You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolution's 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.
On this episode, we talk about the evidence for narcissism in
deep time and relatedly, how bodies tend to float in the
water when they die. We promise those are related.
We also discuss how graceful you need to be or not to be to
continue your species AKA get laid for.
Evolution As always this episode talks about gross things, in
particular the things that happened to dead bodies post
mortem. So please read the content
warnings in the description. Also, this content is not for
children, unlike Amy's new book, which is great and you should go
buy a copy. So we're going to start off
today's story with a lovely conversation about Berlin
Ichthyosaur State Park, AKA the park in Nevada that despite
having driven by it twice, even though it's in the middle of
fucking nowhere, I have never actually been able to go into
because it's been closed every single time that I've gone
there. I'm so sorry.
So. It's so cool.
I know. I've been there.
I know you've been there. So if you're driving in the
middle of nowhere Nevada, you might drive past this place and
it may or may not be open. But Berlin Ichthyosaurus State
Park is a theoretically so I hear very cool sight in Nevada
where you have a whole bunch of Shoni Asaurus which are these
really big Ichthyosaurus like multiple meters long like.
Biggest. Yeah, some some big daddy
Ichthyosaurus and they are in the the lunning formation.
And as it turns out, probably not big daddies.
Probably Big Mommy Ichthyosaurus.
I can relate. Big, beautiful mommies.
That's right. And they, the actual State Park
encapsulates Quarry 2, which is one of the many, many places
that you find these ichthyosaurs throughout the lunning
formation. I guess there's something like,
I think almost 100 ichthyosaur individuals throughout the
lunning formation. And a recent study demonstrated
that they're actually kind of throughout time.
So this stuff in Quarry 2, there's 7 individuals I think
that are right next to each other and they all probably died
around the same time, which is exciting for a variety of
reasons. Not for them.
It doesn't matter what they think is exciting.
They died. Yeah.
Well, and so that is that has been kind of the historic
question, right? Is was it just a bad day?
Was it bad luck? Initially when these things were
discovered, it was assumed to be strandings that basically these
ichthyosaurs got stranded in shallow water.
Turns out probably not that shallow of water.
There's some arguments as to how deep it is, but it's probably it
was right at the bottom of what they call storm base.
So if you look at the lending formation, all of the little
shells have been moved and imbricated.
So they're they're in line, they're all in the same
orientation through water movement, which is important, as
it turns out for this whole story.
And the ichthyosaurs are in basically that section.
So probably not that shallow, probably around 500 meters to
maybe a little more depending on where you talk to.
It's pretty deep. Pretty deep, yeah.
That's deep to me. I know I don't want to go that
deep. Someone who's.
Afraid of the ocean? That's fucking terrifying.
Yeah, that's true. I don't want to not be able to
touch the bottom. Snorkel has not gone well for me
historically. It's always jellyfish stinging
me, fish attacking me or dead salmon.
Yeah. Kelp just just disrespectful
kelp. It's the only form of kelp is
disrespectful. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, yeah, snorkeling. Anyway, great out there, you
guys go do it. We don't like it.
Yeah, so the letting formation not shallow like we initially
thought. So then the follow up thought
for how do you get these dead ichthyosaurs, these massive
mommies in the same spot? How do you get them dying
theoretically all around the same time?
So the next thing was OK, the classic how do you kill lots of
things in the water, poison their asses using algae.
So algal blooms was the the next.
Kind of OK. I was like who is going to
poison them if not mad dinosaurs?
Man was not there yet. No, it was, it was plants,
algae, right? Yeah.
So the next idea was algae, although that has also been
overturned. There's not.
When you see an algae bloom in the water, there's a couple
things that you expect to see in the geologic record, including
like a thick organic layer and mercury spikes, I guess.
I don't know why, but apparently mercury spikes and neither of
those things exists in the lending formation.
And also turns out the ichthyosaurs and Cory too may
have died together. Shit tons of other ichthyosaurs
accumulated over 100,000 to 1,000,000 years in the lending
formation. So lots and lots of time
averaging. Lots of big ichthyosaurs dying
in the same region for hundreds of thousands of years
potentially. Probably not LG coming through.
Time to kill every single one of them.
So what is the next most natural and obvious theory?
Amy, these animals are dying. If you said well obviously it's
a giant Kraken making a self-portrait with dead
ichthyosaurs, well you are right that that was the next theory.
