The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 871: Are Birds Actually Dinosaurs?

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with paleontologist, evoutionary biologist, and author, Steve Brusatte. Topics discussed: The Story of Birds is out now!; Steve's other best selling books on The Rise and Reign of Mammals and The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs; why birds are dinosaurs; the odds of something becoming a fossil; the physical traits, adaptations, and eating habits that helped early birds survive; and more.   Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Holy smokes, we're joined today by paleontologists and writer Steve Broussadi, who has this very popular science collection. And it started out with the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. Correct? That's right. Big Time New York Times bestseller. It got on the list. It was a shock. A dinosaur book on the bestseller list, which was awesome. And then the rise and rain of the mammals, which tells the story of the mammals. And then the book out right now, the story of birds. And that's literally out like today, the day that we're taking. Yeah, this is the publication day. Oh, that's so I'm happy. I'm honored to be here with you on the day the book comes out. Yeah, I got an admission to make though. And I just have to come out and say it.

I haven't read the books. Well, I'm glad you're honest. If I could touch them though and absorb all the knowledge, if I could touch them and absorb all the knowledge and then have that in my head so I could be like that guy. And also like dominate that end of trivia. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of factoids and a lot of trivia in these books, but really they're pop science books and they, and they're meant for everybody. You know, I'm a professor. I'm a scientist. I teach at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland alum from the Midwest here in America. And I do so much academic writing for my job, these books, I like to make them accessible to everybody. And to be the kind of books that when I was a teenager growing up in Illinois out in farm country, it was really through books that I got into science and nature and conservation. And so, I try to write in this sort of style that can hopefully reach kids and reach people of all walks of life today. Yeah, like make it approachable. Yeah, absolutely. So you teach at University of Edinburgh. Yeah, that's right. Um, you're a writer and also in your, in your bio, you do some of the consulting. Yeah. On the Jurassic Park stuff. And we,

years ago, we had the paleontologist Jack Horner on who, who had like that same gig at a time. That's right. So what's that like? What's that about? Yeah, it's cool. So I've worked on the last two films after Jack retired. So I've worked on Jurassic World Dominion. That's the one that came out in 2022 with Sam Neal and Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and then Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard, you know, that storylines converged in that film. And then I worked on the most recent one, Rebirth, which came out last summer. And that's the one with Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey and rehearsal Ali. Great films. A lot of fun. I mean, my job is really just to consult on the science. I'm the paleontology consultant. So I,

What it is... You're not the story doctor? No, no. I don't write the script. I don't direct the film. I don't, you know, of course not. What it is is that I basically just have this line of communication with the directors, with the writers, with the artists that are designing the dinosaurs. And it's a lot of phone calls, chats over Zoom, a lot of emails where they're showing me stuff as they're developing the characters and asking me questions about the real dinosaurs.

And so they, you know, they do care about accuracy and realism. Of course, they're monster movies, but they really are interested in the science. And there's always been a great science and nature and conservation message through those films. So I'm just glad that they do it. I think it's super cool that these filmmakers for, you know, a multi-billion dollar franchise care enough about the science that they want a scientist on board to help out. You know what connects us in a weird way? You worked on that movie. In that movie, Scarlett Johansson wears an FHF.

chest harness, which is one of our companies, FHF, GER. No kidding. So is that? American made chest harnesses and she's got one on in the movie. That's cool. I thought you were going to say, oh, we're both steves and we're both from the Midwest and we're both Italian-American. So that's, so in that, is that when, is she wearing that when they're doing like the rock climbing? Never watched it.

I just know it happened, though. Never read my books. Never watched the films. Well, yeah. I'm like, I'm trying to be honest, man. No, that's cool. You'll have to watch it and see because that's, that's super neat. I mean, they're very realistic with the cost.

and with the set designs. It's incredible. I mean, they, for Dominion, they had me take a lot of photos of some of our field sites where we're out collecting fossils and digging up dinosaurs. And they use those images to build this set of a dinosaur dig. And when I walked on to the set, I mean, I thought I was in the badlands. It was incredible. So the realism on these things is tremendous. When you have budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, you can do that. So on the story of birds, let me ask you this question. I guess it's been over the last 10 years. I don't know, you can correct me, 10 years, 12 years, 15 years or something. It's like people have started to say, like if you're looking at, I like to hunt turkeys, right? You're looking at a wild turkey. Yeah. And people are like, it's a dinosaur, man.

You know, like it was all of a sudden like this idea broke. Yeah. Right. That when you're looking at a sandhill crane, you know, and a sandhill crane walking along with his babies in tow. and it's kind of hunting around, you know, and people will be like, that's it. Like, that is a dinosaur.

They never went away. How accurate is that understanding? That's true. That's true. So modern day birds are dinosaurs. And what I mean by that is they're part of the dinosaur family tree. They evolve from other dinosaurs. They're just a strange type of dinosaur that got small and evolved wings

and developed the ability to fly. And they're the only dinosaur that lives on. today. All the other dinosaurs died out when that asteroid smashed into the Earth 66 million years ago. So really, we need to think of birds, how we think of bats. You know, what is a bat? Well, a bat is a mammal like many of the mammals you have here. Why is it a mammal? It evolved from other mammals as part of the mammal family tree. It has hair. It feeds his baby's milk. It has molar teeth. All the classic mammal stuff. But bats are just unusual mammals. Yes, they're different than elephants or wales or dogs or cats, but they're an unusual mammal that got small, evolved wings, developed the

ability to fly. Birds are the dinosaur version of that. So when you're hunting turkeys, you're hunting dinosaurs. But if you took, like, what if you took a wild turkey now, yeah, okay, or Sandhill Cran, whatever to hell one you want, you take a wild turkey now, and you brought that wild turkey back to 61 million years ago and cut that turkey loose. Yeah. Would it be, would it be that there was something not quite right? right about that turkey? Yeah, that would be a wild experiment to do. I mean, I think that if you took a turkey or if you took something like a cassowary, you know, those giant flightless birds from Australia with the huge claws on their feet. I mean, to me, they look like raptor dinosaurs reincarnated.

I mean, if you, you know, anybody out there listening who maybe is a bit skeptical of this dinosaur bird connection, I mean, first of all, just like look at a chicken and look at the scally foot of a chicken. It looks like a little foot of a T-Rex. And believe it or not, it was that sort of similarity, that sort of obvious in-your-face realism of bird feet looking like, you know, dinosaur feet that led the first scientists in the 1860s to propose the idea that birds came from dinosaurs. So it's an old idea. It's been around, but you're right that it hasn't. I thought it's been around since the early 2000s. I think it's percolated a lot more into like public, you know, consciousness. And the reason, I think there's probably a few reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that in the

mid to late 90s, the first fossils of feather-covered dinosaurs were discovered. Now, it's very hard to turn a feather into a fossil, you know, because a feather is soft. It's like skin or hair or muscle, you know, that stuff is hardly ever fossilized. When we find a dinosaur fossil, fossil is usually the bones, the teeth, the hard bits that can get buried and turn to stone and survive the rigors of millions of years. So feathers really challenging to fossilize. But in China, there just so happened to be about 125 million years ago, these volcanic fields. And occasionally, they would erupt and they would bury these entire ecosystems. Kind of like when Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompay. And so you get people in Pompeii that were just like freeze frame.

They're like mid-sentence. Yes, they're making breakfast or like they're walking the dog. And so it's like that with these dinosaurs and that locked in the feathers. And this was the first time, this one in a trillion fossilization occurrence the first time that we could see directly that, yes, a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And that really sealed the deal because this idea that birds came from dinosaurs, it goes all the way back to the 1860s, all the way back to Charles Darwin himself when he was writing about evolution. But it really lacked that final, you know, trump card, that final now in the coffee. How clear are those, how clear are those feather fossils? Oh, they're incredible. They're beautiful. I have some images in the story of birds of some of them.

That shows one of those fossils. That shows them. And I've been really lucky. It's just, there's no argument. No, it's in your face. I mean, and there's a variety of feathers. Some of the feathers are more downy, more fluffy, you know, like some birds have today, especially baby birds.

Some are elaborate quill pen feathers that form giant, you know, wings on the arm, sometimes even on the lakes. And they're beautiful. And I've been very, very lucky to spend a lot of time in China working with Chinese scientists. who get these fossils from the farmers. It's farmers in northeastern China. And I love this because I come from farm country, you know, and they're growing some of the same crops that they, you know, growing Illinois.

They're growing corn, especially out there. And the farmers are out working the land and they're cracking open the rocks and they're finding these beautiful fossils. And I have seen, I've seen farmers bring these in to small museums in China. And they show us, you know, what this is. And it's a dinosaur gloriously covered in feathers. Really? look just like the feathers of modern birds. I mean, it is absolutely stunning. And I tell a story

in the story of birds. And also a similar, I tell some similar stories in the rise and fall of the dinosaurs because I touch on the dinosaur bird connection in that book, but stories of going to China, walking into one of these small museums, like opening a door, being confronted with this beautiful skeleton of a raptor dinosaur, like a Velociraptor-type dinosaur covered in feathers. I mean, it is, it is just astounding. Yeah, because, yeah, when I was a kid, if you had a dinosaur book, Everything was green and scaly. Yeah, same here. When I was growing, like in the late 80s and early 90s, back home in Ottawa, Illinois, where I'm from in northern Illinois, in grade school.

Wallace grade school I went to out in the middle of the farm country, literally, in the library in town. I remember the books. I remember the dinosaur books. I wasn't that into dinosaurs as a kid. That came a bit later when I was a teenager. But I remember those books. And those books, I mean, they would say things like, we'll never know the colors of dinosaurs.

It's impossible. Dinosaurs probably looks like giant, you know, overgrown crocodiles and lizards. They were probably covered in scales and were green and gray and just kind of dull and kind of plotting and kind of stupid. But that idea, that image of dinosaurs has really changed now. And we know that a lot of them, of course, were covered in feathers. We can even tell the colors of some of those feathers,

the melanin, the pigments, the same pigments that give birds, their feather colors today, we can find those fossilized. And that tells us that they were brown or they were black or they were white or they were ginger or the feathers were iridescent like a crow's feathers. Really? Yeah. And we know that. We know a lot of dinosaurs were much more intelligent than we used to think.

Yeah. How do you know that? Yeah. Let me preface it. Yeah. I have a 11-year-old. Yeah. And, well, not just saying because I've been doing this the whole time I've been a parent.

Like we're always checking out, um, we're always checking out whatever kind of new dinosaur thing is out there, right? Right now we're watching the dinosaurs on Netflix, which is kind of excruciatingly narrated by Morgan Freeman. Yeah. A lot of the stuff in there, man. Like, I sit there, I was watching, I was watch

it last night, my little boy laying in bed, before bedtime. And a lot of times I'm saying to him as we're laying there, I'm like, that's bullshit, man. Like, I'm like, they don't, like, how do you know that? Like, one of the things is. That's good. I mean, we should be skeptical.

You know, when we're talking about. They have them that they constantly vocalize. Yeah. They never shut up. Yeah. So even if a, even if a T-Rex comes to attack something, he growls at it. He like, growls. Right.

He growls on his approach. And he's like, well, how do you know? I'm like, because there's just things that animals are like and animals don't perpetually vocalize. Yeah. But the biggest thing that I'm like, when I keep telling him, I'm like, there's a quote for my friend. I won't give the reason.

