Fossil Action Scenes: Dino Birth and Prehistoric Combat

as he flies overhead. Too late. The dromeo Saurus attack. They swallow eggs hole, they rip leathery wings. The quetso co Atlas swoops down as near he dares he sees and understands. He turned sharply away. I am quetzo co Atlas. The ground trembles below me. I glide over the rock ledge and soar into the sky. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb,

and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert I gotta ask, when you are at home reading dinosaur books with your son, do you read them out loud in that Tulsa Doom voice you just did. Yes, if I can get away with it, I use voices, but sometimes he just says, use your regular voice, dad, and I I have to oblige or he could just grow up thinking that Fulsa Doom is his dad. Well, these books in particular really really encourage a very dramatic reading. Now who wrote these

two we were looking at it was two different books. Yes, now these are. One book is called I Am Quetzalcoatlas and the other one is I Am Diplodocus. These were written by Karen Wallace and illustrated by Mike Bostock. Now, you sent me a link to these on Amazon, and I went and looked it up, and it is so funny because there is just one star review is coming out the eye sockets. People are mad about these books. Yeah, the first of all, I want to get out there.

These are great books. I highly recommend. These are five star books in my opinions. These are these are dinosaur children's but dinosaur children's books. And uh. And when I say I love them, I'm not being like ironic, like, oh it's a horrible book, and you know it's but I but I find something weird about them. Now, these are these are great dinosaur books, but they are a bit dark, or at least they're a bit realistic. You know, so many dinosaur books are like kids having adventures with

dinosaurs or things are kind of whitewashed. No, these these books encourage the child to look through the eyes of of of an animal living in an in an ancient time, uh, competing for resources, having to deal with the relentless predators, encountering death and injury, and and I think all the

ones I've read end in death. Uh. But and it's weird because when I read the first one to my son, which I think was the quets solco Atlas one, I was reading it for the first time allowed to him, and we were getting to the violence, and then we were getting to the part where the male Quetsoco Atlas flies over and sees his family consumed by predators, and I was like, oh my god, my kid's gonna lose it. This is too dark, this is too violent. He doesn't

he makes a skip over predation and documentaries. He's not crazy about super dramatic scenes in children's movies, so I didn't think he'd be able to handle this, but he did. He loved it, and and he has this, I don't know, an interesting disconnect where if it's dying a saur violence, it's okay. If he has a whole book about like it's called The Death of the Dinosaurs, it's a kid's book in which it's just it's basically Corman McCarthy's The

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

a five star way. A lot of these one star reviews featured lots of direct quotes from the books, like lists of words ripping, slicing, slashing, tearing, and thieving. I'm sorry, whoever, I just quoted from the internet, but uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there there is a certain way in which I understand how dinosaur violence can seem different than violence the it's taking place in the present. I mean, for one thing, we definitely do have a time desensitization mechanism

in our brains. And in the same way that if you hear about how yesterday a thousand people were massacred, that is a heartbreaking tragedy. But if you hear about how a thousand years ago a thousand people were massacred, it's fodder for jokes. It just doesn't it just doesn't resonate in the same way. I guess it was no less tragic then, but it just really doesn't hit you.

And dinosaurs may suffer from that, but I think they also are subject to a kind of conditioning in the brain that comes from dinosaur illustrations, which is that, at least in my mind. Maybe maybe this is not true across the board, but when I scan my memory of dinosaur illustrations from my childhood, they're always action scenes. Something

violent is happening or is about to happen. It's not just lots of pictures of you know, some herbivore standing around in the water, drinking water, eating leaves, maybe a carnivore just basking in the sun. There's always feeding imminent or or fighting taking place. Something's leaping at something else, mouth open, claws extended, they're wrestling. I think of that, Uh, well, this wouldn't be dinosaurs, but it would be prehistoric animals.

I think of that iconic image of the saber tooth cat, and it's some other scavenger I don't remember what, maybe a dire wolf fighting over a mammoth carcass. Yeah, I mean paleo art is rich. There's there are a lot of just wonderful works there. I mean, especially when you're dealing with with actual painted paleo art and and not some of the c g I stuff. You find a lot of the times now and you do have scenes of like peaceful duck built dinosaurs out in the water.

But the ones that stick with us, and the certainly the ones that I remember from dinosaur books to chin and then I'm rediscovering now with my almost five year old, are these scenes, like you say, I'm drum attic encounters of a one dinosaur battling another herbivore versus predator duking it out in a prehistoric landscape. I mean, that's the stuff that draws us in usually also there's like a

volcano or roughing in the background. Why is that, Well, you know, I guess tying in like the whole extinct, like the the extinction of the dinosaurs is wrapped up in them. They're like the Norse gods, of of of prehistoric creatures. True, yeah, they existed for like tens of millions of years, and yet in our minds they're constantly going extinct. But but you're right, there's almost always a volcano.

It's like two animals fighting volcano in the background. Crazy like the fight scenes you see for dinosaurs, Like how often do you encounter something that climactic even in our biggest blockbusters, like two to combatants battling killing each other as a volcano erupts in the background. Um, it's crazy stuff. I guess that's how it's got to be. And you know what, it's probably not the fact or not the case that that's really what the dominant art is is.

Just that's what I remember. I think you it makes an impact. You know, you've probably called that out right. But one thing that's kind of cool is that you don't have to go to fiction to find a few of these crazy action scenes from the prehistoric world, and this brings us to our topic today. Robert, you suggested this episode and the idea is fossil action scenes. Now, what made you want to do this? Was it just

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

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

between protoceratops and this particular predator. Uh and and and we've learned a lot from what this creature consisted of based on this fossil find. Now you might be wondering, well, why why would that be such a special thing. I mean, these animals live for millions of years and they get fossilized. So why wouldn't we see all kinds of action scenes in the fossil record? Why is that a rare and

wonderful thing to come across? Well, you have to think a little bit about the conditions under which fossils arise to understand why this really shouldn't happen all that often. Yeah, and really it makes it makes these encounters all the more amazing. So so yeah, stick stick with us here

as we dive into just how fossilization occurs. Right, Okay, So when we think of fossils, were usually thinking of bones, But that's actually a little bit narrow because a fossil, in reality, as the term would be used by somebody who works in paleontology or biology, is a physical remnant of any kind left behind by an organism that lived in a previous geological age. So these could be things like preserved footprints or eggs or nest sites, burrows, things

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

that die don't get fossilized. And you can probably figure this out if you just do a little mental math about how many organisms have ever existed and how you're not constantly wading through fossils on planet Earth. Um, there are a bunch of hurdles you have to pass through to turn from a regular dead animal into a fossil. First of all, fossilization is going to strongly prefer animals with hard body parts, right, you want to have bones, teeth, shells,

animals that don't have hard body parts. If you're a jelly fish or a slug or something like that, you're almost always going to decompose entirely and just disappear into history. Also, fossilization depends very much on the environment. It's much more likely to happen in an environment that promotes rapid burial,

because you can think about it, it's pretty intuitive. Actually, the longer a dead organism lies exposed to the open environment, the you know, the seafloor or the air or whatever it might be, the more vulnerable it is to all kinds of pressures that would destroy it. So this could be scavenging, scavenging by animals, decomposition by microbial life, erosion by forces like wind and tidal action and stuff like that,

and just general destruction. If you're sitting out in the open, the parts of your body, even the hard parts of your body, you're gonna get worn down and destroyed over time. Yeah,

