You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Wetherell.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we're two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
Would you vote for your state fossil to be the giant Beaver?
Well, if you live in Minnesota, you might have the chance to do
just that. Be feminist.
Vote giant Beaver. We'll also dip South and visit a
controversial yet deeply dumb argument that ultimately is just
body shaming a long dead capybara.
Like always, our episodes are not for kids unless you want
them to know a lot of slang for vaginas.
Please check the content warnings and assume that we will
always make the most obvious dirty joke.
You're welcome. Oh, Rodents of Unusual size is
what we're talking about today. I have a fun anecdote for us to
talk about. So this fall, the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology meeting was in Minneapolis, MN.
Oh yeah. The thing is, if you hadn't told
me that Minneapolis was in Minnesota, I would not have
known which. I mean, I only, I only like
forgive that because of confusing things like Kansas
City, KS and Kansas City, MO. So otherwise it's Minneapolis,
yeah. That is fair.
That's really dumb. Like it gives it away in the
name. I don't.
OK, all right, whatever. We're moving.
On whatever, whatever. So the meeting was there.
Cool. I almost said Wisconsin stuff
JK. And I was talking to this
student I used to work with who is from Minnesota, and he was
telling me about the process of the state trying to adopt A
state fossil and how everyone, OK, they had a vote in 2021 and
the giant Beaver won the vote by a landslide.
No one surprised. No one surprised, but that it's
like taking a while for it to actually go into effect because
there's some controversy around it being the state fossil
because it's a giant Beaver and it's a joke and some people are
not into it. And also because the official
name is Castroides, Ohio Ensis, and they're like, well, what the
fuck? It's not a we're Minnesota.
I don't want some Ohio motherfucker up in here.
Well, I feel like First off, you're reclaiming Ohio bullshit.
You know, like you're, you're taking it from them and that's
gotta mean something. And also it's feminist to have a
giant Beaver as your state foster.
Yeah, yeah. You love Beaver.
That is so great in this day and age.
Like we support Beavers. The giant, the better.
Big brown Beaver. Yes.
Big brown floppy Beaver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that. And apparently, apparently back
in like 1988, they also pushed to make Castroides the state
fossil, and it never made it through the legislation for
these like exact reasons. But now, like literally in the
last two months, they have been at the different blah, blah,
blah state government things. And they're all these pictures
of this guy from the Science Museum in Minnesota, where the
opening night was for. SVP is it Alex Hastings?
Yeah, yeah, OK. I've seen his some of his Tik
toks talking about the giant Beaver that's.
Awesome. Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of pictures
of him holding a giant Beaver. Many giant Beavers.
So many giant Beavers. Like he's the giant Beaver guy.
He is the. He's the Beaver collector.
Yeah, I'm sure he. Oh, God, like, right.
And so, yeah, I found a few Reddit threads because I was
trying desperately to find, like, a record of someone being
like, this is it Like we don't want to be called slang for
woman's vagina? So I couldn't.
But I did find some Reddit posts that were all just like, yeah,
of course I voted for the giant Beaver.
Why would I vote for? Anything else?
Yeah. But do you want to hear the
other contenders? The other contenders were the
one that came in second was Bison Antiquis, and then we also
had like some bellumite, A stromatolite.
That's what I would have voted for.
Some shark teeth, trilobite, Saber toothed cat, croc,
relative thing, Colombian mammoth.
That's basic, guys. A lot of states already have
that one. Yeah.
And so those were the contenders.
And the giant Beaver, Castroides, Ohio Ensis 1.
And it is still like up in the air if it's going to actually be
officially added to the list of state things because every state
has like a state bird and a state flower and a state Beaver.
Listen, listen. You just have to think of it as
it's only going to come up when people are talking about your
state, which means that it is tourism potential.
Think of all of the dumb jokey tourist things you could do with
Giant Beaver as a T-shirt. You got to get that marketing
money, Minnesota. I I went to Wisconsin, the wrong
state. Nope.
I'm sorry I gave you so much shit.
I went to Minnesota and all I got was this giant Beaver.
Right. Like, there's just so many.
Yeah, no. And a lot of pop culture jokes,
you know, like, nice Beaver. Anyway, so it is still up in the
air. But man, Alex is definitely
doing fighting the good fight for giant hairy Beavers
everywhere. I mean, they were really hairy.
OK, so let's talk a little bit about the giant Beaver, which is
found across North America, including in our state of
Oregon. That's where I first learned
about it. Yeah.
And then there's like one species that's pretty much
across the entire North America. And then there's a species
that's only in the southern part.
So the most recent paper I found on it said that the mass
estimates are about 60 to 100 kilograms, which I actually I
actually like the I. Google.
OK actually in pounds that's 132 to 220 lbs.
So we are talking as all of the different propaganda for vote
for my giant Beaver is always like a bear sized Beaver and I'm
like. That's hot.
