May 23, 2013 • 23 mins
Extreme Mammals Part I: In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind series, Robert and Julie discuss the amazing world of prehistoric mammals and count down their favorite weird warm bloods from the smallest to largest.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we're doing two episodes here where we're going to talk
about extreme prehistoric mammals. I think everyone here and it
(00:23):
already knows vaguely what I'm talking about, talking about the
creatures that came post dinosaur, that we're that we're just
as weird and crazy and varied as dinosaurs, except they were,
of course mammals. They were the prehistoric mammals, the forerunners
in many cases of what we have today, just earlier models,
more outrageous models, gigantic models, tiny models, models with features
(00:45):
that we either don't see today at all or we
see just a shadow of them. And when I was
a kid, I remember spending a lot of time in
dinosaur books, of course, because I you know, I love
dinosaurs like most kids, and jumped into them. And some
of the books that I had, including the excellent McMillian
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals by Dixon, Cox,
(01:08):
Savage and Gardener. Uh, this was one of my favorite books,
and half of it is dinosaurs. Like the first half
is dinosaurs with all the beautiful illustrations of them and
how we think they might have looked. And in the
second half is all mammals and the with the dinosaurs.
You know, dinosaurs were great, Dinosaurs were awesome, but there
(01:28):
was more of this division. Like when you took in
the story of the dinosaur, you knew that something something
horrible happens, something catacause MC happened, and the age of
the dinosaurs vanished completely, and that now there's really nothing
like these creatures roaming the earth. I mean, yes, there are.
We still have crocodiles now we see to sendence of them,
and we see some some things that are that that
(01:49):
remind us more of the world of dinosaurs than others.
But but when you look at the the extreme prehistoric mammals,
when you look at things like the giant sloth, uh
like the creatures we're going to discuss these two episodes,
it's weirder because they're closer to what we have now,
but just as alien. Well because they are extreme mammals.
And we'll talk a little bit more about what is
(02:09):
extreme and what's normal, but they really do sort of
boggle the mind. Right, it's a wonderland of creatures that
you just don't normally um see out there in literature
in the media, right because Dinosourci always taking top billing.
But we're kind of we're taking the bones today of
all these really incredible creatures, dusting them off, and we're
gonna look at the oddest parts of them, what makes
(02:32):
them unique. We're going all prehistoric packing arm today. Now
you should probably mention of what sparked this. Well, we
both have seen the exhibit Extreme Mammals. We saw it
at the firm Bank Museum here in Atlanta, but it
is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, and
it has some amazing examples of of these extreme mammals
(02:55):
that we'll talk about before we get into that. Though,
I thought it would probably be good for us to
call over extinction mass extinction, uh, specifically because it's kind
of plays into this idea of of why these seems
so exotic and far removed from us. But the fact
of the matter is that extinction is just not a
modern phenomenon. In fact, all mammals and other species that
(03:17):
have ever lived are extinct. Yeah, and which is which
really drives, and it begins to drive home when you
start looking through one of these books and you're and
you realize, oh, well, there were like pages and pages
of different types of prehistoric horse that that we just
that are no longer with us, just completely gone. You know,
I was thinking that, particularly as a kid, if you're
(03:37):
flipping through that, that's gonna be really hard to get
a hold on reality, because even when four year old
will say, Okay, I get dinosaurs, and I get this
creature once lived, but but what about a mermaid really
that could live? Right, especially when you say something like
well the easter bunny, Sure that's that's totally for real.
But but yeah, I mean you look pat back at
this past which is just amazing, just riddled with these So,
(04:01):
starting about one thousand years ago, large mammals and other
species began to disappear a lot more swiftly than normal
as humans began to spread from Africa and other continents.
Then the extension rate sped up beginning about twelve thousand
years ago, and it continues to accelerate today. There were
astonishing mammals that roamed North America until about twelve thousand
(04:22):
years ago. There were beavers the size of grizzly bears,
giant beaver. Yeah, and short faced bears that stood at
about eleven feet tall or three point four meters high.
I mean, this was amazing. So besides over hunting by human,
scientists have proposed several different theories as to why this happened.
Climate change, killer plagues, a comment, right impact, or atmospheric explosion. Now,
(04:50):
truth of the matter is it's probably a bit of
a combination of all of these factors. So it's not
just humans. But you know, if you've if you've got
a comment that is hurling towards the earth, that obviously
is going to take out a big amount of the population.
And probably most famously, as you have already mentioned, uh,
sixty five million years ago, dinosaurs they disappeared in a flash,
(05:14):
and it's thought to be that there could have been
a comment and then some atmosphere changes that followed that
wipe them out. Yeah, And it's these environmental changes some
of these theories, to me, you're the most interesting because
you're you're looking as always you're looking at organisms responding
to the environment, organisms responding to to where they can
(05:35):
get resources, how they can can best take take them
in and these forms evolving over time to exploit them.
So you with with mammals, you see their maximum diversity
about fifteen million years ago, during the Miocene epoch twenty
three point oh three to five point three million years ago.
