You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Weatherill.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we're two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
On this episode we talk about surprising animals that traverse
that fine line between opportunistic snacker and full
on predator mode. How the fuck does a sloth hunt?
We also discussed scientists who went full Sherlock Holmes on a
turd full of sloth theoderms, and then a whole different set
of scientists who were just stabbing slabs of meat and
throwing knives for science. Like always, our podcast is
gross and we curse. I realize we just cursed
directly in the intro and we talk about horrific things.
So choose your listening audience wisely and pay
attention to the warnings in the description.
Today's episode starts with carnivorous armadillos.
And I thought that was just going to be the full stop
because I found out about them. It was like, that's crazy, but
it kind of went real sideways in a way that you are going to be
really excited about. So the carnivorous armadillo is
called macro Euphrates euphratus micro macro.
Why do we not practice these things?
Because this is hilarious. I mean you can't even see the
spilling the spell. Like who's the?
Yep. Macro Euphrates.
Let's go with that Macro Euphrates.
Sounds beautiful. Which Euphrates is I guess one
of the modern armadillos. So it's just big, big, big
armadillo. And this was a big boy.
This is the biggest of the true armadillos.
Because the reason that I read about Macro Euphrates is I had
heard while I was at that conference that someone was
talking about pampatheers. And I was like, what the fuck is
a pampatheer? Because she was trying to figure
out if the bone that had washed up in Georgia was a pampatheer.
And a pampatheer is not an armadillo.
But you know how like brontatheers are not rhinos, but
they look fucking identical. And they're very closely
related. So I mean this, it's only not a
rhino to OK, OK, OK. So it's it's an armadillo for
every general audience person on the street.
Yes, it's an armadillo, but it's technically.
Not yes. So giant armadillos AKA
pampatheers get up into like I think the low 1000.
That's their name, Pampatheers. I mean, can we just talk about
how sick that is? That's got a nice ring to it.
I well, maybe that's why I like. It pamper ears.
Is that your neck? Deep in Pampers these God God
damn it. You're probably right.
You're probably like, oh, that's cute and comfortable and full
of. Shit, it is.
I'm like, oh, the one I changed this morning.
Let me tell you anyway. Pampathy.
So yeah, Pampatheers. So I went and looked up
Pampatheers and somehow Google Scholar was like, actually,
would you rather know about this giant armadillo that was
carnivorous? And yes, yeah, I would.
Yeah, I would. So Macro Euphrates is
carnivorous. We think all other armadillos
for the most part are right. All Never.
Very excited for this. And do they differ at all
amongst dentition and others? So how would you know just
morphologically, if they're eating that good, just pure meat
diet, Yeah, keto. Yeah, the keto, right.
So like I always have found it kind of funny that there's like
this distinction between insectivorous and carnivorous
and insectivorous and pisgiverous, which is fish
eating. Like those are not good enough
animals to be. Considered Noctis eating?
Is that what you're trying to? Clarify It is not fish.
So it's seems a little arbitrary to me, although it really is
related to dentition, right? It's are your teeth made for
slicing and dicing or are your teeth meant for stabbing and
chomping? And it's not just your teeth,
right? So if you want to eat meat, just
generally lots of animals eat meat that you might not expect.
Horses pretty well known for eating baby chickens.
That's a thing. That's a thing that happens.
Deer will kill. Birds know that.
But yeah, I did know that. I did know that.
I do know that these terms are more like guidelines.
They are not. They're not rules.
These animals don't know. We call them vegetarians.
They're offended. Yeah, if you guys ever see like
a chipmunk or a squirrel in the middle of a road standing next
to a dead chipmunk, that's not a funeral, that's a feast.
They are eating it. Yeah, right.
So yeah, facultative omnibory use, every part is a lot more
common than you might expect. The issue comes in with, well,
what if you want to kill something to eat it?
You can still be a horse and you can eat a chick, but like if you
want to be regularly hunting your prey, you need to have some
adaptations. Now macroeuphritis, which is
from the Pliocene of some spot in South America that I forgot
to write down, but it is from the Pliocene.
It's not very well known. The biggest species is only got
like one skull and a couple of just enough of the body to tell
that it definitely still had the weird armadillo shell, but not
enough to be like, and it had stabbing claws, but just just
enough to be like, yeah, double check armadillo.
