The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - On The Origin of Smooching, Mausoleum Madness, Chubby Cheetahs

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Amanda Reed and Riley Black join the show to discuss the fat American cheetah, weird mausoleum culture, and where the heck kissing came from. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dustin from Sacred Symbols here, have you ever wondered what it actually feels like to have a better laptop like the DellXPS powered by Intel Core? With its premium thin and light design, it feels smooth in your hands. The responsive touchscreen keeps things fast and precise for easy scrolling and swiping. And with long-lasting battery life, you get non-stop energy to keep working without constantly hunting for a charger. Built for those who want better, the DellXPS built for you. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles,

we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Amanda Reid. And I'm Riley Black. Riley and Amanda, both welcome back to the show. It's been too long on both friends.

Amanda, of course, you were regular for a while, and it's been a little bit, but hopefully this will be the first of many return appearances from you. So welcome. It feels good to be back doing what I was born to do, which is speaking for 20 minutes straight with pauses for jokes. Wow. So true. Put it on my CV. And Riley, we always love having you on. and I'm really excited to have you here to promote your new book. Would you tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah, I mean, that's always a great reason to come on these things, just like I have a new book. I keep writing books so I can actually talk to my friends and colleagues on their podcasts more often. So the new book is Tyrant Lizard Queen. And as you might guess from the title, we are doing a sort of subversive look at T-Rex, using all our latest science to talk about how this dinosaur actually lived from hatching to adulthood. but challenging a lot of the traditional tropes that this is just like a big monster that wants to eat everything. It's really using narrative to get into the life of a particular female T-Rex nickname Snagletooth and all the trouble,

good and bad that she gets into as she wanders around this ancient environment. I'm so excited. And the title's so great. I decided to just go for it. It was one of these things where I mentioned this explicitly in the preface. It is a bit of a poke. And we're doing toxic uri dinosaurs, basically like, yes, it is scientific. I've been doing this for so long. The reference section is incredibly long.

Everything I tried to research as much as I could. But I was tired of seeing the same dinosaur stories. So this is the trans lesbian dinosaur epic that I wanted to see in the world. Who is she? Who is she? Ladies and gentlemen, her. I can't wait. Great.

Well, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I'm in this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarn, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned most week actually was, except we don't actually pick a winner anymore. I feel like it's time for me to stop having this bit where I explain that we don't do it, except when we have a guest on who's been on the show before for the first time in a while,

and I leave that out, then at the end they're always like, wait, we didn't pick a winner. We didn't pick a winner. That's on me. That used to be a thing we did. Anyway, it's because we're all winners here. Life is hard enough without two people not winning every episode. So that's my stance. Amanda, for the first time in far too long, what is your tease?

All right. I've been waiting to do this. All right. So my tease is, thank you neoclassicism for modern mausoleons. Yeah. I do love a mausoleum. I feel like there's been some, I mean, Mausoleum's always a great, you know, atmospheric set piece in a film, but several recent films came to mind.

I mean, Knives Out, Wake Up Dead Man, which I thought was as somebody with religious trauma, I adored in particular great use of mausoleum. And also great use of hot priest. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Riley, what's your tease? So my tease is North America's Cheetah.

that got fat on fish. Ooh. Can't wait. Me getting all you can eat sushi from Kura sushi. I relate a lot to this cat as we get into it. Just leave the salmon. Just leave it in front of you, please. It's like, have I put away my 15 plates to get my free little prize yet?

My tease is literally why is kissing? Why is it? Amazing. Yeah. I'll jump in today first. So yes, literally why is kissing? Why it do? Why should do that?

We're going to start by talking about the 2026 Ig Nobel Awards. I guess maybe it's Ig Nobel because it's a Nobel Prize, but I feel like Ig Nobel. I always want to say Ig Nobel. Yeah. Who knows? Who cares? Anyway, they were recently announced. Of course, I think most people who listen to Weirdest saying are probably already familiar

with these awards. But in case you're not, buckle up. You're going to love them. it's a ceremony that honors research that sounds ridiculous and sometimes is kind of ridiculous, but also gets people talking from their own website. Their goal is to make people laugh, then think. They say we hope to spur people's curiosity and to raise the question, how do you decide what's important and what's not?

And what's real and what's not in science and everywhere else. And I love that. I feel like in prepping this episode, I was thinking about how these awards and then the British Medical Journal's Christmas edition, which is, I've also talked about on the show before, where it's all real research. It's not fake. They're not satire. But they sort of, they do a cheeky Christmas journal edition where it's like all your kind of silly stuff that isn't actually arguably a great use of your time. Yeah, they love a cheeky Christmas over there. And so the science stuff is like, let's do the weird issue. Exactly. And I love that they do that. And they're always such

amazing things in there. And now I'm like, in getting this episode together, I was like, ooh, the autumn approaches, the cool crisp air, Halloween, and the BMJ Christmas edition. And I can't wait. So you'll be hearing some more weird research. Of course, you hear weird research literally every other week on the show, but that in particular. Anyway, the Igno Bell's just announced as of when I'm recording this. And there were some highlights this year that I'll run through, though I am going to focus on one particular research project that was in here. But just, you know, speed run. The economics prize was a study that found evidence that upper class people are more likely

to engage in unethical behavior, including snatching candy from children. You don't say. I literally am like, fork found in kitchen. Yeah, exactly. How do you think they get to be upper class? But, yeah, we love being able to use the headline. that rich people are more likely to steal candy from a baby. Medicine, that award was for an aerodynamic study of nose blowing.

It's horrible. Which was actually from a 1977 paper. It was awarded posthumously RIP Dr. Takahara. We love research into how to blow a nose. Biology, this one's interesting because I looked and the study was actually retracted, but not because the data is bad. So this was on the defense behavior of venomous snakes. and the researchers were doing a bunch of stuff to basically try to incite snake bites. Okay.

