(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.

(Approximate times)

• 00:00 Introduction to Joschua Knüppe and his work
• 09:51 Joschua’s experience as a scientific advisor for Netflix’s The Dinosaurs
• 19:56 The process of creating scientifically accurate dinosaur reconstructions
• 30:08 Challenges of communicating scientific uncertainty in media
• 39:57 The influence of fossil evidence and environmental data on paleoart
• 50:11 Future projects and research in paleoart and paleontology

Summary

In this episode, paleo artist Joschua Knüppe shares insights into paleo art, the process of creating scientifically accurate dinosaur reconstructions, and his role in Netflix’s The Dinosaurs. We explore how scientific knowledge influences media portrayals of prehistoric life and the importance of transparency in science communication.

Takeaways

• Joschua Knüppe’s role as a paleo artist and scientific advisor
• The process of creating scientifically accurate dinosaur reconstructions
• The influence of scientific literature and fossil evidence on paleoart
• Challenges of communicating scientific uncertainty in media
• The importance of transparency and honesty in science communication
• The impact of media portrayals on public understanding of dinosaurs
• The use of modern techniques and research in paleoart
• The role of color, behavior, and environment in dinosaur reconstructions
• The collaboration between scientists and artists in media productions
• Future projects and ongoing research in paleoart and paleontology

Keywords

paleontology, paleoart, dinosaur reconstruction, Netflix The Dinosaurs, scientific accuracy, science communication, fossil analysis, prehistoric animals, paleo artist, dinosaur media

Hello and welcome to I know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries in science with us. I’m Gareth. And I’m Sabrina. And today in our 472nd episode, we’ve got a new dinosaur named Kank.

speaker-1 (00:42.69)
Yeah, it’s a fish-eating dinosaur. We also have an interview with Yoshua Kanupa, a paleo artist and scientific advisor who we’ve had on the show before. Plus, we’ve got Dinosaur of the Day, Ooko Tokia, an armored ankylosaur. And our fun fact, which is that T-Rex is now the most valuable dinosaur fossil. It dethroned Stegosaurus.

speaker-0 (01:06.038)
Mm-hmm. ‘Cause there was that one Stegosaurus sold for a bunch of money. Yep.

speaker-1 (01:09.482)
Apex. We’ll get into it later.

speaker-0 (01:12.024)
I mean, it makes sense. T-Rex had always been the most expensive. It just took, I guess, for the next T-Rex to come up for sale for it to regain.

speaker-1 (01:20.204)
It was surprising to talk about stegosaurs being the most expensive.

speaker-0 (01:23.872)
Yeah. But before we get into all of that, of course, we’d like to thank some of our patrons for making our podcast a reality. And this week we have a new patron to thank, and that is Todd. Thank you very much, Todd, for joining our Patreon. And then rounding out our shout-outs, we’ve got Potta, Geraldine, Tiffany, Chris, Charybdis, Clever Girl, Mongol Warrior, Michael, and another Michael. Yes.

speaker-1 (01:49.006)
Two different Michaels.

Thank you so much for being a Dino at all and being part of our community. We hope you are enjoying being able to talk to each other on our Discord and getting our bonus content. If you want to become part of our community, then you can check us out at Patreon, patreon.com slash inodino, see if all the perks are things that you might want.

speaker-0 (02:14.808)
Hmm. And as of this release, there’s still a little bit of time to get a exclusive card through our backer kit in the extended what they call pre-sales period, confusingly, after the crowdfunding ends. And you can do that at inodino.com slash cards. And if you’re a patron, then you get access to the exclusive NanoTirana stuff.

speaker-1 (02:40.248)
Jumping into the news, we’ve got a new dinosaur, an uninloggiid, Kink Australis. This was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Mateus Jay Mata and others. And uninloggiids were bird-like theropods related to Velociraptor. Their fossils have been found in South America, Madagascar, Australia, Antarctica. There’s at least eight species of them.

This new one, Kank, lived in the Lake Cretaceous about 70 million years ago in what is now Patagonia Argentino, is found in the Churillo Formation. The fossils were first found in 2018, but they were too fragmentary to be named a species at the time. The holotype is a single vertebra, but eventually more specimens were found, and some fossils found include part of the feet, five shed teeth, and vertebrae.

speaker-0 (03:29.518)
Could be worse.

speaker-1 (03:31.842)
Well, at least it wasn’t named just on one bone. So Kank is medium sized, estimated to be about sixty pounds or twenty seven kilograms and up to ten feet or three meters long.

speaker-0 (03:34.402)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (03:45.09)
Medium sized, that sounds really small to me, but I guess for an Unan Lagiad it was medium sized.

speaker-1 (03:51.798)
It’s similar in size to a greater Raya.

speaker-0 (03:54.806)
Yeah, Rheas reasonably sized, I guess. Yeah. But they’re alive today. So Well. For a non avian dinosaur, it seems like any if anything alive today, any bird alive today is bigger than

speaker-1 (04:08.514)
think when whenever we talk about medium or large size or small size, it’s in regards to their closest relative.

speaker-0 (04:14.806)
It’s true. Yeah.

speaker-1 (04:17.166)
‘Cause sometimes we’ll talk about a small sauropod, and a small sauropod is bigger than a medium sized loggy.

speaker-0 (04:24.214)
Or bigger than like a vehicle. Yeah.

speaker-1 (04:26.702)
All right, so the genus named Kank is in honor of a myth of the Ayana Kank, the southernmost group of the indigenous Tewelche people of Patagonia. Kank refers to an old giant Rhea or Rhea whose powerful running steps left an imprint of its toes in the sky, and that formed the Southern Cross constellation. And the species name Australis means from the south, which makes sense. It’s a southern hemisphere dinosaur.

speaker-0 (04:55.704)
That’s interesting because I remember the native people from Broom, Australia, had their legend of a giant emu bottomed man who walked on the beach and made the basically like tyrannosaur or other large theropod-sized footprints. And this one has a rea, which is basically like an ostrich. But instead of walking in the sand, it’s walking in the sky. Yeah.

speaker-1 (05:22.19)
Birds get around. So Kank is smaller and more grassile compared to other Unanlagids like Ostroraptor. It did have that large claw on its second toes. That’s one of their features and why they’re somewhat closely related to Velociraptor. So maybe Kank was an active fisher. It had a long snout, a lot of teeth, and a long, flexible neck, which would be good for fishing, similar to modern herons.

speaker-0 (05:51.478)
least we assume it would ’cause we didn’t find any of those parts. All we have is f feet, teeth, and neck vertebrae. they’re neck vertebrae. Okay. Yeah.

speaker-1 (05:58.168)
Vertebrae.

speaker-1 (06:02.19)
It had pneumatic cervical vertebrae, so air sacs in the neck bones. And based on the neck bones, it had special structures for muscle attachment and to protect neck blood vessels, similar to today’s herons with the complex neck movements. It also had small teeth that were not serrated. So another thing going for going after fish. Yep. It lived in a wetland environment with a lot of rivers and streams. So this helps show that this group were fish eaters.

speaker-0 (06:31.448)
The Unan Lagiads, or at least some of them.

speaker-1 (06:34.06)
Yeah, and Kank was also found alongside fish fossils, so there’s a lot of things pointing to the fish here.

speaker-0 (06:39.95)
Yes. Which is still evidence, by the way. Still admissible. People think circumstantial evidence doesn’t count, but it does. well then. Just means that it’s the circumstances. Like being fossilized by a fish.

speaker-1 (06:54.254)
I mean, it’s possible kink went for other prey too, because there were frogs, lizards, turtles, and mammals that lived around the same time and place. But there’s a lot of clues pointing to the fish. Mm-hmm. It would have had to watch out for mape. That’s a big mega raptorid that lived around the same time and place. yeah. Yeah. Be careful. There’s plans to dig more in the same area where these fossils were found. Hopefully to find more kink fossils. So it’d be cool to learn more about this potential fish eater.

speaker-0 (07:20.322)
Get more than some teeth, some foot bones and some neck bones. Yeah. We could confirm that it actually does have that long snout that people are assuming it had. Hmm. And in just a moment we’ll get onto our interview with Yoshua Kanupa, but first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

speaker-0 (09:22.614)
And now on to our interview with Yoshua Kanupa. But as always, we have an extended version of this interview. So if you’re a patron, you can check out your premium content feed and you will see it there, along with a little footnote at the bottom of the show notes in the extended interview that tells you when to skip ahead to for the ad-free episode if you want to skip over this slightly abridged version. We are joined this week by Yoshua Kanupa, who is a paleo artist and the host of PaleoStream on Twitch.

Which is great handle. Is also the scientific advisor for Netflix’s The Dinosaurs, which came out earlier this year. And if his name sounds familiar, we talked to him in episode 403 about his graphic novel Europosaurus, Life on Jurassic Islands, which we very much enjoyed and we like the conversation too. So we’re happy to talk to you again. Thank you for joining us.

speaker-2 (10:12.46)
Yes, thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

speaker-1 (10:15.064)
So, what’s it like to be a scientific advisor for something like a Netflix show?

speaker-2 (10:20.654)
It’s hard to describe because as it should be pointed out, my part in this was absolutely minuscule.

speaker-1 (10:28.27)
It was enough to get you credit though.

speaker-2 (10:32.48)
Yeah yeah, they they gave me credit, which I honestly did not expect at all. So I I I should explain a little bit how this this all went down. Netflix, the dinosaur, is basically a direct continuation of Netflix’s other paleo documentary, Life on Our Planet, which we usually just call Loop in the community. And after Loop came out, a few days afterwards, Tom Fletcher, the main consultant.

of that show actually joined our Discord server. We didn’t even invite him or anything, but he came in, he he answered a lot of questions and so on. I protected him a little bit from the little nerds and stuff. And we had a really nice conversation about the show. And like I tried to give like really constructive criticism to to the Wolves thing. And sometime later

He approached me in direct messages, like, hey, could we have like a little talk about this and like go a little bit more into the nitty-gritty of your ideas? Like what could make this program better? And I think we sat down for like two hours or so, and I had a long list of points where I think, like, okay, this this I think you did really well. This could be better. This part here, please don’t do it again.

speaker-1 (11:57.292)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (11:58.484)
If you ever pick this up again. And yeah, I didn’t really think much about it at that point, although I he already told me that yeah, we want to work more in this direction. And yeah, that was basically my part. It wasn’t really like for the dinosaurs, it was more like for life on our planet in a way. But as I was told, my critique certainly was hurt and was.

speaker-0 (12:21.166)
Interesting.

speaker-2 (12:28.096)
incorporated. Like one of my main critiques and quite a few other people, like I I was basically a little bit the voice of the paleo community going back to Netflix in in this situation. And what many of us critiqued was that individual interactions oftentimes broken down to more violent struggles like like fights and and hunting scenes.

We’re basically stand-ins for like greater evolutionary narratives, which is just not what happens. Yeah. Like how animals like interact violently is oftentimes not like deciding the evolutionary fate of a who’s lineage.

speaker-0 (13:17.364)
Mm. Yeah. It’s not like this one’s stronger and therefore it survives.

speaker-2 (13:21.71)
This one has the brains, you know, like like and when Spinosaurus steps into water, it gets a a twenty percent melee damage buff. And that’s why it like can now overpower Kakarodontosaurus, you know. It’s it’s it was a little bit at times a little bit like like a video game in its logic or in its storytelling. Yeah. And I think they really, really improved in in that regard, with the dinosaurs. So yes, that was my part.

on the wall thing. And and we we should also mention there’s many, many, many, many more consultants on this show. Like the only reason I really stick out because I don’t have a doctor or professor title to my name. But yeah.

speaker-1 (14:05.614)
Well was thinking ’cause we know you’re a dinosaur expert. There’s there’s a lot of experts, but experts in different aspects.

speaker-2 (14:12.876)
Yeah, yeah. You you could say I’m I’m an expert to a certain degree on like how these animals might have looked. Although that again, like to only to a degree. I I try to be like a little bit of an expert in everything in this. Like paleontology is such a huge field.

speaker-0 (14:30.158)
yeah. Definitely. Did you give any feedback on how they looked, like what you liked and didn’t like from Loop?

speaker-2 (14:36.224)
A little bit, although that really wasn’t my focus. Because I think like I’m talking to Tom Fletcher, he’s paleontologist, he knows the shortcomings largely himself. I know from other people who worked with like Big Studios before that there’s always something being lost in translation. Like like I think it’s one of the biggest problems of like the the overall creative process with Big Studios that you have this this hierarchy.

Like the the the consultant usually cannot directly talk to the artists themselves. It always goes through producer and like art director and then trickles slowly down to to the artist. so it takes longer and less less precise and and it’s just just unwieldy the whole process compared to what you would need to really make it make it work for something like this.

speaker-0 (15:34.742)
That makes sense why so many of these documentaries end up looking kind of similar because they they have the starting point and it’s easy to say, well, this one did a pretty good job and then the artists know where to start from there. And if they’re not talking through a new concept directly with someone with a lot of new input, it’s yeah, it’s not gonna change too much.

speaker-2 (15:54.798)
Yeah, and of course also these big studios, usually all the artists working there or like the companies they they hire, like these are not dinosaur experts. Like they might have never done a prehistoric animal before. And even if it might have not been for a docum documentary, like paleo documentaries with a lot of CGI are such a niche thing. Yeah. So yeah. I I mean I I there’s always hope that we get a little bit more now.

But yeah, it’s it’s certainly not the the usual thing for for these CGI artists to do that are more used to like doing doing like Marvel movies and Jurassic Park or Jurassic World at best.

speaker-0 (16:37.804)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. For every dinosaur documentary, there’s probably five or ten dinosaur fighting, you know, scenes in various movies or things that look kinda like a dinosaur that people would draw from.

speaker-1 (16:52.846)
It sounds like they took a lot of good feedback though because I know they made like Tyrannosaurus seem more parental. That’s something we don’t we’re starting to see a little bit more of in dinosaur media, but it’s still pretty rare.

speaker-2 (17:04.977)
Yeah. No, I I I really liked many things they they did with this season, the the things they showed. There’s there’s so many more interesting behaviors and setups they introduce. And I I I think my one of my favorite parts is that they actually have like the first episode being fully on the Triassic. Yeah. And and even starting before we have proper dinosaurs, like like showing like the setup.

Okay, here we have the animals that would eventually lead to to dinosaurs. That is so rare to have. And I’m I know many, many people also were, for example, very disheartened by the lack of Triassic stuff, for example, in the new working with dinosaurs. Which has different reasons why that didn’t happen, but it’s it’s yeah, pe people still want to see this this stuff, even if we don’t have the

Giant therapods, giant sauropods and stuff. Not the not the weirdest things. Yeah, I I think the Triassic and early Jurassic segments might have actually been my my favorite in the dinosaur.

speaker-0 (18:15.448)
Yeah, ’cause even though I mean I really liked the Seam of Spinosaurus because it was sort of a modern take and they were they showed it like just getting completely outswum by a shark. It’s like that was in loop, not in the dinosaurs? I think I saw it in the dinosaurs too. But the

speaker-1 (18:25.853)
That was in loop.

speaker-2 (18:32.984)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (18:36.81)
Yeah. It’s just kind of a fun to see, you know, these modern interpretations of Cretaceous stuff. But it’s also yeah, I I agree with you. My biggest thing with prehistoric planet on Apple was it was cool, but it’s like it’s the Hell Creek. And then when they did prehistoric planet too, it was like more of the Hell Creek mostly. And I’m like, you know, there’s so much more of the Mesozoic to go through. And with the Triassic, too, like you were saying, there’s lots of interesting stuff there that isn’t dinosaurs. So if you’re not just limiting

If sure, if you limit just strictly to true dinosaurs, like within Dinosauria, and you’re not showing any other animals, yeah, the Triassic is kind of boring. But if you look at the Triassic and you’re looking at all the fauna there, it’s crazy. Like the n the variety all and the story too of how it leads to the true dinosaurs after the Triassic Jurassic boundary is really interesting to see the comparison. Like, well, why did the dinosaurs do better than these other animals that superficially look really similar or look

Like you were saying, you know, if you had like a video game buff, like why would a pseudo Sukian that’s huge and almost looks like a T Rex in some ways with big teeth and a big impressive mouth? Like, how could that go extinct? But this little goofy, two legged, skinny coelophysoid is doing great. It’s a it’s a really interesting story.

speaker-2 (19:56.31)
Yeah, yeah, no, no. I I there’s there’s so much cool cool stuff happening in the Triassic. Like yeah, there’s there’s nature itself like reinventing itself like several times over after the big extinction at the end of the Permian. but also like the the Triassic is f long. There’s there’s so much still happening there. one of the I like like like I I was I was pointing

happily at the screen when when it came up on on the dinosaurs they actually name drop the carnian pluvial event. Like I think that might be the first time something is like this has happened in in like a big modern documentary. Like I sure there there are smaller on on the side that are mostly like fossils and talking heads and so on. And I think they are actually very important. But like

these really big budget documentaries usually shy away from stuff like that. I mean that was one of the biggest critiques of prehistoric planet ice age how little they went into these scientific terminologies. Yeah. And and stuff like that. I mean there I I think there are other things in in terms of like science communication that are really, really good in Ice Age. Like each episode basically going into like

one of the phases or one of the aspects of like these glacial cycles, like the freezing, the melting, and and what that does to ecosystems. So I really appreciated that, but at the same time you’re also a little bit a little bit left hanging wanting to know more, because many of these creatures you don’t even have a name to. Yeah. So yeah, I I I think say the dinosaurs does does this really well.

speaker-0 (21:45.826)
Yeah, that’s true. It’s it’s always a fine line of like how much narration, how much explanation is there, because you don’t want to make it like you were saying, just a pure talking head, almost like a lecture. But you also need to add enough information that when you’re done watching it, you weren’t like, well, I saw this big bird thing attack this saber-toothed tiger.

speaker-2 (22:05.614)
Yeah, yeah, of course. it’s always like, but who even remembers that or who even wants to know? But there is always people who will remember and who will want to know. And like even if they are not like wanting to go into paleontology and stuff like that, like there’s there’s there’s like studies on like while kids like dinosaurs and learning all these complicated names, that is a big part of that.

Like like it’s subtle it’s like an a pool of knowledge that kids can accumulate that they suddenly have that the the adults don’t have. And and it’s so important for that. So like them being like, no, we want to create this this cool product for the wool family. So we shouldn’t make it too technical.

speaker-0 (22:55.747)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (22:57.25)
The adults wanna know too.

speaker-2 (22:58.74)
Yeah, true. Adults want to know too and it’s it’s it feels like profoundly anti intellectual the world notion. Which is his own can of worms.

speaker-0 (23:08.588)
Yep, that’s true.

I can’t remember with Ice Age if they did I really like one of the things I really liked in Prehistoric Planet was the first Prehistoric Planet was they at the end of the episode, I know they did in the second one too, they would spend a few minutes sort of going back and explaining how we knew those things and sort of getting some of the scientific nomenclature out there sometimes. But I don’t remember seeing that in Ice Age, but maybe I just

speaker-2 (23:33.678)
They did that too. They did it actually in all three epis seasons, but in the first season these segments were separate from the actual program, and you could just click on that separately on Apple’s website, while in the second season it was part of the runtime, which many people liked a lot more. and many people wanted to see more of.

speaker-0 (23:58.38)
Yeah, I was gonna say the ratio to me, I could have used more of that end piece because I remember when we were talking, I got to interview one of the producers for Ice Age, and I had like a long list of questions, like, was this real? Was this real? Was this real? You know, like what was this based on? What was this based on? But I only had a couple minutes to talk to him. So I got through like two of them, but I still didn’t find out like

This behavioral thing they showed, is that just because we know that a modern bear did something similar, or is there actually something in the fossil record that shows it? And that’s the kind of detail. It’s hard to get that information without talking to someone who worked on the show because it’s it might be buried in some paper somewhere, but figuring out how much of it is inference versus how much of it was scientifically informed and from where is super valuable information. Like you said, I think a lot of people would be interested in.