But they did have a skull. And there are some other smaller
species where they have the jaw. So they looked at the skull and
the jaw of macroephritis and they were like, OK, well it's
got all of this muscle mass migration for biting force at
the front of its mouth. So if you want to be able to
bite and kill something if your prey is running away, you
usually need to be able to stop it from doing that.
So having bite force concentrated in the front in
your mouth is a good thing for predators to have.
Meanwhile, herbivores tend to concentrate their bite force
towards the back end because that's where they're doing the
vast Midori of their chewing like.
But they have to pluck that vegetation.
They have to pluck it. What?
About the bite force there. But the Bush doesn't try to run
away. You don't.
Grass doesn't try to evict. It might.
And if they miss? Silent Bro, They.
Can go back for a second shot. No pressure, and they don't have
things like Saber teeth to conveniently just get a nice
kill shot that will just get straight to the point.
So they need to grab it. Yeah, bite it.
OK, OK, I I'm following. Yeah.
So you're looking at a lot of muscle force action stuff.
And then of course you're always looking at teeth.
So I want you to Scroll down 1st to the first page and this is.
Not even there yet and I already have.
Questions. Yeah, so we've got the skull of.
OK, great. No big idea how big the scale
bar is. No fucking idea.
They did not write down how big the scale bar was and pissed me
off. It did this for every single.
Photo This could be any size, could be any size.
OK, this was one of my question. I have so many questions, but
I'm looking at I'm looking at a skull from looking up into the
roof of the mouth and then down onto the roof of the skull and
then a side shot. So three different views.
The scale bar is not helpful. So yeah, you're like my mind
wants to make it like rodent sized.
I would say just size has kind of a rodent.
This big animal was, I think I said four.
I think it's £200. Oh.
OK, OK, she thick. All right, so yeah, exactly.
So it's hard to hard to bloody tell, but this is one of my
questions is that armadillos are xenarthrins right along with our
friends the slots and they have teeth a dentine spitting lyrics
like a machine. So are these motherfuckers teeth
also dentine? Yes, and then how did they do
any? Then how do you to any?
OK, continue. I'm excited.
Right. So, OK, so First off, let's talk
about the skull, because the teeth is what led me down this
rabbit hole that I think you're already going down.
But with the skull, let's cover that first.
Looking at the skull, you can see that it's a little bit.
It's beefier, it's thicker. The zygomatic arches are
actually pretty thick for an armadillo.
Yeah, the snout is really robust.
So it's meant for, like, resisting biting.
And tell me what you're seeing with these teeth, which as you
pointed out, these do not have dentine or they do they have
dentine, they have no enamel because Xenarthrins at some
point said I don't need the hard part of my teeth.
I think they said I don't need teeth at all.
And then that would they re evolve them?
Yeah, they only got the soft inner gooey bits, but.
This is all we got. But they don't have the hard cap
that we have on our teeth. But what else do you see with
those teeth? I mean some of them, I mean they
kind of look like what slots do, which is they seem pretty sharp.
They look like self sharpening teeth and then the side view
shows that the canine position is a or what I would think is
the canine position is like a larger Fang like tooth as well.
So it definitely looks bitey and grabby.
Yeah, so xenarthrins, so sloths, armadillos, glyptodons, which
are not armadillos but look like armadillos because there's quite
a few animals that are just like, yeah, well, I don't have a
shell. This.
Works. Yeah.
I love this. This is a great look.
I'm gonna go. Fashion niece it does of the
evolutionary. I like being part both.
So there's a lot of animals in Zen Arthra, and they all have
that thing in common. They don't have enamel.
You know what else they don't have with teeth?
Real incisors and they just seem to have just a disgusting just
that either could be a giant incisor or it's it's nasals
already opening. All of their teeth look like
nasty pegs. Yeah, Yeah.
So it's not clear, at least not from the reading that I did,
whether xenarthrins branched off from other mammals before the
basic tribosphenic dentition happened, or if they.
That would make them very. Old, right.
So tribosphenic dentition is what you see in marsupials, but
it's it's the idea that each tooth has more than one point to
it. And it's like specially set up
in AV, but for the purposes of what we're talking.
About beautiful It's gorgeous. It's lovely.
It's just like you did it, you did it, you figured it out.
Good job. It's complex dentition whereas
xenarthrins they got pegs of denting.