That's a skinny bear. That is a thin, underweight
bear. I saw a black bear in Texas and
that was the smallest bear I've ever seen, so I think that.
Yeah, it's as big as a bear from Texas.
I would also like to point out to the Science Museum of soda on
your Castroides Ohio and says giant Beaver page that you
spelled Castroides incorrectly. Just FYI, it's like a title.
It's in big font, it's bold and you added in caster I so it's
caster Rio iodies anyway FYI. Okay, so it was a big old
Beaver. I had actually a bit of a hard
time finding anything that was, I really wanted them to be like
embracing the joke. But they are serious scientists
and they didn't. So they wrote their papers like
normal boring papers. So the one that I liked the best
opened with the giant Beaver. The largest rodent of the North
American Pleistocene is surrounded by controversy.
OK. Why are we all so fucking
dramatic? My God.
I know, surrounded by controversy.
Controversy. No guys, it's a dead fucking
Beaver. It's been dead for 10,000 years.
Katy Perry going to space. And I was like, what
controversy? It's a, it's just a like super
sized Beaver. Apparently it's not just a super
sized Beaver. So the whole thing is about it's
not the exciting, it's not like should this be our state fossil?
It's about if they should, if they actually were just like
modern Beavers and do the same things that modern Beavers did
or if they were different types of Beavers and were and lived a
different Beaver life. Like that's the controversy.
That was it. It also.
Enjoyed that this one had lots of good nicknames for the giant
Beaver, including swamp rats and large clumsy water hog.
So thank you for that. I was like, yeah.
Why don't you use that as your state fossil name?
You're not the giant Beavers, you're large, clumsy water hog.
I just enjoy how many different animals get like wrapped into
the the comparison. Yeah, I wanted even more.
I big hairy bear. I don't know, Barry.
No. Bill Platypus?
Yeah. Yes, but that's that's for the
controversy. Megan, thank you.
Beautiful transition because the platypus has like Paddley tail.
Right. Yeah.
So they, it's not known, it's not thought that this Beaver had
a flat paddle tail like that. It had more of like a Nutria rat
tail kind of thing going. On back.
There because the conclusion that I read from a bunch of
different papers, the the most recent of which was all about
stable isotopes from both the bones of the fossils as well as
like comparing it to plants. And that it is that they weren't
like normal Beaver, today's Beavers.
They were so different and instead these ones were a lot
more aquatic and we're not as terrestrial at all.
And again, I love this. It reminded me of the ankylosaur
paper because it was like the short limbs and bulky body of
Castroidis made it poorly adapted to a life spent
predominantly on land. And it must have relied on
access to the water for shelter from from terrestrial predators.
And I'm like, again, we are just like looking, we got these
animals that body shaving that we're like look at their dumb,
dumb bodies. They couldn't have done that.
How did they migrate? You know, how did they get from
.8? I guess if they're in the waters
like water slide. Rivers, they can only go One
Direction, actually just downriver.
Right, so. That's why they went extinct.
They got to the ocean and they died.
That's not. How watershed works.
Yeah, it is. It's super funny.
So in terms of the like what you would look at.
So it didn't necessarily have a flat tail and it had hind limbs
that were much shorter than in modern Beavers.
And the tail was also longer. So again, that's why they call
it these like again, like clumsy.
I love this. Animals being called clumsy
water hogs. Clumsy water hog with its dumb,
bulky body that was so worthless on land.
So they also point out that the teeth are a little bit larger as
well. And they have those striations
in them like they're, they've got the.
I don't know what the actual anatomy term for that is.
Whereas modern Beavers are nice and smooth enamel.
Yeah. So they did determine that by
looking at isotopes and some of these bones that the giant
Beaver could handle cold tolerant stuff because it was
found in the Yukon in Alaska. We did it isotopes to tell us
that. Yeah, right.
I know. It's like the it's like the
darkling beetle, the DNA darkling beetle.
Yeah. So they did think that it is
more of like a wetlands, predominantly marsh and shallow
lakes environment and that it did not construct its habitat by
constructing dams and it did not chew down trees like modern
Beavers do. And they think that it went
extinct because this wetlands, swamp, lake situation like was
less and less with climate change.
And I wrote, so it's a sex legs situation.
Yeah, it sounds like sex legs, but for walking.
Yeah. And so that's, I mean, those are
those are kind of the highlights of it, I guess.
I mean, yeah, they died about 10,000 years ago.
There is some evidence that they interacted with early humans,
legend and folklore, which is really cool kind of paleo
heritage situation. But yeah, I also just left with
some questions, like, OK, if so, they have these giant incisors
like a Beaver does. If they're not chewing on logs
and they're just eating water plants like a nutria freak, what
a nutria do to keep their incisors short?
Aren't they ever growing? So how would this motherfucker
not like just how would they deal with their ever growing
incisors if they're not, you know, getting that wood?