Next idea, parsimony out the fucking window.
We're just, let's not talk about like the geographical
reconstruction, right? Like or what physical
constraints are happening to make it so this place is being
selected for No no no vain Kraken, but Kraken was just like
this song was written by me. Right, but not just vain Amy.
Like this Kraken had a sense of self.
This Kraken had artistic spirit and integrity.
You are describing every narcissist I know.
That's true narcissistic giant Kraken.
So this is this is a story today, both of real theories
proposed by. Hypotheses.
I'm just. Suggested, sorry, a hypothesis
does not mean that it makes sense, is a good idea, is valid
in any way, shape or form. And we're also going to talk
about how just because they wrote a paper on it does not
mean that that paper was peer reviewed or is in any way
something you should consider more valid than just their
words. Same with abstracts, because
initially when this theory was brought to the public's eye,
this was in 2011 and it was at the Geological Society of
America. I remember where I was.
Were you at this GSA, this this meeting?
I wasn't at this GSA, but I just have such distinctive memories
of that abstract coming out and just the ridicule and the
absurdity, and then the conversation about what I think
you're going to talk about, which is about GSA and that they
essentially accept everything. Yes.
So a geological Society of America, if you want to go and
present your theory, regardless of whether it's good or not.
Young Earth flood creationism. Yeah, geology, that all of that
stuff is accepted at GSA without any criteria.
So they don't reject anything as long as it's.
They don't want to get sued y'all.
They get money from the government, so you have.
To pay, you have to pay to submit an abstract.
So like there's literally no reason for them to reject your
stuff because you give them money to publish your abstract
and then you give them money to attend and talk about your
science. So yeah, there's some financial
problems with the way that these meetings are run, but this is a
reminder that just because it appears to be in a big
publication like GSA, that doesn't mean it's peer reviewed,
right? That doesn't mean that it's
something that you should just accept at face value.
So in 2011, this this gentleman, I have read his name 1000 times.
I'm going to just call him Mark McMenamins because I don't
remember. I confused that.
And Mark McMahon, which I know is a different person who I
think is a real person. So Mark Mcmenamin might be
McMenamins. Yeah, which is a restaurant
sissing. Mcmenamin, how's his tater tots?
Presumably really good sweet potato fries.
I fucking love their. I do love their tater tots.
Screw their tater tots, their sweet potato fries are so good
they should sponsor us. I would talk about their sweet
potato fries free. And like their beer, but
whatever. Yeah, whatever.
So Mark Mcmenamin presented this in 2011 at GSA, and his theory
was that these dead ichthyosaurs looked like the tentacles of a
giant Kraken. It has to be giant, because
these ichthyosaurs are like short school bus size.
Like, they're pretty. They're pretty fucking big.
They're multiple meters long, so it has to be a giant Kraken let
me go ahead and before we move on any further I think I want to
show you what he was seeing all right so we're going to take a
look together the. Human brain is amazing at
finding patterns and things, whether or not so true.
They're there, Yeah. Amy, for the people who are
still listening to this, can you describe what it is you're
seeing? I'm looking at a picture of, I
mean, it just looks like wrinkly, rumply.
I don't know where I'm going with this, like a texture to it.
You can see that there are some distinctively round areas, which
I know are the ichthyosaur vertebrae, so the backbones.
And then there's kind of some like linear features coming out
from that that might be ribs or something like that.
And they're arranged in a way where, like, I don't know,
they're next to each other. And like, it kind of looks like
a plesiosaur paddle, you know, on a smaller scale, like with
those kind of bones next to each other.
Yeah. They're kind of spooning hanging
out. Mark Mcmenamin presented
basically this picture and a couple of other pictures because
if you look at the vertebrae of the ichthyosaurs in Quarry 2, so
ichthyosaur vertebrae, if you're not familiar with them, they
basically look like little hockey pucks.
They don't have a lot of it's increased flexibility.
They're in the water. They don't need to be able to be
real stiff and rigid. So they have just hockey pucks
for vertebrae. Yeah.
And instead of being in like a domino series of hockey pucks.
Like a sleeve of Oreos. They don't look like that.
Yeah, they look like what would happen if you took a sleeve of
Oreos and left them on a table, which is that some of them would
roll and then land on their back.
So every single one of these hockey pucks is facing upwards,
and there's two separate rows where they're alternating
because as most people think, probably they just rolled out of
a sequence and rolled next to one another.
