You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Amy Atwater.
And I'm Megan Wetherell, and we're two living scientists who
are weirdly excited about dead things.
On this week's episode, we're talking about dinosaurs in the
Arctic, dinosaurs in the Antarctic, and how and why they
lived in these far, far reaches of our globe.
Also, we talk about rafting again, but this time for rocks.
Like always, our podcast talks about some disgusting stuff, so
please read through the content warnings before continuing.
All righty then we are talking about very cold and not
necessarily cold but very far north, very far South things
today on our weird planet. This made me have a lot more
appreciation for planet earth and how cool it is.
I will be getting latitude wrong this entire time.
I just. Oh yes, I am fully prepared to
watch you just suffer through latitude.
In your defense, Very similar words, but like historically I
have noticed that that I am not. You've got a lot of strong
suits, honey, but this one is. It's not one of them.
I get it. It's it's not.
My brain likes to not make sense of that.
So this time we're switching it up and I'm going to be talking
about all things South Pole today, which I was going to
gloss over all of the human stuff because I was like, man,
whatever, until I've realized that all of these expeditions
had scientists with them and frequently had geologists with
them. So there are some really
interesting overlaps with paleontology and like European
racing to get to the polls, all all those countries.
So we'll just dive in with that. Giving you the year is it's
1911, His name is Robert Falcon Scott.
He has gone on a couple Antarctic expeditions before,
really pushing the boundaries of how far South he could go.
He sometimes worked with Shackleton, who we talked about
a little bit in reference to leopard seals before.
And they started out as friends, and then they decided that they
were enemies because Scott decided he wanted to go explore
a part of Antarctica that Shackleton was like, no, it's
mine. I claimed it.
And it was just, it sounded like it was very petty and stupid.
And it didn't really matter because Scott had a much
different ending than Shackleton did.
So he goes on this expedition from, you know, like 1910 or
something like that to get to the South Pole.
No one has gotten there yet. He's like, I'm going to fucking
do it. Shackleton just failed.
Fuck you, Shackleton. I'm going to go for it.
And they had all of these mishaps, like they took ponies
because Shackleton was like, ponies are great.
And then the ponies were not great.
They were not acclimated. Yeah, hooves on ice.
That's exactly what I think about as being good.
Yeah, let's get these tiny ass little hooves and put them on
slick surfaces. Yeah, exactly.
And we also we know for. Leopard seal food.
It's like, why not just try to use the leopard seal?
I don't know. But obviously, because of a lot
of other places and cultures and traditions, we can know that
dogs do this very well instead. And it turns out that a
Norwegian was also going to the pole at the exact same time.
And he was using a dog sled setup and team.
And they were like, yeah, we're fucking dogs.
We're Huskies were made for this.
And Scott's expedition was not doing so great.
And when they made it to the Pole, the Norwegian guy had
already been there a month or so before him.
They lost the race to the pole. The Norwegian people, our guy
just like left a tent and flashed lag and shit.
So if you scroll to your first picture, it's the picture of the
dejected Scott and crew having just lost the race to get to the
South Pole, looking really bummed out.
Wow, they do look really like most of the time when you look
at photos from like the 1900s, people look kind of bummed out.
But these these people just look exhausted, like they just
realized how useless horses are. More things.
And like racing to the pole, but I get it, you know, it's, it's
there. And so they were super dejected.
I got to this patch of snow a little bit too slow.
And I mean, they're all from England and stuff like that.
I'm sorry, the Norwegians already have quite the advantage
when it comes to polar expedition.
So duh, you lost to some folks from Norway.
Like it's. I'm not surprised by that at
all. So yeah.
Yeah, Scott wrote in his journal.
I had to save because I thought it was it's kind.
It's not that funny, but it's kind of funny.
The worst has happened. All the daydreams must go.
Great. God, this is an awful place.
Like a teenage girl's diary. Yeah, and I love how he's saying
the worst has happened but the worst has not happened yet.
No. So then it's like February,
they're like, fuck, OK, we we have to make do of this
experience some way somehow. And they hike towards this
Moraine where they actually saw rock instead of just ice for the
first time in like 14 weeks or something like that.
So they all start rock hounding and picking up rocks and they
find these fossil plants and they're like these are fucking
cool. So they literally create a bag
35 lbs of fossil plants that they then dragged and then.
Consolation prize. But they didn't get there and
they died on the ice all together with this bag of
fossils in their tent that they were going to die no matter
what. There was some miscommunication
with some other team mates or whatever somewhere else who were
supposed to meet them with the dog sled team.
That did not happen but it has been brought up many times.
I read in many accounts of like his so-called folly of adding
additional 16 kilograms of rocks to their burden as they were all
dying so. Whoops.
But but the fossils were Glossopteris, which is a
Permian, so Paleozoic age plant that had only ever been found in
places like South America, parts of Africa, and I think India
prior to this, maybe not even all of those places.
And this was around the time of Wegner figuring out how
continents were moving and shaking.