Nothing a shy Beaver like. I wonder if so like all rodents
have ever growing teeth, right? Like that's kind of like their
their jam. But I mean, that doesn't mean
that they all grow at the same rate, right?
Like maybe they just had slow ever growing teeth.
Well but it makes me think about the semi aquatic or fully
aquatic ones today. Like nutria like water and their
teeth are gross. Theirs are like the like they're
like red incisors. Yeah, they're.
Icky. So I just, I'm I was like, OK,
cool. I like the data.
I like the end to the controversy.
Wow. I was really worried.
I was like losing sleep. I was so concerned with this.
Yes, yes, yeah. But those are yeah.
Those are my fun facts about the hopefully soon to be state
fossil of Minnesota. You should embrace it and
embrace your giant. Beef.
Yeah, just I I love the giant Beaver.
I'm so sad that I have not yet found a giant Beaver or actually
found a sloth on my own at any of these places.
Seen sites that I keep getting roped into.
So I don't think any giant Beavers have been found in
Washington state yet. So fingers crossed one day.
When will weather out? On the list, but they yeah they
should be there hypothetically. I mean maybe your sex lakes went
around like went out earlier, but that's The thing is like
they were in Oregon and Oregon is still pretty swampy and
marshy and wet moist. So I am kind of like, but there
is some, you know, again, it could have been hunting as well
related because all of the mythologies are like and then we
haunted it and. Slaughtered it.
So OK, not all of them, but that was the general vibe is kill it.
So maybe we just killed them all.
I mean, I don't know what regular Beaver tastes like, but
like, we do hunt them for their fur or we have for their fur.
So yeah. Do we have any like mummified
castoroides or do we just have bones?
No, we just have. But I mean enough.
I guess we wouldn't argue about the tail if we had mummified
Castoroides, right? Yeah, and that one of the cool
things about the specimen from Minnesota, that was also funny
because it was like in a little cave, like underneath, like an
undercut, and then it collapsed on it.
So I also why I'm just like, yeah, it's like it's a.
Dark cave for your Beaver. But one of the things that
spelunking for giant. Beaver.
Yes. Gave face lesbianism.
I have been listening to a lot of Chapel lately.
So embrace your giant Beaver. That's what I'm saying.
Big Beaver clam I'm. Going to keep dig into the.
We played that SVP and I was like, what is this?
Element. So I'm old.
It took me a while to get there. Oh, anyway, it was in this kind
of karst environment, so a lot of limestone.
So it was about like 12,000 years old.
So it had kind of this like calcified rind on it.
Like it was partially stalagmited and stalagtite
mited. Yeah.
And that's how it was able to preserve so well.
And they were super excited in this peeper peeper and this
paper because the other specimens of Castroides up until
this point, which is in like the 60s were mostly just like the
axial skeletons. So like backbone and skull and
whatnot and maybe some isolated incisors.
And this one, the whole paper is like it has feet, feet
especially in consideration to the feet.
And I'm like, oh, this got this giant Beaver is on only fans
with some big ass feet. Like it was just so funny.
It was like the whole thing. I think if I had searched feet
it was like 20 times and like. Wow.
Look at its feet. So it was cool because it
preserved not the axial skeleton.
So like just the just the arms and feet in the skull.
And I'm like, that's weird. How do you do that?
So interesting preservation, cool place to seen things.
I should have said that yes, in addition to being about £200,
they could have been about 7 feet long.
And the whole time I was thinking about the classes that
we took together about reconstructing body size and
what we've discussed. And I think that's what.
Oh my God, yeah, one more content and you don't want to
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Weird and dead. Head on over to
geopedalfabric.com now. Yeah, Let me tell you a little
bit about Joseph Artagasia, which I do feel like maybe you
gave me that one in part because it was the harder one to say and
you didn't want to learn how to pronounce it, and I just
refused. So I it might not be that, and I
don't care. You're on to me.
Yeah. So Joseph Artagasia is the
biggest rodent of all time, the largest extinct rodent.
When they say that they are talking specifically about
Joseph Artagasia Monesi because there are two species.
Except First off, first controversy.
Fucking are there fucking are there?
Cuz that's always my thing, right?
Any species I don't know. OK so so these two I say species
2 specimens. 2 specimens. Oh Oh well, now I see why you
are so. Angry.
So in the 1960s they find a loose jaw of Joseph Joseph
Ardigasi. I think they had called it
fucking major. Which is hilarious because it's
the smaller 1. Is that what it's called?
Whatever, I don't care, it's not Joseph Joseph Ardigasi.
I'm Anesi. So in the 60s they find this in
Uruguay on the the beach rolled out just a loose jaw of a big
capybara like animal. And I can't read Spanish and was
too lazy to translate it so. But I did notice that in the
headline that they really emphasized the fact that it is
big, which is the only thing anyone cares about with Joseph
Sobartigasias that it's fucking big.
