August 23, 2018 • 38 mins
Almost everything you know about pterosaurs is wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't flying dinosaurs and they weren't all pterodactyls. Which makes this a great episode for you to learn some new and amazing stuff about terrifying prehistoric beasts!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryants. Just the two of us
batching it today. Yeah, that's what my dad used to
say if he had to take care of me while
(00:22):
my mom was working. We're just batching it? Is that?
What was that what he said? Yeah? I thought that
was a relatively new term. No, I mean at least
the early eighties, right, Maybe my dad was like way
ahead of his time. Why hasn't there been a movie
called batching it? I I don't know. That's actually pretty obvious.
The fact that it was around as a word in
(00:44):
the eighties makes me even more surprised that there's not
a movie called batching it that, like the protagonist has
to put on like a car wash to save their
business or something like that. Yeah, Owen Wilson, what did
he do? Well? He would just be the star batching
it imagine, right, I guess. So could that guy be
any more charming than he is? He's pretty charming. Speaking
(01:07):
of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a wonderful
little beast named Ketze Colatus North ropy. Mhm are you
are you familiar? So ketzo colatus is named after the
Aztec flying serpent god quetzal Coat, right, so it makes sense.
(01:31):
But this guy was a real thing. Not to put
down the Aztecs beliefs or anything like that, but this
is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the
late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call
a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd
be dead wrong, pal. What it really is is a
(01:51):
terrace sore. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're
going to sort through, but the most important point is
that this east right here is twenty ft tall, as
tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin
to about an F sixteen fighter jet. And it was
a bad mama jama. That's that for ding. That's good.
(02:16):
I like it. I didn't even use the way back machine,
just trimmed the fat. Gone, oh you do. You don't
even need that old clunky thing anymore. We just use
our imaginations. Were not actually in the Cretaceous period like
we would be if we had used the way back machine. Okay,
uh yeah, these terra starts with the p of course,
a silent p um that is from Greek meaning winged lizards.
(02:40):
And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They
were not dinosaurs. Yes, big big distinction here. They're close,
it's like a sister to a dinosaur. Perhaps they're from
the same claude, which is arcasaurs, but it's a really
wide claude. And all that means is that they have
in the very remote asked some single common ancestor with dinosaurs. Yeah,
(03:03):
and they were. They were around roughly the same time
period and definitely and went away in the same fashion.
So it's it's normal, i think for people to say,
look at that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur, even
though neither one of those is necessarily correct. Yeah, So,
just to get this across one more time, pterosaurs were
(03:24):
not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but they weren't dinosaurs.
They weren't birds either, And to confuse things even further,
there were birds around at the time of the dinosaurs
and the time of the pterosaurs. And to confuse things
even further, there were such things as actual flying dinosaurs
(03:45):
we call them velociraptors, right, and these vertebrates. Actually we're
flying long before birds and bats by like millions and
millions of years. Yeah, think this How Stuff Works article.
This is a good one. I gotta give big ups
to Clint um pump Free. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, it
(04:07):
sounds like an action how Stuff Works writer chest be Frock.
You know, uh um but he he said, I think
eighty million years difference. Eighty million years before. Yeah, I
mean that's that's a lot of years it is. Um.
So there's a lot of like confusing stuff flying around.
(04:28):
And I think there's one other thing we should probably
address right out of the gate is that you you
you shouldn't call them pterod actyls, even though a lot
of people do. Pterod Actyls are actually a specific genus
of pterosaurs. Um, So to call all pterosaurs pterod actyls
would be incorrect. But you could call all pterod actyls pterosaurs, okay. Yeah.
(04:50):
And and technically, like if you have seen this this
thing in movies a lot that they say that's a pterodactyl,
what you've probably been looking at this whole time is
one of the the species. And there you know, potentially
up to two hundred of these species right now. I
think they've identified about a hundred hundred thirty ish. But
(05:11):
a tara uh tara no done is how you'd say it.
I that's what I would have gone, like, Tara no
down right. That's probably what you've been seeing in movies
all this time that you've been saying, that's a pterodactyl.
Like if you if you look up an image search
of the Torontodon, you'll say that that's a pterodactyl because
(05:35):
I saw it in King Kong. Yeah, it's like this
giant wing beast with kind of short, stubby legs and
a huge wing span and like a weird crest on
its head in a long pointy beak. A pterodactyl. Everybody
knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be an idiot. Yeah,
you saw in King Konge. Saw the same thing in
Jurassic Park three in two thousand one. Right, things hadn't
changed all that much. But in that time span, it's
(05:57):
actually kind of surprising because our under standing of um
tara stars had increased dramatically, and yet we were still
just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterod actyls, which
isn't the case. Yeah, there was a paleontologist named O. C.
Marsh who, Uh, it's a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Uh.
(06:20):
He collected these first fossils and what is now and
was then Western Kansas in the late eight hundreds, like
eighteen seventy, and they've been well. I was about to say,
they've been digging up lots of these since then. They
sort of have, but uh, not nearly as many as
other types of fossils, because these fossils are really highly
(06:44):
breakable and dissolvable and uh, they're they're tough to get
a hold of and keeping one piece throughout the process. Yeah,
we should, we should talk about that. Like, one of
the reasons there is so little understanding of tara stars
is because they don't fossilize very well now because their
bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed
to allow these giant reptiles to fly. They didn't say like, oh,
(07:07):
we need to be designed to leave our mark later. No,
it's like we want to fly right exactly. So early on,
I think the first tarodon or the first terrasaur Um
specimen was found in the late eighteenth century in Germany
Um and by the time O. C. Marsh was digging
them up a hundred years later in Kansas Um. They've
(07:27):
they've been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been
abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that
were identified, right, So when O. C. Marsh started to
dig him up, this is a big deal. And because
he was finding virtually all of the same species, the
taranodon um, that became the common conception of the the
(07:50):
what the terrasaar is. But it was coupled with an
earlier named Pterodactyl that had been given to the the
entire uh species or the entire group by George Cuvier
and I think eighteen twelve. Yeah, and that first fossil
you're talking about, no one knows. No one got credit
for that, for digging that thing up. But like you said,
(08:12):
it was in Germany in a lime in limestone, like
a hundred and fifty million year old limestone late in
the eighteenth century that eventually found its way to a
man with a great name, uh Cosimo Alessandro Collini. Man.
When I first came across this in his article, I
was like, I'm looking forward to hearing Chuck say that
(08:33):
guy's name that's him. He was Italian go figure, and
he was a natural scientist, and he, like many others
to follow, for a long time, didn't really know what
it was, since since he they found that in an
ancient lagoon with all kinds of seafaring creatures, he understandably
thought it was a seafaring creature. Yeah. And some of
(08:55):
the best perverse preserved fossils that we have of these
things are found in things like lagoons where something happened
to them. They died, suddenly quickly fell into a like
a body of water um which probably broke their fall
a little bit. They landed at the muck. Then we're
covered up potentially in some anaerobic um in an anaerobic state,
(09:18):
and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what it takes
to to fossilize a terra star. Yeah. And Cuvier, who
um kind of got it all wrong by calling it
a pterodactyl for everyone in the future. He was actually
the same dude though, who did say, actually, I think
those are wings, not paddles, and that was, you know,
(09:39):
a big breakthrough. Yeah, And the reason he called them
pterodactyls it means wing finger in the Greek. Right, so
tara saw means winged lizard and pterodactyl means wing finger
because as we'll see, the the front edge of the wing,
the leading edge of the wing is actually an extraordinarily
long pinky. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
(10:02):
I think so too. It that's a good way to
lead up to a break too, don't you think? Agreed?
