August 18, 2024 • 34 mins
The New York Times published an article this week, What’s in a Name? The Battle of Baby T. Rex and Nanotyrannus profiling a $20 million-dollar dinosaur fossil for sale at the David Aaron Gallery in London. The gallery describes the fossil as a, “rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton”. Newt discusses the sale of the dinosaur with his guest Dr. Stephen Brusatte, Chair of Paleontology and Evolution in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Newts World. As many of you know,
I am a dinosaur enthusiast. I have loved studying dinosaurs,
reading about him, visiting museums since I was a young boy.
So I was struck this week when an article on
The New York Times entitled What's in a Name? The
Battle of Baby t Rex and Nano Taranus, profiling a
(00:27):
twenty million dollar dinosaur fossil for sale to David Aaron
Gallery in London. It seems there's a controversy about this
quote rare juvenile Trannosaurus rex skill. My guest today is
somebody you've heard before who's done several podcasts with those
who I think one of the most brilliant explainers of
(00:47):
paleontology alive today. He is quote one of the stars
of modern paleontology according to National Geography. He's worked on
dig sites and in labs all around the world. Was
also the paleontology advisor to the film Jurassic World Dominion.
So you can imagine how pleased I am to welcome
(01:08):
back my guest, doctor Stephen Prossatt, Chair of Paleontology and
Evolution in the School of Geosciences at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland. Steve, welcome back and thank you for
(01:30):
joining me again on Newtsworld. The number of years back,
my wife Callista had gotten me a copy of a
Nanotyrannis skull from the Cleveland Museum, which sits proudly in
our library. So I have a big interest in nanotyrannusis.
I do not have a t rex, of course, but
I wouldn't mind having one if I could figure out
(01:50):
where I put it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, mister Speaker, is always a pleasure because when we
get together and talk dinosaurs, it's a couple of guys
that love fossils, love science having chats about these things.
And you has been very kind to me for the
books I've written and to the field of paleontology in general.
You've been an enthusiast.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I have to ask you, have you ever been interviewed
before by somebody who had a Nana tyrannoskull?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Oh, you know, I've been asked a lot of interview
questions before. That's a question I've never been asked, so
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Literally, when you walk in our house, to your right,
there's a Nana Turannos skull sitting there. It's beautiful. It's
a fabulous skull. It's a cast, of course, but we
got it from the Cleveland Museum of Science, which has
a terrific collection, particularly a fossil fish.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And that's the classic skull of this dinosaur. Maybe it's Nanotyrannus,
its own species. Maybe it's a juvenile, a teenage t rex.
There's a lot of debate about that, but that skull,
which was found many, many decades ago and went to
the Cleveland Museum, that's really the keystone of this whole debate.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful fossil. So you're very lucky.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
It's either the type fossil of a new species or
it's just a baby Terrannosaurs Rex.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yes it is, and I think either of those is
very exciting. You know, Either it's a distinct species of
a smaller tyrannosaur. This animal would have been about the
size of an suv more or less, whereas t Rex
as an adult would have been the size of a bus.
So it's either its own species of smaller Tyrannus, or
it's a teenage t rex, which is pretty neat because
(03:18):
fossils of really all dinosaurs are very rare, and it's
hard to have fossils of babies and teenagers and adults.
So if we have a teenage t rex, that can
tell us a lot about how this great enormous king
of dinosaurs grew up. So I think either way, this
debate is resolved down the line. It's a very interesting
and important fossil.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So I'm curious because I'm guessing that to be called
a juvenile t rex has it listed at the David
Aaron Gowery, it must be substantially bigger than a nanoterremus.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
It's really hard to know. So there is this new
specimen of this new fossil that's for sale. I don't
know a huge amount about it. I know not much
more than has been reported in the press, including in
this New York Times article. I haven't seen this fossil myself.
I haven't studied it. I've just seen some photos. They
are marketing it as a juvenile t rex. But other people,
(04:09):
other scientists, would look at that same fossil and say,
we actually think that's a nanotyrannus, a separate species. So
really it's the same thing as your Cleveland skull. The
cast of the skull that you have at home. Is
it a separate species, Is it a juvenile t rex?
We don't really know. We just know that it is
a tyrannosaur of some type that's about the size of
(04:30):
an suv. It lived at the end of the Cretaceous Period,
about sixty six million years ago, and I do think
until there are more fossils, scientists are going to be
debating this for a long time because these dinosaurs are
so rare.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I mean, even a nana Trannus as a predator would
have been very formidable if you'd walked into him in
the evening. Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Absolutely, t Rex is the ultimate because this thing was
forty feet long, it weighed seven or eight tons, Its
head was the size of a bathtub. It could crush
us in its jaws. T Rex is the ultimate. So
if you compare any other dinosaur to t Rex, it's
gonna seem maybe a little bit more lame. But come on,
this Nanotyrannus or teenage t rex, whatever it is, was
(05:12):
a big animal in its own right. It surely would
have weighed about a ton. It could have run pretty fast,
it could have chased you down, and it had a
whole mouthful of sharp teeth, so you would not have
wanted to come anywhere near this animal.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Do you think in market value it would make a
difference in price if they concluded it was a nano
tyrannus or is it still so cool it'll probably get
the same price.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
This is something that when the New York Times reporters
were writing this article and they talked to me about it,
if they asked me this question, and it's a good
question when you're marketing something. This is something they're trying
to sell for a lot of money. Of course, you're
going to try to market that in the way that
makes it most exciting for people and most exciting for
hopefully for museums that might want to purchase it. And
(05:56):
I don't know what sounds better to you. I'm not sure. Really,
do you think a nanotyrannus is better? Do you think
selling it as a babyt rex sound? But I don't
honestly know. I think both of those things are quite interesting.
And so you see auctions sometimes where these smaller tyrannosaurs
are up for sale and they call them nano tyrannus.
So you see both and I don't honestly know which
(06:16):
one would on its own fetch a higher price, said.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I was surprised to learn that in twenty twenty two,
a Dynoonicas, which is the inspiration for the Veloci raptors
in Jurassic Park, sold for twelve point four million dollars.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I'm really surprised these dinosaur auctions and sales. Yeah, they're
happening with more frequency these days. It does seem like
we're in a period of time where dinosaurs are in
with the world of private collectors and art collectors and
so on. There's just a trendy thing happening, and there's
a lot of auctions. You hear of new auctions all
the time or new sales, and it makes sense to me, right,
(06:56):
I mean, I love dinosaurs, and there's something fascinating and
enthralling about these animals, and so some of the price
tags are getting pretty high. Some of them do surprise
me when you're getting into the many millions of dollars,
But I think it just shows that there is this
enduring fascination with these animals, and there's a lot of
people around the world that would love to have their
own dinosaur, and I totally understand that.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Well. I noticed that there's a t reaction named Stan
who was sold at auction for thirty one point eight
million dollars in twenty twenty, and he was bought by
the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. I assume
going into a museum. I mean Abu Dhabi's really working
at this tourism business. They have a relationship, for example,
with the Lover and have a sort of Middle Eastern
(07:39):
louver building, which is pretty nice, But thirty one point
eight million for a single skeleton is pretty darn and pressive.