So they find this jaw. The other thing that I I saw
that is translated from Wikipedia, so like there's a
little bit of a game of telephone in addition to a
language barrier there, so take this with a grain of salt, is
that apparently it's a partial jaw and it's missing the M3, the
third molar, and it looks like it actually rotted out of the
jaw. So like so it wasn't.
All their molars look exactly the same.
OK, that's probably wrong. But all rodent to me pretty much
exactly the. Same to me.
I am just like, look at those squiggles, OK?
Yeah, squiggly, squiggly, long, ever growing things.
You have this old jaw. They decided that it came from
the San Jose, I think it's San Jose formation, because that's
nearby, but it was just a loose jaw sitting on the beach.
Then cut to 2000 and 8:00-ish. That's when they published it at
least. OK, that tracks.
Find a skull in a boulder on the same beach.
So it's in a boulder, so it's not part of the formation, but
at least there's enough rock there that they can definitely
say it's the San Jose formation. Compare it.
And these just in the species description, they just say it's
a different species because it's so much bigger and I ran out of
time, but I don't know how much bigger it is.
And I don't know that I maybe it just had a small jaw, guys.
Maybe it just had a big fathead and a small jaw.
It just had a little hillbilly jaw.
Yeah. Anyway, yeah.
Yeah. Sorry.
So yeah, JD Vance. Yeah.
So we've got like a skull and a jaw of apparently 2 vastly
different sizes that are found in the same beach.
OK. From the same formation.
So that's all of the specimens I think that we currently have of
this big, big rodent. So, OK, great.
Awesome. Yeah.
So really setting us up for a great amount of success.
What we do know and what everyone agrees with is that
these are a they're not in the same family as capybara's, but
they're kind of capybara esque. They're cavea morph so they all
kind of look capybara shaped. They which is right, just a.
Yeah, it's just a big It's gonna.
Look like it's that. It's just a big rodent with like
kind of unsettlingly small feet for the size of its head.
That's what I think of when I think of capybaras is those feet
should be bigger. Yeah, why is it all about the
feet? These fucking weirdos.
Fucking Cap Amor. Well, yeah.
Yeah, but it's not, it's not in the same family.
It's the only living member of that family is called a Pakirana
and Pakiranas. They let me find the Wikipedia
quote for them. It was so sad.
Was it large, clumsy water hog? It's even kind of kind of worse,
honestly. Here is the description of
Pakuranas from Wikipedia, noted resource Wikipedia.
It has, you know, like an overview of Pakurana's, which is
basically like, they look kind of like capybaras, but they have
stripes and maybe they're in trees.
And here is what it said in Characteristics.
I'm gonna read you the full characteristics.
Are you ready? But honestly, the first sentence
really just sells it. Pakurana have 4 legs and large
heads. Oh my God, they are considered a
scansorial species. When they eat, they grasp their
food with their fore paws while sitting on their hind legs.
Full stop. That's all that apparently we
know about. Them I mean, honestly, that is
like not that far off from how I describe an oreodont, so I kind
of love that. I know I was looking for.
Limbs and large. Hands.
Sitting on the little. Like a little rodent eating
grass. Yeah, that's great, that is.
Like I love that they clarified 4 limbs, not 2, not 644 limbs.
Amy, I had a. Conversation yesterday with
someone who was like, yeah, it's not like I got 4DS.
And I was like, well, you kind of do.
It's not like you would call a cat's forearms, arms.
You would just call all those DS.
You do have 4DS. He was like, and I was like,
please just fix my iPhone screen.
I'm going to go shopping. Yeah, it was great.
So. So that's pacaranas and the
other thing that I found out about pacaranas is I learned a
new word which was now I have to find the new word on my thing
here. When I was reading the original
description, they mentioned that the largest living rodent is a
capybara at 60 kilograms and the next is the Sylvadic pacarana at
15 kilograms. I had to look up Sylvotic
because I'd never heard that word before.
And I will tell you that what comes up on Google is not what
they meant, because what comes up on Google is plague bearing,
which just seems like a really mean thing to say about this
animal that we only know it. Has. 4 limbs and this.
Barrel with legs is infested with the plague, but like, no.
But maybe it really does meet that because the Prairie dogs
carry the plague. I look at them like every day at
work and I'm just like you disgusting creatures.
Yeah, it's also that means living on the edge of the
forest, which I think is the version that they were going.
With I prefer plague. Nope, plague.
Plague. OK, so they are able to
determine. So with the fossil, is it all
just morphology or is there like is it all just morphological
that's making it that type of rodent?
Yes. So it's all just morphological
that's making it that type of rodent.
The formation they think now is Pleistocene.
It used to be considered Pliocene, but now they're
they're they think it might be Pleistocene.
So they I guess in theory maybe could DNA test it, but no.
One wants to break them back. No one cares.
Well, nobody wants to bring them back, Amy.
And I can tell you there's really one thing that they care
about with this rodent, and that's not something you get
from DNA. And then they slightly care
about two other things. So yeah, the big question about
Joseph Arteagasia, how fucking big was it?
