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 episode, we talk about dead animals and tombs together,
some of whom seem more excited to be there than the.
Others from ominously falling ash to excuse me, just let me
just squeeze in there and presumably fighting to the
death. We talk about all the
circumstances of how these couples came to be.
Also a weird amount of time spent discussing the exact
timing of rigor mortis. Like always, our show talks
about some disgusting things and sad dead animals, so please
check the warnings in the description here we are together
today to talk about fossil friends like you and me were
fossil friends. We.
Are gathered here today. We are gathered here today to
continue to praise the devil. We're talking about fossil
friends, and I don't mean me and Megan's amazing friendship.
What we mean are animals or organisms that have been
preserved together in the fossil record.
And our big questions today are trying to discern, OK, were they
doing that on purpose? Were they trying to hang out?
Or was it preservation? Is it is this an artifact of
taphonomy? Like what happens between an
Organism being, you know, like dying and being discovered?
Or were these organisms actually interacting?
What's the nature of those interactions?
And how the heck do we ever get preservation that allows for us
to even ask these questions? Like what sorts of ingredients
do you need to be able to preserve you and your best
friend forever for 100 million years, 100 million years.
So arguably the most famous, they're not friends in this
scenario. I'll just start with that.
This is it's frenemies. We're fossil frenemies.
Sometimes they might be friends, Sometimes they might be enemies.
Sometimes they might be roommates.
Sometimes they might be roommates with a like a winky
emoji. You know, that's really the the
big question here. All of these could be
interspecies love affairs. I don't know.
Except for the ones that are very clearly like mother and
child. Let's.
Just Oh yeah, yeah. No, this is not not Game of
Thrones bullshit. Not an Oedipus right now, right?
Yeah, you're right. Thank.
You're right, though, frenemies is important.
We do a lot of the stuff we're talking about, at least what I'm
talking about. I got stuck with all the
dinosaur stuff this week. I mean, I am braced all the
dinosaur stuff this week and embracing is a good turn.
OK, so I'm just cutting to it. The dueling dinosaurs, right?
The dueling. I've been hearing about these
fucking fossils for over a decade now.
Like well over a decade now. I'm kind of a little over it,
but I've been excited about the more recent developments in
this, mostly because the people working on it now are very cool
people. So the dueling dinosaurs is one
of the best known cases of dinosaurs found together in the
fossil record and have been very much interpreted as fighting.
It is a juvenile T Rex and a Triceratops that was found on
private land in Montana in 2006. It only came to public attention
in, like, 2011 because they started such an impressive
marketing campaign to sell it. It was very controversial then.
It's very controversial now. I've actually had a role in
this. I kind of forgot about it.
And then I was like, oh, yeah, I had to, like, go testify in
front of the Montana Legislature on this when I was working at
Museum of the Rockies in Montana.
So why this specimen was found on private land?
OK. And it's a very sexy specimen.
And so they were like, well, we're going to sell it.
We're not going to, you know, give it to a museum.
We're going to sell it. They had a really hard time
trying to sell it and then eventually they got an offer,
which is where it is now with the North Carolina State
University Museum. And then since the OK, so this
is the this is the this is the T.
So when you are a landowner and Megan, you are I'm not I, I
don't know that I don't count. I shouldn't be able to vote.
You can own. You can own your land.
When you own your land, you very rarely own your mineral rights.
Mineral rights are subsurface rights to land.
That is way more confusing and patchwork quilt like.
It is just chaotic. You like a one piece of land
that's one individual family. My own though surface rights to
there could be a dozen different players involved with those
mineral rights. It is very complicated and it
exists because minerals, some of them are worth a shit ton of
money. It's all about economic,
economic value. So they're separated and a lot
of times this is, is like Shell, Texaco, all these groups are
going to own your mineral rights and you don't own the the
surface. You will own the surface rights,
but not the mineral rights. So when this fossil, it turns
out, was going to be sold for a heck of a lot of money, the
people who owned the mineral rights to that land came in and
said no, no, no, no, no, that's ours.
We want that money because yeah, yeah, yeah.
We own the mineral rights. And fossils, by definition, are
minerals. Therefore, they should be a part
of this. I mean, it was a freaking.
It was a shit show. It went to the Montana Supreme
Court. I, I don't remember.
I think I testified in like 2019.
We were very on the side of no, no, they're not for like a ton
of reasons, mostly that like a therefore you're making all
fossils be an economic mineral resource and they're not all.
So now all of a sudden if I just want to pick up some like
ammonites that I find on my own land now I don't own them
because they're fossils. And so technically the whoever,
it just gets really confusing. It all also really threatens a
bunch of fossil ownership claims in other places and other parts
of the state. So again, if we look at what has
already been done, it was just very weird, especially because
it's so fragmented and it can just be make access almost just
like not possible. So eventually, I mean, and it's
all because I spoke to them. On yeah, obviously, yeah.
It's like, hello, right? Fossils are not mind.
We don't process them. We're not like putting them in,
grinding them up. I mean, you can, yeah.
I guess, yeah. And I mean, some of them have
minerals, like there's the ones that are opalized, but that's a
totally separate weird hybrid case, so.
You can get pyrites disease in a fossil, but pyrite is pretty
worthless too. So yeah, we just got to find
that dinosaur with a diamond up its butt and then that will
that'll cause some controversy. That'll be that'll be all right.
