Quetzalcoatl: The Winged Serpent

From the Aztec temples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to the 1980s monster film “Q: The Winged Serpent,” the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl soars high over the human imagination. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the history of this winged wonder -- as well as the prehistoric Quetzalcoatlus named after the ancient Lord of the Dawn. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we thought we would treat you to the beginning
of an early nineteen eighties film trailer. Yeah, before we

(00:23):
go any further, Uh, take a load of this. For
ten centuries it has waited m to be awakened, to
be worshiped again, like a god, to fill the skies,
to cast its shadow over the earth, to release its fury. Okay,

(00:53):
so it's October. You know we're doing stuff related to monsters,
horror movies. What on earth was that? Robert? That was
a was? It was part of the trailer to Cue
the Winged Serpent, released in nineteen eighty two, written and
directed by b movie legend Larry Cohen. Oh the guy
who made God Told Me To Yeah, also known for
It's Alive and the Stuff. This particular film, though, is it's,

(01:17):
in my opinion, a real gym because it's it's nine
two New York, so it's essentially like late seventies New York. Yeah.
It it really gets that grimy nous and that doomy nous.
I've I've been trying to figure out exactly what it
is about, like late seventies New York in movies, where
it just there's this grim, fatalistic, doomy kind of cynicism

(01:41):
that everybody's got where it's like they know the end
of the world is coming soon. Yeah, I mean what
part of it is that? I mean, we could do
you could do a whole episode, the whole podcast series
just on that vibe. I mean, really, the the HBO
series The Deuce is kind of attempting to do the
same thing, looking particular at particular areas of of the
culture during that time. But yeah, I think there's a

(02:01):
certain national cynicism, and then there obviously some some major
issues going on in New York City at the time. Uh.
This trailer adds a little extra issue to that. Heap
that being a giant, uh flying serpentine creature that may
or may not be an Aztec god that is roosting

(02:21):
somewhere in the city and occasionally a soaring down to
grab a Sunbathe is off the roofs of New York
City skyscrapers and window washers, window washers, cops, anybody who
happens to be up there within reach. Now, essentially this
creature is a dragon, right, It is a giant, angry

(02:44):
looking bird lizard thing. I don't really I don't think
it has feathers, does it. No, it's very very smooth,
very reptilian. It looks kind of like a winged saua
pod with enormous eyes. It's a very strange design. But
it's stopped motions, so every moment you spend with it
in the film is magic. So this movie is you know,

(03:04):
it's got that that grimy, nasty, sleazy B movie quality,
that late seventies Larry Cohen kind of thing. But it's
also kind of good. It's like, it's got a funny script.
There's like a great scene where the cops are about
to storm the nest of the of the dragon creature
and one of them is just drinking a Budweiser. Yeah,
it has an ingenious plot because well, I don't know,

(03:26):
maybe not ingenious, but it has a clever plot that
I really like for a monster movie. Uh, which, just
to run through the cast real quick, You've got Candy Clark,
you have David Carradine, you have Richard Rowntree, David Carradine
Beta Carotene. Why is it every time I say David Carradine,
I want to say beta Caroteen. I don't know, he's
he's just rich in it, I guess. But most importantly,

(03:47):
you have Michael Moriarty, who's just great at playing a
down on his luck slee's bag, and he really brings
it in this movie. Reviews from the year it came
out pretty much agreed with this him and they were like,
I don't know about this monster movie, but that Michael
Moriarty is fabulous, and he is fabulous in it. He
plays essentially, yeah, this New York sleeves bag who I

(04:09):
think he's involved in a diamond highst and he flees
and he ends up stumbling upon the nest of the
of Q the Winged Serpent, because he just happens to
climb to the top of the Chrysler building. I don't
remember why he does that. He's just like, well, I'm
up here now. But he discovers like where the monster
that is terrorizing the city is located, where it's egg

(04:30):
is located, and so what does he do with this
heroic information? He blackmails the city. I was just right,
babe me a million dollars and and give me immunity
for all my crimes or I won't tell you where
the egg is. Yes, and there there's some other elements
to the plot that really uh fun as well. That
there's one scene, and this is in the trailer where

(04:50):
David Decaradine's police officer character's detective character says, this thing
has been prayed back into existence. And there's this whole
plot with like an az Tec cult and ritual murders. Um,
it's it's it's a fabulously fun film. Now with the
nod to the to the cult and with Q standing
in for quetzel Kadal, Uh, it's clear that the beast

(05:14):
in this film is a monster ified version of the
ancient meso American god ketzel Coadal. And I think it's
worth stopping to appreciate that the the original ketsel Coadal,
the feathered serpent, is not a monster, but is a
holly magnificent god of the heavens. Right, And it's unfair

(05:36):
to really do associated with a bunch of blood sacrifice.
Though we were discussing this little offline before we came
in here. That's often where a lot of people's imagination
goes when they are reminded of the Aztec civilization or
other meso American or or South American civilizations. Yeah, this
is one thing that I think is is kind of

(05:57):
sad and unfair that that ancient meso American religions often
get associated with human sacrifice. And it's not unfair because
there was no human sacrifice. So there there was, It's
pretty clear that that was a feature of some ancient
meso American religion. But what's unfair is that it's like
meso American religion gets singled out for association with human

(06:20):
sacrifice when human sacrifice is just everywhere in the ancient world.
There's evidence that the ancient Greeks probably did human sacrifice,
the you know, ancient Nordic religions, you know, the Celts
and the Scandinavians. I mean, everywhere you look, you'll find
evidence of human sacrifice somewhere back in time. So it's
not like this was unique to the Mesoamerican religions. So
in this episode, we're going to mostly talk about the

(06:43):
religious origins of quetzo Quaddle as well as some of
the things that it has inspired uh and may have
inspired yet we're gonna talk a little bit about serpents
that actually sort of fly through the air. We're also
going to talk about a particular prehistoric flying creature that
has been named in the Quetzo kadals honor. But let's

(07:04):
start with the god itself, quetzal Kadal, the plumed serpent.
Tell me about this god, Robert. So, in reading a
bit about the plume serpent god, a number of things
it became really clear. Um. I was one book I
picked up was RUDOLPHO Andy as a fictional Lord of
the Dawn the legend of Quetzo Kwaddle, which is I

(07:26):
say fictional. Basically, what he attempted to do in this
book is to provide a narrative, easily read, narrative version
of Quetzo Quaddle's story. And I actually saw a really
good user review for this where they pointed out, you know,
with with Greek myths in particular, it's not just archaeological
and anthropo anthropological information that we're exposed to as a kid.

