Fossil Action Scenes: Dino Birth and Prehistoric Combat

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from house up
works dot com. The allosaurus attacks, his teeth plunge like knives.

(00:30):
The Diplodocus's skin turns ragged and red. The allosaurus bites deeper,
his claws gripped her belly. A frightened diplodocus roars to
the herd. Another diplodocus swings his rump sideways. His bony
tail snaps like a whip through the air. The allosaurus
falls back, his eyes sting like fire. The mother quetsoco

(00:55):
Atlas jerks backwards in fear. She hears her maid calling
as he flies overhead. Too late. The dromeo Saurus attack.
They swallow eggs hole, they rip leathery wings. The quetso
co Atlas swoops down as near he dares he sees
and understands. He turned sharply away. I am quetzo co Atlas.

(01:20):
The ground trembles below me. I glide over the rock
ledge and soar into the sky. Hey, you welcome to
stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert I gotta ask, when
you are at home reading dinosaur books with your son,
do you read them out loud in that Tulsa Doom
voice you just did. Yes, if I can get away

(01:41):
with it, I use voices, but sometimes he just says,
use your regular voice, dad, and I I have to
oblige or he could just grow up thinking that Fulsa
Doom is his dad. Well, these books in particular really
really encourage a very dramatic reading. Now who wrote these

(02:02):
two we were looking at it was two different books. Yes,
now these are. One book is called I Am Quetzalcoatlas
and the other one is I Am Diplodocus. These were
written by Karen Wallace and illustrated by Mike Bostock. Now,
you sent me a link to these on Amazon, and
I went and looked it up, and it is so
funny because there is just one star review is coming

(02:23):
out the eye sockets. People are mad about these books. Yeah,
the first of all, I want to get out there.
These are great books. I highly recommend. These are five
star books in my opinions. These are these are dinosaur
children's but dinosaur children's books. And uh. And when I
say I love them, I'm not being like ironic, like,
oh it's a horrible book, and you know it's but
I but I find something weird about them. Now, these

(02:44):
are these are great dinosaur books, but they are a
bit dark, or at least they're a bit realistic. You know,
so many dinosaur books are like kids having adventures with
dinosaurs or things are kind of whitewashed. No, these these
books encourage the child to look through the eyes of
of of an animal living in an in an ancient time, uh,

(03:07):
competing for resources, having to deal with the relentless predators,
encountering death and injury, and and I think all the
ones I've read end in death. Uh. But and it's
weird because when I read the first one to my son,
which I think was the quets solco Atlas one, I
was reading it for the first time allowed to him,

(03:28):
and we were getting to the violence, and then we
were getting to the part where the male Quetsoco Atlas
flies over and sees his family consumed by predators, and
I was like, oh my god, my kid's gonna lose it.
This is too dark, this is too violent. He doesn't
he makes a skip over predation and documentaries. He's not
crazy about super dramatic scenes in children's movies, so I

(03:53):
didn't think he'd be able to handle this, but he did.
He loved it, and and he has this, I don't know,
an interesting disconnect where if it's dying a saur violence,
it's okay. If he has a whole book about like
it's called The Death of the Dinosaurs, it's a kid's
book in which it's just it's basically Corman McCarthy's The
Road with Dinosaurs, Death after Death after Death. And he

(04:13):
and after we read it, he was like, oh, that's
a great book. I love that. Yeah, there is no
God and we are his dinosaur prophets. Uh. And indeed,
one of the reviews for the uh for the book
by Karen Wallace, I am a t rex Ryan Toronto
Tyronosaurs Rex. Uh. One of the one star reviews, someone said,
this reads like a Cormy McCarthy novel. They did, and
I agree with them, but in a good way, in

(04:35):
a five star way. A lot of these one star
reviews featured lots of direct quotes from the books, like
lists of words ripping, slicing, slashing, tearing, and thieving. I'm sorry, whoever,
I just quoted from the internet, but uh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean there there is a certain way in which
I understand how dinosaur violence can seem different than violence

(04:59):
the it's taking place in the present. I mean, for
one thing, we definitely do have a time desensitization mechanism
in our brains. And in the same way that if
you hear about how yesterday a thousand people were massacred,
that is a heartbreaking tragedy. But if you hear about

(05:20):
how a thousand years ago a thousand people were massacred,
it's fodder for jokes. It just doesn't it just doesn't
resonate in the same way. I guess it was no
less tragic then, but it just really doesn't hit you.
And dinosaurs may suffer from that, but I think they
also are subject to a kind of conditioning in the

(05:40):
brain that comes from dinosaur illustrations, which is that, at
least in my mind. Maybe maybe this is not true
across the board, but when I scan my memory of
dinosaur illustrations from my childhood, they're always action scenes. Something
violent is happening or is about to happen. It's not
just lots of pictures of you know, some herbivore standing

(06:01):
around in the water, drinking water, eating leaves, maybe a
carnivore just basking in the sun. There's always feeding imminent
or or fighting taking place. Something's leaping at something else,
mouth open, claws extended, they're wrestling. I think of that, Uh, well,
this wouldn't be dinosaurs, but it would be prehistoric animals.

(06:22):
I think of that iconic image of the saber tooth cat,
and it's some other scavenger I don't remember what, maybe
a dire wolf fighting over a mammoth carcass. Yeah, I
mean paleo art is rich. There's there are a lot
of just wonderful works there. I mean, especially when you're
dealing with with actual painted paleo art and and not
some of the c g I stuff. You find a

(06:43):
lot of the times now and you do have scenes
of like peaceful duck built dinosaurs out in the water.
But the ones that stick with us, and the certainly
the ones that I remember from dinosaur books to chin
and then I'm rediscovering now with my almost five year old,
are these scenes, like you say, I'm drum attic encounters
of a one dinosaur battling another herbivore versus predator duking

(07:06):
it out in a prehistoric landscape. I mean, that's the
stuff that draws us in usually also there's like a
volcano or roughing in the background. Why is that, Well,
you know, I guess tying in like the whole extinct,
like the the extinction of the dinosaurs is wrapped up
in them. They're like the Norse gods, of of of
prehistoric creatures. True, yeah, they existed for like tens of

(07:28):
millions of years, and yet in our minds they're constantly
going extinct. But but you're right, there's almost always a volcano.
It's like two animals fighting volcano in the background. Crazy
like the fight scenes you see for dinosaurs, Like how
often do you encounter something that climactic even in our
biggest blockbusters, like two to combatants battling killing each other

(07:51):
as a volcano erupts in the background. Um, it's crazy stuff.
I guess that's how it's got to be. And you
know what, it's probably not the fact or not the
case that that's really what the dominant art is is.
Just that's what I remember. I think you it makes
an impact. You know, you've probably called that out right.
But one thing that's kind of cool is that you

(08:12):
don't have to go to fiction to find a few
of these crazy action scenes from the prehistoric world, and
this brings us to our topic today. Robert, you suggested
this episode and the idea is fossil action scenes. Now,
what made you want to do this? Was it just
reading these books? Yeah? It was really um. I mean
I encountered stories about some of the some of these

(08:34):
major finds before. But when I read to my son
about dinosaurs, I I read some of these kids books.
But we also go through the Macmillian Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, which is an older book, and
certainly as we read through it, we have I have
to remind myself that I'm not dealing with a recent text.
It's like twenty or maybe thirty years old at this point,

(08:55):
so it's probably got some outdated info. But man, those
illustrations make up for that is gorgeous. Us. I'm looking
at it right now. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous book. Imagine
some of you listening and grew up with it as well.
But it makes mention of some of these As we
read the more in depth discussions on these these different
fossil finds, it'll mention. Oh yeah, there is an encounter
between protoceratops and this particular predator. Uh and and and

(09:19):
we've learned a lot from what this creature consisted of
based on this fossil find. Now you might be wondering, well,
why why would that be such a special thing. I mean,
these animals live for millions of years and they get fossilized.
So why wouldn't we see all kinds of action scenes
in the fossil record? Why is that a rare and
wonderful thing to come across? Well, you have to think

(09:40):
a little bit about the conditions under which fossils arise
to understand why this really shouldn't happen all that often. Yeah,
and really it makes it makes these encounters all the
more amazing. So so yeah, stick stick with us here
as we dive into just how fossilization occurs. Right, Okay,
So when we think of fossils, were usually thinking of bones,

(10:01):
But that's actually a little bit narrow because a fossil,
in reality, as the term would be used by somebody
who works in paleontology or biology, is a physical remnant
of any kind left behind by an organism that lived
in a previous geological age. So these could be things
like preserved footprints or eggs or nest sites, burrows, things

(10:24):
like that are sometimes fossilized. Or of course it could
be the things were more familiar with body parts themselves.
If it's more recent, it might even include maybe uh,
soft tissue encased in ice or resin and stuff like that.
But more often with the much longer extinct animals we're
talking about, uh, fossilized bones, these geological entities that come

