May 10, 2019 • 32 mins
Will and Mango dig wonder: how hard it is to bring a species back from extinction? Plus: why do people wake up in the morgue after being declared dead? Why are fish markets the best places to look for extinct species? And can resurrecting the Wooly Mammoth help us solve climate change?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
I guess, well, well, what's that mango? So did you
know the world's largest be isn't as extinct as we thought,
not as extinct as we thought. I gotta feel like
that's too bad. No, it's actually a good thing. How
(00:24):
our giant monster be is a good thing. So for
for starters, the vs aren't exactly monsters. There are only
about an inch and a half long, and they've got
a two and a half inch wingspan, so it's about
the size of a thumb or I guess three times
the size of the average honeybee, not the size of
matras like you might be imagining. I mean maybe not.
But actually just pulled up a picture one of these
(00:45):
things while you were talking, and I have to say,
this is the most terrifying be I have seen in
my life. Like, why do they have such massive pincuers
on their faces? They almost look like these stag beetles,
but just creepier. Yeah, So I was trying not to
mention that because it makes them look so much scarier.
But they're actually just used to scrape resin off trees
to build their homes. So it's not that scary. But
(01:05):
here's what's really interesting. The species was first discovered in Indonesia,
and this was back in eighteen fifty nine, and then
nobody could find it again after that, so it was
just presumed to have gone extinct. And then in this
entomologists stumbled across the bees alive and well in Indonesia
and he collected the specimen. He wrote about discovery, but
he didn't get any video or photos, and then the
(01:28):
bees trail went cold again. But it sounds like now
somebody has found them again. Is that right? Yeah, so
they thought they were extinct, but it's totally right. In
January this year, this photographer named Clay Bolt actually made
history by finding the giant bees in the wild for
the very first time. And it sounds like it was
a pretty surreal experience because apparently the female bees make
(01:49):
this really deep thrumming sound with their wings, so he
could not only hear them, he could actually feel the
air being displaced as they flew by. And it was
amazing because it's this creature that he'd only ever imagined about, right,
and suddenly he has this super tangible and memorable experience
with them. Anyway, Clay's account got me thinking that this
(02:10):
week it would be really fun to look into creatures
that had come back to life. And so that's what
we're going to talk about, all these weird cases out
there where creatures seemingly died and then returned. So let's
dive in day their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
(02:45):
I'm Will Pearson and it's always I'm joined by my
good friend man Guess Ticketer on the other side of
that soundproof class bringing a dead fern back to life.
At least I think that's what he's doing. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Oh, is that what he's doing.
I thought Tristan just brought in his neglect did the
house plant? Actually, Tristan's trick only works with one kind
of plant, what's called a resurrection fern, which is not
(03:06):
the fern that he's got over there. But you know,
during a drought or a heat spell, the ferns will
turn brown and they shrivel up, and if you look
at them, they look completely dead. But then you just
splash a little water on them and press though it
takes like twenty four hours and the leaves unfurled, turn
green again, and the whole thing is good is new.
I mean, it's kind of like magic. Yeah, it does
sound like something you'd study at Hogwarts in the homology
(03:28):
class or whatever. It's pretty cool. And even though it
does seem like magic, there is of course a scientific
explanation on how these ferns come back to life. These
resurrection ferns never actually die during this dying out process.
In fact, these plants can lose up to of their
water content and once they're exposed to water again, they'll
still spring right back. So you know, as long as
(03:50):
the fern can hold onto at least three percent of
its water, it actually won't die. That's pretty incredible. So
those numbers can't hold up for most plants right now,
with most plants, if they lose more than ten percent
of their water, they are completely done. And so the
saving grace for resurrection ferns is, you know, it's their
ability to synthesize these special proteins called dehydrants, and so
(04:11):
these allow the cell walls of the plant to kind
of fold and unfold is needed rather than just cracking
and crumbling like other plants do when they dry out.
And believe it or not, that's not the resurrection ferns
only claim to feign because back in astronauts actually took
a bunch of these ferns with them on the Space
Shuttle Discovery, and this was a feat that earned the
(04:31):
plant the title of first fern in space and that
special I like it, But what sort of experiments where
they running on these plants since this, Well, basically we
wanted to see if the plants could still resurrect themselves
in zero gravity, and apparently they could with no problem,
And as later explained, the resurrection fern quote proved to
be a hearty space traveler and exhibited regeneration patterns unaltered
(04:54):
by its orbital adventure. So not only can they cheat death,
they can do it while rocketing through space at thousands
of miles an hour. I do like that, but to
be fair, resurrection ferns aren't the only ones to master
the old back from the dead routine. And it's not
just flowers and trees getting into the act either. The
animal kingdom has its own resurrection like events, including some
insects and amphibians that can freeze themselves during winter and
(05:17):
then thaw out in the spring totally alive and healthy.
But again, like with the ferns, those animals don't technically
die though, right, right, but they come pretty close. Like
you can take the wood frogs, which we've talked about
forever ago on the show. But when temperatures dropped, the
wood frogs go into what's basically the state of suspended
animation and all of their processes shut down. So there's
(05:39):
no heartbeat, there's no breathing, nothing, but their cells stay
alive regardless, and it thanks to this handy adaptation they've
evolved that lets them survive for long periods without oxygen.
So I remember talking about them, but remind me how
long they can actually stay like that, so it can vary.
I mean, most wood frogs do this extreme hibernation for
a few days at a time is to cope with
(06:00):
like a cold snap or something like that. But they
can stay frozen for longer, even for weeks if they
need to, which is pretty amazing. And you mentioned their
cells still receive oxygen during this big sleep, and that
makes sense. But what I'm wondering is how those cells
survive the freezing process at all. I mean, there's water
inside those cells, and water expands as it freezes to ice.
(06:20):
And so it seems like those newly formed ice crystals
would just break the cells apart from within. Yeah, that's
exactly right, and it's a big part of why a
cryopreservation isn't really an option for humans. Our cells just
aren't equipped to handle a deep freeze. And it's actually
the same for wood frogs. If they're cells froze, they
would die too. But that's why whenever there's this sub
zero temperature that sets in the frog's central organ starts
(06:44):
expelling moisture, and this way the water surrounding their organs
freezes into ice, but their organs themselves and their cells don't.
And that's not the only trick either. Before a wood
frog fully freezes, its body floods the veins with a
special glucose molecule that works like an anti freeze. So
when the glucose reaches the frog cells, it will dissolve
(07:04):
in the water and bond with the water molecules, and
this means that water molecules in the cell won't be
able to bind with other water molecules to form ice.
So even if the water in a cell reaches subzero temperatures,
it still won't freeze. Okay, I think I got it. So,
so they really use the same strategy on a cellular
level as they do for like their central organs, right exactly.