And do you want to guess how? So this paper was published in
2008. How many papers have been
published re describing how big it is?
I mean, I'm pretty sure one is Hopkins.
One is Hopkins. I think I know at least two, but
probably like 5. I'm going to go with like 5.
So I found six papers that deal with talking about its size, if
you include the original paper, which I do because that's the
only thing they care about. They barely talk about anything
else with it. So Joseph Rd.
Gassi, I'm on SI, it's definitely the biggest rodent,
but how big is it? Because as we see with the
Pakurana or Pakarana, the issue is that head is really fucking
big. Disproportionate.
Yeah. It's a large, clumsy water hog.
Come on. We don't know.
It's. It was weird looking.
We don't even have feet. And we only have the head and a
jaw of a different species. We don't even have feet.
We have no real idea if it follows the big head trend when
you are reconstructing body size as you know.
Yeah, like on this exact paper in stats class in college.
Yeah, exactly. It's important to note that they
don't mean how long was it. They don't mean how tall was it,
how wide was it. They mean body mass.
How much did it? How fat was this.
God damn. Rodent, the body shaving.
Why do we have to care? Why does it matter so much?
Can't we just accept and rule them for who they are?
I just why for real? Why must we categorize
everybody? That seems to be the only thing
that we really truly give a shit about is arguing with one
another about how big it is. Because if you use their teeth,
you get like if you use the square like amount of chewing
area that normally correlates OK with body size.
But it turns out that it correlates differently in
rodents than it does in other animals.
And it probably correlates different in capybaras and
pacaranas than it does in other animals.
So like all of a sudden you get if.
The only modern 1 is only 15 kilograms, right?
Then it must. It's a terrible analogy to then
just inflate that right? I mean like that's shitty when
you don't have something to in between to be able to bracket
it. And the skull is not perfectly
complete. So if people are using the
length of the skull, sometimes you I guess have to interpret a
little bit as to whether the nose bones went further than I
think that they actually are on the skull.
So there's a little bit of estimation that's involved.
And then some other people to interpret the size have used the
occipital condyles, which is where your head connects to
your, your neck. And like some, I think cabbie
borrows. But like definitely some other
Caviomorpha rodents, they have really large peroxipital
processes. So they have like these big
phalanges that go out past the occipital condyles, but kind of
also merge with it a little bit like they're.
Meaty tuck. OK.
Right. So if the idea is that your
occipital condyle, because it's holding your head to your body
should have a good idea. It should be useful for
predicting how big your body is. A whole paper was out arguing,
well, we should actually include the pair occipital condyles
because these are so big. Like these processes are so big
so. Just like yeah and then
categorize. This I did read very briefly,
read a different paper that wasn't actually about Joseph
artigasia, but it was on weird para occipital condyle stuff
that said that maybe it actually had the best title I've seen in
a long time. And this is the only other
thing, of course, that we really know about pacaranas, but it's
about an extinct one, which I think is very funny.
Why pacaranas never say no? Nose of the unique occipital
cervical configuration. So they.
Couldn't of their way. Of saying it couldn't.
They can't say. I got that wrong so they can't,
but that's I don't. I don't like that title at all.
I still thought it was funny, but yeah.
OK. So yeah, they've got, they've
got maybe they can't shake their heads.
So do you actually use the occipital condyles?
Similar. So you use the skull?
And how we were still fucking talking about this?
The last paper about this was in 2024.
Why do we care so much? The mass estimates that have
rolled out from these different things have ranged from on the
low end, 269 kilograms, whoa, to on the high end, more than 2000
kilograms. Whoa.
What? Yeah.
I mean, like, I know that's a lot.
Are you really not gonna help me?
OK, 2000. I had.
I didn't translate all of them, but.
The 4400 lbs. We're what?
What? Yes.
Yeah. So we're going from, yeah, like
400 lbs to 4000. Pounds.
That's the range. Logarithmic difference.
Oh my God. I guess it's not technically the
most recent one, but the one that I actually like read in the
greatest depth and then also like translated everything to.
They had a range just with their with the paracondyles was 254 to
576 kilograms which is 560 to a 1270 pounds.
Wow. And I will say female cows can
weigh 1 to 2500 lbs. So this is like a small female
cow but not like one of my cows because miniature cows typically
weigh between like 300 and 500. So this would be bigger than my
mini cows. And bigger than my Beaver.
Wow. Way bigger than your giant
Beaver. Yeah, even those, those are the
small estimates, right? Like.
Right, OK, so even on the small. We've scaled it down and it's
still really big, so not a bare sized Beaver but maybe a bare
sized Gabby Barra thing. Wow.
And what did it? What did it do with its four
lips? I mean, is it just like a
grazing thing? Is it I'm?
So glad you brought it up. Like what a capybara do are they
like? What kind of ecosystem do they
live in? I have no idea.
