(Approximate times)

• 00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
• 02:17 Recent fossil discoveries and their implications
• 03:56 Chromiornis Fungi: The Funky Bird That Choked on Rocks
• 07:01 Gastroliths and Dinosaur Digestion Insights
• 09:09 Fossil Evidence of Predation and Scavenging
• 10:16 Dinosaur behaviors and ecosystem dynamics
• 14:13 Tooth Marks and Dinosaur Feeding Behavior
• 20:02 Review of Netflix’s The Dinosaurs Series
• 20:42 Analysis of the recent dinosaur docuseries
• 35:12 Review of the fictional dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street
• 37:01 Climate and Ecosystem Changes in the Mesozoic
• 51:53 Sauropods and the Climate of the Jurassic
• 59:59 Debates on dinosaur taxonomy and species validity
• 01:02:06 Plant Evolution and Defensive Adaptations
• 01:10:01 Media and Fossil Evidence in Dinosaur Science
• 01:15:38 Insights into prehistoric climate and sea levels
• 01:29:59 Modern birds as dinosaur descendants
• 01:45:00 Closing thoughts and future directions

Summary

In this episode, we explore the latest discoveries in dinosaur science, including a bird that choked on rocks, how gastrolith shape reveals dinosaur digestion, and the evolution of plants and animals during the Mesozoic. We also review recent dinosaur media and discuss fascinating fossil evidence. In this episode, we explore the latest in dinosaur research, including new fossil discoveries, behaviors, and the science behind their ecosystems. We also review the recent docuseries and a fictional dinosaur movie, providing insights into paleontology and popular culture.

Takeaways

• Fossil evidence continues to reshape our understanding of dinosaur diversity.
• Behavioral reconstructions are increasingly supported by new scientific findings.
• Popular media often blends fact and fiction, highlighting the importance of scientific literacy.
• Large-scale ecosystem modeling helps explain past climate and sea level changes.
• Ongoing debates in taxonomy reflect the fragmentary nature of the fossil record.

Keywords

dinosaurs, paleontology, gastroliths, dinosaur digestion, Mesozoic, fossil evidence, dinosaur media, extinction events dinosaurs, paleontology, fossil discoveries, dinosaur behavior, docuseries, dinosaur movies, prehistoric ecosystems

speaker-0 (00:29.038)
Hello and welcome to I know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries in science with us. I’m Garrett And today in our 576th episode

speaker-1 (00:34.892)
And I’m Sabrina.

speaker-1 (00:39.874)
We’re getting close to Halloween, so we have some somewhat gory news items like the antiornithine bird that choked to death on rocks. Oof. And on a related note, how the shape of gastroliths can help us figure out dinosaur digestion. There’s also a hatchling allosaurus that got eaten, and tooth marks on Edmonosaurus that shows a T-Rex was feeding on it. Now’s a good time to catch up on shows too. So we’re also reviewing Netflix’s The Dinosaurs and the movie The End of Oak Street.

And we’ve got Dinosaur of the Day, Stygy Venador, a dubious dinosaur with a lot of similarities to Nanotyrannis. And it also kind of sparked some more debate around Nanotyrannis. Not the big debate, but little debates. And our fun fact is that paleontologists found an iguanodon with a bacterial infection that led to an open sore on its skin. Oof. Keeping with that gory theme.

speaker-0 (01:33.624)
That is gory. Yeah. I could imagine that in a front yard as like a gory dinosaur display on Halloween, like a zombie looking tyrannosaur or iguanodon with all sorts of lesions on it. Yep. Oof. But before we get into all of that, as always, we’d like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have a new patron to thank, and that is Daniel. Thank you very much for joining.

speaker-1 (01:47.916)
An infection open source.

speaker-0 (02:02.072)
Then rounding out our shout-outs, we’ve got Jacqueline, Okie Boomer, Sassy Sauropod, Histology Sorus, Jurassic Pirate, Bony McBoneface, Xenorama, Ninja Raptor, and Matthew.

speaker-1 (02:17.518)
Thank you so much for being a Dino It all and being part of our community. We hope you’re enjoying all of the perks that come with it, because if you’re part of our Patreon, patreon.com slash InoDino, we’ve got all kinds of exclusive content like mini episodes because we can’t keep up on all the news in the regular show anymore. We also have our Ino Paleo, we have our Discord community and so much more.

So yeah, if you want to join, that’s patreon.com/slash inodino. All right, getting into our somewhat gory part of the episode. I’m gonna start with that bird that choked to death on rocks. Yes. This was published in Paleontologica Electronica by Jing May O’Connor and others, a new in anti-ornitheme bird called Chromiornis Fungi.

speaker-0 (03:09.166)
That sounds like a made up name.

speaker-1 (03:11.832)
Kinda. Well, first I wanna say this bird was named last year and somehow we missed it. It was the one out of the fifty-five that we missed.

speaker-0 (03:22.168)
Well, it is an enantiornathine in our defense, which is it’s like a it’s a non avian dinosaur, but it’s almost a bird.

speaker-1 (03:30.988)
Yeah, but we covered other bird prehistoric birds. So it came up when we were researching all the dinosaurs that were named last year as part of our dinosaur rookie cards backer kit project, because we made that field guide. And as I was going through it, I realized, I have no notes on this bird because we didn’t talk about it.

speaker-0 (03:48.972)
And you were flagging like, you know, this episode has all the extra information. And then it was like, wait a second, where’s the episode?

speaker-1 (03:56.386)
And then I read, was like, how did we miss it? It choked to death on rocks. So Chromeornis lived about 120 million years ago. It was found in Liaoning province in China in the Geophotong Formation. As for that name, the genus name Chromiornis means chromiobird, and it refers to an electrophunk group.

speaker-0 (04:19.715)
and not like crow no the bird.

speaker-1 (04:22.094)
Pro like Chrome C-H-R-O-M-E. The species name Funky refers to two musicians in that group, Chromeo, Dave One and P Thug, who together are the funk lords.

speaker-0 (04:25.54)
okay.

speaker-0 (04:36.855)
It is as ridiculous as it sounds.

speaker-1 (04:39.564)
The full name means funky chromo bird, as the authors put it, quote, in honor of the chromo funk lords P Thug and Dave One, who, like many birds, make beautiful music. And I just want to say Jing Mei is known as the punk rock paleontologist. So this tracks.

speaker-0 (04:56.448)
She was the lead author? Yes. man, that’s funny.

speaker-1 (04:59.544)
Yeah.

So Chromiornis was about the size of a sparrow. It’s estimated to be like 33 and a half grams, point zero seven pounds.

speaker-0 (05:09.538)
Wow. Yeah, that’s like a little over an ounce.

speaker-1 (05:14.178)
Very small. It had a long snout though with teeth. It had a lot of features in common with longiteryx. also had a long snout with teeth. Chromioris’s rostrum or beak is about sixty percent of its skull, the length. And then the teeth are only in the tip of the beak, the distally restricted dentition, if you want the technical terms. Yep. It had long straight teeth.

The skeleton found was nearly complete, and it’s mostly articulated, but unfortunately poorly preserved. They found a single individual on a slab and counter slab. It’s missing most of the hips and its left foot digits, toes, and the right arm and rest of the hips are disarticulated. It had a robust pygostyle, the tailbones were that fuse to support tail feathers. Its sternum was fully ossified, and there’s fusions in the bones, so it was likely.

A mature individual or nearly fully mature. There’s also soft tissue, including traces of the eyes, skin, and feathers that were preserved. There’s some dark traces in the orbit, which may be remnants of the eye preserved within the scleral ring, which is not preserved. And you can see fossilized skin under UV light. Yeah. There’s lots of feather traces too, many that were long and narrow, and that shows there were some immature ones. So

speaker-0 (06:30.2)
cool.

speaker-1 (06:38.796)
This bird may have been in molt when it died, ’cause it’s in the middle of getting new feathers. No flight feathers appear to be preserved, however. And then as for the choking bit, they found this dense, large cluster of small stones near the neck bones. There’s more than eight hundred pebbles that were in its throat. Woof. Yeah. Some were gastroliths, there’s also some clay balls in there.

They found that it was likely not gizzard stones based on it not being found in the gizzard area. That’s much lower in the stomach. And it’s also different in terms of density, volume, and number of stones compared to some ornithuromorph birds in the Jehol biota that lived around the same time. So it’s possible that Chromioris swallowed rocks because it was sick. It was likely trying to regurgitate those rocks, but then they got stuck in its esophagus, and there’s 800 of them.

And it choked to death. It just swallowed too many. This is abnormal behavior. There are some birds that sometimes ingest calcium-rich rocks to help produce eggshells or to remove parasites, but when they do that, they ingest far fewer rocks.

speaker-0 (07:34.178)
Man.

speaker-0 (07:47.926)
I was thinking that when you mentioned the clay, because I think it was in prehistoric planet. It was in one recent dinosaur documentary they had this scene where all these, I want to say ceratopsians were going through a cave or something, and they were trying to get to this nutrient rich clay, which I think was calcium. It was some sort of mineral that they were getting out of the clay. And they did that in the documentary because that’s something that birds do today. Yeah. And it kind of would make sense too that.

Maybe normally they could swallow a rock or they could swallow clay. But if you tried to swallow a bunch of rocks and a bunch of clay at the same time, then it might sort of get stuck together in the throat and cause a problem. Yeah. And like you said, maybe it was just sick and it was sort of desperate to try, you know, they didn’t have tums. Yeah. It’s trying to find something to make it feel better.

speaker-1 (08:28.054)
Also hundreds of rocks.

speaker-1 (08:38.881)
Maybe it wasn’t fully in its right mind.

speaker-0 (08:41.376)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s intense. Cause when you mentioned that it looked like sort of gastrolis and there was a large number of them, my first thought was, well, maybe it was the gizzard, but the gizzard was just in the wrong spot. Because sometimes when things die, things shift around in the fossilization or the taphonomy process. But if it’s a lot more and it has clay in it, that’s kind of weird for a gizzard. Yeah. So yeah, that I guess the choking hypothesis does sound

Maybe like the simplest explanation, even though the explanation of this bird died because it choked on a bunch of rocks and clay it doesn’t sound normal, but yeah.

speaker-1 (09:17.336)
Very unusual.

It’s not. It’s interesting. So that brings me to our next story, which is that the shape of gastroliths can help us figure out how dinosaurs digested their food, which didn’t help us with chromiornis. But it’s kind of related. This was published by Ryuji Takasaki and others in Paleobiology. And gastroliths, when we talk about them, they’re often considered to show that a dinosaur was a plant eater.

But some carnivores today swallow stones. So the key is to look at the shape of the gastroliths. And for this study, they put together a dataset of 104 individuals from 46 Archosaur species, all modern and living, so birds and crocodiles, that all had at least one gastrolith. And they found a correlation between gastrolith shape, stomach muscularity, and diet.

So the gastroliths can help us show different dinosaur digestive strategies. They found that rounded stones are more for grinding tough plants, and they show that the animal has a muscular stomach. And angular stones show a weaker stomach and less processing of foods with gastroliths. So triceratops has been found with angular stones, so it chewed more or found other ways to process its food. Sauropods also had angular stones.

And we’ve talked about before, they likely spent a lot of time fermenting their food in their stomach. Meat eating dinosaurs that led to birds evolved muscular gizzards early on. So they could eat tough foods without needing heavy jaws. Now, birds have a muscular stomach. They process food in the gizzard. And sometimes they get help from gastroliths. So it’s a combination for them of muscles and stones. So yeah, it’s kind of interesting to think about.

speaker-1 (11:13.634)
I will say with sauropods, we’ve also talked about studies where sauropods just haven’t been found with enough gastrolis that it would have really made a difference, which is what they found here, because they’re talking about the plants are probably fermenting in their stomach.

speaker-0 (11:27.02)
Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. I also wonder because we’re talking about huge groups of dinosaurs, and we don’t get that many samples of the gizzard stones for each family. That I w I wonder if it’s not, all ceratopsians did it this way and all sauropods did it that way, but maybe just these individual species within the groups and there might be a lot of overlap and different sort of convergent evolution happening. So

speaker-1 (11:53.09)
Right. Well, it was triceratops, not ceratopsians, but yeah, the sauropods was a bigger group. So yeah. Back to the more gory stories. Paleontologists found evidence of a poor hatchling allosaurus being eaten. Mm. This was published in papers in paleontology by Elizabeth Malafea and others.

speaker-0 (11:58.317)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (12:14.252)
Usually there’s no evidence because they ate the evidence.

speaker-1 (12:18.232)
That’s true. Well, here they found a hatchling Allosaurus upper jawbone or Maxilla in Portugal. It’s from the weight Jurassic. They was found at a site that’s known for microvertebrate fossils. Mm-hmm. And it had this corrosion pattern on the jawbone, the way it’s worn down. And that’s likely from digestion.

speaker-0 (12:38.614)
Yeah, you didn’t mention it with the gastroliths, but often that’s how they confirm that something is a gastrolith and not just a rock, is that it looks like it was sitting in acid for a while. Yeah. So I guess the same thing’s true for this jawbone. Yeah.

speaker-1 (12:50.798)
Yes. The teeth were corroded on the crowns, that’s the main part of the tooth, above the gum line, and the rest of the bone has no sign of corrosion. So it seems like it was regurgitated and partially digested.

speaker-0 (13:00.285)
interesting.

speaker-0 (13:05.25)
Well it’s still it’s a meat protecting the rest of the bone.

speaker-1 (13:08.014)
It was probably partly eaten by a non-avian theropod based on the pattern and where the fossil was found. Although it’s also possible it could have been a pterosaur or a crocodiliform. But the main thing to take away is that it’s important to look for the patterns.

speaker-0 (13:23.31)
Patterns on where the acid etching is. Interesting. If you were gonna hack up a part of a dinosaur, a jaw is probably a pretty reasonable part to not want. I mean, they’re sort of weirdly shaped and not much meat on them, and the teeth too is trouble. Yeah.

speaker-1 (13:27.008)
Evidence of digestion.

speaker-1 (13:43.214)
Gets in the way. Well, speaking of teeth, tooth marks on Edmontosaurus bones likely show a T-Rex that was feeding or scavenging. This was published by Bethanya Siviero and others in PLOS One and it’s open access. And for this study, they looked at 3,013 bones that are all from between 72 to 66 million years ago. They’re from the Lance Formation in Wyoming in the U.S.

Most of these fossils are from Edmontosaurus. There’s four types of tooth traces pit, puncture, score, and furrow. But it’s hard to tell bite marks because sometimes they can get mixed up with things that form because of disease or insects or weathering or erosion. All those things can leave similar marks. For this study, though, they looked at depressions, punctures, holes, and grooves that were likely left from teeth. And most of them didn’t have bone remodeling, so it likely happened at the

After the dinosaur died. They were probably scavenged. Some animals may have been killed by predators, then the bodies may have been exposed, and then the scavengers fed on those carcasses before they were buried and fossilized. And they found 12 possible tooth traces in five ribs, five vertebrae, one radius, and one ulna, so arm bones. And there were four that had patterns that closely matched the shape and spacing of T Rex teeth. So there we go, going back to those patterns.

I guess a different kind of patterns. You got your digestive patterns with the acid and then the teeth mark patterns.

speaker-0 (15:18.732)
Yeah, that is one of the main ways that they identify what bit something is how far apart the teeth are and what that matches. Because if it’s a bunch of little tiny marks very close together, you figure that, that was a small animal with its teeth that are close together. There aren’t a lot of things with as big and as far apart of teeth as T Rex in the late Cretaceous. So that definitely narrows it down. Plus, the way they’re serrated and some of those details can really

Seal the deal. Sometimes there are holes too that are about the size of the tooth, and that can tell you as well. And we’ll get into some reviews of some awesome dinosaur media that we’ve consumed recently in just a moment.

speaker-1 (16:00.686)
But I’m consumed.

speaker-0 (16:02.254)
But first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

speaker-1 (18:08.494)
All right, now we can get into our dinosaur reviews. I mentioned we’re gonna talk about Netflix’s The Dinosaurs, as well as the movie The End of Oak Street. But before we start that, we want to quickly talk about a short story called The King and the Dragon that was written by Toonrex, also known as S. Hunter Allred, who, full disclosure, is a patron. So thank you, Toonrex, for letting us know about your short story.

We’ll have a link to it in our show notes in case anybody wants to read it. So I really liked this short story. It’s set in the Hell Creek Formation 66 million years ago, and Leptoceratops, T-Rex, Nano Tyrannus, Edmontosaurus, and Dakota Raptor all make appearances in the story. It’s written from the dinosaurs’ perspectives, which are some of my favorite kind of stories to read. This one has a fantasy element to it as well.

So I think keeping the Dakota Raptors in it works because there is some debate about Dakota Raptor being synonymous with Ciro Raptor. Now, without giving too much away, T-Rex is tracking Nano Tyrannus to keep the Nano Tyrannoses away from his nest. But then something killed all three of the nanos in a strange way. There’s burnt flesh and there’s evidence of feeding. The title is The King and the Dragon, so maybe you can guess where this is going. I did say there’s fantasy here.

The culprit is a dragon. It’s about as large as the T-Rex. It walks on all fours. It’s got giant bat-like wings, and it’s known as Firedrake. It can breathe fire. The two giant predators face off, and there’s a good battle scene. I won’t give it away, but it is worth the read. And yes, I did enjoy the story and the twist. So it’s available on Amazon. And again, we’ll share a link in our show notes. Thank you, Toon Rex, for sharing with us. Now for our

T V show review? I guess. Series, documentary series.

speaker-0 (20:08.046)
What are they called? Limited series or something.

speaker-1 (20:10.51)
I think they call it a documentary on docuseries, yeah. The dinosaurs on Netflix. It’s from executive producer Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment. They collaborated with the creators of Our Planet and they made this four episode series on the rise and fall of dinosaurs. It builds on the groundwork of life on our planet. It did premiere way back in March, but you know, sometimes we take our time on this show.

speaker-0 (20:37.054)
We too. I don’t know why we took our time this much this time. But I think it’s just because it didn’t get the same sort of fanfare that Prehistoric Planet did, and because that was the Planet Earth people and everybody loves Planet Earth. And then Walking with Dinosaurs, obviously everyone knows that. So when that got remade, people were very excited. And maybe that sort of sucked some of the wind out of this.

speaker-1 (20:42.375)
Here we are, it’s the same year.

speaker-0 (21:06.182)
documentary because there’s just been so much rapidly as far as for sort of the public, non-dinosaur focused media, maybe they were a little bit burnt out on these dinosaur documentaries. I don’t know, but we didn’t really hear that much about it from our friends and family. Usually we get a bunch of texts when there’s a new dinosaur thing that came out. And this one seemed to be more under the radar than the other ones, at least. Yeah. Although

speaker-1 (21:29.806)
So I do remember when we logged into Netflix, it was prominently featured for a while. Yeah. They had some behind the scenes videos, which was pretty cool to watch. So I learned that they built over sixty creatures, VFX creatures, for the series, but they also did some I don’t know the proper term, but physical things. So like they ran around Thank you, practical effects. So they ran around with

speaker-0 (21:35.054)
Within Netflix, yeah.

speaker-0 (21:54.387)
Practical effects.

speaker-1 (21:59.054)
Hackycephalosaurus heads, their blue heads, to get context for certain shots. They wanted to know what height, what speed, that sort of thing. And sometimes they play acted out scenes. They also use lidar scanning because they needed an accurate map of the ground for some of the shots. That’s a a laser and mirror measuring system so that artists know the exact layout of the environment when they make their VFX. And that helps with things like making the ripples that Spinosaurus makes when wading through the water accurate.

speaker-0 (22:28.536)
Nice. Yeah. Those two details are super important because you can always notice when they sort of cut corners on the VFX separated from the shooting because people aren’t looking in the right spots or you know, things aren’t lining up quite right. I get there aren’t any people in this one. But and then like you said, making the environment respond in a way that represents what’s actually happening in the final product

Is a big difference. That was one of the things I remember with walking with dinosaurs, the original, where they made sure to, like you were saying, make the water splashes match what was going to happen with the VFX that made a really big difference and sort of combining those effects.

speaker-1 (23:08.206)
And then it turns out they also built at least one dinosaur. I couldn’t find a list anywhere because some of those dinosaurs looked a little like puppets to me, but we’ll talk about that when we get there.

speaker-0 (23:18.446)
That was one thing, and maybe we just didn’t find it, but I don’t remember seeing any behind the scenes and they certainly at the end of the episode didn’t have an explanation of why they made the decisions they did or how any of it was created the way that we’re used to in some shows.

speaker-1 (23:32.344)
Well, it was like a separate three video behind the scenes. That’s how I found out that they built over sixty creatures and they did the lidar and everything.

speaker-0 (23:36.492)
there is.

speaker-0 (23:42.158)
That’s good. I didn’t see that part. So I get to learn something.

speaker-1 (23:44.782)
So yeah, we’ll start with episode one, rise. We’ve got Pachycephosaurus. I thought that was an interesting choice starting with Pachycephalosaurus because it’s the rise and fall of dinosaurs, and Paycephalosaurus is not the first.

speaker-0 (23:59.736)
That’s sort of more like the fall end of the rise and fall since it’s a Cretaceous animal.

speaker-1 (24:05.528)
It was a cool scene and you know what, I remember making a note, they had that tinnitus sounds after the headbutting. Yep. Which I thought, you know, they probably did have some kind of reaction if they were headbutting.

speaker-0 (24:16.77)
Yeah, ringing ears would make sense. They did have ears and hearings, so that big slam against the head, even if it is cushioned. I mean, if we bump our head not even that hard, you can tell. Yeah. It’s not like they were bulletproof.

speaker-1 (24:30.03)
Yeah. And then we go back in time. We’re on Pangea. Mm-hmm. I liked how they showed these softish leathery eggshells.

speaker-0 (24:41.55)
Yeah, ’cause that is the current thinking that dinosaurs prob and dinosaur forms or dinosaur morphs, whatever these earliest Triassic, not quite real dinosaurs, true dinosaurs, probably did have those soft leathery eggs and maybe even some of the early dinosaurs too. Right.

speaker-1 (24:57.898)
And for the show they had Marasuchus hatching. That’s the dinosaur form. Mm-hmm. And it’s cute. It’s small. It’s on two legs. It’s got the down feathers.

speaker-0 (25:07.02)
Yep, they had pretty cute fluffy and bipedal babies. Yeah. They also implied that they had air sacs.

speaker-1 (25:18.136)
Yes, and lighter bones and the fact that it it moved on two legs is what set it apart. Mm-hmm. They do this thing where they go close up on the baby’s eye and then one year later it’s fully grown.

speaker-0 (25:28.918)
Yes. Yeah. And they were pretty successful running in the documentary because they had Pseudosukians and I think it was Tanastropheus that were on land trying to gobble them up.

speaker-1 (25:40.64)
Yeah, yeah, ’cause it had to basically run towards life. Mm-hmm. Which is a good depiction of early dinosaur forms. They weren’t at the top of the food chain yet. They weren’t dominating Earth.

speaker-0 (25:52.3)
Yeah, because they and they even showed it just trying to scavenge, which you don’t have to be on top of the food chain to scavenge, but there was a luparosucus, which I guess is another pseudosukian that shoot it off. So it didn’t even get a chance to scavenge, let alone hunt successfully. Yeah. Until nighttime, when they showed that okay, now the cold blooded animals have to sleep. And that’s when the dinosaur forms have a warmer metabolism. Yeah. And, you know, can produce some of their own heat so they can be more active at night. And they showed that being an advantage.

speaker-1 (26:22.07)
Which is what mammals were doing later.

speaker-0 (26:23.532)
Yeah. And I thought I just I really liked that presentation of here’s the disadvantages that dinosaurs had in the beginning and here are the advantages they had. And it wasn’t like a foregone conclusion that, these little dinosaur forms were gonna be these amazing predators. It was like, they’re really at the bottom of the food chain, but they do have this, they have some benefits to their biology. Yeah.

speaker-1 (26:47.31)
And then we get to the, I guess, true dinosaurs, Plateosaurus. That one looked kind of like a puppet to me, but I couldn’t find anything about whether or not it was.

speaker-0 (26:55.702)
Yeah. And right before that too, I liked that they had the Carnian pluvial event. yeah. Which basically they showed these sad, hungry rhinchosaurs in the forest that couldn’t reach the food. And they were like, the trees evolved, but they blocked out the, you know, like the canopy blocked out the light for the lower plants.

Which I thought was a little bit dramatic, this thing starving to death, because you don’t necessarily have to literally starve to death as an entire species in order to be replaced or, you know, for another species to gain dominance. But yeah, it was it was pretty evocative. And they showed it again being scavenged by a pseudosukian.

speaker-1 (27:34.68)
Yes. and this is all narrated by Morgan Freeman. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (27:38.178)
Yeah, he’s kind of America’s Sir David Attenborough, I would say. Him and Sigourney Weaver seem to be the top build documentarian narrators for some reason. I don’t know how they got into that role. He does have a wonderful voice. That’s probably what it is. And with Plateasaurus, I like to that they said it was quote unquote the first dinosaurs to become gigantic. Yes. And they were referring to it reaching all of seven meters, which is like twenty feet.

speaker-1 (27:51.906)
He has a very soothing voice.

speaker-0 (28:08.118)
Which really for a dinosaur form, yeah, I guess is pretty big. Well

speaker-1 (28:14.254)
Plateosaurus is more than a dinosaur form.

speaker-0 (28:17.038)
Brew for a dinosa but it’s not big for a dinosaur though. That’s what I’m yeah, for a Triassic dinosaur, it’s pretty good. It was enough that they could reach some tree branches. So it was doing better than the Rhincosaur that was the sad hobbling around starving animal. Yes. Which again, I don’t even think I think there would have been some ferns and stuff at ground level. I think they were a little bit over the top with that. But one thing I really liked with the Pleiadiosaurus is they showed it knocking down trees. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (28:20.856)
For an early dynasty.

speaker-0 (28:44.716)
And they said that it needs 25 kilograms of plants a day, you know, like 50 pounds, which I guess you might need to knock down a tree to do. But even if you don’t have to, we know that elephants are roughly in the ballpark of size, and they knock down trees like nothing. So it makes sense that they would knock down trees. Certainly, some weaker, smaller trees would be no problem for them to knock down. And it’s just not something you see depicted in dinosaur documentaries much. You always just see.

brachiosaurus, look, it can reach up so high. And then, you know, like a potosaurus and maybe it couldn’t reach as high. Yeah. But they never really show the one that couldn’t reach as high, just knock down the tree instead. Right.

speaker-1 (29:20.064)
It’s shows like Dinosaurs where Earl Sinclair is a tree pusher, that’s where you see the dinosaurs knocking down the trees.

speaker-0 (29:25.274)
It’s true. Yeah. He was working for the herbivores on that show, it turns out. Yeah. Well his boss was an herbivore.

speaker-1 (29:31.488)
there we go. So then we’ve also got Pro Compsignathis, which I liked the nictating membrane they gave it. Mm-hmm. And it was spotted and fuzzy. That one also looked like a puppet to me.

speaker-0 (29:44.3)
Yeah. I thought it was kind of weird that they implied or actually they explicitly said that Procomps Ignathas was trying to hunt Palladiosaurus. Yeah. Even though it was so small. I think they were just having fun with it because when you look at it up close, it looks like some of the larger later theropods. And then you zoom out and it’s like this couldn’t do anything to it.

speaker-1 (30:05.13)
No, it was just trying to get water nearby.

speaker-0 (30:07.768)
But it they did show it sort of snapping at the Palladiosaurus a little bit. And I was like, there’s no way. And then there’s no like time traveling knowledge that, like, my descendants in forty million years are gonna be bigger and they’re gonna be able to eat this animal. Yeah. That was kind of silly. But I guess from a narrative standpoint, it kind of made sense to point out the yeah. The ancestor, you know, it’s the ancestor of some bigger animals.

speaker-1 (30:33.422)
I think they did a good job with continuity in terms of showing the changes over time and kind of connecting those dots.

speaker-0 (30:41.432)
Yes, I think so too. They also, I was I remarked to you while we were watching it, that to me, this documentary, even more so than showing the evolution of dinosaurs really well, what I think it showed the best was the evolution of other animal groups, especially pterosaurs, and the evolution of plants. Yeah. I think it did a great job, more than any other recent dinosaur documentary we’ve seen, of showing how the whole ecosystem changed because they had that focus on the carnian pluvial vent.

The late Triassic extinction, which almost always gets glazed over, events that happened during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they really tied it all together and, you know, including insects and plants and everything in a way that we didn’t you don’t see in most dinosaur documentaries. So I really appreciated that. That and maybe it makes sense because it was the Our Planet team, which was all about the full ecosystem on the current Earth, that they took that same approach to this documentary. Yeah. So I yeah, I really like it. I think.

Even if you didn’t like the dinosaurs in it, which I think there is a lot to like about them, it was just a really informative and good documentary just for what it is.

speaker-1 (31:50.37)
Yeah, like you’re there are pterosaurs in every episode. This first episode has some fuzzy ones.

speaker-0 (31:55.682)
Yeah, they show Lillian Sternus trying to get at some pterosaurs.

speaker-1 (32:00.622)
I think it it successfully stomps on one.

speaker-0 (32:03.042)
Yes. And I really thought they were going to do Celophysis or do Dilophosaurus a little bit before the end of the Triassic, because there have been proposals, you know, that maybe it was in the latest Triassic, because they were in 201 million years ago at this point. But instead they showed Lulian Sternus and this really cool snake looking camouflage on it, which worked really well with the rocks as it was sneaking up on the pterosaurs. Actually, I think it kind of

grabbed onto it more than step. it stepped on it at the end. Yeah. Yeah. So I I thought that was really cool. Yeah.

speaker-1 (32:39.042)
And then this first episode it ends. There’s a volcanic eruption because you know, there’s only four episodes in the series, so we know there’s a couple of extinction events.

speaker-0 (32:48.344)
Yep. The lesser known in Triassic extinction. Yep.

speaker-1 (32:51.7)
And it disturbs Lillian Sternus having this face-off with a big reptile that once the pterosaur just stomped. I thought it was interesting that throughout the series they talk about dinosaurs and the big reptiles, as if they were these very separate things. It threw me off. I get why they were doing it, because they’re differentiating, like, yes, here we’re talking about the dinosaurs that became successful and did these different things, but every time they were talking about.

speaker-0 (33:09.208)
Yes.

speaker-1 (33:20.982)
Other reptiles I was thrown up.

speaker-0 (33:23.522)
Yeah, they used the word like reptile in quotes, basically to exclude archosaurs, which was weird. Like nobody uses reptile and excludes pterosaurs and dinosaurs from it when they say reptile, but that’s usually how they used it on the show. But sometimes they would use the re word reptile and basically only be talking about basal diapsids, or only be talking about crocodilomorphs, or only be talking about pseudosukians. So like

It’s almost like they had the script, and whenever there was a big word that was kind of esoteric, you like crocodilomorph, they just replaced it with reptile. So depending on the sentence, reptile could mean all sorts of different things, but it never included dinosaurs or pterosaurs, which was a little confusing.

speaker-1 (34:10.892)
Yes. But that the way the episode ends with the eruption and I think there were earthquakes. Maybe the earthquakes came later, but it just really reminded me of Fantasia. We recently rewatched Fantasia. Mm-hmm. And before I recently rewatched Fantasia, I would have said it reminds me of Land Before Time, but seeing Fantasia, I think Land Before Time got a lot of inspiration from Fantasia. Yeah. But the way that the earth is shaking and

speaker-0 (34:35.598)
Borrowed heavily.

speaker-1 (34:40.909)
The different the rocks shoot up and everything.

speaker-0 (34:43.598)
Extremely dramatic. Yeah. Cause you talk about magnitude 10 earthquake or like a moment magnitude 10 earthquake, you’re talking about maybe 10 feet, like a few meters of earth movement in Land Before Time and Fantasia, and also the dinosaurs. These movements are like hundreds of feet. And like rocks just shoot, like moving all over the place. Just crazy town, very cartoonish movements of the earth.

