NOVA

Why did birds survive?

Why are they the 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.

Seeds can last in the soil for a long time.

Yeah.

And so if you could eat seeds, you would have access to one of the last food sources.

Steve Brusatte, welcome to Particles of Thought.

Hakeem, thanks for having me.

It's great.

We both have our new books out, so it's cool we can be here together.

Absolutely.

This week the books are released.

Yeah, so I'm gonna say this for our listeners.

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 gonna get to your book in this interview, sir.

That's gonna be that could be the whole second topic.

But listen, you are an expert on dinosaurs, so let's get the obvious question out of the way right now.

What's your favorite dinosaur?

T. rex.

T. rex, okay.

Why?

It is.

My second favorite dinosaur though, I must say, is a goldcrest, which is a bird.

It's the tiniest bird we have in Europe.

We'll get to that later, I know, the dinosaur bird connection.

Wait, currently?

Currently, yeah.

Oh.

Yeah, so my favorite is T. rex.

The ultimate predator, you know, the bus-sized, 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 as 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 dinosaurs.

Hey, so let me ask me a Hakeem question because I told this to the staff, 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, the mammal with the most delicious skin, and the fish with the most delicious skin.

Just skin.

Skin.

Okay.

And fried.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, you're not gonna wanna boil skin.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know, you're from Scotland, you're living in Scotland, they might boil skin.

Yeah, I'm from Illinois originally.

We wouldn't boil skin there.

Yeah, but maybe in Scotland.

I'm gonna name what they are.

They are the chicken, the pig, and if you don't know, the golden pompano.

Okay, I didn't know that one.

I would agree with your first two.

Yeah, very few people do.

If you live on the coast of Florida, you may, 'cause you can just catch 'em from the beach.

But what is the dinosaur with the most delicious skin?

Oh, see, now we're getting into the real question.

I don't know.

I think-- Would it be an herbivore?

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 Triceratops.

Triceratops was a-- That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, good, 'cause a pig, we know pigs.

And they were kind of big pig versions of dinosaurs, if we can.

This is the hardcore science.

Now we have it, you're the first in the world.

There we go, Triceratops belly, fried Triceratops belly.

So when you say Tyrannosaurus, most of us think Tyrannosaurus rex, but that's not the only Tyrannosaur, right?

That's right, so T. rex was the last member of a great family of dinosaurs, really a dynasty of dinosaurs that stretched for more than 100 million years.

Wow.

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.

Yeah.

It was like 40 feet long.

I mean, it weighed 7 or 8 tons.

But it came from ancestors that lived way back in 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 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 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's crust that we now identify as North America.

But at the time, was it connected to what we now call the Eastern Hemisphere, Eurasian and African land masses?

Yeah, so as you know, the planet Earth is very old.

And of course, Earth is part of a solar system that's been around for 4.5 billion years and the universe is much older.

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 supercontinent of Pangaea, this giant slab of crust that stretched from North Pole to the South Pole surrounded by a single global ocean.

And that's where dinosaurs got their start.

But then that supercontinent broke apart.

You know, we see that with Africa and South America.

Yeah.

You know, they look like puzzle pieces because they are.

Right.

They did once fit together.

And the amazing thing about dinosaurs is that they started on that supercontinent 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 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-- That's brilliant.

The continents moving, but to changes in temperature and sea level.

And ultimately, when it comes down to it, 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 us to understand.

Absolutely.

And those are even more drastic changes, right?

Absolutely.

And the Earth's been through pretty much everything.

I mean, there have been times of supervolcanoes.

There have been times when asteroids have smashed into the Earth.

There's been times of extreme climate change, ice ages and global warming, 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 that allows us as paleontologists to figure out how the Earth and how life has changed over time.

Well, let's talk about how T. rex changed.

So those early T. rexes, did they have like the short forearms?

No, they didn't.

They 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 four feet on the ground?

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.

Yeah.

When they were hunting.

Their heads were not that big.

Ah.

You know, they had a nice toothy smile.They had steak knife teeth.

Wow.

But they were slender, long-legged, fast-running, arms for grabbing prey.

And then over the course of 100 million years of evolution, 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 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 our arms.

Wow.

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 to brace themselves maybe when they were feeding, or maybe during mating, or maybe if they were grappling for food, or who knows.

Hug their babies?

Hug their little tiny babies, yeah.

They would have laid eggs and had these very cute little babies that would grow into tyrants.

So yeah, maybe the arms, they keep them warm.

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Man, so, um-- if there's, when they start, you have a change from an ancestor.

So does that mean that, you know, like the human family broke off into all these different humans that were there simultaneously?

Right.

So does it become the case you have all these simultaneous Tyrannosaur cousins that are 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 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.

Oh, okay.

You have these different types of big meat eaters in Africa and in South America.

But you have, 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 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 Nanotyrannus that was about the size of maybe like a big SUV compared to the bus-sized 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.

Oh, wow.

And so there was this diversity.

Yeah.

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 up until that moment, you know, the asteroid impact.

I even heard that there was something called Pinocchio rex.

Yeah, that's one that we named.

So that's the nickname.

That's the nickname.