Let's go. Well, now we're on the road, driving in
your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from
(10:25):
Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right, Okay,
we're back. I feel like we kind of jumbled things
up like a bunch of terra star bones. Sure, so
let's reset here, shall we? Should we reset with the
head let's the head crests. If you've seen a movie
(10:50):
like Jurassic Park, and you saw what you thought was
a pterodactyl and that and he had that beautiful looking
he or she, well maybe maybe he, because now they
think maybe only the males. But these head crests, uh,
these things were sort of one of the staples of
of many, if not all, of these species. But they
(11:11):
were all really different and some fantastic looking, and they're
not exactly sure. There's still a lot of debate over
what they use these big crests for. Yeah, they thought
maybe they use them as a rudder in the air
to steer with and the flying around. It does make sense, um.
Some people thought that they may be used them as
(11:32):
a marine rudder. Maybe they used them for defense because
they were like made of horn and bone covered with skin,
and they think possibly they had coloring to them, maybe
they had feathers or light for They're not quite sure.
But because there's just such a lack of understanding, and
because tara saur fossils are so few and far between,
it's still basically anybody's guess what they were used for.
(11:54):
But then I think in Germany, I'm not exactly certain
when this was discovered, but a email TerraSAR was discovered
um a and it had a or I should say
she had an egg in her um overducts. Still, so
it was the only terra star to ever be positively
identified by sex um in the history of the world.
(12:18):
And she lacked that headcrest, so it really lent support
to the idea that it was males only, kind of
like how a peacock has the very bright feathers and
the p hen does not. They think that maybe it's
the same thing or more kin to like antlers in
Dear or Moose. They're males are the ones that have
the antlers, and they think they use it maybe a
little bit for defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm
(12:41):
a dude and I'm looking for some action. Check out
the sides of my antlers. They think it was probably
the same with Tira sars now. Yeah, and these things, like, uh,
it's amazing when you look up these pictures. Some of
them are just really fantastically colored. Some of them are
really big, like that Tapahara imperator. Yeah, if you look
(13:02):
up one terrace are during this episode, make it this guy. Yeah,
this is cool. This thing looks like it literally has
a sailboat sail on top of its head. It's and
like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like what the
artist's conceptions are, it just must have been something to see. Yeah,
that nicktosaurus is pretty interesting too. Um, this this one
(13:24):
didn't seem to have any sort of it looked like
a sail, uh without the sail, Like, what do you
call the frame of the sail. I'm sure there's some
great name for it, the uh the timber, the timber, sure,
but these I mean it's they liken it in this article. Uh,
the pump does two television into a and they are
(13:48):
really big and look only clunky to me. Yeah, I
mean it would be good for skewering, I guess, but
it could also be terrible for screwing. Like if you
were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could probably
catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get the
fish off because it's they're just these antenna We're just
way too tall and long. Yeah. And then this terra
(14:08):
dusto is really um, you should look at that one
up to it's pretty amazing. This one looks like this
one looks like if a dinosaur mated with a pelican
and a toothbrush. Yeah. I saw one person described it
as a toothbrush with wings. Yeah. The like the lower
jaw has like a thousand really long small needle like teeth,
(14:33):
and it looks like this big toothbrushy underbyte. Yeah, and
it does. Like when you look at it, you're like, oh,
it's clearly gotta be related to a pelican. Again, it's not.
Pelicans and birden birds are around during the time of dinosaurs,
and if birds are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs.
But it does look a lot like it, and it
makes sense that it would because from what we're learning
(14:53):
about Tera saurs now these days, is that a lot
of them were ocean going, that they had the goods
to fly across an entire ocean over the course of
a few days, like maybe an albatross would um, and
that they would fly low, some of them and skim
the surface of these ancient oceans in on Earth and
scoop up marine life with their with their jaws, with
(15:15):
their lower jaw, just like a pelican would um. So
what's what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea
that this is going on a hundred million years ago,
is that pelicans are not related to these things, so
that this this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more
than one time. You know what I'm saying. I find
(15:37):
that fascinating Rather than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that,
Actually they didn't. That's just two different branches of the
same tree developing into something very similar. And what they
call it um yeah or no convert convergent evolution. I
think yes, it is it's conversion evolution, when like a
(15:59):
trait or behave of your characteristic develops separately among different
branches of the tree, rather than developing once and then
descendants all have that same trait. Yeah. And although they
did certainly love a good seafood meal, uh, they used
to think that was sort of all they ate, and
now new research suggests that they do eat or did eat, uh,
(16:22):
all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs. Yeah. The way
that they're they describe them now is that it's just
like birds. Right, You've got birds that eat all sorts
of different things that fill all sorts of different ecological niches.
That's what they're coming to to the conclusion about with terasaurs,
Which I mean, Chuck, this is like a huge sea
change from what it was even back in the nineteen
(16:43):
fifties or sixties or seventies, and we thought there were
just a few species, and it turns out there were
a ton of different ones and a lot of variety
and a lot of diversity. And now we're starting to
kind of get a handle on that. Yeah, and they
think they were probably able after they hatched to fly
pretty quickly to take care of themselves pretty quickly. Um and,
(17:05):
like you mentioned, they're flying they believe now? Was they
were kind of built for the long haul. Um did.
Weren't super fast, but could you know, like a long
distance jet liner? Right? But some of them there were small,
Some of them were smallest songbirds, and I imagine they
were flitty. Yeah. I can't remember the name of one,
(17:25):
but there was one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny,
little little flying pterosaur. Could you imagine anything more frightening
than what you would call a pterodactyl the size of
a robin? Yeah? I imagine a hundred of those, or
it could look kind of cool like the little UFOs
and batteries not included, remember those. I didn't see that movie.
(17:47):
Do you remember like the ads or anything from it? Though? No?
It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and
um and with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay,
it was very similar though, huh. I think Donna Michi
was in both. Maybe why not? He had that market cornered.
If you can get your hands on Donna Michi, you
(18:09):
put him in your movie, buddy, Yeah for sure. So okay,
where are we at, Chuck? Well? I think we can
go we can hop over to um the fact that
for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds, but
bats was the other thing that people confused them with.
There was a an anatoby professor named Samuel Thomas von Summering,
(18:34):
and in the eighteen hundreds he incorrectly suggested that these
were bats. Another paleon Teller's named Harry Seeley even wrote
a book called Dragons of the Sky in which he
said birds were the descendants of these uh. And it's
a it's understandable why these dudes were wrong. They were
doing the best they could. And when you look at
(18:55):
those wings, uh, it looks you know, that membrane, it
looks like it would be a bat swing. But there
are there are some differences. Yeah, there's some big differences.