He said this one time. I told him something. he said to me, I don't know why that's not true, but that's not true. Okay, yeah. Well, yeah. And when I see those giant, uh, taradactile things. Yeah. The proportions.

Yeah. The super thin neck. Yeah. The giant head walking around on his elbows. Yeah. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. But that's not right.

I mean, that one is right. That one is right because. Walking on his elbows, but I'm saying like the ratio of heads. size and neck size and wing size? No, it's totally weird, right? But that, so, so you're right about the vocalizations and these things. And a lot of the films and a lot of the dinosaur documentaries, yeah, the behaviors we don't know.

But you just said they're smart. That's why I'm jumping your case. So I will say. So how do, why? Yeah, yeah. So first I'll stick up for the pteradactals for just for a minute. So they're totally weird. You're absolutely right.

You look at one of these giant taradactals, which are not actually dinosaurs, by the way. They're cousins of dinosaurs. I love them all together because they were alive together. Super cool. I don't know because of this movie. Well, we find, so we know those proportions are correct because we find fossils of these things. One of the best fossils we ever found, my crew at the University of Edinburgh, we work all the time on the Isle of Sky in Scotland. This absolutely beautiful, enchanted, majestic island off the West Coast.

There's Jurassic Age fossils that are about 170 million years old. And one of my students, Amelia, she found a tereidactal skeleton. So we have it all there in the rock. the head, the neck, the wings. It has really weird proportions. So that's real. But there's like a... Because we can see it directly.

It just seems to defy a physical. Yeah. Reality of... I know. I'm with you with the taradactyls. Again, I want to repeat. I don't know why it's not true. No, no. And so we also have footprints and handprints

so we can see they walk like that. That's an example of something from the fossil record. Okay. That doesn't live anymore. That if we didn't have fossils, we would have no idea they exist. And we do have the fossils. And the fossils show us they're weird. And the same is true with birds. So in the story of birds, I talk about some of these incredible birds that once live that don't live anymore.

Terror birds, these top hunters, top predators that stood larger than a human had a head the size of a horse, a big hooked beak. They don't live anymore. I mean, thank God. But we would never think something as weird as that could exist if we didn't find the fossils. There were soaring birds that had wingspans of over 20 feet wide, that we, you know, like double the size of an albatross, the biggest bird today. So there's a lot of things in the fossil record that we find as fossils that we go, holy shit. Like, but to circle back, things like the vocalizations, the behaviors, those are often things that we don't know directly. So on these shows and these films, a lot of that, those storylines and those behaviors are based on what modern animals do. But sometimes, you're absolutely right, people like you that know modern animals that spend a lot of time out in nature confronting animals and trying to hide from animals and trying to sneak up on animals and trying to protect yourself from animals.

Like you know all animals behave. Yeah. And there are some things in those shows that, yeah, are wacky. An animal is not just going to announce itself by screaming and growling and roaring when it's hunting. I mean, come on. You don't do that when you're out hunting. So when you said you see signs, let me hear you. I don't want to say about.

birds too. Yeah. But let me hear with another one from this thing I'm watching. Yeah. So this dude, there's this giant dinosaur and he comes out in the water and he catches a fish. Yeah. And then he, like, lays the fish on the bottom of the ocean.

And then he hangs out with his, with his beak open. Yeah. But he's huge. Yeah. He says he's the tall as a giraffe or something like that. Yeah. And he's got his beak open and he waits for a shark to come grab the bait and then catches the shark and swallows it.

Yeah. And I'm kind of like, that when I sell that with my boy, I'm like, come. on. Come on. I mean, that is, well, you don't know. I'm like, they don't know. We don't know. We don't know. And, you know, I should say that Netflix show, you know, it's a very impressive show. The CGI they've done. It's cool. Yeah. And it's, you know, I didn't work on, I work on a lot of these shows as a consultant. I didn't work on

that one, but I know that the, the producers and the artists and so on, you use my book quite a bit, you know. Oh, really good. It is like, right, the story of the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. So, you know, and I had meetings with the producers and stuff. So I'm impressed with what they've done. I think it's a very good show. But to make a show, to make something on TV, well, you know, you know what it's like to make a TV show. I mean, it has to be compelling. There has to be a storyline.

Things have to be doing stuff. And when it comes to these fossils, you know, we find a fossil. And maybe that fossil tells us, oh, my goodness, there's this weird animal with a bizarre head and neck and whatever. Okay, that animal existed. But what did it do? How did it move? What did it eat? Sometimes we might have some evidence.

Sometimes the last meal is found fossilized in the stomach. Is that right? That happens sometimes. So we do sometimes get direct evidence for behaviors. But a lot of times we just don't. So we have to speculate a little bit. We have to draw parallels to modern animals. And this is more for the filmmaking again.

Being a scientist is different. What trip me out when I first kind of jumped in on you on this. Yeah. And we get back to intelligence, by the way. You said intelligence. And I'm not like, of course. I mean, like, sure. I mean, of course many of them must have been, but I'm saying like, what would you ever look at?

Yeah. What would you ever look at to validate that? But because it's not a crazy premise. You know, like there's all these different ways we conceptualize animal intelligence. Most people would regard an earthworm as probably not particularly bright when it comes to problem solving. Yeah. You look at corvids, like, crows and ravens who seem like very, very curious. They're feathered ape.

basically. Interested in problem solving, interested in pattern recognition. So what would you ever look at to be like there was intelligence? Yeah, that's a great, I'm glad you asked. It's almost like I planted the question, but I didn't because we're studying this now in my lab in Edinburgh. It's actually one of the

biggest things that we're studying. And we we're paleontologists, we study fossils, but we're working with the bigger team of biologists, including biologists who study behavior in modern animals. So my good colleague, Matias Ozwe, and his crew in Sweden. They have a farm.

Matthias and Helena is his wife. They have a farm. On their farm, they have a raven enclosure. And it's a university research facility. And so, and I write about this in the story of birds. In the last chapter, I talked about like modern bird intelligence and cognition. And a lot of that's about their work. And they basically put the ravens through these exercises.

They put mirrors in front of their faces. They give them stuff to make tools out of. They run these different scenarios where, you know, they take some food from a raven and see how it behaves and so on. So we work closely with them. We also work very closely with neurobiologists with the people who actually study brains of modern animals. And there's so much to a brain. I mean, more than anything, just the neurons, those little, you know, cells, the powerhouses, the little computer chips in the brain. So we put all this evidence together, and we try to understand basically as much as we can about extinct species and their intelligence

and their behaviors. is limited, but the biggest direct evidence that we have from fossils is we don't get brains fossilizing usually. A brain is one of the softest, most supple parts of the body, and it decays. Yeah, you can run your thumb through it. Oh, yeah. And once an animal dies, I mean, the brain is one of the first things to go. But so for a dinosaur, like a T-Rex, that's 66 million years old, I mean, you're not going to get a brain preserved as a fossil. But what you do get preserved as a fossil is the head, the skull, the bones. And the brain is, and the brain is, inside the bones. The brain is in a brain cavity. Our brain is in a cavity in our head. So we can

cat scan fossil dinosaur skulls, the same way a medical doctor would use a cat scanner to see inside of our bodies if maybe something was wrong and they wanted to, you know, check us out and see what might be happening inside. We can use the x-rays of the CT scanner to make a digital model of that brain cavity. And that's a digital model of the brain. And so that doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us how big that brain was, how big the brain was relative to the body, how big the different regions of the brains were. There's the olfactory bulbs in the brain

that control the sense of smell. You know, a lot of mammals today, you know, have very good sense of smell, and some don't. And the size of the olfactory bulbs helps control that. There's optic lobes in the brain that help control vision.

We have the ears, you know, that are not part of the brain, but we can also use the cat scanner to see inside the ears and see the cochlea. Where the cochlea was, the cochlea, that's that thing in us that's looping and kind of twisted, that's what hears sound, relayes sound to the brain. We know from modern animals, you know, the length of the cochlea correlates to the range of sounds that can be heard.

So I think, as you can start to see, we can build up a bit of a picture. No, you know, we can't put a T-Rex through a maze. We can't stick a mirror in front of a T-Rex and see if it would recognize itself. But we can cat-scan a skull, we can build a digital model of the brain, we can measure the size of that brain. We can see what the regions of the brain were like. And so for something like T-Rex, that tells us it had a pretty big brain for an animal of its size. It wasn't like our brain. It wasn't quite that big.

But for an animal, a reptilian type of animal of its size, it had a pretty big brain. Brain relative to body tells us a lot about intelligence. So it was fairly intelligent for a dinosaur. Its brain had huge olfactory bulbs, huge, like off the charts for dinosaurs. So T-Rex had a really good sense of smell compared to other dinosaurs. The brain had big optic lobes. It had good eyesight. The ear had a long cochlear.

It could hear well. So T-Rex was a pretty smart, very keen hunter. And really, you know, we think of T-Rex as this brute-forced, you know, brute-force kind of murdering dinosaur, the ultimate monster from Earth history, the size of a bus, had the size of a bathtub, crushed the bones of its prey with its teeth. That's all true. But it was also really smart. And that's what I love about T-Rex.

It had the brawn and it had the brains. And we know this from the fossils. We're not making it up. We have evidence for it. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash.

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Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I pay a lot of attention to archaeology around Ice Age hunters in North America. And what's kind of interesting is that. the amount of conversations and books and things that are written about humans hunting for mammoths. But then you look at how many known mammoth kill sites there are, like really sort of like places where you have strong evidence that humans and mammoths were together at the same time is very small. Maybe as few as like 13 instances. How many, like take, you were just talking about T-Rex.

how many T-Rex pieces? Oh, yes. Globally or whatever. Like, how many are in the mix? Like, you're taking the information from what size pool of evidence. You're right. When it comes to fossils,

normally our evidence is fairly limited. I mean, we are like detectives at a crime scene where there's maybe, you know, one hair and one fingerprint and, you know, a few threads and, and you were trying to reconstruct, you know, a story out of it, something plausible. And some fossils are more common than others.

And you're right with the mammoths. I talk about this in the rise and rain of the mammals about the relationship between humans and giant mammals. And I'm sure we can dive into that, you know, a little bit more as well. But there are very few places where there are mammoths that have spear points, you know, from human hunters that are associated with the skeletons or that have cut marks on the bones. They exist, but they're not as common as you would think. And that's because it's hard. Well, some people would say they're more common than you would think. Well, some people, yeah, yeah.

And when it comes down to it, it comes down to preservation. Yeah, it's hard to preserve fossils. I put that to an archaeologist. I'm like, why aren't there more? He goes, my God, there's a lot. Yeah, yeah, because I, 13 is a ton of. When you think about the odds of any single thing becoming a fossil, like, I mean, you and me are probably never going to become a fossil.

Like, we're probably not going to die and get buried in sand or mud pretty quickly. And then turned into stone. And then preserved for thousands or millions of years. And then, you know, some paleontologists or some hiker or some farmer, who knows, walks by and sees our bones sticking. I mean, that's what you need to get a fossil. And only a tiny fraction of individuals that have ever lived will ever turn into a fossil. And that's why oftentimes it's actually things like the footprints of dinosaurs that are more common than the skeletons. Because when you think about it, you know, one individual has one skeleton, but how many footprints do we make in our life?