That was definitely not the most realistic.

speaker-1 (35:14.734)
But I get it. You wanna show how bad an extinction event can be. Yeah. But the thing is, I think in a lot of cases, day to day, you might not notice everything going on during a mass extinction. Yeah. Unless an say an asteroid hits the Earth.

speaker-0 (35:30.644)
Exactly. You’ve talked about in our extinction episodes how it’s hard to know if you’re living through a mass extinction because what’s happening is like species are like just slowly disappearing. You know, it’s not one

speaker-1 (35:43.042)
Fast for geologic time, but slow for us living in it.

speaker-0 (35:47.402)
Exactly. Cause if you are living through a mass extinction, it might be that there are a million of something today that fifty thousand years ago there were three million of, and in another fifty thousand years there’s gonna be half a million of. It’s not going from the full this animal is everywhere to nowhere in one giant cataclysm. That does happen occasionally, but rarely.

speaker-1 (36:12.398)
That’s not to say big things don’t happen, ’cause volcanic eruptions are dramatic. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (36:18.872)
Yeah, but most of those mass extinctions I remember you covering, it’s over the span of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, not hours.

speaker-1 (36:27.448)
Yeah. But when you’re trying to show it in four episodes, I get why.

speaker-0 (36:32.374)
I I almost feel like it would have worked better as a time lapse showing the earth move everywhere, but then you don’t show the explosions. Yeah. Because the explosions would be little blips. Right. So I g I guess they just went with the showy thing.

speaker-1 (36:43.566)
They did a time lapse in other ways by showing the earth changing with the continent shifting and everything when they were s moving ahead in time to different eras.

speaker-0 (36:51.48)
Very true. There were a lot of time lapses as they jumped in time. Then episode two starts out with a bang, with three quarters of all plant species going extinct.

speaker-1 (37:01.934)
That’s kind of the opposite of the episode name, which is Conquest.

speaker-0 (37:06.254)
Not a conquest for the plants.

speaker-1 (37:09.334)
No, more for the dinosaurs.

speaker-0 (37:11.222)
Yeah, because of course the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic ends a lot of reptile, as they would say, lineages. And then the dinosaurs get to fill in a lot of the missing pieces.

speaker-1 (37:26.488)
Yeah, we’ve got Volcanodon.

speaker-0 (37:28.95)
And Massospondylus, both from the earliest Jurassic in southern Africa, so still doing a good job with their ecosystems, putting animals that have actually been found together together.

speaker-1 (37:40.59)
Mm-hmm. In this case they’re looking for food and Volcanadon wins ’cause it’s bigger. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (37:45.55)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, kind of showing the I guess they talk about kind of an arms race between plants and dinosaurs throughout and how the plants are getting taller and then the dinosaurs get taller to reach higher in the trees.

speaker-1 (38:00.322)
Yeah, Volcanadon was definitely bigger than its ancestors.

speaker-0 (38:04.718)
The Soroponomorphs.

speaker-1 (38:07.318)
Mm-hmm. One thing I like that they do in the series is there’s a lot of shadows and silhouettes to make the animal seem maybe bigger or more menacing. And then they often pop out and it’s like, wait a minute, that’s still a small dinosaur.

speaker-0 (38:21.59)
Is that what they did with Heterodontosaurus? I can’t remember.

speaker-1 (38:24.791)
I don’t remember about heterodontosaurus specifically. Yeah. They did that a few times.

speaker-0 (38:29.676)
Yes. Yeah, I think often they do it when it’s gonna be something impressive too. They kind of mix it up. Mm-hmm. But I I liked the cute fluffy little heterodontosaurus. It had long feathers on its back and at the end of its tail, sort of the fan of tail feathers. We don’t really know. Right. Well, th some of these looked more penaceous than just filaments.

speaker-1 (38:46.744)
Filaments.

speaker-1 (38:50.958)
Mm. I liked how they said it weighed as much as a chihuahua. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (38:57.326)
That’s good comparison. And also like a dog, it’s a heterodont with the heterodontosaurus, so it had teeth for eating anything. Yes. And they also showed some like cheek pouches, kinda like a chipmunk, which I enjoy.

speaker-1 (39:09.21)
So something I learned about that is they had this behind-the-scenes video about making that heterodontosaurus, and they mentioned he’s a real cheeky chappy. And so they had to go through a few iterations. They did the 3D skeleton and then they modeled it with the muscles and skin. They worked with ILM on this and with Mark Witten, and to an extent, Yashua Kanupa, who we interviewed, because he mentioned how he was indirectly involved. But yeah, this heterodontosaurus, they nicknamed it Hetty.

And they had to go through a few iterations because at first they made it look too hamster like the way it stored food. They said the hamster was one of the inspirations for the cheek pouches, but they were just too big of cheeks at first. And it apparently took hundreds and hundreds of hours to make this heterodontosaurus.

speaker-0 (39:56.322)
That makes sense. I mean, I always expect whenever anything’s getting 3D modeled for scientific accuracy that hundreds, if not a thousand hours person hours, not necessarily just one person slogging away that whole time.

speaker-1 (40:08.814)
Holding a pine cone and eating it, it looked to me the way you see some mammals feed themselves with hands.

speaker-0 (40:15.854)
Yeah, that’s why I was saying chipmunk, very chipmunk vibes. Or squim. But the big cheeks are like the chipmunk thing, I guess. Yeah. Squirrels do it too, though. Then on the other end of the spectrum, they had Dilophosaurus, which I thought looked pretty good. I really enjoyed it. It was pretty thin as it should be for Dilophosaurus, because Dilophosaurus was not a bulky dinosaur. It was very thin compared to later carnivores like Tyrannosaurus or Giganotosaurus or Spinosaurus. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (40:18.894)
Swirl.

speaker-0 (40:45.678)
But they did make it nice and tall, and they have this intense head-on view of the male with its red-tipped crests. And then of course it does a mating display. So it’s sort of scraping at the ground a little bit, but moving its neck mostly, using its crest for calls, it seems like, because it has sort of a more resonant sound to its noises.

speaker-1 (41:04.878)
The song of the Swamp King. Mhm. That’s what they is how they put it. To me it sounded like kind of like an elephant or a bird. It was like woo woo. Can’t do it justice.

speaker-0 (41:16.622)
I thought it was a pretty good sound, pretty realistic for what kind of hollows it might have had in those crests. And they talk about the methane greenhousing, or maybe I should say the methane climate forcing, where temperatures are rising and they show a mass of spondylus panic running in a forest fire, which is very dramatic compared to just the competition that probably did them in about 183 million years ago.

speaker-1 (41:41.784)
But you gotta pack it all into four episodes.

speaker-0 (41:44.128)
Yeah, and it’s a more exciting visual to do it that way. Mm-hmm. Then they jump ahead to a hundred and sixty million years ago, we get mementosaurus the snake-necked sauropods, as I’m gonna try to remember to call them from

speaker-1 (41:51.647)
yeah, those were cool.

speaker-1 (41:57.07)
I liked the shot of them. We’re looking up at four of them and their necks kind of blend in with the really tall trees.

speaker-0 (42:04.856)
Mm-hmm. And they gave one of them a red snake neck, which, like Allosaurus, red being a common color for display. And red is one of the easiest colors for animals to make, biologically speaking. So it makes sense that they used red a lot more in the docu-series, I guess, than things like blue or purple or yellow, or some of these colors that are a little bit more challenging for animals to create.

They also said that it could reach straight up 50 feet, which I had to fact check. I think maybe it could if it held its neck at a 45 degree angle or steeper. And there are some estimates of the largest Mementosaurus having a neck that’s long enough that at that angle it might have been able to reach about 50 feet. But I the blood pressure would be tough to manage with that kind of elevation. Basically, once you get above

30 feet, even trees and things need special structures in order to get water higher than that. And you need a lot of blood pressure coming out of the heart in order to pump all the way up. Cause they still have a brain at the end of that, too, and some other senses. So they need a decent amount of blood flow to their head and all the muscles in their neck. So 50 feet is a tall order, but maybe they could do it. And speaking of red, they also had an ankiornis snapping at some bugs. I think that ankiornis looked great.

speaker-1 (43:30.402)
It didn’t have red on it though. It had the orange on top of the head.

speaker-0 (43:33.43)
Yeah, but it it’s kind of the same structure. The same melanosome that gives you red versus orangey brown.

speaker-1 (43:40.174)
They made it gray, but it looks kind of bluish in the scenes it’s in. Mm-hmm. And what they said in the behind the scenes notes is that it is gray, but the light from the sky makes it look more blue.

speaker-0 (43:54.188)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that kind of goes back to they put a lot of emphasis into the ecosystem as a whole and sort of how the lighting and all these things affect how the animals look. They don’t look disconnected from the environment like they do in some, I guess, cheaper or more simple documentaries.

speaker-1 (44:12.558)
I like too the well, with Ankiornis, we know its wings were white with speckles of black. So you always see that when you see Ankiornis. I’m used to seeing Ankiornis depicted with a black body though.

speaker-0 (44:25.036)
Yeah. It’s one of those things where we don’t know for sure. Like because with the melanosomes, you don’t know if it made it black or sort of more of a gray, how intense that black coloration was. But they did do the white sort of pattern. And the white is really in the fossil where there weren’t any melanosomes, but everybody sort of adopted it as a white color, but it’s really just sort of an unknown. So

speaker-1 (44:50.134)
Right. But if you’re going to make a guess or a hypothesis

speaker-0 (44:55.98)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s certainly within well within the realm of possibilities.

speaker-1 (45:00.878)
Poor Ankiornis gets chased in this series by what was it, Sign Raptor?

speaker-0 (45:04.642)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it was coming after the ankiornis in the woods very aggressively. Mm-hmm. And then they have it waiting at the bottom of the tree like a dog that chases a cat up a tree or something.

speaker-1 (45:16.61)
Well yeah, Ankiornis hides in the tree trunk, but it’s kind of a shallow hole. And then it manages to jump on Cyan Raptor’s head while Cyan Raptor’s trying to get it, and then it Ankyornis climbs up the tree.

speaker-0 (45:28.45)
didn’t remember that it jumped out its head. That’s very dramatic. Yeah. And then it kind of glides from the canopy and they use that as sort of a representation of dinosaurs are starting to learn how to fly, kind of, but they’re not fully powered flight yet, more glide.

speaker-1 (45:31.402)
Is

speaker-1 (45:44.622)
Not good enough because it got eaten by a pterosaur.

speaker-0 (45:47.338)
It did. It managed to get a dragonfly midair, but then it gets eaten by a pterosaur, which again, I don’t know if pterosaurs would have really hunted ankiortis. Maybe. It’s more likely that they just weren’t as good at catching prey and, you know, hadn’t developed stronger flight muscles and things like that, which is why the pterosaurs are still dominating. Not necessarily because pterosaurs are directly eating the ankiortis, but

Yeah, that’s got a trope that they couldn’t resist, I see. But then we get to your favorite formation. The Morrison. Yeah.

speaker-1 (46:23.596)
Not enough sauropods when we got to the Morris in them.

speaker-0 (46:26.112)
Yeah, it was more focused on Stegosaurus.

speaker-1 (46:28.886)
Which is cool. Stegosaurus is a well known one from the Morrison.

speaker-0 (46:33.728)
It certainly is, yeah. They gave it the most textured plates I’ve ever seen on a Stegosaurus. They I don’t know what they looked like to me. It kind of reminded me of very old, like bronze bashed metal where it’s been worked but not to a smooth condition. So it’s got these huge ridges in it. But then they made the body very smooth looking. So it was kind of a

speaker-1 (46:39.51)
It’s like ferns to me.

speaker-0 (47:01.11)
Interesting combination having the smooth body with the more extra ridgy plates.

speaker-1 (47:08.94)
I think the plates were meant for camouflage to some extent and not just within plants because they show later Allosaurus is going after a herd of stegosaurus. Well, backing up, there’s an Allosaurus trying to scavenge a sauropod, a male that’s trying to get one from the same carcass as a larger female. And I did like the way they made Allosaurus look bird-like with the eyes, and then the way they faced each other head on.

But the female attacks the male, the male falls to the side, and he walks away and then some time passes. And then that same male is very hungry, hasn’t eaten in weeks after since this attack. So he’s going after this herd of stegosaurus. So he’s a little bit desperate because otherwise I don’t know how often Allosaurus would go after a whole herd.

speaker-0 (47:54.742)
Yeah, I like that setup of this is not a typical battle that you would see occurring because a lot of times they skip that sort of setup in these documentaries and they make it seem like, well, all these dinosaurs just tried to fight each other all the time, and then whichever one won, it was because it was bigger or it was stronger or whatever. But I like the emphasis that it wasn’t his first option to go after a stegosaurus that was clearly at the limits of its capability.

speaker-1 (48:24.344)
Right. After it tried to scavenge a sauropod, which we both found interesting.

speaker-0 (48:28.704)
Mm, that they they tied in that little chestnut that caused a little bit of a controversy.

speaker-1 (48:35.202)
Yeah. But so back to the stegosaurs and their plates, they’re banding together and they’re bouncing and they’re moving their tails and all of that makes them kind of blend together and it makes it harder for the allosaurs to pick one out to attack because the allosaurs’ only hope is to isolate one from the herd.

speaker-0 (48:53.698)
Yeah, obviously it can’t try to hunt them all at once. And I thought the moving plates, they did a really good job of showing how all these plates moving all over the place, because with the way that they placed the plates, you could see through like they weren’t completely overlapping. So you could kind of see a stegosaur on the other side, or at least some of its plates. And it really did make a confusing looking scene. And you could see how that would be difficult for a hunter.

It’s similar to with zebras, they talk about how zebras have these stripes. And it’s not so much so that one individual zebra is camouflage, it’s so that when you have a whole bunch of zebras, they kind of blend together and it makes it tricky for a predator to isolate one and find the small one or whatever. Mm-hmm. And I I think they did a good job showing that as a potential reason that maybe these plates were useful. But then once it attacks too, the plate is also useful in defense. Mm-hmm. And they show the thagamizer in action.

speaker-1 (49:42.574)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (49:51.17)
Well, so the female allosaurus comes back and manages to isolate one of the stegosaurs from the herd. And then yeah, they show these things that we know exist in the fossil record, where the allosaurus takes a bite out of the stegosaurus plate.

speaker-0 (50:06.358)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, because we have some tooth marks that look like that. And then we also have a hole in a Allosaurus vertebra that matches a stegosaurus spike. So you have it kind of going both ways. And something that wouldn’t happen scavenging, a dead stegosaurus is not putting a hole in an allosaurus if it’s just if they’re going about their business separately.

speaker-1 (50:28.494)
And then it was interesting because the female Allosaurus loses the battle with the Stegosaurus.

speaker-0 (50:33.952)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it takes a hit from that thagomizer, like we were alluding to. And they mentioned the thagomizer too has a meter long spike, which I had to fact check. And that is possible. I didn’t realize they could get that long, but this is another one of those things where if you’ve gotten used to looking at skeletons, only the bones in museum displays, it’s easy to forget that there would have been a keratin covering making it larger in life and probably sharper. So yeah, a meter long, a three foot long spike.

just one of the individual spikes, so across the thing, you know, six feet ’cause it’s got one on either side is definitely possible and obviously a formidable weapon.

speaker-1 (51:12.684)
Yeah. But then the male allosaurus that’s been hanging around watching all this sees the female go down and ends up eating the female because they talk about how allosaurs could be cannibals.

speaker-0 (51:24.374)
Mm-hmm. And there, I mean, a large number of meat-eating animals in the animal kingdom do cannibalism when they get the chance, especially when something’s already dead. You know, it’s different if you have to hunt them and then eat them, but if they’re already gone. But Allosaurus, especially because we have these large clusters of them. And some of the proposals, like at Cleveland Lloyd, is maybe all the smell of that dead allosaurus was drawing in more allosaurus and then they were getting.

Killed there for whatever reason, whether it’s poison or a predator trap with some kind of mucky ground or something. So yeah, I really like that episode. I think they did a great job. A couple little quibbles here and there, but overall, other than basically the way they depict evolution, because it’s so hard to show, I think it was great. So then, even though we didn’t get much sauropod action in the Morrison formation, episode three kicks it off with some sauropods.

speaker-1 (52:22.51)
yeah. Titled Empire, meaning Dinosaur Empire. Not necessarily Sauropod Empire. Yeah.

speaker-0 (52:28.608)
I think the titles are really good for the time period, but what they choose to actually show in the episodes don’t necessarily line up that great.

speaker-1 (52:37.304)
We’re starting off with this epic winter, which we saw that and we thought, U Tyrannus which they did show U tyrannis and they gave it blue eyes and of course it’s very fuzzy.

speaker-0 (52:47.628)
Yeah. But they started with the sauropods migrating in the cold, which I thought was funny because it’s like Empire and like look at them being miserable, trudging along in the snow. And I was interested in this, the climate side of things, because it was very snowy, very snowy. Like, you know, enough that the sauropods are noticeably being encumbered a little bit by the depth of the snow. And I remember reading that.

U tyranus, yes, it lived in the cold, and it was quite a bit colder than most of the Mesozoic where it lived, but maybe not that cold. So I had to do some research into it. And so the Yixian formation in China, Northeast China, today is where U tyranus lived, as well as some sauropods and a bunch of other things. Most of the plants that have fossilized there are like those you find today in subtropical and temperate forests.

And there are also ferns, cycads, and horsetails, which indicate a fairly warm and moist environment. But oxygen isotopes give a mean annual temperature estimate of about 10 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the same as London. Mean annual temperature only tells you so much though, because you could also be somewhere like Minnesota or Canada. And there are places that average 50 degrees because there are a hundred degrees in the summer and zero degrees in the winter.

Or you can average 50 degrees because you’re 80 in the summer and 20 in the winter. So it doesn’t tell you everything. Fortunately, based on some of the details in like the lines of arrested growth in the trees, we can estimate about how long and harsh the winters were. And they don’t seem to be that long and harsh, but they were long enough that it did restrict their growing at least once a year.

speaker-1 (54:35.628)
And justify why Eutranus needed the feathers.

speaker-0 (54:38.656)
Yes. The Yishan formation also was pretty high in altitude, which might have increased the snowfall. And obviously that would have happened in the winters, even if they weren’t super cold. But we know that it wasn’t frozen a lot of the time because most of the fossil evidence shows a lot of lakes and the plants that you would expect around lakes. So if it was frozen all the time, we wouldn’t be getting that kind of evidence. So I did.

Of some research. I was trying to get the best analogue today for what the Yshian formation was like. And what I came up with is that the climate is somewhere in the range of what you get in Great Britain. So either snowing a little bit like you get in London or often snowing like you get in Scotland, but either way, having that wet and lush summer that you get across the whole Isle of Great Britain.

speaker-1 (55:31.478)
Maybe you tyrannus molted.

speaker-0 (55:33.164)
Yeah, maybe. Exactly. Yeah. Because the average temperature was fifty degrees. So even though we expect it to have snowed, it would have been pretty warm and humid in the summer.

speaker-1 (55:42.51)
They I thought it was interesting how they talk about Earth warms up and U tyranus doesn’t do as well when Earth warms up. And it actually I think it they had their U tyranus die in an avalanche. And they throughout this series, they seem to always show the end of whatever dinosaurs being featured.

speaker-0 (55:55.167)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (56:02.86)
Yes, yeah. Cause it it’s sort of like the this individual dying represents the entire species going extinct. I don’t know if there would have been enough snow where it lived for there to be avalanches. It could have just been that that was a you know, one in a million snowstorm because it would have presumably lived through some pretty bad snowstorms in its entire history as a species, but I don’t think that was a really representative example of where uteranus would be most of the time.

speaker-1 (56:29.91)
point was we saw its story end. Yes. And then they moved on to Terasaur.

speaker-0 (56:35.808)
I know, I really liked that Gway Draco I think. It was really cool looking with its extra toothy mouth at the tip of the mouth.

speaker-1 (56:39.394)
The ghost dragon.

speaker-1 (56:45.91)
Yeah, I had to look it up afterwards because I saw it and I thought, that’s like the I don’t know, flying version of Helico Pryon. yeah. The teeth are different, obviously, but the fact that there were so many and they’re sticking out, ’cause Helico Pryon has been depicted as teeth sticking out.

speaker-0 (57:04.864)
Yeah, you get it a lot with like the fishing animals, which obviously Helico Prion being a basically a shark was going after a lot of fish. And then they had longiterix or longipteryx or longipteryx. I can’t remember how they said it.

speaker-1 (57:19.95)
They were including those in Antiornithens as dinosaurs, which they are.

speaker-0 (57:23.318)
Yes. Yeah. And they also show that it had a lot of teeth, much smaller than Guid Draco, obviously. But what I really liked is they had it basically harassing the pterosaurs like crows. Mm-hmm. And I like that idea that one of the advantages to these birds, or bird-like dinosaurs, isn’t necessarily the might of the individual, but some of that intelligence, some of the cooperation, some of the

size of the fight in the dog versus dog in the fight situation. And they also have a big advantage that they could take off so much quicker and easier. So you could imagine as a pterosaur, the fight or flight calculus might be a little bit different where it’s like, if I need to flee, I’ve really got to get going now because it takes me a little more effort to get up off the ground. And so yeah, they just don’t think it’s worth it and basically show them taking off. And

Yeah, showing that progression of flight because you’ve got anchiornis and now we’ve got long gypteryx.

speaker-1 (58:23.899)
And it was kinda like almost like they were getting back at the pterosaur after the pterosaur got ankiornis.

speaker-0 (58:31.566)
I did really like pointing out the sort of irony of the cyclical nature of some of these, you know, now you’re at the bottom of the food chain or you have to look out for this other animal. But in a hundred million years, maybe you’ll be on top. Or at least you’re descended.

speaker-1 (58:45.964)
Yeah. And with longiterix, they were attacking to protect the nest. And they went back to the nest when it was once they’d driven the pterosaur away. And I liked the way they made the eggs. They looked like quail eggs to me. They were speckled and small.

speaker-0 (59:02.21)
Yeah, they looked a lot like whale eggs. Then they really got into the environment because they showed the first flowers, which they pegged at 113 million years ago, which is roughly in the ballpark, right? That’s the end of the early Cretaceous. Cretaceous is widely seen as when angiosperms, the flowering plants, and where all of the fruit and vegetables we love today, their ancestors first evolved. And what I like too is that they showed beetles moving pollen and not bees.

Which I thought was just so cool. It makes perfect sense because beetles have been around a lot longer than bees, but it’s just a neat thing to add into there, just a little difference. Like it’s starting to look a little bit more like today’s world, but there are these subtle things like, beetles are the ones spreading the pollen around. One thing, the thing that took me the longest to fact-check by far in the whole series is that they mentioned spines, thorns, and poison evolved then to deter herbivores.

speaker-1 (59:46.392)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (59:59.638)
And that that was a new evolution for plants. So I had to do a whole bunch of paleobiology research to see if that was actually true because I was very skeptical of that claim. Obviously, it could have been the first spines, thorns, and poisons on angiosperms, since that’s when they were diversifying. But in all plants, it just seemed really unlikely. So I’m gonna break it down by these different categories. So spines.

Spines go way back to the Devonian period with psyllophyton, which had spines on some species, although not all. And obviously the Devonian is long before dinosaurs. We’re talking over 300 million years ago. It is, yeah. But some of the first or some plants are on land. And actually, one of the first chemicals that we know they evolved was this chemical that is sort of like sunscreen. It helps them.

speaker-1 (01:00:41.166)
It’s the age of fish.

speaker-0 (01:00:53.516)
resist the radiation from the sun that you don’t have to worry about as much when you’re in the water. But the spines on them are interesting because they might even predate herbivores in general, which is really weird and confusing. And there have been studies on like what is the advantage for a plant having a spine if not for defense? And there are ideas, so in modern citrus plants, for example, their thorns, which are a different structure but related, are used to store moisture.

So it could be that it was kind of a water store. It could be a surface area thing. There are some other potential advantages to having spines that you might not get from just a stem and leaves. And spines, by the way, in plant morphology, specifically mean modified leaves.

It’s not like when we talk about dinosaurs and we say it had spines and we use that to mean all sorts of different things. If you’re a plant person and you say spines, it has a very specific biological meaning, and that means a leaf which has been modified into a spike. So obviously, thorns are different. Spines are those modified leaves, but thorns are modified stems. So generally, thorns are stronger since they have a woody structure.

speaker-1 (01:02:06.638)
That makes sense when I think of like rose bushes.

speaker-0 (01:02:09.47)
Rose bushes actually have prickles, which are not thorns. Yeah, all of these grow off of a stem, but thorns themselves are literally a modified stem themselves. So you could imagine it growing into a branch, but then instead of growing into a branch, instead sort of sharpening to a point and turning into a thorn, that’s more or less how they grow. With roses though,

speaker-1 (01:02:14.348)
Even though they’re on the stem.

speaker-0 (01:02:37.356)
Since you bring them up, they’re a totally different thing. They call them spicules. There are other smaller spikes and they work better for smaller predators. And basically they just grow straight out of the skin. They’re kind of like an osteoderm where they grow just within the skin and stick out that way. A lot of animals have multiple of these. So they’ll have these little tiny bristles that grow straight out of the skin to deter things like ants or little Did I say animals? Plants. Plants have them for deterring animals.

speaker-1 (01:02:53.783)
Interesting.

speaker-1 (01:03:01.934)
Animals or plants have this?

speaker-1 (01:03:06.958)
Got it.

speaker-0 (01:03:07.692)
So they’ll yeah, they’ll have the little things for deterring little predators, and then they might have huge thorns for deterring cows or some mega herbivore. So thorns, though, going back to them real quick, I tried, but I could not find a good answer on when these evolved. There’s this whole weird thing about young earth creation and thorns, and it makes it really hard to Google. So I don’t know when thorns first evolved, but

I suspect that they were probably before the first angiosperms. I’m not sure though. If anybody knows a lot about paleobiology or has a recommendation of someone we should talk to, send us a message at inodino.com slash questions so that we know who we could talk to, or you can answer our question.

speaker-1 (01:03:54.715)
So it’s the opposite. We’re asking you the question.

speaker-0 (01:03:57.162)
Yes. The questions go both ways. So that’s enough about the spiky things. Poisons also probably go way back before dinosaurs. I like this quote from Current Opinion in Plant Biology, where they said, quote, The majority of the several hundred thousand specialized metabolites produced by plants function in defense against insects and other herbivores. End quote.

So it seems unlikely that the first herbivore-resistant chemicals evolved in the Cretaceous with mega herbivores when they have so many chemicals that evolved against insects, which were around for a lot longer in advance. And I can’t find the exact date for the first insect or herbivore-resistant chemical, but chemicals don’t often fossilize. And we know that chemicals like alkaloids, glycosides, terpenoids, phenols.

And even short chains of amino acids called peptides can work as defense for some herbivores. And since peptides are literally just short chains of amino acids, that’s like the easiest thing you could possibly evolve. So I I don’t think there’s any chance that these plants were on land for 300 million years and not a single one of them evolved a peptide for defense. So yeah, I think that claim about thorns and spines and poisons evolving in the Cretaceous is way off.

speaker-1 (01:05:23.439)
I think the reason they did it was because they’re showing a stegosaur that can’t eat these new plants because it’s got spikes on them.

speaker-0 (01:05:31.2)
Yeah. I do think a fair statement would be that plants needed to develop new thorns, new spines, and new poisons to deal with these new herbivores. But that’s been an arms race going back over 400 million years. That would have been going on throughout the Mesozoic as new dinosaurs evolved and new insects evolved. That wouldn’t be a a new thing for the Cretaceous.

speaker-1 (01:05:51.96)
Yeah. But I think the point was to focus on this poor stegosaur that was the last of its herd. They made a claim that stegosaurs are herd animals by nature. I thought that was a bit of a general overgeneralization. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:06:06.36)
Yeah, I think it was because they had that whole plate thing going on, like the zebra analogy. But yeah, certainly it’s very hard to know if any dinosaurs really spent time in herz.

speaker-1 (01:06:16.702)
Yeah. But yeah, the poor Stegosaur is starving because of the spikes on the plants and her jaws aren’t able to handle the tougher plants. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:06:27.15)
Yeah, and it kept getting poked by those thorns. But then they have the most beautiful scene of the entire series.

speaker-1 (01:06:34.222)
And not surprised you’re saying this.

speaker-0 (01:06:36.14)
I mean it is like the most serene scene in the series, I think. It’s the ankylosor, specifically a notosaur, so no tail club.

speaker-1 (01:06:43.47)
Specifically Peloropletes. I had to look it up later.

speaker-0 (01:06:48.28)
okay, nice. Yeah, they had it sort of bounding on the bottom of a pond, surfacing with a lily pad on its head, giving a little bit of hippo energy, I guess I would say. But they talk about its advanced jaws that can eat all of the new plants, which are they literally say much fancier.

speaker-1 (01:07:08.268)
Yeah, it did. It said it was fancier than a stegosaur and it can crush the food.

speaker-0 (01:07:13.034)
Mm-hmm. And they have this beautiful scene in a meadow. They emphasize that it has this nasal labyrinth to amplify vocalization. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And they they describe singing as his passion, which I thought was pretty funny. Yeah. And but then they have a female responding to his quote, deep, sultry humming.

speaker-1 (01:07:21.004)
Yeah, so they show it singing.

speaker-1 (01:07:28.075)
Obviously speculative.

speaker-1 (01:07:35.63)
So I found out that this scene was inspired by the twenty twenty three discovery of the Pinakosaurus larynx.

speaker-0 (01:07:44.622)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And also there have been some studies on that nasal labyrinth in the head, which going along with that, you know, vocalization in the throat is how you get all these different sounds. And they also talk about its stylish armor. It has another red head, again, red being one of the easier colors. And it successfully mates.

speaker-1 (01:08:07.148)
Yeah. I mean without at first glance I thought, is this Borealapelta? It’s kind of reddish. It’s swimming. Are they gonna show it bloating and floating later? But it was the wrong place, wrong time anyway. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:08:16.418)
I’m glad they did.

speaker-0 (01:08:20.792)
Yep. That was a very good scene.

speaker-1 (01:08:23.118)
Well then we move on to mid-Cretaceous and the sea levels reach the highest point in history.

speaker-0 (01:08:29.613)
Yeah. I know we talk about all the islands, you know, how Europe was an archipelago and the western interior seaway that divides North America. But what I liked is that they explained why. They said it’s not just because there are no ice caps, but also because these underwater mountain ranges are displacing huge amounts of water. So if you have all these mountains underwater, that water has to go somewhere and it gets pushed up onto the land. Mm-hmm. Which is really interesting.

speaker-1 (01:08:54.764)
Yeah, and then that’s how we get hot segment. they called it Never Land for Dinosaurs where normal rules don’t apply. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:08:57.21)
yeah, I loved their depiction of hot saga.

speaker-0 (01:09:04.119)
They’re all still small. They never grow up.

speaker-1 (01:09:06.638)
Except when they’re not small.

speaker-0 (01:09:08.6)
Yeah, that’s true. They mostly focus on the small dinosaurs.

speaker-1 (01:09:11.894)
No, they also focused on the Hot Sigopteryx. The Pterosaur. yes, yes, yes. I’m so I’m thinking of the scene in general, which is a lot like a horror movie.

speaker-0 (01:09:22.912)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, they have the little Magyarosaurus, little cutie. They describe it as about the size of a pony. And then they have the shadowy hot seg optery swooping in really ominously, like they don’t even notice it at first. You just see it above their heads, and then it comes over and most of them manage to hide in a burrow. Yeah, I guess I mean I’m I guess I’m using burrow loosely. Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:09:41.317)
They had in a cave.

speaker-1 (01:09:46.894)
But the cave to me made it seem more horror movie ish.

speaker-0 (01:09:50.463)
I suppose so, yeah. But then you have a not so bright sauropod that leaves the burrow and just gets snapped right.

speaker-1 (01:09:57.547)
Yeah. Shouldn’t have done that. Nope. You never leave the group.

speaker-0 (01:10:01.602)
No, that especially not a minute after you see a big predator right outside. But then in happier news for dinosaurs, we get Spinosaurus.

speaker-1 (01:10:10.104)
Yeah. And it was really interesting. I was watching closely to see, all right, what’s this Spinosaurus gonna do? ‘Cause it’s in a swamp and it’s waiting at first, but then it goes to the beach and they talk about how it’s adapted to a planet that’s now mostly ocean and then it shows it swimming and doggy paddling in the ocean.

speaker-0 (01:10:21.422)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (01:10:29.44)
Yeah. I really like too I think they did a good job representing that it wasn’t a great swimmer and even explicitly saying if it tries to catch something like a shark or a a large fish by chasing it down, it will never succeed because it is not that well adapted to the water.

speaker-1 (01:10:46.638)
But it can feel movement with its snout. So what it does is it gets some Yeah. Yeah. And then it just waits with its mouth open.

speaker-0 (01:10:52.291)
Bait?

speaker-0 (01:10:56.878)
I loved the baiting idea because it catches this fish and you’re like, okay, it’s gonna eat the fish, and then it spits it out. It’s like, why didn’t he eat it? And then you have the like animation of it slowly falling in the water. Yeah. Yes. And it was really funny because our daughter saw the little clip that pre-plays of the Spinosaurus. It’s like the first thing of it about to eat a shark. And she literally the whole time is just chanting, Eat the shark, eat the shark.

speaker-1 (01:11:07.158)
Chumming the waters. ‘Cause it’s trying to get a shark.

speaker-0 (01:11:25.326)
So she was very excited that it succeeded. Yep. one a couple things I need to point out about the Spinosaurus. I think its behavior they nailed the obviously speculation about it baiting is maybe a little bit beyond its capabilities, but we don’t and it’s fun. But they have a pterosaur that lands on its back and it like wiggles its sail to make it leave. It might have been able to wiggle its sail. That’s potentially possible. It would have been

speaker-1 (01:11:41.198)
No, for sure.

speaker-0 (01:11:54.67)
Pretty hard because the its sail is literally fused to its vertebrae. So it would have had to rotate its whole back quite a bit to get it wiggling. But the bigger problem is they have the Spinosaurus look back at it while it’s keeping its mouth still in the water. And Spinosaurus almost certainly couldn’t move its eyes within its sockets because they’re just the wrong shape and size in order to swivel. They would have had to move their whole head to look in different directions.

But in that scene, obviously it’s got its mouth in the water, so it couldn’t have moved its head. So they just had it move its eye. Yeah. But it probably couldn’t have really done that. The other thing is, I think they did a good job with its overall proportions, leg, arms, its whole anatomy looked good. Even its back spines, they gave it more of a old school semicircle, whereas a lot of the newer stuff, it’s more of a squared off sale. Both of them are

basically equally possible at this point given the fossils that we have. I and honestly, I think maybe we’re leaning a little bit more towards circle, semicircle again. But they made its tail really weird. They didn’t do the long fin extending down the whole top of the tail. They gave it a big dip in the middle. So it only I maybe because they have the other dinosaurs that have that sort of same visual language of like the tail fan where it’s wider at the tip.

