About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of Interview: From T. rex to Birds with Steve Brusatte — Particles of Thought from NOVA PBS Official, published July 4, 2026. The transcript contains 16,826 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"why did birds survive why are they only the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid and one of the things that seems really quirky really nuanced like how could you ever predict this one of these quirks of evolutionary history but the birds that survived were the ones that had beaks there were still..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: why did birds survive why are they only the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid and one of the things that seems really quirky really nuanced like how could you ever predict this one of these quirks of evolutionary history but the birds that survived were the ones that had beaks there were still lots of birds that had teeth that died out when the asteroid hit the teeth of their velociraptor ancestors but the ones that survived had beaks they could eat seeds seeds can last in the soil for a long time and so if you could eat seeds you would have access to one of the last
[00:00:31] Speaker 2: food sources steve brusatti welcome to particles of thought thanks for having me it's great we both
[00:00:43] Speaker 1: have our new books out so it's cool we can be here together absolutely this week the books are released
[00:00:48] Speaker 2: yeah so i'm going to say this for our listeners uh if you haven't gotten either of our books i blurbed steve's book and steve blurbed my book and here we are and this was not planned we had no idea it absolutely was not i'm going to get to your book in this interview sir uh that's going to be the whole second topic but listen you are an expert on dinosaurs so let's get the obvious question out
[00:01:09] Speaker 1: of the way right now what's your favorite dinosaur t-rex it is my second favorite dinosaur though i must say is a gold crest which is a bird it's the tiniest bird we have in europe we'll get to that later i know the dinosaur currently currently yeah oh yeah so my favorite is t-rex the ultimate predator you know the bus size meat-eating bone crunching monster but my second favorite is the tiniest bird we have in europe in scotland where i live now wow and to me that connection between something as giant and primeval and reptilian is t-rex and then this cute little bird the size of a golf ball wow that's what i love about dinosaurs they span millions hundreds of millions of years of time and they still do persist today we still have animals that carry on that legacy of t-rex yes those are real
[00:02:00] Speaker 2: dinosaurs hey so let me ask me a hakeem question because i told this to the staff and um you know i go off script a little bit so i have identified over the course of my life the bird with the most delicious skin okay the mammal with the most delicious skin okay and the fish with the most delicious skin just
[00:02:17] Speaker 1: skin skin okay fried yeah of course yeah you're not going to want to boil skin right yeah well i don't
[00:02:24] Speaker 2: know you're from scotland you're living in scotland yeah i'm from illinois originally we wouldn't boil skin there yeah but maybe it's scotland but i'm going to name what they are they are the chicken yeah the pig and if you don't know the golden pompano okay i didn't know that one i would agree very few people do if you live on the coast of florida you may because you can just catch them from the beach but what is the dinosaur with the most delicious skin oh see now we're getting into the
[00:02:48] Speaker 1: real question i don't know you know i think oh i think so i think usually it's the animals that eat plants not the animals that eat a lot of meat and fish and all kinds of stuff that end up tasting better so let's go with uh triceratops you know triceratops yeah good because a pig you know we know right and they were kind of you know big pig versions of dinosaurs if we can yeah this is the hardcore science now we have you're the first in the world there we go triceratops belly you know fried
[00:03:17] Speaker 2: triceratops belly so when you say tyrannosaurus like most of us think tyrannosaurus right but there's
[00:03:23] Speaker 1: that's not the only tyrannosaur right that's right so t-rex was the the last member of a great family of dinosaurs really a dynasty of dinosaurs that stretched for more than a hundred million years now t-rex lived here in north america it was the american tyrant it ruled the end of the cretaceous and it lived about 66 to 67 million years ago and it was literally the size of a bus it was like 40 feet long i mean it weighed seven or eight tons but it came from ancestors that lived way back in the the jurassic period about 170 million years ago and those ancestors they were about my size okay so smaller than you right but my size the ancestors of the t-rex were smaller the founding members of that tyrannosaur family were these small fast-running fleet-footed long-limbed quite intelligent uh hunters and they were not at the top of the food chain though they were second or third tier and they had to bide their time and they had to endure millions of years of upheaval of rising and falling sea levels of changing temperatures of volcanoes of extinctions in order to get that opportunity to go to the top of
[00:04:36] Speaker 2: the food chain and become the great t-rexes so what you point out is all those changes that are happening geologically over tens of millions and hundreds of millions of years so when you say north america you mean the slab of earth crust that we now identify as north america but at the time was it connected to you know what we now call the eastern hemisphere eurasian and african land masses or yeah so you
[00:04:57] Speaker 1: know as as you know um the planet earth is very old and of course earth is part of you know a solar system that's been around for four and a half billion years and the universe is much older um the earth has changed so dramatically and continues to change i mean the continents are moving now whenever there's an earthquake you know that is the earth lurching but even when there's not an earthquake you know the continents are moving about at the pace our fingernails grow yeah and so when the age of dinosaurs started the very first dinosaurs lived about 230 million years ago in the triassic period all the land was together as the super continent of pangea this giant slab of crust that stretched from north pole to south pole surrounded by a single global ocean and that's where dinosaurs got their start but then that super continent broke apart you know we see that with africa and south america you know they look like puzzle pieces because they are they did once fit together and the amazing thing about dinosaurs is uh that they started on that super continent and then they were along for the ride as it broke apart and as it changed and that's true also of mammals it's true of the birds that spun off from dinosaurs so when i write these books like the the new one the story of birds that tells the history of birds and how birds evolved from dinosaurs which i know we'll get to later but a lot of that story or the story i talk about in the rise and fall of the dinosaurs the dinosaur book i did is what these animals are doing as the earth is changing how they're responding and not just to the the continents moving but to changes in temperature and sea level and ultimately when it comes down to i mean t-rex is cool you know my favorite dinosaur yeah but the reason we study dinosaurs and other fossils is because we want to know how real animals real ecosystems have responded to real changes in climate and environment over time and i think that's quite important in this day and age for
[00:06:48] Speaker 2: us to understand and those are even more drastic changes right absolutely and the earth's been
[00:06:53] Speaker 1: through pretty much everything i mean there have been times of super volcanoes there have been times when asteroids have smashed into the earth there's been times of extreme climate change ice ages and global warming uh and everything in between so we can learn a whole lot from the history of the earth and it's the fossils that tell that story the fossils and the rocks that's the archive yeah that allows us as paleontologists to figure out how the earth and how life has changed over time well let's
[00:07:19] Speaker 2: talk about how t-rex change so those early t-rexes did they have like the short forearms no they
[00:07:23] Speaker 1: didn't so that's a part of the t-rex story that's really neat that the very first ones were very traditional meat-eating dinosaurs quadrupeds like they walked on their hind legs so they were only walking on their hind legs but their arms were pretty long and their arms had a wide range of motion they had three big fingers they had claws at the end of those fingers and they surely used those arms to grab prey you know part when they were hunting their heads were not that big you know they they had a nice toothy smile they had a steak knife teeth but uh but they were slender long-legged fast running arms for grabbing prey and then over the course of 100 million years of evolution you you have this trend in tyrannosaurs where they get bigger their bodies get bigger and it doesn't happen gradually it really happens in pulses when some of their competitors go extinct and there's a job open at the top of the food chain and they you know balloon out but as their bodies got bigger their heads got bigger and their arms got smaller so disproportionately bigger exactly and it seems like the heads in something like a t-rex the heads were doing all the work they were like land sharks they were leading with their head they were grabbing their food with their head they were crushing their food they were swallowing their food the arms weren't doing much you know their arms about the size of of our arms yeah but more muscular certainly more muscular than me and so they were still doing something they were probably using their arms we don't know for sure we debate this a lot but probably uh to brace themselves maybe then when they were feeding uh if or maybe during mating or maybe if they were grappling for food or hug their babies hug their little tiny babies yeah they would have laid eggs and have these very cute little babies that would grow into tyrants so yeah maybe the arms they keep them warm particles of thought is
