From the Vault: Prehistoric Transylvania

Schell Castle. You approach a golden chalice, resplendent in an embossed spiral of geologic time that winds around from rim to base. At the merest touch, the chalice chimes and shivers, dragging you back through two hundred years of history to

the castle's raising in the Transylvanian wilds. Off you grasped the golden chalice, and time sheds from your perspective like this again, of a great serpent, spiraling out in every direction as you descend through the depths of centuries millennia, through eons of evolutionary change in geologic upheaval, until the chalice slips from your trembling grip and leaves you in an Age of Wonders pottig as you knew it is gone now a paleo island rising up out of the

Late Cretaceous Sea. You glimpse movement and note the approach of several sauropods. Only these are not the hulking giants you're familiar with. They seem dwarf creatures the size of ponies. You could ride one, if only you dared to approach its alien flesh. But before you can muster the courage, the creatures scatter from the clearing predatory therapods to flee back into the forests. As a great shadow descends from the sky, a terrasaur to rival the dragon bowow of myth.

It lands before you. It towers like a siege engine, but you've already thrown yourself to the ground. You're fumbling for the golden chalice so that it might take you home, or take you further back anywhere to escape the jaws of hats. A got to extend them A welcome to stuff to Blow your mind? A production of I Heart Radios has to works. Hey, are you welcome to stuff to blow your mind? My name is Robert Lamb, and

I'm Joe McCormick. And if you can probably guess from that fun little cold open that we have prepared for you there, we are going to be traveling back in time in this episode via paleontology, back to prehistoric Transylvania. That is so exciting, Robert, I can tell you are just itching to like write a novel about this, this ancient paleo island. Yeah. I was really inspired by this, and this is one of those situations where I was

inspired by reading a dinosaur book to my son. Uh. There's a book titled Atlas of Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins and illustrated by Lucy Leatherland, and it has these wonderful, you know, big two page spreads to show a different part of the world and an idea of what the prehistoric life might have looked like. And they had a spread they cover every continent, and they had a spread for heydeck showing like what what prehistoric Transylvania, of what

prehistoric Romania would have might have consisted of. And uh, I have to admit, despite having you know, covered sauropods on the show, and certainly we've talked about gigantic terra saurs quite recently I wasn't really familiar with this corner of the prehistoric world. It clearly it set off a little explosion in your mind. I can sense the energy coming off of you on the subjective hottig and I wanted to say that you're opening reminded me of two

different things. The poem Directive by Robert Frost, which is about going back in time and it also involves a chalice. Yeah yeah, it talks about like I forgot about it, or if or if I just uh, you know, came up with that idea, you know, via some connection to things that were inspired by what he wrote. You should look it up again as a great poem directive, I mean, but it also was like a cross between directive and a sound of thunder. Yes, yeah, yeah, and I was,

I guess I also was definitely thinking about the time machine. Um, you know, who can escape Wells's time machine when considering the past at all? I mean, anytime you're thinking about dinosaurs, you can, and another prehistar creatures such as the pterosaurs, you can't help but imagine like traveling back and encountering them.

That's the ultimate frame of reference, right, What if I was standing next to one but this is the ultimate real monster versus fictional monster crossover because because well not to call dinosaurs monsters, but you know, they're the They're one of the closest things to monster myths, to dragon

myths that you've got in the real world. So you've got like a really interesting sort of dinosaur fossil site with with interesting biogeographical qualities that we will explore as we go on in the and the rest of the episode. But it's right there in Transylvania, right It's it's vampire country, indeed, and you know, we will encounter a fossil that has been dubbed Dracula paleontolog is covering it. How about those pony size sauropods. You didn't make that up, did you know? No,

that's all. That's one of one of like the really amazing things about about this particular scenario and and ultimately about everything we're gonna talk about in this episode, is that is that we're looking at an example, a prehistoric example of island dwarf is um and island gigantism, also known as the the island factor or the island rule. And this is a concept we've talked about on the show before. Oh yeah, yeah, it's come up several times. It has to do with body size in populations of

