The Science of Everything Podcast - Special Episode: Dinosaurs in Popular Culture

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

In this special collaboration with I Know Dino podcast, we discuss the history and impact of dinosaurs in popular culture and media. We cover the history of the scientific study of dinosaurs and how their presentation in media has changed over time with new discoveries, and what aspects of their behaviour and appearance tend to be presented accuracy or inaccurately. We also discuss lesser-known aspects of understanding dinosaurs, such as how changes in the atmosphere and ecosystem would affect dinosaurs of they were to be alive today. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a PayPal donation or becoming a Patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

Hello, you're listening to a special episode of the Science of Everything podcast, dinosaurs and popular culture. I'm your host, James Fodor. So in this special episode, I have a discussion with the I Know Dino podcast, which some of you may be familiar with, and we talk about dinosaurs and their presentation and representation in popular media and their understanding and misunderstandings in popular culture. and we discuss quite a range of topics, including dinosaur appearance, their habits and behavior, the different varieties of dinosaurs and how accurately they're depicted in media. And we also cover a bit of the history of paleontological understandings of dinosaurs and how that's been reflected in movies and other popular media. So without further ado, let's transition over to the recording with the I Know Dino podcast.

All right, so we're doing something a little bit differently this week, or maybe I should say this episode, we're going to be talking about dinosaurs, and it's a collaboration this week between I Know Dino and the Science of Everything. We'll be talking about dinosaurs and really how they intersect with other fields in science and also why they are so compelling and why they're such a big part of popular culture. Yeah, it's an exciting topic. I'm happy to be here. So our first topic for discussion is why dinosaurs have captured so much public attention. I have a lot of thoughts about this. I'm curious, James, what you think about why they're so popular? I did a bit of reading about the history of dinosaurs in popular culture.

And it seems like it was in the late Victorian period when the fossils first began to be sort of scientifically studied, that it really captured a lot of people's attentions. And then more recently in the later 20th century with some of the more popular expressions in film, like Jurassic Park being one of the big examples, it's sort of led to a bit of a renaissance. I mean, I don't have a very good answer to this. I'd be interested what your insights are,

but I think one of the major factors has to be just how large the creatures are. I think anything that big is, particularly being land creatures, would be likely to capture people's attention. as well as that we don't have that many large reptiles that are alive at the moment. So that's sort of quite different to anything that's alive currently. And I think that naturally attracts people's attention when it's something so big and so different.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So I should put some like names and dates on it maybe as like the background of when in Victorian times. So Dinosauria named by Richard Owen in 1842. Basically, he noticed the similarities between iguanodon. megalosaurus and hylaosaurus and figured these should be grouped together there's so much in common between them and named dinosauria but then it wasn't really picked up it wasn't like today where if you know someone would post online there's this new group of animals it would be like overnight yeah it went like a decade plus because the first real public display of dinosaurs was benjamin waterhouse

hawkins in 1854 with the crystal palace dinosaurs and so these are like these big sculptures they were for a big sort of like World's Fair type thing that got a lot of people excited, but it was kind of localized. You know, again, it was like we didn't have photography quite yet then, and there were some drawings and some people were really excited about it, but it didn't really become a global affair. Then in the U.S., the first lifelike mount was Hadrosaurus in Pennsylvania in 1868, which was again the same kind of thing. It was like some local people got excited. It drew apparently hundreds of thousands of people from like,

the nearby vicinity to the museum, but, you know, is still local in a way. And really what kicked it off, I think, from my perspective, was the Bone Wars, which was Athneal Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. They were competing. They ended up naming Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Triceratops, which are still some of the biggest names in all of dinosaur fandom, I guess you could say. And also in terms of dinosaur research, people are very interested in them. And that really took dinosaurs to center stage. And then also on top of that, when dinosaurs got another point, I guess, going back across the pond, you've got Andrew Carnegie or Carnegie got involved in this exploration of dinosaurs.

And he found depleticus in a couple of quarries. And actually the king of England requested a depleticus for his own museum, the natural history museum in London. And that became Dippy, which. sort of really now in London, a lot of people on a permanent display have time to see it. And then back in the U.S. again, Barnum Brown in the earliest 1900s found T-Rex, and that went on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. So between those two, I think we finally had a permanent installation in London,

a permanent installation in New York. And like you said, some of the biggest animals, T-Rex basically the biggest land predator, Diplodicus, one of the biggest things ever to walk, herbivore or carnivore, and it started showing up in all the comics and movies and everything like that. So that's, I think, maybe the starting point of it, but then the why is very interesting. Like you said, maybe it's the size. It could be that the reptiles. There's a lot of answers. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's always hard to know what, uh, why popular attention gets attracted to particular thing, to particular, well, to particular anything, really. I think also, I mean,

there are many other interesting types of animals that existed, you know, in the past. And I think some of those tend to get, well, actually, like some of the creatures that lived alongside at the time of dinosaurs, like the pterodactals, for example, that are lumped in with dinosaurs. And so the way that the word is used in popular culture isn't the same as it's used scientifically. So in some sense, it's not as, it's not that people are specifically interested in dinosaurs as such. It's that they're interested in large, fascinating creatures from the past. Yeah, I think that's a really good point because even the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, which I referred to, they call them dinosaurs and they say it's with a capital D and they refer to it as like the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, sort of in

quotes includes all of their animals and they go way back, you know, they go back before dinosaurs and then they go all the way up to basically the present with like the giant elk. They just call them all dinosaurs because that's what people do. Well, that's definitely not a dinosaur, but yeah, that's interesting. So I know you're very interested in, or maybe I shouldn't say very interesting because you're interested in a wide variety of topics. I was very impressed with the breadth of content on your podcast. but one of the things that I don't know as much about is psychology,

and I know that you're interested in psychology. Do you think there's some psychological aspect to why humans are so fascinated with these creatures that were bigger than us and are now extinct and those details of dinosaurs? Well, that's interesting. I've heard speculations about this sort of thing before, about whether there's some sort of evolutionary basis for, obviously not, well, presumably not dinosaurs per se.

that would be going back rather a long way before humans, but perhaps with reptiles. I don't know that there's been any actual study of this. I don't, not quite sure how one would study that. And I think it's probably not very likely because I don't think we would have had, I mean, the human environment of evolutionary adaptation was in the savannah of East Africa, and I don't think there would have been many instances where humans would have been particularly threatened by reptiles in that sort of environment, at least as far as I know. so I think that that is probably mostly just speculation about whether there's like a particular

reason that humans are fascinated with dinosaurs or reptiles but you know it's hard to say it's hard to say for sure but yeah honestly I expect that humans have more evolutionarily had much more interactions with other mammals I don't know and maybe maybe you know many of the animals we know about like domesticated animals farm animals are mammals so Perhaps that just contributes to the fact that reptiles seem so different to us. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I don't know that that's an evolutionary adaptation so much as more of a social one. Yeah, but as you were saying it too, I was wondering,

does it matter that they're reptiles and not mammals? Because maybe from sort of just visceral feeling of it, just this thing that is that much bigger than you, whether it's an elephant or a hippo or a Tyrannosaurus, it might all sort of conjure up the same sort of emotions of like, whoa, look at that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I certainly think that's a factor. People are interested in large animals like elephants, for example.

