You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolution's most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Weatherill.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we're two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
On this episode, we cover the details of radioactive dinosaurs
and poisonously gassy horses, and Megan tries, kind of
unsuccessfully, to remember the details from her minor in
chemistry. Yeah, well that's pretty much
it. But of course, like always, we
talk about gross things and we curse a lot, so please check out
the content warnings in the description.
Also, we are not for kids but Amy's new book is and you should
go buy a copy of the Fossil Keepers dresses.
For this episode, we're going to talk about radioactive dinosaurs
and radioactive horses and radioactive wood and all sorts
of radioactive fossils. Oh my.
I thought that I would start this one off with a story that
I'm hoping you haven't heard. I try to just, you know, cut all
dinosaur information from my brain when I can, so even if I
did know it at one point, does not mean it's still there
totally. Fair.
Well, you can just pretend that you didn't hear it anyways,
right? This is all new information.
For your tour to see. How good your acting ability.
And yeah, OK, so the story goes like this in the year of our
Lord and Savior 1990. Oh.
This is this is OK year. This is good year.
Yeah. In 1990 in Utah, a group of
paleontologists in Dinosaur National Monument found the
skeleton of an Allosaurus, which they were excited about, but
whatever, it's an Allosaurus. And they found like almost,
almost the full body. And it was in a quarry, but the
quarry was, I mean, you've we've talked about Dinosaur National
Monument in some of our Patreon stuff, but it's pretty steep.
So there became a certain point where they couldn't quarry back
anymore without it being kind of dangerous, especially since they
weren't sure if there was going to be anything else in there.
Because what they found was they found pretty well a whole
skeleton except for the head. No head.
OK, Headless Horseman style. OK, Ichabod is the name I see.
Yes, yes. Yeah, very French guillotine
style Allosaurus. So they kept looking for like 2
weeks I guess. I every time I read one of these
papers I get really mad because I feel like all of the
paleontology work that I've done has been in rocks that are as
hard as fucking diamonds. So the idea of sitting there for
two weeks and successfully getting like a whole dinosaur
out is just insane to me because everything's so hard.
I think everybody's digging through fucking sand in these
dinosaur places. That's the only logical
conclusion that I can come to. Just mud it well, and it varies.
It actually gets really frustrating because the Morrison
here in Morrison, Co, of which it's named is a very, very, very
well cemented sandstone, silicious sandstone.
And it is next to impossible like the original, like, you
know, Arthur Lakes and Marsh or Cope, I can't remember because I
don't care. They had to use dynamite to get
it, and they knew they were just blasting through bones, but
there was no other way to do it quickly because of the bone
wars. They're trying to like, hurry,
hurry, hurry. And then it's fascinating when
you go to other places with Morrison, there's like mud, mud,
stone and shale. And people are like, yeah, we
just took out 50 Apatosaurus and you're like, what the fuck?
Yeah, well, apparently this was in 50 Apatosaurus zone where
it's just everything's on easy mode unless you're looking for a
head. So they ended up pulling out the
entire body minus the head, and they flew it out by helicopter,
of course, because that's the way that dinosaur people do it.
And it was I guess 2700 kilograms, which doesn't sound
as big as I would expect a rock of dinosaur to be.
We've already established that me and the the metric system or
like no bueno. So to me I'm like, is that just
like a ton? That's a lot less than a ton.
How much is that in pounds? Bitch, tell me I'm American.
How would I know? You researched this?
I didn't research that. Well, you should.
Science communicator. Oh yes.
So I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm pretty sure that the
HVAC specialist just arrived, which, but I do think it's very
funny that we are actually going to talk a lot about HVAC today
in this episode. And the HVAC guy is coming so
well, last we left off, my dogs were barking at the HVAC guy.
We were talking about this Allosaurus where they they
carried out an unknowable size because neither of us can really
translate kilograms. You willfully can't translate
them. And I just kind of generally
can't and didn't didn't look them up.
But really, really heavy body, no head.