And these fossil that the name means tongue Fern, if you're
interested. Anyway, the tongue Fern became a
pivotal part of reconstructing how the continents have changed
since the Paleozoic, and how the position of Antarctica has also
changed so drastically that it was at once hospitable to lush,
beautiful plants and tropical animals as well.
But before all of this, this concept of the moving continents
was pretty out there, and it was because of finding fossils like
the Glossopteris that were found next to all of these dead guys
that helped us understand how continents change.
Do you think that? They like, felt like it was kind
of teasing the horses to have fossil plants that the horses
couldn't eat like. The horses were dead by this
point, Megan, the horses were. Long.
Dead, they were eaten. That's right, The benefit of
taking horses over dogs is there's more animal to eat.
That is true, but you can't feed horses dead Penguins.
Or maybe you can. I mean, horses will eat flesh.
In a tough search. Yeah, well, also just sometimes
because they can, right? Herbivores.
No judgment. No judgment.
Well that's wild. I I'm sorry that Glossopter has
helped curse these men to their deaths, but. 001 Other thing I
have to to know is that these were not the first fossil plants
found in Antarctica. The first ones were also found
by some different Norwegian guy. Sorry.
These are like the third, but arguably the most significant in
terms of identifying them to the same plant in different
continents. So good job, Scott.
Are we just saying that to make these people feel better?
They're dead. We're.
Not going to get haunted by them.
They they died, No. They're haunting all those
Norwegians or Norwegians. God, oh.
Norwegians, maybe this is a good segue to talk about paleo
latitude and paleo longitude, which are terms that we're going
to use a lot today. Latitude and longitude mostly
for Amy's sake. Uh, latitude is the horizontal
lines which actually tell you how far up towards the poles or
down towards the equator. That's counterintuitive.
It's. Counterintuitive longitude is
are you facing the sun? Are you away from the sun?
Longitude is harder to kind of reckon with as far as fossils
go. It's actually much harder to
figure out the longitude of a continent than it is to actually
figure out the paleo latitude. And I, I will say, and paleo
latitude just means ancient latitude.
So continents move quite a lot. They bump into one another.
They also disappear and they're created.
But like knowing where a patch of land was helps you understand
a lot about the climate and geology stuff.
So discovering the ancient latitude is kind of important.
And I have to say that, well, I do feel like I understand
latitude and longitude probably better than you at the very
least. Well, I definitely slow bar did
not fully understand paleo latitude because I forgot that
our planet is 3 dimensions and I just assumed you know you'll
look at a map, the map is flat and sometimes I forgot that the
world was not flat. It is.
Flat of my discovery in advance. Solid burn.
Anyways, so I learned how magnets work this week, which
was pretty exciting. So latitude is divvying up the
the round planet, but you can also figure out where your paleo
latitude is by magnetic particles, which I understood.
But because I thought the world was flat in my head, because the
only other ways I've used compasses is to look at the
difference between magnetic north and geographic N, it's
always been a little confusing to me how that could get you
paleo latitude. So to back up for a second, when
you have magnetic particles that are preserved in a rock, usually
in lava, they will basically become magnetically oriented
with our planet's magnetic poles.
So you can use those to tell important information about
which direction was the pole, because apparently that flippity
floppies and also it wobbles a little bit.
So it gives you a lot of information, but it doesn't just
give you like which direction is north because the magnetic pole
is 3 dimensional. It's not just horizontal as if
the world was flat, it's also up and down.
So if you have a particle forming and preserving that
magnetic particle and locking it in place, so no matter where you
move it on the planet, it can't rotate in the different
direction. If you do that at the pole, it
has a declination, which would be difference between magnetic
north, which is where our magnetic pole is, versus true
geographic N. It also has an inclination,
which is how far down is it? Which direction is it going
down? Right here on top of a pole.
It's 90°. If you're not, it's some other
variant of degrees. OK.
Yeah, yeah. That's how you can tell Bailey a
latitude. Basically, it tells you that
it's pointing straight through the planet.
You don't seem mind blown by this.
So clearly I, you haven't thought about it before.
That's what I'm going with. This blew my mind.
It was absolutely. I was like, Oh my God, this is
how it's worked the whole time. Magnets go up and down.
My compass doesn't do that. I I think it's good that we're
going to get jazzed on different parts of this because I had
sometimes earlier that I was bouncing off the walls and Kelly
was like, what the hell? And I was like, so you know, I
think it's good that we, yeah, I'm learning this is good.
I mean, this is perfect because a lot of my shit is based on
paleo mag stuff. So to be able to have this
foundation very useful and explaining why, because there's
a pretty large margin of error with reconstructing paleo stuff.
And the part part of this is what you're describing is it's
just it's three-dimensional. There's all these different
components. Those are all going to have
their own baggage in terms of error.
So, yeah. And if it's pointing down, it's
of course pointing directly at the magnetic pole.