So for T-Rex, T-Rex is one of the better-known dinosaurs because it lived right at the end of the age of dinosaurs, so right before the asteroid hit, which means it's one of the most recent dinosaurs to today that has persisted, which just means there's been less time for its fossils to be eroded away. And it's found across Western North America. T-Rex is only from Western North America. It's like a Rocky Mountain dinosaur. It is. It's the American tyrant dinosaur from the Asian. ancient dinosaurs from the Cretaceous. And it's here in Montana, some of the best fossils of T. rex. The first fossils of T. rex were found right here in Montana in the early 1900s by the great

fossil collector Barnum Brown, who was from Kansas and was collecting on behalf of the big natural history in New York, the American Museum of Natural History. He came out here. This was to south eastern Montana, the Hell Creek area. And he found the bones of this gigantic, snarling primeval predator, and they brought him back to New York and put him on display. And that's how T-Rex got its start. And since then, some of the best fossils are found out here, but also across the border into the Dakotas. There are some found a bit north in Saskatchewan. And then there's some others that are found all the way south, really, down to New Mexico and Texas. And there are several dozen decent fossils of T-Rexes. And then, you know, thousands of individual teeth and bones and so on.

Thousands of teeth and bones. Yeah. So, you know, and I've been, you know, and I've been, been out. I've collected with crews out here in Montana, you know, not, not recently, when I was a student, I really cut my teeth as a, as a paleontologist coming out here and dig at dinosaurs, because I went to school in Illinois and from Illinois, nobody's ever found a dinosaur in Illinois. I think it's similar in Michigan where you're from. It's just not, doesn't have the kind of rocks, you know, to preserve dinosaur fossils, rocks of the right age. So I came out here. And yeah, we'd find T-Rex bones, T-Rex teeth, and bones of triceratops and duck-bill dinosaurs and so on. They're actually not super rare. So we have a good amount of evidence. And that's what's really cool. I love it because we

really are like detectives and we want as much evidence as possible. And yeah, of course, we want to find complete skeletons. But sometimes, you know, a single tooth, a single bone can tell us something we didn't know before. And that's what makes paleontology so much fun. I mean, when we're out looking for fossils, we don't use any special tools. You know, we don't have sonar that we shoot into the rocks to see what's inside. I mean, we're, we just go all prospecting. We're like gold prospect. I mean, we're just out walking around seeing what sticking out of the rock. Just looking at the surface. Yeah, looking at the surface. And if we see something interesting, maybe it's something that's a different color, a peculiar shape, a different texture, you know, we'll go down and we'll look at it. And maybe 95%

of the time is going to be nothing, some smudge on the rock or some mineral crystal. But sometimes, like this teradactyl we found in Scotland that I was mentioning, where our students saw this, you know, she saw this interesting color, very different from the rest of the rock. She looked down and had a shape to it. You know, it looks like there was a beak and some teeth on the side. And that turned out to be a head, which turned out to lead to a skeleton. And we dug in further and took it out. So it's a real game of luck and chance and circumcited.

You've got to be patient. You got to be persistent. And, you know, and I don't mean to be trite, just, but it is a lot like hunting or fishing. I mean, you know, you've got to go out and you've got to spend the time. You don't know what you do your homework. You know, you go to the right places. where you think there are going to be fossils of the right age because they're the right kind of rocks and so on. Just like you go out fishing, you know, you go to a place where you know there are fish and maybe

your friends of fish there and they've had, you know, good luck. But then you just got to go and do it and put in the time. And a lot of time, nothing happens, you know, most of the days we actually don't find very much. But when we do, oh my God, the rush is incredible. And of course, we always collect fossils as part of a team. You know, nobody goes out and like digs up a brontas. by themselves. That would be impossible. So there's great camaraderie, great friendship on the field crews. And that's one of the most fun things about this science. You know, this isn't being an astrophysicist where you're in front of your computer or a molecular biologist in the lab or a chemist. No offense. Those are great. I've studied, you know, a lot of these sciences

myself when I was, you know, in college. And I have friends that do these sciences. And it's great. But those sciences aren't for me. I like the science of being out and looking for stuff. And anybody can do it. You know, anybody can do it. These farmers are finding fossils in China. There's farmers back home in Illinois that find woolly mammoths and save the two tigers. And so that's what's awesome. So if you're interested in fossils, it really is like if you're interested in hunting or fishing, just figure out wherever you live, what the laws are, who owns the land, if you need a permit or whatever, and then just go out and do it.

And that's how you learn. And it's so much fun. I want to I want to get to with the chick's loop strike or like the asteroid impact that every you know 60 million years ago

this thing hits kills all the dinosaurs or not right I want to get to that birds yes but let me ask this though who who is that dude or was like a dude who was working

I think in North Dakota or something he's kind of a controversial figure maybe that was that was feeling like he was finding right evidence of like the actual impact.

Yes. Or animals. Yes. Animals that were killed. Yeah. In the tsunamis. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Like like like this freeze frame instant of when the chick's loop strike happened. Yeah. Yeah. That's at this site in North Dakota. They call it the Tannis site. And how much do you buy that? Uh, well, so yes and no.

So definitely, um, there, there are dinosaurs there. There are mammal fossils. There are a lot of fish fossils. they're preserved in these basically ancient river channels. And the age comes from very close to the end of the Cretaceous. We can just tell that from the rocks. And also there are remnants at that site of like stuff that the asteroid did. So there are.

Yeah. So I mean, some of the deposits seem to be like, you know, these flood deposits, which, okay, lots of things could cause a flood, but the asteroid would have. But the real calling card is there are these little tectites and. spherals. These are these, the scientific terms for these things, but they're basically like little balls and little bullets of glass. So it's stuff that would have been, when the asteroid hit, so the asteroid hit near Cancun down in Mexico, which is, you know, several thousand miles from here. And that's some of a bitch was like a mile wide, right? Oh, oh, it was a six mile wide rock. A six mile wide rock, which I don't know, maybe sounds big, maybe doesn't, but that is a

rock the size of Mount Everest. Yeah. It's the size of the city of Edinburgh, where I, live. If you look on the maps about six miles wide, and it would have been traveling, you know, more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet. And I mean, really, it was just a piece of space junk, right? It was like some leftover crumb from the formation of the solar system. And it could have gone anywhere, but it's just having to make a beeline for what is now Mexico. And it punched a hole in the face of the earth over 100 miles wide. You can still see a lot of that crater. A lot of it's covered by the water, the Gulf of Mexico, but some of it's still there on land. The force was tremendous. I mean, it released more energy than like a billion

nuclear bombs put together. And so it did cause- People kind of argue about the angle, right? Yeah, people do. That came in on a shallow angle. And you know what? Honestly, that's where I lose track of things. This really gets into the physics of it. And, you know, because it had to do with like, when that sucker hit. Yeah. What direction did it blast all that stuff? Exactly. And if it hit more direct or more at an angle, you know, that would have caused differences. I'm sure, I'm sure, did, but the physics of all that is a little bit beyond me. But in North Dakota at this site, there are these little spherals and tectites. And this is some of the stuff that would have been blasted up.

Okay. And then basically vaporized or liquefied, gone up into the atmosphere. And then, you know, what goes up must come down unless it would totally shoot off past gravity. And so that stuff would cool, solidify into these glass bullets and rain down. And this would have happened really all over the world, but it would have been, there would have been more of this stuff, the closer you got to ground zero. And North Dakota and Montana, we're not that close to the Yucatama. It also is that directional thing. And the direction.

Because if it came in at the right angle, maybe it like blasted all that junk that way, you know. Right. Right. So that's what's found at this site. And there's also some other sites in Montana where you get these spherals. That tells you that this was the asteroid. And by the way, yeah, and the chemistry of these things can be studied. And they basically match the chemistry of the that was hit in the bedrock in the Ucatam. That's how we know that these little glass bullets were from that particular asteroid impact. So the site in North Dakota, it definitely was associated somehow with the asteroid. I mean, were these animals that were killed immediately?

Did they die a few weeks later? That's where it gets a bit iffy. A lot of that site is still unpublished scientifically. So it's been talked about a lot in the press. It's been in the news quite a bit. Sure. But there hasn't been a lot of scientific. It's treated as controversial.

Yeah. Well, it is because although we can tell that it must be close to the asteroid, if the claim is that, you know, this was formed by the asteroid, the instant, the day. Yeah, man. That's really tough because the fossil record and the rock record, you know, we can get really good preservation stuff. But figuring out, you know, a single day 66 million years ago and having the confidence, you know, we were talking about evidence for things. Like it can be very consistent, very plausible. with the evidence, but it's hard to find that slam dunk evidence that, yes, this was formed on this day.

So that's the controversy. Nobody doubts that these are very latest Cretaceous fossils. Nobody doubts that this site has something to do with the asteroid and the extinction, but the claim that, you know, this stuff was fossilized on the day. That one is what gets people debating. And scientists love to debate. We love to debate. Of course we do.

Sure, yeah. We love to poke holes in each other. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're so skeptical as scientists all the time, about everything. If that thing hit today. Yeah. Is it, in your mind, if that hit today, is it safe to say that humans would go extinct? I don't know about that.

I mean, like most paleontologists, like I'm much more comfortable looking at the past rather than predicting the future. But we know a lot about the climatic conditions after that. I mean, I think it's safe to say that you and me would be dead right now. I would have a, I know I would have a tough time. Um, I just because where we're sitting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So when the, so first of all, when that asteroid hit like 66 million years ago, that was not some normal asteroid. There's lots of asteroids buzzing around out there. Occasionally, you know, there's a meteor or something that hits the earth. And usually they're pretty small. This was huge. And this was the biggest asteroid to hit the earth in at least the last half a billion years. Like this was utterly terrible bad luck way out of the norm. of Earth history. And, you know, nothing can prepare for something like that. It's such an one in a trillion out of the blue thing. And so you had these dinosaurs like T-Rex and triceratops. They were there the day of the asteroid. We know their fossils go right up to the layer from

these spherals and the other chemicals and stuff the asteroid left behind. They were utterly dominant. I mean, they were ruling the food web, you know, the biggest mediators, the biggest plant eaters. Their kind had been around for over 150 million years. But now, Now all of a sudden, things went to chaos around them so quickly, so thoroughly that they didn't have time to adapt, you know, the normal processes of adaptation and natural selection and genes changing a little bit through the generations. Now, that can't work. I mean, you had to confront that asteroid with whatever hand of cards you had. And so 75% of all species died. So when after that asteroid hit, your entire species had a one in four.

chance of surviving. It was utterly catastrophic. And it seems like the biggest thing is that if you were big, you died and destroyed. Everything bigger than a husky dog died, at least that lived on the land. Didn't matter what you were. If you were a dinosaur, if you were a crocodile, whatever it was. Probably just because... Why do you think that is?

I think it's just a matter of food. I think when the asteroid hit, it unleashed, you know, earthquakes and wildfires and tsunamis and these hurricane force winds swept across the landscape. And then all the dust and the dirt and the grime from the collision went up into the atmosphere. The soot like forests across the world just spontaneously combust it was like global wildlife. All that soot went into the atmosphere. And the atmosphere has currents just like the ocean. So within really a few days or a few weeks, all that crap would have spread around the earth.

And it would have blocked the sun out. And the earth would have went dark and cold. It would have been a global nuclear winter. And maybe it was just a few years long. Maybe it was up to a decade or so long. You know, there are computer models that physicists have used to predict how long that winter would be. But plants would not have had sunlight. They couldn't make their own food.