And you like a bat in particular, I could see
confusing it with right, like an ancient bat, because with
a bat, you have four digits, and three of those
(19:16):
digits form the bones in the wing, and you've got
one little digit wiggling free, so a bat can climb
around with its index fingers. Right, with a terra star,
you have three digits that are free and then the pinky.
The fourth digit is the one that forms that long
sometimes ten long bone that's the front ende of the wing.
(19:42):
But they had three uh, they had three fingers free.
And this is really significant because before they used to
think and if you go back and you look at
how pterodactyls were drawn in like the middle of the
twentieth century, UM, when they weren't in flight, they're probably
standing on their back legs, and they realized that this
(20:03):
is probably not how terasaurs stood that instead, because the
the the their foe arms were far more powerful than
their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that
they um walked on all four legs using putting most
of their weight on their front way legs with their
(20:24):
front floor arms, with their three free digits, and their
their wings tucked off to the side. Um. And they
look kind of like like a cartoon bulldog walks, is
what I'm seeing. That's what they think now, Like a
cartoon bulldog, not a real one. Right, well, I mean
a real bulldog doesn't walk quite like a cartoon bulldog.
(20:45):
Cartoon bulldogs more exaggerated and pronounced. You know what I mean,
It's a cartoon. Should we take another break? All right,
we'll do that, and then we'll talk a little bit
about how they fly and and other good stuff. Right
after this terrasaurs, Well, now we're on the road driving
(21:15):
in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two
from Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right,
all right, So you mentioned they were quadrupedal mhm, four footed,
four footed, and initially they thought that they would like
(21:37):
birds because we see birds do it, and it's probably
especially back in the eighteen hundreds, it was, uh, maybe
they're all working off the notion of the easiest solution
is probably correct because they would see a bird hop
off those back legs and think, well, this is clearly
what ptero dactyls did. Yeah, yeah, and I never thought
(21:58):
about that, But that's like exctuly what a bird does.
It jumps up in the air from its back legs
and flaps its wings and then provides lift from that
point on using its wings. Yeah. I'd never really thought
about that, but that's how birds fly. Yeah, they hop
around and if they want to. And and it's funny.
One of the other articles you sent, uh, one of
those guys believed the palion Tallers believes that it even
(22:20):
evolved into flying that they used to hop around on
four legs, and eventually they started jumping higher and higher
and then started flapping and then before you knew what
they were flying. Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to
gliding to flying. Um, And they don't know. Again, they
haven't found what you would call a proto um terrace
(22:42):
star like whatever was the link between ancient reptiles and terrasaurs.
But um, that's kind of the current guess right now
is that they evolved from some small light lizard that
was good at jumping. Yeah, and there they one of
the big keys and finding out and I don't think
you said this how strong their arms were. Yeah, that
(23:03):
that sort of was a big breakthrough because when you
think of like, you think it all comes from the
legs because they're jumping. But because they found more fossils,
they realized they were a quadrupedal and they said, man,
they actually have incredibly strong arms and shoulders and these
little tiny feet. So not only are the quadrupedal, but
(23:25):
a lot of that initial hopping lift may come from
the arms and not the legs at all. So they think,
now what they do is so it's just basically pushed
themselves off their front arms and legs to an extent,
and it just basically hop up into the air and
then start flapping their wings rather than like a bird
jumping off of their back legs. Is that what you mean? Yeah?
(23:47):
And then but most of that comes from the from
the arms and shoulders rather than the feet, and the
feet I think just sort of drag behind. Uh and
perhaps maybe helped with steering, Is that right? Uh? Yeah?
And they so there you can actually divide terosaurs into
two groups depending on when they they were around. One
started around a hundred and fifty million years ago, and
(24:10):
then one came later. And the first groups had long tails.
So if you look at old drawings of pterot actyls,
you'll frequently see with kind of like a long forked
devil's tail, you know, and that it's actually kind of accurate.
They think that the original ones had longer tails to
learn to steer in the air. But then as they
got more and more UM adapted to flying gracefully, they
(24:34):
lost their tails. So the later ones, the ones that
were around UM when the Cretaceous period ended suddenly UM
mostly called oz dar kids, which is not an easy
word to pronounce um that that they had they had
lost their tails because they had developed other methods of
of changing how they fly midflight. So like they because
(24:59):
the wing member rain was connected to their ankle from
their shoulder um with their finger uh kind of providing
the front of the wing, if they altered the angle
of their wristbone where they moved their ankle in and out,
it would change the actual dynamics of their wing and
they could dive and lift and do all sorts of
other things. Which is this is a big sea change
(25:21):
in our understanding of terasaurs too, because they used to
think that they basically had to run and jump off
of a cliff to gain flight. Yeah, because they were
so weird looking and so weirdly um developed in different ways,
huge heads, enormous beaks, big head crests, small, puny, little
(25:41):
withered feet, you know, like um like um Mr Burne's
hands or yeah, that's a good one, or um David
Cross and the Titanica uh segment on Mr Show like that, right,
that's like a terrastaur's leg. So it didn't make any
sense how they flew. But now that we're starting to
(26:03):
learn more and more about them, we're like, oh, actually
they had a lot of really really interesting adaptations, um,
not the least of which was their bones. Yeah, I
mean are all of their bones hollow or just those
wing bones all of them? Wow? I mean that made
them incredibly light obviously, but that also ended up being
one of the problems and trying to get fossils of
(26:24):
these guys, because they just they were very highly uh destructible,
non fossilizeable, non fossilizable. Do you remember a fossil episode
that was like one of the better old ones if
you ask me, Yeah, I agree, I learned, I learned
a lot on that. Yeah, we should trot that out
in the selects soon. That's a great idea, would be
(26:45):
a good one. Um. They also thought if they were
on water, uh, like they had just had a little
snack on a on a lake, that they would use
those wings as paddles and just get going that way,
pushing off the surface and then flapping until they were,
you know, shaking it off above the above the water, right,
exactly a lot like marine birds do today. Right. So
(27:07):
those bones, um, like you you kind of hit it
on the head. They are extor they were extremely light, right,
They they were about a millimeter thick, something like the
thickness of a playing card I saw. But it is
super nuts, especially considering that these things were holding up
like a bird that was up to twenty ft tall, right,
(27:27):
or not a bird, a TerraSAR man. I just averted
so much email chuck, Uh, like a millimeter thick bone wall.
But the way that their bones were made, they were
made of cross sections of basically like plywood, so they
were really strong. And then if you cut their bone
(27:48):
in two and looked down the hollow tube, you would
see that there are little struts criss crossing to provide
even more internal support for those bones. So you could
have a twenty foot tall uh terra Star that could
actually fly because it was that light. I saw one
um one of the as dark kids. Uh was it
(28:10):
was something like had a twenty foot wingspan, but it
probably didn't weigh any more than twenty pounds. Yeah. And
some of these, I mean, what were the largest ones
liket in wingspan? Yeah, so about like ten to fifteen
meters in wingspan. Um, like the size of like a
jet plane, like a fighter jet. I just flew in
(28:33):
my first private jet. Oh yeah, how was it? Uh?