And because our Earth is on a slight tilt, the magnetic pole
doesn't always match, I don't think ever matches to the actual
geographic North Pole. And the geographic North Pole is
the thing that actually really matters as far as climate goes
because that's the part that points at the sun or doesn't
point at the sun. So there is quite a lot of
wiggle room. I did find a really cool website
that seems pretty new. It's called Paleo latitude.com.
It is spelled the American way, so there's no stupid extra A's
in there British people. But it has like a listing of
Paleo latitude information. They get it, they did it wrong.
They're it's not Palatio, it's Paleo.
And yeah, it's as long as you click on something that was a
continent at the time, you can get paleo latitude information.
So you can't click on the West Coast of Oregon and figure out
where it was, but you can't click because that was in the
ocean. But anything that was a
consonant that we have information for, I will do some
interpolation stuff and tell you where it probably was, which is
very cool. That's handy because I was doing
a lot of eyeballing and yelling at these different articles for
being all over the place of acting like some of these
Jurassic Antarctic dinosaurs, They're like, they're so cold.
And I'm like, no, it was literally fucking 90° all the
time during this time period. Like they weren't fucking cold.
So it and some place, I mean, there's a lot of debate about
the exact placement of the continents.
You know, like it's great to have these tools, but people
still fight about where exactly they would have been located.
Yes. And yeah, they'll they'll always
be some tweaking. The other way you can do paleo
latitude is you can just take the continents and put them on a
little model and you can wiggle them around because you maybe
know where plumes were and where things were separating over
time. So you can get some model
answers as well. But yeah, magnetic is probably
one of the number one ways that people get paleo latitude
information. And with the Arctic, at least
since going back to like the time of the dinosaurs, which is
about as early as I looked, our continents like the North
America, Asia, we've kind of just been bumping up and down a
little bit near the Arctic. There's not actually a shit ton
of change as far as the landmass goes at the Arctic Circle.
It's up 10°, down 10°, but it's not like there was no
continental mass and now there's continental mass like slider
variations compared to the story of Antarctica, which as far as
continental drift goes, I understand it is a little bit
more exciting. It is indeed.
This was a good challenge because my own research is based
in North America. Almost.
Yeah, No. Every single fossil I've ever
dealt with and handled for the most part is North American and
is part of one of these former supercontinents.
That is not what Antarctica was a part of.
So this was good to jump into Guantuana, you know, and that's
essentially the southern giant proto early giant continent
things. Pangea, but they're all
together. Woo Pangea, they're all
together. Then they break up.
So what we now know as modern day Africa, South America,
Australia, India and Antarctica was this giant landmass called
Guandwana. If you've seen a sticker that
says Reunite Guandwana Land, this is a bit of a tongue in
cheek joke about bringing back this super continent that does
not exist anymore. So what does that mean for
Antarctica? When we talk about Antarctica
today, it is very cold. It is the covered in ice or
giant ice sheets, glaciers that cover the entire surface.
It has not always been that way. In fact, the major ice sheets
didn't really start get going again until the Miocene.
So you know, like 20 million years ago.
Before that, especially in the Cretaceous, so the end of the
age of dinosaurs into the Paleogene.
So the Paleocene, Eocene Thermal maximum, this is when the Earth
is very warm. And that is a lot of the
conditions in which life formed in Antarctica.
It wasn't the ice sheets that it has always been.
It was when it was more hospitable, both because of
global climate, but also because of paleo latitude.
So we know that about 450 million years ago, the crust
that now makes up Antarctica was on the equator, which is mind
boggling on its own to think about.
And then by about 200 million years ago, Antarctica, the crust
there was now joining up with parts of South America, Africa,
India and Australia to make up this Guan Donna that we've
talked about. And it did slowly split apart to
create Antarctica as a separate continent.
But this wasn't until probably, oh gosh, I didn't actually get
an exact number on that, but we're talking probably like
around the KT boundary around then just based on and maybe
even a little bit later because of the mammal fossils that we
find there. So during this time period where
we have a lot of the dinosaurs, so there are dinosaurs in
Antarctica from like this early Jurassic time period and then
also a early late Cretaceous time period.
And Antarctica was totally ice free at these times.
Like it was very, very hot. We know from foraminifera
fossils. So teeny tiny itty bitty
microscopic animals that live in the ocean can give us a good
idea of their bottom dwelling creatures.
So what the sediments. And again, if we're talking
about trying to interpret what these past latitudes and
climates may have been like, you want to understand like ocean
temperature, ocean placement. So you use all these itty bitty
ocean fossils. And they found out that
Antarctica was literally, during the Cretaceous, was thought to
be about 30°C, which is like 86°F at its southern area, which
would have even been getting close to the Antarctic Circle at
that time. So it's still pretty far South,
but it's so warm globally that it's not actually so much
affected by cold weather as it would be periods of darkness.
And that's what the animals would have had to be more
adapted for than just the cold when we're talking about at
least the dinosaurs that make up this area.
And I mean, it goes into a lot of the reasons why even today,
it is really, really difficult to for organisms to live in the
Arctic, the polar regions, and also in deep time.
