From the Vault: Twilight of the Moa

two of our series about the Moa. That's right. The first one was more about the Wingless Wonders themselves themselves, and this is more about, you know, the fall of the Moa, the twilight of the Moa, their extinction and what we know about how we can you know, put together, uh, their final days, where they went, and we'll even touch on the question of what if we could bring them back. Hi, everybody, it's Seth the producer of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

I'm here in March to just pop on a quick note into this episode saying, Hey, it's March, and you know what that means. We're all recording from our own homes, all separate and all social distancing, so that means the sound quality of this one is a little strange. But just to let you know, each time we've been doing these home recordings, they've been getting better and better and better.

So I can guarantee you that next one is going to sound a little better than this and the next one, and after that's going to sound a little bit better than that one, etcetera, etcetera. So just so you know, this is all temporary and we'll get back to our regular episodes as soon as we can sound quality wise. Thank you very much, and enjoy the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back. We're still social distancing now. There must have been a weird back and forth year because Thursday of last week's episode we were broadcasting from our closet and our laundry room, right, but then Tuesday of this week's episode. I think that was recorded in the studio before we came home for the Great Retreat, that's right. And also we record our vault episode intros about a month out, so people might

have noticed that as well. But this episode, part two of our Look at the Moa, Twilight of the MOA we're calling it. This episode is recorded from our respective closets in our homes. You're actually in a closet now, as opposed to your your laundry roomness. That correct, that's true. I decided to become a monster in the closet. Uh, And I've got so I've got the same talisman's that I had last time in order to bring me good luck and watch over me while making this recording. I've

got tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps. I've got my thor Christ. But this time I also brought in an extremely tasteful novelty mug that my wife found an East Tennessee thrift store. Which is great because I cannot bring this mug to the office. I am sure I haven't get in trouble for that. Yeah, the home office brings with it certain advantages, doesn't it? For For me?

I looked around the house. I would have loved to have had a toy of a moa, like a little plastic like Schleck moa, but sadly we do not have one, and it would be irresponsible for me to even try and mail order one at the moment. So you have a plastic Shrek, no I have. I do have a plastic terror birds. So it's not accurate, but it's it is still an extinct flightless bird. Uh. So I'm gonna set it right here next to my microphone and it will it will serve as my mascot. Well mayor pocket

sized titles watch over us. So, so where do we leave off last time? All right? So in our last episode, and if you didn't listen to it, do go back and listen to that episode before this one. In it, we discussed the evolution of flightless birds and the rise of the moa, nine species of large flightless birds that evolved as the dominant vertebrates on the isolated islands of

what he's currently known as New Zealand. But the rule of the moa did not last forever because Homo sapiens arrived, and this episode will deal with the subsequent extinction of the moa because you know what they say, more humans moa problems. I wondered how you were going to work that in, saying, you know, I had to get to it eventually. Yeah, yeah, that's true for I'd say every organism except us, right, except maybe like Hathogen's that that

prey upon us. Right, Yeah, it's certainly when we're dealing with with megafauna um creatures of that nature, there's this is a tale of doom whenever humans enter the equation, and we'll we'll point out some other examples of that as we'd move along. No, wait a minute, I'm thinking of some more exceptions. We've got rats too. I mean rats were great for them, and rats will come up. Yeah, so so yeah, a few exceptions there. But you don't want to be a moa when humans show up. Right,

So the rule of the moa was lengthy. They evolved into the into these dominant positions in New Zealand, but as we discussed on the show before, it can be precarious at the top, certainly for apex predators, but also from massive dominant herbivores, especially when something changes. Oh yeah, we also talked about this in our episode. I believe it was on the Leviattan or the Leviathan genus of

like the the ancient predatory sperm whale. That's right, yes, where it's easy to look at a creature like that, or a creature like hosts eagle, which we discussed in the last episode, to look at these creatures and think, well, that's there's no taking that down. That's that's that's a dominant organism. But it is, uh, you know, it is the ruler. But it is it is it's thrown rest upon a precarious pyramid of bones. Yeah, heavy lies the crown exactly. So Yeah, when something changes, it can topple

everything over. And in the thirteenth century, see I've seen twelve a d c. As a potential date, a major change arrived on the shores of New Zealand. And that change came in the form of Homo sapiens. Uh. The long world changing wave of human migration had only made its way to you know, near the bottom of the world, to this nation of the birds, and this would have

been what would come to be known as the Mallory. Uh. These were uh, these settlers were a Polynesian people who arrived in several waves uh in what is now New Zealand. This is one of the later regions of planet Earth to be settled by humans. Absolutely like these were some of the last in true pioneers heading into parts of the world, not not only parts of the world that they had not been to before, but where no human had gone before. Um. You know, the European colonists and

explorers would only come in the wake of these true pioneers. Now, Polynesian culture itself is endlessly fascinating, and I'd love to come back and deal with some of the related topics on the show, such as their amazing navigational abilities or the use of aquaculture in in the Lion Islands. But essentially we're talking about a long curving leg of human expansion that extends from China through the Philippines, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tahiti, uh Hawaii, Eastern Island, and