I suspect encourages people to go out in the field,
and particularly on private land and try to find these things.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
That number when that fossil is sold, that thirty one
million number. That shocked me, and it shocked a lot
of paleontologists, and it got us worried, frankly, because if
a dinosaur goes for that much money, of course other
people are going to want to get in on the action,
and it means that there's now a really high price
a bounty if you will, the dinosaur bones out there.
(08:16):
So of course it encouraged a lot more people to
look for dinosaurs. That's a great thing. But also if
the price tags go ever higher, it makes it less
likely that museums can purchase these one of a kind dinosaurs,
more likely that they're only affordable to the ultra rich,
the really ultra rich, the kind of people that have
(08:37):
tens of millions sitting around. So I think it's a
double edged sword there. But thankfully that fossil stand that
t Rex is going into a museum, as you say,
in the Middle East, the museum still being built. I'm
very excited about that. I think it's a great thing.
First of all, that fossil will be conserved and it'll
be put on display, and it will also be put
on display in a part of the world where there
(08:58):
are not so many dinosaurs fossil. So I think this
will in a way be a great ambassador for both
paleontology and American paleontology. T Rex is an American dinosaur,
so I think it's wonderful that children and families throughout
the Middle East can go see this dinosaur in the
museum down the line we know.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I think prior to stan the most famous t Rex
purchase was by a public institution, the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago, which bought Sue for about eight
point three six million back in nineteen ninety seven, which
today be about thirteen point five million give an inflation.
But I mean, I've been out there. It's really a
(09:36):
very impressive exhibit. I mean, you can understand why some
of the donors who support the museum thought that they
would certainly be rewarded in popularity and in attendance by
having Sue there.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Sue is my favorite dinosaur of all time. I grew
up in northern Illinois, from a little town called Ottawa,
So hi, everybody out there from Ottawa who might be listening.
About seventy five mins miles southwest to Chicago, and Sue
was purchased by the Field Museum when I was a
young teenager, and I was incredibly excited. And then in
the year two thousand it was put on display and
(10:11):
I was sixteen years old, ben and I remember very well.
I tried to convince my parents to let me skip
school that day to go see the opening of the exhibit,
which was in the middle of the week. For some reason,
I think that was maybe just for journalists. I don't know,
but I really wanted to weasel my way in there
to see it. And they wouldn't let me do it.
And you know, Paul, props to my parents. They valued
education more than anything. But we did go and see
(10:34):
it very soon after, and I've seen Sue dozens of
times over the years. It is in many ways, I
feel my hometown dinosaur, and that fossil, probably more than
any single fossil, really inspired me as I was studying paleontology.
So I am thankful that that dinosaur, which when it
was sold in the late nineties, that price was exorbitant.
(10:56):
I am so thankful that a museum was able to
work with donors and sponsors to get the funding to
make sure that fossil was put on display, because there's
an alternative universe out there where an oligarch buys that
fossil and it disappears and it is never put on display,
and I never see it, and I'm never inspired, and
(11:17):
millions of others in Chicago that to visit the museum
are never inspired to. So my great hope is that
when these one of a kind dinosaurs are discovered, that
some way or another, they find their way to a museum.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Most of these do end up in some kind of
a museum environment, but I remember I think it was
the number three guy at Microsoft personally owned two t
Rexis in his home.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
If you have the Microsoft money, that'll do it. But
you're referring to Nathan Miervold, who's very well known to
us in the field of paleontology. I mean, he's a polymath,
incredibly brilliant guy, and he has done research. He's done
primary research. He's published academic papers on dinosaur fossils in
peer reviewed journals, the same ones that I publish in
(12:04):
and other scientists too, So we greatly respect him in
the field. And I think as an aside, I'll just
say that's one of the neat things about paleontology is
as a science, it is fascinating to people. It attracts
a lot of different people that wouldn't necessarily be drawn
to a lot of other sciences. So I think that
is one of those things about dinosaurs that enduring mystery
(12:26):
and fascination that brings so many people together, and he's
a great example of that.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Hi, this is newt If you live in California or
you happen to be visiting, I'd like to invite you
to my two upcoming book events in January Challis and
I are both going to be at the Richard Nixon
Library and Museum in jor Belunda on January ninth at
seven pm. Check Its are available now at Nixon Foundation
dot org. And Chlis and I are both going to
(13:04):
be at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in
Simi Valley on January tenth at five pm. Tickets are
available now at Reaganfoundation dot org. I hope you'll join
us for a book signing and a talk and a
chance to get together and kick off the new year
at the Nixon Library and the Reagan Library. I have
(13:33):
to ask you just a little bit about not just
Toronto source, but this entire group of dinosaurs who reoccur.
I mean, there's sort of a parallel evolution over millions
of years, and if you go back, I guess what,
thirty forty million years you at Alisaurus. There are a
whole group of dinosaurs who end up very similar to
(13:54):
t Rex. It is really big rear legs, really big
powerful head, and really tiny arms. And I'm curious, from
your perspective, why do you think the tiny arm giant
predator keeps reemerging.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
This is why I love talking to you, mister speaker,
about dinosaurs, because we can get in the weeds these
fascinating bits of science, and this is one of them.
T Rex is an incredible dinosaur, sublime dinosaur in so
many ways. But there were other meat eating dinosaurs over
time that also evolved to look something like t Rex,
(14:30):
to become around the size of a bus, to develop
really big heads with lots of sharp teeth, and to
make their arms smaller as they did so. And as
you say, the alosaurs are some of those dinosaurs. There's
a group called the carcarodontosaurs. I know that's a real
tongue twister, but one of the most famous ones is Jiganotosaurus,
which was the villain in the new Jurassic World film
(14:53):
from twenty twenty two, the one that I worked on.
And there's many other examples. So there seems to be
something about dinosaur where time and time again, over and
over again, these different groups of meat eaters all developed
about the same size and similar types of body. So
I think it means that there was something very successful
(15:14):
about that design about making a living, about hunting food,
about getting enough food, at being able to get enough
nutrition and cover enough area, and so on with that
type of body. And what it really is is the
head seems to get so big that it takes over
most of the functions of the arms and the smaller ancestors.
(15:35):
So in the smaller tyrannosaurs or smaller alosaurs, the ancestors
of the big ones, the arms were longer and they
had sharp claws, and they were probably used to grab
prey and to slash a prey. In the big ones,
time and time again, the arms get small, the heads
get big. The heads are probably doing almost everything. They're
grabbing the food, they're biting the food, they're killing the prey,
(15:58):
they're chopping up the prey, swallowing the prey. And that
seems to be the case. But that's very different than say,
how mammals have evolved. You know, different types of meat
eating mammals, saber toothed tigers, wolves and dogs and so on.
They don't do that. And I think that speaks to
just the differences of dinosaurs and mammals and the types
of biology they have in physiology and so on. And
(16:20):
there's so much more we could go into the book.
