Paleontology (DINOSAURS) Encore Presentation with Michael Habib

Oh hey, it's that lady that tries to learn macromae and gives up after like four strings. Ally ward back with another episode of Ologies. So y'all, this week was supposed to be vecceleology Veccileology. I'll get it by next week, which is all about Flags, and I am just hip deep in Flags right now. I'm editing and researching and writing this episode, and I just wanted one more week with it because it turns out it's a very complex issue with a lot of history and a lot of context.

This is my deal? Well, you're right. Actually did cut up a cadaver this morning, did you? Yes, it's actually a few of them. So that's how my mornings often start. We had one hundred and eighty eight medical students in a room with thirty five did people.

Oh my god.

So you get a good couple off in the morning, you sit down and you take a part of human beings. So that that's my deal for about half the time, and the other half of the time ago and play of dinosaurs.

There is a wrong way to take a part of cadaver, isn't there.

There are a lot of wrong ways. Actually there are more wrong ways than correct ways, as it turns out.

So now you study movement of animals, and that's kind of how you got into paleontology. What is is paleontology only about fossils or is it just about living things of that era?

So palaeontology it doesn't necessarily have to be about fossils, but it historically it kind of was. It was considered to be the study of fossils. Essentially, although it more literally is just the study of life in the past, and you mostly do that through fossils. I'm one of those paleontologists who does play of fossils.

Before we go much further, let's define super quick what a fossil actually is. I didn't know this until just now. Fossils are any trace or remains, like a cast, or an impression or a substitution with raw, even the thing itself of something that was once alive. They have to be at least ten thousand years old to be considered a fossil. I don't know what they're called if they're younger than that, to be honest, and the word fossil comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, which is

It's a fossil.

Speaking of old things, Michael didn't decide he wanted to be a paleontologist until later in life.

I declared at age four that I wanted to be a paleontologist.

Yeah, okay, just kidding. That's an early proclamation.

I you know, I like getting in early. That could be time to procrastinate.

So you waited from the age of four until what eighteen to enroll in college. That's a long that's a lot of stalling.

It really was, It really was. There were all kinds of things that I that I waste the time doing in the interim, such as growth and development.

Very strange learning to use a fork.

He isn't learning to use a fork?

Yeah, well what happened at four? Like when that declaration went down? When you're like, mom and dad said, own, I'm going to be a paleontologist? Like, where were you in a museum?

Oh? Yeah, absolutely, I we were in the Smithsonian Museum of National History.

Do you know what I told my parents I wanted to be when I was three?

And you what do you want to be when you get big? A porky big Allison.

War Workie Pig side note was a cartoon character who wore an open blazer with no shirt. He lacked pants.

They're probably museums for that, you never know.

Yeah, it's just called restaurants. So what was your path like when you actually got into the study of it. How much education does it take to be a paleontologist?

Well, you know the answer is it varies because it depends on really what you're doing in paleontology, what kind of palletologists you want to be.

In Michael's case, from the time he set out to be a paleontologist, he finished kindergarten, grammar school, in the middle school, in high school, got an undergrad and master's degree in biology, then another five years to get a PhD and functional anatomy.

And then off to join the quote unquote real world, which, if you're a paleontologist who takes apart dead people for living at a medical school, is not an accurate term. I don't know what the real world is. I've never played in it. I've seen it through windows. It looks scary. I've decided to avoid it for the time being.

So you've never walked into an office every day in a tie.

I don't think I've ever walked into an office in a tie.

Right, Yeah, I'm still stuck on the fact that, like, you spent your morning taking up our dead people. Like I know that we're here to talk about paleontology, but from the anatomy perspective, like, when did you go down the path of teaching anatomy? What is it like for you in terms of like confronting mortality, because I mean, Paleo, you're dealing with ancient things. So do you ever have any weird existential crisis about like death and impermanence or anything.

I think I got most is out of the way. When I was young, I was a precocious youngster, and by that I meant I, you know, I questioned the uh. I had a lot of questions about mortality at a uncomfortable age, and my uncomfortable it was uncomfortable for my parents. You know, if you if you want to be really good at vertebrate anatomy, the model system is basically humans.