(10:45):
up from the bedrock. Now, the vast majority of animals
that die don't get fossilized. And you can probably figure
this out if you just do a little mental math
about how many organisms have ever existed and how you're
not constantly wading through fossils on planet Earth. Um, there
are a bunch of hurdles you have to pass through

(11:06):
to turn from a regular dead animal into a fossil.
First of all, fossilization is going to strongly prefer animals
with hard body parts, right, you want to have bones, teeth, shells,
animals that don't have hard body parts. If you're a
jelly fish or a slug or something like that, you're
almost always going to decompose entirely and just disappear into history. Also,

(11:31):
fossilization depends very much on the environment. It's much more
likely to happen in an environment that promotes rapid burial,
because you can think about it, it's pretty intuitive. Actually,
the longer a dead organism lies exposed to the open environment,
the you know, the seafloor or the air or whatever
it might be, the more vulnerable it is to all

(11:51):
kinds of pressures that would destroy it. So this could
be scavenging, scavenging by animals, decomposition by microbial life, erosion
by forces like wind and tidal action and stuff like that,
and just general destruction. If you're sitting out in the open,
the parts of your body, even the hard parts of
your body, you're gonna get worn down and destroyed over time. Yeah,

(12:14):
I mean I always think that too. When I when
I was a kid and I lived in a rural area,
we'd go the same way to school every day or
into town every day, and there was a dead fox
at one point, and every maybe it was a coyote,
I can't remember, but every time you pass, there'd be
a little less of it, would be a little more scattered, because, yeah,
a body is going in a natural environment, it's just

(12:35):
gonna be scavenged and torn apart, and then it's going
to break down like that. That coyote is never going
to be a fossil. Uh. The route where I walk
my dog Charlie has of late had a slowly settling
pile of fur with a couple of visible jawbones and
teeth and stuff. Not sure what that was. At some

(12:56):
point it was something mammalian. Uh. And yeah, you you
just watch it over time disappear. So, yeah, that's what
happens out in the open. So for this reason, if
you want to turn into a fossil, if you want
to be preserved, you want to be in a sediment
forming environment. That would be an area like the bottom
of the sea floor, where there's a good deposition of
sediment on top of you. And this is one reason

(13:18):
you're going to see way more fossils of water dwelling
animals than you do of land dwelling animals. But rapid
burial can also happen in some other situations, for example,
on land where there are sand dunes and the desert
that might quickly bury an animal body that you know,
if a sand dune collapses or gets blown by wind
over the body or in an area where some kind

(13:38):
of moving water flow. Alluvial areas can wash sediment over
the body and bury it that way. Of course, over time,
we know what happens to sediment under pressure. It gets
turned into rocks and solidified in various ways. But even
if an organism is quickly buried, that doesn't necessarily mean
it's going to turn into a fossil. Then you you've

(13:58):
still got a few hurdles, one of which is that
it has to undergo some geological transformation. When you come
across dinosaur bones in the museum, they're not really the
bones of the dinosaur that you're looking at. What what
you're looking at as a kind of geological photocopy in
a sense. Uh So. One of the processes by which

(14:22):
this happens is known as per mineralization. And this is
when you've got groundwater that trickles around and through a dead,
buried organism, and as it trickles through the organism, it
carries these minerals with it, dissolved minerals in the water
and leave some of them behind. So the mineral laden
water fills all these little microscopic gaps and pores in

(14:45):
your bones, and it deposits some of those minerals that
it carries in those empty spaces, and then over time
these minerals accumulate and crystallize throughout the structure of the bone,
essentially turning the bone into a rock in the shape
of the original bone. I have to admit, like looking
back on my own history of dinosaurs, I think I

(15:05):
had a sense of sadness when I learned for the
first time that dinosaur bones are not actual dinosaur bones,
that they are their fossils. Of course, it's it's still amazing,
but but I think I feel like there's there's a
certain sadness that can sink in when you when you
first have to realize, oh, this is it's not as
simple as the bones of the creature that I'm trying

(15:27):
to imagine. Well, while these processes do go on, I
can't say for sure that it's like none of the
original bone is left. I'm not actually sure about that.
You know, some part of it may remain in in
the process like per mineralization. Of course, I also have
to add that when you're at the museum, you're also
looking at you might be looking at a specimen for
which and there there is no complete skeleton, and they're like,

(15:49):
you know, casts created based on projections. And in some
museums you might go to, especially smaller museums, you might
be looking at an entire replica as opposed to actual fossls,
and a good museum will tell you the difference. I mean,
for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
I remember going through their big fossil exhibits. They would
have illustrations alongside the reconstructions that would show you sometimes

(16:14):
like what part was original and what part was recast.
So you have this per mineralization process, but then you've
also got this process known as replacement, and this is
similar but sort of more more total, more holistic, and
organism's body is buried and then it disappears because it
gets decomposed, maybe my microbial life or gets dissolved through

(16:36):
chemical reactions with the soil or the groundwater gets washed
away and eroded, and what you're left with is a
cavity in the ground in the shape of the original structure.
So you might have like a cavity in the shape
of a skeleton or a shell or a bone, and
then this cavity gets filled in with some other mineral,
creating a sort of mineral cast in the same shape

(16:58):
as the original organ in structure. Then, of course there
are other ways. There is for example, carbonization where organisms
get squeezed between layers of sediment and leave this carbon
imprint that sometimes happens to like plants and insects. Then
there would also be resin in casing, which we all
know from Jurassic Parks seeing the mosquito and the amber.

(17:20):
Things can be frozen and ice, of course, like we
see from the previous ice age. You might see a
mammoth frozen and ice. And then things can be for example,
buried in tar, like in the tar pits. So there
are a lot of ways things can be preserved across
the geological eons. But despite all these different ways that
it can happen, it doesn't happen that much. Only a

(17:41):
very small portion of the animals that exist get preserved,
and then only a small portion of those that get
preserved actually get found by us. So we have a
have a very limited sampling of what there once was
on planet Earth. But another thing to think about is
not just the scarcity of fossiles, but the process by
which they're created. It doesn't tend to favor action. You know,

(18:07):
you're you're not likely to catch a fossil of an
animal in mid behavior where it's clear what was happening.
Something was dead, was probably very very often moved around
by some water currents or something like that, so you
don't really necessarily get a sense of what was going
on in this animal's life. Yeah, fossil evidence of feeding

(18:28):
behavior or any kind of like really key life moments
are exceedingly rare. And it's that it's always worth remembering
that the fossil record itself is inherently incomplete. You're not
gonna never gonna have a complete fossil record because, as
we've discussed, like the limits of fossilization, that all the
criteria that have to be met a stand in the

(18:48):
way of that um And I don't mention this to
cast doubt on what we have or the you know,
the visions of the past that we derive from our fossils.
It's just that we're left to figure out the shape
of what came before with an in complete jigsaw puzzle
that has no box right heart of the cover. And
it's Joe discussed here to begin with, sediment has to
cover in organisms remains in order for the long fossilization

(19:10):
process to begin. Most organisms decomposed before this can happen.
Fossilization odds increase if the organism happens to exist in
large numbers or lived in and around a sediment. So,
for instance, trilobytes meet both criteria. Tons of them, they're
on the ocean floor, They're very well represented in the
fossil record. Not so great for a lot of these

(19:31):
great wonderful land predators you'd want to see, Yeah, like
something like a t rex that that would have been
an apex predator. I always think of a pyramid, a
pyramid of bones, okay, and your apex predator is seated
on a throne at the top of this pyramid. So
you can only have so many pyramids based on the
bones and the bodies and the life force of the creatures.