At Yeah, they are. Pegs is a good way of describing
it. Yeah.
I would almost say homodont in a way.
Like every tooth looks the same, which is not mammalian.
Yeah, most mammals have got. And that's what makes us so
great. And that's when I laugh at
dinosaur people. And I'm like, you don't know how
old your individual is. Yeah.
You think that's a different species?
Yeah, it's great. Yeah.
So if you look carefully on this armadillo, you'll notice that
that big stabby canine, it has pretty clear facets on it, like
bevels, and it is a little bit not as round.
Like that's the best that they can fucking do.
Like they can't make complex teeth, but they can make their
teeth a little bit more like a stabby knife and a little bit
less like a stabby pole. So that tooth that is a little
bit more elongated, a little bit more blade like not Gray, but a
little bit more is right where the the vast majority of the
bite force, I guess is concentrated.
So that's it's biting tooth. And they argue that yes, other
armadillos are known to eat what comes up and to be omnivorous,
but no other armadillo, regardless of how omnivorous
they are, has bothered to change their teeth shape and their
skull shape to be more effective at biting because other
armadillos are eating what is small or already dead.
They're scavenging carrion. So that's the idea here is that
this one has taken it the next step forward and is not just
scavenging carrion, but is actually eating flesh.
Oh, delightful. Yeah, it's going that extra,
extra mile. And these were probably like
other armadillos, fossorial or burrowing.
So it's like fucking this will not make sense to you, but it's
like tremors. It's like this.
Burrowing. Oh, I do.
I do. Generally get that?
I think I have seen that one. So yes, because isn't it like
largely geology? So I think that's what my.
One of the main characters in the first one was a geologist,
yeah. Yeah, I think you made me.
That sounds right. I really like so stupid.
But I yeah, that whole phase that you also made me watch that
one paranormal show, Is that what it was called?
I have no idea whatever happened to that show, but it was highly
entertaining. I don't know, but I liked so
many paranormal shows that I really that's not a very good
description, so it could have been any.
Portal. It was in the United Kingdom.
They were all British. Oh, it was primeval.
There were dinosaurs in it. I don't remember that.
OK, well, you really, we just saw that there was a portal and
it blacked out that there were dinosaurs and fossil mammals
coming through it, but. Nope.
OK, but I got there. It's fine.
They were all real pissy when they got through.
So, you know, then they did some damage.
And if this animal had come through, our Gophers would have
been in serious trouble because it was theoretically good at
digging and biting. So when I was looking at these
these pegs and remembering that OK, Zen arthrans have some
limited, it reminded me slots have fucking insane looking
teeth. Yeah, they do.
They look like they should be able to kill you Yeah, They
they're very similar to this. They're very sharp.
They have wear facets on them and.
They're self sharpening. That's like their whole deal.
Yeah, they're self sharpening and sure, they're not as hard as
enamel, but they are still rocks in your face.
So that made me go and kind of think, well, I wonder if there
are some slots that are omnivores, right, carnivores.
Like I'd always heard that they were all herbivores.
Yeah, like, yeah, the worst. Yeah, so the very first paper
that came up when I was looking up Sloth Omnivore is a paper
from 2021 in Scientific Reports, which is like science is not
quite as cool a cousin. So it's still a pretty good
journal. And it was an amino acid study
on the various, like basically an isotope study.
They looked at the isotopes of amino acids of these different
sloths, both modern and fossil, and they looked to see whether
or not they were lining up with being herbivores or omnivores
and. Love it.
I looked at that table for a long time and was really
confused. So the two living sloths are
Brady Pus I. Know best name Good job God
Brady Pus. And then Collopus, which fun
fact, when I wrote an episode about sloths for PBS eons, I
told them to say it as Chilopus because I just wasn't thinking
and they got genuinely upset with me because they thought
that I was trying to make them. Sounds too calopus is so.
Much better, I know. And I was like, Oh no, I guess I
had been saying Chilopus. But you're right, it's probably
Calopus. Don't ask me to explain that.
Go. Ask a goddamn sloth hunter.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm guessing just as much
as you are. So anyways, Calopus Chilopus,
the three, the two toed Sloth and Brady.
That was also one that they analyzed and Brady the three
toad slot. So Brady puss so stupid.
