Prehistoric Monsters of the Deep

The Blue Whale is the largest living animal on Earth, but it isn't the first gigantic sea creature. In this podcast, Allison and Robert examine the prehistoric dinosaurs of the deep. Tune in to learn more about real-life sea monsters.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast. Is
Alison Madama, the science how staff works dot com. And
this is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works

(00:22):
dot com. Tell me something else, and do your kids
play with sea monsters in the bathtub? You're just swimming cool?
Not so much yet. Yeah, they got a couple of
fish that squired out water, which are pretty exciting. A frog,
it's getting a little moldy, to be honest. Nothing nothing
is exciting. Its prehistoric monsters of the deep though, Yes,
what about you when you hit the bathtub? And then

(00:45):
the rare happenstance that I take a bath instead of
a shower, I tend to only have like like a
like an orange soda or an orange Lacroix with me.
So I'm kind of out of the plastic sea monster phase.
But when I was a kid, I mean I still
loved giant sea monsters. But as when as a kid,
I was really into them. And I had this book
which actually brought in today and we have in the

(01:06):
podcasting chamber with us um and it was titled The
Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, and it's
fabulous because it's like every other page is as like
a double truck spread of of these awesome prehistoric monster
um illustrations. I had a lot of fun going through it,

(01:28):
definitely when we were picking out the animals that we
wanted to feature because it's dinosaurs, and then later on
it gets into prehistarting mammals that are awesome, you know,
because it's like giant horses and and you know, killer
sloths and things like that. And then there's a whole
section with with the with the sea creatures, the sea monsters,
if you will, and and they're amazing, I mean that
the illustrations. Uh, it's several different illustrators, but a guy

(01:51):
by the name of Colin Newman did the fish and amphibians. Yeah,
and all the animals seem to have a slightly different personality,
as you pointed out, Yeah, it's like they don't get
me wrong there, they look very scientific. There's nothing cartoony
about them, but there's something about the way they're drawn, Yeah,
where they have kind of they seem to have their
own little personalities, right. The Shonnasarus, which we're going to
talk about in a little bit. Kind of seems like

(02:13):
it's almost smiling. It seems Mary. It seems like a
Mary marine, a Mary fat dolphin, like I kind of expected.
It kind of looks like you should be like dressed
up like a like a nineteen twenties billionaire, you know,
kind of a monopoly man, like going like floating down
the street in a like an underwater New York. Yeah. Yeah,

(02:33):
So before we get to some of the ancient rulers
of the ocean that we want to talk about today,
who who's ruling the oceans today? Who? Who are the
big marine? Who the who are the rulers today? Well, um,
as as anybody's ever watched Shark Week can tell you,
the great white is pretty awesome. It's great white is
pretty awesome. And and how bigs great white get Great

(02:54):
whites can get about between twenty Yeah, it's pretty sizeable,
they look pretty years and they can definitely chomp down
on pretty much anything that gets in their path. Yeah. Well,
I was wondering when we're talking about great whites, Um,
I mean, great whites have been around for a long time,
so I really wanted to check on that and they've
been around as long as eighteen million years ago to

(03:15):
twelve million years ago, and then if you look at
the Great Whites ancestors, they might go back as far
as fifty million years ago. So it's not quite but
it's still that's not quite as old as some of
the characters we're going back like double that for for
the guys we're looking at, of course the other as
far as we're talking about sea monsters and just giant
underwater creatures because obviously creatures in the sea can be

(03:38):
larger than the creatures on on the surface because of
you know, they're suspended in water, et cetera. And so
today we actually have the largest species as far as
we know that has ever existed, and that is the
blue whale. Yes, and what are the measurements on the
blue whale. It's pretty astounding, um, seventy eight feet in length,
although they have one recorded at it in six ft,

(04:01):
so that's pretty crazy. If you assume, I don't know,
ten ft to a building story, so that would be
equivalent to a ten foot building, I'm sorry, a ten
story building. Well, yeah, I know, I knew what you
were getting it. Yeah, and there and they obviously weigh
a ton too, as much as a hundred fifty tons,

(04:21):
and the females, of course, are larger than the males,
which is nice to hear sometimes. Now, one of the
distant relatives, um of of modern charks was the the megalodon,
a big tooth. Yeah, and and this one is is
a favorite I know of a lot of people out there,
because there's actually a whole series of books, um, the
meg books. I've not heard of those. Yeah, it's uh,

