November 1, 2012 • 27 mins
Prepare to explore an alien Earth as Stuff to Blow Your Mind takes you back to the Ordovician Period, when invertebrates thrived in primal seas that covered most of the super continent Gondwana. Join Julie and Robert as they explore this age of change.
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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. Julie,
I see you were wearing a trial a byte today.
I am. And it's an awesome necklace. It's actually made
by Lucy Lamb. That's my sister. Yeah, I was gonna say, um,
(00:27):
your sister l u c y E Lamb, And it
is so cool. It's a it's a trial byte that
she actually created by looking at diagrams and picture. She
doesn't actually have the fossil itself, but she did this
out of clay polymer, and um, it is so awesome.
If you guys want to check it out, go to
her at sea shop. But it is officially the mascot
(00:48):
of today's podcast. Yes, the trial by is, of course
a denizen of the Ordovician period. This is an ancient
period of Earth that I barely remember from science class.
Generally it would get one illustration and it's kind of this, uh,
this world of weird squitty creatures and strange looking, brutal
(01:09):
looking fish. And of course the trial byte and the
trial byde always had sort of center stage in these. So, yeah,
my sister sent you this necklace and um yeah, she's
on Etsy Lucy Lamb Designs. So it's it's kind of
the the mascot for today's episode. And I do understand
that your your daughter named the Trial byde as well.
She does. Yeah, I wish she did. And she plays
(01:29):
with a watch. She calls it gong and it has
many adventures. But that's how one should arrest the imagination.
I think that, you know, even a three year old
is like whoa, And it does kind of put you
in the mindset of, Okay, if if this creature was
hanging out during this era, what was this era like?
And as you say, it's it's kind of one of
(01:51):
those periods that gets passed over. Um, you know, Jurassic
is much sexier, but it is very interesting and we
sort of sort of got our attention when we were
reading the book Cracking, which talks about stephalopods, and in
it the author describes the period as for a while,
(02:11):
the seeds were deliciously warm, and the planet seems to
have been a kind of garden of eaten, a time
of nirvana that allowed life to flourish in many different forms,
and this became a very uh important intersection of how
life developed. Even though again this is not what the
sexiest period um. The seeds were teeming with creatures. Yeah,
(02:34):
and as well as we'll discuss these creatures, as small
and non flashy as they often are, they really laid
the groundwork for the many more diverse species that would
come in the ages to follow. It's really a fascinating
time period when you when you when you take the
time to to really think about what it was like
four million years ago, an age of supercontinents and shallow
(02:58):
oceans and for them part up until the end, generally
nice warm, rich times. Yeah. And we're talking about a
period of about forty five million years, so a lot
obviously went on during this time period. But let's just
do a quick overview of the geologic time skill um
because this, you know, in case anybody's wondering, like, okay,
(03:18):
now Jurassic, I know about davisian Um. What I wanted
to talk about is that geologists have been working on
this since the eighteen hundreds, this idea that we can
organize Earth time, or deep time as they call it,
the Earth's history, and it starts with something called boundary events.
And a good example of this is the boundary between
the Permian and the Triassic. Well, now, first of all,
(03:40):
how old is the Earth? Because the guy at a
parade the other day tell me it was two thousand
years over. That doesn't found right, so that I'd check it.
I think it's a bit older than that, about four
points million years um. Yeah, And so obviously you have
to arrange that amount of time. And again we called
that deep time. So I have something like twenty one
different periods. Yeah, within these boundary events. And the boundary
(04:04):
events are marked by global extinction, for instance, and that
would be between the Permian and Triassic. Uh, there's the
global extinction in which a large percentage of the plants
and animal species were eliminated. Another example is the boundary
between Precambrian in the Paleozoic, which is marked by the
first appearance of animals with hard parts, so we're thinking insects, fish, reptiles.
(04:25):
And then within that construct there are eons, eras and periods,
and then even in shorter term periods of epochs. So
we are talking about the ordificiam period to today. And
as you say, uh, four hundred million in change. Uh
some accounts eight million years ago, lasting for about forty
(04:46):
five million years in this warm, soupy, wonderful atmosphere, very
tropical that ushered in so many different species because of
this climate. Robert B. Laughlin wrote an excellent article called
what the Earth Knows in the American Scholar and he
gets into a lot of deep issues, but he starts
off by really wanting to to drive home exactly how
(05:06):
big geologic time is and and you know what kind
of time periods we're talking here, and he uses precipitation
to do it. And I'm not going I'll link to
the article in the blog posted the companies this episode,
but just to hit two real key points on there.
He points out that the total precipitation that falls in
the world in one year is about one meter of
rain the height of a golden retriever from now. He
(05:29):
adds to the total amount of rain that has fallen
in the world since the Industrial Revolution is about two
hundred meters the height of the Hoover Dam. The amount
of rain that has fallen in the world since the
time of Moses is enough to fill up all the oceans.
