August 13, 2019 • 41 mins
This episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind takes listeners to Transylvania, where a rogue baron made important early strides in the field of paleobiology and where, during the Late Cretaceous period, giant pterosaur dubbed “Dracula” feasted on pony-sized dwarf sauropods.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You were standing in the halls of Sachell Castle. You
approach a golden chalice, resplendent in an embossed spiral of
geologic time that winds round from rim to base. At
the merest touch, the chalice chimes and shivers, dragging you
back through two hundred years of history to the castle's
(00:24):
raising in the Transylvanian wilds of Hattick. You grasp the
golden chalice, and time sheds from your perspective. Let the
skin of a great serpent, spiraling out in every direction
as you descend through the depths of centuries millennia, through
eons of evolutionary change in geologic upheaval, till the chalice
(00:47):
slips from your trembling grip and leaves you in an
age of wonders. Pottig as you knew it is gone.
Now a paleo island rising up out of the Late
Cretaceous Sea, you glimpse movement and note the approach of
several sauropods. Only these are not the hulking giants you're
familiar with. They seem dwarf creatures the size of ponies.
(01:09):
You could ride one if only you dared to approach
its alien flesh. But before you can muster the courage,
the creatures scatter from the clearing predatory therapods to flee
back into the forests. As a great shadow descends from
the sky, a terrasaur to rival the dragon Bowler of myth.
It lands before you. It towers like a siege engine,
(01:31):
but you've already thrown yourself to the ground. You're fumbling
for the golden chalice so that it might take you home,
or take you further back anywhere to escape the jaws
of hats Agotor extend them A welcome to Stuff to
(01:52):
go your Mind A production of iHeart Radios has to works. Hey,
you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you
can probably guess from that fun little cold open that
we have prepared for you there, we are going to
(02:12):
be traveling back in time in this episode via paleontology,
back to prehistoric Transylvania. That is so exciting, Robert, I
can tell you are just itching to like write a
novel about this, this ancient paleo island. Yeah, I was
really inspired by this, and this is one of those
situations where I was inspired by reading a dinosaur book
(02:36):
to my son. Uh. There's a book titled Atlas of
Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins and illustrated by Lucy Leatherland.
And it has these wonderful, like you know, big two
page spreads that show a different part of the world
and an idea of what the prehistarth life might have
looked like. And they had a spread they cover every continent,
(02:59):
and they had a spread for Haydeck showing like what
what prehistoric Transylvania, what prehistoric Romania would have might have
consisted of? And uh, I have to admit, despite having
you know, covered sauropods on the show, and certainly we've
talked about gigantic terra saurs quite recently, I wasn't really
(03:19):
familiar with this corner of the prehistoric world. It clearly
it's set off a little explosion in your mind. I
can sense the energy coming off of you on the
subjective Hottigg, and I wanted to say that you're opening
reminded me of two different things. The poem Directive by
Robert Frost, which is about going back in time and
it also involves a chalice. Yeah. Yeah, it talks about
(03:41):
like I forgot about it or if or if I
just uh, you know, came up with that idea, you know,
via some connection to things that were inspired by what
he wrote. You should look it up again as a
great poem directive, I mean, but it also was like
a cross between directive and a sound of thunder. Yes, yeah, yeah,
and I was I guess I also was definitely thinking
(04:03):
about the time machine. Um, you know, who can escape
Wells's time machine when considering the past at all? I mean,
anytime you're thinking about dinosaurs, you can, and another prehistar
creatures such as the pterosaurs, you can't help but imagine
like traveling back and encountering them. That's the ultimate frame
of reference, right what if I was standing next to one.
(04:24):
But this is the ultimate real monster versus fictional monster
crossover because because well not to call dinosaurs monsters, but
you know, they're the They're one of the closest things
to monster myths, to dragon myths that you've got in
the real world. So you've got like a really interesting
sort of dinosaur fossil site with with interesting biogeographical qualities
(04:46):
that we will explore as we go on in the
and the rest of the episode. But it's right there
in Transylvania, right, it's it's vampire country indeed, and you know,
we will encounter a fossil that has been dubbed Dracula.
The paleontolog is covering it. How about those pony sized sauropods.
You didn't make that up, did you know? No, that's all.
That's one of one of like the really amazing things
(05:07):
about about this particular scenario and and ultimately about everything
we're gonna talk about in this episode, is that is
that we're looking at an example, a prehistoric example of
island dwarf is um and island gigantism, also known as
the the island fact or or the island rule. And
this is a concept we've talked about on the show before.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's come up several times. It has
(05:29):
to do with body size in populations of animals that
become isolated. But will really just that become isolated because
it doesn't have to be on islands. Islands is just
the easiest way for it to happen, Like another way
it can happen or in these interesting ecosystems known as
sky islands where um, I don't know, if you ever
to see like like essentially a plateau, it could be
(05:50):
the like that. One great example that I've been to
is like in Big Been National Park in Texas. So
you you have desert and then in the middle of
this there are some mountains rising up. And as you
go up the slopes of the mountains and in between
them at the higher altitudes, actually the climate changes, right,
because at higher altitudes it almost kind of mimics higher latitudes,
(06:12):
and so the types of plants you find change, the
types of animals you find change. It goes from sort
of desert to a weird kind of forest up in
the higher parts of the mountains. And so this can
function kind of like an island, right, because there are
creatures that can survive up in those mountain forests but
can't traverse the vast expanses of desert down below, or
if they do it, it can be very dangerous and they,
(06:34):
you know, might not make it to anywhere they could survive.
So anyway, you know, wherever you have a case where
species can survive in a very limited geographical range and
they're cut off from the rest of the continental populations,
you can have these cases of island gigantism or island
dwarf is um. Basically, smaller species tend to become larger
(06:55):
and larger species tend to become smaller. And there are
multiple reasons for this, but mainly it's that the smaller
species tend to become larger because on islands there is
a lack of predators that they would encounter on the
mainland that would be a check on their their growth. Meanwhile,
larger species tend to become smaller, presumably because of a
lack of energy resources that you would find on the mainland.
(07:18):
There's less to eat on the island, so it actually
pays to have a smaller body that requires less food.
A commonly cited example of this is like the mammoths
that were found on certain islands, like the gigantic Colombian
mammoth evolved a dwarf variety on the Channel Islands off
the coast of California. There was also the Wrangel Island
(07:39):
mammoths that were I think the last wooly mammoths on
Earth that went extinct around four thousand years ago, were
smaller than their continental varieties, and the basic idea with
these examples is that they were able to to reach
these islands when the water level was lower, and then
they end up trapped there essentially, and life goes on
and evolution continues. Right, Life goes on, but there's less
(08:01):
to eat, so if you're trying to make a bigger body,
you're more likely to starve to death. So the ones
with genes for smaller bodies tend to be the ones
that survive. And so obviously we think about, you know,
examples of this in the recent past or in the
modern world. But the same principles of evolution and energy
and food dynamics would have been in place in the
time of dinosaurs, right exactly, so you could run into
(08:24):
exactly the same issue. And it seems like that's exactly
what's going on in this ancient Transylvanian island called hot Egg. Yes,
sixty six million years ago, this region was an island
in the large body of water that we we refer
to now as the Taffy c and this would have
covered large parts of Europe up through the Late Cretaceous period,
(08:45):
and it would have uh and it would have caused
this resulting group of islands to essentially be a European
archipelago and German born paleontologist Hens Deeter Sous describes it
as a quote show allow epicontinental sea dotted with variously
sized islands. Uh Seuss Senior scientist and Curator of Vertebrate
(09:07):
Paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History of the
Smithsonian Institution. And he even has a dinosaur named after him.
Um so you know he's the real deal. It's a
Paki cephalosaur, right, Pacula, Pakia cephalosaur. Hans sus Susia and Cecia.
Always a good sign and a paleontologist. The amount of
honor is directly proportional to how hard it is to
(09:30):
say a little known fact. We We should also note
that you know we're we're talking a long time ago here,
so it's not million issue. Oh, Europe was flooded back then,
um no. As SEUs points out in a two thousand
Tin paper titled an Unusual Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous
of Romania and the Island Rule, there was there was
complex tectonic activity along the northern margin of the western Tethys,
(09:55):
and then there was volcanic activity that resulted in these
Cretaceous islands rising up. So and then the largest of
these covered much of what we now know as the
Iberian Peninsula and France extending into Central Europe. Now, this
particular island in the Deaths, which is you know, which
corresponds to the modern region of Hatig Transylvania. This would
(10:18):
have been roughly I'm reading eighty thousand square kilometers or
thirty thousand, eight d eight square miles. And to put
that in perspective, modern day Ireland is uh roughly thirty
two five hundred nine square miles in size. So sort
of Irelands sort of a you know, a Romanian Ireland
um that's crawling with odd sized prehistoric creatures. So that's
(10:42):
how we came to have these islands, roughly, these European
islands in the late Cretaceous uh and uh. And you know,
we ended up with various creatures stranded upon these islands. Uh.