other islands in this broad stretch of the ocean. Again, they were the Polynesians were the last true pioneers of human expansion, and Polynesian expansion took place over the course of thousands of years as well, and the culture evolved along the way it takes on ends up taking on different forms in the locations where they land, often due to resulting isolation, uh, you know, because these are in many cases very far flung islands and and and sometimes

we're talking about, you know, centuries and centuries between people making it to one island versus another. So New Zealand was discovered and colonized very late in human expansion, and when the archaic Mallory arrived, they encountered the Moa Following this encounter, the nine species of moa would scarcely last more than another century, and they were extinct by fourteen five. So let's get into what we're mainly going to discuss

in this episode. This this collision between Homo sapiens and moa, And probably the best place to start there is by talking about just the word moa. Where does it come from?

I was reading in Prodigious Birds, MOA's and Moa Hunting in New Zealand by Athol Anderson, and the author shares that the earliest recorded use of the word moa comes via Cornish missionary William Colenso who in eighty eight heard that some mallory described the moa as a large bird, others as a large bird with a face like that of a man, lived in a mountain cavern that was

guarded by two giant lizards. This in other tales described the residents of Mount uh Taranaki or Mount Egmont's described the very strange residents that live there, often taking the form of abnormal birds or lizards, sometimes with human qualities. And this really lines up with what we've talked about on the show before about sacred mountains and holy mountains and the various myths that people accumulate regarding the sorts of things you would find there, in the sorts of

creatures that would populate those uh, those mysterious cliffs up there. Yeah, there are a couple of ways of looking at that. In our episode on the Sacred Mountains, I guess we did two of those episodes. I mean, one thing is we talked about the idea that if you get really really high up there, there's some evidence that people sometimes start, you know, experiencing psychosis or hallucinations. Um, so, like that could be a source of some supernatural beliefs in some cases.

But but I'd say probably the more prevalent issue is just that the top of the mountain is inaccessible, so it is naturally a place to put your mythical creatures at home in You know that that is where they hide absolutely now I know it. As some people were probably wondering, here is eighty eight. That sounds kind of late for the earliest recorded use of the word moa. Yeah, so how long would the species have been extinct before

the word appears in writing? Yeah? Yeah, it's uh, it seems a little confusing at first, right, because first contact between Europeans and Maori occurred December eighteen, sixteen forty two, with Able Tasman's Dutch East India Company expedition. Now specifically, Europeans had been asking the Mallory about other giant creatures

recorded in their traditions since the seventeen seventies. In the near two centuries after, there was certainly communication and exchange between Europeans and Mallory, in addition to, of course colonial subjucation. Uh Anderson discusses this uh in his book, and it points out that earlier references to the moa might either have not been recognized or not associated with the term moa self, so you know, descriptions of the animal might

not have been immediately tied with moa. For instance, there were accounts of spirits covered in hair in the form of birds, and there was talk of how a giant kiwi lived in the mountains. Uh and will again remind everyone that the kiwi and the moa are not actually

all that related. But this UH, this sort of discovery would have stemmed from Earth, from general European interests in the extent kiwi, so you know, they might have been asking about the kiwi and they would have been heard about myths of giant birds that are in some way like a kiwi. That is interesting, Yeah, the idea that the concept could persist over time, especially if you have like something that's morphologically very similar but just like much

smaller to refer to. Right. And in all of this, again we're just we're discussing like European knowledge all of the Moa, which is ultimately tied to European knowledge edge and understanding of the Mallory, which of course is is a strained relationship, you know, to say the least, because again you're talking about the the indigenous people, the Maori, and you're talking about the the colonial power that then arrives on their shore in the form of the Europeans.

Anderson also points out that a major factor might be that the Mallory conceptionalize the moa as not being true birds but is just being is being bird like, which Nights had a little confusing. But then I think back to just some of the weird things about the moa, you know, like they had the thing that the fact that they had no wings, not even vestigial wings. They were just two limbed organisms. Um, you can see why they might defy easy categorization. Likewise, they're just the size

of the larger species. Well, sure, I mean when we use the term bird now, I think like you and I are going to be referring to an evolutionary clade, uh that is defined by evolutionary relationships. But if you're just categorizing animals that you see in the world, what are the bases on which you form your categories? Like a bird might well be understood as something that flies.