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[00:10:19] Speaker 1: competing and occupying niches is that the case yeah yeah we see that we see that the first tyrannosaurs were again pretty small but also you know quite localized and there weren't a whole lot of species and over time that family tree diversifies and by the end of the age of dinosaurs you have a bunch of tyrannosaurs living at the same time and they're only living though in north america and asia because the continents have moved apart so much that it's other groups of predators that are really ruling down south you have these different types of big meat eaters in africa and in south america but you have uh if we were to look at about 66 67 million years ago right before that asteroid came down and changed history and i'm sure we can talk about that because that's where dinosaurs and astrophysics come together right and uh so there would have been a whole panoply of tyrannosaurs you would have had t-rex at the top of the food chain here in north america but there was a smaller tyrannosaur living with it called nano tyrannous that was about the size of maybe like a big suv compared to the bus size t-rex and then over in asia you had one called tarbosaurus which looked like you know more or less like a t-rex but even shorter arms and so there was this diversity and that is something that made them quite successful it wasn't just that there was this one species t-rex that was you know super dominant but it was part of a family right that had survived and endured and adapted and was continuing to change
[00:11:45] Speaker 2: up until that moment you know i heard that there was something called pinocchio rex yeah that's one that
[00:11:50] Speaker 1: we named so that's the nickname that's the nickname so this is a dinosaur um that that i studied and i described with my dear friend jinxiong lu sadly he passed a few years ago and he was one of china's great dinosaur hunters yeah he died way too young you know in his 50s he had diabetes it was really really tragic but i i spent so much time in china with him as a young scientist you know it's people like that that really were instrumental in in my career i think every career is like this but in a science like paleontology it's a small field it's very collegial actually and it's finding these friends and colleagues that give you opportunities so i met jun chong basically when i was a student and um and he invited me out to china to work with him and in southern china there was a big construction site there's a building boom i don't know if it's still happening but this was about 15 years ago and it was i mean the buildings they were putting up the roads they were laying there's a construction worker who he was driving a backhoe driving a digger and he was laying the foundation for a building and he crunched into something and you know we stopped to take a look and it was a petrified bone and so construction work stopped and they looked in the area and they found there was basically a skeleton of a dinosaur with a big long snout a lot of sharp teeth and so they called the local museum and thankfully they did because word also got out there's some black market fossil dealers and so they all kind of converged the museum and then a few of these hucksters and the museum got the fossil and they brought it to the local museum jun chong was asked to to study it and he knew that i studied tyrannosaurs for my work and my phd and so he invited me and we studied it together and it's amazing so it's like cousin of t-rex living in southern china with a long snout yeah and jun chong came up with the formal name and he called it chongasaurus sinensis that's the formal latinized you know scientific name of this tyrannosaur chongasaurus sinensis okay it's fine you know it's it's easy enough to pronounce i guess it's like our names you know maybe a little bit unusual people are you know hard to pronounce for many people so i said this needs a nickname and we said and i said so i just remember saying it looks kind of like if t-rex you know was pinocchio and he told a lie in the nose so so it's stuck and we called
[00:14:05] Speaker 2: it that and it's fun you know the rumor is t-rex had this brain the size of whatever right but at the same time you know this is late in the dinosaur um lineage and you know typically complexity grows and smarts develop so do we have a sense now because there's so many times where we were like oh we were wrong about dinosaurs they were colorful they had feathers they you know could they have been smart
[00:14:29] Speaker 1: yeah absolutely we we are always learning new things about dinosaurs and many of the ideas that you see in books even books that weren't published that long ago or in films turn out to be not true or turn out to be outdated and so one of those ideas is that dinosaurs were stupid you see this in older books they were dim-witted they had small brains now dinosaurs were very diverse right t-rexes stegosaurus is with the plates on their backs triceratops is with the horns the long neck dinosaurs so they're kind of like mammals today there's a great diversity of mammals some mammals are very very intelligent and some mammals have smaller brains and there's everything in between so we can tell that some dinosaurs would have been fairly intelligent and t-rex was actually one of them t-rex was a pretty smart dinosaur and the way that we know this is from the fossils left behind the fossils are always our clues i mean we're detectives we're out there looking for clues the files you find them near next
[00:15:27] Speaker 2: to calculus books is that oh yeah of course that's right yeah yeah we can see yeah that's right there
[00:15:32] Speaker 1: that's right there you go and the tiny hands of the tyrannosaur evolved to hold their you know calculus book um what we do see is a is is interesting i think we see that you know we can find the fossil heads um and we can cat scan those you know just the way a medical doctor might to see inside of us if something's wrong um and the x-rays of the cat scanner can see inside these fossil skulls and we can use software to build three-dimensional models of what's inside so we can fill in the brain cavity digitally like the brain doesn't preserve as a fossil at least i've never seen one right you know brains are
[00:16:07] Speaker 2: so soft and supple they'll decay fossilizing jello yeah exactly but you know the the case of the brain
[00:16:14] Speaker 1: the thing that held the brain the brain cavity is there so we can use a software build a digital model so we can see the size and the shape of the brain we can compare brains between dinosaurs we can compare them to modern animals and that tells us that something like t-rex was actually probably pretty smart for an animal of its size it had a pretty big brain for a reptilian type of creature of its body size and it had really big olfactory bulbs in its brain those are the things at the front that control smell so it had a great sense of smell it had you know decent sized optic lobes that controlled eyesight and we can see the ears of t-rex as well and we can see that pretty long cochleas yeah you know that's the snail in the ear that's the snail in us it looks like a snail because mammals like us have great senses of hearing that's a real mammal hallmark so we have these long coiled cochlea because the longer the cochlea more or less the greater range of sounds you can hear so t-rex didn't have a cochlea quite as long as ours but for a reptilian creature it had a long cochlea so when you add it all together relatively speaking relatively speaking for an animal of its time for a dinosaur of the cretaceous it was a pretty smart animal and it had keen senses so one of the things i love about t-rex and really the reason it is my favorite dinosaur it's not because it's big and scary and it's not because it's a bully and it's mean and it crushed the bones of its prey and all that yes it had brawn it did but it also had brains and i love it it was the ultimate predator yeah brain and bronze together wow wow so we had a um guest on named eric jarvis yes you know about eric i know eric we published one research paper together in the story of birds in my new book i profile eric oh yeah because eric you know and i won't tell his story he would have told it here but his background in new york uh in in dance i mean it's incredible he's a brilliant guy and he thinks so creatively and artistically i got that but he's one
[00:18:12] Speaker 2: of the world experts on on brains well well this is what he said to me about it he said you know for example i asked him about humans and he you know we were talking about birdsong and you know there's this idea of vocal learning and uh you know that connection between the brain and the muscles and how it redirected itself to the um vocal cords and that apparatus and um an element of that he said that even in humans we probably sang he guesses or speculates or hypothesizes before we spoke so if you take that to the smart t-rex were they singing oh this is a question we need to ask eric or were they rapping
[00:18:53] Speaker 1: you know what we don't know this is one of the things that there are limits to the fossil record obviously as a scientist i never want to say never i'm not going to tell you something's impossible the same way you're not going to tell me something's it's an open question it's open because once you say something's impossible you just shut down right the opportunity to learn and to push boundaries but it is challenging to understand how sound evolved and how how vocalizations evolved just because it's all soft tissue it's soft tissue mostly you know there's no cretaceous cassette tape
[00:19:25] Speaker 2: sound doesn't fossilize that would have been an eight track yes oh yeah i certainly would have some
[00:19:30] Speaker 1: gramophone or i don't know all right um but there's certain things we can tell from fossils you know we can cat scan skulls build those digital models a question about the skull so you know one of the
[00:19:40] Speaker 2: things that is a common wisdom which might be completely false but i think it's not is that the brains the folds in the human brain the more folds the more surface area for computation or whatever right do you get imprints on the inside of the brain case that can illustrate what the surface of the
[00:19:57] Speaker 1: brain was like sometimes yeah it's on a case-by-case basis but usually the pun intended no not pun intended on a brain case by brain case basis um hey that's good um this is why we're writers right we do this without even realizing um but uh but sometimes like if the close like the bigger your brain is and the more it fills your brain cavity usually the more impressions it leaves on the sides of the bones so we can tell from some you know dinosaurs that some had brains that filled their cavity more than others because you see the imprint and oftentimes it's like the blood vessels and the nerves and those bits that are impressing on the bone um so in something like t-rex um with sound it's tough but you know we can build these models of the skulls from cat scans and we can digitally pass air through them and see it's through the nasal cavities now it's kind of difficult with the t-rex but there's are some duck-billed dinosaurs these are the ones that well they are what their names say they have these beaks that look kind of like a duck's bill and then they had a bunch of teeth behind them they were plant eaters and they were big sophisticated bulk feeding plant eaters living right at the end of the age of dinosaurs with t-rex uh and there's one called uh parasaurolophus or parasaurolophus depending on your pronunciation exactly it's like our names there's various ways to pronounce them uh and and there's a very famous fossil from new mexico my colleague my good friend tom williamson uh he did this study where they cat scanned it they he worked with physicists actually at sandia national labs in new mexico and they passed air through it they used some of the software that instrument makers use you know you're designing a new tuba and you want to make sure it sounds funny you mentioned that instrument i'm a tuba player are you okay okay i would claim i did my research and knew that but another coincidence um another coincidence like us blurbing our books and each other's books and talking here um but uh but they did that and they could tell that these duck-billed dinosaurs could produce these low bellowing sounds they could probably travel long distances right so we don't know for sure nobody's there to hear it but by cat scanning the skull and modeling airflow that indicates that it could but in a in a few cases a few very very very very very rare cases you get