My my poor segue back. To you, you did a beautiful job
and then I thank you. I appreciate the prompt and the
compliment. Yes.
So when we talk about ice, which we are going to still talk about
even though there were no ice caps, it is important to
recognize that there is a big difference between what we
currently recognize as ice, although our children might not
versus like winter freezing, right.
So like during the time of the dinosaurs ice existed.
It wasn't like a like a non existent concept, but it
probably was very seasonal. You have winter freezing and
then summer warming and in a lot of places you didn't have winter
freezing because it was too goddamn hot in the winter.
But at the polls at least and the Arctic poll, you probably
still did have winter freezing in some areas.
And the way that we can tell that is not just by us like
doing beard hand WAVY temperature modeling things,
although frankly we can do that too.
There is geologic evidence for glaciers, for ice caps and for
things like winter freezing on lakes.
That is not an actual ice cap and it does kind of differ.
So some of that geologic evidence includes things like
this weird mineral that sounds like a Wizard of Oz reference.
It's called a glendinite, and it's like a calcium carbonate,
like limestone thing, but it forms in cold water.
And during the Mesozoic, it pretty much only seems to have
formed in like the Baltic region.
So it tells you that water was getting cold at least down at
the bottom of the ocean in kind of the northern portion of the
Northern hemisphere. You also get things like
tilites, which is a glacier rock deposit.
So if you have big glaciers, they make like kind of distinct
looking formations. And we are going to talk now
about rafting again. Except.
Yeah, I or. Yes, rocks.
Oh, oh, I'm even more excited. Yeah, Oh yeah.
It's not just sleepy, tiny, almost dead monkeys, it's also
rocks. That raft.
So rocks rafting. Another name for this is also
drop stone. A drop stone is a special
glacial feature. Basically, when you have a big
glacier kind of plowing its way down a valley, it will pick up
and incorporate rocks into the ice.
And then when it meets the sea and it breaks into icebergs,
those rocks are like suspended particles until the iceberg
melts. And so you get like these big
chunks of weird glacier rocks that melt out of icebergs and
they fall. And they're called drop stones,
both because they're dropping, but they also make like visible
depressions in the sediment. So they like drop and dent it.
Essentially they had some force to it as it was dropping.
Yeah, yeah. So drop stones that come from
ice rafting, especially with glaciers, either knocking over
rocks or pulling them up, is very frequently pretty big
rocks. And it's a little bit weird to
look at because you both get that divot underneath the rock
because it's slammed into the mud.
But it's also a very big difference in particle sizes,
because when you're talking about rocks, you get tiny, tiny,
tiny little particles deposited when the water is slow, and big
ones are usually deposited when the water is fast because that's
the only thing capable of moving big rocks.
But with drop stones and other glacial features, you get this
weird like lots and lots of little tiny sediments like slow
water with like this weird giant big rock in the middle of
nowhere. But you can also get those
through other methods. They're usually smaller.
So the the drop stones we're going to talk about now are
usually things like pebbles, but can you think of some things
that might potentially kick rocks into a lake or into the
ocean? That would bring rocks into a
lake or an ocean besides, well, let's see, some really kinky
dinosaur sex lakes probably #1. Is that because the the
dinosaurs are incorporating the rocks into their sex lives or
they're dying mid coitus and their gastroliths are being
deposited? Both.
So I think yes, things that can. OK, So you're saying that are
just like isolated rocks though? Not like a rock fall, some sort
of landslide lahar? Landslide, landslides in lahars
will, but they bring down lots of them, right?
So these deposits, it's often like single ones.
So one of the ways that you can get this is you can get this
with trees or tree throw. Tree throw.
Oh yeah. Have you not heard this term
before? No.
It's a it's a geomorphology thing.
My husband is a geomorphologist and so he talks about fucking
tree throw all the time, so I've heard of it a lot.
But trees love to snuggle rocks very aggressively with their
roots and so they will actually break up the rock.
And if a tree gets knocked over in like the wind, it pulls the
rocks up. And so it's called throwing
because it does move them. However, it's not like a fucking
catapult, right? Like, it's not, it's not sending
them two miles into the ocean. Yeah, so you.
Do get you get some short scale movement from trees.
You can of course also have animals knock things into other
things, right? So like, it's not like dinosaurs
were out there skipping rocks or anything, but you can get
occasional rocks. Well, you don't know.
That that's true. I guess maybe that was like what
the tale was for on sauropod dinosaurs.
It was like really good flinging action it.
Could just be a bonus that doesn't have to be a.
Standard, standard. Yes, always.
OK, OK, tell me then. Some of the other ones are
things like shoreline freezing. So instead of having like a big
glacier, if during the winter you have like the shoreline gets
ice on it, it's the same process, right?
The ice will grab some of the bigger rocks that are up on the
shoreline and then as the ice melts, sometimes it'll drift
out. You'll get like mini icebergs
essentially, and so you'll have pebbles and cobbles dropped.
So this is what people think was happening in a place that I
should have looked up the pronunciation of.