There's no like now that I've said it so many times, I can't
think of a different way to say it that doesn't sound stupid,
but it's Brady looking animal. So, Bradipus, that just sounds
like I'm trying too hard. Yeah, make a person who travels
to France for the first time and starts saying it.
Croissant. Pradipus.
Bradipus. So they looked at Bradypus and
Nothra theory OPS, and Bradypus and Nothra theory OPS came back
pretty similar as hardcore herbivores.
And then Shalopus came back as not quite as herbivorous.
And then Mylodon came back as slightly lower than Shalopus.
And I was really confused looking at this because I was
like, well, why are you saying? Because the paper's title is
Mylodon is definitely an omnivore.
Like, okay, well, it's not that far off from Chilopus.
Why do you think it's an omnivore?
Amy Chilopus is an omnivore. Oh my God, we never knew.
So relatable. I did not know that when we went
down to Costa Rica to go let's not.
Let's not talk about that trip. Yeah, Brady Pus is a strict
herbivore. Jalopus is omnivorous to the
extent that they kept saying in the paper that this was a zoo
animal that was fed an omnivorous diet, a zoo animal
fed an omnivorous diet. So they I guess won't won't do
very well in a zoo if you're not giving them some mermaid.
What are they doing in the fucking wild?
They go like they don't move, they're asleep all the time.
Are they just eating the moths that live and.
They're just crawls into their mouths, right?
Like they have a all those moths on them.
Right. But that's like, I'm like, is
that how that's how easy it is to be an omnivore.
You just hang out with your mouth open and like meet.
I guess. I should try, Never mind, not
gonna finish. That like algae growing on them
so. Right, Right.
Yeah, My God. So I came up with a little rhyme
to help myself remember, but does not apply to fossil sloths.
I just got excited about it for modern ones and that is if the
toes are three it only eats tree so that's pretty good.
If the toes are two, it might eat you.
If you're slow enough, you fall into it.
But you have to stand there. You have to stay up there and
put whatever meat you're. It makes sense though.
Chelopus are the mean ones. Those are the butthole eye ones.
You got butt holes for eyes? Yes, and as a side note, they
looked at amino acids from the hair of these animals, including
the fossil ones, which just seems like the weirdest drug
test ever. OK, so I was like OK, so
Myelodon is an omnivore. I wonder what else is out there.
Jalopus is apparently an omnivore and I never knew that.
And so a kind of semi side quest, one more content and you
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And so a kind of semi side quest, I started looking at
osteoderms because I got distracted and I was interested.
It happens, yeah. And a side quest took me to this
paper on a coprolite full of osteoderms.
And this is going to be relevant later, but I want.
Because I mean, a good zenarthrin does have the
capacity for osteoderms, so. Exactly.
Yeah, so osteoderms are it's Bony skin.
So armadillos have osteoderms, Pamphythias and bosteoderms do
nots have osteoderms and slot giant ground sloths have
osteoderms. Tree slots do not.
They seem to have lost them secondarily.
Sorry, buddies. You want to guess how big those
fucking scale bars are? This is poop.
I'm looking at the scale bar. I hope that that's like an inch,
which isn't usually what they use.
Probably something metric that's probably like, maybe, I don't
know, 2cm. I hope maybe a centimeter.
It's a great guest and it depends on which panel you're
looking at because the scale bar changes and isn't.
Labeled accurately on and then they don't define it.
I would have gotten chewed out for this.
Yeah, Hey guys, if you're gonna have a scale bar, write the
number. Oh how how big it's supposed to
be. So the poop that scale bar is 3
centimeters. OK, OK, OK.
Yeah. So it's a pretty a pretty solid.
Turd. It is good, it looks nice, it is
classic turd shaped. You would not mistake it.
If someone handed that to you, you'd be like you, gross.
Yeah, so why don't you describe that that classic turd to our
audience? Yeah, we've got a nice
cylindrical log here, but that's got a little bend in it.
But then the other two shots are a zoom in at the different ends
of the shit and it is conglomeratic, I would say.
Like it is there's it's full of large clasps is how I and
they're pretty rounded. They're rounded.
Yeah, it does it. Someone did eat corn.
Yeah, I know you don't remember, but you did.
So yeah. Yes, very corn like very much
Yes, It's beautiful. Yeah, so one of the funny things
about this paper is, I mean, they they concluded that it was
some sort of big predator that ate a sloth.