So this is a dinosaur that I studied and I described with my dear friend Junchang Lu.

Sadly, he passed a few years ago-- Oh, I'm sorry.

But 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 spent so much time in China with him as a young scientist.

You know, it's people like that that really were instrumental 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 Junchang basically when I was a student and, 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.

Yeah.

And it was, I mean, the buildings they were putting up, the roads they were laying.

There was 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, he 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.

Wow.

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.

Right.

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.

Junchang was asked 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 Junchang came up with the formal name and he called it Qianzhousaurus sinensis.

That's the formal latinized, you know, scientific name of this Tyrannosaur: Qianzhousaurus sinensis.

Okay, it's fine, you know, it's easy enough to pronounce.

I guess it's like our names, maybe a little bit unusual, people are--hard to pronounce for many people.

So I said, this needs a nickname.

And we said, and I said-- I just remember saying, it looks kind of like if T. rex was Pinocchio and he told a lie, and the nose.

So it stuck and we called it that, and it's fun.

The rumor is T. rex had this brain the size of whatever, right?

But at the same time, this is late in the dinosaur lineage, and typically complexity grows and smarts develop.

So do we have a sense now, 'cause 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?

Yeah, absolutely.

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 dimwitted, they had small brains.

Now dinosaurs were very diverse.

Right.

T. rexes, Stegosauruses with the plates on their backs, Triceratopses 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.

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 fossils are the clues.

You find them near, next to calculus books, is that-- Oh yeah, of course, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, we can see.

A fossilized calculus book in the hands of a Tyrannosaur.

Yeah, that's right.

There you go, and the tiny hands of the Tyrannosaur evolved to hold their calculus book.

What we do see is interesting, I think.

We see that, you know, we can find the fossil heads, and we can CAT scan those, you know, just the way a medical doctor might to see inside of us if something's wrong.

And the X-rays of the CAT scanner can see inside these fossil skulls, and we can use software to build 3-dimensional models of what's inside.

So we can fill in the brain cavity digitally.

Yeah.

Like the brain doesn't preserve as a fossil.

At least I've never seen one.

Right, how could that happen?

You know, brains are so soft and supple, they'll decay away.

It's like fossilizing Jell-O.

Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, the case of the brain, 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 decent-sized optic lobes that controlled eyesight.

And we can see the ears of T. rex as well.

And we can see they had pretty long cochleas.

Yeah, 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, 'cause 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-- So 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 'cause 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.

Brain and brawns together.

Wow, wow.

So we had a 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, oh yeah.

Because Eric, you know, I won't tell his story, he would've told it here.

But his background in New York, in dance, I mean it's incredible.

He's a brilliant guy.

Brilliant guy, loved it.

And he thinks so creatively and artistically.

Yes, yep, I got that.

But he's one of the world experts on brains.

Well, this is what he said to me about it.

He said, for example, I asked him about humans, and we were talking about birdsong, and you know, there's this idea of vocal learning, and you know, that connection between the brain and the muscles and how it redirected itself to the vocal cords and that apparatus.

And 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 rappin'?

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 wanna say never.

I'm not gonna tell you something's impossible the same way you're not gonna tell me something's impossible.

It's an open question.

It's open, 'cause once you say something's impossible, you just shut down the opportunity to learn and to push boundaries.

But it is challenging to understand how sound evolved and how vocalizations evolved, just because-- 'Cause it's all soft tissue.

It's soft tissue mostly.

There's no Cretaceous cassette tape.

Sound doesn't fossilize.

That would've been an 8-track, sir.

Oh yeah, I certainly would've.

Some gramophone or I don't know what.

Yeah, right.

But there's certain things we can tell from fossils.

We can CAT scan skulls, build those digital models.

Well, a question about the skull.

So one of the 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.

Do you get imprints on the inside of the brain case that can illustrate what the surface of the 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.

Hey, that's good.

This is why we're writers, right?

Right.

We do this without even realizing it.

But sometimes, 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 dinosaurs that some had brains that filled their cavity more than others because you see the imprint.

Mm-hmm.

And oftentimes it's like the blood vessels and the nerves and those bits that are impressing on the bone.

So in something like T. rex, with sound, it's tough, but 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 are some duck-billed dinosaurs.

These are the ones that, well, they are what their names say.

Right, yeah.

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.

And there's one called Parasaurolophus or Parasaurolophus, depending on your pronunciation.

Potato, potato.

Exactly, it's like our names.

There's various ways to pronounce them.

And there's a very famous fossil from New Mexico.

My colleague, my good friend, Tom Williamson, 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 the way it sounds.

Funny you mention that instrument.

I'm a tuba player.

Are you?

Okay.

Okay.

I would claim I did my research and knew that, but another coincidence.

Another coincidence, like us blurbing our books, each other's books and talking here.

But they did that and they could tell that these duck-billed dinosaurs could produce these low bellowing sounds that could probably travel long distances.

Right.

So we don't know for sure, nobody was there to hear it, but by CAT scanning the skull and modeling airflow, that indicates that it could.

But in a few cases, in a few very, very, very, very, very rare cases, you get some of the vocal organs preserved as fossils.