[00:22:16] Speaker 2: some of the vocal organs preserved as fossils all this stuff with pinocchio and all these weird things you're finding it i just have to ask what's the most surprising discovery you've encountered oh there's
[00:22:29] Speaker 1: always you know something new and with and that's the thing about paleontology that we really are um detectives looking for clues and when we go out and look for fossils we don't really know what we're going to find i mean we don't know that makes it fun it makes it a little bit scary as well but it but
[00:22:46] Speaker 2: it does make it exhilarating kind of like you've been people have been doing this for over 100 years
[00:22:50] Speaker 1: why are you still finding anything well because there's so much to be found i mean the history of life is so long the earth's four and a half billion years old and the world is big today there's so many places that haven't been explored oh really so you know you think of there's large you know swaths of central asia let's say that you know during uh soviet times uh there wasn't a lot of investment there there weren't a lot of scientists being trained certainly paleontologists and now these countries are opening up and there's vast landscapes so if you go out to places like that you know you just don't know what you're going to find so you always got to be prepared to be surprised i mean my biggest surprise ever uh is a few years back you know i was leading my team of students from the university of edinburgh where i teach in scotland our grand old university which is amazing it goes back to the 1580s i can't believe it the land of castles i know growing up in illinois i'm you know i never knew i'd be teaching at this the 1580s yeah and so it's an awesome university i teach on an earth sciences uh course and you know we have master's students and phd students as well and so we bring them out pretty much every year sometimes multiple times a year to the isle of sky which is oh yeah i've seen that oh it is enchanted i mean i've not been there perfect yeah well go one day it is a beautiful landscape and so a lot of that landscape that topography is carved out of jurassic aged rock and so we go there and look for fossils there's dinosaurs and there's crocodiles and there's some of the ocean reptiles that live with the dinosaurs they're about 170 million years old yeah and they lived back when scotland was
[00:24:22] Speaker 2: subtropical which for those of us that live in scotland it was south of the tropics it was it was
[00:24:30] Speaker 1: within like the tropical subtropical zone it was a little bit farther south it was closer to the equator just because of the way continents have moved but also the whole earth was warmer okay there were no ice caps at the poles right sea level was higher and just everything was warmer but the atlantic ocean then had just started to open pangaea the super continent had just started to split a few tens of millions of years before so you had this narrow sliver of an atlantic ocean scotland was an island in the middle subtropical teeming with dinosaurs so we bring our students out and one of one of our students amelia penny uh she was out for a first time looking for fossils and we were walking it was low tide we have to wait till the tide is low uh to work along the coastlines and in the the drab colored gray limestone rock of the coastline she saw this brown object sticking out of the rock so she took a closer look and she saw that it had not only a different color but it had a shape to it it looked kind of like wedge shaped and it came to a point it kind of looked like a beak and then on each side there were all these circles and ovals that kind of looked like teeth and the texture of it kind of had that grain that grainy texture that bone has and so we took a closer look and said oh my goodness this is a this is a skull this is a head this is a fossil head what could it be it has a beak it has teeth well what did that well pterodactyls did oh and so this turned out to be the head of a pterodactyl or a pterosaur that's the common name these were the flying reptiles uh that are not dinosaurs they're cousins of dinosaurs although you see them in the dinosaur films and in the toy sets and everything they're cousins they were the first animals with bones to evolve powered flapping flight they did that way back on pangea yeah so long before birds so they're not ancestors of birds they have nothing to do with birds and they flew with these giant wings of skin attached to one long finger the ring finger it's like et the longest long finger and and so nobody had found one in scotland before just you know maybe one or two little scraps so we have our student amelia she makes this incredible discovery that skull leads to a neck which leads to a body which leads to wings and we have this nearly complete skeleton of this pterodactyl with like an eight foot wingspan wider than a king-sized bed discovered on the isle of sky by a student out collecting wow for her first time did you get the full we have almost all of it some of the bones are missing but but it's beautifully preserved we determined it was a new species and we described it a few years ago we gave it a name and we called it yark skianak and that's the name that if you see it written down you will not know how to pronounce it i promise you because it's from scottish galaxy so the language of the highlands yeah and the and the islands right um and so it means winged reptile from sky uh and so this is this uniquely scottish pterodactyl so that's the most unexpected thing we've ever found that's probably the most important thing we've ever found we had no idea no clue when we started that morning looking for fossils there was
[00:27:27] Speaker 2: no inkling we would find something like that so if you could pick one moment in the entire lineage of tyrannosaurs on which to hinge that species is existence as as the key moments what would you
[00:27:42] Speaker 1: choose i would choose the middle part of the cretaceous this was kind of between 90 and 100 million years ago so there were already tyrannosaurs these small human-sized ones that started the tyrannosaur family they were successful they were good at being smaller predators they had that kind of wolf or jackal type of ecological niche but then there was this burst of environmental change in the middle cretaceous and we don't know a huge amount about it there's not a lot of rocks and fossils of that age we know there were changes in sea level we know there were changes in temperature we know there was some global warming but we don't know the full picture yet we're learning it's one of the big blank spots it's now no longer a blank spot we have fossils and we have rocks but we're developing um they had to endure that crisis and they did endure that crisis that extinction event knocked out a lot of their competitors so they're the big dinosaurs that were at the top of the food chain before the spinosaurs and the allosaurus and the car carodontosaurus and all you know these ones a whole variety of big meat eaters and so tyrannosaurs had to endure that climate and environmental change and they did and then on the other side of that there was this job opening at the top of the food chain and that's when tyrannosaurs ballooned their bodies to become these bus-sized bone-crunching monsters but the hinge point was getting through that extinction and we don't know how they did it but what we do know from some really rare fossils some fossils from uzbekistan i mentioned central asia earlier i was opening up some colleagues of mine uh sasha uh varianoff who's russian and hansu said he was the curator at the smithsonian he sadly just passed but one of the great paleontologists they collected these fossils in uzbekistan invited me to help study them and they're tyrannosaurs that come from right around that time of this extinction and this climate change and these tyrannosaurs are the size of horses so they're bigger than those first ones and they have this beautiful these beautiful skull fossils that we can cat scan and we've done that and we can tell that their brains and their senses were getting really keen at that point in time so it seems like while tyrannosaurs were still relatively small the size of horses in this case they were not the top predators in their ecosystem there were other bigger meat eaters and other groups of dinosaurs but these tyrannosaurs were evolving greater intelligence and keener senses so could that have helped them get through this extinction maybe we think that's it's hard to test that idea rigorously now but regardless they did get through the extinction and then on the other side they got bigger and became top predators but they kept those big brains and those keen senses that they had evolved at smaller body size and that's what gave t-rex the brawn and the brains so
[00:30:33] Speaker 2: tyrannosaurus rex was among that group of unlucky dinosaurs that all bit the dust literally 66 million years ago um so had that not happened what would have occurred with that lineage were they thriving and set to just continue domination or you know was stress starting to kick in for them it really looks