Hearing just, you know, like, yeah, this part isn’t so well backed by science, but we think it’s fun and it could happen versus like, no, there’s a fossil that like really shows this was a likely thing. Well

speaker-1 (25:00.918)
I say like on Netflix is the dinosaur, they had the singing and Kylosaur, and that was based on that paper that that we talked about on our show.

speaker-0 (25:07.372)
Fossilized hyoid bone.

speaker-2 (25:09.462)
yeah, yeah, yeah, the the Lyrynx. Yeah, potentially lyrics. Like I I a friend of mine who is like he’s working in Tepholymy, but he’s like kind of like a little bit like like a paleovocalization nerd on the side. He he’s a little bit skeptical about that. But yeah, I know there’s there’s there’s cool cool things happening in in that department, and that we even have like these big osophite hyoids like in in ankylosaurus, like in in several

speaker-0 (25:12.216)
Mm. Yeah.

speaker-2 (25:38.776)
generalizing at this point. Like we I I think makes it very likely that they would do quite a bit of vocalization. Also with with like their very complex nasal passages. Not necessarily like in as in the dinosaurs with the pyloroplitis that they have there. Unfortunately not name dropped. But like in prehistoric planet Tartia

in in Mongolia. There we have or also like some some North American ones like you Procephalus. You have like incredibly complex nasal pastures, also like nasal openings that look really weird and that make you think, okay, what noises would come out of that? Because they they are like speculating, this is maybe for cooling the breast and stuff like that, because they are like in like desert environments or like like like getting the moisture out of out of there before it’s like exhaled and and stuff. But

That would do more than just like help with thermoregulation.

speaker-0 (26:38.478)
Yeah. Yeah. And even if that it evolved primarily for something like that, it doesn’t mean it affected the way they sound.

speaker-2 (26:45.238)
Yeah, yeah, also because we have stuff like this not just in the desert species, but also in like the much more humid North American parts.

speaker-0 (26:53.676)
Yeah. So yeah, it’s hard to say chicken or egg, like what it evolved originally for, but it could be that once they had it in that desert environment, nobody else was gonna drop it because all of a sudden they can make these cool sounds that really impressed the the ladies or the fellas, as the case may be.

speaker-2 (27:11.178)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I to to go back to what you said earlier with with like these segments at the end of prehistoric planet like showing off like how do we know some things and stuff like that. I I I like that. It was too little, absolutely. Like like every segment I feel like should have had something like this. Yeah. Like I would like to know more about the Namact and and why you show Dino Kyrus this way, yada yada yada.

Yes. But I think that’s in general like one of the biggest weakness of most paleo documentaries, even the ones that don’t do not have like a huge CGI budget, and that is academic honesty and transparency. Like not just saying this is how we know it, but also saying this is what we don’t know and this is what we can only speculate about.

speaker-0 (28:06.636)
Yeah, yeah, that level of certainty.

speaker-2 (28:08.98)
Yeah, like I I wa I was part of an little documentary two no three years ago at this point. And we filmed like a longer interview for like I I think the world shoot was like like six hours or so. Like with with me like talking to the camera but also painting live and stuff like that like that. In the end, nothing of that got into the documentary. Mostly because on the cutting floor.

They decided to change the tra trajectory of the wool thing because the format was supposed to be more about the facts, the hard facts, you know, the stuff we know. And we and and me and the director, we were talking mostly about all the things we don’t know and all the uncertainties and and so on. Like really going into okay, yes, we know all of this stuff, but there’s so much more we have no idea about. And

Like the director too had like a different idea about how it how how the wool program could be, and then the higher ups were like no no no no no, not all this this wibbly wobbly stuff. No, we want to give the people like the hard facts they can bring up at dinner parties, you know? Did you know that about dinosaurs? Yada yada yada. And and yeah, it’s it’s it’s basically sucking a little bit the the humanity out of the field in a

speaker-0 (29:36.16)
scientific method in general because it’s it isn’t just like a list of facts.

speaker-2 (29:40.736)
It’s it’s baffling to me sometimes what is all shown to people and like sold as a truth, although we don’t know it. And I mean, I as a paleo artist that that is basically my bread and butter. I I sell illusions to people, like illusions of certainty. I don’t know if T-Rex really looked like this, but it looks plausible and it follows like

the scientific literature to a degree, but at some points the literature just stops and you’re left with a oftentimes huge gaping hole that you have to fill with creativity. Yeah. And that is just not accessible to most people.

speaker-0 (30:25.922)
Yeah. I think of that with with kids that I talk to. Sometimes they’ve got their favorite dinosaur. And sometimes the reason it’s their favorite is because a toy has painted a specific color or they did like a specific sort of interpretation on little spines it might have had on its back or some little detail. And you know, you don’t want to crush their spirits by saying, like, well, maybe they all had that, or maybe none of them had that, or that color might be wrong, or something like that.

But it’s interesting, you never know what people are going to latch on to that maybe to a paleo enthusiast might be obvious, like, we don’t know the exact good to acknowledge that in these sort of documentaries to be like, Well, we made them this color because we took inspiration from this bird, but that’s really where it starts and ends.

speaker-2 (31:02.51)
No absolutely.

speaker-2 (31:12.802)
Yeah, no, like there’s the yeah, the the emotional attachment that people form to certain ways of how we portray the past or individual animals is is so strong sometimes. I oftentimes do it the other way around when I to talk to small children. I absolutely crush their dreams right there. I’m I’m like

Brazer do it early than later when when their attachment has grown even deeper and they can no longer because then you get like like angry little people in the comments being like, why does it look like this? It should be like this.

speaker-0 (31:48.184)
You’re shutting them down before they get online as the

speaker-2 (31:50.574)
Yeah, yeah, no, like I I got a relatively late little sister and I taught her very early on about stuff like that and she grew up fine. So

speaker-1 (32:05.39)
So it works.

speaker-0 (32:08.686)
Good to hear.

speaker-2 (32:09.442)
Yeah, yeah. No, like I I what what I like to say always is when it when it comes to my line of work, learn to love the process, not the illusions is it creates. That also helps a lot with stuff like I might create artwork the other day and like today something comes out that completely changes how we imagine something. And when I’m like too much attached to the way

things look the way I painted them, then I will never be happy.

speaker-0 (32:42.946)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s a very good point.

speaker-1 (32:45.676)
In those cases you’re okay just start over.

speaker-2 (32:48.258)
Yeah, no, I’m I’m usually with with rare exceptions, I’m usually like, boy, more opportunity to do painting. You know? Like explore that once again. And I I think that is something that many, many people need to to learn that we oftentimes have to convince ourselves after new publications come out.

speaker-1 (32:56.351)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (32:58.337)
Like

speaker-2 (33:16.014)
To like something again because we are so used to aesthetics. We we oftentimes make arguments from aesthetics. The way something is portrayed can be just as important sometimes for the acceptance of science as the actual science itself. But I’m tasked to create an image of a new species.

One of the so first things I do is look in the section about geology and see okay what what else has been found here and what are the conditions, so the depositional environment, like how was this thing dep deposited here in this locality? And what does this tell us about the environment and so on? There there is so many information you can draw from that, even down to the coloration of the animal to a certain extent.

Because pigments found in the environment can travel up the food chain and will end up potentially in in your animal. Like like flamingos being pink because they eat all these little red crustaceans is like a famous example, but there are so many more where this is the case. And yeah, so that is always one of the first things to do.

speaker-0 (34:37.098)
I love that detail. Yeah. Thinking like, this animal might have been this color and it was in the same ecosystem as this other animal. So maybe eating it would change it its color.

speaker-2 (34:46.742)
Yeah, that that can have an influence, but also just like is it like an open environment or like a dense forest? Animals today like tend to have different patterns and gradients in their coloration based on what environment they they live in. And then it c goes to the like like you can like talk for hours just about coloration, but f another important thing is like does the animal see color or not?

speaker-1 (35:15.806)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (35:16.78)
And this is a constant question always with dinosaurs because yes, they fill all these niches that big mammals fill today, but mammals are largely colorblind, and dinosaurs were probably not, because crocodiles and birds see colors really well. Yeah, yeah, oftentimes better than us, like seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum, and so.

speaker-0 (35:35.052)
Yeah, maybe even better than us.

speaker-2 (35:46.73)
You have on the one hand that, but then again you also have to keep in mind that large animals, even non-mammals, usually get more blends the larger they get. So there’s a

A lot, a lot of discussion going on all the time in in regard to that. also in dinosaurs where we have soft tissue and and so on. Like there was the idea for a while that in heterosaurs we could see patterns in the scales because they were like larger and smaller scales, sometimes appearing like in clusters and stuff. So people were like, maybe the bigger like that means these scales.

Guys had spots and this guy over here had stripes and stuff like that. But when you look at modern day reptiles, usually scale size doesn’t really correlate with color. So another idea in the moment is that maybe this has a more like a functional thing going on here that the bigger scales are like more rigid parts of the skin, and the smaller scales are are the softer parts. So you have like integrated folding patterns.

That helps with the elasticity of of the skin and stuff. So super cool stuff.

speaker-0 (37:02.956)
Yeah. We did see. I remember Sabrina was recently talking about a paper where there was a sauropod and some of the pigmentation, and it looked to be that it had sort of a speckled pattern to it. And that’s something you don’t see because, like you were alluding to, larger animals tend to be more bland. And it seems like that is the primary way that paleo art takes it. They seem to take that as like the over because that’s what people are comfortable with. You see a T-Rex and it’s big and it’s sort of

brown or green, it feels right if you make it striped or you make it really bold colors with all sorts of, you know, variation on it. It doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen today. And it just seems and it also doesn’t look like famous depictions of it, I guess. then people might not have as good of a reaction to it. But I like the idea of like a Bronosaurus being colored like a giraffe or something. Just totally different than what you usually see. Yeah.

speaker-2 (37:59.502)
Giraffes are a weird case. And this is like going into color genetics and stuff like that, and and like how patterns are formed and and so on. It’s a it’s it’s very, very complex. I friend of mine is like a horse expert and he can like talk for hours about horse color genetics. It’s insane. Like whenever I do a horse, like I usually get like afterwards the comments, actually down there it wouldn’t be that tone because

Based on these and these genes, that is not really how it works. And if you have like a light lighter car part here, then you would also have lighter parts down here. Yeah. It’s really intricate. And the question then also is usually okay, okay, we know this about modern day horses, but how far in their evolution would that go back, these these things? And

speaker-0 (38:51.81)
Yeah, especially ’cause domestication has impacts on coloration too. And pretty much all the horses we have now are in a domestic I mean, there’s I think there’s a couple exceptions potentially, but most of them are on this domesticated lineage. So who knows how much that messed with their coloration.

speaker-2 (39:08.11)
Yeah, although apparently potentially not that much because we have this this cave art that actually shows some really interesting patterns and coloration that is similar to some modern day domesticated breeds. Where like for example, these these like very spotted horses, like that look a little bit like Dalmatian dogs. But stuff like this can also be found in cave art.

speaker-0 (39:23.379)
that’s awesome.

speaker-2 (39:37.6)
And like color genetics shows that genes for like this stuff appearing go back far enough that you would also have like spotted horses probably in in in prehistoric times. At least within the genus Equus.

speaker-0 (39:49.846)
That’s great. Yeah. It’s too bad we don’t have any cave art of dinosaur coloration. That’s true.

speaker-1 (39:52.782)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-2 (39:57.088)
That would make it so much easier. Then again though like like people back only a very limited palette to work with. I mean it’s it’s

speaker-0 (40:03.597)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (40:05.462)
It’s who knows how much creative liberties they would have taken.

speaker-0 (40:07.82)
Yeah, that’s true.

speaker-2 (40:08.706)
True, true that. Yeah. But yeah, like it’s it’s kind of a blessing that like most ice age mammals would probably have like a color palette that can be relatively easily reproduced with like ursin pigments yet that you find on your own doorstep. Yeah. You don’t have to like grind up laszuli to to get in br vibrant bruvaceri and stuff.

speaker-0 (40:32.747)
Yeah.

That’s a good point.

speaker-1 (40:36.782)
So since last we talk I mean, we you’ve mentioned a few projects that you’re working on, but I’m sure you’ve done many, many things because it’s been a few years, I think, since since we had you on the show. What are some of the projects you’re working on now that you can share?

speaker-2 (40:54.85)
One of the biggest things that is, at least from my side, already done is another graphic novel that should come out this year, probably in fall or a little bit later. It’s about an another locality. So with the Europosaur stuff, it was focused on the Langenberg query. And this one is about the Geiseltal open pit mine. Nowadays it’s a lake. but

No, it’s it’s an it’s an artificial lake. Many many of our open pit mines over here has been turned into into lakes, and it’s basically the eastern sister locality of Messel. Yeah. Similar preservation too, but it’s much less known, largely because it’s well, it’s eastern Germany, so for longest time it was like behind the Iron Curtain and stuff, and Messel so much more famous.

speaker-0 (41:32.952)
Nice.

speaker-2 (41:50.122)
and and so on despite the material from here being on par with with that what we what we have from Massel. And instead of Europosaurus our protagonist this time is a terrestrial crocodilian. Boveriucus which was like one of the apex predators of of this ecosystem.

speaker-0 (42:02.798)
Nice.

speaker-0 (42:09.582)
What’s the d estimated date of messel?

speaker-2 (42:13.022)
it’s it’s like fifty three million years.

speaker-0 (42:16.674)
Nice. So we’re getting some some more I w I wanna say modern, but that’s not the right

speaker-2 (42:23.906)
Yeah, Minozoic, it’s Eocene in age. So yeah, it’s it’s a little bit different environment from from Methel. it’s not like like like a lake where everything got stuck in it. it’s more like like a swamp in some cases, but also more open areas on so on. Like it it varies throughout the valley. There’s also a limestone plateau nearby where we have cave sediments. So we we know there were like

speaker-1 (42:24.216)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (42:52.962)
like actively forming caves in that region during the time of Bovariusuchis. And it’s it’s exact exciting and similar to the last graphic novel, this all goes hand in hand with a scientific project that also informs like what is like in the texts in the book. And yeah it it it brings a new new look basically to to this locality and hopefully gives gives it also some publicity because like everyone knows Messel.

speaker-1 (43:22.634)
Yeah. Yeah. Is that how you chose it? You wanna shine a light on a

speaker-2 (43:27.642)
It was one of the reasons. the other reason was that one of our authors already on the Europosaurus graphic novel, Oliver, he was curator at the collection for a while where all all the the Geiseltown material is housed. And and so it felt like a logical step after the Langenberg query to go into into this locality. And if it all goes well, there are ideas

For more of these kinds of books.

speaker-0 (43:58.541)
Nice.

speaker-1 (44:00.13)
I I I mean, we both really enjoyed your graphic novel. I like the style. It’s just something you don’t see too often. Yeah.

speaker-2 (44:07.468)
Yeah, yeah. Beyond that, there’s like a few other projects. I just recently finished another book about plesiosaurus, unfortunately only written in German.

speaker-1 (44:17.962)
speaker-0 (44:18.146)
We have some German listeners. What what’s the Plesiasor book called?

speaker-2 (44:22.35)
Title is The Welt der Plesiosaurier, Paläontologische Abenteuer, written by Achim Schwerman and Sven Sachs. Was an idea that has been like flown around in the heads of some people for a while. It’s mostly talking about like paleontology in general, like in the grand scheme of things, but plesiosaurus specifically.

With a specific focus then again on the plesiosaurs of Westphalia, which is my neck of the woods. Because there is an interesting amount of plesiosaurs we have here, four endemic genera so far. Among them the oldest plesiosaur from the Rassian, so the latest Triassic. Up

speaker-0 (45:13.006)
Nice.

speaker-2 (45:14.088)
Going then through through the early Jurassic. and we also have an early Cretaceous species here that is known from incredibly complete remains. I think it still is like the most complete Cretaceous plesiosaur of Europe. Bronchosaurus. Yeah. Known also from several specimens. Yeah, so it very important. All four have been coined fossil of the year.

speaker-0 (45:33.846)
Well.

speaker-0 (45:43.96)
my

speaker-2 (45:45.16)
recently, which is why this book was like published in a way in the first place, because okay, the idea was was around for a while, but then it became clear that this would happen, that we would get all four with basically awarded this title. And so Achim and Sven like, okay, now we have to put together a book. Now we have to make it happen. And I I did like probably over fifty

Illustrations for that for that book. Yeah.

speaker-1 (46:18.678)
That’s great. Do you know if it’ll be translated?

speaker-2 (46:21.762)
There is attempts in that direction. Like I I know Sven want and Achim want to to look into the possibility. I’m not sure if it might be too niche for for like English speaking publishers, but here’s open. Fingers crossed that it that it might work out.

speaker-1 (46:41.272)
Keep us posted and then for our German listeners, maybe check it out and let us know.

speaker-2 (46:46.39)
Yeah, yeah. for the German listeners, if you want to buy it, might be a little bit tricky in the moment because you will probably not find it on Amazon, but mostly through the museum where it’s published directly, the LVL Museum für Naturkunde in Münster. Unfortunately, the museum currently is being renovated, among other things, also their website. So they don’t have

the best online shop up and running in the moment. Of recording this might have already changed. I haven’t looked in while.

speaker-1 (47:18.062)
Maybe it’ll change.

speaker-1 (47:22.85)
Ha ha ha.

speaker-0 (47:23.754)
Also it makes it more fun. It’s like a scavenger hunt.

speaker-2 (47:27.542)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

speaker-1 (47:30.39)
It’ll be worth it.

speaker-2 (47:32.704)
that is another big project in recent years. I did a lot of illustrations for the new exhibition they’re having there. Yeah, we my region here has has a lot of really cool localities and the new exhibition is putting a little bit more emphasis on that. Like we we have everything from like huge diversity of like Devonian fish and stuff like that, Triassic marine reptiles.

speaker-0 (47:40.078)
Nice.

speaker-2 (48:02.612)
As mentioned, like all these plesiosaurs, dinosaurs too, like Vien Venato are huge, megalosaur is is from from from here. Nice. And yeah, yeah. Also like Xenozoic stuff as like like big big proboscideons and tons of ice age stuff. So much ice age stuff that it’s it’s like getting too much for the local collections at the same time like like there’s a area in

The Rhinish Mountains, that is an basically the wool region is a former Devonian reef lifted up during the Mesozoic. we actually have their Cretaceous cave sediments in there with like like dinosaurs in caves preserved. Super rare, super cool stuff. Mostly like isolated bones and teeth, but like beautiful cut-through, like like a cross-section of the ecosystem. But most

speaker-0 (48:48.086)
Let’s see

speaker-2 (48:59.584)
Mostly what you find in there is like ice age megafauna. And that way too much. Like there’s still new caves being found to this day. And the people in Munster are usually the first people to be like contacted when something like this is found because they have to like go in there and like see if there’s any important fossils. And usually there is with like thousands of cave bears. Like

speaker-0 (49:26.434)
No cheese.

speaker-2 (49:28.427)
but also rhinos, mammoths and and and reindeer and there’s some megalosaurus and stuff laying around. There’s a lot. Yeah.

speaker-1 (49:40.588)
I guess that’s a good problem to have. Too much, not too little.

speaker-2 (49:43.318)
It is a good problem to ma have. What that is, I hope, something that will people take away from from the new exhibition, like just how much has been found on their own doorstep. Mm-hmm. Which is something I I love to like do in general, like like showing people like, hey, beyond the famous stuff in the US, you know, like beyond Hell Creek, there is so much more. Like oftentimes in your own neck of the woods that you you can explore.

artistically or or in terms of research. Over here in in set collection we have a bunch of fossils from the Cretaceous of beautifully preserved fish, like on par or even better preserved than what you see in Solenhofen. wow. Like like like little sharks with all the denticles and stuff like that. And

Really incredible stuff, like some of the earliest lantern fish are in there. And you can still see the bioluminescent organs in the skin. Nobody knows about the stuff. Mostly because the this the material is largely housed in a little local museum that mostly published about this locally, all in German and all nearly a hundred years ago.

speaker-0 (50:44.334)
That’s it.

speaker-0 (51:03.192)
That isn’t an issue for getting the word app.

speaker-2 (51:05.486)
Yeah. And and it it never ye really left left this this bubble because all the people who who like published on it were well pub publishing locally. And I guess in Germany you you might have known about this stuff. actually when you are in I think a Pittsburgh, you might have also known about this because at some point the museum traded a few specimens back and forth. but yeah, it’s very

speaker-1 (51:29.58)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (51:35.424)
unknown to to even fish workers, like people who study prehistoric fish. So whenever I see a fish worker, I’m like, have you ever heard of the fishes of Zendendor Zendenhorst? look at this, look at this. There’s a few images online and it’s like beautiful. But I want more people to work on this stuff because it’s it’s an absolute treasure trove for for research. There’s I think only one English speaking paper on this material.

speaker-1 (52:04.968)
I hope more people do work on it. Yeah. Maybe a graphic novel could come out.

speaker-0 (52:09.73)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (52:12.766)
They are I mean I I wouldn’t say no.

speaker-1 (52:14.958)
Cool. Well, so for our listeners, where is the best place if they wanted to find out more about you and your work online?

speaker-2 (52:23.8)
Simply Googling me usually works watching the tr the the streams on Twitch or now also YouTube. I’m I’m doing multi streams now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. simultaneously I I I got my app and finally got got a plug in for that. Because not everyone wants to join Twitch necessarily. But most people have a Google account so can join and comment on YouTube.