But if you're Mark Mcmenamin, you think that this looks so
much like the suckers on a tentacle of a Kraken that.
My God. This is a self-portrait.
But of just their tentacles. Of yes, and it gets worse.
I want to also give you what is the the real reason that these
ichthyosaurs look like this so I'm going to stop sharing now.
So very recently there was a paper published where they
looked at the sedimentology of the lunning formation.
They looked at the the quarry 2 stuff they looked at all of this
different stuff. They figured out that probably
the water depth was around 500 meters.
They were the people who said that OK well everything is
oriented so it's right at about storm base.
It's like you have some water moving it, but not a ton.
And they went through and they looked at all of these
ichthyosaurs and they found that even though they're kind of
deposited throughout time, so this is clearly like a long term
process that is happening. You don't find a whole lot of
other shit with them. So it's pretty much just
ichthyosaurs and things that these ichthyosaurs probably
weren't eating like ammonites, and not very many of those
either. It's really mostly ichthyosaurs,
which is kind of odd, but you don't find sub adult
ichthyosaurs, you only find fully adult ichthyosaurs and
like babies or embryos so. Oh, with mom?
With. Mama.
Yes, with Mama Slash coming out of Mama.
Double stuffed Oreo. Oh God.
These researchers theorized that probably what happened was that
this was a like, not a breeding ground, but a having babies
ground. This was where Shoneysaurus came
to a nursery. Basically, this is where they
came to have their babies because there's no real reason
for them to go into low productivity waters.
Like why would you go someplace that has no food and why would
these animals be going there consistently?
Well, if you look at modern whales, this is something that
mother whales will do when they're about to give birth.
They go to low productivity areas that are relatively warm
still so that they can give birth without having to deal
with fucking sharks, basically. Right?
Like there's no other predators because there's nothing for them
to eat, so they're more likely to be able to give birth in
peace, which would explain why all of these animals were there.
As for the animals in Quarry 2, they took a look at them and
they decided that like everybody else has decided except for Mark
Mcmenamin, probably what happened was that these animals
were not buried right away, that these animals died.
They went to the bottom and then they probably bloated a little
bit and then floated a little bit.
So for a period of time you probably had six or seven
ichthyosaurs bobbing around dead in the water, rotting.
It's like fucking salmon. Yes, basically.
Rotting recently. Yeah.
So they think that for whatever reason, this group of, I keep
saying six or seven, I should just go and look, but whatever.
This group of ichthyosaurs in particular, probably maybe there
was an illness or something, they they died for whatever
reason, it was just a bad year and they didn't get covered up
right away. They probably were decomposing a
little bit, maybe floating a little bit, which is why they
are kind of in the same orientation.
So all of them are kind of facing the same direction
imbricated just the same way as the shells are in the sediments.
And when they deposited as they rotted, there were probably some
cross currents that just knocked their vertebrae out of
alignment. And that's that's their
explanation, which, yeah, that makes sense.
Other than the horrifying nightmare image of 6, yes, dead
ichthyosaurs bobbing at the bottom of the sea.
And other studies have demonstrated that ichthyosaurs
will lose articulation before they lose completeness.
So when ichthyosaurs are rotting, they have a tendency
for their bones to come apart before they kind of just
disappear. So most these ichthyosaurs
aren't perfectly complete, but most of their body parts are
there, which suggests that they probably were somewhere in that
rotting phase when they were actually covered.
So it makes sense with other ichthyosaurs as well.
And yeah, there probably was a little bit of bloat and float,
which is how this whole thing is shoehorn into this episode.
And I would not say that the Berlin icosaurs aren't the
classic bloat and float example. But Amy, you're going to tell us
about that classic bloat and float example.
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for time. And also just because it was too
much. Too much for the general public.
That's that's right, Megan doing my best newscaster voice.
Yeah, I got stuck with dinosaurs this week, but it was so much
fun. It was super worth it.
I did. I did, yes.
So the classic, you know, we want to talk about bloat and
float because it's fucking weird and dead like it's perfect for
us. It's a natural pairing.
Also, I can relate. Who can't like I get I would say
it. I was like, yeah, there's bloat
and float. No, it's not like a bunch of
like pregnant ladies like Bob and down a river, but apparently
a bunch of dead pregnant ichthyosaurs Bob.
