A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
What is the Tully Monster? It might be a vertebrate, or it might not, but scientists have unable to agree for 70 years.
The first time I saw the Tully Monster, it was as a painting on the side of a U-Haul as the Illinois State Fossil. Wooster College has the image.
That's an unusual claim to fame. Since then, I've been curious about it, so of course I featured this video today. As for it being either a chordate or a mollusk, well, it would be even weirder than a conodont as a chordate and among the weirdest mollusks.
The Cretaceous Period is famous for enormous ocean-dwelling beasts. New research shows it boasted the biggest octopuses, and maybe the biggest invertebrates, of all time.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
Yikes! And I thought the Mesozoic oceans, particularly during the Cretaceous, were dangerous and scary enough. Oh, and the Tully Monster makes a cameo here.
400 million years ago, Prototaxites might have towered high above all other terrestrial life. Ever since its discovery, we've been trying to figure out what this massive ancient organism could possibly have been. For a while the leading theory was that it was a fungus, but recent studies suggest Prototaxites might have been something we've never seen before...
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
I showed a PBS Eons video about Prototaxites to my organismal biology students as an example of ancient fungus. If I were to ever teach that class again, I'd have to remove it. Good thing I'm retiring!
On the 1st of September, Drexel University made the announcement that they plan to permanently close the Academy of Natural Sciences; the oldest natural history museum in all of the Americas. The news came as a shock to everyone from locals to the the staff of the museum themselves who learned about closure on the same day as everyone else. Now the fate of this historic institution and the millions of rare and valuable artifacts within it hang in the balance. Join me as we fight back against this attack on science and help save the Academy.
...
HOW TO SAVE THE ACADEMY:
Step 1: Go to this link https://save-the-academy.org/...
The page at the link urges people to complete five actions, the first of which is sign a petition.
I've signed and so have 108,090 others. The last on the list is "share your story." That's what this blog is about. I'm recycling part of a comment I left on George Morgan Davis (1938 – 2024): The Director’s Cut to kick off my personal story.
On the one hand, may George Davis rest in peace. I have at least one story about the Council of Systematic Malacologists, where I first met George, and the San Diego Natural History Museum that I did not want to commit to paper or pixels while he was alive. On the other, the same instincts that guided George in that tale would be useful. Have you heard that Drexel University, which took over the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and turned it into the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, has decided to shut it down by the end of the month? If George were still with us, he'd be fighting that decision. I located your blog and the PDF you linked to while searching to see if George was still around. He's not, but I'm glad I found your blog.
When I wrote "Sometimes, people with less than pure motives get results, a topic on my to-do list," in 'Mr. Scorsese' and 'The Librarians' both Emmy winners, George Davis, who was curator of malacology at the Academy of Natural Sciences when I knew him in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was one of the people I was thinking about. Now's not the time to tell that story.*
Instead, I'm telling another story, that of Joseph Leidy, who "named the holotype specimen of Hadrosaurus foulkii, which was recovered from the marl pits of Haddonfield, New Jersey" and "also described the holotype specimens of Arctodus (A. pristinus), the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus), and the American lion (Panthera atrox), among many others." I have connections to all these extinct animals, which Leidy described at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
One of the fiberglass dinosaurs at Pre-Historic Forest, where I worked as a tour guide and consultant, was Hadrosaurus foulkii. It was the high point, literally, as its statue stood at the top of the trail, of the walking tour. I could have used more information about the creature as the first dinosaur described from the United States. It would have been been more informative than making a bad joke about New Jersey (If it were described today, it might have been called Sopranosaurus, to which a heckler once responded "What about Hoffasaurus?" My retort was "You know where you can find Jimmy Hoffa? In the Yellow Pages under concrete." That joke has extra resonance now that I live three miles from where he disappeared.)
I've mentioned several times that I did my M.S. research at Rancho La Brea, where Arctodus in the form of A. simus), the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus), and the American lion (Panthera atrox all occur. I haven't mentioned Actodus, known as the giant short-faced bear, on this blog before, but I have written about direwolves and American lions, so both are still relevant to me 40 years later. It would be a huge loss to science that I would feel personally if anything happened to the holotypes of these organisms, especially if it were because the museum closed and the specimens were lost.