Although people certainly think about elephants or even, I'd say hippos differently to dinosaurs. But yeah, it's a, I think dinosaur has a, maybe there's a historically contingent aspect there that, you know, Tyrannosaurus was one of the earliest discovered and, like, popularized dinosaurs. it's very, well, you know, it's very scary looking. Especially the way, I mean, maybe there's even an aspect here about the fact that we only have, like the way that they're typically presented is in the skeletons. And the skeletons emphasize, like it kind of looks a bit, I don't know, scarier to be as a skeleton for, but also it emphasizes things like the teeth, which would survive, but then it looks more

threatening and then so it looks more ferocious. I think if we only saw, if we only saw elephants or hippopotamus, as skeletons maybe we'd think of them a bit differently. I don't know. But so maybe there's a few things going on there. That's an excellent point because, yeah, we just did a recent episode on mammoths and we were talking about, you know, they have tusks. Many of the species had tusks on the top and the bottom.

And that's similar to hippopotamus. But people don't think of the tusks on a hippopotamus because they have these big fleshy lips covering it. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that view of T-Rex is having these big, sharp teeth where really the teeth that they often show are way below the gum even that you would see, you know, in the skull. So even with it living, if it had its teeth exposed and it had its mouth open, it probably looks even scarier as a fossil where you can't see, or you can see so much detail of those big menacing teeth.

Yeah, so it's, and once a certain conception exists in popular culture, then that's something that people play into with the way the exhibits are designed and the way people talk about it and so on. So maybe it's sort of self-reinforcing that dinosaurs are kind of scary and ferocious. And large, as many of them weren't. But, you know, those are things people expect. And so that's what draws the crowds, I suppose. So, yeah, maybe if there were relatives of dinosaurs that lived today that were, like, large reptiles, maybe not exactly the same. But if that was the case, then perhaps it would be very different.

But, yeah. That's true. Hard to say. Yeah. And it's a good point, too, when you were saying, you know, there's the fear factor to it because the least popular dinosaurs are definitely the least scary as well because like nobody cares about hadrosores. They don't care about the early ornithopods that are like these small little things.

Most people don't even know they exist. People think of triceratops with the big horns that could poke you. They think a stegosaurus with the tail with the spikes, T-Rex with the big teeth, and the ones that just kind of looked more like normal animals that we might be used to today in a way everybody just sort of ignores those because they're no longer interesting, I guess. Yeah, and that relates to the way they're often portrayed in media as well, which is, I mean, I don't think if you made, maybe there are some examples of this that I don't know of, but I don't think if you made a dinosaur movie that didn't have dinosaurs ripping people's heads off, people would be very interested.

Like, you've got to put that in, right? You know, there's probably lots of other stories you could tell about dinosaurs, but that's what people expect, and that's what they want to see, I suppose. So it's kind of self-reinforcing as the way that they're perceived. Yeah, that's true. I think some of the funniest movies are the early, going back and looking at some of the early ones that had soar pods as like the big, you know, the long-neck dinosaurs as the like big villain,

because they tend to have sharp teeth and then you've got this thing that we know just ate plants, but it's like eating people whole and all this goes. I think I've seen some of those. They're very strange, well, from a mon point of view. Yeah, the Lost World had a little bit of it because they brought back like a Bronosaurus or Diplodocus or whatever to London and then it breaks free and rampages through the streets and it's like eating people and knocking them down with their tail and everything because it's like that's what the people went to the movie theater to see. They want to see that spectacle of the dinosaur attacking. People don't want to see them just like in a nature documentary stance because they're like, no, they're too exciting. Let's see them do something. Yeah, although, yeah, that being said, walking with dinosaurs, I mean, that's a little. old now. I remember that when I was a kid coming out. That was very popular and that, I mean, I guess it did play up some of the things about like ferociousness and size to get interest, but it was

much more of a kind of simulated nature documentary kind of style. So that was quite popular as well. So, you know, maybe there's a, maybe there's still an avenue there, but. Yeah, prehistoric planet recently was sort of in that same vein too where they showed dinosaurs. It was produced by BBC in a very, like, planet Earth style where it was like this is the animal and its natural habitat, not necessarily always fighting or... Yeah. There is still some fighting, though, because like you said, you can't really avoid it completely.

Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe that would be a good point to talk about the next question then, which is about how the accuracy of the presentations of dinosaurs and media and what sort of typically they get wrong and what they get right. And that leads me to something that I was just thinking. about with what you were saying is that one thing this isn't just true about dinosaurs this is something i've noticed in pretty much any depiction of any wild animal or like even monsters or anything in any media which is that they they seem to always be hungry and when they you know when they

catch prey they like bite it a couple of times but then they just want to catch another prey that they're not satisfied with what they have which doesn't seem very realistic to me i my understanding would be once you've caught prey then you would um want to protect that and there's no real reason to then go looking for something else. But this is, I mean, obviously that's done for sort of dramatic effect, but it's always kind of annoyed me when the animals behave in sort of a bizarre way. But maybe there's other things that I've caught your attention about media portrayal of dinosaurs. That's a great point. That is not one that I think I've ever brought up before because you're 100% right. Animals hunt to get food. They don't hunt because they feel

like, it's not like they're just trophy hunting for the sake of, look, I killed this thing and you didn't think I could kill it. Yeah. So for me, I think the biggest thing that I notice is also that like ferociousness, the lack of any sort of animal, like real animal behavior to them. They're not usually shown as parents, which we do think that most of the predatory dinosaurs probably had a little bit of parental care because that's how a lot of predatory animals are today. They teach their young how to hunt. So certainly there would have been at least some of that

and some of the dinosaur species, maybe not all of them all the time, but you'd expect to see some parental involvement. There's also that, like I mentioned, the wrong teeth. Like you get on the, some of the herbivores become carnivores for the excitement factor. Also, a big one to me is dinosaurs living, together that didn't actually live together. So like Stegosaurus fighting T-Rex is always

maybe the most obvious one to me because our little fact of we live closer in time to T-Rex than T-Rex did to Stegosaurus. There's no way Stegosaurus was ever interacting with the T-Rex. Yeah, so T-Rex was during the Cretaceous. When was Stegosaurus? So, yeah, T-Rex was the very end of the Cretaceous and Stegosaurus was the end of the Jurassic. so they had like the full Cretaceous in between them. Right, right. The Cretaceous is very long. So, yeah.

Yeah, well, I think that's something that people, well, I don't know that that's specific to dinosaurs. I think people have trouble, I mean, I put myself in this gutterer, people have trouble really comprehending just how long, like, geological time is and how long millions of years really means. And when dinosaurs are talking for tens of millions of years. So, yeah, I think that's one I can kind of understand when you're putting dinosaurs in, media, you want to pick the best ones. You don't want to be restricted by what actually existed

alongside each other. Although sometimes they have excuses, like in the movie Jurassic Park, when they're cloning dinosaurs, they can kind of, well, cloning dinosaurs suspect. But if you think they can do that, then presumably they can clone whatever they want. So I guess that aspect makes sense. Although they kind of talk about this more in the book than in the movie, but in the book, they explore the idea that because they're trying to reconstruct an ancient ecosystem that's long since extinct. And they're kind of doing it in this haphazard way combining different animals and plants from different times. They don't really know how it's going to behave. And so they kind of overestimate the control they can have over it. I don't know that this was explored too much in the movie,

but it's quite an interesting aspect of the book, actually. And I thought that that was a sort of an important insight because, like, you could, you know, if you could somehow clone a dinosaur, that would be one thing. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't exist in anything like its original environment with other species and the plants and like the temperature of the planet would be different. There'd be all of these things that it would presumably change how it behaved. And so you wouldn't even have like a full idea about what the dinosaur was originally like. Yeah. So I think that's that's one aspect where it comes to like mixing dinosaurs from different time periods is that you can't really just pluck an animal out of its environment and out of

it when it existed in time and understand much about how it behaved or why it like function the way it did because, you know, all of those things are crucial to determining that. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I agree that Jurassic Park's strategy with it was a good solution because, like all good sci-fi, it makes you take one leap, like, okay, if we had the scientific advance and then everything else can kind of flow from that. So once you get the ability to clone these ancient dinosaurs, sure, you can clone as many as you want from whatever time periods you want and stick them together. But you're right that it wouldn't be that simple as now they're all just back.