animals that become isolated. It but will really just that become isolated because it doesn't have to be on islands. Islands is just the easiest way for it to happen. Like another way it can happen or in these interesting ecosystems known as sky islands, where um, I don't know if you've ever see like like essentially a plateau, it could be the like that. One great example that I've been to is like in a big been National Park

in Texas. So you you have desert and then in the middle of this there are some mountains rising up. And as you go up the slopes of the mountains and in between them at the higher altitudes, actually the climate changes, right because it higher altitudes, it almost kind of mimics higher latitudes, and so the types of plants you find change, the types of animals you find change. It goes from sort of desert to a weird kind of forest up in the higher parts of the mountains.

And so this can function kind of like an island, right because there are creatures that can survive up in those mountain forests but can't traverse the vast expanses of desert down below, or if they do it, it can be very dangerous and that you know, might not make it to anywhere they could survive. So anyway, well, you know, wherever you have a case where species can survive in a very limited geographical range and they're cut off from the rest of the continental populations, you can have these

cases of island gigantism or island dwarf is um. Basically, smaller species tend to become larger, and larger species tend to become smaller, and there are multiple reasons for this, but mainly it's that the smaller species tend to become larger because on islands there is a lack of predators that they would encounter on the mainland that would be a check on their their growth. Meanwhile, larger species tend to become smaller, presumably because of a lack of energy

resources that you would find on the mainland. There's less to eat on the island, so it actually pays to have a smaller body that requires less food. A commonly cited example of this is like the mammoths that were found on certain islands, like the gigantic Colombian mammoth evolved a dwarf variety on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. There was also the Wrangel Island mammoths that were I think the last wooly mammoth's on Earth that

went extinct around four thousand years ago. Were smaller than their continental varieties. And the basic idea with these examples is that they were able to reach these islands when the water level was lower, and then they end up trapped there essentially, and life goes on and evolution continues. Right, Life goes on, but there's less to eat, so if you're trying to make a bigger body, you're more likely to starve to death. So the ones with genes for

smaller bodies tend to be the ones that survive. And so obviously we think about that, you know, examples of this in the recent past or in the modern world, But the same principles of evolution and energy and food dynamics would have been in place in the time of dinosaurs, right exactly, so you could run into exactly the same issue. And it seems like that's exactly what's going on in

this ancient Transylvanian island called hot Egg. Yes, sixty six million years ago, this region was an island in the large body of water that we we refer to now as the Taffy Sea. And this would have covered large parts of Europe up through the Late Cretaceous period, and it would have uh and it would have caused this resulting group of islands to essentially be a European archipelago.

And German born paleontologist Hans Dieter SEUs describes it as a quote shallow epicontinental sea dotted with variously sized islands. Uh SEUs his senior scientist and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. And he even has a dinosaur named after him. Um, so you know he's the real deal. It's a Paki cephalosaur and Pacula Pakia cephalosaur. Hans Sus Sussia and Ceci.

Always a good sign and a paleontologist. The amount of honor is directly proportional to how hard it is to say a little known fact. We we should also note that you know we're we're talking a long time ago here,

so it's not million issue. Oh, Europe was flooded back then, um no. As SEUs points out in a two thousand Tin paper titled an Unusual Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Romania and the Island Rule, there was there was complex tectonic activity along the northern margin of the western Tethys, and then there was volcanic activity that resulted in these cretaceous islands rising up. So and then the largest of these covered much of what we now know as the