And they were subject to evolutionary changes that we refer
to roughly as the island rule. So the Titanic sauropod
is humbled to the size of a pony, and other
(11:02):
creatures that will get to rise too much larger sizes.
And who would read such a such a thing from
the fossil record, you know, you might. You might think,
especially given um uh you know that that paper I
decided from two thousand ten, you might think, well, this
is a fairly recent discovery. You especially might think that
if you uh you know, like me, we're not familiar
with this, this marvelous world of of of oversized and
(11:26):
undersized prehistoric beasts. But to look to the origin of
these discoveries, we have to look to a rogue Austro
Hungarian baron of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
All right, let's take a break and when we come back,
we will meet the baron. All right, we're back, So
it's time to meet the baron, a character who plays
(11:47):
a major role in the history of the science and
discovery of the the Paleo Island Hottig. And this baron
is Baron friends Notche von Felso Silva's who lived eighteen
seventy seven. In nineteen thirty three, yes, Baron Nopcha and
and I have to have to admit, when we started
this episode, I really didn't expect there to be a
(12:07):
fascinating human story in the midst of all of this,
even though, of course paleontology is always a human story
because paleontologists are the humans who who uncover these secrets
of the past. But I thought this was just gonna
be all, um, you know, rampaging prehistoric beasts, right, But
this is a fascinating individual. And Smithsonian dot com has
(12:28):
a great article on NOA titled History Forgot This rogue
aristocrat who discovered dinosaurs and died penniless by Vanessa Veselka,
which goes into far more detail in his life than
we're going to explore here, especially concerning some some tragic
in the later portions of his life. He was a
really interesting figure though, and this is a great article,
(12:48):
by the way, this is one that I think listeners
just should go go off and read. Definitely, yeah, he is.
You know, it's tempting to want to just sum him
up in a few words like say, oh, he was,
you know, a gentleman scientists towards the end of the
time period in which the general that gentleman scientists was
a thing, and that's I think mostly true. But then
there are all these other weird dimensions to his character.
(13:08):
Um So, he was born into privilege and aristocracy, but
he also seemed to live with what we would now
likely classify as like as a manic depressive disorder, you know,
he was he was apparently prone to periods of intense
focus and energy, which it is good when you're engaging
in you know, early fossil study and some of the
other activities he was involved in. But then of course
(13:31):
the flip side is that that there were these morose
periods as well. He's also described as like being absolutely
brilliant in a scientific sense and mostly self taught, you know,
just learning from like writing to people and getting them
to send him books, and then teaching himself subjects like
biology and geology that you know, he didn't have formal
(13:51):
training in, and then making all of these discoveries about
dinosaurs and paleontology and about deep time. But also not
all always, not always having the right kind of social
skills within the professional context to get his work accepted.
Like apparently he was very rude, and he was or
it could be very rude, but could also be very charming.
(14:14):
Yeah yeah, and and uh yeah, so much of it
again was he was self taught. He's he's writing other
experts and getting them to send him books. Or there's
also the story of him him going off to university
and bringing this fossil with him from you know, from
from the area of Romania, and you know he was
from and uh, and the professor there was like he
(14:35):
was like, what is this? He help me figure this out?
And he's like, I don't know, you can figure it out,
essentially like send him back with it, which you know,
which is the author points out of the Smithsonian piece. Um.
You know, the sucker says that's either like some great
tutelage where the professor is like, oh, I'm going to
grow this young mind by inspiring them to go U
find the answer themselves, or it's like a really lazy
(14:58):
or overwork professor was like I don't have time to
help you, uh, you know, decipher this rock. Go do
it yourself. But do it himself. He did. And and
so he's one of these remarkable you know, accounts of
his kind of like a self made gentleman scientists. Uh,
though obviously had had a certain advantage on the situation
by being born into the aristocracy. Well yeah, that's a
(15:20):
common thing you see in the history of science that
that a lot of the great scientists of the nineteenth
centuries say, we're we're sort of aristocrat types. Uh. And
obviously I don't think that's because aristocrats are better at
sciences because they had the resources and the leisure to
pursuit to like, to get into these pursuits. If you're
a farmer working night and day, like you, you don't
(15:41):
have the time and the money to go into the sciences. Yeah. Yeah,
so he was. And then I said, he's like I said,
he's he's kind of emerging towards the end of the
gentleman science being a thing at all, and certainly towards
the end of his career. In the end of his life,
he was kind of shut out from scientific circles. Uh.
And some of the ideas that he he was was
promoting during his life were ultimately ideas that were not
(16:03):
widely accepted, though interesting, interestingly enough, would become widely accepted
many decades later. In the nineteen seventies, for example, is
a time when people started looking back at him and saying, oh,
here's this interesting character, uh from the history books. He
you know, he published a hundred and fifties scientific papers
in his life, and he identified twenty five genera of
(16:24):
reptiles and five different dinosaurs. But we've largely forgotten him
and we don't celebrate him at all. Uh, And and
people started you know, looking back and realizing who he
was and what he what he had discovered here. And yeah,
there are other aspects to his to his life that
are all interesting as well. Um, he was an adventurous individual.
He served as a spy for the Austro Hungarian Empire,
(16:47):
but he seems to have largely used his service to
the state as a vehicle for pursuing his interest in
geography and geology and the study of the Albanian people. Right.
There seems to be this like mix of interests here
because like he apparently just loved the Albanian culture and
like wanted to study it and you know, document all
their customs and everything like that. But the the government
(17:08):
that was funding his work basically wanted a sort of
you know, the early twentieth century equivalent of like a
c I a fact book on a country, right, and
they wanted intelligence that could be used in it could
maybe be used in warfare or something like that later on.
So that's the money going into what he's doing. But
he but he apparently was just in love with Albania
(17:29):
and its people and and its culture, and at one point,
even through his name in the hat to potentially be
a king. There's there's that whole storyline. Um. Again, I
encourage everyone to to read that article about him. But again,
his in his scientific pursuits, he was very much ahead
of his time. Uh for starters. The theory of continental
drift is now widely, if not universally, accepted, but this
(17:52):
was not the case during Nopcha's life. Yet he presented
some of the most credible geologic evidence at the time
for continental drift. And then, of course, when it came
to fossils, this is where he made his arguably his
greatest impact. He discovered some some very curious fossils in
the Hattag region, many of which were noticeable for being
quite smaller than examples that were popping up elsewhere, and
(18:14):
he argued that these were examples of of of the
island rule in action, that the Hatta region was once
an island in a prehistoric sea. Now we'll get to
the specific dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures in a little bit,
but just just consider he found titanosaur sauropods the size
of mere ponies, despite the fact that titanosaurs are the
(18:37):
largest land animals that we know to have ever existed
reaching sizes you know, we're talking a hundred and twenty
one ft or thirty seven meters long and uh and
the weights of somewhere in the neighborhood of of of
seventy six tons. And yet he finds fossil evidence of
these multiple noticeably smaller uh Sara pods, And it just
(18:58):
raised the question what were they so well, I mean,
the obvious things that they're juveniles dummy, right, aren't they
Aren't they just baby Sara pods? Yeah? That well that
was what critics argued, that these were just juveniles. Uh
and uh. And certainly one of the more alarming things
about Sara pods is that they do grow to such
alarming size from relatively small eggs. I mean, Sara pods
(19:22):
are her weird and strange creatures. Uh. You know that
we're still you know, figuring out how, you know, all
the you know, the answers to the mysteries of their biology.
And so, you know, just the fact that you find
some small ones, you know, it does seem like it
could be it could be one possible explanation could be that, well,
these were just the juveniles. Um. And and this read
(19:42):
doesn't seem to have completely fallen out of fashion. As
recently as two thousand seven, a paper in historical biology
by Jean Leloof argued that that's some hot tig. Sara
pod fossils might suggest quote age class communities among sara
pod populations. So this is like a gang of sauropod youths, yes, exactly, like, yes,
(20:03):
a street gang of youths. Uh, you know. And I
believe we've discussed uh, this sort of thing in terms
of crocodilians and maybe komodo dragons on the show in
the past, the idea that some animals experienced tremendous body
size changes and therefore corresponding changes in diet and behavior
and maybe thought of his living in their own niche
(20:23):
daring different phases of their life, either alone or in groups. Yeah,
different life phases. They're almost kind of like different animals. Yeah,
you know, like a small komodo dragon is going to
eat different food than a full grown adult komodo dragon.