(19:53):
And so your apex predator that's gonna be a really
rare fined. Yeah, I mean, the ecology can't support lots
of them in the place, so there's not that many
to choose from. And then it's also existing in circumstances
that make it less likely to get fossilized when it dies,
right and then you know, and that's why we have
we have a number of species out there where we're
basing the entire species on me maybe even just a

(20:16):
few different bones, you know, or at least an incomplete skeleton.
And then plus fossils might be set in stone, but
they're far from impervious. Like all rocks, they can erode,
they can melt, they can fragment. So even once fossilization occurs,
that doesn't mean they're gonna last. It also doesn't mean
that somebody didn't build a church over it at some point.
And it's now and so you know, it's a UNESCO
World Heritage Site now, and you'll never get that juicy

(20:40):
like you know, three t rex of feeding fossil extravaganza
that's trapped underneath it. You know, there's so even if
fossilization happens, we might never see it. So even when
you do wind up with the fossil jigsaw puzzle pieces
you need, you still have to figure out how they
fit together. You have to imagine the missing pieces. Uh,
there's been a long process in which we've continually refined

(21:03):
our understanding of the form of these dinosaurs. We're still
continuing to refine our understanding of what they looked like,
how they behaved. I mean, you look at something like
the iguanadon the spike thumbed creature, one of the earliest
dinosaur finds who's got two thumbs and got illustrated in
a very weird way. Yeah, you look that guy, because

(21:26):
if you look at those illustrations, the body just changes rapidly.
T Rex is another one where we've we've had some
some distinct changes over time and how we interpret its
bodily positioning and uh, you know, so a lot of
the time we can only guess at the shape. We
can form theories about the shape, and the same goes.
The same holds true for how different prehistoric species would

(21:48):
have interacted with each other based on their forms and
the behavior of existing animals. Evidence of dinosaurs feeding, as
we said, is exceedingly rare, but every so often the
fossil records record throws us a real hum dinger. They
give us an action scene preserved in stone. So that
is what we're gonna be looking at for the rest
of the episode. But I think we should take a

(22:09):
quick break first, and when we come back we will
get into some of these amazing fossil action scenes. All right,
we're back now, Robert. Before we actually take a look
at these fossil action scenes, one thing we should keep
in mind is that we should say again, you can't
always look at a fossil and know how and where

(22:30):
an organism died, right because a lot of remains are,
for example, moved around by water currents before they get
buried and fossilized. Uh, it might call to mind you
can imagine like a big alluvial floodwater deposit where a
bunch of bones get washed into the same place, and
then you could come along as a future archaeologist and

(22:51):
dig this up and look like, oh, there was an
ancient monster battle here, this is where the battlefield was
and all the creatures fell. But really what you're looking
at as a place where the bones were moved to
along a you know, a path, the path of a
river or or a flood deposit or something like that.
So we do need to keep in mind that you
always have to approach a fossil site with skepticism to

(23:15):
look at the surroundings, to look for clues to figure
out if what you're looking at is a true, you know,
institute scene or if it's some something that has been
altered by the environment or by the behavior of animals
or something like that. Indeed, keep that in mind at
all time. So let's go ahead and launch into it here. Uh,

(23:35):
it's kind of fun to think of this as a
as a big fight card, like a you know, like
a like a sort of wrestling term or you know,
you know, like a boxing wrestling and then a type
of situation where you you have the card right the
opening matches, the mid card, and then finally the main event. Robert,
I think you're more into the fighting arts than I am. Well,

(23:55):
probably some of the fighting arts, but here we're talking
about the dinosaurs were fighting arts, and with our first case,
we're actually gonna we're gonna kick off with just prehistoric
mammal fighting arts. So it's time to look at the
showdown of the Colombian mammoths. So these were placed to
scene epic animals. Colombian mammoths about one point five million

(24:17):
years ago until around ten to thirteen thousand years ago.
They lived in North America, stretching down into ice Age
Central America. And Uh, these things were big. They were
bigger than their cousins, the wooly mammoths we know about
the Colombian mammoths could grow up to about thirteen feet
tall way maybe eight to ten tons or so. And

(24:38):
so I want to set the scene for how these
fossils are discovered. In nineteen sixty two, there's some workers
who are, according to one account I read, installing some
electric lines, and another account I read they were doing
some surveying. So I'm not sure what's the true story there,
but they were out working on a ranch in the
Nebraska Panhandle. So that's western Nebraska. It's a sparsely populated

(25:00):
part of the state, but it is a place where
you can come across some ancient fossils. And near this
tiny town of Crawford in western Nebraska, they came across
the leg bone of an extremely large animal, and they
took this leg bone wrapped in some feedsack to a
paleontology student named Mike Vorhees who was brought in for excavation.

(25:24):
Why are you Why are you grinning? Well, and I'm
just certainly wondering if there's a connection to Jason Vorhees. Yeah,
well it's spelled differently. This is I e s all right,
all right, I'll try and force the mental image out
of my mind. Yeah, but I mean both bone kings
of a sort. Now vorhes Is brought in and he
discovered that there was not one, but two male Colombian

(25:48):
mammoths fossilized together in the same site. Why together, Well,
it looks like they died fighting each other. As I
said a minute ago, the columbia In mammoths are related
to the smaller, more northern dwelling wooly mammoth, and mammoth's
lived in Europe and Asia since about two point five
million years ago or so, and they are not the

(26:10):
ancestors of existing elephants. I think that might be a
common misconception, but instead their cousins of elephants along a
different line of elephant like creatures. They're more closely related
to Asian elephants than to African elephants. And Asian mammoths
are believed to have migrated to North America over the
Bearing Straight Land Bridge about one and a half million

(26:30):
years ago or so, and they had evolved into the
form we recognize as the Colombian mammoth by about one
point one million years ago. So they occupied North America,
stretching down into Central America up to about the southern
border of Canada, so you can think about them all
throughout the the United States area on all in the plains.
I've heard that they've been found, uh, pretty pretty far

(26:52):
east and pretty far west. Wooly mammoth's tended to live
farther up north in like Canadia. Canadia, I said it
you Canada and Alaska. Now, the Columbian mammoths could live
about seventy or eighty years, so that's a nice lifespan.
And once they were adults, they really had no natural predators.
They're huge now. When they were children, of course children.

(27:15):
The that is that the term for mammoth's juvenile mammoths
were preyed upon by the standard carnivores of the time,
maybe sabretooth cats and things like that. I guess it
would be a calf, right, calf, an elephant calf? Is
that right? I think that's probably right. We'll go with it. Now,
mammoths show sexual dimorphism in the tusks, with the males

(27:37):
having these longer, heavier tusks than the females, and sometimes
the Columbia tusks could grow up to about sixteen feet long.
I think about that. This is on an animal with
a body length and maybe thirteen to fifteen feet. So
the tusks are these gigantic weapons. And these animals wind
extinct sometime between thirteen thousand ten thousand years ago, probably

(27:58):
due to a combination of climate change in human hunting
that we don't really know for sure. Have you got
an illustration here? Oh? There it is. Man, look at
those massive tusks and they're they're kind of hooked in
inward and they're not uh, not underhanded sloping up, but
like hooked around like a grasping claw or something. And

(28:18):
now to get back to the fossil find that young
paleontologist Mike Vorhees who worked on the excavation in nineteen
sixty two, he stuck around with the project and there
was a two thousand six article on NPR News where
they interviewed him and he was describing the original discovery
and he said, quote, once we got to the skull,
it turned out, well, there's one tusk. There's two tusks. Oh,

(28:42):
three tusks. What's going on here? Even a young student
realizes that an elephant only has two tusks. So it
gradually dawned on us that we actually had two animals
locked in a death struggle and probably the most exciting
single fossil I've ever seen. Now, Robert, I have attack
for you a photo of this where you can kind
of see what's happening here. Now, scientists more recently believed

(29:05):
that the two mammoths that are fossilized in this scene
were very likely in this testosterone fueled bull elephant phase,
each about forty years old, fighting over mating opportunities, and
it appears they were well matched because the fight led
to this entanglement of the tusks, which somehow killed them both.
So you've got the two skeletons locked face to face

(29:29):
with tusks entwined. One of the mammoth's tusks is gouging
into the eye socket of the other, so that that
would make a good what's her name, Wallace book right
his his eyes gouged. It hurts immensely. Yeah, you this
this illustration of the skulls and the tusks intertwined like
this would make a really gnarly tattoo. Yes, it would,

(29:53):
that would be. Yeah, it's like a metal band album
cover kind of thing. It's it's for real Now, the
fight between these two mammoths was probably a lot more
dangerous than the average mammoth fight, and it's because both
of these mammoths had one of their tusks broken off
and thus shortened. And this actually made it more lethal
than one of these would have normally been because it

(30:15):
allowed them to get in closer for fighting, and since
they got in closer than would normally be possible, it
led to this tangling of the tusks that killed them. Now,
it's probably the case that their deaths came slowly, or
at least one of their deaths came slowly, with one
of the two bowls dying before the other one and
then pinning into the ground by the face. And in

(30:37):
this state they would have been unable to reach food
or water, but also would have been vulnerable to opportunistic scavengers.
And this, this aggressive fighting between male mammoths can possibly
be chalked up to the glory of what's known as must.
There are you familiar with this concept, Robert Musk the
smell of the scent no, no, no, must, must with

(30:58):
a thh, not with a kill? A familiar with? Okay?
So must? Is this kind of this problem? This is
not the right way to say it, but I want
to characterize it this way. It's like a recurring murderous
puberty in male elephants. More literally, what it is is
a hormonal period lasting up to weeks and even months,
when a bull elephants body begins to produce about sixty

(31:21):
times the amount of testosterone normally found in male elephants,
and during this period, known as the must, bull elephants
secrete a substance called tempour in from the temporal glands
on the sides of their head. You can see pictures
of them where it looks like they're just using some
gross orange fluid from their temples. Uh. But it also

(31:43):
alters their regular behavior, so they become much more violent
and aggressive. Elephants that are that work with humans in
these periods become much more dangerous to work with. And
they also emit this noise known as a must the rumble,
and they can be seen I watched video of this
doing this display called tusking the ground where they will

(32:04):
stab their tusks into the soil um and I think
they're multiple theories on why exactly they do that, but
it looks pretty threatening. I'm not sure if it's meant
to look threatening, you know. I I certainly watched the
number of documentaries detailing elephants, but but I feel like
most of them tend to focus on the female herds.