And because that's what I was thinking is really funny.
Is like you get so bloated when you're pregnant to be bloated
and death is kind of rude. It's like, come on, have I not
like paid my dues? Has my body not already been
disgusting? I don't know why.
Can you guess here? Well, yeah, why are we going to
really test that? So one of the best examples of
bloat and float is with ankylosaur dinosaurs, and that's
what we're going to talk about today for most of my time.
So ankylosaurs are the armored dinosaurs.
They're on all fours. They had all the protective
plates and armor on their back. They kind of looked like a weird
glyptodont turtle kind of thing, but a dinosaur.
I call them pissed off coffee tables.
They're at the right height to just do mad damage to the shoes.
Not that not that any of like humans or coffee tables
coexisted with Ankyla, sorry. So don't get it twisted.
So should probably clarify so that Mark Mcmenamini men man
doesn't try to try to come for me.
OK, So what is below and flow. I really liked their definition
of this. So I read this incredible paper
that was looking at this long term, long time kind of known
idea, like Sternberg, who's a classic paleontologist from
1900s, and even Nobska, our guy from like the early 1900s.
Like they were like, you know, we find ankylosaur's belly up a
lot. We find their bums like this.
So it just became a part of the literature.
But it was really anecdotal. And so this paper, which is by
Mallon at all, we've talked about one of Jordan Mallon's
papers before. This one was just as satisfying,
if not way fucking funnier. It was clearly written with joy,
like you could tell that they enjoyed this project.
It is so stupid what they did. It's freaking great.
So they were like, okay, ankylosaurs are thought to be
preserved belly up on their backs more often than not.
And it's oftentimes pointed to. So the paper first was, does
this actually show? Does this hold up statistically?
Do ankylosaurs preserve better on their backs?
And then the second part is why, with an emphasis on testing this
is it the bloat and float hypothesis, which folks have
just been like, oh, it's in Kyla Sores.
They just like toppled over and we're like, help me and went out
to sea. And it was just like a total
disaster. And that's kind of what bloat
and float has to do with. So it's like if an animal dies,
maybe it was attacked by a predator, maybe it just died of
old age, maybe it died from who the fuck knows what.
Something collapsed around it, like it's maybe it's Burrow.
And then perhaps that carc, that carcass would have been washed
into an adjacent river or stream or some sort of water source.
And a lot of what they're called Thuluvial deltaic environment.
So we're talking about river systems that are shooting out
into the ocean. So like think of the Mississippi
coming out of New Orleans and Louisiana.
So when you're close enough to the ocean, sometimes when you
get your dead body gets into a stream, it will go all the way
out to the ocean, especially if you're nice and bloated from
your decomposition of your internal organs.
And if you just swell up like a cute little rotting disgusting
balloon, you're like floating around and it's and you're just
bobbing around like we've been saying.
And they think a lot of this too because of the heavy osteoderms
or armor on the back of these that's like, once you're
flipped, you're fucked. Like you're done, like you're
dead or alive, you're fucked. And so then again, so bloating,
right? All these gases and whatnot,
which also causes you to be more unstable and more likely to
float or and flip supposedly. And then once that degassing
occurs either by natural processes or something punctures
you, if you will, then actually get sync to the bottom of a
channel, maybe a river channel or again, an marine sediments.
And part of this is they're like, we find so many fucking
ankylosaurs in marine sediments. Were they just like really into
an ocean view or is this a tafanomic process that their
bodies are just more inclined to just be whoop out to sea because
they're already kind of like this little upside down boat,
like ready to go. So that was the setup.
That was just the setup, let alone any of their.
It was freaking amazing. So they decided to focus on. 1st
off, I should probably also define we're going to talk about
two types of ankylosaurs. Ankylosaur is a more general
group. Ankylosaur Rids are the ones
that are like the classic whackety whack with like a tail
club. They're the ones that have the
junk on the tail that smackety smacks.
And then we also have the notosaurids and those are
Ankylosaurus that just had a basic bitch dinosaur tail.
No frills, no whistles, none of that.
And it actually matters. It matters.
They talk about this a lot, go really into the tail, like a
lot. Love to hear Carrie Weber's
thoughts on these tails Heart. That I would have assumed
mattered for this, but OK, sure. It comes up a lot.
Yeah, it is. Anyway, so they focus on these
Alberta dinosaurs and Kyla sores, partly because that's
where Sternberg and others made this observation.