So eventually the Montana Supreme Court came down and was
like, no, they're not mineral rights because of everything I
just talked about. So that came down, which means
they were able to finally sell the fossil to North Carolina
State. It's with paleontologist I
admire a lot. Doctor Lindsay Zano is leading
the charge on this and one of the main preparators is a friend
of mine, Nikki Simon. Amazing human.
So I know it's in good hands now, but the question has been
so did this juvenile T Rex and this triceratoid, were they
actually dueling? Were they actually fighting or
did they just get washed in together?
Now the official stance by Zano is that, well, we haven't
actually studied the specimen yet, it is still very actively
being prepped. I'm pretty sure they have a live
feed that you can go watch it be prepped in real time.
The slowest live feed. Like I hate prep work so I find
it very. I find it very actually.
Go ahead and scroll to the first picture to see how it was at
least when Nat Geo got an image of it.
See I vaguely when I remember this story I remember seeing
pictures of some black bones and like just always some dude in a
cowboy hat leaning over them. I don't know if it was.
Right. Like I don't know if it was the
same guy or if it was just like classic white guy and a cowboy
hat. Like could have been a stock
image. Like that is the stock image
from Montana, I think. But I remember the fossil being
better prepped than this. So apparently we loaded up in my
mind. Interesting.
That is not what it was. Yes.
No, not especially to sell it for what they were trying to
sell it for is also really interesting.
It's like buying something that you have to do years of work on.
I guess that's like me trying to.
Find a house right now, Tesla, it's in 16 pieces.
You have to put it together. Yeah.
Oh, and no, we're not giving you a break in the price.
Actually we're trying to sell it for the most of fossils ever
been sold for before. We do not know.
We don't know how much that that they purchased it for.
So that is kind of a secret, but they have kept it.
Yeah. They, I mean, incredible work
with the friends group that they had to bring together to raise
enough funds. And as someone who is in
development, I'm like damn. Yeah, who are those friends?
I want those friends. I want that money.
Yeah, I definitely. OK.
So of course, the other reason that this specimen is very
controversial is because it's a juvenile T Rex.
So therefore it is potentially going to be informative into the
nano tyrannis debate that we've touched on before.
But again, this is this idea that a very, very small but
vocal group of dinosaur paleontologists have stated that
there is a pig me tyrannosaur present in the Hell Creek
formation. And not just tea.
Did you just say? Pig me or pick me.
That is how they describe nano tyrannis, pig me tyrannis.
OK like small, not like pick me, not like I'm the best.
I'm not like other Tyrannosaurus.
Rexes sorry, that's my Nope. I mean it is that too.
They think that and it's pig me yes and yeah, because this is
associated with, you know, like Bob Baker and stuff and so he
loves a good miniature. Anyway, not very many people are
on the nano Tyrannus train. The folks that are very vocal
though, So you hear a lot about it.
Those are the folks who've been a big proponent and marketing
this and trying to sell it for a lot.
So I just I anytime that there's money involved with the
scientific opinion, I just a big grain of salt, right?
I don't know if what their intentions are, but that is one
of the reasons that dinosaur paleontologists are excited
about this specimen is it's yet another sample size to go into
this stupid debate about if there was another T Rex out
there or a smaller tyrannosaur out there.
Or if what most folks think is that it is a juvenile T Rex,
right? Like we just find we don't find
just adults. So then some folks are like,
well, it wasn't collected as a scientific specimen, so it is
worthless. That's what Jack Warner said,
which I find very funny coming from him because I had to clean
up his collections in office after him.
And let me tell you about poor scientific quality.
So I think that's a big, you know, and it is really
interesting. Zano and her team are going back
out to the original site to understand it in context of the
geology to be able to answer that question better.
So some really cool stuff is going to be coming from it.
But honestly, you know, it's it's been very much marketed as
they are fighting, fighting to the death dinosaurs.
And we really have no freaking clue about that yet.
So we're, we're, we're still, we're still out on that.
Like, that is a lump of mud with like a dinosaur draped on top of
it. And the only reason that I can
believe that there's more than one is that there appears to be
too many legs. But like, it's just a bunch of
legs coming out of a lump of mud.
I feel like ascribing anything to this at this point is pretty
pretty. You're reading into it too much.
So if it's not 2 dinosaurs fighting, what could it be?
Amy, what is it? What could it be?
It could. Again, it could just be absolute
happenstance. It could just be that they died
near each other or they were both in the same debris flow.
They were both in the same depositional environment.
They were both in the same river.
We've talked about this, right? I mean, this is the sturgeon
too. It's like, was it purposefully
up that hydrosaur's ass or did it just get shoved there by
nature And the beauty that is nature?
So great the the the dueling dinosaurs is not helpful in
terms of having a solid answer on if this is just how they were
buried or if this is actually an interaction.
So what are some other examples of true interactions, if there
are any? If you really want to know more
about like whether or not these organisms interacted, I mean,
there's going to be cases where you can never ever prove one way
or another. There is, however, there are
cases where you can at least strongly suggest because you a
have a fully prepped specimen or a way to look inside of the
specimen, like the example I'm going to talk about.
And you have like forensic evidence, right?