(04:45):
forgive me, I can't remember the author's name offhand, but
there's a there's a series of them and there it's
actually I've never read read one, so the fans will
have to correct me if I'm wrong in this. But
there's it has to do with like there being like
a deep area of the ocean that's still warm, but
it's cut off from the rest of the ocean by
like a really like chilly layer. Okay, species evolving, they
have like isolation and they're all like running wild in there,

(05:07):
and then scientists, you know, end up accidentally freeing them
and they run rampage jaws like all over the ocean. Wait,
was it the Michael Crichton I'm larn now, No, No,
it's like it's it's some of the it's another dude,
um and they almost made a movie out of her something.
But but it's one it's it's one of these where
I think it involves like each book ends up involving shark,
giant sharks battling other prehistoric creatures, and it's part of

(05:29):
this I don't know. There seems to be this whole
like subset of fandom on on the Internet where people
were really into um, prehistoric sea monsters and imagining what
their battles, like their Godzilla esque battles would would consist of.
You know which is pretty cool. Was that MTV show
where they used to have the different celebrities battling it

(05:51):
out in the in the ring, right, right, so Deathmatch
except with yeah, except with with prehistoric monsters. Right. So
let's talk about some of the characters we're gonna get
around today. Yeah, we're we're dealing with with some legitimate
prehistoric monsters here, we're shying away from the prestart sharks

(06:13):
and getting into what a lot of people would would
probably say like dinosaurs of the deep. Yeah, let's kick
it off at the Shoonosaurus. So as we were just
talking about let's imagine diving into the waters about two
hundred and forty eight million years ago and way back.
This is the Triassic Period, I believe. Yeah, So let's
imagine that we're going to dive into what is now

(06:35):
present day Nevada, except to then it was uh covered
in water, and you might have encountered this gigantic greene
reptile that to my eyes, like I said before, it
looks like this sort of massive, pop bellied dolphin with
a slightly sharper beak as opposed to the more rounded
ones you might see on a bottle nose dolphin today.
But the chopper beak only had teeth at the front,

(06:56):
which I didn't find particularly scary. So I'm not sure
I'm going to qualify this as legitimate monster per se. Well, still,
I don't know. Teeth only at the front, that's kind
of creepy. You were a smile at you, that would
be It just reminds you of somebody having buck teeth,
you know, It's like sore back in. A gentleman by
the name of Dr. Semen Mueller discovered the fossilized remains

(07:16):
of what we now know as a Shonasaurus popularis and
Muller justice like proud looking. He's just he's a popular dude, right,
So what that means in Latin? I've popular a popular snosaurus.
I think it's what they're getting at. But sure, so
Muller discovered them in this area of Berlin or what

(07:38):
is now Berlin actheas Or State Park. But the serious
digging didn't start until the nineteen fifties with two guys,
Dr Charles Camp and Dr Samuel Wells from Berkeley, which
does a lot with dinosaurs, and these two gentlemen unearthed
about forty asaurs uh discovered in different locations throughout the park.
And of course, in nine the shown is source Popularis

(08:01):
achieved its place and fame. It became the Nevada State fossil.
So good for them. I have to admit I didn't
know that we had state fossils. I didn't either. I
also have learned something that we have state insects. Well,
I think I knew that, but state fossils is new.
I wonder what Georges is. I don't know. I don't know.
So if they shown a source belonged to the order Ectheosauria,

(08:22):
which means a fish lizard. Okay, so if you're to
look at it, um, it had four paddles, kind of
like the flippers that you see on dolphins today, and
it had a fish like tail that barreled it through
the water. How big is bigay roughly fifteen meters according
to some measurements, and that's about double the length of

(08:44):
the larger or great whites. Yeah, but that in perspective.
And so that was for one particular species, the popularis.
And then they unearthed another species um called the I
believe the sicky in it sickeni insis, and that might
have been even bigger. So a Shinasaurus breathed air, just
like dolphins do, but the Shona saurs didn't lug its

(09:04):
massive body to short lay eggs. Instead, it gave birth
to live young at sea like its fellow athosaurs. So
this is pretty cool. I was reading um that scientists
unearthed the fossil of an adult female a thesaur giving birth,
that the fossil record was able to capture that. That's
I think that's just amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's one
thing if you can get one just sort of standing there,

(09:24):
but when you when you when you get like fossil
uh finds that involve you have birth or or or
you know, eggs or or like. The occasionally will be
like two dinosaurs duking it out, you know. Yeah, So
taken together, you kind of wonder why the Athosaurus, of
which the Shona saurs was one, died out because there
are some pretty highly successful animals and the occupied, according