The amount of rain that has fallen on the world
since the ice Age ended is enough to fill up
all the oceans four times. The amount of rain that
has fallen in the world since the dinosaurs died, that's
(05:50):
enough to fill up all the oceans twenty thousand times,
or the entire volume of the Earth three times, whichever,
you know, what you choose. And then he says that
the amount of rain that has fallen in the world
sent its coal formed is enough to fill up the
earth fifteen times, and the amount of rain that has
fallen on the world since oxygen formed is enough to
fill the Earth a hundred times. So yeah, and he
(06:12):
he goes on to talk a bit more about how
geologists and scientists try to figure out what was present
in the atmosphere at different times in the world's history,
and if you're interested in it, again, the article is
great to go into a little bit more detail about
how we can extract this data. But I did want
to mention something called stratigraphy, and these are techniques used
(06:33):
by geologists to determine the geologic time scale. And something
that is quite common that it is used is something
called radiometric dating. Now, this is a comparison between the
naturally occurring radioactive isotope, which is a variant of a
particular chemical and a material, and it's decay products using
decay rates. So a good example of this radiocarbon dating
(06:55):
is if you took a plant from you don't know
at this point, but maybe it was d thousand years
ago with plant material, and that plant material, when it
was alive, would absorb a quantity of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis,
and this quantity actually matches the level of the carbon
isotope in the atmosphere at that time. And then when
the plant dies, it quits amassing radioisotope carbon fourteen specifically,
(07:19):
and the isotope begins to decay. So we know this
decay rate allows us to determine when in time the
plant existed in what the atmosphere was like, which is
really so cool that we have these sort of instruments
available to us. And that's just one part of stratigraphy. Yeah,
the the indeed, stratigraphy basically boils down to layers, comes
(07:39):
down to going diving down through the layers of sediment
that have built up over the ages and seeing what
was going on at different levels in the past. Kind
of like a really dirty room, say like a six
year old kid's room. It's just got toys playered everywhere,
stomic books, bits of food and mucus and all the
things that come out of the secure. And you were
(08:00):
to go in and and start peeling it back and
seeing what happened, what point during the last forty eight
hours that all this accumulated. Yeah, it's funny to think
of it that way, because I think oftentimes when we
think about the Earth, we think of it as a
static thing. But you don't realize that they are these
layers of sediment that we continue to add a sort
of like dust falling on a surface. And this is
called bio stratigraphy. It's the fossil evidence in rock layers.
(08:24):
And if you look at something called graptolights, these are
extinct plank tonic organisms. They have been and they still
are used to correlate the ortivisian strata. Yeah, I mean,
certainly for me, the big thing that always drives home
geology is anytime I'm in a mountainous area and you
see that fossil remnant of some ancient seedwelling creature, and
(08:45):
and it lets you know that what is now a
mountaintop or or the side of a mountain was once
the bottom of the sea's and that that alone always
just really drives it home for meat. Yeah, there's a
lot of common sense. And then just looking at it
with the naked eye. Yeah, vast periods of time, but
periods of vast change when you look at it all together. Okay,
So back into the time machine. We are now in
the Ordivisian period, and as we have known it before,
(09:08):
it is warm climate. Most of the earth is covered
in water, and um, you know, we've got deep water,
we've got shallow water, and all sorts of little organisms
growing in that. Yeah. And since I knew I was
taking a trip in the time machine, I did bring
my smartphone with me with his GPS, and it's just
completely going nuts. It has no idea where I am
(09:29):
or even what continent I'm at I'm on. And one
of the reasons is because this is an age of supercontinents,
where particularly we have a very large one by the
name of Gondwana, which includes most of the land masses
in today's southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar,
and the Australian continent as well as some other little
bits like the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, which
(09:53):
have you know, since moved their separate ways. And so
you've got this super continent. You also have this atmosphere
which has carbon dioxide levels that are believed to have
been between eight and twenty times their current values. And uh,
we have the land which is pretty barren. Yeah, and
a lot of it is underwater or at least a
(10:14):
little bit underwater, shallow seas in a lot of places. Yeah.
So if you were standing there in the earth at
this time and just imagine looking around you, obviously there
wouldn't be any animals, it wouldn't be in any insects
flying in the air. Um. What we do have is
something called tetrahedral spores, and they're similar to those of
primitive land plants like mosses. And that suggests that plants
(10:37):
invaded the land at this time. And we have a
few animals and plants that began to explore the margins
of the land, but nothing really colonizing beyond the beachheads. Yeah,
it was. It was an age of underwater life, um,
and a lot of this life began in the previous age.
The Cambrian, so most of the main branches existed then,
but it was it was during this age the artivision,
(10:57):
that things really begin to branch out at the family
and genus level. And as we had mentioned before, we've
got those graptolites and trilobites, early arthropods. We have brachiopods
also knows as lamp shells, and continents, which are early vertebrates.
They're also red and green algae, very very festive, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals,
(11:21):
cronoids which are these sea lilies with feeding arms that
are very surreal looking, in something called gastro pods, which
are pretty much snails and slugs. And you know, within
this network you have extensive reef complexes in the tropics.
One of the critters that you may remember from that
one illustration in your elementary school science book is the indusserita,
(11:43):
which is an extinct not alloid creature similar to the
modern day nautilus, except the shell kind of looks like
an ice cream cone, so they kind of look like
ice cream cone squid. So that was one of the
creatures that definitely had an impact on me when I
was a little Well, an impact is saying well, putting
it a little too strongly. Uh. I noticed it at
least when I was a kid, because it's like, hey,
(12:04):
look at that squid. It's like it's like a ice
cream cut. I think that's one of the things that
captured my imagination is the fact that there are so
many creatures during this period that have since gone extinct.
Um And we'll talk a little bit about that later,
but I mean, it kind of boggles on mine to
think of the different sorts of configurations and designs of
these creatures, many of the in many of these like
(12:24):
you said, these are the roots of all modern day life.
But but yeah, just so many of these things are
extinct now. I mean, you have a few survivors of sorts.
You have the horseshoe crab, of course, which has really
been a successful design that hasn't needed any update in
the ages. For the most part, your modern Nautilus is
a call back to the cephalopods of that ancient day.
(12:46):
As we discussed in our Cracking episode, the trio byte
itself is pretty amazing when you think about how many
different forms of trialobyte there were in those days. There's
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand species of trialo bye,
and we're finding new species of them every day. The
smallest known trial about species is under a millimeter long,
while the largest ones includes species from thirty to seventy
(13:08):
centimeters in link roughly a foot or two in length
you want to translate that. So that's pretty amazing too,
because I used to think of trial by was just
there's the trial by. That was just one little critter
that we just haven't to have a lot of fossils
of today. But it's just a catch off for a
number of species. Yeah, it was the reason. The reason
for that is because if you say twenty different species,
and then of course you can see why it's so
successful because sort of winnowing its way through the ages
(13:31):
and trying to figure out what was working was not
working so successful. And that's the other thing so successful.