So sad six years later. Like story of my life.
So true. That could be dirty.
I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean it like that.
OK, Yep, heavy Allosaurus body. It's OK if you're if you're
bottom heavy like this Allosaurus was.
So in 1996, a professor from the University of Utah came out to
test his new radiological surveying technique, which was
not, oh, let me X-ray the ground to see if there are bones.
It was huh. I know some of these bones are
radioactive and the dirt isn't. So what if I just took a little
detector up to the quarry wall? Because, you know, we can do
dangerous shit targeted, but we can't take down the whole quarry
wall. So let's see if we can find it.
And sure enough, they found the head.
So they found a like a, a high source of gamma radiation in the
wall, and it was the skull. Yeah, turns out to be a new
species, although it's not the new species, is I.
Know what specimen this is? I didn't know that about its
discovery though. But is this Allosaurus?
Jim Meds and I. Yes, yes, it is.
Yeah, yes. Previously known as Allosaurus
fragilis, yes. Yeah, I think fragilis is a
cooler species name. That one's still valid.
There's still Allosaurus fragilis, and now in the last
couple of years, there's this new species, Allosaurus, Jim
Madsenai, which I guess includes this one, but it also includes
the famous big owl that I managed at Museum of the Rockies
Mor 693. So that one is also Jim
Madsenai. But I, again, I don't fucking
care. It doesn't make any difference.
I just call it Allosaurus. I'm sorry, I don't care.
I'm just going to call it Allosaurus.
Like, it's fine, it's close enough.
It's fine, it's whatever. Well, and Allosaurus and
dinosaur and paleontological species change all the fucking
times. But I do think that they did
give it a pretty lame name because as you said, it's a very
Ichabod Crane story and I feel like Allosaurus Ichabod Ansys
has been a significantly cooler name.
Forget your years of dedication to Utah paleontology, Jem
Madsen. Fuck off.
It's Ichabod Ensis. Ichabod Ensis.
I mean, yeah, so I have exactly 1 image for this episode because
they did a reconstruction so that they could try and to show
you how far the head was away from the body.
Oh my God. First off, this is hilarious.
So I'm looking at it's like a two-part, it's like a two-part
image. It's like the actual skeleton
itself still embedded in the rock and the skull above it.
And then it's like a schematic drawing next to it to just show
you what elements are there and what not.
And yeah, I mean, I'm is that scale bar?
Is that in, is that in? What is my sense of like, is
that full thing like a meter? If so, and the head is only like
a meter a meter and 1/2 from the rest from its torso.
But apparently they it took them six years and looking for gamma
radiation to find that find that head.
There's so many that's. A great question I.
There's so many jokes to be had. But it is like this image is
just hilarious. Also because it kind of looks
like they like there's no border on the image and because the
head is so far away from the body, it kind of looks like it's
floating and maybe was supposed to be part of a different image
like it's graphically. It looks like bad Photoshop.
Like it really does. Looks like someone lassoed the
skull and then like accidentally moved it and saved the image and
we're like ah fuck. Yeah, yeah.
So like regardless of what that measurement is, it's pretty far
separated from the rest of the body.
And like the rest of the body isn't complete.
There's, you know, there's some missing feet and stuff, but
you've got most of the backbone, you've got the ribs, you've got
at least one full arm you've got.
Got the pelvis? A confusing array of legs,
pelvis and most a big chunk of the tail.
So like to have that complete of a skeleton and then just have
the head fucking off in the distance.
What do you think happened? Oh, I mean that to me.
Well, OK, it also kind of looks like it's in death pose.
I'm gonna say that too. Where the curl, the tail is
curled and the head, even where it is, if you imagined it had
like a giraffe neck, it could almost be that dramatic arch of
a death pose. So part of me wonders if that
is, I mean like for I have two thoughts.
One is water and just being in a river and your head being the
part, like the end of the tail is also not articulated.
It's nearby, but it's also not articulated.
So these distal parts that aren't as connected as well as
like that torso could have been moved by water in this colluvial
system and it could have also been predation.
