So there are a lot of images, a lot of photos, and it's not too thick. It's about 400 pages of text. But you know, I'm covering 325 million years of evolution. And really what I want to do is tell that story from start to finish. I want people to understand where we came from, our deepest ancestry. And I want people to appreciate our history.

We come from a long legacy of mammals that have endured everything the earth has thrown at whether it's you know temperature spikes ice ages rising and falling sea levels volcanoes asteroids all these things mammals have survived including the asteroid that killed the dinosaur and maybe that's the neatest story of all and i tell that story in chapter five so you know we so 66 million years ago this six mile wide rock falls out of the sky. It's traveling faster than a speeding bullet, literally. And it smashed into what's now Mexico with the force of over 1 billion nuclear bombs put together. It unleashed chaos, tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, all kinds of bedlam.

The dinosaurs could not cope. T-Rex was there to witness it. Triceratops was there to witness it. Triceratops was there to witness it, but they succumbed. But we had ancestors that survived because they were small, because they were adaptable, because they could hide easily, because they could eat lots of different food, because they could grow fast. So to me, that's maybe the most remarkable thing of all, that we, our ancestors, actually survived that worst day in the history of the earth and if they didn't we wouldn't be here and having this conversation that's true

i mean we even survived my nine ex-wives so you know but there's a lot of things and they're very resilient yeah so far so far yeah so i'm looking at the picture here, and I'm not sure if I held it up first. But, man, if you were a dentist 200 million years ago, there was a lot of money going on there, right? Yeah. Well, you know what's remarkable about saber-toothed is that because they're mammals like us, they only have a set of baby teeth, a set of adult teeth. That's it. Like a dinosaur or a lizard, a frog. I mean, they can go through teeth throughout their lives, just like a conveyor belt of teeth in their mouth. But not that saber tooth tiger.

Those things had canine teeth that were like a flaw. And if they broke one of those things, they were done. So they had to be very careful. And they probably didn't go around wielding those things like a knife-wielding maniac just with replets abandoned. They probably used them more as ice picks to make a very precision strike into the throats of their people. That's what we think. Wow. Wow.

You're giving me nightmares. Nice. Yeah. So you do a real detailed history. It's got lots of great reviews on it. It's number one bestseller in endangered species. Congratulations for that. Yeah.

I'm, you know, I, I, I peek at the Amazon and good reason reviews probably more than I should. You know, they tell us authors not to look, you know, or look occasionally because, you know, you get those one star reviews. Sometimes I really get you down. But, but when I, yeah, when I last looked at it, there was some good feedback from people I was very happy to see. And, you know, the book's been out for a week now. So I'm just glad that some people are picking it up, are reading it, and are engaging with it. That's really all you could ask an author. Yeah. And it's really detailed and it kind of weaves a little bit of storytelling. You talk about, you know, kind of almost the experiences of what, okay, this animal is going through, what's happening, its environment, giving details and locations. It's very interesting, especially if people aren't dinosaurs.

But even then, just understanding the history of, like, here's a picture of a human's brain, a dog's brain. Well, it's no wonder my dogs are idiots. A Morganucondon brain. That's the very first mammal. That's the oldest mammal we find. Over 200 million years old. There's a Cyanarpus. Cyanarps?

Yeah. These are some of the ancestors of the mammoths. So you can see in this, so this is a really cool illustration. And Sarah Shelley did this illustration. She works with me in my lab in Edinburgh now. She was my first PhD student. She's now one of the experts, world experts on early mammal evolution. And she's a great artist.

So in addition to Todd Marshall's new artistic reconstructions of all these mammoths and sabertooths, we have Sarah that's provided a lot of detailed illustrations of things like brains and jaws and teeth, you know, the more technical stuff to convey these details of mammals in ways that words just simply cannot. Yeah. The picture of the whale skeleton. Holy crap. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming

out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold.

Now, how small, and not to make it all about us, screw the dinosaurs, how small, I mean, what was it, what, what, what, what things of us were to survive that big nuclear bomb hit? Was it where we fish at that point or like sell, sell the other stuff or were we just like, we were Steve Boucher just hanging out in the yeah i'll answer that second i just want to say something about whales first because you mentioned the photo of the whale and i don't i don't know if i can maybe be able to find this i came across it i have this chapter on extreme mammals chapter seven is all about bats and whales and elephants. And here we go. Here's some images you can see.