(07:26):
But the more researchers learned about the frog's approach, the
better we get it perfecting things like freezing human organs
for transport, and that technique might help us perfect cry
of preservation in the future, you know, getting humans into
this act of resurrecting themselves, which is a little bit creepy,
and also, if you think about it, some humans have
already jumped the gun on the whole resurrection thing. I
(07:47):
was actually reading about this rare phenomenon called auto resuscitation,
which is when a person who has declared dead spontaneously
comes back to life spontaneously. So this isn't like a
patient who's flatline that doctors used the clients on and
jolt them back to life. It's someone who comes back
to life on their own, that's right. So according to
a two thousand seven medical review I believe this was
(08:08):
the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, they've actually
been over thirty cases of auto resuscitation since the initial
report on this condition back in two so on average,
these patients returned to life did so about seven minutes
after doctors stopped administering CPR. One patient made it all
the way to the hospital morgue before suddenly returning to life.
(08:30):
I mean, can you imagine what that must have been
like for the poor folks who had to wheel that
person down there and in the morgue no less, but
it's just so like, of all places to witness someone
coming back from the dead, this would have been such
a weird experience. So these people sort of pop back up?
Did they live for a while? I mean, the sad
reality is that the majority of these patients die shortly
(08:51):
after their auto resuscitated it. But I think what's amazing though,
is that in a little over a third of the
reported cases, the patients make a full recovery with little
or no neurological damage. That is wild. So do doctors
have any idea of why this is happening? Well, I mean,
it's tough to say for certain, because they've only been
like we said, thirty something cases reported in the last
(09:12):
forty years, and that's you know, not a lot of
data to go on. But that said, the reports do
offer some clues about what might be going on here,
for instance, the use of CPR, which is something that's
in all of these reported cases. So remember I said
the patients came back a few minutes after CPR was stopped. Well,
that gap in time might actually be the key to
(09:32):
understanding the whole phenomenon. It's a little bit complicated. So
I pulled this good breakdown from the Smithsonian and and
here's how they explain it. One popular theory is that
dynamic hyperinflation which can occur during CPR if the lungs
are rapidly filled with air without adequate time to exhale.
In theory, when emergency doctors stop CPR, the lung pressure
(09:54):
caused by dynamic hyper inflation returns to normal and the
blood begins to circulate with greater e is producing an
auto resuscitation effect. So how can doctors guard against this
kind of thing? Like? Is there a set amount of
time they need to wait? I don't think there's like
a hard and fast rule around this, but doctors who
have studied the subject do recommend waiting at least ten
(10:15):
or fifteen minutes after CPR has seas before declaring someone dead,
just to be on the safe side here. That is
so strange, like there's this period of time when death
isn't necessarily final, that someone might still pop back to life. Yeah,
I mean it's it's you know, it's not super likely,
but it it does happen, it makes you wonder about
where the cut off is, Like that point past which
(10:37):
death is irreversible, it might be, you know, more fluid
than we had first guessed. Yeah, I think you're right.
In fact, I was reading about this concept people talk
about in the conservation world called the Lazarus taxon or
Lazarus species, and it's basically a group of plants and
animals that were believed to be extinct but we're later
rediscovered in the wild, like the giant b I mentioned
(10:59):
at the top of the show. It's not the same
as the biological resurrections we've been talking about, but it's
another interesting case of death not being quite as final
as we first looked at. I definitely want to hear
more about this, but before we get to that, let's
take a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius
(11:27):
and we're talking about Lazarus species. These are the extinct
plants and animals that turned out to be not so
extinct after all. And speaking of Lazarus, I actually forgot
to mention this earlier, but auto resuscitation actually shares some
biblical inspiration. It's actually nicknamed the Lazarus phenomenon. Have you
heard of this? So in both cases the name is
(11:48):
the nod to the New Testament story where Jesus performs
a miracle by raising this man named Lazarus from the dead.
So kind of a fun, if not surprising bit of
overlap between religion and science here. Yeah, is pretty cool.
But the term Lazarus taxon was coined in the nineteen
eighties by a couple of paleontologists, and they were studying
the fossil record. They noticed some organisms seemed to disappear
(12:09):
during one of Earth's massive extinction events and then miraculously
reappear on the record later, and these species taken together,
form what the scientists called the Lazarus taxon. So these
days the term applies more broadly, not just to fossilized organisms,
but also to living species that have been rediscovered after
the presumed extinction. Actually, there's a slight variation on this,
(12:31):
called the elvis taxon, which is species that seem like
they re emerged, but it's actually an impostor. This is
a true thing. But back to the Lazarus. Like you
think it's the small club of species, but they're actually
about three hundred fifty species on that list includes everything
from plants to insects to every kind of vertebrae. Wow,
so it really runs the gamut. But what are some
(12:53):
of the most famous on the list, or maybe just
a few favorites who came across. So my favorite species
are are the ones that turned up in the super
unexpected places, and one of the oldest and most famous
of these is definitely the Seilic himp, which is this
ancient type of fish that was believed to have gone
extinct over sixty five million years ago. It was in
the supposed to be wiped out in that same extinction
(13:15):
event that claimed the dinosaurs. Yeah, I actually think I've
seen these guys before. They live like way down deep,
don't they. Yeah, I mean their bottom dwellers for sure.
But that's part of the reason it took us so
long to find one alive. That said, living silicants weren't
discovered thanks to some technological breakthrough or or some sort
of landmark expedition and instead, it all happened by sheer chance,
(13:38):
and here's how it went down. So in December, this
Natural History Museum curator named Marjorie Courtney Latimer was strolling
the docks in East London, South Africa. Apparently she did
this often as part of her work for the museum.
She would just visit the local fisherman and if anyone
thought they had caught something interesting that day, Marjorie would
take a closer look at their catch, and on that
(14:00):
in December, she indeed found something interesting in the hall
of this fisherman named Captain Hendrik Goosen. So in his
pile of fish there was this bizarre looking fin that
Marjorie had never seen at the docks before, and this
is how she described it. I picked away at a
layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I
had ever seen. It was pale mauve blue with faint
(14:22):
flecks of whitish spots. It had an iridescent silver blue
green sheen all over it. It was covered in hard scales,
and it had four limb like fins and a strange
puppy dog tail. Wait, let me make sure I have
this trait. So she found what is basically a living fossil,
and this was at a South African fish market. Yeah,
(14:42):
and it was actually really big too, so the silicon
she found at the market weighed a hundred and twenty
seven pounds, which made it tough to transport back to
the museum. And in the end Marjorie and her assistant
they managed to get the fish into the backseat of
a taxi, but they nearly got thrown of that too,
because the fish smelled so bad. Apparently, as they pushed
it through the door and finally got in, the driver
(15:03):
was shouting, no stinking fish in my tax together. I mean, honestly,
can you really blame the guy? Yeah, I mean you can.
And once they explained the circumstance and probably how big
a tip they were going to give, the driver agreed
to help. Although that wasn't the only obstacle Marjorie face
that day. So when when she got the fish back
to the museum, she still wasn't sure what she'd found.
(15:24):
Her expertise was actually in birds, not fish, and when
she asked the chairman of the museum board to help
her identify the specimen, he told her it's nothing more
than a rock cod and then he left to go
on his holiday. You know, it's funny, it almost reads
like parody. But well, obviously the museum was no help.
So how did Marjorie ultimately crack this case? So the
first thing she did was to find some way to
(15:46):
preserve the fish long term. She tried the morge at
her local hospital, but they flat out refused to store fish,
no matter how ancient it was. And uh, in the end,
she had to settle for getting it taxidermied instead. So
she reached out to a fish curator at a different
South African museum. This guy at J. LB. Smith, and
she sent the description and sketches of what she had found.
