The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - 'Silly Walk' Science, Trombone-Head Dinosaurs, Museum Secrets Revealed

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Dustin growing. Dustin, welcome to the show. Oh, I'm so excited to be here. So excited. Awesome. We're so excited to have you.

Listeners, Dustin is here to nerd out about dinosaurs for us. Justin, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about why you know so much about nerdy dinosaur things? I mean, who doesn't love that? No, so I'm a science communicator. I'm an educator. Like, I've taught in museums. I've taught in the classroom. I do a ton of museum consulting. But my main gig is being an over enthusiastic dinosaur nerd on the internet. Because I firmly believe dinosaurs are a gateway drug to science. We can get into why. But again, like I said, a moment ago, any chance I have to nerd out about dinosaurs, I'm here. So I'm excited. Let's see. do this. Amazing. And I totally agree. Dinosaurs are probably like the OG gateway drug into science. What kid does not have a favorite dinosaur? I used to say that that's why I wrote about poop science so much that I thought it was a great gateway drug into loving science because everybody poops. Yeah, famously. Famously, everybody poops.

Dinosaurs are more fun. All right. So 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, nerding out on the internet, et cetera, 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 yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? Okay, well, I'm going to talk about two of 2022's most interesting cupboard discoveries, aka things that people found in the back of their cupboards. Oh. I thought that was going to be like a slight euphemism, meaning like stuff from the bowels of a museum because that does happen all the time. It is museum cupboards, but I mean,

not my cupboards. Sorry, all. Sorry to disappoint. I was really, I was, I was like, wow, I didn't know there was a whole subset of amateur cupboard archaeologists. There is probably. Dustin, what's your tease. My tease is that the king of all the dinosaurs, America's dinosaur, as it were, Tyrannosaurus wrecks probably, probably had feathers. Oh, la la. That sounds amazing. I love it. I love a giant threatening chicken. I love that. Yeah, who doesn't want to glow up like that? Fabulous. My tease is that scientists have finally investigated the metabolic usefulness of the Monte Python silly walk. Oh, good one.

Wow. Wow. All right. Well, all right. I guess shall we begin with that then? Yes, please. Yes. Excellent.

Okay. So for a little bit of preamble, for listeners who don't know, the British Medical Journal, which is a super serious, legit scientific journal, as legit as they come, has since the 1980s. had an annual Christmas issue. And it's very cheeky. They publish studies that aren't fake. Like you have to actually write a paper that's in the format of a real science paper

and you have to have real data for it. But they also, you know, they're not that serious as the meme goes. That being said, their potential impact really runs the gamut. So like some of them investigate genuine, but understandably neglected issues, like the risks of head banging too much at heavy metal shows, which we have actually talked about in a Popsai feature package I edited. That's really awesome, all about various scientific questions around heavy metal. So I'll link to that on Popsai.com slash weird.

Some are inherently cheeky, but like not entirely worthless. like whether beauty sleep is a thing. So in other words, like whether being tired makes people perceive you as uglier. A 1999 study recounted the like trials and tribulations of trying to get an MRI image of people having sex, which did actually result in a few scientific insights, but also got itself an ignoble award, which of course, awards research that sounds very silly. And to be fair, this one did sound pretty silly.

There are also plenty of medical workplace-specific gags, like statistical analysis of why teaspoons and chocolates disappear so quickly from hospital lounges. And then some of the studies use humor to crack open actually serious issues. In 2015, I covered one that confirmed that women in positions of medical leadership were outnumbered not just by men, but by men with mustaches. So great. So all over the place, it's a delightful tradition.

Wow. Everybody loves it. If you don't, you are absolutely a scrooge, a grinch. It's great. And the 2022 Christmas issue had, I feel, a real Christmas cracker of a study. It had an investigation into the biomechanical implications of Monty Python. silly walk. So I'll pause. I assume that my fellow hosts are familiar with the silly walk, at least in passing. In passing. Yes. So I'm familiar with the concept.

Maybe I'm putting myself on blast here, but I do somewhat of a similar. So I run a lot. I play soccer lot. And there are times at night where I just go for a walk in the neighborhood and like to loosen up and stretch out. I do what I assume is relatively similar. So I'm excited. to a hear about it and be get a little like credence and so then I don't feel like a total psychopath when I'm walking like that outside no yeah you are going to be vindicated yes for sure um I was definitely raised in a a Monty Python household so the silly walk was really formative for me um you know it's I'll link to clips on pop that com slash weird but just to like briefly summarize it's John Cleese doing just an absurd walk.