(07:52):
We were exposed to the stories themselves. We get to
kind of experience the stories as just pure stories. And
this particular reviewer was saying, you know, I had trouble
finding that with meso American religions, and this book provided that.
So in the book itself is is a very good
I'll mention a little bit more as we go forward,

(08:12):
but there's an introduction in this book from the University
of New Mexico's David M. Johnson, and yeah, he does
a great job of just just rolling through, like what
was quetzo kaddle, what did what did it stand for?
And what is our what do we know? What do
we not know about it? And he points out that
there's a lot that we do not know about the

(08:33):
toll Tech Empire. This would be uh, one of the
empire's proceeding of the Aztec Empire. He says, he said
that we're only we're only talking the Mesoamerican world roughly
seven hundred years ago, so we're not going into the
the the ancient past really uh. He says that we
know more about Athens of two thousand years ago or

(08:54):
Hebraic traditions from three thousand years ago. Uh, meso American
world against seven h years ago, and there's so much
we don't know. And he says this is largely because
Spanish friars did what they could to destroy the codices
of the Aztecs in the Maya. We have to remember
that the most obvious thing here is that this was
a world that was invaded by Westerners, by the Spanish,

(09:19):
by the Portuguese UH and UH, and that the culture
was ravaged for it. On top of this, the hieroglyphic
style books of the Aztecs UH were there to apparently
aid in the memorization of oral literature. So imagine, perhaps
this is my my read on the scenario. Imagine if
only the illustrations and the illuminations of Christian stories survived,

(09:43):
but the Bible did not, or we had you know,
mostly artwork to go by uh in order to figure
out what the Greek pantheon consisted of, you know, and
what the stories were that were associated with those individuals.
I think that that's just a rough example to sort
of outline the problems of not having the you know,
complete access to the information. But so in general, there's

(10:05):
been a great loss of Mesoamerican literature that was in
many ways caused by colonialism. Yeah. He pointed out in
this that only something like sixteen books survive, three Mayan,
six Wahaka books, and that most of what we know
about pre conquest culture in Mesoamerica comes from archaeological evidence
and postconquest scribes and scholars, but quetzo Quaddle seems to

(10:29):
have existed in this pantheon of meso American culture for
a while. Is this kind of wind god who creates
the earth by lifting up the heavens. And he was
probably a very old god emerging from the beliefs of
coastal regions associated with shells and wind and sea. The

(10:50):
the quet soul part of his name refers to a
rare bird with precious green feathers, feathers used in ceremonial dresses,
and um At should point out that there you can
look up pictures of quets as they are like five
different species of quets als and there, and their feathers
are quite beautiful. They're found in Mexico in the extreme
southern United States. Yeah, I think does the Does the

(11:11):
name refer to their long tail feathers? Is that right?
I believe so. And these would have been used in
uh various religious attire. They are beautiful birds. And now
the cowaddle aspect of the name that refers to a
snake tied to earth energy fertility in the cyclical nature
of life. So in this combo UH, this god, we

(11:33):
have a convergence of earthly and spiritual energy. We have
a creature of the ground and a creature of the sky,
both as one, and he went by other names as well.
He was known as Kukulkin in the Yucatan and Guku
Mats in Guatemala. In devotion to the feathered serpent spread
as far north as New Mexico and south to Columbia, Peru,

(11:55):
and Bolivia. And of course outside of this tradition, obviously
we have to point to the fact that this is
not the only tradition that involves a winged serpent. You
encounter feathered serpents and other religions as well, uh and
in Europe and Asia. And essentially, as we pointed out
with with Q from the movie, it's it's not that
different from other ideas of a dragon, a great holy

(12:18):
winged creature. Now, I don't want to try to over
smooth or overconform the differences between different mythical beasts from
around the world, but I am always fascinated by the
fact that it seems to me, you know, if if
I'm not over you know, over generalizing that so many
different cultures have something like a dragon. There's the European dragon,

(12:42):
the ancient Near Eastern dragon, the Chinese dragon. And then
if we're saying cuetzel Kadal is in many ways kind
of like a dragon. Is that? Um? Is that just
us seeing patterns and things that are objectively not all
that similar or is that really a pattern? And if so,
what is it that causes dragon imagery to arise spontaneously

(13:05):
in so many different cultures around the world. Yeah, I
mean you can also tie in just the serpentine aspect
of it. I mean, obviously there are a lot of
world servants in mythologies, and there's a lot to be
said about our basically, our our encoded response to the
side of a snake. Um, if if cats had a
god of the sky they worshiped, perhaps it would be

(13:26):
a what is it a cucumber with wings in the sky. Uh.
And again I yeah, we don't want to over generalize things,
but I feel like there are certain creatures of the
Earth that humans have a natural heightened response to. And
then add you know, several thousand years worth of myth
building and world building on top of that, and you

(13:47):
get some curious forms. Well, yeah, I wonder if this
goes back to something we talked about, like in our
the First Monster episode, where we discussed the idea what
types of animal forms would become most embedded in review
eared in human consciousness, and you would tend to assume
it might be something like an apex predator or some
animal representing danger, but then also bringing in qualities that

(14:11):
we associate with, like intelligence and human characteristics. But also
just a minute ago, I think you mentioned something about
the cyclical nature of of the world and of time.
I figured that had something to do with with the
ancient Mesoamerican theology we're talking about here, right, Yeah, The
belief system in ancient Mexico is one in which you

(14:31):
had various ages that had preceded our own. Each fallen
age was ruled over by an appropriate god. So we
at ages of water, ages of fire, each ended by
disharmony between the forces that must otherwise exist in balance.
And these were not strictly moral dimensions of good versus evil,
but forces apparently more akin to Eastern models of yin

(14:55):
and yang um. Though there is a timeless struggle at
the heart of this, and it is I think very
easy to categorize the two players in it into sort
of a good versus evil interpretation. But then again that's
our Western minds approaching it too right. You might want
to put things in the familiar categories and say you've
got God and the devil, but it's not quite that

(15:16):
case with what Ketzelkadal and tes Catlee PoCA. Yes, tes
catlet PoCA, whose name apparently means smoking mirror, referring to
the obsidian mirrors used in worship. That's so good, So
it's essentially he's essentially the god of the Black mirror Um.
Interestingly enough, that black Mirror came up in an episode
that Christian and I did on John d the the