All this stuff with Pinocchio and all this weird things you're finding, I just have to ask, what's the most surprising discovery you've encountered?

Oh, there's always, you know, something new.

And that's the thing about paleontology, that we really are detectives looking for clues.

And when we go out and look for fossils, we don't really know what we're gonna find.

I mean, we don't know.

That makes it fun.

It makes it a little bit scary as well, but it does make it exhilarating.

You know, it's kind of like, people have been doing this for over 100 years.

Why are you still finding anything?

Well, 'cause there's so much to be found.

I mean, the history of life is so long.

The Earth's 4.5 billion years old.

And the world is big today.

There's so many places that haven't been explored.

Oh really?

So you think of, there's large swaths of Central Asia, let's say, that during Soviet times, there wasn't a lot of 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 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 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 never knew I'd been teaching at this-- 1580s?

1580s, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, and so it's an awesome university.

I teach on an earth sciences 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 Skye, which is this-- Oh yeah, I've seen that.

Gorgeous isle.

Oh, it is enchanting.

I mean, I've not been there personally.

I've seen it on the map.

I like to just study maps.

Well, go one day.

It is a beautiful landscape.

And so a lot of that landscape, that topography, is carved out of Jurassic Age 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 lived with the dinosaurs.

They're about 170 million years old.

And they lived back when Scotland was subtropical.

Which for those of us that live in Scotland-- So does that mean it was south of the tropics?

It was 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 back then.

Oh, okay.

There were no ice caps at the poles.

Sea level was higher and just everyhing was warmer.

But the Atlantic Ocean then had just started to open.

Pangea, the supercontinent, had just started to split a few tens of millions of years before.

So you had this narrow sliver of an Atlantic Ocean.

Wow.

Scotland was an island in the middle, subtropical, teeming with dinosaurs.

So we bring our students out and one of our students, Amelia Penny, she was out for her first time looking for fossils.

And we were walking, it was low tide.

We have to wait till the tide is low to work along the coastlines.

And in 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.

Oh.

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?

Wow.

What could it be?

It has a beak.

It has teeth.

Whoa, what had that?

Well, Pterodactyls did.

Oh.

And so this turned out to be the head of a Pterodactyl or a Pterosaur.

Pterosaur, yeah.

That's the common name.

These were the flying reptiles 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 Pangaea.

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.

Oh, geez.

It's like E.T., the long, long finger.

Yeah, wow.

And so nobody had found one in Scotland before, just 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 8-foot wingspan, wider than a king-size bed, discovered on the Isle of Skye by a student out collecting for her first time.

Wow.

Did you get the full--?

We have almost all of it.

Some of the bones are missing, 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 Dearc sgiathanach.

And that's a name that if you see it written down, you will not know how to pronounce it, I promise you, because it's from Scottish Gaelic, so the language of the Highlands.

Yeah.

And the islands.

Right.

And so it means winged reptile from Skye.

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 no inkling we would find something like that.

Wow, so if you could pick one moment in the entire lineage of Tyrannosaurs on which to hinge that species' existence as the key moments, what would you 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.

Yeah.

We know there were changes in temperature.

Right.

We know there was some global warming.

Uh-huh.

But we don't know the full picture yet.

Right.

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.

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-- Oh.

The big dinosaurs that were at the top of the food chain before, the Spinosaurs and the Allosaurs and the Carcharodontosaurs 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-- Ah, yeah.

Central Asia.

How it's opening up.

Some colleagues of mine, Sasha Averianov, who's Russian, and Hans Sues 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.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

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 in 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 Tyrannosaurus rex was among that group of unlucky dinosaurs that all bit the dust, literally, 66 million years ago.

So had that not happened, what would have occurred with that lineage?

Were they thriving and set to just continue domination, or was stress starting to kick in for them?

It really looks 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 6-mile-wide asteroid crashed into-- 6 miles.

--what's now wet Mexico.

So imagine that, a 6-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.

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 100 miles wide.

You can still see a lot of that crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, near Cancun.

Most of it's covered by the water of the Gulf.

When you say see, what do you mean?

You can see the outlines.

You can actually, and you can see it more on the map.

Standing on the surface of Earth?

Yeah, but it is so big, you don't really realize what it is.

But when you look at it from a distance, and especially because a lot of it's covered by the water of the Gulf.

You actually need like geological surveying to see the shape of it.

But there are these caves, these sinkholes, these cenotes that trace the rim of the crater in and around Cancun.

Wow.

So a lot of people on spring break, go to Cancun, go to the beaches, they go diving in these caves.

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.

Wow.

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.

Right.

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% 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.

Oh.

I mean, 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 in the Four Corners area of New Mexico.

And there's Tyrannosaurs, and there's long-neck 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.

Wow, yeah.

So probably they would have persisted.

Yeah.

But they didn't.

And what 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 world 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.

But the T. rexes, were they?

Probably, or approaching warm-bloodedness.

Which means they need more food.

They need more food, and they're big, you know.

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.

And some of the, well, the only dinosaurs that made it through were the ones with feathers and big wings.

Wait a minute, okay, that was my next question.

Yeah.