So yeah, no, that’s that’s why I’m doing doing stuff every every weekend. On Fridays, we have something called flocking together where people like vote beforehand on our Discord. like what’s what what do you want to draw? And the foremost voted on things is then will be done on stream by everyone who wants to join in, each one in 20 minutes. So it’s just sketches that come out of that. It’s basically just

little little drawing exercises. And every Saturday we do something called formation pieces, where we have a huge wheel of names with more than forty localities and formations on it. And we spin it every Saturday. And wherever it lands on, we take like two weeks to like research set locality or formation, and then within one sitting, sometimes two when it takes a little bit longer.

I do like like one piece showing like a panorama of set locality as it might have appeared when it was still a living, breathing ecosystem.

speaker-1 (53:57.71)
Cool. Well that sounds great. Especially if you’re an artist.

speaker-0 (54:02.008)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-2 (54:03.318)
It’s it’s a lot of fun. And I have to thank at this point like all all friends and and colleagues that that help with that. Like just keeping the like community running, but also helping with research research and stuff, because I usually don’t have the time to do that all myself, but there is very passionate friends that that some sometimes like very forcefully are like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m I’m I’m looking into that. Go go go on.

speaker-1 (54:30.446)
It’s good. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. It was great to catch up.

speaker-0 (54:31.916)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (54:40.448)
It was a pleasure.

speaker-0 (54:42.616)
Thanks again, Yoshua, for taking your time to talk to us and explain all about.

speaker-1 (54:49.14)
art and streaming your art and your role in Netflix’s The Dinosaurus. Yeah, it’s always a pleasure to talk. So thank you.

speaker-0 (54:59.458)
And in just a moment we’ll get into our dinosaur of the day, but first one last break for our sponsors.

speaker-1 (56:07.534)
And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Ookotokia, which was a request from Tyrant King via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you. Ookotokia was an ankylosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous and what’s now Montana in the US. It was found in the two medicine formation. It looked like a typical ankylosur. It was covered in armor, its body was low to the ground, it had that long tail with a club, a small head, it walked on all fours. It was large and heavy.

It’s estimated to grow up to sixteen feet or five meters long and weigh two point two short tons.

speaker-0 (56:40.494)
Compared to other ankylosaurs, I’d say that’s medium sized. We’re going on the family level of things. It’s way smaller than an ankylosaurus, for example.

speaker-1 (56:50.382)
Still heavy. The type and only species is O.O. Kotokia Horneri. It was named in 2013 by Paul Penkolsky. It was stored in the Museum of the Rockies for more than three decades, and then Penkolsky found it in the collections. The genus name means child of stone and refers to its body armor. And that name also honors the Blackfoot people. The fossils were found on their land.

So the name’s a combination of the Algonquin language spoken by the Blackfoot people and Latin. The species name, Hornerai, is in honor of Jack Horner who collected the type specimen. The holotype is a crushed but well-preserved skull, part of the shoulder blade, osteoderms, and armor on the neck, a large humerus or armbone, and other fragments. There were also six other specimens found that include parts of the skull, hips, arms, legs, shoulders, tail club.

And part of a cervical half ring. The skull of Ookotokia is relatively smooth compared to skulls of other ankylosaurs that lived around the same time. It had large eye sockets, and the back of the skull had some horn like protrusions. Mm-hmm. Things sticking out. It also had a large club at the end of the tail made of two big bone lumps. And maybe the club was for self defense, swinging at predators or rivals, or sexual selection. Ookotokia

speaker-0 (57:47.598)
Hey, not too bad.

speaker-1 (58:16.406)
Lived in an area that had a long, dry season and warm temperatures. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include Ovarapterosaurs, the Nodosaur Edmontonia, Ceratopsians such as Brachyceratops, Trodontids like Troodon, Dramaosaurus such as Dramaeosaurus and Bambiraptor, and tyrannosaurids like Albertosaurus, Dyspleosaurus, and Gorgosaurus. And some other animals that lived around the same time and place include turtles, lizards, and gastropods.

speaker-0 (58:42.894)
It’s pretty fun name. I could see it being part of a song like O Koto Gia. It’s a lot of syllables too. For it’s not that long of a word, but it’s like every two letters gets a syllable. Yeah, it’s a good one. There are a lot of Algonquin names in the northern Midwest. The origins are like a lot of city names and stuff, and they’re always pleasant.

speaker-1 (58:50.368)
It is, it is.

speaker-1 (58:55.95)
It sounds nice.

speaker-1 (59:07.286)
And our fun fact is that T-Rex is now the most valuable dinosaur fossil. Again, a dethroned stegosaurus. So there was a T-Rex. Maybe you heard about this because it was all over the news. It sold at auction in July for 50.1 million US dollars. It was estimated to sell for like twenty to thirty million, so it went way higher than expected. Just for context, Apex the Stegosaurus sold for forty-four point six million US dollars in twenty twenty four. So

couple of years earlier.

speaker-0 (59:37.954)
The previous record holder and the the couple before that were both T Rex. I think maybe the most expensive T Rex was that one that ended up in Abu Dhabi. It was like thirty two million. Yeah, was that Stan? Yeah.

speaker-1 (59:49.39)
Stan. Stan. So this T-Rex was found in South Dakota, lived more than 67 million years ago, and it’s nicknamed Gus after the late Gary Gus Licking, a cattle rancher whose land it was found on. It took three years to excavate, or three field seasons to excavate Gus. They finished getting gus out of the ground in 2023. Then it took another three years to reconstruct the T-Rex, and it’s one of the largest T-Rex found.

It’s about twelve and a half feet or three point eight meters tall. It’s about thirty eight feet long. Its skull is about fifty four inches long. Yeah. And the skull’s too large and heavy to be mounted on the skeleton, so they mounted it with a reproduction of the skull.

speaker-0 (01:00:26.606)
That’s big.

speaker-0 (01:00:33.538)
Yeah, that’s pretty standard. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (01:00:35.916)
Now Gus is about sixty one percent complete by bone count. It had thirty out of thirty two belly ribs or gastralia, which is pretty good, and a hundred and eighty three fossil bone elements.

speaker-0 (01:00:47.35)
This makes me guess that some of the bigger bones were missing. Cause if they have the bigger bone, they’ll do the completeness based on the volume of the bone and be like, Yeah, it’s missing the thirty whatever gastralia, but those barely count because they’re so small. But in this case, since they’re counting up all the gastralia, I feel like they must have been missing some of the big stuff.

speaker-1 (01:01:07.32)
I didn’t see any illustrations or anything, so I don’t know which bones they are, but I think the gastralia was highlighted because we don’t find it that often. Yeah. It’s possible Gus fought other T Rex because there’s a bite mark on top of its skull. There’s also broken ribs and other signs of injuries. And Gus was sold over the phone. There was a I think a just a few minutes bidding war and then it went for fifty million US dollars. So a lot of paleontologists in museums are not happy because, you know.

speaker-0 (01:01:16.462)
For sure.

speaker-1 (01:01:37.122)
Gus can’t be studied now, and they were priced out because the bidding started at nineteen million US dollars, and then of course went way above that.

speaker-0 (01:01:45.998)
You didn’t say who bought it, is it an anonymous buyer, I assume?

speaker-1 (01:01:49.986)
We don’t know. It was somebody bought it over the phone.

speaker-0 (01:01:53.142)
Okay. So sounds anonymous then. I mean, every once in a while, actually not even that infrequently, these do end up in museums, whether they’re purely donated or there’s some sort of agreement where they’re on display, whether or not, like you said, anybody’s gonna research it under those conditions is sort of a separate question. But hopefully it ends up in some public display of one sort or another and not just in somebody’s home. Yeah. I guess time will tell.

speaker-1 (01:02:22.264)
Yeah, we’ll see. I’m sure we’ll hear about it if that’s the case. Hopefully. And that wraps up this episode of I know Dino. Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned in our next episode of I know Dino in a couple weeks. We’re gonna be talking about so many new sauropods. I think I counted eight we need to cover at least. Yeah. So many new dinosaurs to catch up on.

speaker-0 (01:02:41.335)
my That is a lot of sauropods.

Well certainly not me.

speaker-2 (01:02:48.782)
Okay.

speaker-1 (01:02:48.856)
Who? Who would say that?

speaker-1 (01:02:53.678)
And if you’re looking for more paleo goodness in the meantime, in between our episodes of Ino Dino, we’ll be having our next Ino Paleo episode, number forty two. We’re gonna be celebrating the number forty two in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, partly by talking about forty two fish, yes.

speaker-0 (01:03:19.916)
That’s a lot of fish. Yeah. And not just forty two like fish, forty two different species of fish.

speaker-1 (01:03:25.952)
Yes. Well genera.

speaker-0 (01:03:28.106)
That’s even more.

speaker-1 (01:03:29.71)
Yeah, so if you want to hear that episode or other bonus content, head over to patreon.com slash inodino. Thanks again, and until next time.

(Approximate times)

• 00:00 Introduction to Dinosaur Growth and Size Estimates
• 03:06 Discovery of Dasosaurus in Brazil
• 07:48 Largest Dinosaurs and Their Size Estimates
• 14:39 Models and Variability in Dinosaur Growth
• 28:41 Early Growth Strategies of Archosauromorphs
• 31:32 Scale Growth and Function in Dinosaurs
• 34:38 Parental Care in Dinosaur Reproduction
• 39:14 New Findings on Tyrannosaurus Rex Growth
• 46:28 Growth in Sauropodomorphs and Titanosaurs
• 55:42 Growth and Diet Changes in Sauropods
• 01:03:24 Dinosaur of the Day: Tomba Titanis
• 01:05:42 Why Birds Lay Large Eggs and Brain Size
• 01:08:00 Implications of Brain Size on Dinosaur Reproduction

Summary 

This episode explores dinosaur growth, size, and parental care, featuring recent discoveries and research on various dinosaur species and their development patterns. 

Takeaways

• Dinosaur growth and size estimates 
• Bone histology and growth rings 
• Impact of climate on dinosaur size 
• Parental care strategies in dinosaurs 
• New fossil discoveries and their implications 
• Growth rates of tyrannosaurs and sauropods 
• Bone remodeling and soft tissue estimates 
• Sexual dimorphism and growth variation 
• Egg size and brain size correlation sound bites

Keywords

dinosaurs, growth, size, parental care, sauropods, theropods, paleontology, fossil record, dinosaur evolution 

Hello and welcome to I know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I’m Garrett And I’m Sabrina. and today in our five hundred and seventy-first episode

speaker-1 (00:37.708)
We’re talking all about dinosaur growth. plus a new titanosaurform. They sure did. Yeah, specifically Dassosaurus, which got pretty large. It lived in what’s now Brazil. And yeah, the rest of the episode is dedicated to dinosaur growth, which includes news about Tyrannosaurus hatchlings, how there were so many, and they were pretty small, how tyrannosaurus took 40 years to reach full size. Some dinosaurs grew really fast, some were incredibly slow.

speaker-0 (00:42.562)
They grew a lot.

speaker-1 (01:07.02)
And we talk about how growth affects how much dinosaurs need parental care. We also have a listener question about how sauropod diets changed as they grew, and a whole lot more. Plus, of course, our dinosaur of the day, Tamba Titanis, which was a titanosaur form from Japan. And our fun fact, which is that birds may lay large eggs because of their brain sizes, because it turns out growth is connected to so many things. Yes.

speaker-0 (01:33.536)
Interesting. But before we get into all that, as always, we’d like to thank some of our patrons and we have ten new patrons to thank this week. We have Joseph, Maggie, Julia and Piney, Alicia, Spino Dino, Brad, Gregol Sower, Tectonic Stego, Aloys, and Ben.

speaker-1 (01:40.364)
Amazing.

speaker-1 (01:55.022)
Thank you so much for joining and being part of our community, being a dino it all.

speaker-0 (02:00.098)
Yeah, we have at least one more new patron to thank next week, maybe more. Who knows what’ll happen by then. Yes. And some people I think might have joined to get the exclusive nano tyrannus card and sticker in our backer kit campaign, which I believe we’re doing a little bit of a encore of for one month. We’re not going for stretch goals anymore, but if you want to get the Shri Rapac that was unlocked.

As well as the other five or six cards. If you’re a patron, you can do that at inodino.com slash cards. And thank you to all of our patrons.

speaker-1 (02:36.654)
Thank you, yes, for our Patreon and for the backer kid support. It’s really cool that we were able to bring these dinosaur trading cards to life. All right. So jumping in, I’m going to start with the new dinosaur, the new Titanosaurform dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocontinensis. And I want to thank Tito Aureliano, who’s one of the co-authors, for sharing this one with us. This was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology by Elvermeyer and others.

And it was a fairly large sauropod. It walked on all fours. It had a long neck, a long tail, the small head. Well, it was more like medium to large in size. It’s estimated to be about sixty six feet or twenty meters long.

speaker-0 (03:18.51)
That is big, but not that big for a titanosaur or I guess I should say titanosaur form.

speaker-1 (03:23.928)
Yes. It does look similar to another Titanosaur form, Garumba Titan. That one lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Spain. This one, Dassosaurus, lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now northeastern Brazil in Maranjao. It was found in the Itapacuru Formation. And some other animals found there include the Rhubaki saurid sauropod, Amazonsaurus, indeterminate theropods of spinosaurs and carcarodontosaurs.

As well crocodilomorphs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, turtles, and fish. So lived in this warm, semi-arid climate that had seasons.

speaker-0 (04:00.174)
So probably pretty similar to what Spain was like back then, because back in the early Cretaceous, Africa and South America were still connected, and Europe was always even back then close to Africa. Mm-hmm. So it wouldn’t have been too far away. So I guess it’s not too surprising that they’re similar.

speaker-1 (04:17.934)
Yeah, and Dacesaurus is part of Samphospondyli. That’s a clade of titanosauriform sauropods, so not Titanosaurs, but Titanosauroforms that lived in the late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous. They’ve been found on all continents and they have at least fifteen tailbones.

speaker-0 (04:34.542)
Fifteen is very low. Yeah.

speaker-1 (04:37.176)
Yeah. But Titanosaurs I think and Titanosaur forms tend to have shorter tails.

speaker-0 (04:42.095)
you’re right. Yeah, ’cause there a lot of are more of like a brachiosaurus type body plan with a big neck but not so much on the tail. Yeah.

speaker-1 (04:49.44)
Yeah, not like Diplodocus that has very long tail. So Dacosaurus has a mix of features that we see in early diverging sauropods as well as later titanosaurs. So earlier and later sauropods, such as the growth pattern that you see in its bones, how fast certain bones remodel. See, we we are talking about growth. Titanosaurs have the highest known rates of bone recycling, where they replace and repair their bone. It’s also known as bone remodeling.

The fossils of Dastosaurus were found on a slope that was about 26 feet or 8 meters high. They’re found in 2021 during construction of a railway, and they’re more than 100 million years old, early Cretaceous. It’s known as the dinosaur of Davinoopolis, before it was officially named, because that’s the municipality in the state of Brazil where it was found. The fossils found include ribs, parts of the hands and feet, parts of the arms, parts of the legs, parts of the hips, and at least 10 tailbones.

speaker-0 (05:46.222)
Pretty good. Yeah. No head though.

speaker-1 (05:47.778)
Head. That’s okay. We’ll take what we can get. The name Dasusaurus means forest lizard. It refers to where the fossils were found, which is an area that has most of the Amazon rainforest. And the species name Tocantinensis is after Tocantins, which is a major South American river and the name of the administrative region of the state where the fossils were found, near the eastern banks for the Tocantins River.

Now when talking about dinosaur growth, there’s two terms that come up a lot. The first is lines of arrested growth or lags, and those are the tree like ring bands that you see in the bones when you slice them open or slice off pieces.

speaker-0 (06:29.538)
Slice it really thin pieces. Yes. Known as histology.

speaker-1 (06:33.72)
Yeah, and they help you estimate the age of the animal because they leave a mark when growth slows down or pauses. And often that happens when there’s fewer resources, like in winter. So you can estimate all right, three lags, that’s at least three winters it’s been through. Mm-hmm. The other term that comes up a lot is bone remodeling, which we already talked a little bit about with the new titanosaur form. And it’s basically you’re replacing old and damaged bone with new bone.

And it helps to keep bones strong and repair micro fractures.

speaker-0 (07:05.218)
Yeah, it also just happens as animals age because those tiny little baby bones need to grow up into bigger bones and the structure is a little bit different. So they get remodeled as the animal gets bigger and heavier.

speaker-1 (07:18.67)
Yeah, it also happens when even when the animal is small and putting a lot of stress on the bones, like walking around. So growth ends when you reach your adult size, but just how big could dinosaurs get? We’ll do a quick recap because we had an episode 486 called How Dinosaurs Got So Big. And I thought it’d be fun to talk about the biggest ones. Mm-hmm. So the longest, heaviest, and overall largest dinosaurs were, of course, the sauropods. The biggest one of all time may have been

Mara Punisaurus, originally thought to be Amphoselius. And that one, the estimates range all the way up to like a hundred and ninety feet or fifty eight meters long and weighing a hundred and fifty metric tons or a hundred and seventy short tons. We get into more details in the episode, but I just wanted to give you the biggest estimate because that’s impressive.

speaker-0 (08:06.336)
Yeah, but that’s not really the size we thought it was anymore. Yeah. Those were sort of the outlandish early estimates.

speaker-1 (08:14.904)
That’s true. And then it it might not have even been the heaviest dinosaur because there’s Bruhathkyosaurus, which is there’s one estimate from twenty twenty three that said it could get up to a hundred and ninety tons, which would be crazy.

speaker-0 (08:31.234)
Yeah, again that’s the that’s the very upper edge of the estimate, like the farthest error bar out.

speaker-1 (08:37.665)
Yeah. And then of course, sauropods aren’t the only dinosaurs that got big, although they got the biggest. There were some large theropods like Spinosaurus. One was estimated to be up to fifty nine feet or eighteen meters long, which is a good size.

speaker-0 (08:54.316)
Very long for a theropod, that’s for sure. Yeah.

speaker-1 (08:57.282)
And then of course Tyrannosaurus could get pretty long. The largest estimates are for up to 40 feet or over 12 meters long. You get into ornithopods, we’ve got Shantungosaurus. That’s a large saurolophine hadrosaur or duckbill, but that didn’t have a crest. And that one was estimated to be up to 54 feet or over 16 meters long.

speaker-0 (09:20.184)
Oof. Yeah, and they were pretty bulky too.

speaker-1 (09:23.16)
Yeah. And it could weigh up to sixteen metric tons or eighteen short tons. So we know about some of these really big dinosaurs. It’s unlikely though that we’ll know how large the biggest of the biggest got. Just don’t know what we don’t know. But for some comparisons, the biggest mammal is the blue whale. That’s about ninety eight feet or thirty meters long. So smaller than some of the sauropod estimates.