Yeah, it's extraordinary. So this is a blue whale. And this whole skeleton, that's the one that's on the ceiling at the Natural History Museum in London. And then the skull, this whole page photos of a skull. And that's a friend of mine, a paleontologist named Travis Park, standing next to the skull. This blue whale would treat Travis like a piece of popcorn. That just conveys how big whales are. And I think we need to appreciate that more because whales, blue whales are the biggest organisms of any kind that have ever lived in the entire

four and a half billion years of the earth. Look at how big they are and live now. They live in the same world as we do and imagine if they were extinct and all we had were some petrified bones surely we would hold these things and as much esteem and as much reverence as dinosaurs so let's appreciate it so anyway that's my kind of spiel on whale i just i love whales because they're so extreme but but you have to talk the asteroid so when the asteroid hit our ancestors are already pretty advanced. They were already mammals, proper mammals. They had hair all over their bodies. They had brains. Yeah, they fed their bait. They had molar teeth like we do with all these different peaks and valleys they could use to chew their food. So they would

have, our ancestors, the ones that stared down that asteroid 66 million years ago, would have been about the size of a mouse or a gerbil maybe a little bit bigger maybe up to rat size but but very small and it would have been covered in fur and they would have been you know pretty smart animals pretty agile and i think if you saw one of these things you'd probably just think oh that's some kind of little mouse or something but it was that meekness that humbl you know, that allowed them to survive when so many bigger things like dinosaurs died. Wow. So basically rat size.

So there were politicians, most likely. No, I'm just kidding. Well, maybe in temperament. That explains why they survived nuclear war, too. Anyway, yeah, this is really cool in the book. What are some other things that we can tease out to readers to get them to pick up the book? I think there's some stories I have in the book about how we know what we know. I don't want to beat the reader over the head with all kinds of details on different scientific techniques and with lots of math or anything like that. I haven't done that. But I do try to give little

snippets of stories of how it is that we actually find fossils. Where do we go? How do we locate them? How do we study them once we find them? And so I tell stories of working in New Mexico. I'm just back from New Mexico. I was just there about a week and a half ago with some of my students and some of my colleagues. And we were out there looking for fossils of those first mammals that lived after the asteroid, the ones that really took that crown away from the dinosaurs. And we find a lot of their bones, a lot of their teeth out in New Mexico. Sometimes we find their skeletons. And what these fossils tell us is that very soon after the asteroid hit, those ancestors of ours, which were only the size of a mouse or a rat while they were living with the dinosaur, within a few hundred thousand years, they're the size of pigs. Within about a million or two years, they're the size of a mouse or a rat while they were living with the dinosaur. Within a few hundred thousand

years, they're the size of pigs. Within about a million or two years, they're the size of cows. So mammals got bigger and bigger really quick after the asteroid hit. And we know that from these real fossils that we find just a couple hours drive north of Albuquerque out in the Badlands. And, you know, it's one of my favorite places to work. Beautiful country, really important fossils. And some of the best fossils are found by our students. And I tell the story of how a student on our crew who was just a few days out of her freshman year of college, she'd never been looking for fossils before. She came out and after a few days of getting her bearings and not really finding much, she discovered a new species, a totally new species of vamp that lives in Africa. So I think stories like this show how fun paleontology is,

how it's an adventure, how it's still a science of discovery, but also how anybody can make discoveries. You don't have to have the PhD letters. You don't have to be a professor. You know, you can be a student. You can be sometimes hikers, find fossils. Farmers, I mentioned the farmers in China. Construction workers in China, which I mentioned. Anybody can find a fossil. It's a very accessible science. That's what I

love about Puget. Do I get a reward when I find a fossil? Well, it depends where you're looking and who you're looking for. I've got a few fossil friends on Facebook, actually, that are fucking fossils. I think that's what I've been called myself, actually. I think my niece and my nephew refer to me as the fossil, the old fossil. Well, that's just awful, man. I love fossils.

Plenty of people love fossils. They're very endearing. I usually do until they start throwing things at me. This is kind of interesting. One of the outtakes from your book, the first elephants were the size of miniature poodles. What the hell is going on there? Isn't that crazy? I mean, you think about elephants today.