I did The Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs a few
years back. I have a few chapters on these big
theropod meat eating dinosaurs, because to me, they're so fascinating.
These are some of the most incredible animals I think
that have ever lived in the history of the earth.
Bus sized predators with heads that we could fit inside,
(16:43):
that crush the bones of their prey.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
They're astonishing animals. And of course they required other dinosaurs
to have grown very big in order to be able
to pray off of them. You can imagine how much
these guys had to eat in order to sustain themselves,
especially if, as some people think, they may have been
warm blooded, in which case they would have been burning
up a lot more energy than say, a crocodile does.
(17:07):
And these were apparently obviously pretty good predators in terms
of running, would have been very formidable. I mean, if
they were appearing in Montana this week, you would definitely
weakened the tourist attraction of going out in the woods
by yourself.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
You got it. I mean, these animals were feats of nature.
The thing that really impresses me about them is not
just their huge size. That's interesting enough, amazing enough, but
one of the things we now know is that these
dinosaurs they didn't just have brawn, they had brains as well.
We know they were quite smart. And the reason we
(17:44):
know that is because we use cat scanners to see
inside of the skulls of dinosaurs. So maybe many of
you listening, some of you at least have had a
cat scan and you've gone in the tube and the
X rays of the scanner, you know, allows the doctor
to see inside of you with that having cut you out,
And we can do the same with a t rex
skull of velociraptor's skull. And when we do that, we
(18:06):
can see the brain cavity, we can build a digital
model of the brain, We can measure the size of
the brain compare it to living animals, and that tells
us that many dinosaurs were a lot smarter than we
used to think. And t Rex was probably one of
the smartest dinosaurs of all. So it was a completely
formidable predator with brawn and with brains.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Well. I was at the Smithsonian one year and they
had borrowed the kind of cat scan that automobile companies used,
So they had this huge machine that they were putting
fossils in and it was fascinating to watch. But you know,
one of the points you make about the brain. You
can actually tell how an animal is adapted based on
this brain case. And my impression is that predators like
(18:49):
t rex had remarkably good vision. I mean, is that
your sense.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yes, you're correct, You're absolutely correct. We can tell that
both from looking at the brain through the cat scans.
We can see the regions of the brain that control
the sense of vision, and those are fairly large. But
what really tells us they had good vision is they
had huge eye sockets, and in t Rex in particular,
the eyes faced partially forward, so they would have had
(19:16):
three D vision, stereoscopic vision, depth perception, just like we do,
and that's actually a pretty unusual thing among animals. So
it means they could have seen in three D. They
could have seen their prey, they could have seen their environment.
That was one of their key hunting tools surely. And
we can also tell from their brain and from their
(19:38):
ears that they had a really good sense of smell,
really good sense of hearing. So these were predators that
were well endowed with the whole toolkit of senses to
seek out their prey well.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And that ability to have exquisitely effective eyesight. Their descendants,
the eagles and the hawks have very similar patterns.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yes, and that's a wonderful thing that although t Rex
is extinct and Triceratops and Brontosaurus and all of those
classic dinosaurs, they've been dead for a long time, but
the descendants of dinosaurs live on as birds, and we
can study birds. We do study birds. We love birds,
so many of us love going bird watching or have
birds as pets. And through watching birds appreciating birds, we
(20:25):
can get a sense for what some dinosaurs were like.
And birds are quite smart, birds have great senses. Birds
are active, energetic, dynamic, adaptable animals, and dinosaurs would have
been like that too.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
You were describing how a t rex would have grabbed
its prey and would have torn pieces out of its prey,
and was doing this with these very tiny arms that
basically had no use. I was reminded that the one
place I can think of this parallel is watching a
killer whale. That if you watch them, they take on
a huge whale and they gradually devoured and it's all done,
(21:02):
of course, with their mouth. They have no limbs that
enable them to operate. Very similar, I think in a
way to how t Rex would have behaved.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, I think that's a very keen point and good observation.
And sometimes I've done this before, you know, I've called
t rex like a giant land shark, and kind of
in the same way that these you know, whether it's
big sharks, whether it's killer whales. When they're in the water,
they don't really have arms or legs anymore, not proper ones.
They have flippers to swim, and so they can't just
(21:33):
grab prey the way that say a dog or a
cat could, so they use their heads for everything. And
I think that's what t rex would have been like,
and it's a very unusual way of hunting. It's just
different than any of the big predatory animals today. The
biggest meat eater today on the land is a polar bear,
(21:53):
plenty ferocious. I mean, of course we don't want to
run into polar bears, but a polar bear could have
been swadded away by the jaws of a t rex.
So that just goes to show how much more extreme
a t rex was compared to anything that's on land today.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Do you think the evolutionary advantage of the tiny arms
was that, since they weren't necessary, they just saved the
energy of growing bigger arms. You know, some people have
argued that if they hunted in packs the smaller arms man,
you didn't bite your neighbors. Often.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
There's a lot of ideas that have been proposed. We
have a project that I'm part of that one of
my former postdocs, a really brilliant young scientist named Greg Funston,
is leading and we're working this up into a paper
as we speak. Actually we're talking about this even today
over email or getting this ready, and we have some
ideas for what the arms of t rex were for
(22:46):
or what they were not for. I think the key
thing is the arms are really small. The arms of
a t rex are only the length of our arms,
but they're much more muscular. They had a huge muss.
We can tell that because muscles leave marks on the
bones where they attach. So t Rex was weird. It
had arms that would have been the length of a
(23:08):
human arm. So imagine a bus. These were the animals
the size of a bus. So imagine a city bus
with human arms sticking out of the front. How weird
is that? That's really really obscene? Almost but those arms
were so muscular that they were still doing something. If
they were doing nothing, evolution would have got rid of them,
just like the legs of a whale. For instance, the
(23:28):
ancestors of whales had legs, they moved into the water.
They didn't need an evolution got rid of them. So
the arms of t Rex were doing something. The muscles
that are really strong on those arms were the ones
that would have been used to grab onto things. So
we think maybe they were using their arms to brace
themselves when they were feeding or when they were mating.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
When you go back to the forerunners of for example,
t Rex or Alosaurus, do they tend to have much
bigger arms.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
They do, And that's what's really intriguing. The ancestors of
t Rex, the ancestors of Alisaurus, and the ancestors of
some of these other types of dinosaurs that independently became
big predators. In all cases, those ancestors were quite small,
and the very first tyrannosaurs, for instance, were only the
(24:17):
size of dogs, and some were the size of humans.
But that's it. And they were not only small. They
had long legs, they could run really fast, they had
smaller heads, they had more delicate, dainty teeth. They were
still meat eaters, but their teeth were quite thin, and
their arms were long, Their arms were much longer. Their
(24:38):
arms had big sharp claws at the end. So clearly
these dinosaurs which were not at the top of the
food chain, these smaller ones would have been living in
the shadows of other dinosaurs, but they were using their
arms to do more things. And then over time their
descendants got bigger, probably the arms became less useful and
the head took over most of those jobs at the
(24:59):
arms had, but the arms did not become useless. They
were still doing something.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
You're always so interesting. What are you working on and
thinking about? Now?