They were literally the only ones?

The only ones, so-- 'Cause 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 dinosaur-like.

Like pterodactyls, right?

Pterosaurs.

Yeah.

So, but we say they're-- but those aren't dinosaurs.

No.

So what would be an analogy to say, okay, you know, are dinosaurs say like dogs or are they more equivalent to say like mammals?

Yeah, they're more like mammal.

A group like dinosaurs was a very diverse, very long-lived group.

And just like mammals today.

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 species and size.

But nothing else looks like mammals, right?

Well, yeah.

Like, other reptiles look like dinosaurs.

True, true, 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.

Right.

That's the feather story.

But when the asteroid hit, you know, 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.

Yeah.

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.

Right, wow.

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 in The Story of Birds, in the new book, I have basically a chapter about this.

Why did birds survive?

Why are they the 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.

Ah.

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 kinda unusual to be able to eat seeds.

It is?

I have teeth, I eat seeds all the time.

I know, so we can do it.

We're super omnivorous, you know.

But birds, a lot of these birds that survived were probably specialists in eating seeds.

Oh.

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 forests would have collapsed, ecosystems would have imploded.

Insects.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Same if you ate fungus, you know.

What if you ate burrowing things like earthworms?

Yes, and that could be part of it too.

So it probably wasn't only seeds, 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 of natural selection of genes shaping individuals over the generations.

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 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-- Yeah.

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.

Right.

The birds we see around us, they stem, they evolved from those plucky ancestors that survived, that stared down the asteroid.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, yes, yes.

How did we come to understand initially that birds were dinosaurs?

'Cause when I was a little kid, birds weren't dinosaurs.

No, no.

Right?

And so how did we crack that case?

And then there's also the case of how we figured out that they were survivors, right?

'Cause once you figure out they're dinosaurs, you have to ask, how the heck did they make it?

Exactly, it changes your whole perspective when you realize birds are dinosaurs.

It means that the past really isn't the past.

The age of dinosaurs did not end-- Yeah.

With the asteroid.

Yes, most of the dinosaurs died, but they have this legacy that carried on.

Yeah.

And in fact, there are over 10,000 species of birds today.

Wow.

And we know, we love everything from hawks to herons to hummingbirds.

There are about 6,000-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.

Wow.

So in that way, the age of dinosaurs lives on, but 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, back home in Northern Illinois, I remember the books we had at school.

These books about dinosaurs, books I'd get from the library, and this bird thing, it wasn't really in there at all.

At all, no.

And these dinosaurs, they were still shown covered in scales like they were overgrown lizards.

Exactly.

They were shown as dimwitted.

These slow-moving, plodding animals, basically these evolutionary failures just waiting, begging to go extinct.

Asteroid, please come down, take us out of our misery.

But we now know that's totally wrong.

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 of Species.

He presented his arguments for evolution by natural selection.

And of course, that book took the Western world by storm.

Based on timing, it sounds like it kicked off the American Civil War.

You know what?

I don't think you can blame Darwin for that.

But-- Is it a coincidence?

1859, 1860-- I don't know, you know.

But Darwin so-- but it is funny to think about 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, yeah.

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 many of the Americans of that time felt about the Earth.

I mean, the Earth was not old, 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, right.

But, 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 that.

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.

Early 1860s.

So this fossil was called Archaeopteryx.

Yeah.

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 Compsognathus 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, 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 the foot of a chicken.

You know, whether you have chickens or whether maybe you eat chicken feet.

Absolutely, yeah.

It looks like a little T. rex foot.

It's covered in scales, it has 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 and feet that just look like bird 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 sci-commer, you know?

Yeah, science communicator.

A 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, Deinonychus.

These things were very bird-like, and so that resurrected the idea-- Even though they were terrestrial.

They were walking.

Yes, they were walking.

They were not flying.

They were bird-like in anatomy.

They were bird-like in anatomy.

With or without feathers?

Well, this, we'll get to this in one second.

Yeah.

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 Deinonychus, this raptor dinosaur, out on the border of Wyoming and Montana, 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-- Always.

And a lot of ornithologists didn't accept it because-- And those are people that study birds.

Yeah, people who study birds.

Ornithologists.

And I understand if you study birds and you're somebody who spent your life watching birds, describing birds, being around birds, and you're around sparrows and hawks and-- I know exactly what they said.

Get the flock outta here.

Yeah, they probably did.

Maybe in even more colorful language.

But you know, it's like, yeah, my precious birds that I love and study so much, that are so smart and they're warm-blooded and they're so capable of songs and so many feats of intelligence, how could they come from a T. rex?

Like, it makes total sense, right?

Yeah.

And so a lot of ornithologists said, all right, to prove it, show us a dinosaur with feathers.

Ah.

Show us a dinosaur with feathers because feathers are so intricate and so unique that again, nothing else has them.

We don't have feathers, fish, frog, you know.

Right.

If you find a feather today, you know a bird has been there.

I mean, it's unmistakable.

Right.

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 I think we're gonna talk about a little bit later, Jurassic Park.

Yeah.

I was 9 years old.

I saw the film.

They had the raptor dinosaurs.