Within a month or so, Smith decided to make a
(16:08):
trip to see the fish for himself, and he definitely
wasn't disappointed with what he found. In fact, listen to
how he later described the day he arrived at Marjorie's
museum quote, although I had come prepared, the first side
of the fish hit me like a white hot blast
and made me feel shaky and queer. My body tingled,
I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was
(16:28):
not a shadow of a doubt. Scale by sale, bone
by bone, Finn by fin it was a true silican.
That must have felt like such vindication. Yeah, but plus
it must have made the museum chairman feel like such
a chump when he got back from his vacation. I still,
I mean, I know I said this a little bit.
I still can't believe she found an extinct species at
a fish market. It just it seems like such a
(16:49):
weird place to find this. Well, the craziest part is
that it wasn't even the only time that's happened. In fact,
there are plenty of Lazarus species that have showed up
at food markets. There's the smooth tooth black tip shark
that reappeared in this fish market in the Middle East.
There's the low astion rock rat, which was rediscovered at
a meat market, and and the Erican forest turtle, which
(17:11):
debuted at a food market in China. But the list
just keeps going. I'm pretty sure you made up a
couple of those. But and I'm not sure what it
says about us in the first place, that we find
so many supposedly extinct animals on our dinner tables. Just
it's just so weird. Yeah, it kind of makes me
wonder if any Lazar species have actually gone extinct for real,
like that way, like he was just eight too many
(17:32):
of them without scientists walking by and stopping them from eating.
But uh, I, I know we've got a few more
things to tackle, But first let's take a quick break.
(17:53):
Welcome back to part time Genius. So, well, I know
you wanted to talk about de extinction, which is the
ability to bring vanished species back to if uh do
you think that's something we'll be able to do one day?
And if so, how long until we're all riding Willy man?
It's to work like God intended. I mean, I think
it's gonna be a little while on that one. But yeah,
to the question of whether we'll be able to bring
(18:15):
an extinct species back, I mean, the truth is we
already have, or at least we we sort of did.
So I'm curious about this sort of you speak of.
Well all right, well let me back up just a
little bit here. So have you ever heard of Celia,
who happens to be the last Boucardo? No, it sounds
like a Tolkien character, though it's it's actually an extinct
species of Ibex that used to live in Spain and
(18:38):
I think in southern France, and so basically picture a
mountain goat or a ram and you're not far off
from this. But alright, so back in two thousand, the
last Boucardo on Earth was sadly crushed to death by
a falling tree. And her name was Celia, right right.
So that wasn't the end of the story there though,
(18:58):
because scientists tried to revive her species, and they used
the nucleus of a cell extracted intact from Celia. So
you're saying they cloned her, Well, it's sort of like
this wasn't like with Dolly the sheep, where her nucleus
could be implanted in the egg of a sheet from
the same species. I mean, remember, Celia was the last
one and there weren't any of her kind around to
(19:20):
donate an egg, so instead, scientists inserted the nucleus from
Celia into the unfertilized egg cell of a different kind
of Spanish ibex. Then they took the resulting embryo and
transferred it to the womb of a living goat. It's
just a lot of connections here, And almost a year later,
in July of two thousand three, the first baby Boucardo
(19:41):
since Celia was born, which is kind of amazing. It
sounds like some bizarre science tur Ducan like like bucardo
wrapped in an I vex wrapped in a living goat.
But is the Bucardo back for real? Now? It's it's
de extinct now. Unfortunately, the baby Bucardo was born with
a long defect and only survived of seven minutes, And
so that means that, depending on how you look at it,
(20:03):
the Bucardo has really gone extinct twice at this point,
not not the happy ending we might have looked for.
But of course that's only if you consider that the
bucardo made from Celia's cell to be a true Bucardo
and not some kind of hybrid, you know, like a
Spanish ibex with Bucardo like traits. I guess, so, I
guess any other species we tried to de extinct would
(20:24):
also be that way, right, Like like we couldn't make
a d percent willy mammoth. It would always be an
animal with cells that most certainly contain elephant DNA and
just a little bit of mammoth DNA like the nucleus
they took from Celia, you know, and and with the
long extinct creature like a wooly mammoth, you'd be even
further into hybrid territory. And that's because there aren't any
(20:46):
living mammoths to harvest intact nuclei from, so scientists will
be working with far less DNA than they had with
Celia the bucardo. So all the efforts that you hear
about bringing back the wooly mammoth, those aren't attempts to
clone a mammoth so much as they are attempts to
make an elephant mammoth hybrid. And so there are new
genome editing methods like Crisper, so scientists could kind of
(21:08):
cheat a little bit by changing the DNA sequences of
elephants to it'll look a little bit more like the
DNA sequences of mammoths. That's why I started by saying
that d extinction is sort of possible. I mean, if
you're willing to accept hybrids as the real thing, or
close enough to it, then I guess the extinction will
definitely be something we can do within the next decade
(21:28):
or so. But on the other hand, if you want
a full on recreation of a vana species, the same genes,
same behaviors, all of that I mean, that's pretty much
never going to happen in most cases. There just aren't
enough ancient DNA lying around to completely reconstruct an animal's genome.
So for all of us Jurassic Park fans, it does
(21:49):
sound like dinosaur and William mammoth hybrids are still on
the table in the not so distant future, and gene
editing could actually get them looking pretty close to how
they did originally. Yeah, and that's actually more like the
Jurassic Park dinosaurs than straight up clones would be anyway.
And you know, I'm not sure if you remember, but
in the movie they filled the gaps in the DNA
sequences with frog DNA and they messed with the genomes
(22:11):
so they actually all have scales instead of feathers. So
we're on the verge of being able to do something
pretty similar to that. I mean, we'd probably use chicken
DNA as our gap instead of frogs, but the basic
idea wouldn't be too far off from that. And so, well,
what about extinct species that have died out more recently,
like hundreds or thousands of years ago, for instance, instead
(22:32):
of millions? Like would those actually be better candidates for
d extinction? Absolutely? I mean, the passenger pigeon is one
example that comes up a lot. They went extinct in
the early twentieth century, so recovering their DNA wouldn't be
that difficult, and there's a good chance the eggs from
a related species of pigeon might be close enough of
a match to create a viable embryo. But funnily enough,
(22:55):
researchers say that the easiest species to resurrect would actually
be the Neanderthal, which is just so weird to think about. So,
according to Scientific American Quote, there appear to be just
slightly more than thirty thousand genetic mutations that differentiate us
from them, and Homo sapiens is the complicated organism best
understood by human geneticist. So of course, bringing us, you know,
(23:17):
a sentient human species back to life is a giant
ethical can of worms. So I don't imagine we'll be
bringing Neanderthals back anytime soon. At least you're telling myself that,
which is probably for the best, because you know, I
E read that even though there's no ideal credit for
the extinction, the willy mammoth would still be the best
choice just because of how much good will it would
(23:38):
generate in the public And it makes sense if you
think about it, right, Like, bringing back to William mammoth
has been a collective dream for decades now. Plus they
look big, free elephants, like it just feels so much
less threatening than a t rex. I mean, still pretty threatening,
but but I think you're right, and there's actually another
reason why raising the mammoth might be the best way
(23:59):
to go, and it's something that you'd probably never guess,
which is climate change. So you're gonna have to explain
this one, all right, Well, it sounds ridiculous, but there
actually is something to this. According to that GEO, Siberia
was home to mammoths and these other giant grazing mammals
about twelve thousand years ago, and back then the entire
region was a grassland, not the moss covered tundra that
(24:21):
it is today. So I'm having a tough time understanding
this year you're saying the landscape changed into something less
productive just because the mammots when extinct. It is possible, yeah,
I mean, the idea is that the mammoths and the
other grazing animals used to maintain the grassy steps by
you know, trampling moss and shrubs, breaking up the soil,
fertilizing what they're droppings. But you know, once the mammoths
(24:44):
went the way of the buffalo, the moss and the
trees took over, and you know, this region gradually transformed
into a tundra. And so some researchers think that reintroducing
mammoths to the tundra could actually cause the ecosystem to
shift back again, which is really interesting and it's how
was like good news for the mammoths and and maybe
for any would be farmers in the region, But how
(25:04):
exactly would this help with climate change? Well, you know,
it's because the frozen ground in Siberia contains a huge
amount of carbon, about twice as much as what's in
the atmosphere already, and the only thing keeping those carbon
stores in check are the region's Arctic temperatures. So as
temperatures continue to rise, the chance of that perma frost
thawing out and that carbon being released rises with them.