It's like you know more about your car if it sucks, because you have to fix it more.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, we tinker in the human body so much to fix it that it's like, well, yeah, had.

Those implants redone a few times? We see some really interesting prostces actually in the lab.

But oh, do you I bet in l A, I bet LA cadavers are like pretty tight. I bet I bet they still look pretty sharp. I'm so sorry the conversation accidentally went from automotive analogies back to the generous and probably very attractive people who have donated their bodies to science and the curious things Michael sees with body donors.

The type of sort of implant I saw most often, Yes, penis and plants.

No where more in LA.

It's about even between Baltimore and LA.

You are kidding me. I honestly, I did not know that that was a thing.

We had what we had what we had one donor with the one the old models that was pumpable. WHOA, No, usually they're just silicon implants. But any case, So, yeah, so we've seen lots of We've seen a lot of penis implants in the in the lab.

But this, this deep knowledge of anatomy informs your work as a pelleontologist a lot. You tend to study a lot of like wing movements of pterosaurs which are not dinosaurs. Technically, that's true.

That's true. So yeah, so it's weird. So the guy who who makes doctors in the morning studies terras wear wings in the afternoon. Go figure. I've been called a physicist in Denial by actually a Caltech physicists, which I could sort of be a compliment.

Particularly in that crowd. That's some complimentary shade.

Yeah, exactly exactly. I'll take that particularly interested in how that gives you motion, how animals move around by taking his wood is really a pretty limitted a number of different kinds of materials to work with and make them do amazing things. We have enough trouble making high performance aircraft, good sale planes and everything that can go hundreds of miles, you know, with fiberglass and carbon fiber and all kinds of metals at our disposal, and animals only have a

Do you have to study aeronautics as well as physiology to try to determine how that would give a terrost or the ability to fly?

So I do have a joint background in fluid dynamics.

Which is the study of how fluids move. Just five minutes ago I learned that fluids are not just liquids. Fluids are anything that has no fixed shape and yields to external pressure, which totally changes the meaning of bodily fluids for me. They could be a liquid or a gas. Let's change the subject. Do paleontologists love puzzles? As someone who has to put bone fragments back together? Do you like puzzles or do you hate them?

I love puzzles. A lot of balletoges love puzzles. Okay, I'm not sure they all do. I think for some palotogess it probably feel like taking your work home with you. Right, Yeah, you get home and I don't have any kids, but I can imagine something that. Do you know, then they can come home their kids like, hey, you want to build this puzzle with me?

Like, oh god, what amount of time do you spend in the field as a paleontologist, and how much of that is back in a lab or looking at spreadsheets or measuring fossil densities and stuff.

So in terms of the amount of time, like how much of the year in the field, it's a good chunk of the summer, that's uh, that's usually when I do all my field work. So basically July and August a good bit of it I'll be in the field, mostly in New Mexico.

Was that a titanosaur?

That's the Titanosaur project? Yeah?

Can you can you reveal what you're working on with that?

Sure? Sure, obviously you actually basically whatever you find. It's not like you went out there and we're gonna find it. Actually we kind of went out there going, I really kind of hope you don't find a titanosaur because really, well, I mean not not. We were being BLib about it, which is what makes it funny, but like there was a part of us it was like, I really hope we won't find things super huge because then we feel

Oh my god.

In fact, one of our one of our specimens may be the largest dinosaur from North America. That's huge. Literally, yeah. So it's just I mean these you know, these are animals that mid size titanosaur is like thirty tons plush, and a big one is like sixty tons plus. How many feet the big guys you're looking at one hundred feet ish? Wow?

How many times bigger than an elephant? Are these guys big?

A big bull African elephant, which would be the largest living land animal. I think the record is like six point two tons or something that really averages more like five and change. Okay, so if a big titanosaur is regularly hitting sixty that's twelve times.

So these titanosaurs are like if twelve elephants stacked under one giant overcoat and pretended to be a person.

That's so huge.