Iberian Peninsula and France extending into central Europe. Now, this particular island in the Tats, which is you know, which corresponds to the modern region of Hatig Transylvania, This would have been roughly I'm reading eighty thousand square kilometers or thirty thousand, eight hundred eighty eight square miles. And to put that in perspective, modern day Ireland is uh roughly thirty two five hundred ninety five square miles in size, so so to Ireland. So sort of a you know,

a Romanian Ireland. Um that's crawling with odd sized prehistoric creatures. So that's how we came to have these islands. Roughly, these European islands in the late Cretaceous. Uh and uh. And you know, we ended up with various creatures stranded upon these islands. Uh. And they were subject to evolutionary changes that we refer to roughly as the island rule. So the Titanic sauropod is humbled to the size of a pony, and other creatures that will get to rise

too much larger sizes. And who would read such a such a thing from the fossil record? You know, you might you might think, especially given um uh you know that that paper I just sided from two thousand ten, you might think, well, this is a fairly recent discovery. You especially might think that if you uh, you know, like me, we're not familiar with this, this marvelous world

of of of oversized and undersized prehistoric beasts. But to look to the origin of these discoveries, we have to look to a rogue Austro Hungarian baron of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All right, let's take a break, and when we come back we will meet the baron. All Right, we're back, So it's time to meet the baron, a character who plays a major role in the history of the science and discovery of the the Paleo Island Hottig.

And this baron is Baron friends Noche von Felso Silva's who lived eighteen seventy seven to nineteen thirty three. Yes, Baron Nope, And and I have to have to admit when we started this episode, I really didn't expect there to be a fascinating human story in the midst of all of this, even though, of course paleontology is always a human story because paleontologists are the humans who who

uncover these secrets of the past. But I thought this was just gonna be all, you know, rampaging prehistoric beasts, right, But this is a fascinating individual. And Smithsonian dot com has a great article on Noche titled History Forgot This rogue aristocrat who discover dinosaurs and died Penniless by Vanessa vese Elka, which goes into far more detail in his life than we're going to explore here, especially concerning some

some tragic in the later portions of his life. He was a really interesting figure though, and this is a great article, by the way, This is one that I think listeners just should go go off and read. Definitely yeah, he is. You know, it's tempting to want to just sum him up in a few words like say, oh, he was, you know, a gentleman scientists towards the end of the time period in which the general that gentleman scientists was a thing, and that's I think mostly true.

But then there are all these other weird dimensions to his character. Um so, he was born into privilege and aristocracy, but he also seemed to live with what we would now likely classify as like as a manic depressive disorder. You know, he was he was apparently prone to periods of intense focus and energy, which is good when you're engaging in you know, early fossil study and some of the other activities he was involved in. But then, of course the flip side is that that there were these

morose period as well. He's also described as like being absolutely brilliant in a scientific sense and mostly self taught, you know, just learning from like writing to people and getting them to send him books, and then teaching himself subjects like biology and geology that you know, he didn't have formal training in, and then making all of these discoveries about dinosaurs and paleontology, and about deep time, but also not always not always having the right kind of

social skills within the professional context to get his work accepted. Like apparently he was very rude, and he was or it could be very rude but could also be very charming. Yeah yeah, and and uh yeah. So much of it again was he was self taught. He's he's writing other

experts and getting them to send him books. Or there's also the story of him going off to university and bringing this fossil with him from you know, from from the area of Romania and you know he was from and uh and the professor there was like he was like, what is this? Help me figure this out? And he's like, I don't know, you can figure it out, essentially like send him back with it, which you know, which is

the author points out of the Smithsonian piece. Um, you know, the Suka says, that's either like some great tutelage where the professor is like, oh, I'm gonna grow this young mind by inspiring them to go, uh find the answer themselves, or it's like a really lazy or overwork professor was like I don't have time to help you, uh, you know, decipher this rock. Go do it yourself, but do it himself.