It's not like they wrote like, love notes to one another if
they were all hanging out, like you have to have some sort of
evidence of interaction. 2 animals being next to each other
dead doesn't mean that they were, you know, fighting one
another, right? So the example that I'm going to
talk about next is significantly better studied.
It is not controversial. It's just very, very cool.
And it's jealous, not dinosaurs, which is also a real big point
in its favor. That's one of the reasons why
it's cool. Yeah, yeah.
This one kind of blew up a little bit I think like two
years ago. It's a story of two different
species of animals found preserved in the same Burrow.
So the two different animals are Thronaxodon, which is a
synodont, which is like a fox sized, not yet a mammal, kind of
fucked up looking carnivorous, maybe thing land dwelling, which
is important because the other animal it was found with is
Bruma Stega, which is a Temnis bundle, which is a kind of an
amphibian, I think not officially an amphibian, but
they look like a giant salamander sort of thing, right?
That's that's what a Temnis bundle is.
And they concluded that I did like this part of the paper.
They concluded that Bruma Stega was in fact aquatic because, you
know, I don't think that anybody knew that for sure, but they
guessed. But they said that because there
was too much cartilage, like there were too many spaces
between its bones, and so it had to be an aquatic.
An aquatic. Salivator gravity would have
just just destroyed this poor creature.
Flippity flopping around on land.
So this borough, it comes to us from the Carew Formation of
Africa, and it is part of the Triassic.
So right after the Permotriassic extinction, which, you know,
huge carbon dioxide, very, very hot.
That said, the Triassic still generally regarded as a super
shitty time to be alive, just really, really hot.
Probably you had to be good at a dealing with lots of heat and B,
dealing with long periods of time where that heat kills off
all of your food. So there's a lot of expectation
that a lot of these different animals were probably pretty
good at things like either burrowing or stealing other
animals Burrows. And if you look at the Karoo
formation, there's a lot of Burrows.
Like, there's tons and tons of Burrows in this particular
fossil formation. Some have animals in them, some
do not. Thranaxodon is known from a
couple of other Triassic sites and at least one Triassic Burrow
where they found it curled up just in its Burrow as if it was
asleep before it died. Cute.
Yeah. At rest.
Yeah, at rest. So it's not clear necessarily
whether Thronoxodon was capable of long periods of hibernation.
I guess they have done some studies where they've looked at
the bones of Thronoxodon and they don't find basically like
tree ring like structures that indicate that they were dormant
for long periods of time. But we've talked about this
before on the show. A lot of mammals are capable of
doing torpor where they're down for a couple hours, they're down
for a couple days, they're they're resting, they're not
wasting a lot of energy, which is, it's the whole point of
hibernation or estivation, which is what you usually call it when
it's in the summer, which is probably more likely what you
would have had here because it was hot as hail.
So through an accident, we know they've been found in Burrows,
not clear if they were making them, but they were at least in
them. Brummastega not not so much,
right? So we have these two animals,
they're pretty similar in size. So they're about fox sized for
both of them. Brummastega is slightly longer
and they are inside a very small borough.
The size of the borough is kind of important because that
suggests that the Burmistega was not shoved into it with the
force of water, right? OK.
There had to be a like an intentional entrance on the
behalf of the the Burmistega can't just be like what
potentially the dueling dinosaurs are.
There's more evidence to it. You guys can't see that Amy is
tilting your head kind of thinking about that, but.
Just like, is it easier for like, water to shove you in a
hole when you're already a weird amphibian who's not supposed to
be borrowing? Sure.
Is it hard for yourself to? Squish your worthless body into
how? Slippery was it?
Are we talking like hagfish level goo?
Was this hole well looped like these are?
Well, the thought is no, in part because the Nexodon is
terrestrial, so that said. They were right.
Buried in what? Our flood deposits.
So if you look at the sediment of this Burrow, you can see the
bottom of it has what they just described as basically like
loose shitty sediment that they think the animals were just kind
of walking around on and scrabbling around on.
And then you have some thick sandstone deposits that cover
most of the body that they think was just like a big flood rush.
And then you have some slight layers of sandstone and it finds
upwards. So basically you have like a
slowing down of a flood event. So whether or not it was shoved
in that way is, you know, I, I, I believe that they probably
didn't for some of the reasons that I'm going to talk about in
a second, but it at least was covered up by a flood.
And then they were entombed together.
And the only reason that they were found is these scientists
pulled out this Burrow. They noticed that there were
some bones sticking out of it. And instead of just going
through and like chipping away and cleaning it, they also
didn't want to do that. So they used synchotron imaging,
which, yeah. So what do you know about
synchrotron imaging, 'cause I know very little, Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I had to deal with this a little bit at Museum of the
Rockies, too. We did not have a synchotron,
but there was a PhD student at MSU at the time working with a
dinosaur paleontologist there, and he was looking at this PhD
student was looking at Truodon eggs.
I'm sure he's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure he's like published
on this. Like this is common knowledge.
I don't know why I'm pausing. He was just looking at at
Troodon eggs and trying to figure out if there's embryos
inside. And so he got.
Permission to take. This like a certain other person
known from there. Yeah, seriously.
Right. So he was able to take it to the
Berkeley Synchrotron, which I have heard is like this giant
room that literally has this very circular kind of system
that's spray, you know, doing all of the intense imagery,
intense lasers and danger things.