It weighs a lot, of course, a hundred and sixty tons or a hundred and forty five metric tons.

speaker-0 (09:53.678)
Probably heavier than any of those dinosaurs. Some of those really upper estimates were above a hundred and fifty tons. Yeah. But really, usually when we’re talking about sauropods, the weight estimate is more in the like high tens of tons, you know, like sixty, maybe eighty tons. Yes. I don’t think there are any where people are confident that they were over a hundred tons.

speaker-1 (10:18.434)
Yeah. But they were still really heavy compared to like one of the largest land mammals that we know about is this giant hornless rhino that’s estimated to be sixteen and a half tons. Fifteen metric tons, which is just so much smaller than some of these dinosaurs.

speaker-0 (10:34.801)
yeah, that paracerathurium. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (10:37.774)
So how is it that dinosaurs could get so large? Well, there’s a few factors probably. They laid eggs, so they could start out pretty small as hatchlings and then grow. But mammals, we grow our babies in our bodies, so that puts some size limitations on mammals, slash us. And souriskians, which include theropods and sauropods, they had those bird-like respiratory systems, so they had the lighter bones, the air sacs to stay light.

speaker-0 (10:54.68)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (11:04.258)
They efficiently inhaled oxygen. They had those bird-like lungs, so they could continuously take in the oxygen. And this helped, well, this allowed them to get big. And why did they have these things? Well, it could have been so they could be better at eating more food or a defense mechanism. Was it really an advantage to get so big? Because big animals tend to go extinct during major extinction events. And of course the non-avian dinosaurs did, but it probably was an advantage for a while.

speaker-0 (11:29.154)
Yeah, it’s really a fascinating question of why they got so big, because we don’t really know for sure. I think the best guesses are a combination of things. They were able to do it because they had that amazing respiratory system. Certainly the super long neck probably wouldn’t be possible without that breathing system and the sauropods. Yeah. And also with the long neck, like you were saying, the lightened bones allows them to get so big in terms of length.

But in terms of mass, there are some very heavy things today, but they’re mostly in the water. And we don’t know for sure why there were these eighty ton animals on land back then and there aren’t now. Yeah. It could be that it was just the a sort of a slow build.

And there was a bit of an arms race between the meat eating and the herbivorous dinosaurs. And it just happened to work out that way for a while. And we saw it again at other times in the past too. But we just don’t happen to have anything quite so big right now from a c a combination of factors.

speaker-1 (12:37.038)
You do want to be cautious though when it comes to estimating dinosaur sizes. Like you were saying, Garrett, we have these huge estimates of some sauropods, but that’s on the upper end. We talked about this in episode 513, too, titled Updates on Dinosaur Growth and Development. Scientists had cautioned how to estimate the sizes and body shapes of extinct animals. And it all comes down to being careful what animals you compare it to because

Since we only know incomplete fossils in many cases of the extinct animals, it’s useful to compare them to modern animals when you’re reconstructing the bodies, but modern animals aren’t an exact parallel.

speaker-0 (13:17.72)
Yeah, because the best thing you can compare it to is basically a bird. They have the most similar skeletons and breathing systems and everything, but most birds aren’t hyper carnivorous, you know, apex predators running around on two or four legs. Yeah. Yeah. They’re usually flying and that has a totally different set of adaptations.

speaker-1 (13:40.268)
And the authors had mentioned there seems to be a tendency to overestimate size because sometimes that just gets people more interested when we talk about look how giant this animal was.

speaker-0 (13:49.678)
Yeah. There’s almost always the earliest papers have the highest weight estimates. And then later on when other people look at it, they’re like, wait a second. Yeah. And also compare it a little more closely to relatives rather than just starting from, Look how big this leg is. Maybe it could have had this much meat around it.

speaker-1 (13:59.021)
Winnow it down.

speaker-1 (14:09.176)
Yeah. So building on that, we have our next new news item, which was published in Cretaceous Research by Evan Thomas Saida. And that’s about how when estimating how dinosaurs grew, some models may be missing some data points. So some recent dinosaur growth models that were saying maybe underfit. That means the model’s too simple and it has some biases or errors. They may not emphasize enough variation, whether that’s based on sex or species.

Now we do know it’s hard to study how dinosaurs grew, especially because there’s a lack of fossils. The fossil record is famously incomplete. And size is influenced by a lot of factors: nutrition, sexual variation, genetic variation, just to name a few. Some case studies that the author mentioned, one that examined Diplodocus growth, which we talked about way back in episode 509. They said that study didn’t account for variability in the animals. So

The author applied a different growth model and found that three different growth patterns could fit the Diplodocus specimens that were involved. And not all were realistic. There was one that showed exponential growth. So it’s like obviously it’s not exponentially growing. But they found that the hypothesis that Diplodocus halorum grew more slowly over longer periods than another species, an unnamed species of Diplodocus, didn’t work based on the evidence used. They had six specimens as part of the evidence, five of

This unnamed species, and then one of Diplodicus halorum. Another example they cited is the study of tyrannosaur growth. They said that that particular study didn’t account for variability in the animals, intraspecific variation in adult body mass of T Rex, for example, just different adult T Rex could have some variation. And also, there was a big question there of how fast does T-Rex grow in early life?

speaker-0 (16:03.18)
Yeah, ’cause we just don’t have many fossils from early life.

speaker-1 (16:06.554)
Although we have a few new ones now, but I’ll get into that in a little bit. And then there’s the sexual dimorphism aspect. So in some animals, like turtles, females are larger than males, so they can lay more eggs, or as the author put it, maximize reproductive output. But with dinosaurs, eggs were often much smaller compared to the adults. So it’s unlikely that, say, titanosaur females needed to be much larger than males to lay lots of eggs.

speaker-0 (16:30.268)
interesting. I never knew that connection between size and egg laying because we often talk about how a lot of times female birds are bigger than male birds. But I didn’t think about, yeah, they have to have eggs. Like that kiwi bird that has an egg that’s like half the size of its body. It would be helpful to have a larger body in that case. Yeah.

speaker-1 (16:52.334)
I’d say. It’s also unlikely that there needed to be much larger female tyrannosaurs than males to allow them to hunt while gestating. That their metabolism while gestating the eggs would only be a fraction compared to, say, what a kiwi goes through. Speaking of Kiwis, it’s not quite half. It’s like they said around 20% of its body size. yeah. It’s still very long.

speaker-0 (17:14.574)
I was thinking the longest dimension is like half, you know, like the length of the egg versus the length of the kiwi bulk of their body.

speaker-1 (17:25.869)
Well, it’s possible that more male dinosaur species were larger than females of the same species too. We see this in lots of crocodilians and with some birds. But even in species with sexual dimorphisms, sex alone only explains a small amount of variation. There’s more differences based on environmental conditions.

speaker-0 (17:42.712)
Yeah, like we talk sometimes about how I think it’s Bergman’s rule that animals that are closer to the poles are bigger than animals closer to the equator. And you see it with things like bald eagles. The bald eagles that are up in Alaska and Canada are way bigger than the ones in Florida. Yeah. And it’s the same species. And, you know, even males and females both do that. So and like you were saying, also the amount of food that they get. And we’re talking about these animals over the span of millions of years. Yeah. So there could be

large changes in the environment, it it makes it more complicated, that’s for sure.

speaker-1 (18:16.93)
Yeah, so the bottom line for this paper is you should take into account the variation within a species as well as sexual dimorphism when you’re estimating growth, which can be hard to do.

speaker-0 (18:27.106)
Yeah, a lot of the overview sort of meta-analyses of dinosaur papers end up summarizing as like we overstate what we know and really we don’t know all that much.

speaker-1 (18:41.826)
Although you can extrapolate a lot.

speaker-0 (18:43.712)
You can. And it is useful to have estimated sizes that are using a consistent methodology. So even if we’re saying this titanosaur is ninety tons and this one’s sixty tons and you’re off, hopefully you’re off in a way that the sixty ton one is still two thirds the size of the ninety ton one and you still have a rough idea about how big these animals are. Yeah. Is useful for talking about them and describing them and things.

speaker-1 (19:09.55)
So going the other way, there is a paper by Matthew Dempsey and others published in Biological Reviews, Open Access, that basically says the dinosaurs were likely thicker and heavier than previously estimated. Lots of debate in science. Mm-hmm. So for this paper, they looked at relationships between the dimensions of living soropsid skeletons and the soft tissues around them. So they’re looking at the volume of soft tissues in animals.

speaker-0 (19:22.68)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (19:38.656)
And that helps estimate what that looks like in dinosaurs. And they combine their models with bird and reptile variables, the you know, two closest living relatives. So body mass helps us learn about geography, ecology, form, function, physiology of an animal. So a lot of things, and mass affects behavior too, as well as how an animal moves. For this study, they used three models and three D scans, and then they compared body masses with previous methods. They estimated the body dimensions of.

Fifty-two dinosaurs. It included most major clades and body plans. And they found that dinosaurs had a lot of soft tissue and more mass. They’re not so shrink-wrapped, which is something we’ve talked about before.

speaker-0 (20:20.184)
Yeah. Sometimes there’s a tendency when you draw a dinosaur and you look at the skull with all of its little divots and holes, finestrae and everything, to bring all of those through in your drawing, because that’s what we know about the animal is what its skull looks like in a lot of cases. But later research showed that well, a lot of these animals do have these sort of holes in their skull, but you don’t necessarily see them when they’re alive. There is the soft tissue covering it. And the same is true about the big cubic bones.

boot that they have at the bottom of their hips that wasn’t necessarily super clearly defined, as well as the bones and their arms and their legs. So that shrink wrap effect is kind of an easy place to start when you’re looking at a skeleton because you’re bringing out the details of the skeleton. But when you look at real animals, they tend to have a lot more soft tissue muscles and bone and cartilage and fat and all that.

speaker-1 (21:14.988)
Yeah. So for their study, they had body mass estimates range from less than two hundred grams for the aviolin Achiatornornis to over sixty metric tons for the sauropod patagotitan. Such a wide variety. Mm-hmm. So yeah, there’s a lot of variation and subjectivity when it comes to estimating a dinosaur’s mass.

speaker-0 (21:35.79)
That is interesting that even with a more robust model, more robust dinosaurs, the Patagotitan was still only in the sixty ton range because like you were talking about earlier, some of these titanosaurs being over a hundred tons potentially. And this is a newer estimate, but it’s still not way out there. Right.

speaker-1 (21:58.382)
There was some debate on the dinosaur mailing group. Keep wanting to say dinosaur mailing list. It’s group dinosaur group, yeah. And there was debate that some dinosaurs would be leaner or have lower body fat, because we see this in some rhinos. They’re healthy, but you can see their ribs for some of them, for example. So it just depends on what models and comparisons you use. Yeah. Some things to consider, the authors mentioned, or long neural spines, is the

speaker-0 (22:05.035)
I think it’s just dinosaur group right.

speaker-1 (22:28.59)
Does that mean it had a sail or a hump? Because that could change your mass estimate, like with Acrocanthosaurus. Also osteoderms and body armor. Horns and frills, maybe they weren’t that dense. And then the long necks of sauropods, it’s a much bigger proportion of their total body mass compared to other dinosaurs. And changes in their neck posture could change their center of mass more than in other animals. Theropods also seem to have slender limbs for their mass, and ornithiscans have seemingly robust limbs for their mass.

speaker-0 (22:57.238)
Yeah. And that is generally how you see them depicted as the theropods like a little bit leaner, long legs. ‘Cause that’s what you see in animals that are hunting usually, whereas the herbivorous ones are often a little bit chunkier. They’re a little more sturdy. Yeah. ‘Cause they’re not usually in these larger animals cases, not outrunning predators. It’s more about being big and bulky and able to, you know.

speaker-1 (23:22.734)
Look at me, I’m too hard to take down.

speaker-0 (23:24.92)
Yeah. And also just being able to like stand your ground successfully. Yeah.

speaker-1 (23:30.67)
So another interesting question about dinosaur growth is did climate affect how big they got? Or how much did it affect their body size evolution? And that’s hard to say, is the conclusion of this paper by Lauren Wilson and others. This was published in Paleontology and also open access. So we’ll have a link in our show notes. You can check it out for yourself.

speaker-0 (23:49.122)
Yeah. People used to always say when we were kids, dinosaurs were so big in the Mesozoic ’cause it was so warm. And when it’s warm, you can get huge and there was more oxygen. So the more oxygen to breathe made them much larger. But then you see things like how there was the ice age, recent ice age in the Pleistocene, and we had huge animals. Yeah. Because cold can be good for getting really big too, because it actually helps you be more efficient with controlling your body temperature. Yeah. And sometimes getting really big.

In a hot environment can be really difficult because you overheat. So it’s complicated.

speaker-1 (24:25.492)
And apparently birds and mammals often get smaller with anthropogenic global warming. That’s warming caused by humans. As for dinosaurs, after the Jenkins event, this is the Torshian Oceanic Anoxic event in the Jurassic, about a hundred and eighty-three million years ago, there were a lot of volcanic eruptions, the earth heat up and then the oceans lost oxygen. So wasn’t great for everybody, I imagine. Mm-hmm.

So after that happened, sauropods moved to warmer and drier environments, and theropods moved to cooler, wetter climates. Ornithiscans had a similar pattern, but it happened way later in the late Cretaceous, about 94 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, well, after the Cretaceous thermal maximum. And that was a time of extreme heat. So how much was this change in climate and moving to the different or preferred climates related to the dinosaurs getting bigger? Well, they collected

paleogeographic data for 339 dinosaur species, basically where in the world they were, and femoral circumferences. That’s a proxy for body mass by looking at their thigh bones.

speaker-0 (25:33.292)
Yeah, bigger legs mean more massive animal, usually. Yeah.

speaker-1 (25:38.594)
They found no clear effect of climate on the evolution of sauropod body size. Same with theropods and ornithiscans. Wow. But they did find with ornithiscans a quote, significant association between ancestral increases in size and decreases in local paleo temperature along ornithiscan branches after the Jenkins event. End quote. So it may be that moving to cooler climates may have driven the rate or amount of change in body size along their lineages, but not.

quote their interspecific variation in size at any given time.

speaker-0 (26:10.794)
Okay. So on a a very long time scale, the fact that they moved to cooler places might have led to l larger species, but within a species you didn’t have variations based on temperature. Yeah.

speaker-1 (26:27.086)
There’s some things to consider, the authors said, like there’s some preservation biases. Some areas we’ve collected more fossils than others. They were just favored areas. Sometimes we only know a partial specimen for a dinosaur, so that’s really hard to estimate a body mass. Also, some dinosaurs changed a lot in size as they grew up, and we don’t know the ontogeny for every dinosaur. We don’t know exactly how it grew. And we don’t know the maximum body size, as we mentioned before. The largest known

Triassic theropods that we know from individuals, they were all still growing rapidly, for example. So we don’t even know how big they got. So the conclusion is that the sample size really affects whether or not you can use these macroevolutionary patterns. And we just need even more data and study it more, more body-sized data sets and phylogenies to draw better conclusions. So I think they haven’t ruled it out. It’s just hard to say definitively.

speaker-0 (27:17.752)
That climate didn’t affect body size. They haven’t ruled that out.

speaker-1 (27:21.526)
Yeah, I think so. That was the impression I got.

speaker-0 (27:23.884)
Yeah. I mean, certainly when you said that there isn’t s clear evidence of climate affecting sauropods or theropods or ornithiscids. Yeah. That makes sense. And also when you look at the family tree of, say, sauropods, you do have a group that got really big at the end of the Jurassic. But then you have groups when it was pretty hot in the Cretaceous that were getting smaller. Yeah. And some of those things were due to being on islands and having less resources available, but some of them seem to be kind of

Arbitrary. Like why was that one small? There was just a niche that opened up.

speaker-1 (27:57.602)
And sometimes on islands you had small sauropods and your regular medium large sauropods.

speaker-0 (28:03.142)
Yeah, exactly. It’s all about like what niche that animal could evolve into, which is a lot more complicated than just the temperature.

speaker-1 (28:11.342)
But I’m sure there’s a lot of factors that go into it. So next up, there was a paper by Kathleen Dolman and others published in iScience that found that scans of early Triassic Archosauromorph fossils show that this group, and that group includes dinosaurs, had a variety of growth strategies from almost the beginning. So Archosauromorphs started in the early Triassic. This is about 252 million years ago. Today they’re birds and crocodilians, so they’re still around. And birds grow fast, but crocodilians grow slow.

It turns out that in the early Triassic, Archosauromorphs were already had different growth rates. Some were fast, some were slow. And that means that fast growth is not a plesiomorphic trait or an ancestral trait in Archisoromorphs. It’s not like they were all growing fast and then eventually the crocodilians got slower. The evolution of growth is important to know because growth strategies are linked to things like adult size, immune resilience, maturation, and basal metabolic rates.

Now, bone tissue types can show different growth rates. For example, if you see disorganized woven fiber bone, that’s associated with fast growth, rapid growth. But if you see regular lamellar bone, that shows slower growth. That’s thin alternating layers or plate-like sheets in the bones. So with that in mind, for this study, they looked at nine limb bones, arm and leg bones, and did micro CT scans. These bones are from South Africa, the Karo Basin, and there’s

Enough differences in these bones that they said there’s at least nine distinct taxa here, but there’s not enough detail in the bones to confidently assign them. They just know there’s enough variation in the bone tissue to show they’re different. And for context, there’s fewer than 20 named Archosauromorph taxa from the early Triassic. So this adds a lot. They said they need to study more fossils though to see that broader evolutionary patterns.

speaker-0 (30:00.587)
Interesting.

speaker-0 (30:05.422)
Yeah, that is a very interesting. We’ve talked before about how sometimes you have a site and there are a bunch of footprints and you can say, okay, we know there were theropods here, we know there were sauropods here, but we haven’t actually found any of their fossils yet. And sometimes it expands the known range of them or the known time period when a group of dinosaurs was around, but you can’t nail it down to a species. I don’t remember ever seeing taking basically a bone fragment.

looking at it under a microscope and saying like, this bone has a different structure from that bone and that bone and that bone and that bone and therefore we can tell they’re all different species. It’s a a very interesting approach.

speaker-1 (30:44.77)
Yeah, I mean we talk all the time about different tools, different techniques that come out in paleontology or sometimes other science other studies, and you bring it into paleontology and then all of a sudden you have a completely different view of a bone that people dug up hundred, two hundred years ago.

speaker-0 (31:03.084)
Yeah, and wasn’t useful for a long time. Yeah.

speaker-1 (31:06.092)
Now, how scales grew as dinosaurs grew can also give us some information on how they lived. That’s what this next paper by Nathan James Enriquez and others is about. This was published in Journal of Anatomy, Open Access. Now, scales have a lot of functions. They can help with moving, visual signaling, protection against bacteria or parasites, as well as protection against UV rays and physical damage, and they can help with preventing desiccation or drying out.

speaker-0 (31:32.494)
That’s funny because a lot of times people reference having something scaly about skin, meaning it’s dried out. But if you had scales you wouldn’t have dried out in the first place, maybe.

speaker-1 (31:42.424)
Yeah, maybe. So the shape and the size of the scale are related to their function. Some animals shift ecological niches as they grow up. So these authors were looking at do their scales change too? Because scales may look different in juveniles and adults, and they might have different functions. Like maybe sometimes they’re for attracting mates. So you the scales change when you’re older. Mm-hmm. They studied the scale growth in the Ceratopsid Casmosaurus and the Hadrosaurid prosperoliphus.