I could go on with the stories of Edward Drinker Cope, Thomas Say, and Henry Augustus Pilsbry, all of whom were important scientists who worked in my areas of expertise and all of whom did their research at the Academy of Natural Sciences, but it's time to wrap up this post. Maybe later.
The Academy of Natural Sciences has an offer from the William Penn Foundation to keep its doors open for at least one year, but Drexel University, who owns the museum, said it is still deciding what the historic museum’s future will be, NBC10’s Andrew Rowan has the story.
When I signed the petition, I added the comment that Drexel should accept the William Penn Foundation's offer. I'll tell the university president and head of the board of directors the same thing. I hope my readers do, too.
New creatures. New era. Experience the Ice Age like never before. Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is now streaming on Apple TV https://apple.co/_PrehistoricPlanet
“Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” is a sweeping new installment of the award-winning natural history series from executive producers Jon Favreau and Mike Gunton, produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit (“Planet Earth”), and narrated by Golden Globe Award and Olivier Award winner Tom Hiddleston (“Earthsounds”), with an original score by Hans Zimmer, Anže Rozman and Kara Talve from Bleeding Fingers Music. The five-part docuseries, set to premiere globally on November 26, 2025, invites viewers into a dramatic new era of prehistoric life, millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs — an era shaped by ice, the intense fight to survive and the rise of a new cast of giants: the iconic megafauna.
“Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” uses the latest scientific research and cutting-edge visual effects to bring this frozen world to life like never before, unveiling the spectacular habitats and inhabitants of ancient Earth for a one-of-a-kind experience. From towering woolly mammoths to elusive snow sloths, terrifying saber-toothed tigers to resilient dwarf elephants (only 3 feet tall), the series reveals the epic struggles and unexpected stories of animals that once ruled the Ice Age. Viewers will journey through vast tundras, barren deserts, expanding grasslands and melting permafrost as these creatures battle for survival in the face of extreme climates, shifting landscapes and the onset of “The Big Freeze,” and ultimately, “The Big Melt.”
The series is produced by the world-renowned team at BBC Studios Natural History Unit with support from the photorealistic visual effects of Framestore (“Gravity,” “The Golden Compass”). Theme by Hans Zimmer, with an original score by Zimmer, Anže Rozman and Kara Talve for Bleeding Fingers Music.
“Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” continues the storytelling journey of the acclaimed Apple TV natural history series “Prehistoric Planet,” which transported viewers 66 million years into the past to witness the age of dinosaurs across two seasons. Blending cinematic storytelling with photorealistic visual effects, the series brings ancient worlds to life, offering a firsthand look at some of the most extraordinary creatures ever to walk the Earth. The complete first two seasons of “Prehistoric Planet” are available to stream now on Apple TV.
Explore the award-winning VFX behind Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, the critically acclaimed third season of the docuseries executive produced by Jon Favreau and Mike Gunton and produced by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit.
Our global teams were tasked with developing the VFX and animation for over 40 scientifically accurate creatures, many never-before-seen on screen. From sabre-toothed cats to rhino-sized wombats, tiny island elephants, and the largest ape to ever live, the core creative challenge was ensuring these animals felt as real, grounded, and emotionally compelling as subjects in a modern wildlife documentary.
Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age earned our global team Best FX at the Annie Awards alongside double honours at the VES Awards for Outstanding Visual Effects and Outstanding Effects Simulation.
This video worked for its awards campaign; it got nominated.
66 million years ago a giant space rock crashed into our planet and killed the dinosaurs. In the span of just four decades, we’ve gone from not knowing there was a space rock at all to knowing exactly where that planet-killer came from.
I've been following this story for as long as I've been a geologist, but I still learned new things from this video, or at least was reminded of things I'd forgotten, like Luis Alvarez having earned a Nobel Prize in Physics. I will say I was skeptical at first, but by the time I earned my M.S., I was convinced.
A giant asteroid impact ended the age of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. How did this mass extinction play out, moment by moment? In this video we meet a geologist who has explored the asteroid crater and learn what the rocks tell us about the last days of the dinosaurs. It was pretty bad!
Not only did Dr. Joe Hanson and Sean Gulick describe the details of what we now know about the Chicxulub impact and its effects, Joe concluded with a "so what" message. Unlike the dinosaurs, we have a choice.
That's a wrap for June's blogging. Stay tuned for Canada Day to begin July.
Don't even think about getting a bigger boat! Let us know in the comments the largest fish you ever caught.