I think other folks would also say the head got ripped off and
they were eating the head like a few feet away.
I don't know. So a death pose in dinosaurs.
What we mean is that dinosaurs have a tendon.
Birds do this too, where they have a tendon that runs along
the back of their neck, and when they die in a way where that
tendon dries or gets heated, their, yeah, their neck curls
back and their head kind of curls back towards their butt.
And this looks to me almost like it did that so hard that it
flung its own head off. Yeah, Taphonomy, like I would
say it's, well, yeah, I mean, yes, yeah, super dramatic.
And then right once it like got the Super bend, then that neck
and skull is even more susceptible to whatever's around
it. Yeah, because you flexed her so
hard. Yeah, it looks like they're
doing like an epic backbend, but they're like point of contact is
like the head and tail, which is bonkers.
Yes, yeah, yeah. So that's that very silly image.
And it sounds like, oh, this is like such a crazy story.
These dinosaur bones are radioactive enough that you can
detect them with detector things, Geiger counters, and
whatever. Detectors.
In fact, detector, In fact, after reading this and prepping
for this episode, I am now very concerned about how many fucking
fossils are radioactive because it's not uncommon.
It's pretty common. We're going to talk about a
couple like big formations, but it's something that for reasons
that we'll discuss later, you should check if you've got a new
fossil locality, double check that it's not radioactive for
reasons that we will be shortly discussing.
And the reason that it's not that uncommon is because of the
way that uranium behaves. So we're specifically talking
about uranium and like it's what are those?
The children? It's little children.
'S daughter products. So uranium is the family tree
daughter products. Thank you.
Yes. So uranium is radioactive.
It's super fucking heavy as far as elements go, which is
important because that makes it hard to accumulate.
Anything that's heavy doesn't exactly get like moved around
super easily. So uranium, yeah.
How do you think that you can move uranium from one place to
the other? Don't say bombs or tries, but
like geologically how do you get accumulation of?
Uranium, well, I am super biased, right?
For like multiple reasons. I've worked with tons of
radioactive fossils and I am married to a man who has studied
uranium for like his PhD. So there's a lot of annoyingness
with that. And greatness.
He's above my head right now. Hello, you're smart.
Didn't talk too much. I already told him I was like,
we're talking about radioactive stuff.
He's like, well, the two different chains of decay.
And I was like Nope. No.
Sorry, you can totally hear me. Sorry.
Oh, but what I was going to say is back to your question and not
my marital situation. I know for a fact from working
at Arches National Park where we have a lot of these rock units
that produce really radioactive bones that quite literally
organic material is one of the sinks and sources of
radioactive. So like uranium.
And in fact have used finding dinosaur bones to know where
uranium deposits could be. And it's literally like in the
matrix as the bones. I would say most, although I'm,
I don't study uranium. So Kelly, you can argue with us
later, but as far as I know, most uranium deposits happen we
will because of hot groundwater, right?
So picking that up and depositing it somewhere and that
sort of stuff can move really nicely through sedimentary rocks
and uranium will full precipitate out when it meets
carbonaceous material like you were talking about.
So not only is uranium likely to be found with fossils, it's more
likely to be found in the fossils than in the surrounding
sediment because it's carbonaceous material that
causes it to fall out of that super stinking hot groundwater.
So you find it in fossils, and you should find it in fossils
pretty much anytime that uranium has like dipped near them.
You're probably going to find uranium as long as it is coming
in before they're fully per mineralized.
So the uranium is part of the per mineralization process for
these things. It's not going to be a track.
Like if I took a fossil bone now and I put it in the ground and
ran uranium past it, the uranium's not going to do
anything because what's happening in a lot of cases is
the saying this word when our first episode of Season 3 was
urine is very different for me. But the urinal atom, I don't
know if that's actually how you say.
I have a minor in chemistry and I don't know if that's how you
say it. I think it is, but I'm concerned
that it's kind of like a Uranus thing where that's not really
how you say it. Whatever, they're all nerds.