It's just like surrealist physical comedy at Monty Python doing what Monty Python did best. No explanation. This man is walking silly. But then he proceeds to have a very serious conversation with someone else about his own silly walk. And it's just, again, just absurd, really ridiculous and really well done. And as a child, I was always like, the silly walk. you know, I pranced around the house doing it. That and the dead parrot scene I would basically recite until my parents wanted to kick me out of the house. So first I'll say this actually

isn't the first time that the silly walk has shown up in peer reviewed literature. In 2020, Dartmouth researchers published an analysis of the gates of the two silly walkers in the sketch who are dubbed Putey and T-Bag. And they published that in the journal, Gate and Poster. So that was not in the BMJ Christmas issue. That was just for real. And they basically measured how much variation between, like, the average step there was. And unsurprisingly, they found that both were way more variable than a normal gate,

but that T-Bags was much more so than Putees. So T-Bag is the John Cleese character. He is like the one who is quintessentially associated with the silly walk gag. He wears like a bowler hat and he does a lot of high kicks. Putey is a man who visits him to try to get a grant to develop his own sleepwalk. His involves a lot of slow and jerky high knees. And John Cleese actually says it's not particularly silly, is it? I mean, the right leg isn't silly at all.

And the left leg merely does a forward aerial half turn every alternate step, to which Mr. Mr. Petey argues that with government backing, he could make it, quote, very silly. So, again, the fact that Teabag's Gate had more variability than Pewdies was not surprising. Sometimes science confirms what we already know. So quick question, quick question. Yes. When you talk about the analysis of the gate, we're speaking specifically of the biomachicator of the lower extremities, right? We're talking of butt to feet.

So I'm assuming nothing was taken into account with respect to like, crazy arm movements within the gate? Is that fair? That's a good question and I think that is true. Also in the sketch, like they do kind of the most of the silliness is in the legs. I think part of what makes it really comedic is that they're quite stoic from the waist up as they do very, very silly walking. But yeah, I do believe that this was focused on the waist down. Okay. And so in this new BMJ study, researchers from the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, and Kansas State University took things a few silly steps further. They gathered 13 healthy adults, as is usually the case with these BMJ studies, you know, small sample size. Nobody's trying to

produce groundbreaking scientific insight here. That is, to be fair, 26 legs, though. Yes, It's true. It is. It's not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so they had them each put on, uh, a rig to measure how much oxygen they were taking in, um, how much energy they were spending and how intensely they were exerting themselves, um, the standard kind of metabolic analysis, uh, in these sort of physiological studies. And then each of them walked around in a normal gate. They got to, you know, pick

just walking how they would walk. Then they also took turns mimicking tea bag and beauty. And there are great videos which I will post on popside.com slash weird. The researchers found that the Pewty Walk, not very silly at all, didn't expend much more energy than a normal stroll. But the tea bag walk basically amounted to intense exercise. Even though it's like not particularly fast or obviously strenuous, it just involves a lot of random movement and that in effect, people were really getting a workout. So based on their findings, the researchers say that doing the teabagg silly walk for 11 minutes a day could provide adults with their total recommended amount of physical activity. Even if someone can't or doesn't wish to kick their legs into the air or

shuffle strangely, the researchers point out that the key is that the movement is inefficient from an energy expenditure standpoint. So they say that, you know, anything that makes your movements less efficient without, of course, causing you pain or discomfort. So like if you're a wheelchair user, you know, wheeling around into zigzag motion, that's an inefficient motion compared to a straight line, that that can accomplish the same goal. And since the best physical activity is whatever activity gives you joy to do and is, you know, easy to do regularly, a silly walk could for some folks be better than like trying to form a gym routine. Of course, you know, people may think that you are like really not okay depending on what your silly walk looks like.

But hey, you know what? I think that part of joyful movement can be not caring that you look like a fool. I have this one quote from the researchers that we did not measure minutes spent laughing or a number of smiles as secondary outcomes while walking inefficiently. Smiling during the inefficient walking trials could not be observed due to participants' mouths being obscured by the face mask worn during data collection. However, all participants were noticeably smiling. upon removal of the face mask. Moreover, bursts of laughter from the participants were frequently noted by the supervising investigator, almost always when participants were engaging in the T-back walk.

So, lovely takeaway from this very silly, silly walk study, just a reminder that, like, fun, silly activities that don't, like, appear strenuous or, like, you know, look like what fitness influences are doing on Instagram are still to like to like a great way to get your body moving get some endorphins and um also you know uh honor an excellent Monty Python sketch if you so wish that like warms my heart I don't know it's very sweet um and yeah there's actually been some research recently on like trying to figure out the reasoning behind like why our gate is the way it is because human feet and hips are like very bizarre. And, you know, we do walk in the most energetically efficient way possible, um, on average, generally speaking. And so yeah,

um, you know, being less energy efficient when you think about it is like what all exercise boils down to. You're like adding a heavy thing to your hand to make the movement of putting your arms over your head less efficient. So as someone who does weightlifting, Like, obviously you do want a heavy weight to be lifted in the most efficient way possible so you don't hurt yourself. So that is like one caveat, I will say, to this very cute takeaway. But I love it. Yeah, that's my whole thing. When's the next silly walk class that I can sign up for on class class is my question.