This is so exciting. I'm sweating. This is so Wait. What happened when you were in the field and someone's like, oh, we got a bone over here, Like what what is that moment?

Like, Well, it depends on what the bone is. In the case of the Titanosaur project. You know, you see some bones into the hill and I first law was, Oh, that looks really exciting. We see some interesting morphology and we can tell it it's what we call pneumatizes. We could tell it had was the animal had all these air sacks in it, and we're thinking, oh, wow, that's cool. That could be like a big predatory dinosaur because they have as they had a lire sex in their bones too.

Oh my god.

And there was that moment where the actually was a particular rod of bone that we started to see as we started to work around it with our tools, that we realized that this was a vertebra from the neck, a neck bone.

I love this part so much.

I literally just loo kind of went ah shit. And of course the one of the poor volunteers. There was like, what, what did I break something? I'm like, no, no, this just went from this went from a one season project to an eight season project. And they're like why, I'm like, well, if this is articulated.

In paleontology terms, articulated means found all in the same place, just a bunch of bones kicking it together in order having a bone party under some.

Dirt, if there's more of it, I mean, I was at this point, I'm thinking, Okay, well, maybe it'll just be the one one element. It wasn't, of course, Oh my god. Then you know we've got we've got a you know, forty ton plus animal on the hillside. And you start and then you start look at the hillside. You go, actually, I think it might kind of just be the hillside.

Oh my god, it's just a mountain, Like.

It's just kind of has this kind of sediment loosely sitting on top of a dinosaur. Who gets to name it, well, that depends. So we don't know whether or not we will be naming it because we don't know if it's a new species yet or not. There is a type of titanosaur from North America that is named just one, which is interesting because the rest of the world there's a ton of these things, like like one of the

So saur pods are those really long necked, kind of round bellied plant munched cuties. Apparently twenty years ago we didn't know much about them because our equipment for scanning and for transport sucked.

There's better equipment and tech these days to work with things this big. You know, half a century agos one finds a titanis for coming out of the hillside. It's like, well that's pretty yeah, moving on, you.

Know, do we just have better vehicles?

Now we got good vehicles. It's more commonplace to be able to use a helicopter. I mean, obviously half a century go people could use helicopter, but it was just they were not something that was regularly available to the budget kind of budgets that we work at. The lift heavy jackets.

Yes, when he says heavy jackets, he does not mean woolen coats. A jacket is that big plaster lump they smooth around excavated fossils to protect it and support it when they're storing it or delivering it. Frankly, it looks like a very fun rainy day craft project. And if you google dinosaur jackets, I dare you, I dare you not to go down a rabbit hole looking at children's hooties and wondering if you can fit into the largest

Oh sure, so yes, so you can get nicknames. So yeah, so they're naming process. So if this thing's up being a new species, we will give a new technical name in a publication and I'll be myself and my colleagues will name it. But in terms of nicknames, in terms of nicknames, those kind of just happen organically, okay, and Archie titanosaurs actually have nicknames. Oh whatever, they are Daisy and Duke. A look at that, and it's usually the students didn't naming these things.

Where did they come up with Daisy and dukes? It's not it has nothing to do with gene shorts, does it, Like Daisy Duke's Daisy Duke's for those unfamiliar are a type of micropant fashioned from truncated denim trousers. They are beneficial in warm climates.

I actually don't know. I am assuming that that was the joke. But I went back. I went out on a scouting trip to check some some map info and came back to the quarry and discovered that my two undergraduate students had named them Daisy and Duke. And apparently there have been some multi hour conversation in which this had occurred to this day. I don't know exactly what went down. I don't know what they came up with.

That's wise. The idea that there is a titanosaur in a hillside named after Jortz is thrilling to me. So when might Daisy and Duke make their museum debut? Please put shorts on them.

There's only so much exhibit space.

Here's a deal with museums. It's actually like the shoe department at JC Penny. What you see on the floor is a representative fraction of what they got in the back. So you may see a cool dinosaur or like a weird old knife or a clay jug. But the museum has literally millions of specimens on site archived for research. The only county natural History museum, for example, has thirty five million artifacts in storage. But if you did get to name it genus and species, any idea where you would start.