Also because the ones that we find in Asia are more inland
deposits and they don't seem to be found belly up as much.
They're preserved upright. So that's another reason that
they wanted to be looking at North American deposits where
they have been found upside down so much so they were able to
actually determine the original oriented presentation for 36
specimens and came out with that.
Yes, 70% of them were found upside down with which is
statistically significant. Turns out.
Yeah, yeah. So they they looked at the
entire Organism, but sometimes they'd also just use skulls, the
hips and tail clubs because all of these, these are some chunky
motherfucking dinosaurs. And so these larger parts of
their bodies are going to be, they were the least subject to
being overturned just by like river flow and channel.
And so they, if they, if these elements are flipped, they're
saying that that's how they were deposited and not flipped later
by like the flow or something like that of water.
You know, they know what I'm saying.
Whereas if it was like a rib, that could have just been.
Like you have a streamlining issue here where the the
question has to be, did they flip upside down because they
were floating or is that how water would naturally flip
things because water likes to sort things like ichthyosaur.
Right, yes, bodies matter what your body looks like during life
and death really can affect this shit.
So we're going to go into some of that because the way they
tested the bloat and float like again, fucking tears.
Like I was so entertained. So they decide they're like, OK,
we have shown first, first part we've we have support that
ankylosaurs in North America preserve on their backs.
OK, So why? So they had four hypothesis
hypotheses that they were testing around this.
And the first two, well, what the first one is just so stupid.
OK, so the first actually, I don't think it's that stupid.
I think there's, I think it's actually kind of hard to measure
this, which they kind of they just they avoided it.
So the first hypothesis is the clumsy ankylosaur model.
Oops, I tripped and I fell on my back.
OK. I tripped and I fell into the
ocean and I can't turn right myself because I'm shaped like a
boat and I can't flip back up. So this is they've maintained.
So there is a hypothesis from Nabska, who we've talked about.
He's the incredibly bipolar Romanian Albanian paleontologist
that I, like, lose my shit for. He said that Ankylosaurus were
subject to accidental overturning, perhaps as a result
of tumbling down a hill where they lay to die.
So this whole part is, it's not like the bloating that's causing
them to flip necessarily. It's that they're dumb and they
have stupid bodies. And so this is kind of like when
we talked about if they were migrating or not.
You look at it at Kyla Serge, you're like, that motherfucker
is not migrating anywhere. Like it's just not happening.
Like it's just like stupid fucking coffee table body.
So they discounted this which I think I don't know if I buy
this. It just seems hard to roll over,
like they're wide. Well, it's just hard to get it
to roll over in the 1st place so.
But if it did from, you know, tripping down a hill as.
Oh yeah, Scott observed. Right.
And it's and so they compare it to turtles.
But turtles are able to write themselves more often than not.
So they were like no. This implies that Ankylosaurus
were especially clumsy, which goes against their Long live
success of over a period of 100 million years.
So they can't be so clumsy, because they're evidently.
Clumsy and just fuck a lot. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You could totally get your fuck out and be a total.
Weirdo, as long as you have a lot of babies it doesn't matter.
Like I'm like, who says clumsiness is a deterrent to
fucking right? You could what if you were too
clumsy? And kylosaurs, if you just fell,
you just fell into each other. It was like, Oh no, bam babies.
That's how sex works from a woman who's had a baby.
I tripped and fell. Then it happened.
I don't know. I don't know.
I wasn't there. I'd like to be.
I'd like to watch this. This would be fucking hilarious.
Yeah, right. So anyway, I also like, as you
know, hate pandas. And like, if we want to talk
about worthless animals that are still alive that can't even
figure out how to have sex, look no further than the fucking
panda pandas. So to just be like, oh, you
can't be if you're clumsy, that means you can't be evolutionary
successful, I think is a non starter.
I think that's a logical fallacy.
And I agree that it's very hard to be able to test this model.
And I wasn't super happy with how they tried to just be like,
Nah, they live for too long to have been that clumsy.
I'm like, have you watched Teen Mom?
Have you seen 16 year olds raising babies?
You don't have to be like sophisticated and intelligent to
have offspring. So I'm also I am also evidence
of this. I am foxy how Tracy was born.
Okay, so they discount that we just fell down this hill one
day. Yeah, fell down a hill.
OK, so the second one is carnivore activity.