It is a time of warmer global climates than those
(05:56):
in proceeding or following periods. Now, since then, global climates
have deteriorated and the tropical regions have shrunk, and tropical regions,
of course, that's where you see the most diversity even today,
like these are. If you were to use some sort
of like business model, I guess it would be like
the capitalist wonderland of the rainforest is where all the
crazy forms can just run wild and and go nuts.
(06:18):
But then also the alternating cold and warm periods brought
on by the ice ages encourage the evolution of particularly
large mammals such as the wooly mammoth, giant deer, giant
ground sloths, and as you said, now they're all gone
over the last twelve thousand years. Yeah, and uh. In
order to really talk about mammals, we should probably discuss
what makes them uniquely mammals or mammalian river dolphin mammal, Right,
(06:43):
spiny ant eater mammal, that mammal, platypus mammal. What do
they all have in common? Well, they all got the milk.
They have the milk. They're all vertebrates, they're all warm blooded,
they all have hair on their bodies, and they all
produce milk to feed their babies with. Yeah, and these
are all excellent design feature because the memory glance. This
allows a mother to leave her offspring in the nest,
(07:04):
go out and forwards, then come back and pump them
full of supernutritious milk. The dense fur helps them retain heat,
which is an important design feature because they're warm blooded,
and that in warm bloodedness keeps them running at above
environmental temperatures, so they can remain active for long periods
regardless of the weather. The trade off, of course, is
(07:24):
that they have to eat a lot to pay the
body's high energy bills. Uh. And also you also see
with mammals they tend to have large complex brains because
they have to control an advanced nervous system and rapidly
processed sense data. Yeah and um. Some placental mammals can
nourish their growing babies in side their bodies for as
long as two years now. That's really important because that
means that their offspring are born more fully developed then
(07:47):
more stupial babies or ones that hatch from an egg. Um.
This is really cool. Whales and drafts, they're just born
with their eyes open, ready to go. Yeah, I love
I don't know if you've ever seen a love birth
of a draft, but it is amazing to see because
within like tent poles being born. Yeah, it's like a
tent being popped up, and they're a little bit wobbly
at first, but it is. It's because in an environment,
(08:11):
especially if you were a prey creature out there in
the grasslands, you gotta you gotta be ready to go.
You gotta be ready to just pop up and run
with the rest of them. There's no just lounging around
the din all day until you finally reached the point where,
you you know, go out and get that job right
where the rubber meets the road. So what makes something
extreme because it's kind of hard to say, like, oh,
(08:34):
that's that's an crazy horn because within certain groups, maybe
all of them have this type of horn on their heads,
but maybe one is just you know, four times larger
than the next, well, I mean extreme again we have distress.
Of course, we're talking about our standpoint, our bow point,
because today the idea of tiny little horses is is
(08:56):
kind of silly and ridiculous, but there was a time
when that was the model so well. And so you
really do have to look within the group though to
determine what is extreme, because you know each animal is
going to have just normal traits, just like we do.
We're we're an example at both normal and extreme traits. Uh,
And I'll get to that. But a kangaroo is a
good example. It's marsupial and uh. While some of the
(09:18):
smaller shrew like marsupials that do hop um, kangaroos are
extreme because they're the only large bipedal mammal that have
that pego stick kind of locomotion, and fossil evidence actually
dating back to million years ago indicates that their ancestors.
Kangaroo's ancestors did not hop so most likely when rainforest
(09:39):
gave way to dry grassy planes, hopping became something that
was selected for right because you wanted to get across
as quickly as possible, and that is what makes kangaroos extreme.
It's interesting because you see the same thing in video games.
Sometimes they'll give you the ability to make your character jump, which,
if you were going to play it completely straight, your
(09:59):
character would walk or run across the level, he would
not jump like a kangaroo. But the design feature will
often be such that there's no there's no additional cost
to jumping, so the player who's just focusing on getting
through the level might just jump ridiculously. That's probably a
also a ridiculous tie in to make here, but I
(10:22):
don't know, it's it's a good visual there. Um. So
I had mentioned that humans are extreme, um, and that
comes in the form of our bipedalism and as you mentioned,
big brains before relative to our body size. You know
everything else warm blooded, differentiated teeth, five fingers, and toes
pretty normal, right. You look at at all sorts of
(10:44):
species across nature and you see the same thing. Right. Well,
we're also many of us relatively hairless. And of course
that's a whole side issue that we've discussed before in
the podcast. Yes, and it doesn't have to do with
a quad gates, although that would be really cool if
it did. Yes, all right, so we're gonna take a
break and when we come back, We're going to begin
a ten part countdown of our favorite extreme mammals. We're gonna,
(11:08):
you know, start with the smallest and work up to
the biggest on our list. So we're gonna knock some
of these out on this episode and the rest will
knock out on the following episode. And I am going
to try to have a gallery up as well, so
that as you go through this, we're going to describe
these creatures, but you're gonna naturally want to see them
as well, So I'll try to make sure that we
have a gallery that you can you can listen to
(11:29):
the podcast and go through that as well and actually
look these things in the face. All Right, we're back,
and we are going to talk about the tiniest, geniest
mammal to have ever existed. We're talking about one and
(11:52):
a half inches long. Yes, this thing is amazingly small,
and uh, his name is bad and annoys, and uh,
this guy was very small. We're talking zero point zero
three three two point zero sixty four ounces um with
more likely we're looking at like one point three grams
as the general weight of these guys. And they lived
(12:14):
about fifty million years ago in what is now wyoming. Yeah,
and uh, the smallest, just so you can have something
compared against the smallest mammal alive today is the bumblebee back,
which is only slightly larger. Uh. This, uh, this little
creature here is thought to be a relative of the shrew.