I think, well, you know, since we don't live in the world of Monty Python where you can go apply for a government grant to perfect your silly walk. I think, you know, your silly walk should be whatever your heart tells you it should be. In my dreams, the silly walk is an Olympic event, right? But it is much like many gymnastics events where it's judged on different criteria. So I think you could judge it upon like artistry, right? Who has the best looking silly walk is one. Second, like what instill, I guess there'd be overlap with like what still is the most joy in the audience. But then the last one, which you just run up is like, which one is actually the most energy, you can measure the energy inefficiency. And like you'd get points for that as well.

I would be a judge. I would love to judge that. It's like three different levels of silly. Like it's like, do you feel illogically? Do you, do your friends feel silly? And like, does your body feel silly? And I bet people from certain countries would be like really good at certain metrics, but not other ones and there'd be like rivalries. I'd love it. Love it. Yeah. That sounds great. It kind of, to me, it's like, it's like the ice dance of speedwalking. Like we need a creative speedwalking category. Many people already think speedwalking is very silly. No offense to speedwalkers.

They accomplish physical feats I could never dream of. But listen, I think it could get sillier. It can always get sillier. They're too efficient. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more weird facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com.

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Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now, I mean, everyone has obviously heard of T-Rex. People love it. I used to think T-Rex was underrated. The more I learned about Tyrannosaurus Rex, the more appropriately rated, I do believe it is. We can talk about bite force. We can talk about tiny arms. But I think the most interesting and fascinating thing over the last few years that we're starting to realize is that T-Rex was probably, maybe not covered, but probably had some level of federation. If federation is not a word, it is now, I guess. Yeah, I think it should be. Now, it's not new news that a lot of bipedal theropods. So, theropods are the primarily carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs, think your T-Rexes, your velociraptors, that type of thing. We've known for a while that certain species had feathers, but it wasn't until relatively recently, we started to discover a lot of smaller T-Rex relatives with direct evidence of feathers.

And the more and more of these we find, the more likely it is, at least scientifically we start to think it's much more likely that T-Rex itself also had feathers. Now, I always like to, before we get into what the actual scientific evidence for this is, I like to think about or like to remind people about every single type of like caveman or orthropithecine or pro, we would call them like proto-humans. Because we don't have direct evidence that like Lucy, about 3.2 million years ago, the first fully upright bipedal hominid, we have no evidence that Lucy had any level of hair or fur.

but if we look at every single primate alive today, we're covered in some level of hair. So it stands the reason the more and more close relatives of T-Rex we find with direct evidence of feathers, T-Rex itself probably had feathers as well. Now, do you guys know, you know Velociraptor unequivocally has feathers? Have you guys heard about this? I have heard about this.

You have heard about this. Okay. Rachel, I assume you've heard about this. Vaguely, but tell me more. Sure. Well, finally, in the most recent iterations of Jurassic World, they finally have some raptors with feathers. And in fact, when Jurassic Park originally came out,

at least within the scientific community, we knew Velociraptor had feathers. It just wasn't in the common parlance in the public's mind, mind's eye. So that that's probably why, by the way, they weren't actually Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They're Dynonicus, which is a larger animal. Steven Spielberg liked the name Velociraptor better,

so they went with that. But really what you're looking at in the original Jurassic Park is a plucked dynonicus. Because in real life, yeah, right? In real life, Velociraptor was the size of like a medium dog

and we now know it was covered in feathers. And so when it comes to extinct animals that haven't been here for literally millions of years, there's a couple ways we can glean clues about whether or not

they had feathers or any soft parts and tigmentation like on the outside of the body that generally doesn't fossilize the way the bones do. So first you have feather or skin impressions

where there's like literally an impression of where the feathers were on the rock around where the bones are fossilized. So while they're not the actual feathers, it's a good indication there were feathers there. I think for Velociraptor, it's even cooler and more interesting because we have found some really, really well-preserved Velociraptor specimens with evidence of something called quill knobs. And in modern birds, mostly along forearms, quill knobs are divets in the bone and their spots where tendons attach feathers to the bone. So you find a velociraptor skeleton with those divots all along the forearm, even though feathers haven't been there for literally millions of years, it's a pretty solid indication feathers

are once attached at those sites, which again makes your velociraptors in Jurassic Park look like weird naked skin chickens when they should probably be, maybe not covered in feathers, but definitely have some level of feathers. And as someone who's like a dinosaur nerd on the internet, a lot of people say,

oh, I don't think dinosaurs with feathers are scary, which I respond, my guy, have you ever seen a bird? Like, if you've ever had a run in with like a goose? Yeah, exactly. Feathers, feathers can. Just because something soft doesn't mean that it's your friend. Like, over and over and over in history, we have learned that. Yeah.