(09:47):
to scientists, um, the ecological niche of today's dolphins, and
say they're around for about a hundred million years, So
I would definitely say that's a that's a good run. Yeah,
so that's the Sinosaurus for you. Okay, I hope you
guys have a good picture and if you don't have
a good picture of the Shinnosaurus, look it up because
he's he's worth a gander. Yeah, we'll have to put
some pictures up on our Facebook page. Yeah, there there

(10:09):
are a lot of pictures out there, so surely we
can find a few we can link to. So let's
come over to a different order, the paura order. Yeah,
and this is where I mean, the other guys were great,
but the police sours or where it really gets awesome. Um,
and the one I'm gonna mention here is the Leo
plurid on, all right, and this guy looks This is

(10:32):
when they really start looking fearsome. This doesn't look like
a fat dolphin. Let's turn the page there so I
can actually gaze upon him again. Yeah, he I mean
this looks like something that would battle like Godzilla. Um. Like,
he's very very streamlined looking. Um looks kind of if
you've seen like a whale skeleton. You know, the actual

(10:53):
skull isn't big in bulbous, you know. Uh, that's kind
of like the the overall shape going on with the
with Elia Plurdon. So it's very streamlined looking, has a
and has this like very sort of cruel looking head,
big thick football player neck um streamlined body into these

(11:13):
massive flippers, and so POS believe he was probably extremely
maneuverable in the water and could move at different depths
pretty easily, and was probably an excellent long distant swimmer.
And where I've actually seen some like some some computer
animated kind of videos where they show this guy and uh,

(11:34):
one of his relatives like just sort of like popping
out of nowhere and like biting the head off of
another underwater creature, which is cool, and I imagine that's
what the end game of this was like, but but
I really dig the idea of of him being like
one of these long pursuit killers, you know, where he's
like he's chasing after him and he's just gonna wear
you down over time, which which is actually kind of

(11:56):
like early human hunters. I mean in the sense that
early human hunters did like the long pursuit of a
of an animal and then eventually wore it out. Right. Well,
another possibility is that he could be engaged in those
long swims to find a mate, right, Yeah, that's true. Yeah,
they were. These were probably guys that covered a lot
of territory. Um. Another part of that big cruel looking

(12:16):
head he's got is he had some powerful muscles to
drive the teeth into the prey um. What was its
prey pretty much anything it wanted because this was a
this is a top predator um and those are pretty rare.
Right when you think about the structure of the food chain,
you've got a couple of folks sitting on top, or

(12:36):
animal species sitting on top, and then a whole mass
accumulating on the bottom. Yeah, Like I I like the
explanation of it as a as a pyramid. You know,
and at the bottom of the pyramid you have is
the thickest and that's where you have all the plant life.
And as you move up the pyramid you have the herbivores,
the omnivores, and then the carnivores. So the guy setting

(12:59):
at the top is just like like one animal the
other animals. Well yeah, yeah, guy right, Well, you know,
I'm using guy in a very gentle sense. The the
animal setting at the very top of the pyramid on
this which I'd like to imagine being like on a
throne of bones, you know, like he pretty much runs
the show, but that whole pyramid supports him. So there's
so that's That's actually one of the interesting things when

(13:19):
we get into looking at the fossil records and these
like super predators and these these top predators, is that
there weren't that many of these guys out there compared
to the rest of the biomass that was ruling the
earth in those days. So so we have we often
have a lot less to go on. Um. I should
also mention that the Leo Proudan this was a late

(13:40):
Jurassic creature, so about two dred and thirteen million years ago.
Where have you found some of these guys. Um they
have shown up in uh the in eastern England and
northern France. Uh you know, dating back up again about
a hundred and sixty million years or so. And uh

(14:01):
oh and and this was pretty interesting too. Apparently there
has been some um, some misinformation about their size. UM.
Generally we're looking at about thirty nine feet in length,
but there have been a there's been like a documentary
or two that have have exaggerated it to eighty two feet. Yeah,
which is quite quite an exaggeration. And and I was

(14:25):
reading up on this and some of the reasons get
pretty interesting. There's a probably the internet's biggest UM fan
is this guy named Richard Forrest, and he runs POLICEO
sour site, which is like just to a search for
POLICEO source site, you'll find it and uh and he
has a whole section where he talks about like some
of these size controversies. And he said, it comes down