And the raptors are shown as very energetic and intelligent.

Right.

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 will never happen.

Oh.

Could this dinosaur bird link?

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 my new book, about how this came to be.

In 1996, three years after Jurassic Park came out, the world's paleontologists gathered in New York at the American Museum of Natural History.

Special place for me, that's where I did 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 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.

This is crazy dinosaurs 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-sized photos.

Of course, this is the day before smartphones or anything.

Right.

So he printed out these photos of this little dinosaur.

Something you could hold in your arm, something about the size of a house cat.

Clearly a dinosaur, clearly a meat-eating dinosaur.

Wings?

Teeth in his jaws.

Yeah, no wings, no, just kind of regular arms for a dinosaur, 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.

Ah.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Oh.

And occasionally one of them would erupt and basically bury these ecosystems.

Wow.

And capture them in stone.

Kind of like when Vesuvius erupted-- Right.

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 are 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.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

So this was the final nail in the coffin, the final trump card, whatever you want to say, that proved that Huxley was right and that Ostrom was right and today's birds came from the dinosaurs.

So in your book, The Story of Birds, which is an amazing book.

Thank you, thanks for the blurb again.

It was fantastic to have your support early on.

Oh man, it's an amazing book.

So 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 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?

'Cause you know, now, yeah.

Yeah, the future.

Well, like most paleontologists, I'm much more comfortable looking at the past than predicting the future.

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 your cats inside.

Yeah, I've heard about that in Hawaii.

Yeah, and so there's many things that threaten birds.

And just over the last 50 years or so.

In the time really since my parents graduated high school, so, you know, from around 1970, there's been a loss of like billions of birds in the standing population, just here in North America.

What?

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 earlier was how the speed of the asteroid hit is what was really key because we can't adapt.

No.

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.

So it's the rapidity of change.

Yes, exactly.

Because the Earth has gone through climate change before, and people will often-- well, okay, sometimes there's people that wanna have a go at me and other geologists and other 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, "Oh, it's global warming, you know, but the Earth's been warm before.

We shouldn't worry."

Right.

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 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.

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 into 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 in trouble today, certain species, ones that only live on one island.

Right.

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.

So 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 are, you know, so are birds-- so if birds evolved from dinosaurs, like we evolved from fish, right?

We're not fish.

Are birds dinosaurs?

If I'm eating some chicken, am I eating a dinosaur?

Yes, I mean, you could in like a tortured genealogical argument maybe say humans are fish.

And when Neil Shubin, who was one of my undergrad profs, wrote his great book, Your Inner Fish, he plays on that.

But you wouldn't really call humans fish because the fishy ancestors are so distant.

Right.

You know.

Vertebrate, is what-- Yeah, exactly.

But birds really literally are dinosaurs in the same way a bat is a mammal.

Okay.

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 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, developed the ability to fly.

But the difference is, not that we wanna imagine it again, but you know, 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 Brusatte.

I'm still in the family.

Yeah.

Right, right, right.

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, steelworkers.

But even though I've moved away, even though I'm different, even though I lose my hair, whatever, even though I'm different, I'm still in the family.

Still got grandma's recipes.

And that's the way that birds are dinosaurs.

Oh, we, yes, we do.

Yeah.

Man, that is amazing.

Rigatoni.

That is amazing.

And it's all in The Story of Birds.

It's in The Story of Birds.

It was great writing the book.

It's, you know, pop science book.

You mentioned how you were inspired by the movie Jurassic Park.

Yes.

And I imagine that the previous generation of paleontologists that study dinosaurs were probably inspired by the Flintstones.

So let's get into that.

Yeah.

Media inspiration.

Yeah, that's what we're doing here.

We're having a conversation that will be broadcast by the media, and this gives, you know, these conversations do help frame the public perception of dinosaurs.

But definitely the films, the cartoons, those have an outsized influence in how people around the world, not scientists like us, but your average person in any place, what their view of dinosaurs is.

Right.

In a way, man, you know, you're living like every four or five-year-old's dream by being a paleontologist.

No, but my son is six, Anthony.

You're living his dream because space is his thing now.

But at four years old, he was into dinosaurs.

I've been trying.

But I have brought the, you know, he understands the dinosaur bird thing.

So if you ask Anthony his favorite dinosaur, he will tell you right away, penguin.

Oh, that is awesome!

But he would tell you 30 other things about, you know, VY Canis Majoris.

Well, let me tell you, I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old right now.

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 was that like?

Is that like getting a Nobel Prize call?

Oh yeah, 'cause I know what that's like, getting a Nobel Prize.

How do you compare, right?

No.

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 as far as communicating science, these movies reach such a big audience, and they're also just really fun.

And it's really random how I was invited to do it.

There've always been science advisors on the film, and there was a previous paleontology consultant, but he retired.

And so 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, 'cause they're always doing the next one.

And it just so happened, totally coincidental, that when I wrote The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, my first pop science book, that my editor, Peter Hubbard, great editor, 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 book or two, right?

Really, that might sell a couple books.

Yeah.

And you know what, it did.

I think that did help get the word of the book out there.