(15:40):
the English Um really polymath but also sorcerer. He had
a mirror that that originated in South America or Mesoamerica.
What did he use it for? Well, magic, of course, right,
if you're gonna have a an obsidian mirror of of
test Catlet PoCA of you're gonna be better be using
it from magic. But anyway, these these two beings that

(16:03):
they created the world, It's said, by tearing apart a
primordial Earth goddess. The world was created from the parts
of her body out of remorse from the two gods
for the the for her unfortunate death, and they also
created man and woman. Um there's an interesting little story
where um quetzo Quaddle himself has to has to make

(16:25):
a regular pilgrimage into the land of the Dead, into Michlin,
and there he has to complete a series of trials
for its king and queen so that they'll let him
bring the old bones of the dead back up to
the surface and then use their ground up substance to
create the next generation of humans. Yeah, and uh and

(16:45):
and again. In this we see you know, some models
here that are present elsewhere in the world, and we're
reminded of, you know, the harrowing of Hell or or
the descents into the underworld in in the Greek mythology,
maybe ice A and o Sirius. Yeah, yeah, this is
his story as old as human time anyway. On top
of this, um uh Quetzokado is also a culture bringer,

(17:10):
so he we associated with architecture, art, and the sacred calendar.
Yet another theme we see in religions all throughout the
world the the this ancient figure figure from the gods
bringing knowledge or customs or culture cultural practices to the humans. Now,
according to the Johnson um Quatso Kaddle was a major

(17:32):
object of worship from around two hundred to nine hundred
sea in the urban center of teoti Wakin, a city
of Mesoamerican pyramids and some two hundred thousand residents. So
the toll texts would inherit this city and dominate Mexico
through the twelfth century, and worship of Katskatdo really took

(17:54):
off in the tenth century when we have this case
whether the myth really melded with his tree. He became
associated with a cultural hero named say A Coddle told
Pilsen and so so you get this idea that told Piltson,
this historic figure, by some estimates like the the oldest

(18:14):
historical figure uh in Mexico. Uh. He becomes merge. We
we end up merging Getzok Waddle and to Pilsen into
a single entity. He becomes the incarnation of the feathered God.
And in doing this, to Piltson becomes a spiritual figure
of peace uh. And in doing so he all alienates
the more militaristic segments of society that don't want to

(18:37):
give up human sacrifice and war, two things that to
Piltson is opposed to saying, you know, hey, maybe we
don't need to be at constant war with our neighbors.
Maybe we don't need to sacrifice human beings. Maybe we
can just sacrifice I think it's like butterflies and lizards
and whatnot as opposed to to to humans. Uh and uh,

(18:57):
And I have to point out and and he's retelling
this tale because Rudolpho and I is retelling, really is
concerned with this incarnation of cats cooddle. He does a
great he has a great way of characterizing this in
a very believable way, not a xenophobic, barbarian approach, where
you where you'd be like, oh, one guy saying let's
not kill everybody, of course, let's do something peaceful instead.

(19:19):
You know, he's he's putting in a form that feels
very modern in some respects where where the opposing king
is saying, look, I mean human sacrifices. What we do.
We have to have armies, we have to have firm borders,
we need to expand and get more farmland, we have
to have war, and uh and uh to Piltson is
standing in opposition to that, So it represents chaos right,

(19:43):
often peace is represented as chaos. Yeah, so he's a
major threat to the establishment. So the story goes that
the king conspires with three sorcerers to deal with Piltson,
and one this is the militaristic king. Yes, and one
of the sorcerers is none other than Ketsok Waddle's arch enemy,

(20:07):
uh Tescotli PoCA in human form. So they end up
using a black mirror to tempt to pelts and uh
they corrupt and in doing so, they corrupt him and
make him fully carnal, so he like loses his god nature. Yeah,
it's like a gradual thing, Like they show him the
mirror and he sees himself and becomes a little vain,
and uh, then there's a you know, an additional level.

(20:28):
I think it's so very very much like a rule
of three type thing. And eventually they bring about his
downfall and he's you know, fully carnal. And after that
he he he has been defeated. He lays in a
stone coffin for four days and then he emerges. He
departs on a raft of snakes, and then he emolates
himself and the ashes become rainbow colored birds that ascend

(20:50):
into the sky, and in doing so ketsok waddle Uh
passes away from the earth, but he promises to return, however,
to to reincarnate at some point in the future in
the year say a Coddle Uh. And this is the
the Aztec calendar. Okay, So the result of this though, Uh.
And then again we have the situation where the myth
and the history are are entangled. But to Pilsen, the

(21:14):
individual Uh is brought down and society ends up splittering, splintering,
and then the in doing so, the toll Tech dynasty crumbles. Uh.
But he remains a messianic figure, driven out in Diosgrace,
dying in exile, but prophesies to return. Well, that is
a great story. It makes me want to read this
book by h. This is this is all from the

(21:36):
Rudolpho and I a book. Yes, Like I said that,
the introductions fabricst in the book itself is wonderful too.
It's short, it's a short read, so I recommend it. Yeah,
I've got to check that out. But I guess we
need to take a quick break and then when we
come back we can explore more about this story. All right,
we're back, alright, so we started off by talking about

(21:57):
kind of kind of the crude version of the plumed
serpent idea as it as it appears in say, slimy
b movies from the early eighties. And then we got
into the idea of quetzel Coadal is actually this magnificent
god from Mesoamerican religion, and Robert you told the story
from from this excellent sounding book about quetzel coadls uh

(22:18):
coming down to embody this character in in the History
of the Empire, and how how all that played out
when the hero was betrayed and exiled, and the idea
that he might return. So let's pick up from there.
All right, well, let's let's jump right in. So one
of the issues here is that so far we've been
discussing quetzo Coaddle in a pre Columbian since and we

(22:39):
say pre Columbian America's were of course talking about before
the arrival of Columbus, before the arrival of of the
various western colonial powers, the colonial invaders that would subjugate
the both continents. And so when this we come to uh,
an idea we've discussed on the show before, and that

(23:00):
is UH, the idea of an outside context problem. Now,
this was a term coined by the late sci Fi
author E. N. M. Banks to describe a problem faced
by a civilization um that that has no ability to
prepare for or scarcely comprehend the problem they're faced with.
An o CPS is when they refer to it is