He did, and and so he's one of these remarkable, you know, accounts of his kind of like a self made gentleman scientists, though obviously had had a certain advantage on the situation by being born into the aristocracy. Well, yeah, that's a common thing you see in the history of science that that a lot of the great scientists of

the nineteenth centuries say, we're we're sort of aristocrat types. Uh. And obviously I don't think that's because aristocrats are better at sciences because they had the resources and the leisure to pursuit to like to get into these pursuits. If you're a farmer working night and day, like, you don't

have the time and the money to go into the sciences. Yeah. Yeah, so he was, And I said, he's like I said, he's he's kind of emerging towards the end of the gentleman science being a thing at all, and certainly towards the end of his career. In the end of his life,

he was kind of shut out from scientific circles. Uh. And some of the ideas that he he was was promoting during his life were ultimately ideas that were not widely accepted, though interesting, interestingly enough, would become widely accepted many decades later. In the nineteen seventies, for example, is a time when people started looking back at him and saying, oh,

here's this interesting character, uh from the history books. He you know, he published a hundred and fifties scientific papers in his life, and he identified twenty five genera of reptiles and five different dinosaurs. But we've largely forgotten him, and we don't celebrate him at all. Uh. And and people started, you know, looking back and realizing who he was and what he what he had discovered here, and yeah, there are other aspects to his life that are all

interesting as well. Um, he was an adventurous individual. He served as a spy for the Austro Hungarian Empire, but he seems to have largely used his service to the state as a vehicle for pursuing his interest in geography and geology and the study of the Albanian people. Right. There seems to be this like mix of interests here, because like he apparently just loved the Albanian culture and like wanted to study it and you know, document all

their customs and everything like that. But the government that was funding his work basically wanted a sort of you know, the early twentieth century equivalent of like a CIA fact book on a country, right, and they wanted intelligence that could be used and it could maybe be used in warfare or something like that later on. So that's the

money going into what he's doing. But he but he apparently was just in love with Albania and its people and and its culture and at one point even through his name in the hat to the actually be a king. There's there's that whole storyline. Um. Again, I encourage everyone to read that article about him. But again, his in his scientific pursuits, he was very much ahead of his time.

Uh for starters. The theory of continental drift is now widely, if not universally, accepted, but this was not the case during Noch's life. Yet he presented some of the most credible geologic evidence at the time for continental drift. And then, of course, when it came to fossils, this is where

he made his arguably his greatest impact. He discovered some some very curious fossils in the Hattic region, many of which were noticeable for being quite smaller than examples that were popping up elsewhere, and he argued that these were examples of of of the island rule in action, that the Hattig region was once an island in a prehistoric sea.

Now we'll get to the specific dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures in a little bit, but just just consider he found titanosaur sauropods the size of mere ponies, despite the fact that Titana sars are the largest land animals that we know to have ever existed, reaching sizes oh you know, we're talking a hundred and twenty one ft or thirty seven ms long and uh and the weights of somewhere

in the neighborhood of of of seventy six tons. And yet he finds fossil evidence of these multiple noticeably smaller uh Sara pods, and it just raised the question what were they so well, I mean, the obvious things that they're juveniles, dummy, right, aren't they Aren't they just baby sara pods? Yeah? That well that was what critics argue,

that these were just juveniles and uh. And certainly one of the more alarming things about saraw pods is that they do grow to such alarming size from relatively small eggs. I mean, Sara pods are her weird and strange creatures. Uh. You know that we're still you know, figuring out you know, all the you know, the answers to the mysteries of their biology. And so, you know, just the fact that you find some small ones, you know, it does seem like it could be it could be. One possible explanation

could be that, well, these were just the juveniles. Um. And and this read doesn't seem to have completely fallen out of fashion. As recently as two thousand seven, a paper in historical biology by Jean Leloof argued that, uh, that's some hot tag. Saarapod fossils might suggest quote age class communities among sauropod populations. Oh so this is like a gang of sauropod youths, Yes, exactly, like, yes, a

street gang of youths. Uh. You know. And I believe we've discussed uh, this sort of thing in terms of crocodilians and maybe commodo dragons on the show in the past, the idea that some animals experienced tremendous body size changes and therefore corresponding changes in diet and behavior and maybe thought of as living in their own uh, niche daring different phases of their life, either alone or in groups. Yeah,

