Life Uh Finds A Way?! (Evolution's Best Mistakes)

Today on the show: They're not dinosaurs, they're from BEFORE the dinosaurs, and they're very, very, very strange. Giant apex predator shrimp thingies, centipedes you could ride on, the tully monster, evolution's most amazing mistakes! I'm joined by paleontologist and science educator Dane Pavitt. Check him out at www.theaveragescientist.co.uk  and  www.youtube.com/danepavitt 

Footnotes:

Last week's mystery animal sound source

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
and today on the show, they're not dinosaurs, mon they're
really Oh my god, what's that thing? That's right, folks,

(00:29):
we are talking about pre dinosaur animals who are really cool,
really wild, really really hard for paleontologists to put together
the sordid history of pre dinosaur animals. We should have
had a movie about these guys, take it over a
park and making people question, you know, whether or not

(00:53):
science has gone too far. So joining me today is paleontologists,
science communicator, museum educator, and perhaps most importantly of all,
a metal guitarist, Dane pa.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
It Welcome, Hey, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm so excited. So I am not really an expert
in these sorts of animals, the pre dinosaur guys. In fact,
dinosaurs I'm not even that well versed in because I
have most of what I know are animals that are
still alive, given that it's the easiest to observe their behavior.

(01:30):
But I think what is so fascinating to me about
paleontology is the lack of direct observation that you can
do and how you guys are kind of like almost
like forensic detectives piecing together these animals.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah. Absolutely, So there's various different branches of how we
can do this. We can kind of pass together the
sort of most likely conclusions about Yeah, if you want
to all about animal behavior specifically, we can use comparative anatomy.
So you have this phenomenon evolution. You may know that
of a convergent evolution, where different organisms will evolve similar
features to solve similar problems in their environments. So you

(02:07):
can look at the fossil record and you say, this
animal has this particular shaped arm bone that means it
was probably digging, or it has this feature in the
spine which means it ran a certain media. So we
can piece together. But yeah, it is very much like
detective work taking these very sparse pieces of evidence, and
the fossil record is notoriously sparse. I think there's sort

(02:29):
of a ballpark estimation that only one in a million
animals that has ever existed actually becomes a fossil. All
the rest just die and rot away or are eaten,
or are just completely lost to the winds of time.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah, because fossilization. I mean, there's a few ways in
which something becomes a fossil, but it is certainly not
a common thing to happen to an animal's carcass. It's
not as if you have just every dinosaur who has
dyed is perfectly encased in stone. The conditions, yeah, the
conditions in which fossil actually form is quite rare. And

(03:05):
it's even more rare for a fossil, like a complete
fossil to form where you get the entire animal perfectly
represented in one piece.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, so there's the classic. It's the classic. One is
the opening the early scene in the original Jurassic Park
where they're in the desert and they brush the sand
away and there is a complete dinosaur skeleton perfectly formed,
with every bone exactly where it is. That almost never happens.
Most fossil animals are known from a handful of bits
of frag like maybe not even complete bones. Teeth are

(03:39):
very very common because a lot of ret load. Before
we want to talk reptiles in particular, a lot of
reptiles shed and regrow their teeth, so teeth are quite common. Sharks.
Sharks teeth are very common. Shells if you're looking in
marine and aquatic environments are aquatic water based environments are
generally speaking more productive for fossil because you have movements

(04:01):
of the sediments, which is more likely to bury things.
So a lot of the most productive sites for fossils
in the world tend to be lakes and lagoons and
slow flowing rivers where things can be easily buried not
necessarily destroyed by strong currents or floods and things like that.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
There's that beautiful Burgess Shale which was discovered in the
early nineteen hundreds that had just an incredible wealth of
fossils from this period of time where you had this
almost doctor Seussian diversity of animals that seemed like some
kind of awful fever dream, which oh yeah, yeah, which

(04:41):
is it is. It's so interesting too because it was
discovered so early, well relatively early. The trials and airs
of trying to put together these fossils that were so
strange looking.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah. So the Burger Shale, it's what call the lagostatn,
which is a German word and it's basically it's a
it's the sort of blanket term for sites of exceptional
preservation and the Burgess Shale seems to have been a
very deep water environment and possibly an oxic. So there
had been quite low oxygen in that environment, which means
not a lot of fuel for like bacteria and things

(05:19):
to break down the carcasses when they sink to the
sea floor. And yeah, you've got creatures, which yeah, they
are so because so the Burgers show represents a period
of time called the Cambrian which is around two hundred
and forty odd million years ago, and it's very you know,
it's very famous phenomena called the Cambrian Explosion, wherein there'd

(05:40):
been micro organisms and algae and things around for several
or several tens and hundreds of millions of years beforehand,
but at this particular point, it was sort of the
stars aligned, sort of the temperature was just right, the
atmospheric conditions were just right, Everything just kind of landed
just right, and there's this huge explosion in diversity of
tomp like multicellular life. And you have early representatives of

(06:03):
the early ancestors of arthropods, sponges, worms, sort of very
very early. Yeah, you can kind of sort of squint
and see the resemblance to modern animals.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, that's what's so interesting to me is when I
see kind of these these animals from the more wormy ones,
like the soft bodied ones, which I mean, it's incredible
that we have fossils of these soft bodied animals, because
we generally think of fossils as like, hey, bones or shells,
something hard, because those are more likely to be able
to be preserved. But yeah, these soft bodied, like worm

(06:38):
like animals that don't have many I think analogs in
modern times, but you can you can kind of find like, actually,
you know, well, we'll talk about one in a little
bit that is very interesting, one of my favorite ones.
But first let's talk about the Anomalocras, which I think
is sort of one of the most famous examples of

(07:02):
this this period. The name being Latin Greco for abnormal shrimp,
which is very funny to me.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, very very abnormal shrimp. Anomalo carus is sort of
it's famous for being kind of characterized as one of
the first eight lot, one of the first large apex predators.
It was so as far as we said, it was
a free swimming animal, which is quite a big innovation.
There were, you know, a lot of the critters that
were around at the time were sort of sediment based,

(07:33):
either fixed to the sea floor or burrowing or crawling
around sea floor. But Anomala carus was free swimming, had
these sort of mobile tendrils on its face for gathering
at prey, and we think it was probably most likely
eating sort of the small Yeah, the small, soft body
crystal floor trilobites would have been very abundant food source.
So these are the famous sort of sort of woodlousey,

(07:55):
beatley looking critters that.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Like polls or isopods of today.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, yeah, very much so. Unfortunately they went extinct at
the end of the Permian period, which is the end
of this sort of we say pre dinosaur is this
larger period of time called the Paleozoic, So this is
the sort of first of three major eons or chapters
if you like, in the history of life on Earth.
Paleozoic is from the Cambrian explosion five hundred and forty