And the same might be the case with with like
a juvenile sara pod versus of course a fully grown
towering sara pod. But according to SEUs, subsequent bone studies
(20:49):
have backed up the theory that we're seeing the effects
of the island rule in the bones of these fun
size Sara pods. Basically, in twenty eight ten, a team
of pale intologists looked at the micro structure of the
bones to determine age and growth patterns, and they showed
that this particular sauropod, these pony sauropods, were fully grown
(21:10):
adults with small body sizes. And this is from a
paper from Benton at All published in Paleoclimatology paleo Ecology. Right,
I think so it mentioned in uh one of the
articles we were reading, I think it was the Smithsonian
article that his methodology was that he actually did molecular
analysis of the bones, like the Nopecho was able to
(21:32):
determine that the dinosaurs were small adults and not young
because he was able to like look at the layers
of bone like osteogenesis rings within the within cross sections
of these bones. Yeah so, or the fossils, I mean yeah, so,
I mean he was not just you know, making a
wild guess here, who's forming the best scientific hypothesis that
he could based on the material. And I have to say, though,
(21:55):
I guess it's just the idea of pony size sauropods.
It's just so atractive. I I'm so flint stones it is.
And it was like there was some movie growing up
to is. I think it may have just been called
the Last Dinosaur, or like maybe the dinosaur had a name,
but I remember there being like a pony size sauropod,
some sort of puppet that that the the actors interact with.
(22:17):
I remember seeing that as a as a child, so
it's probably, uh, you know, brings back some of those memories.
But then also I mentioned when I was telling my
son about this, reading to him from that dinosaur book
I mentioned earlier, you know, he was instantly in love
with this idea of pony size sauropods because I guess
the idea is, if it is pony size, you could
ride it. You could walk up to the gentle saua
(22:38):
pod and jump on its back and go for a
wild ride through the late Cretaceous jungle. That's so good.
I don't know if this is the same last dinosaur
you were thinking of. I just I was trying to
call something out of the deep childhood memory, and it
is a It is a dinosaur from an animated series
of things. It was like fringe or something called Denver
the Last Dinosaur, And it is a he's like a hip, skateboarding,
(23:02):
sunglasses wearing dinosaur with a kind of with a with
a head feature that looks like a mohawk. And I
can't tell if he's supposed to be a sauropod or
a therapod. It seems unclear. No, that I don't think
I've seen that one. This would have been some live
action fair that I'm thinking of, like a like a
VHS rental for sure. Well, maybe after we get out
of the studio today we can go watch some Denver
(23:24):
the Last Dinosaur and see how it does. All right, well,
we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll
discuss some of the specific prehistoric creatures that we we
we have thus far encountered in Hautigan. Alright, we're back,
and it's time to discuss the pony size magyaro saris. Okay,
let's go for a ride. Saddle him up. Alright, So again,
(23:47):
While some have considered them to be juveniles, perhaps living
in their own, you know, social group, apart from the
giant adults, bone evidence seems to suggest that they were
fully grown adults, and this would be you know, probably
be perhaps one of nature's most impressive displays of the
island effect, humbling even the mighty Titanus are into a form,
(24:07):
you know, more befitting of this late Cretaceous ireland sized
uh island in what is now known as Romania. So
Sara pods in general, again, are just strange and mysterious creatures,
perhaps some of the strangest creatures ever to walk the Earth.
I mean, they push the boundaries of what's possible in
a terrestrial organism, like what sustainable, what's even you know,
(24:30):
morphologically possible, and uh, you know, and if these little
guys are just a ripple in an already amazing glimpse
of the prehistoric past. I mean we've been seeing sar
pods our entire lives, right, I mean we see him
in in cartoons, in toys, and you kind of take
them for granted. Right. There's just this thing that Fred
Flintstone slides down the neck off or the tail off
(24:51):
I can't remember, at the end of his work day,
but getting petted by Sam Neil. Yeah, they're just kind
of the a Jurassic Park. They're just kind of the backdrop,
they don't really do anything, um well, because they're not
a media to sources, but they are their own mystery,
you know, when you start getting into the details of
you know, how they fed themselves and and and even
(25:13):
the various discussions about just how something this big lives. Yeah,
I mean it starts well as you were just alluding to,
it sort of makes you question the what are the
extremes of what an animal can be and how it
can survive? Like, um, you know, obviously we've talked about
giant animals on the show before and about how they're
(25:34):
they're just sort of like problems that you might not
even expect when animals start getting past a certain size
and volume, problems with like heat distribution or like or
like heat exchange, and of course there'd be like energy issues,
especially so sorrow pods are you know, these are gonna
be herbivores, right, They're they're not meat to sources, so
(25:54):
they're needing to eat plant matter in order to sustain
a body the size of a boat or bigger. You know,
so like you just start to wonder, like how could
they possibly eat enough to survive? How could they do it? Yeah,
it feels like biology just out of control to a
certain extent. And uh and in a sense, you, I
guess you could look at it like that, you know, like,
here is a form that is totally unsustainable if anything
(26:18):
drastic happens to the environment. And of course, drastic things
did happen to the environment, and these were these were
not certainly not the forms to survive the Late Cretaceous
extinction event. But uh, yeah, I would love to come
back and do perhaps a whole episode on sauropods in
the future, or bring on, you know, a guest and
expert who can talk to us about the weird mysteries
(26:39):
of sauropod life totally now. Right at the beginning of
the episode, we mentioned a a pterosaur called hats agopterics.
I know this one caught your fancy Roberts. So what's
the deal with hats agopterics? All right, so we've we've
talked about the flying terra saurs on the show before.
The prehistoric flying reptiles that took to the air are
(27:00):
on a membrane of flesh that stretched between their ankles,
and they're greatly elongated fourth finger, so creepy to see
the skeletons and realized that the wing is a finger,
because it's a it's a distinctly different wing arrangement compared
to the vertebrate flight of birds and bats. Closer to bats,
it seems closer to bats, but still, you know, very
(27:21):
much its own thing. And of course we've recently discussed
the mighty u quatso kualis the this this godlike giant
terra sar that was found in the late Cretaceous but
in North America, and we often speak of it as
being perhaps the largest creature to ever fly inve Indeed,
it truly did fly, and and most paleontologies seem to
(27:42):
think that it did, but there is some disagreement there.
We'll get into an example of that. But you know,
it's it's ultimately only one of the sky lords of old,
because we had certainly had had q the wing serpent,
but who also had hats of gopter X. Both are
of the same family as Arkaday so named for the
Persian dragon Ozdaha so hetzegopter X was a terra saar,
(28:07):
a winged reptile that when it was standing on the
ground would have been as tall as a giraffe. And
that's that's on We're not talking like reared up on
its hind legs exactly, though it's morphology is is very distinct.
We we have an image of this creature and an
artistic rendering that you'll find on our home page and
stuff to blow your mind dot com. But as it's
(28:28):
you know, it's standing there on its hind legs and
on its its wings. It would have been as tall
as a giraffe with this enormous head, and if it
were to actually spread its wings you would have a
wing spat of roughly thirty six feet. It had this
broad skull. Uh and and you look at examples of
of the skull or at least two ideas of what
(28:50):
the full skull would have looked like, and it almost
looks too big to fly, but apparently it was made
fliable by polystyrene like structure that gave it from into
strength but also lightness. Yeah, this is the thing you
see with birds and you see with terosaurs because their
bones have to be very light in order to fly,
so they often have a kind of hollow or low
(29:11):
density structure. Now, one of the really cool and ultimately
um you know, nightmarish things about the hatsogopterrects and and
other uh and and it's you know, large terra sarkin
is that regardless of their flying ability to whatever extent
they you know, were or were not capable of flying,
their fossils suggested they were rather adept at moving about
(29:32):
on all fours on the ground and not not only
just moving about, but hunting their prey in this fashion.
So you know, great folded living cargo planes that tower
over the dwarf herds of of sorrow pods, scooping them
up and their powerful jaws and gobbling them down. Uh.