(32:25):
Ye in the matriarchal order there, because you have the
the elderly females, uh, leading and then you have the
younger females, and then you have the the young the
calf's following around. And in the males they live separately.
And now that you've described their behavior at times, you
understand why they have to live outside the house, right,
so when they go into a must period, you just

(32:46):
don't want to be around them. They're no good uh.
And so it's it's not unknown actually for for other
types of animals to engage in these than these mutually
deadly male dominance encounters. For example, stags sometimes go into
male dominance conflicts where they get their antlers hopelessly locked.
You might remember from last year there was the discovery

(33:07):
of these two bull moose in Una lucklyit Alaska. Oh yeah,
I think I remember this. Yes, So they're frozen in
ice with their antlers locked, and it looks like what
happened in this case was that the two moose were
in a fight over mating rights, and they got their
antlers stuck together, and then they drowned, and then the
water that they drowned in froze. This also happened sometimes

(33:30):
with male white tailed deer and elk who they have
these antlers and they locked them together in these dominance displays,
and sometimes they get their antlers entangled during fights over
mating and territory, and once they're stuck together, they can
become exhausted and die and sometimes even be eaten alive
by coyotes, and their vulnerable state even crazier. Here's another

(33:52):
thing I came across male dominance entanglement swans. Did you
see this video? It went viral a while back, but
there were the two photographers in Latvia named Alexander and
Vitali drov And in two thousand nine they filmed this
encounter where they had a pair of swans that were
just hopelessly entangled by the wings and necks, floating pathetically

(34:16):
in a pond, just kind of paddling around randomly, looking
on the verge of death, and the two men came
up to them. I from what I've read, by the way,
don't don't try this because swans can actually be very
aggressive and dangerous. Yeah, so don't try to mess with swans.
But the two men were unable to untie the knot

(34:37):
of birdnecks and wings and the two swans, you would
you'd have to see it. It's crazy. They are in
a knot. They're just completely twisted around each other. And
once they finally get all this stuff untangled, the two
swans just scramble away, and without this intervention, it looks
like they probably would have died. But in a National
Geographic article about this incident, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum

(34:59):
bird expert Brian K. Schmidt says that they were probably
also male swans who were fighting overbreeding territory. So with
all these animals, from swans to stags to mammoths, it
often probably doesn't come to a physical fight, right, and
two males are going to be making threatening displays at
one another and then the less dominant one is going

(35:19):
to run away. But sometimes this doesn't happen in the
situation escalates into this genuine battle of strength, and I
just think it's kind of odds is a strange poeticism
to it that there's this tendency of male animals across
all these different classes of life to put up fighting
displays for the right to mate with females, only to
end up in an eternal death embrace with their enemy

(35:42):
and usurper. Yeah, to remove them from themselves from competition. Yeah,
for the for the thing that they're after feels somehow metaphorical.
Well that is, that is one heck of an encounter.
It's one of these where you can look at you
can look at the fossil evidence you can, and then
you can imagine conflict and and just just see these

(36:03):
behemoths locked up with each other and just battling to
the death. Yeah. It's also kind of sad though, to
imagine what they looked like once they were on the ground,
maybe once one of them has died and they're just stuck. Yeah,
I don't know. It's an ignominious end for a for
a powerful beast. I agree. Well, you know, if that,
if that's the story of an end, I think we

(36:25):
should discuss the story of a beginning. So we're on
the lower still on the lower card here, so it's
time to you know, we can include some some fossil
action scenes that are less combative in nature. Well, I
should hope, so come on, yeah, because certainly bring the peace,
love and understanding. Yeah, because the animal interactions don't have
to include violence. They can of course include mating. They

(36:48):
can also include birth itself or or the the care
for young. Right, And that's why we turn now to
the it feels saurus all right, Yes, And what we're
dealing with here is it the osaurus live birth. And
this this now blew me away when I've heard about it.
Here's something that's interesting to me. I didn't know that

(37:09):
I theosaurs would have live offspring. I just would have
assumed they laid eggs because it seems like they're sort
of half reptile half fish, both of which lay eggs. Right. Yeah,
And we and certainly when we think of aquatic reptiles,
we think of existing examples that are the very sea turtles, who,
as as as I think most of us know, have

(37:29):
to return to shore to lay their eggs and then
go back to sea. So what we're dealing with here
are are athosaurs, in many cases specifically the Ichthyosaurus. There
are several varieties. The time here is early Jurassic to
early Cretaceous. Location Europe Greenland and North America and these uh,

(37:49):
these specimen. These organisms were generally up to six ft
six inches long or two ms long. So the athosaurs
were the fish lizards the name applies. They were indeed
highly specialized marine reptiles. They ruled the seas, ranging far
and wide throughout the early Triassic times for roughly one
million years. I love these guys and I actually have

(38:13):
a bumper sticker on my car of of one done
by the local Atlanta artists our land. Uh it I
interpreted as an ichthiosaura. It might just be a funky dolphin.
But but but I see it, and I think, knowing
our lands, I have googly eyes. It does have strange eyes.
But you know, the funky dolphin thing is is is

(38:35):
apt because indeed, when you look at a skeleton or
certainly a work of paleo art, the Ichthyosaurus does look
very much like a weird dolphin, and paleontologists believed they
would have probably occupied the same ecological niche uh. The
origins are unclear, but they likely evolved from a land
reptile rather than another aquatic one. That is really interesting.

(38:56):
Of course, now we know that these these marine mammals
evolved probably from land dwelling mammals. Right, They were land
dwelling mammals that moved back into the water. And now
we see the same thing happen with reptiles, but earlier. Yeah,
it's mind blowing to see the evolution of a basic
form across a different species. So you have, you know,
the shark, the tune of the dolphin, the athosaurs. It

(39:18):
makes me wonder if you know, some distant water world
on another planet, Uh, you're gonna have creatures that are
very different in many respects but still end up taking
the basic form of the athiosaur or the dolphin. Yeah,
it seems widely successful. So we talked earlier about you know,
the what helps a creature become a fossil if it

(39:40):
lives in the water, but it lives in a near sediment,
and if it's around insufficient numbers and the ethos are
definitely lines up with this. It's an animal that we
know very well from the fossil record, based on several
hundred complete skeletons, many stemming from early Jurassic fossils recorded
in shallow waters now shale in southern Germany. And and

(40:01):
these are these are some excellent fossils because in many
cases there's a thin film of carbon around them that
indicates the exact shape of their bodies while they had flesh.
So so it's not just a matter of you know,
when you look at some of the dinosaurs uh skeletons,
you'll see varying theories about like, well, maybe this one
had some sort of um like an inflatable growth on

(40:25):
its head, especially with the duck build dinosaurs, or just
stuff about skin texture and feathers and things like that. Yeah,
we don't always have enough fossil events to really fully
imagine the flesh, but with the atheosaurs we do. We
have this carnibon outline that tells us the shape they
had in life. We also have a fossilized poop or
corporate lights. We have the stomach contents in some cases,

(40:49):
so we know what they ate, mostly fish and some cephalopods,
and we even have remnants of pigment cells to suggest
a dark reddish brown colorization. Now you might be well,
whine with an animal that lives in the water or
want to have like a dark ruddy, you know, kind
of color, And there there's a theory that they may
have used this dark colouration to to heat up rapidly

(41:11):
between deep dives into the cool depths for fish. Whoa, yeah,
so again, they basically had the same role as a
modern dolphin, and paleontologist believed they may have become extinct
due to later competition with the increasingly advanced sharks of
the cretation. Now that's funny because I love sharks, but

(41:31):
it's hard for me to think of sharks as advanced. Well,
this was a time when they were. They were the
hot new model. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they
are the dinosaurs now, I mean so yeah, it's certainly
we do have these amazing prehistoric sharks, right, I mean
the Megalodon, krotoxy Ryan and all these. But this was
a time when the atostars ruled the world, the world

(41:52):
the seas for for this long stretch of time. But
then the sharks got more advanced and they likely outcompete
them for resources. Now, one cool thing about the ichthyosaur
is that if it's occupying a similar to the dolphin
and it evolved for the same way, it's probably not
going to be a gill breathing organism, right, but it's
an air breathing organism. Right. Yeah, everyone agrees they were

