Paleontology (DINOSAURS) with Michael Habib

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So I'm gonna be super super honest with you. And this pains me to say because it's kind of a point of shame for me as a science enthusiast, But I don't really give a fuck about dinosaurs, at least I didn't for a long time. Flies, turtles, birds, nests, plants. I'm down with all of these because in my brain, I'm like, we share the planet with them. I can look at them, I can watch how they grow, you can look at what they eat, how they get it on.

This is my deal? Well, you're right. Actually did cut up a cadaver this morning?

Did you? Yes?

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 cup of coffee in the morning and you sit down and you take a part of human beings. So that's that's my deal for about half the time and another 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 palontologists who does play a fossil.

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 rock, or 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

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 palantogle.

Just 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'n't learning to use a fork, right, Yeah, Well what.

Happened at four? Like when that declaration went down? When you're like, mom and dad said down, 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.

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 kirky bit a porky big Allison warm worky 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 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 paletologists 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 in 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 of our dead people. 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 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, you know, I questioned the uh. I had a lot of questions about mortality at an 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 action in the lab.

Oh do you?

I bet in l A, I bet LA cadavers are like pretty tight. I bet they're 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 implants.

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 there 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 pelontologist. 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, it's weird.

So the guy who who makes doctors in the morning studies tears were wings in the afternoon.

Go figure.

I've been called a physicist in denial by actually 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, and.

Particularly interested in how that gets you motion, how animals move around by taking his wood is really a pretty limited 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 handful of materials really to

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 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 palantoges love puzzles. Okay, I'm not sure they all do. I think for some ties it probably feels like taking your work home with you, right, Yeah, you get home and I have many 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 and like how much of the year I'm in the field, it's a good chunk of the summer, that's 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 we feel, you know, compelled to excavate it and it's going to take forever.

Land animals of all time.

Oh my god.

In fact, 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 a mid sized 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 at first of all was oh, that looks really exciting. We see some interesting morphology and we could tell it it's what we called pneumatizes. We could tell it had was the animal had all these air sacks in it, and we're thinking, oh, wow, it's cool. That could be like a big predatory dinosaur because they have are they had a lire sex in their bones too, And we started exiting around it and were like.

This doesn't really look like it would fit. What could this be?

You think it's because this is a pretty big element. Is you're going to the hill and you're thinking that it's like a relatively big part of a small animal, and then at some point your brain switches and you realize you're doing the small part of an enormous animal.

Oh my god.

And there was that moment where.

It 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 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 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, that's just a mountain, Like it's just kind of is this this kind of sentiment loosely sitting on top of the time this one

So saur pods are those really long necked kind of round bellied plant munchioned 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 ago. So 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 to good vehicles.

It's more commonplace to be able to use a helicopter. I mean, obviously, half a century ago people could use the helicopter, but it was just they were not something that was regularly available to the budge kind of budgets that we work at on the lift heavy jackets ps.

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 size offered.

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, there's are 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' naming these things.

Where did they come up with Daisy and dukes? It not has nothing to do with gene shorts, does it? Like? Daisy dukes? 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 map info and came back to the quarry and discovered that my two undergraduate students had named them Daisy and Duke. And apparently there had been some multi hour conversation in which this had occurred. To this day, I don't know exactly what went down.

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 J. C. 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 National History Museum, for example,

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

Yeah, I squealed, easy, 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 everything.

Oh, Art, so it is the dig site is near four corner. It is.

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.

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, let's just let's just look at just the field season.

Let's assume that salaries for the museum employees is 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, some 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 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.

Jackson mc someways my parents said they went to two weddings last year. They were each cost over sixty five thousand dollars.

Serious. You can buy 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 the Sincdnonychus okay, which is very similar to Velociraptor of Drurassic Park fame. Incidentally, the real velociraptor was about coyote sized and feathered, not giant and scaly.

Dino enthusiasts love to note that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were not historically Accurateonicus, which means terrible Law, was much closer to what was portrayed as a velociraptor, and I thought this was just someone sleeping on the job, but the confusion is said to have originated Fromonicus originally being labeled as a subspecies of velociraptors. Either way, these things should have had feathers. So imagine a giant claude

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, Buticus was particularly interested. It was particularly important historically because it was one of the first dinosaurs that was specifically used in some of the some of the original hypotheses about the organ as the birds and especially 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.

Words of living dinasaurs, words of dinasaurs. There's also a bad ass of huge claws and you know, fast and could leap and all that kind of good 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.

If.

Now these days I might very well say and have said that my favorite might be chungy raptor chang 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 tale that was found recently an amber?

Very cool? I actually had a little heads up that 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 Myanmar and saw this apricot sized piece of plant resin for sale. Is like a jewelry piece whatever the seller

That's that's a it's a really neat find.

It is the beginning of what'll probably you'll be seeing more.

More things like that in the future.

Are we going to 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 them like their structure is completely unaltered. And DNA has a reasonably short half life, so you would just get doubled a gook out like you can 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 chickens.

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

They've found a whole dinosaur ammer, a whole.