different life phases. They're almost kind of like different animals. Yeah, so you know, like a small commodo dragon is going to eat different food than a full grown adult komodo dragon, and the same might be the case with with like a juvenile Sara pod versus of course a fully grown, towering Sara pod. But according to SEUs, subsequent bone studies have backed up the theory that we're seeing the effects of the island rule in the bones of these fun

size Sara pods. Basically, in twenty eight ten, a team of paleontologists looked at the micro structure of the bones to determine age and growth patterns, and they showed that this particular sauropod, these pony Saara pods, were fully grown

adults with small body sizes. And this is from a paper from Benton at All published in Paleoclimatology paleo Ecology, Right, I think so it mentioned in uh one of the articles we were reading, I think it was the Smithsonian article that his methodology was that he actually did molecular analysis of the bones like the Nopesio was able to determine the innosaurs were small adults and not young because he was able to like look at the layers of bone,

like osteogenesis rings within the within cross sections of these bones. Yeah so, or the fossils, I mean, yeah so. I mean he was not just you know, making a wild guess here, who was forming the best scientific hypothesis that he could based on the material. And I have to say, though, I guess it's just the idea of pony size sauropods. It's just so attractive. I I'm so flint stones it is.

And there was like there was some movie growing up too is I think it may have just been called The Last Dinosaur, or like maybe the dinosaur had a name. But I remember there being like a pony size sauropod, some sort of puppet that that the the actors interact with. I remember seeing that as as a child, So it's probably uh, you know, brings back some of those memories.

But then also I mentioned when I was telling my son about this reading to him from that dinosaur book I mentioned earlier, you know, he was instantly in love with this idea of pony size sauropods because guess the idea is if it is pony size, you could ride it. You could walk up to the gentle saua pod and jump on its back and go for a wild ride through the late Cretaceous jungle. That's so good. I don't know if this is the same last Dinosaur you were

thinking of. I just I was trying to call something out of the deep childhood memory. And it is a It is a dinosaur from an animated series of things. It was like Fringe or something called Denver the Last Dinosaur. And it is a He's like a hip skateboarding, sunglasses wearing dinosaur with a kind of with a with a head feature that looks like a mohawk. And I can't tell if he's supposed to be a sauropod or a therapod. It seems unclear. No that I don't think I've seen

that one. This would have been some live action fair that I'm thinking of, like a VHS rental for sure. Well, maybe after we get out of the studio today we can go watch some Denver the Last Dinosaur and see how it does. All right, Well, we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll discuss some of the specific prehistoric creatures that we we we have thus far encountered in hot digg. Alright, we're back and it's time to discuss the pony size magyaro saris. Okay, let's go for

a ride to settle them up. Alright, So again, while while some have considered them to be juveniles perhaps living in their own you know, social group apart from the giant adults, bone evidence seems to suggest that they were fully grown adults. And this would be, you know, probably be perhaps one of nature's most impressive displays of the island effect, humbling even the mighty Titanus are into a form, you know, more befitting of this late Cretaceous ireland sized

uh island in what is now known as Romania. So Sara bods in general, again, are just strange and mysterious creatures, perhaps some of the strangest creatures ever to walk the Earth.

I mean, they push the boundaries of what's possible in a terrestrial organism, like what sustainable, what's even you know, morphologically possible, and you know, and if these little guys are just a ripple in an already amazing glimpse of the prehistoric past, I mean, we've been seeing sarropods our entire lives, right, I mean we see them in in cartoons, in toys and you kind of take them for granted. Right.

There's just this thing that Fred Flintstone slides down the neck off or the tail off, I can't remember, at the end of his work day, but getting petted by Sam Neal. Yeah, they're just kind of the Jurassic Park. They're just kind of the backdrop. They don't really do anything, um well, because they're not a media to source us, but they are their own mystery, you know, when you start getting into the details of you know, how they fed themselves and and and even the various discussions about

just how something this big lives. Yeah, I mean it starts well as you were just alluding to. It sort of makes you question the what are the extremes of what an animal can be and how it can survive?