(42:13):
air breathers, there's no getting around that. But they seem
to get around the necessity of returning to shore to
lay their eggs as other uh you know, extinct and
existing marine animals, marine reptiles must And that's where the
action packed fossil comes into play. Not a fossilized bit
of combat, but a seemingly fossilized live birth whole, or

(42:34):
at least that's what the fossil evidence suggests. So there's
there's been some debate in the past on whether this
might have been near stomach contents. Uh. You run into
similar cases of interpretation, like you have some some bodies
grouped together. Is there just it's just just some accidental
overlay here, Um, what's going on when we look at
these But the consensus now seems to be that that

(42:56):
we do have fossil evidence of embryos and live earth
sometimes scattered outside of the body. And there's some discussion
over whether this was due to explosion after death, like
the body bloats up and then burst right. Um. Early
arguments that they might have given birth on land gave
way to uh an aquatic consensus at least with the

(43:18):
with with with many of the athios are species, evidence
shows that they were born tail first to prevent drowning
breach by nature. Now this being said, In two thousand fourteen,
uh Ryosuki Motani of the University of California Davis and
colleagues published research concluding that a fossil i specimen of

(43:39):
the athiosaur Chao Hu sais this is the oldest of
Mesozoic marine reptiles that lived approximately two forty eight million
years ago. Uh They showed that the partial skeleton which
was recovered in China may show a live birth. It
features three embryos and neonates, one inside the mother, another
exiting the pell us, with half the body still inside

(44:02):
the mother, and the third outside. Interestingly enough to study
concluded that these specimens might have given birth on dry
land due to the head first positioning of the emerging
young So this would have been an older example. So
we can imagine how how this might have developed into
the full uh at sea live birth that the majority

(44:24):
of the atheosaurs engaged in. God, it's crazy to imagine
that this must not be all that weird for the
majority of life on Earth. But but I don't know.
All doing all of the life stuff, mating, giving birth,
all in this marine environment with nothing to grab a
hold of. I mean, and it's crazy to think too,

(44:46):
that this is a form that evolved from a terrestrial creature.
You basically encounted the same, the same blocks, the same,
the same struggle to try and imagine, uh, just the
the scope of evolution over the course of time periods
that humans just simply did not evolve to fathom totally.

(45:06):
Now I've got another one for you, Robert, in the
same scope, getting away from the fighting more towards the
reproduction and nurture. Uh, this one's gonna be short, but
in a group of German scientists reported, I thought this
was amazing, the first known find of a pair of
vertebrate animals fossilized in the active mating. So it's a

(45:30):
pair of turtles from about fifty million years ago or so.
It's described in the article Caught in the Act, the
first record of copulating fossil vertebrates by Walter G. Joyce
at All in Biology Letters in and these turtles were
discovered in the Eocene Messil Pit fossil site in Germany,
which is a site of an ancient lake that's produced

(45:52):
tons of fossils, and the turtles in question were Aliachellis
crassus sculpta, an example of what's known as the pig
nosed turtle, and the authors used the fact that the
two turtles died in the coital position to infer something
interesting about the lake, or at least this was their
their conclusion. Not everybody agrees with it. But when these

(46:13):
types of turtles mate, the smaller male mounts up on
top of the back of the larger female, and once
they're in the copulation position, they tend to sort of freeze.
They just sort of stopped moving around and they do
their thing and they're frozen in position. Now, of course,
if they're frozen in position and it happens out in

(46:34):
open water, the couple of turtles will tend to sink
down into the water during the mating process. And what
the authors de do is is that the mating began
on the surface waters which were inhabitable fine, and then
sank down into the abyss hole section of the lake,
which they hypothesized was toxic. And this is their explanation

(46:57):
for why this lake has produced so many fossils. That
that the abyssle section of the lake is has some
kind of dissolved I think they were talking about dissolved
CEO two that would be toxic to animals that have
some kind of respiration quality in their skin. And so
as the mating pair sank lower during mating, their skin
absorbed poisons and they died in the act, only to

(47:19):
be buried and fossilized in the sediment below and now
pointed and then laughed at by everyone. Well, I like
how this this story starts out feeling like a James
Bond love sequence, like from Russia with love needs to
be playing over, you know, Da da da da da,
and then it turns deadly. Yeah, as it always does. Uh,

(47:40):
But yeah, I thought that's kind of interesting. You can
look up the picture of the two turtles. They are
joined in their fossilized state, uh, and it's kind of
an interesting thing to look at. So yeah, as turtles
mating always always are. If you ever go to the zoo,
you you may encounter mating turtles, and it's all it's
always worth gazing at and listening to because it's generally

(48:03):
there's a lot of grunting involved. I'm not sure have
you seen the YouTube videos of turtles trying to mate
with various objects such as shoes and bowls. No, I
have not. Yeah, they tend to make a kind of
squeaking sound that's cute. I will have to look those up.
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, we're going to get back into the combat. Alright,

(48:30):
we're back, So we're finally going to get back into
the combat, and we're going to get back to the
to some of the dinosaurs that everyone's properly familiar with.
You've been itching for a fight, haven't you. Yes, I have.
And enough enough of this love, enough of this reproduction
and birth. Yeah, and we're definitely in terms of the
big fight card. We're into the upper mid card now,

(48:54):
so it's time for some really hard hitting action. And
when you when you think about dinosaur combat, there are
a few names that are gonna be on that list,
and I guarantee for most people, I mean, for modern listeners,
this one might even be up at the top, but
I think it's probably two or three, maybe four, and
that is the Velociraptor. Now, I wonder if wasn't there

(49:15):
some TV show that does these historical matchups where it's
like who would win in a fight between a velociraptor
and a medieval night Probably there was some show like
this wasn't there, so it sounds like something that would
be on that I didn't watch. Samurai versus Velociraptor. Well,

(49:35):
advantage probably goes to the velociraptor. Just just off the
top of my head without really crunching with data. Uh,
these will tell me why these were pretty terrifying creatures.
So late Cretaceous is the time period the location asia
modern day Mongolian parts of China. These guys were six

(49:56):
ft long or one point eight meters long, so there
an growth the family Dromeo Saraday and they look pretty
much like the creatures you know and love from the
Jurassic Park movies, but with three major differing factors here.
So first of all, we know now that they had feathers,
likely iridescent feathers, Okay, So I don't think that takes

(50:19):
away from the terrifying nature of the velociraptor. I know
a lot of people don't like it. I love it.
I think that's even better. But birds are scarier than lizards. Yeah,
birds are scary. And you know what, you don't have
to like it. That's what the science says. Uh. They
had feathers and they were terrifying. You don't have to
like it to be eaten. They don't care. The velociraptor
doesn't care if you're if you approve, if it's uh,

(50:40):
if it's plumage. And second, the head is all wrong
in the movies. Okay, so the actual velociraptor probably had
a head that was you know, it is a long, low,
flat snouted head. It looked more like an alligator. And
a third it was it was This was a smaller
creature than you see in them, of vise. It was
about the size of a large dog, not as tall. Yeah, yeah,

(51:04):
a bit longer. So the creature you see in Jurassic
Park is actually patterned after Udnonicus, which is a close
relative in the same family. So Michael Crichton basically wrote
about Dnonicus, but thought, hey, velass velociraptor sounds cooler. We'll
just make it be Adnonicus and then we'll call it

(51:25):
of a loci raptor. Now I don't know if this
theory is correct, but I have read that people essentially
figured out why Crichton chose the name of velociraptor, and
it's that they think he was using as a major
research resource for Jurassic Park, this one particular book by
this author who had an idiosyncratic view of Dinonicus and

(51:48):
thought that it was a velociraptor of a different type.
So I have read that. I don't know if that's correct,
and I guess I guess Michael Crichton has passed on
and we can't ask him, but but I have heard
that's jested as how that mix up happened. Okay, so
he might have had a little more excuse there as
opposed to just it sounds cooler. But regardless, we know

(52:08):
better now, and we're still depicting these Jurassic Park movies.
They're still making more, aren't they. Yeah, they're still making more,
and they're still depicting the velociraptor as Adnonicus without feathers,
which I think they have a responsibility to to fix that.
I mean, granted, nobody's going in and watching Jurassic Park
or Jurassic World or whatever. The next one is going

(52:29):
to be called as their hopefully as their primary educational
dinosaur documentary. Hopefully that's not also where you get your
info about chaos theory, right. But but on the other hand,
like this is still like a prime visualization of dinosaur life.
I mean, it's it's a it's amazing footage. They're putting
all this money into it. Why not make it match

(52:51):
up with our current understanding of the fossil record. I
why not have some some feathered dnonicus or just go ahead,
have feathered velociraptors. Because the thing is, even though they
were smaller than what you see in the movie, they
still would have been deadly, especially if they were hunting
in a pack. Yeah. Yeah, I mean think how scary
that would be to get get attacked by these tiny things? Yeah,
or you know, dog size thing. Nobody wants to get