And I love it. If you have cats, then you've
(12:35):
met these or pieces of these things. Yes, I love this.
Paleontologist Jonathan Block was just looking at some material underneath
a microscope when he spotted a tiny, tinyy fossil jaw
and then realized that he was looking at teeth, and
this is how it was discovered. Yeah, this guy is
crazy small and just and and and adorable. I mean,
(12:57):
that is something that's small. You can't help it find
a little adorable, even if it's kind of shrew like,
and shrews are kind of ghastly in a way. Yeah,
But to think that it could sit there and run
up your the tip of your pencil and hang out,
that's how small we're talking. Would we could crawl up
to the tip of your pencil and uh and just
sat there. It weighed as little as a dollar bill.
I feel like it would be a great writing companion, right,
(13:21):
mused if you will. But like a lot of these forms,
this this, this one one extinct. You won't find these
guys anymore. Um. And really a way to think about
a lot of these forms is think of like the
most specialized business imaginable. Say like during a boom time,
say during say that the dot com boom, you'll have
like a very specialized website that comes out. It's it's
(13:42):
trying to make money off of off of the boom.
And then when they stuff dot com No, no, we
we've we've survived. I'm kidding were I mean, we are
specialized in the information realm. Yeah, but we don't think
of any kind of like specialized, uh you know particular,
say like a bakery, a bakery that only specialized in
meat flavor donuts. Well, great, you're gonna clean up as
(14:02):
long as bacon flavored donuts are the thing. While those
are in style, you're just it's gonna be hand over
a fist. But when that goes out of style, well
then you're gonna you're gonna either have to evolve into
a different form or you're going to perish. And so
you see that with a lot of the creatures we're
going to talk about in this for a for a
period of time, that was an excellent design. But when
the environment changed, when the resources changed, when the get,
(14:25):
when the basic game changed, then uh, then that form
had to vanish. If this was alive today, do you
think that it would have, um, you know, pretty high
internet status if it could sneeze? Yeah, yeah, it could sneeze.
Anything always always helps. Yeah. Um. The next item on
our list is the horn to go for. And I
(14:47):
couldn't help but think about Calibus from Clash of the Titans.
You know, you know, the horned beast man with the whip.
Of course, fabulously I brought to life Ray Harry Howson,
who's sadly passed away this week. But but but yeah, yeah,
I can see this is this is kind of the
rodent version of that character. Uh. The rodent we're talking
(15:11):
about the hornet gopher is epic Gallus. Uh. He was
one ft long thirty centimeters lived in North America. Probably
resembled a modern marmot, except he has long, powerful claws
on the front feet and horns a pair of almost
rhino like horns that are sort of rising up from
the top of its snout. And and and I mean
(15:32):
you see these in the skulls that they have, that
they've detected these things. I mean, it's it's it's very
obviously a pair of horns. Yeah, and it's a bit
of a mystery as to what they were used for,
probably digging. Some people have said maybe it's a mating display,
but the fact that both genders have the horn would
seem really unlikely because it doesn't indicate like, I'm a
(15:53):
male with high reproductive fitness come over here, so you know.
Another clue is that they have really small eyes, which
would indicate the possibility of poor eyesight. So most likely
they're just we're, you know, hanging out, burrowing, digging a lot. Yeah,
of course, with any of these things, you're going to
find the various people have have the varying theories again
(16:14):
that it's intra species combat, it's the sexual display, that
it's defense, but yeah, they're the burrowing things. Seems to
make the most sense sance this, This would have been
a burrowing animal. It would be amazing to come upon,
I mean because it really those those horns are just
so unexpected, and I think that's probably what's so amazing
to us humans is because we are used to our
(16:35):
regular run of the Milico first. But it's probably just
as simple as you know. Here in the United States
in the Southeast, I could care less about squirrels or
they're taking over my yard. But maybe another person in
another world might think that they're quite excited. I've I've heard,
you know, accounts of people who who visit, say Atlanta,
and they have they've lived most of their lives in
(16:56):
a place that does not have squirrels. They come here
and it's amazing. They're like, oh my good us look
at these amazing creatures. And we're just like, yeah, those
are those are tree rats. That's that's what. But epigallis
a lot of fun because it's kind of like a
devil rat. Uh. And it also you can't help but
be reminded a bit of the jackalope, which of course
is a is a false creature created through taxidermy that
(17:18):
has like the head of a jack rabbit with antlers um,
which is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing to see on a
wall somewhere. But in this example of the epic Galius,
we see something just as crazy. Now, the next example
that we have on our list is a tiny horse.