They couldn't photosynthesize. They would have died. And as the forest collapse, you know, they took the entire ecosystems with them. And so if you were big and you needed a lot of food, I mean, there just wasn't much food on offer. If you were smaller and you didn't need to eat as much or you could eat a wider variety of food, very omnivorous, you would add better odds to survive probably. And that's probably a large reason, maybe the main reason why T-Rex and Triceratops died, but you had some of these small birds and you had these small little furry mammals, the ancestors of ours, that made it through the asteroid because they were small. They could eat lots of different food. They didn't need to eat that much food.

they could hide easily, they could dig burrows, they grew quickly, they reproduced quickly. That was probably the winning hand of cards to have when that asteroid hit. And if you wanted to be one of those one out of four species that survived, being small, not having to eat a lot, being able to hide, being able to grow quickly, those were probably your get out of jail free cards. What was, like, what parts of the earth were you most likely to live? Were you most, like, where did most life forms survive or didn't it work like that? It's hard to tell. There probably was some geographical component of this extinction. Obviously, anything close to ground zero to the Yucatan, I mean, not only would have died,

would have vapor. I mean, literally vaporized, just like turned to ghosts. I mean, and the physicists have, again, computer models of this that show that maybe within, you know, a thousand miles or so of that ground zero, everything gone. Everything gone. There would have been other parts of the world. I mean, you know, all things can. the farther you were from ground zero, probably the better.

It does seem like from the fossil record that some of the survivors, some of the groups that then start to thrive, like some of these small mammals, which then become really big and really start to diversify and take over the world soon after, because now the dinosaurs are gone, you know, that some of them may have come from northern Asia. Okay. That's one idea. It's hard to be sure of that because the fossil record is kind of limited, but that this could have been like, you know, refugium, like some, you know, place where far from the, from the worst of the carnage that animals could have survived. And then from surviving there, once the sunlight came back, you know, they could have spread around. That probably did happen. We just don't know.

We need to know more about the whole world. And the fossils we have of that age happen to be concentrated in certain places, as fossils often are. And some of the best fossils are from right here in Montana. We have, you know, the very last dinosaurs. and the mammals that took over all the way down south to New Mexico. And that's where I've worked quite a bit with Tom Williamson, who just retired as the curator at the museum in Albuquerque. Tom and his sons, Taylor and Ryan,

he'd be their twins and he brought him out, starting when they were like six years old and taught them out to collect fossils. And they've collected incredible. I talk about them in the book. I have pictures of them in the bird book because they've collected some of those important fossils of the birds that survived the asteroid.

They were like 12 years old. It was incredible. What did those, so tell me about what dinosaurs survived. Okay. So if we, if we chase down this idea that like that that was the birth of birds. Yeah. What did they look?

Who were they? Like, who were they? What did they look like? If we saw them today, would we be like, oh, a bird. Yeah, we would. We would.

We'd recognize them immediately because they are the modern style birds. The only dinosaurs that survive the asteroids. were birds that had beaks instead of teeth that had big wings, big chest muscles. You know that when you're out hunting turkeys and you're cooking a turkey, all that meat in the chest that connects to that big breastbone. That is something modern birds have. Those are the airplane engines. That's what's control the wings of birds.

Now, turkeys don't fly particularly well, but they can fly. Birds that fly a lot, they have even bigger muscles. So beaks, big chest muscles, big wings, really lightweight skeletons, really high. hollow bones and really fast growth and reproduction. So most birds, who made it. Yes, that's who made it.

And so birds today, like, it's actually really hard to see a baby bird. Like, even if you're a keen bird watcher, okay, you know, it's maybe breeding season and,

okay, the eggs are being laid, but you have such a narrow window to see a baby bird because they grow so quickly, you know, from a hatchling into an adult, sometimes within a matter of days or weeks in some species.

Yeah, like it takes a trained eye, you know? Yeah, it's incredible. And this is all because my, style birds can grow really fast. They have really high metabolisms. They're warm-blooded. So those were the only dinosaurs that survived. Why is that? So, of course, we need to look at the victims a bit to get a sense of how the victims and the

survivors differed. So of course, among the victims were things like T-Rex and Triceratops and the duck-billed dinosaurs and the dinosaurs with dome heads and the dinosaurs that were armored and like the bigger dinosaurs, the classic canonical dinosaurs. They probably died because they were too big. They just couldn't get enough food. But there were also lots of other birds that were flapping and flying and fluttering around over the heads of T-Rex and Triceratops on the day the asteroid hit. And most of those birds did not survive either. Some of those birds still had teeth. They still had like raptor dinosaur claws on their hands. They had long tails. Basically primitive birds, like holdovers from the dinosaur ancestors of birds. And they all died. They all died.

except for modern style birds. And so we think that it is being able to grow really fast and reproduce really fast in the modern style birds. That came in handy. I mean, if the world goes to hell and it takes you 20 years to go from a baby into an adult like it did in a T-Rex, I mean, come on. You're in trouble. But if you can go from a baby to an adult within like a few weeks, okay, the generations

can turn over really quickly. Of course, these birds had big wings and big flight muscles. they could fly really well, which means they could escape from localized dangers. Oh, there's a flash flood coming this way. Oh, there's a forest fire. And the beaks, we think, are important too, because a lot of these birds that had these beaks, they could eat seeds, which seems kind of trivial. A lot of birds today eat seeds.

We just kind of think it's normal. But in fact, it's quite hard to subsist on a diet of seeds. It's a pretty peculiar diet. And these birds with beaks could do it. And we know that in some cases we have the last meals preserved in the stomachs. We know that some of these early birds ate seeds. Now, when we see it in the modern world today, if there's a forest fire, if there's a volcano that obliterates an island, stuff will grow again. And why is that?

It might take a year. It might take a few years, but seeds can persist in the soil. Seeds are really hardy. And so back when the asteroid hit, if you were the type of animal that ate part of a growing plant, you ate leaves, you ate fruit, roots, you ate stems or whatever, you'd be in trouble because the forest collapsed. The trees died. The other plants died when sunlight was shut off. But if you could eat seeds, you could eat basically the last surviving food source. It wouldn't get you through forever, but it might get you through a year, two years, three years. And so that could have been there, get out of jail

free card. But really, I like to think about it as, you know, when that asteroid hit, this was so sudden, so unexpected, totally out of the blue, just this bolt. from the heavens, nothing had a chance to prepare for that. That's not how evolution works. So the earth became this fickle casino. It became a game of chance. And really, you had to confront that asteroid with the hand of cards you were dealt. And some animals had just a bad hand of cards. They were big. It took them a long time to grow. They needed to eat a lot of food. But other animals had a good hand of cards. You know, the dinosaurs, like T-Rex and Triceratops, they had the dead man's hand. The birds, the little mammals, they could grow fast, they could eat lots of different foods.

The birds could probably eat seeds with their beaks. They could hide easily and so on. That was a winning hand of cards. And maybe it didn't guarantee your survival. You're at the poker table. If you have a good hand of cards, it doesn't mean you're going to win. So got to play the game. But that was probably what allowed those particular dinosaurs of all the dinosaurs, just modern style birds to survive, and it allowed our ancestors, our tiny, furry ancestors to stare down the asteroid as well, and thank God they did or else we wouldn't be here. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. If you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest

conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeart Radio app. On Blood Trails, the stories don't. don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, and but he wasn't. This season, we're going deep. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

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Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, what about all those big, like, those teradactile birds? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

They're not birds. But they were gone. Nope, they were gone. So they died with the asteroid. Because they were most... When you keep talking about beaks and teeth, like think of a Morganzer's bill. Yeah.

Is that the kind of tooth you're talking about? No. So no birds. today have real teeth. So they have serrated bills. Some birds do have serrated bills, but it's the keratin of the bills that's serrated. There's some fossil birds

like these giant soaring birds that had 20 foot wingspans. They actually had bony teeth. Their jaws were like saw blades, but it was bone. No birds have teeth like us that have enamel on the outside and grow from a tooth socket. But of course dinosaurs did. Now when a

bird develops in the egg today, it starts to grow teeth very early on. And then the beak starts to grow, and that stops the teeth from developing and the teeth never develop. But some of these developmental biologists, the kind of biologists that, you know, oftentimes are looking for cures, for cancer,

and these kinds of things, trying to understand how different genes control growth, they can actually make a bird grow teeth in the egg. And they look like the teeth of little raptor dinosaurs. So that's some of the modern day evidence. You know, this was unknown to Darwin. Darwin and his contemporary didn't even know what DNA was. But this is some of the modern day evidence that drives home that point that birds evolve from dinosaurs.

You can make a chick and grow little dinosaur teeth in the egg. But they know modern birds have teeth. They can't really grow them to completion. There's something about these little teeth that just doesn't work anymore. They start to grow. They fade away. if you make them in the lab grow, they can grow a bit,

but then the bird dies in the egg. But there, the genes, these dinosaur genes, are lurking in the genome of modern birds. Now, teradactyls, he's about pteradactyls. So,

taradactyls are, they're not dinosaurs, they're not birds, they are a group of reptiles that flu. They're close cousins of dinosaurs. So it's fine. Most people think they're dinosaurs

and, you know, it's funny, and that's fine. They had like a beak structure. They did. That's where you get into this thing that's confusing. I shouldn't say it's confusing, but I guess, I don't know, it's not the right word for it. Amazing, confusing, whatever, is that so many things can arrive at the same solution by different paths, like, meaning a bat.

Yeah. Okay, here's a mammal with a wing. A flying squirrel is somewhere in the process of developing flight. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they don't flap their wings like a bat, so they don't have the power. flight that a bird or a bad or a tarottole. But he's like on his way. Yeah, they're on their way. He's on his way to figuring it out. You know.

Or in another case, you have the structures of fish. Yeah. Finns. Yeah. But then you have marine mammals that have like fins and structures. But they all got there these very different paths. Yeah. Right. So when you look at those those like from all the kids' dinosaurs books and stuff, you see like the taradactos like he's got a bill. Yeah. Or a beak. He flies around. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. But it's just like coincidence. Yeah. It's what we call convergent evolution. And it's just because if you live a certain lifestyle, let's say you fly. I mean, there's only a certain number of ways that a body can fly, especially if you're going to flap your wings.

So a bird, a bat, a taradactyl. Just basically by like the laws of physics, they're going to end up looking somewhat similar because they're all flying. Same with swimming. You know, you're going to swim with flippers or fins. You're not going to swim. swim. If you're going to live your life in the open ocean, you're not going to swim with the type of arm we have. So evolution over time often converges. Just, you know, in a sense, it's

coincidentally, because nothing in evolution is planned. But really, it's because of natural selection. You know, if you're going to fine tune an animal to be an ever better swimmer or flyer or what have you, there's only certain ways that's going to work just with the physics of motion. So you do get distant relatives often re-evolving the same features. And you're because they're living similar lifestyles. And terasors, the pterodactyl, and birds are a great example. You know, they are not particularly closely related. They evolved flight independently of each other.

It was actually the pteradactals that did it first, way back in the Triassic period, on the supercontinent of Pangea back when all the land was one. That's when pterodactals took to the skies. And they evolved a really strange type of wing that is not made of feathers, but is made a skin. It's like a giant sal of skin that attaches to one super long finger, the ring finger. So like E.T. You know, the long finger.