And then narrows before getting to the bulk of the animal’s body. But they, yeah, they made it basically go flat along the top of the tail for a lot of the length of it. And we have some spines on those tail vertebrae that show that it would have had more of a sort of fin on top of the tail there. So I think that was a little bit of a miss. But I really like that scene.

speaker-1 (01:13:36.63)
Yeah. They’re super good. And then with the Spinosaurus they talk about well now dinosaurs have taken over the skies and the seas. Mm-hmm. And they’re also dominant on every continent.

speaker-0 (01:13:46.604)
Yeah, they show Antarctica a little bit, which I thought was great. They have the bioluminescent fungus there, and we see Antarctica pelta and some sauropod. I don’t know what it was, in a very pretty scene. And yeah, they put a lot of effort, obviously, into that scene, even though it was such a short scene. So I’ve I really appreciated that one.

speaker-1 (01:14:07.756)
Yeah. And that brings us to the last episode titled Fall. We know where this is going.

speaker-0 (01:14:11.906)
Dun dun dun. We do. Yeah, they skip ahead all the way to 75 million years ago, and they show the asteroid in our asteroid belt. this also I don’t know if this might have taken me more research than the thing about the the plant biology. Yeah, because I’m not super knowledgeable about astronomy, so I had to read some of these papers about how asteroids leave our asteroid belts, which, yeah, was a challenge for me. But

speaker-1 (01:14:27.662)
Plants.

speaker-0 (01:14:42.304)
I will say we knew a little bit of this because you especially often cover these news items of where the asteroid hit and how it impacted the Earth. And we know that there’s a good chance it’s an asteroid from our asteroid belt given the iridium levels and some of the chondrite material that you see from the asteroid. We also know that there are plenty of asteroids bigger than the Chicksalube impactor in the asteroid belt, so it’s reasonable that an asteroid that size could have come from that location.

But the problem for me is the timing. I can’t really make sense of the nine million years for it to get to Earth after a large bump, the way they show it in there. So basically, the asteroid belt is very diffuse. It’s not like you see in Star Wars and things where I mean it’s not our asteroid belt in Star Wars, but you don’t see multiple rocks at the same time.

The average distance between rocks in the asteroid belt is something like a million kilometers. wow. They are very far apart to the point where when we’re sending spaceships past the asteroid belt, we don’t even worry about asteroids. We just send it and it’s like there’s they’re so spread spread out that whatever, it’s the odds of it hitting are vanishingly small. So it’s not even worth the effort of calculating. But they do occasionally bump into each other. And in the animation, they have the asteroid.

bump into another asteroid, or I should say maybe a meteoroid bumps into the asteroid and sends it on the collision course for Earth. And they make it seem like it’s just sort of headed in that direction. But if it just headed in that direction, it would be going 0.002 miles an hour if it was going to take nine million years to get there. And if you did try to do that, it wouldn’t work because Jupiter basically just would pull it back into a slightly different orbit. Jupiter sort of holds

The asteroid belt where it is.

speaker-1 (01:16:40.182)
That was one of the unlucky things for dinosaurs. Jupiter didn’t do that.

speaker-0 (01:16:44.822)
Yes. Well, probably what happened is something called resonant chaotic pumping. So basically Jupiter and Saturn periodically disrupt the orbit of these asteroids. And if they hit them in just the wrong pattern over millions of years, it will adjust their orbit to the point where it sort of gets flung out of the asteroid belt onto a new orbit. So in that case, there wouldn’t be any initial bump.

It’s just from this sort of forcing of Jupiter and Saturn’s orbit. So I I don’t think that initial bump really makes any sense because if it did get initially bumped enough to get knocked out of the orbit, it would only take a few years to get into orbit with Earth. And so then the timing would be much faster. If it’s getting sent by this resonant chaotic pumping, which is way more likely, that’s how most of the asteroids get knocked out of the asteroid belt. There is no initial bump.

speaker-1 (01:17:44.408)
Maybe we need to talk to an astronomer.

speaker-0 (01:17:46.55)
Maybe. The other interesting thing is it could have been bumped in a way, but it probably would have been bumped by the sun. So basically the sun’s radiation heats up the asteroid. And then as it turns, it re-radiates that heat energy from the sun and it just causes an ever so slight push that over millions of years can cause it to move a little bit and mess up its orbit enough that it ends up in one of these resonant, chaotic pumping situations.

And those things are estimated to take millions to even a hundred million years to hit Earth. So that fits within the nine million year range that they lined up in the show. And this does happen all the time. There are tens of thousands of asteroids currently going through this process in Earth’s general vicinity, but it is nothing to worry about because most of them are very, very small. And there’s only a couple that are Chicksalube impactor size.

And they’re not anywhere near getting into Earth’s orbit at this point or colliding with Earth. Yep. So that’s what I learned. That’s probably why they picked seventy five million years. I don’t know why they showed a direct impact. Maybe it’s just because showing the gravity effects of Jupiter and Saturn are too difficult and not what the show is really about. Mm-hmm. But back to Earth.

speaker-1 (01:18:51.598)
Well that’s good. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:19:09.582)
We get to 72 million years ago, and now we’ve got the Western and Syrior Seaway taking over North America, and they’re emphasizing all the coastlines and islands, which isn’t something we usually talk about. Usually we just talk about you’ve got the western landmass and the eastern landmass. We don’t talk about just how many islands there would have been, which I really like them emphasizing that. Mm-hmm. North America’s answer to Spinosaurus, as they call it, which is Hesperornis.

speaker-1 (01:19:29.378)
Good for the water birds.

speaker-1 (01:19:35.118)
It’s very different dinosaur. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:19:39.47)
It is the answer to Spinosaurus in that they’re both semi-aquatic.

speaker-1 (01:19:44.236)
Yeah, it looks kinda like a penguin but with a longer neck.

speaker-0 (01:19:47.682)
Yeah, I think they made it kind of like a clumsy dodo bird on land. but they gave it really beautiful swimming animations. Mm-hmm. And then they introduced the mosasaur, which they describe as twice the size of a killer whale, which I think is just a fantastic way to introduce a mosasaur because that is an accurate representation of its size, but also in terms of behavior, because killer whales are famous for being smart.

speaker-1 (01:19:51.458)
No, yeah, they made it very awkward on land. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:20:13.632)
And going after all different types of prey that a lot of other sea animals might not go after. And given the large conical teeth that mosasaurs had, I think that’s probably likely. Although I don’t know if it would have really gone after Hesperornis all that often.

speaker-1 (01:20:29.294)
Well it does in the shell and it eats one.

speaker-0 (01:20:31.842)
Yes. I thought it was interesting too that they’re like, it’s fleeing to shore because it still needs to breathe. Yeah, but like mosasaurs have to breathe too, because they’re reptiles. They make it seem like the mosasaur this big advantage in the water though, and that’s Hesperornus has to get out. I think they since they both have to breathe, there were a lot more options for how Hesperornus could have handled it. But I think they really just wanted that shot of Mosasaurus snapping it. Yeah, on the beach.

speaker-1 (01:20:37.614)
No, the Hasperona.

speaker-1 (01:20:59.742)
From the beach.

speaker-0 (01:21:01.996)
Which makes sense. And it worked. And it’s within reason. We get another sauropod, maybe Alamosaurus, I’m thinking, but really it’s not about Alamosaurus, it’s about Myasaur or some similar hadrosaur in huge herds in the thousands, as they put that.

speaker-1 (01:21:21.292)
Yeah, I was surprised with that number.

speaker-0 (01:21:23.842)
They describe it as, quote, the greatest gatherings of dinosaurs the world has ever known. Is a a bold claim considering we’ve had birds for many millions of years at this point.

speaker-1 (01:21:28.718)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:21:34.934)
But it looks really cool, this aerial shot of this giant hadrosaur herd.

speaker-0 (01:21:40.086)
Yes. And we do have some large nesting grounds fossilized. So I guess that supports the idea of this large nesting round that they show in the docu series.

speaker-1 (01:21:51.374)
Yeah, they’re in the nesting colony. And then they gotta watch out for pterosaurs, because like you were saying, Garrett, pterosaurs make a lot of appearances in their series.

speaker-0 (01:21:59.394)
And I like that they have the six-month-olds in the nest, because you were just talking about how there’s this evidence from Myasora that the parents basically were bringing plants back to their babies because they’re wearing out their teeth, but they’re not really strong enough to walk around yet. So I I liked that a lot. I thought it was kind of weird how aggressive the Ketzel Coatlas was in this scene. I think maybe they just didn’t feel like going through a whole other story.

Like they did with the allosaurs, where it’s like, it tried to get food and then it couldn’t. So then it has to go a little more desperately. But that Ketzilco Atlas seemed really desperate to get to those babies. It’s like screaming at all the other hadrosaurs, like charging in. And it does get one, which was surprising to me, because I thought, what is the point of this nesting community if you’re not fending off predators as a community? But then the mama gets in and takes it down.

speaker-1 (01:22:56.205)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:22:56.812)
Which I think is very realistic if a Ketzalco Atlas was bold enough to get into that situation because pterosaurs do have fairly fragile bones and they don’t take off that quickly, not as quickly as birds. They need a little bit more momentum and effort to get up and off the ground. So if you’re on the ground near a nest and the mama notices you, you could be in trouble. But yeah, I like that emphasis on it’s not just dinosaur on dinosaur. The pterosaurs add a whole other element to this ecosystem.

speaker-1 (01:23:25.036)
Right.

speaker-0 (01:23:26.37)
And then what’s a dinosaur documentary without the Hell Creek? So they had to do that with sixty-six million years ago.

speaker-1 (01:23:32.206)
Of course. But instead of focusing on Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus, we’ve got Ankylosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.

speaker-0 (01:23:39.426)
They put it the latest and greatest of the armored warriors, six meters long and highly territorial. Yes, yeah, very strong. I would like to point out that it was more like eight meters long, with the most current and up-to-date estimates, maybe even ten meters, although that’s probably pushing it. And it probably weighed about eight tons. This is the Yes, I think it’s the only dinosaur they give the full binomial name for, too.

speaker-1 (01:23:45.912)
And they show up pushing a log.

speaker-1 (01:24:01.998)
Pretty big.

speaker-1 (01:24:07.256)
I was gonna say, well they say Tyrannosaurus Rex, but we’re just so used to hearing that one.

speaker-0 (01:24:12.322)
Yeah, and Kylosaurus magnaventris.

speaker-1 (01:24:15.512)
So we both made a note of that. That’s that’s funny.

speaker-0 (01:24:18.086)
I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard somebody say Magnaventris with ankylosaurus. Somebody there likes ankylosaurus. That’s what this taught me.

speaker-1 (01:24:25.774)
And we should find them and talk to them.

speaker-0 (01:24:28.57)
Yeah. They show it patrolling its territory. They show its half ton club tail. And then of course T-Rex shows up because like you said, we didn’t have Triceratops fighting T-Rex. You gotta have Ankylosaurus.

speaker-1 (01:24:42.37)
Yep, and they face off. It’s a pretty epic fight.

speaker-0 (01:24:45.386)
It is. I thought it was a little bit weird. It’s a little bit Jurassic Park three Spinosaurus versus T-Rex, where like the T Rex gets its head around the neck of the ankylosaurus and it’s like, okay, well, that’s game over. Right.

speaker-1 (01:24:58.742)
But they didn’t phase the ankylosaurus.

speaker-0 (01:25:00.662)
Yeah, it does in the defense of the defense it does have those cervical neck rings which were pretty strong. Yeah. A T Rex had such a strong bite. I think if it got it around its neck like that.

speaker-1 (01:25:14.068)
They also both moved pretty quickly. Yes. And when I think Ankylosaurus, I don’t think fast mover.

speaker-0 (01:25:17.176)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:25:20.895)
Or T Rex really for that matter, especially one that’s strong enough to do anything against ankylosaur.

speaker-1 (01:25:27.118)
Yeah. but then Ankylosaurus goes for the shins with its tail.

speaker-0 (01:25:30.538)
It does. They did spend a lot of time facing each other like head to head, which is very weird for the ankylosaur, because it would be pointing its tail at the T Rex as much as possible. But like you said, it does eventually do that and go for the the shin. Doesn’t really do any damage though, which is weird because we know that if an ankylosaur got a full hit on a shin, it would break it. That leg is doomed. Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:25:53.934)
They did have the T Rex go away for a little bit because of that attack. Yes. But then the Ankylosaurus got too complacent. Mm-hmm. And then we have Morgan Freeman saying there’s one thing that sets them apart intelligence. And T Rex ambushes and is successful.

speaker-0 (01:26:08.291)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:26:12.108)
Yeah. I will say because I think the T-Rex was moving faster than it actually probably could have. And we think that Ankylosaurus, one of its main defense strategies, was just to drop down. Yeah. And we didn’t see that happen at all, which was kind of weird because it’s like that’s probably how it defended itself. Just drop down and you can’t get knocked over. Mm-hmm. It wouldn’t have needed to hear, and we know they had decent hearing or see that well in order to notice the T Rex.

speaker-1 (01:26:14.69)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (01:26:41.302)
A split second before it was next to it where it could just drop down. And the other thing I want to mention about the ankylosaurus is they made its tail way too flexible. It was bending like a nodosaur tail. It didn’t have the handle leading up to the club at the end. It was bending like way too much. But other than that, I really liked the way that they represented the ankylosaurus.

speaker-1 (01:27:02.114)
Then there’s the whole scene where the T Rex is dragging the ankylosaurus with its jaws and moving the whole body and it does move past a herd of triceratops. So we do have triceratops a little bit in there. They talk about T Rex has to eat an equivalent of 200 steaks a day. Yeah. And it’s leaving a trail of blood in the forest. And it’s doing this because it needs to bring the food back to her nest of five hatchlings, which they sound kind of like puppies yelping for food and they’re fuzzy. and also the T Rex has lips or at least it

Covers the teeth. I think they did that with all of the theropods. But I wanted to say some behind the scenes stuff I found out. They built a full life size prop ankylosaur for this ankylosaurus T-Rex scene. Nice. Specifically for the dragging part. It’s because they wanted to see ankylosaurus close up, caught up on the rocks and the tree roots. So

speaker-0 (01:27:36.098)
Yes.

speaker-0 (01:27:55.598)
That was brand new to me. I’ve never seen anything depicted like that. Dragging a large any kind of animal, any kind of dinosaur being dragged by a T Rex like that.

speaker-1 (01:28:04.962)
Yeah, same. So they built a model. Matthew Healy built it. And they f well, they first made a VFX one with ILM. And then they crafted this posed maquette and made a steel frame, a rough polystyrene sculpt on top. They wrapped it in some stuff. They covered it in slurry and laid clay on it and sculpted that way. And of course they gave it the wound to show where the T-Rex got it. And

He said he got constant reviews on the scales and the muscles and the nose, because it had to look exactly like the VFX one. And they also had to test if it was tough enough to be thrown around. And then they gave it a blood rig so it could spew out blood from the wound. And they shot it in the forest. And then they added the VFX later of the T-Rex and Ankylosaurus. But they had to get the shots for the dragging and dropping and then use that. So specifically that ankylosaur being dragged in the river, there were

A whole team of people, they’d be counting to three and then pushing. It got stuck in the riverbed at one point, but but yeah, it took an entire team to get that one shot.

speaker-0 (01:29:12.982)
Yeah. They did show it like practically moving heaven and earth to get this ankylosaur to its babies, which it would have been a monumental task. Like I said, an adult ankylosaurus would weigh eight tons. Yeah. And that’s about the weight of a T-Rex. So I guess it’s reasonable, you know, like a human can drag another human where you can usually drag something around the weight of yourself. Although it doesn’t scale

necessarily when you get up to these multiple ton ranges. So I don’t know how well a T-Rex would be able to pull because that’s a lot of force on those teeth, right? That it’s pulling with, because it doesn’t have hands it can pull with. It’s got to be all on those small front teeth it’s using.

speaker-1 (01:29:56.322)
Got that mother adrenaline must feed my baby.

speaker-0 (01:29:59.266)
Yeah, I guess so. But it’s possible those teeth would have just been ripped out trying to pull like that. I guess so. Especially though when you’re talking about those giant spikes on the side of ankylosaurus digging into the ground. Yeah. Like could its teeth actually pull stronger than ankylosaurus? A whole row of meters and meters of these spikes digging into the ground or like you were saying, into a riverbed with the rocks? I don’t know.

speaker-1 (01:30:03.702)
I could grow new teeth.

speaker-1 (01:30:25.944)
Well, they said they found support for this in modern raptor behavior. And then there’s birds and crocodilians that kill and take their food home, which lasts longer than taking chunks.

speaker-0 (01:30:36.118)
Yes. Certainly the idea of moving some food home makes sense. But we don’t have anything like an ankylosaurus around today that gets dragged. And if you were purely in water, like deep enough water too, like you were saying, you could bloat and float type situation, drag it across some, you know, a lake would be a lot easier for it. But yeah, I’m not sure. I’m kind of I’m torn because I love ankylosaurus. I don’t like seeing it get killed. But on the other hand

speaker-1 (01:31:03.96)
Good scene.

speaker-0 (01:31:04.878)
T-Rex versus Triceratops is so overdone. But it’s also the one that we have the evidence for, scientific evidence for, you know, like bites in Triceratops frills that match T-Rex teeth. So I don’t know. They were and they pulled it off. I don’t know how realistic it was, because again, it’s the the real stress comparison is how strong are the front teeth of T-Rex.

speaker-1 (01:31:20.246)
We’re going for something different.

speaker-0 (01:31:33.794)
compared to the holding force of eight tons on spikes in the dirt, I kinda think the d spiky, dirty ankylosaur is harder to move than the T-Rex could handle. Mm.

speaker-1 (01:31:48.364)
Not that it matters because the episode ends with the end Cretaceous.

speaker-0 (01:31:52.098)
Yeah, they emphasized the asteroid vaporizing the seabed, which I thought was a really good addition because I I think they did a fantastic job showing, you know, like the Earth getting blanketed and all the realistic fires they had all over the place.

speaker-1 (01:32:08.795)
The explosions, the earth shaking and knocking down even the sauropods.

speaker-0 (01:32:12.992)
Yeah. That global ash cloud.

speaker-1 (01:32:17.23)
There was a lot of poetic lines, like they’re yeah, caught beneath the death cloud and they’re entombed.

speaker-0 (01:32:23.02)
Yes. They talked about the death toll for the dinosaurs is catastrophic. Although I would argue it’s more catastrophic for the pterosaurs and mosasaurs because they were completely wiped out. Right. Yeah. The earthquakes, though, I I gotta say, more fantasia style absurd earthquakes, because like you were saying, they’re literally swallowing up sauropods. So I was trying to look up what a magnitude twelve or thirteen earthquake.

could look like, because that’s the estimate on about what this earthquake would be. If you try looking that up from any source that talks about earthquakes, they’ll tell you we don’t get magnitude 12 or 13 earthquakes because we’ve never had one in the history of humanity. But in general, earthquakes don’t happen that way. Earth the way they showed the earthquake was kind of like the whole crust turning into confetti and sort of getting shuffled around and falling and rising and

getting all crazy town. If that had actually happened, we would see it in the stratigraphy. That’s just not how earthquakes really work. As the USGS put it, because they actually have a FAQ on this exact trope happening in movies where the earth opens and a like a villain falls into it. But in this case it’s the earth opening way bigger and a whole sauropod putting falling into it. They say that that’s total fiction. Their quote is gaping faults exist only in movies and novels

The ground on the two sides of the fault slide past each other. They do not pull apart. If the fault could open, there would be no friction. Without friction, there would be no earthquake. So it’s sort of like the earth never really spreads apart in this big jolt like that. That’s just not how earthquakes work. Earthquakes work by shoving against each other and sliding past each other. The only spreading that happens is that slow spreading that you get at the spreading center is like in the

Mid Atlantic Ridge, places like that. Mm-hmm. At the site of the earthquake, that’s not where you get spreading.

speaker-1 (01:34:25.612)
You can have it though where all of a sudden there’s a like six foot tall wall of rock.

speaker-0 (01:34:32.896)
Yeah, certainly. Yeah. But they always stay together. Mm-hmm. They never spread out and swallow a sauropod. Yeah. Like happened in there. So that was a little bit too dramatic for my liking. I think they could have just showed some of the Tanacyte or Tanacyte type stuff with the huge flood coming in and, you know, impaling the turtle and stuff.

speaker-1 (01:34:53.624)
They did talk about the world being so hot it bursts into flames and suffocates the planet with ash, the world goes dark, the ones that survive then die from freezing temperatures. And then we’ve got the poor Tyrannosaurus that just fed its babies. It’s weak, it’s having trouble breathing, and it’s kind of the symbol of the end of the dinosaurs as it takes its last breath.

speaker-0 (01:35:16.546)
Yeah. They couldn’t resist. Gotta have that. Although they threw in some other dinosaurs too. It wasn’t just T Rex, so I like that. And they even had a moment where I think it was Pachycephalosaurus or one of the smaller Ronathiscians was walking along and sort of encounters T Rex in like this fiery forest and they like look at each other and then they just kind of keep going. Yeah. I do. Yeah, ’cause it’s like this is not the time for eating. Yeah. They’re both just like trying to find water or somewhere cooler to not, you know, be in trouble.

speaker-1 (01:35:35.254)
What are you

Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:35:46.572)
I did think the the idea that in two weeks the temperature dropped by twenty-five degrees Celsius was a bold claim. Cause that’s like forty degrees Fahrenheit. That is a huge temperature drop. And what I remember, I that’s definitely on the very extreme end of the temperature estimate for a drop. Mm-hmm. I don’t know if the earth would have actually dropped quite that much in temperature.

speaker-1 (01:36:12.96)
It was a very dramatic sudden event. So yeah, I don’t know.

speaker-0 (01:36:17.046)
Yeah. What I was thinking though is if the temperature dropped twenty five degrees Celsius worldwide, you’d be freezing all of these dying dinosaurs, and that would be a lot of meat available for scavengers, which could explain some of the animals like we were talking about the Allosaurus scavenger hypothesis. If we had an instant deep freeze of all the meat on Earth, that would have been good for quite a few groups of animals and fungus and plants.

speaker-1 (01:36:45.41)
That didn’t get frozen?

speaker-0 (01:36:46.636)
Yeah, exactly.

speaker-1 (01:36:48.686)
And then we go forward in time to today, there’s people excavating dinosaurs, and to me it looked a lot like Jurassic Park, the way they were depicting it, kind of brushing away sand, and then you see this intact giant theropod skull.

speaker-0 (01:37:02.156)
I did feel like they went to like a playground for that scene, not an actual dig site.

speaker-1 (01:37:08.142)
‘Cause that’s rare.

speaker-0 (01:37:10.348)
Yeah. Was a pretty ideal dig situation. Also the skull looked a little bit flatter, you know, a little bit more set up to look like that. A real T Rex skull.

speaker-1 (01:37:19.864)
Yeah. But the very ending was cool. Yes. Where they talk about how dinosaurs are still around as birds.

speaker-0 (01:37:27.298)
Yes, I loved the montage of comparisons they did there. They started even with just showing a shoe bill and a cassawary among the birds, which I think are the two birds most like their Mesozoic ancestors. Obviously, the shoe bill, if you haven’t seen it, it’s also known as B-Rex, is its full by or is its binomial name. But it’s like five feet tall. It has a super wide beak. It looks very menacing. It’s got gray feathers and a big hook on the end of its bill.

Then there’s the Casswari, which is famous for having basically like a raptor claw type situation. It’s not curved, but it has a very long, sharp claw that it does use for kicking things mostly when threatened. Pretty intense. But then they show all these comparisons between dinosaurs and birds. So the first one is a wading bird snatching a fish, just like Spinosaurus. You get a swimming bird swallowing a fish, also like spinosaurus. You have raptor feet, which are like raptor feet.

speaker-1 (01:38:25.886)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:38:26.176)
Yep. And obviously I I’m being tongue in cheek because it’s more like a velociraptor, like a modern bird of prey showing their feet and the similarities, the three toes, the big claws, all that. You have an eagle ripping apart prey like a T Rex. They have penguins swimming, kind of like Hesperornis. Penguins are a little bit better, but you know Hesperornis was most of the way there. There was an ornithumimid running like an ostrich.

You have an ankyornis gliding like a hawk. And I liked that one because you have the red head on the ankyornis and the red tail on the hawk. And then they had maybe a brush chicken, I’m not sure, some sort of black bird with a red head. And it was doing a mating display, just like the Allosaurus, which also had the same colors. And then they had a small bird feeding its babies. It was feeding its babies a bug, but that was similar to the T-Rex feeding its babies the ankylosaurus meat. Mm-hmm.

And then huge flocks of birds all over the place, lots of different types of birds in large flocks. And they showed the herd of hadrosaurs for comparison. And I think all of that was great. Yeah. All of that behavior was great. I think we might have been seeing a little bit of their research process and how they chose their coloring, like with the allosaurus. I wonder if they looked at that bird and they were like, We’re gonna color allosaurus like that one and have it act like that. Because a lot of times when you’re animating animals.

Prehistoric animals, you look at modern animals, and I think that might have been literally their sort of reel of this is how we’re gonna make them behave.

speaker-1 (01:39:58.434)
You’re saying this might be one of your favorite series.

speaker-0 (01:40:00.652)
Yeah, certainly. For a dinosaur documentary, I liked it a lot. Like I pointed out, there were couple dinosaurs here and there that I didn’t like that much. I think maybe prehistoric planet might have been a little bit more precise in their dinosaur anatomy and movement and things like that. But they did take some big swings in prehistoric planet too, with like yeah, neck bubbles on sauropods or whatever. But in terms of like the overall scenery of

speaker-1 (01:40:20.43)
Dreadnought.

speaker-0 (01:40:31.064)
The documentary, how they have the completeness from the plants to the pterosaurs to the bugs to the dinosaurs to the sea level, the geology, all of that stuff, I think was just really spot on. I think they did an amazing job. And yeah, I think I might almost like it more than prehistoric planet. I don’t know. I really like the dinosaurs a lot in prehistoric planet, but

Since we’re dinosaur people, we already know so much of the stuff about dinosaurs, and I liked how they tied in how the dinosaurs interacted with the ecosystem so much more in this than we’re used to seeing. So yeah, it was great. I think it was kind of a slept-on docuseries, but it was very good. Yeah. Highly recommend if you have Netflix or a friend with a Netflix password.

speaker-1 (01:41:17.486)
You didn’t hear that from us.

We’ve got one more review, this time on the fictional side of things. But before we get into that, we’re gonna take a quick break for our sponsors. All right, we’ve got one more review. This time it’s pure fiction. Mm-hmm. The movie The End of Oak Street, which we actually got to see in theaters and it was great. I didn’t know much about the movie going in other than Anne Hathaway’s there, and there’s dinosaurs. But I enjoyed it overall.

speaker-0 (01:41:41.378)
It was.

speaker-0 (01:41:47.806)
Yeah. I did too. I intentionally avoided as much information about it as possible. From just the poster, you could see that there was a dinosaur on a regular suburban street. Mm-hmm. So I was a little bit hopeful we’d get something, you know, sort of camp cretaceous y. Yeah. A little bit of end of Jurassic Park Two where there’s dinosaurs rampaging through modern society. My favorite type of dinosaur fiction, I think.

speaker-1 (01:42:14.166)
Yeah. A sci fi survival film. we’re gonna have a lot of spoilers here if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

speaker-0 (01:42:19.574)
Yeah, it might be streaming by the time this comes out. If it is, you should watch it. The summary is we liked it. Yeah. So watch it.

speaker-1 (01:42:26.638)
So it’s a family in the suburbs in Michigan, and this is nineteen eighty-two. And it took me longer than it should have to realize we were in nineteen eighty-two.

speaker-0 (01:42:37.198)
Yeah. It they weren’t really emphasizing all of the technology and, you know, the what songs were on the radio kind of clues. Yeah. Right off the jump. Or maybe they were, and I was just fixated waiting for the dinosaurs.

speaker-1 (01:42:52.276)
That could be. But also like today you can listen to any song easily. That’s true. Sometimes people just try not to have their phones out because they want to be more in the moment. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:43:03.63)
Their hair also just kind of looked modern to me. It didn’t really look like eighties.

speaker-1 (01:43:08.236)
Be. But yeah, the big thing that happens is this entire neighborhood gets sent back in time to when the non-avian dinosaurs lived. Mm-hmm. We’ve got Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisie Stella, Christian Confrey. They’re all part of the Platt family. They have a dog named Starbuck. And they also have a friend, Jeanette, played by Jordan Alexa Davis, who joins them. Those are all the main characters of the movie.

speaker-0 (01:43:31.874)
I think they all did a really good job. The one thing that threw me off was Ewan McGregor’s American accent was weird. And also the fact that I know who Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway are, and was like, they’re not a very realistic couple. Why why is Anne Hathaway married to Ewan McGregor who’s so much older?

speaker-1 (01:43:52.622)
I thought it was fine. I was waiting for the dinosaurs more than anything.

speaker-0 (01:43:56.178)
Yeah. I I’m used to Ewan McGregor’s normal voice and hearing the American accent which he didn’t always pull off quite right threw me off.

speaker-1 (01:44:07.054)
They’re kind all over the place time wise, I noticed, because they had plants from the Triassic. Actually the first clue that something weird was happening is the librarian identifies Pleuromea, and that’s something from the early to middle Triassic.

speaker-0 (01:44:22.198)
And just by a picture. Yeah. He just like sees it. I’m like, wow, we got a paleobotanist working as the librarian apparently.

speaker-1 (01:44:28.504)
But then you get animals from the Jurassic and the Cretaceous that appear. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (01:44:32.11)
Yeah, they definitely did a all of the Mesozoic is one point in time trope that we’re unfortunately pretty used to. I was thinking that what they were gonna do is that it was like sort of a complex wormhole thing where they’re popping up at all these different times. And so that’s how we can bring all these animals together in one spot. But they make it pretty clear that it’s like, no, this is that one time and the present one time that everything is switching between.

speaker-1 (01:45:00.046)
The animals were pretty cool. They had Allosaurus, which they made it a bit shaggy. Mm-hmm. And it had a very tough hide. It could take a lot of beating.

speaker-0 (01:45:11.468)
Yeah, they made it a little the the dinosaurs and the other prehistoric animals were a little bit bulletproof, I would say.

speaker-1 (01:45:17.24)
First. It’s got a very, very long neck and it’s also bigger than it was in life.

speaker-0 (01:45:22.594)
Yeah. I was trying to figure that out too. I’m like, is that Dilophosaurus? Is it seal is it monolophosaurus? What is going on with that thing?

speaker-1 (01:45:29.07)
I mean the overall shapes looked like Coelophysis, but I like, There’s no way it’s too big, but it it was Coophysis. Okay. They had Spinosaurus, which looked a little bit like the Jurassic Park three Spinosaurus to me.

speaker-0 (01:45:39.436)
Yeah, its legs were way too big and you know, it was clearly a terrestrial old school terrestrial interpretation of Spinosaurus. I think so. There was something in a pool.

speaker-1 (01:45:53.016)
Then there was Ankylosaurus, which looked a little turtle like, which reminds me, I liked that scene of the ain’t prehistoric turtles that were blocking the road.

speaker-0 (01:46:01.95)
I did really like that too. And they’re like trying to get to move and the journals are like No. Who are you?

speaker-1 (01:46:06.976)
What? Why? There was Camarosaurus, which was a little bit too fuzzy for me. That one threw me off. And it showed a close-up a few times where it’s like brushing against the house and

speaker-0 (01:46:20.142)
Against the window, yeah, and they look out.

speaker-1 (01:46:22.242)
I thought it was a mammoth and I was like, When did mammoths get in here?

speaker-0 (01:46:25.354)
I thought it was gonna be Dynachyrus and those were gonna be like the big feathers on Dinachyrus. But yeah, they showed it as chimarosaurus. It’s like why? Why did they I don’t know. They were taking a lot of big swings. I think just to be different, yeah. It felt like

speaker-1 (01:46:39.271)
Or just to show like, hey, we know dinosaurs were feathered or at least some dinosaurs were feathered. Let’s see what we can do with that.

speaker-0 (01:46:45.922)
did really lean into the feathers. It’s kinda like maybe fifteen years ago in Paleoart when it was like Dinosaurs had feathers. Okay. Feathers on everything. Then w later people pointed out like, not everything. Take it easy. It especially if anything gets called out for not having feathers, it’s sore pod.

speaker-1 (01:46:55.231)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:47:03.998)
Right, ’cause they might have been too big.

speaker-0 (01:47:06.082)
Yeah, they already had likely gigantothermia. They’d be overheating most likely with all those feathers. Yeah. Especially Jurassic things like Camarosaurus. That was a warm planet. It lived in like a swamp. You don’t need a bunch of feathers in big long, fluffy, insulating feathers they gave you.

speaker-1 (01:47:24.398)
Yeah. Yeah. So like I I’d say the rest of the dinosaurs, I was like, cool, they look cool, but that Camarosaurus, no, that’s too fuzzy. Mm-hmm. They did have a fun mating scene with the Camarosaurus.

speaker-0 (01:47:34.688)
Yeah. That was pretty funny. Is that the one they took a picture in front of? Yeah. It did. That was a good touch. It was.

speaker-1 (01:47:41.838)
Then we got Stegosaurus. Its plate seemed extra sharp to me.

speaker-0 (01:47:45.27)
Yeah, I remember that too. But then talking about it after the dinosaurs Netflix series, mm-hmm, those were also pretty sharp. So they maybe that’s the new thing with stegosaurus plates making them extra knifey.

speaker-1 (01:47:53.998)
True.

speaker-1 (01:47:59.598)
Yeah, could be. We’re just not up to date on our stegosaurus plates. Mhm. There were a few non dinosaurs too. My favorite, maybe your favorite too, Garrett, was the Titanoboa. That was enjoyable.

speaker-0 (01:48:09.718)
yeah. That might have been my favorite scene, or at least it was definitely my favorite non dinosaur. It might have been my favorite animal in there. It was so funny because they have it like snaking up through the house and it just keeps going and going and going. Yeah. And everybody’s reaction to it was so perfect. Like it is exactly what you would do. You’d be like, what is this thing? And yeah.

speaker-1 (01:48:24.482)
Moves slowly, but it’s persistent.

speaker-1 (01:48:34.104)
Kill it, kill it.

speaker-0 (01:48:35.692)
And the way it has to like retreat after it gets stabbed and it’s just perfect. I loved that. They made it way too big though. Holy moly. Titanobo is like knee, maybe hip height if you’re on the shorter side. They made that thing like the height of a doorway practically. It was huge and so wide and so long. They yeah, that thing was way over the top in terms of scale, but so fun.

speaker-1 (01:48:54.166)
You’re

speaker-1 (01:49:03.682)
Mm. Then on the pterosaur sides there was Ornithochirus and Pterodactylus, and a Pseudosukian, Ornitho Sucus.

speaker-0 (01:49:12.472)
That I think is the one that was in the pool. Yeah, ’cause it was sort of a more reptile type thing. And it was kind of funny ’cause they show it crawling out of the pool and it’s like destroying the above ground pool as it crawls out. I was like, how did it get in? Didn’t it mess it up getting in?

speaker-1 (01:49:14.706)
that would make sense.

speaker-1 (01:49:26.168)
Maybe it that’s how it got transported.

speaker-0 (01:49:28.406)
It flopped straight into it. No, because the whole neighborhood went, right?

speaker-1 (01:49:31.854)
That’s true. But there were a couple of flashes before the neighborhood went where You’re right. Yeah, some of got brought over early.

speaker-0 (01:49:39.406)
Just got plopped that’s how they got there. How they got back, right? Didn’t they fall into a pool on the way back? Yes. Maybe those wormholes have a propensity for dropping things into pools. Something about the water.

speaker-1 (01:49:48.366)
Maybe. Yeah, there were some good twists in the movie and a lot of really good suspense. Mm-hmm. It felt almost like watching Jurassic Park for the first time again, where you know where are the dinosaurs? When are they coming?

speaker-0 (01:50:04.75)
Yeah, I loved it. The dinosaurs, like we were saying, not super realistic to the point where we couldn’t even identify what they were trying to do with the like what dinosaurs that even supposed to be. I don’t know. But I still loved it. Mm-hmm. And super mega spoiler warning before we go into some of the things that happens with the animals, but I really liked the way they had the animals behave. I liked how the coelophysis was just crazy. Yeah. Just running around like that’s how I imagine a Triassic dinosaur to be. Just like

I’m going. I’m not thinking hard, but I’m a predator. If something’s moving and I might be able to eat it, I’m gonna try. Just because it was it was in a tough ecosystem. And maybe that’s how it had to be. I don’t know. Maybe. And I liked how the Titanoboa was like so slow and methodical like a snake. And they did just such a good job of the variety of animals, giving them all their different personality and how they were kind of scary in different ways. And some of them weren’t that scary, you know, like the sauropods.

speaker-1 (01:51:02.74)
Well, they’re scary in you don’t want to get in their way ’cause they’re so big. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:51:07.606)
And then I I just loved the scene with Allosaurus was the best. That was definitely the best part of the movie for me. I guess I did like it better than the T Titana Boa part because obviously they’re running from it, fleeing, and Anne Hathaway’s kind of trapped on the porch. So then you get Ewan McGregor swooping in like a white knight. He’s gonna kill the Allosaurus and he knocks it down, and you think he’s he’s one, and then it bites his leg off. Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:51:35.638)
Wasn’t expecting that.

speaker-0 (01:51:37.066)
I loved that moment so much because I was like, now we’ve got real stakes. It’s not because to that point it was like the only characters that were getting killed were either like sort of a villain almost, like the annoying neighbor or whatever. Or so minor that they don’t even have a name. It’s just like random neighbor running gets eaten, kind of thing. When he lost his leg, I was like, yeah, now we’re we’re showing something, even if Allosaurus might not have been a bite a leg off kind of animal. I loved it. And then

speaker-1 (01:51:51.726)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:52:06.624)
It had him completely get eaten, and then they have Anne Hathaway’s reaction to it, which is just like, you know, very realistic. Very realistic, you know, putting her acting chops to work. And yeah, I think she did a fantastic job there. It was just perfect. I love that scene so much. It took it from action movie to horror movie, and I was just I was there for it. I was a little bit bummed at the twist at the end when he got brought back to life because I was like, they got rid of the stakes.