Like um you know, obviously we've talked about giant animals on the show before and about how they're they're just sort of like problems that you might not even expect when animals start getting past a certain size and volume, problems with like heat distribution or like or like heat exchange, and of course there'd be like energy issues especially, so sorrow pods are you know, these are gonna be herbivores, right, They're they're not meat a sources, so they're needing to

eat plant matter in order to sustain a body the size of a boat or bigger, you know, So like you just start to wonder, like how could they possibly eat enough to survive? How could they do it? Yeah, it feels like biology just out of control to a certain extent. And uh and then in a sense, you I guess you could look at it like that, you know, like here is a form that is totally unsustainable if

anything drastic happens to the environment. And of course drastic things did happen to the environment, and these were these were not certainly not the forms to survive the Late Cretaceous extinction event. But yeah, I would love to come back and do perhaps a whole episode on sorrows in the future, or bring on you know, a guest and expert who can talk to us about the weird mysteries

of sarropod life totally now. Right at the beginning of the episode, we mentioned a a terrasaur called hats agopterics. I know this one caught your fancy Roberts. So what's the deal with hats agopterics? Alright, So we've we've talked about the flying terrasaurs on the show before, the prehistoric flying reptiles that took to the air on a membrane of flesh that stretched between their ankles, and they're greatly elongated fourth finger. So creepy to see the skeletons and

realized that the wing is a finger. Yeah, because it's a it's a distinctly different wing arrangement compared to the vertebrate flight of birds and bats. Closer to bats, it seems closer to bats. Yeah, but still, you know, very much its own thing. And of course we've recently discussed the mighty uh Quatso koalis, the this this godlike giant terra saar that was found in the late Cretaceous but

in North America. We often speak of it as being perhaps the largest creature to ever fly inve Indeed, it truly did fly, and and most paleontologies seem to think that it did, but there is some disagreement there. We'll get into an example of that. But you know, it's it's ultimately only one of the sky Lords of Old, because we had certainly had had Q the wing serpent, but we also had hats agopter X. Both are of the same family as dark a day So named for

the Persian dragon Ozdaha. So hats agopter X was a terra saar, a winged reptile that when it was standing on the ground, would have been as tall as a giraffe. And that's that's on. We're not talking like reared up on its hind legs exactly, though it's morphology is is very distinct. We we have an image of this creature and an artistic rendering that you'll find on our home

page and stuff to blow your mind dot com. But as it's you know, it's standing there on its hind legs and on its its wings, it would have been as tall as a giraffe with this enormous head, and if it were to actually spread its wings you would

have a wing spat of roughly thirty six feet. It had this broad skull uh and and you look at examples of the skull or at least two ideas of what the full skull would have looked like, and it almost looks too big to fly, but apparently it was made fliable by polystyrene like structure that gave it tremendous

strength but also lightness. Yeah, this is the thing you see with birds and you see with pterosaurs because their bones have to be very light in order to fly, so they often have a kind of hollow or low

density structure. Now, one of the really cool and ultimately, uh, you know, nightmarish things about the hatsogopterres and and other uh and and it's you know, large terra Sarkin is that regardless of their flying ability, to whatever extent they were or were not capable of flying, their fossil suggested they were rather adapted moving about on all four is on the ground, and not not only just moving about,

but hunting their prey in this fashion. So you know, great folded living cargo planes that tower over the dwarf herds of of saara pods, scooping them up and their powerful jaws and gobbling them down. Uh. That's that's ultimately the vision that we're left with. It's astounding to imagine this thing, that this form that has evolved to take to the air and then returned a giant to the

earth and then ruling over these these diminished sara pods. Yeah, it's not really similar to what you see with birds, for example, because birds don't crawl with their wings right. When birds move around on the ground, they tend to they walk on two feet. They're more like the therapod uh dinosaur design. They walk on the two feet and