[00:30:57] Speaker 1: like the world changed in a moment 66 million years ago probably the worst single day in the history of life and that is when outer space met planet earth when this six mile wide asteroid crashed into six miles now wet mexico so imagine that a six mile wide rock and i mean you you would know better than me but this is some leftover crumb from the formation of the solar system it could have gone anywhere and it just so happened to make a beeline to the earth and it impacted with such a force that it released more than a billion nuclear bombs worth of energy and it punched a hole in the face of the earth more than a hundred miles wide you can still see a lot of that crater on the yucatan peninsula mexico near cancun most of it is covered by the water you say sea you can see you can see the outlines you can actually and you can see it more standing on the surface yeah i mean it's so big you don't really realize what it is but but when you look at it from a distance and especially uh because a lot of it's covered by the water of the gulf you actually need like geological you know surveying to see the shape of it but there are these caves these sinkholes these cenotes uh that trace the rim of the crater in and around cancun so a lot of people on spring break they go to cancun go to the beaches they go diving in these caves uh and these caves mark ground zero where asteroid met earth and it unleashed earthquakes and wildfires and hurricane force winds and tsunamis and i mean we find these rocks these layers of rocks these tsunami deposits where there are boulders ripped up that were the size of houses i mean the energy was tremendous and we see in the geological record in the rocks we see the soot and the charcoal from these wildfires that ignited around the globe and so the soot from the fires the dust and dirt and grime from the collision would have gone up into the atmosphere the atmosphere has currents just like the ocean so given a few days maybe a few weeks at most this stuff would have circulated around the world the earth would have been plunged into darkness it would have gone cold global nuclear winter for probably a few years maybe even up to a decade and that's why more than anything that 75 percent of all species died but it probably happened quite quickly and so if you were alive that day the asteroid hit and t-rex was there and triceratops was there and to circle back to your question there was no sign they were in any serious trouble no we've just found some new fossils in new mexico that this big team that we work with with tom williamson down at the museum in albuquerque and really this has been led by andrew flynn who's a young geologist in new mexico we have this new community of dinosaurs uh in the four corners area of new mexico and there's tyrannosaurs and there's long-necked dinosaurs and there's duck-billed dinosaurs and horned dinosaurs we've really accurately dated that and it was like right before the asteroid and there's other fossils of that age from montana so we know across north america now there were dinosaurs living right up and not just a few dinosaurs a whole bunch of them they were thriving so probably they would have persisted yeah but they didn't and what we we gather is that in this world now that's been thrown into chaos first it's the tsunamis and the fires but then that nuclear winter sets in t-rex triceratops those dinosaurs had been around for over 150 million years they were utterly dominant but now suddenly their worlds had changed so quickly they were left holding a bad hand of cards yeah they were big they needed to eat a lot of food it took them many years to grow from a baby into an adult they couldn't hide very easily and they were warm-blooded as well probably some of them were we don't know for sure what the t-rexes were they probably or or approaching warm-blooded which means they need more food they need more food and they're big you know right it's one thing if you're warm-blooded and you're the size of a shrew because there were some little warm-blooded furry things the size of a shrew that made it through yeah and some of the the well the only dinosaurs that made it through were the ones with feathers and big wings
[00:34:57] Speaker 2: wait a minute okay that was my next question yeah they were literally the only one only one so because other reptiles made it we still have crocodilians that's right we still have turtles that's right right that's right and that's another thing right you have all these different reptiles some of them look very uh dinosaur like like pterodactyls right pterosaurs yeah so but we say there but those aren't dinosaurs so what would be an analogy to say okay you know are dinosaurs say like dogs or are they more
[00:35:25] Speaker 1: equivalent to say like mammals yeah they're more like mammals a group like dinosaurs was a very diverse very long-lived group and just like mammals today your mammals today there are humans i mean we're mammals but dogs and cats are and rodents are and bats are and whales are and elephants are so dinosaurs were similar they had a great diversity of but nothing else looks like right like like other reptiles look like true true that that's true so in a sense though because we know that some of these depictions of dinosaurs aren't really correct which we can get to that's the feather story uh but when the asteroid hit you know the the canonical dinosaurs the big ones they just were left exposed they were vulnerable it didn't matter how successful they were it didn't matter how long they had lived because now the world was changing so quickly around them but these little mammals had what it took we had ancestors that stared down that asteroid and why they were tiny they could hide easily they could dig burrows they didn't need to eat that much food they could grow from a baby into an adult quite quickly they could turn over the generations quickly and similar with birds the only dinosaurs to make it through so imagine i mean it's kind of morbid because it would mean we would bite the dust but imagine a world you know an asteroid comes down and every mammal is killed right except for bats and that's what happened and so when the asteroid hit you know these birds probably because they could fly so they could get away from immediate dangers more easily they were small they were really small they didn't need to eat tons of food they grew super quickly yeah like birds today they would have grown from a baby into an adult within a few weeks maybe a few months they could have turned over the generations really quickly and one thing that probably came in really handy and i in the story of birds and in in the new book i have basically a chapter about this why did birds survive why are they only dinosaurs that survived the asteroid and one of the things that seems really quirky really nuanced like how could you ever predict this one of these quirks of evolutionary history but the birds that survived were the ones that had beaks there were still lots of birds that had teeth that died out when the asteroid hit the teeth of their velociraptor ancestors but the ones that survived had beaks they could eat seeds which might seem like a trivial thing right today birds eat seeds we put seeds out in our bird feeders but it's kind of unusual to be able to eat seeds it is i have teeth i eat seeds i know so we can do we're super omnivorous you know but birds a lot of these birds that survive were probably specialists in eating seeds and that probably mattered because when the earth went dark and cold no sunlight or very little sunlight plants couldn't photosynthesize right so the trees would have died the forest would have collapsed ecosystems would have imploded there would have been a lot of insects that would have died as well you know some survived some would have died but these ecosystems would have imploded like houses of cards you know the plants die the plant eaters die the meat eaters die yeah if you ate part of a growing plant you ate flowers you ate fruit you ate roots you ate leaves you would have been in trouble your food would have been gone after maybe a few weeks a few months but we know in the world today there's a volcano that obliterates an island there's a forest fire seeds can endure that's how plants regenerate and seeds can last in the soil for a long time and so if you could eat seeds you would have access to one of the last food sources it wouldn't get you through forever but maybe it could get you through for a year another year
[00:38:53] Speaker 2: same if you ate fungus you know borrowing things like earthworms yeah and that could be part of
[00:38:58] Speaker 1: it too so it probably wasn't only seeds yeah but that was probably a major part of the story when it comes down to it the world changed so quickly that organisms they didn't have a chance to adapt through the normal processes a natural selection of genes shaping individuals and over the generation so if you were alive the day the asteroid hit you would have had to confront everything that was happening with whatever hand of cards you held right and i think the earth really did become this fickle casino you were at the poker table and it was a game for your life and if you were big and you had to eat a lot of food and and you grew slowly that's a bad hand of cards that's a dead man's hand and that's the card that t-rex had and triceratops but birds they could grow fast they could fly away easily they they could eat seeds some of them maybe could eat worms and some of the other things some of the fungus that was proliferating as things were dying that was their good hand of cards that got them through but then once the sunlight came back you know there wasn't another asteroid that hit the earth i mean the danger was done right and the earth could heal heal and regrow and it was a time of rebirth and from that time of rebirth came so much of the diversity of modern day birds the birds we see around us they stem they evolved from those plucky ancestors that survived that stared down the asteroid yes yes yes how did we come to
[00:40:24] Speaker 2: understand initially that birds were dinosaurs because when i was a little kid birds weren't not no no right and so how did we crack that case and then there's also the case of of how we figured out that they were survivors right because once you figure out they're dinosaurs you have to ask them how the
[00:40:39] Speaker 1: heck exactly it changes your whole perspective when you realize birds are dinosaurs it means that like the past really isn't the past you know the age of dinosaurs did not end with the asteroid yes most of the dinosaurs died but they have this legacy that carried on and in fact there are over 10 000 species of birds today and we know we love everything from hawks to herons to hummingbirds there are about six thousand ish species of mammals so more or less there are double the number of birds than mammals today which means there are double the number of dinosaurs than there are members of our own group so in that way the age of dinosaurs lives on but you know most of the famous dinosaurs died now how do we know this this is an idea that when i was growing up you know in the late 80s and in the 90s uh back home in in northern illinois you know i remember uh the books we had a school these books about dinosaurs books i get from the library and this bird thing that it wasn't really in there at all you know and these dinosaurs they were still shown you know covered in scales like they were overgrown lizards they were shown as dim-witted these slow-moving plotting animals basically these evolutionary failures just waiting begging to go extinct you know asteroid please come down take us out of our misery but we now know that's totally wrong uh but it's not that this dinosaur bird idea is a new idea it's not some crazy new theory proposed by some audacious young paleontologist no it actually goes back to the time of darwin oh it goes back to the early 1860s but has had a tortured history like many scientific theories and so in 1859 darwin wrote the origin species he presented his arguments for evolution by natural selection and of course that book took the western world by storm it's based on time and it sounds like it uh kicked off the american civil war you know what i don't think you can blame darwin for that