In the time, this was a time when trial abouts
could just pretty much own the sea, and that their
ownership of it really didn't last too terribly long. I
mean longer than I guess human ownership of anything has lasted,
but certainly they're not around today. Well, and I'm thinking
that a jaw bone might have something to do with this,
(13:52):
and we're going to take a break, but when we
get back, we are going to talk about how we
owe our jaws to the ordivision period. All right, we're
back and we're talking about the jawbone and how the
jaw bone really doesn't become a thing until we're smack
dab in the middle of the ortivision period. So what
(14:14):
did things have before jaws? Well, okay, you have to
you have to think back, all right, imagine again these sees.
Most of the animals that are really ruling it here
are things like trial bias, are things like cephalopods. And
you do have some fish, but they're very primitive fish
and they do not have jaws. They have more like
slits and they're pretty cool looking if you look up
(14:34):
some of the image of these um. The Ortivisian fish
have large bony shields on their head. They have small
rod shaped or plate like scales covering their tail. They
look they're like armored fish. But they just have that
slit like mouth and it really limits what they can do.
To put a fine point on it, here, they cannot
run the roost. Here, they have no chance that dominance
(14:57):
because it's the it's it's the cephalopods that are eating everything,
those of the dominant predators. All these slit mouths fish
can do is just run around and hope that a
squid doesn't grab them. But with the development of the jaw,
this changes everything. Suddenly they are the ones who can
start becoming the dominant predators in the ocean. And it
really gives the scale. I have this image of a
(15:18):
James bonen Villain jaws I think it was and uh,
and now I'm imagining these these primitive fish with these
giant but you can see where the advantage would come in. Um.
There was actually a genome duplication during this period that
allowed the ancestral gill arches to modify themselves into jaws.
And as you said, this made an enormous impact because
(15:40):
these early vertebrates went from being prey of invertebrates in
the ocean to dominant predators in their own right. So
we can definitely point to that development and say thank you,
because can you imagine us without jawbones. Uh, we obviously
wouldn't be successful as a species. We just be mumbling
around naked while squid and other or some sort of
(16:02):
highly developed squid. I guess ruled over us, which is
everything would be mashed in baby food. Yeah, I mean
that made some people. That may be your fantasy, but
it can be convenient. It can be convenient, I guess,
you know, being hand fed or technacal fed mush by
your squid overlord. But I'm kind of glad it turned
out the way it did. But that's not all. There
(16:22):
are a number of adaptations that we can We can
look back to the Ortivisian period and say that's that's
where that made it onto the blueprint. So here are
just a few of the things that occurred in the
Ordivisian period which we can look to in our own
bodies and say this is when it made it on
the blueprint. Divisions going on inside the brain, the actual
way that our brain is divided. We can look back
to that period and say this is when those divisions
(16:43):
begin to take place. You look to our immune system.
You can look at things like the clotting factor. You
can look at more complex evolved immune systems, uh, such
as anybody's caroteen and skin became more numerous kidneys became
popular all of a sudden, UH. And the thing to
do in the Ordivision period exactly. It's like suddenly you
(17:04):
need a kidney. So we started developing them additional skull
elements again like the jaw, the lens and iris of
the eye, the inner workings of the ear, and interestingly
enough blood vessels that actually go to the heart. Yeah.
So again here's the base machinery that we have, I
guess you called the base model of the human being
(17:24):
being developed during this period. Even though most of the
stuff is going to die out, the changes that take
place here are going to influence the next phase, that's right.
And as you say, die out is is a huge
marker of this period. As we know, the ordivision and
began with shallow, warm seas. But the end of the
period experienced a five hundred thousand year long ice age
and this was triggered by the drift of the supercontinent,
(17:46):
as you mentioned, Gondwana to the south polar regions. Yeah.
That's the thing about this you look back on it,
it's like this paradise where all these little creatures, unknowingly
are just they're just living it up in this the
shallow seas of Gondwana. And meanwhile, Goodwin that is steadily
making its way on this path of doom towards the
southern tip of the planet. Yeah, and that's what ended
(18:09):
up with our mass extinction here of some estimates of
sixty of marine life wiped out. The not the trial bytes.
They got to live another day in another period. But
the end of the period was marked by a glaciation event,
and it's called the her Nation glaciation. And this is
when we saw a drop in sea levels and eventually
(18:29):
like glaciers across large chunks of Africa and South America. Okay,
so this has been driving scientists nuts because they're not
quite sure why glaciation would occur because it's a high
c O two level defined by the high CEO two.
So you have a natural greenhouse factor going on, which
is we all know tends to melt glaciers and in
(18:51):
cost global warming, right, would have this this warm climates.
They're saying, why would there be a sudden change and
there we say sudden deep time. And again this period
was forty five million years long. Um. But there is
a couple of scientists, and in particular Timothy Linton of
the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University
of Exeter, and he put up this theory, and that
(19:15):
proposes that the first land plants may have caused a
drop in CEO two levels, bringing about the glaciation and
indirectly causing the extinction event in the oceans. So they're
saying that if you look toward these or if you
look to early mosses, that they may have released large
amounts of nutrients into the oceans causing vast algile blooms. Okay,
(19:39):
would no big deal, right, except for that these agile
blooms will then absorb a lot of the CEO two
in the atmosphere and that causes the climate to turn
colder abruptly sort of and then bringing about the end
or Visian mass extinction. So along with this, though, ironically,
is that when the oceans cooled a bit, even more
(20:00):
life proliferated at first because you could have more diversification
with these cooler climates. But of course as that became
more and more intense, which you have is less and
less regions of the oceans actually being very hospitable. And
then of course what is surviving is then you know,
trying to get the same sort of food source, and
(20:22):
that's went in with this mass extinction. So that's one theory.