They can handle it. So the urinal atom which is UO 2
plus plus I guess that it can actually attach with two
adjacent phosphates. So it is more it's really likely
to precipitate out and replace the calcium in your bones.
So it actually is like per mineralizing you.
Is that why? Kicking out calcium.
Is that like, what, when people get straight up like Chernobyl
and their bones like are destroyed from the inside out,
Is that what's happening? Is that the Oh, never mind,
never mind, let's not talk about.
That I'm making that face because that sounds disgusting.
I do have a funny story about Chernobyl later.
Oh yeah, super. Funny I.
Do. But yeah, I don't, I don't,
we're not going to talk about the degree of damage that it's
causing. These animals are dead.
These are dead animals. They're not getting naked by
uranium juice. They're becoming one with the
uranium juice as part of their fossilization.
So I have a whole bunch of uranium fossils here.
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you buy books. Oh, with spider webs that I was
going to show you because I have a have a bunch of petrified
wood. Well, so the story with this.
Oh, it's very. Is that super betrayal?
OK, I was going to. OK, OK.
So this type of petrified wood is I'm doing the the makeup
girly thing. You know how they put their hand
behind so that your camera will actually focus.
So fucking smart. I've got to give credit where
credit is due. Those are some video smart
girls. So I'm only holding up pieces
that have blue because this petrified wood is from the
Miocene. It's not something I'm studying.
It's something that we're collecting as rocks just for fun
because you're allowed to do that out by Saddle Mountain in
central Washington. And it comes in a lot of
different types and shapes. And the stuff that I'm holding
up here is all the not so technical term for it is bog
wood, because it's basically these these chunks of slightly
rotting wood that fossilized. And so they kind of exploded a
little bit during the fossilization process.
So they're like cemented together chunks with silica.
And in some cases like this one that I was showing you, that
silica went like full hog. And so you just get a bunch of
silica as well. So this blue chunk is on top of
the stick and then the rest of it is just straight up agates.
But the blue stuff is the only stuff that has uranium in it.
And we didn't know that it had uranium in it.
We just went and we collected a whole bunch of this cool
petrified wood and we surrounded our fucking house in it until
like 2 years ago when someone was like, Oh yeah, highlight
Opal. It's, it's glows green under
shortwave UV length. And that's how you know that
it's got uranium in it. And so we tested a bunch of
things in our house and we discovered that anytime you have
blue on these faucets, that's got a whole bunch of uranium in
it. Do you know how hot they are?
I do a little bit because a we got an ancient, Oh my God,
Geiger County. Hey, shit works man.
It's like the ideas that that hasn't changed.
It's not changed. Yeah.
As long as it it has to be. You have to calibrate them and
recalibrate them every once in a while though.
Yeah, well, and you can't this this one has batteries that you
have to take out. You can't leave them in.
You know, you want to prevent corrosion.
But it's like, I think it's from the 40s or the 30s.
It's pretty, pretty goddamn old, this Geiger counter.
So I know that, but also I sent some pieces to a TikTok friend
who's a chemist and he tested them for me and was like, you're
safe, you're fine. Oh my God that is like the best
use of TikTok I've ever heard of.
That's excellent. Yeah.
So yeah, it's super, super common and it happens a lot in
petrified wood. It happens a lot in bones.
And some kind of famous formations for it would be like
the Chinley Formation in Utah. And the Morrison is really well
known for radioactivity, which is where this little Allosaurus
came from. And it's a fossil formation that
you've had to deal with a lot. The salt wash member of the
foricin of the Morrison was I guess it's the most radioactive
because it was a fluvial system. And then groundwater came up and
I guess it's kind of sandy and they, it sounds like maybe there
was some sort of salty brine layer above it.
So you get basically these fluids coming into that sand and
then not being able to penetrate up too much higher.
So that's why you get. And I would also wonder too, I
mean, gold is also something that's very, very heavy, right?