When Marlo Anderson mentioned that a Danish scientist had figured out that the "dragon's tongues" were really giant sharks teeth in 1666, I thought "that has to be Nicolaus Steno." It was.
In 1667, Danish naturalist Nicolaus Steno made a discovery that forever changed the way we viewed the oceans forever. The fossils were thought to have been the petrified tongues of dragons or snakes, but what Nicolaus realised was the truth was equally, if not far more terrifying. These strange objects were actually the fossilized teeth of the largest shark to have roamed the oceans, the megalodon.
I plan on lecturing on Steno's contributions to geology on Thursday and I will include this factoid. One of my students is really into sharks and he'll enjoy it.
I have more material, but I feel like being a good environmentalist and conserving my resources for next year. May I remember to celebrate on time then. In the meantime, stay tuned for the News & Doc Emmy Awards won by Underdogs for Wayback Wednesday.
Watching this trailer reminds me that I showed Chasing Ice to my students last week and this is week is Earth Week, making this a good movie to recommend to my students. Welcome to blogging as professional development. It also makes me think that it's the strongest competitor to Sally. Last year, I thought that the "Hunt for the Oldest DNA" episode of NOVA on PBS had the strongest science of all the nominees, but didn't have the best chance of winning. Surprise, it won! That could happen here.
I’m so happy to report that The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice was awarded the a National Emmy for Outstanding Science and Technology documentary!! Our science and film team is beyond ecstatic!! It was a tremendous honor to be amongst so many great documentary filmmakers last night. This award elevates not just the film, but also the voices of the scientists and the documentary’s funder, the National Science Foundation.
As a scientist and filmmaker, my work aims to unify scientific research and share it with the public. This is especially important when the science we urgently need to hear is being attacked. So thank you to the @emmysnatas for this timely and beautiful award!!
Galápagos giant tortoises once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with at least thirteen species. But now some of those species are gone forever and the same forces that doomed those tortoises might have ended up helping save others.
No need for geneetic engineering and cloning — old-fashioned selective and captive breeding could re-create species thought to be extinct. That's good news for today's biodiversityholiday!
Follow over the jump for a retrospective of two posts from the back catalog that relate to today's topic.
A fossil that sat untouched for decades is now helping rewrite part of the dinosaur family tree, and the breakthrough is happening at Virginia Tech.
What may look like crushed rock is actually a fossil, one that scientists painstakingly rebuilt piece by piece into one of the earliest meat-eating dinosaurs ever identified.
Earlier this year, Srivastava identified the fossil of a meat-eating dinosaur that is thought to be three times older than the T. rex, the only one of its kind that anyone has ever found.
We spoke to Srivastava about his discovery.
A fossil skull provides new clues about how dinosaurs ascended to their full Jurassic power.
“You want to stick your finger in a dinosaur brain?” asked Simba Srivastava.
Surrounded by cabinets full of ancient bones in the paleobiology lab, the Virginia Tech undergraduate student held out a lumpy, pockmarked fossil.
“This is a uniquely sucky specimen,” said Srivastava. “It's so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you'd throw up.”
Nevertheless, the senior geosciences major spent two years unscrambling the ancient creature and determining its place in the story of evolution. His findings, which were published April 15 in Papers in Palaeontology, shed light on how dinosaurs dominated the Jurassic period.
This is the type of work a long-tenured curator or a late-stage professor would do, but geobiologists Sterling Nesbitt and Michelle Stocker tapped Srivastava when he was a first-year student.
“We want undergraduate researchers to experience the whole paleontological research process at Virginia Tech,” said Nesbitt. “Simba grabbed the project by the reins.”
Dino domination
The mangled skull was uncovered twice: In 1982, a crew from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History unearthed it from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. Thirty-some years later, Nesbitt dug it out of a drawer and eventually brought it back to Blacksburg. Using computed tomography scanning data, Srivastava isolated the specimen digitally and 3D printed a reconstruction.
The skull belonged to a species of meat-eating dinosaur that’s more than three times as old as Tyrannosaurus Rex (sic).
These creatures lived at the end of the Triassic period, which is about 252 million to 201 million years ago. Back then, dinosaurs weren’t the all-powerful apex predators portrayed by Hollywood. They were vying for resources against the forerunners of crocodiles and mammals.