Speaker 2 (25:28):
The big thing now in the world of dinosaurs is
that we have a major anniversary coming up, and that's
a two hundredth anniversary of dinosaurs. The very first dinosaur
that ever got a name was Megalosaurus back in eighteen
twenty four February of eighteen twenty four to be precise,
in England, and it was the first time that scientists
(25:52):
had recognized that there were these giant reptiles that used
to live, whose bones were fossilized and could be and
a lot of these bones were found by workmen and quarries,
digging canals and so on. During the Industrial Revolution in England.
First of all, and then farther around the world. So
that anniversary is coming up. It's amazing for me to
(26:12):
think about everything that's happened over the past two hundred years.
You know, two hundred years ago humans had no real
concept that dinosaurs existed. Now dinosaurs are everywhere, you know,
we take them for granted. But we've learned so much
during that time. And for me, we're working on this
t rex project. That's one thing we're doing. We're doing
a lot of work in my lab, not just on
(26:35):
dinosaur evolution, but also on mammal evolution, how mammals took
over from the dinosaurs. But one of the things we're
turning our attention to is more about dinosaur intelligence and
dinosaur senses and dinosaur cognition. Can we actually look at
fossils and say more than just oh, this dinosaur had
a big brain. Can we actually get into the head
(26:57):
of a dinosaur. Can we make comparisons to modern day
animals that might tell us something about the types of
brains dinosaurs had. How many neurons they had, you know,
the little powerhouse cells of the brain, what kind of
behaviors they were capable of, would they have recognized their
self in a mirror. Could they have navigated a maze?
It sounds totally fanciful, But there's so much experimental work
(27:20):
on the modern animals that are close relatives of dinosaurs,
birds and crocodiles, and there's so much work now on
cat scans of dinosaurs skulls that maybe we can bring
these lines of evidence together. So I'm getting obsessed with
that and part of a team. It's a big international team.
My good colleague Larry Whitmer, a great dinosaur expert who
you may know you know Ohio, is a big part
of this. And then we have colleagues in Sweden, the
(27:42):
Czech Republic who are some of the world's experts on
animal cognition and animal brains, Masospuff and Problemiamic, and we're
all starting to work together, us and our students about this.
I have a new PhD student who is just starting,
another student who will start next year, Ada Manning, and
really mead here in Britain and going to be working
on dinosaur brains and dinosaur intelligence. I think that is
(28:03):
so fascinating and I can't wait to see what we find.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Will this lead to your third book?
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Oh, the third book well, you know, I did the
dinosaur one a few years back, which again thank you
for the very kind reviewed for Fox News of the
Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs, and I followed up with
the one on mammals, the Rise and Rain of the Mammals.
That's the last time we spoke on the podcast was
all about mammals. And I do have a third in
the works and I'm just starting to write it. It'll
be with the same publishers, and it's going to be
(28:29):
about birds. So it's going to be about the origin
of birds and the history of birds, the one hundred
and fifty million years of evolution that led to today's birds.
Evolution that included routes of Earth history, penguins that were
eight feet tall, terror birds, elephant birds, birds with wingspans
almost the size of fighter jets, all the way down
(28:52):
to you know, tiny hummingbirds. All of this great, incredible
diversity of birds today, over ten thousand species of living
modern data dinosaurs. Really, that's just the tip of the
iceberg of what have been many more species of birds
that have lived over time. Sometimes birds have been the
top predators in their ecosystem. Other times birds have adapted
to do all kinds of remarkable things with their wings
(29:15):
and with their feathers, and I'm just starting to dive
into this. I'm starting to write it now this month,
the New Year is kind of my starting point here,
and this will take me about a year and a
half to write. It'll come out probably in twenty twenty six,
but keep your eyes tuned for that, and of course
I'd love to talk to you more about it when
it comes out.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That would be fascinating. It's interesting that when you look
in the Paleocene and the scene you could have imagined
an alternative with the birds actually won out because they
were certainly remarkable competitors, and the number of carnivorous birds
that were not somebody'd want to run into in a
dark alley.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
No, and you're absolutely right. There were some ecosystems after
the asteroid killed it dinosaurs, you know, t rex was gone.
That job at the top of the food chain was open,
the top predator job. Mammals eventually filled those roles, sabertooth
tigers and dogs and cats and so on, but for
a period of time in some ecosystems it was birds,
(30:15):
birds that had survived the asteroid that got bigger and
became the top predator. So in a way, dinosaurs kind
of continued their rule at the top of the food
chain in some ecosystems for many millions of years until
mammals were able to catch up and finally take over.
And I know that's going to be a big theme
I'm going to explore in the book because whenever I
(30:36):
do public talks, whenever I talk to people, especially kids,
and I say, what birds do you want me to
really talk about in my book, And almost all the
time I hear somebody say the big giant predator ones
that lived after the dinosaurs died. So I look forward
to writing about those.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
That's what makes it the most fun. I've always been
surprised when you talk about flight, for example, that I
think forty percent of all mammals or bats, yes, So
competition for using the era is much more complex than
people might.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Know it is. And I think we don't appreciate that
about bats just because most bats are nocturnal, we don't
really see them. I mean, they're small, they hide away,
they're mostly sleeping or inactive during the day, but there's
tons of them and they live almost all over the world.
And dinosaurs, though and pterodactyls as well the reptiles that
(31:27):
live during the time of dinosaurs. They evolved flight before bats,
so dinosaurs had their time continue today of course, as
birds bats are the newcomers on the scene. And really
today there's such a wealth of flying animals. We're in
an almost unprecedented time in Earth history where there's such
a great diversity of flying creatures.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Steve, I want to thank you for joining me helping
our listeners understand more about the dinosaurs and the auction
world and extraordinarily interesting issues that we're beginning to learn
how to deal with. I loved reading both of your books,
so of course your latest book, The Rise and Rain
of the Mammals, is actually a superb book. Then, because
a dinosaur person, how could I not love The Rise
(32:08):
and Follow the Dinosaurs? And I recommend both of them
to everybody. And I think that having a childlike interest
in the world that has been keeps you younger and
keeps your brain open. And I appreciate you for being
one of the great advocates of all of us understanding
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well, thank you. That means a lot, and I appreciate
you as well. You've done a lot for the field
of paleontology. You've done a lot to keep this field
in the public eye. Your interests, your enthusiasm, your work
with museums, and the things you do, like say when
you reviewed my book. These things all matter. So you know,
a big thanks for me for your help with this field.
And the last thing I'll just say is, you know,
(32:47):
any of you listening, if you're into dinosaurs as much
as the speaker and I are, and you're ever confronted
with this opportunity to purchase a dinosaur at an auction,
think about donating that to a museum. That's one of
the ways to carry on a legacy in paleontology, to
ensure that children that families for generations to come can
(33:08):
also become enthused about dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Thank you to my guest doctor Steve Brussette. You can
get a link to buy his latest book, The Rise
and Rain of the Mammals, a New History from the
Shadow of Dinosaurs to us on our show page at
neut world dot com. Newt World is produced by Gingerish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guardnsie Sloan.