God damn it, here we go. Anyways, the Jingar Basin is a
Triassic slash Jurassic site in China and it was a pretty large
lake system. And some recent research has
suggested that even though in the Jurassic slash Triassic
carbon dioxide was like 2000 parts per billion.
So fucking enormous, so warm. But even at that time, they
think that there was seasonal freezing of this lake because
you see these little stones that they think were being frozen by
shorelines. There was one other method, and
I agree that it's probably with shoreline freezing.
They think that the paleo latitude of this site in China
was probably like 70 to 75° in latitude, so pretty far north.
So it would make sense, but they very casually mentioned in this
paper that they didn't think it was algae rafting.
And then I went of algae rafting.
Right. Yeah.
So algae rafting is something that we have seen in like
glacial marine settings. So not super far north
necessarily, not like polar N, but like areas where you do have
glaciers. And it's not like my first
vision was like, you know, that nasty, nasty, thick, like algae
that forms on the tops of lakes and stuff during the summer.
Like, you get like a blanket of it.
I thought it was like somewhat kicked a Pebble on it and then
it like drifts out into the middle of the like.
Magic carpet, right? And The thing is that that could
happen, but algae doesn't melt. So if you had a big old nasty
carpet of algae, it would basically go down with the ship.
You would only have algae plus rock, not algae or rock.
So that sort of algae rafting would have like a big organic
layer. So that wasn't what they were
talking about. What they were talking about is
an algae that is called bladder rack or sea grapes.
It's like a seaweed. And I'm giggling because the
scientific name, this is definitely not how the genus is
pronounced. But I'm going to it's it's fuck
us. Oh good.
Fuck us, the algae is responsible for algae rafting.
Yeah, it does. It is I I mean was there any
other option? No, Yeah.
So fucus is a seaweed and it has a holdfast and then it has it's
called bladder rack or sea grapes because it has like these
little like relatable things that help keep it upright.
Yeah, it sounds disgusting. Yeah, it it looks pretty gross,
but because it clings to the rock, just like with tree throw,
if the algae plant gets dislodged, sometimes a little
Pebble will come with it. Oh God.
So you'll get. Oh my gosh.
But The thing is, and because it has the little the little
bladders that help it float, it can actually float quite some
distance. So it's a a little, a little,
it's a raft, it's a, it's an algal.
It's a little raft. Water.
Little net, little exploration. It's dragging it along like a
little anchor. Cute.
It's very cute, yeah. Usually, however, you get that
kind of blown up onto the the shore.
So that's not necessarily going to explain finding a lot of
drops. Also, they made a really good
point that you only ever find one Pebble per plant because
they only have one hold fast. So they really can only they can
only do so much damage, which is why I do believe these these
scientists when they say that they think it was ice rafting.
Well, specifically shoreline freezing in this area in China
during the Jurassic when you have 2000 parts per million of
CO2. Hot which is not so hot.
It's getting. Gross.
Oh that that is yeah, cuz I mean, they so often it's
referred to as these like ice free world.
And your point is that it is free of ice caps and there could
still be ice present at especially at again, these more
polar places, especially if you aren't getting light for 30 to
60 days, which is what you can dealing with when you get within
that thirty negative or yeah, and get quite cold.
Yeah, because you have. So I had to think about this for
my own, for my own. I was like, so the equator, 0,
the poles 90. OK, All right.
That was my start. We're trying to understand when
when a paper says it was at 60° latitude or even further South,
I'm like, yeah, but what does that mean?
So we can go ahead and scroll. You're going to scroll past a
picture of the fossil glycopterist that I forgot to
tell you to look at. It's quite beautiful.
It's like, actually lovely. Is this the the death
glysopteris? I couldn't figure out where that
one is. It's probably like lost in the
British Museum or something. So no, this is not one of the
deaf tongue ferns. This is just a very pretty
example from Wikipedia. That's very pretty.
So that's like this vibe again. So when you a lot of and they
have other other accounts of finding like beach leaves and
other fairly broad leaf plants. And if you go into some of the
basics of paleo botany and reconstructing paleo
environment, the bigger the leaf usually the more tends to be a
more tropical climate, not always, but a lot of times the
bigger that. And then you can scroll on down
to see exactly where I'm talking about in terms of where
Antarctica was back in the days of Guan Duana.
So you can see the equator is going there.
It's yes. I can't even imagine.
I think a lot of these reconstructions are based on
Paleo mag, which is interesting too.
And all I want to point out here is that E Antarctica is at the
30th degree line latitude, so it is 30° South of the equator, OK?
So that is around where you're going to find places like Cape
Town, South Africa today, and a big chunk of what is now
Australia. So again, just thinking about
the climates of those places, yes, they can get cold, yes,
they can get snow, but most of the time they're still quite
warm. And the definition of the polar
circle is I think 2/3 S, so it's 66.33333° to be considered in
the Antarctic polar circle. So a lot of these dinosaurs.