That's that's ultimately the vision that we're left with. It's
(29:54):
astounding to imagine this thing, that this form that has
evolved to take to the air and then returned to
giant to to the earth and then ruling over these
these diminished sauropods. Yeah, it's not really similar to what
you see with birds, for example, because birds don't crawl
with their wings right. When birds move around on the ground,
(30:16):
they tend to they walk on two feet. They're more
like the theropod uh dinosaur design. They walk on the
two feet and they got their wings folded up. These
are more like sometimes you can see bats crawl this
way where they've got the they've got the winged hands
that are part of the wings, but they still use
them to crawl quadrupedally. And so when you see representations
of this, I've seen it animated the way these giant
(30:38):
pterosaurs would crawl. It looks messed up. It's really scary. Yeah,
I think bats are probably the best, uh, you know,
contemporary comparison. Particularly, there is a type of of of
bat you'll find in New Zealand, the Mista synoda bats,
and they spend much of their time on the ground there.
(30:59):
They're certainly will flight, but they crawl around a lot
of the time. So they have their their claws have
extra projections that aid in digging around in the dirt
and uh and and climbing on the on on the
sides of trees, and their wings fold back in a
unique way, so there, you know, it's more streamlined. So
when it's in in ground mode, it it really looks
(31:22):
more like some manner of rodent in a sense. I mean,
there's is still clearly a bat, but but it does
seem like this you're seeing a similar situation where this
this this winged form has taken back to the earth,
and due to uh, you know, the particular you know,
relaxation of the predatory pressure in its environment, is able
(31:43):
to sort of become you know, a big deal on
the ground again, So it has the optics big on
the ground, big on the ground, A big deal on
the ground. I guess that's one of the things that's
just that's just so um, you know, topsy turvy about
the scenario, right, is that again the small all sauropods
and the giant winged creature that doesn't necessarily have to
(32:05):
fly anymore, that they can just uh you know, roam
about on all fours and gobble up of you know,
whatever it pleases with virtually no predators. And that's that's
key to to figuring out why has the gop directs
was so big. It would have had no predators in
an abundance of food. And here's the thing, perhaps even
larger food than they would have found elsewhere, because they
(32:28):
have this enormous meal that you know, they're they're probably
not eating a sauropod in other scenarios, but here, well no,
of course not I unless there may be scavenging or something. Yeah,
But but but here suddenly the sauropods are smaller, perhaps
even bite size or fun size, if you will, and
so they grew large and dominant lords of Earth and sky,
and keeping with the Mahars of Edgar Rice Burrows fiction,
(32:51):
these were the this sort of Terra Saar like creatures
that ruled over one of his fictional worlds fattened on
Sara ponies. Yes, uh, there is even one particularly large
fossil that they found in Hantig that they actually dubbed Dracula,
And this wasn't in in two thousand nine, and they
found fragments of an even larger specimen, or at least
(33:14):
a specimen of the far larger lower jaw. In two
thousand eighteen, Michael Habiev, an expert on terra stars at
the University of Southern California, told National Geographic dot Com
and eighteen that he believed that this latest specimen was
this latest specimens especially was probably too large to fly.
Um that it may have flown when it was younger,
(33:36):
but then it basically reaches the point where it's it's
large enough and it doesn't have to anymore, which is
interesting because we're kind of coming back to this idea
of a creature growing, and it's sort of mode of
of operations. It's a it's diet changing. So you could
have a creature here that you know, when it's young,
it's still flying from place to place, but then once
it reaches a significant size, it has no need to
(34:00):
fly anymore, maybe has limited ability to even achieve powered
flight anymore, but it's not an issue because it's a
towering TerraSAR monster that eats all the dwarf sauropod babies
that it wants. And then Michael Michael Haby he compares
this to the elephant birds of Madagascar, which work, which
(34:21):
went extinct roughly a thousand years ago. But we're a
large flightless bird that thrived in that part of the world,
cut off from the rest of Africa. Big death, Ostrich.
But there are a few other examples worth touching on here.
For instance, there's a tomato saurus. This was a hadressar
or a duck build dino, another variety I'd love to
(34:41):
come back to and discuss in detail on the show
because they're so alien and also in some ways a
great example of kind of peak dinosaur prior to the
Late Cretaceous extinction event. But this particular specimen in in
Haunting was smaller than a modern crocodile, so roughly like
five meters long or so um. And this was uh
(35:01):
and this was one that would have seemed almost mountable
to a human if you were standing next to it,
or at least while this hadrosaur was on all fours,
because other hadrosaurs were considerably larger and would have towered
over humans, particularly when they reared up on their into
bipedal form. And here's another interesting fact about Tomatosaurus. A
(35:22):
fossil of a juvenile specimen was discovered in sixteen with
evidence of a benign tumor in its lower jaw. And
this is the first for a dinosaur fossil and ultimately
proof that that such tumors are not mere modern biological realities,
of course. And then there's a bald oar bond doc okay,
(35:43):
and this is that we we referenced this name earlier
in the Cold Open, but this particular species was named
after the dragon of Romanian legend, and so this would
have been a therapod hunter, in keeping with raptors such
as velocity raptor. And it's one of the Dromeo sarids.
But it differs from other Droma sarid fossils because it
had only two functional digits on its hand. Most of
(36:05):
its relatives would have had three for proper grasping, so
reduced ability in this department. But it also had more
digit functionality and its large talent feet and so this
is what SEUs has to say about this. Thus, each
foot of Baldar sported a double set of these large claws,
which were likely used for seizing and disemboweling prey. The
(36:25):
robust hind limb shows extensive fusion of bones in its
proportionately short distal portion, with formation of a tibio tarsis
and a tarso metatarsis. Uh. These unusual features suggest that
Baldoor was capable of delivering powerful strikes with its feet,
and Sus contends that these changes were likely due to
(36:45):
the island effect as well. So just another peculiar example
of of of a fossil species that was not found
elsewhere but was was warped, was changed and took on
a special form due to its isolation on this island
and got the gutting kick. Yeah well now maybe we
(37:07):
I think you've changed my mind and my number one
time travel destination. I think I want to go to
hot Egg. Well, I would definitely visit if it were
visit Hoteg give Hotig. We're, you know, a special exhibit
at a Jurassic Park type scenario. But that it brings
me back to my my past rants about Jurassic Park,
like why do we keep coming back to the same
(37:30):
and in many cases outdated um dinosaur and prehistoric forms
when we could be encountering these creatures like this should
be the next Jurassic Park film. In my opinion is uh,
you know, don't bring back the u the t rex,
don't bring back the velocira raptors. Don't change their color
just so you can sell a slightly different toy, uh
(37:51):
to the kids. No, still, you can still sell plenty
of toys to the kids. But make it. Make it these,
you know, make it pony sized sauropods. Make it the
hotsagopter X. I think hotsagopterrects would make a terrific c
g I Villain. I think that that. Yeah, there's a
lot of potential here. I mean, people would want to
have that. They'd have reason for bringing back a pony
(38:12):
size sauropod if they could have a petting zoo kids
could ride them. Yeah, yeah, that that's more plausible plot wise.
All right, So there you have it. We're gonna we're
gonna leave it right there again. That that really cool
children's dinosaur book, Atlas of Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins
and illustrated by Lucy Leatherhead. Uh. It's definitely in print,
(38:33):
definitely worth picking up, and I think it's worth picking
up even if you don't have any kids in your
house or in your life. If you love dinosaurs and
prehistaric creatures and or you know geology and geography, it's
it's it's a great just a tabletop book if nothing else,
but you can also spend lots of time reading through
it with young ones uh and and feeding their need
(38:56):
for for dinosaurs and terra saurs. It's that or um
Also obviously, we we surely have listeners who either reside
or are from Romania, or have visited Romania, and perhaps
you've you've visited some of these areas. Though some of
the articles we're looking at mentioned that you know, there
are attempts to celebrate paleontology in Romania, various museums that
(39:22):
have you know, the efforts that have been put together.
So we would love to to read your field reports
on Romanian paleontology, uh and uh and and ultimately just
you know the the world that we are discussing in
this episode, only you know millions of years later. Absolutely,
also send us your barren friends nope, chef fan fick.
In the meantime, if you want more episodes of Stuff
(39:43):
to Blow your Mind, go to Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show,
the best thing you can do is to rate and
review wherever you have the power to do so, but
also make sure you have subscribed. And hey, we have
another podcast titled Invention, and I think you should give
that a shot. You should subscribed to that as well.
And might be thinking, oh, I don't know, Robert and Joe,
I really like these trippier episodes, these weirder episodes that
(40:05):
you put together. I don't know how trippy and weird
technology is. Well. I just want to uh to read
you a quick quote from Terence McKenna on technology to
remind you otherwise. He says, um, we take in matter
that has a low degree of organization, we put it
through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, Gospels, space shuttles.
(40:27):
This is what we do. We are like coral animals
embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. And
that's exactly what we talk about every week on Invention.
Couldn't have put it better. Yeah, so make sure you
check it out. Make sure you have subscribed to Invention.