Capybara are grazers pretty much exclusively.
I guess they really really dig the grass for some reason, but
they are also semi aquatic so just like all of these big
things, nothing big likes to not float.
So Kathy Bars spent a lot of time in the water so.
Large and clumsy. I think they eat quite a lot of
water plants as well. And I didn't see any real papers
doing analysis on how Joseph Artigasia lived.
So it sounds like they think that the San Jose formation was
maybe an estuary and that this animal was maybe kind of live in
semi aquatically and eating grass.
But that does bring me to my next point, which is once we,
once a person has stopped giving a shit about how big this animal
is, which apparently for some of us is never, you will never care
about them. Size Queen.
The next most common there's there's two types of paper and
they're the only other types of paper I've ever seen on Joseph
Artigaccia. So we don't know really what it
eats. We don't really know.
Like, who cares? And you think about it.
Yeah, none of that matters. Just eat something that are two.
Are two questions are how big is your brain and what those teeth
do, man, how bad? How bad is that bite?
You got some big teefees. Those are some big biteys.
So we've got 2 papers for each of them because this is gonna be
the new the new wave of Joseph Rd.
Gasias. Instead of arguing at how big it
is, let's argue about how hard it can fucking bite.
Of course. And I can already tell you that
the estimates are fucking insane.
But it is, I mean, honestly, with some of these estimates,
like, you know, I, it's made me really stop trusting finite
element analysis papers because I looked at them and was like,
oh, you didn't translate any of your uncertainty.
There's no error propagation in here, right?
And you already have huge ranges in your estimates.
And it looks like, and I, I admittedly kind of my eyes
blurred and I stopped caring. But yeah, it, it looks like
maybe a lot of these bite force papers are really just putting
these skulls under strain to see what the maximum bite is.
And just because you can like pull out Superman level strength
when your child is under a car or you need to bite a tree or
something, doesn't necessarily mean that that's some.
Weird scientists are plagued with your skull when you're
dead, yeah. That doesn't necessarily mean
that's how often or how hard you bit on the rag.
Right, OK. It looks like they just do
stress tests and they're like when does the skull shatter?
Why does it matter? If the skull hasn't shattered
then it's still but their skull didn't fucking.
Shatter because they existed for a while?
Fine. They didn't all just shatter
their skulls all the fucking time.
I I just don't. I'm like, hey, how did these
things live? I don't know.
They obviously didn't live. Well, they they obviously lived
like we know they lived. Yeah.
Why are we? They bit each other.
That's. Yeah.
Well, we don't even know what they were doing with their
teeth, but because. Why we'd be.
Yeah. These are.
I think the word is hystericomorph.
They're a group of rodents that includes caviar morph.
They're all rodents. Where they evolutionarily at
some point needed more musculature to chew and said
fuck it, let's take a shortcut. And instead of doing what pretty
much all other animals do where we run our muscles over the
bone, they saw the infra orbital for Raymond and said, I'm gonna
just squeeze in there. Yeah, So they, they took, they
took a hole and they pushed some muscle into it and made it
bigger and bigger and bigger. And they run part of their, I
think it's their masseter muscle through that fucking hole, which
means that they just have different bite strengths, First
off, because they have different constraints 'cause they have
musculature that's working in different directions, but it
also means they have a lot of bite strengths.
So let me Scroll down to where I had put my estimates, but I want
you to think about how hard you think that this animal could
bite. I don't know, I don't know it it
like a number. I would need it to be like a bit
through a tree, a bit through the jello Jello.
I don't know. So I because people do this with
T Rex all the time and I can never remember the numbers
because I don't care. But I also doesn't like it's not
tied to anything real for me. So it's really.
And since they're dead, I'll never know what they were
chomping on with them big old teeth.
So just tell me. OK.
So like there's of course as we've mentioned, there's
multiple estimates because we just aren't original I guess.
And so the first estimate said about 3000 Newtons and the
second estimate said that actually you have two different
measurements. At the incisors you get 1300
Newtons and at the molars you get 4000 Newtons.
And I know that none of that makes any sense.
So I looked up how hard a dog can bite and these are actual
tests of dogs biting. So I don't know what the cross
compares to. And they can bite between 13 and
1300 Newtons, so 1300 Newtons. So the the estimates are.
Teeth. Dog bite or worse?
Yeah. Dog bite or significantly dog
bite or double double dog bite. Can we not also just use our
eyes and look at that skull and also know that it could do that?
Like I get I'm just like, I feel like sometimes, yes, we need to
actually go through the work and put the numbers to it.
But something said like really like this just seems OK.
Whatever you need that line on your CV, go go for it.
It could bite really hard. I saw somewhere preparing it to
like a crocodile bite estimates but then I couldn't find actual
numbers for that so I don't know.
But the question is why? Why would you bite that hard?
Like what's the point if you eat grass?
Grass doesn't run. Couldn't it just be a byproduct
of evolving to large sizes? Yeah.