Dam 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 conceit.

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 take the advantages 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 field is popular? Is kind oftology? I mean it's I mean how petty would have to be to complain?

People are really interested in what I do, but sometimes they get it wrong. You know, like that would be that would be awful.

It could 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 I mean the care You're supposed to be obnoxious, right, I mean, he's supposed to be obnoxious. And Dave Swimmer did a great job with the character. And 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 Celacanth mega Celacanthus dobi from the Upper Cretaceous of North America and its Bearings on the phylogeny of Mesozoic sela cants. He recently posted about working on a study of some quote mystery copper lights. The

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

I hope he's met David Shwimmer for I hope they hug. I want them to hug. Did you have any hero 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?

Uh? Well, you know, I had. I had a few years grow up. Actually I had one in particular that 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 Wysample. And I went he was giving a talk at a nature center near where I lived at the time. I was like nine or ten or something, and I got super excited. I'll never forget that day. It was all

And he just rolled with it.

And he talked to me afterwards and he was like and he basically just not only that I think paletology was awesome, but after that day, I decided paleontologists were.

Just awesome, most awesome people. Oh that's just great. You know this this hard work.

Sorry, so anyway, the uh so, that gave me this awesome additional passion for the field. But what makes the story really cool is fast forward a little over.

A decade later, he became my pH supervisor.

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's like wait, I'm like that was me and oh that's a 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 to 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 passy about the job, which is, even though there was 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 Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. It'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 as you could see the swarms from a distance because it looks like smoke hanging over the grass. Man.

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 job? Oh?

That one's hard because just because the job actually is super fun.

I love fieldwork.

I love opening drawers and 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 anatime and a friend's dad up years ago at a social gathering. Her dad, Kioto Mines, said he'd give me a little bit of a hard time. And you guess so you're you're an academic, right, yeah, what do you actually make?

What do you like? Salary wise?

No? No, 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.

Just 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 checkmate. It was is pretty good. So you know, but I do love that component. I love I love training, you know, 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.

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Okay, your questions some of them might be ridiculous, some of them might be too difficult to answer. I'm not sure, but okay, I'm just going to start. David wants to know any new thoughts on what color dinosaurs were, Any new.

Thoughts nice, 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 it 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 preservedossils. You need a microscope to

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 taste like chicken.

Yeah, so you know what putting in it is birds are just weird dinosaurs Yeah, and uh, and they probably did. I mean, keep in mind, the closest living relatives of birds are crocodilians, And if you ever had alligator, it tastes a little bit 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 imagined

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 track, is so good, And that's used particularly in 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.

How do you know when the switch brushes when the one you currently have is unusable. Okay, yeah, it's as we've already discussed, petologis 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 anyting, 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 rush will kind of do. Certain perssel types are better than others. But you know, it's you know, it's not you're not like, it's not like painting. We're going out to detail work.

The key thing is to not to damage the fossil.

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 up.

I've used dental tools 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 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 for 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 or less work.

As an average individual you're.

Displaying isn't a single individual ever lived, but it's sort of an average of four or five app individuals that were very similar.

So it's like a frank consur, it's like a frankensor.

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 do some placard reading. It's interesting to see trends in paleontology, and I don't know, it's interesting to see paleontology itself evolve. Stephen one of our audio engineers, really

Oh, I know, I had a question. So I had a question about the toro, the Toros Serratops 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 horn dinosaurs consider 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 it's a neat idea. But right now, I'd say the majority opinion amongst paleontologists is still that Triceratops is a valid name.

But we'll see how it plays out. Thank you, no worries.

What's the hot goss on Brnosaurus ronosaurs?

So so the the short answer is Brontosaurus 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, oth Neil Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope had a mutual reciprocal hatred for each other. They tried to outdo each other in terms of paleontological supremacy, and they would sabotage each other's work. They would publicly discredit the other one one of them, Marsh put the wrong

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

That's some good breaking news on the Bronosaurus front. Yes, I feel like between Pluto and Bronosaurus a lot of people got really confused about who was what what was happening? Just over ten years ago. Just catch you up, Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet because it doesn't have enough game compared to the objects around it. That is 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 if the questions 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. Service temperature changes very rapidly. You need to go into the fossil record. This shit

It's because, oh, yeah.

Yeah, we've seen this in our records right about the time a whole bunch of shit died.

Right.

And it's not, of course, because stuff gets too warm. It's because the rate.

Right.

And if you want to know how fast things have to change to be disruptive, you have to look at the fossil record.

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 as a biomechanist, I do work with engineers on robotics applications. For the most part, if you're interested in an animal model, Fromer says that 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, 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, 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 succinctive way of putting what I rambled on about.

Well, then, the idea of us having a unmanned aviation that's in the shape of a pterosaur, just like a robotic pterosaur. 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 Funy a riteable robot terrastor that you can use to get to work?

Can that be l a 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 ologies 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.

Whoa And it was just like boom, and I was like, oh my god, this was scary.

Okay, say goodbye everybody.

Pacodermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, mattology, nathology, zeriology, slinology.

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