So if there's something that, look, this is kind of like a bird, and that it has a beak and all that, but it doesn't fly, it doesn't meet your necessary criteria for what makes something a bird exactly. Yeah, and so the bones of the moa were apparently not described by the Mallory as bird bones, but they were

described as moa bones. So here's the here's a quote from from Anderson on all of this quote, it is very difficult to document this point, but the separation of dangerous mythological moa from large birds used as food and easily hunted to extinction in Pollock's description, and the lack of any comparable prosaic tradition about MOA's in most of

the moa stories collected by missionaries seem suggestive. Certainly, it was the very lack of an unequivocal association between the term moa and any straightforward account of large birds hunted and eaten by maories which formed the main flaw exploited throughout the long debate about what, if anything malories had

known about the dinner riforms. Oh, and the dinner if the forms that refers to the group to which the moa belong, right, Yes, so, well, we'll ponder this dangerous versus easy to drive to extinction question as we perceive, because I'm not entirely convinced this species can't be both of these things. You know, certainly when humans and the humans in question have tools, tactics, and invasive species on

their side. Oh sure. I mean some of the most dangerous creatures in a one on one context are also some of the easiest to drive extinct. I mean, if you just wanted to drive an animal extinct, what would be like the easiest ones to do? Probably like large carnivores,

because there's already so few of them. Of course, the moa were not carnivores like this, But yeah, of course, like large animals generally being fewer in number because of their energy requirements within the environment, would seem to be easier to drive to extinction than if you were trying to exterminate something that's very easy to kill like rats. Yeah, and again I think they the evidence seems to indicate they would have been dangerous creatures because these were big animals.

Even the little bush moa was four and a half feet tall. Now that's smaller than an adult southern castlewary, which is generally five to six feet taller one and a half to one point eight meters, But if you see one, you would not mess with it, right. Yeah, They're they're fierce creatures. So it seems like the larger species of moa especially would certainly be in a position to put the hurt on an aggressor and do so in a way that's in keeping with what we see

in in extant rack eye species. But does that mean they were a match for the humans that arrived on their shores. No, because the archaic nowory were a very skilled and advanced people. They arrived in waves from Hawaiki. This is a mythical land that is usually identified as to Hiti by historians. And they were of course skilled sailors that arrived on wooden vessels capable of traversing great

distances at sea. For instance, the distance between Tahiti and New Zealand is two thousand, nine hundred and fifty miles or four thousand, seven hundred forty seven kilometers. I mean, that's a long way to go, even if you know exactly where you're going. But here we're talking about like the settlement of a new, previously unknown island, right, So yeah,

I just I just really want to drive home. Like the skilled nature of these Homo sapiens that arrived um, and what's more, they brought with him both human cunning and human tool use. They were masters of the club and the spear especially. They also brought with them other animals, including a breed of domesticated Polynesian dog known as the curry, which, as with other Polynesian dogs, did not bark. But apparently how they also brought with them, quite by accident, the kiori,

the an Asian rat um. Now, the curi is still a pest species in New Zealand because, as we know, once rats become established anywhere, they're very difficult to get rid of. The curry dog, on the other hand, has been extinct since the arrival of Europeans, and we'll talk more about that species in a minute. And they also brought with them um plants as well, such as the sweet potato. Well way, does there any thinking that the sweet potato could be involved in driving them OA extinct

or not? I have not read anything to suggest that, but I mean that kind of that sort of thing is certainly possible, right and generally speaking, when you have humans from a distant land show up and introduce into the ecosystem not only their destructive selves, but also invasive organisms, uh there's you know, you're just really up ending the croc pie. You know, you're really changing the chemistry of

the whole ecosystem around potentially. Oh yeah, well, actually, now that I think about it, I could totally see how I'm not saying this is the case here, but I could totally see how something like this wheat potato could drive a native species extinct. Because humans come, they bring with them their crop staples. In order to plant those crops, they have to, uh to establish agricultural zones that destroy natural ecosystem. So yeah, I could see it. Again, not

saying we know that happened here right. All right, On that note, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we will continue to discuss the collision between Homo sapiens and the Mola. Thank alright, we're back. So what do you need as fresh colonists in a world like New Zealand. Well, let's see classic hierarchy of needs. I'd say first you need you need fresh water, food, and shelter probably right, Oh yeah, absolutely, Am I on the right track here? Yes? Yes, another need that I

I didn't instantly think of. And part of this is probably because I've never been to New Zealand myself, so I don't have like the bodily experience of this. But New Zealand can be quite cold, so you know you're you're arriving in an new land, but also a land where the temperature has dipped down a bit more. Uh So the the archaic mallory. Uh they were fortunate and they did bring within the couri dogs, which helps solve some of these issues. Because the creatures had many utalitarian uses.

They could be eaten, their pelt could be made into clothing, and other parts of its body could be used for bits of clothing and tool use and so forth. But beyond that, you know, when they started exploring this new world, they very quickly would have discovered the moa, and the moa would be just a gift of resources to these people. Now here's a question that researchers and historians have have pondered over the years. So what sort of moa population

did the archaic Mallory encounter. It's long been widely accepted that, you know, the newly arrived humans at least played a role in the extinction of the moa. But there there there's been some disagreement in the past over to what extent. For example, did the archaic Mallory encounter thriving populations of moa across much of the islands, or did they encounter dwindling populations of moa that were restricted to certain areas, or did they find moa populations that were already in