And we, because, like, even just as simple as what they ate, there was the one scene in Jurassic Park, the movie where the triceratops ate the wrong plant. And the, like, botanist is like, what are you doing? You know, this is obviously a poisonous plant, which is kind of funny because it's like, yeah, it's poisonous to certain animals today, but, like, poison isn't one thing to all animals. So it could very well be that you try to feed it something that you think, oh, yeah, most herbivorous animals can handle this.

And it turns out to be poisonous to a dinosaur. or, yeah, just the different animals interacting with each other and not knowing what to make of their surroundings or the temperature, like you said, because it was a lot warmer for much of the Mesozoic could be a big problem. Yeah, well, the composition of the atmosphere was different as well. I wonder if that would even pose difficulties for dinosaurs. Yeah, it was, there was generally a little more carbon dioxide and a little bit less oxygen for certain periods. But again, they were around for so long. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It depends which dinosaur you're talking.

Yeah. So that could be a problem in and of itself. There might not be one atmospheric condition that works for all the dinosaurs. Yeah, that's a good point. I was also listening to your episode recently on metabolism and thinking about, like, amino acids and whether or not they would have the right diet or the right plants still around that match with what their metabolism requires. Like, could they even sustain themselves?

Yeah. Well, I was thinking about that as well. I don't know really anything about. dinosaur biochemistry and how much is it differs from. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Maybe you could, maybe species like crocodiles that have been around for a long time might give us some insight into that. But yeah, I don't know how much that's been studied.

Obviously, that doesn't fossilize very readily. Yeah. I'd like to your point where you were saying in that episode that originally there's a good chance that we could synthesize all the amino acids and then we sort of lost a few abilities over time because maybe there was a lot of food that we were eating that had those amino acids. So our body, our adaptation was basically like, well, why bother making it if you're just eating it all the time anyway? So maybe that's a point in favor of the dinosaurs because maybe they had more ability. They hadn't lost all of it yet. If anything, maybe the modern animals are

more sensitive to losing things from our diets. I don't know. Yeah, it could be. But I mean, if there's one thing I've learned studying nature, it's that there's always more complexities that you didn't understand until you run into them. So I imagine that if we did somehow figure out how to clone dinosaurs that people would probably have to spend decades just figuring out how to feed them and how to keep them alive in the atmosphere and how to prevent them from like killing each other or like interacting socially and like all of these other things that you know like even keeping animals that are quite close to us and that we understand relatively well in zoos is a very difficult is a very difficult feat and I imagine it would be just extraordinarily difficult to do that with dinosaurs

when the ecosystem is so different so I do like that that they kind of did explore that aspect a little bit in the movie, more so in the book, because I think that would be one of the major challenges of dinosaurs. And that's not something that you really see explored much in the popular depictions. Yeah, yeah. And on that note, too, keeping them breeding would be incredibly difficult because we think a lot of them had very unique and specific nesting behaviors for like the type of soil, maybe being near either volcanically active environments or using certain types of compost, potentially for keeping their nests warm and trying to simulate that and getting that all ready for them. You better hope you are really good at cloning so that you can try for a long time.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's a challenge to get endangered species breeding in zoos in many cases, so I can imagine it would be even harder with dinosaurs where we know less about them. In terms of other aspects of accuracy of depictions, one common complaint is that many, especially, well, I don't know if, this is changing much. Maybe you'd know more about this, but certainly many depictions of dinosaurs don't show them with feathers when particularly many of the later dinosaurs, like raptors, would have had feathers. That's one that people bring up about Jurassic Park a lot.

Although, interestingly, I think, Jurassic Park's an interesting case, because they mentioned that they, the way they cloned the dinosaurs is that they had a lot of gaps in the DNA, which you would, and they filled it using frog DNA, and presumably they made a bunch of assumptions and other adjustments as they went. So theoretically they may have removed the feathers to make the dinosaurs appear more ferocious or something. So I can actually kind of buy that the dinosaurs that they constructed wouldn't have actually been authentically what the dinosaurs would have looked like, which is another interesting aspect that I like to think about. But are there any other aspects particularly about the appearance of dinosaurs that struck you? Yeah. From the popular presentations.

That is a good point because that is the perfect weasel out of inaccuracy that Jurassic Park did, it was a stroke of genius by Michael Crichton. Like, what? Yeah, you know, it's not really a dinosaur, so don't worry about all these details. And then in the book, too, he did fun stuff like the, I believe it was carnatoris, if I'm not mistaken, could go invisible. It had like huddlefish DNA or something, so it could just be invisible. Oh, yes, I remember that. You could just do so many fun stuff if you're like, oh, it's got DNA from all sorts of things. It's just fantastic.

But yeah, the feathers are a good one. We don't know for sure if all the dinosaurs would have had feathers, but certainly the raptors are the big one, you know, the Velociraptor type one. But speaking of Velaselopter, the big thing that it sort of got wrong with Velociraptor is the dinosaur named Velociraptor properly, the genus Velociraptor is much smaller than the Velocer that's in the movies. It's like the size of a turkey. And it is interesting, though, because while they were shooting the movie, basically, there were paleontologists out in the field who, found a relative of Velociraptor, another raptor, that is named Utah Raptor now, which is roughly the size of the Velociraptor that's in Jurassic Park. So it's almost like it just had the wrong name, but there was a sort of similar animal in existence. Yeah, I didn't realize the Utah

Raptor was such a recent discovery. So, yeah, that's another, but that's another thing that I, that I've thought about as well, because, yeah, the Velociraptor, like, historically was much smaller and wouldn't have been very intimidating to humans. But again, I could imagine that, like, this is interesting when it comes to the popular presentation of dinosaurs. Like if you were building a dinosaur park, you probably wouldn't want to call it Utah Raptor. That sounds a little bit weird. Like, why is it named after U.S. state?

You might just call them Raptors or maybe Velociraptor if you wanted to sound, because that sounds more ferocious, I think. And, you know, some people will be like, that's actually a Utah Raptor, but most people wouldn't know the difference anyway. So it sort of emphasizes, it sort of emphasizes, that the distinction between like, like, actually understanding the creatures that you're engaging with or just like presenting them as a spectacle. Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things I think about Jurassic Park as a movie and book is the emphasis on how wanting to produce a spectacle,

whether that's to make money or for our own satisfaction or whatever it is exactly, can undermine the idea that can undermine the effort to actually understand the creatures. And in the case of Jurassic Park, that leads them to, like, lose control and other things like that. but I mean, in reality, it's not likely to be so, have that much of an effect. But it's still, I think it's a reminder about the importance of trying to learn about things in a more detached way, not in a sense that you don't care, but you're just like more sensitive to, I don't know, not sensationalizing things or getting, getting over-excited because it's, you know, so different.