(33:35):
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying news World, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
(33:55):
Newt World concern up for my three free weekly columns
at gingerishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is nuts World.
On this episode of Newts World. As many of you know,
I am a dinosaur enthusiast. I have loved studying dinosaurs,
reading about him, visiting museums since I was a young boy.
So I was struck this week when an article on
The New York Times entitled What's in a Name? The
Battle of Baby t Rex and Nano Taranus, profiling a
(00:27):
twenty million dollar dinosaur fossil for sale to David Aaron
Gallery in London. It seems there's a controversy about this
quote rare juvenile Trannosaurus rex skill. My guest today is
somebody you've heard before who's done several podcasts with those
who I think one of the most brilliant explainers of
(00:47):
paleontology alive today. He is quote one of the stars
of modern paleontology according to National Geography. He's worked on
dig sites and in labs all around the world. Was
also the paleontology advisor to the film Jurassic World Dominion.
So you can imagine how pleased I am to welcome
(01:08):
back my guest, doctor Stephen Prossatt, Chair of Paleontology and
Evolution in the School of Geosciences at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland. Steve, welcome back and thank you for
(01:30):
joining me again on Newtsworld. The number of years back,
my wife Callista had gotten me a copy of a
Nanotyrannis skull from the Cleveland Museum, which sits proudly in
our library. So I have a big interest in nanotyrannusis.
I do not have a t rex, of course, but
I wouldn't mind having one if I could figure out
(01:50):
where I put it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, mister Speaker, is always a pleasure because when we
get together and talk dinosaurs, it's a couple of guys
that love fossils, love science having chats about these things.
And you has been very kind to me for the
books I've written and to the field of paleontology in general.
You've been an enthusiast.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I have to ask you, have you ever been interviewed
before by somebody who had a Nana tyrannoskull?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Oh, you know, I've been asked a lot of interview
questions before. That's a question I've never been asked, so
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Literally, when you walk in our house, to your right,
there's a Nana Turannos skull sitting there. It's beautiful. It's
a fabulous skull. It's a cast, of course, but we
got it from the Cleveland Museum of Science, which has
a terrific collection, particularly a fossil fish.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And that's the classic skull of this dinosaur. Maybe it's Nanotyrannus,
its own species. Maybe it's a juvenile, a teenage t rex.
There's a lot of debate about that, but that skull,
which was found many, many decades ago and went to
the Cleveland Museum, that's really the keystone of this whole debate.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful fossil. So you're very lucky.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
It's either the type fossil of a new species or
it's just a baby Terrannosaurs Rex.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yes it is, and I think either of those is
very exciting. You know, Either it's a distinct species of
a smaller tyrannosaur. This animal would have been about the
size of an suv more or less, whereas t Rex
as an adult would have been the size of a bus.
So it's either its own species of smaller Tyrannus, or
it's a teenage t rex, which is pretty neat because
(03:18):
fossils of really all dinosaurs are very rare, and it's
hard to have fossils of babies and teenagers and adults.
So if we have a teenage t rex, that can
tell us a lot about how this great enormous king
of dinosaurs grew up. So I think either way, this
debate is resolved down the line. It's a very interesting
and important fossil.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So I'm curious because I'm guessing that to be called
a juvenile t rex has it listed at the David
Aaron Gowery, it must be substantially bigger than a nanoterremus.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
It's really hard to know. So there is this new
specimen of this new fossil that's for sale. I don't
know a huge amount about it. I know not much
more than has been reported in the press, including in
this New York Times article. I haven't seen this fossil myself.
I haven't studied it. I've just seen some photos. They
are marketing it as a juvenile t rex. But other people,
(04:09):
other scientists, would look at that same fossil and say,
we actually think that's a nanotyrannus, a separate species. So
really it's the same thing as your Cleveland skull. The
cast of the skull that you have at home. Is
it a separate species, Is it a juvenile t rex?
We don't really know. We just know that it is
a tyrannosaur of some type that's about the size of
(04:30):
an suv. It lived at the end of the Cretaceous Period,
about sixty six million years ago, and I do think
until there are more fossils, scientists are going to be
debating this for a long time because these dinosaurs are
so rare.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I mean, even a nana Trannus as a predator would
have been very formidable if you'd walked into him in
the evening. Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Absolutely, t Rex is the ultimate because this thing was
forty feet long, it weighed seven or eight tons, Its
head was the size of a bathtub. It could crush
us in its jaws. T Rex is the ultimate. So
if you compare any other dinosaur to t Rex, it's
gonna seem maybe a little bit more lame. But come on,
this Nanotyrannus or teenage t rex, whatever it is, was
(05:12):
a big animal in its own right. It surely would
have weighed about a ton. It could have run pretty fast,
it could have chased you down, and it had a
whole mouthful of sharp teeth, so you would not have
wanted to come anywhere near this animal.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Do you think in market value it would make a
difference in price if they concluded it was a nano
tyrannus or is it still so cool it'll probably get
the same price.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
This is something that when the New York Times reporters
were writing this article and they talked to me about it,
if they asked me this question, and it's a good
question when you're marketing something. This is something they're trying
to sell for a lot of money. Of course, you're
going to try to market that in the way that
makes it most exciting for people and most exciting for
hopefully for museums that might want to purchase it. And
(05:56):
I don't know what sounds better to you. I'm not sure. Really,
do you think a nanotyrannus is better? Do you think
selling it as a babyt rex sound? But I don't
honestly know. I think both of those things are quite interesting.
And so you see auctions sometimes where these smaller tyrannosaurs
are up for sale and they call them nano tyrannus.
So you see both and I don't honestly know which
(06:16):
one would on its own fetch a higher price, said.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I was surprised to learn that in twenty twenty two,
a Dynoonicas, which is the inspiration for the Veloci raptors
in Jurassic Park, sold for twelve point four million dollars.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I'm really surprised these dinosaur auctions and sales. Yeah, they're
happening with more frequency these days. It does seem like
we're in a period of time where dinosaurs are in
with the world of private collectors and art collectors and
so on. There's just a trendy thing happening, and there's
a lot of auctions. You hear of new auctions all
the time or new sales, and it makes sense to me, right,
(06:56):
I mean, I love dinosaurs, and there's something fascinating and
enthralling about these animals, and so some of the price
tags are getting pretty high. Some of them do surprise
me when you're getting into the many millions of dollars,
But I think it just shows that there is this
enduring fascination with these animals, and there's a lot of
people around the world that would love to have their
own dinosaur, and I totally understand that.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Well. I noticed that there's a t reaction named Stan
who was sold at auction for thirty one point eight
million dollars in twenty twenty, and he was bought by
the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. I assume
going into a museum. I mean Abu Dhabi's really working
at this tourism business. They have a relationship, for example,
with the Lover and have a sort of Middle Eastern
(07:39):
louver building, which is pretty nice, But thirty one point
eight million for a single skeleton is pretty darn and pressive.