severe decline. And of course, depending on the answer, it paints a different picture of the extent of Maori moa hunting and the impact of their arrival. You know, some could argue that well, in perhaps climate change, volcanic eruptions, and or disease had already impacted moa populations, and humans were just the final straw. So the moa certainly went extinct over the next century or so. You know, there's no moa hiding in the wilds of New Zealand, sadly,

no matter what anybody might try and tell you. And it wasn't until the nineteenth century the Europeans discovered evidence of the great birds, consisting of charred skeletons, gizzard stones, and eggshells. They certainly told the tale of their demise. DNA evidence, however, does shine light on the question of

pre maori moa populations. As Rachel Newer wrote in The New York Times back in quote Morton Eric Allentoft, the researcher the University of Copenhagen and colleagues analyzed DNA from two D one moas collected from museums and new excavations and estimated the age of these specimens using radio carbon dating. They found that in the millenniums before humans arrived in New Zealand, the moa displayed none of the genetic bottlenecking

indicative of a declining population. So there's no genetic evidence of any of a decline in the moa during the five thousand years prior to their rapid extinction. Uh, you know, via the human arrival. Okay, so what does that tell us? Well,

that leaves us with this version of the story. The archaic Mallory arrived on the shores of a new land where strange, often gigantic birds were roaming around, and through the use of spears and snares and hunting dogs and the human cunning, they were able to bring the birds down and process their kills with the same sort of efficiency we see, you know, with the curios. It's also possible that the moa had no natural fear of humans as well, which would have just made them even more

susceptible to this kind of harvesting. Well, yeah, i'd imagine that's possible, especially without um, without large mammalian predators on the island of New Zealand, like they're only real predator would have been the hostile eagle, right, which they're adapted to a landscape in which the only thing to worry about comes down at you from above. Who knows what they would have done if, like, you know, a bipedal

hommaid walks up to them in a group. Yeah, exactly, and and plus their extinction didn't just come via the hunting of grown adult MOA's because they're they're large, eggs were certainly sought after foods as well. We see that from some of the you know, the evidence of you know, they're finding egg shells and evidence of the eggs having been consumed. And since the moa produced just one or two eggs, the harvesting of their eggs would have further

spelled doom for nine species of moa. For example, the I believe this is a co Cora egg, the largest moa egg ever uncovered, would have weighed nine pounds when fresh. Wow. To put that in perspective, an ostrich egg typically weighs one point four kilograms or three point one pounds, which is more than twenty times the weight of a chicken egg. So we're talking about you know, two people, uh that have arrived on these islands, you know, struggling for existence

like that. That's a huge bounty of resources in that egg. Do you ever see anybody eat an ostrich egg? I feel like I have before in the past, but I haven't. It's not the kind of thing I've seen on a menu recently. It did not come highly recommended to me. Apparently in addition to being very large, it's gott a it's got a tough shell, I guess as you might imagine. You know, it can't just have like an egg shell thick like a chicken egg shell thickness shell. Uh, that's

a little bit difficult to get into. But then once you do get into it, tremendous nutritional resources. Yeah, I mean that that that's a one egg omelet for you. Yeah. So basically the situation is the maori ended up hunting and harvesting the moa faster than the moa could reproduce, and as the bounty of moa flesh and bone dwindled, the moa hunting Maori diversified and came to depend on fishing,

fouling uh in the gathering of mollusks, etcetera. And this led to the establishment of more permanent and semi permanent settlements. So then it looks like it really was us. It was people that drove the moa extinct. Oh yes, I think at this point, especially with the genetic evidence, that's that's what without question. Now it is reported in why

did New Zealand's moas Go Extinct? By Virginia Morrell Morton Allentoft, who mentioned earlier evolutionary biologists of the University of Copenhagen, remarked that the idea may run counter to some ideas that we tend to have about indigenous people. We often think of them, uh, you know, living in equilibrium with nature. But the Maori end up killing and eating the moa

at every stage of the creature's life. So alan Toft contends that this sort of harmony with nature that we sometimes envisioned ultimately rarely exists within human beings, and that any arriving humans would have extinguished the moa the same way. And certainly we see other such extinctions, um, you know, including the distinctions of large flightless birds due to the arrival of humans. So again, don't think less of the

Maori for the extinction of the moa. Uh. These great birds were always on a collision course with humans, and if by some miracle the Polynesians had never found New Zealand, the Europeans would have eradicated the moa on their own. So again, it's an old story. Humans arrive somewhere, mega fauna is hunted into extinction. We see that with the mammoths.

We see that with cave bears, giant kangaroos, etcetera. Oh yeah, I mean it seems like a ubiquitous picture of human development and geographical spread, like it is absolutely nothing unique about whatever individual culture reached this megafaunt of first. Now, I think one of the really fascinating questions in all of this is beyond the questions of like Europeans figuring out what the Mallory thought about the moa, is just a question of like, what how does that impact a people?

You know, to to have come to this, to come to New Zealand to be essentially become the Mallory. And in the process of becoming the Mallory, you go through this period of moa hunting Mallory in which you have this you know, this bounty of these these creatures too to to hunt and feed on, and then they're gone. Then you have to diversify and change the way you live, Like what is the memory of that like in a people. I found a fascinating article about this published on the Conversation.