And it's this sal of skin that attaches to it. That's how they fly. Now, birds, of course, fly with wings made out of feathers. Bats fly with a skin wing, but one that attaches to the entire hand. So each of them have wings. Each of them flap those wings, but each wing is subtly different. And that tells us they evolved independently. They evolved for flying.

yeah, they were optimized for flying, yeah, but each one had a slightly different ancestry, and that's why the wings are slightly different. Now, with the pteractals then, the birds came onto the scene about 150 million years ago. That's when we have the oldest fossils of birds that still look like they're half dinosaur. They have teeth, they have big claws. And by that time, there had already been pteractyls for like 80 million years. So birds were interlopers into this taradactal world. And then for the next, you know, many tens of millions of years, they competed. I mean, they competed for supremacy in the sky. Yeah. And then the asteroid came down suddenly out of the blue and it killed off almost all of the birds, but a few of these modern style birds with

beaks and, you know, fast growth and so on survived. The asteroid killed off all the taradactals. We don't know why exactly. Most of those taradactals were bigger. And I think that probably is something to do with it, there weren't like the equivalent of pteradactals, like all the little songbirds and so on that we have today. And some taradactals were giant. So I think that's probably one of the reasons. But it could have also just been a bit of dumb luck, you know? I mean, things went to chaos. This was one bad day that then compounded over the days and weeks and months. But maybe the terasaurs just had a bad break. But they're gone. They're gone. And now birds are alone in the skies. bats would come later from some of the mammals that survived.

And that's why for the first 10 million years or so after the asteroid, birds evolve like crazy. And that's where we see the first fossils of most of the modern birds that we know. And that's where the DNA, when we build family trees based on DNA. Because, you know, this story isn't just about what fossils we happen to find. That's part of it. But we can learn so much about the history of life and evolution by basically doing like what they did on the Springer show. You know, you get the DNA. You want to know what's related to what.

And you could build these family trees. That tells us, for instance, that birds are reptiles. When you build a family tree from DNA, the birds slot within the reptiles. They are right up next to crocodiles. Crocodiles are the closest living cousins of birds. So that really proves this idea that goes back to Darwin. They had no idea what DNA was back then. But along with like, you know, the genes in a bird that can grow teeth.

And these are all the more modern, recent things that tell us that Darwin and his contemporaries were right, that birds really are. highly modified reptiles that came from the dinosaurs. How big was the biggest bird that survived that strike? Probably quite small. That was probably part of it as well. We have a few fossils. Like bigger and a chicken or not bigger than chicken? Probably smaller.

So there are... The probably the biggest bird was smaller than a chicken. Yeah, probably so. There were other birds living then that were bigger than chickens. But they vanished. But it seems like they vanished. Now, bird fossils are rare. You know, birds have delicate bones.

It's harder to turn a bird into a fossil than it is like a big T-Rex or something like that. So we're always dealing with limited evidence, but there's a few places in the world that have really good fossils of birds from right before the asteroid. One of them is in the Netherlands and in Belgium, you know, not just a bit south of where I live now. It just so happens. And there's some of the birds preserved there. And they're tiny. They have beaks, not teeth. They grew really fast.

They had big flight muscles. But, I mean, their heads were just maybe, you know, less than an inch. So you could have held these things in your hand. They were really small. We also have good fossils from Antarctica. And I tell this story in the book, in the story of birds about some of my colleagues, Julie Clark and Matt LaManna, they're very adventurous paleontologists. And they bring teams of themselves and their students down to Antarctica to look for fossils. And I mean, that's dedication. I mean, I do fieldwork in Scotland. And there's stuff down there. Yeah, and there's stuff down there. And they find birds that were living within the few million years before the asteroid. And these are modern style birds. They actually are close relatives of chickens and ducks. You can tell that from the bones. We don't have the DNA, but the bones make it very clear. They have chicken and duck features of their wings and of their legs and of their heads. And they were small. So that was

part of the picture, too. They had beaks and could eat seeds. They could fly well. And they were small. And it seems like the survivors also lived in or near the water. They were not perching birds. They weren't nesting in the trees. The forest collapsed when the asteroid hit. I got you. So living in the water helped too. So as I think we can see, it was probably just a lot of things compounded together that gave them the better odds to survive. But from those tiny survivors, very quickly in the next interval of time after the Cretaceous, the next interval of time is called the Paleocene. And this is when mammals really take off and you get mammals that get up to the size of cattle.

You know, after 150 million years of tiny mammals living with dinosaurs, never getting bigger than a badger. Yes, hiding little holes somewhere. It's great. Yeah. And it's because T-Rex is gone. Triceratops is gone. But birds do something similar. And you start to see the major modern groups of birds appear as fossils. The DNA tells the same story that they were

originating around that time. And this is where you get, you know, the ostrich group and the penguin group and the distant ancestors of songbirds and of, you know, hawks and eagles and so on and of everything in between. I mean, there's over 10,000 species of birds today. And a huge

amount of that diversity was established really early on as these few surviving tiny birds with their beaks that could make babies and grow, you know, to an adult within years, they looked out on this world where there's no big dinosaurs anymore. And the trees are starting to grow again. I wonder if they had it in them to feel optimistic. You know what? This seems bad, but this is going to actually work in our favor. Who knows? I'll tell you, though, they did have pretty big brains. We can tell from the cat scans. And so that was probably part of the picture as well, having bigger brains and intelligence and keener senses would have helped as well yeah be more adaptable more resilient you know what i think about when i'm thinking about all these animals from back then like i always

imagine you know if you cut a big old backstrap out of like a bronosaurus but you know it seems like but those taradactyls man they seem like they'd be a shitty taste in bird oh they'd be horrible oh they doesn't seem like it'd be the worst kind of meat on the planet taradactyl would be probably one of the worst things you can eat there'd be hardly any meat on there yeah a lot of them made fish so they would have been pretty disgusting as you know we know when we eat things that are like primarily fishers if you could have if you could know like what a dinosaur steak like a herbivore dinosaur yeah steak would be like or if you could cook up a bird from back then would it be like is it just like chicken now oh i love it you know it's funny and i know you're talking about this because

you know this is your your show this is meat eater podcast um but you wouldn't believe it i get asked that question quite a bit what they would have tasted like and i mean what they would have tasted like What do you think their flesh was like? So I think, so first of all, probably like animals that lived today, the ones that ate plants would have tasted a lot better than the ones that ate meat. So you would probably... Do you think they had like red meat? Or do you think they had like chicken meat? I don't know.

So, you know, they weren't mammals. They wouldn't have had the same kind of meat as mammals. I think like, you know, ostriches and emus, like those are probably the best comparison from what a dinosaur would be because, you know, they are dinosaurs and they're big dinosaurs. I sometimes picture all the meat on one of those things being like snapping turtle meat. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, turtle meat and like alligator is another one. So, you know, alligators and birds are the closest relatives of modern day dinosaurs. And, you know, you eat gator meat. It oftentimes tastes like chicken.

Now sometimes that's because it's farmed and they, you know, feed them chickens. But generally, you know, you can get a bit, even wild gator. I've had it, you know, down in Louisiana. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of chickenies, kind of poultry. Yeah. So probably a lot of dinosaur would be like that. But yeah, go after the triceratops steak, the Brontosaurus burger, you know, Fred Flintstone was right there. When I was watching that deal with my little boy last night, there was a scene where they, um, he kills this, this T-Rex kills this big dinosaur and he drags at home.

Yeah. So those little kids can eat it. And, um, they're snacking on it. And it was real dark, beef like. Yeah. That's another thing where I'm like, they don't know that. No, no. I would, and, you know, I'm not going to say they're wrong because this is getting really kind of far from the fossils.

I like to try to stick as close to the fossils as I can. Yeah, but you got to make you kind of wonder about it all, though, right? Yeah. So I, truly honestly, I know it's maybe a bit of a glib thing we're talking about, one of the dinosaurs have tasted like and which steak would you want to eat. Okay, put it a different way then. Well, like, then never mind what they taste like. But like what would, you know what, you don't mean, it's a thing you can't tell.

Yeah, we can't tell. Because you're saying, like, for a long time, we didn't have feathers and we had feathers, but like the qualities of, like, the qualities of flesh or whatever, you know. All we can do there really is look at modern-day birds and crocodiles and alligators as the closest relatives and make this probability argument that a lot of dinosaurs would have had similar sort of meat. And not just meat, but, you know, when it comes to organs, internal organs and tendons and ligaments and all these things that we just don't normally get as fossils, looking at the modern animals that are closely related to dinosaurs is our best approximation. but it's not, again, it's not slam dunk, you know, it's a guide. It gives us some, you know, degree of plausibility, but these are things we ultimately don't know, which I, which makes it fun. And with shows like that, and especially when we do the Jurassic films where we don't have to be as concerned with total scientific realism because they're monster movies.

You know, we can have fun with some of that stuff. You know, another one I always wonder about in your guys' world is how do you ever get a sense of population dynamics? Meaning like picture that, picture that today you were out, um, like let's say you go through the big valleys around here. Okay. Here and there is an eagle nest.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. But you could feasibly spend a day looking for a bald eagle nest and not find one. Yeah. Here and there. Yeah. You'll find an aspirin nest.

Yeah. Okay. Like if you look really hard, you'll, you'll never, you'll probably never find. If I gave you a week, during peak time and I said, find me a hummingbird nest,

you wouldn't find it. Yeah. Okay. But then you go to other places, right? Like shoreline, rookeries and stuff. You know other places you'd be like,

well, there's thousands of them. Yeah. Or you go to a giant bridge and cliff swallows. It'd be like, oh no, I'm looking at hundreds of cliffs swallows.

Yeah. In Scotland, we have these, you know, Gannock colonies out on some of the rocks, you know, right near Edinburgh. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, hundreds of thousands. maybe in one place. Yeah. So how do you ever, like, if you imagine the years after, and you have these surviving birds, is there ever any way to get a sense of like population dynamics?

Meaning was it that you would, that you could boat down the coast for days and not see anything and then find some little nesting colony, right? It was that bad. Or do you think it would have been that the skies were full of thousands of them? I honestly don't know. I think the fossils don't give us that information. And I don't, I'm not saying it's impossible.

I never like to say as a scientist that something is impossible to know. That's the worst thing you can say as a scientist. But I think it's, it's highly unlikely. It's just the, it's not like we have a snapshot of an entire, uh, community, an entire landscape with fossils. But they, with this stuff with mitochondrial DNA, right? Well, they start telling like, you can be like, yes. Yes. But you can start telling like this thing came out of.

of a population with blank number of breeding age females. So when you have the DNA, and this comes into play with human evolution, for sure, because when you study the mitochondrial DNA of modern day humans of us, the geneticists are able to tell that the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is, you know, consistent or indicative of some kind of bottleneck. I don't remember all the details. Yeah, like the seven daughters of Eve or are like Western Europeans. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm probably mutilating this, but it might be an old idea, but at a time, no, there's something, there was like that all Western, that Western Europeans went through a bottleneck of seven females. And I'm not sure, because it's not my field, but I've read a lot. When I was writing the mammal book, I read a lot of this. And yeah, we might be wrong about the details, but I think that's still true that there were definitely these bottlenecks and evolution of homo sapiens.

And that does explain why human genetic diversity. I mean, there is a lot of genetic diversity in one sense, but. really, you know, if you take you or me or you take, you know, somebody from South America or Africa or China, I mean, our genes are really similar, really similar because of those bottlenecks. With other mammals, you can do similar things. And I've seen people do this, like with woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers, uh, to try to understand what those last populations were like at the end of the last, uh, spasm of the ice age, you know, how many mammoths were left? Do they collapse quickly? Yeah. And you could track, like, you track along and be like, these ones came from,

A very small, dwindling population. Yes. And people have done that for sure with the last surviving mammoths, as far as we know, lived in Rangel Island, this little Russian island, basically. Yeah, until 4,000 years ago. It's time people are building pyramids in Egypt. It's nuts. You know, time back in the Midwest where there were, you know, great Native American tribes that were building, you know, civilization. I mean, there were still mammoths on this island.