[00:42:32] Speaker 2: um but is it a coincidence i don't know you know but darwin so but but it's funny to think about
[00:42:40] Speaker 1: it in a weird way that this debate i'm talking about was happening mostly in england and in europe while america was plunged into civil war which is kind of mind-bending to think about it so 1859 darwin publishes and it's controversial i mean my goodness species evolved right you know everything wasn't just created by a creator at one point in time this really got at the core of western civilization of ideas going back to the greeks and certainly what the british and you know many of the americans at that time felt about the earth i mean the earth was was not old and and species were species and everything was fixed so darwin presents this idea and of course the public is skeptical so darwin and a lot of his friends were looking for this sort of slam dunk evidence they wouldn't have used that term right right you know evidence that they could convince the public it's one thing to write a book and tell all these stories about finches on the galapagos and breeding pigeons and all i mean darwin made a really strong case but is there something really visual you know could you find some fossil that captures evolution in action and just a few years after the origin of species was published in the early 1860s quarry workers in southern germany discovered this incredible fossil it's something you could hold in the palm of your hands it was obviously a bird it had feathers it had wings of course it's a bird nothing else alive today has feathers no frog has feathers no fish has feathers so it's a bird but it also had teeth in its jaws it didn't have a beak it had big claws on its hands like a reptile it had a long bony tail so it really did look like it was half reptile half bird evolution in action 1860s 18 early 1860s so this fossil was called archaeopteryx it became known as the first bird but a bird that we now would call the transitional species it really does show birds evolving from reptiles now around the same time there was this small little skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur called compsignathus that was discovered in these same rocks in germany these were ancient lagoons so about 150 million years ago in the jurassic period most of europe was flooded beautiful crystal blue lagoons and these animals sometimes would fall in and get fossilized buried yeah yeah and so this little dinosaur had a skeleton that was it was clearly a dinosaur it's just like a little version of of you know a meat-eating dinosaur and its legs and its feet especially just looked like bird feet and i think we see it today right you look at it at the foot of a chicken you know whether you have chickens or whether maybe you eat chicken feet it looks like a little t-rex foot is covered in scales and as claws and so it was those similarities that might seem a little bit glib or a little bit trite but actually back in the 1860s nobody knew what dna was right it was looking at these similarities in the skeletons and so here you have this half bird half reptile fossil and you have this meat-eating dinosaur that has legs that just and feet that just look like a bird's feet so it was thomas henry huxley who was darwin's great disciple who put these pieces together now darwin was a posh gentlemanly scientist who came from wealth he was in his stately home his manor house writing huxley was a street brawler huxley was a man of the middle class and huxley loved being out in britain he would travel around giving lectures he was maybe one of the first you know people you could think of as like a psycomer you know science communicator sagan before sagan sagan before sagan and really literally he was he was very famous across britain and he even came to america to give lectures you know this was the 1860s so he came soon after the civil war to give lectures in america he was really well known because he went out and he didn't just give lectures at the universities he went out and gave lectures to the working men of london and the working men of britain and very famously in 1868 we're almost a decade beyond the origin of species the public is starting to grapple with darwin's ideas people are starting to accept them and it was then in the 1960s that a new generation of scientists started to find new fossils of small fast long-armed life fast-growing dynamic energetic raptor dinosaurs like velociraptor dinonychus these things were
[00:47:02] Speaker 2: very bird-like and so that resurrected the idea even though even though they were terrestrial they
[00:47:08] Speaker 1: were walking they were walking they were not flying in anatomy they were bird-like in anatomy with or without feathers well this we'll get to this in one second but bird-like in anatomy so just looking at the bones the long arms the shape of the pelvis how the pelvis is back swept the shape of the neck the long gracefully curved neck and dozens of other features so very famously the yale paleontologist john ostrom he found dinonychus this raptor dinosaur out on the border of wyoming and montana out out in the prairies and he resurrects the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs and he writes this one page paper in the journal nature you know the prominent preeminent scientific journal and it's like the gettysburg address i think of it as the gettysburg address of evolution because it is so short yeah but it is so wise and within a very small word count he articulates that yeah birds did evolve from dinosaurs and these dinosaur fossils are so bird-like and these are the features that unite them and it brought that idea back in vogue but there were dissenters there were contrarians and a lot of ornithologists yeah didn't accept it because those are people that study birds and people yeah people study birds you know and i understand if you study birds and you're somebody who spent your life watching birds um describing birds being around birds and you're around you know sparrows and hawks and i know exactly what they said get the flock out yeah they probably did maybe an even more colorful language um but you know it's like yeah my precious you know birds that i love and study so much you know that are so smart and they're warm-blooded and they're they're so capable of you know songs and and so many feats of intelligence how could they come from a t-rex like it makes total sense right and so a lot of ornithologists said all right to prove it show us a dinosaur with feathers show us a dinosaur with feathers because feathers are so intricate and so unique that again nothing else has and we don't have feathers fish frog you know if you find a feather today you know a bird has been there i mean it's unmistakable and so for a few decades you know scientists were looking ostrom was looking and he didn't find any and why is that well feathers are hard to turn into fossils they're soft they break down quickly it's usually the hard bits the bones the teeth the shells that turn into fossils more easily and then in 1993 this film comes out that we're i think we're going to talk about a little bit later jurassic park yeah i was nine years old i saw the film they had the raptor dinosaurs and the raptors are shown as very energetic and intelligent yeah and very bird-like in many ways but they don't have feathers because nobody had found still fossil of any dinosaur with feathers and so i think people were starting to think that maybe it'll never happen oh could this dinosaur birdling was this on the outs again you know the ebb and flow of a scientific theory but i tell this story in the story of birds in in my new book about how this came to be in 1996 three years after jurassic park came out the world's paleontologist gathered in new york at the american museum in natural history special place for me that's where i did my my phd right oh nice west side of central park yeah and it was autumn the leaves were turning and they gathered for this meeting academic meeting like many that i'm sure you've been to you know as as an academic scientist and this rumor starts going around the museum you know a little bit like a game of telephone this rumor there's this weird new dinosaur somebody found this new dinosaur there's this crazy dinosaur it's from china i think it's from china i think it's really small no maybe it's big and so a chinese scientist had come with some index card size photos of course this is the day before smartphones or anything so he printed out these photos of this little dinosaur something you could hold in in your arm something about the size of a house cat clearly a dinosaur clearly a meat-eating dinosaur teeth in his jaws yeah no no wings no just kind of regular arms for a dinosaur um claws and so on but it was covered in this halo of fuzz it was covered in this fluffy stuff that really looked like down feathers and so somebody by covered you mean like all over his body and so somebody walks up to finds john ostrom who by that time is in the twilight of his career and shows him these photographs and his knees literally got weak he fell to the floor and he recounted this and there's other scientists who i know who were there when they were young he fell to the floor and he started to cry and he said there it is that's the feathered dinosaur we've all been waiting for and it wasn't just one this discovery opened the floodgates it was discovered by a farmer wow a farmer in northeastern china liaoning province so this is a place that shares a long border with north korea way away from the tourist zone and it's a land of rolling hills and factories and a lot of farmland they farm a lot of the same stuff they do back home where i'm from in the midwest and in the mid-90s this farmer working his field started to just look in the rocks crack open the rocks and he found this beautiful skeleton covered in feathers and then other farmers started to look and all of a sudden these fossils came out of the woodwork and they just started appearing everywhere and it just so happened that about 125 million years ago or so this entire area it was teeming with dinosaurs and other animals too and plants but there were some volcanoes in the distance and occasionally one of them would erupt and basically bury these ecosystems and capture them in stone kind of like when vesuvius erupted buried pompeii and so that's what locked in the feathers it was a one in a trillion thing but they were buried so quickly this freeze frame and now we have thousands of feather-covered dinosaurs i mean they're regularly discovered by farmers and we don't just have ones that have fluffy bits we have ones with full-on quill pen feathers we have ones with wings yeah so this this was the final now in the coffin the final trump card whatever you want to say that proved that huxley was right and that owes from a right and today's
[00:53:07] Speaker 2: birds came from the dinosaurs so in your book the story of birds which is an amazing book thank you
[00:53:12] Speaker 1: thanks for the blurb again it was fantastic to have your support early on oh man it's an amazing book so