I suspect encourages people to go out in the field,
and particularly on private land and try to find these things.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
That number when that fossil is sold, that thirty one
million number. That shocked me, and it shocked a lot
of paleontologists, and it got us worried, frankly, because if
a dinosaur goes for that much money, of course other
people are going to want to get in on the action,
and it means that there's now a really high price
a bounty if you will, the dinosaur bones out there.
(08:16):
So of course it encouraged a lot more people to
look for dinosaurs. That's a great thing. But also if
the price tags go ever higher, it makes it less
likely that museums can purchase these one of a kind dinosaurs,
more likely that they're only affordable to the ultra rich,
the really ultra rich, the kind of people that have
(08:37):
tens of millions sitting around. So I think it's a
double edged sword there. But thankfully that fossil stand that
t Rex is going into a museum, as you say,
in the Middle East, the museum still being built. I'm
very excited about that. I think it's a great thing.
First of all, that fossil will be conserved and it'll
be put on display, and it will also be put
on display in a part of the world where there
(08:58):
are not so many dinosaurs fossil. So I think this
will in a way be a great ambassador for both
paleontology and American paleontology. T Rex is an American dinosaur,
so I think it's wonderful that children and families throughout
the Middle East can go see this dinosaur in the
museum down the line we know.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I think prior to stan the most famous t Rex
purchase was by a public institution, the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago, which bought Sue for about eight
point three six million back in nineteen ninety seven, which
today be about thirteen point five million give an inflation.
But I mean, I've been out there. It's really a
(09:36):
very impressive exhibit. I mean, you can understand why some
of the donors who support the museum thought that they
would certainly be rewarded in popularity and in attendance by
having Sue there.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Sue is my favorite dinosaur of all time. I grew
up in northern Illinois, from a little town called Ottawa,
So hi, everybody out there from Ottawa who might be listening.
About seventy five mins miles southwest to Chicago, and Sue
was purchased by the Field Museum when I was a
young teenager, and I was incredibly excited. And then in
the year two thousand it was put on display and
(10:11):
I was sixteen years old, ben and I remember very well.
I tried to convince my parents to let me skip
school that day to go see the opening of the exhibit,
which was in the middle of the week. For some reason,
I think that was maybe just for journalists. I don't know,
but I really wanted to weasel my way in there
to see it. And they wouldn't let me do it.
And you know, Paul, props to my parents. They valued
education more than anything. But we did go and see
(10:34):
it very soon after, and I've seen Sue dozens of
times over the years. It is in many ways, I
feel my hometown dinosaur, and that fossil, probably more than
any single fossil, really inspired me as I was studying paleontology.
So I am thankful that that dinosaur, which when it
was sold in the late nineties, that price was exorbitant.
(10:56):
I am so thankful that a museum was able to
work with donors and sponsors to get the funding to
make sure that fossil was put on display, because there's
an alternative universe out there where an oligarch buys that
fossil and it disappears and it is never put on display,
and I never see it, and I'm never inspired, and
(11:17):
millions of others in Chicago that to visit the museum
are never inspired to. So my great hope is that
when these one of a kind dinosaurs are discovered, that
some way or another, they find their way to a museum.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Most of these do end up in some kind of
a museum environment, but I remember I think it was
the number three guy at Microsoft personally owned two t
Rexis in his home.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
If you have the Microsoft money, that'll do it. But
you're referring to Nathan Miervold, who's very well known to
us in the field of paleontology. I mean, he's a polymath,
incredibly brilliant guy, and he has done research. He's done
primary research. He's published academic papers on dinosaur fossils in
peer reviewed journals, the same ones that I publish in
(12:04):
and other scientists too, So we greatly respect him in
the field. And I think as an aside, I'll just
say that's one of the neat things about paleontology is
as a science, it is fascinating to people. It attracts
a lot of different people that wouldn't necessarily be drawn
to a lot of other sciences. So I think that
is one of those things about dinosaurs that enduring mystery
(12:26):
and fascination that brings so many people together, and he's
a great example of that.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Hi, this is newt If you live in California or
you happen to be visiting, I'd like to invite you
to my two upcoming book events in January Challis and
I are both going to be at the Richard Nixon
Library and Museum in jor Belunda on January ninth at
seven pm. Check Its are available now at Nixon Foundation
dot org. And Chlis and I are both going to
(13:04):
be at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in
Simi Valley on January tenth at five pm. Tickets are
available now at Reaganfoundation dot org. I hope you'll join
us for a book signing and a talk and a
chance to get together and kick off the new year
at the Nixon Library and the Reagan Library. I have
(13:33):
to ask you just a little bit about not just
Toronto source, but this entire group of dinosaurs who reoccur.
I mean, there's sort of a parallel evolution over millions
of years, and if you go back, I guess what,
thirty forty million years you at Alisaurus. There are a
whole group of dinosaurs who end up very similar to
(13:54):
t Rex. It is really big rear legs, really big
powerful head, and really tiny arms. And I'm curious, from
your perspective, why do you think the tiny arm giant
predator keeps reemerging.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
This is why I love talking to you, mister speaker,
about dinosaurs, because we can get in the weeds these
fascinating bits of science, and this is one of them.
T Rex is an incredible dinosaur, sublime dinosaur in so
many ways. But there were other meat eating dinosaurs over
time that also evolved to look something like t Rex,
(14:30):
to become around the size of a bus, to develop
really big heads with lots of sharp teeth, and to
make their arms smaller as they did so. And as
you say, the alosaurs are some of those dinosaurs. There's
a group called the carcarodontosaurs. I know that's a real
tongue twister, but one of the most famous ones is Jiganotosaurus,
which was the villain in the new Jurassic World film
(14:53):
from twenty twenty two, the one that I worked on.
And there's many other examples. So there seems to be
something about dinosaur where time and time again, over and
over again, these different groups of meat eaters all developed
about the same size and similar types of body. So
I think it means that there was something very successful
(15:14):
about that design about making a living, about hunting food,
about getting enough food, at being able to get enough
nutrition and cover enough area, and so on with that
type of body. And what it really is is the
head seems to get so big that it takes over
most of the functions of the arms and the smaller ancestors.
(15:35):
So in the smaller tyrannosaurs or smaller alosaurs, the ancestors
of the big ones, the arms were longer and they
had sharp claws, and they were probably used to grab
prey and to slash a prey. In the big ones,
time and time again, the arms get small, the heads
get big. The heads are probably doing almost everything. They're
grabbing the food, they're biting the food, they're killing the prey,
(15:58):
they're chopping up the prey, swallowing the prey. And that
seems to be the case. But that's very different than say,
how mammals have evolved. You know, different types of meat
eating mammals, saber toothed tigers, wolves and dogs and so on.
They don't do that. And I think that speaks to
just the differences of dinosaurs and mammals and the types
of biology they have in physiology and so on. And
(16:20):
there's so much more we could go into the book.
I did The Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs a few
years back. I have a few chapters on these big
theropod meat eating dinosaurs, because to me, they're so fascinating.
These are some of the most incredible animals I think
that have ever lived in the history of the earth.