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

to break down like that. That coyote is never going to be a fossil. Uh. The route where I walk my dog Charlie has of late had a slowly settling pile of fur with a couple of visible jawbones and teeth and stuff. Not sure what that was. At some point it was something mammalian. Uh. And yeah, you you just watch it over time disappear. So, yeah, that's what happens out in the open. So for this reason, if you want to turn into a fossil, if you want to be preserved, you want to be in a sediment

forming environment. That would be an area like the bottom of the sea floor, where there's a good deposition of sediment on top of you. And this is one reason you're going to see way more fossils of water dwelling

animals than you do of land dwelling animals. But rapid burial can also happen in some other situations, for example, on land where there are sand dunes and the desert that might quickly bury an animal body that you know, if a sand dune collapses or gets blown by wind over the body or in an area where some kind of moving water flow. Alluvial areas can wash sediment over the body and bury it that way. Of course, over time, we know what happens to sediment under pressure. It gets

turned into rocks and solidified in various ways. But even if an organism is quickly buried, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to turn into a fossil. Then you you've still got a few hurdles, one of which is that it has to undergo some geological transformation. When you come across dinosaur bones in the museum, they're not really the bones of the dinosaur that you're looking at. What what you're looking at as a kind of geological photocopy in a sense. Uh So. One of the processes by which

this happens is known as per mineralization. And this is when you've got groundwater that trickles around and through a dead, buried organism, and as it trickles through the organism, it carries these minerals with it, dissolved minerals in the water

and leave some of them behind. So the mineral laden water fills all these little microscopic gaps and pores in your bones, and it deposits some of those minerals that it carries in those empty spaces, and then over time these minerals accumulate and crystallize throughout the structure of the bone, essentially turning the bone into a rock in the shape

of the original bone. I have to admit, like looking back on my own history of dinosaurs, I think I had a sense of sadness when I learned for the first time that dinosaur bones are not actual dinosaur bones, that they are their fossils. Of course, it's it's still amazing, but but I think I feel like there's there's a certain sadness that can sink in when you when you first have to realize, oh, this is it's not as simple as the bones of the creature that I'm trying

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

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

So you have this per mineralization process, but then you've also got this process known as replacement, and this is similar but sort of more more total, more holistic, and organism's body is buried and then it disappears because it gets decomposed, maybe my microbial life or gets dissolved through chemical reactions with the soil or the groundwater gets washed away and eroded, and what you're left with is a cavity in the ground in the shape of the original structure.

So you might have like a cavity in the shape of a skeleton or a shell or a bone, and then this cavity gets filled in with some other mineral, creating a sort of mineral cast in the same shape as the original organ in structure. Then, of course there are other ways. There is for example, carbonization where organisms get squeezed between layers of sediment and leave this carbon

imprint that sometimes happens to like plants and insects. Then there would also be resin in casing, which we all know from Jurassic Parks seeing the mosquito and the amber. Things can be frozen and ice, of course, like we see from the previous ice age. You might see a mammoth frozen and ice. And then things can be for example, buried in tar, like in the tar pits. So there are a lot of ways things can be preserved across the geological eons. But despite all these different ways that

it can happen, it doesn't happen that much. Only a very small portion of the animals that exist get preserved, and then only a small portion of those that get preserved actually get found by us. So we have a have a very limited sampling of what there once was on planet Earth. But another thing to think about is not just the scarcity of fossiles, but the process by

which they're created. It doesn't tend to favor action. You know, you're you're not likely to catch a fossil of an animal in mid behavior where it's clear what was happening. Something was dead, was probably very very often moved around by some water currents or something like that, so you don't really necessarily get a sense of what was going on in this animal's life. Yeah, fossil evidence of feeding behavior or any kind of like really key life moments

are exceedingly rare. And it's that it's always worth remembering that the fossil record itself is inherently incomplete. You're not gonna never gonna have a complete fossil record because, as we've discussed, like the limits of fossilization, that all the criteria that have to be met a stand in the way of that um And I don't mention this to cast doubt on what we have or the you know, the visions of the past that we derive from our fossils.

It's just that we're left to figure out the shape of what came before with an in complete jigsaw puzzle that has no box right heart of the cover. And it's Joe discussed here to begin with, sediment has to cover in organisms remains in order for the long fossilization process to begin. Most organisms decomposed before this can happen. Fossilization odds increase if the organism happens to exist in large numbers or lived in and around a sediment. So,

for instance, trilobytes meet both criteria. Tons of them, they're on the ocean floor, They're very well represented in the fossil record. Not so great for a lot of these great wonderful land predators you'd want to see, Yeah, like something like a t rex that that would have been an apex predator. I always think of a pyramid, a pyramid of bones, okay, and your apex predator is seated

on a throne at the top of this pyramid. So you can only have so many pyramids based on the bones and the bodies and the life force of the creatures. And so your apex predator that's gonna be a really rare fined. Yeah, I mean, the ecology can't support lots of them in the place, so there's not that many

to choose from. And then it's also existing in circumstances that make it less likely to get fossilized when it dies, right and then you know, and that's why we have we have a number of species out there where we're basing the entire species on me maybe even just a few different bones, you know, or at least an incomplete skeleton. And then plus fossils might be set in stone, but they're far from impervious. Like all rocks, they can erode,

they can melt, they can fragment. So even once fossilization occurs, that doesn't mean they're gonna last. It also doesn't mean that somebody didn't build a church over it at some point. And it's now and so you know, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site now, and you'll never get that juicy like you know, three t rex of feeding fossil extravaganza that's trapped underneath it. You know, there's so even if

fossilization happens, we might never see it. So even when you do wind up with the fossil jigsaw puzzle pieces you need, you still have to figure out how they fit together. You have to imagine the missing pieces. Uh, there's been a long process in which we've continually refined our understanding of the form of these dinosaurs. We're still continuing to refine our understanding of what they looked like,

how they behaved. I mean, you look at something like the iguanadon the spike thumbed creature, one of the earliest dinosaur finds who's got two thumbs and got illustrated in a very weird way. Yeah, you look that guy, because if you look at those illustrations, the body just changes rapidly. T Rex is another one where we've we've had some some distinct changes over time and how we interpret its bodily positioning and uh, you know, so a lot of

the time we can only guess at the shape. We can form theories about the shape, and the same goes. The same holds true for how different prehistoric species would have interacted with each other based on their forms and the behavior of existing animals. Evidence of dinosaurs feeding, as we said, is exceedingly rare, but every so often the fossil records record throws us a real hum dinger. They give us an action scene preserved in stone. So that is what we're gonna be looking at for the rest

of the episode. But I think we should take a quick break first, and when we come back we will get into some of these amazing fossil action scenes. All right, we're back now, Robert. Before we actually take a look at these fossil action scenes, one thing we should keep in mind is that we should say again, you can't always look at a fossil and know how and where an organism died, right because a lot of remains are, for example, moved around by water currents before they get

buried and fossilized. Uh, it might call to mind you can imagine like a big alluvial floodwater deposit where a bunch of bones get washed into the same place, and then you could come along as a future archaeologist and dig this up and look like, oh, there was an ancient monster battle here, this is where the battlefield was

and all the creatures fell. But really what you're looking at as a place where the bones were moved to along a you know, a path, the path of a river or or a flood deposit or something like that.