There's weird rules about names and stuff, And because we might actually be gave it the name, I can't say right, you can't say it. But we have a potential name in mind for what one of the two specimens in particular is probably a new species.

Yeah, I squealed, easy, easy.

What I can say is it's a cool name that came out of conversations in part with the native people who live in the area.

That's awesome.

I don't mean the abrasive white men. I mean actual native people. And we were in four Quarters, so we're near we get a little bit of of everything.

Oh Art, So it is the dig site is near four Corner.

It is a species name. We don't have anything necessarily in mind, although I suspect what my proposal would be is that we name it after the donor that funds the expedition, because it is a privately funded expedition.

That's so baller, though, to fund a dinosaur dig. If I were jay Z, I'd be like, screw a yacht, I'm going to funded dinosaur dig. If I had like Beyonce money, I'd be like, let's go dig up some bones.

Well, you know the funny thing is, too, you don't need Beyonce money in order to do it it.

Really, how much money does it cost to dig up a dinosaur? This is the most fun game I've ever played.

Let's let's have fun with this. How long? How much do you think a field season for us costs?

Oh?

Gosh, Well, it depends on if you have interns, if you have to pay them, or if you just have to buy them, like you know, a bottled water.

We have a combination of paid employees for the museum as well as volunteers. Okay, but let's just look at just the field season. Let's assume that salaries for the museum employees is just part of their yearly and everything. So just the additional money for the supplies the trucks to get people out there, to feed them and keep them safe, make the jackets.

Pay attention for some huge revelations, get transport the specimens. I would say eight hundred thousand dollars, four million dollars, a billion dollars.

I' less than ten thousand year.

You're kidding me? Are you kidding me? So you can't? You could buy a Toyota camri used or a dinosaur expedition, that's right. What kind of a world is this? I haven't Why haven't we all done this? A good question, shrill, I'm so, I'm so excited.

Yeah, I've yet to run anyone who underestimates the cost. They always overestimate. Oh yeah, it's there. You know, this is this thought that all there must be pouring billions of dollars in Pon tells me now now, no, no, no, no.

There's no way that anyone could think it was less than ten thousand. That's amazing.

No, it can, it can, it can obviously climb from that. You're still talking about tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands or millions.

So less than a wedding these days, Yeah, people drop some cash on their way Jacksons.

My parents said they went to two weddings last year. They were each cost over sixty five thousand.

Dollars serious by a goddamn dinosaur vertebrae for that the whole dinosaur.

Maybe, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's that's six and a half field seasons.

The average American wedding costs around thirty thousand dollars, and the average amount it costs to be a guest in someone's wedding, like getting there, buying nylons with no runs in them presence is eight hundred and eighty eight dollars. Everyone start eloping so we can reallocate that money to digging up more cool dead stuff. So do you have a favorite dinosaur?

Do I have a favorite dinosaur? Yes, I have a couple of favorite dinosaurs, depending on what kind of favoritism right one has in mind, the one.

That really has a place in your heart, Like you know which one it is, there's one that you really like the most.

Sure so growing up. So the one that makes me think ah childhood is this Thingonicus okay, which is very similar to Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame. Incidentally, the real velociraptor was about coyote sized and feathered, not giant and scaly.

Dinoh enthusiasts love to note that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were not historically accurate. It's true Dinonicus, which means terrible law, was much closer to what was portrayed as a velociraptor, and I thought this was just someone sleeping on the t job. But the confusion is said to have originated from Gnonicus originally being labeled as a subspecies of velociraptors. Either way, these things should have had feathers. So imagine a giant claude bird wanting to murder you.

Some of them are. I've seen some people get really upset about it. I just I don't get that upset about it. But yeah, I mean, it's essentially if they're sentially fancy creatures. Butaus was particularly interesting. It was particularly important historically because it was one of the first dinosaurs that was specifically used in some of the what would some of the original hypotheses about the origines of birds and specially being dinosaurs.