It's by conservation biologist Priscilla Way, University of what Kat Associate Professor him A Wanga and Professor of computational biology Murray Cox. It was published in two thousand and eighteen in its title Dead as the Moa oral traditions show

that early Maori recognized extinction interesting. So the team of researchers here, which includes a conservation biologist, a linguist, bioinformationist, and experts in Maori culture, they stressed that tracing the centuries old extinctions is difficult, but that through the collaborative analysis of ancestral sayings traditional ancestral sayings in Maori culture, they found that early Maori certainly paid attention to the state of flora and fauna in their environment, and that

they recognized the extinction of the moa. But despite knowing roughly when and who you know regarding the more extinction, we don't really know a lot about how the Maori felt about and how they processed this event, which again would have been a major event in their lives. This was the destruction of an important food source as well as a source of various tools and parts. Uh. Some of this remains in the Maori oral traditions, specifically in

these various ancestral sayings. So the researchers here they point out that of these ancestral sayings. Uh, the ones that refer to birds anyway, A disproportionate number of them refer to the Moa, to their appearance, to their into their nature, and their uses to humans. All right, so what would these things go like in translation? Well, yeah, I'm just gonna share the translations. So they do. They include the original Maori versions in this article, so encourage anyone to

it's interested to check that out. But like, one of them is lost as the Moa was lost. So that's kind of like an expression like dead as a doornail, like yeah, or hidden as the Moa hit. And then here's another one. The people will disappear like the Moa. And this this one's really haunting because they point out that as the Europeans arrived, the Maori compared their plight to that of the Moa. Wow. So here's a quote Maori recalled the Moa after Europeans arrived, too malory. We're

suffering badly from diseases and deprivation. In the late eighteen hundreds, it was as though the Maori world was being felled along with the forests. There was a very real fear among both Maori and Europeans that Maori people and culture would also disappear, just like the moa wow, that is haunting. Yeah, I'm still thinking about these expressions. I was trying to think of a point of comparison. Of course, one is uh is like gone the way of the dinosaurs uh,

an expression in English. Though, of course, our knowledge of where the dinosaurs went does not come from cultural memory. It comes from like something we learned through science. I guess you could maybe say gone the way of the dodos.

Some people say that that. Yeah, though I guess when people say that, they tendn't they tend not to do it with any accepted role in the in the extinction, you know, Like I feel like that's one of the aspects here worth pondering is that, you know, the Mallory would have have realized that their ancestors played this role in the extinction. Now that's not to say that, you know, did it on purpose. Obviously, there's a there's a huge difference between you know, say, setting out to cause an

extinction and I don't. You know, obviously they wouldn't want to have to have done that, because these creatures were a source of of of of vast resources to them. But you know, they were you know, ultimately it was it was not something that were capable of exerting control over, you know, I mean, like it's it's really has always been a human struggle to figure out to what extent we can exploit the natural world without damaging it beyond control.

And clearly like that is something that is still a major stumbling block to human beings. We still mishandle that same equation on a on a daily basis. All Right, we're gonna take one more break, but when we come back, you know, we're going to move beyond the extinction of the moa and ponder the question, well, could we bring the moa back? Than alright, we're back a dinosaur story? Is that a movie? We're back a dinosaur story? You don't know that movie? I don't know that. I do.

Oh man, I think I rented that when I was a kid. Let's see when did that come out? Based seven book? Oh yeah, I rented that one when I was a kid. That was that was a Turtles video find that I brought home, avenge that from the from the bone heap, and I don't think it was good. I mean, I haven't seen it since I was a child. It does not seem like one of the animated dinosaur movies that would hold up best. I don't know. I'm looking it up. And this voicecast. You got John Goodman,

you got Jay Leno, Walter Cronkite. I think Walter Cronkite plays like a mad scientist who brings dinosaurs through a time portal or something and puts him into New York in the in the nineties. And Julia Child is in this really yeah, does she play one of the dinosaurs. No, sadly, she plays a worker at the Museum of Natural History. Okay, well, I don't know. Maybe that would be uh interesting to go back and excavate at some point. But it looks great.

It has four directors, a mark of quality. Okay, so we're talking about the possible resurrection of the moa. Now, there was a pretty good article I was reading about this on stat by the science writer Sharon Begley from February seven, uh and concerned the possible d extinction of one species of moa. Of course, if you're not familiar with the concept of d extinction, it has come up on the show before, but you can probably figure it out from the name, right It's also known as a

resurrection biology. It refers to the process of bringing an extinct species back to life. The pop culture example that everybody knows is Jurassic Park. Now, what did they do In Jurassic Park? They found ancient deposits of amber or fossilized tree sap in which dinosaur era mosquitoes had been trapped when the sap was still soft, and then the sap hardened over time and then fossilized in the ground.