But that all changed drastically when an extinction seemingly wiped out most of the competition. With that, the Triassic ended, and dinosaurs came into their power.
“Dinosaurs go from being co-stars to the headliner,” Srivastava said.
Clues about how dinosaurs evolved and spread in the succeeding Jurassic period lie buried in the rocks, but well-preserved fossils from the end of the Triassic are rare.
In fact, Srivastava’s squished specimen is the only one of its kind anyone has found so far.
The skull shows that the species had massive cheekbones, a wide braincase, and probably a short, deep snout. It was the first time these characteristics had been seen in early dinosaurs, indicating that they were constantly evolving, according to the study.
Murder muppet’s last stand
The name Srivastava picked for the new species reflects its bizarre proportions and unfortunate condition.
“We landed on Ptychotherates bucculentus, which means ‘folded hunter with full cheeks’ in Latin,” said Srivastava. “One paleo-artist said that it looked like a murder muppet.”
After two years of deep research, the Virginia Tech team was able to determine that the skull belonged to one of the last surviving members of one of the earliest-evolving families of carnivorous dinosaurs called Herrerasauria.
Thanks to this fossil, the group made another, somewhat surprising discovery.
Ptychotherates was found in rocks that may date to right before the great extinction at the end of the Triassic period — and no other members of their family was ever seen again, possibly suggesting that this dinosaur group went extinct as a result of that mass extinction.
“This forces us to reconsider the impact of the end-Triassic extinction as something that wiped out not just the competitors to dinosaurs, but some long-standing dinosaur lineages themselves,” Srivastava said.
And finally, because no herrerasaurians have been found anywhere else this late in the Triassic, the area that is today the American Southwest may have been where they survived the longest and made their last stand.
Srivastava’s folded hunter is their only spokesperson.
“This specimen, it fits in my hands, but it is the only proof that any of these dinosaurs lived this long, lived in these latitudes, the only proof that they evolved to have this skull shape,” said Srivastava. “All these billions of individuals that existed through time are spoken for by this one specimen.”
I can relate to Simba Srivastava. I'vementionedseveraltimes that I studied the fossil mollusks of the tar pits (Rancho La Brea) in Los Angeles. Those specimens sat in drawers at the George C. Page Museum (La Brea Tar Pits) for nearly a decade before I read about them in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology and saw an opportunity, which I seized. I approached my advisor, who told me there would be a talk about the invertebrate fossils at the tar pits the next week. I attended the talk, spoke to the collections manager afterwards, and got a tour of the working area of the museum. I felt like a kid in a candy store; I'd wanted to be there ever since the museum opened. I then met with the assistant curator and began work within the month. I ended up working there for four years, becoming Student-In-Residence before completing my M.S. thesis and moving to Michigan. While I was there, I realized that there was a century of research waiting with the specimens already in the collection. That's true of every major research museum; there are hundreds, if not thousands, of discoveries waiting to be found sitting in drawers and on shelves. Srivastava and his advisor/co-author Sterling J. Nesbitt made one of them.
By the way, not only did Srivastava and Nesbitt describe and name a new genus and species, they proposed a new clade of dinosaurs, Morphoraptora within Herrerasauria, which is already in the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia has had its issues, but rapid and accurate reporting of scientific discoveries is not one of them.
One of last year's top posts is about science and technology at Virginia Tech, so follow over the jump for a brief retrospective about it.
Fossilized poop might seem gross, but coprolites give us critical information about how animals lived millions of years ago.
Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)
That was a fascinating survey of the information derived from coprolites, once I can recommend to my students, although I'm not going to show it to them. Just the same, welcome to blogging as professional development.
Since the SciShow video overlaps with a Howtown video I featured, follow over the jump for the most read entries containing content from Howtown last year.
You've heard of fake purses, and fake food, and fake concert tickets. But fake fossils? Turns out forging evidence of life in the ancient past isn't as uncommon as you might think. From another work by the infamous forger of the Piltdown Man to the carved footprints that fueled a conspiracy theory, here are seven of the weirdest fossil forgeries of all time.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
I knew about Piltdown Man, which is why I blogged about it twice, now a third time, but I had forgotten about Charles Dawson's other fossil forgery, the toad in the hole, which seems lazy in comparison. I hadn't heard about some of the others, particularly the augmented cheetah. Too bad — Acinonyx kurteni was a good name that is now invalid.