But then they show that there were the two Jeanettes because Jeanette went and saved her family and like self. Yeah, it’s easy to miss, but at the end you see the family together and there are two of her. And it was just like okay, I’m not even mad now. Perfect. Is great. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. You don’t have to have hyper realistic dinosaurs to make a good dinosaur movie. no. This was a very good example of that. It’s good story, good pacing, you know, all the animals were fun.

speaker-1 (01:52:39.607)
Including her

speaker-1 (01:52:47.598)
I would definitely watch this movie again.

speaker-0 (01:53:04.296)
Everything yeah, it’s gonna be

speaker-1 (01:53:05.934)
So yeah, that’s our reviews.

speaker-0 (01:53:08.536)
Holy moly, that was a long segment. That was. For those of you who like longer episodes.

speaker-1 (01:53:14.648)
There you go. Yeah, hope you enjoyed it. And on that note, we’re gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, but stay tuned for our dinosaurs of the day.

speaker-1 (01:54:13.154)
And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Stygy Venador, which was a request from Paleomike716 via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you. It’s a maybe dubious tyrannosaur. It lived in the late Cretaceous in what’s now Montana in the U.S. It was found in the Hell Creek Formation. It was on the small side. Being a tyrannosaur, it walked on two legs. It had a long tail and a long low skull, and of course, sharp teeth.

speaker-0 (01:54:31.758)
Everybody’s favourite.

speaker-1 (01:54:42.668)
The type species is Stigivenador Mulneri. For a while it was considered to be a species oblysodon, but that’s another dubious genus. It’s also been considered to be a juvenile tyrannosaurus. We only know it from fragments, though, so it’s hard to know for sure. Which is why it’s a maybe dubious one. Part of the skull was found near Jordan, Montana back in nineteen sixty six. It was found by Harley Garbani.

speaker-0 (01:55:12.414)
That’s it? yeah, that that’s tricky.

speaker-1 (01:55:12.824)
Yes.

They found part of the snout, including the upper jaw, teeth, and parts of the skull roof. It was found alongside a triceratops skull. That specimen number, if you want to look it up, is LACM two eight four seven one, and it’s in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

speaker-0 (01:55:34.326)
yeah. I think that is that in the gross series of T Rex? I think it might be. Maybe.

speaker-1 (01:55:39.97)
B. So Ralph Molner described the fossil in nineteen seventy eight and said that it had similarities to tyrannosaurs and dramaosaurs and considered it likely to be a big dromaeosaur. It was called the Jordan theropod for a while because it was just too fragmentary to give it a name. Yeah. In nineteen eighty eight, Gregory Paul considered it to belong to a Blycodon. That one was named in eighteen sixty eight. The dubious carnivorous dinosaur.

speaker-0 (01:55:57.016)
I remember that one now.

speaker-1 (01:56:09.752)
But was known from Montana and the Judith River Formation. He considered it to be a new species, so he named it Oblicodon Mulneri, after Ralph Mulner, and he named it based on one of its teeth. Mulner later agreed they were similar, but considered it to be the same as the type species, Oblicodon Mirandis. But again, Oblysodon’s considered dubious because its teeth are similar to many tyrannosaurs, and it was named from one tooth.

speaker-0 (01:56:39.534)
I’m glad that’s considered dubious, so we’re not keeping that name going.

speaker-1 (01:56:44.824)
Part of the confusion was the tooth was thought to be a pre-maxillary tooth, so in the front of the jaw, but it turned out to be a maxillary tooth, further back in the upper jaw. And that’s the Jordan theropod I’m talking about, also now known as Digi Venador, maybe. And a boy sodom was named from a pre-maxillary tooth. So you couldn’t compare apples to apples, these teeth. So George Olshevsky, Tracy Ford, and Seiji Yamamoto renamed.

speaker-0 (01:57:08.375)
I see.

speaker-1 (01:57:14.638)
Stygivenador in 1995, since a Blysodon was dubious. That genus name, Stygi Venador, means Styx Hunter. It refers to the Hell Creek Formation, so kind of means Hell Creek Hunter. In Greek mythology, River Styx is a mythical boundary river that separates the world of the living from the underworld. And then the species name is for Ralph Molnar. For a while, Stygy Venador had multiple species, but those are considered to be dubious juvenile tyrannosaurs now.

speaker-0 (01:57:23.18)
Good

speaker-1 (01:57:44.788)
In 2013, Pete Larson argued that Stygivenador may be a young Nanotyrannus instead of a juvenile T-Rex. But in 2024, Nicholas Longridge and Evan Saeda found Stygivenador to be its own distinct taxon. They found that it had similarities to nanotyranus, but also differences in the shape of the teeth and jaws, the maxillae and dentaries. They also said there was a lot of variation in nanotyrannus specimens.

On his blog, Nicholas Longridge wrote about Stygy Venador’s long, low snout, which reminded him of the Nanotyrannis holotype. He suggested that the dueling dinosaur specimen known as Bloody Mary was not Nanotyrannus, but rather Stygy Venador. So this is what I’m saying is it’s bringing up some debates around Nanotyrannus, but not the same debates as before, because I think it’s firmly established that Nanotyrannis is valid, but the details seem to be under debate.

speaker-0 (01:58:26.84)
man.

speaker-1 (01:58:41.516)
Now, Lindsay Zano and James Napoli in 2025 said that they consider Stygy Venador to be a gnomum dubium. It’s too hard to definitively identify based on it being fragmentary and poorly preserved, and that Bloody Mary had enough similarities with another Nanotyrannus lancensis specimen that they were both Nano Tyrannis. Also in 2025, Gregory Paul considered Stygi Venador to be valid and said that it lived alongside Nanotyrannus.

And it’s likely they competed.

speaker-0 (01:59:13.088)
Yeah, and Sty Veneter wasn’t named until nineteen ninety five, so in terms of naming priority, Nanotyranus, which was named in nineteen eighty eight, would win out. Although Ablisodon, if we’re saying that right, was also named in nineteen eighty eight. I’m not sure which one was named earlier in nineteen eighty eight, if it was Nanotyrannis or Alblisodon, but

I’m guessing nano Terratis is probably gonna be the name that sticks.

speaker-1 (01:59:44.088)
Well, if Stygi Venitor is considered to be valid, then it’s just its own

speaker-0 (01:59:48.758)
I see. If it is distinct from Nanotyrannus. Yeah. I was going based on the comment that maybe the Bloody Mary specimen was the same species as Stygi Venitor. And then the naming priority, whether that would go to either Stygi Venitor or Nanotranus. So it would definitely go to Nanoterannus over Stygi Venitor, but not necessarily oblysodon, depending on which month it was named.

speaker-1 (02:00:14.262)
So anyway, if they lived alongside each other, they maybe competed, but in Nicholas’s blog post he mentioned there was presumable niche partitioning. So maybe Nanotyrannis could take down larger prey than Stygi Venador. Sounds like we need more fossils than this partial skull. Stygi Venador, if you consider it valid, lived in the Hell Creek Formation. So there were a lot of other dinosaurs around, including Tyrannosaurus, Nanotyrannis, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus.

And Kylosaurus, a lot of the famous ones.

speaker-0 (02:00:45.464)
popular formation. Mm-hmm. With more and more tyrannosaurs all the time.

speaker-1 (02:00:50.102)
Yes. And last but not least is our fun fact, which is paleontologists found an iguanodon with a bacterial infection that led to an open sore on its skin. This was published in Royal Society Open Access by Javier Salas Herrera and others. It’s called a skin ulceration. So there’s a lesion in a long bone, the tibia, the lower leg bone, and there’s overgrowth. It’s got a smooth and swollen surface with well defined segments.

They did a CT scan and they found hyperdense superiosteal bone area. So bone area on the surface with a lot of buildup. Now iguanodon is the second dinosaur named, and a lot of iguanodon fossils have been found.

speaker-0 (02:01:35.488)
Mm-hmm. And a lot of them have been split off to into their own genera.

speaker-1 (02:01:39.372)
Yes. This one is from the Arcias de Morea Formation in Spain. It’s from the early Cretaceous. They found that it’s a quote pathological response to an overlying skin ulceration. So it’s an open sore on the skin and there’s evidence of swelling.

speaker-0 (02:01:55.446)
it was so bad that it affected the leg bone.

speaker-1 (02:01:58.604)
Yes. It could be from a fractured bone, bone bruises, a traumatic infection, or a tumor. But they ruled out the fractured bone because the CT showed no characters of a fractured callus. There’s no clear disruption of the bone or indications of bone healing. They ruled out the bone bruises because based on the pathology and where it is on the bone and also how the bone tissue looks, it’s just doesn’t look like it’s from a bone bruise. And they ruled out tumors because they didn’t see evidence of it in the CT scans.

speaker-0 (02:02:05.006)
Man.

speaker-0 (02:02:28.238)
So what are we left with?

speaker-1 (02:02:29.55)
Traumatic infection. They found it was an acute skin reaction from a skin ulceration, that opened sore on the skin, likely from a traumatic infection. This is the first case of this bacterial infection in a dinosaur. And again, there’s that swelling on the bone. So unfortunately, this poor iguanodon was probably in a lot of pain that worsened when it was walking and from muscle pressure. There also would have been scarring, and it just would have had a hard time walking.

speaker-0 (02:02:57.906)
Yikes and a traumatic infection is basically what it sounds like. There’s a trauma. So some kind of mechanical trauma, like getting poked by a huge thorn or a triceratops horn or a T Rex tooth breaks through the skin and then it gets infected. Yeah. So the reason that you get a tetanus shot basically is to prevent this sort of traumatic

speaker-1 (02:03:23.138)
Didn’t have an option back then for technical

speaker-0 (02:03:25.646)
They didn’t have vaccines, they didn’t have doctors, they didn’t have antibiotics, they didn’t have any of the good stuff. So once the skin barrier is broken, you’re just at the the whims of your immune system versus whatever gets in there. See who wins the battle. And I guess in this case, the infection was winning. Yeah.

speaker-1 (02:03:47.694)
So that wraps up this episode of I No Dino. We started with the gory news. We ended with some gory news. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned in our next episode of I know Dino. We’ll have an interview with Riley Black, author of Tyrant Lizard Queen, and we’ll also be talking even more about Tyrannosaurs. And in the meantime, if you want to get your paleo fix.

speaker-0 (02:03:54.872)
There you go.

speaker-1 (02:04:14.478)
If you’re at the Triceratops tier or above of our Patreon, we will have an Ino Paleo episode. This one will be about extinct camels.

speaker-0 (02:04:25.184)
nice. They didn’t always look like the large two-humped variety of today.

speaker-1 (02:04:30.958)
So you can join at patreon.com slash inodino. Thanks again, and until next time.

(Approximate times)

00:00 Introduction to Megaraptorins and Episode Overview
02:00 Distribution and Habitat of Megaraptorins
04:55 Anatomy and Unique Features of Megaraptorins
08:50 Evolutionary History and Phylogenetic Relationships
13:10 Fossil Discoveries and Key Specimens
16:56 Behavior and Hunting Strategies of Megaraptorins
19:56 Recent Research and New Insights
22:47 Summary and Final Thoughts

Summary

In this episode, we explore the fascinating world of Megaraptorins, a group of carnivorous theropods known for their large arms and claws. We discuss their discovery, anatomy, evolution, and the latest research, shedding light on their role in the prehistoric ecosystem.

Takeaways

• Megaraptorins’ distribution across continents
• Anatomy and physical features of Megaraptorins
• Evolutionary history and relation to other theropods
• Fossil discoveries and significance
• Behavioral insights and hunting strategies
• Air sac system and bird-like features
• Size variation and growth patterns
• Recent research and new findings

Keywords

Megaraptorins, Theropods, Dinosaurs, Paleontology, Cretaceous, Evolution, Fossils, Predatory Dinosaurs

speaker-0 (00:29.07)
Hello and welcome to I KnowDino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I’m Gary. And today in our 575th episode, we have a Megan. yeah, you teased that last.

speaker-1 (00:34.701)
And I’m Sabrina.

speaker-1 (00:38.99)
Mega Raptor episode. Yeah. This was a request by a few of our patrons, so it’s been a long time coming. And we talk about this enigmatic group of carnivorous theropods. They have huge arms and hand claws, which is unusual for large theropods. We also have an update on Mega Raptor and an overview of all known megaraptorins. Wow. Thorough. Yes.

speaker-0 (01:05.422)
Wow.

speaker-1 (01:07.33)
Plus, we have our dinosaur of the day, Anexosaurus, a possible Mega Raptor that was also possibly gregarious. And bonus, because I wanted to be thorough. We also have Aonoraptor, a Mega Raptor with a lot of air spaces in its tailbones. And our fun fact for this mega episode is that paleontologists originally considered Mega Raptor’s hand claw to be a giant foot claw. And funny thing is the opposite happened with Velociraptor.

speaker-0 (01:36.856)
That is funny.

But before we get into all of our Mega Raptor action, we’ve got some patrons to thank. And this week we have four new patrons to thank. And they are Elle, Philociraptor on theme, Anne, and Josephine. And then rounding out our shout outs, we’ve got Rachel Raptor.

speaker-1 (01:58.198)
All right. A couple raptors. Yeah.

speaker-0 (02:00.11)
Cerosaurus Rex, Jurassic Jim, Alo Mary, Steph, and Carcavodontosaurus.

speaker-1 (02:09.612)
Wonder though, for the raptors, if it’s more like for the Velociraptor, the Drameosaurs than the Mega Raptors. Maybe they can let us know. Yes, thank you so much for being part of our Dinoidal community. We really, really appreciate it. And it’s thanks to Dinoidals that we get to do episodes like mega mega raptor episodes. So if you want to join, we’ve got plenty of

speaker-0 (02:16.233)
Yeah, we don’t know.

speaker-1 (02:38.158)
perks and exclusive content. You can access things like our monthly I know paleo show, as well as mini episodes, because try as we might, we can’t fit all the new dinosaur news into regular episodes on I know Dino. So you can do all that at patreon.com slash I know dino. So yes, mega mega raptor episode. We had a few requests. I want to thank Tales of Extinction and Morgan who requested this mega raptor in episode.

To quote Morgan, it wasn’t just tyrannosaurs in the north and abellosaurs in the south. True. Mm-hmm. Don’t forget the mighty megarapterans.

speaker-0 (03:16.642)
Yeah, and the other raptors.

speaker-1 (03:19.21)
Well, they’re much smaller. So Megaraptora, megaraptorins, they had long skulls and big claws on their hands. This group lived in the Lake Cretaceous. They’ve been found in Australia, Asia, probably Europe, Africa, and South America. Worlds. Yeah. I guess not Antarctica so far.

A twenty twenty five study found that megarapterons may have had a cosmopolitan distribution, meaning they lived all over the planet, before Laurasia and Gondwana split, which is fairly early on.

speaker-0 (03:53.678)
Yeah, you didn’t mention North America either, but I feel like there has been at least some proposed mega raptorins from North America.

speaker-1 (04:02.112)
If there are some, those are the like possible mega raptorins, not for sure definitive mega raptorins. Cause for this episode I researched all the definite known mega raptorins and then I kinda just skimmed over the potential mega raptorins. But I don’t remember reading any that were North American.

speaker-0 (04:05.902)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (04:23.746)
There is on the paleo biodatabase in the Cedar Mountain Formation, that’s where Siots is, which is maybe in Megaraptora. That’s the proposal. So that’s in Utah. But that’s the only one on the entire North American map. And you’re right, there’s nothing in Antarctica.

speaker-1 (04:43.009)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (04:46.872)
No, although they probably traveled through Antarctica.

speaker-0 (04:49.174)
Yeah, it’s more that we don’t have a lot of rock to work with in Antarctica, so we just haven’t found it yet.

speaker-1 (04:55.276)
But yeah, mega raptorins, they’re carnivorous, they’re theropods, they got the strong arms, the large claws on their hands. And that’s what makes them so interesting is because other large theropods usually had smaller arms.

speaker-0 (05:08.322)
Yeah, they mostly replaced their big hands and grabbing ability with a big powerful skull. Mm-hmm. But Megaraptora, not so much.

speaker-1 (05:17.804)
Most species of megapterans we know only from fragments, which is too bad. No complete megaptora skeleton has been found yet, and megaraptor is often described as an enigmatic group.

speaker-0 (05:30.69)
Or a mysterious group, you could say.

speaker-1 (05:32.684)
Yeah, partially ’cause of the fragments and also because why did they have such big hands and claws on the hands? Mm-hmm. They were highly specialized predatory theropods. So of course they had the well developed arm bones. And as megarapterons evolved, their muscle attachments on their arms got even more developed. This is according to a twenty twenty three study. So it’s like you were saying, Garrett, with other big theropods, they kind of evolved to have the bigger heads, but mega raptorins, as they evolved, they got stronger arms.

speaker-0 (06:01.869)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (06:02.668)
Megarapterins had three fingers on each hand. The first two fingers were long with the large curved claws, and the third finger was small.

speaker-0 (06:10.338)
Yeah, I always think of it as like the biggest finger is the first finger and then they kind of get progressively smaller down the hand. Yeah. Different than our hand. It’s like if we had the middle finger switched with the pointer finger kind of. And then our middle finger was a lot longer.

speaker-1 (06:21.644)
Yeah.

A mega raptor had a vestigial fourth hand bone, but it didn’t have a finger attached, which is interesting. Megaraptorins could likely do complex movements with their arms and their hands. I wanna just quote Tales of Extinction here, who said, Given the large claws and moderate bite strength, I wonder if it specialized in hooking smaller moving prey that it could easily overpower, like crocodilomorphs, a spear fisher on land. I didn’t see anything specifically about megaraptorins and crocodilomorphs, which is too bad.

But I will get into later a bit about how they use those arms. Now, megarapterins, they also had wide belly ribs or gastrella, and that means that they had wide bodies. They had long footbones, which is an indication of being a fast runner. Their leg bones were slender and similar to solurosaurs that could run, which also indicates running. And they may have had deep muscular tails. That’s based on ridges on the backbones or dorsal vertebrae.

Their bones were heavily pneumatized, so lots of air sacs to make them lighter, especially the vertebrae, ribs, and ilium in the hip. And what’s interesting about that is we only see this kind of pneumatization outside of Megaraptora in Neovenator or Neovenator, which is a carcherodontosaur. Some megaraptorins like Marusraptor and Erosteon had very pneumatic bones in the hips and the ribs.

Which were likely like modern birds and housing sinuses connected to the lungs.

speaker-0 (07:58.165)
that’s cool. So they were actually using the air sacs for improved breathing.

speaker-1 (08:03.67)
Yeah. Omega raptorins, their neck bones, or cervical vertebrae, were episthocelous. That means they were convex from the front and concave from behind. So their necks may have been flexible. They had long, lightly built skulls with many relatively small teeth, and they had proportionally small teeth.

speaker-0 (08:23.746)
I was gonna say, their teeth didn’t seem that small, but I guess for such a large animal, proportionally they were small, not like T Rex teeth or I guess Allosaurus teeth.

speaker-1 (08:33.546)
Exactly. Just like when we talk about T Rex had proportionally small arms, but if you were to measure it on an absolute scale, it’s still pretty big.

speaker-0 (08:42.092)
Yeah, more like our leg kind of size. the most megaraptorins would put those arms to shame for sure.

speaker-1 (08:44.511)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (08:50.936)
Now multiple mega raptora fossils have been found around the world. We may find more from Laurasia in the future, the north, but we’ll see. There’s been a lot of debate over how megarapterans are related to other theropods, part of their mystery. They evolved from being small in Laurasia to being large and highly pneumatic in Gondwana. A 2025 study found that it appears that at least in central Patagonia,

Megaraptorids lived through a lot of climate changes and they successfully adapted, so it seems like they could thrive in a lot of different kinds of habitats.

speaker-0 (09:25.998)
I guess that makes sense ’cause they were found on pretty much every continent. That’s a lot of habitats.

speaker-1 (09:30.444)
Yeah. The hypothesis right now is that they moved from Australia to South America and then they got really big once they were in South America, not long after. They got there likely via Antarctica, sometime in the mid-Cretaceous. And then they seem to have increased in size, going from like five meters long to seven meters long.

speaker-0 (09:49.55)
So that’s roughly fifteen to twenty feet I’m gonna round to.

speaker-1 (09:54.338)
Sounds roughly right. And they went from like 300 kilograms to a thousand kilograms in weight.

speaker-0 (10:01.422)
So like six hundred to two thousand pounds, very roughly.

speaker-1 (10:04.098)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a pretty big increase. And then they stayed large. For example, Mape is a very large one. Yeah. It could get up to like thirty-three feet or ten meters long. Then there’s Bahariosaurus, which is a potential possible mega raptorin. That one is estimated to be up to forty two feet or almost fourteen meters long. So yeah, Megaraptora is like medium to large in size.

speaker-0 (10:13.548)
I like mape.

speaker-0 (10:32.534)
That is bigger than I usually think about mega raptorins being. So at least lengthwise, that largest one is pretty much T Rex size.

speaker-1 (10:41.762)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (10:43.286)
And in just a moment we’ll get into Mega Raptor, the dinosaur that started the whole clade. But first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

So that brings me to Mega Raptor, the arguable star of the show, because that’s where Mega Raptora got its name.

speaker-0 (13:17.678)
Yeah, you’re not gonna have Megaraptora without Mega Raptor.

speaker-1 (13:19.948)
Yeah. We did cover Mega Raptor as our dinosaur of the day back in episode two hundred and sixteen, but that was many, many years ago. Yep. So I wanted to devote some time in our Mega Mega Raptorin episode to Mega Raptors specifically. Yeah. Plus some new research has come out since our dinosaur of the day. So Mega Raptor was a large theropod. It lived in the Lake Cretaceous in what is now Argentina. It was found in the Portizuelo Formation.

It was about 30 feet or nine meters long and weighed about one ton. So on the larger size for megarapterans, it had a long, slender skull, at least in the juveniles. As an adult, it was probably a deeper, more robust skull, but we know the juvenile skull. It had long jaws. It had small conical teeth in the front of its jaws, and then more curved teeth in the back. So that gives it the heterodont teeth, different shaped teeth in the mouth. Mm-hmm. It had ten cervical vertebrae or neck bones.

And it had a wide, deep torso, the chest, the abdomen, the hips. It had very strong arms and long hands. And those hand claws were long and curved. It had three fingers on each hand. And the first finger, just like its relatives, was the longest and had the large claw. The third finger was the smallest. At times, Mega Raptor has been depicted as looking like a dramaosaur, but it’s not closely related to raptors, even though it’s got the name Raptor in the name.

speaker-0 (14:46.956)
Tricking the artists.

speaker-1 (14:48.238)
The type and only species is Megaraptor Namun Huachii. That genus name means large thief, and the species name means footlance in Mapuche. It was named in 1998 by Fernando I. Novas. He’s the one who found the fossils in 1996. And at first, only four bones were found: an arm bone, a long finger bone, part of a footbone, and a huge claw. The claw looks a little bit like a dramaosaurus foot claw.

So originally that’s why the thinking was the claw was on the foot instead of the hand. Mm-hmm. Those other bones, when compared to an allosaurus, they were larger. They were larger than an allosaurus’ armbone, footbone, and finger bone. So for a while, Megaraptor was thought to be larger than Allosaurus and having this big killing claw on its feet.

speaker-0 (15:39.79)
Like a crow a hybrid Allosaurus raptor.

speaker-1 (15:43.586)
Yeah, although some Allosaurus specimens could get bigger than the rough estimate for Megaraptor. And four years later, a more complete skeleton was found, including a complete hand, and that’s how we figured out that the foot claw was a hand cloth. That’s pretty handy. Didn’t even mean to do that one. Now interestingly, Novas considered Megaraptor to be a solurosaur related to either Dramaosaurs or Troodontids.

So not exactly a raptor raptor, even though in the name. Now we know Mega Raptor from seven partial or fragmentary skeletons. Yeah. But only two of the individuals have parts of the skull.

speaker-0 (16:22.445)
Too bad.

speaker-0 (16:26.446)
That is not great.

speaker-1 (16:28.194)
Yes. The second specimen found included an armbone and the complete hand, and it was found associated with a sauropod femur or thigh bone. The third specimen was a partial juvenile skeleton, although not everyone agrees that that belongs to Megaraptor. It’s hard to tell if the differences in features like the tail are because this animal was still growing, or if it’s a different species. Juveniles are tricky. The fourth specimen found includes a humerus, an armbone.

speaker-0 (16:50.83)
They are.

speaker-1 (16:56.738)
The fifth specimen has parts of the skull and a quote unquote large part of the skeleton, but that one’s only been described in a thesis which also mentions two more specimens that include parts of the arm and a finger bone. So maybe one day it’ll be even more described. We’ll see. Megaraptor, of course, is known for its large claws. That first claw that was found was three times longer than a grizzly bear’s claw. Oof. And that doesn’t even include the tip of the claw.

speaker-0 (17:25.224)
’cause that’s just the the bone part, not the keratin covering?

speaker-1 (17:28.78)
Yes, so with just the bone, it’s estimated to be about fourteen inches or thirty-seven centimeters long. But with the keratin, it probably was over sixteen inches or forty centimeters long.

speaker-0 (17:39.438)
That is huge and terrifying.

speaker-1 (17:41.954)
Yeah, that was one of the fun facts I really liked, including in our National Geographic Kids book, I know Dino. Yes. So at first, once scientists realized that Mega Raptor had these huge hand claws, not foot claws, it was thought that it used its hand claws to rip open carcasses. But now it’s considered to be a more active predator. Like

speaker-0 (17:48.332)
With the exclamation.

speaker-1 (18:09.292)
It probably would have scavenged if there was an easy meal, because what animal wouldn’t, but maybe it also used its claws to grab prey and pull that prey closer to its jaws. A 2023 study found that Megaraptor could extend and bend its arms and could move its hands a lot, which probably would have helped with catching prey. Now, Megaraptor is closely related to Australovenidar, or how do you say it, Garrett? Because I can’t remember now.

speaker-0 (18:34.498)
I used to say Austro Lovenator.

speaker-1 (18:36.482)
Yes, that’s how I used to say it too, and now I can’t go back. I just got used to saying Australovenador. But anyway, yeah, they’re closely related and they had a lot of similarities. Australovenidar had mobile arms and wrists and could possibly grip prey and then move it close to its jaws. So it could be that all mega raptors did this. One study examined the brain case of the juvenile mega raptor and then reconstructed soft tissues, so the brain, the blood vessels, and more.

The brain case is partially preserved, so that helps. And they compared it to Marus Raptor and other theropods. The brain case is highly pneumatized, a lot of air-filled spaces. That seems to be one of the ways to just describe megarapterins in general. Lots of air.

speaker-0 (19:22.528)
Lightweight. Yes. That’s why it was only one ton despite being like the length of an allosaurus.

speaker-1 (19:27.192)
Yeah. And they found that Megaraptor may have had a mean range of hearing, somewhat similar to Velociraptor and the Therizinosaur Falcoreus. It also had a relatively large floccular lobe of the cerebellum. So they found that it probably had a stable gaze and then it could keep its head stable while moving its head rapidly. Yes, yeah. It would be better at pursuing prey compared to some other carnivores that lived around the same time, like

speaker-0 (19:49.336)
for hunting.

speaker-1 (19:56.664)
abellosaurs and even Murusraptor. Megaraptor had a small olfactory apparatus, so its sense of smell wasn’t as good as tyrannosaurids and carcharodontosaurs though. Now Megaraptor lived in a humid climate with rivers or streams, and other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include abellosaurs, like Elumgasum, titanosaurs, like Photolongosaurus, and other theropods like Uninlagia.

Some other animals that lived around the same time and place include pterosaurs, turtles, fish, and crocodiliforms. Now that we’ve covered Mega Raptor, I wanted to go into the rest of the Mega Raptorins and just give a brief description of each because it turns out that we have covered most of these as our dinosaur of the day in various episodes.

speaker-0 (20:45.366)
Yeah, a lot of them have been found fairly recently, right?

speaker-1 (20:48.456)
yeah, so some of them are news items too. But I will start with the unnamed ones. So there’s an unnamed Megaraptorid known as Lightning Claw. It was found in Opal Fields near Lightning Ridge, Australia. Me too. It lived in the early Cretaceous. It’s estimated to be up to 20 feet or 6 meters long. That hand claw is about 10 inches or 25 centimeters long. And maybe it used it like a grappling hook to catch prey. When it was found

speaker-0 (21:00.664)
I like lightning claw for that.

speaker-1 (21:17.806)
I think when it was found is when they said it was the largest theropod known from Australia, but I think that was before Australavenidar was found. Anyway, it was found by miners in an opal field, and they found a footbone, parts of the hips, ribs, arm, and of course that giant hand claw. Although it may be synonymous with rapator. There were also two partial megarapterin skeletons described in 2020. These are from the late Cretaceous in Patagonia, Argentina, found in the Bajo Bariel Formation, they’re in Tubu Province.