[00:53:17] Speaker 2: the the the tell the story in the story of birds you do go into all this detail and you go from the dinosaur to the bird and uh you pointed out that birds are there's twice as many species of birds as there are of mammals roughly right yep that's right so what does that say about the future because
[00:53:42] Speaker 1: you know now yeah yeah yeah the future well like most paleontologists are much more comfortable looking at the past right than predicting the future um what we do know is that birds today are in one of their most vulnerable states probably since they stared down the asteroid and it's just because of climate change it's because of land use change because of pesticides because and you know not to i this might rub people the wrong way because so many people love them but cats cats cats kill so many birds if you have a cat keep keep your cats inside yeah it's and and so there's many things that threaten birds and just over the last 50 years or so um in the time really since my parents graduated high school sort of you know from around 1970 there's been a a loss of like billions of birds in the standing population just here in north america so some species have gone extinct but it's more that just the populations have crashed and it is because of our effect on the planet so something you brought up
[00:54:42] Speaker 2: earlier was how the speed of the asteroid hit is what was really key right because we can't adapt you know life evolves on the same time scale as geological changes normally happen exactly but now we're looking at rapid climate change and we're looking at rapid human changing of the planet's surface yeah so it's the rapidity yes exactly because the earth has gone through climate change
[00:55:05] Speaker 1: before and people will often you know what well it's okay sometimes there's people that want to have a go at me and other geologists and scientists but normally it's well intentioned i go back home i talk to my family my neighbors my friends and they'll say things like it's global warming you know but there it's been warm before we shouldn't worry and i'll say yeah you're right this isn't the first time the earth has warmed up if somebody's told you that that's wrong you know that's that's the extremist no the earth has of course warmed up many times in the past and there have been times where there have been volcanoes that have spewed out a lot of carbon dioxide and that's led to global warming and other times there have been other causes but what's happening now is that it's happening so quickly you know normally this takes place over many thousands tens of thousands of years of volcanoes spewing out and spewing out what we're doing now is really within a few centuries we are putting so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so it's the pace of change now the earth will be fine in the end the earth has endured everything i think birds you know birds are are in trouble today certain species you know ones that only live on one island right you know ones that have a really peculiar diet or a peculiar way of reproducing of course they're more vulnerable but by and large birds are survivors they survived that asteroid they've survived all these whims of climate change they outlasted the pterosaurs they outlasted all the other dinosaurs yeah so i i i'm pretty confident birds will do well and make it through i'm probably more confident with birds than with us to be honest okay so our you know
[00:56:34] Speaker 2: so our birds evolved from dinosaurs like we evolved from fish yeah right we're not fish are birds dinosaurs have i eaten some chicken am i eating a dinosaur yes i mean you could in like a tortured
[00:56:49] Speaker 1: genealogical argument make you know say humans are fish and when neil schuman is one of my undergrad you know props wrote his great book your inner fish he plays on that you know but you wouldn't really call humans fish because the fishy ancestors are so distant you know vertebrate yeah exactly but but birds really literally are dinosaurs in the same way a bat is a mammal okay and and so a bat is obviously a mammal you know bats evolved from mammals part of the mammal family tree they have hair they feed their babies milk they have the features of mammals they're just the only mammals that evolved wings and and started to flap around and fly birds are the dinosaur equivalent of that they're part of the dinosaur family tree they directly evolved from like velociraptor type dinosaurs but they're a peculiar type of dinosaur that got small evolved wings don't develop the ability to fly but the difference is not that we want to imagine it again but you know if if all mammals died except for bats that's kind of the world we're in with the dinosaurs all the other ones died leaving only this one peculiar group but they are very much dinosaurs in the same way i'm still a brusati i'm still in the family you know i've moved to scotland i moved away from the ancestral home in the midwest i have a different job my ancestors they were coal miners steel workers but even though i moved away even though i'm different even though i'm losing my hair uh whatever um even though i'm different i'm still in the family and that's the way that birds are dinosaurs oh we yes we do yeah man that is amazing that is amazing and it's all in the story of birds it's in the story birds it was great right in the book you know pop
[00:58:19] Speaker 2: science you mentioned how you were uh inspired by the movie jurassic park and i imagine that you know the previous generation of um of uh paleontologists that studied dinosaurs were probably inspired by the flintstones so let's get into that yeah media inspiration yeah yeah that's what we're doing
[00:58:39] Speaker 1: here we're having a conversation that will be broadcast you know by the media and this gives you know these conversations do helps frame the public perception of dinosaurs but definitely the films the cartoons those have an outsized influence and how people around the world not scientists like us but your average person uh in any place what their view of dinosaurs is in a way man you know you're living
[00:59:02] Speaker 2: like every four or five year old's dream by being a no so no but my son is six anthony he
[00:59:08] Speaker 1: you're living his dream because space is his thing but at four years old he was in a dinosaur i've been trying but i did i have um brought the you know he understands the dinosaur bird thing so if you if you ask anthony his favorite dinosaur he will tell you right away penguin oh so he's good there awesome but he would tell you 30 other things about you know by canis majoris and well let me tell you
[00:59:30] Speaker 2: i have a three-year-old and a five-year-old right now they they don't care at all about space but they love dinosaurs good good for them yeah now listen if your job when you think it couldn't get any better i'm a paleontologist i'm out in the field you get the call to consult on the film jurassic world what what's that like is it like getting a nobel prize call oh yeah because i know what that's like getting
[00:59:55] Speaker 1: a nobel prize um i mean i well i feel very charmed to be able to do it and it's super fun i've worked on the last two jurassic world dominion and jurassic world rebirth and you know as far as communicating science these movies reach such a big audience and it also is really fun and it's really random how i was invited to do it uh it they've always been science advisors on the film and there was a previous uh paleontology consultant but he retired and so when they when colin trevorrow the director was making jurassic world dominion he started planning it out in 2018 right around the time the previous film had been released because they're always you know doing the next one and it just so happened totally coincidental that when i wrote uh the rise and fall of the dinosaurs my first pop science book that my editor peter hubbard great editor uh he had this brilliant idea let's release it around the time of this jurassic world film in the summer of 2018. that might sell a couple books and and you know what it did i think that did help get the word of the book out there um but later on that summer a few months later uh i got an email uh from a said colin trevorrow i looked at my my gmail account and colin trevorrow and the subject line says i read your book okay now for jurassic park fans you might remember in the first film the little kid tim uh the little gadfly kid um who's way into dinosaurs he he when he first meets uh sam neill's character the paleontologist he goes up holding i've read your book i've read your book so so that's just the subject line email i'm like okay something so i look at the email and it's just very brief it says you know hi steve my name is colin i make scientifically inaccurate dinosaur films i'm coming to edinburgh for the arts festival we have the big fringe festival every august i'm coming with my family i'd love to sit down and talk about dinosaurs now i thought this email was a joke i thought one of my students i'm great i have great students i run a lab at the university did you recognize the name immediately i knew the name oh yeah no no because he's the director of the first jurassic world and the producer of the series and he you know he's a pretty well-known filmmaker and i'm you know i'm not like a huge until you said it i didn't know it yeah but you know what well we won't tell colin i hope you're not watching he's from this part of the world too but no but so i saw so i thought you know what this this is it's one of my students is doing this they're having a go at me you know steve's getting a big head with his book you know let's have some fun but i passed it along to uh you know by my publisher to peter and his team um at uh at what what is now mariner books harper collins and they said okay we'll look into this and a few hours later they called and we're like yeah that's him like that's his email like he does want to talk to you it's like oh my god okay so we had a brief phone call um colin and me and then he did come to edinburgh a few weeks later and um we uh his family was off seeing a show uh i took him to the scotch malt whiskey society which is this club that bottles up casks of whiskey because we're in scotland but it was it was noon so we didn't have whiskey we didn't want you know his family was at this kid show but we had really good coffee they had great coffee we sat for three hours drinking this fantastic coffee um in the new town of edinburgh and he said right away he said i'm starting to plan the next film it's going to be the one that finishes the this this trilogy of jurassic world is going to tie up a lot of the story arcs and a lot of the different characters the human characters and i want some new dinosaurs in there and i want some of these dinosaurs to have feathers so that's one of the first things he told me and i said oh that's music to my ears yes and he said can you help me do it you want to help me do you want to come on to the team i said absolutely so people sometimes think you know that or give me credit for bringing feathers to the franchise no no it was colin's vision from the start but i was very happy
[01:03:34] Speaker 2: to be there you know by his side so does it start with like uh dinosaur design or script writing of their behavior or what is where do you begin and then does it evolve to you're actually on set