You know, what. First of all, I've always wanted to
fly on a private jet, but never thought I would
have cause to um, because you know, unless you're extremely wealthy,
you only do that if you get invited to for
some strange reason, Like you don't just book it. You
(28:55):
you should be on high alert if you're some wealthy
person invites you on the private jet. Uh. And it
was awesome. It was as awesome as you think, And
the most awesome part of it was the just the
sheer lack of hassle. Yeah, like you Like, I parked
my car at the little tiny airport here in De
Cabb County. Uh, walked across the parking lot and into
(29:18):
the lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain,
and he was like, are you Chuck, And I said yes,
and he said right this way, and he walked out
the back door and there's a plane and they say
watch your head. You get on it. And he says,
you're ready to go. That's was it just you? No, no, no,
that was like uh five of us on an eight seater.
(29:42):
Everybody was waiting for you. Uh. Yeah. I was the
last person to get there, and I was a little stressed.
But then I thought, wait a minute, that's the other
perk is they don't leave you yea, like there. I
mean there's a schedule, but it's really late. But it
was cool. I mean they're the one we were on.
Was I mean, it's not roomy, so it's not like
Air Force one or anything, like you feel like you
(30:05):
can just walk around. But like when I was standing,
I'm five ft ten and if I said completely straight,
my head would brush the ceiling a little bit. Mhm.
But uh, and you're just like private but no t
s A like you just you just walk on. They
fly you there and then you get off and you're
(30:26):
right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle,
and all I could think of was like, man, it
must be great to be a billionaire sure and never
have to deal with an airport again. Yeah, but yeah,
it was kind of cool. But then also once you're
up there, you're kind of like, well, you know, it's
it's it's not like life changing. Yeah you you me,
Actually I've never flown on one. You me flew on
(30:47):
one and you said basically the exact same thing you
did that. Just the the lack of hassle and how
fast you get somewhere. Yeah, Um, is just just beyond amazing. Yeah.
I mean it takes away hours and hours of airport crap.
I know, you start to develop like that terrible sensation
where your eyes hurt for some weird reason to even
(31:07):
know you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like
there's a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to
leave behind. Yeah. And it also when you're going to
take off, because just because it's small, it feels like
you're going as fast as you're going, whereas in a
in a jumbo jet, it really doesn't right, Like I
was kind of like, man, we're going fast. So oh hey,
(31:28):
so um, speaking of you, me and flying, I have
an update. Okay, do you remember the story about the
Russia visas that we failed to get? I told her
that I told that story and she was like, you said,
we we forgot And I was like, yeah, we did, right,
and she's like, no, we asked like five different people,
five different times, and we're told we didn't need visas.
(31:49):
So I wanted to let you know, Chuck, that we
actually are as buttoned up as you think. We were
just misinformed. We got that great email from a new
listener that was like, listen to some dumb story about
some guy, and it's dumb visa. I was like, oh,
welcome to the show, brother, Yeah you should probably door.
(32:10):
Was that that guy? That one guy? Okay, yeah, he's
very turned off by your side about your visa story.
Yeah whatever, So anyway, thanks for indulging the private jet convo. Yeah,
I'll bet that guy loved the private jet. It'll probably
never happen again. But it was basically like writing around
on a on a tarrasaur. So that's how I wedged
it in there. Nice work, that's nice. So, um, I'm
(32:33):
trying to think of what else, Like Tara Saurs kind
of bring out the little entertain year old to me.
I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my
um little outdoor archaeologist boots. I see that white white
pull up cruise socks, and I'm just a total little nerd.
You keep dusting everything in here too. I'm not even
like one of those dinosaur nerds, but some just getting
(32:54):
into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that to YouTube? Just
kind of draws out like the little kid? I think so,
And I think probably because at least when I was
in you and I were growing up. I feel like
public schools just like did such a poor job of
talking about these periods. Oh yeah, you know, yeah I
remember that. But I also remember dinosaurs being kind of
(33:15):
huge in the eighties. Uh yeah, at least they were
in Ohio. M does that an Ohio thing? I don't know,
I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic Park obviously changed
everything as far but when was that nineties? Yeah? Early nineties. Yeah,
but I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among the
kids before that. Maybe maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I hit
(33:37):
my head and don't realize it. I don't know. I
know kids. I mean, my daughter loves dinosaurs, So it's
a thing. Yeah, it definitely is a thing. Um, and
it's getting to be even more of a thing the
more we learn about terrasaurs too. It was just somebody
called that the twenty one century the golden age of
terrasaur research. So they're expecting big things from the field. Yeah,
(33:59):
and like you said, hopefully they can find that proto
terroristaur and that's when the community really gets all excited
when they can make those links. Hey, you know, it's
speaking of the community. I read this article in National
geographic and God bless him. I can't remember the guy
who wrote it, but it's called white Terrasaurs were the
(34:20):
Weirdest Wonders on Wings. It's a great article, and um,
the guy basically just got into all like the dirty
laundry of the terrastar paleontology community. And apparently they're very
well known among paleontologists for just despising each other. Like
the terrastaur paleontologists don't like each other, talk smack about
(34:42):
each other publicly, and just snipe at one another a lot,
which just makes the whole thing even that much more fascinating,
you know, Like they're real competitive and real backbity interesting. Yeah,
and in this case that's a good thing, Yeah, because
they keep pushing one another. Agreed, You got anything else? Now?
(35:02):
Are we done with terrasaurs? I don't have anything else,
I don't think. Okay, Well, if you want to know
more about tarasaurs, go to your local natural history history
museum and say, hey, tell me about that pterodactyl. See
if you can stump them. Uh. And since I said stump,
it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this one.
(35:26):
Which one is this one? Oh? Um foot binding. I
believe we did this in a select episode. It was
it's one of our older ones, but a really good one.
I think I agreed, and this goes like this. Hey guys,
I'm assumed to be grad student from uh Guangdong, China
and have been a listener for a couple of years now.
(35:47):
This is my first time writing in and it's about
foot binding. I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering
she told me that her grandmother had bound her feet.
I asked if great great Grandma had trouble walking, and
she said she had never even wobbled a little bit.
Because it turns out she never made her own little shoes.
She just bought toddler shoes for herself. That's called making lemons. No,
(36:13):
that's called making lemonade out of lemons with your feet.
That's right, she said. Great great Grandma came from a
wealthy family, and bound feet were more of a symbol
of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do
farming chores and catering to the male foot fetish at
that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born,
but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother,
was born in nineteen fourteen. She made sure that her
(36:35):
feet were never bound. She also put all of her
kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then.
Oh yeah, footbinding is certainly not something that I am
proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away
from having to get my own feet bound. That's supposed
to sitting here writing you guys right now, it just
says uh to me, how far we've gone. Thanks for
the show. By the way, in the Draft podcast, Josh
(36:56):
was having trouble pronouncing Q I n G honesty. Q
may be roughly pronounced as t S, not exactly the same,
So just say sing next time, that would do. I didn't.
I don't even think I tried that one. I tried
every other phoneyme except for sing uh. And this is
best regards from Ruoi. Thank you very much. Ruoi. That's
(37:21):
pretty cool and like nice sense of perspective to um.