(08:23):
million years ago up to two hundred and fifty million
years ago, which ends with the Permian extinction event, which
took out huge, huge numbers of these amazing animals, some
of which had made it all the way from the
Cambrian explosion, like the trilobites.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
And what was the precipitating event do we think for
that mause extinction was a change in the climate.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
So well, ultimately, all mass extinction events are some form
of climate change. It just depends on what the triggering
event is and what we believe. This one was a
massive spike in volcanic activity at this site in Siberia.
So we're talking an area hundreds of you know, tens
of possibly tens of thousands of square kilometers of land

(09:10):
in Russia basically fractured into a constantly erupting supervolcano, and
I'm talking on the scale of thousands and thousands of years.
And over the course of that time, it released you know,
trillions of tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases. It
caused a runaway greenhouse effect. It acidified the oceans matt

(09:30):
huge amounts of acid rain. As sea temperatures rise, water
is less able to hold gas at high temperatures, so
A that means less oxygen for the life living in
the ocean, and B it means less CO two is
being absorbed into the ocean, which causes even more heating.
Some estimates put it as high as eighty percent of

(09:52):
all life on Earth was wiped out at the end
of this extinction event.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
That's incredible. I mean, maybe this is the optimist in me,
but I feel like that's so really impressive that we
bounced back from that. You know, it's it's kind of
amazing that you can have such a mass extinction. Obviously
very bad for the current trial bides just trying to
live their lives, but still the life somehow, you know,

(10:16):
was able to recover from that.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, well, among the survivors were well, obviously everything that's
alive today is descended from that, you know, relatively small
handful of life that made it through this extinction event,
but it caused this huge kind of restructuring of the
food chain. So there's this really interesting event sort of
immediately following that extinction. We're still pre dinosaur. By the way,

(10:39):
the dinosaurs don't really the dinosaurs don't really come into
their own until the sort of middle to late Triassic period,
which is sort of two hundred and twenty two hundred
and thirty million years, So there's a good thirty million
year block between that extinction and the dinosaurs really starting
to come into their own, and there's this phenomenon known
as the Mesozoic marine revolution, which is really interesting kind

(11:00):
of upheaval in the oceans. So one major part of
it is the diversification of secondarily aquatic tetrapods. So there's
a few technical terms here. I want to make sure
the audience are fully on board here. So secondarily aquatic
is basically any animal that has evolved from a land
based ancestor and has gone back into the water.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
So we've got whales. Whales would count as that, right.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Whales absolutely, yet sturles, crocodiles, sea lions, penguins, anything that
has come from a land based ancestor into the ocean.
During the Paleozoic, before the Permian extinction event, they didn't
really there weren't really any of them because throughout that
time the large ocean niches, the sort of big spaces
in the ecosystem were dominated by fish and arthropods, So

(11:48):
the big predators in the ocean were giant fish and
giants arthropods, So there were things like Dunkleostius is probably
the most famous one, which is this it's part of
a group of fish that doesn't exist anymore, called the placoderms,
and rather than having teeth they just have extended bones
of the skull that would sheer against each other like
scissor blades. That is, there's been some recent studies on

(12:11):
Doncleosis as to exactly how big it was. It was
believed to be like a sort of school bus sized monster.
That's been scaled down with it recently. We think sort of,
doesn't it.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Where we like it was the size of the Empire
state building. Maybe actually just the size of a Volkswagen.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yeah, there's quite a bit of that. There's also the
sea scorpions, which were another casualty of the Permian extinction events.
Not technically scorpions, they are arthropods.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
So they look like a flat scorpion, kind of like
if you took the rolling pin and just sort of
like rolled out a scorpion.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, they've got this great, big,
grasping pincers. They've got this big, long, flat tail, which
some of the smaller ones may have swam, but some
of the big ones probably stuck to the seabed. Some
of the really big ones were nightmarish, like the biggest
arthropods of all time. Yes, two meters long, possibly two
and a half. For some of the really big ones.

(13:08):
So these are the things that are occupying the big
the big ocean niches at the time. And then the
Permian extinction happens and it kind of opens up the
food chain somewhe It opens up the ecosystem, and you
have this big adaptive radiation where this happens a lot
after extinction events. When you have when you've got the
slate white clean, that leaves a lot of space for
innovation and sort of evolutionary experimentation. So you start to

(13:32):
get reptiles moving into the ocean. You get early sort
of crocodile and turtle relatives. You have lots of very
strange things that don't really exist anymore, like the placar
donts Placoderms is the armored fish. And then you have plecardonts,
which are these weird swimming reptiles that are not turtles,
but they have very wide, flat bodies and armor across them.

(13:53):
They sort of look like baked turtles. They're very strange things, yeah,
very odd looking, but some of them have some of
them are derived ones. They've got these forward facing teeth
at the front of the jaw, and then they have
these very flat plate like teeth at the back of
the jaw and the roof of the mouth, and that's
interpreted as being adaptations for prising apart and crushing shellfish.

(14:16):
And that's the other big part of the mesozoat marine
revolution is that it forced this big change in ocean
invertebrates through the evolution of new creatures that can crack
open and ingest shells and exoskeletons. Because if you think,
you know, if you're like a limpet or a barnacle
or something attached to a rock or attached to the

(14:37):
sea floor, and there's nothing that can break you, basically fine,
But if something pulls you off the rock and you
can't reattach yourself or swim away or crawl into a
hole and hide, you're basically doomed. So sessile animals, so
things that attached to the sea floor and basically stay
there the rest of their lives started to decline and

(14:58):
animal and yeah, these sort of shellfish and invertebrates had
to find all sorts of new ways to adapt. So
creatures that lived on the surface declined, Creatures that lived
in burrows diversified. There was a lot more burrowing animals
after this. A really good example is crinoids, which, again
making sure your audience caught up. Crinoids is really really

(15:19):
weird creatures that evolved early on in the Paleozoic, not
quite the Cambrian. They have I think it's penta radial symmetry.
So humans are bilaterally symmetrical. We've got a left side
and the right side. Chronoids have five way symmetry. You
can look you look down on them from the top,
you can split them five ways as they've got the
mouse in the middle.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
So like starf like kind of terms like starfish and
there are.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, they are a kindoderms. Yeah, they're related to starfish
and sea urchins. So they've got a mouth in the middle,
and then they have all these big branching feathery arms
that come outs and their suspension feeders. They gather organic material,
they put their arms out, they collect food from the water,
and then they draw their arms into the mouth in
the middle. And there's two major varieties of them. There's

(16:07):
the standard ones just as I've described, which can use
their arms to swim around and crawl around on the
sea floor, and we call them feather stars. And then
there's the stalked variety, which have a great, big, long
stalk that trails from underneath the body and attaches them
to the seafloor. And they kind of makes them look
like a flower, and we call them sea lilies, and
they are all still around today. They've made it through