So in the early Jurassic, we know that, OK, we don't know the
exact paleo latitude, but we do know that it was somewhere
between probably 30 and 60°. And so 64 frame of reference is
Kelly is from, my husband is from Juneau, AK, which is from
about 660° latitude. But north of the equator,
Alaska's a northern, so again, like Juno is one of the farthest
S cities you can be in in Alaska.
So it's really rainy and it definitely gets very, very dark.
I would. I've been there over Christmas
or New Year's. It isn't 100% dark though.
The sun rises around 10:00 AM and sets again by like 2:00 PM.
So you get about four hours even in some of the darkest days.
So to really get complete darkness for a good chunk of the
time, you need to be like above 60° or below depending on how
you define how you look at the globe.
Well, it's above regardless, right?
Because it's going counting the same.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. Yes, yes.
I, I nod. So just talking about some of
these animals, we had this early Jurassic group of dinosaurs.
So Cryolophosaurus, which is like so close to
Brachyolithosaurus, but cryo is going to be the indicator that
it's cold, right? It's like the cold crested
lizard. I want to just clarify that it
probably wasn't that cold that much, maybe a couple of times,
but it wasn't like this fucking current Antarctic dinosaur.
Like I just a lot of, I just so much of the stuff I was reading
was like it was so cold and I was like, no, it's wasn't.
But it did probably experience like 30 to 60, three days of
complete darkness in a given winter.
And that is something really interesting.
I read this interesting paper that was like, OK, the dinosaurs
had two options. They can either hoof it on out
of there, right? Because you're still attached to
like, South America, Africa, Australia, maybe you can get get
north. And then they have this whole
argument. They're like, yeah, but one of
the dinosaurs from Antarctica, from the Cretaceous stuff is an
ankylosaur, Anarctopelta. And.
And they were like, itch can't migrate.
It's worthless at that. It has such stupid legs and such
a stupid body. I I just was really, really
entertaining. So this whole paper is going
well. If they can't migrate, then they
have to essentially hunker on down.
But a lot of times it doesn't seem like they have a lot of
good evidence for hibernation or anything like that.
It's just that because it was warm enough, there was still
plant growth and they could rely on their other senses to get
through the month to two months of pure darkness, they were just
fine. It doesn't look like they were
hibernating or anything quite like that, because again, while
it was S, it still was quite warm for both the early Jurassic
and this Cretaceous stuff. I also just have to tell you
that as I was doing this, there were so many fun little Easter
eggs of animals that we're obsessed with that have a tie to
Antarctica. And one of the first ones is in
the same formation that Crylophosaurus is discovered is
also so asaurapodimorph. So there's the first one for me
to go, what is its name? Glacialosaurus, Something like
that. Sure, we'll go with that.
And yeah. And then we've got a cool
ankylosaur that's more like. So yeah, the early Jurassic
stuff is like 185,000,000 years old.
People really love Cryolophosaurus because it was
one of the biggest theropod meat eating dinosaurs of all meat
eating dinosaurs across the world at this time, which is
pretty cool that it was in Guan Dwana and it had this stupid
kind of comb Crest on its face that has been argued if it had
any. Yeah, very.
It's very, very, yes. Bird ornamentation style.
And a lot of folks think it's probably for species recognition
because it looks like it would have been worthless for like,
interspecies combat. And, you know, people want to
make it all about, like, violence.
So a lot of folks are saying no, it was probably just for.
Because that's about chickens. Use their.
For looking good. Bitch slapping each other with
their heads right. It's definitely always
aggression, never attraction. Never.
Yeah, never. But do they do that?
I'm not familiar enough with chickens it seems.
Like they don't have chickens, don't head butt chickens have?
They have nasty ass claws. So they will they'll stab each
other with their claws. Yeah, or pack each other.
Yeah, well, that was that's probably what Cryolithosaurus
was doing too. I don't know.
Everybody loses it for cry, you know, cry me a river.
It was definitely like dealt with darkness, but I don't think
it actually had to. They don't think that it was
probably like burrowing. There's no indication that any
of these dinosaurs here were good at burrowing, but they did
compare. This was also about the North
Pole hadrosaur legs to the legs of Caribou and how they are
similar adaptively and this comparative method to show that
they were well built for long migrations depending on the
season. But then they just kept going
back to the stupid ankylosaur and being like ankylosaur.
Why do you not follow the rules? Yeah, it was like they literally
said it lacked fossorial adaptations and was likely
incapable of finding sufficient shelter, so it must have been
subsistence over winter to be the most acceptable means of
adapting to these dark, dark polar days.
And they also really want to point out that these dinosaurs
are like, no, no, no, no, no. They were able to handle colder
in climates because these assemblages from the Jurassic
and Cretaceous stuff have dinosaurs but lack turtles and
crocodiles. And therefore they also made a
point that This is why dinosaurs did not go extinct at the KT
boundary because they can't handle the cold.
That's obviously bullshit because Cryolophosaurus was like
building igloos and having itself a grand old time.