(25:27):
And that's where the mammoths would come in. Like, if
they were able to transform the region back into a grassland,
the carbon stores just might stay put. And Smithsonian actually
had a nice breakdown of why this is exactly, and
so here's how they explained it. Because grass absorbs less
sunlight than trees, this would cause the ground to absorb
less heat and in turn keep the carbon pools and
(25:50):
their greenhouse gases on ice for longer. Large numbers of
mammoths would also trample snow cover, stopping it from acting
like insulation for the ground, and allow the perma frost
to feel the effects of the bitter Arctic winters. Again, this,
in theory, would keep the ground colder for longer. Yeah,
I don't see how anything could go wrong with this planet.
(26:10):
It's gonna be great. It is funny like, on one hand,
resurrecting a species kind of feels like playing god, and
that's one of the main arguments you'll hear from opponents
of the extinction. And yet at the same time, since
humans were responsible for so many recent extinctions, it also
feels like we were playing god when we wipe these
creatures out in the first place. So maybe bringing them
back as a way to right some of the wrongs
(26:31):
our species has done the nature, especially in cases like
a mammoths, where the revival might also benefit the environment
as a whole. Yeah, but in a minute, may go,
your main motivation is just wanting to ride one to work.
You said it earlier. Yeah, I mean if riding a
William Ammit to work is wrong, then brother, I don't
want to be right dollar for every time he said that.
(26:52):
All right, Well, while we're waiting on science to deliver
on that promise, what do you say we have ourselves
a quick fact off sounds good? All right, I'll kick
it off here. So remember that Siberian permafrost that we
talked about a few minutes ago, Well, it turns out
(27:13):
it's home to more than just carbon deposits. Just last year,
researchers discovered that the frigid ground had also preserved ancient
life in the form of two forty thousand year old
nematodes or roundworms. So, even more incredibly, the researchers were
able to successfully quote defrost the creatures, according to report
from the Siberian Times. Isn't that amazing? There's something called
(27:36):
the Siberian Times, not the fact the fact that there
is a Siberian Times. I just love that. And if
that's true, then round worms can endure cryo preservation for
way way longer than we thought the previous record for
a nematode was it was revived like thirty nine years
of dormancy or something like that. But not only that,
(27:56):
it would also mean that those resurrected roundworms are now
the oldest live animals on the planet, and by a
pretty wide margin, of course. Yeah. So, so I've got
a weird one for you. The name Lazarus came up
a lot this week, so I did some digging on
the name itself, and it turns out it's going through
a bit of a resurgence right now. According to rankings
on on the top baby naming sites, the name Lazarus
(28:19):
is now more popular than it's been in over a century.
And so what what are these reports based on? Exactly? Yeah,
So a lot of the data comes from the users
on these sites, but the rankings also pull from the
Social Security Administration, So things like how many babies born
in two thousand eighteen were named Lazarus shows up on this.
The data goes all the way back to about nine hundred,
which is when the name Lazarus was at its peak
(28:40):
as the one thousand, hundred fifth most popular name in
the country. Wait, and that was the name at its
peak popularity. Yeah, but but you've got to keep this
in perspective. For the rest of the twentieth century, the
name hovered between the three thousand and four thousand most
popular name, and it started to rise in the early
nineties and now it's back in the low thou and
it's just like it was about a hundred years ago.
(29:02):
Oh wow, it's impressive. Alright. Well, one anything I read
about this week is an experiment with cryo preserve seeds,
and it's called the Project Baseline Resurrection Approach. So basically,
millions of seeds from different plant species are being collected
and then shipped to a seed bank in Colorado and
then they're kept on ice for anywhere between five and
fifty years. So the idea is that once the time
(29:25):
is up, scientists of the future can actually warm up
the seeds, plant them, and bring them back to life.
And that way they'll be able to compare these ancestor
plants with their descendants, you know, which will be the
plants collected from the exact same location where the ancestor
seeds were first harvested. And so the hope is that
by you know, looking at this side by side comparison
(29:45):
across multiple decades. It will actually allow the scientists to
see how a certain plant population changed over time. That's
really cool. It's kind of like a botanical time capsule.
But okay, here's a good one. I found about Caspian horses,
which Nattio describes as having the hallmark movie stylings of
all Lazarus species. So here's what happened. In nine seven,
(30:06):
an American horse breeder and researcher named Louise Leyland married
this Iranian aristocrat named Narci Ferous and they moved to
Tehran together, and a few years later, the couple opened
a children's riding academy so that Louise could share her
love of riding with all the locals. The only problem
was that the stallion's native to the region were way
too rough and bad tempered for the kids to ride safely.
(30:27):
So Louise asked around and she hoped to find this
alternative horse for the kids, and she started hearing these
rumors about a group of strong but friendly miniature horses
that lived tucked away in this remote mountain region near
the Caspian Sea. So, based on that hunch, Louise got
some friends and they went on this expedition, and sure
enough they actually found the group of horses that they'd
(30:48):
heard about, And the more time she spent with them,
the more she realized they resembled this ancient lost breed
of horse that these Persian royals had carved all over
their palaces. It was called the Caspian horse, so Louise
made the connection almost immediately, but it wasn't until the
ninety nineties that DNA testing was finally able to confirm
her suspicion. But Louise knew the horse's pedigree from the start,
(31:10):
so she brought them back to Tehran for students, and
to this day, Caspians are still considered the ideal starter
horse for young riders. Wow. Alright, So to recap, a
riding instructor turned adventurer discovered a lost colony of royal
horses and then marched them back to civilization so that
children of Iran would had something safe to ride. I
(31:32):
don't think I can top that today, Mega, so I
think you win the trophy. Congratulations, Thank you so much,
And that doesn't for today's part time genius from Gabe
Tristan Willemy. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time
(31:57):
Genius is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
I guess, well, well, what's that mango? So did you
know the world's largest be isn't as extinct as we thought,
not as extinct as we thought. I gotta feel like
that's too bad. No, it's actually a good thing. How
(00:24):
our giant monster be is a good thing. So for
for starters, the vs aren't exactly monsters. There are only
about an inch and a half long, and they've got
a two and a half inch wingspan, so it's about
the size of a thumb or I guess three times
the size of the average honeybee, not the size of
matras like you might be imagining. I mean maybe not.