And people like, there's, you can make easy guesses as to why feathers first evolved, which is like coloration for either mate's selection of display or for downy toss for insulation to stay warm. But some of people who think a lot about, especially when it comes to something like Velocerap that had big feathers on its forearms, if you have feathers on a non, like a flightless animal, those feathers are often used, especially in the case of Velociraptor, to flap and hold down struggling prey. So that downward thrust can create a lot of help for you strength-wise to hold down something that may be larger than you are in order to dispatch it, kill and need it. Which makes, again, feathers even more terrifying. They're literally air-benders.

like it's yeah now blow like blow a Velociraptor up remember Vloporpe medium sized dog to summing the size of a T-Rex and again we don't have direct evidence of feathers and T-Rex but it's smaller cousins like Dylon Uttranus Juan Long direct evidence of feathers on these guys so I think I'm excited for the future and by when I say future I mean I don't know next five 10 years of paleontology because we're not only going to start finding more and more animals with feathers ideally we'll see a T-Rex with direct evidence. We can even get into coloration of feathers if you want. Again, I will nerd out about this all day. So just cut me off. Well, I want to, I want to talk about T-Rex's tiny arms.

Please. It's been a few years since I was looped into the latest thoughts on, on why their arms so tiny. I have to turn it back to you first as a scientifically-minded person. You look at this animal. It's ginormous and its arms are comically small. What, how, why? What do you guys thing. Do you have any theories, hypotheses? I don't ask questions about those. Listen, whatever wild theory you come up with is probably not going to be as weird as an actual one that was reported by a paleatologist. This is a few decades ago where he could click. How would you even begin to try to test this? He purported that the males, just the males,

this doesn't explain the females arms at all. The males would use their tiny arms to tickle the backs of females while mating. Ew. Yeah. I don't, I don't want to hang out with any scientist who's thinking that much about back tickling. I don't know. Well, tickling is famously sexy. Everyone loves tickling.

Listen, no shamed people who do. But again, I don't think I want to hang out with that particular professor. One time I covered an archaeology story and the guy who wrote it and kind of my main outside source, well, sort of, you know, towing the line between archaeology and paleontology, because we're talking about like pro-documents. And it was the same kind of like, maybe they had this kind of bone because they did this. And my outside source was like, he's literally just making up a story. There's nothing that can prove or disprove this. And I was like, my dude, yeah, I get that. But also, he said the same thing about what you said. It gets.

That's very intense. I mean, not that. I don't know that's a great example, but one of the reasons why I do believe dinosaurs are gateway drug to science is because they're not here anymore. Well, birds, that's a whole other conversation. But non-avian dinosaurs are not here anymore, right? So like, Rachel, if you are a lion scientist, you can go look at lions. You can observe how they move, how they make, how they hunt, all that.

But like, I can't go watch a T-Rex walk down the street. So if you're four or 400 years old, like you can be studying this your entire life or you can be a kid with Wikipedia in a bunch of books. And your ideas about maybe how they looked or moved or took care of their young could potentially be just as accurate and worthwhile as a real life practicing paleontologists. And that really like levels the playing field. And to me, it speaks like why we do science in the first place. And it's always fascinating, always drives curiosity and there's always more to learn. Yeah. Well, and you know, you can't go back and study a dinosaur, but you can stick a plunder on a bird's butt. You can't. You can't do that.

That is true. That is absolutely true. I will link to that on popside.com slash week. Sarah, your face did a thing. Oh, my gosh. To give it, to make it stand like a dinosaur. So they were like, this is how they walked because we gave it a little plunder butt. Anyway, great steady.

Who are these people? So what is the latest thought on the short arms? Okay, so you don't want to throw out a theory. That's fine. I guess like if I was going to come if I was going to say a random theory the first thing that comes to mind is like I mean I guess I think of it in terms of being more of a like a claw for fighting other T-Rexes so it's like more efficient to have it up there at T-Rex level that like a long floppy arms I don't know T-Rex argument like rock paper scissor it out with your T-Rex argument. Yeah exactly that's what I'm that's what I'm seeing. Didn't have scissors by now. Quick sidebar.

I know this is an auditory platform. So you guys can see this. But Rachel, you did your claws like this. So for those of you at home, if you want to do, yeah, like air quotes,

basically, if you want to do anatomically correct, not just T. T. Not a dinosaur. They were clappers, not slappers. So if you're,

your palms need to face in towards each other. Clappers, not slap. Yeah. I know it's very important. My air quotes got to face each other. Yes, your air quotes face each other.

Exactly. That makes it like even more useless to me. You know? No, they could clap each other's heads like I guess. I don't know, but if they were up like this, you could like snatch things from like a tree. I don't know. I don't know.