I don't know. But I do know that it leads to
even more precise, like with a micro CT, you can get like down
to the point some millimeters. And I think with synchrotron you
can get even greater detail than that.
However, what I heard from him was the hardest part is then you
have the data and you have to process the data to actually
generate your images. And that is the part that, from
what I heard from him at least, was insane.
And he was actually building an AI system to do it for him.
Kind of probably like what you were doing with your PhD
morphometric stuff, because it was too long for him as an
individual to process all that data in that time frame.
So that's what I know about a synchrotron.
Yeah, so they, they ran through a synchrotron and they did find
that I, I'm not, they didn't quite describe it.
It's, I think it's different bone, like the bone is a
different density than the rock. And so that's why you can see it
popping out. But there's some, there's some
difference. And I think they had to do some
hand carving of the the data. And then I think they had some
algorithm that was pulling out a lot of the rest of it, but they
found, oops, too much bone. It can't just be through an
axidone. And sure enough, there was also
Brima Stega. So it's like just like an
accompaniment to a fossil that they already had seen and had
been expecting, which I think is kind of cool, right?
Like. I think it's cool.
Extra bonus. My immediate question though, is
the synchotron's shit, as far as I know, is advanced and
expensive. So is Trinaxodon so special and
like unknown that it's. I'm just curious about the steps
that they took that led to using a synchotron, I guess.
Like, are these, you know, is this?
Yeah, yeah, they did it. That's my reaction.
They just said that they found it kind of incidentally.
So I'm not sure why they decided to do it.
I mean, it seems more convenient to do that than to prepare it
out if you're not also the person who then has to, like,
carve out each slice of your enormous data file.
I'm sure they made a student do it.
That's just as pretty sure that's how a lot of these labs
go, right? Yeah.
So you get some different sensities.
You can segment them out. And So what they found are these
beautiful, beautiful images of these two specimens.
The Thronaxodon, which again, it looks kind of, it looks very dog
like, is kind of curled up a little bit.
It's kind of got its arms underneath it, but it's got its
head turned at a real weird, somewhat unnatural angle.
It's also got some broken ribs. Its ribs are broken on the left
hand side, which I think is where it's shoved up against the
Burrow. When you look at the the broken
parts of the neck and you look at the broken parts of the rib,
they are kind of these really like sheer fractures.
They're basically the sort of things that you get post mortem.
Like this wasn't something that it wasn't like slammed up by
Bruma Stega, who just really wanted to get into that Burrow.
It seems as the. Body slam.
Yeah, it probably wasn't a body slam.
It probably was. Well, it was a body slam, but it
was a you're in already a body, you're probably already dead
sort of slam through mistega. On the other hand, Bruma Stega
isn't so through an accident is laying on its belly.
It's very cute other than the whole broken neck and broken
ribs thing. And Bruma Stega is laying upside
down so it's got it's tummy facing upwards.
It's like half. It's honestly like if you sleep
with a toddler, I think it's kind of similar right?
Where like Bruma Stega is upside down and on top of Thranaxonon
and a shoved Thranaxon kind of off into the side.
It's shocking that there's not like a leg in Thranaxonon's
face. That would be the the full
toddler sleeping experience. But so true, right?
So Brimstega is upside down. Brimstega also has broken ribs,
but those ribs show signs of green bone fractures.
It looks like they were broken while Brimstega was alive.
Also, some of them are healed. So some of them show signs of
like coming back together and healing.
Some of them even show their partial fractures as if it was
pushing up against tissue, right?
Because you know, you don't just have air beneath your ribs.
You have meat and gross stuff. So yeah, just gunk.
So the idea is that Bruma Stega probably got battered ribs
before coming into the Burrow long enough ago that it was
probably still healing from them, but it wasn't necessarily
what killed it. There are also two puncture
marks on Bruma Stega's, like, eye socket or two holes.
They don't go all the way through.
And the paleontologist mentioned that, like, you know,
synchrotron is great. They didn't get quite good
enough resolution to determine if they are tooth marks or if
they are like dissolution pits or if they are like some sort of
infestation. So there are some dots.
They're not the right size to be the Thrun Accidon's teeth.
They are too big and they're too far apart.
But it does have some mysterious holes on its head.
So Brumastega healing from an injury, Thrinaxodon curled up as
if it's sleeping inside a Burrow that is presumably Thrinaxodons
and not Brumastegas. The thought is that Thrinaxodon
was already in there. Brumastega joins the chat, I
guess, and comes on inside the Burrow.
And so the question is, was Bruma Stega dragged in by thin
Accidon? Was it shoved in by water, or
did it come in voluntarily? And was thin accidon still alive
when it came in? Right, because you could have
had thronaxodon die. That's true beforehand.
Right, just be hanging out in the crypt.
Yeah, right. For sure.
Peaceful so. They don't think probably that
it was dragged in because a it's a pretty tight squeeze.
I'm not sure how Thronaxodon would have dragged it in and
then turned itself around. But also the the holes on the
head don't really seem to match it.
So it doesn't seem likely that Thronaxodon was dragging Berma
Sega in. So you can probably get rid of
that one. The thing that they brought up
in the paper is you know if you die in a Burrow, your bodies
typically mummify, right? You dry out and desiccate which
makes you stiff. So if you are dead in a Burrow,
you dry out. You get stiff if water or Bruma,
Sega or whatever comes in. It might shove you up against
the wall, but it might also shove you up against the wall in
a way that is crackly like shoving jerky against a wall,
not a steak. Yes.