That completes the celebration of today's holiday. Follow over the jump for some of the most read holiday posts during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Happy Wayback Wednesday! Yesterday, I told my readers to "Stay tuned to see if I post the first retrospective of the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News..." I just don't have time to do that today. Instead, I'm looking at another kind of wayback by sharing PBS Eons asking What Killed All These Pterosaurs?
At the Solnhofen formation in Germany, over 500 fossils of 15 pterosaur species have been found. But it might be hiding a dark secret, one that’s been massively distorting our view of who was living and dying there, and why they left so much evidence behind.
I couldn't resist this video, not only because it exemplifies looking way back, but also because it mentioned Rancho La Brea and it promotes a book on topic for the original theme of this blog: The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization: survival & rebuilding strategies revealed. Perfect!
February 12 represents the 214th birthday of Charles Darwin, a scientist whose ideas transformed human understanding of the natural world, and undoubtedly one of the most influential scientists in history. But that history may have been different, as Da[rw]in’s career altering voyage aboard HMS Beagle almost didn’t happen.
First, The History Guy uploaded this video three years ago, so last Thursday was Darwin's 217th birthday. Second, I had no idea Robert Fitzroy, captain of the Beagle, was himself an accomplished scientist. Third, I knew that Fitzroy wanted a gentleman scientist companion, but I didn't know Darwin was essentially his third choice; I certainly didn't know the names of the two men who could have gone in Darwin's place. Still, Darwin turned out to be the best person available. Fourth, the video reminded me that Darwin was the grandson of Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of Wedgwood & Sons; I had heard that before, but couldn't have remembered that off the top of my head. I think I'd heard, but had forgotten, that his uncle Josiah II had finally allowed him to go. While not mentioned in the video, I did know that he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah II. Talk about a close family!
By the way, I recall being a member of the Paleontological Research Institute back in the late 1980s. I've long since let my membership lapse, along with the rest of my professional association memberships. I've been concentrating on teaching instead of research the past 30 years and didn't have the time, and sometimes the money, for meetings and membership dues.
The History Guy has several videos about Valentines Day. Today's is Chocolate: A History.
From The History Guy archive for Valentine's Day, a brief history of the food of the Gods.
That was fascinating, from cacao's prehistory in Mesoamerica to today, including mentions of almost all of today's big names in chocolate, including Cadbury, Lindt, Nestle, Hershey, Reese, and Mars — sorry, no Godiva. I learned a lot from both videos, making today a good day. The second video also made me hungry. Lunchtime!
For decades, rising carbon emissions have accelerated climate change, but this year marked a critical turning point that could finally reverse that trend. Renewable energy has now graduated beyond the need for subsidies and incentives, emerging as a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels in many countries. News Editor Tim Appenzeller and policy expert Li Shuo describe the economic forces behind this shift, and the obstacles that remain to the continued rise of green energy.
...
1:15 The graph has mislabeled trend lines. "Other renewables" generate more energy than hydropower alone.
[C]onvincing people to be less wasteful, particularly creating less food waste and eating less meat, especially beef, would be helpful. [One] could consider that to be a technology. So is renewable energy. Between the two, it would move Earth Overshoot Day back more than a month. Progress!
Yes, it is, and it's good news I can share with my students. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
Science Magazine's video is shorter and more focused than PBS Terra's, so it's one I'm more likely to show to my students. Again, welcome to blogging as professional development.
Custom gene editing shows promise for ultrarare diseases
New weapons against a sexual scourge
Neurons make a deadly donation to cancer cells
An all-seeing eye on the sky
Face to face with a Denisovan
Large language models do science
Triumph of calculation helps resolve particle mystery
Xenotransplants set new records
Rice that beats the heat
Including the "winner," that's four health stories, two computer science stories, one of which is also a physics story, an astronomy story, an evolution story, a genetics story that touches on climate change, and an energy story that also touches on climate change. Six of these are biology in some form, so these selections please me as a biologist. One of them is also paleontology, so I'm doubly pleased as a paleontologist. All of that is on top of the good sustainability news.
Not all of 2025's science stories were good. Follow over the jump for the bad news this year.