Never mind. Well, I don't think, it's funny. I don't think either of those things were happening. And that actually is a good say way. Fair enough. Fair enough. To my theory as to why they had tiny arms.

And it's not that they had tiny arm for a reason. It's because other stuff got bigger. I think tiny arms were an evolutionary. trade off. T-Rex, I mean, you've seen a T-Rex skull. It's huge. It's massive. They have the strongest bite force of any animal ever ever on land. Any animal ever on land. Any terrestrial animal. And about 13,000 pounds per square inch. That's like dropping 13 grand pianos on the space the size of a quarter, right? Also, they're doing this with, I don't even call them teeth anymore. They have like nine inch serrated murder bananas. I love the phrase murder banana. Yeah, they're

That's everything people don't know. They were serrated on two different edges, like double-sided steak knives. So we're talking perfect killing machine. Clearly over time, nature was selecting for bigger, stronger bite force. That was clearly helpful for this animal. And in order to gain that much weight at the front of their body without basically tipping over and maintaining a balance, right, bipedally, they have to lose some weight in the front. And so maybe arms atrophied basically over time or we're not being used. And again, nature is selecting for a larger head, more muscular, heavier, more robust skull.

And so over time, those arms lost any real function as a tradeoff. And so it's not that, so it's funny because we're like, oh, what were their arms for? And I guess my answer would be nothing. Yeah. Well, and that's great because like that is something that comes up in talking about evolution so much. I mean, in my book, which is about the history of sex, I talk about the evolution of the sex is a lot. And there's a lot of kind of getting people to just like flip the way they're

thinking about stuff because it's like, don't ask why this happened, like why this would have arisen. Ask like what might have been paired down to this thing, you know? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because evolution is like, it doesn't take requests. I say that a lot. And sometimes to get a giant chompy head, you're going to end up with little arms. Yeah, very cool. That's funny. It just made me think of like, no one's like, hey, Hussein Bolt, how do you use your fingers? You know what I mean?

Like it's not the question. Right. Yeah, totally. So you said that you used to think that T-Rexes were underrated. No, I used to think they were overrated. Okay, okay. Never mind then. I was going to say like what made you lower your estimation, but you have become more impressed with T-Rex over time.

Right, because like it's in the, you know, it's in the, your, your cognizum of T-Rex from like age, I don't know, three, right? And everyone's always talking about it. And it's what is portrayed as a cinematic movie monster, basically, right? But I don't have to tell you guys, like the stuff you see in the media isn't always 100% scientifically accurate, right? But once you actually start digging and learning about T-Rex when it comes to like feathers, when it comes to bite force, When it comes to their furculia, they had a wishbone, like the clappers, the more I learned about T-Rex, and the more I learn about other dinosaurs in comparison. I mean, it may not have been the largest land carnivore ever. Gigonautosaurus and spinosaurus are both up there.

But in North America, absolutely. I just like the more I learn, it's like, okay, I think there's a reason why this thing has captivated hearts and minds for a hundred years. So I think it is fairly, once you get past like the painting. neon ones on like backpacks and you think about it like strictly as an animal I don't I do think is appropriately rated I think I I said again I'll say multiple times dinosaurs are gateway drug to science they're the greatest group of animals that the process of evolution is ever produced I believe the jury is still out on humans we can't we can't make an judgment on humans yet but like just the diversity in form and function of what is obviously like on spire just to see I

I don't think there's a group of animals that holds a candle to dinosaurs. What's your favorite dinosaur? Thank you for asking. It changes all the time and kind of like a proud parent. I feel a little weird selecting just one and saying it publicly. Two that I always come back to are, first of all, Dynonicus. The Dynonicus basically jump started. I'm throwing up air quotes, dinosaur revolution in the early 70s where not just in scientific circles, but in the public eye,

dinosaurs kind of went from these slow, cumbersome reptiles dragging their tails through the swamp to much more like active, athletic, warm-blooded predators. And Dynonicus was kind of the animal that jump started that. Specifically in 1969, John Ostrom, I'm sorry, Robert Backer drawing, maybe put that somewhere, this back, B-A-K-K-E-R drawing of Dynonics in 1969. It still haunts my dreams. I still remember seeing it in a book as a kid. And it was like unlike any other animal I'd ever seen, ever. So Dynonakis is one and the other. We're going to go herbivore to counter that carnivore. Paracarolophis, which is a duck-billed hadrosaur that has a meter long, three-foot-long, basically head trombone. So its skull has a nasal passage. Air goes in its nose. It goes backwards

three feet, loops back around and comes out its mouth. It does. It has a trombone attached to its skull. And again, we don't know exactly what it's for. I always say any weird feature on a dinosaur. is either fighting, flirting, or fanning, like thermoregulation fanning, fighting, flirting, or fanning. And for that, it's probably, probably flirting. Like, big, like, what else is a no-strom-mode-for? Do we know what kind of sound? Like, can you play it like an instrument?