And those mammoths live so recently that the DNA, or at least a lot of it, still there. I mean, DNA breaks down really quickly. So we don't have any T-Rex DNA or any triceratose DNA. So that's what you would draw, like, that's what you would need to draw? Yes. Like, population dynamic stuff from. Yeah, to have a rigorous basis for that. And so we can't really do that with T-Rex.

You know, what were those populations of T-Rex like before the asteroid hit? Now, I say we can't do it in that way. There have been some ecologists that have published quite esoteric studies. estimating the size of T-Rex populations based on how many fossils we know and how those fossils are distributed in the amount of time, but it's a statistical exercise. And the air bars are that are probably huge. Hit me with a ballpark. I think, so I don't remember the details. This is work that there's a very eminent, more statistical-minded paleontologist named Charles Marshall in California. And he led a team that did this. And it was actually a big research paper.

They published it in Science in the Premier Journal about 10 years ago or so. And I think they estimate as something like, you know, a million. I mean, I could be butchering, like a population of one million. But like a million at a time, like standing population of T-Rex. But, you know, and they were very upfront about the biases, but it was more of like a thought experiment. Like what scientists like to do, sometimes we're in the pub and we're sketching on the back of a napkin or something. It's a great thought experience. And you know what I, you know what I'll say as part of the thought experience? There's no way. Yeah. I mean, well, why? So what's, so what's your, what's your gut feeling? Oh, why would I give that gut feeling? Because I would just look at general.

large predator populations. Yeah. That like just that large predators are generally pretty scarce. Yeah. Oh yeah. But it would be like how big. I don't know. Because the other thing you look at is carrying capacity, but we don't really probably

don't understand the carrying capacity of the landscape. Not really. Without understanding the vegetative regime. Exactly. So there are some studies that have been published by ecologists, you know, hardcore ecologists that understand the modern world. And they're kind of dabbling in dinosaurs, doing their own thought experiments, but trying to understand carrying capacity. And it's tough because, yeah, the vegetation back then was

very different from the vegetation today. The climate was different. The temperature was different. We also don't really know much about the fine details of the metabolism and the growth of these dinosaurs. We debate where they warm-blooded or not, you know, and it's not either or, you know, you can have degrees of metabolism. So all that stuff factors into carrying capacity. So it's really Yeah, that's a tough one. It's really tough. With carrying capacity questions, it's like even if you go

to you go like the oceans today. Yeah. You know, and you look at the biomass per unit of space that comes out of you know, stuff at like the 50th parallel versus the biomass or unit of space that comes out of sort of like the oceanic desert, you know. Yeah. So you can't.

They're so radically different. It's probably impossible to note. But I guess an interesting thing. saying, we can move on from this after this question, but I guess you could look at, let's say you go to before the strike. Yeah. Okay. And you sort of, and you take any gap of time, right?

You take a gap of time of a million years or five million years. And you go like, how many fossils were regenerating per unit of time? And then if you go post-strike, do you wind up, do you look in the fossil record and be like, you know what? There were so few animals alive that from 66 to 56 to 46 million years ago or whatever, there are no fossils, meaning because the chances of making a fossil are so slim that if you had so few species left on Earth that like the fossil lottery.

Yes. Isn't paying off. Yes. And then in some way you might look and be like, there just really wasn't much around, you know? Yeah. people do this, there are paleontologists who are very statistically inclined that build these statistical model. I mean, it's actually quite similar to how people build like, you know, polls for elections or predicting the stock market, like that kind of statistics.

Like it's quite rigorous and quite robust, but also as we know, it's not always correct, you know, it's trying to predict things based on limited evidence. There is this argument that individuals were so rare right after the asteroid. Yeah. That that's why we don't have tons of fossils because people often ask, well, if this asteroid came down and caused this extinction on some Tuesday morning, you know, why don't you have all these bodies being preserved as fossils? And when it comes down to it is just, yeah, the fossil lottery. I mean, to turn something into a fossil, it needs to die. It needs to be buried in sand or mud. It needs to be turned into a rock.

And then that rock has to be accessible on the surface of the earth today for some scientists to walk by and see the fossil sticking out. So even at any given moment of time, even if a lot of things died at once, just the odds of any individual getting buried by sand or mud and turned into a fossil, it's low. And this is part of the, you know, the same thing when we talk about woolly mammoths. You mentioned mammoths that have been found with direct evidence for human hunting. There's not tons, or maybe some archaeologists say there actually are, but it gets down to, you know, what we expect. And even if humans are killing these mammoths and leaving. evidence behind spear points and projectiles and so on, just the odds of getting that stuff turned into a fossil is low. So it is very hard. It's very hard. We can do these statistical studies

and we can make predictions. But ultimately, we're dealing in these cases, when we want to understand populations, it's just, it's really challenging with fossils. Again, I'm not going to say impossible, but challenging, really challenging. And I think we need to be very skeptical as scientists this any time somebody makes a bold claim about, you know, these populations of dinosaurs were this big or they did that or it was this ecological reason that they collapsed. Sometimes also, let's face it, bizarre things happened. The passenger pigeon is a great example of that that when extinct, you know, the last one died in a zoo, you know, in the 1900s. Really just a few decades before, there were billions of these things living across North America. And yes, they were overhunted by people

in the 1800s, but also there was a genetic crash. They went through some kind of bottleneck, and I mean, it just wreaked havoc on them. They collapsed as a population. It would be very hard to know that kind of thing from fossils, not having the genetics and only having limited fossils preserved here and there. So I think we just have to be always mindful that we can learn a lot from fossils. Fossils can often tell us, oh my God,

there's this strange group of pteractyls. would never know existed if we didn't have their fossils. And they could fly and they could grow in this particular way and they lived in these particular places and they fit into the family tree this way. Those are things that we can get quite readily from fossils. But, you know, details of behavior and population size and these kind of things, it's tough. So we, you know, it's like we're squinting at the heavens, looking at the stars, making constellations out of these limited, you know, limited stars trying to find patterns. But that also makes, I think it makes any science fun, honestly, when there's mysteries and there's uncertainties and you're trying to push the evidence as far as you can go. When we're studying intelligence and cognition and extinct species, like, that's what we're doing now.

Like, I'm under no illusion. I don't think we're going to figure out, you know, how many neurons there wasn't a brain of a T-Rex or could a T-Rex recognize a self in a mirror. You know, those are very specific things. But we're pushing at the boundaries and we want to know as much as we can know from the fossils that we have, from cat scans, them and looking at the brains and the regions of the brains and comparing to modern animals and so on. So all science is really about, you know, pushing the boundaries and knowing as much as we can know with the evidence at hand and then trying to find new evidence to test that, to overturn that, to buff up our ideas or what have you.

Experience Harry Stiles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Stiles. IR Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond. With flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from tripcentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got to. Download the free IHeart Radio app. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win.

Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you at the show. Kiss all the time, disco occasionally available now. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cut. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps gamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did.

And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. What's the biggest, like, if you look at you yourself and your own research, the research of your community, hit me with one or two of like the biggest questions you have right now. Like the things that, and not things that you can't answer, but things that you're optimistic that would find an answer that sort of like professionally keep you up at night. So there's a lot. You know, there is so much we don't know. And we're learning more and more all the time.

I mean, we really are in a golden age of paleontology. People are finding more fossils than ever before, especially when it comes to dinosaurs. There's about 50 new species found a year. It's like once a week, somebody's finding a new species. And it's because more people are looking. I want to pause my question because I forgot to ask you a question preceding this. Okay. I thought of earlier.

So hold that thought. Okay. I'll hold that thought. But it's buddies with that question. Okay. So is it is, here's the question. Is it would ever, are fossils ever of such value that, that people would industrial scale surface mine for fossils? Because you said it's like looking at the surface or people luck into it.

Are there any case? is where like like engineers industrial scale surface mining strip mining for fossils yes with things like coal okay coal's a fossil it's fossilized wood basically from trees and of course that's been industrially mined forever because they're not targeting fossils no so so there are other things like i mean oil comes from uh ancient organisms and there's you know ancient sea plankton formed chalk and formed, you know, the diatomous earth that's used. So there's economic, various things that we use economically that have huge outsize importance in our world and our economies are actually fossils. But I know that's not what you're at. You're asking

if, you know, industrially, you'd strip mine a whole area to find the T-Rexes or something like that. And the answer is not really, at least not yet. Recently, there have been a lot of these auctions of fossil dinosaur skeletons. And some them are bringing pretty big prices. They're like coming out of Mongolia and stuff. Yeah, the Mongolia ones are tricky because that's illegal. So there's a black market there. But the ones that, and you do see some of these up for auction sometimes and those are seized

oftentimes by the government either here or in Mongolia. But if you find a fossil here in the U.S., I mean, if it's on your land, you do what you want with it, right? I mean, this is our culture. And so, you know, traditionally a lot of ranchers here out west, you know, scientists would say, I want to look in your land and we're looking for dinosaur bones. And sometimes people would say no, of course, but a lot of times people would say, yeah, go out. You know, we got all these acres and these are just bones to put in the museum.

And that's great. It's been wonderful. I mean, I know, you know, so many of my colleagues have discovered amazing fossils because they built these relationships with ranchers out here and across the West. Things are changing a bit, though, because some of these fossils are being put up for auction and going for $30 million, $40 million. This Stegosaurus went for over $40 million. So of course, if this is your land and there's some fossils on there, even if you like the scientist, if you have a chance to make 40 million bucks from a fossil, of course, what are you going to do? That's what I'm saying? That you would like, that you would, the same way people prospect for gold, you would prospect for that stuff.

And so there are commercial fossil hunting outfits and they're quite common here out in the American West that go out and look for fossils so they can sell them. And there are ranchers that buy ranch land, not for their cattle. might use it for their cattle as well, but because it's land that has the right kind of rocks to find fossils. So there is a market for this. There definitely is a market for this, which, you know, has its pluses and minuses. As an academic scientist, you know, I hate it if there's a fossil that's so important and so beautiful and it would be so good at a museum and it would be so good at inspiring people and educating kids if that disappears into some rich guy's vault, you know. But at the same time, look, this is law. We're not going to change. Nobody wants to change the law

of the government here like seize a fossil from your land. So that is the economic reality. But it's not industrial scale. It just would be really hard to like strip mine an entire ranch in the hopes you might find a fossil here or there because they're still rare enough. It's not like finding, you know, I mean, it's usually not like finding a coal seam or a vein of ore or something. You might find a bone bed of fossils. where you have a lot of skeletons preserved together

because there was a flood or something that killed a whole herd of dinosaurs, you probably could industrially mine those, but otherwise most fossil dinosaurs at least are so random, one here, one there, one there, that it would be hard to do that. Okay, so let's get back to the question of what, what are the, not the fantastical things that you'll never know,

but what are the kind of thing, like the big questions you have that you could see like a pathway to answering, when you look at the whole collection of your work, the story of the mammals, the story of the dinosaurs, the story of the birds, where are the pieces where you're like,

I see how we get to there, but I don't understand how we got from there to there. You know, there's a bunch. And in each one of the books, I actually kind of here and there highlight a few of them.