(14:46):
to like two different things. On on one hand, again,
you don't have a lot of fossil record for these
big killers, uh, so you can kind of have to
throw in some estimation. You know, like a lot of
times you're estimating their size any way based on like
their jaw side. And then then also you might you're
you're thinking, like, all right, I have X number of

(15:07):
skeletons of this guy, but this is this is not
you know, the one that I have here is probably
not the biggest, so we can probably estimate that they
get maybe twenty bigger. So then you so you end
up saying, hey, the species can get to this length.
And then then also he said that if you're if
you have you're trying to get funding for your study,
then apparently size matters, so you want to stress the

(15:29):
size of your creature, you know. Um and uh and
then finally he referred to something and I love this,
uh a process called godzilla god He said, godzilla ization,
which sounds like you would want to say god zillification.
But uh. At any rate, this has to do with
the media picks up on one of these stories and
the the Yeah, like the Predator X, which we'll get

(15:51):
into you he just gets more ferocious with each media.
You know. It's like like Science Daily gets it, he's
pretty tough. Then New Scientists gets he's even tougher, you know,
and like trickles down to finally people on the blogs
are just like going nuts about how crazy this dinosaur
is or pliosaur is um. So anyway, I found that
really interesting. Well to his point, to forest point, I

(16:13):
will say that when I when we were picking out
the animals for this prehistoric podcast, I was checking out
animals based on definitely appearance, but also size. I mean,
the big ones you're you're curious, you know, they kind
of blow you away, um, just off the bat. And
then when you start getting into the different species. You know,
of course they all have their own really unique adaptations
that are fascinating in their own right, but off the bat,

(16:35):
if something is forty two ft, definitely, yeah, that definitely
I thought, yeah, this this should go on the podcast,
you know, Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean I I tended
to go first on just how ferocious and mean looking there,
and then and then look and see how big they were.
But it's it's kind of I guess they went through
a similar thing with like with the actual like land dinosaurs.
You know, for the longest, everybody loved the t rex

(16:57):
and that was whatever was biggest, whatever was baddest, and
then kind of people got more into like oh, velociraptors,
which we've of course we did a whole podcast on that, right,
and now velociraptors have their very own awareness day. Yeah,
take that t rex. So I wonder if with like
with the with the the prehistoric sea creatures, it's kind
of like we're having the same process, but it's like
a few years behind. So everybody's still up in arms

(17:19):
about the big ones. It's kind of like nineteen eighties,
like pro wrestling, when everything has to be giant steroid guys,
you know. So it's like we're still in like, oh
my god, it's so big. It's like, let's look at
how big this dinosaur is. It's like fifty ft. No,
it's eighty feet. But maybe in like five years or so,
we'll be really into the smaller predators of the in
the fossil record. Well, before we get into the smaller ones,
I want to tell you guys about the cronosaurs. And

(17:41):
you guys might have heard about this one. This is
another ple cosaur and he was occurring in the Early Cretaceous.
So if you don't know when the Early Cretaceous period was,
that's about four million years ago for this particular guy,
this particular cronosaurus. So we're creeping up closer and closer
to the more modern seat law. Right, And this was
another marine reptile who's capable of reaching astounding lengths. This

(18:05):
one clocked in at lengths of forty two ft. So
take a moment and think about that. We can just
throw these numbers around all day. Buttot again, that's that's impressive.
Imagine swimming at your local beach and encountering a forty
two organism. That's that's pretty astounding. So the Cretosaurus has
been found um are fossils of the cronosaurs have been

(18:27):
found in Australia mainly it's the biggest known place asaur.
It had a flat topped head, and if you think
of a crocodile head, that's what that's what to me.
It kind of looks like it's reminiscent of a crocodile head.
But it had those four flippers, and it had this
body that tapered off into a point. It wasn't a
tail exactly, didn't have a lobed fin or anything like that,
but just kind of tapered off. It was an excellent swimmer,

(18:50):
like the leoh plurid on that Robert just mentioned, that
is a really tough word to say. Let's just say
like it's fellow places I haven't spelled out fanatically in front.
I mean I still keep tripping over it. So it
had to leave the water to lay eggs. And this
was really really it's only vulnerable times. It had this
big head, strong teeth and jaws made it very formidable.
Then it's a really big head, like it looks in