So we do need to keep in mind that you always have to approach a fossil site with skepticism to look at the surroundings, to look for clues to figure out if what you're looking at is a true, you know, institute scene or if it's some something that has been altered by the environment or by the behavior of animals or something like that. Indeed, keep that in mind at

all time. So let's go ahead and launch into it here. Uh, it's kind of fun to think of this as a as a big fight card, like a you know, like a like a sort of wrestling term or you know, you know, like a boxing wrestling and then a type of situation where you you have the card right the opening matches, the mid card, and then finally the main event. Robert,

I think you're more into the fighting arts than I am. Well, probably some of the fighting arts, but here we're talking about the dinosaurs were fighting arts, and with our first case, we're actually gonna we're gonna kick off with just prehistoric mammal fighting arts. So it's time to look at the showdown of the Colombian mammoths. So these were placed to scene epic animals. Colombian mammoths about one point five million years ago until around ten to thirteen thousand years ago.

They lived in North America, stretching down into ice Age Central America. And Uh, these things were big. They were bigger than their cousins, the wooly mammoths we know about the Colombian mammoths could grow up to about thirteen feet tall way maybe eight to ten tons or so. And so I want to set the scene for how these

fossils are discovered. In nineteen sixty two, there's some workers who are, according to one account I read, installing some electric lines, and another account I read they were doing some surveying. So I'm not sure what's the true story there, but they were out working on a ranch in the Nebraska Panhandle. So that's western Nebraska. It's a sparsely populated part of the state, but it is a place where

you can come across some ancient fossils. And near this tiny town of Crawford in western Nebraska, they came across the leg bone of an extremely large animal, and they took this leg bone wrapped in some feedsack to a paleontology student named Mike Vorhees who was brought in for excavation. Why are you Why are you grinning? Well, and I'm just certainly wondering if there's a connection to Jason Vorhees. Yeah,

well it's spelled differently. This is I e s all right, all right, I'll try and force the mental image out of my mind. Yeah, but I mean both bone kings of a sort. Now vorhes Is brought in and he discovered that there was not one, but two male Colombian mammoths fossilized together in the same site. Why together, Well,

it looks like they died fighting each other. As I said a minute ago, the columbia In mammoths are related to the smaller, more northern dwelling wooly mammoth, and mammoth's lived in Europe and Asia since about two point five million years ago or so, and they are not the ancestors of existing elephants. I think that might be a common misconception, but instead their cousins of elephants along a different line of elephant like creatures. They're more closely related

to Asian elephants than to African elephants. And Asian mammoths are believed to have migrated to North America over the Bearing Straight Land Bridge about one and a half million years ago or so, and they had evolved into the form we recognize as the Colombian mammoth by about one

point one million years ago. So they occupied North America, stretching down into Central America up to about the southern border of Canada, so you can think about them all throughout the the United States area on all in the plains. I've heard that they've been found, uh, pretty pretty far east and pretty far west. Wooly mammoth's tended to live farther up north in like Canadia. Canadia, I said it

you Canada and Alaska. Now, the Columbian mammoths could live about seventy or eighty years, so that's a nice lifespan. And once they were adults, they really had no natural predators. They're huge now. When they were children, of course children. The that is that the term for mammoth's juvenile mammoths were preyed upon by the standard carnivores of the time, maybe sabretooth cats and things like that. I guess it would be a calf, right, calf, an elephant calf? Is

that right? I think that's probably right. We'll go with it. Now, mammoths show sexual dimorphism in the tusks, with the males having these longer, heavier tusks than the females, and sometimes the Columbia tusks could grow up to about sixteen feet long. I think about that. This is on an animal with a body length and maybe thirteen to fifteen feet. So

the tusks are these gigantic weapons. And these animals wind extinct sometime between thirteen thousand ten thousand years ago, probably due to a combination of climate change in human hunting that we don't really know for sure. Have you got an illustration here? Oh? There it is. Man, look at those massive tusks and they're they're kind of hooked in inward and they're not uh, not underhanded sloping up, but

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

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

of see what's happening here. Now, scientists more recently believed that the two mammoths that are fossilized in this scene were very likely in this testosterone fueled bull elephant phase, each about forty years old, fighting over mating opportunities, and it appears they were well matched because the fight led to this entanglement of the tusks, which somehow killed them both. So you've got the two skeletons locked face to face

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

cover kind of thing. It's it's for real Now, the fight between these two mammoths was probably a lot more dangerous than the average mammoth fight, and it's because both of these mammoths had one of their tusks broken off and thus shortened. And this actually made it more lethal than one of these would have normally been because it allowed them to get in closer for fighting, and since they got in closer than would normally be possible, it

led to this tangling of the tusks that killed them. Now, it's probably the case that their deaths came slowly, or at least one of their deaths came slowly, with one of the two bowls dying before the other one and then pinning into the ground by the face. And in this state they would have been unable to reach food or water, but also would have been vulnerable to opportunistic scavengers.

And this, this aggressive fighting between male mammoths can possibly be chalked up to the glory of what's known as must. There are you familiar with this concept, Robert Musk the smell of the scent no, no, no, must, must with a thh, not with a kill? A familiar with? Okay? So must? Is this kind of this problem? This is not the right way to say it, but I want to characterize it this way. It's like a recurring murderous

puberty in male elephants. More literally, what it is is a hormonal period lasting up to weeks and even months, when a bull elephants body begins to produce about sixty times the amount of testosterone normally found in male elephants, and during this period, known as the must, bull elephants secrete a substance called tempour in from the temporal glands on the sides of their head. You can see pictures of them where it looks like they're just using some

gross orange fluid from their temples. Uh. But it also alters their regular behavior, so they become much more violent and aggressive. Elephants that are that work with humans in

these periods become much more dangerous to work with. And they also emit this noise known as a must the rumble, and they can be seen I watched video of this doing this display called tusking the ground where they will stab their tusks into the soil um and I think they're multiple theories on why exactly they do that, but it looks pretty threatening. I'm not sure if it's meant

to look threatening, you know. I I certainly watched the number of documentaries detailing elephants, but but I feel like most of them tend to focus on the female herds. Ye in the matriarchal order there, because you have the the elderly females, uh, leading and then you have the younger females, and then you have the the young the calf's following around. And in the males they live separately.

And now that you've described their behavior at times, you understand why they have to live outside the house, right, so when they go into a must period, you just don't want to be around them. They're no good uh. And so it's it's not unknown actually for for other types of animals to engage in these than these mutually deadly male dominance encounters. For example, stags sometimes go into male dominance conflicts where they get their antlers hopelessly locked.