It's called hieroch ethereum the dawn horse horsey a w N. Yes,
(17:39):
and it called the dawn horse because this is basically
the earliest known equit ancestor of all horses. Uh, but
rather peculiar. Would you would might not instantly recognize it
as a horse, or if you saw it today, you
might think that there was something weird going on in
your brain, like you're having a little acution episode. But
first and foremost, this tiny horse was eight inches tall
(18:02):
at the shoulder or twenty cimeters. Extremely tiny. This this
is just like completely out of scale with what we
think of as a modern horse. It's true, And I
think about it as like, oh, this is something that
I think a Russian billionaire would try to pray resurrect, right,
like for what are we gonna do with the wooly mammoth?
But if you could clone eight inch horses, yeah, and
(18:24):
start selling those, my goodness, Russian billionaire's daughters all over there.
Who wants a pony when you can have an eight
inch horse and a stable of them? Yeah, you could
be in your apartment in New York. You know, you're right,
this is perfect for the apartment dweller. Um. Now, they
were a bit different from horses in other regards as well.
For instance, they had four toes in the front and
(18:46):
three in the back, so they ended up having large,
unhorselike feet. It's true. Um so when you think about
a horse, you think about that powerful toe with a hoof, right,
it's just not a footpad, and these guys has had
more le footpads for trying to navigate the terrain. You know.
They also lived fifty million years ago during the early
(19:07):
part of the Tertiary period, and they were a pretty
wide spread throughout Europe and Asia exactly, So I mean
you'd have to go back pretty far to be able
to check these guys out. And they were probably pretty
bright because they think they had rather large and complex brains,
so they were probably very alert, you know, constantly on
the watch because they're tiny horses. And while we think
they're adorable, we would think they're adorable, the actual creatures
(19:32):
they had to share the world with probably thought they
looked delicious probably and uh, speaking of deliciousness, they were vegetarians,
so they weren't going after any meat themselves. They're having
more complai, I would hope so, because it would have
really put a dark twist on this if we finally
revealed that they were carnivores, but of course they're not.
They're they're vegetaries. Well now I'm just imagining and look,
(19:52):
you know, this eight inch horse like hanging off the
neck of a giant creature trying to take it down.
But they had a more complete series of teeth than
modern horses, which were used to feed on those soft, leavy,
leafy vegetation spots. All right, so we we've had two
tiny creatus, well, three tiny creatures so far. We've we've
talked about the uh, the the tiny pencil crawler. We've
(20:14):
talked about the horned rat, we talked about the dawn horse,
and now we're going to talk about the whale who
could walk. This was amazing to see at the Extreme
Mammals Exhibit because it it is a whale with with
four feet essentially, and it is terrifying to look at
because you know, normally think of whales as being the
sort of benevolent creatures lolling around in the waters but
(20:38):
not able to actually scramble up on a river bank
or you know, the sand and eat your foot. Yeah,
it basically kind of looks like a ten foot long
mammalian crocodile, like a flesh of dial Yeah. And one
of the cool things about this one is so a
lot of our our stories of sea monsters come from
the fact that if you if you have a whale
(20:58):
that is washed up on the beach and of its
flesh is gone, the and not not only the whale,
but other other sea mammals um with the flesh disappears,
and you're just looking at the skeleton. It looks like
a drastically different creature and you think, oh, look at
this thing. It has this slender head and it's was
living in the water. It must have been something fierce.
Well this is basically what this is, basically what this
creature looks like. Yeah, it just really looks like it
(21:21):
could take you off guard, I guess you could say,
which is the whole point of it. Right. It lived
about forty nine million years ago in the shallow seas
of what is now modern day Pakistan. Yeah, because Pakistan
back in these days, uh as an island off the
coast of of India in the Indian Ocean, yep. And
uh it weighed in about four hundred pounds pretty big. Yeah,
And of course we can look at modern whale specimens today,
(21:43):
and we we see the remnants of their their legs,
the remnants of their limbs that have not completely been
the form is not completely been abandoned in their evolution.
It's true, the front legs of whales have evolved into flippers,
and there's tiny remnants of hind legs inherited from their
landwelling ancestors which remain in this elaton, but they perform
no known function. Yeah, so it's sort of like the
(22:04):
wisdom teeth of the body. So scientists consider angle cita
is to be in early whale because it shares these
underwater adaptations. Uh, it had the adaptation of a nose
that enabled it to swallow underwater, and it's periodic bones
head structures like those of whales, enabling to hear well underwater.