Yeah. Right, right, right for those
poor, vulnerable little Braille ribs in there.
Yes. So you you could be mummified.
You would also have something like that if the animal had
recently died and was going through rigor mortis, but if
they had gotten through the rigor mortis phase, they'd be
limp again. So there's like 2 stages of
limpness. There's you're alive or very
recently dead, then you get stiff for rigor mortis, then you
soften up again and then you mummify, right?
So when you look at both Bermastega and Thronaxodon, both
of them look soft because their tails are kind of both, like
they look like they're spooning basically.
And like curled up towards the entrance of the borough, so it
looks like they were like still floppy.
So either both of them died at the exact right moment so that
they were neither of them were rigor mortisy, or they were both
alive at the same time, which the authors kind of argue is
probably the more realistic version because otherwise it's a
very small timeline to have those two animals coexist.
So what they think happened is that Trinaxodon was curled up in
his Burrow brew mistega, probably because it was still
healing from an injury. This is also a juvenile, by the
way. So this is some dumb teenager
crawls into the Burrow just shoving its way in there and
then they the Trinaxodon either was they they think it just
didn't bother kicking. It or it like right or it just
happened that the next second was the the sedimentation that
berries. Yeah, yeah.
Like there I brought a flood. There's something behind me.
Can I, can I just scooch in here?
Excuse me? And then they think that once
the flood came in, that's what knocked Bruma Sega over.
So they did bring up that this isn't entirely unknown.
That even though you would think that, like, an animal who digs a
Burrow isn't going to be super stoked if other animals come
into the Burrow, sometimes when you're hibernating or you're in
torpor, you are too tired to give a shit.
Yeah. And the example that they gave
is there are some Badgers in Poland that have been known to
just let it lie if their Burrows get invaded by raccoon dogs,
which is an animal that I didn't know existed.
Yeah, me neither. I should know that I literally
studied dogs, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like
from the name, I have a pretty solid idea of what it looks like
and what it is. So that's the thought on Bruma,
Stega and Thronaxodon. There's still other potential
scenarios. You know, it could be of course,
like pretty closely after rigor mortis, so a couple days post
death. But yeah, they think that the
most realistic 1, and I agree, is that Thronaxodon was just
like I'm napping and then they died together.
That's I hear it's kind of peaceful.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, why not Sure,
sure. And I, I could also understand
if like maybe whatever event was happening that displaced
Bremestega from its watery place, I'd like encouraged it to
seek out this shelter is the event that then buried them or I
don't know, you know, like that's where I get into a lot of
it. It's just like, how, how were
you preserved like that? Like how was that moment?
So often I I go on the side of no, I think it was just random
because I just it seems so hard for in this, you know,
fossilization so rare already. To also preserve an actual
interaction is fascinating. It's fascinating with a cozy
little, you know, salamander friend to just get through.
Flipping over. Yeah, I mean, that's relatable
too. Yeah, so that's the that's an
example of two organisms that yeah, we we think at least there
was pretty close to like either both of them are alive or like
it was just the world's most coincidentity of coincidences.
But a little bit more evidence than for the dueling dinosaurs.
A little bit less dramatic of a story too, because it's not they
were fighting. It's fuck it, fine, you can
stay. Which feels a little bit more
realistic as well. I mean really when you think
about it, when are you most likely to be fossilized?
When you are fighting an animal to stay alive or when you are
napping. Or when you are swimming next to
an active volcano. Just saying.
Just saying in my life, probably the next time I like go to a tar
pit and I'm just like, let's do it right in for animals though,
especially something that's going to be burrowing, right.
You're already. And I just, yeah, I was talking
to a Co worker. Well, Katie, our editor today,
he was telling me about Prairie dogs and how they build the
tunnels here and then some type of owl uses their Burrows and
it's this symbiotic. Burrowing owls.
And I'm like, if you're called a burrowing owl, then fucking
Burrow. Like you don't take, you don't
let someone else do it and then take that title.
But they didn't name themselves. Talking about I thought that you
love a lazy thing. I'm just.
Jealous, just jealous always that I don't think of this.
Well, OK, so we've talked about a probably not actually
associated, but just died together or like we're preserved
together. Now we're talking about one
where it's like, well, OK, they probably had maybe a very minor
interaction and did know that they were on some level in each
other's space. And now I'm going to tell you
about one that is no, they were fucking fighting.
Like there's just. There's no.
There's no question about it, but I heard all about it.
Folks probably have heard about it too.
It's this incredible fossil from China that features a mammal
full blown fighting with a Cetacosaurus, which is a
dinosaur kind of related to Triceratops.
It's a ceratopsian. And they, there is legit
interaction in this fossil. And it is, it's, it's very
fascinating. So yes, let's see.
This is from the Lower Cretaceous of China.
This is Rapeno mammis robustus, which is a type of, I looked at
gobiconodontid mammal, which is a again, a non nontherian
mammal, kind of like what I think you're talking about with
Thronoxodon. So these are, you know, these
are mammals that were yours are much older, but this one is the
one that was around from like 180 to like, I don't know, 90
million years ago or so. And it was thought to be
carnivorous. And again, nontherian is so the
theory in mammals today are US like central mammals and
marsupials, but not monotremes the platypus.