But actually just pulled up a picture one of these
(00:45):
things while you were talking, and I have to say,
this is the most terrifying be I have seen in
my life. Like, why do they have such massive pincuers
on their faces? They almost look like these stag beetles,
but just creepier. Yeah, So I was trying not to
mention that because it makes them look so much scarier.
But they're actually just used to scrape resin off trees
to build their homes. So it's not that scary. But
(01:05):
here's what's really interesting. The species was first discovered in Indonesia,
and this was back in eighteen fifty nine, and then
nobody could find it again after that, so it was
just presumed to have gone extinct. And then in this
entomologists stumbled across the bees alive and well in Indonesia
and he collected the specimen. He wrote about discovery, but
he didn't get any video or photos, and then the
(01:28):
bees trail went cold again. But it sounds like now
somebody has found them again. Is that right? Yeah, so
they thought they were extinct, but it's totally right. In
January this year, this photographer named Clay Bolt actually made
history by finding the giant bees in the wild for
the very first time. And it sounds like it was
a pretty surreal experience because apparently the female bees make
(01:49):
this really deep thrumming sound with their wings, so he
could not only hear them, he could actually feel the
air being displaced as they flew by. And it was
amazing because it's this creature that he'd only ever imagined about, right,
and suddenly he has this super tangible and memorable experience
with them. Anyway, Clay's account got me thinking that this
(02:10):
week it would be really fun to look into creatures
that had come back to life. And so that's what
we're going to talk about, all these weird cases out
there where creatures seemingly died and then returned. So let's
dive in day their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
(02:45):
I'm Will Pearson and it's always I'm joined by my
good friend man Guess Ticketer on the other side of
that soundproof class bringing a dead fern back to life.
At least I think that's what he's doing. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Oh, is that what he's doing.
I thought Tristan just brought in his neglect did the
house plant? Actually, Tristan's trick only works with one kind
of plant, what's called a resurrection fern, which is not
(03:06):
the fern that he's got over there. But you know,
during a drought or a heat spell, the ferns will
turn brown and they shrivel up, and if you look
at them, they look completely dead. But then you just
splash a little water on them and press though it
takes like twenty four hours and the leaves unfurled, turn
green again, and the whole thing is good is new.
I mean, it's kind of like magic. Yeah, it does
sound like something you'd study at Hogwarts in the homology
(03:28):
class or whatever. It's pretty cool. And even though it
does seem like magic, there is of course a scientific
explanation on how these ferns come back to life. These
resurrection ferns never actually die during this dying out process.
In fact, these plants can lose up to of their
water content and once they're exposed to water again, they'll
still spring right back. So you know, as long as
(03:50):
the fern can hold onto at least three percent of
its water, it actually won't die. That's pretty incredible. So
those numbers can't hold up for most plants right now,
with most plants, if they lose more than ten percent
of their water, they are completely done. And so the
saving grace for resurrection ferns is, you know, it's their
ability to synthesize these special proteins called dehydrants, and so
(04:11):
these allow the cell walls of the plant to kind
of fold and unfold is needed rather than just cracking
and crumbling like other plants do when they dry out.
And believe it or not, that's not the resurrection ferns
only claim to feign because back in astronauts actually took
a bunch of these ferns with them on the Space
Shuttle Discovery, and this was a feat that earned the
(04:31):
plant the title of first fern in space and that
special I like it, But what sort of experiments where
they running on these plants since this, Well, basically we
wanted to see if the plants could still resurrect themselves
in zero gravity, and apparently they could with no problem,
And as later explained, the resurrection fern quote proved to
be a hearty space traveler and exhibited regeneration patterns unaltered
(04:54):
by its orbital adventure. So not only can they cheat death,
they can do it while rocketing through space at thousands
of miles an hour. I do like that, but to
be fair, resurrection ferns aren't the only ones to master
the old back from the dead routine. And it's not
just flowers and trees getting into the act either. The
animal kingdom has its own resurrection like events, including some
insects and amphibians that can freeze themselves during winter and
(05:17):
then thaw out in the spring totally alive and healthy.
But again, like with the ferns, those animals don't technically
die though, right, right, but they come pretty close. Like
you can take the wood frogs, which we've talked about
forever ago on the show. But when temperatures dropped, the
wood frogs go into what's basically the state of suspended
animation and all of their processes shut down. So there's
(05:39):
no heartbeat, there's no breathing, nothing, but their cells stay
alive regardless, and it thanks to this handy adaptation they've
evolved that lets them survive for long periods without oxygen.
So I remember talking about them, but remind me how
long they can actually stay like that, so it can vary.
I mean, most wood frogs do this extreme hibernation for
a few days at a time is to cope with
(06:00):
like a cold snap or something like that. But they
can stay frozen for longer, even for weeks if they
need to, which is pretty amazing. And you mentioned their
cells still receive oxygen during this big sleep, and that
makes sense. But what I'm wondering is how those cells
survive the freezing process at all. I mean, there's water
inside those cells, and water expands as it freezes to ice.
(06:20):
And so it seems like those newly formed ice crystals
would just break the cells apart from within. Yeah, that's
exactly right, and it's a big part of why a
cryopreservation isn't really an option for humans. Our cells just
aren't equipped to handle a deep freeze. And it's actually
the same for wood frogs. If they're cells froze, they
would die too. But that's why whenever there's this sub
zero temperature that sets in the frog's central organ starts
(06:44):
expelling moisture, and this way the water surrounding their organs
freezes into ice, but their organs themselves and their cells don't.
And that's not the only trick either. Before a wood
frog fully freezes, its body floods the veins with a
special glucose molecule that works like an anti freeze. So
when the glucose reaches the frog cells, it will dissolve
(07:04):
in the water and bond with the water molecules, and
this means that water molecules in the cell won't be
able to bind with other water molecules to form ice.
So even if the water in a cell reaches subzero temperatures,
it still won't freeze. Okay, I think I got it. So,
so they really use the same strategy on a cellular
level as they do for like their central organs, right exactly.
(07:26):
But the more researchers learned about the frog's approach, the
better we get it perfecting things like freezing human organs
for transport, and that technique might help us perfect cry
of preservation in the future, you know, getting humans into
this act of resurrecting themselves, which is a little bit creepy,
and also, if you think about it, some humans have
already jumped the gun on the whole resurrection thing. I
(07:47):
was actually reading about this rare phenomenon called auto resuscitation,
which is when a person who has declared dead spontaneously
comes back to life spontaneously. So this isn't like a
patient who's flatline that doctors used the clients on and
jolt them back to life. It's someone who comes back
to life on their own, that's right. So according to
a two thousand seven medical review I believe this was
(08:08):
the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, they've actually
been over thirty cases of auto resuscitation since the initial
report on this condition back in two so on average,
these patients returned to life did so about seven minutes
after doctors stopped administering CPR. One patient made it all
the way to the hospital morgue before suddenly returning to life.