But, yeah, the size one is interesting that I was reading one of the links you posted about the comic books, someone who'd analyzed presentations of dinosaurs in comic books, which was very interesting. And they mentioned that there was a tendency to exaggerate the size of some of the dinosaurs. I saw one image of a pterodactyl taking on a, I think it was a Spitfire, like a World War II era plane, and it was much larger than a... So I was just thinking that that was rather imaginative. I think... I suspect a Teradactal probably wouldn't have been able to keep up with the Spitfire either. I'll definitely show how fast pterodactos went, but it wouldn't have been hundreds of miles per hour.

Yeah. How close they would be? I'm not quite sure, but definitely not keeping up. They could catch them on the ground. That's probably about it. I agree. The size part of it is a really big part. And I think in general in the Jurassic Park movies, too, that everything's like maybe 50% bigger than you would expect it to be in real life.

I think the Velociraptor was scaled up even more, but that was sort of to put it on human scale. It was kind of the goal. It was like a movie thing. They wanted to be eye level with the people and fitting through the kitchen doors and all that kind of stuff. So that kind of made sense. But the name thing is interesting that you mentioned using the name Velociraptor because it's a little more evocative than something like Utah Raptor. And there was this book, this proposal that came out right before Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park to synonymize some of the other. Raptor, some of the other close relatives into the genus Velociraptor.

So Velociraptor would have been the name of multiple species. And one of those was Dinonicus, which was bigger than Velociraptor, and that was sort of more what the book version of the quote-unquote Velociraptor was really more of a Dinonicus. So it wasn't quite as much of a size difference in the movie from Dinanicus to their version of Velociraptor as Velociraptor to their version of Velociraptor. but yeah, there's always a lot of license with the size. I think it makes sense, though, for that sort of dramatic effect. You want something human scale, and then you want things that are enormous.

Like you said, maybe it has to take on a plane. So what are you going to do? You've got to scale it up in order to make that work. Now, one thing that I've read about when preparing for this episode, which did surprise me is apparently T-Rex weren't actually very fast. That surprised me For no other reason That they have such long legs

I would have figured that they could have moved fairly quickly But apparently not Yeah, that's one of those where There are a lot of opinions And there are a lot of papers And there are a lot of sort of back and forth On how fast they were So I think the current consensus

Is maybe in the teens of miles an hour Which is still fast I mean a human can only sprint at about 20 miles an hour-ish. If you're in decent shape for a pretty short distance, but the bigger thing for in terms of at least T-Rex and humans, because for some reason, that's the first place my head goes, even though we didn't coexist, is they're not nearly as agile. So, you know, a smaller animal wouldn't really have to worry about T-Rex, not because of its speed, but because of the agility and the ability to get into burrows and all those types of advantages.

But something like a T-Sarotops, the thing with T-Rex is it really, doesn't have to be faster than everything that lived with it. It doesn't have to be faster than all the hadrosaurs and all the ornithomimosaurs like gallomimus running around like the flocks of them in Jurassic Park. It did end up catching it in Jurassic Park, but it wouldn't have to because if it was faster than T-Sarotops, and we know that T-Rex did occasionally eat triceratops from bike marks on triceratops, that might have been all it needed. You know, it doesn't, it's like that. You don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to run outrun the slowest. that's also running from the bear sort of analogy.

And there was also the potential for younger Tyrannosaurus to be much faster. So even though the largest adults might not have been fast, some of the smaller ones, and they took a very slow growth curve for most of their adolescence, and then they had this big spike actually pretty similar to humans where we in the teenage years have this really big growth spurt. So a 10-year-old T-Rex might be able to chase down some pretty fast prey, whereas a 20 or 30-year old T-Rex might not be able to. That leads me to something that I don't think I've ever read before.

How long do we think dinosaurs lived for? Oh, yeah. It's pretty variable. So T-Rex was like around 30 years, are like the biggest ones that we have and also the oldest, not surprisingly, around 30 years. But there were some other dinosaurs like the allosaurids, so relatives of alasaurus, including like Carcaryodontosaurus, which is sometimes you'll see it like, it's even bigger than T-Rex, it's this one from Africa

and they have relatives in South America that they were also very large predators that had small arms too. Pretty similar to T-Rex in a lot of ways. But we think those might have lived like 50 to 60 years and the way they can tell that is they slice into the bone and they have

just like trees, rings in the bones that show you at this slower growth period presumably in the winter when things are a little bit slower. There's a little less food available and their bones grow little slower, just like tree rings do. And you can count those rings up and figure out how old they are. It's a little bit trickier with dinosaurs because they're hollow in the middle. So the older they

get, the bigger that hollow spot gets. But if you look at enough of them, you can kind of interpolate or extrapolate how many of those rings might be missing in the middle of the bone and get to an estimate. So yeah, some of those. And then sauropods, the long neck dinosaurs, are maybe the hardest ones. They don't have as good of those growth rings in them. Maybe because they were just growing all the time because they were so big. But we don't know exactly how old they would have gotten. A lot of people guess that they would have been, yeah, 60, 70, probably pretty old if they got to an adult size.

They wouldn't have had as much pressure on them to stay fast and at like peak physical condition because at that huge scale, the odds are they didn't have a lot of predators. So they might have had a lot of young dying, just like turtles on a beach trying to scamper, the ocean, but once they hit a certain scale, they might have just been big enough that they didn't have to worry about predators so much, maybe they just kept growing aging. Well, that's what I read, that the very large of sauropods probably didn't have any natural

predators because they were so large, which is an interesting thought. It is. I guess it's kind of like elephants, although I do know elephants occasionally get attacked by large groups of predators, but I think that's a pretty uncommon occurrence. Yeah, the size of dinosaurs is just... It's hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, yeah. In terms of other things that movies get right and wrong, really, if you start with Jurassic Park,

they get almost everything right because they were sort of the state of the science in 1993 in terms of their posture, their overall metabolic activity rate. You know, they weren't like slow and lumbering. Their tails aren't dragging. They've got a fair amount of intelligence. They've got, you know, herbivores eating plants. They're showing their teeth properly reconstructed. They're basically right, other than the scale of them are wrong a little bit.

Some of them are missing feathers. And you also get a couple of interesting choices like De Lafosaurus having a frill and spitting venom, which are just sort of way out there in terms of. Yes, I don't know why they decided to give that one a frill. I think I can understand the venom from a... I don't know. Maybe they just like the visual. I think so. I'm not sure. Yeah, that one seems to have been a bit of license, but... It could be another one of those. Well, they mixed in the cobra DNA, and we got this to Laphosaurus doing this strange thing.

Yeah, it could be. Could be. Yeah, I think it's... Depictions like Jurassic Park have really done a lot to move dinosaurs back into popular consciousness. And particularly, as you were saying, the more modern presentation, which I think emerged around the 60s and 70s, more modern understanding of dinosaurs as being relatively fast moving compared to how they've previously been thought to be and more intelligent. And obviously that makes for a more interesting depiction in media. It is interesting to see some of the, because I have seen some of the old, like early 20th century, like often cartoon depictions of dinosaurs. And they are, they are very different. I guess that depicts how they were sort of understood at the time. It's just kind of

lumbering, you know, dragging the tails and, uh, and also the posture was, was quite different as well. Yeah. Yeah, we often describe it as like the kangaroo posture because it's sort of like fully upright, at least the bike, you know, ones like T-Rex and stuff, sort of way upright, like a person wearing a T-Rex costume sort of stints more than anything. Yeah, whereas the more mon depiction is essential, well, I don't know how quite to describe it, but the more sort of the body is more closer to parallel with the ground. Yeah. Yep.