(16:28):
all the extinctions, all the way into the present day.
During the Massasoka marine Revolution, you have this explosion of
creatures that can break through exo skeletons. The sea lilies,
the ones fix to the sea floor, start to abandon
the shallow water and move into the deeper ocean. So
most of the sea lily species that we have today
live in deep offshore waters, whereas the feather stars that

(16:50):
can move around and swim and escape, they live on
the reefs and coastal environments. So it is this complete
restructuring of how entire food chains and ecosystems work over
this extinction boundary.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah, you have a mass when you have like a
massive shock like that, you have for the remaining species
that are now adapting to say the you know, the
arms race that's happening as new species start to take
over in the niches that have been abandoned by the
species that have gone extinct. Everything is impacted right in

(17:26):
a way that like they all have to readapt It
kind of reminds me of one of the animals I
was thinking of talking about today was Endoceras Gigantium, which
is sort of like that that big unicorn like cephalopod
during the I'm gonna say a period as if I
know what I'm talking about, even though I don't, the

(17:46):
Ordovician period. So it was this like ancestor of modern
day squid octopuses, not alloids, but unlike modern day squids
and octopuses, it had this massive shell and unlike the nautilus,
which still has that shell, it was this really straight,

(18:09):
large conical shell that spanned from over nine up to
possibly the larger estimates are eighteen feet, although that's not
exactly confirmed, but it could be anywhere from like three
to over five meters. And so it's thought it was
like this ambush predator, right, because you're so big, you're

(18:31):
not going to be very mobile, and you have this
giant shell to defend itself. So that once, and similarly
to other giant shelled cephalopods, thought that it went extinct
because it could not out compete with this new sort
of wave of like the fish and more mobile, more agile,

(18:54):
and swifter creatures that were evolving at the time. So
it went from because you'd think, like a lot of
people will often ask like, well, if you have something
that has this amazing defense mechanism, like a giant shell,
why would it get rid of it? Right, because like
squid octopuses, they're very vulnerable, they're so squishy, But it
doesn't matter necessarily if you're perfectly protected, if you're not

(19:18):
getting any food, if you're unable to compete with the
faster predators and the faster prey.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, the the evolution of a spine was a big
innovation because that that's you know, that provided the sort
of propulsion for sort of early predatory fish to swe
you know, be a lot faster and a lot more
agile and maneuverable in the water. And yeah, so I
think things like endoceras and you know, these giant autaloids
would have would have had no predators, had had no

(19:45):
competition until these larger, you know, the early ancestors of
sharks and things like that, some of which would have
been capable of cracking through these shells. Yeah, sharks were
a big innovation at the time they used sort of
started to occupy the ape expression each but they were
kind of overtaken by the placoderms, the big sort of
sheer teeth fish. They were kind of your two main

(20:08):
sort of apex predator bodies that came in at the time,
and they were all kinds of bizarre as well. You
have these really nice out groups, as they're called, So
you have sort of we have your sort of evolutionary
group of animals that we consider modern day sharks, and
then you sort of go back a step on the
family tree and off on a little weird side branch,
and you find all these really odd creatures that aren't

(20:30):
quite entirely sharks that that's sort of the closest thing
we can relate into the things like one of the
more famous one is Stepacanthus, which has got these like rays.
It's rather than like the kind of triangular dorsalt thing.
It's got this kind of flattened structure on its back
with all these bristles and spines across it. We think
it's a sexual display structure of some kind because we

(20:52):
only find it in the males. There's a ah, the
names escaping me. Now there's all kinds. There's a oh,
helica prion.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
As a real yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, so yeah, this this whole family group of sharks that,
instead of having a jawline as conventional sharks do, all
their teeth run down the middle of the jaw, and
there's some that have them like scissor blades, one on
top of the other. But helica prion has this big
spiral of teeth which we now interpret as being new
teeth growing in the center and kind of growing outwards

(21:22):
towards the outer edge of the spiral, and then as
they are replaced, they kind of fall out of the front.
It's possible it may have been able to use that
to cut through, you know, shells and of things like
the squid and the autoloids that were hanging around at
the time.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, no, it is. It is so weird because with
a lot of these animals, when I mean, one thing
is that I think that the reason these shapes look
so bizarre to us is that we are we acclimate
ourselves to the shapes of say, you know, we look
at a hammerhead shark, right, and we're we're a climatized
to that. So we see that and we understand it

(22:00):
we see this sh this as a normal animal shape
more or less, but that's really only because we have
gotten used to it that when like the first people
who probably saw a hammerhead shark was like, well, this
is an incredibly weird shape for a shark head. So
something like stephacanthus that has this weird anvil on its head,
which I'd be I'd love to see a hammerhead shark

(22:23):
and a deethacanthus get together and see what what what
they would make us, what they can build, see what
they can craft? Uh, but you know, yeah, I mean
it's it is interesting because they're all especially when we're
trying to piece together say that the purpose like how
how say the jaws work of this like weird spiraling
saw too thing, how they would actually maneuver that? Or

(22:43):
like this death of canthus, what that that protrusion was,
and the way we piece it together in terms of well,
if it was only found on males, maybe it would
be a sexual signaling uh device essentially. But it's also
kind of odd because we even in current animals, right,
like if you look at the narwhal, right, they have

(23:04):
this it's not really it's not really a horn. It's
a giant tooth, and it's generally found in the males.
It's less likely to be found in the females, although
some females do have it, which is again confusing, and
it is unclear exactly these are animals that are alive today.
We can observe them. Whales are always tricky because they're

(23:25):
in the water. These ones especially tricky because they're in
very cold water and we don't generally do well. We
struggle even to understand what narwals use their tusks for.
And that is as we have been aware of nar
wals for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, I mean,
you know, thousands of years when including local populations, and

(23:49):
yet the even with understanding that, yes, it seems to
be a sexual difference, but then we find all these
strange things about it, right like where the narwal tusk
is interval. It has all these pores in which a
seawater can filter through, possibly as a sensory organ but
we don't know. And so it's just it's when you

(24:09):
think about that puzzle that we have currently with an
animal we can physically interact with, we can look at
its tusk, we can get a fresh you know, narwhal
tusk and examine it, and then we try to do
that with something that's extinct like steph acanthus, And it's like,
what this protrusion could have possibly been. It could have
been a sexual ornament, it could have been a sensory organ,

(24:34):
it could have been both, and you know, just like
it's it's so it's so tantalizing.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Oh, like what say, like the comparison i've heard, you know,
and sort of looking at you what we what we
can pass in the fossil record. The comparison I've heard
is like human medical research. You know, we've been studying
the human body in earnest for a couple of hundred
years now, and there are more people working in human
medicine than arguably any other field of science. And we're
still learning new things about the human body. Yeah, we're

(25:03):
not going to run out of beatings to figure out
in the fossil record anytime soon.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Still not exactly sure what that all appendix is doing there. Well,
we're going to take a quick break and when we
get back. That's right, we're talking about more pre dinosaur
awesome things, including one that does look like a hallucination.
All right, So we are back. I do want to