If you want to get in touch with us with
an awesome story like Ruoe did, you can catch up
with us on social media. Just go to our website
Stuff you Should Know dot com uh and you will
find all of our social media links there. And if
you want to send us a good old fashioned email,
Wrap it up, smack it on the bottom, and send
(37:41):
it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryants. Just the two of us
batching it today. Yeah, that's what my dad used to
say if he had to take care of me while
(00:22):
my mom was working. We're just batching it? Is that?
What was that what he said? Yeah? I thought that
was a relatively new term. No, I mean at least
the early eighties, right, Maybe my dad was like way
ahead of his time. Why hasn't there been a movie
called batching it? I I don't know. That's actually pretty obvious.
The fact that it was around as a word in
(00:44):
the eighties makes me even more surprised that there's not
a movie called batching it that, like the protagonist has
to put on like a car wash to save their
business or something like that. Yeah, Owen Wilson, what did
he do? Well? He would just be the star batching
it imagine, right, I guess. So could that guy be
any more charming than he is? He's pretty charming. Speaking
(01:07):
of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a wonderful
little beast named Ketze Colatus North ropy. Mhm are you
are you familiar? So ketzo colatus is named after the
Aztec flying serpent god quetzal Coat, right, so it makes sense.
(01:31):
But this guy was a real thing. Not to put
down the Aztecs beliefs or anything like that, but this
is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the
late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call
a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd
be dead wrong, pal. What it really is is a
(01:51):
terrace sore. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're
going to sort through, but the most important point is
that this east right here is twenty ft tall, as
tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin
to about an F sixteen fighter jet. And it was
a bad mama jama. That's that for ding. That's good.
(02:16):
I like it. I didn't even use the way back machine,
just trimmed the fat. Gone, oh you do. You don't
even need that old clunky thing anymore. We just use
our imaginations. Were not actually in the Cretaceous period like
we would be if we had used the way back machine. Okay,
uh yeah, these terra starts with the p of course,
a silent p um that is from Greek meaning winged lizards.
(02:40):
And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They
were not dinosaurs. Yes, big big distinction here. They're close,
it's like a sister to a dinosaur. Perhaps they're from
the same claude, which is arcasaurs, but it's a really
wide claude. And all that means is that they have
in the very remote asked some single common ancestor with dinosaurs. Yeah,
(03:03):
and they were. They were around roughly the same time
period and definitely and went away in the same fashion.
So it's it's normal, i think for people to say,
look at that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur, even
though neither one of those is necessarily correct. Yeah, So,
just to get this across one more time, pterosaurs were
(03:24):
not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but they weren't dinosaurs.
They weren't birds either, And to confuse things even further,
there were birds around at the time of the dinosaurs
and the time of the pterosaurs. And to confuse things
even further, there were such things as actual flying dinosaurs
(03:45):
we call them velociraptors, right, and these vertebrates. Actually we're
flying long before birds and bats by like millions and
millions of years. Yeah, think this How Stuff Works article.
This is a good one. I gotta give big ups
to Clint um pump Free. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, it
(04:07):
sounds like an action how Stuff Works writer chest be Frock.
You know, uh um but he he said, I think
eighty million years difference. Eighty million years before. Yeah, I
mean that's that's a lot of years it is. Um.
So there's a lot of like confusing stuff flying around.
(04:28):
And I think there's one other thing we should probably
address right out of the gate is that you you
you shouldn't call them pterod actyls, even though a lot
of people do. Pterod Actyls are actually a specific genus
of pterosaurs. Um, So to call all pterosaurs pterod actyls
would be incorrect. But you could call all pterod actyls pterosaurs, okay. Yeah.
(04:50):
And and technically, like if you have seen this this
thing in movies a lot that they say that's a pterodactyl,
what you've probably been looking at this whole time is
one of the the species. And there you know, potentially
up to two hundred of these species right now. I
think they've identified about a hundred hundred thirty ish. But
(05:11):
a tara uh tara no done is how you'd say it.
I that's what I would have gone, like, Tara no
down right. That's probably what you've been seeing in movies
all this time that you've been saying, that's a pterodactyl.
Like if you if you look up an image search
of the Torontodon, you'll say that that's a pterodactyl because
(05:35):
I saw it in King Kong. Yeah, it's like this
giant wing beast with kind of short, stubby legs and
a huge wing span and like a weird crest on
its head in a long pointy beak. A pterodactyl. Everybody
knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be an idiot. Yeah,
you saw in King Konge. Saw the same thing in
Jurassic Park three in two thousand one. Right, things hadn't
changed all that much. But in that time span, it's
(05:57):
actually kind of surprising because our under standing of um
tara stars had increased dramatically, and yet we were still
just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterod actyls, which
isn't the case. Yeah, there was a paleontologist named O. C.
Marsh who, Uh, it's a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Uh.
(06:20):
He collected these first fossils and what is now and
was then Western Kansas in the late eight hundreds, like
eighteen seventy, and they've been well. I was about to say,
they've been digging up lots of these since then. They
sort of have, but uh, not nearly as many as
other types of fossils, because these fossils are really highly
(06:44):
breakable and dissolvable and uh, they're they're tough to get
a hold of and keeping one piece throughout the process. Yeah,
we should, we should talk about that. Like, one of
the reasons there is so little understanding of tara stars
is because they don't fossilize very well now because their
bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed
to allow these giant reptiles to fly. They didn't say like, oh,
(07:07):
we need to be designed to leave our mark later. No,
it's like we want to fly right exactly. So early on,
I think the first tarodon or the first terrasaur Um
specimen was found in the late eighteenth century in Germany
Um and by the time O. C. Marsh was digging
them up a hundred years later in Kansas Um. They've
(07:27):
they've been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been
abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that
were identified, right, So when O. C. Marsh started to
dig him up, this is a big deal. And because
he was finding virtually all of the same species, the
taranodon um, that became the common conception of the the
(07:50):
what the terrasaar is. But it was coupled with an
earlier named Pterodactyl that had been given to the the
entire uh species or the entire group by George Cuvier
and I think eighteen twelve. Yeah, and that first fossil
you're talking about, no one knows. No one got credit
for that, for digging that thing up. But like you said,
(08:12):
it was in Germany in a lime in limestone, like
a hundred and fifty million year old limestone late in
the eighteenth century that eventually found its way to a
man with a great name, uh Cosimo Alessandro Collini. Man.
When I first came across this in his article, I
was like, I'm looking forward to hearing Chuck say that
(08:33):
guy's name that's him. He was Italian go figure, and
he was a natural scientist, and he, like many others
to follow, for a long time, didn't really know what
it was, since since he they found that in an
ancient lagoon with all kinds of seafaring creatures, he understandably
thought it was a seafaring creature. Yeah. And some of
(08:55):
the best perverse preserved fossils that we have of these
things are found in things like lagoons where something happened
to them. They died, suddenly quickly fell into a like
a body of water um which probably broke their fall
a little bit. They landed at the muck. Then we're
covered up potentially in some anaerobic um in an anaerobic state,
(09:18):
and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what it takes
to to fossilize a terra star. Yeah. And Cuvier, who
um kind of got it all wrong by calling it
a pterodactyl for everyone in the future. He was actually
the same dude though, who did say, actually, I think
those are wings, not paddles, and that was, you know,
(09:39):
a big breakthrough. Yeah, And the reason he called them
pterodactyls it means wing finger in the Greek. Right, so
tara saw means winged lizard and pterodactyl means wing finger
because as we'll see, the the front edge of the wing,
the leading edge of the wing is actually an extraordinarily
long pinky. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
(10:02):
I think so too. It that's a good way to
lead up to a break too, don't you think? Agreed?