Presumably the the mosquitoes in the sap were trapped with their bellies full of dinosaur blood that they had just feasted on. And so the scientists in the book, in the movie Jurassic Park, they extract the preserved dinosaur blood, they sequence it out, they get mr DNA from the from the insect bellies, and then they used that blood

and the DNA sequenced from it to clone dinosaurs. It was, of course, I would say, a very ingenious plot device, but unfortunately it looks like it probably would not work in reality. What if? What if? The reason it didn't work, though, was that it turns out the mosquitoes had not consumed the blood of dinosaurs, but he consumed the blood of the Time Travelers from Ray Bradberry Sound of thunder Man. What what were the chances that would be a very

good closed time travel loop? What? What do you like better the time travel movies where you go back and actually change the past, or the ones where you go back and it proves to be a closed loop where you just cause whatever present already happened. Oh, you have to go back and forth between the two. You know. I feel like that's the only way it really works. You know, it's like it's the sour in the suite with your time travel. But let's bring things back to

Jurassic Park. Why didn't it work? Okay, so basically there are several reasons, but they all come down to time. Now. One of the reasons is not in fact that you couldn't discover a mosquito with prehistoric blood and it's guts that uh. But believe it or not, paleontologists actually have discovered preserved insects full of the remains of not not intact, but the remains of prehistoric blood in fossil beds. Uh.

And this is a slight tangent. But I didn't already know this, and I was amazed by what I was reading here, so there's one prominent example I could find.

I don't know if this is still the only major example known today, but it was described in a research article published in P and A s in called hemoglobin derived porphyrins preserved in a Middle Eocene blood engorged mosquito, and it was by Daily Greenwall to Julia S. Garreva, Sandra M. Celia Strom, tim Rose, and Ralph E. Harback, and the discovery was also written up by Ed Young in a short news item for the journal Nature on

October four. So the researchers here were examining a total of thirty six mosquito specimens from a shale deposit known as the Coal Creek member of the kischen In formation in northwestern Montana, and the layer from which they were recovered is estimated to be about forty six million years old. So this collection of fossilized mosquitoes included two previously unknown species of the genus Lisda. One was cool Assada kischen

in and one was cool Asda lemniscata. But one of the mosquitoes from this boniard was truly special and you can look up images if you want on the Internet. In the words of the researchers, the image of this specimen was quote obviously that of a female blood engorged mosquito with non plumos antennae and a very dark red black distended abdomen compared with the non hematophagus male. Uh so there's a new word for your vampire fiction. By the way, him at aphagus means eats blood or drinks blood.

Non hematophagus would mean does not drink blood like the male mosquitoes. The male mosquito doesn't drink blood. Obviously, if your gut is busting with blood like this, uh, this female mosquito here, you are him atophagus. But but ed Young writes in his summary that prior to this discovery, paleontologists had found fossils of blood sucking insects, but we always had to yes what these insects were feeding on through kind of indirect cues, like preserved evidence of blood

borne parasites contained in their digestive systems. This fossil find was totally different because it contained direct molecular evidence of blood feeding within the insects gut, specifically lots of iron and organic compounds called porphyrans, which are constituents of hemoglobin, that's the protein responsible for transporting oxygen and blood uh.

And the find was also extremely unlikely. In the words of the lead author, Dale Greenwalt quote, the abdomen of a blood engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to burst. It is very fragile. The chances that it wouldn't have disintegrated prior to fossilization were infinitesimally small. And it's amazing because that's on top of the already minuscule chances of any animal being fossilized in the first place. I mean, remember,

the fossil lottery has few winners. Almost all organisms that ever live just decom hose and disappear without leaving a trace. But unfortunately, there are a couple of reasons you cannot use this mosquito or a mosquito like it to extract dino d NA DINO. Both of these reasons have to do with time. So the first is that the fossil mosquito is only forty six million years old. So the last of the non avian dinosaurs we know died out in the KPg extinction that was about sixty six million

years ago. This Mosquito would have been from the Middle EO scene. So if it were possible to clone anything based on what was in the mosquitoes guts, it would have to be something that lived in North America around that period. And I was like, well, hell, I'll look up a candidate, and I found a pretty cool one that the coolest candidate I could come up with was named Miss Sonics, whose name means middle claw, and who was part of a now extinct larger group of carnivorous ungulates.

Carnivorous ungulates. Remember the unguluts are the hoof to mammals. Uh. So examples would be dear you know, bo vines, uh, horses, but these, of course are carnivorous. You can't think of on gill. It's like that today there were once predatory carnivorous hoofed mammals roaming the continents. Uh. You know, trying to think of a donkey that could eat you. Yeah.