(25:28):
talk a little bit more about anomal chrus before we
move on, because it is I think we had talked
a bit about its perception of this as this apex predator,
but the way we've seen it has kind of changed
a little bit over the years. You know, it was
originally discovered in the Burgess Shale in the early nineteen hundreds,

(25:52):
and it took a while to assemble this thing, and
it kind of was I think the first pieces they
found were that the front appendages that that looked like
giant shrimp. And that's kind of where that name came from,
because it's like straight abnormal shrimp. And I couldn't really
confirm this, but I think I once read an account

(26:14):
where they were saying that at one point they thought
that those front appendages were just whole animals because they
were they seemed like a complete shrimp.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Like a like a big yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
And so what the actual entire animal looks like is
it It was over a foot long, its front limbs
looked like it had a pair of giant shramp attached
to its face. It has these two big compound eyes
attached to short ice docks, a segmented body with these

(26:48):
fan blade like appendages on each segment which are thought
to actually have had gill structures attached to them. Then
it ended in this sort of like fan like tail.
So the whole thing kind of looked like a giant
flattened shrimp, but also it looked like it had two
other shrimp attached to its face. And it was thought

(27:10):
to be this example like you had mentioned earlier, because
it was one of the most even though it doesn't
seem that huge at only about over a foot long
compared to the other life at the time, it was
very large and very mobile, but there was so there's
this idea of it being this fierce apex predator like

(27:31):
basically the early example of say like a great white shark.
But the front appendages were studied a lot, and they
found that they seemed to not really be meant for
extreme strength, right like say, wrangling something that's really giving
it a lot of trouble. So the ideas that maybe

(27:54):
it was actually going after softer bodied prey, maybe something
a little easier to grab, like a trial a bite,
like some kind of soft bodied early these more sessile
animals that could be grabbed and perhaps even chased and grabbed,
but something that's not going to give these two front

(28:16):
appendages too much trouble.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, it's sort of you look at there's there's a
bunch of diagrams and sort of close ups of the
different So these sort of front appendages, they have these
sort of bristly spines that were along the underside which
seem they almost they sort of I'm getting fish hook
from them. So it's not necessarily it's not strictly very precise.
It's more you just kind of snag whatever comes onto it.

(28:41):
And there's different species, and the different species all have
slightly different shaped hooks to them, so that's suggesting possibly
they might be going after slightly different prey. Might be
a bit of ecological partition going.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Over fuschbeak finchbeak differences, where you have different sort of
beaks that.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Are exactly yeah, yeah, yeah, Arwin' stinches.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, And then you got to think, yeah, like the
creatures it's you know, yeah, yeah, it is only a
foo long, and you've got to think the creatures that
it's going after are probably going to be centimeters long
if that, and yeah, there's there's going to be very rudimentary,
very early defenses.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
You know that far back in history, there's going to
be stuff that burrows, is going to be stuff that
has armored, But there's going to be a lot of
stuff that sits on the surface and is going to
be largely defenseless against a gargantuan creature of entire long Yeah, like.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Can barely register what this thing is before just getting
slurped up.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yeah, Like a lot of a lot of creatures are
going to be very slow moving. A lot of things
aren't going to have any eyes. They're going to have
very very very basic nervous systems and sensory organs and
things like that. So Yeah, although it does have this
sort of reputation as you know, the earliest apex predator,
it's not necessarily a very high bar to jump, even
the kind of standard of the prey that's around at

(29:59):
the time.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Well, that is a sick burn for the poor Middle
Cambrian period soft bodied animals living on the seafloor.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Wow, look at you.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Speaking of soft bodies. I don't we have to talk
about hallucinogeneous hallucigenea. Yeah, lucigeneia I generally go with hallucinogenea
hallucigeneous genus.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
As long as it's spelled right, it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, No, Hallucigenia, I think is I had written out
a fancy pronunciation guide for myself that I just tripped over. Uh,
but yeah, hallucigenia that it was this like genus of
panarthropod's uh lobopodians Greek term for blunt feet, which is

(30:49):
kind of cute, I guess. But yeah, these these mostly
soft bodied marine wormlike animals, and they're I mean, I
I when you look at them, there's I mean, there's
there are a lot of different kind of types of
these local podions and different ones not whucagenea, but different

(31:12):
types of low podions do look a lot like modern
day velvet worms, which are also panarthropods, who have these
little tiny legs. They have this soft body. They look
so much like maybe a caterpillar, but they are not.
They're they're not at all related.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
To caterpillars, like bleshy caterpillars.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Very fleshy. There's I love them. I think they're.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Velvet velvet worms are great. Yeah, they have a strange
sort of air of cuteness about them and then they
do the whole spin.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, glue, they they do scirt a bit of glue.
It's the sticky substance that they have these two protrusions
at the side of their head that actually kind of
look like these cute little eyes, but they're not their eyes.
They are glands from one which they spew this sticky
glue like substance at their prey. Because as cute as

(32:05):
they they look like little pokemon that would say something
like yeah, really really adorable, but they are vicious predators
and they will immobilize their prey with this sticky substance. Uh,
and then just you know, casually stroll up to them
eat them at their leisure. It's actually quite horrifying. What
they do. To their credit is like, you know, this prehistoric,

(32:28):
just a creature from before we even had insects, and
but yeah, so so we see this and this is
as modern. But hallucigenia was even weirder. It was such
a strange looking thing that we really struggled after discovering
it because we actually had it's kind of incredible. The

(32:51):
fossil records of it were quite good, like there are
there were like these full sort of impressions of this animal.
But even with that, it really struggled to figure out
how this thing works. What is its feet, what's its back,
what's its head, and what's its butt? Things that you
would think are basic things you could figure out looking

(33:14):
at something.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Its whole body plan is search an anomaly. And yeah,
like I said, there's, there's, there's, there's. There's been so
many different interpretations of like trying to trying to figure
out just which way round this thing goes. People have
interpreted one end as the head and one end as
the back, and like this, does it sit this way
up or this way up? And yeah, things like that

(33:36):
and yeah, and they say it's it's it's incredible that
we do have these like this sort of soft body
preservation of these things. But this is the weird, it's
a weird sort of paradox with kind of fossil preservation
is that, you know, soft bodied animals do generally preserve
less well in the fossil record, but in environments that
are just right for it, you find loads of them. Yeah,

(33:57):
so those are really really useful fossil sites.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, absolutely so. It just we kind of looked out
at getting these these ones at this you know, I
believe this was also the Burgess Shale.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
I think I believe so, yes China as well.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yes there are. In fact, there was a research done
by Chinese researcher and I think I don't know where
this other researcher is from Lars Ramskolden who Jiang Wang,
who were actually like in the nineties, like we're studying
some of these fossil records, and they there had always

(34:37):
been this assumption that there was so essentially what this
thing looks like is it's a tube, as are we all.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
To be free, which is which is which is how
what most animals are.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
We're still tubes. We're just tubes with extra widgets. But
you know, so it's tubes. Tubes, Yeah, tubes at all.
I love that. So we so oh yeah, so a tube.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
And then on it's along its back or possibly it's belly.
It has these spines, and then along its belly or
some have thought its back, it has these soft appendages.
So the first go of it, they thought it had
that it walked on these spines kind of like stilts.