And in addition, it's teeth are also similar to other
(22:26):
early whales. Indeed, all right, so this is the first
section of these extreme mammals. But do make sure to
check into the next episode because we're gonna look at
something that looks like a snuffle opicus. Yeah, this is
just the tip of the iceberg. The really weird stuff
is going to happen in the next episode. In the meantime,
you can reach out to us, you can get in
(22:46):
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(23:06):
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does it How stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we're doing two episodes here where we're going to talk
about extreme prehistoric mammals. I think everyone here and it
(00:23):
already knows vaguely what I'm talking about, talking about the
creatures that came post dinosaur, that we're that we're just
as weird and crazy and varied as dinosaurs, except they were,
of course mammals. They were the prehistoric mammals, the forerunners
in many cases of what we have today, just earlier models,
more outrageous models, gigantic models, tiny models, models with features
(00:45):
that we either don't see today at all or we
see just a shadow of them. And when I was
a kid, I remember spending a lot of time in
dinosaur books, of course, because I you know, I love
dinosaurs like most kids, and jumped into them. And some
of the books that I had, including the excellent McMillian
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals by Dixon, Cox,
(01:08):
Savage and Gardener. Uh, this was one of my favorite books,
and half of it is dinosaurs. Like the first half
is dinosaurs with all the beautiful illustrations of them and
how we think they might have looked. And in the
second half is all mammals and the with the dinosaurs.
You know, dinosaurs were great, Dinosaurs were awesome, but there
(01:28):
was more of this division. Like when you took in
the story of the dinosaur, you knew that something something
horrible happens, something catacause MC happened, and the age of
the dinosaurs vanished completely, and that now there's really nothing
like these creatures roaming the earth. I mean, yes, there are.
We still have crocodiles now we see to sendence of them,
and we see some some things that are that that
(01:49):
remind us more of the world of dinosaurs than others.
But but when you look at the the extreme prehistoric mammals,
when you look at things like the giant sloth, uh
like the creatures we're going to discuss these two episodes,
it's weirder because they're closer to what we have now,
but just as alien. Well because they are extreme mammals.
And we'll talk a little bit more about what is
(02:09):
extreme and what's normal, but they really do sort of
boggle the mind. Right, it's a wonderland of creatures that
you just don't normally um see out there in literature
in the media, right because Dinosourci always taking top billing.
But we're kind of we're taking the bones today of
all these really incredible creatures, dusting them off, and we're
gonna look at the oddest parts of them, what makes
(02:32):
them unique. We're going all prehistoric packing arm today. Now
you should probably mention of what sparked this. Well, we
both have seen the exhibit Extreme Mammals. We saw it
at the firm Bank Museum here in Atlanta, but it
is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, and
it has some amazing examples of of these extreme mammals
(02:55):
that we'll talk about before we get into that. Though,
I thought it would probably be good for us to
call over extinction mass extinction, uh, specifically because it's kind
of plays into this idea of of why these seems
so exotic and far removed from us. But the fact
of the matter is that extinction is just not a
modern phenomenon. In fact, all mammals and other species that
(03:17):
have ever lived are extinct. Yeah, and which is which
really drives, and it begins to drive home when you
start looking through one of these books and you're and
you realize, oh, well, there were like pages and pages
of different types of prehistoric horse that that we just
that are no longer with us, just completely gone. You know,
I was thinking that, particularly as a kid, if you're
(03:37):
flipping through that, that's gonna be really hard to get
a hold on reality, because even when four year old
will say, Okay, I get dinosaurs, and I get this
creature once lived, but but what about a mermaid really
that could live? Right, especially when you say something like
well the easter bunny, Sure that's that's totally for real.
But but yeah, I mean you look pat back at
this past which is just amazing, just riddled with these So,
(04:01):
starting about one thousand years ago, large mammals and other
species began to disappear a lot more swiftly than normal
as humans began to spread from Africa and other continents.
Then the extension rate sped up beginning about twelve thousand
years ago, and it continues to accelerate today. There were
astonishing mammals that roamed North America until about twelve thousand
(04:22):
years ago. There were beavers the size of grizzly bears,
giant beaver. Yeah, and short faced bears that stood at
about eleven feet tall or three point four meters high.
I mean, this was amazing. So besides over hunting by human,
scientists have proposed several different theories as to why this happened.
Climate change, killer plagues, a comment, right impact, or atmospheric explosion. Now,
(04:50):
truth of the matter is it's probably a bit of
a combination of all of these factors. So it's not
just humans. But you know, if you've if you've got
a comment that is hurling towards the earth, that obviously
is going to take out a big amount of the population.
And probably most famously, as you have already mentioned, uh,
sixty five million years ago, dinosaurs they disappeared in a flash,
(05:14):
and it's thought to be that there could have been
a comment and then some atmosphere changes that followed that
wipe them out. Yeah, And it's these environmental changes some
of these theories, to me, you're the most interesting because
you're you're looking as always you're looking at organisms responding
to the environment, organisms responding to to where they can
(05:35):
get resources, how they can can best take take them
in and these forms evolving over time to exploit them.
So you with with mammals, you see their maximum diversity
about fifteen million years ago, during the Miocene epoch twenty
three point oh three to five point three million years ago.