Those are sloth osteoderms. They couldn't, I think, tell
which ones. But this poop they said in the
highlight section which is like above the abstract, it's more
more. Condensed.
Like pinpointing than the abstract.
Then they said it was identified as a large carnivore coprolite
through a multi proxy analysis. Amy, can you guess the multi
proxy analysis might have included?
That guy looks at it, that guy looks at it, that guy looks at
it, and they all said it look like poop.
I mean, fair. Yeah.
So they all agreed it was poop. In fact, I didn't actually see
that defended anywhere in the quick scheme of the paper.
But specifically for calling it a carnivore poop, they said,
well, it's shaped like a tube. That's not the term that they
used. Cylindrical, I think is what
they said. It's really big, and then it's
full of phosphorus, and phosphorus makes sense because
phosphorus, carnivorin poops. You often find that in there
because it's a a decomposed form of bone.
Yeah. So it's very much like, why
don't I use this DNA analysis to identify the beetle when I have
the whole darkling beetle? Because you don't need to know
that there's phosphorus in it. You can fucking see bone.
You can see bone there. You don't have to, right?
Exactly, exactly like those. No, whoever ate this like found
a rotting dead thing with osteoderms and just ate just
took out those osteoderms and swallowed them without.
Yeah, no, no, it obviously consumed a lot of bone.
It's still. There so so shaped like a tube
really big has bone in it. I mean that sounds like a
carnivore to me, but I did think that was pretty funny.
Multi proxy. Multi approach.
Especially when the proxy was Why don't we talk about fossils
instead of the fact that it has bone in it?
Right. So yeah, it's really going
around. The next analysis is going to be
they're going to just go take a shit and they're going to eat a
lot of armadillo and then go and be like, what does it look like?
I kept looking and this is about where I started to get back on
track and simultaneously so far off of it.
So I found a paper that said, OK, you know, like there's some
like variation in different sloths.
They did notice that Milodon had a little bit more bite force.
So that kind of seems to match up with the the fact that it
seems to be omnivorous. And they also found that
Megatherium had pretty insane bite force, like really strong
bite force. Nice.
Right at the tip of its mouth. Nice.
And also Megatherium, as it turns out, has a larger occlusal
area of its teeth, so its teeth have more surface area.
Like than would scale. OK, that's exactly.
What? Yeah, than you would expect from
scale because. And that's a sign of a as well,
because it means they're not doing the herbivore thing of
like barely chewing and tossing it back to ferment.
It means that, you know, they need to be doing some chewing
and some grinding and they have to be doing some work in their
mouth, which isn't always related to carnivore, but it's
definitely not not a sign carnivore.
And then this is. This was why I.
Texted you so excited. You look so excited right now.
I'm really, Yeah. I found my new favorite paper
and that's what we'll be talking about pretty much for the rest
of this. So my new favorite paper came up
because it was titled and this is in like I don't like Royal
Proceedings B or something from like the 1990s.
So like a decent tier journal, but a little bit older when they
had better senses of humor than they currently do.
It's called Megatherium the Stabber.
Just that. That's a second title.
See. It like oh but is this the
inverse Iguanodon? Is this like everyone thought
Iguanodon's thumb spike was for stabbing but it was for
vegetation? Like megatherium but old psych
it was actually used for stabbing.
That's great. If anybody does go and look at
Iguanodon's stabbing potential, they will have to cite this
paper. We gotta get in on that.
That's hilarious. Yeah, Mega theory.
I'm the stabber, which is how I will be referring to myself in
third person. Megan.
From the stabber. If I'm mad I'm going full mega
theory. I'm the stabber.
I think it's. A great name.
That's right, This is perfect. I'm going to get that on a mug
for you. Thank you.
For whatever reason, possibly because of the crazy bite
forest, possibly because its teeth are bigger, possibly just
because they were like, I don't know, its vibes are off.
The authors of this paper thought that maybe there was a
chance that Megatherium was carnivorous, not just scavenging
carnivorous, but maybe actively hunting.
And they decided to take a look at its arms.
Now, most giant ground sloths do have pretty scary hand claws.
Yeah. I don't know, huge if
megatheriums are scarier than anything else, but like, the
going hypothesis is that they're using them to pull down tree
branches. Which is why every fucking sloth
illustration looks like the sloth is a pole dancer that just
hasn't quite gotten off the ground.