So almost like the head and the tail are the ends of a teeter-totter and they're sort of balanced around the hips and the feet. But just basically the way they show in Jurassic Park is the easiest way to describe it. Yeah. So if anything, it looks like the public presentation of dinosaurs has improved quite a bit with things like Jurassic Park and the BBC documentaries. So it is encouraging that science communication can sometimes work. Yeah. I guess. It's also, yeah, the connection between science and popular culture is very interesting, too,

because even something like T-Rex, that's like the scientific name. That's not a shorthand name for an animal. Like, you know, when you say a polar bear, it has a completely different scientific name. Whereas T-Rex, it stands for Tyrannosaurus, and then that becomes T-E-E. because you can always abbreviate the genus name, and then Rex is the species name. And I can't think of any other animal where people are as interested in the science

where they actually learn the scientific name of animals where basically every dinosaur is known by its scientific name, at least in English. I know in some other languages they have nicknames, but it's interesting, like Stegosaurus, it's Stegosaurus. Tricerotops is Triceratops. People are very involved with it. Yeah, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought about that aspect before, but I think one of the aspects there has to be that dinosaurs are only known through scientific research. So there aren't, they weren't pre-existing common names like there are for many other animals. Although it's also true that even less common animals that people wouldn't be familiar with, they'll still, like polar bears might be a good example, actually. That's not one that most people have much interaction with. Yeah, they still use a common name for it. But I think, I mean, there's also, I think, a tendency to compare new animals or new, potentially like, unfamiliar

animals to us or to a culture to existing animals that are familiar. An example that comes up from the Australian context actually would be koalas, which not so much here, but I think elsewhere and still sometimes you hear them call koala bears because they kind of look a little bit like bears, but they're not really anything like bears and not related to bears. But I think it's sort of natural for people to make that, make comparisons to things that they know about. But for dinosaurs, they're so very different that I think maybe that's less of a common thing.

But yeah, I don't know. I guess probably it's also a factor of the fact that dinosaurs popularized through museums. And so they tended to show, you know, the scientific names. And that's sort of caught on. And so that's what people call them. But yeah, that is an interesting phenomenon. That's a good point with the similarity to modern animals too, because I was thinking like there's the quote unquote saber-tooth tiger.

or saber-toothed cat, which also we know from fossils, but like you said, it's similar to a modern cat. So you can give it a nickname or, you know, there's things like terror birds, which are these giant, you know, sort of like ostrich creatures that were predatory dinosaurs, technically, that went extinct by the time we were talking about them at least. And, but they look like birds. So yeah, terror bird, you could come up with that name. Yeah, and some of the extinct megaphone, it tends to be called, just after modern versions, like the giant kangaroo or giant sloth would be another one. There's probably other ones.

I'm kind of lazy as a name, I suppose. But it's sort of easy to communicate, I guess, what it at least looks like, whether it's necessarily related or not. But yeah, dinosaurs, we haven't had that. So, yeah, it is nice to be able to refer to animals by more or less the proper names. It does get a lot more attention on them, too, when a new species is found because it's all of a sudden a new thing that you could talk about in common, like, vernacular, whereas if there's a new species of bird or something, it's like, well, nobody ever talks

about it by its name like that, so it's like, okay, it's just another hawk. Yeah, well, people don't typically distinguish the species of many animals anyway, so. That's true. Having a new one doesn't necessarily mean very much. Yeah, I think the last question we had was how can learning about dinosaurs help to learn about other fields of science. I think we've already kind of highlighted that a little bit because we've talked a bit about how other aspects of the, you know, the Mesozoic world, like the atmosphere, for example, and plant life and biochemistry affected dinosaurs and, like, potentially

would influence how they would behave today if we try to bring them back or things like that. So, I mean, this is the point I sort of made before that you can't just sort of pluck a creature completely out of its environment and expect to one. understand it. You need to understand the context in which it lived and that automatically brings in a whole bunch of other scientific fields. But yeah, did you have thoughts on this issue? Yeah, I do. So I think like you were saying, the environment itself around the animals is not only something that you need to understand to or understand the animal, but understanding the animal does help you understand some of the environment around it too because they're so interrelation.

So by studying dinosaurs, one of the most interesting things to me about dinosaurs is that the first dinosaurs sort of evolved in the shadow of a huge mass extinction from the Permian to the Triassic. And then when they became the dominant life forms on land on earth, it was in another great extinction, the largest extinction ever, basically, at least for land animals. and that was the Triassic to the Jurassic boundary. So then they like really took off there. And then they went extinct obviously and got replaced sort of in a way by mammals at the end of the Cretaceous. So they're sort of bookended both in terms of their rise and in terms of their extinction by these mass extinctions. And then there are these smaller extinctions along the way. And since they were around for so long, we don't really have that with very many other animals where you can

actually measure how these extinction events affected their evolution and affected their distribution around the world and sort of which forms succeeded the most. So I think that's a really interesting thing that you can look at, just sort of an overall evolutionary side of things. But in terms of their environment, there's also other factors like flowering plants, angiosperms evolved basically during the Cretaceous. So the Triassic and the Jurassic dinosaurs didn't have that selective pressure of these plants. available potentially for eating or replacing plants that they might have wanted to eat before or, you know, been biologically adapted to eating. So you see actually at the end of the Cretaceous

things like serotopsians like Triceratops and things like hadrosaurus, so hadrosaurus or the other lambiosaurus like Parasaurolophis were doing really well. They were diversifying a lot. They seemed to be evolving. There was a lot of new species coming about, whereas some of the other dinosaur species actually were declining. And so a lot of research in this area will look at, well, would the dinosaurs have gone extinct if the asteroid hadn't impacted Earth and, you know, kicked off this huge climate change for about a decade around the world and, you know, basically like nuclear winter, or were they already in decline anyway and maybe they would have gone extinct anyway? And I think, I tend to think that that's sort of an oversimplification

because dinosaurs were so diverse that really, yes, some of them were not thriving and other ones were doing really well because of this change in plants. But that change in plants seems to have affected like the types of teeth dinosaurs had, as well as which groups were doing really well. And you can, it's just, that's a very interesting piece. So maybe even just by looking at what's going on inside dinosaurs' mouths, we might be able to tell what's going on with the evolution of plants at that point in time. Yeah, and that's a really important aspect as well to understand the floor that existed.

But obviously, we know that technically dinosaurs didn't go extinct because we have them around today as birds. But I think it's, well, let me ask you this question. So do you think that, suppose, you know, there'd been no asteroid or equivalent sort of catastrophic event around that time, would there still be a place? I mean, you don't know how much it would have changed other things, but let's sort of assume that the rest of the ecosystem sort of changed similarly to how it eventually did. Would there still be a place in today's ecosystem for like non-avian dinosaurs? Or is it imaginable that they're still around? What do you think? Yeah, I think definitely, mostly because they were fairly adaptable.

They also were basically endotherms, so they were good at regulating their own body temperature, we think. They actually had maybe higher body temperatures than we do. And so they would have been able to handle hotter environments for sure. And in terms of whether or not, they could have survived ice ages, I think so, because they, again, they were pretty varied. Some of them made nests that they could sit on and incubate eggs, so they wouldn't have had that sort of pressure of, you know, the young would die on their own. And they had, a lot of them had feathers, so they had some good insulation. We know that there were dinosaurs that lived at the poles during the Mesozoic, so they could survive for basically months without much sunlight.