It is a time of warmer global climates than those
(05:56):
in proceeding or following periods. Now, since then, global climates
have deteriorated and the tropical regions have shrunk, and tropical regions,
of course, that's where you see the most diversity even today,
like these are. If you were to use some sort
of like business model, I guess it would be like
the capitalist wonderland of the rainforest is where all the
crazy forms can just run wild and and go nuts.
(06:18):
But then also the alternating cold and warm periods brought
on by the ice ages encourage the evolution of particularly
large mammals such as the wooly mammoth, giant deer, giant
ground sloths, and as you said, now they're all gone
over the last twelve thousand years. Yeah, and uh. In
order to really talk about mammals, we should probably discuss
what makes them uniquely mammals or mammalian river dolphin mammal, Right,
(06:43):
spiny ant eater mammal, that mammal, platypus mammal. What do
they all have in common? Well, they all got the milk.
They have the milk. They're all vertebrates, they're all warm blooded,
they all have hair on their bodies, and they all
produce milk to feed their babies with. Yeah, and these
are all excellent design feature because the memory glance. This
allows a mother to leave her offspring in the nest,
(07:04):
go out and forwards, then come back and pump them
full of supernutritious milk. The dense fur helps them retain heat,
which is an important design feature because they're warm blooded,
and that in warm bloodedness keeps them running at above
environmental temperatures, so they can remain active for long periods
regardless of the weather. The trade off, of course, is
(07:24):
that they have to eat a lot to pay the
body's high energy bills. Uh. And also you also see
with mammals they tend to have large complex brains because
they have to control an advanced nervous system and rapidly
processed sense data. Yeah and um. Some placental mammals can
nourish their growing babies in side their bodies for as
long as two years now. That's really important because that
means that their offspring are born more fully developed then
(07:47):
more stupial babies or ones that hatch from an egg. Um.
This is really cool. Whales and drafts, they're just born
with their eyes open, ready to go. Yeah, I love
I don't know if you've ever seen a love birth
of a draft, but it is amazing to see because
within like tent poles being born. Yeah, it's like a
tent being popped up, and they're a little bit wobbly
at first, but it is. It's because in an environment,
(08:11):
especially if you were a prey creature out there in
the grasslands, you gotta you gotta be ready to go.
You gotta be ready to just pop up and run
with the rest of them. There's no just lounging around
the din all day until you finally reached the point where,
you you know, go out and get that job right
where the rubber meets the road. So what makes something
extreme because it's kind of hard to say, like, oh,
(08:34):
that's that's an crazy horn because within certain groups, maybe
all of them have this type of horn on their heads,
but maybe one is just you know, four times larger
than the next, well, I mean extreme again we have distress.
Of course, we're talking about our standpoint, our bow point,
because today the idea of tiny little horses is is
(08:56):
kind of silly and ridiculous, but there was a time
when that was the model so well. And so you
really do have to look within the group though to
determine what is extreme, because you know each animal is
going to have just normal traits, just like we do.
We're we're an example at both normal and extreme traits. Uh,
And I'll get to that. But a kangaroo is a
good example. It's marsupial and uh. While some of the
(09:18):
smaller shrew like marsupials that do hop um, kangaroos are
extreme because they're the only large bipedal mammal that have
that pego stick kind of locomotion, and fossil evidence actually
dating back to million years ago indicates that their ancestors.
Kangaroo's ancestors did not hop so most likely when rainforest
(09:39):
gave way to dry grassy planes, hopping became something that
was selected for right because you wanted to get across
as quickly as possible, and that is what makes kangaroos extreme.
It's interesting because you see the same thing in video games.
Sometimes they'll give you the ability to make your character jump, which,
if you were going to play it completely straight, your
(09:59):
character would walk or run across the level, he would
not jump like a kangaroo. But the design feature will
often be such that there's no there's no additional cost
to jumping, so the player who's just focusing on getting
through the level might just jump ridiculously. That's probably a
also a ridiculous tie in to make here, but I
(10:22):
don't know, it's it's a good visual there. Um. So
I had mentioned that humans are extreme, um, and that
comes in the form of our bipedalism and as you mentioned,
big brains before relative to our body size. You know
everything else warm blooded, differentiated teeth, five fingers, and toes
pretty normal, right. You look at at all sorts of
(10:44):
species across nature and you see the same thing. Right. Well,
we're also many of us relatively hairless. And of course
that's a whole side issue that we've discussed before in
the podcast. Yes, and it doesn't have to do with
a quad gates, although that would be really cool if
it did. Yes, all right, so we're gonna take a
break and when we come back, We're going to begin
a ten part countdown of our favorite extreme mammals. We're gonna,
(11:08):
you know, start with the smallest and work up to
the biggest on our list. So we're gonna knock some
of these out on this episode and the rest will
knock out on the following episode. And I am going
to try to have a gallery up as well, so
that as you go through this, we're going to describe
these creatures, but you're gonna naturally want to see them
as well, So I'll try to make sure that we
have a gallery that you can you can listen to
(11:29):
the podcast and go through that as well and actually
look these things in the face. All Right, we're back,
and we are going to talk about the tiniest, geniest
mammal to have ever existed. We're talking about one and
(11:52):
a half inches long. Yes, this thing is amazingly small,
and uh, his name is bad and annoys, and uh,
this guy was very small. We're talking zero point zero
three three two point zero sixty four ounces um with
more likely we're looking at like one point three grams
as the general weight of these guys. And they lived
(12:14):
about fifty million years ago in what is now wyoming. Yeah,
and uh, the smallest, just so you can have something
compared against the smallest mammal alive today is the bumblebee back,
which is only slightly larger. Uh. This, uh, this little
creature here is thought to be a relative of the shrew.