It is still somewhat of a mystery. And actually, if
you look at all different periods of time and you
see extinction um and certainly we think about the dinosaurs,
we are still struggling to find out exactly what went on. Yeah,
there's another theory that holds that tectonic activity lay to
increased weathering, which pulled carbon dioxide from the air and
cooled the climate, which then of course triggers the glaciers,
(20:45):
as we mentioned before. But again just one more theory
as to what exactly was happening here. Yeah, apparently the
Appalachian Mountains scientists or fingering and saying it's that tectonic
activity that actually was sort of the death though to
the atmosphere at that time. And certainly you do see
fossils when you're hiking up in the appellations. Indeed, So
there you go. There's a little introduction to the Ordivisian Period.
(21:07):
I hope that that would like me you maybe give
a little more a thought to that one illustration in
your elementary science book. Maybe you had two illustrations and
you were lucky, but I just had the one, and
realize that it's it's more than just one page, one
insignificant page out of Earth history, but a very important chapter.
And certainly, if you want to try to imagine alien worlds,
(21:29):
you can't do any better than looking back and dime
at the different phases of life on this planet. This
was really an alien world and certainly the kind of
thing we can conceivably find out there in the universe somewhere.
Can you imagine landing on an Ordivisian world somewhere and
experiencing this stepping and waiting through all of it. I
would just, like, I mean, just to be able to
scuba dive in those oceans would the amazing thing to see. Um,
(21:54):
So thank you guys for time traveling with us, and
and thank you Gong the trial bike for for accompanying us. Yeah.
Another thing about the trialobyte, by the way, just that
I was reading about, is that it is a fossil
that you can hold in your hand. And I think
that's one one reason that the trial byte resonates with us.
So because you know, things like like a Toronosaurus rex,
it's a bunch of bones, you have to send all
(22:16):
this time assembling it, looking at it standing back. But
the Trialobyte you can hold this little piece of history,
this fossil in your hand, and there's something there's something
kind of magical about that. Well, and just I mean,
I'm looking at my necklace right now, and just even
looking at it, it reminds me it's so sculptural looking,
and it reminds me some of the Geiger stuff in
terms of like the exo skeleton, and I don't mean
(22:37):
Geiger and like the more horrific way, but the more sculptural,
like really beautiful parts of nature. Yeah, there's a kind
of biomechanical aspect to it, for sure. So so yeah,
thanks Lucy for us sending that in. Again, Lucy Lamb Designs,
she has a few of those on the site as well.
I think some of that are made out of black
polymer clay. Yeah, they're very cool. Yeah, yours is a
(22:57):
limited edition though it's white. No, and no one can
have it. All right, Well, let's call over the robot
and see if he has any mail for us to read.
All right, we received a couple of bits of email
regarding our map episodes. We have three of them that
(23:18):
we're recording this. Two of them have published. Really, we
heard from a listener by the name of Martinez. Martinez
rights in and says, Hi, Juliene Robert, it's Cam again
from the Philippines, and I was just listening to her
episode on maps. Like Julie, I adorn maps not only
because they're useful, but because I find them very aesthetically pleasing.
To be fair, I don't think all maps are beautiful,
but there's a lot that are quite beautiful, especially the
(23:40):
really old ones, the ones with here be dragons on
the ages, for instance, or the ones from the age
of Sail. They're not all accurate, especially compared to contemporary maps,
but I think they're a great visual reminder of the
time when the world seems so much larger and so
much more mysterious than it is now. I also completely
agree that maps alter the way we perceived the world.
It reminds me of a time during my undergrad when
(24:01):
my world literature professor showed a traditional version of the
world map, pointing out that Europe was in the rough center,
whereas the Philippines was somewhere on the edges. Almost like
an afterthought, the next map he showed was altered, and
it placed the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia
in the center and placing Europe in the United States
on the edges. That that image was revelatory, showing that
(24:22):
the iconic world map isn't as iconic as we thought,
but nearly one possible way of viewing the world one
made iconic because no one has ever really thought to
question it. If one would have put the Philippines and
Southeast Asia in the center, my professor asked, would we
be as dismissive of our own country and its culture?
Likely not. Finally, YouTube discussed maps and fantasy novels, and
(24:43):
I do have to say I love them as much
as I love real world maps. I like knowing where
the characters are at any given point in time. I'm
a big believer in geography playing a big role in storytelling,
so I like having maps when I can get them.
The more detailed, the better. But speaking of fictional worlds,
I'd like to ask, why hasn't Sci fi I caught
onto this yet? Sure, there are plenty of ships, plans
and such, especially from Star Wars and Star Trek, but
(25:05):
what about maps for all those countries set in fictional
planets that crop up so frequently in space opera type novels.
There's much talk of interplanetary and intergalactic empires, but why
has no sci fi rider thought to draft up a
map showing where all these planets lie. Just faster than
light travel render maps obsolete perhaps, but I would still
like to see maps for such empires, or at the
very least maps of the individual planets used in these stories.
(25:28):
The only one I know of was one that was
done for Star Trek, which showed almost all the planets
involved in all the series up to Deep Space nine,
I think, but they're just for Star Trek. If there
are any sci fi series out there with maps like that,
or even for just individual planets, I'd really like to
know anyway. Sorry for the long email. Thanks for the
great work you're both doing the podcast though, and I
hope you keep blowing our minds well. Thank you. There
(25:50):
was some lovely thoughts there on maps from Martino. Yeah,
that was great, and I'm glad that he brought up
the political aspect of maps too, because that's something we
could have done an entire podcast on. But that was
a good example of how we see the world. Yeah,
and again it gets down into that area we talked
about where you have a map as a vision of
the world as it is, but it's also a vision
(26:11):
of the world as it is perceived. What is the
center of our map? What is the center of our
place that we create out of this space? Like, that's
that's essential to our understanding of ourself and our understanding
of physical reality. So and our assumptions that we don't
even question until you know, someone says, hey, wait, that's
that's a bit off. Yeah. So so there you have
(26:32):
a wonderful bit of listener mail there. If you would
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(26:52):
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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. Julie,
I see you were wearing a trial a byte today.