Insight snake to bite to look at how different factors like temperature and like time of day, body size and age of the snake, how all of these things factor into the likelihood that a human encounter with a snake is going to end with snake biting you. And that is, you know, a real and interesting question. It did, the study did involve them in their way. words, softly stepping on snakes at different locations in the snake's body. It really seems that they were quite thoughtful about it. And again, it's not like there's no merit. Sometimes you see animal studies and you're like, okay, you just wanted to bong a snake

on the head and get funding for it. There's a reason to want to know how much foot pressure on a snake makes a snake fight a person. But apparently the study was retracted when there was some blowback about whether the ethical reviewed board approval they had had covered stepping on snakes. And so perhaps more on that on a later date, but they do have this ignoble award for their retracted study. But they do contest that that retraction. And like I said, there's no, the data wasn't falsified.

It's just sort of a disagreement on the justification of step it on snake softly. Controversy about treading on snakes. Yeah, yeah. Don't tread on snake. No step of snake, please. So wow. It is literally, the retraction should just be no step a snake, please. Right, no stepy.

That's it. No stop. The physics award was for attempts to design a splash-free urinal. Okay, wow. Yeah. Don't know how those attempts did. I didn't read the paper, but they tried. The technology award was for such a great phrase, 3D necro printing.

I love that. Yeah, yeah. Scientists used the proboscis of a female mosquito as a nozzle for a tiny 3D printer. That's great. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And this was actually, before they won the award, my husband Oliver had sent me, he has an email throughout of just weird fact ideas.

And he had sent me this one, and it was on my list. So maybe I'll circle back to that one eventually. I did. I mean, that feels like one that, like, I was about to say, I wish that H.R. Geiger were still alive for you about that's like, he might have already had one. Like, it's just this rediscovery. R.I.B., you would have loved the Barboscis printer. Yeah.

Well, and I, there was an episode at this point. a few years ago where I talked about a study that was basically just like a proof of concept for using dead spiders in soft robotics, like using them as the claw grasper. And I thought that was so interesting. And I also remember there being backlash of people saying this is necrocapitalism. It's going to lead to the use of dead bodies as robots. And I was like, oh, man, there's so much I'm worried about with. regard to capitalism. And I think that's a leap, man. I think we're already there. It's like,

there's the thing to be concerned about. And then it's not being caused by people studying spider graspers. Just tried to have a take that day. And it just wasn't it. Just wasn't it on that Tuesday. Okay. So the award for all faction, one of the great things about these awards being silly and made up is that, you know, they have sort of the big categories like venison in physics. But then every year there are a few where it's just like this year's award for olfaction. There was a study on basically surveying parents on how they felt about their children's odors as the children got older, not following the same parents, but like surveying parents with kids of different ages.

And basically showing that, you know, as is very common knowledge, parents think that their babies smell great. It turns out, shockingly, parents don't also think their teenagers smell great. I do remember that one day, like, in the van where it's like, I wasn't sending him with deodorant. What do you want me to do about this? Sorry, just 5% stinkier than normal. Yeah. And yes, this study did find that odor pleasantness was found to decrease as a function of children's age. And this was the same, you know, regardless of the sex of the parent and the sex of the child. And they were suggesting, you know, maybe it's particularly important that babies smell pleasant to us because we need to care for them. And it's less important that we

care for teenagers in that same intimate way. So as they start to get smellier, we also start to be less immune to their stink, which is delightful. There was another award for. for the Peace Prize this year, documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike. So these researchers, I may do a deeper dive on this sometime because it is a really fun one. And listeners, by the way, if any of these, you're like, Rachel, please do a whole episode. You can always email me at Rachel at popsight.com.

Also, you can email me just to say you like the show. Sometimes, listen, to be a little vulnerable, sometimes I forget people listen to the show and like it. So you can always send me a nice note and it really makes me feel very happy. Anyway, so... I mean, tell creative people you like their stuff. There should be more of them. I know, I know.

I really tried to be very earnest and unashamed with reaching out to people whose work I like being like, you're good. I like it. Because I know that that always makes me so happy. Send Rachel Fanmail 2026. So anyway, yes. This study, they were basically like, okay, so we know that when you look at the friend friend dyad, the relationship between you and that friend. If you ask sort of what qualities you want your friend to have, you're going to say you want them to be like nice, probably. And then if you ask sort of jet in a more general sense without

any additional prompting, you know, how kind do you want your friends to be, you're going to answer thinking of how they treat you. So you're going to say you want them to be kind. But if you specifically ask people, how do you want your friends to be to your enemies? Then you value a friend who will, you know, absolutely kill someone for you. And then that's, it's one of those things where it's like, again, fork found in kitchen. I mean, my best friend, Amy, truly one of the kindest people in the world. People talk about her when she's not there about how incredibly just kind she is, net positive to the world. wonderful human.

Like, when I just closed to her the behavior of a bad man in my life, she was like, okay, so you want to die? Right. We ride at dawn. And by we, I mean me. And I was like, wow, it didn't even occur to me. Which always makes it difficult when you're in a situation, right, because it cuts the other way where you're friends with somebody and somebody has wronged them or at least they feel

that way. But you don't side with your friend. You see the other person's argument. You have to kind of talk to your friends like, I think you might be in the wrong on this one. And it's like approaching a wild animal. It feels like it'd be so careful. Control Z, control Z, undo. Undo. Undo.

I remember there was a video a few years ago that I think was Caleb Huron, but may have been another creator. But it was basically, it was like, you know, POV, your friend is telling you about who's wrong them. And they are definitely wrong and it's it's them going like yeah right no and i mean it would be different if no yeah right

right and you know maybe in a situation where no yeah i was like that's so real oh my gosh one more before i get into the main story just too special not to share their award this year for soil science um was for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then them up after two months. So this is from the researchers talk, they're writing. I'm about to read some quotes. We watched as the two young boys stuck their shovels in the ground and painstakingly dug up the remains of the underpants. Most of the organic cotton brief had decomposed in the two months that the underpants had been buried. The worms, insects, and bacteria ate most of our underpants. They exclaimed, we have good soil. So yeah, basically these researchers, I think,

They were in Sweden. They were somewhere in Scandinavia. Oh, no, sorry. They were in Switzerland. My apologies. So these Swiss researchers, they wanted to do, they wanted to get citizen science help on studying soil. And so they wanted to ask a bunch of people to bury some fabric and then unburry it.

And they were going to get soil samples. They were going to get these fabrics back. And looking at how they had decomposed in that amount of time was going to help them get information about the health of the soil. And they were like, okay, so we can like send people cotton squares. And then they were like, how do we get people interested in this? And then they realized that cotton underpants with elastic edges would be, in their words, both intriguing and practical.