(08:30):
I mean, can you imagine what that must have been
like for the poor folks who had to wheel that
person down there and in the morgue no less, but
it's just so like, of all places to witness someone
coming back from the dead, this would have been such
a weird experience. So these people sort of pop back up?
Did they live for a while? I mean, the sad
reality is that the majority of these patients die shortly
(08:51):
after their auto resuscitated it. But I think what's amazing though,
is that in a little over a third of the
reported cases, the patients make a full recovery with little
or no neurological damage. That is wild. So do doctors
have any idea of why this is happening? Well, I mean,
it's tough to say for certain, because they've only been
like we said, thirty something cases reported in the last
(09:12):
forty years, and that's you know, not a lot of
data to go on. But that said, the reports do
offer some clues about what might be going on here,
for instance, the use of CPR, which is something that's
in all of these reported cases. So remember I said
the patients came back a few minutes after CPR was stopped. Well,
that gap in time might actually be the key to
(09:32):
understanding the whole phenomenon. It's a little bit complicated. So
I pulled this good breakdown from the Smithsonian and and
here's how they explain it. One popular theory is that
dynamic hyperinflation which can occur during CPR if the lungs
are rapidly filled with air without adequate time to exhale.
In theory, when emergency doctors stop CPR, the lung pressure
(09:54):
caused by dynamic hyper inflation returns to normal and the
blood begins to circulate with greater e is producing an
auto resuscitation effect. So how can doctors guard against this
kind of thing? Like? Is there a set amount of
time they need to wait? I don't think there's like
a hard and fast rule around this, but doctors who
have studied the subject do recommend waiting at least ten
(10:15):
or fifteen minutes after CPR has seas before declaring someone dead,
just to be on the safe side here. That is
so strange, like there's this period of time when death
isn't necessarily final, that someone might still pop back to life. Yeah,
I mean it's it's you know, it's not super likely,
but it it does happen, it makes you wonder about
where the cut off is, Like that point past which
(10:37):
death is irreversible, it might be, you know, more fluid
than we had first guessed. Yeah, I think you're right.
In fact, I was reading about this concept people talk
about in the conservation world called the Lazarus taxon or
Lazarus species, and it's basically a group of plants and
animals that were believed to be extinct but we're later
rediscovered in the wild, like the giant b I mentioned
(10:59):
at the top of the show. It's not the same
as the biological resurrections we've been talking about, but it's
another interesting case of death not being quite as final
as we first looked at. I definitely want to hear
more about this, but before we get to that, let's
take a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius
(11:27):
and we're talking about Lazarus species. These are the extinct
plants and animals that turned out to be not so
extinct after all. And speaking of Lazarus, I actually forgot
to mention this earlier, but auto resuscitation actually shares some
biblical inspiration. It's actually nicknamed the Lazarus phenomenon. Have you
heard of this? So in both cases the name is
(11:48):
the nod to the New Testament story where Jesus performs
a miracle by raising this man named Lazarus from the dead.
So kind of a fun, if not surprising bit of
overlap between religion and science here. Yeah, is pretty cool.
But the term Lazarus taxon was coined in the nineteen
eighties by a couple of paleontologists, and they were studying
the fossil record. They noticed some organisms seemed to disappear
(12:09):
during one of Earth's massive extinction events and then miraculously
reappear on the record later, and these species taken together,
form what the scientists called the Lazarus taxon. So these
days the term applies more broadly, not just to fossilized organisms,
but also to living species that have been rediscovered after
the presumed extinction. Actually, there's a slight variation on this,
(12:31):
called the elvis taxon, which is species that seem like
they re emerged, but it's actually an impostor. This is
a true thing. But back to the Lazarus. Like you
think it's the small club of species, but they're actually
about three hundred fifty species on that list includes everything
from plants to insects to every kind of vertebrae. Wow,
so it really runs the gamut. But what are some
(12:53):
of the most famous on the list, or maybe just
a few favorites who came across. So my favorite species
are are the ones that turned up in the super
unexpected places, and one of the oldest and most famous
of these is definitely the Seilic himp, which is this
ancient type of fish that was believed to have gone
extinct over sixty five million years ago. It was in
the supposed to be wiped out in that same extinction
(13:15):
event that claimed the dinosaurs. Yeah, I actually think I've
seen these guys before. They live like way down deep,
don't they. Yeah, I mean their bottom dwellers for sure.
But that's part of the reason it took us so
long to find one alive. That said, living silicants weren't
discovered thanks to some technological breakthrough or or some sort
of landmark expedition and instead, it all happened by sheer chance,
(13:38):
and here's how it went down. So in December, this
Natural History Museum curator named Marjorie Courtney Latimer was strolling
the docks in East London, South Africa. Apparently she did
this often as part of her work for the museum.
She would just visit the local fisherman and if anyone
thought they had caught something interesting that day, Marjorie would
take a closer look at their catch, and on that
(14:00):
in December, she indeed found something interesting in the hall
of this fisherman named Captain Hendrik Goosen. So in his
pile of fish there was this bizarre looking fin that
Marjorie had never seen at the docks before, and this
is how she described it. I picked away at a
layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I
had ever seen. It was pale mauve blue with faint
(14:22):
flecks of whitish spots. It had an iridescent silver blue
green sheen all over it. It was covered in hard scales,
and it had four limb like fins and a strange
puppy dog tail. Wait, let me make sure I have
this trait. So she found what is basically a living fossil,
and this was at a South African fish market. Yeah,
(14:42):
and it was actually really big too, so the silicon
she found at the market weighed a hundred and twenty
seven pounds, which made it tough to transport back to
the museum. And in the end Marjorie and her assistant
they managed to get the fish into the backseat of
a taxi, but they nearly got thrown of that too,
because the fish smelled so bad. Apparently, as they pushed
it through the door and finally got in, the driver
(15:03):
was shouting, no stinking fish in my tax together. I mean, honestly,
can you really blame the guy? Yeah, I mean you can.
And once they explained the circumstance and probably how big
a tip they were going to give, the driver agreed
to help. Although that wasn't the only obstacle Marjorie face
that day. So when when she got the fish back
to the museum, she still wasn't sure what she'd found.
(15:24):
Her expertise was actually in birds, not fish, and when
she asked the chairman of the museum board to help
her identify the specimen, he told her it's nothing more
than a rock cod and then he left to go
on his holiday. You know, it's funny, it almost reads
like parody. But well, obviously the museum was no help.
So how did Marjorie ultimately crack this case? So the
first thing she did was to find some way to
(15:46):
preserve the fish long term. She tried the morge at
her local hospital, but they flat out refused to store fish,
no matter how ancient it was. And uh, in the end,
she had to settle for getting it taxidermied instead. So
she reached out to a fish curator at a different
South African museum. This guy at J. LB. Smith, and
she sent the description and sketches of what she had found.