Okay, okay, okay. I mean, people have made models at the field museum next to their parasolophis fossil. There's this thing that you can blow into that mimics the shape. Now, how exact that is would it really sound like, who knows? Oh, but yeah, people have definitely experimented with that. And that I will say low key, parasolophis is a lot of people's favorite dinosaur and it flies under the radar. A lot of people. Amazing.

I've asked you guys, what are your favorites? I had one once and now I'm really, I'm really blanking. I think I went through a period where I covered so many studies about newly discovered or better understood. dinosaurs that they kind of blurred together. But now I'm like, I got to, I want to dive back in. I'm going to find myself a new favorite dinosaur. The nose hormone is probably going to be hard to beat, to be honest. It's fun.

I'm also, like I have to say, I'm kind of more of a Leopluron person. Oh, okay, okay. Technically not a dinosaur. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. actually obligated said, yep, okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm more of a leoplayer-on person. But, yeah, you know, I do love the weird herbivores, I think, generally speaking, more than the carnivores. Just because I think their faces, they come up of weird shapes, you know, when it's not all about, like, jaw power or, like, agility, they do some really fun. stuff with their faces. I love a duck-billed dinosaur. So yeah, yeah. Sarah Kylie, what about you? I don't know. I mean, I feel like I'm kind of the same boat where I see so many random ones like once and then it's like gone. But I am partial to the ones they find in Scotland. There was this one that had like they found like a tiny baby one. And the illustration was just so, so cute that I like, I'll have to send it to you guys. But I think like T-Rexes are kind of like the golden retrievers of

like dinosaurs. Like they deserve. They deserve to be up there the way that they are up there. Like, there's a reason. They don't have to be your favorite. Golden Retrievers aren't my favorite. But like, you can't even deny that they deserve to be up there. Okay. They're good dogs.

I need to find whatever the corgi of the dinosaur world was. And that's going to be my favorite. I think comparing dogs to dinosaurs is a good route. You just inspired me. I'm going to do this because like one of the things I like doing in my science communication is like, try to put dinosaurs in a completely different realm that people would imagine. as a means of like engaging in a new way. So for instance, literally yesterday, I went through all the star signs.

I was like, okay, what are, what is characteristics of your Libras? What is characterst of your Sagittarius? And then which dinosaur best fits those? And so I now have a list of star side dinosaurs, but now I got to make a dog equivalency. What was Aquarius? Dare I ask. What was Aquarius? Thank you for asking.

Let me double check. I have that right here. Aquarius, January 20th through February 18th. Is that correct? Yep. Yep. Okay. Are you apparently?

Are you also in Aquarius? Yes. that. We're both Aquarius. Okay, this is going to be tough. So apparently you guys fetishized personal freedom. You're purposely esoteric and mostly just no feelings, just concepts. Just vibes. Just five. So I went with Stegosaurus. Nice. I feel like it's pretty weirdly esoteric and just vibes, man. The plates, spikes. Yeah. Yeah. No, I can, yeah, I'm happy with that. I can get behind that. I'm supportive. But I am excited to find out with the corgi. Um, of the dinosaur.

Well, you know what? Put me on the spot. Give me, when you think of corgis, just give me a quick like sent her to description of a corgi. Compact. So like, yeah, obviously. Yeah. Compact.

Yeah. Funny proportions. Okay. Sassy attitude. Has an attitude. Yeah. Kind of happy go lucky, goofy. Okay.

And popular. Yeah. And pie. So I have two potential, uh, dynos. So first protoceratops. Protoceratops is a. very small version of triceratops basically lived in the gobi desert pro seratops is interesting because we found them i mean full size it's like medium large dog ish uh and we found

so many of their remains at like every life stage that we're we completely understand their ontodging like how their bodies change and grow uh throughout their course of their life but i think we i'd want to go for corgi i want to go with uh an animal whose name is impossible to pronounce when you see the words until you hear that it's it's just called see Like look at C. Tococosaurus. C. Tacosaurus. It's like P-S-I-T-O something. But there are these tiny little guys, the big eyeballs.

And they have, we think some sort of. Oh, wow. I looked it up and yeah. That's a good. Yeah. It's a good. They've got little like weird, I don't want to say fur. Maybe like, not fur, but like feathery spines coming off their butts.

And corny butts are famous too. Oh, yeah. This is very cute. Okay. Thank you for inspiring my. next Instagram post, dinosaur dogs. I am really excited. I'll keep in.