And so you do need to have like a environment, like a river
system that has quite a few point bars and different, you
know, textures and stuff to capture it.
Like, you can't just have it be or just get washed out.
So yeah, like needs to have that interesting overlap.
What I was reading with the the Morrison is it's actually not so
with gold you're talking about, I think they're called placer
deposits, where you get those hot fluids that deposit the gold
and then it weathers out and you want to look for areas where
heavy things are accumulating. But with the uranium and the
saltwash member, you're not actually looking for fluvial
movement. It actually was deposited after
the sediment was in place. So it's not like you find
pockets within the saltwash, Remember where it's heavier, you
just find it where the groundwater went through.
Yeah, which is weird. Interesting.
Yes. So that's one kind of famous
one. And then another famous one that
is obviously more cool because it involves mammals is the
Hagermann fossil pets, which are in Idaho.
And Hagermann isn't super well known for having like uranium in
its bones. It does.
I checked. There's some uranium, there's
some thorium, but all of the little daughter products are the
things that you really find in Hagerman stuff, including
radium. And then it radium decays to a
gas called radon, which is why Hagerman fossils are straight up
kind of dangerous because they are actually off gassing radon
and they are doing it at rates where if you just have one bone
and you hang around with it, you're probably fine.
But in these places, like at the fossil beds themselves and at
the Natural History Museum at University of Idaho, you have
these cabinets where you're putting all of these things all
together. And as a result, you accumulate
a shit ton of radon because the cabinets are often closed.
And because some genius at some point was like, oh, we have
poison bones. Why don't we put them in a
cabinet together? Let any gas out.
Yeah, we'll put them together and we'll make sure that the
problem just fucking accumulates in the cabinets.
Open the doors. Get hit.
By a wave of radar, Yeah, that's what I've heard of being because
people also don't necessarily open like, you know, fossil
collections are. Some stuff doesn't get looked at
for a really long time, even decades.
So if you're not regularly opening up those cabinets, then
yeah, you're at a much higher risk for weight radon poisoning.
Yeah, yeah. As it turns out, radon is the
solution to pollution is dilution.
You want to make sure that the radon is dispersed.
You just don't want to have a concentrated dose of it.
It's OK to have a little bit, which is good because radon is
kind of all over the country. Radon is often found in the
ground, so if you have a basement in certain areas of the
country, you need to have a radon detector.
It's heavy. To make sure that things haven't
accumulated. I think that's an important.
Part too, right? Like.
It's heavy, so it sinks. So that's why the basement,
that's why cabinets, once you open it, it wants to go to the
lower area, which is where you're standing.
So it's again, it's seeking these low lying places.
With this is more for everybody else because you've been a
collections manager, you've seen collections.
So collections of paleontological bones are often
stored in like one or two ways. The first way is you put
everything from the same formation together, and then
maybe you do it by like when it was collected, maybe you do it
by locality within that area, or maybe you put everything of the
same type together. So like, the same species go
together, and often they're still the same species from the
same place. So it turns out that not every
species at Hagerman fossil beds collected uranium in their bones
equally. What?
There are certain animals that were more likely to be toxic
than others. It's me.
I'm toxic, I absorb so much
radon. Hagerman is a Pliocene site.
What animal would you guess has the most the highest degree of
radon? Well, I know they're famous for
their horses, which were technically zebras, which is
cool. So I mean, like, it's kind of
the only thing I know them for, so I have to go with the horses.
I mean, actually, I know they have a lot in common with
Johnny. Oh, good.
I should have just stopped while I was ahead.
I think A. Pliocene.
Oh, well, that's some, I think it's right, equivalent with like
Mascal. I think it's yeah, yeah,
something. Right.
Yeah, I don't know, rattlesnake, maybe something like that.
But I have some animals in common in some of my fossil
localities with Hagerman, so I've gotten real familiar with
their Equus simplicitins bullshit baby horse, which is
one of the ones that I have. But so horses are the worst,
which is interesting on a lot of fronts, just because it's very
funny to me that we can now officially say horses are the.