(23:21):
often fatal. In most societies or civilizations only ever encounter
one of them. The most common example is one civilization
suddenly encountering another civilization of far greater technological power, such
as humans encountering an alien species that can travel between
the stars. But a less extreme version of this, of course,

(23:42):
could simply be encountering a civilization has much more advanced
weapons of war. Exactly, for example, beings that are encased
in iron and traverse the entire oceans and great wooden
vessels and capture the power of wind to do so,
whose weapons pierced the air like thunder, and whose very

(24:02):
very bodies exude a creeping death that cannot be stopped. Uh.
And in this we have the conquistadors. We have the
armies of her non Cortes, the conquerors of the Spanish
Empire that arrived in Mesoamerica. And of course we know
that the European colonial invaders brought more than one kind
of warfare. It wasn't just the explicit technologies was like steel,

(24:24):
armor and swords and guns and stuff. It was also
biological warfare. So in the case of the Spanish arriving
in meso America, this is obviously a situation where there
was a lot of destruction, a lot of cultural descripted destruction.
This was a catastrophic event for the peoples of the Americas.
So we mentioned the year, say a Coddle earlier, the

(24:49):
the year that uh Quetzo ku Waddle was prophesied to return.
So that year, that year ends up rolling around once more,
and by Western measure, this the year fifteen nineteen. This
was the year as well that Cortez arrived. No, so
you can understand the confusion, right Uh you look and
you say, well, here, surely this is quetzoquad returned to

(25:12):
claim his throne, attended to by an unnatural army and
arriving on what was described as perhaps floating mountains or
even the four mythic temples of quetsok Waddle. Interesting, now,
I had heard before the idea that when I say
Cortez and his armies arrived, that that they were perceived
as gods. And I didn't know if that was actually

(25:34):
historically true or historically likely, or if maybe that was
like an untrue rumor or Spanish tale. Do you have
do you have a sense of whether that's actually historically accurate? Well,
it seems to be. There seems again we don't have
complete knowledge of everything I went down, but there do
seem to be a few different ways of interpreting this
from what I've seen so far. So you're dealing primarily
with UH, with the the ruler makte Zuma the second

(25:59):
sometimes referred to monte Zuma and UH. And so he's
he sees this, he sees what's happening, he sees the
Spanish that have arrived. And you could say that either
oh well, he and his people think there are gods,
or perhaps just the the the weirdness of this is
enough to make them hesitate. You don't know how to RESPONCD.

(26:19):
They didn't know how to respond. Yeah, I mean that's
the problem of an outside context. Problem is that you
have no context for it, and therefore you don't have
a response. Uh, and readily available at hand. Wisdom is
often prudence holding back and you know, not acting hastily, right, So,
and you also have other factors at work here. We
mentioned that the disease factor. You also have the fact

(26:41):
that the invaders are fairly quick to align themselves with
the enemies of the Aztecs, Like they doesn't take them
long to figure out like what are the power dynamics
and how they can exploit the situation. And however it
ends up exactly playing out. It's clear that, you know,
the Aztec empires is toppled within two years years uh
makta Zuma the second becomes a mere prisoner. But there

(27:05):
wasn't There's another interpretation of events here that I thought
was fascinating, and that is that Montezuma the Second uh
was apparently you know, he's worried by the portents of
doom and in the typical mode of rulers, somewhat paranoid
about plots against him. And then he meets Cortez and
his Spanish retinue, who were you know, also in awe
of this great city. Uh, and they're also that that

(27:28):
would be to nok Titlain. Yes, and there and again
they've aligned themselves with with enemies of the Aztec Empire
and so he ends up presenting Cortes with quote the
treasure of Quatzokuadle. Okay, so, markte Zuma presents Cortes with
like a a religiously significant piece of raimond a costume,

(27:50):
And as explored briefly in Robert Draper's National Geographic Magazine
article Unbearing the aztec Uh, it's possible too that monte
Zoom of the second was quote cunningly outfitting Cortez in
the godly garment of the soon to be sacrificed. So again,
he doesn't really get into this a lot in this article,

(28:11):
but think back again to the The Rise and Fall
of Ketso Kwaddle. Ketzoku Waddle is a king prophesies to return,
but also a king whose very story is one of
sacrifice and death. So perhaps the idea is that montag
Zuma was maybe not so much a fly trapped in
the web of symbols and myth, but a spider trying

(28:33):
one last clever trick to ensnare his enemy within the
trappings of symbol and myth, to turn the people against
him by essentially laying a trap of religious belief. Interesting.
I wasn't able to find much else on this this
read this theory, but I find that fascinating. It reminds
me of our our episode on ritual regicide, the idea

(28:55):
that that even rulers can be trapped within this, uh,
this myth cycle of death and rebirth. Yeah, I haven't
thought about that episode much recently, but that was a
really interesting one. You know, we talked about all the
traditions of the sacrifice of the king. You often think
of the king sacrificing like you know, other people captured
enemies or whatever, but sometimes occupying a position of glory

(29:18):
also puts a target on you, even a even a
sacred or religious target. Yeah, so that's that's an interesting read.
In this scenario, obviously that plan, if that was the plan,
did not work. So what happens after an outside context problem?
Will you end up with a struggle for cultural survival? Um?
I mean that's kind of in a way the best
case scenario, assuming you're not just completely destroyed decimated by

(29:39):
the encounter and uh. One of the methods by which
the old ways may be preserved is within the new.
And we see this tradition of merging the idea of
Ketzokadal with the apostle St. Thomas from Christian trade editions,
who is said to have traveled far preaching the Gospel.
And you see this and this is you know, after
the fact, this is certainly more and say the uh,

(30:01):
the seventeenth century, but you see this merging of iconography
and identity where you have the plumid serpent God essentially
crossed over with this Christian apostle. And by the seventeenth century,
writers and priests began to make more of these comparisons,
and the trend ended up dying back down in the

(30:22):
nineteenth century. But but it's but it's it's fascinating to
look at how these two figures became once more, ketzo
Quaddle became associated merge with a historic individual. You know,
I'm tempted to think that, I know, the members of
the Church Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints believe that
Jesus himself came and preached in the America's right. Yeah, exactly.