I am. And it's an awesome necklace. It's actually made
by Lucy Lamb. That's my sister. Yeah, I was gonna say, um,
(00:27):
your sister l u c y E Lamb, And it
is so cool. It's a it's a trial byte that
she actually created by looking at diagrams and picture. She
doesn't actually have the fossil itself, but she did this
out of clay polymer, and um, it is so awesome.
If you guys want to check it out, go to
her at sea shop. But it is officially the mascot
(00:48):
of today's podcast. Yes, the trial by is, of course
a denizen of the Ordovician period. This is an ancient
period of Earth that I barely remember from science class.
Generally it would get one illustration and it's kind of this, uh,
this world of weird squitty creatures and strange looking, brutal
(01:09):
looking fish. And of course the trial byte and the
trial byde always had sort of center stage in these. So, yeah,
my sister sent you this necklace and um yeah, she's
on Etsy Lucy Lamb Designs. So it's it's kind of
the the mascot for today's episode. And I do understand
that your your daughter named the Trial byde as well.
She does. Yeah, I wish she did. And she plays
(01:29):
with a watch. She calls it gong and it has
many adventures. But that's how one should arrest the imagination.
I think that, you know, even a three year old
is like whoa, And it does kind of put you
in the mindset of, Okay, if if this creature was
hanging out during this era, what was this era like?
And as you say, it's it's kind of one of
(01:51):
those periods that gets passed over. Um, you know, Jurassic
is much sexier, but it is very interesting and we
sort of sort of got our attention when we were
reading the book Cracking, which talks about stephalopods, and in
it the author describes the period as for a while,
(02:11):
the seeds were deliciously warm, and the planet seems to
have been a kind of garden of eaten, a time
of nirvana that allowed life to flourish in many different forms,
and this became a very uh important intersection of how
life developed. Even though again this is not what the
sexiest period um. The seeds were teeming with creatures. Yeah,
(02:34):
and as well as we'll discuss these creatures, as small
and non flashy as they often are, they really laid
the groundwork for the many more diverse species that would
come in the ages to follow. It's really a fascinating
time period when you when you when you take the
time to to really think about what it was like
four million years ago, an age of supercontinents and shallow
(02:58):
oceans and for them part up until the end, generally
nice warm, rich times. Yeah. And we're talking about a
period of about forty five million years, so a lot
obviously went on during this time period. But let's just
do a quick overview of the geologic time skill um
because this, you know, in case anybody's wondering, like, okay,
(03:18):
now Jurassic, I know about davisian Um. What I wanted
to talk about is that geologists have been working on
this since the eighteen hundreds, this idea that we can
organize Earth time, or deep time as they call it,
the Earth's history, and it starts with something called boundary events.
And a good example of this is the boundary between
the Permian and the Triassic. Well, now, first of all,
(03:40):
how old is the Earth? Because the guy at a
parade the other day tell me it was two thousand
years over. That doesn't found right, so that I'd check it.
I think it's a bit older than that, about four
points million years um. Yeah, And so obviously you have
to arrange that amount of time. And again we called
that deep time. So I have something like twenty one
different periods. Yeah, within these boundary events. And the boundary
(04:04):
events are marked by global extinction, for instance, and that
would be between the Permian and Triassic. Uh, there's the
global extinction in which a large percentage of the plants
and animal species were eliminated. Another example is the boundary
between Precambrian in the Paleozoic, which is marked by the
first appearance of animals with hard parts, so we're thinking insects, fish, reptiles.
(04:25):
And then within that construct there are eons, eras and periods,
and then even in shorter term periods of epochs. So
we are talking about the ordificiam period to today. And
as you say, uh, four hundred million in change. Uh
some accounts eight million years ago, lasting for about forty
(04:46):
five million years in this warm, soupy, wonderful atmosphere, very
tropical that ushered in so many different species because of
this climate. Robert B. Laughlin wrote an excellent article called
what the Earth Knows in the American Scholar and he
gets into a lot of deep issues, but he starts
off by really wanting to to drive home exactly how
(05:06):
big geologic time is and and you know what kind
of time periods we're talking here, and he uses precipitation
to do it. And I'm not going I'll link to
the article in the blog posted the companies this episode,
but just to hit two real key points on there.
He points out that the total precipitation that falls in
the world in one year is about one meter of
rain the height of a golden retriever from now. He
(05:29):
adds to the total amount of rain that has fallen
in the world since the Industrial Revolution is about two
hundred meters the height of the Hoover Dam. The amount
of rain that has fallen in the world since the
time of Moses is enough to fill up all the oceans.
The amount of rain that has fallen on the world
since the ice Age ended is enough to fill up
all the oceans four times. The amount of rain that
has fallen in the world since the dinosaurs died, that's
(05:50):
enough to fill up all the oceans twenty thousand times,
or the entire volume of the Earth three times, whichever,
you know, what you choose. And then he says that
the amount of rain that has fallen in the world
sent its coal formed is enough to fill up the
earth fifteen times, and the amount of rain that has
fallen on the world since oxygen formed is enough to
fill the Earth a hundred times. So yeah, and he
(06:12):
he goes on to talk a bit more about how
geologists and scientists try to figure out what was present
in the atmosphere at different times in the world's history,
and if you're interested in it, again, the article is
great to go into a little bit more detail about
how we can extract this data. But I did want
to mention something called stratigraphy, and these are techniques used
(06:33):
by geologists to determine the geologic time scale. And something
that is quite common that it is used is something
called radiometric dating. Now, this is a comparison between the
naturally occurring radioactive isotope, which is a variant of a
particular chemical and a material, and it's decay products using
decay rates. So a good example of this radiocarbon dating
(06:55):
is if you took a plant from you don't know
at this point, but maybe it was d thousand years
ago with plant material, and that plant material, when it
was alive, would absorb a quantity of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis,
and this quantity actually matches the level of the carbon
isotope in the atmosphere at that time. And then when
the plant dies, it quits amassing radioisotope carbon fourteen specifically,
(07:19):
and the isotope begins to decay. So we know this
decay rate allows us to determine when in time the
plant existed in what the atmosphere was like, which is
really so cool that we have these sort of instruments
available to us. And that's just one part of stratigraphy. Yeah,
the the indeed, stratigraphy basically boils down to layers, comes
(07:39):
down to going diving down through the layers of sediment
that have built up over the ages and seeing what
was going on at different levels in the past. Kind
of like a really dirty room, say like a six
year old kid's room. It's just got toys playered everywhere,
stomic books, bits of food and mucus and all the
things that come out of the secure. And you were
(08:00):
to go in and and start peeling it back and
seeing what happened, what point during the last forty eight
hours that all this accumulated. Yeah, it's funny to think
of it that way, because I think oftentimes when we
think about the Earth, we think of it as a
static thing. But you don't realize that they are these
layers of sediment that we continue to add a sort
of like dust falling on a surface. And this is
called bio stratigraphy. It's the fossil evidence in rock layers.