Right. And in pretty cold temperatures, potentially even in the snow, some people. people think. So yeah, I think they were very adaptable and they were pretty capable of surviving in a lot of these environments. And there isn't really anything around today that's that different in terms of temperature or things like that. The main difference is plants, honestly. So one of the big differences, we have a lot of grass land now. We didn't have grass in the Mesozoic. So that's another one of those funny mistakes some people make is they'll show dinosaurs like grazing on grass. There was no grass to be eaten in the Mesozoic. So they might have some different. difficulty today getting beyond these big grasslands, basically. They might not have much to eat trying to get across like the step or something like that. So that might be a barrier to them. But I think in general, yeah, most of the ecosystems today, they probably would have fit decently well in if they had survived. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, obviously it's ecosystems are so complicated. It's sort of hard to see the speculations. But yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about. I think we, one of the things that interest me is we don't, we don't see, well, I sort of said before, we don't see very many large reptiles anymore. But maybe that's not, maybe that's just, well, yeah, I mean, modern reptiles are also different to dinosaurs as well, being cold-blooded. So that's maybe not a fair comparison. But, yeah, anyway, it's interesting to think about.

Yeah, that's a good point. Because we do, whenever we're trying to look at dinosaurs and figure out what they might have been like on a biological level, we basically have to work between crocodilians, mostly, and birds. And they're both so different from dinosaurs, because like you said, crocodilians are mostly cold-blooded, they're mostly aquatic, and birds are mostly small, and they're hyper-specific adapted to flight. Even the flightless ones still have tons of those adaptations in their body. So that might tell us a little bit about a very specific subset of dinosaurs that were on

that same branch of the evolutionary tree. But for things like, yeah, like sauropods, a long-neck dinosaurs. It's like, we have nothing. Usually people use elephants. That's like the scientific equivalent. Yeah, that's like the best. No, not at all. Like they sort of are in a similar ecological niche, kind of,

but they're not even necessarily eating the same types of things at all. Well, actually, that actually raises a question. So, you know, the sauropods, at least pretty much all the ones I've seen, have very long necks. Whereas the large, large mammals that also, you know, herbiferous, The giraffe being an obvious exception, but most of them don't have very long necks. Why did sauropods have such long necks? Was it to reach up to trees, or what were they doing with them?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think in some cases it was to reach higher in trees, and that's just that typical niche partitioning, like with a giraffe, if you can reach high and they can't, you know, you can need something different. But in a lot of cases, they think that they didn't really raise their necks that high, and maybe it was an efficiency sort of gain, like sweeping back and forth. You don't have to move your huge body around if you just have to have to. to move your lightweight head.

It's just a funny life hack. But I think the bigger thing might be like why mammals can't because it does seem like it could be a big advantage. And one of the things that's really cool about dinosaurs and why it annoys me when people use the term dinosaur to like imply this like lower evolutionary state. You know, obsolete. Yeah, exactly. Or like, yeah, like Neanderthal.

People do the same thing. Yeah. Because dinosaurs could breathe in this amazing way that birds still can where it's, they They call it unidirectional airflow, where basically when they breathe in, they're not only filling their lungs, but they also fill all these air sacs in their body that sort of... I didn't know how else had air sacs. Yeah, yeah, especially sauropods. We can see the air sac, they call them diverticulate, I think. I can't remember.

But you can see the invasions of the air sacs into the vertebrae and into some of the other spots. So you can tell that they had these air sacs. The same thing happens in birds today, which is how you can tell the comparison. and so they would fill all their air sacs, and then when they breathes out, the air sacs fill the lungs, so they're still getting fresh oxygen as that oxygen leaves from the lungs too. So in that way, when sauropods breathe in and breathe out, they don't have to wait for that air to get all the way down their long neck, and they're not like sort of holding their breath that whole time. They're still exchanging oxygen. So the fact that us, you know, tidal breathers, as it's called, you know, things go in and they go out like the tide,

were limited in that way that dinosaurs aren't, so maybe that makes a limitation on our neck length that they didn't have. Yeah, interesting. It's just something I've wondered because, yeah, the body plan is quite different, especially if there's different aspects going on. Conversion evolution can sometimes mean that different types of animals adapting to a similar niche often can end up looking similar or having similar adaptations, flight being an example of that.

But, yeah, in the case of large herbal, The zoopause, the sauropods do look very different to large mammals that occupy. Well, I don't know if you can say similar, but at least comparable niches in terms of grazes and such. So, yeah, it's something that I've wondered about. Yeah, I don't think we have a good answer for it. Just like we don't have a great answer for why T.Rex had such small arms. Yeah, well, that's another one. It is very, it's almost like if you were to design a very sort of scary-looking predator,

T-Rex is pretty much it, except for the arms. The arms look like you've just, you're not put the effort in. Like, come on. Clearly, the arms need to be scary than that. It just doesn't look like it matches. You ran out of ink before you got to the arms. Yeah, it's very weird. And I was just reading it.

So it's thought that the arms were kind of vestigial, that they didn't really do much with them? Is that accurate? Yeah, that's one of the proposals. I've read so many different, I've read so many papers, and they're not converging on, like, usually in the scientific literature, you can sort of see a direction. direction to the study. For a while, the common belief was, okay, T-Rex had a huge head, and it, again, is sort of a teeter-totter with the tail, you know, like the front and the back. So if it had huge arms, then it would have been too front-heavy. So maybe as its head got bigger,

its arms got smaller. But we've recently found, like, more fossils, and we see that the arms started shrinking before the head really got to a point where that would make sense. so that isn't the answer and then there were one of the first hypothesis was they were like claspers for mating so that you know would grab onto the back of the female if it's the male to sort of like

get some stability during mating but it's not nearly strong enough to do that I've heard other hypotheses that like well they had pretty long claws so it could be that it's sort of a defense mechanism so if you're like if something if you're fighting something or trying to defend yourself if it gets beyond

your face, you're sort of open for attack in your neck area. So it would be useful to have something there to sort of defend yourself. And maybe the arms were useful for that, but not much else. So they didn't need to be that long. But I think in general, you're right. It seems that their evolution was focused on other things. And so the arms were less important. So putting resources into growing big, strong arms just wasn't there. Because we see it in other dinosaurs that had big impressive skulls too. Like I was talking about the carcaryodontosaurus, the allosaurus relatives. Carnotaurus famously has really, really small arms, even smaller than T-Rex.

And it seems like, well, it's probably, again, it was using its mouth for what it needed to use its mouth for. And usually another animal, its ancestors may have used its hands for part of that purpose and it no longer needed them. But yeah, we really don't know for sure. It's a big mystery. Yeah, well, another question actually that I have about the T-Rex is that there's, people talk about how much it was a scavenger versus a predator, and obviously those aren't mutually exclusive. One thing that I don't quite understand, maybe this just reflects my ignorance about about scavenging is, I mean, there's obviously nothing inconsistent about doing some scavenging if you're a predator.