Let's go. Well, now we're on the road, driving in
your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from
(10:25):
Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right, Okay,
we're back. I feel like we kind of jumbled things
up like a bunch of terra star bones. Sure, so
let's reset here, shall we? Should we reset with the
head let's the head crests. If you've seen a movie
(10:50):
like Jurassic Park, and you saw what you thought was
a pterodactyl and that and he had that beautiful looking
he or she, well maybe maybe he, because now they
think maybe only the males. But these head crests, uh,
these things were sort of one of the staples of
of many, if not all, of these species. But they
(11:11):
were all really different and some fantastic looking, and they're
not exactly sure. There's still a lot of debate over
what they use these big crests for. Yeah, they thought
maybe they use them as a rudder in the air
to steer with and the flying around. It does make sense, um.
Some people thought that they may be used them as
(11:32):
a marine rudder. Maybe they used them for defense because
they were like made of horn and bone covered with skin,
and they think possibly they had coloring to them, maybe
they had feathers or light for They're not quite sure.
But because there's just such a lack of understanding, and
because tara saur fossils are so few and far between,
it's still basically anybody's guess what they were used for.
(11:54):
But then I think in Germany, I'm not exactly certain
when this was discovered, but a email TerraSAR was discovered
um a and it had a or I should say
she had an egg in her um overducts. Still, so
it was the only terra star to ever be positively
identified by sex um in the history of the world.
(12:18):
And she lacked that headcrest, so it really lent support
to the idea that it was males only, kind of
like how a peacock has the very bright feathers and
the p hen does not. They think that maybe it's
the same thing or more kin to like antlers in
Dear or Moose. They're males are the ones that have
the antlers, and they think they use it maybe a
little bit for defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm
(12:41):
a dude and I'm looking for some action. Check out
the sides of my antlers. They think it was probably
the same with Tira sars now. Yeah, and these things, like, uh,
it's amazing when you look up these pictures. Some of
them are just really fantastically colored. Some of them are
really big, like that Tapahara imperator. Yeah, if you look
(13:02):
up one terrace are during this episode, make it this guy. Yeah,
this is cool. This thing looks like it literally has
a sailboat sail on top of its head. It's and
like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like what the
artist's conceptions are, it just must have been something to see. Yeah,
that nicktosaurus is pretty interesting too. Um, this this one
(13:24):
didn't seem to have any sort of it looked like
a sail, uh without the sail, Like, what do you
call the frame of the sail. I'm sure there's some
great name for it, the uh the timber, the timber, sure,
but these I mean it's they liken it in this article. Uh,
the pump does two television into a and they are
(13:48):
really big and look only clunky to me. Yeah, I
mean it would be good for skewering, I guess, but
it could also be terrible for screwing. Like if you
were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could probably
catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get the
fish off because it's they're just these antenna We're just
way too tall and long. Yeah. And then this terra
(14:08):
dusto is really um, you should look at that one
up to it's pretty amazing. This one looks like this
one looks like if a dinosaur mated with a pelican
and a toothbrush. Yeah. I saw one person described it
as a toothbrush with wings. Yeah. The like the lower
jaw has like a thousand really long small needle like teeth,
(14:33):
and it looks like this big toothbrushy underbyte. Yeah, and
it does. Like when you look at it, you're like, oh,
it's clearly gotta be related to a pelican. Again, it's not.
Pelicans and birden birds are around during the time of dinosaurs,
and if birds are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs.
But it does look a lot like it, and it
makes sense that it would because from what we're learning
(14:53):
about Tera saurs now these days, is that a lot
of them were ocean going, that they had the goods
to fly across an entire ocean over the course of
a few days, like maybe an albatross would um, and
that they would fly low, some of them and skim
the surface of these ancient oceans in on Earth and
scoop up marine life with their with their jaws, with
(15:15):
their lower jaw, just like a pelican would um. So
what's what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea
that this is going on a hundred million years ago,
is that pelicans are not related to these things, so
that this this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more
than one time. You know what I'm saying. I find
(15:37):
that fascinating Rather than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that,
Actually they didn't. That's just two different branches of the
same tree developing into something very similar. And what they
call it um yeah or no convert convergent evolution. I
think yes, it is it's conversion evolution, when like a
(15:59):
trait or behave of your characteristic develops separately among different
branches of the tree, rather than developing once and then
descendants all have that same trait. Yeah. And although they
did certainly love a good seafood meal, uh, they used
to think that was sort of all they ate, and
now new research suggests that they do eat or did eat, uh,
(16:22):
all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs. Yeah. The way
that they're they describe them now is that it's just
like birds. Right, You've got birds that eat all sorts
of different things that fill all sorts of different ecological niches.
That's what they're coming to to the conclusion about with terasaurs,
Which I mean, Chuck, this is like a huge sea
change from what it was even back in the nineteen
(16:43):
fifties or sixties or seventies, and we thought there were
just a few species, and it turns out there were
a ton of different ones and a lot of variety
and a lot of diversity. And now we're starting to
kind of get a handle on that. Yeah, and they
think they were probably able after they hatched to fly
pretty quickly to take care of themselves pretty quickly. Um and,
(17:05):
like you mentioned, they're flying they believe now? Was they
were kind of built for the long haul. Um did.
Weren't super fast, but could you know, like a long
distance jet liner? Right? But some of them there were small,
Some of them were smallest songbirds, and I imagine they
were flitty. Yeah. I can't remember the name of one,
(17:25):
but there was one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny,
little little flying pterosaur. Could you imagine anything more frightening
than what you would call a pterodactyl the size of
a robin? Yeah? I imagine a hundred of those, or
it could look kind of cool like the little UFOs
and batteries not included, remember those. I didn't see that movie.
(17:47):
Do you remember like the ads or anything from it? Though? No?
It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and
um and with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay,
it was very similar though, huh. I think Donna Michi
was in both. Maybe why not? He had that market cornered.
If you can get your hands on Donna Michi, you
(18:09):
put him in your movie, buddy, Yeah for sure. So okay,
where are we at, Chuck? Well? I think we can
go we can hop over to um the fact that
for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds, but
bats was the other thing that people confused them with.
There was a an anatoby professor named Samuel Thomas von Summering,
(18:34):
and in the eighteen hundreds he incorrectly suggested that these
were bats. Another paleon Teller's named Harry Seeley even wrote
a book called Dragons of the Sky in which he
said birds were the descendants of these uh. And it's
a it's understandable why these dudes were wrong. They were
doing the best they could. And when you look at
(18:55):
those wings, uh, it looks you know, that membrane, it
looks like it would be a bat swing. But there
are there are some differences. Yeah, there's some big differences.
And you like a bat in particular, I could see
confusing it with right, like an ancient bat, because with
a bat, you have four digits, and three of those
(19:16):
digits form the bones in the wing, and you've got
one little digit wiggling free, so a bat can climb
around with its index fingers. Right, with a terra star,
you have three digits that are free and then the pinky.