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Okay, we're back. And Sarah Kylie, tell us what's been going on in the cupboards. What's been going on in the covers? Yeah, so this is more like too many weirdest things. But get excited. So double trouble. So as someone who doesn't clean out their ask often enough. Today's weirdest thing is a wake-up call to do it more often, especially if you happen to work at a museum. Because who knows what you'll find once you fish out all the mess? For me, it's like a missing earring or like a broken pen that I find in the void. But two museums very recently found something much cooler and much more relevant to the studies of long-lost creatures. So that's right. In two museums this year, researchers found both a hidden lizard relative that

holds the key to when squamates originated, which is a big whoopin deal apparently, and the remains of the last living Tasmanian tiger. And they're both just shoved in a cupboard somewhere. And these findings were reported days apart, so apparently everybody did their spring cleaning at the same time. But I'm going to talk to you a little bit about both of them. But first, shout out to our science news writer, Laura. She does the reporting on all of these fun little zany things.

So thank you to her for letting me even talk about them. But let's start with the lizard. So for our first adventure, we're going to go to the Natural History Museum in London. In the 1950s, scientists discovered a lizard fossil in Gloucester, England. And back then, back in, like, I'm talking million years ago, not in the 1950s. In 1950s, it pretty much was the same thing. But millions of years ago, whales in southern England were quite different from what we'd expect today. The area, like around Bristol and Cardiff now, were thought to be an archipelago of

islands where dinosaurs roamed, which, you know, there you go. Talking about corgis, that's where they came, the Welsh corgi of dinosaurs, there you go. But so in the 1950s, they went to this area, dug up a bunch of dinosaurs,

or not dinosaurs, lizards, excuse me. And they found a weird lizard, but it kind of got grouped in with the Clevisaurus fossils, which is a part of the Rinko Cephalia group, which I hope, hopefully have said that right. I lifted up earlier today. And the Rinkosophilias, there's only one living relative of this group now, the Tuotara of New Zealand.

But the oldest fossils of this group go back like 238, 240 million years ago. So these are really old. And it was assumed that at that point, they split from squamates, which basically include the majority of today's lizards and snakes. So we have these two groups. Only one of the Rinkos made it. and the rest are squamates. But if you take a second look at the stuff in your junk drawer, if you're the National History Museum of London,

can make for some pretty exciting stuff. So they took a closer look at this weird fossil that kind of had just been lumped in with other lizards. They did some x-ray scans and reconstructed the skeleton in 3D, and they discovered that this lizard had more in common with the ones scampering on in our backyards than the unique Tartara. So it wasn't a rinko. And according to scientists, this newfound species is clearly a squamate, which ages when squamates broke off back quite a little bit.

And it differs basically in the brain case, in the neck vertebra, in the shoulders. There's a median upper tooth in the front of the mouth. The way the teeth are set up are very different. There's also, what is this? There's some weird stuff that is a primitive feature not found in modern squamites. an opening on one side of the end of the upper arm bone. The humorous were an artery and nerve passed through. So just some weird stuff for sure from millions of years ago.

Basically, what they found was that this old lizard in the cupboard was more like the European glass lizard and many snakes like bows and pythons than the lizards that it kind of had been smushed in the cupboard with, which is pretty exciting. Check your lizards, people. Check your lizards. So it got a whole new name, which I'm not even going to try. but you can read about it on Popsai.com slash weird. But it means small butcher because they have little baby sharp teeth. But yeah, the crucial finding here is that squamates may have started diversifying quite a bit earlier than we thought in the late Jurassic. But yeah, so one of the scientists who did the research, Mike Benton, said this was a time of major restructuring of ecosystems on land.

With origins of new plant groups, especially modern type conifers, as well as new insects, and some of the first modern groups, such as turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs, and mammals. Adding the oldest modern squamates then completes the picture. It seems that these new plants and animals came on the scene as part of a major rebuilding of life on Earth after the end Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, and especially the Cambian Pluvial episode 232 million years ago when climates fluctuated between wet and dry and caused great perturbation to life.

So yeah. That's a great way to find it. Right perturbation to life. So yeah. It's always nice when a finding like that like makes sense in the broader evolutionary picture. It is like, how the heck? It's just like, we just write it all. This thing that makes complete sense buried for 60 something years.

So yeah, clean out your cupboards. You might find something that makes complete evolutionary sense that you forgot about. So yeah, that's the item number one. And then the next one is about the last Tasmanian. tiger. So the next reason, clean out your drawers, comes from the Tasmania Museum at Art Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania. And so, T-Mag, I've been to T-Mag. This is a great museum. It is on my to-go list now because I'm like, I want to see, I want to see all the tigers. But so the remains that these, that we're talking about now, the tiger are not millions of years old, but there's

still a really big deal because for 85 years, the remains of the last known Tasmanian tiger or thysine were missing. Like, nobody knew where they were until they were found in a cupboard at at this, at TMAG, like a cupboard. Just the oldest, like, people have been looking for this for 85 years. Like, I don't know. I don't know. It's like next to the coffee creamer. Like that's, like, in a staff room. How did, how did you forget about this? But there's kind of like a fun little story behind it. But here's a little trivia about the Tasmanian tiger first. It was a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial with sharp claws native to New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania for four million years. It's funky looking for sure. It's got yellowish gray fur and distinctive tiger stripes.