they got their wings folded up. These are more like sometimes you can see bats crawl this way where they've got the they've got the winged hands that are part of the wings, but they still use them to crawl quadrupedally. And so when you see representations of this, I've seen it animated the way these giant terosaurs would crawl. It looks messed up. It's really scary. Yeah, I think bats

are probably the best uh you know, contemporary comparison. Particularly there is a type of of of bat that you'll find in New Zealand, uh the Mista synoda bats, and they spend much of their time on the ground there. They're certainly capable of flight, but they crawl around a lot of the time. So they have their their claws have extra projections that aid in digging around in the dirt and uh and and climbing on the on on the sides of trees and their wings fold back in

a unique way. So there, you know, it's more streamlined. So when it's in in ground mode, it it really looks more like some manner of rodent in a sense. I mean, there's is still clearly a bat, but but it does seem like this you're seeing a similar situation where this this this winged form has taken act of the earth and due to uh, you know, the particular you know, relaxation of the predatory pressure in its environment, is able to sort of become you know, a big

deal on the ground again. Okay, so it has the optics big on the ground, big on the ground, A big deal on the ground. I guess that's one of the things that's just that's just so um, you know, topsy turvy about the scenario, right, is that again the small saua pods and the giant winged creature that doesn't necessarily have to fly anymore, that they can just uh you know, roam about on all fours and gobble up,

you know, whatever it pleases with virtually no predators. And that's that's key to to figuring out why has the gop directs was so big. It would have had no predators in an abundance of food. And here's the thing, perhaps even a larger food than they would have found elsewhere, because they have this enormous meal that you know they're They're probably not eating a saua pod uh in other scenarios.

But here, well no, of course not, I mean unless there may be scavenging or yeah, but but but here, suddenly the sauropods are smaller, perhaps even bite size or fun size, if you will. And so they grew large and dominant lords of earth and sky, and keeping with the Mahars of Edgar Rice Burroughs fiction, these were the this sort of Terra sar like creatures that ruled over one of his fictional worlds. Fattened on Sara ponies. Yes, uh, there's even one particularly large fossil that they found in

Hauntig that they actually dubbed Dracula. And this wasn't in in two thousand nine, and they found fragments of an even larger specimen or at least a specimen of the far larger lower jaw in two thousand eighteen. Michael Habib, an expert on terra sars at the University of Southern California told National Geographic dot Com and een that he believed that this latest specimen was this latest specimens especially

was probably too large to fly. Uh that it may have flown when it was younger, but then it basically reaches the point where it's it's large enough and it doesn't have to anymore, which is interesting because we're kind of coming back to this idea of a creature growing and it's sort of mode of of operations. It's a

it's diet changing. So you could have a creature here that you know, when it's young, it's still flying from place to place, but then once it reaches a significant size, it has no need to fly anymore, maybe has limited ability to even achieve powered flight anymore, but it's not an issue because it's a towering TerraSAR monster that eats

all the dwarf sauropod babies that it wants. And then Michael Michael Haby he compares this to the elephant birds of Madagascar, which will work, which one extinct roughly a thousand years ago. But we're a large flightless bird that thrived in that part of the world cut off from the rest of Africa. Big Death. Ostrich but there are a few other examples worth touching on here. For instance,

there's uh Tomatosaurus. This was a hadrosaur or a duck build dino, another variety I'd love to come back to and discuss in detail on the show because they're so alien and also in some ways a great example of kind of peake dinosaur prior to the Late Cretaceous extinction event.