It made the front page of the New York Times. Ancient DNA over 2 million years old, retrieved from the frozen dirt of Greenland. It reached back further in time than many scientists used to think was even theoretically possible. And it contained the genetic ghost of an /entire ecosystem/ – one that has no counterpart in today’s world and one that we had /no idea/ even existed. It told of a time when Greenland was green…and how we might borrow genes from that ancient past to help us adapt to the future.
I was glad to be wrong about "Hunt for the Oldest DNA" episode of NOVA, the winner.
This is the only episode of NOVA nominated and I agree it's probably the best one of 2024. It's also the nominee with the most important science. That written, it's not likely to win the most votes, since most of the electorate will judge the nominees for their cinematic and journalistic merit, not their scientific value. As I reiterate nearly every time I write about awards shows, electorates matter.
The News & Doc Emmy voters pleasantly surprised me by voting for the nominee with the most important science. Congratulations to them and NOVA!
The Earth 2.4 million years ago, during the earliest Pleistocene, wasn't as warm as it was 3.6 million years ago, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as today, but it's a good analog just the same. If that's the future we're heading towards, then it might be a good idea to borrow the adaptations those organisms had to prepare today's organisms for the warmer world that's coming. That's a Crazy Eddie concept, but I'm enough of a Crazy Eddie to approve of it.
That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for another evergreen educational entry tomorrow.
Deep in Siberia’s permafrost, scientists have revived “zombie viruses” that have been frozen for tens of thousands of years — and headlines warn they could spark the next pandemic. In this episode of Howtown, we investigate the real science behind these ancient microbes: what’s actually being found in the Arctic, how giant viruses like Pithovirus sibericum survive for millennia, and whether thawing permafrost could ever release a pathogen capable of infecting humans. From mammoth carcasses to anthrax outbreaks to the relatively recent discovery of enormous amoeba-infecting viruses, this video breaks down the five steps any ancient microbe would need to start a pandemic — and why the truth is more fascinating than frightening.
This is the flip side of Vox explains how thawing permafrost is already releasing dangerous diseases. Vox's video said it was possible. Adam Cole and Joss Fong came to the conclusion that, in this case, the answer is no. The giant viruses revived from the permafrost infect amoebas, not animals, so they are not able to infect humans. Also, the viruses that can infect humans and then spread from human to human are not able to survive being frozen. Yes, anthrax and Clostridium can survive as spores for centuries (the Clostridium toxins that killed the rhinos in The Last Rhinos: A New Hope came from buried cattle corpses), but they don't spread from person to person, so no pandemic.
Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest known flying animals, survives in science as sixteen wing bones pulled from Cretaceous Big Bend by grad student Doug Lawson in 1971. Paleontologists reverse-engineer the rest of its body by referencing its Azhdarchid cousins like Zhejiangopterus, and Q. lawsoni, making inferences from extant archosaurs like birds and alligators, examining trackways, and modeling their wings in flight software. Still, there's a lot that they don't know about how these giant pterosaurs lived. Thin bone walls, rare 3-D preservation, and million-to-one erosion odds explain why cousins Hatzegopteryx, Arambourgiania, Cryodrakon, and Thanatosdrakon remain fragmentary in the fossil record. The sparse clues they left behind have inspired a wide range of depictions in documentaries over the years, the pinnacle of which was Prehistoric Planet from the BBC's Natural History team.
"Theropod dinosaur facial reconstruction and the importance of soft tissues in paleobiology." Cullen et al., Science 2023
Science!
That's a wrap for today, but I'm not done with holidays. Stay tuned for a late celebration of National Sports Day with the Emmy Awards for Welcome to Wrexham and Love on the Spectrum tomorrow.
I'm not feeling up to resuming my Emmy Awards coverage today — the first day of classes for the Fall Semester left me tired and with the first papers to grade — so I'm revisiting one of the winners of the 2023 IgNobel Prizes for April Fools Day, a holiday special instead.
Two of the prizes connect to stories I tell my students, geologists, particularly paleontologists, licking rocks and spiders moving their limbs by hydraulic action. Science Friday went into more detail on both in Saluting Science’s Silly Side, Virtually (click to listen).
This year’s awards included prizes for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools, and for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
I'm a paleontologist, so I know what geologists do in the field, including tasting rocks for composition and chewing on them for texture. I tell my students about the chew test for siltstone versus shale, but I also tell them not to do it to their specimens; the rocks are already identified. Besides, they can tell by rubbing them.