You might remember from last year there was the discovery of these two bull moose in Una lucklyit Alaska. Oh yeah, I think I remember this. Yes, So they're frozen in ice with their antlers locked, and it looks like what happened in this case was that the two moose were in a fight over mating rights, and they got their antlers stuck together, and then they drowned, and then the

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

thing I came across male dominance entanglement swans. Did you see this video? It went viral a while back, but there were the two photographers in Latvia named Alexander and Vitali drov And in two thousand nine they filmed this encounter where they had a pair of swans that were just hopelessly entangled by the wings and necks, floating pathetically in a pond, just kind of paddling around randomly, looking on the verge of death, and the two men came

up to them. I from what I've read, by the way, don't don't try this because swans can actually be very aggressive and dangerous. Yeah, so don't try to mess with swans. But the two men were unable to untie the knot of birdnecks and wings and the two swans, you would you'd have to see it. It's crazy. They are in a knot. They're just completely twisted around each other. And once they finally get all this stuff untangled, the two swans just scramble away, and without this intervention, it looks

like they probably would have died. But in a National Geographic article about this incident, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum bird expert Brian K. Schmidt says that they were probably also male swans who were fighting overbreeding territory. So with all these animals, from swans to stags to mammoths, it often probably doesn't come to a physical fight, right, and two males are going to be making threatening displays at one another and then the less dominant one is going

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

and usurper. Yeah, to remove them from themselves from competition. Yeah, for the for the thing that they're after feels somehow metaphorical. Well that is, that is one heck of an encounter. It's one of these where you can look at you can look at the fossil evidence you can, and then you can imagine conflict and and just just see these behemoths locked up with each other and just battling to

the death. Yeah. It's also kind of sad though, to imagine what they looked like once they were on the ground, maybe once one of them has died and they're just stuck. Yeah, I don't know. It's an ignominious end for a for a powerful beast. I agree. Well, you know, if that, if that's the story of an end, I think we should discuss the story of a beginning. So we're on the lower still on the lower card here, so it's time to you know, we can include some some fossil

action scenes that are less combative in nature. Well, I should hope, so come on, yeah, because certainly bring the peace, love and understanding. Yeah, because the animal interactions don't have to include violence. They can of course include mating. They can also include birth itself or or the the care for young. Right, And that's why we turn now to the it feels saurus all right, Yes, And what we're

dealing with here is it the osaurus live birth. And this this now blew me away when I've heard about it. Here's something that's interesting to me. I didn't know that I theosaurs would have live offspring. I just would have assumed they laid eggs because it seems like they're sort

of half reptile half fish, both of which lay eggs. Right. Yeah, And we and certainly when we think of aquatic reptiles, we think of existing examples that are the very sea turtles, who, as as as I think most of us know, have to return to shore to lay their eggs and then go back to sea. So what we're dealing with here are are athosaurs, in many cases specifically the Ichthyosaurus. There are several varieties. The time here is early Jurassic to

early Cretaceous. Location Europe Greenland and North America and these uh, these specimen. These organisms were generally up to six ft six inches long or two ms long. So the athosaurs were the fish lizards the name applies. They were indeed highly specialized marine reptiles. They ruled the seas, ranging far and wide throughout the early Triassic times for roughly one million years. I love these guys and I actually have a bumper sticker on my car of of one done

by the local Atlanta artists our land. Uh it I interpreted as an ichthiosaura. It might just be a funky dolphin. But but but I see it, and I think, knowing our lands, I have googly eyes. It does have strange eyes. But you know, the funky dolphin thing is is is apt because indeed, when you look at a skeleton or certainly a work of paleo art, the Ichthyosaurus does look very much like a weird dolphin, and paleontologists believed they

would have probably occupied the same ecological niche uh. The origins are unclear, but they likely evolved from a land reptile rather than another aquatic one. That is really interesting. Of course, now we know that these these marine mammals evolved probably from land dwelling mammals. Right, They were land dwelling mammals that moved back into the water. And now we see the same thing happen with reptiles, but earlier. Yeah, it's mind blowing to see the evolution of a basic

form across a different species. So you have, you know, the shark, the tune of the dolphin, the athosaurs. It makes me wonder if you know, some distant water world on another planet, Uh, you're gonna have creatures that are very different in many respects but still end up taking the basic form of the athiosaur or the dolphin. Yeah,

it seems widely successful. So we talked earlier about you know, the what helps a creature become a fossil if it lives in the water, but it lives in a near sediment, and if it's around insufficient numbers and the ethos are definitely lines up with this. It's an animal that we know very well from the fossil record, based on several hundred complete skeletons, many stemming from early Jurassic fossils recorded

in shallow waters now shale in southern Germany. And and these are these are some excellent fossils because in many cases there's a thin film of carbon around them that indicates the exact shape of their bodies while they had flesh. So so it's not just a matter of you know, when you look at some of the dinosaurs uh skeletons, you'll see varying theories about like, well, maybe this one had some sort of um like an inflatable growth on its head, especially with the duck build dinosaurs, or just

stuff about skin texture and feathers and things like that. Yeah, we don't always have enough fossil events to really fully imagine the flesh, but with the atheosaurs we do. We have this carnibon outline that tells us the shape they had in life. We also have a fossilized poop or corporate lights. We have the stomach contents in some cases, so we know what they ate, mostly fish and some cephalopods, and we even have remnants of pigment cells to suggest

a dark reddish brown colorization. Now you might be well, whine with an animal that lives in the water or want to have like a dark ruddy, you know, kind of color, And there there's a theory that they may have used this dark colouration to to heat up rapidly

between deep dives into the cool depths for fish. Whoa, yeah, so again, they basically had the same role as a modern dolphin, and paleontologist believed they may have become extinct due to later competition with the increasingly advanced sharks of the cretation. Now that's funny because I love sharks, but it's hard for me to think of sharks as advanced. Well, this was a time when they were. They were the

hot new model. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they are the dinosaurs now, I mean so yeah, it's certainly we do have these amazing prehistoric sharks, right, I mean the Megalodon, krotoxy Ryan and all these. But this was a time when the atostars ruled the world, the world the seas for for this long stretch of time. But then the sharks got more advanced and they likely outcompete

them for resources. Now, one cool thing about the ichthyosaur is that if it's occupying a similar to the dolphin and it evolved for the same way, it's probably not going to be a gill breathing organism, right, but it's an air breathing organism. Right. Yeah, everyone agrees they were

air breathers, there's no getting around that. But they seem to get around the necessity of returning to shore to lay their eggs as other uh you know, extinct and existing marine animals, marine reptiles must And that's where the action packed fossil comes into play. Not a fossilized bit of combat, but a seemingly fossilized live birth whole, or at least that's what the fossil evidence suggests. So there's there's been some debate in the past on whether this

might have been near stomach contents. Uh. You run into similar cases of interpretation, like you have some some bodies grouped together. Is there just it's just just some accidental overlay here, Um, what's going on when we look at these But the consensus now seems to be that that we do have fossil evidence of embryos and live earth sometimes scattered outside of the body. And there's some discussion over whether this was due to explosion after death, like

the body bloats up and then burst right. Um. Early arguments that they might have given birth on land gave way to uh an aquatic consensus at least with the with with with many of the athios are species, evidence shows that they were born tail first to prevent drowning