(35:22):
And it's only this thing is only like a few
centimeters big, so it's tiny, tiny, But originally thought Yeah,
it's just it kind of walks on these sharp thorn
like projections, as if there's stilts. And then the these
appendages on its back were used to gather food and
pass it along to its mouth. But then researchers took

(35:44):
another look at that fossil and they used like a
dental drill to kind of like get a little deeper
into it, and they actually found another pair of that
soft appendage. So it's like, now those are beginning to
look much more like legs, uh. And so they flipped
it back over and so this might make more sense
that it's walking on these soft appendages whereas the spikes.

(36:05):
Maybe that's a defense. But in terms of that, it
was assumed that there's like always this sort of big
balloon like blob on one end of it. And people thought, well,
that's its head. You know. It's kind of a weird
look ahead. It's kind of a blobby looking head, but
it's a head, right, because it's is it is a
balloon on one end of the animal. But yeah, like

(36:27):
I said, these researchers raum schooled and Jean one like
questioned whether that really was the head, and they kind
of because this showed up on multiple fossils, but they thought, like,
this seems more like it's an artifact of something else,
some kind of stain maybe.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
And then more recently, can you can get like preservation,
You can get like tephonomy and preservation issues, or sometimes
stuff is like the fossil itself can be prepared in
such a way that it leaves marks and stains and things,
and they can get misinterpreted further down.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
The line exactly. But the thing that was weird, right
was that this was something that seemed to kind of
recur in multiple fossils. So it was like, Okay, so
perhaps this is some kind of air and processing, but
it does seem to happen and more than just one individual.
And so more recently Martin Smith and John Bernard Karen

(37:19):
used electron microscopes on this head and they came up
with a new theory, which is that this seems like
it was a stain made of fluids that were expelled
during decomposition. So what was once thought of its as
its head is basically the fluids that were pushed out

(37:39):
of its butt as it was decomposing, which I'm afraid
to say happens to all of us when we decomposed.
So if you think that sounds gross bad news, that
basically happens to all animals as we decompose. We have
a lot of fluids, gases that will be forced out
of our tube bodies.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Problem tube. It's a it's a great example of how
new technology can be used to like examine old specimens.
You know, it's you know, sometime because it's our work
in the museum myself, and yeah, people sometimes wonder why
we hang onto the you know, fossils that are dug
up tens of years ago, hundreds of years we want
you people wonder why do we hang onto them? And
these days you can use X rays and electron scanning,
microscopes and set scans and all sorts of stuff, and

(38:22):
you can get all kinds of new information from old
fossil specimens by applying new technology to them. You know,
you don't know what the next big innovation is. If
you want really bizarre body plans from the Palaeozoic, you
really can't go much further than the Tully monster, which
is such a strange creature. We genuinely don't know what

(38:43):
it is. So eventually, yeah, we talked about out groups,
you know, things that you know, it's a close relative
of this thing, and it's kind of off on its
own branch of the family tree. With most fossil animals,
we can kind of get a broad idea of like, okay,
it's an arthropod, or it's a fish or something. The
Tully monster we genuinely have no idea. All we know
is it's got a left side and the right side,

(39:03):
and that's the only thing it has. That's the only
thing it has in common with any group of animals
otherwise symmetry.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Right there, you go.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
It's got it has symmetry. It's got eyes on stalks
like a snail, its mouth is on the end of
a hose, it's got fins like a squid. It's got
something that looks like a noto cord like a vertebrate,
and it's just put in its own group. It's genuinely
such a weird little creature. And it exists in the
Carboniferous period as well, which is actually quite a long

(39:31):
way from the cart from the from the Cambrian, So
it's not like this is one of those really super
early weirdos that showed up at the beginning of complex life.
This is something that you know, it's whatever it is.
It's a lineage has been around a while and we
don't know. Yeah, it's a ghost lineage. We don't know
what it's evolved from. We don't know how it's related
to other animals.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
Looking at this thing, do you remember that video game Spore?

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yes, it is totally a spore creature.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yes, looks it looks like when you make something in
Spore that does it does not survive past the first
few stages of your game. But yeah, this is such
This is such a wacky looking thing because it's got
something that almost looks like an elephant trunk or a
or like a tentacle. But at the end it's got
this like little grabby like almost moment a.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Thing like a some Some have interpreted that that, yeah,
like a beak or pincers or something. Some have interpreted
it as being like flexible like a trunk. Some of
interpreted as being jointed like an arm. Yeah, it's got
like the gills along the side of a body are
like a lamprey. It's got like sets of holes down
the side of its body past It's got all these

(40:41):
weird mixtures of features and nobody's quite sure what to
make of it.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
You know, it kind of looks like one of those
Boston Dynamics robots, but without the legs, uh, which is
you know, it is very interesting. This is uh, this
could be the Lockness monster. Like you know this, maybe
we should take another few submarines in there.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, it's that's what that's what people have seen rising.
It's a giant It's a giant tely monster.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Yeah, incredible. This is this is definitely cryptid territory where
it does not it does not look like something that
should have existed.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
It should not be here.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
It should it. Apparently it didn't. It didn't make it.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
No, it didn't. Didn't didn't make it into the present,
which is a shame because you know, if if they were,
if if they were one of those creatures that had
made it through the extinctions, we could like do a
genetic test on it and figure out where it might fit.
But we've just got these fossils and as far as
we know, they only existed in the Cambrian and we
don't know what branch of the tree of life they
come from.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
Who knows. Maybe it had two butts, we we we
really can't tell.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
Maybe maybe.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, the other thing that Martin Smith and Gene Karen
found was that when they examined the other side right
now that they've guessed that the side with the fluid
explosion is probably the butt. What they look when they
looked at the head, they found a couple of spots
that looked suspiciously like eye spots. So we go from

(42:20):
having this the initial impression of this thing, which is
that it has like it walks on stilts. It has
this weird balloon head with no eyes, and then we
turned it upside down. Now it's walking on its little,
soft little feet, it has spikes on its back, and
it's got a it's got a head that has eye spots.