I mean, they're big. They're the biggest mammals that live on land. They're five or six tons the biggest elephants. I mean, you see them at the zoo or at the circus or something. I mean, they're just, they're gargantuan, right? And there have been even bigger elephants that used to live, and we find their fossils. And then there's very famous extinct elephants like woolly mammoths and so on. When you think of elephants, you think of giants, but they did not start that way. I mean, all big things, they have to start somewhere. And so elephants started very humble and way back

some, you know, 50-ish million years ago, 55 million years ago, give or take, the first elephants were evolving in Africa and they were just the size of little lap dogs. They would have been very cute. They would have, you know, barely even come up to the ankle of one of today's elephants. That just goes to show over long time periods you know evolution can do remarkable thing and just like dinosaurs started out small the first dinosaurs were just the size of house cats the first elephants were small too yeah well that's probably good because every hot chick on on instagram would probably have a small dino a small elephant if they're still that size great pets you know rather than a chihuahua or whatever, you know,

give yourself a tiny little elephant, have it around on your leash. Yeah. And they probably didn't do that annoying bark that chihuahuas do. I can't stand it. No, just a really kind of probably shriekish shrill something up the trunk. No, no, no. I'll go for that over there. I've broken up with people over there.

Yappy chihuahuas. Let's see. I mean, fair is fair. I got to say that chihuahuas, you know, dogs are mammals. But the thing is, I talk about in the book about how we domesticated dogs and how we took wolves and turned them into things like, you know, chihuahuas. And how crazy that it was, a species of mammal, making our own species of mammals sometimes quite annoying, but also beautiful ones. You think of all the wonderful dogs and cats and other pets.

I have Siberian Huskies. Is it true that they're the first conversion from wild to domestic dogs? Is that true at all? I'm not quite sure which of the modern-day dogs are kind of most similar to the ancestral wolf, but certainly huskies, it would make sense if they are because they really do look a lot like. So even if they're not like the closest relatives, I think they're a pretty good approximation for what that first domesticated dog would look like. And this was like more than 10,000 years ago.

Humans took wolves that were probably hanging around their campfires drawn by the smell of a mammoth barbecue and uh started to throw them scraps of meat and started to domesticate the dogs go back the long way i thought the earliest domesticated mammals were husbands anyway this is really funny but this is really funny i'll take from your book the first whales had legs. What the hell is going on? And did they get rid of the legs because they were tired of sharing land with our stupid asses? So whales are remarkable. I already talked about the blue whale and how big it is and how you should treasure it.

But blue whales, of course, are just one you know, one of the endpoints of an amazing evolutionary transition. Whales are mammals, which means their ancestors came from the land. So whales developed from animals that started on the land. And about 55 million years ago, we start seeing fossils of that age of these little animals, these little mammals with hooves. They looked like a little baby deer, like Bambi. And these things we can tell are starting to evolve in the direction of webs. And then over the course of the next 10 million years or so of fossils, we see this beautiful sequence.

It's like the scenes in a movie or like a flip book, you know, progressing. You can see this small little animal with hooves get bigger and bigger, turn its arms and legs into flippers, lose its legs entirely of all the big head, and become something that can only live in the water. So it is an amazing thing to think that the first whales had legs and arms. They were walking whales. They could move on land. They could could also swim so when you see a whale just remember that its ancestors lived on land and moved into the water that just goes to show how remarkable evolution was it maybe they were just skipping leg day at the gym and they lost the legs i mean that's hey you know we weren't there to witness it right so yes i think you need to go

back to the drawing board and do more study. Because a couple of this stuff sounds like guys at the gym that I know. Let's see. I mean, that's crazy to think about. Those would have to be some hell of legs to, you know, have a blue whale walking around. Yeah, well, they weren't the size of blue whales at that time. Oh, okay. They totally lost their legs.

They lost the hind legs. They turned the front legs, the arms, into and so after that, they got really big. So these guys are like me. After they quit using their legs, they got fat. I get it. This is kind of interesting. Charles Darwin was flummoxed by fossil mammals in South Africa and seemed to combine features of many modern mammal groups. So was he full of crap then? So Charles Darwin was probably the most famous dropout of the university. Oh, he's from the same college too.