Subscribe to Invention anyway. Huge thanks to our audio producers
(40:47):
Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like
to get in touch with us directly to let us
know feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Act. That's Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(41:12):
is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You were standing in the halls of Sachell Castle. You
approach a golden chalice, resplendent in an embossed spiral of
geologic time that winds round from rim to base. At
the merest touch, the chalice chimes and shivers, dragging you
back through two hundred years of history to the castle's
(00:24):
raising in the Transylvanian wilds of Hattick. You grasp the
golden chalice, and time sheds from your perspective. Let the
skin of a great serpent, spiraling out in every direction
as you descend through the depths of centuries millennia, through
eons of evolutionary change in geologic upheaval, till the chalice
(00:47):
slips from your trembling grip and leaves you in an
age of wonders. Pottig as you knew it is gone.
Now a paleo island rising up out of the Late
Cretaceous Sea, you glimpse movement and note the approach of
several sauropods. Only these are not the hulking giants you're
familiar with. They seem dwarf creatures the size of ponies.
(01:09):
You could ride one if only you dared to approach
its alien flesh. But before you can muster the courage,
the creatures scatter from the clearing predatory therapods to flee
back into the forests. As a great shadow descends from
the sky, a terrasaur to rival the dragon Bowler of myth.
It lands before you. It towers like a siege engine,
(01:31):
but you've already thrown yourself to the ground. You're fumbling
for the golden chalice so that it might take you home,
or take you further back anywhere to escape the jaws
of hats Agotor extend them A welcome to Stuff to
(01:52):
go your Mind A production of iHeart Radios has to works. Hey,
you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you
can probably guess from that fun little cold open that
we have prepared for you there, we are going to
(02:12):
be traveling back in time in this episode via paleontology,
back to prehistoric Transylvania. That is so exciting, Robert, I
can tell you are just itching to like write a
novel about this, this ancient paleo island. Yeah, I was
really inspired by this, and this is one of those
situations where I was inspired by reading a dinosaur book
(02:36):
to my son. Uh. There's a book titled Atlas of
Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins and illustrated by Lucy Leatherland.
And it has these wonderful, like you know, big two
page spreads that show a different part of the world
and an idea of what the prehistarth life might have
looked like. And they had a spread they cover every continent,
(02:59):
and they had a spread for Haydeck showing like what
what prehistoric Transylvania, what prehistoric Romania would have might have
consisted of? And uh, I have to admit, despite having
you know, covered sauropods on the show, and certainly we've
talked about gigantic terra saurs quite recently, I wasn't really
(03:19):
familiar with this corner of the prehistoric world. It clearly
it's set off a little explosion in your mind. I
can sense the energy coming off of you on the
subjective Hottigg, and I wanted to say that you're opening
reminded me of two different things. The poem Directive by
Robert Frost, which is about going back in time and
it also involves a chalice. Yeah. Yeah, it talks about
(03:41):
like I forgot about it or if or if I
just uh, you know, came up with that idea, you know,
via some connection to things that were inspired by what
he wrote. You should look it up again as a
great poem directive, I mean, but it also was like
a cross between directive and a sound of thunder. Yes, yeah, yeah,
and I was I guess I also was definitely thinking
(04:03):
about the time machine. Um, you know, who can escape
Wells's time machine when considering the past at all? I mean,
anytime you're thinking about dinosaurs, you can, and another prehistar
creatures such as the pterosaurs, you can't help but imagine
like traveling back and encountering them. That's the ultimate frame
of reference, right what if I was standing next to one.
(04:24):
But this is the ultimate real monster versus fictional monster
crossover because because well not to call dinosaurs monsters, but
you know, they're the They're one of the closest things
to monster myths, to dragon myths that you've got in
the real world. So you've got like a really interesting
sort of dinosaur fossil site with with interesting biogeographical qualities
(04:46):
that we will explore as we go on in the
and the rest of the episode. But it's right there
in Transylvania, right, it's it's vampire country indeed, and you know,
we will encounter a fossil that has been dubbed Dracula.
The paleontolog is covering it. How about those pony sized sauropods.
You didn't make that up, did you know? No, that's all.
That's one of one of like the really amazing things
(05:07):
about about this particular scenario and and ultimately about everything
we're gonna talk about in this episode, is that is
that we're looking at an example, a prehistoric example of
island dwarf is um and island gigantism, also known as
the the island fact or or the island rule. And
this is a concept we've talked about on the show before.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's come up several times. It has
(05:29):
to do with body size in populations of animals that
become isolated. But will really just that become isolated because
it doesn't have to be on islands. Islands is just
the easiest way for it to happen, Like another way
it can happen or in these interesting ecosystems known as
sky islands where um, I don't know, if you ever
to see like like essentially a plateau, it could be
(05:50):
the like that. One great example that I've been to
is like in Big Been National Park in Texas. So
you you have desert and then in the middle of
this there are some mountains rising up. And as you
go up the slopes of the mountains and in between
them at the higher altitudes, actually the climate changes, right,
because at higher altitudes it almost kind of mimics higher latitudes,
(06:12):
and so the types of plants you find change, the
types of animals you find change. It goes from sort
of desert to a weird kind of forest up in
the higher parts of the mountains. And so this can
function kind of like an island, right, because there are
creatures that can survive up in those mountain forests but
can't traverse the vast expanses of desert down below, or
if they do it, it can be very dangerous and they,
(06:34):
you know, might not make it to anywhere they could survive.
So anyway, you know, wherever you have a case where
species can survive in a very limited geographical range and
they're cut off from the rest of the continental populations,
you can have these cases of island gigantism or island
dwarf is um. Basically, smaller species tend to become larger
(06:55):
and larger species tend to become smaller. And there are
multiple reasons for this, but mainly it's that the smaller
species tend to become larger because on islands there is
a lack of predators that they would encounter on the
mainland that would be a check on their their growth. Meanwhile,
larger species tend to become smaller, presumably because of a
lack of energy resources that you would find on the mainland.
(07:18):
There's less to eat on the island, so it actually
pays to have a smaller body that requires less food.
A commonly cited example of this is like the mammoths
that were found on certain islands, like the gigantic Colombian
mammoth evolved a dwarf variety on the Channel Islands off
the coast of California. There was also the Wrangel Island
(07:39):
mammoths that were I think the last wooly mammoths on
Earth that went extinct around four thousand years ago, were
smaller than their continental varieties, and the basic idea with
these examples is that they were able to to reach
these islands when the water level was lower, and then
they end up trapped there essentially, and life goes on
and evolution continues. Right, Life goes on, but there's less
(08:01):
to eat, so if you're trying to make a bigger body,
you're more likely to starve to death. So the ones
with genes for smaller bodies tend to be the ones
that survive. And so obviously we think about, you know,
examples of this in the recent past or in the
modern world. But the same principles of evolution and energy
and food dynamics would have been in place in the
time of dinosaurs, right exactly, so you could run into
(08:24):
exactly the same issue. And it seems like that's exactly
what's going on in this ancient Transylvanian island called hot Egg. Yes,
sixty six million years ago, this region was an island
in the large body of water that we we refer
to now as the Taffy c and this would have
covered large parts of Europe up through the Late Cretaceous period,
(08:45):
and it would have uh and it would have caused
this resulting group of islands to essentially be a European
archipelago and German born paleontologist Hens Deeter Sous describes it
as a quote show allow epicontinental sea dotted with variously
sized islands. Uh Seuss Senior scientist and Curator of Vertebrate
(09:07):
Paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History of the
Smithsonian Institution. And he even has a dinosaur named after him.
Um so you know he's the real deal. It's a
Paki cephalosaur, right, Pacula, Pakia cephalosaur. Hans sus Susia and Cecia.
Always a good sign and a paleontologist. The amount of
honor is directly proportional to how hard it is to
(09:30):
say a little known fact. We We should also note
that you know we're we're talking a long time ago here,
so it's not million issue. Oh, Europe was flooded back then,
um no. As SEUs points out in a two thousand
Tin paper titled an Unusual Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous
of Romania and the Island Rule, there was there was
complex tectonic activity along the northern margin of the western Tethys,
(09:55):
and then there was volcanic activity that resulted in these
Cretaceous islands rising up. So and then the largest of
these covered much of what we now know as the
Iberian Peninsula and France extending into Central Europe. Now, this
particular island in the Deaths, which is you know, which
corresponds to the modern region of Hatig Transylvania. This would
(10:18):
have been roughly I'm reading eighty thousand square kilometers or
thirty thousand, eight d eight square miles. And to put
that in perspective, modern day Ireland is uh roughly thirty
two five hundred nine square miles in size. So sort
of Irelands sort of a you know, a Romanian Ireland
um that's crawling with odd sized prehistoric creatures. So that's
(10:42):
how we came to have these islands, roughly, these European
islands in the late Cretaceous uh and uh. And you know,
we ended up with various creatures stranded upon these islands. Uh.