However, the creatures first disappeared from the mainland about 2,000 years ago, and there's a couple of reasons why people think that happened, like hunting and introduction of the dingo. But by the late 19th and early 20th century, Europeans started to come in and colonize things, which was a little bit of a disaster for lots of things, including these marsupials. People blamed them for killing chickens and sheep, and they were slaughtered by the thousands, and governments even started offering bounties for them. Like if you brought a pilt, then you would get a bounty. So this plus the dingoes was a big disaster.

And the last known Tasmanian tiger in the Beaumars Zoo and Hobart died on September 7, 1936. But when you see pictures of like the last ever tiger, it's not this one. Like it's very weird that all of the pictures that if you like, you know, look up last Tasmanian tiger is actually the second to last one. Like this one just kind of fell off the radar because they couldn't find its body, I guess. And so the last one is actually a very old female that was captured by a trapper and sold to the zoo in the middle of May 1936. And it was not publicized at all because it was really like you weren't supposed to be snaring these things. I mean, obviously this was the last one. Like I don't know who was out there like, I got to go get it.

But yeah, so it was kind of like hush, hush a little bit because it was kind of shady that they even had this. And it only lived for a few months. And when its body died, it was taken to when its body died. When the tiger died when it passed on. The body was taken to T-Mag because, hello, it was the last one. We need to figure out all sorts of things, because this is our last chance, I guess. And for many years, the museum creators and researchers searched for this body. They could not find it.

And they couldn't find any thysine material dating from 1936. They couldn't find anything recorded. They just assumed somebody threw it out, which is wild. Wild to me. But a couple of scientists did some in-depth snooping, like some really in-depth. snooping and found an unpublished museum taxidermist report from 1936 and 1937 and it mentioned the Tasmanian tiger and so they were like okay we have a record that has not been published that's you know 90 years old let's do a little dig in and so they did that they dig through all

the Tasmanian tiger samples in the entire museum and they found the tan skin and disarticulated skeleton of the final one the last one so the mystery is over um for now I mean I mean, there are plenty of people out there that would like this one to not be the last one, which I can link to that as well. But yeah, that's a whole different story. And these aren't even the only two things that happened like in a weak time span of cupboard discoveries. There are a whole other one where the second fossilized evidence ever of Army ants was hidden in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. So there's just a lot of cool stuff that needs to be spring-bined out of the... museums. But yeah, moral of the story is, if you have been missing something for 85 years,

it's probably right where you left it. But yeah. I love that. Well, they're so, I mean, in every natural history museum, they have like so many drawers and filing cabinets full of cataloged stuff. And a lot of it is really fastidiously cataloged, but there's this like stuff grandfathered in from a really slapdash era of natural history where it was just like some rich man brought this in put it in a drawer he says it's a wombat like you know and so they're still like they got a lot of that stuff to sort through still it is wild just let me go through it let me in I mean in natural history museums there are stuff like you know what this is once you found it like oh that's a thylacine but like for instance the American Museum Natural History

they've been collecting dinosaur fossils for 150 years and there's literally stuff just still in jackets waiting for an unlucky grad students like unpack this stuff right so I don't think it would be controversial to say that not just there but in other major natural museum there are unnamed new species of dinosaurs that we just haven't like unpacked yet

we're just waiting just waiting for someone to name that just waiting luck of the draw yeah you get to name well I guess most usually if you find it you get to name it. People are always like, that's not a real dinosaur name. And I'm like, listen, all names are made up. It can be whatever. Amen. That's true.

Like your name isn't real either. But like nobody's telling you. Right. Exactly. All words are made up. What are you going to do? What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it was the trombone nose dinosaur, even though that was not a main feature.

I mean, I'm always a sucker for some. from some dinosaur stuff. And we are coming into like possibly a whole dog versus dinosaur Instagram posts, which I feel like will make the highlight of my year. And it's only January 6th. I have to give you guys credit. I have to shout you out. This is idea.

Excellent. So Dustin, that means you win this week. Oh, wow. Yeah. You win nothing. But I respect and esteep.

Oh, I just assume because this is an audio. format. People can't see the like the streamers and balloons falling down behind me right now. Right? Yeah, we we spend a lot of time setting those up at every host house. How'd you get into my apartment? Your cat. That's why he's been looking at you weird. Yep. No, he knew. Dustin, reminder listeners where they can find you, including so they can track down what kind of dinosaur their dog is. Sure. I mean, if you look me up on Twitter or Instagram, but you just look up Dustin Growick, you should find me on Twitter. I am Dustin Groick. But on Instagram I'm dinosaur whisperer because of my strange ability to commute with the past I guess.

Awesome. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Thaltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and 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.

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