So, by the way, all birds are technically dinosaurs. And that may be a thing that you've accepted and you've processed in your heart or mind, but it still weirds me out.

There's also a bad ass of huge claws and you know, fast and could leap and all that kind of goo stuff. So I was he's a kid. I was like, ooh, I like the one that can, you know, go and assassinate things with great prejudice. Now these days I might very well say and have said that my favorite might be channga.

Raptor channga raptor. Now, who what a weird thing? First off, it's c h a n g y u raptor. To find it google it, it took me a while. So this was a non bird flying dinosaur. But it looks a fucked on like a bird. It's a bird with wings on its hind legs. It has four wings, four wings, and a tail that was like a foot long, big claws and teeth. What the hell man?

Which is not something you hear a lot about.

Now. Michael was on the team that first analyzed and published the paper naming this a new species, so you know.

So that one has a special place in my heart for that reason.

How do you feel about the feathered tail that was found recently an amber?

Very cool? I actually had a little heads up that was coming.

You did. Is there like a text thread that all the paleontologists of the world are on.

No, no, no no.

By the way, I have found out by hanging around scientists that they do have text chains and they do talk about nerdy news. I was added to one with some scientists and field scientists called Scorpions on our Faces and I love it. Now a little background on this last year, a paleontologist was trolling some amber markets in Mean mar and saw this apricot sized piece of plant resin for sale. Is like a jewelry piece whatever the

It's a really neat find. It is the beginning of what'll probably you'll be seeing more more things like that.

Okay, in the future are we gonna be cloning anything.

No, you're not gonna be cloning anything from this because while it while it more or less looks exactly like it just was preserved yesterday, because the soft tissue is there, Wow, that doesn't mean that the molecular structure is completely unaltered. And DNA has a reasonably short half life, so you would just get doubled a gook out like you could probably get DNA but not it wouldn't mean anything. Okay, DNA doesn't have to break down much, and it would

If you saw the movie Gatica, which was from one million years ago aka nineteen ninety seven, it's about genetic engineering, and I always thought it was so clever that Gatica was spelled using only the letters of DNA sequencing. So GTCA. Isn't that cool? Anyway back to old sap.

Chicken, those specials gonna be very interesting for understanding anatomy of early feathers, for example. But you're not gonna not gonna be cloning anything out out of that unfortunately, Although how cool it had been if like Michael Crichton had known about those sites, or if those have been available when he was writing. You wouldn't even have to use a mosquito thing he could just because that wouldn't actually work.

Yeah, they found a whole a whole dinosaur amer who.

Hand and they just made you know, that would have been would have been great. Although I have to say the mosquito intermediate thing was was clever.

Yeah, it is clever.

It's a very very clever concepution. Let the girl.

How do you feel about pop culture and its treatment of dinosaurs? Do you feel like it's good that it stokes people's interest, or do you feel like it's there's too much mythology and too much fiction.

Well, I think it's I think it's both. I mean, most of it is nowhere even in the ballpark of accurate. But on the whole, I think the advantage is outweigh the disadvantages. I think for the most part, it's awesome. I think it's great. You know, how many scientists would kill to have their fields popular? Is ptology? I mean it's I mean, how petty would I have to be to complain it? People are really interested in what I do,

You'd be a real jackass.

I'd be a real jackass.

Although, how did you feel about ross on Friends being so pedantic and exhausting? Did you ever feel like he got a bad rap?

I think he earned it. He's obnoxious, Well, okay, you know, and he's supposed to be I mean, the character is supposed to be obnoxious, right, I mean he's supposed to be obnoxious. And name Swimmer did a great job with the character. And you know, interestingly enough, there is a palontologist named David Swimmer.

Are you serious. He was, in fact serious. David Schwimmer is a paleontologist at Columbus State University, and he authored a paper called Giant ceilacant Mega Seilacanthus DOBI from the Upper Cretaceous of North America and its Bearings on the phylogeny of Mesozoic seila cants. He recently posted about working on a study of some quote mystery copper lights. Copper

I don't know. Probably a little bit of both in my guests, but I.