(08:24):
And if you look at something called graptolights, these are
extinct plank tonic organisms. They have been and they still
are used to correlate the ortivisian strata. Yeah, I mean,
certainly for me, the big thing that always drives home
geology is anytime I'm in a mountainous area and you
see that fossil remnant of some ancient seedwelling creature, and
(08:45):
and it lets you know that what is now a
mountaintop or or the side of a mountain was once
the bottom of the sea's and that that alone always
just really drives it home for meat. Yeah, there's a
lot of common sense. And then just looking at it
with the naked eye. Yeah, vast periods of time, but
periods of vast change when you look at it all together. Okay,
So back into the time machine. We are now in
the Ordivisian period, and as we have known it before,
(09:08):
it is warm climate. Most of the earth is covered
in water, and um, you know, we've got deep water,
we've got shallow water, and all sorts of little organisms
growing in that. Yeah. And since I knew I was
taking a trip in the time machine, I did bring
my smartphone with me with his GPS, and it's just
completely going nuts. It has no idea where I am
(09:29):
or even what continent I'm at I'm on. And one
of the reasons is because this is an age of supercontinents,
where particularly we have a very large one by the
name of Gondwana, which includes most of the land masses
in today's southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar,
and the Australian continent as well as some other little
bits like the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, which
(09:53):
have you know, since moved their separate ways. And so
you've got this super continent. You also have this atmosphere
which has carbon dioxide levels that are believed to have
been between eight and twenty times their current values. And uh,
we have the land which is pretty barren. Yeah, and
a lot of it is underwater or at least a
(10:14):
little bit underwater, shallow seas in a lot of places. Yeah.
So if you were standing there in the earth at
this time and just imagine looking around you, obviously there
wouldn't be any animals, it wouldn't be in any insects
flying in the air. Um. What we do have is
something called tetrahedral spores, and they're similar to those of
primitive land plants like mosses. And that suggests that plants
(10:37):
invaded the land at this time. And we have a
few animals and plants that began to explore the margins
of the land, but nothing really colonizing beyond the beachheads. Yeah,
it was. It was an age of underwater life, um,
and a lot of this life began in the previous age.
The Cambrian, so most of the main branches existed then,
but it was it was during this age the artivision,
(10:57):
that things really begin to branch out at the family
and genus level. And as we had mentioned before, we've
got those graptolites and trilobites, early arthropods. We have brachiopods
also knows as lamp shells, and continents, which are early vertebrates.
They're also red and green algae, very very festive, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals,
(11:21):
cronoids which are these sea lilies with feeding arms that
are very surreal looking, in something called gastro pods, which
are pretty much snails and slugs. And you know, within
this network you have extensive reef complexes in the tropics.
One of the critters that you may remember from that
one illustration in your elementary school science book is the indusserita,
(11:43):
which is an extinct not alloid creature similar to the
modern day nautilus, except the shell kind of looks like
an ice cream cone, so they kind of look like
ice cream cone squid. So that was one of the
creatures that definitely had an impact on me when I
was a little Well, an impact is saying well, putting
it a little too strongly. Uh. I noticed it at
least when I was a kid, because it's like, hey,
(12:04):
look at that squid. It's like it's like a ice
cream cut. I think that's one of the things that
captured my imagination is the fact that there are so
many creatures during this period that have since gone extinct.
Um And we'll talk a little bit about that later,
but I mean, it kind of boggles on mine to
think of the different sorts of configurations and designs of
these creatures, many of the in many of these like
(12:24):
you said, these are the roots of all modern day life.
But but yeah, just so many of these things are
extinct now. I mean, you have a few survivors of sorts.
You have the horseshoe crab, of course, which has really
been a successful design that hasn't needed any update in
the ages. For the most part, your modern Nautilus is
a call back to the cephalopods of that ancient day.
(12:46):
As we discussed in our Cracking episode, the trio byte
itself is pretty amazing when you think about how many
different forms of trialobyte there were in those days. There's
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand species of trialo bye,
and we're finding new species of them every day. The
smallest known trial about species is under a millimeter long,
while the largest ones includes species from thirty to seventy
(13:08):
centimeters in link roughly a foot or two in length
you want to translate that. So that's pretty amazing too,
because I used to think of trial by was just
there's the trial by. That was just one little critter
that we just haven't to have a lot of fossils
of today. But it's just a catch off for a
number of species. Yeah, it was the reason. The reason
for that is because if you say twenty different species,
and then of course you can see why it's so
successful because sort of winnowing its way through the ages
(13:31):
and trying to figure out what was working was not
working so successful. And that's the other thing so successful.