And this is a really cool and to look up paleo art for because it seems like it's just a very hard creature to try and envision in your head. You know, a lot of the illustrations end up just looking like this weird kind of like long snouted, almost almost like a cross between a rodent and a lion. Uh. It's you get a really really weird sense of category

confusion when you look at these images. I mean a lot of uh descriptions say it would have been in some ways superficially like a wolf, but of course it was not of the order of the dogs. It was not like a big cat. It's not like a wolf. It's not any of that In terms of evolution airy relationships. It's more like a deer or a cow or a horse or something. But it is a carnivore that would

you know, might bite your leg off. So anyway, I'm all for cloning a ton of those if we could, But again I want to stress that, uh, there was not clonable material within that mosquito's abdomen, and in fact, based on what we know, there couldn't be because the other reason you couldn't clone dinosaurs from the gut contents of any mosquito is that DNA is extremely fragile. It breaks down very quickly and starts breaking down within hours

of the death of an organism. After forty six million years, DNA would degrade to the point where a genome can no longer be recovered all the more at anything older than sixty six million years, so you can't get to a dinosaur. Uh So, then you might wonder, well, how long can DNA last in in preserved animal remains? What's the farthest back that we could go to sequence the genome of an extinct creature, extract all that information, and

then maybe even clone it back to life if possible. Well, the MOA has a part to play in the answer to this question. I found this out by total serendipity. I didn't even know this when I started looking into this subject. Uh So, to determine the period within which you could reasonably expect to extract usable DNA from a sample, you need to know the rate of molecular decay for DNA as a molecule. And there was a study inve

that looked into this question. It was by our friend Morton E. Allentoft that you mentioned earlier, but also by Matthew Collins, David Harker, James Highly, Charlotte L. Oscome, Marie L. Hale, Paula F. Campos uh oh, and apparently add others. I guess it had a lot of authors. Sorry, but it was called the Half Life of DNA and Bone Measuring Decay Kinetics in a hundred and fifty eight dated Fossils published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society b So.

The authors here examined mitochondrial DNA from a hundred and fifty eight radio carbon dated bones of the extinct New Zealand MOA, all from between six hundred and eight thousand years ago, and all preserved in roughly equivalent environmental conditions. And that's very important because it gives us a point of reference. If like the conditions under which the bones are preserved or roughly the same, then you can start to get a good idea between them what the average

rate of decay is. It's not going to vary as much due to differing environmental factors. Um so, they estimated from this sample that the average half life of DNA was about five hundred and twenty one years. So you start with an original sample of DNA and a bone, and after five twenty one years half of it's gone. Then after another five hundred and twenty one years, half of what remains is broken down, So now you're down to a quarter of the original concentration. So the the

decay adds up fast. Now, of course, the decay rate of DNA will not be the same in all cases. It's going to depend on factors about in what conditions it's preserved. But even in ideal conditions, there does appear to be a ceiling on how long DNA lasts, or or how long you could expect to get any usable

information out of it. Under the absolute best conditions. This means basically every molecular bond between the nucleotides of the DNA would be broken down after about six point eight million years, but long before that, even if some bonds are still intact, the DNA would be so broken up that would be unreadable. The maximum recoverability threshold for meaningful genetic information might be something like one point five million

years or so. So it seems to have been the scientific consensus for for several years now that DNA is way too short lived for us to ever clone dinosaurs. Except I did come across a really recent study just from this month March. Uh. Now, it doesn't disprove that this, but it is a still controversial reported finding that would

seem to challenge this if it's correct. So it was published in National Science Review in March by Alita im Baliol at All and uh so the the author's right here quote a histological ground section from a duck build dinosaur nestling in the species is uh. Hippacrosaurus Stebben Jerry revealed micro structures morphologically consistent with nuclei and chromosomes in

cells within calcified cartilage. We hypothesize that this exceptional cellular preservation extended to the molecular level and had molecular features in common with extant avian cartilage. So this is a duck build dinosaur. It's another Montana special discovered in the

nineteen eighties. It would have been a nest of young duck build herbivores that all died sometime around seventy five million years ago, and the paleontologists here were examining skull shards from these juveniles, and the shards would have been made out of car ritilage rather than out of bone. But when examining these cartilage skull shards are the remains

of them. Uh. The researchers believe that they discovered signs of intact cell nuclei and DNA within these fragments, but then again, I want to say a lot of paleontologists are skeptical about this supposed find. Of course, there's the theoretical limitation on how long DNA would last, or at

least is believed to last on a molecular basis. But I was also reading a piece by a University of Bristol vertebrate paleontologists named Michael Benton, who thinks it's more likely that if there is any actual DNA in this sample, it came from recent external contamination, not from a dinosaur. So I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens there with follow up research. But I don't know. That's interesting and he gives us some hope, right, But

I've got to bring it back to the MOA. So, whatever the truth about DNA from millions of years ago, as unlikely as that seems, the MOA has existed much more recently, and for that reason, the idea of recovering the genome of the MOA and bringing a species of MOA back from extinction is much more plausible by orders

of magnitude. So back to that Sharon Begley article from She writes about how there's a team of researchers based out of Harvard University that were able to assemble an almost complete genome for our old friend we mentioned in the last episode, and I think earlier in this one, the little bush moa or a nomal opterics did aform us. So these again would not be the biggest ones. These are not the towering moa. These would be the smaller variety. But I would not be surprised if they could still

kick your throat out. You know, they probably were some tough little customers. As we were talking about earlier, the little bush moa when extinct in the thirteenth century. Now, this work was dependent on DNA extracted from the tow bone of a moa that was housed in the Royal