But later on that summer, a few months later, I got an email from a, said Colin Trevorrow.

I looked at my Gmail account and Colin Trevorrow.

And the subject line says, "I read your book."

Ooh.

Now for Jurassic Park fans, you might remember in the first film, the little kid, Tim.

The little gadfly kid who's way into dinosaurs.

When he first meets Sam Neill's character, the paleontologist, he goes up holding, "I've read your book.

I've read your book."

So that's the subject line of the email.

I'm like, okay, something.

So I look at the email and it's just very brief.

It says, "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 of Edinburgh.

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's a pretty well-known filmmaker, and I'm not like a huge film buff.

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 thought, you know what?

This is-- 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 my publisher, to Peter and his team at what is now Mariner Books, HarperCollins.

And they said, okay, we'll look into this.

And a few hours later, they called and were 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.

Wow.

So we had a brief phone call, Colin and me.

And then he did come to Edinburgh a few weeks later.

And we-- his family was off seeing a show.

I took him to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, which is this club that bottles up casks of whisky, 'cause we're in Scotland.

Right, right.

But it was noon, so we didn't have whisky.

We didn't want, you know, his family was at this kid's show.

But we had really good coffee.

They have great coffee.

We sat for 3 hours drinking this fantastic coffee, in the new town of Edinburgh, and he said right away, he said, "I'm starting to plan the next film.

It's gonna be the one that finishes this trilogy of Jurassic World.

It's gonna 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!"

Yeah.

And he said, "Can you help me do it?

Do you wanna help me?

Do you wanna come onto 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 to be there, you know, by his side bringing that.

So does it start with like dinosaur design or script writing of their behavior, or where do you begin?

And then does it evolve to you're actually on set, or, you know, how does that play out?

I'm really an advisor, I'm a consultant.

I just feel it's my responsibility to make sure the science is represented.

I know that, again, they're not nature documentaries.

I know that they're not gonna design these dinosaurs strictly based on only the exact things we know from fossils.

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.

So they might have-- I worked on one.

Did you?

Which one?

It was a movie where they had a ship.

I don't remember the name of it.

But they had a ship with neutron stars as the power source at the front of the ship.

So I helped them with the design of that.

Yeah.

So that must have been fun, right?

That must have been really fun.

Well, it was cool.

But it was kind of like, I was an assistant professor, so I'm feeling the pressure.

Oh, okay.

I'm like, I gotta get this right.

Let me do all these calculations, and let me-- That's right, you gotta do the math somehow.

Or do they have you writing equations on the board?

I heard some science advisors-- Oh, I've done that for TV.

Yeah, I've done that for TV.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, 'cause then you gotta get those right.

Oh my god, if you mess up.

Well, but here's the thing, for those of us-- because sometimes people push back online because there is scientific accuracy, but there's also the fact that it's interfacing with storytelling and entertainment.

Yes, exactly.

That's it, that's it, that's it.

And how you balance that because you know what they're trying to get at, right?

They're not, these aren't your students in the university.

No.

No, no, no.

Right, right?

You have to balance these different elements.

And so, things get a little loose-ish sometimes.

Not necessarily quite there.

How do you deal with that?

Do you have a tension with 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 100% in line with what we know from the fossils.

Now, if I was consulting, and I do this quite a lot on nature documentaries and dinosaur shows, like Prehistoric Planet and Walking with Dinosaurs.

That's the one I watch, Walking with Dinosaurs.

Oh yeah.

So I work on these shows and that's very different, you know.

These are produced by the BBC in many cases.

I do a lot of NOVA stuff.

I'm often on these NOVA shows, which is probably why I'm here.

Those are different.

You gotta make sure that you're spot on with the actual evidence, the actual fossils.

It's like when I write my books.

I am writing them.

They're nonfiction.

I'm the specialist.

I'm the paleontologist, they need to be accurate.

I'm not gonna tell you that some bird is 30% bigger than it really was just to make the story better.

That's not gonna happen.

Well, there's another thing that happens that I find that I do.

And that is-- 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 gonna say, in the world of physics.

Right?

Sure.

And if you're a scientist, 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 try to make it as clear as possible that this is not observed, known knowledge.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think that's the key.

And for folks like you and me that do a lot of this, I think we just get comfortable with it and we find a way, or we try our best to make that clear.

When I write my books, like in The Story of Birds and The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, I often open the chapters with some sort of vignette.

Some sort of fictional story of some, you know, a T. rex hunting or a terror bird coming out of the forest onto the plains.

You make it cinematic.

Yeah, and I only do it for a few pages.

Right, right.

Because I'm not a very good fiction writer.

I can't carry it.

I mean, the thought of trying to write a novel or something, that scares me.

But also, 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.

Right.

Whether it's a film, or whether it's a book.

In your book, you did a great job with that.

And I try to do the same.

People want stories, and we're trying to reach, you know, not 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 try to channel that.

And the best, you know, the best thing for me of-- it's great when your book's 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 year or so, I mean, a few times a week I get messages from people.

And there was a guy, a long-haul truck driver who was listening to my dinosaur book on audio.

There was a kid who's in his early 20s, who was stationed overseas in the military who was reading the book, you know, to pass the time.