The fourth digit is the one that forms that long
sometimes ten long bone that's the front ende of the wing.
(19:42):
But they had three uh, they had three fingers free.
And this is really significant because before they used to
think and if you go back and you look at
how pterodactyls were drawn in like the middle of the
twentieth century, UM, when they weren't in flight, they're probably
standing on their back legs, and they realized that this
(20:03):
is probably not how terasaurs stood that instead, because the
the the their foe arms were far more powerful than
their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that
they um walked on all four legs using putting most
of their weight on their front way legs with their
(20:24):
front floor arms, with their three free digits, and their
their wings tucked off to the side. Um. And they
look kind of like like a cartoon bulldog walks, is
what I'm seeing. That's what they think now, Like a
cartoon bulldog, not a real one. Right, well, I mean
a real bulldog doesn't walk quite like a cartoon bulldog.
(20:45):
Cartoon bulldogs more exaggerated and pronounced. You know what I mean,
It's a cartoon. Should we take another break? All right,
we'll do that, and then we'll talk a little bit
about how they fly and and other good stuff. Right
after this terrasaurs, Well, now we're on the road driving
(21:15):
in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two
from Josh can chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right,
all right, So you mentioned they were quadrupedal mhm, four footed,
four footed, and initially they thought that they would like
(21:37):
birds because we see birds do it, and it's probably
especially back in the eighteen hundreds, it was, uh, maybe
they're all working off the notion of the easiest solution
is probably correct because they would see a bird hop
off those back legs and think, well, this is clearly
what ptero dactyls did. Yeah, yeah, and I never thought
(21:58):
about that, But that's like exctuly what a bird does.
It jumps up in the air from its back legs
and flaps its wings and then provides lift from that
point on using its wings. Yeah. I'd never really thought
about that, but that's how birds fly. Yeah, they hop
around and if they want to. And and it's funny.
One of the other articles you sent, uh, one of
those guys believed the palion Tallers believes that it even
(22:20):
evolved into flying that they used to hop around on
four legs, and eventually they started jumping higher and higher
and then started flapping and then before you knew what
they were flying. Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to
gliding to flying. Um, And they don't know. Again, they
haven't found what you would call a proto um terrace
(22:42):
star like whatever was the link between ancient reptiles and terrasaurs.
But um, that's kind of the current guess right now
is that they evolved from some small light lizard that
was good at jumping. Yeah, and there they one of
the big keys and finding out and I don't think
you said this how strong their arms were. Yeah, that
(23:03):
that sort of was a big breakthrough because when you
think of like, you think it all comes from the
legs because they're jumping. But because they found more fossils,
they realized they were a quadrupedal and they said, man,
they actually have incredibly strong arms and shoulders and these
little tiny feet. So not only are the quadrupedal, but
(23:25):
a lot of that initial hopping lift may come from
the arms and not the legs at all. So they think,
now what they do is so it's just basically pushed
themselves off their front arms and legs to an extent,
and it just basically hop up into the air and
then start flapping their wings rather than like a bird
jumping off of their back legs. Is that what you mean? Yeah?
(23:47):
And then but most of that comes from the from
the arms and shoulders rather than the feet, and the
feet I think just sort of drag behind. Uh and
perhaps maybe helped with steering, Is that right? Uh? Yeah?
And they so there you can actually divide terosaurs into
two groups depending on when they they were around. One
started around a hundred and fifty million years ago, and
(24:10):
then one came later. And the first groups had long tails.
So if you look at old drawings of pterot actyls,
you'll frequently see with kind of like a long forked
devil's tail, you know, and that it's actually kind of accurate.
They think that the original ones had longer tails to
learn to steer in the air. But then as they
got more and more UM adapted to flying gracefully, they
(24:34):
lost their tails. So the later ones, the ones that
were around UM when the Cretaceous period ended suddenly UM
mostly called oz dar kids, which is not an easy
word to pronounce um that that they had they had
lost their tails because they had developed other methods of
of changing how they fly midflight. So like they because
(24:59):
the wing member rain was connected to their ankle from
their shoulder um with their finger uh kind of providing
the front of the wing, if they altered the angle
of their wristbone where they moved their ankle in and out,
it would change the actual dynamics of their wing and
they could dive and lift and do all sorts of
other things. Which is this is a big sea change
(25:21):
in our understanding of terasaurs too, because they used to
think that they basically had to run and jump off
of a cliff to gain flight. Yeah, because they were
so weird looking and so weirdly um developed in different ways,
huge heads, enormous beaks, big head crests, small, puny, little
(25:41):
withered feet, you know, like um like um Mr Burne's
hands or yeah, that's a good one, or um David
Cross and the Titanica uh segment on Mr Show like that, right,
that's like a terrastaur's leg. So it didn't make any
sense how they flew. But now that we're starting to
(26:03):
learn more and more about them, we're like, oh, actually
they had a lot of really really interesting adaptations, um,
not the least of which was their bones. Yeah, I
mean are all of their bones hollow or just those
wing bones all of them? Wow? I mean that made
them incredibly light obviously, but that also ended up being
one of the problems and trying to get fossils of
(26:24):
these guys, because they just they were very highly uh destructible,
non fossilizeable, non fossilizable. Do you remember a fossil episode
that was like one of the better old ones if
you ask me, Yeah, I agree, I learned, I learned
a lot on that. Yeah, we should trot that out
in the selects soon. That's a great idea, would be
(26:45):
a good one. Um. They also thought if they were
on water, uh, like they had just had a little
snack on a on a lake, that they would use
those wings as paddles and just get going that way,
pushing off the surface and then flapping until they were,
you know, shaking it off above the above the water, right,
exactly a lot like marine birds do today. Right. So
(27:07):
those bones, um, like you you kind of hit it
on the head. They are extor they were extremely light, right,
They they were about a millimeter thick, something like the
thickness of a playing card I saw. But it is
super nuts, especially considering that these things were holding up
like a bird that was up to twenty ft tall, right,
(27:27):
or not a bird, a TerraSAR man. I just averted
so much email chuck, Uh, like a millimeter thick bone wall.
But the way that their bones were made, they were
made of cross sections of basically like plywood, so they
were really strong. And then if you cut their bone
(27:48):
in two and looked down the hollow tube, you would
see that there are little struts criss crossing to provide
even more internal support for those bones. So you could
have a twenty foot tall uh terra Star that could
actually fly because it was that light. I saw one
um one of the as dark kids. Uh was it
(28:10):
was something like had a twenty foot wingspan, but it
probably didn't weigh any more than twenty pounds. Yeah. And
some of these, I mean, what were the largest ones
liket in wingspan? Yeah, so about like ten to fifteen
meters in wingspan. Um, like the size of like a
jet plane, like a fighter jet. I just flew in
(28:33):
my first private jet. Oh yeah, how was it? Uh?