(53:13):
eaten by a pack of dogs as tiny as a
relative word or a tiny relative to what they were.
And it's certainly in the dinosaurs seen a scheme of things.
So no matter how you shake it, the raptor was
indeed a member of the terrible cloud lizards group here,
all of which were swift, fearsome hunters, probably pack hunters

(53:33):
in many cases. Uh, there's controversy about that we can
get into it, get back to especially concerning Denona, because
they would have had large brains, elongated sickle shaped claws
on the second toe of each foot, and uh as
the as Jurassic Park indicates. They would have been clever girls.
But they were probably not as smart as cats or

(53:54):
dogs are today, so don't get too excited about that.
They couldn't have, you know, piloted a helicopter, so you
think maybe smart for dinosaurs, but not as smart as
the movies would have you believe. Probably mean that's probably
a larger conversation, right, because I've seen my car to
try to open a door, So who's to say that

(54:15):
a dinosaur couldn't open a door. We'll leave that one
for another another episode. But will your cat run with
your motorcycle gang? Oh well no, probably not. I think
she would. She would flatly refuse to do that. Okay,
we'll leave Jurassic World out of this now. Now tell
us about the other contender here, Robert, all right, the
other contender is Protoceratops. This one you've seen many pictures

(54:36):
of this one before. It was a common dinosaur, and
it's essentially a smaller tri Serratops. Smaller horned dinosaur, but
without any of the without any of the horns, say
for a sort of nose bulge. Okay, now it does
have like a frill, right, yes, it does have a
broad neck frill. And this was primarily to to anchor

(54:57):
muscles for the heavy toothed beak and aw, so it
was and it and its one horn was more of
a crest, and this crest was larger and older males,
suggesting it was probably used in mating battles. It walked
on all fours, though it may have been able to
run on its back legs when needed. So this is
where we get a really important dinosaur combat fossil, also

(55:20):
known as the fighting dinosaurs. Uh and this was This
was a nine find in Mongolia, and it seems to
show a deadly battle between a velociraptor and a protoceratops
roughly seventy four million years old. One interpretation is that
the raptor is eviscerating its prey with its claws, while
the protoceratops is caving in the predator's chest with its

(55:43):
horned beak. Another interpretation is that the raptor is slicing
open the throat and the Protoceratops is biting down on
the raptor's right arm with its beak. Either way, it's
a deadly tableau that indicates they died at the same time.
UM A Polish Mongolian team discovered it in the White
stand Zone cliffs of the Southern Gobi Desert and it's

(56:05):
considered a national treasure of Mongolia and you can you
can see it on display in the Mongolian Dinosaur Museum
in ulm Pitar. I've never heard of that museum before,
but Mongolia is a treasure trove of fossils. I bet
that place is awesome. Yeah. I tried to go to
the website but it was down. I would certainly love
to hear from anyone who's actually been there. So interpretations

(56:28):
vary on this encounter, Like you know, certainly it's an encounter.
Nobody seems to be doubting that, but some look to
it as a preserved example of a common encounter like these.
This was the common predator and this was the common prey,
and this kind of thing went down all the time
in the past. Others have argued that it might have
been a chance encounter between two species that didn't have
much to do with each other. Um this, and this

(56:50):
illustrates some of the problems with basing everything you know
about prehistoric species interaction on a single bit of evidence totally.
But that's not all. Luckily so, a two thousand ten
study published in the journal paleo Geography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology revealed
some corroborating fossil evidence uh so that we're talking about

(57:13):
Upper Cretaceous deposits uh in inner Mongolia UH that features
a mass of badly eroded Protoceratops bones. Among them, they
found two velociraptor like teeth and bite marks, So the
paleontologists stressed that this uh, this raptor in this case
likely scavenged its meal. But this find and the fighting

(57:36):
dinosaurs of find indicate that the creatures probably regularly fed
on Protoceratops, both as hunters and scavengers. And they point
out that almost all living carnivores do the exact same
thing with their core prey species. You would rather just
come across a dead one and eat that without having

(57:56):
to struggle, But if you're starving, you'll yeah, or or
likewise that maybe you know, maybe you prefer the thrill
of the kill that the fresh meat. Though of course,
any interaction like that is going to bring the risk
of injury or death. Uh, and injury for a predator
can be a major thing. Like I remember researching these

(58:18):
these cases where male cheetahs develop a strategy for bringing
down an ostrich, which generally isn't on the menu. And
one of the reasons is taking down an ostrich is dangerous.
And if you're a cheetah that depends on high speed,
an injury can mean starvation because it's not like you
can just go on the shelf and recoup and then
get back in the game. Now that that could be
a death sentence. Um, So yeah, taking on dangerous prey

(58:43):
is dangerous. Well, that is a perfect segue into our
next conflict, which is the showdown between Tanantasaurus and Dynonicus.
So now we're gonna be looking at what are assumed
to be a standard predator and prey species of North America.
So Tanantasaurus, which is uh that means sinew lizard lived

(59:05):
in the early Cretaceous a little more than a hundred
million years ago in North America, especially western regions, and
it's about six to eight meters long, up to around
two ms high, about two thousand to hundred pounds, and
then we're back to Denonicus. Uh. That's the genus that
includes the species Denonicus and tirapists. That's also Early Cretaceous,

(59:27):
same same time period, pretty much a hundred million years ago,
roughly uh, North America, United States, and Denonicus is up
to about three and a half ms long, maybe a
little more than a meter high, usually about a hundred
and fifty pounds, so also not huge. You know, we
were just talking about the smallness of the raptor um.

(59:48):
There is a great story about this fossil tableau I'm
about I'm about to explain. But the story is by
Desmond Maxwell and the December nine to January two thousand
issue of Natural History magazine, which I think that's the
magazine put out by the American Museum and Natural History,
I think UM. And it's describing the work of the
Yale Peabody Museum paleontologist John Ostrom and others in understanding

(01:00:14):
Dononicus largely through its relationship with its supposed prey to Nontosaurus.
So John Ostrom is now known as this really important
very influential twentieth century paleontologist, and he's widely associated with
our current understanding of dinosaurs as the ancestors of modern birds.
People had gone back and forth in the paleontology community

(01:00:35):
about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. I think during
the eighteen hundreds people associated dinosaurs with birds, but then
a lizard model seemed to take over, and then the
bird model started coming back. So in the mid nineteen sixties,
Ostrom was working on fossil fossil excavations in the Cloverlely

(01:00:55):
Formation in Montana and Wyoming. I think this was southern Montana,
and on the last day of the digging season in
nineteen sixty four, Ostrom discovered a composed scene of fossil
bones that was totally unlike anything he had encountered in
his work before, where there were five specimens in total
at this site. Four were small therapods. Now, when you

(01:01:18):
think therapod, that's sort of the velociraptor or tyrannosaurus kind
of model, you know, two legs, the that that kind
of thing, and then pieces of one large ornithopod. Her
before in the site where these were discovered came to
be known by the Yale excavation crew as the shrine site. Yeah,

(01:01:39):
it evokes this kind of holy mystery. Neither of these
species had been described in the scientific literature before, though
I think denonicas skeletons had been found, They hadn't just
they just hadn't really been described by scientists. And the
small therapods were most noticeable for this one huge hook
shaped claw found on each foot, and this in them

(01:02:00):
their name Denonicus, also of course means terrible claw. Meanwhile,
this one large herbivore was called Tanantosaurus, meaning sinew lizard.
It's kind of they should have called it like gristle lizard. Now,
because of the arrangement of the fossils, Ostrom came to

(01:02:20):
a strange conclusion. These four predator carcasses lie, you know,
they lay buried around the remains of one large prey animal,
and because of the nature of the area. Looking at
how the bodies were oriented and some stuff about the sediment,
Ostrom didn't think the bones could have been washed into
the plate into that place by moving water. The fossils

(01:02:42):
appeared to be lying in the place where the animals died,
so he concluded that Denonicus was a pack hunter. Now
you remember this from Jurassic Park, right, their pack hunters,
you know all that. So the scene, as you should
imagine it, is that a pack of around eight denonic
becus attacked, wore down, and killed this much larger prey animal,

(01:03:05):
the Tanantosaurus, but not before about half of the hunting
pack was injured and killed in the struggle. And now
this interpretation has remained very controversial. Scientists go back and
forth on it. In Jurassic Park, we do see the
stand in for the Denonicus executing these complex pack hunting behaviors,
but real evidence for this kind of pack hunting behavior

(01:03:26):
has been kind of elusive. And the article basically mentions
three main lines of evidence that the Didonicus were pack hunters.
One of them is the arrangement of bones itself, the
weird way the bones are laid out at the shrine. Now,
it's fairly certain that the fossilized animals died in the
position where they were found. And here's one good piece
of evidence. After a dinosaur dies, tendons in the vertebrae