[01:03:46] Speaker 1: or you know how does that play out i'm really uh an advisor i'm a consultant so i just feel it's my responsibility to make sure the science is represented you know i know that again they're not nature documentaries i know that they're not going to design these dinosaurs strictly based on only the exact things we know from fossils you know these have to be characters they have to look good you have to recognize them on the screen they have to do stuff they have to drive a story so the scientific accuracy is part of that but they've always had science advisors i respect that deeply you would know better than me but i mean all the star treks all the star wars they have astrophysicists working on these you know so they might have one did you which one uh it was a movie where they had
[01:04:28] Speaker 2: a ship i don't remember the name of it they had a ship with a neutron star as a power source at the front of the ship so i helped them with the design of that yeah um so that must have been fun right that must have been really fun well it was it was cool but you know it was kind of like you know i was an assistant professor so i'm feeling the pressure i'm like oh okay let me do all these calculations
[01:04:46] Speaker 1: that's right you got to do the math or do they have you write in equations on the board i heard some science yeah yeah i've got that for tv yeah because then you got to get those right oh my god
[01:04:55] Speaker 2: if you mess up well but here's the thing you know for those of us because sometimes people push back online because you know there is scientific accuracy but there's also the fact that it's interfacing with storytelling exactly that's it that's it that's it and how you balance that uh because you know what they're trying to get at right they're not these aren't your students in the university right right you have to balance these different elements and and so you know things get a little loose-ish sometimes i'm not not necessarily quite how do you deal with that and do you have a tension with
[01:05:29] Speaker 1: that internally i've learned to be comfortable with it and i'm okay as long as it's not too outside of the bounds exactly you know so i just i want the science to be represented i want the dinosaurs to be realistic even if they're maybe not a hundred percent in line with what we know from the fossils now if i was consulting and i do this you know quite a lot on nature documentaries and dinosaur shows you know like prehistoric planet and walking with dinosaurs um that's the one i watch walking oh yeah so i work on these shows and that's very different you know these are produced by you know the bbc in many cases i do a lot of nova style you know i'm often on these nova shows it's probably why i'm here those are different you got to make sure that you're spot on with the actual evidence the actual fossils it's like when i write my books you know i need i am writing them they're non-fiction i'm the specialist i'm the paleontologist they need to be accurate i'm not going to tell you that some bird is 30 percent bigger than it really was just to make the story better that's not going
[01:06:23] Speaker 2: to well there's another thing that happens that i find that i do uh and that is and you know and this is a problem i had before i was a person who was making stuff for the public i would look at books written by certain scientists in certain fields that i'm not going to say in the world of physics sure right and if you're a scientist yeah you can distinguish between when they're saying we know this the evidence shows this versus here's what we think or believe or where we're speculating so i will speculate but i make it try to make it as clear as possible that this is not observed known
[01:06:56] Speaker 1: knowledge absolutely and i think that's the key and for you know folks like you and me that do a lot of this i think we we just get comfortable with it and we find a way we try our best to make that clear when i write my books like for in the story birds in the rise and fall the dinosaurs i often open the chapters with some sort of of vignette you know some sort of fictional story of some you know a t-rex hunting or a terror bird coming out of the forest you know onto the plains or make it cinematic yeah and you know and i only do it for a few pages um because i'm not a very good fiction writer i can't carry it i could i mean the thought of like trying to write a novel or something that scares me but but also i you know i don't want there to be too much speculation and then i really try to make clear in this fictional story or in this story i envision this and this is what we really know but you do have to tell stories to reach people whether it's a film or whether it's a book in your book you did a great job with that uh and you know i try to do the same people want stories and we're trying to reach you know not the the phds and not the other professors and not even our students who are studying science we're trying to reach everybody and when i write these books and when i do the films i really try to remember what it was like as a teenager growing up in the midwest becoming obsessed with fossils and and try to channel that and the best you know the best thing for me of of you know it's great when your books are reviewed by the new york times and they say it's good or you get some award but the thing that's most special to me is when i hear from readers so if anybody out there knows my books i'm easy to find online please do get in touch seriously but over the last you know year or so i mean a few times a week i get messages from people and and there was a guy a long-haul truck driver yeah who was listening to my dinosaur book on audio there was a kid who's in his early 20s who was stationed overseas and in the military who was reading the book you know past the time um this is great that's who i want to reach and to do that you have to tell stories and you can't write academically no and it's the same with the films these are blockbuster films yeah but they are so important that that's the concept most people have of dinosaurs and you can nitpick on the films and certainly paleontologists will nitpick that dinosaur is a bit too big or the anatomy of the foot looks wrong or it probably wouldn't have had that color but jurassic park was probably the best thing that's happened to paleontology at least in the last century i mean that brought dinosaurs to the public in this bold brash bombastic but hugely engaging entertaining new way and the amount of interest in paleontology
[01:09:22] Speaker 2: exploded in the early 90s leave the movie and want to learn oh yeah and so many museums put on dinosaur
[01:09:27] Speaker 1: exhibits so many museums hired dinosaur paleontologists the number of jobs that were created because of that film same at universities you know they wanted to put on dinosaur classes especially for non-majors hire a paleontologist and so many young people around the world around the world not just in the u.s not just in britain where i live now but around the world i have colleagues from argentina colleagues from mongolia that say that watching those films that's what got them into paleontology now they're discovering new dinosaurs they're making groundbreaking scientific progress all because of these films so
[01:10:02] Speaker 2: that is important so this is six films over 30 years seven now with reverse that came out but this is decades and in this century man science has been oh yeah evolving so rapidly yeah so if you go back from the first jurassic park in 1993 right up until today have we have the movies gotten better at incorporating the latest knowledge and you know it's almost like that could potentially ruin characters
[01:10:35] Speaker 1: well that was the issue with the feathers so yeah when jurassic park came out in 1993 it became you know a global phenomenon i mean it's still on the list of best films of all time it's right up there with the fast and the furious there we go yeah absolutely yes and zoolander and you know i don't know what else has 12 a series of 12 movies yes 18 movies but but yeah it became james bond bond yeah there you go indiana jones star wars uh but you know it became such a famous film uh and and in 93 nobody had ever found a fossil of a dinosaur with feathers but the first ones were found in 96 by farmers in china so okay we know the velociraptors wrong but already that was an icon that was the brand those raptors you weren't just gonna paste feathers on them in the next film you know so that persisted for many films these scally dinosaurs and more recently we've gotten feathers this is what colin
[01:11:32] Speaker 2: wanted to do do you think they got the information that we have this yeah they knew it yeah they knew
[01:11:36] Speaker 1: it it's just look i mean that velociraptor that became a household name that those scenes never heard of it before no no once jurassic park came exactly and the scenes of them pack hunting and opening the doors i mean okay that's that's and being smart i mean there's some artistic license there but those are iconic movie scenes so no you know coca-cola is not just going to change this logo one day right you know so so they were kind of stuck with that but colin wanted to bring some feathered dinosaurs in and it's not that the raptors have been changed to be feathered but it's other characters have been introduced other types of raptors that do have feathers we have this one pyro raptor that has feathers has wings it's what a real velocity after could look like could not so it's really funny i think the name sounds so in your face pyro raptor but it's called that because it's fossils and there's only a few bones were found in france after a forest fire that's why that's the secret behind that name i wish it was a dinosaur that we can see from the the bones of its throat because of the fire but you know
[01:12:39] Speaker 2: because you do have these chemical warfare reptiles right you have venom and you have like uh acids and things yeah so why not emit you know take methane which you have methanogens right create a methane bladder and have some way of igniting it with two teeth you know what you know what if who knows what evolution will make who knows so in in terms of dinosaurs in the media where do you think because you know there's a lot of cartoon dinosaurs and it seems like they typically reflect the older ideas of dinosaurs so who's getting it right do you think that um the portrayals of dinosaurs now are catching up to because i tell people i tell people a lot but like yeah the physics that you see in books that's the stuff that was discovered a long time ago that's been yeah right yeah the latest stuff that's why when you're an expert you have to be current you know the latest stuff so are there you know um entertainment depictions media depictions of dinosaurs that are the closest to the modern