Would you lick a 65-million-year old dinosaur poop? Granted, it’s not a question many people ask themselves - but for George Frandsen it’s a firm, “Yes!”. Not merely a dinosaur fossil hunter, George is specifically on the hunt for coprolites, the more scientific term for ancient dino dung. Already the proud owner of the world’s largest collection of dinosaur poo fossils, we join him on his quest to discover more of these rare fossils. Far from being just an amusing curiosity, coprolites can unveil a surprising amount of clues into the lives and diets of dinosaurs. As for the licking part, well that’s maybe best left for George to explain.
Seeing this reminds me that I haven't used the eating bugs label since 2023 and not written a post focusing on the topic since 2019. I may or may not return to the topic, but if I don't, I have a new subject that can gross out my students and readers.
PBS Eons has a related video, but first here's Joss Fong of Howtown licking a fossil bone for science in Tastes like deep time...
[F]or anyone wondering, it was an Oreodont fossil from South Dakota, part of a jaw.
This is the one I might show my students; it's short and not as gross, although it has less information than the PBS Terra video.
While dino bones from the Late Triassic Period are few and far between, the other clues they left behind can reveal how this epic saga played out to those with the stomach to decipher them.
Because, it turns out, the story of the rise of the dinosaurs is a tale written in puke and poop.
No licking, but lots of gross and punny science. I approve.
Beneath the streets of Los Angeles lies one of the most prolific fossil sites in the world. At the La Brea Tar Pits, millions of fossils including giant sloths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and mammoths have surfaced from ancient asphalt, offering a rare glimpse into a vanished world.
In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton joins paleontologist Emily Lindsey to investigate the sudden disappearance of North America’s megafauna around 13,000 years ago. Together, they follow the trail of ancient life through radiocarbon dating, fossil excavations, and lake-bottom sediment cores.
For decades, scientists debated whether climate change or human hunters were to blame. But new evidence points to a more complex and unsettling cause: a dangerous combination of warming temperatures, ecological disruption, and the spread of fires… ignited by us.
This isn’t just a story about extinction. It’s a glimpse of how past crises mirror the present, and a warning about where we could be headed next.
When I was doing my research at the Tar Pits 40 years ago, I became quite familiar with the competing hypotheses of climatechange and human overhunting (Paul Martin's overkill hypothesis) causing the terminal Pleistocene extinctions of New World megafauna. However, I also realized that overkill didn't replicate perfectly around the world. Humans arrived earlier in Australia than in the Americas, but it took thousands of years for the Australian megafauna to go extinct. The same was true in northern Eurasia, which had other humans, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, already living there for hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived. And, of course, where the megafauna had co-evolved with human ancestors in Africa and southern Asia, most of the large animals survived into the present. I resolved these data by synthesizing them; late Pleistocene extinctions happened during the first episodes of major climate change after modern humans were first present. The mechanism I had in mind was that climate change stressed the populations of megafauna, which then couldn't withstand human hunting. That ancient humans could make the effects of climate change worse never occurred to me. As Shane Campbell-Staton said, "That is a plot twist I wasn't expecting."
Just because I wasn't expecting it either doesn't mean I don't accept it. I do. After all, I've been watching the fire season expand in California over the past 15 years. I even ask my students two questions about in the worksheet for Chasing Ice: "1. Chasing Ice opens with a montage of natural disasters. Name three of them." One of them is a wildfire. "How many months has the fire season increased in the American southwest since the 1980s?" The answer is two months, although last year's California fire season extended about four months into January, which I recounted in PBS Terra tells 'The REAL Story of the LA Fires | Full Documentary' for Flashback Friday. As Campbell-Staton said, this is uncomfortably familiar.
[P]rocesses that happened in the past are likely to repeat in the future, so understanding the past is essential for preparation. This is a key takeaway from uniformitarianism, the concept that everything we see in nature is the result of everyday processes occurring over sufficient time, which is boiled down to "the present is the key to the past." It also means that the past is the key to the future.
File all the above under "it's a always a good day when I learn something new."
I also felt a lot of nostalgia seeing where I spent much of four years, but this entry has gone on long enough. Time to wrap it up. Stay tuned for another entry about the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.
Is global warming just part of Earth’s natural cycle? In this episode of Weathered, we break down why that’s not the full story. From ice ages and Milankovitch cycles to the role of CO2 and fossil fuels, today’s climate change is unlike anything in Earth’s deep past. Learn why the speed of warming matters and how we can bring our temperature down.