Hope he's met David Swimmer, for I hope they hug. I want them to hug. Did you have any heroes that were paleontologists growing up? Like, do you have a paleontologist just mentor or hero or someone who maybe died that you never got to meet.

H Well, you know, I had a few years grow up, but actually I had one in particular comes in mind. This is actually a really cool story. I one of my one of my heroes growing up was a paletologist who worked in Baltimore named David wy Sample, and I went he was giving a talk at a nature center near where I lived at the time. Okay, I was like nine or ten or something, and I got super excited. I'll never forget that day. It was all adults and me. I was the only kid at this thing, and I

Seriously, did he remember you at all.

He didn't until I jogged his memory once He's like, yeah, remember there's this kid and he was like wait, I'm like that was me and oh that's which is really which is pretty cool.

That's like the end. That's like the ending scene of some movie that like works out. Everything worked out, Okay.

Everything worked out. Okay. Yeah. I basically feel like I get paid in my hobby, which is awesome.

What's your least favorite thing about the job, and then we'll follow that with your favorite thing, So like least favorite quick thing about the job.

The least favorite thing about the job is the same and least favorite thing that a lot of people would probly say about their job, which is, even though there's less bureaucracy and less paperwork than a lot of jobs, there's still enough of it to be annoying.

Yeah, what about flies on the digs?

We don't have a lot of problems with them in New Mexico. But the other place that I do feel to work these days is in Dinsaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. Whi's an amazing place, It's incredible, but when we go there typically in August, the mosquitoes are just terrible. It's terrifying. You could from a distance, you could see the swarms from a distance because it looks like smoke hanging over the grass.

I love bugs, but not not in mass like that.

Yeah, go to give blood, Go to Alberta. One day.

They're gonna they're gonna find one of those mosquitos and amber. They're gonna clone you. You're gonna be like that. We made another. Well, what's your favorite thing about the gym?

Oh, that one's hard because just because the job actually is super fun. I love fieldwork. I love opening drawers in new museums and the collections my good places to you know, travel to do research. I really do enjoy teaching now. Of course when I'm teaching isn't really pantology, but I love anatomy in general. I love teaching anatome. And a friend's dad up years ago at a social gathering, her dad care to me and he said he'd give

What do you like? Salary wise? No?

I know he meant like, isn't like, what do you what do you make?

Like?

What do you make?

And I think that seems a little rude.

Oh he was, he was doing being He was being rude, I think on purpose. And I took a quick second and said, I make doctors face.

What did he do? Did you crying?

No?

He turned around, popped it from the beer and handed.

It to me. That's amazing.

It was like, check me, this is pretty good.

So I know.

But I do love that component. I love I love training future physicians. There's just so much talent and brain power just wandering around at all times. Right, you could sit down in the Starbucks at usc and you start talking to people and you like learn five new things before noon.

That's a lot of quality noggins in one area. I have some rapid fire questions for you for listeners. Some of them might be ridiculous, some of them might be too difficult to answer. I'm not sure, but okay, I'm I'm just going to start so before we get to questions from not even listeners yet, because I recorded this before we even had listeners or a Patreon. For each episode, I donate to a charity of the ologists choosing, and

It depends on how new you're looking at. But within the last handful of years, yes, there was a significant breakthrough in It's still a little bit controversial, but seems to be accurate in looking at the impressions of feathers, in particular, because feathers store their pigments, some of their pigments, and these little kind of little capsules basically that do preserve in some of these fossils, and these really well preserved fossils. You need a microscope to see them, but

Ooh, what is microscopy. It's just looking at things with a microscope.

Okay.

That means they can get some of the blacks, grays, dark browns, and reddish browns, but they can't get other colors. So we have some idea that some of these things, these had bold patterns, but we don't know how bold the colors were.

Interesting, Okay, Tony wants to know if dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds, does that mean that dinosaurs tasted like chicken?