That pole dancer has got an apple shaped pear shaped body
for sure. They got that huge apple.
Bottom. Jeans.
Apple. Yeah.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's beautiful.
Hilariously. I have a like a stuffed ground.
I'll have to send you a picture afterwards.
I have a stuffed ground sloth like stuffed animal.
And I realized the other day that if I put it next to my
lamp, it also looks like a pole dancer because it's arm is up in
the classic ground sloth pose. So yeah, pole dancers of the
past and maybe carnivorous. So for whatever reason they
wanted to look at. OK, well, if this animal is
using those claws not for manhandling trees or whatever,
but is using them for stabbing and they specifically said
because it's it's talons are really I guess they're narrow
and they're like more slender and knife like.
I don't know from the way that they described it if it's more
knife like than other ground slots.
Fair. OK, I've seen the fire number,
but I can't, like, I can't readily pull that.
Yes, yeah, seen some pretty fucking big ones.
Real big. Yeah, yeah.
So they decided to do a study of its forearms to see whether it
was built for power, which presumably you'd need a lot of
strength to RIP a tree down so you could eat it, or for speed,
AKA for stabbing. What if the tree is falling
really quickly and maybe it's for those trees, Yeah.
Yeah, like a little ninja. Yeah, right, Right.
Yes. Maybe it's scissors.
Maybe that's what they were using them for is they didn't
want to chew. They just used them as little
scissorhands. Didn't think about that.
So they discovered that it was built for speed rather than for
strength, and that it could have generated about 2700 joules of
force. And this is about where the
paper descends into some of the stupidest sentences that I've
ever read in my life. But like purposefully.
Stupid, I was gonna say it's still your.
Favorite. Like I had to go and look up the
author's name and the word me too to make sure that there
wasn't like some obvious thing because I was fangirling a
little bit by how stupid. I love that is actually.
I hate that that's your order of events.
That's really. Depressing.
I know, right? Yep.
So I'm gonna read you some sentences, right?
So they. Because I have no car.
They wanted to make certain. Jewels mean that's.
Not yeah, they were like, well, we wanted to make certain that
that was sufficient to penetrate soft tissues.
Also just backing up, I should point out that this is the 90s
where I feel like this sort of thing was less frowned upon,
where instead of just going to sight, how much force does it
take to cut meat, They were like, I know how to cut meat,
how much force can I make? I'm a human being, how strong am
I? Great, wonderful.
So an experiment was done in which one of the authors RAF a
100 kilogram, a 38 year old male paleontologist with no special
training in any sporting discipline, threw into the air
an object of 1 kilogram up to a height of 2 meters by the
actions of his right tricep. Hello.
Gross. This is so.
I hate everything about that. That's terrible.
Amy, it sounds like he's tossing knives in his kitchen for.
Yeah. His right tricep alone.
Why don't you just? Say like, how do you I also just
I'm like, what do you mean? Right, tricep alone.
I mean, that's also really hard. How did you how did you freeze
all the other muscles in your arm to make sure it was just the
right tricep? And again, right, this is just
ridiculous of just like, or it's one of these things where you're
just like, oh, shit, I don't know.
We really need to have a source for this.
OK, OK, Fred, take off your shirt.
This knife here anyway, that's stupid.
I hate that that's worthless. Also, that's like freaking
meaningless. So anyways, he figured that
that's 20 joules of kinetic energy.
So his sad, measly little arms could make 20 joules of kinetic
energy. But he wasn't done.
He wasn't done with the. Experience way smaller than
Megatherium. Like by own awe.
Yeah, the same subject he, he was concerned that OK, well that
doesn't necessarily tell you about meat, right?
The same subject stabbed a 10 centimeter thick muscle of
domestic cattle covered with fur with a a kitchen knife, using
again only the energy produced by his right tricep.
Maybe he was fucking tired after throwing all those knives in the
air and he wasn't able. OK but wait, what?
This is like a hunk of meat with flesh still on it?
Or is this? Yeah, see, that's, that's the
thing that kind of confused me at first, because at first I was
like, this motherfucker is pretending to be a giant ground
sloth and he is stabbing steaks. Like, that's really what that
means, right? But no, it's covered with fur.
Is he stabbing cows? Is he?
Is he going outside? It's the 90s.