And that’s because we know their skin for different ages. Wow. Yeah. And they compared how the scales looked in juveniles and adults. The scale shape stayed pretty much the same in both, although the Casmosaurus scales got wider as it grew up. So it doesn’t seem like there’s anything mating related. Size was, as they put it, largely non adaptive. It just doesn’t seem that the scales were for display to attract mates. They found reticulate scales on Casmosaurus. That’s the first ones found for a ceratopsid.

It was on the right foot of one. These are small scales. And being on the foot, it’s in quote reticulate scales, because it’s not exactly the same as the ones we see on birds. Pro Serolifus has a quote novel type of basement scale. Those are scales that are small, not overlapping, and they surround and connect larger scales.

speaker-0 (33:00.01)
Yeah. I think of as more they call base mint scales, but I feel like you could just call base scales. Yeah. ‘Cause they’re sort of like the default scale that’s around that don’t really stand out.

speaker-1 (33:10.542)
I think I’ve heard both terms. So instead of being rounded or polygonal like in reptiles, they make this irregular scale outlines with protrusions that can be sharp or angular or blunt and rounded. So things are sticking out. We see this in Seroliphus too. It’s possible that the frills and crests of adult ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were also covered by scales, which would be interesting, especially if they got these protrusions. So they compared them to eight modern reptiles.

Some crocodilians, skinks, and snakes. And it seems that the general scale shape is likely species-specific and consistent as they grow up.

speaker-0 (33:48.31)
Okay, so a little bit of species recognition. One of those details that is lost for almost every species, what their scales looked like. And we’ll get into more dinosaur growth stories in just a moment, but first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

speaker-1 (33:50.669)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (34:08.141)
So we’ve talked a bit about different ways that growth affects, I guess, lifestyles. This next bit is about how growth affects parental care. And I’ll just start with a quick recap. In our last episode, episode 570, we talked about Tom Holtz Jr.’s paper, Bringing Up Baby, where he basically said dinosaurs were like latchkey kids and mammal parents are or were more like helicopter parents. Because

The dinosaurs in the Mesozoic seem to kind of be more independent, whereas with mammals, we tend to rear our young for a longer period of time. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (34:50.222)
I mean you kinda have to if they’re drinking milk. Not a lot of options. But dinosaurs could go either way.

speaker-1 (34:55.244)
Yeah. And in the case of dinosaurs, it’s even more interesting because sometimes some dinosaurs filled a totally different niche as a baby or a juvenile compared to the adult. But then with mammals, because you’ve got the babies or the young with the adults, they kind of they’re doing the same things, eating the same things, living in the same places.

speaker-0 (35:16.184)
Yeah, ’cause they can basically stay with their parent until they’re ready to do the thing the parent is doing. Yeah. They don’t have to figure out their own solution when they’re too small or not skilled enough to get whatever food that the adults might be eating.

speaker-1 (35:31.246)
Exactly. So breaking that down a little bit more, I’m gonna start with theropods, specifically tyrannosaurs. So tyrannosaur hatchlings may have left their nest shortly after hatching and hunted. This was published by Nicholas Longrich and others in biology. It’s open access. You might have heard about this one. It was kind of big news when it first came out, because it was about tyrannosaurus babies. Mm-hmm. Now young dinosaurs and eggs are rare.

And we don’t know much about the early life of tyrannosaurs. In this case, they studied hatchlings of both Tyrannosaurus Rex and Gorgosaurus. All these hatchlings were under one year old. They were all fragments found in drawers with porous bones. That’s what shows that they’re from young dinosaurs. The largest one weighed five and a half pounds or two and a half kilograms, which is less than point one percent of the adult mass.

speaker-0 (36:23.147)
Yeah, ’cause you’re talking about l more like five tons versus five pounds.

speaker-1 (36:27.808)
And they may have been even smaller when they first hatched, more like 3.7 pounds or 1.7 kilograms. Yeah. So they CT scanned the specimens. There’s bones and teeth. Tyrannosaurs had relatively small hatchlings, it turns out, compared to modern birds. And this suggests that they laid a lot of eggs and provided relatively little care for hatchlings, which is interesting because we often talk about like, the tyrannosaurs gave the parental care. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (36:34.072)
Makes sense, those are small eggs.

speaker-1 (36:57.592)
They estimated that there might have been twenty eggs in a small T Rex clutch, thirty with a large one, which is a lot, fifteen eggs in a Gorgosaurus clutch, still a lot. And they did have proportionally larger offspring than most reptiles, but they were relatively smaller than birds.

speaker-0 (37:13.192)
Interesting. The point one percent is actually on the bigger end for a reptile. I guess if you look at a baby sea turtle, it is tiny. It’s just like a few grams. So and but they put way more in a nest, like you were saying. Yeah.

speaker-1 (37:26.904)
So they saw some bone remodeling. It’s likely from when the tyrannos were moving around soon after hatching. We mentioned that it’s doing some repair and regrowth because of the stress from walking around. The bones remodel under stress. They get thicker and denser as the animal goes from not moving in the egg to hatching and moving around. Titanosaur hatchlings, bone density increased too around when they hatched and increased as they grew.

With these tyrannosaurs, the hatchling fossils looked a lot like adult fossils. And the teeth wear shows that they fed on relatively large vertebrates. Hmm. So the thinking is that tyrannosaurs, the reproductive strategy is likely somewhere in between primitive reptiles with limited parental care and advanced parental care seen in birds. It’s likely there was only one parent with dinosaurs, not two like with birds. You get one parent with crocodilians and many basil birds too. And tyrannosaurs didn’t seem to be stuck in the nest. They

Left soon after hatching and likely hunted.

speaker-0 (38:26.19)
Yeah, I guess if you have wear on the teeth that shows that they were chewing on bone. Something. Yeah. Or at least scraping up against bone occasionally, that means that it was probably wasn’t parents feeding them scraps of meat unless I guess they gave a scrap that had bone on it. Maybe it is so hard to figure these things out.

speaker-1 (38:41.198)
Hard to say.

But keeping with Tyrannosaurus, there was a recent paper that found it took Tyrannosaurus Rex 40 years to reach its full size. And this was published in Pier J, it’s open access by Hollywood. And 40 years is 15 years longer than previous estimates. Before, age 25 was considered adult size, and Tyrannosaurus Rex was considered to have a lifespan of only like 30-ish years, and full size being about eight tons. So

How did they come to this conclusion of 40 years? They found these previously hidden growth rings in the fossils. So they analyzed 17 tyrannosaur individuals, young juveniles to adults, the femora and tibiae, these are leg bones, and the smallest one was at least 10 years old when it died. So you’re looking at the lags, they used specialized lighting, circularly polarized and cross-polarized light, to study the thin slices.

speaker-0 (39:17.762)
Yeah, ’cause that’s a lot longer.

speaker-1 (39:43.052)
And they found growth rings that were difficult to detect using other methods, which means that there were more lags there than they previously thought.

speaker-0 (39:50.26)
Interesting, because circular polarized light is usually what they use. Maybe the cross polarized light. Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s just more of like a linear filter, but I guess that could make a difference. Or they were just looking closer. A lot of times you kind of see what you expect to see on these types of scans. So it makes sense that you might have only noticed the obvious ones if everybody is always pointing out the obvious ones. And it takes someone looking at it more closely to notice a few.

More faint lags near the center. Yeah.

speaker-1 (40:25.666)
Then they used statistical models to combine information from multiple specimens just to get a better idea of how T-Rex grew, to show its growth trajectory. And they found that T Rex grew at a steady pace over several decades, which would have helped with younger tyrannosaurs being in different niches as they grew up, because what they ate, how they lived and interacted with other species would have been different, especially it’s growing at this steady pace instead of a fast growth. Mm-hmm. There’s some limitations to the study.

They acknowledge, you know, there’s just not enough fossils, especially of young or small individuals and old and large ones. So this study is best suited for middle-sized, middle-aged tyrannosaurus wrecks.

speaker-0 (41:05.034)
Okay, so it might not have been purely linear all the way from hatching. Yeah. Maybe there was a period of faster growth for a little bit and then when they reached middle age ish, then they sort of leveled it out. Well, not leveled out, became more linear.

speaker-1 (41:19.906)
Yeah, and different pressures can also affect growth. A lack of resources would slow growth, for example. They found no strong link from living animals to support the idea that being full size is related to sexual maturity. For example, so many birds reach adult size so quickly before they’re sexually mature. And mammals apparently don’t have a consistent pattern, which is interesting. For this study, they also looked at Jane and Petey, which are now known to be nanotyranous specimens.

And Jane and Petey had different growth patterns from Tyrannosaurus Rex. I’m guessing that they at least started the study before or when the nano paper came out. But anyway, it is more data supporting nano tyrannus being valid. And they did mention that paper in the addendum that they were pleased to learn that study complimented theirs.

speaker-0 (42:05.518)
Yeah, that was one of the thoughts about the growth rate of T Rex, because a lot of those papers looking at the growth rate of T Rex would put Jane and Petey and some of these other now nano tyrannous specimens on the plot. And it I think made more of a pronounced S shape curve as a result because you get these later, older individuals who are on the smaller scale.

speaker-1 (42:30.732)
Yeah, yeah, it would definitely change in how we see things. Just a quick note about parental care in dinosaurs. Birds grow fast, but apparently it’s accelerated because of parental care. Because they can reach their adult body size within the first year, usually. Four months, I think, was the fastest I heard about. A T Rex took longer. It’s unknown the degree of parental care they got. It’s entirely possible there was parental care, like we were just talking about with the hatchlings.

speaker-0 (42:45.71)
Yeah, sometimes just a couple of months.

speaker-1 (42:58.326)
And if so, that early period could have accelerated its growth, and then it wouldn’t be following the same growth model later in life. And middle-aged. Sticking with the tyrannosaurs, just wanna do a quick recap. This was from episode 513, updates on dinosaur growth and development, where we talked about Displetosaurus, how the skull bones helped show how the dinosaur changed or really didn’t change as it grew up. Because they looked at

speaker-0 (43:05.07)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (43:27.394)
different parts of the skull and they found that it looks the same as Dyspletosaurus grew up. It’s constrained throughout ontogeny, as the scientists put it. Which is helpful in some ways because then you can confidently identify no matter the age, whether a fossil is Dyspletosaurus or another dinosaur that lived around the same time and place, Gorgosaurus.

speaker-0 (43:48.054)
Yeah, that’s certainly helpful because we talk a lot about how a lot of times baby dinosaurs look like earlier, more basal forms of similar dinosaurs. And that can make it really hard to identify a baby dinosaur species. And a lot of times you end up naming them a different species, and then later on people realize that, it just looked different because it was a baby. Yeah. So if they look the same their whole life, that is much easier for paleontologists.

speaker-1 (44:13.068)
Yes. Easier to put together that growth series, too. Mm-hmm. Our last theropod we’re going talk about is Ceratosaurus and how it grew more than nine times faster than its fellow Ceratosaurs. This was published by Riley Sombathy and others in the Journal of Anatomy. It’s open access. And Ceratosaurus was known, it’s been known for a while for growing fast. It’s also the only theropod currently known with osteoderms on its body. Mm-hmm.

For this paper, they described bone tissues of three leg bones, two ribs, and one osteoderm from four different individuals of ceratosaurus. And they compared annual growth rates from three individuals to five other ceratosaurs. So they looked at lags, remodeled bones, and fibers. And the bone tissue in the legs looks similar to the bone tissue in modern bird legs. And bird legs represent some of the fastest growing bones. There was variation in the lags, in the legs.

There were lags in other bones too, but some of them didn’t have lags. Some of them had lags at regular intervals, and some were just all over the place. Ceratosaurus is one of the earliest diverging ceratosaurs, and it’s also the fastest growing. Their maximum annual growth rates were on average at least nine times faster compared to other Cerratosaurins. Oof. Yeah. And later Ceratosaurs grew more slowly, and they were generally smaller, which it could be because of environmental stressors, so they didn’t want to use as much energy to grow.

But some later Ceratosaurus include like Mechikosaurus and Majungasaurus, which were smaller. There’s no data from juveniles though, which does limit the study. So they’re saying that they need more samples from younger individuals to figure out when exactly Ceratosaurus started growing so quickly. Sounds like we just need more baby dinosaurs.

speaker-0 (45:55.886)
Mm-hmm. They’re so easy to find. That should take no time at all.

speaker-1 (45:59.264)
All right, that covers the theropods for this episode. Moving on to the next group of dinosaurs, the sauropods. Starting with a nude tiny young sauropodomorph sheds light on how early dinosaurs grew. This was published by Leomar Santos Campos and others in Paleo World. So in the late Triassic and what’s now Brazil and Argentina, that shows the earliest stages of dinosaurs diversifying and spreading out. In this paper, they described one of the smallest known.

Dinosaurs from the Triassic and what’s now southern Brazil and how it grew. The fossils include an arm bone, parts of the hands, and part of a vertebra. So in total, they got five bones. And these fossils were found back in 1999. They’re all tiny, they’re all smaller than 57 millimeters long. Hmm. We went from big serratosaurus to small sauropodomorph. Now, big sauropods, of course, they’re known for having the long neck, the columnar legs, the barrel-shaped body, and the small head.

speaker-0 (46:44.706)
Woof, those are small. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (46:50.412)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (46:57.176)
But that body plan changed a lot over time before settling in, and that’s for multiple groups. And soropodomorphs didn’t all evolve linearly from walking on two legs to walking on twos or fours to eventually walking on all fours. It’s kind of all over the place. And late Triassic and early Jurassic Soropodomorphs all had different strategies, which may mean that the body plan was adapted in different ways depending on their locomotor needs.

speaker-0 (47:21.947)
interesting. Yeah. So if they needed to move more quickly or slower. Yeah.

speaker-1 (47:26.476)
Yeah. for this one, it’s some sort of juvenile sauropodomorph, and there’s one lag. There’s also some bone remodeling. Again, bone regrows when under stress, like when walking or running, and it was about midway through its second growth cycle. Based on its bones, we can see continuous and rapid growth early on, but it’s an intermediate growth rate compared to other Jurassic juveniles, so it grew more slowly. On the other hand, the titanosaur nucensorus grew quickly but differently than expected.

This was published in historical biology by Virginia Zurigas and others. Nucensorus was a saltosaurus, titanosaurus dinosaur that lived in the Lake Cretaceous in what is now Argentina, and it had armor-like osteoderms. It’s small for a sauropod, we do know most of its skeleton. It was about 23 to 30 feet or 7 to 9 meters long. For this paper, they described an incomplete juvenile nucensorus that was about 44 to 64% of an adult size.

They compared it to adult specimens and found that various bones fused late during ontogeny, while it was growing up, or at least it was later than in the juvenile they studied. They also found that the air sacs in the bones got more developed as it got older. And they found that it grew allometrically, so different parts of the body grew at different rates. This contrasts with previous hypotheses that titanosaurs grew isometrically, meaning all their body parts grew at about the same rate.

speaker-0 (48:50.956)
Yeah. And isometric growth where they grow at about the same rate is usually correlated to animals that are sort of in the same niche.

speaker-1 (48:58.978)
Yeah. Now, based on histology, nukensores grew quickly, but there’s at least one lag or growth mark, and that also challenges previous hypotheses on how sauropods grew, because previous hypotheses were that they grew quickly and not interrupted. They didn’t pause for growth throughout the year, like in winter when there’s fewer resources, and that interrupted growth only happened when it was older. But this is showing that’s not the case. And giant sauropods

Lived for a long time. We talked about that in episode 509. New sauropods in the Yale Peabody has reopened, where a team studied Diplodocus and Supersaurus. Anyway, this brings us to our listener question, which came from Matt. Thank you, Matt. This question was posed a long time ago, but it made sense to include in this episode because it has to do with sauropod growth. I’m paraphrasing here, but if you start off with a hatchling sauropod that’s small enough to feed in your lap, and then it potentially grows into a treetop browsing giant in a decade.

Mm-hmm. The question is about how its diet would have changed over time and how much would it need to eat so it could grow so large? Which is a great question. And we’ve covered bits and pieces of this in past episodes, which we had to do some digging to find.

speaker-0 (50:08.268)
Yeah. As soon as you it pointed out this listener question to me, I was like, I know we’ve talked about this. Yeah. I just can’t remember when.

speaker-1 (50:15.704)
But yeah, sauropods, they were eating machines. And once they were big enough, they could use those long necks to swing over big areas, kind of like lawnmowers, and then just eat from one spot.

speaker-0 (50:26.018)
Or maybe in the case of the high browsers, like a a chainsaw and a stick. Trimming less of trees.

speaker-1 (50:30.229)
yeah.

But what about his hatchlings? Well, back in episode 220, we talked about Musaurus. Some hatchlings had been found near a nest with eggs, so maybe there was some parental care there. A young musaurus had awkward proportions. It started off its life on four legs, and then its body proportions changed, and then as an adult, it was on two legs. Its teeth were a little different too. It’s possible the young ones ate insects as well as plants, which would be good for getting more protein. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (51:00.568)
To a growing mooseurus need.

speaker-1 (51:02.54)
Not just mussaurus, but yeah, for growing in general, you need protein and nutrients. And in episode 256, we covered an SVP talk that rated which foods were best for young growing sawpods.

speaker-0 (51:13.56)
Yeah, that was a really good one. I think it was Carol G that presented it. Yeah. And she was talking about her super food, as she called it for the dinosaurs, were horse tails. Basically, Equicetum is like the official genus name. They were around through all of the Mesozoics. They would have basically been available for every herbivore. But they found a way to determine how much energy comes from these plants by putting microbes in a syringe and then measuring the amount of gas coming off of it, which

speaker-1 (51:23.574)
Yes.

speaker-0 (51:42.85)
Correlates the amount of fermentation that’s done, and more gas means there’s more energy being released. And then they have a five-star system for it. And they gave horsetails five stars because they produce a lot of energy and very quickly, which is good for having a short digestion time, which is what a lot of those little sauropods and some of those other small herbivores, especially in places like the Triassic, would have had. And so those young animals, in addition to digesting faster, they also need a lot of energy to grow.

quickly and so that equicetum is just perfect for them.

speaker-1 (52:16.546)
Yeah, because there’s a few ways to get that extra energy and protein. You just eat more, you digest better, you pick better food, or you digest faster because you have a higher body temperature. And horsetails, they were quick to digest, they give you a lot of energy. They were everywhere too. Cause they could get to three meters tall back in the Cretaceous. And even if you ate at all, the rhizomes, the underground plant stem that acts as like a storage organ that allows plants to spread and reproduce, they reproduce again, including every spring. So the horsetails come back.

speaker-0 (52:45.566)
Kind of like a weed. Yeah. If you don’t get the whole root with it, it’s just gonna come right back.

speaker-1 (52:49.698)
Yeah. And a lot of modern animals eat horse tails too, like trumpeter swans, they eat them after breeding. So do some geese. Those are good times to get more nutrients. It’s possible that juveniles and hatchlings ate the shoots of horsetails. Back to the sauropods. Horse tails also were better than grass, although there was no grass in the Jurassic. cycads they found were not great. But as the sauropod got bigger, horse tails didn’t matter as much.