You know, what. First of all, I've always wanted to
fly on a private jet, but never thought I would
have cause to um, because you know, unless you're extremely wealthy,
you only do that if you get invited to for
some strange reason, Like you don't just book it. You
(28:55):
you should be on high alert if you're some wealthy
person invites you on the private jet. Uh. And it
was awesome. It was as awesome as you think, And
the most awesome part of it was the just the
sheer lack of hassle. Yeah, like you Like, I parked
my car at the little tiny airport here in De
Cabb County. Uh, walked across the parking lot and into
(29:18):
the lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain,
and he was like, are you Chuck, And I said yes,
and he said right this way, and he walked out
the back door and there's a plane and they say
watch your head. You get on it. And he says,
you're ready to go. That's was it just you? No, no, no,
that was like uh five of us on an eight seater.
(29:42):
Everybody was waiting for you. Uh. Yeah. I was the
last person to get there, and I was a little stressed.
But then I thought, wait a minute, that's the other
perk is they don't leave you yea, like there. I
mean there's a schedule, but it's really late. But it
was cool. I mean they're the one we were on.
Was I mean, it's not roomy, so it's not like
Air Force one or anything, like you feel like you
(30:05):
can just walk around. But like when I was standing,
I'm five ft ten and if I said completely straight,
my head would brush the ceiling a little bit. Mhm.
But uh, and you're just like private but no t
s A like you just you just walk on. They
fly you there and then you get off and you're
(30:26):
right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle,
and all I could think of was like, man, it
must be great to be a billionaire sure and never
have to deal with an airport again. Yeah, but yeah,
it was kind of cool. But then also once you're
up there, you're kind of like, well, you know, it's
it's it's not like life changing. Yeah you you me,
Actually I've never flown on one. You me flew on
(30:47):
one and you said basically the exact same thing you
did that. Just the the lack of hassle and how
fast you get somewhere. Yeah, Um, is just just beyond amazing. Yeah.
I mean it takes away hours and hours of airport crap.
I know, you start to develop like that terrible sensation
where your eyes hurt for some weird reason to even
(31:07):
know you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like
there's a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to
leave behind. Yeah. And it also when you're going to
take off, because just because it's small, it feels like
you're going as fast as you're going, whereas in a
in a jumbo jet, it really doesn't right, Like I
was kind of like, man, we're going fast. So oh hey,
(31:28):
so um, speaking of you, me and flying, I have
an update. Okay, do you remember the story about the
Russia visas that we failed to get? I told her
that I told that story and she was like, you said,
we we forgot And I was like, yeah, we did, right,
and she's like, no, we asked like five different people,
five different times, and we're told we didn't need visas.
(31:49):
So I wanted to let you know, Chuck, that we
actually are as buttoned up as you think. We were
just misinformed. We got that great email from a new
listener that was like, listen to some dumb story about
some guy, and it's dumb visa. I was like, oh,
welcome to the show, brother, Yeah you should probably door.
(32:10):
Was that that guy? That one guy? Okay, yeah, he's
very turned off by your side about your visa story.
Yeah whatever, So anyway, thanks for indulging the private jet convo. Yeah,
I'll bet that guy loved the private jet. It'll probably
never happen again. But it was basically like writing around
on a on a tarrasaur. So that's how I wedged
it in there. Nice work, that's nice. So, um, I'm
(32:33):
trying to think of what else, Like Tara Saurs kind
of bring out the little entertain year old to me.
I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my
um little outdoor archaeologist boots. I see that white white
pull up cruise socks, and I'm just a total little nerd.
You keep dusting everything in here too. I'm not even
like one of those dinosaur nerds, but some just getting
(32:54):
into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that to YouTube? Just
kind of draws out like the little kid? I think so,
And I think probably because at least when I was
in you and I were growing up. I feel like
public schools just like did such a poor job of
talking about these periods. Oh yeah, you know, yeah I
remember that. But I also remember dinosaurs being kind of
(33:15):
huge in the eighties. Uh yeah, at least they were
in Ohio. M does that an Ohio thing? I don't know,
I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic Park obviously changed
everything as far but when was that nineties? Yeah? Early nineties. Yeah,
but I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among the
kids before that. Maybe maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I hit
(33:37):
my head and don't realize it. I don't know. I
know kids. I mean, my daughter loves dinosaurs, So it's
a thing. Yeah, it definitely is a thing. Um, and
it's getting to be even more of a thing the
more we learn about terrasaurs too. It was just somebody
called that the twenty one century the golden age of
terrasaur research. So they're expecting big things from the field. Yeah,
(33:59):
and like you said, hopefully they can find that proto
terroristaur and that's when the community really gets all excited
when they can make those links. Hey, you know, it's
speaking of the community. I read this article in National
geographic and God bless him. I can't remember the guy
who wrote it, but it's called white Terrasaurs were the
(34:20):
Weirdest Wonders on Wings. It's a great article, and um,
the guy basically just got into all like the dirty
laundry of the terrastar paleontology community. And apparently they're very
well known among paleontologists for just despising each other. Like
the terrastaur paleontologists don't like each other, talk smack about
(34:42):
each other publicly, and just snipe at one another a lot,
which just makes the whole thing even that much more fascinating,
you know, Like they're real competitive and real backbity interesting. Yeah,
and in this case that's a good thing, Yeah, because
they keep pushing one another. Agreed, You got anything else? Now?
(35:02):
Are we done with terrasaurs? I don't have anything else,
I don't think. Okay, Well, if you want to know
more about tarasaurs, go to your local natural history history
museum and say, hey, tell me about that pterodactyl. See
if you can stump them. Uh. And since I said stump,
it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this one.
(35:26):
Which one is this one? Oh? Um foot binding. I
believe we did this in a select episode. It was
it's one of our older ones, but a really good one.
I think I agreed, and this goes like this. Hey guys,
I'm assumed to be grad student from uh Guangdong, China
and have been a listener for a couple of years now.
(35:47):
This is my first time writing in and it's about
foot binding. I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering
she told me that her grandmother had bound her feet.
I asked if great great Grandma had trouble walking, and
she said she had never even wobbled a little bit.
Because it turns out she never made her own little shoes.
She just bought toddler shoes for herself. That's called making lemons. No,
(36:13):
that's called making lemonade out of lemons with your feet.
That's right, she said. Great great Grandma came from a
wealthy family, and bound feet were more of a symbol
of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do
farming chores and catering to the male foot fetish at
that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born,
but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother,
was born in nineteen fourteen. She made sure that her
(36:35):
feet were never bound. She also put all of her
kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then.
Oh yeah, footbinding is certainly not something that I am
proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away
from having to get my own feet bound. That's supposed
to sitting here writing you guys right now, it just
says uh to me, how far we've gone. Thanks for
the show. By the way, in the Draft podcast, Josh
(36:56):
was having trouble pronouncing Q I n G honesty. Q
may be roughly pronounced as t S, not exactly the same,
So just say sing next time, that would do. I didn't.
I don't even think I tried that one. I tried
every other phoneyme except for sing uh. And this is
best regards from Ruoi. Thank you very much. Ruoi. That's
(37:21):
pretty cool and like nice sense of perspective to um.
If you want to get in touch with us with
an awesome story like Ruoe did, you can catch up
with us on social media. Just go to our website
Stuff you Should Know dot com uh and you will
find all of our social media links there. And if
you want to send us a good old fashioned email,
Wrap it up, smack it on the bottom, and send
(37:41):
it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com.
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