So he started here in the 1820s as a medical student. His father wanted him to become a doctor. Dad put a lot of pressure on him. But Darwin, there was a problem. Darwin hated blood. So that's a real problem. You're going to be like a 19th century doctor. So, you know, so after a couple of years, he just couldn't hack it. So I tell my students every year, I teach a first year course about the history of life here. And every year I tell my students that if you stick it through to graduation, you will have a Cliffs Charles Darwin. That's true. But Darwin landed on his feet. You know, his father was well

connected and father then got him into Cambridge, as we like to say, a lesser school. And so at Cambridge, he studied theology. So he actually got a degree in theology at Cambridge. Not then his dad wanted him to become a pastor, just a county parson to have his own little church somewhere in the English countryside. And Darwin hated that idea as much as being a doctor. So instead, he had this opportunity to get on a ship and sail the world. And he did it. So for five years, he sailed around the world on the ship called the Fiegel. And it's that ship that left England and went to South America and sailed all around the world. And you have the Galapagos Islands down in South America, famous stories of Darwin studying the birds and kind of coming to this realization that life is at all. That's part of the story. But what Darwin also did was when

the ship dropped anchor in South America, Darwin would venture inland. He talked to locals and talked to some of the indigenous tribes. And he would go out and he'd look for not only living animals, not only birds and stuff, but he would look for fossils. And he found fossils. He found bones of giant mammals. And they completely flabbergasted because they were so different from any mammal he knew in Europe. These were not foxes and badgers and deer and stuff. They seemed to have weird Frankenstein combinations of different mammals. A little bit roguish, a little bit elephant, a little bit horde.

A little bit rock and roll. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, a little bit whatever. And so he didn't know what to do with them. They confused people for a long time. This is back in the 1830s, Darwin's Finding Book. It was only a few years ago that somebody found some dna in

some of those bones and a little bit of protein in those bones put it through the whole paternity test you know the whole dna thing and determine that these things are actually close relatives of horses so they don't look like horses but we would have never known that if it wasn't for the dna darwin never knew that darwin didn't even know there was such thing as DNA. So that just goes to show how some of these fossils, over time, they've been collected, studied, and scrutinized by some of the greatest minds in science. And they've been using, you know, until new technology, the DNA revolution, the same sort of stuff that allows, you know, you to find the, put the murderers behind bars and find the true father on one of the afternoon talk shows.

You know, that same technology helps us study fossil mammals and soldiers. Yeah, I owe child support to about six of my ex-wives over that show that found the DNA. Let's see. This is kind of interesting too. America used to be a Savannah. Savannah? Yeah.

Savannah? Yeah. Savannah. Savannah. Depends how posh your accent is, but yeah. America used to be a savannah. Savannah? Yeah. Savon? Yeah. Savon, savannah. Depends how posh your accent is, but yeah. I went to public school. Let's see. It used to be a savannah, which is pretty interesting. And I'm trying to find that place again.

Much just like Africa was today. 12 million years ago, rhinos and camels, camels for hell's sakes. And horses galloped across the Great Plains. That's crazy. What happened to camels and rhinos? Did we evict them or did we just treat them like we do most immigrants and treat them badly and they leave? Well, you know, they were natives in many ways. They were American natives. And you would never know it looking at the mammals we have.

Did the Indians kill them and eat them like we did with the buffalo? No, no. These things mostly left, you know, before there were there really entirely these things left before there were humans in the Americas. So so it's a stunning scene to conjure up. And this is chapter eight in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. And in the new book, this is all about the American savanna and other stuff that was happening around that time. And I start off with this fictional story, but one that's based on a remarkable fossil site in Nebraska, where thousands of animals were buried by a volcanic eruption. This is the Yellowstone Volcano. It erupted about 12 million years ago. It blew ash across much of America. That ash would have fallen like snow, and it would have captured, killed and captured and buried a lot of animals. And so what we see from this place is called the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska.

What we see from those animals captured in the ash is that if you were in Nebraska 12 million years ago, you could have gone on safari. It would have looked a lot like Africa today. There were rhinos. There were camels. There were forces. There were elephants. there were forces there were elephants incredible and there were huge predators these things that we we nicknamed the hell hounds and the hell pigs these these extra big extra ferocious versions of some of the mammals that we still have isn't that just texas no i'm just kidding now no sense anybody any listeners in Texas.