(42:43):
It starts to look a little bit more like a
weird caterpillar, but nonetheless a body plan that does make sense,
Like the spikes make sense when you make it, you know,
make that analogy to modern day caterpillars. There are a
lot of caterpillars that have these thorny projections on their
back that protects it from predators. The soft, soft appendages

(43:05):
are very good for locomotion when you're trying to get
over ridges and bumps and crawl under things, so that
you have this this fluidity of motion, and the eye
spots of course pretty important. Like we talked about how
some animals that didn't even have any ability to detect
light at all were very vulnerable to predators. So yeah,

(43:28):
it is. It's like it went through so many strange iterations,
and even though what we kind of now think it
probably look like and was oriented as is still incredibly weird,
it at least makes some sort of sense.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Yeah, it's it's sort of an example of, like it's
a very early example of like recognizable features of sort
of what would go on to become kind of the
body plan of later on anamalgy with discernible legs and
eyes and a front end and a back end and
things like that. Yeah, it's it's very it's it did
it in a very weird way, but yeah, it's it

(44:04):
is sort of like an early sort of template or
trial run for what life on Earth would look like
further down the line.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
A prototype, Uh, you know, it's the first draft is
never going to be perfect, and.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
That evolution isn't you know. Most most animals are kind
of a B plus, you know, they're sort of good enough.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
That's all. That's all that's required. People sometimes have this
impression of evolution as being like a machine that creates
the perfect animals, like well, if we are alive right now,
or the animals that are alive, they must be you know,
perfected forms of life through the elegant process of evolutions.
Like now, as long as you can pop out some

(44:44):
babies and those babies can pop out babies of their own,
it's good enough, good enough.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
And there's there's always an issue that like the the
more quote unquote perfectly adapted an animal is, the more
at risk it is to extinction when the climate change.
I like to use it so when I do science,
I like to use the example of bears. So like
black bears, quite they've got quite a broad diet, they're
fairly adaptable, they can tolerate lots of different temperatures. They're
doing okay. Polar bears very strict diets, very tight range

(45:14):
of temperatures they can tolerate, and they're having a really
tough time of it right now.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, it's it's that it's a it's
the classic thing of like, well did you invest everything
into one crop right like like pandas do or do
you diversify, you know, and need a bunch of different things,
which does it does help out, but yeah, it is.

(45:37):
There is a recent study of looking into sort of
the pre we're going back really far. This is like
pre animal DNA, like the oh yeah, the produced DNA
and how researchers have sort of used genes from that

(45:58):
produce DNA and then found ones that are similar to
like gene markers and mice and then tried to see
if they could just like put that in there, like
sneak a little bit of protest DNA into the mouse
to get the same effect as the as that protein
sequence that was so similar, and they found indeed they could,
which I think is what's so interesting about these early

(46:22):
animals is yes, they may have lacked a lot of things,
like some of them didn't even have eye spots, some
of them didn't have a brain, but they had enough
of a genetic library that they could go through say
a mass extinction event or these these incredible sort of
bottleneck types of events and still have enough diversity that

(46:42):
they were able to start developing you know, a flurry
of useful features that were then used in later animals
that we now recognize as having sort of a useful
body plant rather than a strange tube with strange appendages.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah. Well, like like you know, talking about like giant panthers,
like herbivores, like as a thing, didn't really exist until
the Carboniferous, which is like near the near the end
of the Camry period, And that's where you start getting
kind of our ancestors. You start getting the first tetrapods
and the land based vertebrates, and like the sort of

(47:19):
the stem mammals, the kind of proto mammals. That's some
of my that's some of my favorite fossil animals is
these thing the creatures that kind of break your traditional
conception of like animal classification because you kind of learning
you kind of learn in school, you know, mammal, bird, reptile, fish, amphibian, inverterate.
But then there's so much stuff in the fossil record
that just doesn't fit in any of them. And yeah,

(47:40):
like the synapsids, which is the sort of the broader
group that mammals belong to. Their early ancestors are showed
up in the sort of Cambrian period and really really
flourished in the Permian so sort of right near the
end of the Paleozoic period, and that you know, you've
got creatures that are starting to resemble a kind of
modern eque system. You've got great big terrestrial predators and

(48:02):
herbivores with all kinds of weird horns and spikes and
frills and things coming off them. You've got the first
saber toothed predators shar not like even even before the
diet You've got you got the gorgonopsids, who are these
like horse sized, like lizard wolf things, just just nightmarish stuff.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
But we had there were dragon we from weird dragon
type animals, maybe without the wings, but yes, and.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
These are these are another group where again you have
all these questions that you can't quite answer through the
fossil record about yeah, because they're they're they're on the
they're on the the line towards the mammals, but they're
not quite there yet. So were they warm bloody or
cold blooded? Did they have skin or scales or fur?
Did they produce milk? Is that something that we only

(48:50):
find in true mammals or how far how far back
does that go?

Speaker 1 (48:53):
There's you don't need We've we've learned you don't need
nipples to make milk. You can just kind of let it.
She'll sort of flosh out of you.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Just bring them out like a sponge.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, and like sicilians, Yes, I know, yes, it's
just like you have so like so when I'm talking
about monitrems, I'm talking about platypuses and echidnas and they
are you know, egg laying mammals, and they do but

(49:25):
they do exude milk, but instead of having discrete nipples,
they have these glands and pores and the milk just
kind of like leaks out of them, which lovely. Sicilians
are a reptile that are not so they are not mammals,
but they and they don't technically produce milk, but what

(49:46):
they do have is a very nutritious and delicious skin
that they allowed their babies to eat off of their bellies.
Like it's mom jerky. It's jerky made from Ah. Hey,
you know it's loving, like when mom makes you cookies.
But hey, kids, you want a little piece of mom jerkey?

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Sure, lovely on that. Any whatever solution works, whatever works,
I'm pretty I'm pretty sure Sicilians have been around since
the Jurassic or something, so it's worked from so far.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
They're very old and very it's it's a recipe that's
been around for many generations.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Mom Mom's classic homebrew, Mom's classic home homebrewed Deally skin.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
There we go. Yes, we'll take a quick break, and
when we get back, we're going to talk about one
of the biggest land Arthur pod. No, the biggest planned
Arthur prod that we know about. Uh and uh yeah,
So we will be right back. So I do want
to talk about arthropleura because I love bugs. It's not

(50:54):
really a bug. Oh, actually, I don't know. Bug doesn't
have a very scientific classification, does it.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
I thought there was. I'm sure I heard that there is.
There is a specific group of insects that are called bugs.
I can't remember what it is, but in the general pilance, yeah,
people just use bugs for bugs.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
I feel like like an exoskeleton. For me, a bug
could also be like a shrimp. That's a bug to me.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
So it's a wet bug.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
It's a wet bug. We're eating wet bugs, folks. So
plural was a genus of massive arthropods that lived well.
It was around like three hundred forty something to two
hundred and ninety million years ago. It was like just
a few million years shy of coinciding with dinosaurs, you know,