The fossils found include vertebrae, parts of the hips, parts of the hand, parts of the leg and feet. Both have large first fingers on their hands and other features that make them seem like they’re megaraptorids, and they’re likely at least seven meters long and weighed at least one metric ton. Now, the oldest megaraptorid fossils have been found in Australia. These two individuals, again, we’re in Patagonia, Argentina, they’re the oldest known megaraptorids from South America, or at least the oldest indisputable ones.

By three or more million years. So that’s why it seems that Megaraptorids started in Australia in the early Cretaceous and then moved to South America, where they grew larger and eventually became apex predators. Now for the named Megaraptorins, we’ve got Fukui Raptor, which was our dinosaur of the day in episode 32. That name means Fukui Thief. It lived in the early Cretaceous in Japan, and it was lightly built and slender. The holotype is immature.

But estimated to be like 14-ish feet or 4.3 meters long and weighed 1300 pounds or 590 kilograms, and it had large flat hand claws. Then we’ve got Fu Wuyang Venador that we talked about in episode 238. That’s from the early Cretaceous in Thailand. Its name means Fu Wuyang thief, and that refers to the Fuchiang Mountains where it was found. Now, the oldest megarapterans that we know of are Fu Wuyang Venador.

And Vieuraptor from Thailand. And I should differentiate here. We’ve got Mega Raptora and then there’s Mega Raptorids. So earlier I was talking about the Mega Raptorids that started in Australia and then moved to South America. Uhhuh. And then got really big.

speaker-0 (23:32.088)
This is a slightly broader group of Megaraptora.

speaker-1 (23:34.796)
Yes. So Viuraptor, we talked about in episode two hundred and thirty eight. Early Cretaceous Thailand again. The name means wind thief, and that was estimated to be like thirteen to fifteen feet or four to four and a half meters long. So on the smaller side for Megaraptora.

speaker-0 (23:50.926)
So this might have been one of those many groups of dinosaurs that started out smaller and then got bigger.

speaker-1 (23:56.192)
they definitely did. Yeah. I mean MAPE. True. And then there’s Rapatar. We talked about it in episode ninety-one from the late Cretaceous in Australia. And its fossil is opalized. We’ve got one left hand bone that was found in nineteen five. And again, lightning claw might be rapport, but I imagine it’s hard to know for sure when all you have to compare is one hand bone.

speaker-0 (24:19.528)
Yeah. But if you are gonna have one bone, it’s pretty cool if it’s made out of opal.

speaker-1 (24:24.194)
That’s true. So getting more narrowly focused, we’ve got the Mega Raptoridae.

speaker-0 (24:31.192)
group that’s the closest to true Mega Raptor itself.

speaker-1 (24:35.586)
Yes. Well, it includes Mega Raptor. But I’m gonna go in alphabetical order. So we’ve got Arosteon, which we talked about in episode three hundred and fifty two. That genus name means air bone. Yeah, it’s interesting. When I think of Mega Raptor, I think hand claws, but I should also think about all these air bones. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (24:58.222)
Mm-hmm. How lightweight they were.

speaker-1 (25:00.864)
It’s from the Lake Cretaceous in Argentina, and it’s estimated to be about 25 feet or 7.5 meters long and weigh like one-ish short tons. Then we’ve got Aonoraptor, but that’s our bonus dinosaur of the day, so I’m not gonna say anything about that one yet. And Australovenador, we talked about in episode 126, the southern hunter from the Lake Cretaceous in Australia. It’s the largest known predatory dinosaur from Australia.

And it’s estimated to be about twenty feet or six meters long and weigh like six hundred and eighty to eleven hundred pounds or three hundred and ten to five hundred kilograms. So it’s it’s kind of small for a megarapterin, but it’s large for a carnivorous dinosaur in Australia, at least that we know of so far. Australia seems like there’s a lot of discoveries happening.

speaker-0 (25:46.75)
A little bit early days still for discoveries there, yeah. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (25:49.784)
There was a 2024 study of how Australovenidar went after prey that found that its claws were more for a hook and pull function, and they adapted to do that as Mega Raptora evolved. So Astrolavenidar may have gone after small animals or used its arms to go after larger prey by hooking the claws into the prey and then pulling them or tearing or slicing its flesh. Australovenidar probably didn’t have a high bite force, even though it looks really cool. I when I think of Astrolavenidar, I just think of banjo.

speaker-0 (26:19.052)
Yeah, and the cool statue.

speaker-1 (26:20.384)
Mm-hmm. Next up there is Joaquin Raptor, we talked about in episode 552. I think we called that one What Dinosaurs Ate, because that one was cool. It was found with a crocodiliform armbone by its jaws with tooth marks on the bone. So it lived in the Lake Cretaceous in Argentina. It’s estimated to be about 23 feet or seven meters long and weigh over 2,200 pounds or a thousand kilograms. Yeah. And it’s very derived. It’s one of the latest surviving.

speaker-0 (26:43.308)
Not as a ton.

speaker-1 (26:49.068)
Megaraptorins, it’s from the latest of the Cretaceous. So it helps show that megarapterans were there until the end, until the bitter end. And it also helps with the hypothesis that mega raptorids moved from Australia to South America and then got really big because it was getting bigger and it’s in South America. When we talked about it in the episode about what dinosaurs ate, we also mentioned how it’s one of the most complete megaraptor individuals found so far.

And it was at least nineteen years old when it died.

speaker-0 (27:19.982)
So that seven meter, twenty three foot length is probably around the maximum.

speaker-1 (27:26.22)
Yeah, prob well, it was maybe not full grown. really? Yeah. But maybe it was close.

speaker-0 (27:31.63)
You’d think by nineteen years old it would be.

speaker-1 (27:33.902)
I don’t know. There’s a lot of debate over dinosaur growth. Yeah, it was cool because Joaquin Raptor lived in this warm, humid floodplain environment close to the sea, and it helped show that megaraptorans could live in all sorts of habitats, because other ones had been found in more semi-arid climates inland. Mm-hmm. So next up we’ve got mape. We talked about in episode 388.

speaker-0 (27:38.817)
It’s true.

speaker-1 (28:00.79)
It’s from the Late Cretaceous in Argentina. It’s the largest known Megaraptorid. Because I mentioned Bahariosaurus, but we don’t know for sure if that’s even a Megaraptora. Mm-hmm. But Mape was about 30 feet or 9 meters long and weighed over 1.4 short tons. Pretty good size. Me too. I remember when it came out, or when it was first discovered. Then, of course, there’s Megaraptor, the large thief. That’s what the name means. And Murus Raptor.

speaker-0 (28:16.982)
Yeah, I like mape a lot.

speaker-1 (28:29.678)
We talked about in episode 88. The wall thief. It was named in 2016, so that one must have been a news item. Yeah. It lived in the Lake Cretaceous in Argentina. It had a long snout and it’s very pneumatic. An immature specimen was found, but it was larger and more grassile than megaraptor specimens. It’s estimated to be 21 feet or over six meters long, but again, that’s based on the immature specimen. And it had fang-like teeth in the front of its jaw. Then we’ve got

Orchoraptor, we talked about in episode 489, the toothed river thief. That’s what the name means. That one lived in the late Cretaceous in Argentina, and it’s estimated to be about 28 feet or over 8 meters long and weigh 3,100 pounds or 1400 kilograms. And last of our megaraptorids is Tratayenia, which we talked about in episode 175. This one lived in the late Cretaceous in Argentina and it’s estimated to be about 26 feet or 8 meters long.

There are, like we mentioned before, some uncertain or possible members of Mega Raptora. And it turns out that we covered all but two of them in our episodes. And one of them we’re covering in today’s episode. So yeah, you’ve got Anisosaurus. That’s the one we’re talking about today. And I’ll just list them without saying the episodes, because if you want to look them up, the best way to do it is to go to our website, inodino.com.

And go to our episode list. But yeah, there’s Bahariosaurus, Chilantosaurus, Datonglong. I will say we haven’t covered that one yet, so maybe someone will request it. Then there’s Delta Dramaeus, which we have covered. We’ve covered all the rest of them in this list. Eotranis, Gualicho, Siatz. That’s one. Yes. Victorovenador and Walgeta Sucus.

Which when I was looking at this list, I was surprised that some of them were considered possible mega raptorins.

speaker-0 (30:28.864)
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, like Gualicho, isn’t that one more of a tyrannosaur?

speaker-1 (30:34.222)
Could be, well, depends who you ask. When I but I was thinking like Walgettosuchus, something with Sucus in the name, I think Crocodiliform. True. So yeah, that’s Megaraptora. Before we get into our dinosaur of the day, I wanted to bring up a listener question. This one’s not so much a question as a story that somebody shared with us from Mastodon, who says, Yes, I know that’s not a dino.

speaker-0 (30:36.844)
I guess so.

speaker-0 (30:43.278)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (31:05.122)
And they said, Not a question, but I thought you might find this to be funny. A couple of years ago, my wife and I were at our son’s house for dinner. We were sitting outside having wine and conversation while my five year old granddaughter was feeding mealworms to the chickens that they keep for egg production. Suddenly their cat flushed a mouse out of the garden area. Before he could catch it, a hen rushed in, grabbed the mouse, and swallowed it in one gall. Upon seeing this, my wife, who’s a city girl, let out a yelp in surprise.

speaker-0 (31:26.082)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (31:31.074)
Without missing a beat, my granddaughter patted her on the shoulder and said, It’s okay, Baba, that’s why chickens are really dinosaurs. Yes. It felt fitting to share in this episode since we’re talking about a carnivorous group of dinosaurs and how they potentially fed. Yes.

speaker-0 (31:37.794)
I love everything about that story.

speaker-0 (31:49.678)
That’s that story is so good because it’s it’s the five-year-old knowing and just completely not being surprised by a dinosaur-like chicken. Mm-hmm. And also just that ferocious of a chicken. Shocked me. Cause we know we have some friends who they dealt with rats like basically killing off their chickens. It’s funny to hear the chicken getting the upper hand.

speaker-1 (32:01.67)
my gosh.

speaker-1 (32:11.57)
Yeah. I guess it can go both ways. Yeah. And on that note, we’re gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, but stay tuned for our dinosaurs of the day.

speaker-1 (33:11.47)
And now onto our dinosaurs of the day, ’cause we have two of Mm-hmm. I’m gonna start with the possible mega raptor, keeping with our theme of mega raptora, Anexosaurus. It was an avtheropod dinosaur that lived in the Lake Cretaceous in what is now Chubu Province in Argentina.

speaker-0 (33:29.518)
So in other words, it’s in the group that’s closest to birds, or close-ish to birds, maybe I should say.

speaker-1 (33:37.198)
Yeah. It’s interesting ’cause in some ways it looked like allosaurus. It didn’t have the crest on its head, but it walked on two legs. It had long arms, a long head, and a long tail. But it was small and robust. It’s estimated to be like seven feet or two meters to ten feet or three meters long and weigh up to between seventy-seven to ninety-nine pounds or thirty-five to forty-five kilograms.

speaker-0 (34:01.998)
That is small. Mm-hmm. Dog sized, one might say.

speaker-1 (34:05.704)
yeah, you could. The five individuals have been found, and they range in age from juveniles to subadults. Its tibia was longer than its femur, so its shin bone was longer than the thigh bone, which likely means it was a fast runner. It was described in 2006 by Ruben Dario Martinez and Fernando Emilio Novas. Novas who named Megaraptor. The holotype includes a right leg and foot, and the type and only species is Anyxosaurus Darwini.

And that genus name means spring lizard because it was found in the spring in the southern hemisphere, specifically September twenty first, nineteen ninety five. Yeah.

speaker-0 (34:43.661)
Ooh, the exact date? That’s over thirty years ago now.

speaker-1 (34:47.85)
The species named Darwinize in honor of Charles Darwin, who visited Patagonia sometime between eighteen thirty two to eighteen thirty three. The details in its vertebrae, feet, legs, and hips are what make it unique, such as having deep neural arches on its neck bones. There’s a lot of debate about how to classify this dinosaur, but a 2022 study found it to be a megarapterin. It may have been gregarious, since five individuals were found in a

bone bed together and they know there are at least five individuals because they found five right tibia.

speaker-0 (35:22.83)
You only have one of those, only one right leg per dinosaur. Yes.

speaker-1 (35:26.062)
They were buried in a fluvial environment, a river or a stream. The skeletons were disarticulated from the currents and then buried.

speaker-0 (35:35.724)
Making it trickier to piece together.

speaker-1 (35:38.252)
Yes. That happens a lot in bone beds. True. There’s no evidence of cannibalism or intraspecies competition, which is why they thought the dinosaurs were gregarious. They all died together. But we’ve talked about on the show before, it’s really hard to know from bone beds what kind of behavior the dinosaurs had. True.

speaker-0 (35:56.062)
True. As we like to say, just ’cause they died together doesn’t mean they lived together.

speaker-1 (35:59.832)
Mm. Yeah, because the fossilization is just one moment in time.

speaker-0 (36:04.686)
And guess in this case we don’t even know they died together. They could have just been squished together by the river.

speaker-1 (36:10.726)
the thinking is that they did die together based on how they were buried and everything. One femur has small, like three millimeter wide tooth marks, which is probably from a small scavenger. So it’s possible they were just gathering at a water hole and they happened to be there at the same time. Because we see this with some rhinos. Two of the individuals are estimated to be about three years old, that’s based on histology. And the three year olds died around the same time, which does make it seem more likely they were gregarious.

Other theropods have been interpreted as being gregarious when they’re found in bone beds, like Coelophysis, Albertosaurus, Cynornithimimus. Crocodilians, birds, and mammals are often gregarious too, and sometimes they’re just gregarious at certain life stages, like earlier on. So maybe this dinosaur was gregarious or social as a subadult, like sticking together for protection or finding food together, and then maybe it became more solitary as an adult. We don’t know. But it is fun to think about. Mm-hmm.

Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the Abellosaur, Xenotarsosaurus, sauropods such as Sarmientosaurus, and ornithopods such as Nodohypsilophodon. Then we’ve got our definite mega raptorin, our second dinosaur of the day, Aeonoraptor. That was a megaraptorin that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Argentina, found in the Quincole formation. It likely looked like other mega raptors.

It walked on two legs, it had a long head and a long tail and long arms. It’s estimated to be up to twenty feet or six meters long, so that’s a decent size for a megaraptorin. The type and only species is Aeonoraptor libertatum. It was named in twenty sixteen by Mateus Mata and others. That genus name means South Thief. Aeoni means south in Tehuelche. And then the species name, Libertatum,

means freedom and it refers to Aeoniraptor being found on the bicentennial of Argentina’s independence from Spain in 1810. Mm-hmm. The holotype is a partial skeleton and it includes tailbones and a sacral vertebra. It’s a bone around the hips. The individual’s probably not skeletally mature. It’s based on neural arches not being fused to the center of the vertebrae. Basically it comes down to some fusions of the bones. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (38:31.734)
It’s got a lot of similarities with Delta Dramaeus and Bahariosaurus, which are both potentially megaraptorans. So that’s interesting, because this one is definitely a megaraptorin. Its vertebrae were long and highly pneumatic, which shouldn’t surprise you if you’ve been listening to the rest of this episode. So there’s a lot of air spaces in those bones. Even the hemorrhage were pneumatic. That’s the bones that attach to the bottom of the tailbones. Wow. Yeah.

Some scientists informally considered Aonoraptor to be synonymous with gualicho. That’s a theropod found in the same formation because of similarities with their tailbones, and we were just saying how gualicio is a potential megarapterin. Mm-hmm. But a 2020 study found that there’s a lot of differences between these two dinosaurs. Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the, well, of course, theropod, gualicho, the peravian ovaroraptor, carcherodontosaurs like Toro venidar.

And titanosaurs like Chucarosaurs. Other animals that lived around the same time and place include some lizard-like reptiles and turtles. And last but not least, going back to our fun fact that we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, paleontologists originally considered Megaraptor’s hand claw to be a giant foot claw, and the opposite happened with Velociraptor, because when Velociraptor was first discovered, scientists thought that its toe claw was a hand claw. Now we know where the claws belong.

And we know Mega Raptor, despite having Raptor in its name, was not a Drameosaur raptor like Velociraptor. They’re not that closely related.

speaker-0 (40:06.84)
Yep. They’re theropods, but other than that, I mean I guess they’re both Ave theropods or you know, in the more birdish realm of the theropod family tree. Yeah. But not too close.

speaker-1 (40:19.534)
Which maybe if you were to look at Mega Raptor, you wouldn’t think that’s like a bird. But now knowing about all its air sacks, that’s pretty bird like. It is. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed this mega mega raptor episode. Stay tuned in our next episode of Ino Dino, which will come out in a couple weeks, we’re gonna be talking about a bird that choked on rocks. no. And dinosaur digestion. And we’ll have some movie reviews.

In the meantime, if you want your paleo fix, we will have a dino download about dinosaur brains and skulls. That’s for our patrons. You can access that at patreon.com slash inodino. Thanks again, and until next time.

(Approximate times)

• 00:36 – Three new hadrosaurs and the PBS Eons interview
• 01:33 – Patron shout-outs and interview preview
• 02:26 – Cryptohadros kali from the Hateg Basin
• 03:55 – Why Cryptohadros was named a “hidden hadrosaur”
• 05:21 – Telmatosaurus history and taxonomic debate
• 07:19 – Gongshuilong fanwei and its sail-like tail
• 10:08 – South China’s first named hadrosaurid
• 12:10 – Plesiolophus warnerensis from Alberta
• 13:09 – Possible links to Parasaurolophus and crest evolution
• 15:35 – Academy of Natural Sciences museum closure
• 18:58 – Why museum closures matter for public access
• 21:38 – Introducing the PBS Eons team
• 22:50 – Why the series explores the Permian and Pangea
• 24:17 – Filming the extinction boundary near Salt Lake City
• 26:14 – Favorite fossil locations, including Joggins
• 28:32 – Helicoprion and bringing fossils to life
• 31:50 – Hologram-style filming and production effects
• 34:05 – Blake on translating science for viewers
• 36:24 – Dimetrodon sails and the soundscape of the Permian
• 39:43 – Antiosaurus, Bradysaurus, and Permian body plans
• 42:50 – Where to watch Eons: Life and Death on Pangea
• 46:06 – Dinosaur of the Day: Shamosaurus
• 48:58 – Fun fact: the widespread third eye
• 51:50 – Dimetrodon, therapsids, and the pineal foramen
• 53:47 – How the third eye changed through time
• 57:44 – Skull evolution and the loss of the third-eye opening
• 59:39 – Wrap-up and next episode preview

Summary

In this episode of I Know Dino, Garrett and Sabrina explore three new hadrosaurs: Cryptohadros kali, a previously overlooked dinosaur from Romania; Gongshuilong fanwei, a South China hadrosaur with an unusual sail-like tail; and Plesiolophus warnerensis, a crest-bearing dinosaur from Alberta. They also interview PBS Eons hosts Blake DePastino, Callie Moore, and Gabriel Philip Santos about their six-part series Eons: Life and Death on Pangea, discussing the Permian period, the Great Dying, filming fossil sites, and bringing prehistoric creatures to life for viewers. The episode also covers concerns about museum closures, features Dinosaur of the Day Shamosaurus, and examines research into the ancient third eye found in many prehistoric animals.

Takeaways

• New discoveries often come from reexamining old evidence. Cryptohadros kali was identified after researchers revisited fossil material from Romania that had previously been attributed to another hadrosaur.
• Partial fossils can still transform our understanding of evolution. Even incomplete skulls and skeletons may contain enough distinctive features to establish a new species or clarify its relationships.
• Gongshuilong fanwei had an unusually shaped tail. Its tall, curved neural spines created a sail-like structure unlike anything commonly seen in hadrosaurs, although its exact function remains uncertain.
• Plesiolophus warnerensis helps illuminate crested hadrosaur evolution. Its combination of ancestral and more advanced skull features may provide clues about the origins of later dinosaurs such as Parasaurolophus.
• The PBS Eons team expanded the story beyond the Great Dying. Their series explores the formation of Pangea, the Permian world, the mass extinction, and the recovery of life afterward.
• Fossil sites can make deep time feel immediate. The PBS Eons hosts described seeing rocks near Salt Lake City that preserve both the extinction boundary and the recovery that followed.
• Science storytelling depends on scale and visualization. Reconstructions of animals such as Helicoprion help audiences understand the true size and strangeness of creatures that can be difficult to imagine from fossils alone.
• The best science communicators ask questions on behalf of the audience. Blake DePastino described his role as translating expert knowledge into explanations that connect with non-specialists.
• Museums provide public access to scientific history. Even when collections and researchers are preserved, closing a museum can prevent people from directly experiencing important specimens and exhibits.
• Shamosaurus was a large early Cretaceous ankylosaur from Mongolia. It had armor, a clubbed tail, and an estimated length of up to 23 feet.
• Many prehistoric animals had a “third eye.” The parietal eye or pineal opening was once widespread among early tetrapods and gradually disappeared in several lineages, including those leading to mammals.
• Evolution often repurposes existing structures. The discussion of the pineal gland, jaw evolution, and changing skull anatomy shows how old features can take on new roles over time.

Keywords

new dinosaur discoveries, hadrosaurs, Cryptohadros kali, Gongshuilong fanwei, Plesiolophus warnerensis, sail-tailed hadrosaur, Parasaurolophus, PBS Eons, Life and Death on Pangea, Great Dying, Permian period, Pangea, mass extinction, fossil discoveries, paleontology, dinosaur science, Shamosaurus, ankylosaur, Mongolia dinosaurs, third eye, pineal gland, prehistoric animals, natural history museums, Academy of Natural Sciences

[00:00:05] Garret: Hello and welcome to, I know Dino keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries in science with us. I’m Garrett,

[00:00:12] Sabrina: I’m Sabrina,

[00:00:13] Garret: and today we have three new had resorts.

[00:00:17] Sabrina: and one of those had OSAs had a sail like tale.

[00:00:21] Garret: Hmm, like Spinosa.

[00:00:23] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:00:24] Garret: We also have an interview with three of the hosts from PBS Eons, Blake De Pastino, Callie Moore, and Gabriel Philip Santos, two of whom we’ve spoken with before. Names might be familiar.

[00:00:38] Sabrina: Yeah. We got to talk about the new six episode series, eons, life and Death on Pangaea. We also have Dinosaur of the Day, Shama Sous, a medium sized and cosa, and our fun fact, which is that most animals had a third eye until the great dying.

[00:00:57] Garret: I think I might know where that’s going.

[00:00:59] Sabrina: That’s do with the [00:01:00] Permian. That. Goes with our interview.

[00:01:03] Garret: But before we get into all of that, as always, we’d like to thank some of our patrons for helping to keep our podcast going and this week we have a new patron to thank and that’s Ash Bot. Thank you so much, Ash Bot for joining. And then rounding out our shout outs. We’ve got Thieving Raptor, Lorenzo Indie, DECA Dang Griffin, T Rx Dinosaurs, Adam j Layla Sous, and Jeff.

[00:01:28] Sabrina: Thank you so much for being a part of our know-it-all community. We really appreciate you. Speaking of, now is a good time. It’s never a bad time to join if you’re thinking of joining.

[00:01:39] Garret: We have so much good content over there, lots of Inop, paleo episodes. That interview we have in today’s episode, we have a much longer version on our Patreon for all of our patrons. So if you wanna check that out, head over to patreon.com/i know Dino.

[00:01:56] Sabrina: Jumping into the news with the three had sores. We’re [00:02:00] starting off with new Racor, crypto Hydros. K. This was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology by Yano Sagia and others. And I would say it looks like a typical hads. You’ve got the bulky body, it can walk on all fours. The long tail, the kind of long horse like head, ’cause sometimes had sores are called the horses of the Cretaceous, although usually we talk about them being the cows of the Cretaceous.

[00:02:26] Garret: I definitely prefer horses ’cause they run faster than cows and the head shape and the browsing rather than grazing in most cases.

[00:02:34] Sabrina: Mm-hmm. This one was in the late Cretaceous in Romania, in the Hotze Basin. It’s about 10 feet long or three meters according to the figure in the paper. So that’s our estimate based on their scale bar. The Hotze basin’s known for the dwarf dinosaurs, although there were some bigger animals,

[00:02:50] Garret: This one sounds like it might have been a dwarf dinosaur. It only three meters long. It’s pretty small for a hat or so in the late Cretaceous.

[00:02:57] Sabrina: they didn’t call it a dwarf dinosaur, so I’m not [00:03:00] sure we know it from a partial skull and skeleton. It includes parts of the skull, parts of the ribs, the tailbone, and part of a leg. It’s closely related to Tel Mesosaurus, which is also from Romania, founded in the Hotze Basin and Teros, which was found in Italy.

[00:03:17] Sabrina: It’s the second non-hard aloid from the Hots region after Urus, which is how it got its name, because the genus name Crypto Hads means hidden. Had or had.

[00:03:30] Garret: I was a little worried that it was gonna be like a crypted link of some sort, but I’m glad it doesn’t have anything to do with that.

[00:03:37] Sabrina: It just refers to being the second hara or in the Hotze Basin and being unacknowledged for so long it was hidden for over a century.

[00:03:44] Garret: Yeah, it is kind of surprising ’cause a lot of times had restores really dominate their ecosystem. We find tons of them. So it’s kind of surprising with all the things that have been found in the Hotze Basin that this one took so long.

[00:03:56] Sabrina: Yeah. Oh, and then hara, of course means thick or bulky, so it’s [00:04:00] got a unique combination of features I should mention to the species name, and is an honor of Maggie R’s mother, the lead author, Celia Kalay. Hopefully I am pronouncing this. Okay. They said, quote, honoring her continuous and full-hearted support and encouragement for pursuing his studies in natural sciences.

[00:04:19] Garret: That’s nice.

[00:04:20] Sabrina: It is. Yeah, they found an incomplete skeleton known as the Jenna specimen. The Holotype includes part of the skull and jaws and some teeth rib fragments, tailbone parts of the legs, and it’s at least a subadult based on fusions of the bones. Again, it’s closely related to Urus, that other Hadrosaur from the same area, and Urus has a long history.

[00:04:44] Sabrina: Ana Nosha first found it in 1895. She found a crushed

[00:04:48] Garret: Oh wow. That’s so, it’s not so new.

[00:04:51] Sabrina: This is OSAs

[00:04:52] Garret: Oh, okay.

[00:04:53] Sabrina: again. It’s got a long history. So she found the crushed skull in 1895, and then her brother, Franz [00:05:00] Nosha, who we’ve talked about a lot on our show, he described and named it as OSAs. But then later the name was changed to Urus because Urus was the name of a Crocodilian already.

[00:05:11] Sabrina: It was named in 1872 by Marsh. They later found OSAs to be a junior synonym of Ortho mes. That one was found in the Netherlands, but that one’s a dubious hado. So then a paper in 1993 found that all hydride fossils from the hot egg were tel Mesosaurus. There’s been some debate on this and eventually a lot of people consider that there may be more than one species, which brings us to crypto hadis.

[00:05:39] Sabrina: So this paper said that only the crushed skull that NSA described, as well as the vertebrae tail back and neck bones that he considered were part of the same individual, belonged to Tata sous, as well as some referred specimens found in the same area. It’s pieces of skull and jaws because they have pieces that overlap with the skull and they look similar.

[00:05:59] Sabrina: So you’re able to [00:06:00] compare and see like, Hey, this looks like the same dinosaur based on this skull. the new genus specimen crypto hydros, they found that it’s different from TSUs and they were able to name it cryptos. And this. Crypto had specimen. The Genesis specimen was excavated in the fieldwork seasons between 2022 and 2024.

[00:06:20] Garret: So it is new.

[00:06:21] Sabrina: Yeah. In some ways, they also found some isolated Titanic or vertebrae pieces of as Darked OSAs crocodile form osteoderms and fragments of turtle plates.

[00:06:33] Garret: Unfortunately, they noticed that those were all from different animals and didn’t just lump ’em together into some crazy combo.

[00:06:40] Sabrina: Mm. I don’t think that happens too often.

[00:06:42] Garret: It does sometimes. It happened with Dakota Raptor just a few years ago. Some turtle pieces got thrown in the mix.

[00:06:49] Sabrina: Yeah. Our next hadas is a ine Gong long fondue. This was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology by [00:07:00] Hanya and others. Sine are known for not really having crests,

[00:07:05] Garret: They’re the boring had

[00:07:07] Sabrina: at least the bony crests. I think we’ve talked about how sores having fleshy crests. Mm-hmm. Anyway, this one Gong Shu Long looks mostly like a typical hadas sour.

[00:07:18] Sabrina: We’ve got the bulky body. It’s depicted walking on all fours. It’s got a long tail. It’s medium sized. It’s about 23 feet or seven meters long. So bigger than the last hadas sour we were just talking

[00:07:28] Garret: Yeah. Way bigger.

[00:07:29] Sabrina: But the tail is tall and it’s got this salike structure at the end. So it’s got these long curved neural spines on the vertebrae at the end of the tail.

[00:07:38] Sabrina: That’s what makes the tall salike structure. These neural spines are long and somewhat recurved, curved backward. They’re eight and a half times as tall as the Centrum that they’re attached to. That’s the main part of the vertebrae bone. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. Not quite like spinosaurus we were saying at the beginning.

[00:07:56] Sabrina: Yeah. Of the episode, but different for a hydros.

[00:07:59] Garret: [00:08:00] Yeah, I wouldn’t really say they’re curved, backward. They sort of like start out backwards and then curve up. So kind of like a, a spoiler on some cars, like the, the deck lid spoilers or like on the old nine 11 that had the little is very specific. Um,

[00:08:18] Sabrina: not familiar with that reference.

[00:08:20] Garret: I need a better analogy. A banana, it’s shaped like a banana.

[00:08:25] Garret: If you have a banana standing up or like hanging, it’s got that kind of curve to it. Concave in the front side. But yeah, that’s very long. It’s almost, the tail actually does in a lot of ways. Remind me of that spinosaurus tail in terms of the height compared to the height of the actual meaty part of the tail with the Centrum where all the most of the muscles would’ve attached and everything.

[00:08:50] Garret: It’s interesting in their estimation of maybe what it looked like. They gave it like a, a flat top sort of look because they gave [00:09:00] it. Basically they have a vertebra or a neural spine that they think was pretty close to the hips. And then they got a whole series of ’em that they think is closer to the end of the tail.

[00:09:11] Garret: And they’re similar in length, so they just assumed maybe this thing had neural spines going all the way down. Its back and tail that were similar in length, but that’s obviously a lot of conjecture ’cause they didn’t find any of them from the back. So we don’t know what kind of sale it had on its back.

[00:09:26] Garret: Maybe it was like Spinosa and it had a huge, crazy one on its back. We don’t know. Gotta find more fossils.

[00:09:33] Sabrina: always.

[00:09:34] Garret: Yeah, I guess so. That’s a really cool one. I like that a lot.

[00:09:38] Sabrina: Yeah. So gong, it’s from the Lake Cretaceous. It was found in the Jang Shi Province in China in the Leon Ho formation. The fossils were found back in 2021 during some construction, and it was found in a bone bed. There’s at least two individuals. Most of the bones were found in two large blocks that could be pieced back together, so that’s always nice.

[00:09:58] Sabrina: There’s three sets of [00:10:00] two duplicate bones found. That’s why they say there’s at least two individuals, and these duplicates are similar in proportion. They’re similar size proportions to each other. So for example, they found two lower jaw bones, left entries, part of the shoulders and lower leg bones or tibia of slightly different sizes.

[00:10:17] Sabrina: So again, that’s how we know there’s at least two of them. The holotype for Gong Shu Long is a right dent entry, a lower jawbone, but they also found parts of the skull, neck bones, backbone, tailbone parts of the arm, parts of the shoulder, and leg bones

[00:10:31] Garret: Nice. I should mention they did find that Centrum from the back, but they didn’t find the actual neural spine, so we don’t know how tall it was.

[00:10:40] Sabrina: Oh, we don’t know the neural spine.

[00:10:42] Garret: Not from the back. They only have ’em from the tailbones.

[00:10:44] Sabrina: okay. So yeah, it’s the first horrid name from fossils found in South China. We’re getting a little specific here because fossils have been found before in other parts of China, but they’ve also been found in South China before. They’re just too fragmentary [00:11:00] to get a name.

[00:11:00] Garret: Oh, that’s why it’s first had resort named. Yes. And then in South China.

[00:11:06] Sabrina: yes, because there are six formerly named Resos from China, but they’re all from the north, and that genus name gong sung means Gong River Dragon. The fossils were found near Gong River and the species named FUE alludes to the sail like tail Fenway’s opinion for a Mandarin Chinese term that denotes the sale.

[00:11:25] Sabrina: Like tale?

[00:11:26] Garret: Hmm. That’s cool.

[00:11:27] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:28] Garret: It’s not a place named Sora Place name Sys.

[00:11:31] Sabrina: No, it’s a descriptive one.

[00:11:32] Garret: It’s a place name long descriptive sys.

[00:11:37] Sabrina: There we go. And our last hydro sour is a Lamb Asosa Plei Warner. This was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences by Bradley Mcfe and others. The Paleo to me looks similar to Paris Raus,

[00:11:54] Garret: Hey.

[00:11:55] Sabrina: and it’s possibly potentially an ancestor to Paris.[00:12:00]

[00:12:00] Garret: Okay.

[00:12:01] Sabrina: It walked on all fours. It had the bulky body, the long tail, and it had a big crest on its head.