On a mega theory on the stabber mission and stabbing cows.
You could go check all the newspapers in that area at that
time. The murderous, mysterious cow
Stabber. The conclusion that Megatherium
must have been an efficient stabber seems clear, but
identifying the stabbed is less easy.
Oh my. So, Amy, can you guess what they
thought Megatherium might have been stabbing?
I mean, this is dark. Each other babies of their own
kind. Yep, so they did look into that.
And there are no healed injuries on Megatherium, and there's no
sign of sexual dimorphism. They ate all of them.
There was no evidence left. You could see actually all the
phosphor of their shit. They left no piece of spot.
OK, so they decided it wasn't each other.
Who else? Who else might they be?
Definitely humans. Definitely humans.
Delicious. Tasty.
Weirdly, that didn't come up because I think they went
extinct before. At that time, the time that they
thought humans had arrived. At this time, I think we know
that they overlapped, but at that time I don't think that
they thought they had. So that one didn't come up.
Right. But are we like skewering like
chickens here or is it a Saber toothed cats that they're
finally getting the revenge on? Yeah.
All right, great. So they were like because.
They're so abundant, you know, maybe it's the stuff.
Maybe megalodon? Or why do I keep saying mega
theory and the stabber is stabbing in defense?
It's an audible. Killer, right?
Okay, stabbing. Sure, sure, sure.
The Smilodon comes. Towards and then they point it
out. Stick their hands up.
Right. It has an adult body mass of 4
tons, so it should not be particularly worried about the
chance of attack by, say, a Saber toothed myelodon.
By analogy, a 70 kilogram man should not be afraid of the
attack of a six kilogram cat, regardless of the latter's
ferocity. Oh my God, so someone has a very
mean cat that's. So they're like, OK, they they,
they could have used it for defense, but it seems like kind
of a waste. So yeah, maybe it ran around the
countryside stabbing easy meals. But they also noticed that with
the stabbing muscles also came strength to like, roll things
over, essentially. OK, like specifically an
armadillo. Yeah, a fucking armadillo.
OK, OK, so it's so. Uh huh.
They they of course did a test again the author RAF, who has no
special training in weightlifting.
We've already defined that this guy is a piece of shit.
Lifted 40 kilograms by the action of both his biceps
muscle. Oh my.
God, not just one tricep, both of his biceps.
So without weightlifting, Megatherium could clearly flip
over things like that, But they think that Megatherium would
have been able to lift or flip over things that were on the
order of 400 to 1000 kilograms, and they conclude that therefore
adult glyptodonts basically would have been susceptible to
this fucking cow tipping hypothesis.
I can't stab you, it'll tip you. So disappointed.
You are vulnerable. That RAF or whatever the fucking
author's initial service was not that listed as being worthless
at all sports and then made a child dress up in a ninja turtle
costume. It saw if he could flip the
child over. Where are the tests?
Where is the science? Where is the test?
Where's the science? Yeah.
Anyways, so yeah, Megatherium the stabber.
The Megatherium maybe killed animals at random.
We do know that Megatherium had good bite force and it had teeth
that maybe implied it was eating more.
However, when anybody does micro wear or mezzaware it comes back
looking like a browser. OK.
And. Maybe it was just occasional,
you know, it wouldn't. He's aware.
All that shit is like last meal record.
It's not like, true. Yeah, it doesn't include the
whole. Maybe, yeah, maybe it was only
browsing because it couldn't find any glyptodons.
Yeah, exactly. It was so fucking hungry it was
only eating leaves and it died because it's not it.
Was like, well this isn't exactly like a glyptodon, but
why don't I choose some wood? That's so sad.
OK, so now the other thing is that when people look at the
coprolites of sloths. I was going to ask about their
poops. I was like, I know we got sloth
poop, what's in that? Poop.
They've got at least one that they think is from a megatherium
and it's mostly full of wood. Not dead.
Glipped it on. So smile it on.
It's a. Good but final supper.
How do you match a coprolite to a butthole?
Exactly. Exactly how do you know which
giant ground sloths butthole that came?
From right. Yeah.
And what what would be the shape, Amy, if Megatherium was
carnivorous? Would it be long?
A tube full of phosphorus. A phosphorus full of tube,
phosphorus full tube, that would be long, long.
And let me tell you, I could not find that other megatherium
poop. But I can tell you that that is
on the order in size of a Nothrotheriops poop.