Ontario Museum in Toronto. And this kind of reconstruction is not easy at all because, well, you can extra act a lot of genetic information the physical genome that, like the chromosomes, are often kind of shattered, so you have to figure out how all the pieces of information that

you've extracted fit together into a broader chromosomal structure. And as with other assemblies of this kind, the researchers here looked into the genomes of living relatives for clues, basing the reconstruction of the pieces on the reference template of an EMU, kind of like how mammoth reconstruction would be based on the genome of of living elephants and things like that. Now, at the time of Begley's article, there were several experts in the field who praised the work.

Morton Allan Toft, who we were talking about several times, Uh, he called it a significant step forward. Also, the evolutionary molecular biologist Beth Shapiro of You See Santa Cruz praised the research. There was one concerning feature. So this paper in ten was published on bio archive, which is a non peer reviewed preprint server. It's so it's like, nothing wrong with something going up on there. It's a place to post research for public access and review before it

gets published in a journal. But I was unable to find evidence of this paper appearing in an actual journal since then, So I'm not sure what that means. Uh, maybe it doesn't mean anything, or maybe it means something about this genome assembly didn't hold up to scrutiny. I guess. I guess we'll have to wait and see. But either way, the recent disappearance of the moa I think absolutely makes them a potential candidate for de extinction, and this research

helps move things in that direction. Now. Of course, just because we could doesn't necessarily mean that we should. I I don't know. I don't know if I have a position on the ethics of de extinction overall. But uh, obviously that's a question that should be considered before we bring these things back and just set them loose at

Disney World. But what an attraction that would be at disney World, Right, you go up to the Mickey, you get your picture taken with the Mickey, then you go up to the moa, you try to get your picture taken. You see if it cooperates danger Sure, but it's like what if what if Jonald Duck could kick what if

you had them my decloto? Yeah, I mean there's so many factors to consider and potentially reintroducing a creature like this, you know, even if it's feasible to to bring them back, because again, you're you're to a certain extent doing what all these different waves of interference have done in the past. You're taking the environment and you're shaking it up again. You're you're adding something to it, even if it's something that used to be there in some form. Um, it's uh,

it's a difficult equation. And then I imagine also there's the argument of is this the best use of our our energy towards you should we instead be focusing on creatures that are still with us, that can be um, that can be saved, or creatures that are saying extinct in the wild but can still be reintroduced. I mean a lot of those are are you know, entirely separate battles so that you know that that you know certainly involved genetics. But um, yeah, it's it's it's it's a

complex situation. It's not just a matter of, oh, well we can bring it back, let's do it. Moa is everywhere. I'm just saying, if we were going to make a hark with de extinctive animals, maybe maybe extinct giant birds rather than dinosaurs. Since you can't do the non avian dinosaurs, why not terror birds in MOA's Without a doubt, I would. I would love to see one of these creatures in

real life. They just sound amazing. It's you know, to see these these two legged organisms handling about, Uh, muntioned on twigs and branches. Uh, it would be beautiful, provided you know, there was there was the space for it. Um. So I don't know it would be interested to see what happens with this. I know it's been It's been brought up before sometimes I think by politicians even um,

and it's been kind of controversial. There's a New Zealand politician who for some reason has been very in favor of bringing back the moa. I'm not sure why, by the way, I just looked it up. Unfortunately, the terror birds appeared to be just out of range given the figures we were citing early I think they went extinct

probably around one point eight million years ago. Uh. Well, there you go, the mo moas it is then MOA's elephant bird's anything else you know within within reach that would have to Those would have to be the main attractions at our park. Give me a host eagle baby, Oh yeah, for for sure. All right, So there you have it are two part look at the Moa, The

Rise of the Moa, the Twilight of the Moa. I found this to be just a really engrossing, uh project to work on because it ends up, you know, dealing with so many things you're dealing with, uh, with biology, evolution of organisms, You're dealing with the history of human migration, UH, colonial disruption, and then the possibility of of bringing an extinct creature back to life through genetic science. Uh. It really has everything spared no expense. Yeah, all right, So

obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there. I also know that we have you know, we have plenty of listeners who live in New Zealand and who have traveled to New Zealand or have some sort of roots or connection to New Zealand. We would love to hear from you about this topic. What are your thoughts about the moa uh and what you have to add to our discussion here. What are your thoughts about being called Kiwi's? Oh yeah, yeah, I would. I would love to hear

from actual uh New Zealand residents on the matter. Would they rather be called MOA's Mm hmm, Sorry, I mean both of the names of birds, so I don't know. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find them. Wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Hue.

Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, who's doing a heroic job of helping us cope with recording from home, so so big shout out to Seth. If you'd like to get in touch with us with back on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of

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