breach by nature. Now this being said, In two thousand fourteen, uh Ryosuki Motani of the University of California Davis and colleagues published research concluding that a fossil i specimen of the athiosaur Chao Hu sais this is the oldest of Mesozoic marine reptiles that lived approximately two forty eight million years ago. Uh They showed that the partial skeleton which

was recovered in China may show a live birth. It features three embryos and neonates, one inside the mother, another exiting the pell us, with half the body still inside the mother, and the third outside. Interestingly enough to study concluded that these specimens might have given birth on dry land due to the head first positioning of the emerging

young So this would have been an older example. So we can imagine how how this might have developed into the full uh at sea live birth that the majority of the atheosaurs engaged in. God, it's crazy to imagine that this must not be all that weird for the majority of life on Earth. But but I don't know. All doing all of the life stuff, mating, giving birth, all in this marine environment with nothing to grab a

hold of. I mean, and it's crazy to think too, that this is a form that evolved from a terrestrial creature. You basically encounted the same, the same blocks, the same, the same struggle to try and imagine, uh, just the the scope of evolution over the course of time periods that humans just simply did not evolve to fathom totally. Now I've got another one for you, Robert, in the same scope, getting away from the fighting more towards the

reproduction and nurture. Uh, this one's gonna be short, but in a group of German scientists reported, I thought this was amazing, the first known find of a pair of vertebrate animals fossilized in the active mating. So it's a pair of turtles from about fifty million years ago or so.

It's described in the article Caught in the Act, the first record of copulating fossil vertebrates by Walter G. Joyce at All in Biology Letters in and these turtles were discovered in the Eocene Messil Pit fossil site in Germany, which is a site of an ancient lake that's produced tons of fossils, and the turtles in question were Aliachellis crassus sculpta, an example of what's known as the pig nosed turtle, and the authors used the fact that the

two turtles died in the coital position to infer something interesting about the lake, or at least this was their their conclusion. Not everybody agrees with it. But when these types of turtles mate, the smaller male mounts up on top of the back of the larger female, and once they're in the copulation position, they tend to sort of freeze. They just sort of stopped moving around and they do

their thing and they're frozen in position. Now, of course, if they're frozen in position and it happens out in open water, the couple of turtles will tend to sink down into the water during the mating process. And what the authors de do is is that the mating began on the surface waters which were inhabitable fine, and then sank down into the abyss hole section of the lake, which they hypothesized was toxic. And this is their explanation

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

pointed and then laughed at by everyone. Well, I like how this this story starts out feeling like a James Bond love sequence, like from Russia with love needs to be playing over, you know, Da da da da da, and then it turns deadly. Yeah, as it always does. Uh, But yeah, I thought that's kind of interesting. You can look up the picture of the two turtles. They are joined in their fossilized state, uh, and it's kind of an interesting thing to look at. So yeah, as turtles

mating always always are. If you ever go to the zoo, you you may encounter mating turtles, and it's all it's always worth gazing at and listening to because it's generally there's a lot of grunting involved. I'm not sure have you seen the YouTube videos of turtles trying to mate with various objects such as shoes and bowls. No, I have not. Yeah, they tend to make a kind of squeaking sound that's cute. I will have to look those up. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when

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

so it's time for some really hard hitting action. And when you when you think about dinosaur combat, there are a few names that are gonna be on that list, and I guarantee for most people, I mean, for modern listeners, this one might even be up at the top, but I think it's probably two or three, maybe four, and

that is the Velociraptor. Now, I wonder if wasn't there some TV show that does these historical matchups where it's like who would win in a fight between a velociraptor and a medieval night Probably there was some show like this wasn't there, so it sounds like something that would be on that I didn't watch. Samurai versus Velociraptor. Well, advantage probably goes to the velociraptor. Just just off the

top of my head without really crunching with data. Uh, these will tell me why these were pretty terrifying creatures. So late Cretaceous is the time period the location asia modern day Mongolian parts of China. These guys were six ft long or one point eight meters long, so there an growth the family Dromeo Saraday and they look pretty much like the creatures you know and love from the Jurassic Park movies, but with three major differing factors here.

So first of all, we know now that they had feathers, likely iridescent feathers, Okay, So I don't think that takes away from the terrifying nature of the velociraptor. I know a lot of people don't like it. I love it. I think that's even better. But birds are scarier than lizards. Yeah, birds are scary. And you know what, you don't have to like it. That's what the science says. Uh. They had feathers and they were terrifying. You don't have to

like it to be eaten. They don't care. The velociraptor doesn't care if you're if you approve, if it's uh, if it's plumage. And second, the head is all wrong in the movies. Okay, so the actual velociraptor probably had a head that was you know, it is a long, low, flat snouted head. It looked more like an alligator. And a third it was it was This was a smaller creature than you see in them, of vise. It was about the size of a large dog, not as tall. Yeah, yeah,

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

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

So I have read that. I don't know if that's correct, and I guess I guess Michael Crichton has passed on and we can't ask him, but but I have heard that's jested as how that mix up happened. Okay, so he might have had a little more excuse there as opposed to just it sounds cooler. But regardless, we know better now, and we're still depicting these Jurassic Park movies.

They're still making more, aren't they. Yeah, they're still making more, and they're still depicting the velociraptor as Adnonicus without feathers, which I think they have a responsibility to to fix that. I mean, granted, nobody's going in and watching Jurassic Park or Jurassic World or whatever. The next one is going to be called as their hopefully as their primary educational dinosaur documentary. Hopefully that's not also where you get your

info about chaos theory, right. But but on the other hand, like this is still like a prime visualization of dinosaur life. I mean, it's it's a it's amazing footage. They're putting all this money into it. Why not make it match up with our current understanding of the fossil record. I why not have some some feathered dnonicus or just go ahead,

have feathered velociraptors. Because the thing is, even though they were smaller than what you see in the movie, they still would have been deadly, especially if they were hunting in a pack. Yeah. Yeah, I mean think how scary that would be to get get attacked by these tiny things? Yeah, or you know, dog size thing. Nobody wants to get eaten by a pack of dogs as tiny as a relative word or a tiny relative to what they were. And it's certainly in the dinosaurs seen a scheme of things.

So no matter how you shake it, the raptor was indeed a member of the terrible cloud lizards group here, all of which were swift, fearsome hunters, probably pack hunters in many cases. Uh, there's controversy about that we can get into it, get back to especially concerning Denona, because they would have had large brains, elongated sickle shaped claws on the second toe of each foot, and uh as the as Jurassic Park indicates. They would have been clever girls.