[00:12:05] Sabrina: Not quite as big as Paris. You can’t, it’s hard to beat, but yeah, it’s pretty big. It was found in Alberta, Canada. It’s from the late Cretaceous about 77 million years ago. It’s from the Oldman formation. They found a skull, roof, and brain case. Wendy Sloboda found it. She’s the same person who found Wendy Sero tops and has made many other discoveries.

[00:12:26] Sabrina: In case that name sounds familiar, and it was found near the Village Warner. That’s how it got its species name refers to Warner, Alberta near what was found. Warner Ensis is the species name, and then the genus name plei opus means near crest. It refers to being somewhat closely related to perserus, although it’s got more basal traits than perserus.

[00:12:49] Sabrina: So it’s got several ancestral features in its skull. For example, in the top and sides of the skull, the parietal has this triangular plateau, but then there’s also some more [00:13:00] derived or later features, like a quote, boomerang shaped dorsal surface of the frontals. So that’s the upper part of the front bones has this boomerang shape on the surface.

[00:13:11] Garret: Yeah. Sort of above the eye.

[00:13:13] Sabrina: Yeah, and then there’s some other details too similar to Paris office.

[00:13:18] Garret: But it, they’re working from a pretty small bone for the holla type. It’s basically the top back of the head, but it has hardly any crest at all on it. So they’re assuming, because it has a lot of details in the part of the bone that they have to parais, that it’s a close relative. And because it’s a close relative and it looks like there’s at least part of a crest there, that it probably had a big old crest, but we really don’t know.

[00:13:44] Sabrina: Yeah, but it is one of the few diagnostic OSAs from Alberta, from the old information, there’s enough features to identify it as this new species, and it helps show that lamb OSAs were all over the northern hemisphere at the end of the Cretaceous.

[00:13:59] Garret: Nice. [00:14:00] That’s interesting. ’cause out of these, we’re always talking about lamby sores are the exciting ones with the big head crests. But I actually think the sine

[00:14:08] Sabrina: With the tail.

[00:14:09] Garret: that gong long with that cool tail. Yeah. The really high spines, it’s certainly not the first hand sore with tall spines on its tail, but this one, the way they’re curved, the banana shape to ’em is really interesting.

[00:14:23] Garret: I’d like to see a little bit more research into it to see if they think maybe those could have been curved astronomically

[00:14:31] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:32] Garret: or if they were definitely like that in life. ’cause I, I don’t remember seeing a lot of banana shaped neural spine, especially with that length to them. But.

[00:14:39] Sabrina: Banana shaped or specific car shaped. I can’t remember what car you said.

[00:14:43] Garret: Oh yeah, I was talking about a little lip spoiler on the back of a car, but I guess there were so many of ’em, and they all seem to have that same curvature, including one that’s from several vertebrae away that you said was in a different block too, makes it a lot less likely that there was some sort of [00:15:00] taxonomy bending them.

[00:15:01] Garret: So interesting. Why? Why the curve,

[00:15:05] Sabrina: Why not?

[00:15:05] Garret: not? cutting in for one other news item.

[00:15:11] Garret: the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum in Philadelphia is unfortunately closing, which was very shocking to everybody in the Paleo and really just science enthusiasts in general community.

[00:15:26] Sabrina: What happened so fast?

[00:15:27] Garret: It did so a lot of people think that maybe. They don’t want to save the museum.

[00:15:33] Garret: ’cause usually if a museum is in danger of closing, there’s a push when they know that funding’s gonna run out to generate some money and, save the museum. Especially considering the Academy of Natural Sciences is the oldest museum in the US and not just the us. According to the dinosaur mailing list, people are saying it’s the oldest museum Natural History Museum in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:15:55] Sabrina: I mean, it’s where Raus was first mounted and that was the first [00:16:00] dinosaur to be mounted in the world.

[00:16:01] Garret: Yeah, that was back in 1866, but I think it was founded in like 1812 or something like that, and it was, I believe, had like a lot of the founding fathers of the United States in it. So it’s an extremely significant institution, and it got taken over by Drexel some years ago.

[00:16:19] Garret: I guess 15 ish years ago, and a lot of people are saying they think that Drexel just really mismanaged it, but other people are saying that they think Drexel is trying to save money because they’re under financial stress, so they’re gonna keep a lot of the researchers and a lot of the material and just sort of move it into other buildings and close the actual museum building.

[00:16:40] Garret: But either way, it’s very sad. It went under a renovation not too long ago, just about a decade ago, and I guess after the renovation, they didn’t really get a big increase in visitors, but obviously renovations are really expensive. So that was part of the problem. But we really don’t know too much details about it because Drexel really hasn’t shared much about why the museum is closing other than the [00:17:00] fact that it’s gonna close at the end of this month, which

[00:17:03] Sabrina: Which I think they shared that at the end of August or beginning of September. So very fast. Yeah.

[00:17:08] Garret: It was like we’re closing in one month. Basically. There is a Facebook group that our listener, and former guest of the show, Jen Cotton, shared with us. So if you wanna see the Facebook group where people are trying to brainstorm about ways to potentially save the museum, you can check out the link in our show notes for that. But it was interesting looking through some of the comments, what that paleontologists posted on the mailing list about this, because it’s not just the Academy of Natural Sciences, which is closing. Unfortunately, we’ve talked about how Carthage College was potentially ending their paleontology program.

[00:17:46] Garret: apparently the Milwaukee Public Museum is closing at the end of this year. And the University of Michigan replaced their museum and sort of SH is now sharing it with other departments. And as they put it, it’s [00:18:00] now a state-of-the-art beautiful collection, but most of the dioramas were removed and there’s really a lot less in the museum despite it being a nice new building and. Michigan State University, which had a hall of evolution in the basement. They basically just completely removed that. So yeah, there’s a lot of museums that are sort of hurting or closing or partially closing or combining right now. And it’s sad.

[00:18:28] Sabrina: Yeah. But with the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum in Philly, there is a group that’s working to try to save it, which I know it’s very short notice.

[00:18:38] Sabrina: And Jen shared us a link. It’s a group on Facebook. We’ll have the link in our show notes because it’s a little bit hard to share a group link on a podcast thing.

[00:18:48] Garret: alpha numeric thing.

[00:18:50] Sabrina: But if anybody wants to get involved, uh, this might be a place to go.

[00:18:54] Garret: Yep. Or at, at the very least, vent frustrations. There [00:19:00] was one person who posted other recently saying that they were paying attention to the outcry, so maybe there’s a chance of saving it.

[00:19:07] Garret: So I think it’s worth trying because again, it’s one of the most important scientific historically institutions in the country. So hopefully it doesn’t close.

[00:19:18] Sabrina: Yeah. We’ll see what happens, but hopefully not, I guess in case it does, if you are in the area, you should check it out before September 30th.

[00:19:27] Sabrina: Yes. It’s definitely worth seeing. We saw it. Ooh, over a decade ago now.

[00:19:32] Garret: Yes. Yeah, it’s cool. It’s very cool to see the original had resource, the original mounted dinosaur, and they have a lot of other cool stuff in there, including some marine reptiles and like I said, it was renovated not too long ago, so it’s a nice museum.

[00:19:45] Sabrina: It’s, Yet, apparently their collections include more than 19 million specimens and more than 73,000 type specimens.

[00:19:53] Garret: Yeah. So again, I think all of that is gonna go to Drexel in a different collection space. I don’t think it’s all [00:20:00] just gonna get thrown out on the curb, but it’s nice when it’s in. A museum and people can see it.

[00:20:07] Garret: ’cause that’s the big problem with these museums closing. It’s not that there isn’t any research being done or that the type specimens are lost, it’s that the public doesn’t really have access to them anymore.

[00:20:16] Sabrina: Yeah.

[00:20:18] Garret: So now back to hopefully lighter news in the regular episode.

[00:20:22] Sabrina: Hopefully you don’t remember.

[00:20:23] Garret: I don’t, I don’t know where this is getting inserted. And in just a moment, we’ll get into our interview with the PBS Eons team, but first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break and now onto our interview with the PBS Eons team. But if you wanna hear more about all of their work and details of the new show Life and Death on Pangea, then be sure to check out.

[00:20:53] Garret: The extended version on our Patreon. If you’re a Patreon, you should be able to just get it through your premium [00:21:00] content feed. And if you’re not a Patreon, please consider joining. We are joined today by Blake De Pastino, Callie Moore and Gabriel Phillips. Santos, who are three of the hosts of the YouTube channel, PBS Eons and their new six episode series from PBS Digital Studios and Complexly titled Eons Life and Death on Pangea, which Explores the Great Dying is now available.

[00:21:27] Garret: Thank you all so much for joining us.

[00:21:29] Kallie: Thanks for having us.

[00:21:30] Blake: Yes, thanks. This is fun already.

[00:21:34] Sabrina: Yes, yes. We’ve had some technical difficulties, so I appreciate all of you putting up with all that. So I know this is your first like long form storytelling, at least for PBS eons. Did you guys decide on the great dying as the topic?

[00:21:49] Kallie: Well, I, we thought about, we were trying to think of topics, right? And we’re like, Ooh, the great dying. Nobody’s really talked about it. Most natural history shows focus on [00:22:00] dinosaurs or the ice age, basically. That’s like your only, your only two options there. And so with the great dying, we would be able to talk about Permian Critters that are very highly ignored.

[00:22:11] Kallie: But then as we were thinking about a six episode series and. Talking about an extinction for six episodes, it could get pretty dark. It get pretty, you know, pretty glum, pretty depressing. So we took a step back and we’re like, okay, well that happened at the end of the Permian. What if we looked at the entire Permian period?

[00:22:28] Kallie: And we’re like, well, what’s the big thing with the Permian? Pangaea? And they were like, Ooh, if we talk about Pangaea, we could even take. Farther step back and be like, how did Pangea form in the late Carboniferous? How did Pangea end? And how did the Permian end at the end of the Permian and the recovery in the Trias?

[00:22:46] Kallie: So we kind of just kept taking steps back until we weren’t so much focused on the great dying as it was the setup for the great dying. And then we try to leave everybody with a, a happy [00:23:00] note that life recovered.

[00:23:02] Garret: Yeah, that’s good. And with dinosaurs, what more could you want? That’s the happiest of endings. So Gabe, I want to ask you, what was your favorite location that you went to during your filming?

[00:23:17] Gabriel: Oh man, that’s a hard one. I think honestly, for me was getting to. Go to the, there’s like a location in Salt Lake City where there was the outcrop that has a layer that shows the extinction, and then right above it is the recovery period. And that’s my favorite place because on just looking at it as you walk by, you wouldn’t know that one of the greatest tragedies in life’s history is recorded at this one site.

[00:23:46] Gabriel: Right. And you know, there’s so many people who were just walking by that day. They were walking their dogs mountain biking. There were tons of animals. There was literal planes flying over us to land in Salt Lake City Airport, and it’s just [00:24:00] incredible to see that this moment of time is preserved in the rocks and it’s something that’s so accessible to so many people.

[00:24:08] Gabriel: It’s such an awe inspiring thing. And it also has this incredible reminder that yes, the end Permian mass extinction was terrible. It was terrifying, but. It was also the story of survival. Following it, right, the recovery, because there was so much life around there. We were there. There were so many plants.

[00:24:26] Gabriel: It really brings together all this idea of what we were trying to share, the story of life and death on Pangaea, and the fact that it kind of got summarized in this one little location right in Salt Lake City where nobody even realizes it. It blew my mind getting to see that location.

[00:24:44] Garret: That’s awesome. You have that in common with Riley Black, ’cause we were talking to her recently and she was on the other side, on the Colorado side of those mountains, talking about the other end of the Mesozoic and seeing the, the line for the extinction and how cool that spot is too.[00:25:00]

[00:25:00] Gabriel: That’s awesome. Rocks are awesome. They can show us so many things and inspire things like I wish more people could appreciate the rocks, man.

[00:25:08] Garret: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:09] Sabrina: Was it hard? ’cause there’s four of you, did you call dibs on where to go?

[00:25:13] Kallie: The only one that I know of that was actual dibs was, was me. Uh, ’cause I, I happened to be in a meeting when we were talking about localities. ’cause I had submitted a bunch of localities. ’cause for whatever, my brain is just like a Rolodex of paleo. Facts. So when somebody asked me like, Hey, do you need of any good carbon ferous, fossil localities?

[00:25:38] Kallie: I’m like, yes. How many do you need? You know? So Joggings was one of them, and when they started talk about all of the field localities that had been determined, joggings was one. And as soon as they said it, I was like, I call dibs. I volunteers tribute, and, uh. That was it. I was like, you can send me anywhere else.

[00:25:57] Kallie: I don’t care. Wherever else I go, [00:26:00] you can send me to all of the crappy localities. There were none. There were none spoilers.

[00:26:05] Garret: As long as you get to go to Joggings.

[00:26:07] Kallie: As long as I get to go to joggings

[00:26:08] Garret: Yeah. That’s awesome.

[00:26:09] Gabriel: I was so jealous. But it was, it, it’s, it was, it was jealousy, but also so excited for Cali. Like that’s such a cool site. And like Cali said, there were no bad localities. We all got to go to some really cool places out there.

[00:26:24] Garret: Yeah, I, I’m happy to hear that because I know it made the edit Callie talking about like, I was like yanking the seat in front of me, like trying to get out of the car. So excited. So it’s, it’s nice to hear that that was real excitement and not just playing it out for the cameras.

[00:26:38] Kallie: Oh, for sure it was, I mean, I, I did not realize that the drive from our hotel to the fossil locality was gonna be like 30 plus minutes, and so I’m anticipating like getting in the car and then just driving down to the coast and it being there, and then I had to wait like 30 minutes and then they kept being like, well, should we stop here for a quick shoot?

[00:26:56] Kallie: Or maybe pick up some B-roll here and. [00:27:00] Absolutely not get, get me there. Just Just get me there. Just get me there and then we can decide what we wanna do. And yeah, it was phenomenal. It was magical. It was just one of the most incredible parts for me personally, of this entire experience.

[00:27:16] Garret: Nice. I wanna ask Gabe one more question because I know you need to leave soon. Do you have a favorite animal that was covered in all of the animals that you discussed? I know it’s a long time period and a lot of diversity, but is there one that stands out to you?

[00:27:32] Gabriel: Yes. I was so excited for this one that I got to talk about was episode three looking at Ocean Life in the, in Panang, and I got to talk about Heela Capra, Heela Capra, you

[00:27:44] Blake: Ooh.

[00:27:44] Gabriel: like the, the, yeah, like the, the shark, like cartilaginous fish that had like the buzz saw teeth, right?

[00:27:51] Gabriel: Like, I’ve known about that creature for a long time, but never really like. Diving into it or appreciating how cool it was, just like [00:28:00] I knew it looked awesome, but when I learned more about it as I read the script and when we got to go visit the Idaho Museum of Natural History, seeing the fossils and learning about it was so cool because it’s.

[00:28:12] Gabriel: I love weird creatures, but this like is a weird creature in the best way possible. And the other th Yeah, exactly. And the other reason I like this is my favorite was, ’cause I’d never realized how truly big Helo Capra was until I got to the museum. In the museum there is a statue that’s made by Gary Staub and you turn the corner and there’s this giant.

[00:28:35] Gabriel: Head sticking out of the wall. And I was like, oh, that’s crazy. To make like an a, a big version of that just for the, and for the exhibit. And they’re like, no, that’s, that’s as big as it is. ’cause like I was like, shut up. Nuh. And then you, they, they have a replica of the tooth worldl next to it. And if you look at the tooth world and like kind of superimpose it on the, like on the statue.

[00:28:59] Gabriel: You can see it [00:29:00] really was that big. And I was like, oh my gosh, no way. This thing was actually that big. And there’s a photo of me with my head inside of the mouth of the statue, and it’s just one of those crazy things of like, you don’t realize. How amazing and how big and how cool some of these creatures are.

[00:29:18] Gabriel: Sometimes just from the fossils and when you introduce the incredible artists like Gary Staub and everybody who reconstruct them, you really get a whole different appreciation for them. And Gila Capra just all of a sudden became like one of my most favorite prehistoric creatures because of this.

[00:29:33] Gabriel: Documentary series and I now have a bunch of stickers. I have a plushie of it. I would love to get like a few new toys. So it’s definitely become one of like my collectible pieces next to like spinosaur and stuff.

[00:29:46] Sabrina: Do you have it in its different versions of the tooth world? Like you wanna stick it out more

[00:29:50] Gabriel: I would love that. Like when in the script there’s a part where I, where we talk about like the different ways that they thought the tooth worldl went and I haven’t seen any [00:30:00] toys or collectibles with the different versions, but if I see one. You know, I’m dropping cash for my collection like that. That was so cool to see.

[00:30:10] Gabriel: And I, I really loved having that picture because it’s great to talk about it now with people and give them that like, sense of scale and like that. Like that idea that they didn’t have before. And I, I think that’s one of my favorite things overall about this series is the incredible artists that we all worked with to bring these creatures to life.

[00:30:28] Gabriel: It’s really showcasing them in a whole different way that I think so many people never pictured before

[00:30:35] Sabrina: Yeah,

[00:30:35] Garret: Yeah, it is really cool I really liked the, we call it a hologram, right? The hologram

[00:30:41] Garret: Oh yeah. The fancy stage

[00:30:42] Sabrina: the third episode. Yeah, with the multiple, yeah. There was like a bunch of animals that were shown up there.

[00:30:49] Garret: did you guys shoot that, we, yeah, we shot that in a theater here in Missoula and Treasure State Studios.

[00:30:58] Blake: It used to be a, like a [00:31:00] shipping depot or. House or something and these filmmakers bought it and they turned it into sound

[00:31:05] Garret: Oh, cool.

[00:31:07] Blake: Yeah.

[00:31:08] Kallie: It was pretty neat. Uh, they meticulously laid out that grid on the floor, and we filmed, of course, there were. There was nothing there when we were filming. And then they put all that cool stuff in at post and man, I mean, I knew they were describing what it was gonna look like, but until I saw mockups of it, I was just blown away.

[00:31:30] Kallie: I was. Like you guys did that, that’s like movie magic, like, oh my gosh. The, the other thing was having the fog machine, ’cause we had to keep it kind of foggy in there, so the lasers and the lights had something to look like they’re bouncing off of. And so every once in a while they’d be like, we need more fog.

[00:31:49] Kallie: And they’d be flapping near a fog machine to get it all

[00:31:54] Blake: They had a pa with a, on a one wheel, you

[00:31:56] Blake: know, uh, like tooling around the whole warehouse in this one wheel with [00:32:00] cardboard just wafting the, the smoke everywhere.

[00:32:02] Garret: That’s great.

[00:32:04] Kallie: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:06] Sabrina: What was a great effect? It was,

[00:32:09] Sabrina: it was, was it hard to talk about when you’re not actually seeing anything next to you?

[00:32:14] Kallie: Kind of, uh, ’cause we had to think about how big the critters were. You know, like you couldn’t be looking over the top of something that was only as high as your knee. I think spoilers, but I talk about a little critter that’s on a pedestal,

[00:32:27] Kallie: luckily. So when we’re talking about a little bitty

[00:32:30] Blake: I did too.

[00:32:30] Kallie: like a pedestal.

[00:32:32] Kallie: Yeah, it’s a look at.

[00:32:33] Sabrina: I liked all of the, the animals that we saw in, in the third episode and the dimetrodon, especially at the end, it did like a little. The sail kind of like wiggled. It was just really cute. Yeah. so I know this episode will be airing after all six episodes have aired, so hopefully our, all our listeners have had a chance to watch it, but we’ve only been able to see the first [00:33:00] three so far, which has been great. Did you have a favorite animal, Blake?

[00:33:04] Blake: My favorite parts of the shoot was interviewing the collections managers and the field paleontologists. Because that’s when I really feel like I’m in my element, right? Like put me in the field and I am equipped. So my background, as you know, is in science journalism and I’m equipped to ask informed questions.

[00:33:24] Blake: So like to the experts, they’re kind of like obvious and possibly dumb. But that’s my job and I don’t, I’m not self-conscious about that, but I can. Tell the difference between a fossil and a rock. What I can do is ask questions. You know what I mean? And so when I am in the, collections and I’m interviewing the scientists, that’s when I really felt in my element, because I knew exactly what I wanted to know.

[00:33:46] Blake: And like I understand my job is to be a proxy for the audience, for the non-scientists, you know? And so I’m kind of a translator for the scientists and the lay people. The viewer. so I got to ask [00:34:00] questions that to many, experts would be obvious, but like I really needed to have answered like, why are so many dimetrodons at the credit site?

[00:34:09] Blake: Why is there so much oil in West Texas? Like, I just needed someone to connect those dots for me. And in the process of doing that, hopefully I’m connecting the dots for the audience. What I’m trying to do is understand how the things I’m seeing in the field relates to me. There’s no other way to put it.

[00:34:26] Blake: Like what’s my place, in the natural world, and like, how does this connect to me? And I like to think that I actually succeeded in doing that because by asking those sort of big, obvious questions. Presumably the viewer wondering the same thing, like, why am I sitting here listening to some guy I don’t know, talk about the metric on, well, Kyle, it’s because it was the first terrestrial predator and probably the closest ancestor to you as a proto mammal in that distance

[00:34:55] Sabrina: That’s one of my favorite facts about Dimetrodon. Yeah.

[00:34:57] Garret: Yeah, I had forgotten that or maybe never [00:35:00] learned that before. And I, some of those details about Dimetrodon that you were sharing Like, oh yeah, it was a hetero dont, it’s like, yeah, of course. You know, they had different teeth for different purposes, you know, like, okay, but then pointing out but it was maybe the first hetero dont, or one of the first hetero donts, and it’s certainly the first in this sort of niche.

[00:35:18] Garret: It’s like, oh wow, that is actually super important, more important that I had realized before work.

[00:35:23] Blake: Another example of this is, I don’t think it’s posted yet, but I did a follow up YouTube episode, YouTube Eons, YouTube episode about Raddon sales, and I think that’s not out yet, so I’m not gonna spoil it. But there is a part in the script where I literally stopped reading it. I stopped on the table read, and then during the shoot I stopped again because like, I can’t finish this script until someone answers me this question.

[00:35:47] Blake: And the writer had. Just as the throwaway line noted that like one of the hypotheses for the Dimetrodon sale is maybe it was a visual cue either for species identification, sexual selection, [00:36:00] um, scaring off potential predators or whatever. And that would only work because, um, no one could hear in the Permian, and I’m like, hold the fucking phone ears did not exist in the Permian.

[00:36:12] Blake: And Han’s like, yeah, no one had ears back then. I’m like, what? I have so many questions. My first question is, what did Earth sound like

[00:36:21] Sabrina: Yeah,

[00:36:22] Blake: if you were walking on around on Earth? No one could hear, but I have ears. What would I hear? Would I hear like the wind rushing water? You know, maybe

[00:36:33] Garret: So many

[00:36:34] Blake: did, how many, what kind of insects were, you know what I mean?

[00:36:36] Blake: But like, no one’s calling to each other, no one’s trying to communicate. So imagine a world without, without hearing. Across the animal kingdom. That’s the kind of stuff that I think about, and so I, I paused the shoot of that episode and I said, Farhan, if you love me, and I think he does for a Christmas present, I want him to write a script about what the Permian world sounded like, and I [00:37:00] want to host it.

[00:37:01] Garret: That does sound cool.

[00:37:03] Garret: Yeah, that was a, that was another detail that was in the Permian episode where you were talking about Dimetrodon and somebody casually is like, oh yeah, the, the joints and the jaw move, and then this part goes back and forms the ear. And I’m like, what? That seems weird.

[00:37:19] Blake: Yeah. Again, like hold up. Did I just understand, did I hear you say that my jaw is also in my ears, like kind of, yeah.

[00:37:27] Kallie: I actually think that would be a really cool eons episode. Just like when hearing evolve. Know, because it’s a different, like transitioning from the water to the land, that’s a whole sound travels in air And so it would’ve been a complete different setup. Um, to hear in air.

[00:37:47] Kallie: It would’ve been huge. Yeah. If a Dimetrodon farts in the woods, does anybody hear it? You know.

[00:37:55] Garret: If no one can hear it, did it happen?

[00:37:58] Blake: Yeah.

[00:37:58] Garret: They had a sense of [00:38:00] smell, so

[00:38:01] Blake: Yeah.

[00:38:02] Kallie: So they, whoever smelt it, dealt it still applies, but at least with the sound, nobody’s gonna know. They’re all silent but deadly.

[00:38:09] Blake: the Permian Forest.

[00:38:16] Garret: That is perfect. There needs to.

[00:38:18] Blake: Anyway, I don’t think I answered your question, but um, that’s my answer.

[00:38:24] Garret: That was a good answer.

[00:38:25] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:38:27] Sabrina: Like

[00:38:28] Garret: places. That’s the important

[00:38:29] Sabrina: It did. And that’s not something that I would’ve even thought about. Like,

[00:38:35] Garret: Farts. Yeah.

[00:38:35] Sabrina: oh no, I was going back to the sound, but yeah.

[00:38:39] Blake: Yeah.

[00:38:42] Garret: Oh man. A lot of you were talking actually about, anti sous,

[00:38:48] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:49] Garret: which is like, to me, sort of the, the most dinosaur, maybe a therapod like of the Permian creatures.

[00:38:58] Kallie: Yeah, anti sous [00:39:00] is one of my favorites. They’re so weird. Their heads are so big. They’re they. Oh man. It seems like everything in the Permian either had too big of head to look structurally sound, or too small of head, like rinus. The proportions just seem. Wrong, uh, all, all around. Uh, but yeah, anti aosa, anti AAU being one of the top synapsids on the planet at that time.

[00:39:28] Kallie: Uh, it’s wild. So knobby, I’m sure it just had awful disposition and probably be biting. Its friends and foes the same. I can’t imagine what all the, even though they couldn’t. Possibly hear that. Well, they probably were still making noises, you know, so like, are they butting heads? Can you hear the clash and Nash of the teeth and,

[00:39:51] Garret: They had to be like, maybe going back to the sound, maybe it was more like the crocodile, like rumble at each other so they could like feel the viscerally, feel the [00:40:00] anger.

[00:40:00] Blake: Yeah,

[00:40:01] Kallie: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:02] Blake: when I, um, had my kind of onset freak out about noise in the Permian, Han’s, like, well, they probably could, they could hear each other kind of like elephants could hear each other moving around and stuff. And they might’ve, like, through their gut, he said their guts are touching the ground. And then.

[00:40:18] Blake: Maybe that’s like some way they didn’t really communicate, but they could at least sense their environment orally, you know?

[00:40:25] Garret: And then the other animal you were talking about, another big one was the Brady, so, which I think you might’ve referred to as the cow of the Permian, which I really like.

[00:40:38] Kallie: Yeah. Uh, the pariah sore, that’s for sure. They are another one that does not look like they’re built structurally sound. So this is one of the small head’s, giant bodied. Ones, but I think, wasn’t it, it’s a

[00:40:50] Garret: Yeah. Or at least that was

[00:40:53] Kallie: yeah, yeah. Yeah. Proposal of their giant bodies, why they had such big, you know, quote unquote [00:41:00] fermentation tanks to try to break down this really poor, nutritious foods that, why would you start eating that?

[00:41:07] Kallie: But good on you. I’m glad you did. I’m glad you did. ’cause it did leave to cows someday. So appreciate it. But it does seem like a, a big leap. A big leap to eating

[00:41:19] Sabrina: There was a lot of time in between.

[00:41:21] Garret: There was a, and a

[00:41:22] Kallie: There was.

[00:41:23] Garret: because there wasn’t any competition for it, so some, something had to figure out how to eat it, I guess.

[00:41:28] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:41:29] Kallie: True. It was, you know, it was bound to happen. It was

[00:41:32] Sabrina: Somebody had to do it. So, for our listeners who may not have had a chance to watch PBS eons yet, or the latest eons life and death on Pangea, where is the best place that they can stream it and find out more about your work? But all of you.

[00:41:50] Kallie: Well, uh, the PBS app is the best place to watch the. Beyond. I keep calling it beyond. So our shorthand for this whole thing for the past two and a half [00:42:00] years has been beyonds, broadcast eons. And so it, it has, it still has not stuck that this project has a legit title now, eons

[00:42:09] Blake: and the podcast is called Peons on like the call sheet and stuff. Yeah.

[00:42:16] Kallie: Yeah, so you can watch Eons, life and Death on Pangea, on the PBS app or at pbs.org/eons. If you’d like to check out our channel and all of our 300 plus episodes, you can check us out on youtube.com/eons.

[00:42:34] Sabrina: Yes. Thank you so much everybody for joining us today and putting up with all of our technical issues.

[00:42:41] Garret: Yes.

[00:42:42] Kallie: That’s all right. We made it through.

[00:42:45] Blake: I enjoy talking about this more than practically anything in the world ’cause it is real. I don’t mean to speak for Callie or anyone else, but it’s just a real labor of love and I just appreciate the opportunity to talk to folks about

[00:42:55] Garret: Awesome.

[00:42:56] Kallie: Yeah, we can finally talk

[00:42:58] Garret: Yeah.

[00:42:58] Kallie: secret that

[00:42:59] Sabrina: [00:43:00] Two and a half years. That’s a long time.

[00:43:02] Kallie: Ugh, it was really hard. Lemme

[00:43:04] Blake: And I am not good at keeping secrets,

[00:43:06] Garret: Yeah, me.

[00:43:07] Blake: I’m, I deserve a treat.

[00:43:10] Kallie: We, we had a ton of wordings about social media, like do not share anything that would give anything away. You can’t, like if there’s a clapboard in front, you know, and it has like what scene we’re shooting, you can’t put that on there. Don’t tell people where you’re at. Yeah. So

[00:43:24] Garret: Like a spy. I’m

[00:43:25] Kallie: had rules

[00:43:26] Garret: to an undisclosed location.

[00:43:29] Blake: Yeah, exactly.

[00:43:33] Sabrina: Alright, well thank you again.

[00:43:35] Garret: Yes,

[00:43:36] Kallie: Yeah, thanks for having us.

[00:43:39] Garret: thanks again, Blake, Callie, and Gabe for coming on our show and talking to us all about your amazing work on PBS Eons. We’ve been following it for a long time, so it’s really fun to get to talk in depth with the people who make these amazing shows that we like so much. And in just a moment, we’ll get into our dinosaur of the day, sham [00:44:00] OSAs.

[00:44:00] Garret: But first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

[00:44:05] Sabrina: And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Shama Sous, which was a request from Morgan VR Patreon slash Discord. So thanks. Sham OSA was an encor that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Dorna Govie province in Mongolia. It’s the first encor from the early Cretaceous found in Mongolia.

[00:44:24] Garret: Huh. I guess they’re all from the Lake Cretaceous, the ones we have there so far. Mongolia, I suppose, is mostly Lake Creta. The famous stuff is Cretaceous stuff like Velociraptor and all that.

[00:44:35] Sabrina: Mm-hmm. So Shamma sous was medium sized. It’s estimated to be up to 23 feet or seven meters

[00:44:41] Garret: Ooh, that’s pretty good for Anor.

[00:44:43] Sabrina: As long as some of the had sores we were talking about.

[00:44:46] Garret: Yeah, and probably a lot heavier.

[00:44:48] Sabrina: Hmm. It looked different from a had sore, it walked on all fours. It was low to the ground. It did have a bulky body and a long tail that ended in a club and a small head.

[00:44:59] Garret: Nice. [00:45:00] Not a ton of early Cretaceous Ankylos. That’s very neat.

[00:45:03] Sabrina: Yeah. These fossils were found in 1977 on a Soviet Mongolian expedition. They found a complete skull, lower jaws, and part of the skeleton with armor. It includes two cervical half rings, that neck collar.

[00:45:17] Garret: that’s great.

[00:45:18] Sabrina: Yeah. And then later a piece of a skull. And lower jaw were also referred to Shamma sous. So Shamma sous was named in 1983 by Tatiana tva.

[00:45:27] Sabrina: The type species is Shamma sous sku, and the genus name shamma sous means sand desert. The species name sati means protected by a shield and refers to that body armor. Mm-hmm.

[00:45:40] Garret: Sand desert sounds a little bit redundant, but I guess you can have deserts like Antarctica that don’t have any sand.

[00:45:47] Sabrina: Fog deserts, that’s a thing, right?

[00:45:49] Garret: That’s true. Sometimes those have sand too.

[00:45:51] Sabrina: Oh, it’s not the thing you notice. So the skull looks similar to go beau. Shama sours had a [00:46:00] narrow snout that ended in a sharp beak and it had a flat skull. The armor on the skull is not separated like head tiles and they’re not very pronounced.

[00:46:09] Garret: weird.

[00:46:09] Sabrina: Yeah, and the squam horns, the bones at the back of the head.

[00:46:13] Sabrina: They’re short and a little bit rounded. It had horns on the cheek and it also had flat oval skews covering its body, which isn’t surprising being in enc Chiso. Some other dinosaurs that lives around the same time and place as Shamma sous include the Stego, Mongolo Stego. And then we’ve got Urus Sora Pods and TROs.

[00:46:33] Sabrina: Other animals that lived around the same time and place include amphibians, turtles, mammals, and lizards.

[00:46:38] Garret: Sham Oau deserves a better place in our dinosaur knowledge, I feel like,

[00:46:45] Sabrina: I think your bias is showing.