In episode 552, What Dinosaurs Ate, we talked about the gut contents of a subadult Diamentinosaurus sauropod. Some bones were unfused, so that’s how we know it’s a subadult. It was at least 36 feet or eleven meters long, so it was a good size. And in this one, there were gut contents, plant fossils in its abdomen. They found a lot of plants. There were conifers, plants with seeds, flowering plants, also known as angiosperms. And there was a layer of skin with scales that were covered a lot of the gut contents, which is how they knew it was gut contents.

speaker-0 (53:47.864)
Probably its own skin. Yeah. Not something it ate. Yes.

speaker-1 (53:50.51)
And they determined, well, this sauropod was not a picky eater and it did not chew its food. There were no gastroliths either. It relied on fermentation and gut bacteria, therefore, to digest its food. And there were a lot of small shoots and sea pods, which may mean it went for new growth in plants. That’s easier to digest. It also showed it ate low and high-growing plants. So this find supports the hypothesis that sauropods were bulk feeders eating whatever food was in reach that it could handle.

So as a hatchling, it would have had to eat plants lower to the ground. As it grew, it could eat more types of plants. And then presumably as an adult, it could eat even more types of plants.

speaker-0 (54:27.948)
Yeah, because as you mentioned, one of the main strategies for these larger herbivores is having a large gut so that it can sit in there longer and potentially at a higher temperature because of that gigantothermy they have going on. The big body helps you warm it up more. Yeah. And then on top of that, we were talking about the long neck sort of sweeping back and forth, adding to efficiency for just consuming a lot. In that huge body where you’re looking for efficiency and movement.

You don’t have time to run around trying to find the optimal food everywhere. You just gobble up everything that you can possibly digest. Whereas the babies, it takes them a lot less energy to move around and they don’t need as much food to fill their stomach. So it makes sense that they would walk around and be pickier, find the plants that give them the most caloric value, and that they could digest in a shorter amount of time. And so that’s how you end up with different diets for the babies versus the adults.

speaker-1 (55:26.274)
Yeah. So that’s our sauropods. We’ve got one last group, the Ornithiscians. Starting with the basal ornithopod, Chang Chunsaurus was one of the slowest growing dinosaurs that we know of. Talk about fast growing ones, now we’re talking about slow growing ones.

speaker-0 (55:42.85)
I wouldn’t have thought an ornithopod would be a slow growing one.

speaker-1 (55:45.784)
Yeah. Well, this was published in paleoecology by Long Han Wang and others. And Chang Chunsaurus was a small herbivorous Neornithiscian, a basal ornithopod dinosaur from the Cretaceous and what’s now China. It was named back in 2005. It’s got a combination of features like early and later ornithopods. For this study, they looked at tissue microstructure. Specifically, they looked at seven femoras, so thigh bones, and there were lags in them ranging from one to two up to eleven to fourteen.

Some of them were lost though from bone remodeling, so they estimated the lost lags. But anyway, they’ve got juvenile, subadults, and adults that they were studying. And they found that it grew slowly, had a slow growth rate. And not only that, it was one of the slowest known dinosaurs in terms of growth. It reached sexual maturity around seven to eight years old, which is also late compared to most small basal neornothiscians. And it reached adult size by around age 14. Yeah.

speaker-0 (56:42.697)
that is kind of slow. Yeah.

speaker-1 (56:44.616)
And it was relatively small, it was about 3.3 feet or a meter long, especially compared to its closest relative Jeholosaurus. Now the slow growth might be linked to living in a semi-arid environment. Maybe there was environmental stress. It could get pretty hot, or there just weren’t as many plants around as when its closest relative live. So again, environmental factors. Going back to parental care.

speaker-0 (56:48.455)
man.

speaker-1 (57:09.718)
Myasaura grew in a way that it needed a lot of parental care as a hatchling, which might not be surprising given its name, the Good Mother. This was published by Hugo Burr and others in scientific reports and it’s open access. They use the inferred metabolic rate for newborn or neonatomyasora, both the rate when resting and maximum activity levels.

speaker-0 (57:16.782)
Yeah, living up to the name. Yeah.

speaker-1 (57:32.342)
And they determined how much oxygen myosaura used and then compared those minimum and maximum rates of oxygen use as a way to figure out how active they were. And that’s one way to figure out how much parental care they needed. Baby birds that forage alone as soon as they hatch have a higher metabolic rate. So if the resting rate and the active rates are the same, it seems that they wouldn’t be too active and they’d be relying more on their parents for help. Although this doesn’t apply to some shorebirds that live in cold, windy environments, because that just

It takes a lot of energy to keep themselves warm. But the idea is if you have the similar rates, then you’re probably getting a lot of parental care. They used a statistical tool that could build models based on phylogenetic information, animal traits, and how closely they’re related to each other, and they included data from modern animals, mammals, birds, amphibians, crocodiles, lizards, and turtles. They found the myasaura resting metabolic rate was similar to fast-growing endotherms today, or warm-blooded animals.

And oxygen use is similar to birds today that need, as they put it, intensive parental care. Altricial birds, which depend heavily on their parents to survive. So they estimated based on all this that myosaurus stayed in its nest for forty to seventy-five days after hatching. That’s based on estimates of babies ages found in and outside the nests. And they likely needed a lot of care from their parents during that time, especially when it came to food and protection.

speaker-0 (58:52.406)
Yeah. If you’re gonna stay in the nest for two months, yeah. You’re gonna need a little parental care.

speaker-1 (58:57.102)
They needed more than tyrannosaurus, it sounds like.

speaker-0 (58:59.328)
Yeah. Although we don’t have any good T Rex nests to based on yet.

speaker-1 (59:03.746)
Not yet. Next up, the Hadrosaur Gripposaurus grew mostly isometrically, meaning everything grew at the same rate. There was a study done in 2022 by Jordan Mallon and others in the Anatomical Record that’s open access. And then there was additional information they published, a commentary this year, the same team. Also open access. So in 2022, they studied the two smallest known gripposaurus specimens that were about two years old.

Gripposaurus is a hadrosaur that lived in the Lake Cretaceous and what’s now Alberta and Canada and Montana and Utah in the US, also possibly Texas. It’s got a big nose. It was named back in 1913 by Lawrence Lamb. The gist of the study is that most of the skull grew isometrically, except for the height of the nasal arch. Yeah, which is what gave it its big nose. That grew allometrically. So that was at a different rate from the rest of the skull bones. Its teeth also changed over time. These juveniles had extra ridges.

speaker-0 (59:41.646)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (59:50.67)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:00:02.838)
on the teeth. So maybe they ate slightly different foods. Its arms and legs grew isometrically equally at the same time. So the way it moved stayed the same as it aged. Didn’t change from being two legged only to four legged only or vice versa. But it could switch between two and four legs as needed.

speaker-0 (01:00:18.23)
It’s just its whole life, not just at one point. That’s interesting too, because usually, like we were saying, with isometric growth, that means that it we think it filled a similar ecological niche throughout its life. But things that grow allometrically, especially a big display structure like that, usually they would say that that was probably a sexual selection feature. Yeah. So maybe that nose was a very important thing for the adult gripposaurus. Yeah. When they’re looking for a mate. Could be.

speaker-1 (01:00:47.118)
Or some kind of visual communication, something. So for this commentary, they said they found more information about one of the juveniles they studied that supported their hypotheses. The skeleton had gotten moved around a lot, pieces are now missing or broken, but they recently found this uncataloged photo of the skeleton taken in the basement of the Calgary Courthouse, which shows it was nearly complete and well preserved back then. The skull today is crushed and fragmented, but it was almost entirely intact in the photo. Some of the bones that are missing now are also in the photo.

The neck bones were complete. Unfortunately, most of that’s missing now, and so were the shoulder and arms. So I don’t know what happened. In the caption, they called it trachodon and said it about twelve feet long. The measurements taken back then confirm that Grypposaurus, because now it’s known as Grypposaurus, that its leg probably scaled isometrically, so all parts grew equally. So again, supporting their 2022 hypotheses. Nice. And last up with the Ornithiscans is the small iguanodont Dysalatosaurus, which had some interesting fused bones in its neck.

This was published in papers in paleontology, it’s open access, by Ricardo Rocchi, and others. Disolithosaurus was a small dryasaur iguanodont that lived in the late Jurassic and what is now Tanzania, found in the Tendiguru formation. It’s the best known dryasaurid and only late Jurassic iguanodont known from the southern hemisphere. Wow. And more than 14,000 elements have been found in that formation. There’s a new block that they studied and had as a small semi-articulated specimen. So they did micro CT.

X-rays of this small individual in a block. And then they made a 3D model and they describe more parts of the skeleton. The individual’s between four and five years old. And it’s got a cervical fusion locus, meaning at the neck there’s multiple bones or vertebrae that form a single rigid bone structure. And that’s the first evidence of this in ornithopods. It seems that it evolved independently in multiple archisoromorph lineages. You do see it in some theropods and sauropodomorphs, also pterosaurs and other animals.

And it can help with keeping the head stable when moving or digging. We’re not sure why Disolitosaurus had one though. That could be an interesting follow up. Mm-hmm. Maybe you need more bones. Fourteen thousand elements is pretty good though. Although I don’t know how complete it is.

speaker-0 (01:02:59.224)
Well, that was the full Tendaguru formation, right? Not just this one individual.

speaker-1 (01:03:03.646)
I think more than fourteen thousand Disolidosaurus elements have been found.

speaker-0 (01:03:08.407)
wow. Mm-hmm. That is a lot.

speaker-1 (01:03:10.062)
So more studies, please. And that wraps up our segment on dinosaur growth. We will get into our dinosaur of the day in just a moment, but first we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

speaker-1 (01:03:24.364)
Alright, we have finished talking about dinosaur growth, at least for this episode. We hope you enjoyed it. And now moving on to our dinosaur of the day, Tomba Titanis, which was a request from Dilophosaur Rob via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks. It’s one of the perks of being a dinodal. You can request dinosaurs. Tomba Titanis was a titanosaur, possibly a titanosaur. It’s a sauropod. It lived in the early Cretaceous and what is now Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. It was found in the Oyamashimo Formation.

It walked on all fours. It had a long neck and tail and small head. Only a partial skeleton has been found. The fossils found include teeth, the brain case, lower jaw, parts of the hips, part of a backbone, some ribs, and some tailbones. It took five field seasons to excavate between 2006 and 2010, because it could only be dug up in winter when the water level of the river was lowest. It was described in 2014 by Saigusa and IKeda. The type and only species is

Tampa Titanis Amisitae. That genus name refers to Tamba, the area where the fossils were found. It means tampa titan. And the species name means friendship and refers to the friendship between the two people who found the holotype back in August 2006, which is very sweet. Mm-hmm. There’s unique features in the brain case and tailbones. There’s also neural spines which stick out of the tail that have a strong curve. Tampa Titanis lived in a subhumid to semi-arid climate.

Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include indeterminate ankylosaurs and iguanodonts, the neoceratopsian sasayamagnomnomus, and theropods such as the eutroodontid hypnovenider. And other animals that lived around the same time and place include squaw mates, amphibians, mammals, crustaceans, and mollusks.

speaker-0 (01:05:11.694)
I’ll always think of it as the friendship titan.

speaker-1 (01:05:14.606)
That’s a nice one. I like it. And now our fun fact of the episode, thank you for sticking with us, is that birds may lay large eggs because of their brain sizes. This was published by Stephanie Lecky and Roger Benson in the Royal Society Open Science, so it’s open access. And large non avian dinosaurs laid pretty small eggs. We actually talked about that in this episode. The biggest dino eggs were smaller than the largest bird eggs.

For this study, they analyzed data about the reproduction and anatomy from mammals, birds, and reptiles. Reproduction includes how many eggs or animals are in a litter, the mass of the offspring or babies, etc. They had data from 2,857 living species, 541 birds, 23 crocodilians, 1,187 squawmates, 56 turtles, and 851 mammals.

speaker-0 (01:06:05.634)
Surprised I didn’t have more birds. It’s like ten thousand species. They only took five hundred. And maybe that was enough to get a representative sample.

speaker-1 (01:06:10.284)
Only. man.

Maybe. They also had data for non-avian dinosaur eggs and egg clutches. They had egg mass data for 35 non-avian dinosaurs, including five ornithiscans, twelve theropods, and seventeen sauropods. And they had a clutch mass or clutch size data for three ornithiscians, seven theropods, and three sauropods. Just because it’s fun to talk about that some of the dinosaurs included were like protoceratops, troodon, massospondylus, myasaura, city potty. They found a pattern.

Species with large brains had fewer but larger offspring. For example, the Hawkspill sea turtle has, on average, a clutch of 158 proportionally small eggs that weigh about 29 grams each. That’s about 0.019% of the adult female mass. For comparison, the blue whale has one baby every two to three years that weighs 2,500 kilograms, and that’s 1.6% of the adult female mass. They found that turtles produced the largest number of eggs for their body size.

And birds produce the fewest number of eggs for their body size. And birds and mammals do a lot of parental care, as we’ve talked about in this episode. So it’s possible the non-avian dinosaurs had limited parental care, and they’re more similar to crocodilians than to birds, though it was likely higher in theropods the parental care compared to other types of non-avian dinosaurs. Like we’re talking about with tyrannosaurus. Maybe there was some there. They said it’s indirect evidence, like the size of offspring or the nest structure, et cetera.

When it comes to inferring parental care. But having a lot of small offspring and lower relative clutch mass may mean limited parental care, especially in the non-theropods. Yes. So they might be more like modern crocodilians. Birds developed bigger brains over time, which led to larger offspring, and that meant bigger eggs to support their development, versus dinosaurs had many smaller offspring.

speaker-0 (01:08:00.78)
So the sort of connection between the amount of parental care and the number of eggs, which is also related to the size of the eggs. Yeah. So that it yeah, that is a little indirect.

speaker-1 (01:08:11.586)
Yeah, the increasing brain size may have indirectly influenced nesting behavior, anatomy, and parental care in birds. Larger eggs meant they needed wider pelvic canals to lay the eggs, they needed better ventilated nests for incubating, and then they needed more parental care after hatching.

speaker-0 (01:08:27.074)
Kind of a chicken or the egg, or maybe I should say the chicken brain or the egg size.

speaker-1 (01:08:31.694)
Question. But yeah, so many aspects of growth to consider. So that wraps up this episode of Ino Dino. Stay tuned. Our next episode of Inodino will be talking about a number of new dinosaurs. If you want even more dinosaur goodness, we have our bonus episodes that go in between our regular Ino Dino episodes, and you can listen to those at patreon.com slash InoDino. Thanks again, and until next time.

(Approximate times)

• 00:00 Introduction to Dinosaur Discoveries and Exhibits
• 02:59 New Sauropodomorph Xiang Yun Long Feng Ming
• 08:58 The Six Extinctions Exhibit at the Bruce Museum
• 10:03 Mass Extinctions and Human Impact on Biodiversity
• 11:01 Fossil Birds and the Extinction of the Chatham Islands Penguin
• 11:58 Fossil Critters and the Diversity of Extinct Animals
• 12:54 The Triassic Mass Extinction and Dinosaur Evolution
• 13:48 Fossil Discoveries in Connecticut and Local Paleontology
• 15:04 T-Rex vs. Taurosaurus: The Ongoing Debate
• 15:52 The Evolution of Bird Brain Size and Cognitive Abilities
• 17:13 Fossil Evidence of Dinosaur Social and Parental Behaviors
• 17:58 The Record-Breaking Pelagornis Sandersi and Its Unique Features
• 18:46 Feeding Strategies of Ancient Flying Birds
• 20:12 The Fascinating World of Fossil Birds and Their Adaptations
• 20:46 The Ecological Roles of Juvenile and Adult Dinosaurs
• 22:13 Implications of Dinosaur Growth and Development Studies
• 22:50 Museum Exhibits and Art-Science Intersections at the Bruce Museum
• 24:07 Conservation Lessons from Extinct Species and Modern Biodiversity
• 24:55 How Paleontology Informs Our Understanding of Earth’s History

Summary

Join us as we explore the fascinating world of dinosaurs, fossil birds, and mass extinctions with Dr. Daniel Sepka. Discover the latest discoveries, research, and exhibits that shed light on Earth’s history and the evolution of life.

Takeaways

• Xiang Yun Long Feng Ming sauropodomorph discovery
• Dinosaur naming and etymology
• Mass extinctions and their impact on life
• Bird evolution and brain size studies
• Fossil bird research and fossilization processes
• The debate over Taurosaurus vs. Triceratops
• The role of juvenile dinosaurs in ecosystems
• The significance of the Triassic mass extinction
• Museum exhibits blending art and science
• Conservation lessons from extinct species

Keywords

Dinosaurs, Fossil Birds, Mass Extinctions, Paleontology, Evolution, Bruce Museum, Scientific Research, Dinosaur Names, Extinction Events

Hello and welcome to I know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I’m and today in our 570th episode.

speaker-1 (00:36.942)
And I’m Sabrina.

We’ve got a new sauropodomorph with a sturdy long tail.

speaker-0 (00:45.294)
That’s how I like I want those flimsy tails, a nice sturdy tail. I don’t know. It’s it’s got the lengths at least.

speaker-1 (00:49.818)
You don’t like diploticates?

speaker-1 (00:54.286)
We also have an interview with Daniel Sepka, curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. And he is an expert in fossil birds. We talk about all kinds of things. And we have Dinosaur of the Day, Brazillo Titan, a square jawed titanosaur. Mm-hmm. That’ll sauropod theme going here. And our fun fact is that dinosaurs were latchkey kids, and mammal parents were or are more like.

Helicopter parents.

speaker-0 (01:24.27)
That’s true. All the helicopter parents I know are mammals.

speaker-1 (01:28.308)
Good one.

speaker-2 (01:31.278)
But

speaker-0 (01:31.95)
But before we get into all of that, as always, we’d like to thank some of our patrons for helping to keep us going. And this week we have 10 random drawing winner patrons to thank, as usual. They are James Pasco, Tyrant King, Daniel McGill, Quadrasaurus, Jennifer, E Ray, Scott, and Lorasaurus. And if you joined recently, we’ll be thanking you soon. But we had to pre record some episodes because we had to do some last minute travel.

speaker-2 (01:43.907)
David?

speaker-1 (01:47.166)
K

speaker-1 (02:01.42)
Yes, so thank you for your patience and thank you to all of our Dino Itals. We hope you are enjoying this show because you make it possible, as well as the perks that you get from Patreon, which includes this month, if you pledge for our dinosaur rookie trading cards, you can get an extra special exclusive nano tyrannus card. Mm-hmm. You just you do have to pledge for the cards.

speaker-0 (02:22.936)
But no extra cost?

speaker-0 (02:27.672)
Yeah. That we’ll just throw it in with the other cards. Will we mail them to you?

speaker-1 (02:31.266)
Yes, and we have about a week left for that campaign. So that means time is running out if you want those trading cards or the stickers or the keychains or our enamel pin or magnets. Yeah. Now is the time. Mm-hmm. Yes. So head over to InoDino.com slash cards if you wanna make sure you get your cards. Jumping into the news.

speaker-0 (02:44.066)
Magnets.

speaker-0 (02:48.354)
It ends at the end of July.

speaker-1 (02:59.736)
There’s a new sauropodomorph dinosaur, Xiang Yun Long Feng Ming, that had a sturdy long tail. This was published by Royal Society of Open Science, it’s open access, by Xiaobin Hu and others. And this sauropodomorph lived in the early Jurassic in what is now Yunnan China. It was found in the Feng Jiahu Formation. They found a partial skeleton that includes neck, back, and tailbones, parts of the ribs, and parts of the hips. So they found 15 tailbones, five backbones, and three neck bones, if you want to get specific.