They probably did. It taste like chicken. Yeah, so you know, putting in it is birds are just weird dinosaurs, Yeah, and they probably did. I mean, keep in mind, the closest living relatives of birds are crocodilians, and if you've ever had alligator, it tastes a little like chicken too.

So there you go.

So there's what we call a phylogenetic bracket of tastiness there and technical about it and yeah, so I imagine it would taste pretty much pretty much like chicken. Your typical dinosaur would probably maybe mostly more dark meat than white meat.

Because they have more hemoglobin for moving.

Uh sort of, it's very close with What turns the dark meat dark is something called myoglobin, which okays, for restoring oxygen in muscle. And it's only you, you, you're on the right tracks, so good, And that's used particularly in what we call aerobic muscle, so muscle that uses a lot of auction. It's high endurance muscle.

So it's this oxygen storing protein myoglobin that makes dark meat dark, which is why legs which move around more are dark meat, and chicken breast, which just sits there not flapping much, is white. So good luck ever looking at a roasted dinosaur the same Adam has a question, how do you know when to switch brushes when you're digging out a fossil? Hi?

You know when the switch brushes when the one you currently have is unusable? Okay, yeah, it's as we've already discussed, paletogs are cheap and we will use them until they're basically worn to hell.

And then you just do. You have to get the finer and finer brushes when you're getting tiny grains of sand off.

You don't usually have to reduce the brush size much, maybe a little bit. It's more things like chisel anything sharp, chisel sizes and things like that. If you're doing some more detailed work, you have to go to a smaller tool. Brushes. Any kind of broad soft paint brush will kind of do. Certain brissel types are better than others. But you know it's you know, it's not You're not like, it's not like painting. You're going out to detail work. You're not

I always picture you guys going down to like a water color, two hairs on the brush, like delicately. It's good to know that you guys are just like, no, just get the dust off.

I've used dental tool to etch stuff around a fossil be for that seems fun. It is for a while, and then it starts to become tedious, but it's mostly fun. Yeah, I stally love it, but yeah, we don't go to tiny brushes.

TJ wants to know how many of the fossils on display museums are actually replicas for casts?

Right, right, So it depends on what museum you're at, and it depends in a large part of what age the museum is or the exhibit is, in particular when it was built. If it's a really old exhibit, so you go say it hasn't been changed since the nineteen twenties, it's likely mostly original material. Oh, because during that time they didn't do as much casting. They didn't mind drilling through some of these things to put them on exhibit.

Armatures are the metal cradles that hold the bones in place externally, not lets you remove pieces of research and put them back do whatever. More importantly, you don't have to drill the shit out of fossils to wire them together, which is very old school.

Now, what percentage of each of the specimen's original is a whole nother ballgame. You very rarely find a complete skeleton, So there's a few different ways of ending up with a complete skeleton. For exhibit one is you create a composite from multiple originals of the same species that are all similar enough in age and size that it'll more

So it's like a frank consur It's like a Frank consort.

Okay. And then if the thing's really incomplete, and this happens quite often, like you found that you do have enough to know what it is, you have enough to know it's a new animal, what have you. But you only have to say, fifteen percent of of the skeleton. You will then fill in the rest of casts.

But the museums are trying their best. Yeah, so do some placard reading. It's interesting to see trends in paleontology. And I don't know it's interesting to see paleontology itself evolved. Stephen one of our audio engineers, really really really big

Oh, I know, I had a question. So I had a question about the toro, the Toro Seratops and the Triceratops controversy.

The controversy here is it sometimes dinos get mistaken for other ones, and dinosaur ghosts hate this.

If the Triceratops is just a juvenile torosaurus or if the you know, they decided if it was actually two different species.

Right, So that is that is actually still a that is an ongoing debate. The majority of paleontologists that work on horned dinosaurs considered them still to be separate species, but there is one research team that has published data indicating that they think that Triceratops is actually what we call a junior synonym that is, it's really just a juvenile of another animal. I'm personally not entirely convinced, but

What's the hot gossip on Bronosaurus ronosaurs?

So the short answer is Bronosaurus is a valid name.