(30:44):
And so you you do see this trend within the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints of some
individuals reinterpreting Ketzokuaddle as Jesus Christ. This, oddly enough, though,
I have to point out, has no connection to the
so called Jesus lizard of southern Mexico and Central America.
Creatures that also bear the name of our previous topic,

(31:07):
the basilists, right, the basilist lizards that can run on
top of the water. Apparently I have nothing to do
with quetzel kattle. Yeah, they're they're real lizards as opposed
to mythological snake guy. Now, speaking of reptiles, lizards, snakes,
all all that kind of stuff. One of the other
avenues we wanted to explore, the idea of the plumed

(31:28):
serpent in is stepping out of the specific religious context
of keutzel Coatl himself, also getting away from the weird
Larry co and monster version and looking at biology. So, Robert,
do you want to go to a mental place with
me to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine you're wandering
through the jungle in Malaysia. In one nearby tree, you

(31:50):
notice a snake with a speckled body of black, green
and gold climbing vertically up the trunk of the tree.
And it uses it's the scales on its underbelly to
sort of grip the bark and slowly make its way
up the tree, and eventually it forks off of the
main trunk to explore a branch, and you wonder, what's
it doing up there? Is it looking for something? Maybe

(32:10):
it's looking for a bird's nest to raid or a
sleeping bat to eat. And it doesn't find anything on
the branch, but it keeps following the branch farther and
farther out, and you're like, where's it going. There's not
that much branch there, right, And then it goes all
the way to the tip of the branch and there's
just nothing nowhere left for it to go. Why is
it doing that? And you might be wondering this when

(32:32):
suddenly the snake coils its head off the branch and
kind of a hanging j shape, and then it dives
straight off the branch, straight in your direction. So obviously
you might flinch and take cover right because the snake
just doves straight at you. But then you realize it's
not stick. Its path is not following a straight line.
It's actually not diving straight at you at all, because

(32:54):
immediately after the snake leaves the branch, it stops plunging
down at a sharp angle and begins to gliding smoothly
through the air and a kind of horizontal pattern as
its body undulates in an S shape, and then finally
it lands in another tree branch high above your head,
in a different tree. You have just watched a snake fly.
And these snakes are real. This would I can I

(33:17):
can see, this would be a very alarming thing. Because again,
if we have an innate fear of snakes and in
all late well, and even if not a fear, at
least a hyper awareness to them, like realizing that snakes
can pose a risk to our mortality. And then here's
one flying through the air like they they should not
be able to do. They should be creatures of the ground,
and this one is seemingly a creature of the air. Yeah,

(33:40):
I mean, it's it's the thing that should not be
You could not blame someone for reacting with horror and all.
But one thing I should be clear about immediately is
that these types of snakes, I believe they are venomous,
but not especially venomous, so they're not really dangerous to humans.
I mean, generally we don't want to promote snake fear
of any kind, but these especially, they're they're not really
dangerous humans. So there are five species of snake in

(34:03):
the genus Chrysopelia, native to South and Southeast Asia, including
countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South China, Vietnam, Cambodia, loose
in other places, generally southern and Southeast Asia. They generally
grow up to about one point two meters or about
four feet long. And Chrysopelia are the flying snakes, or

(34:25):
perhaps more appropriately the gliding snakes. Because you've got to
make that important distinction, I would say usually the way
we use the word flying means to travel horizontally through
the air on your own power. You know, it's self
powered flight in a way that can theoretically continue gaining altitude,
whereas gliding is using existing momentum. The momentum you've already

(34:46):
got to travel horizontally through the air without losing altitude
too fast. Airplanes fly, hang, gliders glide, and these snakes glide.
So on average, these snakes can cover a horizontal distance
of about ten or about thirty three ft from a
branch at a starting height of about nine meters or
about twenty nine point five feet. Some reports have them

(35:07):
flying much farther. I read a National Geographic article that
claimed they've been known to glide up to a hundred
meters horizontally, but I couldn't determine the source of that claim.
It seems kind of nuts, but maybe you know, we
can take it. So in order to fly like that,
obviously the snakes they can't flap their wings. They don't
have wings. So what do they do? How do you

(35:29):
generate the lift to glide like that? And the answer is,
instead of flapping their wings, they turn their whole body
into a wing. So wings work, and this would be
the simple version, by guiding air flow in such a
way as to generate lift. And generally they do this
by trying to form a relatively flat, horizontal surface under

(35:49):
which air can flow and push the flying object up
against gravity. So if you're a snake and you want
to turn your snake body into a wing or a
pseudo wing, one thing you'd probably want to do is
make yourself as flat and as wide as possible, and
that's exactly what they do. So in recent years, a
few studies, often associated with a Virginia tech biologist named

(36:10):
Jake Soca, have captured and analyzed high speed video of
the flying snakes, and also made digital and physical models
based on these analyzes to understand how they glide from
tree to tree, and what they found is that these
snakes can literally splay their own ribs out to the
sides and flatten their body into a semiconcave cross section.

(36:34):
So imagine a snake. You know, you normally imagine the
skeleton of a snake has got a backbone and then
kind of a circle of ribs forming almost a cylinder, right,
So imagine that C shape of the ribs. Instead spreading
out like a bird opening its wings, the ribs spread
out kind of flat, and in doing this, the snake
can basically double its width. But then it also undulates

(36:58):
in an S shape as it glides with waves traveling
down the length of the body, and this also helps
keep it aloft. So the whole process begins with a
ballistic dive where the snake reaches off of the off
of the branch, spreads its ribs and goes flat, gathers
its body into an S shape, and then it begins
to wriggle the S shape in large amplitude undulations. And

(37:20):
this process allows the snake, instead of falling straight toward
the ground, to glide an angle of about fifteen degrees
to about thirty five degrees until it floats down at
its target destination. Speaking to the BBC for an article,
Soka characterized it as sort of like the animal is
swimming in air. I could see where that just seeing

(37:41):
something like that would open the door from mystical interpretations. Yeah,
you've gotta wonder if somebody saw that in ancient times,
how would they not come up with some kind of
dragon based on it or something. Now, of course, this
is not This is not something that you would find
in Mesoamerica. So we're not saying that this snake inspired
the Cutzel Coadal story or anything like that. But you

(38:02):
can see how similar ideas of flying serpents plumed serpents
might be inspired by something like this. Now, of course,
every article about this research also mentions, Robert, can you
guess what it also mentions in the very last paragraph
of every one of these articles, snakes on a plane? No,
what will we use this knowledge of analyzing snake flight

(38:22):
to do? Oh? Yes, well, that's that's the closing of
any good science article, right, What are the practical applications?
Build robots? Always says, build robots. There's so many of these.
I wish we could just get more science articles that say,
you know what, it's just great to study snakes, and
they don't have to justify it at the end by

(38:43):
saying we will use this knowledge one day to build
weapons snakes that fly into enemy territory in ways you
can't possibly imagine. Well, But at the same time, I
do understand that, you know you you want to end
on a really strong aw note with the science article
and and and off times. That's the future applications, that's
where you find that gold. But these snakes themselves inspire all.