So essentially that this is also a Nobska idea that they were
flipped over by big carnivores and that then because they
needed to expose their little tender underbellies to be eaten.
So they went and they looked for carnivore bite Marks and they
were not found on a significant number of the specimens.
So that one got discounted. And the main one that they
focused on today is bloat and float.
So the bloat and float hypothesis again means that they
died, they get bloated from that degassing of their death and
then they fall into or get associated into some sort of
river waterway that takes them either to a Deep River or a big
ocean kind of thing where they then are deposited with either
thaluvial so river deposits or like marine deposits.
And so they think that they predicted that an ankylosar
carcass in particular would be incredibly unstable in water as
well, particularly when bloated, reflected by an increased offset
between the centers of mass and buoyancy.
And then they decided to do computer modeling to show this.
Oh God. It is so great.
Like essentially. Ankylosaurs.
They're putting big armor things on turtles.
How are they determining this? But OK.
I really, really, really wanted them to make a ankylosaur model
and throw it into a river. Like I really wanted that.
I think it's calling for that because even they say at the end
that sure, we got some significant results from this.
However, it's based on estimates for reconstructing a body that
we don't actually know and we don't have like all we have our
bones. That doesn't necessarily tell
you how an animal's musculature was or where it was a chunky
badonkadonk versus not. And they acknowledge that
there's only so much you can do with this computer modeling.
But they did 3 dimensional digital models of both a
noticeaurid and an ankylosaurid to look at the stability of
Ankylosaurus floating in water. And they did all of this by
basing it on a variety of floating and sometimes sinking
models of living forms, including American alligators,
elephants, horses, giraffes, sea turtles and Penguins, which they
were. And then they chose those two
particular Ankylosaurus species because they are their bowel
plans are relatively representative of their
respective families. So then they went ahead and they
plugged all this into these different computer models with
different density of fresh water versus saltwater and like
different just current flows and different body size dimensions,
tail club versus a naked tail. And we're able to determine
that, yes, they flipped much faster when they were bloated.
And that means I'm actually going to show you my picture.
Isn't it fucking awesome computer modeling?
Like they went, they literally were measuring like the density
of Osicone or not Osicone. Sorry, osicles like their
osteoderms like to be able to, to, to measure this and to play
with these models. So would you like to describe
what you're seeing? Sure.
All right. So what I'm seeing is A4 paneled
figure, and on the top we have an Ankylosor with a name that
I'm not even going to. There's so many vowels.
Absolutely not. Starts with an E and on the.
Bottom of cephalus? Yeah, something like that.
There's no close Cephalus, I think.
Yeah, OK. It's like URL, but if you just
got rid of the R and then you have sorta on the bottom, which
is a notice or and has no armor on its tail.
And so on the left hand side, they have both profiles from
above and from the side. These animals on the left hand
side as if they're not bloated and then on the right hand side
as if they are bloated where they looks like they've just
stretched the model out, which is pretty funny, especially
since they basically just they become more the the art style is
low Poly where you have polygons making up your 3 dimensional
body and then your body gets bigger and then just has fewer
polygons. That's kind of it's a bloated is
just a fat low Poly version of Yep.
The original version it is 115% of the body.
Local circumferences were of the for the bloated versus non
bloated and the factor of 15 comes from observations of that
amount of distance. Distention observed in dead
African elephant elephants. Wow sorry not elephants.
Elephants, yes. So I mean, again, subjective
based on a mammal that doesn't have a shit ton of body armor
all over it. Also just, you know, a reptile
versus a mammal. Regardless though, they found
pretty strong support that a ankylosaurs are uncomfortable,
uncomfortable, unstable in the water.
I mean, I me too. I've relating again, I'm
projecting, projecting. I'm just, yeah.
Which ankylosaur are you today? Sometimes you're the bloated
ankylosaur, sometimes you're the non bloated ankylosaur.
And so it turns out that the notice sores end up flipping way
more. They are more prone to.
Flipping, which is. Reflected in the yes, exactly
it's fucking with again, just how this ship sails through the
water and not having this heavy dragging it down thing that
helps keep it lowered. And and so yeah, they they found
that the both bloated and non bloated ankylosaurs are pretty
unstable in water, which does make me go back to the clumsy
hypothesis. So you're telling me that they
could just fall into the water alive and still flip over and
die without like the bloating part of it?