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's the concept most people have of dinosaurs.

Yeah.

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 exploded in the early '90s.

Yeah, 'cause you leave the movie and want to learn more.

Oh yeah, and so many museums put on dinosaur exhibits.

So many museums hired dinosaur paleontologists.

The number of jobs that were created because of that film.

Same at universities.

They wanted to put on dinosaur classes, especially for non-majors-- Right, yeah.

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 that is important.

So this is six films over 30 years.

Seven now with Rebirth that came out recently.

But this is decades.

And in this century, man, science has been evolving so rapidly.

So if you go back from the first Jurassic Park in 1993, right?

Up until today, have the movies gotten better at incorporating the latest knowledge?

And, you know, it's almost like that could potentially ruin characters, right?

It could.

Well, that was the issue with the feathers.

So when Jurassic Park came out in 1993, it became 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, no, not to rip on-- What else has 12, a series of 12 movies?

18 movies.

But yeah, it became-- James Bond.

Bond, yeah, there you go.

Indiana Jones, Star Wars.

But it became such a famous film.

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 velociraptor's 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.

So that persisted for many films, these scaly dinosaurs.

And more recently, we've gotten feathers.

This is what Colin wanted to do.

Do you think they got the information that we have, this new information?

Yeah, they knew it.

Yeah, they knew it.

It's just, look, I mean, that velociraptor, that became a household name.

Absolutely.

Those scenes of them-- Never heard of it before-- No, no.

But once Jurassic Park came out-- Exactly, and the scenes of them pack hunting and opening the doors.

And being smart.

And being smart.

I mean, there's some artistic license there, but those are iconic movie scenes.

So no, Coca-Cola's not just gonna change its logo one day.

Right.

So they were kind of stuck with that, but Colin wanted to bring some feather dinosaurs in.

Dinosaurs in it.

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 Pyroraptor that has feathers, has wings.

It's what a real velociraptor could look like.

And breathe fire?

Could not, so it's really funny.

I think the name sounds so in your face, Pyroraptor.

But it's called that because its fossils, and there's only a few bones, were found in France after a forest fire.

That's why.

Really?

That's the secret behind that name.

I wish it was a dinosaur that we can see from the bones of its throat that it could breathe fire.

Because of the fact that, you know, because you do have these chemical warfare reptiles, right?

You have venom and you have like acids and things.

Yeah, absolutely.

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 that rub together or something.

You know what?

Who knows what evolution will make?

Who knows?

So 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 the portrayals of dinosaurs now are catching up to, 'cause 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 cleared, right?

Yeah, yeah, 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, entertainment depictions, media depictions of dinosaurs that are the closest to the modern understanding?

You're absolutely right that there are older concepts and older stereotypes of dinosaurs that still do persist.

And I see them sometimes, you know, I see them in kids' books and I kind of cringe, ugh.

Oh, there's a raptor that's shown naked and scaly and it's drooping his hands.

We know that's not true, by the way, the hand drooping thing.

The whole hand droop thing.

Nope, they would've held their hands inwards like this.

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.

The films in Jurassic, yeah, you still see some of these scaly 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 an Apple-BBC production, I consulted a bit on that.

But it was, it was, you know, they hired a paleontologist, Darren Naish, a friend of mine in Britain.

Yeah.

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 in 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 nature documentary types, Prehistoric Planet or Walking with Dinosaurs, you know, those have to show dinosaurs doing things.

Yeah.

You know, they can't just show a fossil captured in stone.

They have to be doing things.

They have to be moving.

They have to be eating.

They have to be confronting each other and fighting.

And sometimes they're sleeping or swimming.

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 would've been.

Kind of like when forensic anthropology, where specialists can use the shape of a skull or whatever to look at-- Make the face.

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 the range of the motion of the limbs.

But the other thing is computer modeling.

Ah.

So doing 3D models of these dinosaurs and putting them into animation software.

Oftentimes the same software scientists use, animators use for films.

And just seeing what looks realistic based on modern-day animals.

Right.

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.

One last one.

Things always go wrong in these movies.

So if you were gonna make an island now, park of dinosaurs, and we somehow, you know, unextinct them.

Oh my god.

How do you get it right?

Where would you, would you use Antarctica or Greenland?

Or say, what's that island, Skye or Maine?

Oh yeah, Isle of Skye, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.

Rampaging Scottish dinosaurs.

Yeah, yeah.

But is it possible to get it right or is it just like, don't do it?

I think there's always gonna be a story and I don't know where the franchise will go.

Future films.

It's a very famous, successful franchise.

What I would love to see though-- and if any of the producers, if Frank or Pat or any of the producers, Mr.

Spielberg, are watching, let's get into a future film with 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.

Yeah.

Let's have T. rex and Giganotosaurus and Velociraptor meet these things that took over from them.

I think the Godzilla franchise already did that, right?

You got the big butterfly.

There's some weird stuff in Godzilla.

So Gareth 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, so I'm gonna have to read this because there are names.

I don't ever remember names in movies.

So I'm gonna read some names here.

So, you know, Jurassic Park, you say it inspired you to get into paleontology.