But they were probably not as smart as cats or dogs are today, so don't get too excited about that. They couldn't have, you know, piloted a helicopter, so you think maybe smart for dinosaurs, but not as smart as the movies would have you believe. Probably mean that's probably a larger conversation, right, because I've seen my car to try to open a door, So who's to say that a dinosaur couldn't open a door. We'll leave that one for another another episode. But will your cat run with

your motorcycle gang? Oh well no, probably not. I think she would. She would flatly refuse to do that. Okay, we'll leave Jurassic World out of this now. Now tell us about the other contender here, Robert, all right, the other contender is Protoceratops. This one you've seen many pictures of this one before. It was a common dinosaur, and it's essentially a smaller tri Serratops. Smaller horned dinosaur, but without any of the without any of the horns, say

for a sort of nose bulge. Okay, now it does have like a frill, right, yes, it does have a broad neck frill. And this was primarily to to anchor muscles for the heavy toothed beak and aw, so it was and it and its one horn was more of a crest, and this crest was larger and older males, suggesting it was probably used in mating battles. It walked on all fours, though it may have been able to run on its back legs when needed. So this is where we get a really important dinosaur combat fossil, also

known as the fighting dinosaurs. Uh and this was This was a nine find in Mongolia, and it seems to show a deadly battle between a velociraptor and a protoceratops roughly seventy four million years old. One interpretation is that the raptor is eviscerating its prey with its claws, while the protoceratops is caving in the predator's chest with its horned beak. Another interpretation is that the raptor is slicing open the throat and the Protoceratops is biting down on

the raptor's right arm with its beak. Either way, it's a deadly tableau that indicates they died at the same time. UM A Polish Mongolian team discovered it in the White stand Zone cliffs of the Southern Gobi Desert and it's considered a national treasure of Mongolia and you can you can see it on display in the Mongolian Dinosaur Museum in ulm Pitar. I've never heard of that museum before, but Mongolia is a treasure trove of fossils. I bet that place is awesome. Yeah. I tried to go to

the website but it was down. I would certainly love to hear from anyone who's actually been there. So interpretations vary on this encounter, Like you know, certainly it's an encounter. Nobody seems to be doubting that, but some look to it as a preserved example of a common encounter like these. This was the common predator and this was the common prey, and this kind of thing went down all the time

in the past. Others have argued that it might have been a chance encounter between two species that didn't have much to do with each other. Um this, and this illustrates some of the problems with basing everything you know about prehistoric species interaction on a single bit of evidence totally.

But that's not all. Luckily so, a two thousand ten study published in the journal paleo Geography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology revealed some corroborating fossil evidence uh so that we're talking about Upper Cretaceous deposits uh in inner Mongolia UH that features a mass of badly eroded Protoceratops bones. Among them, they found two velociraptor like teeth and bite marks, So the paleontologists stressed that this uh, this raptor in this case

likely scavenged its meal. But this find and the fighting dinosaurs of find indicate that the creatures probably regularly fed on Protoceratops, both as hunters and scavengers. And they point out that almost all living carnivores do the exact same thing with their core prey species. You would rather just come across a dead one and eat that without having to struggle, But if you're starving, you'll yeah, or or likewise that maybe you know, maybe you prefer the thrill

of the kill that the fresh meat. Though of course, any interaction like that is going to bring the risk of injury or death. Uh, and injury for a predator can be a major thing. Like I remember researching these these cases where male cheetahs develop a strategy for bringing down an ostrich, which generally isn't on the menu. And one of the reasons is taking down an ostrich is dangerous.

And if you're a cheetah that depends on high speed, an injury can mean starvation because it's not like you can just go on the shelf and recoup and then get back in the game. Now that that could be a death sentence. Um, So yeah, taking on dangerous prey is dangerous. Well, that is a perfect segue into our next conflict, which is the showdown between Tanantasaurus and Dynonicus. So now we're gonna be looking at what are assumed to be a standard predator and prey species of North America.

So Tanantasaurus, which is uh that means sinew lizard lived in the early Cretaceous a little more than a hundred million years ago in North America, especially western regions, and it's about six to eight meters long, up to around two ms high, about two thousand to hundred pounds, and then we're back to Denonicus. Uh. That's the genus that

includes the species Denonicus and tirapists. That's also Early Cretaceous, same same time period, pretty much a hundred million years ago, roughly uh, North America, United States, and Denonicus is up to about three and a half ms long, maybe a little more than a meter high, usually about a hundred and fifty pounds, so also not huge. You know, we were just talking about the smallness of the raptor um. There is a great story about this fossil tableau I'm

about I'm about to explain. But the story is by Desmond Maxwell and the December nine to January two thousand issue of Natural History magazine, which I think that's the magazine put out by the American Museum and Natural History, I think UM. And it's describing the work of the Yale Peabody Museum paleontologist John Ostrom and others in understanding Dononicus largely through its relationship with its supposed prey to Nontosaurus.

So John Ostrom is now known as this really important very influential twentieth century paleontologist, and he's widely associated with our current understanding of dinosaurs as the ancestors of modern birds. People had gone back and forth in the paleontology community about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. I think during the eighteen hundreds people associated dinosaurs with birds, but then a lizard model seemed to take over, and then the

bird model started coming back. So in the mid nineteen sixties, Ostrom was working on fossil fossil excavations in the Cloverlely Formation in Montana and Wyoming. I think this was southern Montana, and on the last day of the digging season in nineteen sixty four, Ostrom discovered a composed scene of fossil bones that was totally unlike anything he had encountered in his work before, where there were five specimens in total

at this site. Four were small therapods. Now, when you think therapod, that's sort of the velociraptor or tyrannosaurus kind of model, you know, two legs, the that that kind of thing, and then pieces of one large ornithopod. Her before in the site where these were discovered came to be known by the Yale excavation crew as the shrine site. Yeah,

it evokes this kind of holy mystery. Neither of these species had been described in the scientific literature before, though I think denonicas skeletons had been found, They hadn't just they just hadn't really been described by scientists. And the small therapods were most noticeable for this one huge hook shaped claw found on each foot, and this in them their name Denonicus, also of course means terrible claw. Meanwhile, this one large herbivore was called Tanantosaurus, meaning sinew lizard.

It's kind of they should have called it like gristle lizard. Now, because of the arrangement of the fossils, Ostrom came to a strange conclusion. These four predator carcasses lie, you know, they lay buried around the remains of one large prey animal, and because of the nature of the area. Looking at how the bodies were oriented and some stuff about the sediment, Ostrom didn't think the bones could have been washed into

the plate into that place by moving water. The fossils appeared to be lying in the place where the animals died, so he concluded that Denonicus was a pack hunter. Now you remember this from Jurassic Park, right, their pack hunters, you know all that. So the scene, as you should imagine it, is that a pack of around eight denonic becus attacked, wore down, and killed this much larger prey animal, the Tanantosaurus, but not before about half of the hunting

pack was injured and killed in the struggle. And now this interpretation has remained very controversial. Scientists go back and forth on it. In Jurassic Park, we do see the stand in for the Denonicus executing these complex pack hunting behaviors, but real evidence for this kind of pack hunting behavior has been kind of elusive. And the article basically mentions three main lines of evidence that the Didonicus were pack hunters. One of them is the arrangement of bones itself, the

weird way the bones are laid out at the shrine. Now, it's fairly certain that the fossilized animals died in the position where they were found. And here's one good piece of evidence. After a dinosaur dies, tendons in the vertebrae cause a curling up of the neck and the tail spine along the backbone essentially, and this is why you sometimes see dinosaur falls with their necks curled back in these crazy positions, as if screaming in pain. You know

what I'm talking about. Uh. This is generally thought to be called caused by this contraction of the vertebral tendons as the animal rots. Now, in the specimen the Tenantosaurus, the tail and neck were heavily curved towards each other, making it almost impossible that the body had been moved around by water currents. It looked like this is where

it was when it died. So if multiple Denonicus died alongside this one large Tenantosaurus at the same time and in the same place, what would explain that other than some deadly fight for survival? Uh? So, the Tenantosaurus is certainly large enough to batter, crush, and kill the relatively small predators. Right that it wouldn't be one Dnonicus versus a Tenanto sourus wouldn't be much of a fight. The

prey animal is much bigger. Uh. Then again, if a pack of eight attacked the this one prey animal and half of the pack died, that does not sound like a sustainable hunting strategy. That is that that that is that does not pay off for the hunters here, right, So was it a fluke? Are we seeing some incredibly weird, rare event where the predators desperate and starving? There's an alternate explanation of the site, which is that the denonicus