It's does seem like they don't need to be bloated to flip it
certainly helps. So I do think that there's still
some room for some clumsy motherfucking ankylosaurs, but
that's just me. And then again, yeah, they found
statistical evidence support for the notosaurids flipping a lot
more and being found in that position again, because they're
essentially just clasts being moving through a substrate, and
they're at the whim and the will of the constraints of that water
in their bodies. Yeah, exactly.
So if you want to be preserved, belly up, put on a backpack, put
on a nice big backpack, and then jump into the ocean just.
Specific want OK, but make sure. You don't have.
Shoes. Or a tail or a tail.
So they found quite a bit of support for this computer
simulated cow tipping, which is what I'm calling it.
And they did have one other hypothesis that they also
investigated that is just super unhinged.
And I'm not entirely sure why they included it because, well,
it's funny what they did. It's not super like it's not a
classic experiment. So anyway, the the 4th
hypothesis, the 4th and final is the armadillo roadkill
hypothesis, which just is all about how, you know, a modern
animal that is armored. The armadillo, when it dies, if
it's on its side or whatever, it's going to roll over as it
bloats from degassing on that perfect little tippy shell.
You know, they wobble, but they don't fall down.
And so they were like, OK, so is that what's going on, that it's
because of this armor that once they get gassy as they're dead,
their bodies just naturally go bloop, which again would then
say, so maybe the reason they're in marine sediments is because
they all had beach houses. So again, like the context still
matters because the armadillo roadkill model does not need
them to be transported by water in any way to explain why
they're found belly up. And so they tested this
prediction by the authors just over a couple of like 3 months
in 2016. Anytime that they were driving
around Georgia and they saw a dead armadillo, they got out and
they looked at it. I love science.
I break for armadillos for my research purposes.
I have to hit this armadillo for my research purposes.
Obviously, you're gonna have some, you're gonna have some
sampling bias when that's the way you're gathering your data.
I wondered if you were in a rush.
Did you stop? Like, I was on the way to a
wedding and then I saw this armadillo dead on the road and I
was like, I gotta stop and touch it and take pictures of it.
No, you didn't do that, you sick psycho.
So, like, how many times did you not?
Did you stop when it was that night?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I, I mean, it's like very
funny. They were like, we don't really
have too much strong evidence for the armadillo hypothesis.
But again, I wasn't super happy with how they actually went
about testing it. But they didn't find that
armadillos it that they were seeing on the side of the road
in Georgia were actually consistently found belly up.
So that didn't have the same support that we see in Kyla
sores. And the only thing I kind of
want to say about it is it was really funny because they were
like, you know, one of the reasons why this not this.
Although armadillos and ankylosaurs are similar in
sharing a rotund body, rude and heavily armored dorsum, the
appreciable differences between them should nevertheless provide
reason to doubt the whatever the comparison because ankylosaurs
are so much bigger and heavier than armadillos.
And since we don't have a giant like and so since you can't
compare them body size wise if they're a bad proxy.
But then at the end of the paper.
The last part of the paper, the very final part of the paper is
they go, hey, you might want to use this idea in glyptodonts
because glyptodonts have also been hypothesized to be bloat
and float. And I'm like, glyptodonts are
giant fucking armadillos. You do have a giant armadillo.
So that was my only, you know what?
I'm glad they went down the armadillo rabbit hole.
It was entertaining. Obviously.
I think there's another research paper or two or three to be done
from there. And obviously the the bulk of
this literally was on these computer simulated tipping
Ankylosaurus and it was so fucking funny.
So yes, there is really strong support that Ankylosaurus did
indeed get preserved on their back more often than not when
they're found in watery environments and not like a
fucking desert. And two, it seems that the
process that is leading to this is that they are dying, getting
really bloated and gross, flipping onto their back and
then fucking sinking like a drop stone.
And that is your classic bloat and float dinosaur edition.
You're welcome. Amazing that is fucking.
I mean this podcast subtitle. Fucking disgusting.
Also if you don't want to sink get a tail club.
I was just saying yeah or don't want to flip.
A tip as much. Get a tail clock.
Don't. Go into the ocean with a
backpack. There's a lot of things you
could do to avoid being preserved upside down, but you
have to be really specific about it because you're not an
ankylosaur. That's really interesting.
Just the idea of pulling over for roadkill to double check
what side it was preserved on is yeah, top 10 science.
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