(51:40):
which is nothing.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
And when we talk we talk about we talk about
geological time, and we talk about short periods of time
that could be like ten thousand years, a couple of
million years. That's nothing.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
It's nothing, nothing, just a little blip. But yeah, unlike
the other animals I've talked about, this is a terrestrial animal.
So like we talked about I mean you've talked about
plane of animals as well that have been terrestrial. But
like the the other really strange ones like anomalo, cars, hallucigenea, uh,
the the that big the yeah yeah yeah, the not alloid, Yes,

(52:18):
those have all been marine mammals or marine mammals. Those
have all been marine life and they and we we
have records of them because of this amazing or just
shale because in for the for the not alloid because
of its shell. But this is a terrestrial creature and
it's really interesting because we do have good records well

(52:40):
maybe not good, but enough record of it. And it
was a it was incredible looking so like it was
basically a giant millipede slash centipede. It had many many segments,
many many legs, unlike its modern relatives, though it grew
to be over eight feet long, which is around two

(53:03):
and a half meters, So it's the largest terrestrial arthropod
that we know of, and it had it's a little
I mean, if you're thinking of your classic millipede that
you typically find in a backyard, and say in the
US or in the UK, it's kind of rounded dome
like sort of like a little like a little train,

(53:23):
subway train. But there are plenty of species of millipedes
and centipedes that actually look more like this arthropleura, which
is their flatter. They're a little wider, and they have
this like pretty serious armor. So they left behind a
good number of fossils. But in addition to fossils of

(53:48):
the animal itself, they also left behind tracks because they
were so big, they were able to form these little
tracks that were I mean, it's kind of incredible, right
like you think about, like, oh, a, basically what this
is a giant miller people leaving behind footsteps that then
get some you know, you imagine like maybe some landslide

(54:10):
happens and then it preserves these these footsteps.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
Yeah, it's it's walking through wet mud in the swamp
somewhere and that's then dried up and been and covered up.
And yeah, some of these so they have them in
in Scotland actually, yes, and yeah they find these trackways
of like you know, these two symmetrical rows of the
little dots in the ground and they're half a meter wide.
You know, you can quite easily stand in the middle

(54:34):
of it. They also they very recently, actually a fully
preserved head of one of these has announced not long ago,
with like mandibles and feelers. So there's there's gonna be
there's gonna be some work done on that to figure
out like feeding mechanics and things like that. I think
most people are pretty on board that it was probably

(54:56):
a herbivore because this was this would have been living
in the what we call the coal swamps, which is
it's a big part of actually the fossil history of
where I live. So I live in stoke On Tract,
which a little town in the rough north of England,
and the coal mines and the coal measures you know,
were a big part of industrial revolution and industry in
that whole time of the year. So my museum is

(55:18):
mostly full of fossils that have come from that period
in time, so it's a lot of fish and a
lot of plant fossils occasionally get these big arthropods. They
wouldn't have been forests made of trees as we can eventually,
because vascular plants weren't quite they weren't quite dominant in
the way. So it would have been like giant horsetails
and liver warts and club mosses and things like that.

(55:39):
So these other plants that these days are generally confined
to the understory would have been making up the trees
at the time, and then of course that goes on
to make the coal that we mind. But yeah, arthropleura
would have been easily one of the biggest animals on
the land around at the time. It would have been
living alongside there's other giant invertebrates around at the time.
There's dragon flies that are half a meter across in wingspan.

(56:03):
There's giant scorpions and spiders and things like that.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
It's a there's enough, there's enough ambient oxygen to be
able to diffuse through those spiracles.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
It's a it's partially that and that's one of those
things that kind of gets misrepresented a lot a lot
of people. The idea.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
It's not like the only reason that.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
They were able to Yeah, it's not the only isdea
and people often apply it to other animals as well.
People think that more oxygen makes bigger reptiles and bigger mammals.
It doesn't doesn't work that way mainly.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
But the lack of birds was a big one.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Lack of birds probab definitely helps. Yeah, but another big
part is the opportunity. As far as we can tell,
arthropods and specifically something like a millipede might have been
the first animals on land. So there's another fossil from
Scotland actually older than Arthroplura, called Numadesmus, which is another
set of footprints. It's another set of tiny fossil footprints

(56:58):
that dates back to about four hundred million years ago
something like that, which is one of the oldest pieces
of evidence of any organism coming onto the land. And
when you know, so we would have been earthly sort
of grab some millipede looking type creatures coming onto the
land and there's no competition, there's nothing competing with them
for space or food resources. So just they've got the

(57:21):
whole planets of themselves basically to expand and grow and
diversify until the arising of the tetrapods that fall invertebrates
as they start coming out of the water.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Yeah, I mean it's it is interesting because if you
think about it right like this, they think that this
was not particularly a vision based sensory creature, right like,
it either had very simple eyes or did not have
very well functioning eyes, so that it would have probably

(57:54):
struggled to compete with a tetrapod that was able to
move around from more nimbly and perhaps have a better
visual grasp of being able to like say, get to
something faster.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Yeah, because there weren't There weren't very many big land
based predators at the time, so the more predatory invertebrates
at the times, so things like scorpions and spiders, I
think their their body plan kind of limits how big
they can get on land and like how lethal they
can be. I think the largest of the land scorpions
pushed nearly a met along, so not unsubstantial, but it

(58:32):
wouldn't have been a threat to something as big as arthurplura,
and having this big, tough exo skeleton would have been
a big, a big help as well. But yeah, you
start to get the early tuchpods coming on land, and yeah,
they're more agile. They've they've got limbs, they've got eyes,
they've got everything they need to to flick flip this
thing over and get to the belly if they want
to just.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Have like a buffet. If you imagine like a like
a group of sort of like tetrapods that look like
a bunch of little weird mongooses just flip this guy
over and then having a having a last supper like
meal at the long this oh yeah book.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
We booked a table for booked a table for twenty
four but we're all going to sit on one side.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
I mean, it does it kind of reminds me of that,
like because we do have like you mentioned, you know,
it's scorpions. You know, we have a lot of uh,
you know, not too not too different in terms of
the body pillion compared to really touch pods things like mongooses, And.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Yeah, it's it's sort of it. Yeah, that's that's quite
a su comparison. Actually, I never not thought of that
poor like like mongooses and mustelides and things like that. Yeah, yeah,
that's yeah, sort of long body, short legs kind of. Yeah,
they're not far off. It's a very it's a good
sort of generalist body plan when you know you want
to move in around on land. Yeah, basically everything. Yeah,

(59:47):
if you if you're not going for any kind of
big specialty.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
There's eventually, I think, give it a few hundred million
years and we're all either going to be noodles or crabs,
and that's it.