Again, do you like petty gossip? Okay, then this is a beautiful story. So in the late eighteen hundreds, two rich dudes ofth Neil, Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope had a mutual reciprocal hatred for each other. They tried to outdo each other in terms of paleon too logical supremacy, and they would sabotage each other's work. They would publicly discredit the other one. One of them, Marsh, put the wrong skull on an a Potosaurus and called it a brontosaurus.

The original material that was named brought to Saurus was then later found that have been comprised of multiple animals of different species whoops. And so it was decided that brought to Saurus was not a valid name because well, it's all known stuff. You can't combine them and say that's a new animal, right. Researchers recently went through that material again with better knowledge, more data that we now have because over time you get better and better knowledge

That's some good breaking news on the Brontosaurus front. Yes, I feel like between Pluto and Brontus, a lot of people got really confused about who was what what was happening. Just over ten years ago, just catch you out, Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet because it doesn't have enough game compared to the objects around it. That is a very casual explanation like Pluto's somewhere just butt hurt.

Yeah right, just crying.

Into a wine cooler, being like what am I am? I?

Right?

Well?

Okay, last question. This is actually from Leela Higgins, who an entomologist at the Natural History Museum. She wants to know how does studying ancient fossils help the world today?

Ah, that is a good question, so I and I can give. There's a couple of different answers to that.

One.

One answer would be that that knowledge, for its own sake is kind of helping the world on a more practical side. If the question is really, you know, what is it? What sort of practical applications it doesn't have? I'll be honest to say that some of it doesn't happening, but some of it does. If you want to know, for example, what kind of shit goes down when global when global atmospheric energy i e. Aservice temperature changes very rapidly,

For more info on this. Look up huge ass meteor that slammed into an area of present day Mexico over sixty five million years ago and change the climate leading to mass extinction of seventy five percent of the animals and plants on Earth aka the k T event k dash T.

And then, lastly, in my particular case, is a biomechanist. I do work with engineers on robotics applications. For the most part, if you're interested in an animal model from says you want to make a running robot or something, you want to look at inspiration from biological systems. Living things are the first place you would normally go because you can get a lot more data from them. Obviously, however, nine point nine percent of all things that have ever lived are extinct.

How weird is that ninety nine point nine percent of all things that have ever lived are extinct. Just do you cut bangs, text your crush. We're all going to die.

So if you limb yourself to just looking at those things, you're only getting a small fraction of the possible solutions to moving around or eating or what are the things that you want to that you want to model. So looking at other ways it's been done is very informative.

Well, I mean, it's I think that's kind of the basis of why people are curious about science. It's that the past can hopefully or possibly inform the future, so you always have like a vested interest and knowledge because it could it kind of plots your course going forward, it seems.

Yeah, that's exactly, And that was a much much more succinct way of putting what I rambled on.

The idea of us having a unmanned aviation that's in the shape of a pterosaur, just like a robotic terosaur. Can you work on that?

I could probably work on that out, And I don't know how useful that would be, but we could probably work on it. That would be pretty funny. A writeable robot Terrasto that you can use to get to work. Can that be LA traffic?

Yeah?

Is that okay?

Well, we'll see what I can do.

Put it on your to do list to very gingerly stock doctor Michael Habib. Find him on the twitters at arrow evo a E r O E v O because aerial evolution is his bag, and to see photos of his fieldwork in the museum but probably not cadavers. Follow him on Instagram. He's at habibanator. Just as it sounds, this podcast is on Twitter at Ology's pod and on Instagram at Ologies, and I'm on both of those as

So then we like get outside and then it's like the deepest, biggest boom you've ever felt.

And it was just like bloom, and I was like, oh, oh god, this is scary. Look at this, you guys. This is before I put secrets at the end of episode. So I gotta add one now. Okay, so this is a modern day one. This is now late August of twenty nineteen, two years later, and I will say that my secret for this episode is number one. Okay, I'll tell you this one. I'm recording this entirely in my underwear, and I'm getting ready to run out the door to

Pacadermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, metatologynethnology, zeriology, elatology.

Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur? First time you see them, it's like a miracle.