[01:13:39] Speaker 1: understanding you're absolutely right that there are older uh concepts and older stereotypes of dinosaurs that still do persist and and i see them sometimes you know i see them in kids books and i kind of cringe oh there's a raptor that's shown naked and scally and it's drooping his hands we know that's not true by the way the whole hand thing nope they would have held their hands inwards like this um so there are things like that that i see i think generally though things are catching up i think most books are pretty good now most publishers especially that do kids books they do try to get scientists to consult or write the books uh the films in jurassic yeah you still see some of these scally dinosaurs but we do have these newer ones with feathers and i think that is changing i think where you really see it really good though is in some of the best documentaries that are done so walking with dinosaurs which i've worked on for many years as a consultant they had a new series last year and these are really accurate up-to-date dinosaurs prehistoric planet which is uh an apple bbc production i i consulted a bit on that but it was it was the you know they hired a paleontologist darren naish a friend of mine in britain he was working with that team full-time on staff for quite a long time getting the realism down and so you see a super modern current view of dinosaurs and prehistoric planet so those are the ones i would check out when you're making a film and jurassic yes but even more so the the nature documentary types prehistoric planet or walking with dinosaurs you know those have to show dinosaurs doing things yeah you know they can't it can't just show a fossil you know captured in stone they have to be doing things they have to be moving they have to be mating they have to be eating they have to be confronting each other and fighting and sometimes they're sleeping or swimming or they have to be doing stuff now we don't always have a great understanding from fossils exactly how dinosaurs would move and exactly what they would do but sometimes we have enough evidence from the bones we can see the muscle attachments on the bones and specialists that really know muscles can actually reconstruct how big those muscles are kind of like when forensic like anthropology where you know specialists can use the shape of a skull or whatever to make to make the face so people that really study muscles can do that sometimes we do get the feathers and skin preserved so there are cases where the fossils can tell us what the dinosaur would have looked like and even sometimes like the range of the motion of the limbs but the other thing is computer modeling so doing 3d models of these dinosaurs and putting them into animation software oftentimes the same software scientists use as animators use for films and just seeing what looks realistic based on modern day animals so looking at how birds move and looking at how reptiles move and seeing just what passes the sniff test with these dinosaurs based on the size and the scale and the proportions of their skeletons
[01:16:29] Speaker 2: one last one so things always go wrong in these movies so if you were going to make an island now park of dinosaurs and we somehow you know un-extinct them oh my god how do you get it right where would you would you would you use antarctica or greenland or say uh what's that island sky or man oh yeah is
[01:16:52] Speaker 1: the sky yeah yeah sure yeah rampaging scottish dinosaurs yeah but is it possible to get it right or is it just like don't do i i think there's always going to be a story and i don't know where the franchise will go i hope there's future films it's a very you know famous successful franchise um what i would love to see though and if any of the producers uh frank or pat or any of the producers mr spielberg are are watching let's get into a future film some of these crazy birds that took over the dinosaur niches after the classic dinosaurs died with the asteroid i'm talking about terror birds demon ducks elephant birds the giant soaring birds with 20-foot wingspans let's have t-rex and giganotosaurus and velociraptor meet these things that took over from i think the godzilla
[01:17:38] Speaker 2: franchise already did that right you got the big butterfly there's some weird stuff in god so gareth
[01:17:43] Speaker 1: edwards who directed the jurassic world rebirth who's fantastic he directed the godzilla he's got great vision of these animals on screen so gareth if you're listening let's do this all right all right
[01:17:55] Speaker 2: so i'm gonna have to read this because there are names i don't ever remember names in movies so okay uh i'm gonna read some names here so you know jurassic park you say it inspired you yes to get into paleontology and you know there are some excellent characters in that movie there's dr grant yeah by sam that's right dr sadler played by laura dern and dr malcolm by jeff goldblum yes all right so dr grant yeah dr sadler or dr malcolm who would you rather have as your thesis advisor
[01:18:31] Speaker 1: oh dr uh sattler is thesis advisor for sure yeah why what is she well she's she's a paleobotanist in the film but she is very clearly very good with people in the film she has her head screwed on straight she kind of you know keeps tabs on sam neill's character while still being you know she organizes the stuff and makes sure everything's running smoothly but is also a world-class scientist that's what you want for a supervisor i got a lot of students and have had a lot over the years they can be a judge if i come anywhere close to that that perfect idea i did i did this summer research
[01:19:03] Speaker 2: as an undergraduate before i went to graduate school and i met so many disgruntled graduate students yeah who they were like you know everybody talks about research but make sure that your thesis advisors are human that's right and for any any younger people that are listening
[01:19:16] Speaker 1: that might want to go into science if you want to do a phd talk to students in the lab or the
[01:19:20] Speaker 2: people you might want to work with see what they're like that's right so which one would you
[01:19:24] Speaker 1: rather have a coffee with oh probably ian malcolm that's jeff goldblum's character yeah nuts i mean his brains on a different wavelength yeah i would just sit and just listen to him talk yeah like i'm
[01:19:36] Speaker 2: doing with you right now there yeah okay so who who we buy so when i look at a show like the big bang theory yeah right the the sitcom i'm like i know every one of those guys in real life right and they're all from caltech coincidentally yeah yeah yeah of course yeah yeah yeah so who reminds you of
[01:19:56] Speaker 1: your old colleagues of those characters yeah well that would be dr grant that would be sam neill's character that that was really nailed that character um really well it was basically michael creighton wrote the book he did model the character on a few different real paleontologists oh really so so dr grant's persona that sam neill plays i mean it really captures a scientist who's you know a great expert in his field but also a little bit awkward but has great ambition great motivation in the new films is jonathan bailey who is the paleontologist he plays it really well i showed up on set and met him and we just so happen to be dressed almost identically wow the way the costume people put him into costume with certain stuff they based him on you oh i wish he was just named people's sexiest man alive so yeah
[01:20:41] Speaker 2: you're right they based him on me oh yeah absolutely like somebody's like literally you know i should be winning that award the way uh you know jordan won nba finals oh yeah and i'm like i how did they miss me with sexiest scientist like i literally i don't know you know the podcast here's done one season
[01:21:00] Speaker 1: right so when it goes on when you write more books that's right next year last question because this is
[01:21:05] Speaker 2: affecting everything how is ai going to change your field good question i don't i don't know how ai
[01:21:10] Speaker 1: might change everything it might do us i don't know it's going to change publishing that's for sure i hope i can write more books right um but in the field we recently published uh just a few months ago we published this paper in proceedings the national academy of sciences on using ai yep uh and it was it was super cool we it was we were so happy to get it published there uh using ai to help classify dinosaur footprints this is something that came it's a physicist gregor hartman is the name he's now a good friend of mine we just text him about uh about the basketball playoffs uh not today oh i'm a big fan too well i grew up in chicago uh chicago area in the early 90s so i can tell you every moment of every one of those bulls teams and gregor and i talk about this but but he's a physicist who's become a machine learning expert he's a professor in berlin and he was reading my dinosaur book he was reading the rise and fall of the dinosaurs with his son who's really into dinosaurs so he reached out to me and said i read your book enjoyed your book is there anything that ai can do and i said well we have these footprints on the isle of sky that we find dinosaur footprints but we don't know if they were made by the meters or the plant eaters was there a news article about this yeah there there there were some news articles because because gregor made an app that you can use and anybody if you find a dinosaur footprint you can take a photo and put it in the app and it won't tell you this is a t-rex but it will tell you what the most similar footprints are and it'll basically make a prediction yeah with some confidence intervals so that's a i think a good use of ai this is this um unbiased un basically untrained you know machine learning algorithm and it tells us that some of these footprints we found in the isle sky were probably made by plant-eating dinosaurs which would make them the oldest in the world of their group wow so as a scientist that's what got me interested in building a tool it was meeting gregor that made it happen now we're working with gregor to build these huge family trees of mammals that's what i'm doing in my research now a big part of it is studying mammal evolution where our mammal ancestors came from and working with gregor is helping us get these new algorithms that can make better family trees uh that can find them using likelihood algorithms and stuff can find them
[01:23:17] Speaker 2: faster so it's very exciting i wish i had that app in 2009 i was in western colorado with the discovery founder john hendrix may he cool rest in peace yeah and he goes you want to see the dinosaur footprints and i'm like yeah we go to look to this plane rock and he pours water and suddenly there you
[01:23:32] Speaker 1: go and i'm like what is that yeah it is because literally that dinosaur was there in that case probably 150 million years ago so it was walking where you're walking when i take my students to sky that's the magic and when it comes down to it that's the magic of fossils these are these are ambassadors from a time long ago a time far away this has been a magical this is fun thank you thank you sir so much for coming into particles of thought pleasure thanks for all you do as a science communicator thank you as well thank you
[01:24:32] Speaker ?: thank you