In the time, this was a time when trial abouts
could just pretty much own the sea, and that their
ownership of it really didn't last too terribly long. I
mean longer than I guess human ownership of anything has lasted,
but certainly they're not around today. Well, and I'm thinking
that a jaw bone might have something to do with this,
(13:52):
and we're going to take a break, but when we
get back, we are going to talk about how we
owe our jaws to the ordivision period. All right, we're
back and we're talking about the jawbone and how the
jaw bone really doesn't become a thing until we're smack
dab in the middle of the ortivision period. So what
(14:14):
did things have before jaws? Well, okay, you have to
you have to think back, all right, imagine again these sees.
Most of the animals that are really ruling it here
are things like trial bias, are things like cephalopods. And
you do have some fish, but they're very primitive fish
and they do not have jaws. They have more like
slits and they're pretty cool looking if you look up
(14:34):
some of the image of these um. The Ortivisian fish
have large bony shields on their head. They have small
rod shaped or plate like scales covering their tail. They
look they're like armored fish. But they just have that
slit like mouth and it really limits what they can do.
To put a fine point on it, here, they cannot
run the roost. Here, they have no chance that dominance
(14:57):
because it's the it's it's the cephalopods that are eating everything,
those of the dominant predators. All these slit mouths fish
can do is just run around and hope that a
squid doesn't grab them. But with the development of the jaw,
this changes everything. Suddenly they are the ones who can
start becoming the dominant predators in the ocean. And it
really gives the scale. I have this image of a
(15:18):
James bonen Villain jaws I think it was and uh,
and now I'm imagining these these primitive fish with these
giant but you can see where the advantage would come in. Um.
There was actually a genome duplication during this period that
allowed the ancestral gill arches to modify themselves into jaws.
And as you said, this made an enormous impact because
(15:40):
these early vertebrates went from being prey of invertebrates in
the ocean to dominant predators in their own right. So
we can definitely point to that development and say thank you,
because can you imagine us without jawbones. Uh, we obviously
wouldn't be successful as a species. We just be mumbling
around naked while squid and other or some sort of
(16:02):
highly developed squid. I guess ruled over us, which is
everything would be mashed in baby food. Yeah, I mean
that made some people. That may be your fantasy, but
it can be convenient. It can be convenient, I guess,
you know, being hand fed or technacal fed mush by
your squid overlord. But I'm kind of glad it turned
out the way it did. But that's not all. There
(16:22):
are a number of adaptations that we can We can
look back to the Ortivisian period and say that's that's
where that made it onto the blueprint. So here are
just a few of the things that occurred in the
Ordivisian period which we can look to in our own
bodies and say this is when it made it on
the blueprint. Divisions going on inside the brain, the actual
way that our brain is divided. We can look back
to that period and say this is when those divisions
(16:43):
begin to take place. You look to our immune system.
You can look at things like the clotting factor. You
can look at more complex evolved immune systems, uh, such
as anybody's caroteen and skin became more numerous kidneys became
popular all of a sudden, UH. And the thing to
do in the Ordivision period exactly. It's like suddenly you
(17:04):
need a kidney. So we started developing them additional skull
elements again like the jaw, the lens and iris of
the eye, the inner workings of the ear, and interestingly
enough blood vessels that actually go to the heart. Yeah.
So again here's the base machinery that we have, I
guess you called the base model of the human being
(17:24):
being developed during this period. Even though most of the
stuff is going to die out, the changes that take
place here are going to influence the next phase, that's right.
And as you say, die out is is a huge
marker of this period. As we know, the ordivision and
began with shallow, warm seas. But the end of the
period experienced a five hundred thousand year long ice age
and this was triggered by the drift of the supercontinent,
(17:46):
as you mentioned, Gondwana to the south polar regions. Yeah.
That's the thing about this you look back on it,
it's like this paradise where all these little creatures, unknowingly
are just they're just living it up in this the
shallow seas of Gondwana. And meanwhile, Goodwin that is steadily
making its way on this path of doom towards the
southern tip of the planet. Yeah, and that's what ended
(18:09):
up with our mass extinction here of some estimates of
sixty of marine life wiped out. The not the trial bytes.
They got to live another day in another period. But
the end of the period was marked by a glaciation event,
and it's called the her Nation glaciation. And this is
when we saw a drop in sea levels and eventually
(18:29):
like glaciers across large chunks of Africa and South America. Okay,
so this has been driving scientists nuts because they're not
quite sure why glaciation would occur because it's a high
c O two level defined by the high CEO two.
So you have a natural greenhouse factor going on, which
is we all know tends to melt glaciers and in
(18:51):
cost global warming, right, would have this this warm climates.
They're saying, why would there be a sudden change and
there we say sudden deep time. And again this period
was forty five million years long. Um. But there is
a couple of scientists, and in particular Timothy Linton of
the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University
of Exeter, and he put up this theory, and that
(19:15):
proposes that the first land plants may have caused a
drop in CEO two levels, bringing about the glaciation and
indirectly causing the extinction event in the oceans. So they're
saying that if you look toward these or if you
look to early mosses, that they may have released large
amounts of nutrients into the oceans causing vast algile blooms. Okay,
(19:39):
would no big deal, right, except for that these agile
blooms will then absorb a lot of the CEO two
in the atmosphere and that causes the climate to turn
colder abruptly sort of and then bringing about the end
or Visian mass extinction. So along with this, though, ironically,
is that when the oceans cooled a bit, even more
(20:00):
life proliferated at first because you could have more diversification
with these cooler climates. But of course as that became
more and more intense, which you have is less and
less regions of the oceans actually being very hospitable. And
then of course what is surviving is then you know,
trying to get the same sort of food source, and
(20:22):
that's went in with this mass extinction. So that's one theory.
It is still somewhat of a mystery. And actually, if
you look at all different periods of time and you
see extinction um and certainly we think about the dinosaurs,
we are still struggling to find out exactly what went on. Yeah,
there's another theory that holds that tectonic activity lay to
increased weathering, which pulled carbon dioxide from the air and
cooled the climate, which then of course triggers the glaciers,
(20:45):
as we mentioned before. But again just one more theory
as to what exactly was happening here. Yeah, apparently the
Appalachian Mountains scientists or fingering and saying it's that tectonic
activity that actually was sort of the death though to
the atmosphere at that time. And certainly you do see
fossils when you're hiking up in the appellations. Indeed, So
there you go. There's a little introduction to the Ordivisian Period.