Bus sized predators with heads that we could fit inside,
(16:43):
that crush the bones of their prey.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
They're astonishing animals. And of course they required other dinosaurs
to have grown very big in order to be able
to pray off of them. You can imagine how much
these guys had to eat in order to sustain themselves,
especially if, as some people think, they may have been
warm blooded, in which case they would have been burning
up a lot more energy than say, a crocodile does.
(17:07):
And these were apparently obviously pretty good predators in terms
of running, would have been very formidable. I mean, if
they were appearing in Montana this week, you would definitely
weakened the tourist attraction of going out in the woods
by yourself.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
You got it. I mean, these animals were feats of nature.
The thing that really impresses me about them is not
just their huge size. That's interesting enough, amazing enough, but
one of the things we now know is that these
dinosaurs they didn't just have brawn, they had brains as well.
We know they were quite smart. And the reason we
(17:44):
know that is because we use cat scanners to see
inside of the skulls of dinosaurs. So maybe many of
you listening, some of you at least have had a
cat scan and you've gone in the tube and the
X rays of the scanner, you know, allows the doctor
to see inside of you with that having cut you out,
And we can do the same with a t rex
skull of velociraptor's skull. And when we do that, we
(18:06):
can see the brain cavity, we can build a digital
model of the brain, We can measure the size of
the brain compare it to living animals, and that tells
us that many dinosaurs were a lot smarter than we
used to think. And t Rex was probably one of
the smartest dinosaurs of all. So it was a completely
formidable predator with brawn and with brains.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Well. I was at the Smithsonian one year and they
had borrowed the kind of cat scan that automobile companies used,
So they had this huge machine that they were putting
fossils in and it was fascinating to watch. But you know,
one of the points you make about the brain. You
can actually tell how an animal is adapted based on
this brain case. And my impression is that predators like
(18:49):
t rex had remarkably good vision. I mean, is that
your sense.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yes, you're correct, You're absolutely correct. We can tell that
both from looking at the brain through the cat scans.
We can see the regions of the brain that control
the sense of vision, and those are fairly large. But
what really tells us they had good vision is they
had huge eye sockets, and in t Rex in particular,
the eyes faced partially forward, so they would have had
(19:16):
three D vision, stereoscopic vision, depth perception, just like we do,
and that's actually a pretty unusual thing among animals. So
it means they could have seen in three D. They
could have seen their prey, they could have seen their environment.
That was one of their key hunting tools surely. And
we can also tell from their brain and from their
(19:38):
ears that they had a really good sense of smell,
really good sense of hearing. So these were predators that
were well endowed with the whole toolkit of senses to
seek out their prey well.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And that ability to have exquisitely effective eyesight. Their descendants,
the eagles and the hawks have very similar patterns.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yes, and that's a wonderful thing that although t Rex
is extinct and Triceratops and Brontosaurus and all of those
classic dinosaurs, they've been dead for a long time, but
the descendants of dinosaurs live on as birds, and we
can study birds. We do study birds. We love birds,
so many of us love going bird watching or have
birds as pets. And through watching birds appreciating birds, we
(20:25):
can get a sense for what some dinosaurs were like.
And birds are quite smart, birds have great senses. Birds
are active, energetic, dynamic, adaptable animals, and dinosaurs would have
been like that too.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
You were describing how a t rex would have grabbed
its prey and would have torn pieces out of its prey,
and was doing this with these very tiny arms that
basically had no use. I was reminded that the one
place I can think of this parallel is watching a
killer whale. That if you watch them, they take on
a huge whale and they gradually devoured and it's all done,
(21:02):
of course, with their mouth. They have no limbs that
enable them to operate. Very similar, I think in a
way to how t Rex would have behaved.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, I think that's a very keen point and good observation.
And sometimes I've done this before, you know, I've called
t rex like a giant land shark, and kind of
in the same way that these you know, whether it's
big sharks, whether it's killer whales. When they're in the water,
they don't really have arms or legs anymore, not proper ones.
They have flippers to swim, and so they can't just
(21:33):
grab prey the way that say a dog or a
cat could, so they use their heads for everything. And
I think that's what t rex would have been like,
and it's a very unusual way of hunting. It's just
different than any of the big predatory animals today. The
biggest meat eater today on the land is a polar bear,
(21:53):
plenty ferocious. I mean, of course we don't want to
run into polar bears, but a polar bear could have
been swadded away by the jaws of a t rex.
So that just goes to show how much more extreme
a t rex was compared to anything that's on land today.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Do you think the evolutionary advantage of the tiny arms
was that, since they weren't necessary, they just saved the
energy of growing bigger arms. You know, some people have
argued that if they hunted in packs the smaller arms man,
you didn't bite your neighbors. Often.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
There's a lot of ideas that have been proposed. We
have a project that I'm part of that one of
my former postdocs, a really brilliant young scientist named Greg Funston,
is leading and we're working this up into a paper
as we speak. Actually we're talking about this even today
over email or getting this ready, and we have some
ideas for what the arms of t rex were for
(22:46):
or what they were not for. I think the key
thing is the arms are really small. The arms of
a t rex are only the length of our arms,
but they're much more muscular. They had a huge muss.
We can tell that because muscles leave marks on the
bones where they attach. So t Rex was weird. It
had arms that would have been the length of a
(23:08):
human arm. So imagine a bus. These were the animals
the size of a bus. So imagine a city bus
with human arms sticking out of the front. How weird
is that? That's really really obscene? Almost but those arms
were so muscular that they were still doing something. If
they were doing nothing, evolution would have got rid of them,
just like the legs of a whale. For instance, the
(23:28):
ancestors of whales had legs, they moved into the water.
They didn't need an evolution got rid of them. So
the arms of t Rex were doing something. The muscles
that are really strong on those arms were the ones
that would have been used to grab onto things. So
we think maybe they were using their arms to brace
themselves when they were feeding or when they were mating.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
When you go back to the forerunners of for example,
t Rex or Alosaurus, do they tend to have much
bigger arms.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
They do, And that's what's really intriguing. The ancestors of
t Rex, the ancestors of Alisaurus, and the ancestors of
some of these other types of dinosaurs that independently became
big predators. In all cases, those ancestors were quite small,
and the very first tyrannosaurs, for instance, were only the
(24:17):
size of dogs, and some were the size of humans.
But that's it. And they were not only small. They
had long legs, they could run really fast, they had
smaller heads, they had more delicate, dainty teeth. They were
still meat eaters, but their teeth were quite thin, and
their arms were long, Their arms were much longer. Their
(24:38):
arms had big sharp claws at the end. So clearly
these dinosaurs which were not at the top of the
food chain, these smaller ones would have been living in
the shadows of other dinosaurs, but they were using their
arms to do more things. And then over time their
descendants got bigger, probably the arms became less useful and
the head took over most of those jobs at the
(24:59):
arms had, but the arms did not become useless. They
were still doing something.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
You're always so interesting. What are you working on and
thinking about? Now?