(01:03:51):
cause a curling up of the neck and the tail
spine along the backbone essentially, and this is why you
sometimes see dinosaur falls with their necks curled back in
these crazy positions, as if screaming in pain. You know
what I'm talking about. Uh. This is generally thought to
be called caused by this contraction of the vertebral tendons

(01:04:14):
as the animal rots. Now, in the specimen the Tenantosaurus,
the tail and neck were heavily curved towards each other,
making it almost impossible that the body had been moved
around by water currents. It looked like this is where
it was when it died. So if multiple Denonicus died
alongside this one large Tenantosaurus at the same time and

(01:04:36):
in the same place, what would explain that other than
some deadly fight for survival? Uh? So, the Tenantosaurus is
certainly large enough to batter, crush, and kill the relatively
small predators. Right that it wouldn't be one Dnonicus versus
a Tenanto sourus wouldn't be much of a fight. The
prey animal is much bigger. Uh. Then again, if a

(01:04:58):
pack of eight attacked the this one prey animal and
half of the pack died, that does not sound like
a sustainable hunting strategy. That is that that that is
that does not pay off for the hunters here, right,
So was it a fluke? Are we seeing some incredibly weird,
rare event where the predators desperate and starving? There's an

(01:05:19):
alternate explanation of the site, which is that the denonicus
were scavenging. The ideas that a bunch of dnonicus came
across the corpse of a dead tenanta sore and somehow
died in the feeding process of scavenging on it. But
then you're faced with another odd question, what killed him? Like?
Why did all these different denonicus die while scavenging this

(01:05:40):
one corpse? The scavenging interpretation that has been advocated by
the prominent paleontologist Jack Horner, And I want to read
a quote from the article I described It said, quote
Horner likens the idea of a Tenantasaurus killing four dinonicus
to that of a lone willed to best dispatching four lions. True,

(01:06:00):
the will to beast is bigger than the lions, right,
but it just seems kind of crazy thinking it would
like kill all these predators. But back to the quote, Yet,
an adult will to beast might weigh from fifty to
a hundred pounds more than an adult lion, compared with
the difference of about a ton between the Tenantosaurus and
the Dynonicus preserved at the shrine site. A will to

(01:06:21):
beast falling on a lion would probably inflict little damage.
A Tenantosurus would crush at anonicus, So some evidence going
both ways there. It's hard to know what to think,
but a couple other interesting lines of thought. One of
them is teeth. Now, the Tanata source remains are associated
with lots of Denonicus teeth. It seems like when you

(01:06:41):
find one of these prey animals dead, there's Denonicus teeth
all around. That tells you something, right, It indicates a
predator prey relationship um there. And there's so many Denonicus
teeth found with Tenantosurus remains, way more than you could
reasonably expect to be lost to a like by a

(01:07:01):
soliditary scavenger. If one came across one Dnonicus was eating
off of a dead corpse, it wouldn't leave eleven teeth
in it, right, That's just too many teeth to be
lost to be sustainable. Also, the placement of the teeth
tends to concentrate in the abdomen and pelvis. Why is

(01:07:22):
that interesting, Well, it's actually consistent with what you see
in predators today, where predators tend to feed on these areas,
the abdomen and the pelvis first. When they kill an
animal freshly, Uh, they tend to go for the parts
while they're still sort of warm and moist, to be
a little gross, to be a little wallace as children's
children's book material, folks. So if the dnonicus were doing

(01:07:45):
the same, it looks like they were feeding on a
fresh kill, not scavenging piecemeal on some dead animal that
came across. And then one final point, the anatomy of
the dnonicus makes it look plausibly like a pack hunter.
It's got this one terrible law that looks effective for
both grasping and slashing. Uh. The the an tirapists part

(01:08:05):
of the name the dnonicus and tirapists that means counterbalancing,
referring to the bone structure of the tail. Now why
would that matter, Well, it means that the animal is
capable of making its tail rigid and using it as
a counterweight to balance and control the movement of its body,
which suggests kind of quick graceful movement and the lightweight

(01:08:31):
of the predator's body also kind of suggests a fast,
active hunter rather than a passive scavenger. So we still
don't know whether the pack hunting interpretation of the Dononicus
is correct, but some subsequent studies kind of try to
endorse the idea. Others have some evidence against it. We
don't know for sure, but this one site, with all
these with these dead predators and dead prey together is

(01:08:54):
still something that's really interesting to think about and how
it informs our understanding of how these almost hunted. All Right,
it's main event time. And when it comes to main
event to combat between dinosaurs, you know, what's what's the
kirk Khan, What's the Flair steamboat, the Massawa Coba Kobashi,
the batman joke, or the gandolf ball rog encounter. What's

(01:09:16):
the one that that is so prominently featured in so
many dinosaur books for children, for adults, even like a
paleontology textbooks. What is the what is the iconic battle? Well,
it has to be everybody's favorite herbivore, which would be
what tri saratops and everybody's favorite carnivore, which would be
turning the source Rex. That's correct. Now, I will say

(01:09:37):
Stegasaurus is also a pretty awesome herbivore. People love those thagomizers. Yeah,
the thagomizers named for Gary Larson cartoon. These are, of
course the spikes and the tail of the Stegasaurus. Uh. Sadly,
Stegasaurus will have to wait for another episode to get
his due. But in this case, yes, t Rex versus

(01:09:58):
tri Sarah tops the cl pasic the paleo artists the
favorite battle. So let's go into a rundown of the
two combinants. Here we have Tarannosaurus rex t rex late
Cretaceous North America and Asia as It's stomping grounds size
up to forty nine feet fifteen meters long, so an
adult human would would fall short of the knee. So

(01:10:20):
this was one of the largest carnosaur dinosaurs uh and one,
and therefore one of the largest terrestrial carnivores ever to
walk the Earth. Yeah. I think it's just the Spinosaurus
and the Gigantosaurus up there with it. Yeah, yeah, I
believe so. And it's a It's diet probably primarily dependent
on duck build hadrosaurs and for a while paleontologists drifted

(01:10:42):
towards uh, when I tend to think of as a
bully scavenger view of the beast. So so, it's this
enormous creature obviously, but there were there were theories about
its its size and its speed that made the paleonta
to say, well, maybe what this thing did is it
just scared away the predators from an existing kill. That's

(01:11:02):
my corps get away from it. Yeah, And who's gonna
stop t rex? Because once in this theory, this view
of a of a slow t rex, once it ambles up,
you better eating all you can eat, because it's it's
gonna get whatever it wants at that point. Now, opinions varied,
but over time the consensus drifted back towards the apex
predator model of the t rex, the saying that it

(01:11:23):
likely hit among the trees and then ran full force
jaws open at its prey. Uh. And it's certainly had
encounters with triceratops as well, which we'll get to. And
of course that's our our next combatant in this battle,
the triceratops. Now, you might put up for the stigasaur,
but I think triceratops is the most widely beloved herbivore dinosaur.

(01:11:45):
I think there's a there's a very strong case for
that being true. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's you
just look at it and you can tell that this
is this is an animal you're behind and to go
back to Jurassic Park. Uh. Stegosaurus I don't think made
it into the film, but tri sarratops Is is prominently featured.
All the human cast members, maybe except for Jeff Goldblum,

(01:12:07):
I think, are hugging on it and touching it because
it's laying there recovering from its illness. Surely getting some
staff infections from that thing. Yeah. Meanwhile, Stegosaurus is off
camera asking hey, what about my scene? Stephen? When when
do I go on? And Steven Spielberg is like, uh,
they did, well just a minute, we're we have to
do this scene. I think they show up in the

(01:12:27):
sequel in the Lost World, do they? Yeah, I remember correctly.
I think that they're somebody's taking a picture of one
and the Stegosaurus becomes disturbed by the loud noise that
the camera makes while it's winding its film back. Okay, alright,
good to know, good to know. So the tri Steratops
late Cretaceous North American thirty ft nine meters long, the

(01:12:48):
most famous of the horned dinosaurs, also the largest and
the most abundant, so they lived in herds across North America.
And unlike the net frills of other horned dinosaurs, and
there are several varieties and even some sub varieties of
Triceratops here, Unlike these others, though, this frill was solid bone,
a defensive structure to protect the neck. And we have

(01:13:09):
fossil evidence of encounters between Triceratops and t Rex, including
evidence of partially healed tyrannosaur tooth marks on a triceratops
brow horn. Whoa healed and now that means it it
met a t Rex and went and lived to tell
the tale exactly it either it at least drove the
creature away or managed to escape and maybe even lethally interested,