Worst. Are they the largest in their
ecosystem? What else was big?
I don't think so. There's other big shit still
around, right? I'm pretty sure they still had
things like rhinos in Hagerman. I also mostly only know the
horses, but I've actually read other papers for some of my own
research recently that makes me think I know why horses are the
worst. So Kate Barenmeyer, who is a
famous taphonomy person, I've been reading a bunch of her
papers lately. And one of the things that she
has found out because she's, she's done a lot of studies on
like how bones are transported in river systems to try and like
reinterpret like if the bones are super rounded, if they're
really angular, if the bones are sorted by type, how far has this
stuff travelled? What was the environment it was
deposited in? And so one of the, the research
things that she did was she took a whole bunch of like relatively
fresh bones of things like horses of deer of I think she
did cows as well. She like tagged them somehow so
she could find them again. And she tossed them in the river
and saw how far they travelled. And she's also done things where
it's. Like my dream I'm like no bloat
and float. Let's literally take some model
ankylosaurs and shove them into the ocean and see what happens.
Why are we not doing this? Let's just see what happens.
NSF Fund. Me she also, she's done some
experiments where she wanted to know because part of the thing
about transporting your bones is the faster that you absorb
water, like if you're a more porous bone.
So if you have osteoporosis, you're not going to travel as
far because you become heavier, right?
So you become harder to move What?
Wouldn't you be easier to move if your bones are super like
riddled with lightness? Well, for a little while, but
then you absorb water. Totes chill, cool.
Yeah, yeah. So she found that horse bones
were the most porous. They absorbed the most water
weight and I wonder if that means that that's why they
absorbed probably the most radon and are the most toxic.
They were the they were the thirstiest.
They were so thirsty for that good, good radioactivity.
Just delicious. So these horses are a real
problem. If you have too many in your
collection, just generally they're they're going to be an
issue. And of course the Hagrim and
Fossil Beds National Monument has quite a lot.
So in 2021, they basically migrated all of the specimens to
a new place so that they could stop poisoning their employees.
So they have a new storage facility.
And one of the big things that they did is they put these
special port systems in the cabinets to suck the radon out
so that you don't get that build up of nasty horse gas in your
cabinets. However, a an intern came, I
think she was an intern. No, I don't think that's right.
An employee came in where her job in 2022, her job was to test
how effective this had been. Basically like she was going to
see if the radon system was working effectively enough
because radon gas obviously is bad, but radon gas can also be
released during prep. So like when you're cleaning
fossils, you can release radon. So like anything you do with
these bones, like was kind of dangerous because they're so
they're so heavy. And if you're doing a lot and
you're sitting in the same enclosed space, a lot of
collection vaults are like they're climate controlled,
they're temperature controlled, but everywhere.
There's not a lot of places for gas to escape unless you are
doing it on purpose. And she found in 2022 that
basically despite all of the changes they had made, they were
still being exposed to 6.3 pico curries per liter of air.
Like people who were working there.
They were getting more when they opened the cabinet because the
cabinets were something like 500 pico carries.
And four is the limit. 4 is the EPA limit that you're supposed
to be getting. Oh.
My. God, so this is after all of
these changes, Amy, can you, as a person who has worked at
National Monuments, guess why perhaps these new inventive
cabinets that relied on HVAC systems didn't work?
Lack of funding? I don't know.
You're like, OK, good. It's like Obama hated us.
It's all no, he made a lot of. National money system.
That was great. Thanks, Obama.
He did. He was great.
He's still alive. I don't know why we're talking
about him like he's dead. The horses are dead.
So they weren't running the the horses are dead.
The people who are working around them potentially could
be. So they, when they established
this new system, the goal was to run the HVAC system the full
time, basically have the AC on all the time.
That's the only way. And you have to vent the
cabinets all the time. But that's expensive.