And the neck bones are short, especially compared to other sauropods. Xiang Yunlong is estimated to be thirty to thirty-three feet or nine to ten meters long, and it’s one of the largest known early diverging sauropodomorphs from China. That’s a mouthful.

speaker-0 (03:45.95)
It is. So of all the early Jurassic and late Triassic sauropodomorphs in China, it’s one of the bigger ones. At thirty feet, that is pretty big.

speaker-1 (03:57.366)
Yeah. So it didn’t have a particularly long neck because its neck bones were on the shorter side, but it did have a robust long tail.

speaker-0 (04:05.206)
That’s where the action is.

speaker-1 (04:06.784)
It might yeah, that tail might have helped it with balance. It might have helped it rear up to eat.

speaker-0 (04:11.084)
It reminds me of another thirty foot long animal with a robust tail. Ankylosaurus. It’s funny to think that the sauropodomorph was about the same length as Ankylosaurus. Yes. I’m guessing Ankylosaurus’ tail was more robust.

speaker-1 (04:15.97)
Which one?

speaker-1 (04:27.5)
Well, yes. I don’t think there’s much guessing there. But back to the sauropodomorph. This helps show s more diversity in sauropodomorphs before they evolved into the long necked giant sauropods, ’cause the long tail may indicate an initial stage of gigantism, and it could be another evolutionary pathway to getting big.

speaker-0 (04:48.792)
Yeah, it’s interesting to hear the tail getting longer first, ’cause I feel like we’ve seen other ones that had a longer neck. That’s

speaker-1 (04:54.124)
Yeah. That’s the usual route, at least the ones we’ve found so far. So the genus name Xiang Yu Long means auspicious cloud dragon. Nice. Auspicious means promising or favorable. It refers to the county where it was found, Xiang Yun, and that name means auspicious clouds. And then Long means dragon.

speaker-0 (05:13.26)
And they use the less common spelling of long with two o s.

speaker-1 (05:17.218)
Yes. And then the species name, Feng Ming, means Phoenix calling. It refers to Luming, the town where the fossils were found, which also means deer calling, and it’s a reminder that birds are living dinosaurs. It’s doing double duty here.

speaker-0 (05:32.43)
Nice. I like that they got a little creative with the name.

speaker-1 (05:35.906)
Names. Yes. And Feng Ming is also the original name of Lin Feng Min, the founding president of China Academy of Art and staff of China Academy of Art helped a lot with this project.

speaker-0 (05:46.392)
Double whammy, so many double meanings going on. They really got their money’s worth out of that dinosaur genus and species name.

speaker-1 (05:53.366)
Yes. And it’s a place name, but also more.

speaker-0 (05:59.958)
And in just a moment we’ll get into our interview with Daniel Sepka, but first we’re gonna pause for a quick sponsor break.

And now onto our interview with Daniel Sepka. But as always, we have an extended version of our interview for those who want to hear even more about what we got to talking about. And you can get that at patreon.com slash inodino or in the Apple Podcast Premium. And if you listen there, there’s a timestamp in the description where you can jump ahead to after this shorter version of the interview. So without further ado, on to our interview.

speaker-2 (08:44.664)
Feed.

speaker-1 (08:58.19)
We are joined today with Dr. Daniel Sefka, a vertebrate paleontologist who specializes in birds, which of course are living dinosaurs. He has more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers and many articles for publications, including Scientific American and American scientists. His main research is on penguins, though he has studied everything from turkeys to albatrosses. He’s also a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History.

adjunct faculty member at the University of Connecticut and Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut, which is an art and science museum, and they’ve got an exciting exhibit out right now about Earth’s mass extinctions. So thank you so much for chatting with me today.

speaker-2 (09:39.886)
Thanks, Sabrina, really happy to be here.

speaker-1 (09:41.57)
Yeah, I wanted to ask first, can you tell us about the Six Extinctions exhibit?

speaker-2 (09:47.276)
Yeah, this is a really fun show. We have everything from Tyrannosaurus to some giant molluscs. And so as the title implies, it covers all of the major mass extinctions in Earth history, the big five in geological time, and the one that we’re unfortunately causing right now.

speaker-1 (10:03.054)
I was gonna ask, yeah, because that one I is there some debate about the sixth extinction if we’re going through it or if it’s we’re not entirely sure.

speaker-2 (10:10.604)
I think it’s really pretty well established that we’ve elevated the extinction rate far above the background with our own activities. Basically anywhere where humans have have gotten, they’ve caused a lot of trouble, especially on islands. That’s from my perspective as a bird paleontologist. We all know about the dodo, but there are dozens of other species that have been wiped out around the world. Whenever people kind of got around and either were collecting the birds directly for food or for eggs or for meat, or

Altering the environment. So introducing other species, changing habitats. We’ve done some damage, unfortunately.

speaker-1 (10:45.354)
Right. It’s not been great for penguins, right.

speaker-2 (10:48.024)
Penguins it always surprised me how well penguins seem to have have done over the years as flightless birds. But we now know that there’s at least one species that was wiped out by humans a little more than like six hundred years ago.

speaker-1 (11:01.92)
that’s pretty recent.

speaker-2 (11:03.434)
It is, yeah. It’s a a species of penguin that was on the Chatham Islands. My colleague Tess Cole led a study that I was part of where we actually had ancient DNA from these bones that were found in like sand dunes out on the Chathams, and they showed that there was a crested penguin species that was basically wiped out pretty quickly after humans got out there.

speaker-1 (11:22.018)
Wow. Does that make an appearance in Six Extinctions?

speaker-2 (11:25.366)
That one does not, no, unfortunately. It did make an appearance in our exhibit Penguins Past and Present, which we did in twenty twenty three, which was about penguins today and and their their evolutionary history.

speaker-1 (11:36.28)
So six extinctions read in the press release you’ve got fossils, there’s casts, there’s realistic models and murals. What sort of animals can people expect to see?

speaker-2 (11:47.64)
There’s a lot of fun critters there. One of my favorites is Anthroplora. This is basically a giant millipede. And so you’ve got this thing that kind of looks like maybe an area carpet that came to life. It’s truly delightful and gruesome. And it it’s you know, it is related to modern millipedes. And so it’s probably like them eating like plant matter and decaying stuff. And so it wouldn’t necessarily be a terrifying creature to us, but it was it was really a fun animal. So that’s one of my faves.

speaker-1 (11:58.102)
Okay.

speaker-2 (12:15.724)
That’s a life reconstruction, so it’s got, you know, the appearance it would have in when it was alive, which was, you know, roughly three hundred million years ago. Yeah, nothing more fun than a nine foot millipede. I spent so much time looking under rocks and logs with my kids and we haven’t found that one yet, but classic.

speaker-1 (12:30.638)
And I said it’s not really a threat to us, but I can imagine standing next to it, it might still seem a little scary.

speaker-2 (12:38.542)
I think the worst thing would be if you accidentally stepped on it.

speaker-1 (12:41.486)
Do you have a favorite mass extinction?

speaker-2 (12:45.912)
Favorite mass extinction. Hmm. It it almost makes you feel bad, right? But

speaker-1 (12:49.634)
Yeah, is that a too too depressing of a question?

speaker-2 (12:54.144)
I I kind of like the Triassic mass extinction and there’s two reasons. One is that it it gives the dinosaurs like the leg up they need to to really take over. And I I love dinosaurs. I mean I think everyone does. And so they may never have achieved the the great sizes and wild forms they did if it wasn’t for you know, removing the boot of the crocodilomorphs from their neck. And that is also really cool to me because it kind of took place like right where we live, Connecticut.

The middle of Connecticut, that fertile valley, the Connecticut River Valley, that’s basically a former lake. the continents started breaking apart. And that rift zone, if it would have continued, that would be the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually it stopped spreading there and started spreading farther east. And so the Atlantic is is still rifting today, but we had a kind of failed tear, and that filled in with these lakes. That’s where all the dinosaur footprints are, these wild fish that we we have, many of them in our collection thanks to Nicholas McDonald.

And massive outpourings of of lava and magma. And this this is really the driver of this extinction. And it’s represented in our landscapes. Like we’ll be driving through these, you know, beautiful less urban parts of Connecticut and you’ll see these rock formations. And that’s basically the volcanic eruptions that wiped out all those creatures. so you’re you’re kind of living right there. And that’s that’s why it appeals to me as a Connecticut resident.

speaker-1 (14:12.334)
That’s cool. Yeah, I ’cause I I don’t think we talk about Connecticut too often when we’re talking about but Yeah. You’ve got some great museums.

speaker-2 (14:23.148)
We have some wonderful museums. I mean, the Bruce, of course, we have our friends at the Peabody. And there were a lot of cool Triassic creatures historically discovered here. It’s tailed off a little bit and that’s because we used to really mine these rocks, these Triassic and Jurassic rocks for construction, like all these brownstones in New York City. A lot of them are made with rocks taken out of Connecticut. but we’ve switched, you know, no one’s really building with those materials anymore. Now we’re using steel and all these other things. But

Back when they were quarrying we’d find fossils a lot more. Now you’re only seeing what erosion reveals or the occasional roadcut. So there’s just not enough excavation going on to turn up these nice skeletons that we once were were getting relatively frequently.

speaker-1 (15:04.302)
Yeah. Well, okay, going back to the Six Extinctions exhibition, I thought it was interesting that there’s a face-to-face encounter with a T-Rex and Taurosaurus at the end. It sounds like the Bruce Museum is team Taurosaurus.

speaker-2 (15:19.456)
are we? Why is that?

speaker-1 (15:21.72)
I usually hear T Rex versus triceratops, right?

speaker-2 (15:24.526)
sorry, thought you meant we were rooting for one versus the other. Well, Taurus Taurus is is an interesting question, right? So I don’t know if you’ve had have you had a Triceratops Taurusaurus episode? Yeah. So I’d encourage people to listen. That I won’t go into it too much detail, but I actually have friends on both sides of the debate. So I don’t want to come down obviously in favor of one or the other, but but basically the debate is Triceratops is iconic dinosaurs probably one of the three dinosaurs that people name if you say name three. Mm-hmm.

They’re probably gonna say Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex. And it’s this, you know, beautiful three horned animal. Taurosaurus looks very similar, but it has big holes in the frill, which triceratops doesn’t have. And so there’s this debate whether they’re two separate species or whether Taurosaurus is actually like an old triceratops. It’s it’s gotten to full size and then it’s developed in these openings. And it’s a really tricky debate. We can’t really ever be a hundred percent sure. we’re never going to be able to like DNA test them or observe them in the wild, but

We are going with Taurosaurus here in the exhibition. And I think that’s the favorite hypothesis of the people who have the original at Yale. So but but it is it’s an ongoing area of research. There’s a lot of a lot of evidence kind of in favor of both sides. And so I don’t know if we’ll ever be a hundred percent sure.

speaker-1 (16:40.802)
Yeah. Just need to find that one skeleton.

speaker-2 (16:44.746)
Well, you know what you’d want to find, I think, is in theory, if Taurusaurus is an old triceratops, those holes are opening up as it ages. But I don’t think they’ve ever found like a triceratops with like a tiny opening in the frill and then one with half of an open. That’s what we’d really want. And maybe that’s something that took place over the course of a year as the dinosaur hit maturity or something, and so we never got one. One of the reasons I I kind of favor the Taurus is there’s really a lot of triceratops out there, and so it would be a little weird if we’re finding a

So many young ones and very few old ones. now it could be that the adults go live in a different area or something like that, but I’d lean towards Taurosaurus, I think.

speaker-1 (17:22.882)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (17:26.038)
No disrespect to anyone who’s doing the work. I’m a bird person, so this is just kind of me glossing over the literature.

speaker-1 (17:31.938)
Yeah. Well, I know you’re a world expert on fossil birds. And actually this was good timing. I recently read a bit about you in Steve Brussati’s latest book, The Story of Birds.

speaker-2 (17:45.375)
no. So I I I keep hearing this from friends and family. I ordered my c I haven’t received it yet. So I have no idea what it says, but hopefully it’s good.

speaker-1 (17:53.656)
Good things, yes, you you come off very impressive. World expert on birds, on fossil birds. Get assigned one.

speaker-2 (17:58.591)
wow. Well that’s that’s kind. I mean I should buy two copies. Maybe.

Yeah. that would be easy well I gotta go to Scotland now though.

speaker-1 (18:07.342)
I know you described as Pelagornous Sandersai.

speaker-2 (18:12.502)
Yes, yes, that’s a big one.

speaker-1 (18:14.158)
It’s got like the what the widest wingspan of any known bird.

speaker-2 (18:17.578)
It does. So it was this huge creature that hilariously enough was actually found at the Charleston Airport. Which I always I always laugh about. It’s so it’s, you know, a little close to twenty five million years old. And it had a wingspan roughly around twenty feet, which is really impressive. Basically when I try to describe it, I say you could take like two California condors and tape them together and this thing would still have a bigger wingspan. So absolutely massive compared to anything alive today. And

Honestly, totally bizarre beyond that. So the size is almost like the most normal thing about this bird. It’s huge, but it’s also got teeth. So it’s got pseudo-teeth, bony teeth. It it looks like it’s got like this, you know, pumpkin jack-o’-lantern grin, but all these sharp little cone-like structures, and they’re actually not true teeth. They’re made of bone. So they’re not enamel and dentine, they’re not in sockets, they don’t replace themselves. They’re they’re projections of the premaxil and the mandible.

They probably would have been covered with beak tissue in life. They said it would have been sharp, but they would have had like a little coating because you can see like the blood vessel traces on the surface. So they had to have something over them. And the bird is it’s got like a hilariously tiny shoulder bone, like the scapula shoulder blade. In fact, when I submitted the paper to Nature, it got rejected. And one of the reviewers said, Clearly I’ve mismatched this bone and it didn’t belong to the specimen because it was too small. But they they have articulated smaller ones.

probably couldn’t really raise its wing above above horizontal. So it it looks like it was hyper adapted to gliding. So very good at holding its wing stretched out, but not very good at flapping. And and maybe it even needed some type of assistance from the wind or you know, jumping off the proverbial cliff as a reviewer said to get into the air. so weird and I sort of hinge draws. There’s three hinges in the draw the d the drawbone’s actually in three separate pieces with a synovial joint, which is like, you know, like a

little capsule joint like your knee or something. And so it probably could expand its jaw like almost it’s so flexible. The only thing I can think of that’s really similar is like snakes. Wow. and it wasn’t it wouldn’t be that crazy, but like a ridiculously flexible jaw as well. And so so many oddities in one creature. And it also happens to be the record breaker for wingspan. Probably not the heaviest bird ’cause its bones were like paper thin. But but in terms of that span, just breathtaking.

speaker-1 (20:41.55)
Do you think it’s just like gliding along with its jaws open? Or maybe

speaker-2 (20:46.134)
It’s very d yeah, we’re really debating what on earth it ate, right? So it’s its legs are dinky. So I think, you know, an albatross can actually get down like you know I think some of them go like six meters down in the water, which is surprising because they have really wide wingspans. And so a lot of seabirds will, you know, there’s gannets that plunge dive and they’ll actually basically fall from the sky and catch fish that are below the surface. There’s skimmers, which, you know, the black skimmer, which is the you can find that on the east coast, it will skim

Like just dip its mandible as it goes. But it it I don’t think that’s any of those are really viable for something so large. There actually was a study recently, a biomechanical study, that said the drag would be too great if it tried this game. So it it almost has to feed at the surface of the water. And the only thing we can really think of is like flying squid and flying fish. And so it’s a it’s gotta be snatching things near or even above the surface. And that that kind of blows my mind because how many patches of flying squid are there?

The the other thing I propose in in the original paper is that it can also eat kinda anything it wanted on land and so there’s this horrifying picture that’s circulating online, but it’s a it’s a pelican eating a pigeon. You know, pelicans and and albatrosses as good as they’ll raid other birds’ nests. They’ll eat the eggs, they’ll eat the chicks. And so I would imagine like a Pelagornus would probably be pretty happy to come to like a gull or albatross or whatever breeding colony and kind of just

What are you gonna do to a bird with twenty foot wingspan? It would just take whatever it wanted. So that was probably a very important food source for it as well.

speaker-1 (22:21.152)
That is a weird bird.

speaker-2 (22:22.958)
It’s so weird. I key I visit Charleston like every two years I go back because there’s something else I need to look at about. I’m like, I forgot to look at this. I forgot to look and it I always find something new on the same skeleton. It’s just such a it’s so bizarre. There’s nothing like it today. I mean, you know, there’s fossil penguins and they’re basically just really big penguins or penguins with long beaks, but there’s no analog there’s no toothed bird alive today to compare this to. There’s nothing that’s that big. And so you’re kind of

Doing your best to to speculate. And if you if you can, you can test it with some kind of models. But I don’t know, sometimes like, you know, the wind tunnels where science goes to die. You’re making a lot of assumptions, right? I’m sure whatever it we think it did, it would shock us to just put on the time travel binoculars and see what it was up to in real life.

speaker-1 (23:10.7)
Yeah. Yeah. You could say that about pretty much anything, right?

speaker-2 (23:14.814)
yeah, I mean all these like what blows my mind about dinosaurs and I I’ve o I did work on one sauropod or Keycha when I was in grad school. I they’re always made my favorite. The Bronosaurus I I don’t I know for great. Yeah. I I it’s good good good taste. I know there’s some debate over whether Bronosaurus is a valid genus, but I’m gonna roll with it. And that was always my favorite. So working on one when I was in grad school is great, but what

What’s up with them, right? Like their heads are like the it’s like the size of a horse’s head and the body’s like fifty tons or more. Like, how did they work? Did they have like, you know, like a brewery in their stomach or they’re fermenting? I mean, even if they’re doing that, you’d think they’d have a larger mouth. They they just they completely k baffle me. Like as something that needs to eat enough to live. I just I can’t wrap my head around it.

speaker-1 (24:07.8)
Yeah.

speaker-2 (24:08.728)
They’re so weird. They’re just so and they’re like filled with air. Yes. And their necks are like I mean, did they just stand there like a vacuum cleaner and move their neck? How did they get through a forest without knocking everything over? Right. How did they even like lay their eggs without them just like falling to the ground and shattering? It everything about them is fascinating to me.

speaker-1 (24:26.39)
Yeah, same. Plus I I was a fan of Littlefoot.

speaker-2 (24:32.112)
yeah, that’s a popular I think that got a lot of people into this Team Sour Pot.

speaker-1 (24:36.43)
I think so too. Well, on back to the birds. I know you led a major study of reconstructing the evolution of bird brain size.

speaker-2 (24:48.299)
yeah, yeah, that was fun.

speaker-1 (24:49.614)
And actually I think that that was probably a little bit in Steve’s book too.

speaker-2 (24:55.892)
yeah. So that was a great great project. It was at Nescent, which was a evolutionary synthesis center in Durham, North Carolina. And they had a program called catalysis meetings where you basically can bring scientists from different fields into one room to solve a problem. So our meeting was about bird brain evolution, and we had people who are like computer statisticians. We had people who do evolutionary trees, people who put little PET helmets on birds to see where what they’re thinking when they’re flying.