(21:07):
I hope that that would like me you maybe give
a little more a thought to that one illustration in
your elementary science book. Maybe you had two illustrations and
you were lucky, but I just had the one, and
realize that it's it's more than just one page, one
insignificant page out of Earth history, but a very important chapter.
And certainly, if you want to try to imagine alien worlds,
(21:29):
you can't do any better than looking back and dime
at the different phases of life on this planet. This
was really an alien world and certainly the kind of
thing we can conceivably find out there in the universe somewhere.
Can you imagine landing on an Ordivisian world somewhere and
experiencing this stepping and waiting through all of it. I
would just, like, I mean, just to be able to
scuba dive in those oceans would the amazing thing to see. Um,
(21:54):
So thank you guys for time traveling with us, and
and thank you Gong the trial bike for for accompanying us. Yeah.
Another thing about the trialobyte, by the way, just that
I was reading about, is that it is a fossil
that you can hold in your hand. And I think
that's one one reason that the trial byte resonates with us.
So because you know, things like like a Toronosaurus rex,
it's a bunch of bones, you have to send all
(22:16):
this time assembling it, looking at it standing back. But
the Trialobyte you can hold this little piece of history,
this fossil in your hand, and there's something there's something
kind of magical about that. Well, and just I mean,
I'm looking at my necklace right now, and just even
looking at it, it reminds me it's so sculptural looking,
and it reminds me some of the Geiger stuff in
terms of like the exo skeleton, and I don't mean
(22:37):
Geiger and like the more horrific way, but the more sculptural,
like really beautiful parts of nature. Yeah, there's a kind
of biomechanical aspect to it, for sure. So so yeah,
thanks Lucy for us sending that in. Again, Lucy Lamb Designs,
she has a few of those on the site as well.
I think some of that are made out of black
polymer clay. Yeah, they're very cool. Yeah, yours is a
(22:57):
limited edition though it's white. No, and no one can
have it. All right, Well, let's call over the robot
and see if he has any mail for us to read.
All right, we received a couple of bits of email
regarding our map episodes. We have three of them that
(23:18):
we're recording this. Two of them have published. Really, we
heard from a listener by the name of Martinez. Martinez
rights in and says, Hi, Juliene Robert, it's Cam again
from the Philippines, and I was just listening to her
episode on maps. Like Julie, I adorn maps not only
because they're useful, but because I find them very aesthetically pleasing.
To be fair, I don't think all maps are beautiful,
but there's a lot that are quite beautiful, especially the
(23:40):
really old ones, the ones with here be dragons on
the ages, for instance, or the ones from the age
of Sail. They're not all accurate, especially compared to contemporary maps,
but I think they're a great visual reminder of the
time when the world seems so much larger and so
much more mysterious than it is now. I also completely
agree that maps alter the way we perceived the world.
It reminds me of a time during my undergrad when
(24:01):
my world literature professor showed a traditional version of the
world map, pointing out that Europe was in the rough center,
whereas the Philippines was somewhere on the edges. Almost like
an afterthought, the next map he showed was altered, and
it placed the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia
in the center and placing Europe in the United States
on the edges. That that image was revelatory, showing that
(24:22):
the iconic world map isn't as iconic as we thought,
but nearly one possible way of viewing the world one
made iconic because no one has ever really thought to
question it. If one would have put the Philippines and
Southeast Asia in the center, my professor asked, would we
be as dismissive of our own country and its culture?
Likely not. Finally, YouTube discussed maps and fantasy novels, and
(24:43):
I do have to say I love them as much
as I love real world maps. I like knowing where
the characters are at any given point in time. I'm
a big believer in geography playing a big role in storytelling,
so I like having maps when I can get them.
The more detailed, the better. But speaking of fictional worlds,
I'd like to ask, why hasn't Sci fi I caught
onto this yet? Sure, there are plenty of ships, plans
and such, especially from Star Wars and Star Trek, but
(25:05):
what about maps for all those countries set in fictional
planets that crop up so frequently in space opera type novels.
There's much talk of interplanetary and intergalactic empires, but why
has no sci fi rider thought to draft up a
map showing where all these planets lie. Just faster than
light travel render maps obsolete perhaps, but I would still
like to see maps for such empires, or at the
very least maps of the individual planets used in these stories.
(25:28):
The only one I know of was one that was
done for Star Trek, which showed almost all the planets
involved in all the series up to Deep Space nine,
I think, but they're just for Star Trek. If there
are any sci fi series out there with maps like that,
or even for just individual planets, I'd really like to
know anyway. Sorry for the long email. Thanks for the
great work you're both doing the podcast though, and I
hope you keep blowing our minds well. Thank you. There
(25:50):
was some lovely thoughts there on maps from Martino. Yeah,
that was great, and I'm glad that he brought up
the political aspect of maps too, because that's something we
could have done an entire podcast on. But that was
a good example of how we see the world. Yeah,
and again it gets down into that area we talked
about where you have a map as a vision of
the world as it is, but it's also a vision
(26:11):
of the world as it is perceived. What is the
center of our map? What is the center of our
place that we create out of this space? Like, that's
that's essential to our understanding of ourself and our understanding
of physical reality. So and our assumptions that we don't
even question until you know, someone says, hey, wait, that's
that's a bit off. Yeah. So so there you have
(26:32):
a wonderful bit of listener mail there. If you would
like to reach out to us, if you would like
to share interesting things with us to be at a
personal story, a cool link photo, or a bit of
art that ties into something we're talking about. You can
find us on Facebook, where we are stuff to Blow
your Mind. You can also find us on Tumbler where
(26:52):
we are stuff to Blow your Mind, and we also
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.