And. Echidnas.
They're also technically non theory.
No nipples is that's the cut off there?
Probably. This is a nippleless mammal.
Try to wrap your head around that guy.
It probably excreted milk just like a platypus.
This is so true. Now I'm like scrolling through
the page to be like nipples. Tell me about their.
Nipples, The nipples. The nipples, I imagine, were not
fossilized. Well, they couldn't have been.
It didn't have them. And I think it also means that
these mammals were laying eggs. That's a pretty big indicator
too. Is that the very important but
hours of entertainment with the nipples?
Yeah, it's so pretty. Good times.
So we've got this this little nippleless mammal, Rapeno
Mammus, which is funny because Mammus means mammal and nipples.
But you know, the Rapeno Mammus is thought to be possum sized,
which when I read that, I keep seeing that places and I'm like
there's a lot of fucking possums out there guys.
It's actually not that helpful. But I think generally like the
Virginia possum that we see here in the United States.
So we're talking like maybe a big cat sized animal and then
sit. Sotakosaurus is a pretty
relatively small dinosaur, honestly.
Sotakosaurus is very well known from China and Mongolia famously
for its preserved cloaca, which we need to do a full deep dive
on that cloak. Legitimately.
They were found together. Oh, the other thing I love about
Sotakosaurus is I I know because they're so fucking many of them
and they've been preserved in such great detail.
They really do know that they had like this Mohawk kind of
thing on just its tail. Like it's not on the the neck or
the back. It's like the tail is just got
this like crazy spines and whatnot that come off of it that
make it have a really special kind of David Bowie flair that I
appreciate and like a full blown beak.
I mean, it's just a weird looking animal.
And then found in this what they call a Mortal Kombat.
So scroll past the one fighting Dinos, whatever you didn't see
that. And you can see this specimen
here in the first picture shows you the actual specimen, kind of
a bird's eye view with a reconstruction of what they
would have looked like in life. And then we'll get to that.
Next one. So what's really interesting is
that there is one of the legs of the mammal is trapped underneath
the Cytacosaurus and and his teeth are in like its rib cage
like in its OK if we Scroll down you can see another picture that
shows you from the paper exactly what I mean by interacting there
are Oh. Wow.
It is like in there, it's got one of its hands, so one of its
4 limbs. Badger behavior.
Just fucking digging in. Nothing is going to stop this
animal. Yeah, it's trying to Burrow into
the Cetacosaurus. FYI.
I the back doors the easier entry.
I would go that way my friend. I don't know what you're doing
trying. To get through the fucking rib
cage. Good luck.
So like literally, so one of the one of the hands is in the jaw,
the lower jaw of the Cetechosaurus like like it's
grabbing its mouth and pulling its jaw down, which my son does
do to me sometimes and he has like baby strength.
It's. It's fish shucking the
Cicadosaurus. Yes, it's noodling.
With its entire body, yeah, I mean, it's got most of its body
just in there. Yeah, it.
Failed. It failed horribly.
And so then the other, the other like it's got a leg that is
embedded in the lower hind limb that's wrapped around like the
tib fib. And then the teeth and the mouth
are literally still embedded into the Yeah, the, I think it's
it they, they talked about it being like the chest or the,
yeah, the, the kind of belly rib cage area of the set.
So I mean, this is like full blown everything that's very,
very much connected. Now, what's really interesting
about this is that, well, there's a lot of really
interesting stuff about this. It was discovered also probably
by private, you know, folks who we don't understand the precise
locality information. We don't know exactly the
provenance for this. That seems to be that actually
was part of the problem with dueling dinosaurs too, which is
interesting that we see this in these frenemies situations is
that a lot of times they're discovered by private folks and
then we do lose a little bit of scientific information because
of that sometimes. If it wasn't taken in context,
it also leads to the concern that it is fake, that it's fraud
and has been a faked specimen. However, I can't find anything
that shows that. It looks like this has been
thoroughly researched. There are ways to know if bone
has been faked or not. A lot of, I mean UV light,
X-rays, CT scans, there are ways to know if this is faked or not.
And so far from what I'm reading and what I've heard from the
community is no, it seems to be very, very much legit.
And again, it's one of these situations where it's debated.
So where were they actually interacting?
Or where? They just discovered like this
with this one. I feel like they were, they were
interacting and I feel like I know the vibe as well of that
interaction and it wasn't positive or friendly.
And just to kind of go off that point of fakes, it's not just
that, like could they have made fake bones and put them in place
like literally the glue that they would have used glows under
UV light like there's and you could do chemical tests on that
stuff as well. So if there's not been a paper
saying it's a fake, I would assume it's not a fake.
Even though it looks fake as hell, it looks fucking.
Fake. Yeah, it really does.
It's just like a level of preservation that is very
unheard of. However, it's very known for
this site. So this is a Cretaceous site in
China. Let me pull up my.
Or where we think This site is I guess, right?
Well, we do know generally because of again, just the the
matrix and everything they do know actually the exact unit of
a formation, the Jehol group of yeah, this is one of the Jehol
group fossils. So these are some of the most
best preserved fossils that we know in the world.