And so someone at the monument was like, Oh well why don't we
just run it during the day when people are here and not when
they're not. And the answer is cuz then you
poison them. So that is so like, not
surprising at all. And it's hard to because I'm
like, it's not a very well known National Monument.
It's very hard to get there. It's in a very weird place.
The people of that area are delightfully strange, but weird.
And I just am like, is it really even worth it to house these
fossils at all at this point? Like, is it worth it?
Like are we learning anything new about Hagerman horses?
Does anyone? I sound terrible right now, but
I don't fucking care. Like human lives are more
important than any fossil ever, ever.
So it's just like, can you send them to the Smithsonian and make
it be their problem, their department, you know, like
they're federal. Like send them the fucking
Smithsonian. Send them.
Because that just seems like it's not like the risk is not
outweighing what we're getting from these fossils in terms of
education, research, tourism, to get radoned all the time.
Sounds shitty, sorry people. Well, I don't know if you've
ever heard people complain about the fact that museums now have
so many casts and they don't have the real fossils on
display. Well shut up and stop your
bitching because at least they aren't fucking poisoning you
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Yeah, they're poisoning someone in a cabinet somewhere.
They'd actually probably be better off, like on a mounted
air display, not in a display case, because then you go right
back into the same problems. Because again, I think it's
really fascinating that you're saying that because like the
like, you know, best practices for collection management is all
about climate control and all about like managing your agents
of deterioration. And it's kind of funny in a
fucked up sort of way that by doing that really well, you can
create a perfect environment to just facilitate a lot of of
radon build up too. But you know, my former museum,
we have a ton of Morrison Formation fossils and we were
Museum of the Rockies is known for its Paleo Histology Lab,
which is all about cutting into the fossils.
So the Paleo Histology Lab manager, she wears a Dos Ometer
ring and she gets it measured on a regular basis and it has never
been high enough to spike anything at all.
I can talk about a lot about why we get freaked out by this, but
there's a lot of things that we do in everyday life that are
really high radiation that are not as bad as like these
fossils. But for her, it made the most
sense since she's literally cutting up Morrison bones.
She would wear it either on her finger or like on a necklace
around her neck. And then she was constantly
being measured at work about how much she was taking in.
Yeah, because you have to remember that there's a
difference between chronic poisoning and acute poisoning as
well. The EPA limit is that limit not
because if you have 5 as opposed to four, you're going to keel
over dead from acute. It's because long term you don't
want to be exposed to more than that all of the time.
So like this, this was an article where this museum
technician who did all this work kind of wrote it up.
And I the the end of the article was basically that Hagerman
since then has been working with another museum in Arizona
because they have poisonous petrified wood.
Right. Chin Lee.
Yeah. How they're using their HVAC
system because I guess their HVAC system is more energy
efficient. So I'm pretty sure they're
having to run the AC or at least the air all the time, which they
should have been doing because that was in the specifications.
So they should have been. I mean, I full up as a moron,
would have also done this if I was in charge.
I would have just kind of forgotten that I was supposed to
run it the full time. Why?
I'm not in charge of this sort of shit.
So like, I can't like fault them too much.
But like it did, it was in the paperwork.
So they should have been running it the full time.
But now they're going to be switching hopefully to a more
efficient system. And it's still nice that they
were actually like testing things and like talking about it
and not. That's the nice thing about
like, the Park Service, right? In.
Theory in theory, yeah. So yeah, I feel like, Oh yeah,
the the one last thing that I really had about radioactive
bones, so that's Hagerman is bullshit.
You should all test your bones and don't have them straight up
I guess in a closed lock cabinet because sometimes you need to
dilute these things. Oh and I didn't, I didn't.
I still don't fully understand why radon is harmful because my
eyes kind of blur and I get too many flashbacks to that
chemistry minor that I don't really remember or use.
But I did find a table that said basically part of the reason
that radon is fucking terrible is it also decays to a whole
bunch of other shit that you don't want in your lungs,
including. Lead, you know.
So, you know, you're, yeah, you're huffing a whole lot of
shit potentially. That's that's very bad for you.