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

one corpse? The scavenging interpretation that has been advocated by the prominent paleontologist Jack Horner, And I want to read a quote from the article I described It said, quote Horner likens the idea of a Tenantasaurus killing four dinonicus to that of a lone willed to best dispatching four lions. True, the will to beast is bigger than the lions, right, but it just seems kind of crazy thinking it would

like kill all these predators. But back to the quote, Yet, an adult will to beast might weigh from fifty to a hundred pounds more than an adult lion, compared with the difference of about a ton between the Tenantosaurus and the Dynonicus preserved at the shrine site. A will to beast falling on a lion would probably inflict little damage. A Tenantosurus would crush at anonicus, So some evidence going both ways there. It's hard to know what to think,

but a couple other interesting lines of thought. One of them is teeth. Now, the Tanata source remains are associated with lots of Denonicus teeth. It seems like when you find one of these prey animals dead, there's Denonicus teeth all around. That tells you something, right, It indicates a predator prey relationship um there. And there's so many Denonicus teeth found with Tenantosurus remains, way more than you could reasonably expect to be lost to a like by a

soliditary scavenger. If one came across one Dnonicus was eating off of a dead corpse, it wouldn't leave eleven teeth in it, right, That's just too many teeth to be lost to be sustainable. Also, the placement of the teeth tends to concentrate in the abdomen and pelvis. Why is that interesting, Well, it's actually consistent with what you see in predators today, where predators tend to feed on these areas,

the abdomen and the pelvis first. When they kill an animal freshly, Uh, they tend to go for the parts while they're still sort of warm and moist, to be a little gross, to be a little wallace as children's children's book material, folks. So if the dnonicus were doing the same, it looks like they were feeding on a fresh kill, not scavenging piecemeal on some dead animal that came across. And then one final point, the anatomy of the dnonicus makes it look plausibly like a pack hunter.

It's got this one terrible law that looks effective for both grasping and slashing. Uh. The the an tirapists part of the name the dnonicus and tirapists that means counterbalancing,

referring to the bone structure of the tail. Now why would that matter, Well, it means that the animal is capable of making its tail rigid and using it as a counterweight to balance and control the movement of its body, which suggests kind of quick graceful movement and the lightweight of the predator's body also kind of suggests a fast,

active hunter rather than a passive scavenger. So we still don't know whether the pack hunting interpretation of the Dononicus is correct, but some subsequent studies kind of try to endorse the idea. Others have some evidence against it. We don't know for sure, but this one site, with all these with these dead predators and dead prey together is still something that's really interesting to think about and how it informs our understanding of how these almost hunted. All Right,

it's main event time. And when it comes to main event to combat between dinosaurs, you know, what's what's the kirk Khan, What's the Flair steamboat, the Massawa Coba Kobashi, the batman joke, or the gandolf ball rog encounter. What's the one that that is so prominently featured in so many dinosaur books for children, for adults, even like a

paleontology textbooks. What is the what is the iconic battle? Well, it has to be everybody's favorite herbivore, which would be what tri saratops and everybody's favorite carnivore, which would be turning the source Rex. That's correct. Now, I will say Stegasaurus is also a pretty awesome herbivore. People love those thagomizers. Yeah, the thagomizers named for Gary Larson cartoon. These are, of

course the spikes and the tail of the Stegasaurus. Uh. Sadly, Stegasaurus will have to wait for another episode to get his due. But in this case, yes, t Rex versus tri Sarah tops the cl pasic the paleo artists the favorite battle. So let's go into a rundown of the two combinants. Here we have Tarannosaurus rex t rex late Cretaceous North America and Asia as It's stomping grounds size up to forty nine feet fifteen meters long, so an

adult human would would fall short of the knee. So this was one of the largest carnosaur dinosaurs uh and one, and therefore one of the largest terrestrial carnivores ever to walk the Earth. Yeah. I think it's just the Spinosaurus and the Gigantosaurus up there with it. Yeah, yeah, I believe so. And it's a It's diet probably primarily dependent on duck build hadrosaurs and for a while paleontologists drifted towards uh, when I tend to think of as a

bully scavenger view of the beast. So so, it's this enormous creature obviously, but there were there were theories about its its size and its speed that made the paleonta to say, well, maybe what this thing did is it just scared away the predators from an existing kill. That's my corps get away from it. Yeah, And who's gonna stop t rex? Because once in this theory, this view of a of a slow t rex, once it ambles up, you better eating all you can eat, because it's it's

gonna get whatever it wants at that point. Now, opinions varied, but over time the consensus drifted back towards the apex predator model of the t rex, the saying that it likely hit among the trees and then ran full force jaws open at its prey. Uh. And it's certainly had encounters with triceratops as well, which we'll get to. And of course that's our our next combatant in this battle,

the triceratops. Now, you might put up for the stigasaur, but I think triceratops is the most widely beloved herbivore dinosaur. I think there's a there's a very strong case for that being true. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's you just look at it and you can tell that this is this is an animal you're behind and to go back to Jurassic Park. Uh. Stegosaurus I don't think made it into the film, but tri sarratops Is is prominently featured.

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

sequel in the Lost World, do they? Yeah, I remember correctly. I think that they're somebody's taking a picture of one and the Stegosaurus becomes disturbed by the loud noise that the camera makes while it's winding its film back. Okay, alright, good to know, good to know. So the tri Steratops late Cretaceous North American thirty ft nine meters long, the most famous of the horned dinosaurs, also the largest and the most abundant, so they lived in herds across North America.