I throw them in there because I want people reading the books to understand that we don't have all the answers. You know, I can write these books and I can tell you the story of dinosaurs and birds and, mammals and their evolutionary trajectory and where they came from and how they changed is the world

change. And it's a nice story. It's a story backed up by evidence, by fossils, by DNA. But it doesn't mean we know every chapter in that story. There's always debates and mysteries and uncertainties. And there's so much we don't know, even though we're finding more fossils than ever before. And one of the big ones is what I'm studying now, the cognition and intelligence of dinosaurs and other extinct species. That's why we're doing this project with my colleagues with Matias and Helena in Sweden and Pavel and Christina, our colleagues in Prague, who are neurobiologists, and then Larry Whitmer is a great paleontologist and Ryan Ridgely, and then our students. So my students, I'm going to shout out the names because I think it's important that, you know, you give the students the credit

because they're doing the work. I got Adam Manning and Millie Mead and soon Fraser Weston studying in my lab, the brains, the cognition, the intelligence, of extinct species. We are pushing. Like we know there's a limit. We know that we're not going to be able, you know, again, to say, T-Rex had this number of neurons or T-Rex could recognize itself in a mirror. But what we want to do is push our knowledge of dinosaur brains to the absolute limit.

How many dinosaurs can we see T-Scan? How many brain models can we build? How many ones can we measure? Map this all out on the family tree. Look at the trends in brain evolution and tie what we can see in dinosaur brains to what we see in the brains of modern mammals, and not just modern mammals, but modern birds and modern crocodiles

and all kinds of modern animals. And the hope is that here and there, maybe that there's some feature of a brain, some physical feature, some lobe of a brain or something, that in modern animals, that if they have that lobe of the brain, they can do a certain behavior.

And then if we identify that in a fossil, we can say, oh, that extinct species could do that too. We know that it's kind of pie in the sky. We know that we're running up to our limits of understanding, but that's why we're doing it because it's exciting and it's fun and it's not just describing dusty old bones. It's trying to understand them as living animals. So that's a big one. And I highlight that in the story of birds. I talk about how we're doing this project and we're doing it now.

And we don't have all the answers, but we're getting them. I mean, literally like, you know, this morning before doing this, you know, my students are seven hours ahead, you know, in Scotland. They're sending me updates about what. they're doing this week and the things they're learning as they're looking at cat scans of dinosaur brains. So that's one. There's a handful of others. And we don't really know why dinosaurs were able to outlast the crocodiles and the salamanders and the other creatures that were evolving around the same time as them way back on the supercontinent of Pangaea. We know there was an extinction. The supercontinent broke apart. And that's why we have separate continents today. That's why

South America and Africa look like two puzzle pieces. They did once fit together. the ocean now separates, of course, the continents. But back before the water rushed in, the earth would have bled lava for like 600,000 years. And this led to runaway global warming. There's tons of carbon dioxide, methane, these nasty gases heated up the atmosphere really quickly. And that caused an extinction. Like continental drift was faster than it is now. No, it's probably, it does speed up or slow down over time, mostly based on what's happening deeper in the earth, like in the mantle of the earth, as you have.

have these convection currents. But by and large, continents move about the speed our fingernails grow, which is slow, but over the course of millions of years, you know, that compounds and it adds up. But this extinction, we know it happened about 200 million years ago as Pangaea split. We know there was climate change. We see the effects of that in the fossil record, but also the rocks. You know, there's a lot about the carbon and oxygen signals in the rocks that can tell you things about temperature and precipitation.

So we know there was this extinction. We know that before there was this extinction, there were a whole bunch of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs were pretty small for the first few tens of millions of years that there were dinosaurs. Most of them were the size of you and me. Some got up to the size of horses. Some maybe to the size of a giraffe. But there was nothing like a brontosaurus, nothing like a T-Rex.

But the world was dominated instead by these giant salamanders, the size of cars. and buy all kinds of crazy crocodiles. You know, not just like the crocs and gators today, but some crocs that ate plants and some that had sails on their backs and some that had beaks and some that walked only on their hind legs. And then this extinction happens as the supercontinent breaks apart and these volcanoes erupt. And they blink out. And they blink out.

Only a few crocs survive. Those are the ancestors of modern crocs. So this is why crocs really only live in the tropics or the subtropics today. Some amphibians make it through, but not the enormous car size one. But dinosaurs make it through. And only after that extinction, a good 50 million years after the very first proto-dinosaur's walked on Pangaea, do you get these big meat eaters and big plant eaters and the ones with horns and spikes and duck bills and dome heads and armor and so on?

So we don't really know why. I mean, why do dinosaurs survive? We don't have a good explanation. It was a time of chaos, of course, and carnage and rapid change. Maybe some of it was dumb luck. but there must have been some hand of cards those dinosaurs were holding that allowed them to survive. We don't know. People have different ideas.

Oh, the dinosaurs could move faster or the dinosaurs had higher metabolism or they grew faster. They were smarter. I mean, maybe, maybe, but the evidence is so limited. But we will find that out. I have no doubt that we will get a good understanding of that. We just need some brilliant young paleontologists to come along with a fresh set of eyes and think about it in a new way. Let me back up to your quick question.

How old was an old T-Rex, if you had to guess? How many years old? Oh, like when it died? Yeah. So we can often tell with dinosaurs because dinosaur bones have growth rings in them like tree trunks. So not every bone does,

but a lot of bones do, especially the ribs and the limb bones. So if we find a T-Rex, we can cut it open and we can see how many growth rings there are. And we can make plots. graphs showing how they grew over a lifetime. We can count the number of growth rings and we can make an estimate how big that T-Rex was and we can make a growth curve, just like you might for a modern, you know, population of deer or turkey or what have you. It's very important for conservation to understand how

the animals are growing. So T-Rex is one of the better understood ones because there's actually quite a lot of fossils. And what we see in the growth lines is there's barely any T-Rex skeletons that have more than 30 growth lines. Okay. So, you know, I just turned 42. I would have been long dead if I was a T-Rex. Okay. And so, you know, and that's just what it was. So it lived pretty fast and died pretty young. Still, it took, though, if we look at those growth curves, it probably took about 20 years or so for a T-Rex to go from a baby to a full-grown adult. So that's T-Rex. Other dinosaurs would have lived shorter lifespans and others would have lived longer. Some of the longer, but yeah, just ballpark. Yeah. So some of the long-necked dinosaurs, you know, the huge ones.

I mean, some of these things got to be bigger than Boeing 737 airplanes, heavier than a Boeing 737 airplane. We're talking 50, 60 tons, even more, Argentinosaurus, Patagatitan. They have great names. And they only probably lived to be about 50 or 60 years old. It's not that they, like, lived for centuries and grew a little bit every year. The thing I was, the thing that, this isn't a question, but it's the thing about those that blows my mind is like, imagine. the the habitat impact yeah of just the feet yeah jimmy like you imagine like what like when

an animal goes through woods and it leaves like an observable path like how jemmy you can't imagine if you if it went through a thicket yeah the thicket's gone yeah do i mean like you can't you can't picture like what it's doing or how it's like occupying the landscape like things that would seem like a barrier, aren't a barrier. Things that would just be like crushed. Yeah. You know, it's impossible to imagine, man. It's impossible to imagine.

It's impossible to imagine, I would say almost because we have one line of evidence in the fossil record. And these are the footprints and the handprints that some of these dinosaurs leave behind. And in fact, in Scotland on the Isle of Sky, where we do a lot of our work, yeah, sometimes we find a pterodactyl. Sometimes we find some dinosaur bones. But most of the fossils are actually footprints. They are footprints and handprints left behind.

as dinosaurs were doing their thing, frolicking around on the mudflats, on the beaches, in the lagoons, back 170 million years ago when Scotland was subtropical. And so we have some evidence. And some of these footprint sites,

I mean, they are just littered with dinosaur tracks, tracks stepping over other tracks. We have tracks of long-necked dinosaurs. You know, these ones were probably, weight of probably about 15 tons. So big, you know,

three elephants put together, but not anywhere near as big as the biggest lung neck dinosaurs. These footprints are the size of car tires. I mean, every time their hand or foot touch the ground, they left a hole the size of a car tire. And, you know, there would be flocks of these things. So sometimes the ground is just totally chewed up, mashed up by just dinosaur footprint over dinosaur footprint. There's even, I kid you not, there's a scientific term that geologists use to describe this kind of rock that is chaotic. chaotic rock because you have all of these dinosaurs stepping in the sand and mud and messing up.

It's called dino turbation. Oh, no kidding. Yes, it's a word. And it's a serious word. You see this in academic papers. And it's just a rock that has been so thoroughly obliterated by the footfalls of dinosaurs that it leaves a telltale sign. So imagine, yeah, they're walking through a forest. You know, they would have left their mark.

Now, of course, they wouldn't have just destroyed everything. I mean, no ecosystem could be in harmony. So there must have been ways that everything coexisted. I got two questions left. These are both going to put you in where you have to theorize. Okay, then I'm going to have a nice drink of tea, okay, to get in the mood. Okay. Here's one.

So after your whole career, you've looked at all these extinction events, species that rose and vanished. Okay. Based on what you've seen and based on what you know about all the different ways things have blinked out. Yeah. How do you think, like, give me a couple. When we go. Yeah.

When we humans go and we're done. What do you think it is? Well, totally speculative. Because I have no evidence for any of this, but it's fun to chat. You've looked at a lot of things that went away. Yeah. And you understand all these different things, like impact strikes from asteroids. Yeah.

Seismic activity, climate changes, whatever. Okay, like, what is, if you imagine, like, what is the thing that gets us? I think there's a few ways that could happen. Obviously, and this circles back to, you know, something you were alluding to a little bit ago in the conversation. If there was a six mile wide asteroid that hit the earth, I mean, we would be in trouble. Yeah. I would think, you know, we, the dinosaurs didn't know that was coming. The dinosaurs didn't have an ability.

We would know for a while. We would know. And we would hopefully be able to do something about it. Have you ever seen the movie Melancholia? No, but I've seen Armageddon. Melancholy is the thinking man's arm again. Yeah, I'll have to watch. That'll be up for the plane ride home.

Maybe it was on. But if that happened, I mean, we would, it would hurt us bad. It would hurt us bad. Even if we were able to stop, and if we were able to totally stop it, fine. But if that asteroid hit us and we had to deal with it, that would be really bad. I will never downplay the technological thing. I mean, could we kind of nuclear war ourselves to death? I mean, yeah, probably.

Yeah. Could AI get super intelligent and decide it doesn't want us anymore and wipes us out? I mean, those are getting so out there that I don't know. Well, no, because then you just start on people would just start unplugging shit. Yeah. So I like unplug everything that you can unplug and then the problem would go away. Yeah. But I'll tell you what worries me.

An asteroid doesn't really worry me because we would know that is coming. You know, there's no volcano big enough that would just wipe us out in an instant. The AI stuff, as you say, like there might be a dystopian future there, maybe, but you're talking about total extinction, really. And so what worries, what worries me, before we're gone, there'll be where there's just handfuls of us left here and there. Yeah. What worries me is there could be a human population crash.

Yeah. And what happened to the passenger pigeon might happen to us. And again, that was that bird. It was maybe the most common bird in North America. Yeah. There's this idea that there had to be a lot of them. Yeah. There was no version where there was a few.