People who look at fossil brains to understand like how Archaeopteryx worked, CT scans, MR like every different type of gene labeling, vocalization in hummingbirds, like every topic you could think of, putting them all in one it’s so great because no one can be an expert on it. So everyone learned something. And we had this like I think it had like thirty two authors, and that was one of the biggest tests of my career was getting like thirty two people to send their data into the same spreadsheet.

speaker-1 (25:51.788)
Ha ha.

speaker-2 (25:52.492)
But I think we learned a lot about, yeah, how bird brain size changed over time and the dinosaur to bird transition and then equally important like among different types of living birds.

speaker-1 (26:02.69)
Yeah. And so what was the trend? It got smaller but denser?

speaker-2 (26:08.15)
One of the funny things is you you always think of dinosaurs I think especially like before Jurassic Park, everyone thought of them as pretty dull witted. I think after Jurassic Park, maybe people think they’re too smart. It kinda like it kind of went into overdrive. We’re like, well, we all know dinosaurs communicated with language and use tools. And it’s like Yeah. so I think that the smartest so the smartest dinosaur was probably about as smart as the dumbest bird is a simple way to put it. There’s not a big

speaker-1 (26:24.078)
Glossaraptors, they can do anything.

speaker-2 (26:35.688)
change in the brain-body relationship. And so we’re looking at not raw brain size, because obviously like an elephant should have a much bigger brain than a mouse, but it scales not isometrically. And so as you get bigger, you need a proportionally smaller brain because some of your brains just like remember to breathe, remember to breathe, remember to breathe. And so like a mouse scaled up to an elephant would have like a huge brain. It would look like this like, you know, alien. But that’s not true because it’s there’s a different slope. Anyway, a lot of

of the first birds to branch off, the bird tree, and dinosaurs kind of pr they’ve kind of fall out on the same line. And so we think that some t theropods were probably like similar in cognitive ability. And and this is of course tricky ’cause not every part of the brain does the same thing, right? Like you can have a a large brain because you have a big olfactory boom and that just means you can sniff really well. But all things being equal, I think those advanced dinosaurs were like in the early bird zone. There’s not like a big change when flight evolves or anything like that. That’s kind of cool.

And then you see some some trends towards really profound brain expansion in groups like parrots and then Corvid. So crows and ravens, they’re like we we had tried to come up with an analogy and we kinda said they’re like the hominids of the bird world. So like these birds, they got bigger and their brains got bigger at the same time, but but faster than their bodies. So like us, we’re scaling up from early primates. And so like, you know, you have Lucy and she’s pretty short.

And then you get bigger and bigger towards like humans, sort of anatomically modern humans, and the brains also skyrocketing at the same time, but it’s it’s going even faster. And so you end up with a bigger body, a bigger brain, but it the brain’s even proportionally larger. And that’s what’s happening in like frozen ravens. So they’re kind of near the the pinnacle of the bird world, them and parrots really. Other groups, you know, they don’t seem like they need a large brain, like pigeons. I I really like pigeons. A lot of people are grossed out by pigeons.

They’re amazingly good at maneuvering in the sky. Like they can some they they really can do some interesting, you know, turning on a on a dime. But pretty sure I saw a pigeon eat a cigarette in New York. So so like the dodo, for example, it’s portrayed as like this, you know, dopey bird. It’s it’s really just a big pigeon. It’s not that the dodo has a tiny brain. It’s that th that whole group is pretty small brain compared to their body side, and that’s just a really big one. Yeah. So

speaker-2 (28:54.36)
Yeah, different different needs though, right? You know, if you don’t need a to do doing, you know, trigonometry, mm-hmm. You don’t really want your brain to be very big ’cause it takes a lot of energy. It’s the most expensive tissue. Like the most expensive organ is the brain per like, you know, cubic centimeter. So having a huge brain and not using it is is an evolutionary liability.

speaker-1 (29:14.37)
Yeah, that makes sense.

speaker-2 (29:16.322)
Yeah, T Rex was a very smart. My my friend Amy Balanoff and I had an article in Scientific American. We we read this paper that said like T Rex had baboon like cognition. We were like so outraged, we’re like, we’re gonna write a reply. And we start we wrote like half the paper, and then Amy got like a like a Google Scholar notification that someone else had already published the thing. But we rolled it into the Scientific American paper, which was kind of more on the whole way T Rex perceived the world. So we

speaker-1 (29:26.284)
That paper, yeah.

speaker-2 (29:44.13)
We still got to use our our research, but we were like, No way, ’cause it’s not very big and half of it’s just for smelling and like a lot of it’s empty too, like a dinosaur brain case for a T Rex. Part of it’s just like blood vessels and junk and sinuses. So there we don’t think it was super smart.

speaker-1 (29:59.47)
It didn’t need to, it had the powerful bite and then

speaker-2 (30:04.332)
Yeah, it just needed to see you or smell you and then go eat eat you. So it did I don’t think it I don’t it never I don’t I doubt it came up with like a plan of attack where we’re gonna you know, we’re gonna come in from the left and then, you know, they’ll fall into a pit we dug. It was sh I’m gonna go eat that guy.

speaker-1 (30:18.83)
Yeah. Do you think any dinosaurs had coordinated a an atta and I know that’s a big question because then there’s a lot of debates but

speaker-2 (30:27.978)
Yeah. Well, so we know there’s some pretty complex behavior in dinosaurs from from direct fossil evidence. So we have like nesting dinosaurs, right? So Ovaraptor and Truodontids, they they clearly incubated their eggs or at least brooded their eggs. And so they they probably have partial contact incubation. So that’s showing a level of care. We have evidence of like satakosaurs living in like groups and like in the burrows and things like that. So there’s definitely some some social behavior, some parental care.

The whole pack hunting thing’s really hard to prove. Yeah. I don’t know w what kind of preservation environment you’d have to get to to have that. but I I think, you know, we look at things that ostriches and emus and chickens do. Dinosaurs are probably capable of very similar things. And so, like, you know, ducks shooing their their young out of the nest into the water or

Teach you know, nudging them to fly and things like that. That’s probably all within their behavioral capacity.

speaker-1 (31:29.026)
Yeah. I mean I’d like to think that there were some pack hunters, but

speaker-2 (31:32.682)
It probably makes sense for some of the smaller ones, especially. I think the Deinonychus, you know, feeding on Tenantosaurus is probably the best example we have. And it’s not like smoking gun exactly, but it probably they’d have a better chance, I think, tanking one down together. Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (31:49.55)
Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that any like research you’re working on or we could go back to exhibitions, things you want to mention?

speaker-2 (32:00.364)
Yeah, just really want to encourage people if you’re in the Connecticut or New York City area to come see Six Extinctions. We got Scotty. So the T Rex is a cast of Scotty, which is nice. One of the largest T Rex ever discovered. Interestingly, discovered by a high school principal, which is great. and it was in like this crazy sedimentary environment. So it took I think like twenty years or something to fully remove it and reassemble it. So it was a lot of work, but it’s a a beautiful skeleton.

About forty feet long, I believe. Estimated at six tons. So it’s an impressive animal. And that’s what’s kind of great about T Rex is it used to just be there’s a Tyrannoshirus Rex. Now they all have names. Yeah. There’s like Sue and Scotty and whatever. And it’s facing down that that Taurosaurus, that controversial serotonin.

speaker-1 (32:44.726)
that’s where Scotty is. Nice.

speaker-2 (32:46.7)
We have them kind of staring each other down. So that’s that’s a highlight I think for most people. Everyone loves sinosaurs. But what’s really fun is delving into the others. So see the giant nine foot millipede and and see and we have classics like the Metrodon, the sail back the reptile. We have that that squidded and ice cream cone we were talking about before. and then there’s animals from the most recent extinction. So we have woolly mammoths and sabretooths that were wiped out basically when humans were moving into the Americas.

And also we have a few objects from our own collection, examples of birds that were wiped out in the last century. So like passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeet, Heath and you know, really sad stories. These two species, passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo both times. I mean, that’s just it was Inca, I believe, was the name of the parakeet, and Martha was the pigeon. Martha’s in the Smithsonian actually, they had her on display on the hundredth anniversary of of the extinction, but

It’s such a cautionary tale, right? There were in Autobahn’s day, there were flocks. They said flocks would take hours to pass over you. Like, could possibly a billion birds like moving in in unit? I mean, just unthinkable numbers, like so so abundant it almost defies belief. It’s almost like it’s a plague of locusts. And and then they’re gone in like a blink of an eye. And so they really they seem absolutely limitless. And now there’s none left.

The Heath end, that died out on Martha’s Vineyard. The last one was called Booming Ben. And you think of these events as happening in the past, but he was he died near an airport on Martha’s Vineyard. So like it was not that long ago. and it’s just they were once allegedly so common that people would complain if they had to be f serve them more than three times a week. I mean, they were supposedly in the common in Boston. so they it’s

Really eye opening house, something that we we just take for granted that is like, you know, it’s just there and it can it can be gone really quickly if we if we are careless with it.

speaker-1 (34:50.414)
Definitely. So for our listeners, if they want to know more about the Bruce Museum or you and your work, are there places they can go online?

speaker-2 (34:57.868)
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a website, of course. You come to the Bruce Museum website, Bruce Museum.org, you’ll see all the exhibitions we have. And we are art and science, right? So we have Six Extinctions is really fun because we actually have a T Rex in a gallery that usually has art in it. But we’re gonna have a great show from Sergeant to O’Keefe with these these masterpieces of art in that same space in in the October. And so like there’s not many museums in the world where you can go see like a Pizarro.

A 2,000 pound quartz crystal, a Dilophosaurus model, a living turtle, and you know, a bunch of Giacometti sculptures. Like we have so much. I’m on the science side, obviously, but it’s really great to be able to enjoy all the art. And one of the things we really pride ourselves on is finding those intersections between art and science. And so we often have, you know, sculpture that’s inspired by natural objects right next to the mineral gallery. We had this beautiful Tara Donovan piece, and it looked

For all the world, like a giant piece of scolocyte, this zeolite mineral. in fact I heard many dads tell their kids it was a giant crystal. it was called aggregations, but having those side by side is just so so eye-opening and evocative and fun. We had this fun art show with Jennifer Angus. she actually covered the walls of our art gallery with over four thousand insects. So they were pinned in these wonderful Victorian patterns, and there was these little vignettes of bugs baptizing one another and coronations and

playing dice and all these things. And so that was like it’s an art show, but it’s the substrate is or the the medium is not paint or or clay. It’s it’s insect. And so that’s what makes us unique, right? We’re not the biggest museum in the world, but there’s so few that that would have both of these. And we’re so proud of that and and really finding the the times when we can do both at once is what what we really live for.

speaker-1 (36:49.134)
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for so for our listeners, you have until September sixth if you want to see six extinctions, although it sounds like there’s never a bad time to visit the Bruce Museum.

speaker-2 (37:01.202)
The only bad time is Monday. We’re close Monday. But other than that, come on come on in. yeah, I I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a it’s a terrific show and you know, come for the dinosaurs, stay for the millibeat.

speaker-1 (37:11.886)
And we also have a on our Patreon we have a whole series on mass extinctions too. If anyone wants to listen more and, you know, bone up on that before you see the six extinction exhibit. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

speaker-2 (37:28.462)
Thanks, Sabrina. I had a had a blast. Thank you so much.

speaker-1 (37:31.662)
Thank you so much, Daniel. That was a lot of fun talking about the Six Extinctions exhibit, as well as birds, of course, and especially penguins. Love talking about penguins. And we will get to our dinosaur of the day in just a moment, but first we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

speaker-1 (39:19.534)
And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Brazillotitan, which was a request from Dilophosaurab via our Patreon and Discord. So thanks. It’s great. So Brazillotitan was a titanosaur sauropod that lived in the Lake Cretaceous and what is now Brazil, in the Adamantina formation. It was small, it walked on all fours. It had a long neck and a long tail and a small head. As a titanosaur would have walked with its neck more upright. And by small I mean it’s estimated to be

speaker-0 (39:26.636)
I love the Dilophyso Rob.

speaker-1 (39:47.97)
39 feet or 12 meters long. It had a squared off snout. The lower jawbone was L-shaped, so that gave it the squared snout. You can think like Nigerosaurus, but much less extreme. The type and only species is Brazillotitan nemophagus. The genus name Brazilotitan means Brazil giant, and then the species name means pasture or wood and to eat and refers to it being an herbivore. The fossils were found in 2000. They were found in reddish sandstone.

Bones were broken, but not really distorted. And then Brazilotitan was described in 2013 by Elaine Machado and others. And the holotype’s a partial skeleton and includes a right lower jawbone, two partial neck bones, parts of the hips, and a footbone. They also found an isolated tooth. It’s likely that Brazil titan was scavenged by theropods before it was buried, because there were some theropod teeth found alongside the skeleton, and the fossils have puncture marks, and they’re in the hips.

speaker-0 (40:44.55)
yeah. Something that you might not reach if you’re just happened to be biting an animal. That’s more of a consuming sort of

speaker-1 (40:52.984)
Happen to be biting. Yeah. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place as Brazilla Titan include sauropods such as Antarctosaurus and Gondwana Titan, and theropods such as abellosaurs and enantiornithes like Navaornis. Other animals that lived around the same time and place include amphibians, turtles, fish, mammals, and crocodilomorphs. And our fun fact is dinosaurs were like.

I’m saying this in quotes latchkey kids, and then mammal parents were or are more like in quotes helicopter parents. This is from something that Thomas Holtz Jr. wrote in the Italian Journal of Geosciences. So dinosaurs in the Mesozoic and mammals today are often considered to be ecologically equivalent. They are or were the majority of the medium and large animals in their eras.

speaker-0 (41:46.934)
In other words, the Mesozoic was the age of the dinosaurs and the Cenozoic is the age of mammals.

speaker-1 (41:54.24)
Exactly. There’s also similarities between dinosaurs and mammals in terms of posture. The fact that we and they, because we’re mammals, we and they have different ways of eating. And there’s evidence of some levels of being warm-blooded. Well, we know that with mammals, but with dinosaurs. But how similar were they really in terms of ecology and meaning how they interacted with their environment? And it turns out that there’s a big difference between mammals and dinosaurs.

And how animals raise their young impacts the ecosystem around them. So with mammals, young animals usually stay close to the mother until they’re nearly fully grown. And that means that they fill the same ecological role as their parents. They’re relying on adults for food and protection and they’re interacting with the same surroundings. And that’s what makes mammals the helicopter parents. Young dinosaurs, on the other hand, were pretty independent. Some had parental care for a few months or a year, but then some of them took care of themselves right away.

And that’s what makes them the latchkey kids. And they’re independent. They could also being independent spread into niches that their parents weren’t in.

speaker-0 (43:02.136)
Yeah, which always sounds a little weird to us as mammals. The idea back when we were thinking that T Rex and Nanoterannus were the same species, that as a juvenile, T Rex might have eaten totally different prey and acted differently and ran faster and done completely different sort of ecological niche filling than the adult would have done. And that’s probably still true. It just turns out the nanotyrannus is also there doing its own thing.

speaker-1 (43:26.862)
Yes. Another example is that juvenile Brachiosaurus wouldn’t be able to reach plants up as high as the adults. So it would have to go to different places to eat different plants and worry about carnivores that wouldn’t be going after the large adults.

speaker-0 (43:40.32)
Yeah. Whereas if it was a mammal, it would be like, Okay, climb on my back, baby Brachiosaurus, so you can reach the leaves or I’m gonna get them out of the top of the tree and feed to you down there or something.

speaker-1 (43:52.242)
that’s funny to think of a brachiosaurus climbing onto a back. All right, so this study started off by looking at dinosaurs’ closest living relatives, birds and crocodilians. Birds today need parents to take care of them until they’re nearly adults. Crocodiles take care of their hatchlings for several months to over a year and a half. And then as they grow up, they fend for themselves and their diet changes.

Alligators, for example, start off by eating insects, then they switch to crustaceans and fish, and then eventually on to mammals and turtles.

speaker-0 (44:25.592)
I should say most birds need their parents to take care of them until they’re almost adults because some of them are pretty precocial and take care of themselves. And they also get to adulthood or near adulthood really fast.

speaker-1 (44:37.587)
sometimes in a span of months. Yes.

speaker-0 (44:40.078)
Like a two or three months and they’re big enough to be like, Okay, I’m outta here.

speaker-1 (44:43.822)
Was it like chickens can start laying eggs after four months, and then I think pigeons are adults after six months? Mm-hmm. So it’s not the same level of commitment that mammals have. Yeah. Especially humans.

speaker-0 (44:54.594)
Yeah. Very true.

speaker-1 (44:56.782)
All right, well, what did dinosaurs do in the Mesozoic? It took them many years or even decades to reach their full size. And with dinosaurs, we see pods of young dinosaur skeletons preserved together with no adults nearby. So it seems that juveniles sometimes traveled in groups together, getting their own food and fending for themselves. It’s possible that in these juvenile bone beds, for whatever reason, some adults were there and they didn’t fossilize, but it’s hard to say.

For this study, they looked at mammalian faunas like Librea plus 18 more faunas, as well as dinosaurian faunas, including Hell Creek, Nemet, and sixteen more. I don’t want to list all the faunas. And they compared the body sizes of adults and juveniles. Young mammals are typically closer to adult size in terms of body mass than Mesozoic dinosaurs. You’d think how like a baby is small compared to an adult human, but not

that small compared to say a sauropod that laid an egg. Yeah.

speaker-0 (46:00.024)
Because yeah, a a human goes from say on the smaller end, five pounds up to two hundred pounds, which would be a factor of forty. Whereas with sauropods you could go from one pound up to I don’t even know how many tens of thousands of pounds, which is tens of thousands of times the size increase.

speaker-1 (46:20.962)
were the hatchlings even on their radar. I don’t know. Yeah. All right. So they examined three scenarios. One where only adults represented taxa, another that included adults and juveniles of all growth stages to represent taxa. And another where there’s juveniles living independently and then there’s adults without dependent offspring to represent the taxa. It’s a preliminary type study so that

simplifies things and Tom Holtz acknowledges that. But he suggests that because dinosaurs were on their own as kids, that doubled the number of species in their communities compared to mammals.

speaker-0 (46:59.349)
yeah, effectively doubled, I guess. Yeah.

speaker-1 (47:01.366)
Yeah. Because they’re doing all different stuff and eating different things and yeah, just living different lives.

speaker-0 (47:07.724)
It could be even more. You could imagine it being three different cause sometimes like you were talking with alligators, right? Some of stay in like trees and things, these smaller lizards. And then as they get a little bit bigger, they might be eating smaller prey. And then when they’re larger, at the largest they could be behaving differently.

speaker-1 (47:25.868)
It’s also possible that dinosaurs had a lower metabolism compared to comparable size mammals, which would allow for more diversity in the same area because they just wouldn’t need to eat as much. So the takeaway here is that dinosaurs change what they ate over the course of their lives. And adults and juveniles can be considered different functional species because they occupy different niches, what they eat, what species can threaten them, where they can move. So just like what you were saying, Garrett.

speaker-0 (47:51.884)
Yep. So even if Nanotyranus and T Rex are different genera, doesn’t mean that juvenile T Rex didn’t behave totally different and still look a fair amount like Nanotyrannus in a lot of ways.

speaker-1 (48:03.298)
Yeah. They might have been rivals. Mm-hmm. Food.

speaker-0 (48:06.36)
Well, yeah. And also probably rivals with others of the same species based on all the face biting that T Rex seemed to do.

speaker-1 (48:14.09)
It’s a tough life. That wraps up this episode of Inodino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. Our next episode of Inodino, we’re going to have at least one new dinosaur and we’ll be talking about dinosaur growth. And don’t forget, you’ve got about one week or so left to pledge if you haven’t pledged yet for the dinosaur rookie cards. You can do that at inodino.com slash cards. Thanks again, and until next time.