[00:46:46] Garret: bias shown. But it’s got, it’s a well-known and OSA from the early Cretaceous that’s, and it’s big 23 feet, seven meters long. That’s one of the bigger anky sours. That’s cool. It

[00:46:58] Sabrina: It is. And [00:47:00] our fun fact is that most animals had a third eye until the great dying.

[00:47:05] Garret: interesting.

[00:47:07] Sabrina: Yes. This was published by Kelsey m Jenkins and others in Royal Society Open Science. So there’s a link if you wanna read the whole thing, we’ll have it in our show notes first. Some definitions though. So tetrapods, those are animals with four limbs.

[00:47:21] Sabrina: Penal gland is another term that kept coming up in this paper. That’s a small endocrine gland in the brain of most vertebrates. It produces melatonin, which helps with sleep. And then we’ve got endocrine, which relates to glands that release hormones into the bloodstream, the pineal gland.

[00:47:38] Sabrina: Associated with a third eye in many animals. today, exothermic animals like lizards, frogs, salamanders, certain bony fish, sharks and lamp rays have it, but it’s not in any mammals today. It’s also not in any birds, which are endothermic, but we also don’t see it in any [00:48:00] crocodilians or turtles or snakes.

[00:48:01] Sabrina: So it’s not like it’s an all exothermic or all cold-blooded animals have this third eye thing.

[00:48:07] Garret: But it isn’t some tetrapods. ’cause you said it’s in lizards, frogs and salamanders.

[00:48:13] Sabrina: Yeah, some exothermic animals and fish too, but not all exothermic, animals, not crocodilians or turtles or snakes in animals that have it today. The third eye is covered by skin. In the past, like in the Permian and the Triosi, this third eye was more widespread, including in our pre mammalian ancestors. So this third eye is at the top of the head.

[00:48:37] Sabrina: In lizards, for example, it helps them sense sunlight changes or manage body temperatures when they’re basking, and it helps them track day and night cycles. As a side note, mammals today do have a penal gland, but it’s internal, so it isn’t linked to the parietal eye or the third

[00:48:54] Garret: Yeah. ’cause we don’t have a third eye.

[00:48:56] Sabrina: No, but it’s really easy to [00:49:00] see this third eye in fossils because there’s a penial foramen.

[00:49:03] Sabrina: It’s a hole that contained the eye. So pre mammalian, th acids had this hole on top of their heads. It’s likely there was an organ inside to help with thermal regulation. The way today’s reptiles do it, there’s one study in 2016 that found that this hole was in most prima million sids before 260 million years ago.

[00:49:24] Sabrina: Around the great dying, a little before the great dying was like 252 million years ago. Then after this time, it wasn’t around as much. It seems like it wasn’t needed for survival anymore. One of the lineages that lost it led to mammals and it disappeared completely in that lineage around 246 million years ago, which may be when that lineage successfully transitioned from cold-blooded to warm-blooded.

[00:49:49] Garret: Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought about that before. So that would mean Dimetrodon might have been cold-blooded. People used to refer to Dimetrodon all the time. As a [00:50:00] mammal, like reptile, which I guess would be even more fitting if it was cold-blooded, but yeah, they would’ve also being one of those mammal ancestors, Dimetrodon and its relatives also had the pineal gland.

[00:50:15] Sabrina: Yeah, I can’t remember if Dimetrodons considered endothermic.

[00:50:21] Garret: Yeah. I don’t know.

[00:50:22] Sabrina: I think it was.

[00:50:23] Garret: Yeah, I thought, I mean, it was assumed to be fairly active, but it’s always a very difficult thing to nail down in the fossil record.

[00:50:32] Sabrina: And its sail probably helped control its body temperature. Cool it down or heat it up.

[00:50:37] Garret: Use that pineal gland to decide when it needs it.

[00:50:42] Sabrina: So for this study, they reconstructed the evolutionary history of the size of the parietal foramen, the hole on top of the head, and they looked at amnios from the carboniferous. The Permian and Trias Amnios are tetrapods that produce a membrane that surrounds and protects [00:51:00] developing embryos. So they have no need for larvae or laying eggs and water.

[00:51:04] Garret: Then the whole world is your oyster if you don’t have to be tied to that watery, mating round.

[00:51:10] Sabrina: Yes. That’s funny ’cause oysters need water.

[00:51:14] Garret: It’s true. The whole world is your tetrapod doesn’t have the same ring to it, I guess.

[00:51:20] Sabrina: So this study, they took a sample of 398 amnio animals and put them in a super tree to look for clay specific trends in the size of the hole on the top of the head. That parietal pramin, they measured their skulls and when possible they measured the length and width of the parietal foramen. And then they compared them with major climatic shifts in the carboniferous, Permian and Triassic to get insights on how things changed.

[00:51:46] Sabrina: So their range was going from about 320 million years ago to 201 million years ago.

[00:51:52] Garret: Okay.

[00:51:52] Sabrina: Yeah. And they found that the size of the third eye varies a lot, but there’s some trends between major amnio lineages [00:52:00] throughout the Permian. So there might have been some convergence in thermal regulatory behaviors between mammal and reptile lineages.

[00:52:07] Sabrina: Some things that are look the same between the mammals and the reptiles going on at the same time.

[00:52:12] Garret: Even though they were evolving them independently.

[00:52:15] Sabrina: Yes. The penal complex has a few functions. They help with spatial orientation, regulating circadian rhythms, and they have a role in associated behaviors like reproduction, and also with like exothermic animals, their behavior regulates their body temperature, like lizards bask in the sunlight.

[00:52:35] Sabrina: The third eye is often absent in animals today that are nocturnal burrowing or thermo. Conforming thermoforming means they allow their internal body temperature to match the outside environment, which is what most sharks do.

[00:52:50] Garret: Oh, that’s interesting. I dunno if I’ve ever heard thermo conforming before.

[00:52:55] Sabrina: I hadn’t either. I was a new term for me.

[00:52:57] Garret: It’s like the most extreme [00:53:00] version of exothermic. Like I just do whatever the environment is. I don’t even try to lay in the sun to warm up. I just go with the flow. Yeah.

[00:53:11] Sabrina: now the size of the third eye may matter. It seems like when it’s bigger, it gets more light, and that may influence thermal regulation, although this is speculative. So knowing more about the third eye can tell us more about prehistoric animal behavior, especially in the Permian and Trias before the great dying.

[00:53:28] Sabrina: The size trends were different between the two groups, the ones that led to mammals and the ones that led to reptiles. The whole disappeared in lineages with higher metabolisms and potential endothermic, the warm bloodedness, and including the direct ancestors of mammals and OSAs, and the hole got bigger in siddons and marine reptiles.

[00:53:50] Garret: marine reptiles too. That’s weird.

[00:53:52] Sabrina: Mm-hmm. There’s one surprise, the parietal foramen. That hole got bigger in the middle and late triosi in pan [00:54:00] mammals before the clade completely lost it.

[00:54:03] Garret: What?

[00:54:03] Sabrina: Yeah. In both pan reptiles and pan mammals, there’s multiple losses in various clades throughout the late Permian, into the triassic, so a lot of interesting things going on.

[00:54:13] Sabrina: There’s a lot of shifts in sizes too, which could be based on environmental, like the weather, the seasons changing over time. So many animals had different amounts of sun exposure or evolutionary changes. The penal complex produces melatonin, which affects how much melanin is in the skin, and melanin protects the skin from UV radiation and can help the animal camouflage in new environments or tract mates.

[00:54:36] Sabrina: Also, the penial complex plays a role in homing behavior and can help the animal navigate territory, or there are also lineage specific trends.

[00:54:44] Garret: That’s a lot of confounding factors.

[00:54:46] Sabrina: It’s really hard to test these hypotheses. It does seem like a large hole would allow for more light, which could affect melatonin production and through that circadian cycles or body temperature regulation.

[00:54:58] Garret: Yeah, and you could [00:55:00] definitely imagine like some of those points, it seems like if you’re in an area with less sun exposure, maybe the penial opening gets bigger because you have to try to get more light in to have the same effect. Yeah. But who knows?

[00:55:16] Sabrina: Now, some marine reptiles got larger parietal foramen, larger holes in their heads during the trias that maybe show some diverse thermo regulatory strategies that could be related to counter shading of the skin, or maybe living in open colder waters. Of course, all of this is speculative though for now.

[00:55:36] Sabrina: Patterns in size and loss of the parietal foramen go with a larger pattern of morphological and physiological change. How bodies changed. So for example, pan mammals and Pan OSAs had a shift in posture and their ears and jaws change, which affects how they move and ate. And these changes may have affected that parietal foramen.

[00:55:56] Sabrina: Maybe they needed it gone to make more room for these other things [00:56:00] going on with their skull.

[00:56:02] Garret: That’s a lot. It also just to me, and this is obviously. Not exactly how evolution works, but it seems like if you can get away with one less vulnerable hole in your head, that’s a good thing. So if they were evolving a way to handle, you know, metabolism, melatonin production, all that kind of stuff internally, using the pineal gland not connected to an a third eye, then that could be an advantage.

[00:56:35] Sabrina: Yeah, a lot of interesting things happening before the great dying.

[00:56:39] Garret: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:40] Sabrina: I guess a little bit after. ’cause we were just talking about some trias animals too.

[00:56:45] Garret: Yeah. And that’s what all the dinosaurs were.

[00:56:47] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:48] Garret: So we find them interesting too.

[00:56:50] Sabrina: That’s true. I was trying to keep on theme with what we talked about with the eons

[00:56:53] Garret: Yeah. It is cool to know that both dinosaurs and humans did not have this [00:57:00] third eye, but like just outside, like you were saying, pan OSAs and pan mammals. So I guess the groups that are just a little bit broader than mammals and OSAs, the groups that led up to both of those independently lost it.

[00:57:14] Garret: Yes. So our shared ancestor between mammals and dinosaurs definitely had these third eyes.

[00:57:20] Sabrina: They needed that hole in the head.

[00:57:22] Garret: Yeah. They needed like a hole in the head. Is that what you’re

[00:57:26] Sabrina: That is what I was thinking. I just couldn’t think of a good way to work it in, but we don’t.

[00:57:32] Garret: We don’t, we don’t need a pineal glam, like another hole in the head.

[00:57:39] Sabrina: And that wraps up this episode of iod Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. In our next episode, we’ll be talking all about Mega Raptors. And in the meantime, if you don’t wanna wait a whole two weeks, ’cause we’re a biweekly show for our patrons.

[00:57:53] Garret: We’re a weekly

[00:57:55] Sabrina: Yeah, we’ll have an I know Paleo episode all about ancient dragonflies, [00:58:00] so make sure you sign up at patreon.com/i know Dino.

[00:58:04] Sabrina: Thanks again, and until next time.

(Approximate times)

• 01:00 — Episode overview: eight new sauropods
• 02:36 — Musangamatusa: a small Triassic sauropodomorph from Zimbabwe
• 10:48 — Ceratocaudia: an early sauropod from India with a possible defensive tail
• 18:02 — Mesetasaurus: a small titanosaur from Uruguay
• 24:52 — Phosphatotitan: a smaller titanosaur from Morocco
• 28:11 — Bicharacosaurus: a possible Jurassic brachiosaurid from Argentina
• 30:19 — Uragosaurus: Thailand’s newly named “snake-necked” sauropod
• 36:23 — Yantalong: a transitional sauropod from China
• 38:29 — Nagatitan: Thailand’s largest known dinosaur
• 41:44 — Bonus discovery: Antarctica’s first dinosaur bone
• 44:38 — Dinosaur Connection Challenge: dinosaurs in Star Wars
• 52:07 — Dinosaur of the Day: Venenosaurus
• 54:50 — Fun fact: dinosaurs kept mammals small—and mammals kept dinosaurs large
• 61:12 — Closing thoughts and next episode preview

Summary

Explore the latest discoveries in sauropod paleontology from Zimbabwe, India, Uruguay, and China, and delve into the fascinating world of dinosaur-inspired Star Wars creatures. This episode highlights new species, their unique features, and the importance of vertebrae in understanding dinosaur evolution.

Takeaways

• Discovery of Musango Matusa Donaensis in Zimbabwe
• Ceratocaudia Antiqua and its tail musculature
• The diversity of small sauropods in the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous
• The significance of vertebrae in sauropod classification
• Star Wars creatures inspired by real dinosaurs
• The first dinosaur bone found in Antarctica

Keywords

Sauropods, Paleontology, Dinosaur Discoveries, Star Wars Dinosaurs, Mementosaur, Venenosaurus, Ceratocaudia, Phosphatotitan, Zimbabwe, India, Uruguay, China

speaker-1 (00:36.974)
Hello and welcome to I know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries in science with us. I’m Garrett. And I’m Sabrina. And today in our 573rd episode, we’ve got eight new sauropods.

speaker-0 (00:49.398)
A sore podastic episode.

speaker-1 (00:51.764)
It is so many sauropods and we’re both we’re doing half of them each. We each have four to talk about. And we’re just for fun going from small to big.

speaker-0 (01:00.366)
Plus, there’s some bonus sauropod news in there, like some that we’re hiding in plain sight. We also have a dinosaur connection challenge. We’re bringing that back. It’s been a while. This week’s is Star Wars. And yes, there’s also a sauropod connection there. We also have Dinosaur of the Day, Venenosaurus, which was of sauropod, of course. It’s a small one. And our fun fact, which is that dinosaurs kept mammals small and mammals kept dinosaurs large.

speaker-1 (01:15.229)
I see.

speaker-1 (01:28.974)
Mm. We talk about dinosaurs keeping mammals small a lot, but not mammals keeping dinosaurs large. That’s interesting.

speaker-0 (01:36.17)
Exactly.

speaker-1 (01:38.146)
But before we get into all of that, of course we have some patrons we’d like to thank. And this week we have seven new patrons to thank. Yeah. They are Jan, Becca, Cheese Stick, Elias, my favorite dinosaurs Acrocanthosaurus, Alexius, and Rachel. And then rounding out our shout-outs, we’ve got Nico, Obi Juan, Sherlock, Cluseau.

speaker-0 (01:43.522)
Amazing.

speaker-0 (02:02.658)
Ooh, that works out well with today’s connection challenge.

speaker-1 (02:05.294)
that’s true. And Brosis girl.

speaker-0 (02:07.886)
Thank you so much for being part of our community. We hope you’re enjoying all of the benefits of being on our Patreon. We’ve been doing a lot of polls. We’ve got a lot of content that goes beyond I know Dino because we get carried away. We can’t fit it all into this show.

speaker-1 (02:25.336)
Yeah, I know paleo and then the

speaker-0 (02:27.608)
The mini episodes. And if you haven’t joined yet and you want to, you can do that at patreon.com slash I know dino.

speaker-1 (02:29.368)
So much good stuff. Yeah.

speaker-1 (02:36.782)
So jumping right into the sauropods because we have so many to discuss.

speaker-0 (02:40.268)
Yes, starting with the smallest one. At least for this episode.

speaker-1 (02:42.25)
It is. Yeah, not the smallest of all time. Although I don’t know. It’s very small. No, it’s not the smallest of all time because it’s a sauropodomorph. And those started out very small. So I guess technically it’s not all sauropods. Some of them are sauropodomorphs, which are not quite within the group of sauropods. They’re a little bit broader of a category.

speaker-0 (03:04.824)
Right. They started off earlier and when they started off they were on two legs.

speaker-1 (03:09.25)
Yes, and that’s the case for this one. This one, usually when we’re talking about podomorphs, we’re saying soropodomorph because they’re mostly Triassic. They’re the early ones that don’t fit within the later, more specific group of sauropods, although technically sauropods are sauropodomorphs because it’s like the broader category. This new sauropodomorph is from the late Triassic from Zimbabwe, and it was published in

In the Journal of Systematic Paleontology by Paul Barrett and others. Yeah, it’s a very long list. It is a sauropodomorph. It has the typical look for a sauropodomorph, being on two larger rear legs and short front arms, which were definitely not legs like they become in later sauropods. But maybe they could have held up their weight. They found the humerus of this one, and it’s pretty bulky.

speaker-0 (03:42.382)
A whole bunch of people.

speaker-1 (04:05.612)
So it probably could get on all fours sometimes if it was trying to go for something low down or drink some water or something. This one was quite small. It was only four and a half meters or about 15 feet long. And they actually gave a weight estimate and they weighed it in at 220 kilograms or about 480 pounds, which is about two ostriches. Not too big. That’s nut. Its full name is Musango Matusa Donaensis.

Musango is quote named for the Musango concession area, the type locality, and the nearby Musango Island. Musango is a Chisona word that can be translated as living in the bush, referring to its remote location.

speaker-0 (04:49.198)
So it was found way far away from anything.

speaker-1 (04:51.448)
Pretty much, yeah. And in the interviews they emphasize the living in the bush aspect of the name origin, which I think is a pretty cool name for a dinosaur because they were all in the bush. There were no cities back in the Triassic, mm-hmm or the rest of the Mesozoic for that matter. I

speaker-0 (05:07.886)
I thought you meant that the people who were digging up and describing this dinosaur had to live in the bush for a long time.

speaker-1 (05:15.33)
They did. I mean, that’s where the name of the place comes from. Yeah. But they’re saying for the dinosaur itself, this one was kind of off the beaten path. Then the species name, Matusa Dona Encis, is in honor of the Matusa Dona National Park, which is right next to where the type locality is.

speaker-0 (05:24.629)
I see.

speaker-0 (05:38.136)
Right where the fossils were found.

speaker-1 (05:40.396)
In the press release they said, quote, the team previously named Musangqua Sanya Tiensis as just the fourth dinosaur ever described from the country in twenty twenty four, with Musango now the fifth, end quote.

speaker-0 (05:54.283)
maybe Zimbabwe is becoming a dinosaur hotspot.

speaker-1 (05:57.334)
Yeah, there are some other good spots in Africa. It’s nice to see new hot spots. Musangwa and Musango are pretty similar and were probably close relatives. The new Musango is more complete. They found about a dozen vertebrae from the tail, a few vertebrae from the back or base of the neck around the shoulders, the upper arm or humerus, and part of the lower arm, a bit of the leg, and a couple pieces from the hips.

speaker-0 (06:26.894)
That’s pretty good for a sauropodamor from the late Triassic. Yes. And vertebrae are important for this group.

speaker-1 (06:33.09)
They are. Unfortunately, most of the bones are partial. They didn’t look like they were in too bad of shape, though. They didn’t look super weathered like you sometimes get with dinosaurs that are in the bush, as one might say. They sliced into the fibula, the lower leg, to do some histology and see how old it was, because again, it was only four and a half meters long. So they wanted to know was it just a baby? Was it young? Was it an adult? How much does that have to say about where it fit in the ecosystem?

But what they found was that it was either done or almost done growing. So four and a half meters, fifteen feet is probably about as big as they got.

speaker-0 (07:11.448)
Again, late Triassic. Although there were some big sauropodomorphs.

speaker-1 (07:12.877)
Yeah.

Yeah, this one I they estimate was about two hundred and ten million years old. So there wasn’t too much on the bigger side in dinosaurs at that time, but there were certainly much larger predators in the area with Pseudosukians and some of the other cool Triassic stuff that didn’t make it into the Jurassic. Probably not surprisingly, it was found at the Musango Archosaur site. It was actually just given that name in a 2021 paper. The site? Yeah. One source I looked at said that it was

That the site was first discovered in 2018. So it’s a very new site, less than 10 years old. The site is just south of Lake Kariba. As a side fun fact, Lake Kariba is the world’s largest artificial lake and reservoir with a storage capacity of 185 cubic kilometers or 44 cubic miles. That is a lot. That’s about five times as big as the Three Gorges reservoir in China, and even a little bit more.

Than that larger than Lake Mead, which is the one behind Hoover Dam in the US. Wow. So it’s a very, very large reservoir. The lake is actually about half of the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia because it blocks up the Zambezi River that goes between the two countries. Wow. Yeah. Professor Jonah Choinier, leader of the expedition and a co-author from Johannesburg in South Africa, said in the press release, quote,

New dinosaur species like Musango show the value of doing paleontological field work in remote and often scenically beautiful places. End quote. It almost makes it sound like he’s tired of working in the bad lands and the like the Karew desert. And he wants to be somewhere nicer while he does his paleontology. Yeah. This site isn’t too far from the Karew basin in South Africa, which is

speaker-0 (08:59.406)
You want a nice view.

speaker-0 (09:04.62)
out in the bush.

speaker-1 (09:11.475)
Not as hospitable, I would say, than being next to a giant pretty lake.

speaker-0 (09:16.93)
Depends on your definition of scenically beautiful.

speaker-1 (09:19.266)
I guess so, yeah. I mean it it is cool looking if you’re looking into geology and you like nice rocky landscapes. It’s not bad, but probably not the most enjoyable place to camp. Since the Karu Basin is in South Africa and South Africa borders Zimbabwe on the south, obviously they’re not too far away. But interestingly, the Karu Basin and the Musango Arcosaurus site.

Seem to have very different animals in them so far. And it’s even more interesting because they’re around the same time in the Triassic and they were connected by land. There wasn’t, you know, any island situation going on in the late Triassic in Africa. So there must have just been a lot of different ecosystems. Maybe dinosaurs couldn’t make it around the planet as easily with all these other large predators around or something. I don’t know. It was. Yeah.

speaker-0 (10:07.352)
Scenery was different. Even back then.

speaker-1 (10:10.83)
So it’s pretty cool. It’s be interesting to see what else they find from this location. And I’m excited because they’ve already said that there’s at least one more dinosaur that they’ve already excavated but haven’t described yet.

speaker-0 (10:22.286)
Yes, hot spot indeed.

speaker-1 (10:23.874)
Sometimes this team saves the best for last too, so we’ll see. Mm-hmm. They did mention the team too has people from different parts of Africa because there aren’t too many paleontologists in Zimbabwe, which is probably why the guy from South Africa led it, but they also had an international team, including the UK and some other countries too. So a large international effort. That’s what we like to see. Experts and locals. Mm-hmm.

All right, the next sauropod is another small sauropod, this time from India. It was published in JVP by Abhishek Nadarajan and others. And the sauropod they found was about seven meters or twenty-three feet long. Ooh. It is eight feet longer, and I mean gotta be at least twice the weight. They didn’t give a weight estimate for this one. But the length estimate, I think, has some pretty high precision because they found about 20 tailbones, a neck bone,

a couple small pieces of ribs and backbones, most of the leg, the femur, tibia, fibula, and a foot bone, and a few other bones. So they probably could have given a weight estimate if they wanted to, although it’s not really that common, especially with sauropods, they tend to just give you a length estimate. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (11:27.918)
Pretty good, yeah.

speaker-0 (11:37.23)
Unless they think it’s gonna be really impressively heavy.

speaker-1 (11:40.61)
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, or I guess impressively light in the case of the last dinosaur. This new dinosaur is named Ceratocaudia Antiqua. Ceratocaudia, you might be able to put together serato, just like in Ceratops, is Greek for horn and cod is Greek for tail, and it refers to the unique horn like crest on the neural spine of the anterior caudal vertebrae. That is

speaker-0 (12:07.168)
Specific. So it’s a horn tail.

speaker-1 (12:10.606)
Sort of. Yeah, that’s what the name means, but it’s really just talking about a little ridge on a vertebra you would not see at all from the outside of the animal. So it’s not like there were horns sticking out of the tail. It’s more like when you look up close at the vertebrae after all the meat and skin and flesh and fat are removed, you see the little bump in a specific spot.

speaker-0 (12:33.08)
Like said, vertebrae is very important for sauropods and sauropodomorphs and telling them apart. Details like that.

speaker-1 (12:37.974)
It is. So the fact that they found so many vertebrae for this one is good for naming a new taxon. And the species, antiqua, is quote Latin for old or ancient, referring to the stratigraphic age of the taxon being one of the earliest neosauropods and the ontogenetic stage of the holotype, end quote. So in other words, it’s very old in the lineage of sauropods, but it’s also an old individual. So

Usually when I hear antiqua, it’s about the age of the species, but it’s cool that in this case it also refers to the specific individual holotype that they found being an old individual. It was found in the Kaladangar Formation, which is early or middle Jurassic. It was probably between about 190 to 170 million years old. There’s some pretty big error bars on the age of this site in far western India.

It’s the first named dinosaur from the formation. Previously, there were just unidentified dinosaurs, mostly sauropods. Nice. There’s actually a pretty good sauropod fossil record from India, including some of the first sauropod fossils. Soratocaudia is the earliest macronarian from India and one of the earliest in the world. So you can think Camarosaurus. This is another early diverging macronarian.

They did histology on several bones, including the left femur, right ulna, left metacarpal, which is a hand or foot bone, depending on which way you want to look at it on a sauropod, because it was holding up its weight, but technically it’s a hand since it’s the forelimb.

speaker-0 (14:19.438)
Right, but it’s using it to walk.

speaker-1 (14:21.238)
Yeah, because this is not a sauropodomorph, this is a full blown sauropod, all legs bearing weight at this point. They also said the long bone histology and non traumatic non contagious pathology indicate senescence in the holotype.

speaker-0 (14:36.846)
So they cut open into its bones and they found it’s old and there’s also some sort of pathology could be an injury or disease, but it wasn’t contagious. It wasn’t anything traumatic. It was just getting old.

speaker-1 (14:50.626)
Yeah. Yeah. So they basically use that as multiple pieces of evidence to say that it was done growing. The non-contagious pathologies that they mention are bones that are fused together and another that eroded from rubbing against another bone. So in other words, these are age related arthritis. Something that can happen in older age in dinosaurs and people. Mm-hmm.

Again, it’s a non-Titanosaur form macronarian like Camarosaurus. And they actually used a silhouette of Camarosaurus for their schematic showing the bones that they found. And they did that cool retro deformation of the bones digitally to take the ones that got squished in the fossilization process and restore them to their former glory. Nice. They also did something that you don’t usually see in papers describing new dinosaurs, and that’s that they

Tried to reconstruct the animal digitally to get some ideas about how it might have moved. Ooh, fun. Yeah. So they found that it had large tail muscles and good flexibility side to side. It was helpful that they had those 20 tail bones and that they retro deformed them because they reconstructed all of that tail musculature. They said with that side to side flexibility, it quote may be used as a mild deterrent to.

Predators of a similar size.

speaker-0 (16:10.808)
To kinda swish that tail round as a warning.

speaker-1 (16:13.334)
Yeah, or actually, you know, occasionally whack something if it gets too close. On Camarosaurs, their tail was pretty straight out the back, and it wasn’t super long. So with this big musculature on it, more I mean, not even in the same ballpark as an ankylosaur, but you could think of it as sort of a a shorter weapon, not like a diplodocus with that long whip-like tail. This is a shorter, sturdier tail, but with some flexibility for side to side movement.

They did say that that hypothesis needs some more testing of its ability to whack predators. But it’s pretty cool. They also note that there are fragments of much larger sauropods in the area, up to about 20 meters or 65 feet long. And again, this one is only about seven meters or twenty-three feet long. So you’re talking about three times the length. So we’re not sure why Ceratocaudia was so small, because

If there were much larger sauropods in the area, it’s interesting that this one stayed so small, especially we know this one was an adult, just like the one before. So these aren’t just babies of the bigger one. Yeah. This is a full-blown adult. Yeah, exactly. Senescent. So their best guess is that maybe Ceratocaudia was filling a different ecological niche from the larger sauropods. So they were just living alongside, doing different things, eating different things, etc. Cool. Yeah, cool. Two really cool.

speaker-0 (17:24.245)
This one had arthritis.

speaker-0 (17:39.192)
Very cool.

speaker-1 (17:42.21)
Small sauropods and from places we don’t usually hear about too many new dinosaur discoveries. Yeah. Yeah, maybe Zimbabwe and Western India are gonna get a nice surge in paleontology. That would be great. The next smallest sauropod in the mix is a small titanosaur from Uruguay.

speaker-0 (17:47.448)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (18:02.03)
I always think it’s funny when we have small titanosaurs to talk about.

speaker-1 (18:05.494)
The name is so counter it’s like jumbo shrimp. Like it’s supposed to be Titanic in its scale, then it’s a small one. But there were quite a few small titanosaurs. This one was published in Emeganiana by Mateus Soto Nunez and others. The genus name of this dinosaur is Mesetosaurus, and Meseda comes from the new spot where the dinosaur was found, Meseta de Artigas, or the Artigas Plateau.

It could be translated as the Mesa dinosaur or plateau lizard, if you prefer.

speaker-0 (18:41.282)
Makes a dinosaur sounds better than plateau lizard.

speaker-1 (18:43.86)
Yeah. Yeah, a lot of times with sore, I just think of it as dinosaur, because usually lizards aren’t named with sore at the end of them. Mm-hmm. The species name protector has a very long explanation. It’s Latin for the one who protects. And specifically they’re referring to Jose Artigas, who is an important figure in Uruguayan history. He lived from 1764 to 1850. One of the things he’s famous for is defeating the Spanish army in 1811.

at the Battle of Las Piedras. And later he became an activist and I think sort of a politician who helped establish Uruguay as a country eventually.

speaker-0 (19:25.326)
Is he the one they named the Artigas Plateau after?

speaker-1 (19:28.792)
Yes. And he also has a large statue or a bust of him on that plateau, very close to where the dinosaur was found. So Exactly. So it’s named Protector, describing Jose Artigas on the Artigas Plateau, which gives you the Mesetosaurus because that plateau piece of it.

This plateau is in northwestern Uruguay in the Guichon Formation. It’s not far from southeast Brazil, where some of the earliest dinosaurs have been found from the Triassic. Nice. But this part of Uruguay has late Cretaceous rock exposed, which means somewhere deep underneath there is some late Triassic rock. It is, yes. This area of Uruguay has

speaker-0 (20:17.398)
That’s a big time difference.

speaker-1 (20:22.988)
Some iguanodontian ornithopods and at least two saltosauroid titanosaurs. Mesatosaurus is an alosaur, which are saltosauroids, you could refer to them as. So Mesatosaurus is also a saltosauroid, if not a saltasaurid. And it’s known from just two tail vertebrae.

speaker-0 (20:47.525)
yeah. There again. The vertebrae coming handy.

speaker-1 (20:50.328)
They do, much less complete than the previous two dinosaurs we have, which means we also don’t know really what the size of it is with just those two tail vertebrae. The vertebrae are at the third and sixth positions, they think, of the tail. And if they have that right, then you can make a much better estimate as to its size because you can compare the size of these vertebrae to other saltosauroids, those specific vertebrae in the tail rather than just

These are some tail vertebrae, and we don’t know which ones. They think very roughly it might be around 10 meters or about 30 feet long based on their reconstruction. And one of the cool things is there’s a very strong tilt on the front of the centra, which resembles ailosaurus. So they put it in the group Ailosaurni. And aolosaurini is only known from the

Late Cretaceous, which supports that the Guichone formation in northwestern Uruguay is also from the Late Cretaceous. There was actually another ailosaurus found in Uruguay way back in nineteen thirty three, a little bit farther south in the country, but that one wasn’t assigned a specific species. So it’s possible that maybe this one eventually Yeah, be recognized as the same species. Yeah, they’re gonna have to find more than two tailbones, probably.

speaker-0 (22:04.385)
the same.

You have to have the overlapping file

speaker-1 (22:12.824)
The interesting thing about aolosaurenes is that because they have that angle on their centra, on their vertebrae, it makes their tail do this abrupt drop right after their back.

speaker-0 (22:26.382)
So they’re probably not swishing their tails around like the last time.

speaker-1 (22:29.394)
Probably not. Yeah. Or if they did it would be pretty close to the ground. Actually, I think it’s possible that they could have dragged their tails on the ground. Almost every piece of paleo art that I’ve seen of the Aelosaurs have their tails still above the ground, but I think that’s just because no one wants to be

speaker-0 (22:46.766)
‘Cause we used to think that they all dragged their tails and now we don’t think any of them drag their tails. So it would be interesting if there were some that did drag their tails.

speaker-1 (22:51.544)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (22:55.84)
Yeah. I don’t think very many paleo artists want to stick their neck out and be like, no, this one had its tail on the ground. It’s fine. Because everyone’s gonna be like, Don’t you know anything about sauropods? They didn’t drag their tails on the ground. That’s so eighteen hundredths of you. But interestingly, the skeletal of Mesetosaurus in this paper looks like it might be tail dragging. The tail it’s hard to tell on a skeletal because you don’t have a ground for reference. But it really goes down and it’s basically

where its feet are at the end of the tail. So

speaker-0 (23:27.702)
It’d be so interesting if it turned out, yes, some dinosaurs did drag their tails.

speaker-1 (23:31.702)
Yeah, these aolosaurs could end up being the tail dragging sauropods at some point.

speaker-0 (23:36.28)
Wonder if they walked slowly too.

speaker-1 (23:38.668)
yeah. And only lived in in like swamps and marshes and never walked on land. That would be so funny. Just all the stereotypes of old sauropods have one. Yeah.

speaker-0 (23:51.63)
We will get into the rest of our sauropods in just a moment, but first we’re gonna take a quick break for our sponsors.

speaker-0 (24:52.12)
We’ve got another titanosaur, this one on the larger side. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (24:56.824)
Hmm, we’ve we’re taking a step up to the big boys.

speaker-0 (24:58.99)
Yeah, we’re getting to the bigger ones now. This is Phosphatotitan Corybgaensis. It was published by Nicholas Longrich and others in Diversity. It’s an open access one. So we’ll have the link in our show notes if you want to read this one yourself. It was a titanosaur lived in the Lake Cretaceous and what’s now Morocco. They found a partial skeleton, including some vertebrae, parts of the hips. The bones are cracked and crushed. There’s a some taphenomic damage. Just happens. Yep.