So what if those sloth osteoderms are sloth on sloth
climb, right? Crime.
I did double check they did live there.
They lived maybe in that fossil formation, but they definitely
lived in that general area. Could have been.
Yeah. Then that would not have changed
the outcome of the paper 'cause they still said carnivore and
Megatherium the stabber was not here to fucking play.
It was here to flip sloths over and eat them and.
Just going. After that, clipped it on.
So Zen Arthur specialist is like, I know you.
I know you're all slow. I know you're all teeth are
worthless. I know you all have a strange
number of neck, neck vertebra, vertebra.
Yeah. Super weird.
Yeah. Wow.
Oh, my God. Holy crap.
Holy crap, for real So. Isn't that the dumbest?
That's. Such a good theory.
I'm the. Stabber, that makes me really,
really happy. I have a picture I've been
meaning to post of me with a Megatherium specimen at the
London Natural History Museum, so now I'm going to make it
about this some. Do you should?
Oh I did post a picture. The next picture is just
coprolites of no through therium since no or no through theory
OPS. Since no through theory, OPS did
have a tendency to poop in groups, there's a group latrine
in. Arizona in Arizona and it.
Doesn't look the same, but no, through theory OPS we know for
sure from isotope analysis was an herbivore, but I don't know
that it's butthole would have produced the same thing if it
wasn't. This does not scream carnivore
to me. It very much knows, Yeah.
But again, if we're talking about I, I really doubt that
they are more than opportunistic.
I would just I just have to go. But how often do those
opportunities you got to keep are the opportunities you make?
This is fair and with all like almost all of this, I want to
see comparisons to like Megatherium.
It was that the largest of the giant ground slots or just one
of like can we compare it to the other ones and see if their
teeth are abnormally large for the getting that.
But I just would want to I want to know I want I but I buy it is
somewhere in that turd is some baby see baby sloth like what if
there's some like infanticidal fucked up like this is what
happened before is I loved sea otters and then I met you and we
did. We learned such horrible things
together and it ruins my favorite animals and you're
going to be like sloths. We're straight up carnivorous.
Yeah, Cannibal. That ate each other's babies.
Just Megatherium and maybe Myelodon.
This is great. No, for sure, herbivore.
I'm just going to have but. Megalonics fair, OK, I think
right, OK Megalonics I think is bigger than Megatherium.
It's. Been it's been a while.
But I don't know what its diet was because I just got real
distracted by this paper and. I mean, you do know what this
really means? Right.
We're not doing another rap battle.
It's not happening. It obviously has to happen.
This is an encore if I've ever heard this is.
Only if you dress up like fucking sloth.
Edward Scissor sure, absolutely chasing me through the.
World, Absolutely. With pleasure.
Absolutely. You know, I would enjoy making a
costume like that. I know, I know.
You made Iguanodon hand costumes unprise.
I really wouldn't call that good though.
Give me enough time. I did make that pleasy sort of
look. It was great it worked out.
Yeah, that's pleasing. So it's cool.
It was perfect. Hot damn, hot damn and hot meat
nothing. Like Xenarthrin says it's
stabbing cannibals, but I hate they get weirder every day if
they're not one of our like, flagship animals along with
fucking turtles, right? Nothing is.
Saint Arthrons are so weird. There's also now some evidence
that Thalasakness or whatever the marine ones were that they
may have also had some adaptations for eating things
like crabs off the sea floor, not just the seagrass.
Wow. Wow, you would think.
Wow. But it makes sense.
That would be hard to do with dentine though man.
Like, well, that would be, I mean, if it grows fast, I guess.
But like, there's so many species of giant ground sloths,
like these giant animals all living in the same general
place, same general time. It makes sense that maybe some
of them were dipping more into the omnivore stuff than we were
expecting them to. Right.
There's got to be some sort of niche partitioning happening
here. And I mean, I know when I worked
with an armadillo at a museum, whatever, that was also a weird
thing I don't want to talk about, but they we fed that
armadillo a lot of bugs that that baby ate a lot of bugs.
So I mean, but that's different than like flesh, flesh eating.
That's just yeah, Insectivory again, so.
Your adaptations are different. Anyways, I think, you know,
jury's out as to whether it's morally different, but
physically it is. And that's a wrap on season 3.
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