And they said, our suspicions proved correct. So they announced the project and people all over Switzerland jumped at the chance to fill the 1,000 spots in their study. They sent out a thousand pairs of identical underpants. The people took soil samples. They buried the underwear. And then, yeah, they correlated all of that data with the degradation of the underpants. And they found that it was a pretty good indicator for soil health, the ability of the soil to break down this organic cotton. And apparently it got such incredible media coverage that more than 25 countries ended up,

also participating. And just to leave you with one quote from the researchers, hopefully the sensory experience of recovering a decomposed pair of underwear from their own land has inspired the participants to see soil as a living system and a vital resource and empowered them to serve as conscientious soil stewards. If that isn't a perfect encapsulation of what the Ignoble Awards is great at, I don't know what it is. That's beautiful. I mean, and what a good pitch for citizen science, right?

It's like, hey, want to help science? Burry some underwear. It's a good activity. I like this. But today I'm going to talk about the 2026 Prize in Biomechanics. The award was for devising a more precise definition of kissing. Oh, okay. So this comes from a study published in January that was trying to come up with a way to study the evolution of kissing.

So Riley, Amanda, why do you think kissing exists? Ooh, because licking the sweat off of each other is a little too crazy nasty. See, I'm going to say like, oh, please. No, no, no, please go ahead. Okay, well, I mean, I've given this some thought as I've had my descent into the realm of BDSM and things. I think it's because, you know, we're kinky little freaks as animals. And we have a lot of air endings. They're sensitive.

it just feels good to do. If there's something that feels good, we will find a way to do it and do it repeatedly. There are other benefits that go with it, but at least the initial sparks. See, let's see what that feels like. I think it was probably pretty simple. Yeah. So the thing is that we don't know, but that is quite in line with, I think, the mainstream thinking about how this happened, or at least, you know, one of the many reasons why it happened.

But yeah, we don't actually know when kissing started. what for and why. And it would be weird to time travel back to try and do. Yeah. You might stop it from happening if you tried to do that. Imagine like going back to the fertile crescent and being like, so there's this thing called kissing, guys. Who wants to smooch me? What if we kissed in ancient Mesopotamia?

It's like we just invented bronze. What are you talking about? What is this smooching? Well, so we do know that kissing is old. Mesopotamian texts show that romantic kissing was already a thing 4500 years ago. And, you know, most of the scholars who have worked in that are like, and you know that by the time they were writing about it,

it wasn't like brand new. It wasn't like somebody was like, writing barely exists, but you know what I'm going to document this thing we just started doing? And I'm not even going to say, you know this thing we just started doing. Yeah. So it had been around for a while. And of course, romantic kissing isn't the only kind. There's something that gets shared kind of meme-like that in ancient Rome, there were three categories of kiss.

That's an oversimplification. That's not really how it worked. They did, however, have multiple words for kiss in a way that I think is still illustrative of this point. So a social peck on the cheek was called an osculum. That just means little mouth. So just pucker up, basically. Wow. And like, yeah, tells you the function.

Yeah, yeah. So again, in this meme oversimplification, Bathium is often referred to as an intimate but closed mouth kiss. It's actually just that this word became very popular in sexy poetry around the first century BC. And we study a lot of that poetry because it was so horny. If you study the classics, you know the poetry I'm talking about. So anyway, Bathium was just like another word for kissing.

It may have, it was probably borrowed from another language group. And it was probably less that it referred to a specific type of a kiss than that. It just, you know, it also popped up and it's got sort of a survivorship bias because of all the horny poetry. Then suavium connotes sweetness. And contextually, it seems like could be loving or corny, but like a sweet kiss, you know, not just a peck. So anyway, all of that is to say, no, it's not actually true that ancient Rome had these three tidy categories of kisses. and you had to check off which one you were getting. But they did have multiple words for kiss.

And to that point, there are many types of kiss. And romantic kissing is almost certainly, I would say, certainly, the more recent invention. And it's less common than we in America, and I think people in the Western world more broadly might assume. One 2015 study tried to comb through a bunch of anthropological texts to see who kisses and who doesn't, meaning like romantic kisses on the lips. And again, this question of what is a kiss keeps coming up and being kind of a problem, which is part of this recent study I talked about. So they found that 90% of the cultures they looked at had parent-child kisses,

but that just under half had romantic kisses on the lips, which is less than I would have thought. Yeah. I think because of just sort of the ubiquitousness, of them in most Western culture and in our media just makes it seem like, well, yeah, people smooch on the lips. And that's, you know, apparently not true everywhere. But again, this comes back to like, okay, but romantic kissing on the lips is just one

kind of kiss. In the examples of places that don't kiss is one culture where they nibble on eyebrows seductively. And I'm like, is that not a kiss? Like, nobody, like, they're not consumed. the eyebrow that is lip contact to face. Again, there's just sort of this obsession with specificity of the romantic kiss on the lips. There's some reasons for that that I'll get into in a second. But getting to this new award-winning study, these researchers wanted to reconstruct the evolutionary

history of kissing. But that meant deciding what they were looking for when they went looking for kisses in animal behavior literature, because they basically they wanted to look at a bunch primates and see who do we have on the record as kissing. Yeah, I was wondering about that. That's distributed amongst our relatives. Yeah. And they landed on this definition, which is a non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific oral oral contact with some movement of the lip slash mouth part and no food

transfer. Which is important because food transfer is super common. Lots of animals, including, you know, non-mammals, ants transfer food. mouth to mouth, bees vomit at each other. You know, we've all heard of this. I'm surprised there's no mention of tongue in this definition. Well, yeah. And so it's interesting you mention that because to my knowledge,

the only non-human animal we have seen, we've clocked using tongue, is the bonobo. Bonobos. Our closest cousins along with chimps and they are the horny ones. But yeah, apparently the tongue is a pretty uncommon thing. It's part of the divide, right? When is it licking and when is it kissing? Wow.

Like maybe animals only get into the fronching when the scientists stop staring at them. Yeah, observation bias. Bonobos will do anything in front of the scientists. That we know. Bonobos, the exhibitionists of the animal kingdom. Certainly they don't care. Do they like it in particular? Maybe.