So I take all of that with a big grain of salt because I have
seen many dinosaur paleo sites where they just ignore turtle
and crocodile material as they're digging up dinosaurs and
pay no mind to it. And I'm also like, I don't think
anyone is claiming that the asteroid hit and then just
cooling is what did it to the Dinos.
I think there were a lot. A.
Lot of negative factors, yes. So yeah, that's kind of the the
take on some of the southern dinosaurs is that they maybe
they could handle some gold. They definitely handle handle
darkness and the Ankylosaurus couldn't migrate away.
Ankylosaurus were just like fucking facet hounds that were
just stuck where they were. Wow, that's really interesting
because the papers I read for the Arctic had excruciatingly
different interpretations. Not only.
Do they not do things like say Oh well the cold must have
killed the dinosaurs? There are papers out there that
straight up claim the cold is what actually gave birth to
dinosaurs. That that I did not see that
coming. No, no I didn't.
You even wrote it in here and I didn't.
I didn't even pick up what you're putting down.
It's a pretty alien concept, but some of our evidence comes from
places like the Jungar Basin, which is that it was at 70 to
75° latitude. So it was higher than Juno.
It probably had some colder winter temperatures.
It probably had some darkness. But in one paper, they noted
that, you know, Jung Garbyson is like there.
I think it's maybe the only high latitude Triassic slash Jurassic
site that we found so far. So like that's part of why it's
so exciting. There's not actually a ton of
evidence for dinosaurs there. They found a couple of
footprints, but this paper also discussed evidence for kind of
a, a differentiation at the end of the Triassic between where
dinosaurs were and where other tetrapods were if you looked
across the planet. So during the Triassic and the
Jurassic, they pointed out that the continents were all smashed
together to an extent that essentially an animal could
theoretically walk from pole to pole, essentially, not all the
way necessarily. And that would be a very
exhausting journey, but there was like a lot of room for these
animals to live in. And they pointed this out
explicitly because because at that point you do not find
herbivorous dinosaurs close to the equator.
You find them further away from the equator because they
theoretically were getting out competed by animals that could
deal with hotter temperatures a little bit better.
Because being an herbivore, you have gut biomes, right?
So like it's you're already bigger, which makes you warmer.
If you have gut bacteria kind of digesting thing for you, they
will also produce heat. So that makes you warmer.
And then they also point out that dinosaurs had feathers of
some kind or another. And it looks more and more like
maybe that was an ancestral characteristic because every
single like every one of the big branches of dinosaurs has some
sort of feather somewhere in its family.
And so do pterosaurs. And while pterosaurs are not
dinosaurs, they are below dinosaurs on that evolutionary
tree. So it seems likely that feathers
were something that they had in common, and feathers initially
evolved for thermal regulation, for insulation.
So these animals, these dinosaurs probably were a little
bit hotter. They were probably warm blooded.
They may have had like some down and that made it so that they
weren't very competitive with other animals in kind of the
middle zones of our planet because it was too fucking hot.
So at the time of the Jurassic, SAS, Triassic, when you have
2000 parts per million of CO2, you know, you have seasonal
freezing up at higher latitudes, but you have dinosaurs that seem
to be dealing with that pretty well.
And we don't have at that point, we have evidence that they were
up there because as we have footprints and stuff, but we
don't have a lot of high latitude sites at that
particular time period with dinosaurs.
So we can't tell if they were there year round.
But they theorized in some of these papers that essentially
that gave herbivorous dinosaurs in particular, a little bit of
an advantage when a big disaster happened at the end of the
Triassic known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province.
So this was a longer eruption. It happened for I think several
million years. And while it did also pump more
of that goddamn CO2 into the air and was partly responsible for
the extremely high CO2 of the Triassic, it also sometimes
would create volcanic winters because it would have dropped
particles like sulfur, which means that the Triassic would go
from really fucking hot to really fucking cold.
And it means that while when it would get hotter, those hot
adapted animals could just kind of move up and out, when it
would get colder, they would start to lose.
So these tetrapods, not the dinosaurs, they would lose
basically like niche space, but the dinosaurs had already been
adapted. They were already they were born
in the cold, the very limited gold of the Triassic and they
were ready to take over, which is why we see this massive
explosion of of herbivorous dinosaurs in the Triassic.
Sorry, explosion in the Jurassic.
Wow. But we do notice that this
actually kind of continues with sauropods in particular.
So the biggest of the big herbivorous dinosaurs, they
actually seem to have preferred cooler climates, which doesn't
mean that they were like, let's go like shoot down an ice cap.
But like as far as the climate extremes go, they would have
they were a little bit more interested in cooler climates
than they were in the Super heated kind of Equatorial
regions. So the Arctic gave birth to
dinosaurs. That is, that is, I mean, I was
just like, yeah, those large bodied animals want nothing to
do with the equator. It was like elephants, rhinos.
Oh. Those, but they're still
nowhere. They're still nowhere as big as
the sauropods. Like not even not even close.
So as someone who was who went through the last part of my
pregnancy in the summer, I wanted to be as far north as
humanly possible. It's way hotter this summer and
I am just like, thank you science.