Sure could, right? Like why does it have to be?
I bite so hard. It's like you just got big.
It's like I'm a gentle giant and I could still bite my own little
cheeky. It hurts.
I mean from the very little research we've done it looks
like they look kind of capybara esque and they probably ate
fucking grass so they didn't necessarily need to have strong
bite forces. But multiple times rodents have
evolved to eat nuts. We do have some rodents that
have evolved to be carnivores. Grasshopper mice are well known
to be pure carnivores. Rodents do use their jaws for
different things, so. OK, so they're curb stomping.
Yeah, but sometimes your ancestor did something.
They're curb stopping or probably their ancestors were
curb stopping and they just have strong faces, but they chose
peace. And grass.
That's what I choose every day too.
Oh, God. OK, cool.
Wow. I'm so glad because I, I, I feel
like we had to do that. We had to propagate the error
the right way in that stats class using like calculus.
And it sucked. And I remember having to care
because we had to do the math and it was annoying.
And now I can't look at any mass estimate and not get upset.
So yes, Edward. So error propagation is the
statistical idea that when you are, because you know, we've
just noticed that we went from 200 to 2000 lbs, you know, of
Newtons or whatever, like there's these huge estimate
variations and those are not error propagated.
That's just the error taking everything at face value that
went into a model. But for example, in order to
calculate the bite strength, they had to calculate how
flexible the bone is for a rodent to know at what point it
would snap. And so they just took a general
rodent number and they didn't provide any degree of
uncertainty. So what if some rodents have
stiffer faces than others? You have to take the error from
that. Then you have to take the error
from, well, how strong are these muscle fibers?
And then you have to take the error from, you know, like, how
big are these ridges? You have to take all of that
error and add it up together using fucking calculus most of
the time to figure out what the actual uncertainty is.
So yeah, with error propagation a lot of these papers would have
way bigger estimates, and they already have pretty big fucking
estimates. Yeah, so which makes it pretty
meaningless when you actually wanna do or say anything about
how big it was. And it's.
Get a real which is. This is why all of these papers
can redo this same stuff over and over again.
It's not just 'cause they're using slightly different
techniques, it's cause a lot of them are not using error
propagation, which means that there's still so much wiggle
room in the model that someone else could like provide slightly
different numbers, use the same algorithm and get a completely
different. Answer so and then, you know,
again, who fucking cares? But I mean, that's a big rodent.
That's big. That's way bigger than any of
today's rodents. So cool.
Good for you, Rous. You know, cool.
We already knew that. So the other grouping of papers
about Joseph Arctic Gasia is really just how big were their
brains? Because I guess for whatever
reason, the first paper that came out said, well, actually
for their body size, their brain spice is much smaller than you'd
think. And then a second paper came out
and said, no, actually it's normal.
And also they had good sniffers their their sniff sniffing brain
portion. Yeah, yeah.
OK. OK, so that's OK.
I love it. Also, it's one skull, right?
It's like 1 skull. So we're also talking about how
big it's brain, is it even a full grown adult like I mean.
I think so, but I don't know. I don't know what rodent baby
teeth look like. How much variation are there in
modern rodent species? Is there sexual dimorphism?
Is there? I don't know.
So my last piece of information about this stupid genus is it is
a a theory I myself have come up with.
Are you ready? These are.
My favorite. I think we're gonna, Yeah, I
think, yeah. Our philosophy here is gonna be
great. So if you are tired of writing
papers about how big this animal is and you're like, what else is
there to study about Joseph Articas, let me tell you, I was
reading through Wikipedia. How it begins.
Some interesting things about capybaras.
So capybaras most rodents in general are high are are hind
gut fermenters. I always get this confused but
they're they have their fermentation in the back which
means they are slightly less effective.
I guess rodents have have changed that a little bit.
So they they do have some bacteria in their foregut, so
it's like they're not committing one way or the other really.
But for the most part they're hindgut fermenters, which means
they're not as efficient. So capybaras have gotten around
that the same way rabbits do, by being auto coprophages.
Hey, I hoped you were going there.
I pooped you were going there and then I ate it.
Self poop eaters. They eat their own poop and they
run it back like the. Sheep.
Do they not want to eat each other's poop?
Will they eat each other's poop? Is it a preference for one poop?
I would assume it's a preference because it's just close
proximity. You know, I think they poop it
out and they're like, that's not done yet.
Let's send that one down through again.
But I don't know what happens if you're like, is there like, is
that what a potluck? Is what if you're hungry?
Be convenient. Oh.
My God that is great. That's disgusting.
So my theory is that Joseph Artagasia had such strong jaws
because it had horrible Constipation and it just had
rock hard turds that it had to chew.
So someone needs to look into the rock hard turd crunching
Ave. That can be the next Nature
paper on Joseph Ardagasia. Stop talking about how fucking
big it is. Talk about whether it was eating
its own SO. It's like a Nutcracker.