And you know, there are some excellent characters in that movie.

There's Dr.

Grant, played by Sam Neill.

Yes, that's right.

Dr.

Sattler, played by Laura Dern.

And Dr.

Malcolm, by Jeff Goldblum.

Yes, sir.

All right, so Dr.

Grant-- Yeah.

Dr.

Sattler or Dr.

Malcolm, who would you rather have as your thesis advisor?

Oh, Dr.

Sattler as thesis advisor for sure, yeah.

Why, what does she?

Well, she's a paleobotanist in the film, but she is clearly very good with people in the film.

She has her head screwed on straight.

She kinda keeps tabs on Sam Neill's character while still being, 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.

That's what you want.

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 ideal supervisor.

So I did this summer research as an undergraduate before I went to graduate school.

I met so many disgruntled graduate students.

Yeah.

Who, they were like, you know, everybody talks about research, but make sure that your thesis advisor is a human.

That's right.

And for any younger people that are listening that might want to go into science, if you want to do a PhD, talk to students in the lab of the people you might wanna work, see what they're like.

That's right.

So which one would you rather have a coffee with?

Oh, probably Ian Malcolm.

That's Jeff Goldblum's character.

'Cause he's nuts.

I mean, his brain's on a different wavelength.

That's who you want to have coffee with?

I would just sit and just listen to him talk.

Yeah, like I'm doing with you right now.

Yeah.

Okay, so who remind-- we bought, so when I look at, I look at a show like The Big Bang Theory, right?

The sitcom?

I'm like, I know every one of those guys in real life.

And they're all from Caltech, coincidentally.

Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.

So who reminds you of your old colleagues?

Of those characters?

Yes, yeah.

Well, that would be Dr.

Grant.

That would be Sam Neill's character.

That was really nailed, that character.

Really well done.

It was based, when Michael Crichton wrote the book, he did model the character on a few different real paleontologists.

Oh really?

Okay.

So Dr.

Grant's persona that Sam Neill plays, I mean, it really captures a scientist who's a great expert in his field, but also a little bit awkward, but has great ambition, great motivation.

In the new films, it's Jonathan Bailey, who is the paleontologist.

He plays it really well.

I showed up on set and met him, and we just so happened to be dressed almost identically.

Wow.

The way the costume people put him into costume with his flannel shirt and stuff.

They based him on you.

I wish.

He was just named People's Sexiest Man Alive.

So yeah, you're right, they based him on me.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

What?

I don't know how they-- What?

I don't know how they-- like somebody needs to tell, like literally, you know, I should be winning that award the way, you know, Jordan won NBA Finals, man.

And I'm like, how did they miss me?

Sexiest scientist.

Like I literally have been the sexiest scientist since like '92.

I don't know.

You know, the podcast here has done one season, right?

So when it goes on, when you write more books.

That's right.

Next year.

Last question, because this is affecting everything.

How is AI gonna change your field?

Good question.

I don't know how-- AI might change everything.

It might doom us.

I don't know.

It's gonna change publishing, that's for sure.

I hope I can write more books.

Right, yeah.

But in the field, we recently published, just a few months ago, we published this paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on using AI.

Very prestigious.

Yep.

And it was super cool.

We were so happy to get it published there.

Using AI to help classify dinosaur footprints.

This is something that came-- it's a physicist, Gregor Hartmann is his name.

He's now a good friend of mine.

We just texted about the basketball playoffs.

Not to date the topic.

Oh, I'm a big fan too, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I grew up in Chicago, the 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 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 Dinosaur with his son who was really into dinosaurs.

So he reached out to me and said, "Oh, I read your book.

I enjoyed your book.

Is there anything that AI can do?"

And I said, "Well, we have these footprints on the Isle of Skye that we find, dinosaur footprints, but we don't know if they were made by the meat eaters or the plant eaters."

Wait a minute.

Was there a news article about this?

Because I think I saw that.

There were.

Yeah, there were some news articles.

Yeah, I saw that.

'Cause Gregor made an app.

Right.

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 with some confidence intervals.

So that's, I think, a good use of AI.

This is this unbiased, basically untrained machine learning algorithm.

And it tells us that some of these footprints we found on the Isle of Skye 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.

And 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, that can find them using likelihood algorithms and stuff, can find them faster.

So it's very exciting.

I wish I had that app in 2009.

I was in Western Colorado with the Discovery founder, John Hendricks, may he rest in peace.

And he goes, you wanna see the dinosaur footprints?

And I'm like, yeah.

We go to look at this plain rock and he pours water and suddenly there it is.

There you go.

It's magical.

And I'm like, what is that?

Yeah, that's magical.

It is, 'cause literally that dinosaur was there.

In that case, probably 150 million years ago.

It was walking where you're walking.

When I take my students to Skye, that's the magic.

And when it comes down to it, that's the magic of fossils.

These are ambassadors from a time long ago.

A time far away.

Well Steve, this has been a magical interview.

This is fun.

Thank you sir for coming into Particles of Thought.

Thank you so much.

Yes, my pleasure.

Thanks for all you do as a science communicator.

Thank you as well.

Thank you.