Well, I mean, have you seen some of those armadillos in there? Well, some of those armadillos in Texas, absolutely. And they're encroaching now north, you know, into Illinois, where I'm from and my family. It's a weird thing. And, you know, those are South American mammals, by the way. Armadillos have only been in North America for a few million years at most. They started coming up when North America and South America docked into each other. And that was only about two and a half million years at most. They started coming up when North America and South America docked into each other, and that was only about two and a half million years ago.

We should start charging them rent. What are the things that we could tease out about your book? It's really interesting, like all the different things you can learn and find out about. You're just like, wow, I never did that. Yeah. One of my favorite chapters to write was Chapter 9, which is all about the Ice Age, all about the megafauna. Woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers. What's really wild to think about is that these animals were here not very long ago.

They died out very recently. You might think when you see a picture of a woolly mammoth or hear the name saber-toothed tiger, you might think these things are millions and millions and millions of years old, that maybe they lived with the dinosaurs. But no, they lived quite recently and they only died out about 10,000 years ago. Our ancestors would have seen that and known that and encountered them and hunted that. There are caves in France and Spain that are plastered with drawings of woolly mammoths. This is like the first graffiti in human history. It's just painting after painting of mammoths. So our ancestors knew these animals.

And back during the Ice Age, there was a whole zoo of the biggest, furriest, weirdest, wackiest mammals. Not only mammoths and sabersoos, but there were sloths that lived on the ground that were more than 10 feet tall. There were armadillos the size of Volkswagen. There were beavers that were bigger than humans. There were deer with antlers that are bigger than a dining room table. In Australia, there were wombats that weighed three tons. There were kangaroos that were too plump to hop. And I can keep going and going. But these are the most amazing and charismatic mammals I think that have ever lived. And they lived very recently, and they only died out as the last part of the Ice Age was ending.

And they really only died out continent by continent after humans arrived. So it's probably largely because of us, through hunting them and changing their environments, that things like woolly mammoths and saber saber tooths are no longer with us. Is there any, is there any prediction on when our rise and fall or fall is going to be? We already kind of know about the rise. Yeah. You know,

I try not to predict too much of the future. Paleontology, we're good at looking into the past. We're good at drawing lessons for the future. I end the book with an epilogue, trying to talk a little bit about the modern day. But look, I don't want to be alarmist. I don't want to be doom and gloom. That's not the point of a book like this. I want people to understand and cherish and revel in the deep history of mammals and look at that history to appreciate where we come from. And yes, to draw some lessons for the future. But I don't know if, you know, X percentage of mammals are going to become extinct,

you know, if temperatures rise X number of degrees. I don't want to get too far into that speculation. That's too far removed from what I know, what I study. And I think I don't want to leave readers with the feeling that everything is just a disaster. I want us to treasure what's come before us and to use that appreciation to hopefully better understand our world today. There you go. Well, I'm going to be showing my Siberian Huskies whenever they're bratty, the chapter on how we domesticated them. Here's how we got you, suckers. Make them read it.

If you know Huskies, they have a whole attitude. When you tell them to do something, they just look at you and go, I'll get back to you on that. I'll think about that. So I'll get something that I can have on them. Well, Steve, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. And thanks for coming on. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you.

Yeah, it's just the best way to find me is on Twitter. It's at Steve Brussati. So just Steve, like normal, and then Brussati is D-R-U-S-A-T-T-E. I do a lot of banter. I, you know, talk to people all the time. Anybody who's into the bossos, who's read the books, who wants to know anything about dinosaurs, mammals, I love chatting with people. So please do take a look at that. That's the best way to kind of connect with me. And then, you know, there again is the cover of the new book, The Rise and Reign of the Mantle, just out and, you know, just really looking forward to seeing what people think about it. I hope people like it. I hope it gives us, you know, a more of an appreciation for where we have come from. This really is a book about

our origins. There you go, guys. Read that book and all that stuff. So would this be a prelude to the Bible? I'm just kidding. I'm just doing jokes here. Well, it depends on your perspective, right? But I reach humans and then hate. Thank you. Thank God I'm an atheist. Folks, be sure to order up the book. June 7, 2022, it came

out. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, A New History from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us. Get it wherever fine books are sold. Remember, stay out of those alleyway bookstores because you might get shanked in there or stabbed or need to attend a shop. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

We'll see you guys next time. Thank you.