And they were subject to evolutionary changes that we refer
to roughly as the island rule. So the Titanic sauropod
is humbled to the size of a pony, and other
(11:02):
creatures that will get to rise too much larger sizes.
And who would read such a such a thing from
the fossil record, you know, you might. You might think,
especially given um uh you know that that paper I
decided from two thousand ten, you might think, well, this
is a fairly recent discovery. You especially might think that
if you uh you know, like me, we're not familiar
with this, this marvelous world of of of oversized and
(11:26):
undersized prehistoric beasts. But to look to the origin of
these discoveries, we have to look to a rogue Austro
Hungarian baron of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
All right, let's take a break and when we come back,
we will meet the baron. All right, we're back, So
it's time to meet the baron, a character who plays
(11:47):
a major role in the history of the science and
discovery of the the Paleo Island Hottig. And this baron
is Baron friends Notche von Felso Silva's who lived eighteen
seventy seven. In nineteen thirty three, yes, Baron Nopcha and
and I have to have to admit, when we started
this episode, I really didn't expect there to be a
(12:07):
fascinating human story in the midst of all of this,
even though, of course paleontology is always a human story
because paleontologists are the humans who who uncover these secrets
of the past. But I thought this was just gonna
be all, um, you know, rampaging prehistoric beasts, right, But
this is a fascinating individual. And Smithsonian dot com has
(12:28):
a great article on NOA titled History Forgot This rogue
aristocrat who discovered dinosaurs and died penniless by Vanessa Veselka,
which goes into far more detail in his life than
we're going to explore here, especially concerning some some tragic
in the later portions of his life. He was a
really interesting figure though, and this is a great article,
(12:48):
by the way, this is one that I think listeners
just should go go off and read. Definitely, yeah, he is.
You know, it's tempting to want to just sum him
up in a few words like say, oh, he was,
you know, a gentleman scientists towards the end of the
time period in which the general that gentleman scientists was
a thing, and that's I think mostly true. But then
there are all these other weird dimensions to his character.
(13:08):
Um So, he was born into privilege and aristocracy, but
he also seemed to live with what we would now
likely classify as like as a manic depressive disorder, you know,
he was he was apparently prone to periods of intense
focus and energy, which it is good when you're engaging
in you know, early fossil study and some of the
other activities he was involved in. But then of course
(13:31):
the flip side is that that there were these morose
periods as well. He's also described as like being absolutely
brilliant in a scientific sense and mostly self taught, you know,
just learning from like writing to people and getting them
to send him books, and then teaching himself subjects like
biology and geology that you know, he didn't have formal
(13:51):
training in, and then making all of these discoveries about
dinosaurs and paleontology and about deep time. But also not
all always, not always having the right kind of social
skills within the professional context to get his work accepted.
Like apparently he was very rude, and he was or
it could be very rude, but could also be very charming.
(14:14):
Yeah yeah, and and uh yeah, so much of it
again was he was self taught. He's he's writing other
experts and getting them to send him books. Or there's
also the story of him him going off to university
and bringing this fossil with him from you know, from
from the area of Romania, and you know he was
from and uh, and the professor there was like he
(14:35):
was like, what is this? He help me figure this out?
And he's like, I don't know, you can figure it out,
essentially like send him back with it, which you know,
which is the author points out of the Smithsonian piece. Um.
You know, the sucker says that's either like some great
tutelage where the professor is like, oh, I'm going to
grow this young mind by inspiring them to go U
find the answer themselves, or it's like a really lazy
(14:58):
or overwork professor was like I don't have time to
help you, uh, you know, decipher this rock. Go do
it yourself. But do it himself. He did. And and
so he's one of these remarkable you know, accounts of
his kind of like a self made gentleman scientists. Uh,
though obviously had had a certain advantage on the situation
by being born into the aristocracy. Well yeah, that's a
(15:20):
common thing you see in the history of science that
that a lot of the great scientists of the nineteenth
centuries say, we're we're sort of aristocrat types. Uh. And
obviously I don't think that's because aristocrats are better at
sciences because they had the resources and the leisure to
pursuit to like, to get into these pursuits. If you're
a farmer working night and day, like you, you don't
(15:41):
have the time and the money to go into the sciences. Yeah. Yeah,
so he was. And then I said, he's like I said,
he's he's kind of emerging towards the end of the
gentleman science being a thing at all, and certainly towards
the end of his career. In the end of his life,
he was kind of shut out from scientific circles. Uh.
And some of the ideas that he he was was
promoting during his life were ultimately ideas that were not
(16:03):
widely accepted, though interesting, interestingly enough, would become widely accepted
many decades later. In the nineteen seventies, for example, is
a time when people started looking back at him and saying, oh,
here's this interesting character, uh from the history books. He
you know, he published a hundred and fifties scientific papers
in his life, and he identified twenty five genera of
(16:24):
reptiles and five different dinosaurs. But we've largely forgotten him
and we don't celebrate him at all. Uh, And and
people started you know, looking back and realizing who he
was and what he what he had discovered here. And yeah,
there are other aspects to his to his life that
are all interesting as well. Um, he was an adventurous individual.
He served as a spy for the Austro Hungarian Empire,
(16:47):
but he seems to have largely used his service to
the state as a vehicle for pursuing his interest in
geography and geology and the study of the Albanian people. Right.
There seems to be this like mix of interests here
because like he apparently just loved the Albanian culture and
like wanted to study it and you know, document all
their customs and everything like that. But the the government
(17:08):
that was funding his work basically wanted a sort of
you know, the early twentieth century equivalent of like a
c I a fact book on a country, right, and
they wanted intelligence that could be used in it could
maybe be used in warfare or something like that later on.
So that's the money going into what he's doing. But
he but he apparently was just in love with Albania
(17:29):
and its people and and its culture, and at one point,
even through his name in the hat to potentially be
a king. There's there's that whole storyline. Um. Again, I
encourage everyone to to read that article about him. But again,
his in his scientific pursuits, he was very much ahead
of his time. Uh for starters. The theory of continental
drift is now widely, if not universally, accepted, but this
(17:52):
was not the case during Nopcha's life. Yet he presented
some of the most credible geologic evidence at the time
for continental drift. And then, of course, when it came
to fossils, this is where he made his arguably his
greatest impact. He discovered some some very curious fossils in
the Hattag region, many of which were noticeable for being
quite smaller than examples that were popping up elsewhere, and
(18:14):
he argued that these were examples of of of the
island rule in action, that the Hatta region was once
an island in a prehistoric sea. Now we'll get to
the specific dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures in a little bit,
but just just consider he found titanosaur sauropods the size
of mere ponies, despite the fact that titanosaurs are the
(18:37):
largest land animals that we know to have ever existed
reaching sizes you know, we're talking a hundred and twenty
one ft or thirty seven meters long and uh and
the weights of somewhere in the neighborhood of of of
seventy six tons. And yet he finds fossil evidence of
these multiple noticeably smaller uh Sara pods, And it just
(18:58):
raised the question what were they so well, I mean,
the obvious things that they're juveniles dummy, right, aren't they
Aren't they just baby Sara pods? Yeah? That well that
was what critics argued, that these were just juveniles. Uh
and uh. And certainly one of the more alarming things
about Sara pods is that they do grow to such
alarming size from relatively small eggs. I mean, Sara pods
(19:22):
are her weird and strange creatures. Uh. You know that
we're still you know, figuring out how, you know, all
the you know, the answers to the mysteries of their biology.
And so, you know, just the fact that you find
some small ones, you know, it does seem like it
could be it could be one possible explanation could be that, well,
these were just the juveniles. Um. And and this read
(19:42):
doesn't seem to have completely fallen out of fashion. As
recently as two thousand seven, a paper in historical biology
by Jean Leloof argued that that's some hot tig. Sara
pod fossils might suggest quote age class communities among sara
pod populations. So this is like a gang of sauropod youths, yes, exactly, like, yes,
(20:03):
a street gang of youths. Uh, you know. And I
believe we've discussed uh, this sort of thing in terms
of crocodilians and maybe komodo dragons on the show in
the past, the idea that some animals experienced tremendous body
size changes and therefore corresponding changes in diet and behavior
and maybe thought of his living in their own niche
(20:23):
daring different phases of their life, either alone or in groups. Yeah,
different life phases. They're almost kind of like different animals. Yeah,
you know, like a small komodo dragon is going to
eat different food than a full grown adult komodo dragon.