But this particular specimen in in Haunting was smaller than a modern crocodile, so roughly like five meters long or so um and and this was and this was one that would have seemed almost mountable to a human if you were standing next to it, or at least while this hadrosaur was on all fours, because other hadrosaurs were considerably larger and would have towered over humans, particularly when they reared up on their into bipedal form. And here's

another interesting fact about Tomatosaurus. A fossil of the juvenile specimen was discovered in twenty six with evidence of a benign tumor in its lower jaw. And this is the first for a dinosaur fossil and ultimately proved that that such tumors are not mere modern biological realities, so of course, and then there's a bald Our bond doc okay, and this is that we we referenced this name earlier in

the Cold Open. But this particular species was named after the dragon of Romanian legend, and so this would have been a therapod hunter in keeping with raptors such as velociraptor. And it's one of the Dromo sarid's But it differs from other Droma Sarid fossils because it had only two functional digits on its hand. Most of its relatives would have had three for proper grasping, so reduced ability in

this department. But it also had more digit functionality and its large talent feet, and so this is what SEUs has to say about this. Thus, each foot of Baldar sported a double set of these large claws, which were likely used for seizing and disemboweling prey. The robust hind limb shows extensive fusion of bones in its proportionately short distal portion, with formation of a tv O tarsis and

a tarsa metatarsis. Uh. These unusual features suggest that Baldoor was capable of delivering powerful strikes with its feet, and Sus contends that these changes were likely due to the island effect as well. So just another peculiar example of of of a fossil species that was not found elsewhere but was was warped, was changed and took on a special form due to its isolation on this island and got the gutting kick. Yeah, well now maybe we I think you've changed my mind and my number one time

travel destination. I think I want to go to Hot Egg. Well, I would definitely visit if it were visit Hoteg give hateg were you know, a special exhibit at a Jurassic Park type scenario. But that it brings me back to my my past rants about Jurassic Park, like why do we keep coming back to the same and in many cases outdated um dinosaur or in prehistoric forms when we could be encountering these creatures like this should be the

next Jurassic Park film. In my opinion is uh, you know, don't bring back the uh, the the t rex, don't bring back the velocira raptors. Don't change their color just so you can sell a slightly different toy uh to the kids. Uh No, still you can still sell plenty of toys to the kids. But make it. Make it these, you know, make it pony sized sauropods. Make it hot sagopter X. I think hot sagopteras would make a terrific c g I villain. I think that that. Yeah, there's

a lot of potential here. I mean, people would want to have that. They'd have reason for bringing back a pony size sauropod if they could have a petting zoo, kids could ride them. Yeah, yeah, that that's more plausible plot wise. All right, So there you have it. We're gonna we're gonna leave it right there. Um again, that that really cool children's dinosaur book. Atlas of Dinosaur Adventures by Emily Hawkins and illustrated by Lucy Leatherhead. Uh. It's

definitely imprint deaf only worth picking up. And I think it's worth picking up even if you don't have any kids in your house or in your life. If you love dinosaurs and prehistartic creatures and or you know geology and geography, it's it's it's a great just a tabletop book if nothing else, But you can also spend lots of time reading through it with young ones, uh and

and feeding their need for for dinosaurs and terra saurs, etcetera. Um. Also, obviously, we we surely have listeners who either reside or are from Romania or have visited Romania. And perhaps you've you've visited some of these areas. So some of the articles we're looking at mentioned that you know, there are attempts to celebrate paleontology in Romania, various museums that have you know,

the efforts that have been put together. So we would love to to read your field reports on Romanian paleontology. Uh and uh and and ultimately just you know the world that we are discussing in this episode, only you know, millions of years later. Absolutely, also send us your barren friends nope, chef fan fick. In the meantime, if you want more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, go

to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is to rate and review wherever you have the power to do so. But also make sure you have subscribed. And hey, we have another podcast titled Invention, and I think you should give that a shot. You should subscribed to that as well. And you might be thinking, oh, I don't know, Robert and Joe. I really like these trippier episodes, these weirder episodes that you put together. I

don't know how trippy and weird technology is. Well. I just want to read you a quick quote from Terence McKenna on technology to remind you otherwise. He says, um, we take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psy kick objects. And that's exactly what we talk about every

week on Invention. Couldn't have put it better. Yeah, So make sure you check it out. Make sure you have subscribed to Invention. Subscribe to Invention anyway. Huge thanks to our audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like to get in touch with us directly to let us know feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff

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