We sort of talked about earlier that if, you know, you can find an easy meal, why wouldn't you take that? But if it was sort of primarily a scavenger, what I don't understand is why it would need such huge, powerful jaws. I would have thought that that would be particularly useful for immobilizing and catching prey. But is that necessarily correct? Like, is it a jaws that large consistent with being mostly a scavenger? Like, how does that work? I guess in the, in terms of the jaw strength, it would probably be sort of an argument for like a hyena type thing. Where like hyenas have fairly strong jaws too, and they're eating a lot of bun.

bone. So people have described, yeah. And T-Rex, too, we think we have coprolite or fossilized feces from a T-Rex that has a lot of bone in it. So presumably maybe they were eating a fair amount of bone. But I will say the hypothesis of T-Rex being a scavenger was the man who came up with that hypothesis. I asked him about it one day and he said, really that was meant to be a thought experiment. I didn't mean it to, I didn't know that. I didn't mean it to be like, take it off. So when it got published, he did publish it and people ran with it as like, okay, T-Rex is now a scavenger. You know, it wasn't actually a predator. But really, it's like, it's like you were saying, it probably was a scavenger some of the time. And it does have adaptations and the ability to scavenge. So it certainly

would have scavenged some of the time. It wasn't just this ferocious, I'm going to kill something and walk away from it. It was the opposite of that where it was like, I'm going to kill something and eat it. And if I stumble across something that's been a walked away from, I'll eat that too. Sort of, that's how I take it at least. Yeah, interesting. In Jurassic Park, they have this, I'm just going on T-Rex questions now. In Jurassic Park, they have this interesting, I don't know, ability mechanic thing where the T-Rex sort of only can see you when you move. I know that that's not that's not accurate about the T-Rex. I'm not really sure where that came from. I'm just wondering, is that even a thing for any type of dinosaur or even animal more broadly that vision is based on

movement? I'm not really sure how that would even work. It always seemed to be strange to me, but I just wondered whether there's a kernel of truth to that. I would say there's not a kernel of truth to the, just the simple answer. That's what I suspected. Yeah, because they did have some of the best vision of really any land animal. They had eyes that were bigger than basically any land animal, or I think any land animal, period. They were about the size of a grapefruit, like five inches, or I think, was it 15 centimeters or 12 centimeters in diameter? Yeah, really big eye. And weighed over a kilo, I think. So it's a very large eye. And we think that they mostly hunted by sight, by just their overall look, although they probably had a good sense of smell, too, which is another

funny thing in Jurassic Park because it can't smell them when they're, you know, right next to him, basically. So he probably could have smelled them. Yeah, so I wonder if T-Rex would recognize what we smell like relative to what it's used to, what its prey used to. It's a good point. So who knows? I guess there's always that out that it's too different. But yeah, the idea that it can't see you if you're right in front of it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me because it would still need to perceive its environment, whether that was moving or not. So it didn't seem a bit strange. But I just wondered where that even came from. I heard one time, where it came from. And it was some animal that mostly uses vision to detect motion,

which I want to say is a type of snake, but I'm not sure. It was something where it was like, it's mostly going by smell, but it can notice things that are moving by vision. So it's sort of like an animal that really isn't using its vision for much. And maybe it can still detect motion, but that's clearly not the case with T-Rex. It was definitely using its vision for a lot. Yeah. And I think I remember, it's it frogs that people were studying the vision where it's mostly based on recognizing flies or something. Maybe it wasn't a frog. Oh, interesting. It could have been frogs. Yeah. It goes back to the frog DNA ago. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, that would be, yeah, but, but anyway, yeah, I didn't think that made a lot of sense, but I was just wondering. Yeah, so,

I mean, a protester like that is going to need good eyesight, so yeah, that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. Especially then when they have raptors in the movie, which have good vision and, uh, yeah. Yeah, it's true because they're pretty close relatives. Yeah, it would be odd for that, such a dramatic difference when the niche isn't that much different. Anyway, yeah, so, you know, Jurassic Park mostly does pretty well, but there are a few things that they included in there for dramatic effect, I suppose. Although, yeah, the Vision one is particularly interesting because I don't know what the big dramatic payoff is. I guess it's the whole thing like, well, you have to be still, even though you want to run away kind of thing.

Mm-hmm. It might be, yeah, you can show it on screen, right? You can show them next to the T-Rex for a while in that dramatic moment. Well, what would the best advice be if a T-Rex decided that you looked like a good snack? What should you do? I always think that what I thought is why not just hide under something where it can't get you. It's not like it can grab you or anything. I mean, if it's a small space, its head won't fit, then it seems like that would work. But maybe there's a, maybe you have another idea?

I think you're 100% right because as people that, you know, study the mammals of the Mesozoa, sometimes point out, essentially while the dinosaurs were dominating the earth, the mammals spent most of that time in burrows, just hiding from all the stuff that wanted to eat them. So yeah, a burrow, if you could find one, would be a great choice. I think also they weren't sort of like if you're trying to run from an elephant, trying to sort of outmaneuver it in terms of back and forth, or like a gazelle running from a cheetah sort of thing. Like, can you turn faster than they can turn, which I think you could. And then, honestly, if you're running in any sort of environment that isn't an open savannah, there's going to be some kind of obstacle that hopefully you can

kind of get behind or climb. T-R-X isn't going to climb anything after you either. Yeah, well, that's what I was thinking, that there seem to be quite a few options that aren't always pursued, but I guess it would be a bit anticlimactic if the T-Rex comes and everyone just scurries up a tree or under a branch or something, and it can't get any of those. It could be kind of funny, I suppose, but, yeah. It's a good example of how, like, those, the overall. oversimplification of like it was the ultimate predator. It's like, well, was the ultimate predator of something, not of everything. Yeah, well, I think that comes back to this point about

understanding the context in which the dinosaurs live, because it doesn't, the idea of an ultimate predator doesn't even really make much sense, because things that are going to be advantageous in certain environments or niches or contexts won't be in others. Short of something that's like a shape shifter, I suppose. That's a bit far-fetched. You can't be the ultimate predator in every environment. So if you are able to move into an environment where the predator is not adapted, then that will be to your advantage. And I guess that's one area where humans are very good, because we are adaptable across a range for environments and very intelligent. And so able to sort of, you know, make those sorts of plans and deductions that can be to our benefit, which is one

reason why I always find it a bit, I mean, I think they do it quite well in the Jurassic Parker book where they explain that, you know, that they have very few people on the island. They don't really understand the dinosaurs very well, and it's been mismanaged and all this other stuff. So you can kind of understand how things go down. But the idea that happens in some of the sequels where the dinosaurs, like, get loose on the mainland, and then people have trouble dealing with them. I mean, it would be a bit of a shock, but the idea that, you know, particularly with modern firearms, we wouldn't be able to deal with dinosaurs very easily, I think is a bit silly. Yeah.

I guess that's another flaw in Jurassic Park occasionally, especially in the later movies, is that they seem to be bulletproof. It's a little weird. Yeah, well, I think that is a phenomenon of many monsters in modern movies, that they just kind of make them bulletproof. Although sometimes it's selective depending on what the writers need at a given time. But yeah, that's a little disappointing. Also just horror movies in general, right? The bad guy falls down, he just gets back up.

It doesn't matter what happened to him. Well, that could be a whole other episode that Fire. I think I talked a little bit about this on one of my episodes before, but firearms are not depicted very accurately in movies. Finally enough, maybe less accurately than dinosaurs some of the time. Oh, that's true. Like the people going flying through window, the conservation of momentum. That's a classic one, yeah, which is very bizarre.

Unless you're getting hit by a cannonball. You're probably not moving much. Yeah, so I think, yeah, in the battle between man and dinosaurs, man would, I mean, I think honestly, probably dinosaurs wouldn't exist because we would have, hunted them to extinction at least many of the large ones like we have with other mega forna let's be honest it's likely sadly enough and it is one of those things too where it's it would be hard for humans to coexist with any sort of large predatory dinosaurs so like you said we might just hunt them to extinction or they hunt us to extinction before we evolved all our tools to drive them to extinction maybe we'd still

be in trees they should have got our ancestors when they could but yeah exactly Oh, dear. Is there anything else you wanted to add or comment on? I think probably. I guess I do have, I am a little interested, too, in what you might think of in terms of the evolution of dinosaurs and not whether they would exist in today's environment, but if you have any opinions on, like, how they might change. Like, what sort of pressures do you see in today's environment if you plopped one of these old dinosaurs in it? is there anything you think might what the pressures on them might be? Hmm.