And the same might be the case with with like
a juvenile sara pod versus of course a fully grown
towering sara pod. But according to SEUs, subsequent bone studies
(20:49):
have backed up the theory that we're seeing the effects
of the island rule in the bones of these fun
size Sara pods. Basically, in twenty eight ten, a team
of pale intologists looked at the micro structure of the
bones to determine age and growth patterns, and they showed
that this particular sauropod, these pony sauropods, were fully grown
(21:10):
adults with small body sizes. And this is from a
paper from Benton at All published in Paleoclimatology paleo Ecology. Right,
I think so it mentioned in uh one of the
articles we were reading, I think it was the Smithsonian
article that his methodology was that he actually did molecular
analysis of the bones, like the Nopecho was able to
(21:32):
determine that the dinosaurs were small adults and not young
because he was able to like look at the layers
of bone like osteogenesis rings within the within cross sections
of these bones. Yeah so, or the fossils, I mean yeah, so,
I mean he was not just you know, making a
wild guess here, who's forming the best scientific hypothesis that
he could based on the material. And I have to say, though,
(21:55):
I guess it's just the idea of pony size sauropods.
It's just so atractive. I I'm so flint stones it is.
And it was like there was some movie growing up
to is. I think it may have just been called
the Last Dinosaur, or like maybe the dinosaur had a name,
but I remember there being like a pony size sauropod,
some sort of puppet that that the the actors interact with.
(22:17):
I remember seeing that as a as a child, so
it's probably, uh, you know, brings back some of those memories.
But then also I mentioned when I was telling my
son about this, reading to him from that dinosaur book
I mentioned earlier, you know, he was instantly in love
with this idea of pony size sauropods because I guess
the idea is, if it is pony size, you could
ride it. You could walk up to the gentle saua
(22:38):
pod and jump on its back and go for a
wild ride through the late Cretaceous jungle. That's so good.
I don't know if this is the same last dinosaur
you were thinking of. I just I was trying to
call something out of the deep childhood memory, and it
is a It is a dinosaur from an animated series
of things. It was like fringe or something called Denver
the Last Dinosaur, And it is a he's like a hip, skateboarding,
(23:02):
sunglasses wearing dinosaur with a kind of with a with
a head feature that looks like a mohawk. And I
can't tell if he's supposed to be a sauropod or
a therapod. It seems unclear. No, that I don't think
I've seen that one. This would have been some live
action fair that I'm thinking of, like a like a
VHS rental for sure. Well, maybe after we get out
of the studio today we can go watch some Denver
(23:24):
the Last Dinosaur and see how it does. All right, well,
we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll
discuss some of the specific prehistoric creatures that we we
we have thus far encountered in Hautigan. Alright, we're back,
and it's time to discuss the pony size magyaro saris. Okay,
let's go for a ride. Saddle him up. Alright, So again,
(23:47):
While some have considered them to be juveniles, perhaps living
in their own, you know, social group, apart from the
giant adults, bone evidence seems to suggest that they were
fully grown adults, and this would be you know, probably
be perhaps one of nature's most impressive displays of the
island effect, humbling even the mighty Titanus are into a form,
(24:07):
you know, more befitting of this late Cretaceous ireland sized
uh island in what is now known as Romania. So
Sara pods in general, again, are just strange and mysterious creatures,
perhaps some of the strangest creatures ever to walk the Earth.
I mean, they push the boundaries of what's possible in
a terrestrial organism, like what sustainable, what's even you know,
(24:30):
morphologically possible, and uh, you know, and if these little
guys are just a ripple in an already amazing glimpse
of the prehistoric past. I mean we've been seeing sar
pods our entire lives, right, I mean we see him
in in cartoons, in toys, and you kind of take
them for granted. Right. There's just this thing that Fred
Flintstone slides down the neck off or the tail off
(24:51):
I can't remember, at the end of his work day,
but getting petted by Sam Neil. Yeah, they're just kind
of the a Jurassic Park. They're just kind of the backdrop,
they don't really do anything, um well, because they're not
a media to sources, but they are their own mystery,
you know, when you start getting into the details of
you know, how they fed themselves and and and even
(25:13):
the various discussions about just how something this big lives. Yeah,
I mean it starts well as you were just alluding to,
it sort of makes you question the what are the
extremes of what an animal can be and how it
can survive? Like, um, you know, obviously we've talked about
giant animals on the show before and about how they're
(25:34):
they're just sort of like problems that you might not
even expect when animals start getting past a certain size
and volume, problems with like heat distribution or like or
like heat exchange, and of course there'd be like energy issues,
especially so sorrow pods are you know, these are gonna
be herbivores, right, They're they're not meat to sources, so
(25:54):
they're needing to eat plant matter in order to sustain
a body the size of a boat or bigger. You know,
so like you just start to wonder, like how could
they possibly eat enough to survive? How could they do it? Yeah,
it feels like biology just out of control to a
certain extent. And uh and in a sense, you, I
guess you could look at it like that, you know, like,
here is a form that is totally unsustainable if anything
(26:18):
drastic happens to the environment. And of course, drastic things
did happen to the environment, and these were these were
not certainly not the forms to survive the Late Cretaceous
extinction event. But uh, yeah, I would love to come
back and do perhaps a whole episode on sauropods in
the future, or bring on, you know, a guest and
expert who can talk to us about the weird mysteries
(26:39):
of sauropod life totally now. Right at the beginning of
the episode, we mentioned a a pterosaur called hats agopterics.
I know this one caught your fancy Roberts. So what's
the deal with hats agopterics? All right, so we've we've
talked about the flying terra saurs on the show before.
The prehistoric flying reptiles that took to the air are
(27:00):
on a membrane of flesh that stretched between their ankles,
and they're greatly elongated fourth finger, so creepy to see
the skeletons and realized that the wing is a finger,
because it's a it's a distinctly different wing arrangement compared
to the vertebrate flight of birds and bats. Closer to bats,
it seems closer to bats, but still, you know, very
(27:21):
much its own thing. And of course we've recently discussed
the mighty u quatso kualis the this this godlike giant
terra sar that was found in the late Cretaceous but
in North America, and we often speak of it as
being perhaps the largest creature to ever fly inve Indeed,
it truly did fly, and and most paleontologies seem to
(27:42):
think that it did, but there is some disagreement there.
We'll get into an example of that. But you know,
it's it's ultimately only one of the sky lords of old,
because we had certainly had had q the wing serpent,
but who also had hats of gopter X. Both are
of the same family as Arkaday so named for the
Persian dragon Ozdaha so hetzegopter X was a terra saar,
(28:07):
a winged reptile that when it was standing on the
ground would have been as tall as a giraffe. And
that's that's on We're not talking like reared up on
its hind legs exactly, though it's morphology is is very distinct.
We we have an image of this creature and an
artistic rendering that you'll find on our home page and
stuff to blow your mind dot com. But as it's
(28:28):
you know, it's standing there on its hind legs and
on its its wings. It would have been as tall
as a giraffe with this enormous head, and if it
were to actually spread its wings you would have a
wing spat of roughly thirty six feet. It had this
broad skull. Uh and and you look at examples of
of the skull or at least two ideas of what
(28:50):
the full skull would have looked like, and it almost
looks too big to fly, but apparently it was made
fliable by polystyrene like structure that gave it from into
strength but also lightness. Yeah, this is the thing you
see with birds and you see with terosaurs because their
bones have to be very light in order to fly,
so they often have a kind of hollow or low
(29:11):
density structure. Now, one of the really cool and ultimately
um you know, nightmarish things about the hatsogopterrects and and
other uh and and it's you know, large terra sarkin
is that regardless of their flying ability to whatever extent
they you know, were or were not capable of flying,
their fossils suggested they were rather adept at moving about
(29:32):
on all fours on the ground and not not only
just moving about, but hunting their prey in this fashion.
So you know, great folded living cargo planes that tower
over the dwarf herds of of sorrow pods, scooping them
up and their powerful jaws and gobbling them down. Uh.
That's that's ultimately the vision that we're left with. It's
(29:54):
astounding to imagine this thing, that this form that has
evolved to take to the air and then returned to
giant to to the earth and then ruling over these
these diminished sauropods. Yeah, it's not really similar to what
you see with birds, for example, because birds don't crawl
with their wings right. When birds move around on the ground,
(30:16):
they tend to they walk on two feet. They're more
like the theropod uh dinosaur design. They walk on the
two feet and they got their wings folded up. These
are more like sometimes you can see bats crawl this
way where they've got the they've got the winged hands
that are part of the wings, but they still use
them to crawl quadrupedally. And so when you see representations
of this, I've seen it animated the way these giant
(30:38):
pterosaurs would crawl. It looks messed up. It's really scary. Yeah,
I think bats are probably the best, uh, you know,
contemporary comparison. Particularly, there is a type of of of
bat you'll find in New Zealand, the Mista synoda bats,
and they spend much of their time on the ground there.