And I love it. If you have cats, then you've
(12:35):
met these or pieces of these things. Yes, I love this.
Paleontologist Jonathan Block was just looking at some material underneath
a microscope when he spotted a tiny, tinyy fossil jaw
and then realized that he was looking at teeth, and
this is how it was discovered. Yeah, this guy is
crazy small and just and and and adorable. I mean,
(12:57):
that is something that's small. You can't help it find
a little adorable, even if it's kind of shrew like,
and shrews are kind of ghastly in a way. Yeah,
But to think that it could sit there and run
up your the tip of your pencil and hang out,
that's how small we're talking. Would we could crawl up
to the tip of your pencil and uh and just
sat there. It weighed as little as a dollar bill.
I feel like it would be a great writing companion, right,
(13:21):
mused if you will. But like a lot of these forms,
this this, this one one extinct. You won't find these
guys anymore. Um. And really a way to think about
a lot of these forms is think of like the
most specialized business imaginable. Say like during a boom time,
say during say that the dot com boom, you'll have
like a very specialized website that comes out. It's it's
(13:42):
trying to make money off of off of the boom.
And then when they stuff dot com No, no, we
we've we've survived. I'm kidding were I mean, we are
specialized in the information realm. Yeah, but we don't think
of any kind of like specialized, uh you know particular,
say like a bakery, a bakery that only specialized in
meat flavor donuts. Well, great, you're gonna clean up as
(14:02):
long as bacon flavored donuts are the thing. While those
are in style, you're just it's gonna be hand over
a fist. But when that goes out of style, well
then you're gonna you're gonna either have to evolve into
a different form or you're going to perish. And so
you see that with a lot of the creatures we're
going to talk about in this for a for a
period of time, that was an excellent design. But when
the environment changed, when the resources changed, when the get,
(14:25):
when the basic game changed, then uh, then that form
had to vanish. If this was alive today, do you
think that it would have, um, you know, pretty high
internet status if it could sneeze? Yeah, yeah, it could sneeze.
Anything always always helps. Yeah. Um. The next item on
our list is the horn to go for. And I
(14:47):
couldn't help but think about Calibus from Clash of the Titans.
You know, you know, the horned beast man with the whip.
Of course, fabulously I brought to life Ray Harry Howson,
who's sadly passed away this week. But but but yeah, yeah,
I can see this is this is kind of the
rodent version of that character. Uh. The rodent we're talking
(15:11):
about the hornet gopher is epic Gallus. Uh. He was
one ft long thirty centimeters lived in North America. Probably
resembled a modern marmot, except he has long, powerful claws
on the front feet and horns a pair of almost
rhino like horns that are sort of rising up from
the top of its snout. And and and I mean
(15:32):
you see these in the skulls that they have, that
they've detected these things. I mean, it's it's it's very
obviously a pair of horns. Yeah, and it's a bit
of a mystery as to what they were used for,
probably digging. Some people have said maybe it's a mating display,
but the fact that both genders have the horn would
seem really unlikely because it doesn't indicate like, I'm a
(15:53):
male with high reproductive fitness come over here, so you know.
Another clue is that they have really small eyes, which
would indicate the possibility of poor eyesight. So most likely
they're just we're, you know, hanging out, burrowing, digging a lot. Yeah,
of course, with any of these things, you're going to
find the various people have have the varying theories again
(16:14):
that it's intra species combat, it's the sexual display, that
it's defense, but yeah, they're the burrowing things. Seems to
make the most sense sance this, This would have been
a burrowing animal. It would be amazing to come upon,
I mean because it really those those horns are just
so unexpected, and I think that's probably what's so amazing
to us humans is because we are used to our
(16:35):
regular run of the Milico first. But it's probably just
as simple as you know. Here in the United States
in the Southeast, I could care less about squirrels or
they're taking over my yard. But maybe another person in
another world might think that they're quite excited. I've I've heard,
you know, accounts of people who who visit, say Atlanta,
and they have they've lived most of their lives in
(16:56):
a place that does not have squirrels. They come here
and it's amazing. They're like, oh my good us look
at these amazing creatures. And we're just like, yeah, those
are those are tree rats. That's that's what. But epigallis
a lot of fun because it's kind of like a
devil rat. Uh. And it also you can't help but
be reminded a bit of the jackalope, which of course
is a is a false creature created through taxidermy that
(17:18):
has like the head of a jack rabbit with antlers um,
which is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing to see on a
wall somewhere. But in this example of the epic Galius,
we see something just as crazy. Now, the next example
that we have on our list is a tiny horse.