Oh, that is a hard question to answer. I think one of the made things would be that the world is, well, I was going to say the world is full of different species. I mean, humans are doing our best to undo that, but I mean, there's still a lot of species. And, you know, many niches are already quite full. So the challenge is going to be how do dinosaurs fit into that. So, I mean, you can have circumstances, obviously,

where an invasive species is introduced and it out-competes existing species like has happened with different species that were introduced in Australia, for example, like rabbits and foxes, cane toad being another example. But, you know, whether dinosaurs would be like that or whether they would just struggle to find a niche in modern ecosystems is a bit hard for me to say. one thing is that I do tend to think that because they were adapted to such different environments, it seems like they probably would struggle in a lot of modern environments. Just, yeah, because the plant life is different, the atmosphere is different, the animals they're interacting with are different.

So just plopping them down, I find it hard to imagine that they're going to become invasive in many environments. But there are lots of environments, so maybe there's some. I tend to think that the smaller dinosaurs probably have more of a chance because they don't require as, you know, they don't have to eat as much, basically. The larger ones is always, there's so much, the trophic pyramid, is that what it's called? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that has to sit beneath them in order to support, like, one large carnivore.

And all of that kind of food chain has to kind of work biologically, like none of them can drive the others to extinction and so forth. It's sort of a delicate balance, right? So the smaller dinosaurs, I think, would probably find it easier. But, you know. It's a great point. which case, maybe they could adapt to similar environments that we already see reptiles or small birds, small birds in. But that's also kind of less exciting.

Yeah. Less exciting. One thing that, one thing we haven't really talked about are marine dinosaurs, or I think many of them weren't actually dinosaurs, but like pleasiosaur and things that lived around the same time. I have very little idea of how viable those would be in, in today's oceans. Oh, yeah. So that's another interesting. I mean, depending on who you ask, maybe there are some of them out there. still. Oh yeah, like lockness. Yeah. Sitting around in locks that didn't exist when they were locked and it doesn't really make very much sense, but you know, it's a nice idea. Yeah. But yeah,

honestly, though, if there were, if there were to be like dinosaur or dinosaur era animals that existed, it would be somewhere in the oceans. Because what was it? It was the, what was that fish that was discovered only in the 20th century? The celacanth, that's the one, yes, which is just insane that that was still around when people thought it was. extinct like hundreds of millions of years ago. So that would be the place where I think maybe maybe they something could still be around. But yeah. Like the movie the Meg. Yeah, I haven't seen that. But well, yeah, that's the thing about some of those movies that the idea that there is some you know, some species out in the ocean that we didn't know about is the kind of plausible.

But then they always make it too extreme and too to kind of over the top, especially when they make them so large that again they would have to eat so much that it's sort of a bit harder to understand how that would work. Yeah, there's a really good point about them fitting into today's ecosystems because usually I think people think, of course, if T-Rex was around today, it could eat anything. So of course it would thrive. But really, like you said, it would have to manage to fit into that ecosystem and eat so much. That's a very demanding and sort of unlikely situation to get into, whereas if you could have some small animal that mostly ate, it was omnivorous. You know, it might be able to survive on multiple different plants and didn't need to eat the

entire top of the trophic pyramid in order to survive. That's a much more likely situation for something that could survive today. So it won't be the meg at the bottom of the ocean. It'll be like some really small ichthyosaur or something that went under the radar. Although, I guess the difficult thing with reptiles, unlike the celicants, is that they all breathe air. So they all have to come to the surface. So presumably with all the fishing we've done all over the world, we would have accidentally caught one of these at some point. Yeah, probably. Well, one can dream.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's probably a good place to end it. Well, yeah, it was an excellent discussion. I certainly learned some things, so that was fun. Yeah, that was great. maybe if you wanted we could each just say a bit about our podcast. Sure, yeah. A little spook at the end.

I'll let you go first. Oh, cool. Sure. Well, I, again, my name's James. I run the Science of Everything podcast. I mean, if you just Google the Science of Everything podcast, you should be able to find my website there. On my podcast, I cover a wide range of topics, so it's very much a generalist podcast.

I like to kind of pick a topic and then cover it in some depth. So, for example, I was mentioned, I did one on biochemistry of nutrition recently or, yeah, of metabolism, particularly. So talked about the different types of biochemical reactions and how the different types of molecules are processed by the body and so forth. And so, you know, I'll pick a topic like that and go through that in an hour or so. So if that's the sort of thing that sounds interesting to you, check out my show. And by the way, I haven't done an episode on dinosaurs yet, but it is on the list of things to cover. But one of the things I wanted to do first was cover the geological time scale and talk about the time period when dinosaurs lived because I don't think you can understand it very well without understanding that. So there's a few prerequisites I want to cover first, but we will get there someday.

Nice. Yeah. It's a fantastic show. And my show is called I Know Dino. It's K-N-O-W-D-I-N-O. So it's a rhyming fun thing for I know about dinosaurs. And every week my wife and I talk about dinosaur discoveries. There's a new dinosaur discovered almost every week.

We're currently in the golden age of dinosaurs. That's a fun fact. Most people don't realize. They think we've already found all the dinosaurs, but it's not true. We're still finding new dinosaurs all the time. And there's also always new research going on about things like, you know, was Spinosaurus a swimmer? Or was it a terrestrial predator sort of thing? So if you're interested in dinosaurs, I recommend our podcast if you're looking for a new podcast.

and you can find it at I know dino.com or if you just Google Dinosaur podcast, we should pop up there as well. And yeah, we can talk about dinosaurs, learn about dinosaurs together. Awesome. Well, thanks very much for the conversation. It was very interesting. So that's the end of the discussion that I had.

Hopefully you enjoyed that. There will be more coverage of dinosaurs in the future, perhaps in a year or two when I get around to that. For those who are wondering about the other series, that we've been working on lately, such as diet and nutrition and the first climate change episode, both of which I've mentioned in recent episodes, they are still coming out soon. So the first climate change episode I'm hoping to release in January, that's taken lots and lots of research, but it's finally coming together. So look forward to that. That'll be coming out soon.

Diet and nutrition as well that I promised a few months ago will be coming out hopefully early next year. Another thing to look forward to is the follow-up episode to General Relativity in our series there. So there are quite a lot of episodes in the pipeline. So don't worry. Recently had a lot of things going on with moving house and other stuff. So unfortunately, I haven't had quite as much time for the podcast as I would have liked, but never fear the science content will continue. So thanks very much for listening. If you want to support the podcast, you can do so in a number of ways. You can leave a review on iTunes or Spotify or the aggregator of your choice. Those are always appreciated. You can make a financial contribution to the podcast via becoming a Patreon supporter,

or you can make a one-off donation via PayPal. Financial contributions are greatly appreciated, and at the moment I'm using them to support a team of editors that I have working on adding images to the audio podcast for uploading to YouTube. And that's a project that's been going on for over a year now. And we're at the point where I'm ready to start uploading to the channel. So that will be exciting. I'll make a special announcement when I actually do that. But that's what your financial contributions will go to support the editing work there to hopefully bring the podcast in a slightly modified format to a new audience. So that's really exciting. And we'll be starting on that in a month or two getting those uploaded. You're also very welcome.

to send me an email. My address is FODs12.gm.com. That's FODS-12 at gmail.com. Feel free to send any suggestions, feedback, or just let me know how you listen to the show. So thanks once again for listening. Take care, everyone. I'll talk to you next time.