(30:59):
They're certainly will flight, but they crawl around a lot
of the time. So they have their their claws have
extra projections that aid in digging around in the dirt
and uh and and climbing on the on on the
sides of trees, and their wings fold back in a
unique way, so there, you know, it's more streamlined. So
when it's in in ground mode, it it really looks
(31:22):
more like some manner of rodent in a sense. I mean,
there's is still clearly a bat, but but it does
seem like this you're seeing a similar situation where this
this this winged form has taken back to the earth,
and due to uh, you know, the particular you know,
relaxation of the predatory pressure in its environment, is able
(31:43):
to sort of become you know, a big deal on
the ground again, So it has the optics big on
the ground, big on the ground, A big deal on
the ground. I guess that's one of the things that's
just that's just so um, you know, topsy turvy about
the scenario, right, is that again the small all sauropods
and the giant winged creature that doesn't necessarily have to
(32:05):
fly anymore, that they can just uh you know, roam
about on all fours and gobble up of you know,
whatever it pleases with virtually no predators. And that's that's
key to to figuring out why has the gop directs
was so big. It would have had no predators in
an abundance of food. And here's the thing, perhaps even
larger food than they would have found elsewhere, because they
(32:28):
have this enormous meal that you know, they're they're probably
not eating a sauropod in other scenarios, but here, well no,
of course not I unless there may be scavenging or something. Yeah,
But but but here suddenly the sauropods are smaller, perhaps
even bite size or fun size, if you will, and
so they grew large and dominant lords of Earth and sky,
and keeping with the Mahars of Edgar Rice Burrows fiction,
(32:51):
these were the this sort of Terra Saar like creatures
that ruled over one of his fictional worlds fattened on
Sara ponies. Yes, uh, there is even one particularly large
fossil that they found in Hantig that they actually dubbed Dracula,
And this wasn't in in two thousand nine, and they
found fragments of an even larger specimen, or at least
(33:14):
a specimen of the far larger lower jaw. In two
thousand eighteen, Michael Habiev, an expert on terra stars at
the University of Southern California, told National Geographic dot Com
and eighteen that he believed that this latest specimen was
this latest specimens especially was probably too large to fly.
Um that it may have flown when it was younger,
(33:36):
but then it basically reaches the point where it's it's
large enough and it doesn't have to anymore, which is
interesting because we're kind of coming back to this idea
of a creature growing, and it's sort of mode of
of operations. It's a it's diet changing. So you could
have a creature here that you know, when it's young,
it's still flying from place to place, but then once
it reaches a significant size, it has no need to
(34:00):
fly anymore, maybe has limited ability to even achieve powered
flight anymore, but it's not an issue because it's a
towering TerraSAR monster that eats all the dwarf sauropod babies
that it wants. And then Michael Michael Haby he compares
this to the elephant birds of Madagascar, which work, which
(34:21):
went extinct roughly a thousand years ago. But we're a
large flightless bird that thrived in that part of the world,
cut off from the rest of Africa. Big death, Ostrich.
But there are a few other examples worth touching on here.
For instance, there's a tomato saurus. This was a hadressar
or a duck build dino, another variety I'd love to
(34:41):
come back to and discuss in detail on the show
because they're so alien and also in some ways a
great example of kind of peak dinosaur prior to the
Late Cretaceous extinction event. But this particular specimen in in
Haunting was smaller than a modern crocodile, so roughly like
five meters long or so um. And this was uh
(35:01):
and this was one that would have seemed almost mountable
to a human if you were standing next to it,
or at least while this hadrosaur was on all fours,
because other hadrosaurs were considerably larger and would have towered
over humans, particularly when they reared up on their into
bipedal form. And here's another interesting fact about Tomatosaurus. A
(35:22):
fossil of a juvenile specimen was discovered in sixteen with
evidence of a benign tumor in its lower jaw. And
this is the first for a dinosaur fossil and ultimately
proof that that such tumors are not mere modern biological realities,
of course. And then there's a bald oar bond doc okay,
(35:43):
and this is that we we referenced this name earlier
in the Cold Open, but this particular species was named
after the dragon of Romanian legend, and so this would
have been a therapod hunter, in keeping with raptors such
as velocity raptor. And it's one of the Dromeo sarids.
But it differs from other Droma sarid fossils because it
had only two functional digits on its hand. Most of
(36:05):
its relatives would have had three for proper grasping, so
reduced ability in this department. But it also had more
digit functionality and its large talent feet and so this
is what SEUs has to say about this. Thus, each
foot of Baldar sported a double set of these large claws,
which were likely used for seizing and disemboweling prey. The
(36:25):
robust hind limb shows extensive fusion of bones in its
proportionately short distal portion, with formation of a tibio tarsis
and a tarso metatarsis. Uh. These unusual features suggest that
Baldoor was capable of delivering powerful strikes with its feet,
and Sus contends that these changes were likely due to
(36:45):
the island effect as well. So just another peculiar example
of of of a fossil species that was not found
elsewhere but was was warped, was changed and took on
a special form due to its isolation on this island
and got the gutting kick. Yeah well now maybe we
(37:07):
I think you've changed my mind and my number one
time travel destination. I think I want to go to
hot Egg. Well, I would definitely visit if it were
visit Hoteg give Hotig. We're, you know, a special exhibit
at a Jurassic Park type scenario. But that it brings
me back to my my past rants about Jurassic Park,
like why do we keep coming back to the same
(37:30):
and in many cases outdated um dinosaur and prehistoric forms
when we could be encountering these creatures like this should
be the next Jurassic Park film. In my opinion is uh,
you know, don't bring back the u the t rex,
don't bring back the velocira raptors. Don't change their color
just so you can sell a slightly different toy, uh
(37:51):
to the kids. No, still, you can still sell plenty
of toys to the kids. But make it. Make it these,
you know, make it pony sized sauropods. Make it the
hotsagopter X. I think hotsagopterrects would make a terrific c
g I Villain. I think that that. Yeah, there's a
lot of potential here. I mean, people would want to
have that. They'd have reason for bringing back a pony
(38:12):
size sauropod if they could have a petting zoo kids
could ride them. Yeah, yeah, that that's more plausible plot wise.
All right, So there you have it. We're gonna we're
gonna leave it right there again. That that really cool
children's dinosaur book, Atlas of Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins
and illustrated by Lucy Leatherhead. Uh. It's definitely in print,
(38:33):
definitely worth picking up, and I think it's worth picking
up even if you don't have any kids in your
house or in your life. If you love dinosaurs and
prehistaric creatures and or you know geology and geography, it's
it's it's a great just a tabletop book if nothing else,
but you can also spend lots of time reading through
it with young ones uh and and feeding their need
(38:56):
for for dinosaurs and terra saurs. It's that or um
Also obviously, we we surely have listeners who either reside
or are from Romania, or have visited Romania, and perhaps
you've you've visited some of these areas. Though some of
the articles we're looking at mentioned that you know, there
are attempts to celebrate paleontology in Romania, various museums that
(39:22):
have you know, the efforts that have been put together.
So we would love to to read your field reports
on Romanian paleontology, uh and uh and and ultimately just
you know the the world that we are discussing in
this episode, only you know millions of years later. Absolutely,
also send us your barren friends nope, chef fan fick.
In the meantime, if you want more episodes of Stuff
(39:43):
to Blow your Mind, go to Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show,
the best thing you can do is to rate and
review wherever you have the power to do so, but
also make sure you have subscribed. And hey, we have
another podcast titled Invention, and I think you should give
that a shot. You should subscribed to that as well.
And might be thinking, oh, I don't know, Robert and Joe,
I really like these trippier episodes, these weirder episodes that
(40:05):
you put together. I don't know how trippy and weird
technology is. Well. I just want to uh to read
you a quick quote from Terence McKenna on technology to
remind you otherwise. He says, um, we take in matter
that has a low degree of organization, we put it
through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, Gospels, space shuttles.
(40:27):
This is what we do. We are like coral animals
embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. And
that's exactly what we talk about every week on Invention.
Couldn't have put it better. Yeah, so make sure you
check it out. Make sure you have subscribed to Invention.
Subscribe to Invention anyway. Huge thanks to our audio producers
(40:47):
Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like
to get in touch with us directly to let us
know feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Act. That's Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(41:12):
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