Yeah. So if you're thinking at this
point listening to this, like, oh, bones are radioactive and we
use these radioactive elements to date things.
Does that mean that you can use bones with radioactive elements
to date things? And I mean no in part because.
They they try. They suck up.
They they try. I'm sure they do.
So there's been a couple studies that have demonstrated that
different animals like clams and I think even with the horses,
they suck things up preferentially.
So when you're doing, you know, any sort of radiometric dating,
you're assuming that there is that they started out with a
constant expected level of the parent and the daughter Adam.
But it sounds like at the very least with these horses and with
clams, they are not doing that. They are more preferential to
absorbing radon. So probably you're going to get
some, some weird results anyways.
But the other thing you have to remember is that this was not a
living horse wandering around suffering from uranium
poisoning. This was a horse that died.
And as it was getting per mineralized, which could have
taken, you know, 1000 years, 100,000 years.
But as that was happening, it was being per mineralized by
groundwater. So even if you could actively
date it, what the fuck would you be dating?
Right. You wouldn't be dating when the
animal died, you would be dating some general idea of when it was
per mineralizing with some problems as far as you know how
that was incorporated. So sadly probably not a great
idea. There's also I think been a
couple studies that have shown that the absorption is not even.
So even if you did for whatever reason want to do this, the
outside of the bone or the tooth might have more uranium than the
inside. So like you, you would get
different numbers. So it's useful if you want to
find them or kill people slowly, but otherwise?
And it's great if it's found in rock rocks, and then you can use
it as a time device if you will. But yeah, no, a buddy at
Petrified Forest, Adam Marsh, has done and tried because he
was in the same lab as Kelly. Well, kind of.
They were both in the Jackson School and Graduate School.
So he would also use the geochronology lab for some of
his work, which was trying to get absolute ages from dinosaur
bone and also teeth and see if you, and exactly what you're
saying is like you're not necessarily getting the actual
time of death. And the amounts varied quite a
bit and the numbers weren't making any sense in terms of
when this Chinle thing is Chinle old or Chianti years old.
We have a general grasp on that. And I mean, it's exciting.
I think there are better methods like not necessarily always
using uranium, but other decay product, you know, other
systems. You know, uranium lead is only
one that folks use. I'm sure he's upstairs just like
listing them off. I'm so sorry, but there's a lot.
I feel like I'm like, hello, God, tell me.
But there are a bunch of other things that MO rutile.
I know that's one. Nope.
Just shout radioactive things. Strontium.
No reaction, not yet, not yet, but there are other things.
So there it is promising, I do think.
Thank you for this lifetime. If you like the podcast, be sure
to really review a shit listen, not only being able to tell
choice, but we really, really, really appreciate it if you'd
like. So your more big problem is on
fossil theft, especially in the Morris information.
Rebecca Hunt Foster gave a great talk.
You can follow Amy on CP. This year where she showed him
that Megan on Instagram and TikTok as Geo and fabric
ownership there on that weird and dead on Instagram and
TikTok. A small pocket is private, but
the amount of Morrison fossils that you see for sale on eBay
and everywhere else like give a very strong indication that a
lot of buy puzzle canal, but we don't have a great way of
telling exactly. Where?
Geographically specimen is from at this point, but shit like
these radioactive elements could be really important in that
puzzle too, which is going to be huge for ethics of paleontology.
So that will be amazing if they get there.
So work on that. Rutil Strontium.
Well, that's radioactive fossils.
Except I realized as I was prepping this, I've tested the
wood in my house. I have not tested any of the
other fossils in my house. So I thought that for a Patreon
bonus, I could try and assemble this fucking Geiger counter and
we could all watch me struggle. Not only did I have a chemistry
minor, Amy, I was a chemistry tutor.
Like I was paid to teach people shit that I don't remember.
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Thank you for listening. Well, I opened this up and found
that there's no batteries. So I was going to go pause.
I'm going to pause the recording so it's not 7000 years long and
go see if I can find some batteries.