Speaker 2 (59:59):
Everything is of everything is evolving back into a.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Crab and too crab or noodle and then we'll duke
it out see which one which body plan works the best. Uh,
but I mean this it is go ahead, sorry, but yeah,
it is really interesting. So this this uh with the
Arthur Pleurro being able to see these footsteps, does the
footprints that have been fossilized, does give us a little

(01:00:24):
bit of insight into its behavior because these tracks were found.
I mean it's a little bit of a it's a
little bit of a puzzle, right because these tracks were
found like near bodies of water. Now, part of that is,
like you said, because that is a premium place for
these tracks to be fossilized. So it's not a very

(01:00:46):
good statistical indicator where they spent most of their time,
because we're gonna have this false like bias towards finding
fossils near the water. So maybe it was just a
few of them who are just like, oh, that's an
interesting area. It happened to walk there, and we get
those footprints and that's what's preserved. Whereas maybe they spent

(01:01:06):
most of their times, like on in whatded areas away
from water. We don't know, but we do know they
did at least go in those places at least once
or twice.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yeah. When interpreting behavior for fossil animals, this happens all
the time. You people will over interpret or misinterpret or
things like yeah you get you know, well you get like,
you know, a bone bed of dinosaurs, for example, you
find a whole bunch of them buried together, and people go,
they were social, they were living in herds. No, this
all this tells you is that they died together. It
doesn't tell you what they were doing for the rest

(01:01:39):
of their lives. It could have been a flash flood,
it could have been a disease or Somethingeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
They all fill in the same hole. We don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, Well, there are examples of that. There's
like like sinkholes and things you know, like that have
been that have been full of the bones of animals
that have fallen and you could easy, oh these animals
like living in caves. No, no, this is just where
they died. And yeah, like you and like trace fossils
as well, you know, so things like footprints and copper lights.

(01:02:05):
You know, people will sometimes you overinterpret it as one
particular behavior. You know, You've always got to keep in
mind that a fossil or a trace fossil or whatever
it is you're looking at just represents one animal at
one particular point in its life. It doesn't represent the
complexities of its behavior and its biology. You've got to
be really careful about interpreting these sorts of things.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
I mean, it's I think that's what I like about
Like when you look at like modern animal behavior and
then you try to think about what humans say, you know,
one hundred thousand years from now, or maybe aliens would
might how they might misinterpret something. So like that, what
we're talking about reminds me of hermit crab death cyclones
where they they get stuck. So like we leave out

(01:02:49):
glass or plastic bottles on the beach. Hermit crabs will
investigate the aperture because they are drawn to apertures because
I mean, they're always sort of looking out for interesting
little nooks and crannies to get into but also potentially home.
So they look at this aperture and then they kind
of fall into the neck of the bottle. And a

(01:03:10):
lot of these bottles are designed such that the hermit
crab can get in, but they can't get out because
they don't have the friction right that, like, they have
the traction of the sand as they're going in, but
once they've slipped in, they no longer have traction, so
they're stuck and then they die. And hermit crabs have
this behavior that when they smell a dead hermit crab,

(01:03:30):
it gives off this a there's this decomposition odor that
attracts other hermit crabs because free home so forree real
estate folks. And so then they are drawn to this
this bottle and they're like.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
Hey, you you just end up with.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
At you get a jug of dead hermit crabs, And
what a weird thing. Like if you're an archaeologist hundred
thousand years from now and you look at this thing.
You might think, like, well, people liked to gather hermit
crabs and jugs and keep them in there for some
reason or or this like hermit crabs liked to use
these jugs as like a din and this is like

(01:04:14):
a family of hermit crabs. Everything absolutely wrong, But like
you can think about all the ways we could come
up with some theory about this, all the ways in
which it's wrong. I do. I like, I love these
sort of illustrations where I forgot the artist's name, but
it's those I think the same artist that was like

(01:04:35):
behind like all Yesterday's or all tomorrow's. Oh yeah, yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
I've met him. I've met him Google Dixon, Sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
Dixon, Okay, yes, And and sort of the the take,
you know, taking a the skeleton of a swan and
then trying to reimagine as someone might try to reconstruct
it as this terrifying creature that uses its side like
like armbones to stab prey and get fish.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
And it's yeah, when you when you find things that
have no modern equivalence is when you really start to struggle,
like interpreting the behavior or the biology of it, like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
The Tolly monster, which you know, but yeah, it is
a really I think that's what's something that is so
interesting to me about palaeontology is that you do you
have such limited data and so it is the that
doesn't mean you can't come to interesting conclusions or come

(01:05:40):
to correct conclusions, but it requires so much thoughtfulness because
you know, it is like what we were saying with like, say,
you don't take into account that you're finding this fossil
because this is the most this is the only place
that a fossil could have formed, and it doesn't actually
tell you much about the animal animal's behavior and how

(01:06:01):
you cope with those problems and then yet continue on
to figure out, you know, what might actually be a
better theory. And it's just so interesting to me. So
bad news everyone, My guests did get hit by an
asteroid and now has to spend a few million years

(01:06:22):
re evolving. Now he's fine, just his internet cut out.
So what a wonderful guest he was, wasn't he? So again,
his name is Dane pat You can find him on
a Blue Sky so and he is also a museum educator,
a science communicator. Very cool. I was so lucky to

(01:06:45):
have him on the show today. Before we go, I
do got to play a little game called guests Who's
squawkn the Mystery animal sound game. Every week I play
a mystery animal sound and you, the listener, try to
guess who is making that sound. So here is last
week's mystery animal sound. The hint was this, who's a

(01:07:06):
stripey baby? All right? So congratulations to Emily M Joyp
and Jares for guessing correctly that this is a baby zebra. Specifically,
this is a baby planes zebra. So the brain the

(01:07:28):
brain call of a zebra. These are meant to help
orient the herd in one direction. It might also be
useful for disorienting and confusing predators because you have this
cacophony of this sound. Very distracting. Calls can also be
used to communicate socially. Something cute about planes zebras is

(01:07:50):
that herds will collectively protect folds by forming a ring
around them defensive things. So where all the youngest the
babies are protected from creditors. All right, So onto this
week's mystery animal sound. It is inspired by young listener Eleanor.
And here is the hint. If you wanted it, you

(01:08:12):
should have put a ring on it, all right. So
if you think you know who is making that sound.
You can write to me at Creature Feature Pod at
gmail dot com. You can also write to me your questions,
interesting articles you've read, questions about your pets, just pictures
of your pets. I always love those, so yeah. That's

(01:08:35):
Creature featurepot at gmail dot com. Thank you guys so
much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you
leave a rating and or review, it really does help me.
I read all the reviews and all the ratings are
incredibly helpful to keeping keeping them metrics up for that algorithm.
Because robots rule the world. Bet boop. Thanks to the

(01:08:56):
Space Cossics for their super awesome song excel Alumina. Creature
Feature creat Your Features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or he guess what. Some of you listen
to your favorite shows not your mother, and I can't
tell you what to do, but I will tell you this.
If you find a Tully monster under your bed, don't panic.

(01:09:19):
Call your local paleontologists. They'll be very interested to meet him.
See you next Wednesday