But certainly it doesn't bother them. They're just doing it to prank the scientists. So, like, we know. Normally we don't. You nasty, you like to watch. You love this. Yeah. So food transfer is really common, so they need to specify that this is not about pushing shoot-up food into, from one mouth to another.

And then the non-agonistic, aka friendly part is important because there's a fish called a French grunt. They're named that because they grind their teeth and it sounds like grunting. I feel really kind of personally called out. But anyway. Right. I love a great. Yeah. As somebody who wears a very structured nightguard for my TMJ caused teeth grinding, I feel seen.

Yeah. But they do kiss fighting. They just kind of open their maws at each other and that's fighting. So, yeah. Oh, yeah, like sarcastic fringe heads. Yeah, yeah. Especially these goby-like fish that have these big mandibles that reach outwards, like wings almost. And they mouth to fight with each other.

Yeah. That's been being way too close. For emphasis. Yeah. So this definition may seem exclusionary to many types of kisses, you know, but nose kisses, which are very common in different cultures. And contrary to popular belief is not like, I think the, what's the common explanation is, oh, so your lips don't freeze together.

It's a different thing. It's a thing you do when you see someone you like and you're all bundled up and you'll rub your little noses together. Or you're pressed to your nose their face and take a nice little. sniff. It's not, it doesn't mean they don't know how to kiss on the lips, guys. It's, come on. But it's very common. There are a lot of cultures where some kind of nose kiss is a thing. Of course, like I said, you know, nibbling on an eyebrow, who's to say that's not a kiss? The kiss on the lips, lip to lip, is kind of uniquely interesting because it provides such a rich opportunity for disease transmission. So that's like a major downside, right? Whereas kissing somebody elsewhere,

Yeah. You know, it's not mysterious that animals like to touch each other. And, you know, Riley, to your point earlier, the lips are a sensitive patch of skin. So using your lips to touch another animal, especially in a pro-social, friendly, and then sensual and romantic way, seems kind of inevitable, right? But swapping spit is less so. And seems, you know, much less common in the animal world. And certainly, like I said, that sort of deep tongue kissing is almost exclusively human. caveat bonobos

who will not, who say step aside humans. Anyway. Yeah, and then is it like convergence or as a homology? If you lost ancestors along the way? Yeah, who was tongue kissing? How far back does it go? Right, did chimpanzees lose it and they had it? I think they did.

I think that, you know, the whole chimpanzee versus binobo thing. I know it's like over-symobile five. Bonobos aren't literally the most peaceful creatures, creatures on earth and chimps aren't. Chimps can have friends. you know, it's grossly oversimplified, but they are like, one of them does war and the other one has a lot of oral sex. So there is, they are. The balance is a bit different between the sex and violence.

And I often feel like there's maybe some lesson for us in terms of not what is, not that one is more innate to humanity than the other, but that, you know, cultures form and norms solidify. And maybe chimps lost tongue kissing. and gained war, and we should be careful that we don't lose tug kissing because we certainly have war. So, like, we got to watch out. I mean, that's all part of it, right? Because they're equidistant from us, evolutionarily. They're closer to each other than neither is to us.

So it's like it's too different, as you say, like pathways and who knows how lined up that way. It's option not being locked in. So this debatable but sensible definition of kissing was on hand. And so they were able to look at research on old world apes and monkeys. And they basically did a phylogenetic analysis, which is, you know, you create those branching trees of connection between different related species. And they essentially treated kissing as an evolutionary trait. So the same way you might try to track, you know, what common ancestor a trait like bipedalism came from.

They threw kissing up there. And they used statistical analysis to try to infer from the existing data how probable it was for various ancestors of those species to also have kissed mouth to mouth. without transferring food. Of course, this is all very theoretical, especially because primates literally create new trends all the time. There are studies about chimps deciding to start putting grass in their ears and butts because it's fashion. So kissing could have come up multiple times in multiple places in multiple species.

But these researchers do think that this very odd mouth-to-mouth swapping spit kissing is probably a pretty ancient trait. They think it goes back to ancestors at least around 17 million years ago, if not more, which would thrillingly suggest that ancient humans had the cultural know-how

to French kiss Neanderthals. Yeah, that's great for us. I too have also French kiss Neanderthals. Too many, in fact. But yeah, there are, as for what this tells us about why kissing exists, it doesn't. And it really doesn't,

it doesn't even tell us when it arose or how, you know, this is more of sort of, they wanted to try to create the model for studying kissing this way. They want to get more data. They're really interested in trying to, you know, trace it back evolutionarily. There are lots of reasons to stumble into kissing. Very common suggestions are that it started with pre-chewing food for babies and that that's how the parent-child kiss became so ubiquitous because we know that babies are very lip-oriented and that kissing is a very important bond. My kid learned how to kiss not too long ago.

He just full open maws and puts his open mouth on your face and is very satisfied that he is kissed. And it's very cute and gooey. And so, yeah, I can definitely, I feel uniquely qualified at the moment to say that, yeah, babies definitely always had their mouths all over their parents faces, especially, you know, pre-human and, you know, ancient humans who were maybe pre-chewing food because they didn't have an immersion blender like I do. Yeah. Sharing that microbiome. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. No, definitely. It makes sense for that kind of contact to be happening a lot. And so then, you know, it becomes a thing that maybe you do sometimes even when you're not pre-chewing food and it's healthy and nice and social. And then culturally, eventually it becomes something that people. people do even not with babies. And then one day suddenly somebody French kisses, you know, behavior is wild. But anyway, another possibility that comes up is that it might be like a

lingering holdover from when we groomed each other socially, because most of our hair disappeared, as did thankfully most of our body parasites. So you were just kind of running out of real estate of places to lovingly, you know, pick bugs off of your beloved skin, sometimes with your your mouth. And so maybe just we sort of, the mouth was just the last place that it made sense to do that. But yeah. So it's like there are many reasons why this could have happened. It certainly is a very strong, you know, as evolutionary psychologist would say, fitness indicator.