(39:05):
Look this up. Watch the video as imagine this is
a snake flying. I mean it's not it's not gaining out,
but it's gliding tree to tree. It's it's amazing to see.
This is what's all inspiring. Not to knock people who
make robots. Making robots is great. I didn't mean to
come off overly strong there. I'm all, I'm all for robots,
but come on, you don't have to justify it by

(39:27):
making robots. You could just study snakes and that'd be great.
I can get behind that. One more thing, of course,
to mention is that there are of course also flying lizards. Again,
if you want to go in the sort of flying
reptile direction. Again, this would be gliding, not flying. But
the draco lizards of the Draco genus are also found
in Southeast Asia, and they've got rib flaps that fold

(39:49):
up against the body when not in use, but they
can be spread out to form a wing and allow
the lizard to glide between trees. Now, the thing I
was wondering is why would snakes and lizards need to
glie between trees? What's useful about that? And so there
I think there are a couple of hypotheses. One is
that once you're already up in a tree and you
want to get in another tree, it might take less

(40:10):
energy to glide to another tree than to climb down
and climb back up. That makes sense. But then the
other thing, that maybe the bigger thing, is that crossing
the forest floor exposes you to large predators. The forest
floor is the danger zone. Once you're up in a tree,
you're safer. So once you are in the safety of
a tree, it would be much better if you could
glide from tree to tree instead of having to go

(40:32):
back down across the forest floor and maybe get picked
up by a leopard along the way. Now, this might
not be a factor, but it also seems like if
something were perhaps following you or stalking you. Um, you know,
this is a great way to escape them. From one
tree to the other. You can glide and it can't
if there's a monkey in the tree that wants to
eat you. You know, you can glide farther than that
monkey can jump potentially. Yeah, though some of those monkeys

(40:54):
can jump. Right, all right, we need to take a
quick break. When when we come back, we will discuss
the key of the beastly flyers of the ancient past,
the pterosaurs. Than all right, we're back, Robert, take me
to the pterosaurs. All right, Well, we're talking about one
particular terras, so we're all familiar with pterosaurs. I think

(41:16):
at this point these are the the flying creatures of
the prehistoric world, the flying lizards of the prehistoric world,
not dinosaurs, right, not dinosaurs. You call him dinosaur, your
six year old will correct you. Um, I have I
have had this happened before, because sometimes that you do
just sort of like a like a like non scientifically,

(41:36):
you just refer to everything from the dinosaur age as
a dinosaur, and uh, yeah, it's inaccurate to call everything
a dinosaur. So the the king or one of the
kings of the of the pterosaurs was undisputably a creature
that is that now bears the name Ketsokadalus, and you'll

(41:57):
never guess what he's named. He's an himed after Ketsoquaddle,
the the the meso American snake god. Robert. You actually
did a reading from a children's book on the podcast
one time that had a great little, you know, sub
story about Ketzel Coatless and it ended with this this,
I am Ketzel Coatlas. Yes, I forget the author's name offhand,

(42:19):
but if you do a search for I am Ketzo
Coatless or I am I think there's one on Diplodocus
as well, but they're all, like really, they're all really
good children's books about dinosaurs that do not candy coat
the life and death nature of of a of a
prehistar creature's life. So we're talking about as far as

(42:41):
Ketzkatless goes. We're talking about the Cretaceous period, and we're
talking about the region that is now known as North America.
First fossils were discovered in Texas in the early nineteen seventies,
and this this creature was apparently just a flying monster.
This thing was incredibly huge. Uh. The estimated wingspan, and

(43:05):
this is something that's changed over the years, that was
higher than they kind of kind of scaled back, but
current data seems to put it estimated at around thirty
three to thirty six ft or ten to eleven meters.
That's roughly the wingspan of a mid sized airplane. For instance, Uh,
the World War two US fighter P fifty one Mustang

(43:26):
that had a wingspan of thirty seven ft or eleven
point twenty eight ms. The swept wing span of an
F FOURT Team Tomcat. That's the uh, the fighter plane
from top gun for anybody who can make that connection, Uh,
that has a swept wingspan of thirty eight feet or
eleven point fifty five What has swept me? So the
the F fourteen can fly with its wings in a

(43:47):
swept position or in an extended position. I see when
when it becomes sort of streamlined. Yeah, okay, Yeah. There
was a great g I Joe toy airplane that was
essentially an F fourteen, uh, and it had wings that
moved like that. That's my main connection with it. So
compared to other things that fly and have wings. This
thing was an absolute beast, absolutely. I mean, even if

(44:11):
it's on the ground, this was a huge creature. So
in a bipedal stance, it would have stood roughly three
meters or nine point eight feet tall, and it may
have scrambled around and like this kind of quadripue quadropedal stance. However,
much like a bat. Have you ever seen it? Um?
Bats crawled, bats crawl or some of the I think
there's creepy. Look, it's creepy. Yeah, there's one particular I

(44:34):
believe there's even one particular species of bad it's primary
primarily ground based. Uh, and it is. It's kind of
creepy to look at. So this thing might have scrambled
around like that, But by many estimates, including Ruta and
bent On in Evolution of morpheological Disparity in Terra Sours
from two thousand eleven, this mighty flying beast would have
probably stood roughly as tall as a modern day giraffe,

(44:58):
but with just a far larger head. Yeah, kind of
like giraffe with with like a screwed up lizard like
pelican head. Yeah, like this great squatting winged beast. Just
imagine that thing looming over you. I feel like this
thing should be right up there with the Tarandosaurus rex.
You know, people should appreciated them on the same level. Yeah,

(45:19):
I mean, I really, it's it's amazing. It is. I mean,
it's it's I mean, certainly all the terosaurs are amazing creatures.
To look back on this, this evolved mode of flying
that that again is is a little bit different from
from birds or bats. It is like we have essentially
three modes of vertebrate flight that evolved, and this is
one of them. And that's talking about powered flight, not correct. Uh,