Speaker 2 (25:28):
The big thing now in the world of dinosaurs is
that we have a major anniversary coming up, and that's
a two hundredth anniversary of dinosaurs. The very first dinosaur
that ever got a name was Megalosaurus back in eighteen
twenty four February of eighteen twenty four to be precise,
in England, and it was the first time that scientists
(25:52):
had recognized that there were these giant reptiles that used
to live, whose bones were fossilized and could be and
a lot of these bones were found by workmen and quarries,
digging canals and so on. During the Industrial Revolution in England.
First of all, and then farther around the world. So
that anniversary is coming up. It's amazing for me to
(26:12):
think about everything that's happened over the past two hundred years.
You know, two hundred years ago humans had no real
concept that dinosaurs existed. Now dinosaurs are everywhere, you know,
we take them for granted. But we've learned so much
during that time. And for me, we're working on this
t rex project. That's one thing we're doing. We're doing
a lot of work in my lab, not just on
(26:35):
dinosaur evolution, but also on mammal evolution, how mammals took
over from the dinosaurs. But one of the things we're
turning our attention to is more about dinosaur intelligence and
dinosaur senses and dinosaur cognition. Can we actually look at
fossils and say more than just oh, this dinosaur had
a big brain. Can we actually get into the head
(26:57):
of a dinosaur. Can we make comparisons to modern day
animals that might tell us something about the types of
brains dinosaurs had. How many neurons they had, you know,
the little powerhouse cells of the brain, what kind of
behaviors they were capable of, would they have recognized their
self in a mirror. Could they have navigated a maze?
It sounds totally fanciful, But there's so much experimental work
(27:20):
on the modern animals that are close relatives of dinosaurs,
birds and crocodiles, and there's so much work now on
cat scans of dinosaurs skulls that maybe we can bring
these lines of evidence together. So I'm getting obsessed with
that and part of a team. It's a big international team.
My good colleague Larry Whitmer, a great dinosaur expert who
you may know you know Ohio, is a big part
of this. And then we have colleagues in Sweden, the
(27:42):
Czech Republic who are some of the world's experts on
animal cognition and animal brains, Masospuff and Problemiamic, and we're
all starting to work together, us and our students about this.
I have a new PhD student who is just starting,
another student who will start next year, Ada Manning, and
really mead here in Britain and going to be working
on dinosaur brains and dinosaur intelligence. I think that is
(28:03):
so fascinating and I can't wait to see what we find.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Will this lead to your third book?
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Oh, the third book well, you know, I did the
dinosaur one a few years back, which again thank you
for the very kind reviewed for Fox News of the
Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs, and I followed up with
the one on mammals, the Rise and Rain of the Mammals.
That's the last time we spoke on the podcast was
all about mammals. And I do have a third in
the works and I'm just starting to write it. It'll
be with the same publishers, and it's going to be
(28:29):
about birds. So it's going to be about the origin
of birds and the history of birds, the one hundred
and fifty million years of evolution that led to today's birds.
Evolution that included routes of Earth history, penguins that were
eight feet tall, terror birds, elephant birds, birds with wingspans
almost the size of fighter jets, all the way down
(28:52):
to you know, tiny hummingbirds. All of this great, incredible
diversity of birds today, over ten thousand species of living
modern data dinosaurs. Really, that's just the tip of the
iceberg of what have been many more species of birds
that have lived over time. Sometimes birds have been the
top predators in their ecosystem. Other times birds have adapted
to do all kinds of remarkable things with their wings
(29:15):
and with their feathers, and I'm just starting to dive
into this. I'm starting to write it now this month,
the New Year is kind of my starting point here,
and this will take me about a year and a
half to write. It'll come out probably in twenty twenty six,
but keep your eyes tuned for that, and of course
I'd love to talk to you more about it when
it comes out.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That would be fascinating. It's interesting that when you look
in the Paleocene and the scene you could have imagined
an alternative with the birds actually won out because they
were certainly remarkable competitors, and the number of carnivorous birds
that were not somebody'd want to run into in a
dark alley.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
No, and you're absolutely right. There were some ecosystems after
the asteroid killed it dinosaurs, you know, t rex was gone.
That job at the top of the food chain was open,
the top predator job. Mammals eventually filled those roles, sabertooth
tigers and dogs and cats and so on, but for
a period of time in some ecosystems it was birds,
(30:15):
birds that had survived the asteroid that got bigger and
became the top predator. So in a way, dinosaurs kind
of continued their rule at the top of the food
chain in some ecosystems for many millions of years until
mammals were able to catch up and finally take over.
And I know that's going to be a big theme
I'm going to explore in the book because whenever I
(30:36):
do public talks, whenever I talk to people, especially kids,
and I say, what birds do you want me to
really talk about in my book, And almost all the
time I hear somebody say the big giant predator ones
that lived after the dinosaurs died. So I look forward
to writing about those.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
That's what makes it the most fun. I've always been
surprised when you talk about flight, for example, that I
think forty percent of all mammals or bats, yes, So
competition for using the era is much more complex than
people might.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Know it is. And I think we don't appreciate that
about bats just because most bats are nocturnal, we don't
really see them. I mean, they're small, they hide away,
they're mostly sleeping or inactive during the day, but there's
tons of them and they live almost all over the world.
And dinosaurs, though and pterodactyls as well the reptiles that
(31:27):
live during the time of dinosaurs. They evolved flight before bats,
so dinosaurs had their time continue today of course, as
birds bats are the newcomers on the scene. And really
today there's such a wealth of flying animals. We're in
an almost unprecedented time in Earth history where there's such
a great diversity of flying creatures.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Steve, I want to thank you for joining me helping
our listeners understand more about the dinosaurs and the auction
world and extraordinarily interesting issues that we're beginning to learn
how to deal with. I loved reading both of your books,
so of course your latest book, The Rise and Rain
of the Mammals, is actually a superb book. Then, because
a dinosaur person, how could I not love The Rise
(32:08):
and Follow the Dinosaurs? And I recommend both of them
to everybody. And I think that having a childlike interest
in the world that has been keeps you younger and
keeps your brain open. And I appreciate you for being
one of the great advocates of all of us understanding
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well, thank you. That means a lot, and I appreciate
you as well. You've done a lot for the field
of paleontology. You've done a lot to keep this field
in the public eye. Your interests, your enthusiasm, your work
with museums, and the things you do, like say when
you reviewed my book. These things all matter. So you know,
a big thanks for me for your help with this field.
And the last thing I'll just say is, you know,
(32:47):
any of you listening, if you're into dinosaurs as much
as the speaker and I are, and you're ever confronted
with this opportunity to purchase a dinosaur at an auction,
think about donating that to a museum. That's one of
the ways to carry on a legacy in paleontology, to
ensure that children that families for generations to come can
(33:08):
also become enthused about dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Thank you to my guest doctor Steve Brussette. You can
get a link to buy his latest book, The Rise
and Rain of the Mammals, a New History from the
Shadow of Dinosaurs to us on our show page at
neut world dot com. Newt World is produced by Gingerish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guardnsie Sloan.
(33:35):
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying news World, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
(33:55):
Newt World concern up for my three free weekly columns
at gingerishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is nuts World.
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