But it was found in a phosphate mine.

speaker-1 (25:29.352)
I’m seeing where that phosphatotitan.

speaker-0 (25:31.658)
Exactly, because it means phosphate giant. And then the species name refers to it being found in the Caribga province in Morocco. Now it looks similar to Patagotitan, but it is much, much smaller than Patagotitan, which is, you know, it’s pretty easy to be smaller than Patagotitan. Phosphatitan is estimated to weigh between 3.9 and 4.7 short tons.

speaker-1 (25:49.741)
Yes.

speaker-0 (25:59.426)
Whereas Patagotitan is estimated to weigh between like sixty-three and seventy-six short tons. And Patagotitan’s estimated to be somewhere between thirty to forty meters or ninety-eight to one hundred and thirty-one feet long. I think the mount at the American Museum of Natural History is like a hundred and twenty-one, hundred and twenty-two feet.

speaker-1 (26:18.4)
Yes, it’s very long.

speaker-0 (26:21.388)
Yeah, so phosphatotitan is about a third the length of patagotitan and what’s that like forty-ish feet, give or take, depending on which patagotitan estimate you’re going with. I couldn’t find any more specifics in the paper. But it’s also less than ten percent the mass of its giant relatives. Yeah. So that you patagotitan, but you’ve also got Argentinosaurus and Puerta Source.

speaker-1 (26:46.072)
Big, big, big, big side. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (26:48.782)
Phosphatatitan is part of the clade Lognicosauria. They’re known for the details on their vertebrae, because of course they’re sauropods. But it’s things like having wide, thick cervical rib loops on the neck bones, as well as a few other details, and having wide rib cages too. Phosphatatitan had very short back and tail centra. That’s the main part of the vertebra. And there’s a few other details similar to patagotitan.

Its smaller size could be because of island dwarfism. Like maybe Morocco was separate from the rest of Africa when it lived, or it was in a small island or part of an island continent. Or maybe it was just better to be a smaller herbivore at the time. Now in South America, you’ve got the giant ones like Patagotitan and Dreadnought, but they seem to be much more rare than the smaller sauropods, which were much more dominant.

speaker-1 (27:43.53)
Yeah, we talked about a couple of them today. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (27:46.422)
And titanosaurs from Egypt from the Late Cretaceous are also relatively small. So maybe this is showing us there’s a high diversity of small sauropods, and that showed a broader shift to a small body size among sauropods or even herbivorous dinosaurs in general.

speaker-1 (28:00.45)
It was good to be a sauropod, not just for the size. They had some other advantages to that body plan too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (28:06.284)
Love their long necks.

We’ve got another new macrinarian sauropod.

speaker-1 (28:14.488)
More upright sauropods.

speaker-0 (28:16.876)
Yes, this one’s called Bicharacosaurus Dionide. This was published by Alexandra Router and others in Pier J, another open access article. A local farmer, Dionidae Mesa, found the fossils in two thousand one in Chubu Province in Argentina, and there’s a partial skeleton that includes neck bones, backbones, ribs, and parts of the hips. So again, that type species is Bicharacosaurus Dionide. That genus name means big animal lizard.

That’s the informal Spanish word for big animal.

speaker-1 (28:48.718)
Bichara mm or Bichara Ko, maybe.

speaker-0 (28:54.68)
Somebody who knows Spanish better than me can please let us know. Yeah. But apparently that’s how Dean Idea described it when he saw it. Dude. Well, I I wish I could roll on my R’s. So the species name is in honor of Deanide Mesa, again, who found the fossils. It was a macrinarian sauropod. It lived in the late Jurassic and what is now Argentina. And macrinarians, we’ve talked a little bit about them, but they’re also known for their spoon-like teeth.

speaker-1 (29:05.182)
You’re supposed to roll that art.

speaker-0 (29:24.632)
The long forelimbs and large nasal opening in the skull. Basically, like you were saying earlier, Garrett, Camarosaurus. Mm-hmm. More than 30 vertebrae, the neck, back, and tail bones were found, which is pretty good. They have all the backbones. There’s 10 of those. It’s an adult, and it’s estimated to be about 20 meters or 65 feet long. Bacaracosaurus has a mix of features that we also see in Giraffe Titan, which is interestingly a brachiosaurid. That’s the one from Tanzania.

But it’s also got a mix of features we see in Diplodocus and related species from North America. Yeah. Its backbones are similar to Diplodocids, and then it’s got some similarities to brachiosaurids, like an abrupt increase in neural spine height. Those vertebrae. So it may be a brachiosaurid, and if so, it would be the first Jurassic brachiosaurid known from South America.

speaker-1 (29:59.052)
are not macronarian.

speaker-1 (30:19.534)
Cool. Mm-hmm. Even though we have a lot of sauropods from Argentina, we do not have a lot from Thailand, which is where our next dinosaur is from. Next sauropod.

speaker-0 (30:31.79)
I think we’re getting more though, lately.

speaker-1 (30:34.444)
Yes, they I mean, for such a small country, relatively speaking, to places like Argentina and India, it does pretty well in terms of paleontology, especially so much of the land is covered in plants, which is not an easy place to find dinosaurs. So this one is a new mementosaur, the really long-necked sauropods. It was published in scientific reports and written by Apirut Nilpanopan and others. Its name is Uragosaurus.

Kala sinensis and the name Uragasaurus means serpent lizard. It is, yeah. So uraga originates from the Sanskrit word meaning snake or serpent, and it’s referring to its distinguished long neck of the family as they describe it. So you could translate it as a snake-necked dinosaur.

speaker-0 (31:10.702)
Is it because of its long neck?

speaker-1 (31:28.66)
Which I think would be really cool if we just started referring to the mementosaurs as the snake-necked dinosaurs. Because you know, you’ve got the Diplotocids or the whip-like tail ones, the brachiosaurs are the upright giraffe-like dinosaurs, and now the mementosaurs could be the snake-necked dinosaurs. So cool. The species name, though, is not as exciting. It’s callosinensis, and it refers to the collosinos.

speaker-0 (31:34.734)
Would be

speaker-1 (31:54.094)
Province where it was found. I thought sinensis because that can be Latin for Chinese basically. That’s what it was going to be, but really it’s Kalosin Ansis. It was found in the Fu Kra Dung formation in northeastern Thailand. It’s probably from the late Triassic, so about 150 million years ago. The holotype is a quote, well-preserved anterior dorsal vertebra. In other words, one single backbone that’s closer to the neck than the hips.

Yeah, it’s not not amazing. It is though the first formally named Mementosaurid from Thailand. So that’s cool.

speaker-0 (32:34.382)
Well I was just gonna say another case of the vertebra being important.

speaker-1 (32:39.072)
It is, yeah. And especially in the snake-necked sauropods, a neck vertebra would be good. But again, this is a back vertebra, but it’s close to the neck. So maybe that makes it better. I don’t know. I went on Paleo Biodatabase, the website that shows all of the paleo discoveries that people have uploaded, which is a lot. And there are some Momentiosaur bones that are on the catalog from just a bit.

To the east, closer to Laos than this find was. And those are all described as either somewhere in the family of Mementosauretae or in the genus Mementosaurus, but they’re all from unknown species. So yeah, this is the first named Mementosaurid from Thailand. Mementosaurus also has at least eight species in it, some of which will probably be split out eventually. So it’s possible that some or all of those other finds.

Are also from Uragosaurus. In the author’s analysis, Oragosaurus came out as an early diverging member of Mementosaure. In other words, it’s quite a bit earlier on the family tree than the more derived Mementosaurus. They didn’t give size estimates for this dinosaur, and I wouldn’t believe them if they did, with just the one vertebra. Yeah. To be fair, they also found a few other vertebrae and a fibula.

speaker-0 (33:58.412)
Yeah, that’s too difficult.

speaker-1 (34:04.994)
But that’s still not that much to go by. And they weren’t articulated, so they couldn’t be confident that they were from the same individual or even from the same species. So they just picked the one bone, being good scientists, good conservative naming, not lumping in too much. And then later someone’s got to come through and say, wait a second, these bones don’t belong to the same animal. The only official bone to use for the size is that vertebra, because of that reason. And that’s the bone.

That they measured and gave a lot of details on. It’s only about 95 millimeters long, which is less than four inches. Not that long when you’re thinking about mementosaurs with their snake necks, although again, this is a back vertebra. However, that four inches of neck vertebra is squished in that direction. So it would have been longer when it was alive. They didn’t retro deform it from what I saw to try to guess how long it would have been. And I mean, of course, that’d be hard. They have no other vertebrae from this animal to compare it to.

speaker-0 (34:45.88)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (35:02.562)
But again, that’s the back vertebra.

speaker-1 (35:04.096)
It is, yeah. Even though it’s so short front to back, it is pretty tall bottom to top and wide side to side. So it’s about fifty-five centimeters or almost two feet tall. And it’s even wider at about 70 centimeters or over two feet wide. Wow. So pretty big. And those measurements are actually in the range for other momentia sores, including members of Mementia Sore Rus. So it wouldn’t have been a small sawpod, probably pretty typical.

For a mementosaur in size, which is, you know, the neck alone can be on for a typical mementosaur, thirty feet, ten meters.

speaker-0 (35:40.088)
The longest neck we know of was forty nine feet, fifteen meters. Yeah.

speaker-1 (35:45.066)
So this one would have been probably in the ballpark of the last dinosaur. You know, you’re you’re talking about in total, maybe twenty meters, sixty-five feet is a very rough estimate for how long it would have been, but you know, it could have been thirty percent shorter or longer than that easily.

speaker-0 (36:02.702)
That’s why we put this one in the middle. Yeah. No for sure. But we know it was bigger than the first couple we talked about.

speaker-1 (36:11.734)
Yep. And it has some unique features on that vertebra, which is why it got a genus name for the first time in Thailand for a Mementosaur. It’s pretty cool. It’s also pretty far south for a momentosaur. Most of them we find are in China.

speaker-0 (36:19.574)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (36:23.938)
Well, funny you should mention that because our next new sauropod, Yanta Long Linai, is a sauropod from the Jurassic in China and is not a mementosaurid. Even though a lot of the mementosaurids are known from the Middle Jurassic of China. This one’s a U sauropod. It was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society by Xiaoqing Jiang and others, and we know it from six vertebrae. Hey

speaker-1 (36:48.878)
Six times as many as we had for Uragosaurus.

speaker-0 (36:53.9)
Yeah. So eusauropods are a more broad group compared to momentosaurus, and they include what you probably think of sauropods, the large ones that walk on all fours and have the long necks. Again, this type species is Yantalong Linai. The genus name means Yanta dragon, and it refers to the historical spot it was found. And the species name is in honor of paleontologist Wenshun Lin. It’s got some advanced features that we see in titanosaurs.

As well as some more basal features that we see with early eustauropods. So it helps show the transition to neosauropoda and it shows even more diversity in vertebrae. But I feel like that’s all we’ve been talking about this episode.

speaker-1 (37:35.906)
Yeah, I didn’t get into any of the details of what made the dinosaurs unique because it’s all just these really specific details of the vertebrae which do not translate well to audio and aren’t even that interesting when you’re looking at the pictures most of the time. Tell me about its unique vertebrae.

speaker-0 (37:48.654)
Well I I’m gonna try here. Okay.

Well, it’s pneumatic, so there’s air sacs and it’s got this hyposphine hypantrum complex that’s an extra pair of I’m gonna say this in quotes, lock and key joints between the vertebrae. that’s cool. And they likely helped add some rigidity to the spinal column.

speaker-1 (38:09.878)
That’s more interesting than the details I skipped on the diamond I was talking about.

speaker-0 (38:12.398)
Now neosauropods have some derived or advanced features like fewer hand bones, which allows for this digitograde posture where it can stand and move on its digits or fingers with the hand raised up off the ground.

speaker-1 (38:27.16)
Yeah. Tiptoes or tip fingers.

speaker-0 (38:29.26)
Yeah. So yeah, that’s what we know from six vertebrae. It is. Our next one is a dinosaur that was hiding in plain sight, as they put it. It’s a new Titanosaurform, Nagatitan Chaia Fumensis. This was published in scientific reports, it’s open access, and it was written by Thidiwoot Setha Ponik Sakul and others. And hopefully I did okay with the pronunciation of their names. Letters. Yes, it’s a lot of letters and I

speaker-1 (38:33.966)
Pretty cool.

speaker-0 (38:58.626)
I’m not familiar. Yes. So again, this titanosaur was described as hiding in plain sight, and by that I mean the fossils were exposed on the bank of a pond in Thailand. It was back in twenty sixteen the water was so low that you could see them.

speaker-1 (39:00.354)
Not too familiar with Thai, yeah.

speaker-1 (39:16.624)
that’s true. There’s a lot of rivers and things in Thailand. That might be w the w one spot you can actually find something where there isn’t dirt and plants on top of Or water.

speaker-0 (39:25.006)
Yeah, so they did field work from 2016 to 2019. Unfortunately, they ran out of funding, but then they were able to come back in 2024. Nice. And they found four backbones, some ribs, parts of the hips, a right armbone, the humerus, and a mostly complete right femur or thigh bone. No skull or teeth, unfortunately. But it is the largest dinosaur found so far in Southeast Asia. Wow.

speaker-1 (39:50.2)
that is a big claim to fame.

speaker-0 (39:52.342)
Yeah, that humerus is about one point eight meters long or almost six feet long.

speaker-1 (39:57.71)
Holy moly, that is a big humorous that’s like femur territory.

speaker-0 (40:02.279)
Yeah. So they’re estimating the full dinosaur was about eighty nine feet or twenty seven meters long and weighed thirty short tons.

speaker-1 (40:09.198)
I think that’s a pretty reasonable estimate. A lot of times on these they go way overboard on the size estimates, but that that seems probable.

speaker-0 (40:18.444)
And had long forelimbs and a wide stance. Its nickname is the Last Titan because it comes from the youngest rock layer from the Mesozoic in Thailand. But it didn’t live in the late Cretaceous, it lived in the early Cretaceous.

speaker-1 (40:31.54)
if I if it’s a titanosaur, the humerus might be longer than the femur. Yeah.

speaker-0 (40:36.462)
So again, that type species is Naga Titan Chaiafumensis. The name means Naga giant. The genus name refers to the quote mythological serpent like creature found in various Asian cultures, especially in northeastern Thailand, often associated with water and Buddhism. And the species name is for the province where it was found, Chaiafum province. It’s the most complete sauropod specimen found from the formation where it was found, which is called the Kok Kruat formation.

There’s been a lot of saurpod fossils found in Thailand, but they’re fragmentary in this formation, which again is early Cretaceous and the youngest Mesozoic rocks in Thailand.

speaker-1 (41:14.018)
Very cool. Yeah. So we’ve got early Cretaceous, and the one I was talking about, I think was late Jurassic. So we’ve got either side of that late Jurassic, early Cretaceous boundary. Yeah. But also, you know, we’ve got the mementosaur, the snake necked dinosaur, as well as the what Naga giant, which is also

speaker-0 (41:39.214)
Snake like thing. Yeah. A serpent like

speaker-1 (41:42.328)
Yeah. Cool.

speaker-0 (41:44.204)
Got a bonus titanosaur here, but this one doesn’t have a name. And it’s actually the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica. It’s a titanosaur bone.

speaker-1 (41:54.872)
We’ve had dip bones from Antarctica before.

speaker-0 (41:57.41)
Yes, it turns out this one was the first one found, though. Mm hmm. It was found back in 1985 on James Ross Island. This was published in Acta Paleontologica Polonica. It’s open access. It was published by Paul Barrett and others. And again, it’s the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica, but it spent 40 years in a drawer. So it’s another one of those hiding in plain sight kind of. Hiding in a drawer. The thinking is that.

speaker-1 (42:00.609)
okay, so it was found a while ago.

speaker-1 (42:18.469)
no.

speaker-1 (42:23.371)
Hiding in a drawer.

speaker-0 (42:27.608)
people who excavated it didn’t know what it was, so got stored away. Maybe they thought it belonged to a marine reptile. That’s true. Well, you I don’t think people usually

speaker-1 (42:33.016)
Better than throwing it away.

speaker-1 (42:37.28)
It happens in fossil collections all the time.

speaker-0 (42:40.192)
okay. Well not in museums. well, okay. Anyway, this bone is about four inches or ten centimeters wide and it’s a tailbone, so caudal vertebra from a titanosaur.

speaker-1 (42:42.552)
Sometimes

speaker-1 (42:52.814)
wide. Wow, that is not big.

speaker-0 (42:54.946)
Yeah, it’s not. And it beats out Antarctopelta by one year. That’s the ankylosor found in nineteen eighty six. So that’s why this is the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica.

speaker-1 (43:05.454)
But it’s not named. So I think the s the ankylosaurus is still more important. First named.

speaker-0 (43:12.838)
The bone found in Antarctica is pretty cool. Yes. That is not an easy And how scenic is it?

speaker-1 (43:15.946)
Well yeah, I by what year?

speaker-1 (43:23.19)
And Kyler’s are is still better than smart up.

speaker-0 (43:25.87)
It’s not an easy place to excavate. True. Anyway, this bone is distinct. There’s a hollow end on one side and a rounded bump at the other, which means that you could line up multiple vertebrae, if you had more than one, from head to tail and connect it with those ball and socket joints. And those ball and socket joints are something you see in titanosaurs. Yeah. So that’s how we know it’s a titanosaur. It lived in the late Cretaceous in what was back then a lush forest. So more scenic, I would argue.

And it’s estimated to be about 23 feet or seven meters long, which I know is not as big as we got, but I was going with well, this one doesn’t have a name, and it kind of goes with our hiding in plain sight dinosaur. Maybe it was a juvenile or maybe it was a small adult. There’s fusions on the bones, so it could be skeletally mature. But when those fusions happen in the bones, it varies throughout the vertebral column, the spinal cord, and there’s no currently recognized pattern among sauropods. So we

Don’t know how mature it was. Plus the bone is small compared to most other sauropods.

speaker-1 (44:29.326)
This one was probably barely bigger than Antarcto Pelta.

speaker-0 (44:33.016)
They live together in that lush forest, maybe.

speaker-1 (44:36.206)
Of Antarctica.

speaker-0 (44:38.99)
So that wraps up our sauropod news, but we still have more sauropod things to discuss. And that brings me to our dinosaur connection challenge, which again we haven’t had in a long time. And I ended up updating our episode list on our website so that you can see which episodes have the dinosaur connection challenges in them. If you want to look at what we’ve done so far. And that’s on our website at inodino.com. So this one is Star Wars.

speaker-1 (44:46.413)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (45:08.694)
It was a request from Toon Rex, our patron, so thank you. And there are a lot of dinosaur inspirations in Star Wars. But I’m gonna start with the sauropods because I’m sticking with our theme, at least just to begin.

speaker-1 (45:19.822)
That’s the one I always think of. I think I know where you’re going with this.

speaker-0 (45:22.956)
Yes, Star Wars Episode four A New Hope.

speaker-1 (45:25.762)
The original Star Wars movie?

speaker-0 (45:27.534)
Yes. They’ve got the Create Dragon skeleton on Tatooine, which is apparently the same replica skeleton that appears in the nineteen seventy-five Disney movie One of Our Dinosaurs is missing. And that skeleton is most likely a Diplodocus. Yep. C3PO walks past it, and I think you see the skull and the neck and part of the back and it’s in the sand.

speaker-1 (45:49.272)
Yeah, I just remember all the vertebrae sort of sticking out in a snake neck sort of fashion. Yes. Although I guess it’s more from the whip like tail group if it’s a diplodocus. Yes.

speaker-0 (45:59.182)
Well, apparently most or maybe all of that skeleton is still out in the Tunisian desert, although pieces have been collected over the years. Yes. So speaking of Tunisia, Tatooinea is a sauropod that we covered as our dinosaur of the day in episode 566. It’s titled Steve Brusati and the Story of Birds, if you want check it out. That’s a diploticid with a long tail, a real dinosaur. And its name turns out has nothing to do with Star Wars. Instead, it refers to the Tatooina.

speaker-1 (46:06.966)
In Tatooine.

speaker-0 (46:28.908)
Governatorate of Tunisia, but it’s the first articulated dinosaur skeleton from Tunisia.

speaker-1 (46:34.05)
Yep. They’re just both named after Tunisia. Yes. Tatooine in Star Wars and Tatooine of the Sorpot.

speaker-0 (46:40.812)
Yes. But back to Star Wars. So also in episode four, in the modified editions, you’ve got the Rontos, which are based on the Brachiosaurus from Jurassic Park. In Episode 4 and New Hope, Special Edition in 1997, and Episode One, the Phantom Menace in the background, you’ve got the Rontos, they’re all CGI. Huh. Apparently, while they were being made, the animators called them Brontos, and then George Lucas dropped the B, so they officially became the Rontos.

speaker-1 (47:07.116)
Interesting. I prefer Brontos.

speaker-0 (47:09.358)
They walk on all fours, they got a long neck, they’ve got a beak and pointed ears. They have bad vision, so they get startled by sudden movements, but they had a good sense of smell, and they shed heat through their skin, which I believe is something sauropods did too.

speaker-1 (47:24.546)
Yeah, pretty much every animal does. So that makes sense.

speaker-0 (47:28.046)
And then we’ve got the Umbaran Starfighter or the T twenty fighter. It’s this small, maneuverable ship for fighting. And the design was inspired by the neckbone or cervical vertebra of a potasaurus. And when you look at it, you’re like, yeah, that looks like a vertebra.

speaker-1 (47:44.046)
I gotta look up the T twenty fighter. wow, that thing looked crazy. I don’t know if I’ve seen that one before. Yeah, it’s got like two big loops on the sides.

speaker-0 (47:54.338)
Yeah. Like I said, it looks like a vertebra. Mm-hmm. Then there’s other types of dinosaurs. So in episode three, Revenge of the Sith, there are Reptavians. That’s animals with reptile and bird traits. One is the Viractile. There’s one called Boga in the movie. Looks like a big gecko with a hooked bill and is covered in iridescent feathers. We’ve also got the blurgs. They’re two leg head reptilians that lived on the moon of Endor and the planet Ryloth.

They’ve got three toes, long tails, a huge head and mouth, and they roar, and they lay eggs.

speaker-1 (48:31.02)
Everything on Endor is weird.

speaker-0 (48:32.942)
Then there’s the Tishar. These are predatory theropod reptiles from the planet Tishari. They’re intelligent. They’ve got long necks and short tails and sharp teeth. They walked on two legs. They’re strong. They’re agile. They also have big tongues. There’s six subspecies of them. Each of those subspecies have different markings on their scales. And they’re known for being business savvy. Well, the intelligence, I think.

speaker-1 (48:55.538)
like a typical therapod.

Yeah, I guess that’s true. Maybe they’re troadontids.

speaker-0 (49:03.522)
Yeah, maybe. Then there’s the Sri Ruk or Sri Ruog. There’s saurians that walk on two legs and they have bird traits, and they also have long muscular tails. And there’s the Acclays. These are non-sentient carnivores that are from Vendexa. You see them in the arena in episode two, Attack of the Clones. George Lucas apparently requested a creature that looked like a combination of a preying mantis and velociraptor, and that is exactly what they look like.

And they’ve got sharp claws and thick skin.

speaker-1 (49:34.754)
Half vertebrate, half invertebrate.

speaker-0 (49:36.48)
Yes. And then there’s the Verks. They live on the planet Semla. They’re tall amphibious humanoids with big eyes and head crests. Their head crests are similar to the crests of Parasrolfus. They’ve got three digits on each hand and foot, and they’re gray and greenish with leathery skin. One of them, Coleman Trebor, was a Jedi Master and member of the Jedi High Council before the Clone Wars, but he died. He was about seven feet tall.

And he first appeared in episode two Attack of the Clones.

speaker-1 (50:08.76)
It sounds like the just stick a Parasoralifa’s head on a human. Yes. You get a verk, I guess.

speaker-0 (50:13.71)
Something like that. The last one I want to mention is Jar Jar Binks, the humanoid amphibian. And I’m bringing Jar Jar up because of Dino Kyrus. We talk about this all the time. Because the headlines when Dino Kyrus was more fully described back in 2014 compared it to Jar Jar Binx because it looked so strange. But I guess that’s a a case because a lot of the Star Wars dinosaurs were based on.

actual dinosaurs, but then Jar Jar Binks, it’s the other way around. Mm-hmm. Or least the comparison.

speaker-1 (50:47.308)
Yeah, they didn’t say, make an creature for Star Wars that looks like Dino Kyrus. People just looked at Dino Kyrus and they’re like, That looks so weird and goofy. Yeah. I’m gonna call it Jar Jar.

speaker-0 (50:57.934)
‘Cause if Jar Jar was based on Dinokyrus, well, first of all, we didn’t know what it looked like other than its arms, but Jar Jar would have way bigger arms and hands.

speaker-1 (51:05.514)
Yeah, and not the big weird head flappy things, probably.

speaker-0 (51:09.038)
Apparently there is a field guide, The Wildlife of Star Wars that goes into details of all the animals in the Star Wars universe. And I just want to give a shout-out. I got some great notes from Darren Nash’s blog as well as SV Pow to talk about the dinosaurs in Star Wars.

speaker-1 (51:25.452)
And in just a moment, we’ll get into our dinosaur of the day, venenosaurus. But first we’re going to pause for a quick sponsor break.

And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Venenosaurus, which was a request from Morgan via our Patreon and Discord, so thank you. It was a sauropod that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Utah in the US. It looked kind of like Brachiosaurus.

And it really looked like cedarosaurus, but I think more people are familiar with brachiosaurs. Mm-hmm. It walked on all fours. It kept its long neck upright and had a long tail. It was small for a sauropod. It’s estimated to be about 39 feet or 12 meters long and weighed 6.6 short tons. The fossils were found in 1998 by Anthony DeCroce, a volunteer for the Denver Museum of Natural History. And then it was described in 2001 by Virginia Tidwell and others.

The type and only species is Venenosaurus Decrocei. That genus name means poison lizard. It refers to the poison strip member where it was found. Yes. And then the species name is in honor of Anthony Decroce for finding the fossils. The site where the fossils were found is known as Tony’s bone bed. Yeah. So again, it’s in the poison strip member of the Cedar Mountain Formation.

speaker-1 (53:14.094)
like venom.

speaker-1 (53:26.87)
It’s very Italian. Yeah.

speaker-0 (53:32.652)
The holotype is a partial adult skeleton with nine tailbones, part of the shoulders and arms, part of the feet, part of the hips and ribs. We know it’s an adult based on fusion in most of the bones, although some of the bones are not fused, and it could be it just looks that way from being buried and fossilized. They did also find some bones from a juvenile. There are some other potential fossils found in other quarries, but it’s unclear if they belong to Venenosaurus or its close relative that was found in the same formation, Cedurosaurus.

Venenosaurus had slender arm bones and long slender hand bones, and its hips were similar to Brachiosaurus. Its caudal vertebrae or tailbones in the middle and near the end of the tail were short, and those tailbones also looked in between the tailbones of late titanosaurs and early sauropods. Titanosaurs had vertebrae that were biconvex, so they bulged outward on the front and back, and early sauropods had vertebrae that were either flat on both ends or concave, curving inward.

Venenosaurus had a mix in its tailbones. It’s slightly convex, so it shows the beginnings of being biconvex, but it also has this flat surface.

speaker-1 (54:39.266)
And it was I realised earlier I said it’s very Italian. I should have said it’s very Italian American since it’s from Utah. Yes. But it has a lot of Italian going on in its naming.

speaker-0 (54:50.092)
Yes. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the Ankylosaur Gastonia, the Ornithopod Planycoxa, and theropods, and other animals that lived around the same time and place include fish, turtles, mammals, and crocodilians. And now for our fun fact, which is that dinosaurs kept mammals small and mammals kept dinosaurs large. Basically. Way to spoil it.

speaker-1 (55:12.226)
Niche partitioning.

speaker-0 (55:17.096)
Anyway, this was published in the International Journal of Organic Evolution by Stephanie Leckie and Roger Benson. So I was gonna start off with like how would that work, but you know, here we are. Anyway, first what made the scientists notice is there’s more small animals today than large animals. We’ve got things like mice, hummingbirds, geckos, shrews.

Also, the authors wrote in the paper, quote, The smallest non-avian dinosaurs weighed approximately 400 grams as adults and are therefore 200 to 3,000 times larger than the smallest living birds. we’ve got the bee hummingbird, which is less than two grams. There is an Etruscan shrew and that weighs also less than two grams. And then with reptiles, we’ve got the Virgin Island dwarf gecko.

speaker-1 (56:06.894)
When you said that, even though you said the smallest non avian dinosaurs were four hundred grams as adults, I was thinking that’s too small. That’s not possible. But you’re right. It’s like a pound.

speaker-0 (56:16.162)
Yeah, and the Virgin Island dwarf geckos, the smallest is point one five gram. So even the smallest non avian dinosaurs were bigger than the smallest animals today. And just want to mention the small dinosaurs that have been found turned out to be babies. So we’re talking about the full grown animals here.

speaker-1 (56:22.439)
man.

speaker-1 (56:38.498)
Yeah. And non avian the ones that couldn’t fly, essentially. Yep.

speaker-0 (56:42.22)
As small animals are important to ecosystems. It’s possible we haven’t found the small dinosaur fossils yet, because they’re hard to find or hard to fossilize, but dinosaurs lived alongside other small animals, and we found those, lizards, mammals, and more. There’s some other interesting patterns the authors pointed out, like pterosaurs got bigger and small pterosaurs disappeared during the early days of birds diversifying in the Cretaceous. Insects also got smaller as birds evolved and spread out.

And then they got even smaller when bats evolved and some birds started specializing in eating insects. Mammals got bigger after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. There’s less pressure from predators and less competition from food from dinosaurs. And flightless birds, they get bigger on some islands when there are no mammalian predators. Now, when it comes to body size, that could be due to intrinsic factors or extrinsic factors. When it comes to intrinsic energy factors,

You’re looking at what body mass will maximize reproductive power. And by that it means you know how much energy for finding mates and reproducing, like the energy cost of laying eggs, as well as passing along the genes. Extrinsic factors include things like habitat, competition for food, if there’s predator pressure. So for this study, they looked at intrinsic factors first. And they looked at birds, lizards, non-avian dinosaurs, crocodilians, and turtles.

And they looked at the maximum body size data for all these groups. Then they used mathematical models to predict what would be the best body size in terms of how much energy they use and what energy they need to reproduce. Yes. They found that the sizes of the animals were similar to the optimal body size predicted in the mathematical model for mammals, birds, except for flightless birds, and turtles. But it didn’t predict well for lizards, snakes, flightless birds, and crocodilians.

speaker-1 (58:15.926)
That’s complicated.

speaker-0 (58:34.634)
Living crocodilians are generally larger than extinct ones. That could be due to where they live, like if they live on an island, for example, or if there’s competition or predation, that could have more of an effect on their body sizes, those extrinsic factors.

speaker-1 (58:47.352)
So the mammals get to be the size that they want to be and birds that can fly get to be the size they want to be and turtles, but the other animals are being a lot more impacted by the extrinsic factors, it seems like.

speaker-0 (59:02.028)
It does seem that way. S and same with non avian dinosaurs. The model didn’t really work for them. Although, as a side note, there’s two formations that fit their model, the Jahol group and the Jadogda formation. The animals found there are close to the optimal body mass that the model predicted. Why are the dinosaurs so large then? It’s obviously not because of intrinsic factors, it’s mostly extrinsic. And those external factors influenced sauropods the most, and then Ornithiscans, the

second most and then the non-avian theropods, which makes sense since they’re the most closely related to birds. So it makes sense they’d be the least affected by the extrinsic factors.

speaker-1 (59:43.0)
So in other words, the non avian dinosaurs’ optimal size was smaller than they were they had to be bigger than than you would expect from their intrinsic motivations, pressure.

speaker-0 (59:53.902)
Yes. So it could be that when dinosaurs ruled, mammals were doing well being small, and that made the dinosaurs get excluded from those small roles by competition and other pressure. So that would mean the dinosaurs, yes, they kept the mammals small, but the mammals also kept the dinosaurs large. They prevented each other from changing size.

speaker-1 (01:00:15.96)
They the mammals filled all of the small niches and the dinosaurs filled all of the large niches. Yeah. And neither of them could they had to stay in their lanes.

speaker-0 (01:00:23.192)
They did, they did. But then what about birds? Why were they able to get smaller when non avian dinosaurs weren’t? It could be with birds being able to fly allowed them to exploit new ecological opportunities. So they weren’t being prevented from getting smaller because the mammals weren’t in the air. They weren’t preventing them.

speaker-1 (01:00:40.066)
Yeah, there’s a and there’s really strong intrinsic pressures with birds because in order to fly, you have some pretty strong pressures just within the body plan of a bird. So if you can get flying and get to where you need to get to eat what you need to eat, a lot of the other animals aren’t gonna have a big impact on you, especially with birds.

They were some of the best adapted for flying. So they just started messing with the pterosaurs, like you were saying. The pterosaurs had to adapt to the birds. Birds didn’t have to adapt to the pterosaurs as much.

speaker-0 (01:01:12.962)
Yeah. So that wraps up our episode of I know Dino. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned. In our next episode, we have a special interview with most of the hosts of PBS Eons.

speaker-1 (01:01:26.021)
yeah. That was that was very fun. Mm hmm.

speaker-0 (01:01:28.824)
And as always, if you want to hear extended interviews as well as even more content around dinosaurs, but also paleo in general, then join our community at patreon.com/slash iknowdino. Thanks again, and until next time.