Within a month or so, Smith decided to make a
(16:08):
trip to see the fish for himself, and he definitely
wasn't disappointed with what he found. In fact, listen to
how he later described the day he arrived at Marjorie's
museum quote, although I had come prepared, the first side
of the fish hit me like a white hot blast
and made me feel shaky and queer. My body tingled,
I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was
(16:28):
not a shadow of a doubt. Scale by sale, bone
by bone, Finn by fin it was a true silican.
That must have felt like such vindication. Yeah, but plus
it must have made the museum chairman feel like such
a chump when he got back from his vacation. I still,
I mean, I know I said this a little bit.
I still can't believe she found an extinct species at
a fish market. It just it seems like such a
(16:49):
weird place to find this. Well, the craziest part is
that it wasn't even the only time that's happened. In fact,
there are plenty of Lazarus species that have showed up
at food markets. There's the smooth tooth black tip shark
that reappeared in this fish market in the Middle East.
There's the low astion rock rat, which was rediscovered at
a meat market, and and the Erican forest turtle, which
(17:11):
debuted at a food market in China. But the list
just keeps going. I'm pretty sure you made up a
couple of those. But and I'm not sure what it
says about us in the first place, that we find
so many supposedly extinct animals on our dinner tables. Just
it's just so weird. Yeah, it kind of makes me
wonder if any Lazar species have actually gone extinct for real,
like that way, like he was just eight too many
(17:32):
of them without scientists walking by and stopping them from eating.
But uh, I, I know we've got a few more
things to tackle, But first let's take a quick break.
(17:53):
Welcome back to part time Genius. So, well, I know
you wanted to talk about de extinction, which is the
ability to bring vanished species back to if uh do
you think that's something we'll be able to do one day?
And if so, how long until we're all riding Willy man?
It's to work like God intended. I mean, I think
it's gonna be a little while on that one. But yeah,
to the question of whether we'll be able to bring
(18:15):
an extinct species back, I mean, the truth is we
already have, or at least we we sort of did.
So I'm curious about this sort of you speak of.
Well all right, well let me back up just a
little bit here. So have you ever heard of Celia,
who happens to be the last Boucardo? No, it sounds
like a Tolkien character, though it's it's actually an extinct
species of Ibex that used to live in Spain and
(18:38):
I think in southern France, and so basically picture a
mountain goat or a ram and you're not far off
from this. But alright, so back in two thousand, the
last Boucardo on Earth was sadly crushed to death by
a falling tree. And her name was Celia, right right.
So that wasn't the end of the story there though,
(18:58):
because scientists tried to revive her species, and they used
the nucleus of a cell extracted intact from Celia. So
you're saying they cloned her, Well, it's sort of like
this wasn't like with Dolly the sheep, where her nucleus
could be implanted in the egg of a sheet from
the same species. I mean, remember, Celia was the last
one and there weren't any of her kind around to
(19:20):
donate an egg, so instead, scientists inserted the nucleus from
Celia into the unfertilized egg cell of a different kind
of Spanish ibex. Then they took the resulting embryo and
transferred it to the womb of a living goat. It's
just a lot of connections here, And almost a year later,
in July of two thousand three, the first baby Boucardo
(19:41):
since Celia was born, which is kind of amazing. It
sounds like some bizarre science tur Ducan like like bucardo
wrapped in an I vex wrapped in a living goat.
But is the Bucardo back for real? Now? It's it's
de extinct now. Unfortunately, the baby Bucardo was born with
a long defect and only survived of seven minutes, And
so that means that, depending on how you look at it,
(20:03):
the Bucardo has really gone extinct twice at this point,
not not the happy ending we might have looked for.
But of course that's only if you consider that the
bucardo made from Celia's cell to be a true Bucardo
and not some kind of hybrid, you know, like a
Spanish ibex with Bucardo like traits. I guess, so, I
guess any other species we tried to de extinct would
(20:24):
also be that way, right, Like like we couldn't make
a d percent willy mammoth. It would always be an
animal with cells that most certainly contain elephant DNA and
just a little bit of mammoth DNA like the nucleus
they took from Celia, you know, and and with the
long extinct creature like a wooly mammoth, you'd be even
further into hybrid territory. And that's because there aren't any
(20:46):
living mammoths to harvest intact nuclei from, so scientists will
be working with far less DNA than they had with
Celia the bucardo. So all the efforts that you hear
about bringing back the wooly mammoth, those aren't attempts to
clone a mammoth so much as they are attempts to
make an elephant mammoth hybrid. And so there are new
genome editing methods like Crisper, so scientists could kind of
(21:08):
cheat a little bit by changing the DNA sequences of
elephants to it'll look a little bit more like the
DNA sequences of mammoths. That's why I started by saying
that d extinction is sort of possible. I mean, if
you're willing to accept hybrids as the real thing, or
close enough to it, then I guess the extinction will
definitely be something we can do within the next decade
(21:28):
or so. But on the other hand, if you want
a full on recreation of a vana species, the same genes,
same behaviors, all of that I mean, that's pretty much
never going to happen in most cases. There just aren't
enough ancient DNA lying around to completely reconstruct an animal's genome.
So for all of us Jurassic Park fans, it does
(21:49):
sound like dinosaur and William mammoth hybrids are still on
the table in the not so distant future, and gene
editing could actually get them looking pretty close to how
they did originally. Yeah, and that's actually more like the
Jurassic Park dinosaurs than straight up clones would be anyway.
And you know, I'm not sure if you remember, but
in the movie they filled the gaps in the DNA
sequences with frog DNA and they messed with the genomes
(22:11):
so they actually all have scales instead of feathers. So
we're on the verge of being able to do something
pretty similar to that. I mean, we'd probably use chicken
DNA as our gap instead of frogs, but the basic
idea wouldn't be too far off from that. And so, well,
what about extinct species that have died out more recently,
like hundreds or thousands of years ago, for instance, instead
(22:32):
of millions? Like would those actually be better candidates for
d extinction? Absolutely? I mean, the passenger pigeon is one
example that comes up a lot. They went extinct in
the early twentieth century, so recovering their DNA wouldn't be
that difficult, and there's a good chance the eggs from
a related species of pigeon might be close enough of
a match to create a viable embryo. But funnily enough,
(22:55):
researchers say that the easiest species to resurrect would actually
be the Neanderthal, which is just so weird to think about. So,
according to Scientific American Quote, there appear to be just
slightly more than thirty thousand genetic mutations that differentiate us
from them, and Homo sapiens is the complicated organism best
understood by human geneticist. So of course, bringing us, you know,
(23:17):
a sentient human species back to life is a giant
ethical can of worms. So I don't imagine we'll be
bringing Neanderthals back anytime soon. At least you're telling myself that,
which is probably for the best, because you know, I
E read that even though there's no ideal credit for
the extinction, the willy mammoth would still be the best
choice just because of how much good will it would
(23:38):
generate in the public And it makes sense if you
think about it, right, Like, bringing back to William mammoth
has been a collective dream for decades now. Plus they
look big, free elephants, like it just feels so much
less threatening than a t rex. I mean, still pretty threatening,
but but I think you're right, and there's actually another
reason why raising the mammoth might be the best way
(23:59):
to go, and it's something that you'd probably never guess,
which is climate change. So you're gonna have to explain
this one, all right, Well, it sounds ridiculous, but there
actually is something to this. According to that GEO, Siberia
was home to mammoths and these other giant grazing mammals
about twelve thousand years ago, and back then the entire
region was a grassland, not the moss covered tundra that
(24:21):
it is today. So I'm having a tough time understanding
this year you're saying the landscape changed into something less
productive just because the mammots when extinct. It is possible, yeah,
I mean, the idea is that the mammoths and the
other grazing animals used to maintain the grassy steps by
you know, trampling moss and shrubs, breaking up the soil,
fertilizing what they're droppings. But you know, once the mammoths
(24:44):
went the way of the buffalo, the moss and the
trees took over, and you know, this region gradually transformed
into a tundra. And so some researchers think that reintroducing
mammoths to the tundra could actually cause the ecosystem to
shift back again, which is really interesting and it's how
was like good news for the mammoths and and maybe
for any would be farmers in the region, But how
(25:04):
exactly would this help with climate change? Well, you know,
it's because the frozen ground in Siberia contains a huge
amount of carbon, about twice as much as what's in
the atmosphere already, and the only thing keeping those carbon
stores in check are the region's Arctic temperatures. So as
temperatures continue to rise, the chance of that perma frost
thawing out and that carbon being released rises with them.