And I don't mean fitness as in finding the most fit partner, but fitness for you as incompatibility, because smell is important. Hygiene is, of course, important. And, you know, we have all of these subtle indicators to show us that a potential mate is not full of plague that they shower and, you know, that they have a pillowcase on their bed, you know, things like this. And it's not nazy. Yeah. And so. having this kind of close contact where you cannot hide poor hygiene or just basic compatibility

in terms of like said preference does kind of make sense as like a thing that people do romantically. I mean even mechanically, right? Because if you think if someone's, I don't want to say a bad kisser, but just like a compatible kisser, that's kind of like, okay, if this is going to take work. I think I might want to go elsewhere. Like, Eros, it's not. sometimes arrows is innate, but you can't always teach arrows.

So true. Yeah. It's really, it's, listen, I kissed a lot of, a lot of people, many of whom I shouldn't bother kissing in my life. I can only remember one time that the kiss itself was what made me be like, oh, no, this is going to work. But it was a strong reaction. And in retrospect, correct.

So listen to you. See, here you're thinking about the date I had on Friday, we were shot. getting weed smoke to each other. It's like, does this count as kissing? We are passing something. Well, see, according to this, no, I would say, yes. Exactly, right? That's why we need a category to start from.

We're going to move those error bars to the sock. Yeah, yeah. One thing I do want to end with is just that there are non-primates that kiss. So, prairie dogs kiss as a form of greeting. The two rodents will press their mouths together, sometimes briefly, press their tongues. And like their teeth kind of click. Anyway, the thing is, they do this to get social information about each other. But sometimes they kiss and that kiss tells them that they're from different social groups, so then they fight. And I really love that. It's just sort of a,

just to, you know, to underline everything I have just said about how kissing is kind of a weird thing that we fell into and it probably arose for reasons that have very, little to do with why we do it now. And I just love the idea of these prairie dogs. They kiss. It's adorable. The kiss isn't like, oh, hello, my beloved. It's like a, oh, hello, who are you?

And sometimes the answer is my nemesis. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's all I have to say about kissing today. And, you know, thank you to the ignobiles for giving us this delightful, delightful story. You know, I would read. and enemies to lovers like prairie dog thick, like on air three. Someone make it happen, please. Send it to me to me.

It's not kissing, but it has made me think about my kitten who likes to put her teeth on my face at about three or four I am. Because I give her low kisses all over her head and I have to wonder. Is she trying to do the same thing? Only she has K-19. Oh. I wish cats, like, if my cat had the ability to pucker his lips, I do think. think instead of kissing, he would just blow a bunch of raspberries at me. In defiance.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Dustin from Sacred Symbols here, you know when you're in the middle of a heavy recording session, editing a show, or just trying to get real work done on the go and your laptop starts slowing down or burning up in your lap? It's the worst. So, what does it actually feel like to switch over to a better laptop like the Dell XPS powered by Intel Core? For start It's built with a premium design that's incredibly thin and light, so it feels smooth, meaning far less weight on your shoulders when you're packing up for travel. Then you open it up and the responsive touch screen makes scrolling, zooming, and swiping feel

completely fast and precise. Everything just flows. Best of all, with its long-lasting battery life, it feels like non-stop energy. You get a better way to work without being chained to a charger all day. Built for those who want better. The DellXPS built for you. Okay, we're back. And Amanda, let's talk about graves.

Mausoleums. Graves. Graves, specifically mausoleums, which should not be confused with crypts. So I'll get into that distinction later. But a crisp chill has descended upon western Pennsylvania where I live, which means it's a particularly beautiful time to take a walk in Allegheny Cemetery, which is one of the largest and oldest burial grounds in Pittsburgh. Fun fact.

One of the most discussed graves in Allegheny Cemetery belongs to the Winter family. It is this Egyptian-themed tomb. It's sort of like five, like five minutes when you enter Allegheny Cemetery from Penn Avenue. It's like right there. And it's guarded by. twin sphinxes with, you know, pronounced bosoms. There's also a winged sun, which is a symbol associated with the ancient Egyptian sky god Horace. And you're probably thinking, who, what, what is this family doing with this Egyptian-styled mausoleum with two titty sphinxes as they're known here to the layperson?

Well, the patriarch of the Winter family, Emil Winter, died in 1941. He was an industrialist and banker. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1857. And he owned a meatpacking industry before selling it in 1902 and moving into steel, which was the big industry du jour of everyone in Pittsburgh during that time. So he never achieved the status. of other steel contemporaries like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Clay Frick, but he did see success in his own right when he co-founded the Pittsburgh Steel Company and served later as the director of Pittsburgh Steel Products Company. He purchased a controlling interest in the Workman Savings Bank and Trust Company, and he remained sort of there until his death. So a funny thing about this mausoleum is that it's not original at all. It is a replica of some other guy's mausoleum, specifically the some other guy in question

is F.W. Woolworth's mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. And funny enough, both tombs were the work of this one single man, John Russell Pope, who later went on to design the Jefferson Memorial. Oh. Super, super cool. So even though this mausoleum, you know, has Egyptian influences, the design of it is actually at odds against Egyptian tradition. So the titty sphinxes that guard the front of it are actually Greek,

although they do bear some thoronic headdresses. You know, these Sphinxes are clearly female. Traditional Egyptian sphinxes are male, or traditional Egyptian sphinx are male. And the image of the Sphinx as a woman was, you know, made by the ancient Greeks, who sort of imagined her as the guardian of the city of Thebes, which, you know, you could only travel through if you solved a riddle. And this winter guy, rich guy, was like, you know what, I'm dead. I'm going to go build a little house for myself. So, which is where we get into the conversation of, all right, why do mausoleums look like that? So for nomenclature's sake, a mausoleum is a large above ground structure, often made of stone or concrete that can have. So for nomenclature's sake, a mausoleum is a large above ground structure, often made of stone or concrete that can have. multiple individuals. They're typically more ornate than crips and they have a higher level of protection from environmental things like flooding, rain, snow. You can be interred at a public mausoleum. You can make your own mausoleum and have it sort of be private, you know, a very

family thing. Crips, however, are below ground. They are specifically made from concrete. And they are typically found in cemeteries and churches. So when you're walking through a cemetery and you sort of see a mausoleum, what sort of building things do you notice? I haven't been by one recently. Like columns. Yeah. Lots of columns. So columns, big in bromance.