It's a poop cracker, turd cracker, bone crushing rodent.
But like poop crushing rodent. OK.
Oh God. Yeah, yeah, why not?
Or maybe it there's still some hard parts in the poop.
Right. That Yeah, the yeah, yeah, these
nutty poops you're reheating. What are we having tonight?
Leftovers. I will say that for those of you
who are wondering, you don't need to Google it.
I will tell you that most otocoprophagus animals, it's
like it's not an Infinity poop cycle.
They haven't like unlocked Infinity food.
They eat it once, so they just run it through that second wash
and then they're done. But how do they know?
I would assume the reason that they pretty constantly, well, if
you are eating your poop, it's because it's not fully digested.
So I would assume that they could either smell the bacteria
that they pooped out or they would tell that it's like soft
and still full of it still smells good.
Yeah, it still smells good as. I sit next to a bag of Taco Bell
and I'm like, yeah. I mean, the way that Taco Bell
sometimes burns on the way out would imply that it does
probably retain a lot of its original kind of chemistry.
Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah, yeah, that reminds me of
something I want to do for a future episode, but OK.
Mystery intrigue thesis. Oh gross gross, I love that.
Why aren't people talking about that?
That's way more interesting. Right.
I think how big those turds would have been, that's way more
interesting. I want to know how big your
poops are. That's a good point.
That's it. Those are some pretty big poops.
Yeah. How big is a capybara poop?
When do they eat their poop? Do they poop in the water?
They are auto copper phages. That's how I know about it, but.
They want Slurpee. Slurpee.
Oh my God. Oh, that just caught up to me,
dear. Water.
Hot God. There are things wrong with me.
It's true. So that's true, but I don't eat
my own poop. I I, you know, huh.
Well, I mean, and that I feel like I didn't mention that in
mine either. One of the other lines of
evidence of why they because we actually care about what giant
Beavers were doing in their ecosystem.
And like yours. Yeah, and the whole were they
chopping logs or not? Another line of evidence that
they were not is that we don't have any wood that has giant
Beaver marks in it. So there's been no matching of
the giant incisors to any wood. And they also said that some
lakes that had been claimed to be dammed by Beavers were just
like coincidence. But they definitely affect their
ecosystem in a large way. And that's what a lot of these
folklore legends were about as well, is about the giant Beaver
just running around the Midwest area kind of like damming up all
the Great Lakes. And that that was the mythology
for that. And the the gods were like, stop
doing that. And then like chasing them all
over, creating these different topographic features of the
area, all being explained by these giant Beavers and like
being chased after. But yeah, it I also really
appreciated the title of this paper.
I will tell you it's from 1972, so.
OK. There's some things about it I
didn't love, but it's called the giant Beaver, a prehistoric
memory. But.
I've like modern day fantasy anyway, OK.
But yeah, it's all about these different folklore evidence of
yeah, that are these stories from the Algonquin people and
Goose Cap who would come through and find all these dams and then
would find the giant Beavers. So then he would go kill the
entire family, 1 by 1, the young ones, the old ones.
He broke the dam and killed the Beavers by Spearing.
He saw another young Beaver going up, so he threw 2 stones
to frighten him. And those are now these rocks
that are these falls in the area.
And so the paper was very interesting because it was
essentially like, do we, you know, this is folklore, these
are oral traditions from indigenous people.
Are they useful in a scientific, archaeological context?
And the author of this is very much arguing, yes, like
absolutely, you know that there's 2 takes on this.
The take could be that either the indigenous people really did
interact with the giant Beaver and have these folklore stories,
or they themselves found the bones and fossils of the giant
Beaver. And we're like oh shit this is
some giant ass Beaver 'cause we also kill Beavers all the time
so we know what a Beaver skull looks like.
And then she related to like talking about Mastodon and how
we knew about man and Mastodon interactions before from oral
traditions, before we had physical evidence of Clovis
people with mammoth or Mastodon kill sites.
And so her point is, hey, we shouldn't just discount these
oral traditions just because they're not physical evidence.
And then they found this cave. When was when did they discover
this cave in 1995 S again like quite a bit after this paper is
written. They found this again karst
sinkhole in Ohio. I didn't make you identify Ohio
and they found it's a paleo Indian site that that dates to
about 12,000 years old that finds spear points, Flint hide,
scraper, as well as remains of a giant short faced bear, a moose,
giant Beaver and a peccary. So we do now again, have
physical evidence that early humans did interact, that it
does appear that it wasn't just a random collection of that in
the cars, that they were brought there deliberately by the
humans. Thank you for listening.
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Atwater and Megan Weatherall. Thank you for listening.
Oh, yeah, hold on, Logan. I've kept the door open because
otherwise there's a big echo, but we are filming.
You have to leave. So just so you know, we are
filming. So you're you, you look great in
your underwear. Please go sit and stop opening
cupboards.