No. And exactly. And I mean, there were so many. they would block out the sun for minutes on end when a flock went by. And this is, you know, this isn't imagined. I mean, this is within recent human history. I mean, there are writers from the 19th century that would talk about these flocks of pastures. Yeah.

And you can, you can hold. There's a lot of taxidermy specimens. You can hold them. And they, they were, there were so many of them. I mean, if you were around in the mid-1800s, I'm sure you would say, all these birds are so common. I mean, nothing would ever happen to them. but they not only collapsed, they went totally extinct, and they did so within really a few decades. And it was because, yes, they were overhunted.

And yes, land use was changing. And all of this prairie land, like back home where I'm from in Illinois, you know, was being, you know, converted to farmland. And there was runoff and pesticides. And that all played a role. But what really did it was it seemed that they went past some threshold. And there was some genetic bottleneck. And something happened with their genes. there wasn't just enough variety anymore.

They weren't reproducing enough anymore and generating new types of individuals that were more fit that could deal with the changes. And they just crashed. They just crashed. And I'm not a geneticist, so the geneticist might understand it. I would understand it much better than me.

But it does seem like there's some kind of mystery there. Like we know there was a crash. If some pathogen carried off 90% of humans. Yeah. Then I think, yeah. A pathogen carries off 90% of humans. The remaining 10% of, There's just something we don't understand and they don't thrive.

And I think that is the most likely scenario. That something, yeah, whether it's a virus, whether it is, I don't know, something from AI or I don't know, some aliens come down. Who knows? But something decimates a lot of humans. You know, it doesn't totally kill us off. But it kills a lot. And then we have this constellation of different populations that aren't really meeting

and reproducing and generating new genetic diversity. And we just crash. And I think that is one likely scenario. Now, a good friend of mine... My money is on path. Yeah. So a good friend of mine, Henry G. is his name. He's a senior editor at Nature, you know, the prominent scientific journal.

He's a great science writer. And he wrote a book called The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. So his publisher back in the UK, we have the same publisher and editor. So we love supporting each other's books. And I loved it, you know, he said it to me before it was published and I read it. Oh, my God. And he talks about this stuff, you know, about how human populations could crash and how having little genetic diversity, you know, among these last remaining populations could cause us to die off.

And that's getting kind of scary. But let me just say one thing, though, this may be a bit more general about the lesson that I take from dinosaurs. And that lesson really is that you can be dominant. Your group can be dominant. You can be around for 150 million years like the T-Rex and Triceratops and Brontosaurus dinosaurs were. you can be the top meat eaters, the top plant eaters, you can have a great diversity of species in the food chain, you can live everywhere around the world.

But then if something happens where the environment changes really quickly, for them it was an asteroid, but who's to say it couldn't be maybe, not a volcano that obliterates everything, but a volcano that causes sudden climate change. Or it could be the climate change that is happening now, that we just let that run wild, but that something happens and climates, environments change.

quickly that the dominant things don't have time to adapt. Yeah. And they just so happen to not be suited to this new world. And that's what I worry about a bit with humans. You know, we are incredibly successful. There's more than 8 billion of us around the world. We live everywhere. But we're so recent.

The oldest Homo sapiens is like 300,000 years old. Yeah. And we're so well adapted to this world, this world that's coming out of an ice age, this world of pretty nice climate, you know. world of pretty clear, consistent coastlines and rivers that can be navigated and floods that can be dealt with. And as weather patterns change and climate changes, and climate always changes, by the climate, climate's always changing in the history of the earth. I mean, come on. What's happening now is, you know, it's not like this is the only time temperatures have gotten warm. No, no, of course

not. But what's happening now is it's happening very fast and it's happening to us. And so we have come up, our societies, our culture, even our physical bodies have evolved and devolved. developed in this world that we know. So if things change really quickly, that could put us in trouble. And there are plenty of species that are a lot older than us that are probably better adapted, more resilient. And so that's where I start to get concerned, that simply if the pace of change is too fast, whether it's global warming, whether it's an ice age coming in, whether it's some big volcanoes, whatever it is that can change the status quo. If it does it really quickly, well, the dinosaurs tell us that even the most dominant and successful animals, if you give them a lot of change too fast, that they can quickly get on the back foot and they can be gone soon.

You use the word concern. Yeah. But like, I don't feel that way. I mean, I do about my kids. Yeah. Right? And I guess their kids. But, you know, when I get like way out, I guess in a way in the sort of geological time we're talking about, I don't find my.

self rooting. I don't have myself rooting for the humans of 10,000 years from now. Like, I'm not rooting for them. Maybe I should. But here's my last question. Because your work explores all these times when you've had, as I said up earlier, explores all these, these like mass extinction events, right? Where everything gets carried off and then the earth rebuilds and things that carried off the earth rebuilds. I like to tell my kids. I'm like, man, someday, someday we won't be around to appreciate it yeah but someday we're going to be gone yeah yeah and this earth is going to be full of insane crazy animals yes that you can't imagine and i don't like i don't know who it'll be maybe there will be beetles there will be beetles bigger than elephants

like i don't know who knows right yeah nobody yeah how can you predict yeah there'll go away we'll go away and and even if even if there's a new Holocaust and we carry away all large mammals and carry away all these complex life forms, like at some time in the future, there will be just the earth will be again full of like crazy stuff. How long, like when you look in the path, like how long do these things take? If you look at these various times when the earth became just wiped out. Yeah. Okay, like the chick's a loop strike. The earth gets like wiped out. How long? How long? is it before you'd go and be like the earth is like kicking ass again, you know, and you got big

stuff and small stuff and green stuff. Usually what we see in the fossil record is that the, I mean, first of all, the earth always bounces back. And so when I talk about concern about modern climate change and environmental change, I'm more concerned for us. Sure. Our species and not just our species, but our civilization. The way we get on with each other, I'm more concerned with that than with the Earth. The Earth is going to be fine. You know, the Earth, that's not I say it's a good thing. I mean, other species will go extinct if climate changes quickly. I don't want to be flippant about it. I mean, it's much better that these things don't have. But the Earth will be fine. When the asteroid hit, 75% of all species died. I mean, there were entire zones like near the impact where everything was

vaporized. I mean, that was as catastrophic as things can get. And what do we see? We see in the fossil record that at least within a few thousand years at most, you have forests again. Okay. You see new mammals move in within a few thousand years. That's when you get the first primates, by the way. Is that right? Our ancestors are only there making their appearance

right after the dinosaurs go extinct, but really soon after, within tens of thousands of years at most. There are fossils from right here in Montana that show that. Within a few hundred thousand years, you have all kinds of crazy new mammals. You know, mammals the size of pigs, mammals that are digging and mammals that are climbing trees.

within a million years he got these cattle-sized mammals and mammals have gone on from there. The earth can recover really quickly. And you don't know what the recovery is going to be. Yeah, it makes me optimistic. It makes me up to. And I have a six-year-old, you know, my son, Anthony. And so we don't quite talk about things this deep, not yet, but he's getting more interested in the world.

He's six. Yeah, I used to trip my kids out by telling them bad stuff like this that I kind of quit. Well, I didn't quit that it's got older where I can tell them bad stuff. I used to tell them bad stuff from there real little. Like, I'd be like, the son. will eventually burn out. And then they started tripping out, but I meant like next week. This is what Anthony does to me, though, because he's really interested in outer space right now.

So he watches a lot of these shows. And so he'll tell me, do you know, the sun's going to burn out and so many million, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of years. Now, come on, son, you know, live your life first. But no, but I'm, when we start to have these conversations, I try to convey that, you know, the earth is more than just us. Obviously, we care about our species, as we should. But the earth is so old, four and a half billion years old. Earth is there has been this fantastic monogery of species that have lived

over time. Species have risen and fallen and there have been crazy things like earlier, taradactyls. If we didn't have fossils, we never know, we never believe something like that existed. And there's a whole bunch of things like that. So the earth is wonderful. And that's why we should conserve as much of it as we can and understand nature

as best we can and be in nature. I think, you know, many of us aren't in nature enough. For listeners of this show, you know, you guys are probably out in nature lot. For the average person, I mean, even me. Most of the time, I'm just at my desk. I'm at home. I'm writing. I'm teaching my classes. I don't get out enough. But I think we all just need to get out more and appreciate the earth and appreciate our part in the earth and where we fit in and to take pride and joy

in this glorious world around us. And absolutely, we should be rooting for the earth. And that means we should make our impact minimal. But at the same time, you know, we're not just some average species. I mean, there are eight billion of us, we're going to put pressure on the earth. You know, we have to. We have to build houses. We have to get around, you know, we can't stop doing these things. But we need to find better ways to live in harmony. And I'm very optimistic. Ultimately, I am optimistic because we're smart. We have huge brains. We have consciousness. We can work together in groups. We can solve problems. I mean, there were humans, you know, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years ago, like ancestors of ours that figured out language and built boats and reached islands.

I mean, this was the edge of the known world. And they did this. We are capable of incredible things as a species. And just watching recently, you know, the Artemis mission going beyond the moon farther than any humans have gone. Like that's awesome. We are capable of amazing things as a species when we put our mind to it, when we work together. And when we support science, when we support education, we put the money into things like, launching that mission or money into conserving things. Even something as simple as making sure the

bald eagle and the California condor don't bite the dust. I mean, those are incredibly successful. We want to do something. We can. And the dinosaurs couldn't do that. T-Rex couldn't do that. T-Rex couldn't do that. T-Rex couldn't have the brain power to do that. But we can't. So ultimately, I'm concerned about climate change and environmental change, but I remain optimistic that we can do something about it and we can adapt. And that's what gives, that's what gives me hope. Yeah. Well, Steve Broussati, thanks so much for coming on the show. Brand new book. The Story of Birds, A New History from their Dinosaur Origins to the Present.

If you want to go in order, you'd go rise and follow the dinosaurs. Well, because I'm promoting the new book, you know, we got to sell these new books. Okay, don't do that. Start with this and then go back, read this and then go, because they're all freestanding books. They are. They're freestanding books. They're all, you know, the dinosaur one tells the story of dinosaur evolution. The mammal one tells the story of mammal evolution, including our ancestry. So honestly, the mammal one might be, you know, of quite a lot of interest to a lot of your listeners.

Start with the birds. But start with the birds. And it's the newest one. And so it's right up to date. But really, they can be read in any order. And again, they're not textbooks. They're not academic books. I try to make them really accessible.

And honestly, like, you know, something that makes me more happy really than anything. I get random emails or, you know, DMs on Instagram or social media from people that read the books. And it's great. And if you read the books, anybody that's listening, please do reach out. I love hearing from people. And I'm easy to find online. But quite recently, I've gotten a, I got a message from a long-haul truck driver here in the West who had the dinosaur book on audiobook as he's doing these late-night drives. I got a message from a kid who was like in his early 20s in the military or stationed abroad who was reading the dinosaur book just to pass the time. Like, that's awesome. I just, it is so cool. So these books are for everybody. I really try to do make them accessible. And I would say if you've never read science books before, you know, they shouldn't be too scary. And there's a whole genre of pop science, really, that you can explore out there that isn't scary, that is accessible. There's a lot of great science writers.

And I've mentioned, you know, a few like Henry G. But there are many others, too. And just, you know, start reading around and seeing what interests you. And that's what I try to do in these books is tell some good stories about these fantastic animals that have lived over time. how they paved the way for the world today. All right, man. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure.

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