It's called hieroch ethereum the dawn horse horsey a w N. Yes,
(17:39):
and it called the dawn horse because this is basically
the earliest known equit ancestor of all horses. Uh, but
rather peculiar. Would you would might not instantly recognize it
as a horse, or if you saw it today, you
might think that there was something weird going on in
your brain, like you're having a little acution episode. But
first and foremost, this tiny horse was eight inches tall
(18:02):
at the shoulder or twenty cimeters. Extremely tiny. This this
is just like completely out of scale with what we
think of as a modern horse. It's true, And I
think about it as like, oh, this is something that
I think a Russian billionaire would try to pray resurrect, right,
like for what are we gonna do with the wooly mammoth?
But if you could clone eight inch horses, yeah, and
(18:24):
start selling those, my goodness, Russian billionaire's daughters all over there.
Who wants a pony when you can have an eight
inch horse and a stable of them? Yeah, you could
be in your apartment in New York. You know, you're right,
this is perfect for the apartment dweller. Um. Now, they
were a bit different from horses in other regards as well.
For instance, they had four toes in the front and
(18:46):
three in the back, so they ended up having large,
unhorselike feet. It's true. Um so when you think about
a horse, you think about that powerful toe with a hoof, right,
it's just not a footpad, and these guys has had
more le footpads for trying to navigate the terrain. You know.
They also lived fifty million years ago during the early
(19:07):
part of the Tertiary period, and they were a pretty
wide spread throughout Europe and Asia exactly, So I mean
you'd have to go back pretty far to be able
to check these guys out. And they were probably pretty
bright because they think they had rather large and complex brains,
so they were probably very alert, you know, constantly on
the watch because they're tiny horses. And while we think
they're adorable, we would think they're adorable, the actual creatures
(19:32):
they had to share the world with probably thought they
looked delicious probably and uh, speaking of deliciousness, they were vegetarians,
so they weren't going after any meat themselves. They're having
more complai, I would hope so, because it would have
really put a dark twist on this if we finally
revealed that they were carnivores, but of course they're not.
They're they're vegetaries. Well now I'm just imagining and look,
(19:52):
you know, this eight inch horse like hanging off the
neck of a giant creature trying to take it down.
But they had a more complete series of teeth than
modern horses, which were used to feed on those soft, leavy,
leafy vegetation spots. All right, so we we've had two
tiny creatus, well, three tiny creatures so far. We've we've
talked about the uh, the the tiny pencil crawler. We've
(20:14):
talked about the horned rat, we talked about the dawn horse,
and now we're going to talk about the whale who
could walk. This was amazing to see at the Extreme
Mammals Exhibit because it it is a whale with with
four feet essentially, and it is terrifying to look at
because you know, normally think of whales as being the
sort of benevolent creatures lolling around in the waters but
(20:38):
not able to actually scramble up on a river bank
or you know, the sand and eat your foot. Yeah,
it basically kind of looks like a ten foot long
mammalian crocodile, like a flesh of dial Yeah. And one
of the cool things about this one is so a
lot of our our stories of sea monsters come from
the fact that if you if you have a whale
(20:58):
that is washed up on the beach and of its
flesh is gone, the and not not only the whale,
but other other sea mammals um with the flesh disappears,
and you're just looking at the skeleton. It looks like
a drastically different creature and you think, oh, look at
this thing. It has this slender head and it's was
living in the water. It must have been something fierce.
Well this is basically what this is, basically what this
creature looks like. Yeah, it just really looks like it
(21:21):
could take you off guard, I guess you could say,
which is the whole point of it. Right. It lived
about forty nine million years ago in the shallow seas
of what is now modern day Pakistan. Yeah, because Pakistan
back in these days, uh as an island off the
coast of of India in the Indian Ocean, yep. And
uh it weighed in about four hundred pounds pretty big. Yeah,
And of course we can look at modern whale specimens today,
(21:43):
and we we see the remnants of their their legs,
the remnants of their limbs that have not completely been
the form is not completely been abandoned in their evolution.
It's true, the front legs of whales have evolved into flippers,
and there's tiny remnants of hind legs inherited from their
landwelling ancestors which remain in this elaton, but they perform
no known function. Yeah, so it's sort of like the
(22:04):
wisdom teeth of the body. So scientists consider angle cita
is to be in early whale because it shares these
underwater adaptations. Uh, it had the adaptation of a nose
that enabled it to swallow underwater, and it's periodic bones
head structures like those of whales, enabling to hear well underwater.
And in addition, it's teeth are also similar to other
(22:26):
early whales. Indeed, all right, so this is the first
section of these extreme mammals. But do make sure to
check into the next episode because we're gonna look at
something that looks like a snuffle opicus. Yeah, this is
just the tip of the iceberg. The really weird stuff
is going to happen in the next episode. In the meantime,
you can reach out to us, you can get in
(22:46):
touch with us, you can check out the gallery that
goes along with these episodes. And you can do it
all by going to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership, that's where everything we do winds up
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(23:06):
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