in Greek architecture, all columns of all forms. You'll also see some domes, which is sort of like, you know, the higher the hair, the closer to God, but like the higher the dome, the closer to heaven, you know? I like that. Most mausolea are symmetrical, which is sort of all about order and permanence. You'll see a lot of elevated bases, which separate the sort of ordinary dirt from this sacred and funerary space. And going back to this theme of permanence, you'll see a lot of, like, stone, marble and reinforced concrete, because, like, what's the point of a mausoleum if it doesn't stand up to the test of time? And you'll also see, like, inscriptions and epigraphy, like, she died, how she lived, a life well lived, etc., etc. So, why do we have new classes, to thank for mausoleums. So much like kissing, mausoleums have ancient origins. The word

mausoleum itself comes from the mausoleum at Haliccanarces, which was built around 350 BCE for Masolus, who was a Persian royal, and it was so famous in antiquity that it became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the name of it became the generic term for any sort of like grand tomb-like structure. Of course, like Egypt, we have the pyramids in Etruscan and early Roman tombs. You know, you'll see a more earthen mound over a stone, a burial chamber. You know, in Rome, you have a lot of massive mausoleums for emperors like the mausoleum of a Gustus and the mausoleum of Hadrian, which are these like huge, centricle drums of concrete and stone. The most famous mausoleum that you all have probably seen is the Taj Mahal, which was commissioned

in 1631 by the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the tomb of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal. And it also houses the tomb of Shah Jha. Hahn himself. So why do we have neoclassicism to thank? Well, in the 18th and 19th centuries, people really idealized neoclassicism itself as a movement, sort of idealized Greek and Roman forms, like, you know, lots of columns. And it's also, like, mausoleums are also a way to like show off your money right it's like we have instead of like you being buried in the dirt with the rest of the plebeians like we've built a whole little house for ourselves and us rich people

together will be in this little stone house that you know our fortunes could afford yeah could house living people instead it's just for us yeah exactly our dead people house is nicer than your house Right. Sorry. So, honestly, in researching this, I did come across a couple articles that were like, what does the inside of a mausoleum look like? And it's interesting, like, as you walk through Allegheny Cemetery, some of the doors are clothed shut with a chain and a lock, and you can sort of peer through the crack. And they are like just very somber and beautiful. Sometimes they have, you know, gorgeous, gorgeous stain. glass as well. So it's sort of like, you know, reheating the nachos of ancient forms and being like, look at this beautiful thing. Look what our riches could afford. So going into the 20th century, and this is when it starts to get a little interesting, mausoleums can even be used as tools for political memory making. So Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow, it's a really good example of this. It's this massive ziggurat-like building made of granite, marble, and labradorite, which you can find swath

of in Canada. So a ziggurat, for those of you at home, is a pyramid-like structure out of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran. And so Lenin's mausoleum, reference is these ancient tomb forms while serving this ideological function. It's like this timeless, secular building, massive in scale, probably took years to build. That is sort of like, and look at Lenin, you know, it's sort of like how the Egyptians, I don't want to call it like, look at my big, cool car, but it's also like, look at my big cool car. Look at my cool building. Isn't it so cool? I mean, this is why people buy dinosaur skeletons, stuff, right?

Yeah. It's like, look what my wealth can acquire. No, exactly. And in some cases, building a mausoleum is actually used for practicality. So say, you're in a place like New Orleans with where the ground is a little not great. So, in fact, in New Orleans, speaking of, they had a ban on burying people in the ground for around 100 years until the man-made levies and the pumping systems were put into place because of how you know, below sea level they were. And during flooding periods, the rising water would float

coffins out of the ground and wash human remains through the town. They also, this also, this also happened in Venice, Italy. And in or on Svalbard in Norway, you cannot legally be buried because the permafrost prevents all decomposition, which is very interesting.

So I mentioned the Taj Mahal earlier. And of course, probably the, actually the largest mausoleum in the world is the mausoleum of Emperor Chin Shih Huang, who was the first emperor of a unified China. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it includes 8,000 terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, acrobats, strongmen, musicians, and anything else you would need to be protected

and entertained in the afterlife. And I think it's really interesting how in Egypt you get buried with, you know, pets and clothes and spoils. And we see that, you know, in China with this specific burial practice of bed mausoleum with 8,000 clay guys to protect you in the afterlife. And if I'm remembering correctly, because my little brother was born in Shian, so there was a time when we talked about the Terracodd warriors a lot. But I am pretty sure all their faces are different. They really took 8,000 guys.

They were like, line up, army. We got to make 8,000 different guys. Right. Has to be believable in perpetuity. Yeah. It's awkward if you wake up in the afterlife and you've only got five rotating faces on your army. Yeah. So, mausoleum, economic indicator, sometimes practical, almost all times somber,

because some mausoleums have little benches that you can sit and be contemplative, of course. Here in Pittsburgh, the winter mausoleum, people will straight up picnic there and just take pictures of the Tiddy Sphinxes, as they're colloquially called. And it's, you know, who did architecture the best? The Romans and the Greeks.

So, or not to say that actually the Greeks and the Romans did architecture the best, but to a lot of people or to a very specific tradition. It's like, let's take this ancient form and we died in 1909 and let's go build some columns. It's the stock model you can draw from. Pretty much. Yeah. Why I think I can just do the Greek columns? No, exactly. Who needs, you know, who needs a regular headstone when you can just get a pyramid for yourself? I'd also, if I could design a mausoleum, I do think I would have to model it after that one

Bass Pro Shops. That's literally a pyramid. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, I feel like that level of wealth is predisposed to it anyway, but it does have a little bit like, all appropriate from whatever culture I want. Who's going to yell at me? I'll be dead.

I'll make it like a pyramid if I want. And as somebody who's shopped in many of Basque pro shops, I'm like, technically this is my culture. Hunting, fishing, being a little bit too empathetically or having a little like way too much empathy for the fish in those

tanks. Are they okay? Who is the fish keeper out of Aspros shops? You should be a pamphlets. But yeah, you'll want to represent a life lived, throw those remains in a house. Wow. And my final fact,

there is, I believe, a name for, mausoleum that has cremated remains and that word is a columbarium. It's a new one. Mausoleums, the war you know. Wow. Wow. I long to take an autumnal stroll through a cemetery. The time is almost upon us.