What's really interesting is that some of the majority of the
Jehol fossils are these two-dimensional compression
fossils, right? Like we've talked about that
too. A lot of times you get buried
and smashed. The reason the sturgeon was so
beautifully well preserved is that Hadrosaur's butt hole
protected it from getting smashed in between layers of
rock and losing all of that delicate detail of the dookies.
So that's where this is interesting too is some of the
site, the fossils from the site are just very yeah, smash.
And then some are these incredible 3D situation, which
isn't always easy to interpret then how they formed.
I'll just say that right now it looks the the consensus from the
authors is that the animals were buried right where they died and
that they really do think that they either happened
simultaneously or very, very close.
So I am trying to understand if they think it was.
I don't think they were already, they thought they were already
dead, but they it is possible that the mammal was scavenging
the carcass of the dinosaur when they became buried.
Because we don't really see the Cytacasaurus doing anything
back. It's kind of brumostagaing this.
It's like, take me, I deserve it.
I'm not worthy. It's taking a very passive role
in being eaten. Yes.
And then there was like they went into this whole part where
they did this phylogenetic least squares regression where they
were looking at like, is it plausible that a small mammal
like this would be feeding on such a big Cytacasaurus?
Because we do know that Rapeno Mammus eats Cytacasaurus.
We have found little baby Cetechosaurus bones in other
Rapeno mammoth specimens. So another interaction that's
proven because it's in the fucking guts of another one.
That's a pretty slam dunk on on that.
But to go after something that was so much larger than itself
is questioned. But then they compare it to a
lot of what we've been talking about modern day mammals, a lot
of them being mustelids, you know, are weasels, Badgers,
Wolverines that are like, fuck yeah, I'm going to take down a
Caribou. You know, I mean, these are it's
it's very plausible that this mammal was fighting with or
feeding on this specimen, but there aren't other like there
are no other tooth marks on the specimen either.
So they didn't think that it had been left out for scavenging all
that long because it seems like it would have already, it would
have had a lot more marks by that too.
So it really they don't think, they don't seem to think that it
was scavenging. They instead think that they
were buried. Their hypothesis of that they
were buried while the predation was going on and that they were
entombed by this very sudden lahar type volcanic debris flow.
So a volcanic situation in there too, that it actually wouldn't
explain why they're so entwined that the left hind foot of the
mammal became trapped underneath that left leg of the dinosaur
when it collapsed because of this kind of lahar.
And they say that that's what would account for no more other
tooth marks or indications of scavenging.
I guess my point, and we'll get into this more is OK, so it's a
lahar. So it's clutching on like, save
me from the lahar, daddy. Or is this?
Like rafting? Right.
Is it rafting this dead Setakosaurus through this
motherfucking debris flow again? How did it like if OK, so the
lahar is what got the one leg trapped underneath the
Setakosaurus is the lahar what got its hand grasping its face
and its other hand grasping its tip fib.
Like I just have these and I just go to like, but how with
the lahar, which I think of as a fairly high energy situation, is
allowing for these to be preserved, preserved so
exquisitely. I am so completely and so in
articulation. So those are yeah.
I'm excited to chat here when we dive into more on how the heck
does this happen? How do they?
Preserve Just to give some more context for those of you who are
not looking at this photo. And also if you're not aware, we
do put these photos on our websites.
We do forget sometimes, but we do eventually put them on there.
So the photos that we talked about for all the episodes are
on weirdanddead.com. But it's kind of like like I
realized that this is not the actual size of the animals, but
like scaling. It looks like a Jack Russell
going after a Great Dane. OK.
And the Jack Russell has like curved its body so badly that it
is both biting the animal and looking at its own ass.
So while it's hands are like akimbo, like spread eagled
holding on to different things, which looks uncomfortable and
weasels are psychotic. So like I know that some some
predatory mammals are just weird and they do weird things when
they're attacking. I guess if your body is that
long, maybe looking at your butt is like a pretty regular
occurrence. But it does look like maybe
maybe it got moved a little bit. That's kind of what I'm
thinking. And then just clung on like an
asshole while that was happening.
But the cicadasaurus has its legs curled underneath it.
And yeah, it looks like it just kind of gave up, but it doesn't
look sorted or anything. It doesn't look like it's
streamlined or was moved very far with the lahar, which is
very interesting. And it couldn't have been
because there's no way that it would have been able to be this
pristine of just preservation articulation, 3D, you know, like
it's just yeah, that's where I guess it's me amigoing the
transport in the burial here. I'm having a hard time wrapping
my head around, you know, I have a geology degree and I'm just
like, that's not what I remember about lahars.
I just don't remember that being like, I'm a peaceful little
like, oh, I'm gonna hug you with some hot volcanic shit.
So I, I just, you know, I, I maybe it's a blessing to not
know more about lahars. I will say this.
The only part of the paper that I highlighted, well, OK, I
highlighted a few, is one of their conclusions is the new
fossil thus challenges the common assumption that Mesozoic
mammals were merely fodder for the ruling dinosaurs.
I'm like, who's common? This is not, that's not how I
think. Sure, okay, Of course there are
mammals eating dinosaurs. Like a fucking course.
Like that's there's so many different dinosaurs too.
Like, yeah, some of them were delicious.
Some of them were small, you know.
Yeah, some were small and they all had small babies, so Yum.