And unlike the net frills of other horned dinosaurs, and there are several varieties and even some sub varieties of Triceratops here, Unlike these others, though, this frill was solid bone, a defensive structure to protect the neck. And we have fossil evidence of encounters between Triceratops and t Rex, including evidence of partially healed tyrannosaur tooth marks on a triceratops

brow horn. Whoa healed and now that means it it met a t Rex and went and lived to tell the tale exactly it either it at least drove the creature away or managed to escape and maybe even lethally interested, who knows, but either way the message seems to be Triceratops, when it encountered t Rex, it was capable of holding

its own at least in some cases. Because of course, you're also gonna have varying situations of age and size, right, like a young um, a young tristerotopes encountering older t rex, which I understand plays into Karen Wallace's I Am a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I think that's why every That's one of the reasons some of the the reviews were so critical is that I don't know for sure because I haven't read it, but I think the t rex kills

try stereotops. This is like the grail legend king version of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king whose strength is failing. Uh okay, So where's the fossil evidence? Where where do we actually have an encounter between these two creatures. Well, we do have what has been referred to as the Montana dooling dinosaurs, and this is from about sixty eight

million years ago. Now here's a little fine print. UM. Based on interpretation, seems like what we have here is an encounter between the smaller nano Tyrannis, which is a close relative of the t rex, though some people argue that this might be a juvenile t Rex tiny enough to be injected into your bloodstream attack your DNA directly. Yeah, well not not that small. Don't let the nano foo, will you? Um? Dino scale is still in play, but

but certainly a smaller t Rex. And then the other creature uh is Casmio Sarine Saratopsian, and this would have been from the Triceratops family, but smaller. Though some people are commenting on this fossil, go ahead and call it a Triceratops based on what we've seen of this fossil, let's believe that the two dinos killed each other in battle. T Rex suffered a crushed skull and chest, and its

teeth pierced the horned one's skull as well. They were buried, probably by an earthquake because the theories like an earthquake happen, So they died and their bodies were there and then an earthquake buried them. Or does it look like the earthquake was going on while they were fighting. I don't want it to be the last either. Interpretation is pretty amazing, like you think of your most cinematic battles between hero

and villain. Does it ever end in both characters killing each other and then a volcano erupts and covers them, or or an earthquake swallows them hold or a mudslide buries them like that kind of thing is rare even in our most uh you know, imagine fictional showdowns, modern modern stories. You don't want the hero to die usually.

I mean, what do they have, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, like plunge to their death together or something that would be a pretty awesome fossil Can you imagine a future generation of intelligent squid creatures looking through the fossil record of humanity and they say, well, we don't have a lot to go on about human on human combat, but we do have the Sherlock Moriarty fossil fine and it's amazing, and it's got this opium pipe you know. Oh yeah,

uh so um. This particular fine though, the Montana doling dinosaurs is is pretty controversial. So it was unearthed by fossil hunters. Fossil hunters that were not working on behalf of you know, scientific organization or a museum. They found this thing, They dug it up, and then they tried to sell the rock embedded fossils at auction for eight to ten million dollars. Yeah. So the idea was to snag a wealthy and fossil enthusiast who then might donate

it to a museum. Uh, it ended up failing to sell it auction into in and uh the thing was valued at seven to nine million dollars, but bidding only reached five point five million. So they just put it into into storage, into a vault. And that's that's where it is today now to give all that's that's sad, that's junk. Yeah. Uh so how did this even come come to pass? Well, you have to look back a

little to you know, the post Jurassic Park zeal for dinosaurs. Okay, uh and uh in particular, there was a t rex skeleton uh named Sue this one moment up for bidding and it was valued about a million dollars, but the Field Museum of Natural History purchased it for eight point four million. And so critics have said, well, this was

kind of the start of the dinosaur gold rush. You've got into people's mind if we find a really awesome fossil, so find we can sell it, you know, at high price to the highest bidder, and then they can they can do the science once we've done that. But first we're gonna get we're gonna get our our our payday. And this area discussion reminds me a lot of the meteorite hunter debate. So when when profit chasing hunters are the ones finding scientifically significant rocks instead of the scientist,

then all sorts of problems emerge. Proper identification, proper protection of the find, proper values placed on the rocks, not to mention, opening the door to fossil or meteorite theft, to black markets, to rock squatting, as we see with with the with the idea of this, this fossil find

just landing in a vault until somebody ponies up enough money. Um. The falsification is pretty interesting to consider that Nicolas Cage, the actor, paid two hundred and seventy six thousand hours in an auction in twenty two seven for a t rex skull, a skull that turned out to have been illegally removed from Mongolia and he had to return it. That's Nick, you should be ashamed of yourself. Well, he turned he did the right thing, the Nick credit. Well,

I guess so, I'm sorry. I don't mean to be vindictive, he I. I think when you first told me about this, Robert, I imagined him reading an apology letter in his can air accent as I just recently rewatched that movie. Well, the headline on the CNN piece that I sent about that um um the title was I think Nicholas Cage returns his t rex skull, which kind of implied that the skull inside his head was that of a t rex,

which I kind of like. By the way, that CNN article reported that quote, he bought the tyronos Are skull during a time when he also bought fifteen mansions, two castles, four yachts, and nine rolls royces. So you know, sometimes you go on a spending uh spree and you make a few questionable purchase in purchases, including maybe a stolen

Mongolian t rex skull. Well, if you're going for opulence and violating the world's right to preservation of natural history, I think you should just go all out, not you know, skip fourteen in the mansions and instead have one castle made out of t rex skulls. Uh. Well, basically, I would say the big take home here is that sadly the Montana dueling dinosaurs uh find uh has not received

the actual scrutiny that it deserves. And if there's a plus side though, the failure of of this and I think there was a Stegasaurus find that also failed to to to bring in the dough that the hunters wanted. These you could indicate that the fossil bubble has burst and you'll see less of this in the future, So fossil hunters will hopefully be more you influenced by the desire to to get these fines to two institutions and experts, as opposed to just making a massive payday off. Yeah.

I mean, maybe I'm just not being sympathetic enough to see the other side of the coin. But to me, it seems like, I don't know, relics of past geological eras seem like the common heritage of humanity. Shouldn't they be in a place where open to the public, where people can come and see them. Yeah, but but then again, but of course they need to get down to the question. While if that fossil relic is in Mongolia at a museum, not everybody gets to see that. If that fossil relic

is in Chicago, not everyone gets to see that. Yeah, but that's better than being in a private it's in a private vault, like virtually nobody gets to see that, and that doesn't benefit anyone. But still, this fossil exists and that that is exciting. So maybe one day, uh kids will get to see it in a museum and paleontologist will get to give it a lot more attention hopefully. So all right, Robert, you got anything else about fossil action scenes? No, I think that the card has concluded.

The main event has concluded. Uh we we've people are throwing their beer cups down into the ring, right, everyone's piling out of the the the cretaceous thunder dome here, and uh yeah, we're left to just consider just the just how amazing it is. First of all that fossils exist, like the the the the string of events that have to take place to reach fossilization and and then recovery

and appreciation by modern humans. But then to consider that, yes, we have these amazing moments from life, violent confrontations, mating, uh and even birth preserved in the fossil record. And I do I've said this on the podcast before, but I do just want to say again, if you've never had the chance to go to a good natural history museum and look at fossil exhibits, you should find a way to do this. It it is worth it. It's so cool, it's it's a life changing experience to really

see dinosaur fossils in person. Indeed, and if you want to check out those books that we read from at the beginning, again, those are by Karen Wallace. There's I Am a Diplodocus, I Am a quetzal Coatlas, and then she also has one on Ankleiosaurus Tyrannosaurus. Uh and uh yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, yeah, they'll be prepared for the carnage. Be prepared for the carnage. Come for the carnage,

all right. In the meantime, if you want to check out various other podcast episodes we've done, head a numbers stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's what you'll find the landing page with this episode, and we'll try to have some links on there that go out to some of the material we've talked about here, and maybe even a really awesome dinosaur battle illustration to cap it

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