So by the time this air is, hopefully there will be a true chill in the air. Today it was not hot where I am, so that's the start. Today I got to throw open the windows and it wasn't too stinky outside. Pittsburgh famously stinky probably because all of the coal plants that used to be around here and the ones that are still around. Yeah, one time I had my windows open and I got a whiff of fresh cut grass and I physically ascended out of my earthly form. It was so nice and lovely. Okay, we're going to take one more break. And then we'll be back with one more fact.

Okay, we're back. And Riley, tell me about the Cheetah Girls. Yes, I want to talk about kitties for a minute. So have either of you heard of a fossil cat called Miracinonix? I have not. Miracynonics would be a great drag name. That's, yeah. Yes, it would.

Yes. I mean, maybe I can be the change that I want to see in the world on that one. But in the scientific sense, this is a cat that for a long time has had a just-so story about it, that has bugged me. So this is my choice for this week, my weird sec, because it turns out I was right in a way that I was not expecting. So the story goes something like this. It was the 19th century, paleontology is getting its start in North America, mostly on the East Coast. A lot of fossils from all over the place as people are wandering around, engaging colonialism, collecting things, sending them back to the East Coast, to the naturalist and the academies of their day.

And some bones go over to a researcher by the name of Edward Drinker Cope. And if you know anything about the history of paleontology, you will know that Cope is one of the two bastards responsible for the Bone Wars. Othneill Charles Marsh from Yale and New Havens the other. These two, you know, met as friends and their youth while studying paleontology abroad, came to hate and despise each other, basically made this everyone's problem to the point that journals like the American naturalists are like, We're not going to take any more papers from you guys. We're closing the comments because you have just abused the privilege going after each other over every little thing.

So it's kind of like these dudes have beef and they used scientific research to like enact their war. Either that or I want to write the romance story. This was just cover for their romance at the time that publicly they hidged each other. But behind the scenes. I take back what I said earlier. I want to read this fick. Yes. There's space on A.O.3 for all.

So they're in the midst of this. It is 1895 and Coke got these bones that they're clearly cat bones of some kind. They're ice age cat bones from more than 30,000 years ago in North America. It's like this seems to be some sort of prehistoric Puma-like cat. And that's more or less where we leave it. This is the early days of comparative anatomy. You get a chunk of something. Compare it to stuff that you already know.

You kind of narrowed down what you think it is. So they got it down to Puma like cat lived in the ice age. Not all that intriguing by itself. and bits of this cat, you know, show up here and there in the fossil record all across North America from basically, you know, Wyoming, all the way down through Florida, Tennessee. It used to be wild here. I mean, there were jaguars that lived in, you know, the forests of Tennessee and Virginia and, you know, mammoths and massodons and giant sloths. The way that this continent was more than 10,000 years ago, be absolutely unrecognizable to what it looks like today.

And this cat was part of it. So time goes by, still collecting this cat. In 1969, there's a second species of this cat that's found this name causes one of these big revisions. Usually when we get a new species of something, paleontologists go back and they look at everything else that's been collected. Are we sure that all this stuff goes together? How are we distinguishing stuff? We do this work. This is where we get the name Mirosanonics from. It's a species called Miracsononics Truman Eye. And it's named that because it's much more slender than the first one. So the first meresanonic species that was found was much more stocky and much more like a mountain line.

because you know them now, similar proportions and everything. They didn't know whether they were closely related, just similar kind of cat. This one, it's lanky. It kind of has that compressed chest look. If you think like a border to collie, almost like a dog like that, it looks fast. It looks lankier. It looks a little bit ganglier. And research is like it still seems close to Puma's, but it seems like she'd be moving fast.

There's some basic biomechanics that work in with this stuff where if you have a relatively short upper part of your limb, so you're humorous or your femur, if that's short, and the lower leg is long, that means it takes less motion to basically swing that upper part back and forth, like to have a muscle pull that and have that swing, and then the lower part of them reaches further to take a bigger step, and that translates to more speed, whereas a slower animal is going to have a very long femur in short parts of the lower leg, so it takes a lot more power to basically move that femur, and then that lower leg takes a little step instead. So this is a big, stepy cat. This is a quick cat. And a researcher suggests, you know, a few years later that Mirosnics is, in fact, not a cougar at all, but a cheetah. That this is that the cheetah lineage is starred in North America.

This was a cover paper in science with a really neat pencil drawing of a really fluffy prehistoric-looking cheetah. Something clearly took just an image from someone got in Keeneer or something and just kind of made it look a little extra prehistoric. But this was the idea. And a lot of paleontologists didn't go with it, but there was an antelope researcher, a pronghorn researcher, Johnathan Byers. And his specialty, we're looking at these North American mammals that I love. They're still around called Pronghorn. You know, the antelope of the famous deer and antelope play, Berkson Home on the Range.

And they're not antelope at all. They're actually more closely related to giraffes, although that's not even close. They're just kind of the last remaining lineage of this ancient group that was everywhere. And people can figure them out as a result of this. If you haven't seen one, if you imagine that something like a deer, but instead of antlers, They have these hook-shaped horns on top of their heads. They shed the outside, but not the whole thing. So it's this kind of in-between antler and the giraffe's Ossacon.

They have this beautiful kind of brownish-red coat with these cream highlights. They got the big dough eyes and everything. This is a glamour magazine kind of mammal that can also run at 55 miles an hour. So looks and muscles. Yes, looks, muscle, but mostly for running. This is like the kind of mammal that spends so much. time like doing its running stuff you want to be i'm not going to see them they're just always out like on the run they got to keep up that training so we have the speed speedster pronghorn with the long

fossil record going back through the ice age beyond and we have an american cheetah and that seems to have proportions like the modern cheetah which can run at speeds you know greater than 55 miles an hour you're up to 65 miles an hour or so so buyers comes up with this hypothesis because there's nothing that exists now that's fast enough to catch a pronghorn going full tilts um out on the plains, out in these sagebrush grasslands where we find them now. And they really prefer these open habitats where they can run. Grizzly bears can't catch them. Mountain lions can't, you know, catch them in a full outrun.