(45:43):
you know, and thinking about this, you know, like again,
it would have it would have seemed like a god
if you were able to see it. And uh, I
can't help but think of Edgar Rice Burrows. Uh pellucidar
I believe is the pronunciation. Uh, a series of books
that's a setting that he did them. I haven't haven't either,
but I was introduced to them just by some of
the art. Initially, they feature a psychic master race of

(46:05):
flying reptiles called the Mahars, and they pop up. They
also pop up in the nineteen seventies six movie At
the Earth's Core starring Peter Cushing. Yes, Doug McClure, oh boy,
and Caroline Monroe. Wow, I've got to see that. How
have I not? Well, I'll tell you. It's actually one
of the movies in the most recent Mystery Science Theater

(46:26):
three thousands serially season, So that all star cast, that
all star cast. If you want to see see Peter
Cushing just totally misused in a film, this is a
great place to find it. Peter Cushing was misused in
about nine percent of the films he was in, but
this one especially because you got Doug McClure in there
to play kind of a goofus, which he did well.

(46:47):
I love Doug McClure. Yeah, he's the classic mid century
movie lug. Yeah. But then Peter Cushing also kind of
plays a dufus, so it's I think he's a scientist dufus.
And then you have like two different levels of dufus
going up against stuff forces they can how should comprehend
How sharp are his cheekbones in it? Does he cut
anything with them? I don't know. They might have been

(47:08):
dulling a bit by that point, I have to say,
But but he's still it's still Peter Cushing, So it's
still a lot of fun. But you have these kind
of wretched looking Terra Sar mahar Uh creatures that show
up in the film. There's also a I think it's
a Boris file a Jo painting that was done for
one of these book covers that has a of course,

(47:31):
like a scantily clad woman, uh. And there's this terrace
star creature, one of these Mahars creeping up on her
to snatch her away, because you know, it's Edgar Rice Burrows.
That's that's kind of the plot. And I can't help
but assume that the Mahars also inspired the Savage Land
Mutants saw On from the X Men comics. Not saar
On from Lord of the Rings, but the what is

(47:53):
essentially like a Terra Saar human ooid that the Mutants
battle in those comic books. Okay, so what else do
we know out this creature, the quetzal Katlas? All right, Well,
in a way, it's fitting that the creature is named
for a god with so much mystery around it, because
a lot of mystery remains surrounding this massive, winged prehistoric creature.
And this, of course is part of the course with

(48:13):
fossil remains, paleontologists have to solve the riddle of the
remains as best they can. We have all these you know,
massive gaps in the in the in the fossil record,
and that's just part of trying to understand the past
through fossils. We have, I think, based on I think
current data, we have I think only one adult Quetzo
katlas fossil to go off of, and it's only wing fragments.

(48:37):
The other specimens have been like smaller, like younger um specimens.
So we we've seen a wide range of estimates than
regarding the flying or gliding abilities of the Ketzo katlas,
a creature with more of an inland range than many
of its flying relatives, So we don't know exactly. We
don't know for sure to what extent it flew exactly.

(49:01):
For instance, Donald M. Henderson went so far in his
two thousand nine Journal Vertebrate Paleontology article to wonder if
it could fly at all. He argued that given its
estimated body mass, this was maybe a flightless creature. Oh yeah,
it might be like the ostrich of pterosaurs or something. Um. Yeah,
you always have to wonder, because I mean, so there

(49:23):
are limits on the size that an organism could reasonably
be expected to fly. Right. You know, you might wonder
like how come dragons don't exist? What why don't we
see birds with a hundred foot wingspan? And I think
part of that has to do with like how how
mass scales up with relationship to volume. Right, Like, one

(49:43):
of the reasons you can't get super giant creatures is
that would be cooling problems with like the surface area
of the giant creature, how much stuff it's got inside
it um And you would probably encounter similar problems when
you keep trying to scale up bigger and bigger flying organism.
As the mass keeps going up, it's going to take
more and more power to lift that mass off the ground.

(50:06):
And you know, well you can. You can generate lift
in multiple ways. You can have bigger wings, but eventually,
like you'd run into structural problems like where bones would
not be strong enough to support the wings at a
certain amount of you know, size and weight. Or you
could have more powerful muscles to flap them harder and faster,
but eventually you might run into fuel problems. I mean,

(50:27):
they're just physics limits on how big a flying organism
can get. And you know, I have to say that
a flightless catsl co outless is terrifying in its own way,
because here it would be a situation where here's a
creature that is like I don't have to fly anymore
because I'm enormous, and I will just eat you with
my toothless beak. I would just gobble you up. I mean,

(50:48):
I want this is not based on evidence, is just speculating.
I wonder if you could also imagine something like a chicken,
where it's not a flying bird, but it's a bird
that can sort of like use wings to it off
the ground for a short period of time. I mean
you wonder about like maybe it doesn't sustain flight, but
it's sort of like hops up and flies very briefly

(51:08):
in order to swoop down and pounce something. Right, But
this is not the only argument that you have the
the other end of the spectrum, For instance, where a
British paleontologist Mark Witten, working with biomechanics researcher Mike Habib,
modeled the creature in two and argued that he could
fly up to eighty miles an hour or a hundred
and twenty eight kilometers per hour for seven to ten

(51:30):
days at altitudes of fifteen thousand feet or four point
six kilometers, with a maximum range of between eight thousand
and twelve thousand miles. That's up to nineteen thousand, three
hundred and twelve kilometers. Wow, so that's some range. Yeah,
that is so if you're a flint stone and you
want to ride a dinosaur for like a for a
transoceanic flight, this is the one you want to snag.

(51:52):
You know, it's not a dinosaur, sorry, a pterosaur quetzo
koitles air. But then we also have more balanced to
pro just falling in between these two. For instance, paleobiologist
David Unwin believes that the creatures could certainly fly, but
we don't really have a lot else to go on. Again,
think to the limited fossils we talked about earlier. He

(52:14):
argues that the distance estimates here might be just premature.
It's also been argued in some of these models that
the creature, if it could fly, you know, it could
probably get aloft via a high powered four legged pounce
into the air, which I have to say that is
alone is just amazing to try and envision, imagine this
massive dump truck of a creature just launching into the air.