I'm not pregnant. I would be so be so miserable.
It's it's a more recent thing. I think that the paper I was
reading it came out like in 2022 or something.
So it definitely has some some ways to go to be proven and
looking for early Triassic sites with higher latitude are
definitely going to be kind of key.
But we do know that at least in the Arctic by the Cretaceous
dinosaurs were fucking adapted for the Arctic.
Like we still don't 100% know how they were dealing with the
darkness. It looks like some of them maybe
had pretty good eyesight, but we do suspect that some of them
were living there year round. They weren't just like the
Ankylosaurus that just got ditched.
They seemed to have. Been guys voluntary.
So there's a Arctic site in Alaska called the Prince Creek
Formation, and it had at the time it was about 80 to 85°
latitude. So really, really far north,
very close to the the north. That's very far because of that.
Very close, right, that's. Super far right, like 90 years N
so that's not far off. And as a result, they would have
had up to 120 days of continuous winter darkness, which is
there's a lot. And that's a lot.
Of course, when you have 120 days of continuous winter
darkness, you also have 120 days of light.
So that's the thing about the Arctic is you can't just be
like, let me invest in great night vision because then you're
going to be blind during the summer.
So you have to, you have to find some way of dealing, right?
You have to be adaptive. And at the time, it had a mean
annual temperature of 6°C, which is 43°F, which sounds insanely,
yeah, until. So I looked up.
OK, sounds insanely cold to me. And then I looked up what the
mean annual temperature is for both where I live in central
Washington and where you live in Colorado, and my mean annual
temperature is 8°C or 47°F. Fuck my life, why did I move
here? And then yours is 10°C or 50°F.
So it's. Too hot.
And of course, yes, as it's not like Amy is out here sweating.
When it gets to be 60°F, it does get very hot both in Colorado
and in Washington, and it gets very, very cold.
We have many days here of negative temperatures.
So it is important to recognize that these mean annual
temperatures are an average of the entire year.
Like you don't have a 40° summer.
You have, you know, negative degree winters and positive
degree summers, right? Yeah.
And it's just all on the opposite time of year if you're
on the South Pole, which is. That is.
Weird. I don't like that, remember.
The the, the hemisphere season thing, that one does fuck with
me. But we do know that in Prince
Creek formation, even though you know, it is a lower annual
temperature, it's not probably as cold as it seems when you
think about mean annual temperature.
But there probably were freezing conditions in the winter.
There was probably occasional snowfall.
But we do know for a fact that dinosaurs were here year round.
So you need some very serious evidence to know that dinosaurs
weren't ditching at certain times of the year.
And that is of course eggs or babies, because if you have eggs
or babies, neither of those things are great at moving
neither eggs nor babies, so. Right.
I mean, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But but the. Eggs in particular.
Don't don't birds that migrate have their babies?
Where do they, you know, do they?
They don't nest all along. I guess they.
Nest in one spot. They do.
I don't know, nest in one spot. But they also have much faster
growth, right? So it would have taken a
sauropod or a hydrosaur dinosaur much longer to achieve
sufficient growth to get the fuck out of there by the
beginning of the winter. So they think that because 70.
So there's a bunch of dinosaurs found in the Prince Creek
formation. 70% of the families have a baby of some kind.
So we know that they were probably laying eggs there.
We haven't found eggs I guess yet, but we found like
perinatal, so very close to being born, very recently born
and they also find several other growth stages.
So there's like kind of a full family tree effect that's
occurring there. And given the the growth rates
of dinosaurs, they don't think that they were growing
insufficient speed to get out of there and come back for the next
year. Yeah, I feel that.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So in the end, we basically just think that maybe dinosaurs were
too slow to be migrating annually, but they definitely
lived in the polls at least for some time of the year.
Yeah, some had those sexy long legs like those modern Caribou,
and some had stupid legs like Meg Kylos.
I'm just kidding. I love Meg Kylosaurs.
It is just really funny to picture them migrating like,
come on, That's that's, that's great.
I love to picture like alternative travel modes for
them, like maybe they were like body boarding down the coast or
something and that's the only way they got anywhere.
Yeah, but yeah. And kylosaurs not long legged.
They were. If anything, it's the turtle,
turtle, turtle. It is the turtle.
This is they're just hunkering down and floating downriver and
downstream and hoping that they get to a place where they can
keep eating. Just rafting just.
Rafting, of course. But yeah, they were there at
some parts of the year at the very least.
And yeah, that's the story of blue dinosaurs, at least as it
stands. But I'm sure there's more
research to come. Thank you for listening.
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Praz Kunal. Editing services provided by The
Amazing. Pretty Bradley, hosted by and
researched by us, Amy Atwater and Megan Weatherall.
Thanks for listening. I I had a student in my one of
my geology 101 classes at like the very end of the class come
up and take like a selfie with me.
I think it was like a Snapchat and just tell me that the earth
was flat and then walk out with a Dick head.