Yeah. So the, the thing that is, is
weird when you're talking about like ash preserving living
animals is a, sometimes they see it coming so they are trying to
escape and B, like it, it's very rarely going to just gently
settle on them, right? Like it's, it's going to have
some form of movement, but that's not always the case.
So a really great example of a lot of animals preserved
together in some clear interactions would be asphal
fossil beds in Nebraska, which is a beautiful, beautiful fossil
site. It's from the Miocene.
I think it's like 11 or 12 million years old.
And there are tons of animals, but they have like this really
weird stratigraphy. So at the bottom of the site,
they have kind of a sandy layer, and they find things like
salamanders and lizards. They find lizards inside of
crane bellies, like crane the bird.
Yeah. So you find a lot of small
animals, Crane the bird. You could be thinking of a
mechanical equipment. Yes, in the Miocene, yes.
Yes, all of those. So you find all of these kind of
small animals at the bottom of this like sandy layer.
And then you go up and you find this big thick ash deposit.
And inside the ash deposit you find rhinos, just like I think
over 100 rhino fossils have been found of Telioceros, one
particular species. You do also find camels and
horses, but they're not as commonly talked about because
there's also this giant fucking rhino herd.
They are all so beautifully preserved that you can see
things like we now could confirm that the the like some of the
differences in their teeth were male versus female because you
could see a fetus inside the female.
So you could you could do all of these insane studies, but the
ash that they're in is like soft ash that fell from the sky.
And unlike this Cicadosaurus, they're on their sides as if
they've slumped over for the most part.
There's there's at least three cow calf pairs, SO3 Mama rhinos
with their baby rhinos, including at least one that's in
like a nursing position, as if it was nursing while it died.
Wow. But like they're on their side
dead before the ash is covering them, which is kind of more more
what you expect with this sort of thing, right?
Like if you're getting like a soft rain out of ash.
It's not usually. Yeah, you could run the fuck
away or you would have to be dead for it to cover you or you
would have to do what happened to these animals, which is
suffer for weeks at a time. Because the other thing that we
see with these rhinos and with the camels and with the horses,
one of the horse has a, has a full right next to it as well,
is you see massive chunks of frothy kind of bubbly looking
bone on all of these animals. Yeah, delicious.
Just take your latte and then imagine that that's bone and
it's growing on the distal. So the the portions of their
limbs that are furthest away from their heart.
So especially prominent in like the ankles, the wrists.
But just like the the far end of the bones is where you get this
accumulation of like nasty frothy bone.
I did read a study that had taken some isotopes from the,
the, the frothy bone compared to the regular bone and had cross
compared them and found that maybe there was evidence that
they had a tent like a, a fever basically when they were
depositing that bone. And so that frothy bone is a
really weird side effect of lung trauma.
And it turns out that this this happens to modern animals too,
and modern people. It's called a hypertrophic
osteopathy or osteopathy. However you want to emphasize
that or Marie's disease. And if you get real fucked up
lung or cardiac problems, sometimes they think that your
platelets don't get like pulled out by your lungs.
So your lungs have like lots and lots of little capillary beds.
So if you have a big old chunk of platelets floating through,
it'll kind of pull it out and then it could deal with it.
If you have so many problems that your your heart is
basically shunting blood past the lungs, which can happen
sometimes, then your platelets don't get taken out.
They get stuck in the capillaries of your fingers and
toes, and platelets are associated with a like a hormone
that could potentially be causing all of these problems.
So we've seen this sort of thing in like modern animals that have
lung cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, all of those things.
You can get this kind of frothy bone growth.
So did this entire herd of rhinos have pneumonia?
Probably not. We think that it was severe
trauma from inhaling ash for weeks that basically that yes,
they maybe they didn't die right away.
In fact, we know they didn't die right away because it takes a
while for the bone to get that nasty, right?
Right. Of course it's gonna take time
before. Yeah, it's not an instant thing.
Yeah, so you get these animals are inhaling all of this ash,
It's causing all of this trauma to the lungs.
It's causing all of these kind of downstream problems.
Their their bones are growing deformities and then finally
they can't do it anymore and so they're at a watering hole and
they all die together. So that's the more classic.
Sorry, Jim. Josh.
Yeah, Yeah. I don't know who that is, but I
believe you. Drink the Kool-aid, the giant,
the biggest mass suicide, and oh this.
Is a cult Later. Yeah, I know this is a cult like
that stuff, but there's no Dragons in it, so why would I?
They are. There are Dragons.
They're just men. Oh yeah.
That's that's. I don't like metaphorical ones.
Thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, be sure
to rate and review us on your listening platform of choice.
We really appreciate it. If you'd like to hear more and
support the show, follow us on Patreon for some exclusive bits
or on our various social media platforms.
You can follow Amy on Instagram at Mary Anning's Revenge.
And Megan on Instagram and TikTok at Geopedal Fabric or
both of us at Weird and Dead on Instagram and TikTok.
This podcast is part of the Geology Podcasting Network.
Produced by the traveling geologist Chris Spencer.
Cover art provided by Chris Spencer and the hosts.
Our theme song is Unlock Me by Prize Canal.
Editing services provided by the amazing Katie Bradley.
Hosted by and researched by us, Amy Atwater and Megan
Weatherall. Thanks for listening, Rigamorous
girl.