(52:37):
And then flapping like crazy and uh, descending a winged
giraffe with a giant pelican head, leaping into the clouds
and then once it's once it's up or or once
it lands again, the question is, well, what does it eat? Well,
one theory the answer is you, well, yes, if we were,
if we were around, that would that would probably be
a possibility. But one theory was that it was a

(53:00):
scavenger and it used its long beak to like dig
into dino corpses, which would also seem to work given
their inland range. You know, so this is not a
thing that's going out and needing a lot of sea creatures.
But perhaps it's flying over vast distances and encountering dead
dinosaurs and it can go down and feast. Uh. And

(53:20):
of course flying is an attractive foraging strategy for scavengers, right, Yeah,
you have a tremendous ability to to take in the
surrounding the region. But they also could have skimmed fish
from freshwater lakes and rivers. That's one theory, but it's
also been pointed out that they likely lacked the next
structure and jaw to really carry that out. A more
likely hypothesis apparently is that they fed much like a

(53:43):
modern stork, stalking shorelines for large and small prey alike.
And uh, I have to say that that is a
terrifying possibility, because if you've ever seen footage of storks
engaging in this sort of terrestrial hunting practice, uh, it
can be it can be pretty horrifying. I accidentally showed
some footage from a documentary I want to say it

(54:04):
was a Disney's Flamingo documentary, uh, to my son, and
he was younger at the time, and there's a scene
where the stork just is stalking the shore and gobbling
up live flamingo chicks. Yeah, it's it's absolutely horrifying. After
he saw that, uh, there was some some later point
we'd forgotten about it, and then we tried to show
him a cartoon that has, you know, the typical like

(54:26):
stork and baby motif. It might have been in one
of the Pixar shorts, and he was instantly not having
any of it. He's like, I know what storks are about,
and you're not going to show me this this, uh,
this short film that involves human babies and storks, because
I know what's going to happen that baby is gonna
get gobbled. No. I mean we we try to present
a level headed view of predation in nature, but sometimes

(54:49):
you just do have a visceral emotional reaction. And I
know exactly what you're talking about. I haven't seen storks,
but I've seen video of UM. I believe it's in
U some David Attenborough near rated documentary UM that had
not storks but pelicans eating baby birds. Just horrifying. Watch it.
Like the way they don't blink, They just got these

(55:11):
big lower beak areas and they just scoop up the
baby birds in and they're like wings and legs poking
out of their mouth and stuff. Is just horrible, frightful.
So I'm sorry, now I shouldn't apply that moralistic tone
to nature, but like it. It is hard to watch.
But here's the question with the quetzo quatless. Would it
be able to scoop sunbathers up from a New York rooftops.

(55:34):
I would say probably not. I think it would need
to land in Central Park where it would still have
plenty to eat. It could attack picnickers and like young
people making out on blankets. Um, you know, school groups
that have arrived there to play soccer, whatnot. There's so
much to eat in Central Park. Hey, we've seen pizza
at now you get pizza ketsel coatlas exactly, just the

(55:55):
junk food. It doesn't need to even deal with live pray.
All right. Well, as we begin to close thing is
out here, I do want to mention that there there,
Ketzo Quaddle has has survived to a certain extent or
re emerged in culture. It hasn't been like the complete
second Coming that was perhaps prophesized, but he remains a
figure of interest, and sometimes you actually see physical, like

(56:19):
new physical manifestations of him. There's a really cool Ketzo
Quaddle statue in San Jose, California, for instance. I have
not seen it in person yet, but I was reading
about it on Atlice Obscura and it points out that
it's downtown, it's very Aztecan style, and it was controversial
back in the nineties as it cost about half a

(56:39):
million dollars. And also some Christian fundamentalists claimed that this
was this was gonna be a place of where you know,
people were gonna worship a bloodthirsty god. Oh yeah. They
were saying that they were going to be human sacrifices.
The statue, which, of course, based on everything we've discussed
regarding this god, that was not going to be the case,
or if it us, it would have been very misinformed

(57:02):
cultist showing up there. Meanwhile, other critics just argued that
it was a religious sculpture on public grounds and then
shouldn't be allowed. But then there's the criticism that they
say that the sculpture kind of looks like coiled dog poop. Well,
I guess coiled serpents sometimes do. Yeah. Well, it's pointed
out on Atlas Obscura, and there is no author attributed

(57:23):
on this particular article. The positioning here isn't crazy, especially
when you look at some of the architectural motifs of
say the Aztecs of Quetzo, kadal Uh and Uh. It
also matches up with this description that of the God
that D. H. Lawrence made in his ninety six novel
The Plume Serpent, where he describes quote, snakes coiled like excrements,

(57:46):
snakes feigned and feathered beyond all dreams of dread. I
have not ventured into that D. H. Lawrence book. Lawrence's novel,
by the way, concerns the Mexican Revolution and a cult
attempting to revive the older legion of Mexico, and he
apparently wanted to title the book Quetzo Quaddle, but his
publishers disagreed. I can see why, like nobody's going to

(58:09):
be able to pronounce that. Well, it's probably one of
the reasons. Probably Larry Cohen's film was called Q or
Q The Wing Serpent, Right. Yeah. One other point of
possible interest, I haven't wait, wait a minute, do you
think that Larry Cohen's movie was in any way based
on the D. H. Lawrence novel. I have not read
anything to suggest that it was, um and I would

(58:32):
say that no, it's probably not, but in it maybe
maybe so in a very Larry Cohen kind of way,
like you picked up on like cultists bringing back an
old religion. Let's get a giant monster in there, and
you've got a movie. On another literary note, I'm very
interested to check out. I haven't read these yet, but
the author Alliotte de Bodard wrote the Obsidian and Blood Trilogy,
a trilogy of books that I've seen described as a

(58:54):
like pre Columbian as tech noir. Oh that sounds cool. Yeah,
So I'm I'm interested in that out and again I
wanna say that an I is book that a reference
at the top of the podcast is an excellently read,
is an excellent read and readily available in like you know,
kindle and physical format however you like to read your books. Awesome.

(59:15):
I think I'll be checking that one out all right.
So there you have it. We've gone from B movie
monsters to uh meso American gods, two prehistoric creatures, uh
flying snakes. What more could you ask for? Well, you
could ask for more monster science content, which we will
be bringing to you for the rest of the month.

(59:36):
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(59:59):
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