(01:13:33):
who knows, but either way the message seems to be Triceratops,
when it encountered t Rex, it was capable of holding
its own at least in some cases. Because of course,
you're also gonna have varying situations of age and size, right,
like a young um, a young tristerotopes encountering older t rex,
which I understand plays into Karen Wallace's I Am a

(01:13:55):
Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I think that's why every That's one
of the reasons some of the the reviews were so
critical is that I don't know for sure because I
haven't read it, but I think the t rex kills
try stereotops. This is like the grail legend king version
of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king whose strength is failing.
Uh okay, So where's the fossil evidence? Where where do

(01:14:19):
we actually have an encounter between these two creatures. Well,
we do have what has been referred to as the
Montana dooling dinosaurs, and this is from about sixty eight
million years ago. Now here's a little fine print. UM.
Based on interpretation, seems like what we have here is

(01:14:39):
an encounter between the smaller nano Tyrannis, which is a
close relative of the t rex, though some people argue
that this might be a juvenile t Rex tiny enough
to be injected into your bloodstream attack your DNA directly. Yeah,
well not not that small. Don't let the nano foo,

(01:15:00):
will you? Um? Dino scale is still in play, but
but certainly a smaller t Rex. And then the other
creature uh is Casmio Sarine Saratopsian, and this would have
been from the Triceratops family, but smaller. Though some people
are commenting on this fossil, go ahead and call it
a Triceratops based on what we've seen of this fossil,

(01:15:21):
let's believe that the two dinos killed each other in battle.
T Rex suffered a crushed skull and chest, and its
teeth pierced the horned one's skull as well. They were buried,
probably by an earthquake because the theories like an earthquake happen,
So they died and their bodies were there and then
an earthquake buried them. Or does it look like the

(01:15:41):
earthquake was going on while they were fighting. I don't
want it to be the last either. Interpretation is pretty amazing,
like you think of your most cinematic battles between hero
and villain. Does it ever end in both characters killing
each other and then a volcano erupts and covers them,
or or an earthquake swallows them hold or a mudslide

(01:16:02):
buries them like that kind of thing is rare even
in our most uh you know, imagine fictional showdowns, modern
modern stories. You don't want the hero to die usually.
I mean, what do they have, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty,
like plunge to their death together or something that would
be a pretty awesome fossil Can you imagine a future
generation of intelligent squid creatures looking through the fossil record

(01:16:26):
of humanity and they say, well, we don't have a
lot to go on about human on human combat, but
we do have the Sherlock Moriarty fossil fine and it's amazing,
and it's got this opium pipe you know. Oh yeah,
uh so um. This particular fine though, the Montana doling
dinosaurs is is pretty controversial. So it was unearthed by

(01:16:49):
fossil hunters. Fossil hunters that were not working on behalf
of you know, scientific organization or a museum. They found
this thing, They dug it up, and then they tried
to sell the rock embedded fossils at auction for eight
to ten million dollars. Yeah. So the idea was to
snag a wealthy and fossil enthusiast who then might donate

(01:17:10):
it to a museum. Uh, it ended up failing to
sell it auction into in and uh the thing was
valued at seven to nine million dollars, but bidding only
reached five point five million. So they just put it
into into storage, into a vault. And that's that's where
it is today now to give all that's that's sad,

(01:17:31):
that's junk. Yeah. Uh so how did this even come
come to pass? Well, you have to look back a
little to you know, the post Jurassic Park zeal for dinosaurs. Okay,
uh and uh in particular, there was a t rex
skeleton uh named Sue this one moment up for bidding
and it was valued about a million dollars, but the

(01:17:53):
Field Museum of Natural History purchased it for eight point
four million. And so critics have said, well, this was
kind of the start of the dinosaur gold rush. You've
got into people's mind if we find a really awesome fossil,
so find we can sell it, you know, at high
price to the highest bidder, and then they can they
can do the science once we've done that. But first

(01:18:14):
we're gonna get we're gonna get our our our payday.
And this area discussion reminds me a lot of the
meteorite hunter debate. So when when profit chasing hunters are
the ones finding scientifically significant rocks instead of the scientist,
then all sorts of problems emerge. Proper identification, proper protection

(01:18:34):
of the find, proper values placed on the rocks, not
to mention, opening the door to fossil or meteorite theft,
to black markets, to rock squatting, as we see with
with the with the idea of this, this fossil find
just landing in a vault until somebody ponies up enough money. Um.
The falsification is pretty interesting to consider that Nicolas Cage,

(01:18:56):
the actor, paid two hundred and seventy six thousand hours
in an auction in twenty two seven for a t
rex skull, a skull that turned out to have been
illegally removed from Mongolia and he had to return it.
That's Nick, you should be ashamed of yourself. Well, he
turned he did the right thing, the Nick credit. Well,

(01:19:18):
I guess so, I'm sorry. I don't mean to be vindictive,
he I. I think when you first told me about this, Robert,
I imagined him reading an apology letter in his can
air accent as I just recently rewatched that movie. Well,
the headline on the CNN piece that I sent about
that um um the title was I think Nicholas Cage

(01:19:40):
returns his t rex skull, which kind of implied that
the skull inside his head was that of a t rex,
which I kind of like. By the way, that CNN
article reported that quote, he bought the tyronos Are skull
during a time when he also bought fifteen mansions, two castles,
four yachts, and nine rolls royces. So you know, sometimes

(01:20:00):
you go on a spending uh spree and you make
a few questionable purchase in purchases, including maybe a stolen
Mongolian t rex skull. Well, if you're going for opulence
and violating the world's right to preservation of natural history,
I think you should just go all out, not you know,
skip fourteen in the mansions and instead have one castle

(01:20:22):
made out of t rex skulls. Uh. Well, basically, I
would say the big take home here is that sadly
the Montana dueling dinosaurs uh find uh has not received
the actual scrutiny that it deserves. And if there's a
plus side though, the failure of of this and I

(01:20:43):
think there was a Stegasaurus find that also failed to
to to bring in the dough that the hunters wanted.
These you could indicate that the fossil bubble has burst
and you'll see less of this in the future, So
fossil hunters will hopefully be more you influenced by the
desire to to get these fines to two institutions and experts,

(01:21:05):
as opposed to just making a massive payday off. Yeah.
I mean, maybe I'm just not being sympathetic enough to
see the other side of the coin. But to me,
it seems like, I don't know, relics of past geological
eras seem like the common heritage of humanity. Shouldn't they
be in a place where open to the public, where
people can come and see them. Yeah, but but then again,

(01:21:27):
but of course they need to get down to the question.
While if that fossil relic is in Mongolia at a museum,
not everybody gets to see that. If that fossil relic
is in Chicago, not everyone gets to see that. Yeah,
but that's better than being in a private it's in
a private vault, like virtually nobody gets to see that,
and that doesn't benefit anyone. But still, this fossil exists

(01:21:47):
and that that is exciting. So maybe one day, uh
kids will get to see it in a museum and
paleontologist will get to give it a lot more attention hopefully.
So all right, Robert, you got anything else about fossil
action scenes? No, I think that the card has concluded.
The main event has concluded. Uh we we've people are

(01:22:08):
throwing their beer cups down into the ring, right, everyone's
piling out of the the the cretaceous thunder dome here,
and uh yeah, we're left to just consider just the
just how amazing it is. First of all that fossils exist,
like the the the the string of events that have
to take place to reach fossilization and and then recovery

(01:22:29):
and appreciation by modern humans. But then to consider that, yes,
we have these amazing moments from life, violent confrontations, mating,
uh and even birth preserved in the fossil record. And
I do I've said this on the podcast before, but
I do just want to say again, if you've never
had the chance to go to a good natural history
museum and look at fossil exhibits, you should find a

(01:22:52):
way to do this. It it is worth it. It's
so cool, it's it's a life changing experience to really
see dinosaur fossils in person. Indeed, and if you want
to check out those books that we read from at
the beginning, again, those are by Karen Wallace. There's I
Am a Diplodocus, I Am a quetzal Coatlas, and then
she also has one on Ankleiosaurus Tyrannosaurus. Uh and uh yeah,

(01:23:17):
I think that's it. Yeah, yeah, they'll be prepared for
the carnage. Be prepared for the carnage. Come for the carnage,
all right. In the meantime, if you want to check
out various other podcast episodes we've done, head a numbers
stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's what you'll
find the landing page with this episode, and we'll try
to have some links on there that go out to
some of the material we've talked about here, and maybe

(01:23:37):
even a really awesome dinosaur battle illustration to cap it
all off, I hope. So also, of course, if you
want to email us to get in touch directly with
feedback about this episode or any other, if you have
any questions, if you have any comments, if you have
any weird ideas. If you want to tell us about
some really cool fossil action scene you saw that we

(01:23:58):
didn't even know about, or you just want to say hi,
you can always email us at blow the Mind at
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(01:24:19):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Fossil Action Scenes: Dino Birth and Prehistoric Combat