I have mentioned several times that I'm a paleontologist who studies Pleistocene fossils, particularly snails. What I don't mention is that I used data from the snails, clams, and plants of Rancho La Brea to reconstruct the late Pleistocene climate of southern California, so I'm quite familiar with natural climate change. That's why I was able to respond intelligently to Ed, the troll who was better than a spammer, when he snarked "Maybe you can tell us what the climate is supposed to be so we will know if it's changing too much."
Ed, actually, I can. The average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere should be almost two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is today based on the pre-1900 temperature trend, three degrees based on the progress of previous interglacials. If you want the reasoning and evidence, you will have to wait until I put together an entire entry with links; it will take more effort than a simple comment is worth. In the meantime, count your blessings that you stumbled onto someone who actually knows the answer to what you may have thought was a rhetorical question too hard to answer.
That was back in 2015.
I'm glad to see Maiya May and Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona confirm both what the climate would have been doing naturally and what it's doing instead. It shows what I told Ed was (and still is) correct.
I teach Milankovitch cycles to my geology students, both on the first field trip where I ask them to describe a display at a museum which summarizes the effects as "stretch, wobble, and tilt (eccentricity, precession, and obliquity)" and in a lecture about glaciers and glacial features, where I reinforce my point with The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained from PBS Eons.
Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?
I've been showing this video since just before the pandemic; I'm surprised I haven't embedded it here until now. I guess I just needed the right opportunity.
As Dr. Tierney points out, carbon dioxide is at levels not seen for 3.6 million years so the Earth is on track for much warmer temperatures even if humans stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because of the fossil foolishness in the BigBrutal Bill, the U.S. alone will continue emitting carbon dioxide and methane for years. Worse yet, as Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth described, it will take 400,000 years for natural processes to remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's four more Milankovitch cycles! Maybe that will make our distant descendants less subject to ice ages, but it's going to mess up the near future for us and progeny down to our great-grandchildren.
So you've probably heard by now that a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences has brought dire wolves back form extinction. Or at least.... they SAY they did. We wanted to break down all the science in their claims, and get to the bottom of the dire wolf dilemma before George R. R. Martin adopts all the wolf pups. Here's the truth on de-extinction, de-mystified.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
I'm glad to see Rancho La Brea make an appearance. I spent four years there working on my M.S. thesis in geology, where "I was the first person to identify 33 species from the most famous fossil deposit in North America." I also walked past the wall of dire wolf skulls and a copy of the mural shown in the video on a regular basis. I'm quite familiar with a paleontological perspective on the species. I'm also aware that using a gray wolf as a template has issues; dire wolves are genetically closer to the common ancestor of most jackals than wolves. Finally, Colossal Biosciences' dire wolves don't fit any of the three species concepts for real dire wolves. Darn.
Dire wolves are back-sort of. Colossal Biosciences seems to have resurrected this extinct predator, but it's not quite as simple as that. Joe talks with their scientists to explore the truth, tech, and ethics of "de-extinction."
The scientists from Colossal Biosciences that Joe Hanson interviewed both gave intelligent, well-reasoned answers that make me think and feel that they know what they are doing and understand its place in preserving biodiversity. I just hope people are listening.
What if there is an actual de-extinction hiding just under the surface.
One question that came up in all three videos is "What is a species?" That has to be answered first to say whether Colossal Biosciences actually revived dire wolves and if not, what are they? I didn't expect that debate last month, but here we are. Also, I agree with Hank that the real de-extinction story will be the red wolf.
Did modders at Colossal Biosciences just break the game?
Patrick Lacey finally wrote a description I can use!
Before I leave, other viewers and I responded to Lacey's "Stark white coat" remark. Here are my comments.
"I spent five minutes scrolling through the comments to see if someone else had noticed this. Congratulations, you did, so we can both say, 'We see what you did there.'"
"Yes, he did, so we can say, 'We see what you did there.' These are Game of Thrones dire wolves and George R.R. Martin is one of the authors on Colossal Biosciences paper."
"Until this development, I had never noticed that Game of Thrones has GMO in the correct order — GaMe Of Thrones!"
Enough silliness in the service of science and entertainment. Stay tuned for Flashback Friday.