They have to use other methods like ambush to predate upon them. So it seemed logical that, okay, back in the Ice Age, we had super fast cat, and we had the ancestors of today's pronghorn. And the pronger must, this must be a ghost, basically, an evolutionary ghost. The pronghorn are fast because of this cat. And it's almost sadly romantic in this way, this predator and prey relationship where they evolved together. you know, on this continent, shaping each other over hundreds of thousands of years, and then the predator goes extinct and we're left with fast pronghorn now.

But it seemed kind of weird because we kept finding Muresenonics fossils in places that don't make sense for an animal that's going to live out on the step that's going to be running everywhere, right? We find them in places like Grand Canyon or Natural Trap Cave. A lot of caves in general. And as anatomists and paleontologists are looking at the skeleton of the cat all over again, it's like, well, there's some things like snow leopards have similar traits, and those are not fast-running cats. They're climbing a lot.

Someone with mountain lions. So it seems like, okay, we had this hypothesis that everybody loves that was just kind of based upon this tenuous relationship. We need proof for this. We need to test this. A couple years ago, there was a paper that came out from the fossils at Natural Trap Cave. Actually, I've done fieldwork. You can actually descend into this cave.

It was reopened a number of years ago by Julie Nietzsche and other paleontologists. It's really neat. It's basically an 80-foot drop from top to bottom. have to basically go to this grate. Someone actually almost drove a car into this, like back in the 60s, and they had to put a grate over it because people joyride around this part of Wyoming,

and the car almost drove into this basically just giant opening with maybe foot drop. The historic excavations, they just built scalfiting. So people had to hold skulls in their arms, holding onto the scaffold going back and forth all the way up. It's better just to repel. So now if you go in and you visit, you have to get roped up and go down there.

And in the cold and the dry, it preserves bones and DNA and stuff, well. So we're not only getting the anatomy, we're getting DNA evidence, we're getting geo-isotopes, things like that. So we're looking at, you know, these natural trap cave cats looked at geochemical isotopes in their fossils. So basically you are what you eat, right? As you eat stuff, the carbon and its isotopes, you know, nitrogen, it's isotopes, oxygen,'s isotopes, all these things get brought into the body and locked into your bones and teeth while they're growing. Same is true for prehistoric animals. This has been used in archaeology and paleontology. I wrote a book

called skeleton keys a number of years ago. This is how we know that the accounts of Richard the Third's life that were made previous to skeleton being found were actually kind of accurate about like when you see a change in his diet through these isotopes in his bones. So do the same thing with these cats. And they are eating pronghorn, but they seem generalist. You can plot the values of these things. Like where the herbivores and there are carbon signatures showing up where the carnivores showing up in relation to that. If they're close, that suggests that kind of one is eating the other because they're clustering together. So it seemed that these Muresenononics cats, were just kind of generalists. They weren't too different from American lions or

sapers teeth cats or other things. They're just kind of eating a little bit of everything. Pronghorn is in the diet somewhere. It doesn't tell us anything about whether they're chasing each other or not. So now comes this new study that just came out about a week or so ago from Molly Cass at John Stone and a collaborative group looking not only at the natural trap cave fossils, but fossils mere sonautics found in the Yukon that these speedster cats, or so we thought, also lived in the ancient Yukon about 30,000 years ago. And when we looked or when those researchers looked at those geochemical isotopes is particularly the nitrogen. This is something that's attached to aquatic food sources.

The fish is in particular going to have elevated levels of nitrogen in their bodies, which then becomes part of the carnivore's body. So when they plotted everything out, the natural trap cave, neurosanogics still showed up in the same space, like around bears and lines and things like that. but the Miracenonics from the Yukon shook way off the charts for the nitrogen. The only food source that would have made sense for that are basically salmon runs. I wish that I could say that these were saber-toothed salmon, that, unfortunately, that species that existed salmon that had little saber-teeth

when extinct by time this cat was around. But still, the salmon runs that we see today when it's like, you know, the fat bear contest that we see every year. If you imagine basically these ancient lanky cougars just gorging themselves on salmon, And what this suggests together with the other evidence is they're generalists, that they were not in this tight evolutionary relationship of predator and prey where they're honing each other and just getting faster and faster and faster. But rather, they were almost like every other carnivore that there was. They were just adapting to whatever was nearby. And if there was a whole bunch of fish available full of eggs and all that other good stuff, they're going to feast on it.

And I think that's neat because now we still have the additional mystery of why are pronghorn so fast? they can still run up to 55 miles an hour far faster than they need to. Is there something in their own sort of courtship and mating systems? Is there some other reason for this? Just how did that happen? And I kind of love that we get this little bit of resolution. The story doesn't work. But now we learn something new and we have new stuff to ask about.

And that's why that's my favorite thing. That's really cool. Yeah, it's always, I mean, if I were a researcher, I know that I would fall pray to the seductive nature of a compelling tidy story. So I try it. It's easy on the outside to be like, well, yeah, it would have been a nice story, but it's just that. But I do love when it turns out we're just wrong about stuff. The answer that seems so tired of you is just not the answer. And some folks, like this was not a scientific effort by any means, but there's a book that

someone recommended to me once because I'd write about this over the years, like waiting for someone to look into this. And a reader mentioned to me, there's a book called All Creatures Great and Small, basically about like an animal collector, like an animal dealer. Back when, like, we thought, like, this was a thing that you'd want to boast and brag about, about all these animals that you've taken from place and keep in your house and all the shenan it was very born, like the born free era kind of stuff, who I guess he had a cheetah that was tame enough and loosed this cheetah after a pronghorn, like out on the plane somewhere

just to kind of test the hypothesis. And it was already goofy then. It seems extra goofy now. Oh boy Man more many than sense Yeah Seems to be a theme It kind of

It kind of seems like a moment you would see on Jackass Right where it's like we're just gonna Put two fast things out in the wild And see what happens The dark Darkest episode of Mythbusters Never aired

Well Riley Thank you so much for coming on today And Amanda, it was great to have you back. Riley, would you remind our listeners what your book is called so that they can go buy it? Sure. The new book is called Tyrant Lizard Queen, The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth's Greatest Carnivore. It's out on October 27th, and you can find it in Hardback, eBook, or audiobook. Wherever you get your books, I certainly recommend your closest indie bookstore.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and a editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.