(25:27):
And that's where the mammoths would come in. Like, if
they were able to transform the region back into a grassland,
the carbon stores just might stay put. And Smithsonian actually
had a nice breakdown of why this is exactly, and
so here's how they explained it. Because grass absorbs less
sunlight than trees, this would cause the ground to absorb
less heat and in turn keep the carbon pools and
(25:50):
their greenhouse gases on ice for longer. Large numbers of
mammoths would also trample snow cover, stopping it from acting
like insulation for the ground, and allow the perma frost
to feel the effects of the bitter Arctic winters. Again, this,
in theory, would keep the ground colder for longer. Yeah,
I don't see how anything could go wrong with this planet.
(26:10):
It's gonna be great. It is funny like, on one hand,
resurrecting a species kind of feels like playing god, and
that's one of the main arguments you'll hear from opponents
of the extinction. And yet at the same time, since
humans were responsible for so many recent extinctions, it also
feels like we were playing god when we wipe these
creatures out in the first place. So maybe bringing them
back as a way to right some of the wrongs
(26:31):
our species has done the nature, especially in cases like
a mammoths, where the revival might also benefit the environment
as a whole. Yeah, but in a minute, may go,
your main motivation is just wanting to ride one to work.
You said it earlier. Yeah, I mean if riding a
William Ammit to work is wrong, then brother, I don't
want to be right dollar for every time he said that.
(26:52):
All right, Well, while we're waiting on science to deliver
on that promise, what do you say we have ourselves
a quick fact off sounds good? All right, I'll kick
it off here. So remember that Siberian permafrost that we
talked about a few minutes ago, Well, it turns out
(27:13):
it's home to more than just carbon deposits. Just last year,
researchers discovered that the frigid ground had also preserved ancient
life in the form of two forty thousand year old
nematodes or roundworms. So, even more incredibly, the researchers were
able to successfully quote defrost the creatures, according to report
from the Siberian Times. Isn't that amazing? There's something called
(27:36):
the Siberian Times, not the fact the fact that there
is a Siberian Times. I just love that. And if
that's true, then round worms can endure cryo preservation for
way way longer than we thought the previous record for
a nematode was it was revived like thirty nine years
of dormancy or something like that. But not only that,
(27:56):
it would also mean that those resurrected roundworms are now
the oldest live animals on the planet, and by a
pretty wide margin, of course. Yeah. So, so I've got
a weird one for you. The name Lazarus came up
a lot this week, so I did some digging on
the name itself, and it turns out it's going through
a bit of a resurgence right now. According to rankings
on on the top baby naming sites, the name Lazarus
(28:19):
is now more popular than it's been in over a century.
And so what what are these reports based on? Exactly? Yeah,
So a lot of the data comes from the users
on these sites, but the rankings also pull from the
Social Security Administration, So things like how many babies born
in two thousand eighteen were named Lazarus shows up on this.
The data goes all the way back to about nine hundred,
which is when the name Lazarus was at its peak
(28:40):
as the one thousand, hundred fifth most popular name in
the country. Wait, and that was the name at its
peak popularity. Yeah, but but you've got to keep this
in perspective. For the rest of the twentieth century, the
name hovered between the three thousand and four thousand most
popular name, and it started to rise in the early
nineties and now it's back in the low thou and
it's just like it was about a hundred years ago.
(29:02):
Oh wow, it's impressive. Alright. Well, one anything I read
about this week is an experiment with cryo preserve seeds,
and it's called the Project Baseline Resurrection Approach. So basically,
millions of seeds from different plant species are being collected
and then shipped to a seed bank in Colorado and
then they're kept on ice for anywhere between five and
fifty years. So the idea is that once the time
(29:25):
is up, scientists of the future can actually warm up
the seeds, plant them, and bring them back to life.
And that way they'll be able to compare these ancestor
plants with their descendants, you know, which will be the
plants collected from the exact same location where the ancestor
seeds were first harvested. And so the hope is that
by you know, looking at this side by side comparison
(29:45):
across multiple decades. It will actually allow the scientists to
see how a certain plant population changed over time. That's
really cool. It's kind of like a botanical time capsule.
But okay, here's a good one. I found about Caspian horses,
which Nattio describes as having the hallmark movie stylings of
all Lazarus species. So here's what happened. In nine seven,
(30:06):
an American horse breeder and researcher named Louise Leyland married
this Iranian aristocrat named Narci Ferous and they moved to
Tehran together, and a few years later, the couple opened
a children's riding academy so that Louise could share her
love of riding with all the locals. The only problem
was that the stallion's native to the region were way
too rough and bad tempered for the kids to ride safely.
(30:27):
So Louise asked around and she hoped to find this
alternative horse for the kids, and she started hearing these
rumors about a group of strong but friendly miniature horses
that lived tucked away in this remote mountain region near
the Caspian Sea. So, based on that hunch, Louise got
some friends and they went on this expedition, and sure
enough they actually found the group of horses that they'd
(30:48):
heard about, And the more time she spent with them,
the more she realized they resembled this ancient lost breed
of horse that these Persian royals had carved all over
their palaces. It was called the Caspian horse, so Louise
made the connection almost immediately, but it wasn't until the
ninety nineties that DNA testing was finally able to confirm
her suspicion. But Louise knew the horse's pedigree from the start,
(31:10):
so she brought them back to Tehran for students, and
to this day, Caspians are still considered the ideal starter
horse for young riders. Wow. Alright, So to recap, a
riding instructor turned adventurer discovered a lost colony of royal
horses and then marched them back to civilization so that
children of Iran would had something safe to ride. I
(31:32):
don't think I can top that today, Mega, so I
think you win the trophy. Congratulations, Thank you so much,
And that doesn't for today's part time genius from Gabe
Tristan Willemy. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time
(31:57):
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