(19:12):
the illustration, it looks oversized, like it looks a little ridiculous. Right,
So we're sitting in this room that's maybe I don't know,
ten ft by seven feet, and the preseosaur head, the
Cronosaurus head I think, which just dominate this space. The
head alone, it's pretty insane. But if you're really interested

(19:33):
in them, I highly recommend you go to the Coronosaurs Corner.
And that's a site that you've forwarded to me. And
what that is is the site for a museum, and
it's a museum in Australia, specifically the town of Richmond
in Queensland. And Cronosaur's Corner is part of Australia's Dinosaur Trail.
Did you know that Australia had a dinosaur trail? I

(19:55):
knew they were They had some really cool fossils, but
I didn't know that they had a dinosaur trail, right,
so only they have established a route which you can
go on and check out all the cool fines. And um,
I was looking at the Chronosaur's site and they have
all these pictures of the different fossils that people have found,
so apparently they might still be letting you dig and

(20:16):
and find stuff. I mean, you could come up with
a Chronosaurus vertebratee or something, which I thought it was
really cool. And they have a based on the pictures,
they have like a giant like fake chronosaurus out front
of the museum that you can I don't know if
you're allowed to climb on it. Look like some of
the photos people had climbed on it. But don't go
climbing on it and blame us, but it looked really cool.

(20:37):
Get your picture made with it for sure. Yeah. If
we have any Australian listeners who's who've been to this
particular corner of the world, please send us pictures. We
would love to see them. Will post them on Facebook. Yeah.
And Chronosaurus Corner, by the way, that's the corner with
a K because it's you know, for branding purposes. Yeah,
Chronosaurus is with the K corner KK. I don't know

(20:57):
those Australians are always thinking, yeah, so what about the elasmosaurus.
The way this guy looks, Yeah, this one's really cool.
This is I guess the best way to describe it is,
and I don't I really don't want to take this
in a longness monster direction, but you know how the
longness monsters basically supposed to look kind of like that,

(21:17):
except with a much longer neck. And if I were
to take a quote from nineteenth century English paaleontologist Dean Conniberry,
he said that these that the Elasmosaurus has resembled quote
snakes threaded through the bodies of turtles. So yeah, these
dudes have really long necks. How long? Um? They contained

(21:38):
twenty eight vertebrae uh and more than half of the
animal's total length was neck, Like twenty six ft was
neck and the things only forty six ft long. Right,
So if I'm whatever, I am five ft something, let's
round it off to five ft four. That would mean
that I had a you know, more than a two
and a half foot neck, which is kind of really

(22:00):
is that would be tough with the podcast microphones. But
it could it could come in interesting and we'll see
how ye, how could that benefit benefit me? Well, they
think that well, obviously it would come into play hunting.
That's the big deal. Obviously if you're any kind of
dinosaur or um or a plea saur and they think

(22:23):
it went one of two ways. One way would be
that basically his head can get get there before his
body can, right, so his body's kind of hanging back here,
and so he can sort of creep his his head
up to you before you're the waters are disturbed by
his body. Which sounds kind of cartoony, you know, it's
you can kind of you know, sneak his head around
the corner and then if you see something good, the

(22:44):
body comes running fast. It reminds me of the Scooby
Do cartoons, you know, where the legs are going so
fast and they make that noise, you know, the Scooby noise. Yeah. Yeah.
It also reminds me of like um, like Inspector Gadget
and um the elastic Man from Fantastic You know how
that their head would come around a corner on like
a super long neck and you know that's that's basically

(23:07):
the advantage of this guy would have another possibility of
feeding wise. Um. And this is one that we can
back up with modern examples in the animal kingdom. UM
involves up the the elasmosaur is just sort of you know,
floating along the top of the water with his head
all the way up right, looking down above water, like

(23:28):
the periscope of a of a subway kind of thing. No, No,
I think it would be more like like the crow's
nest on a like a ship, except if if you
were like up in the crow's nest looking down and
seeing what kind of fish are down in the water.
So he's he's got his head all the way up
and he's looking down and seeing what's going on the water,
and then he sees a fish he wants to eat,
you know, he just strikes down to the water with

(23:50):
his head long neck, grabs hold of it and has
his lunch. And there is there's actually a bird that
has a similar practice today and it is called snake bird.
Right yeah, and then a anhinga. Uh. And I look
up a picture of this guy and you definitely get
a real prehistoric vibe off of him. Um. That's um.
If you want to do a Google image search. It's

(24:12):
a n H I n G A, and uh, it's
got this creepy long neck and he just kind of sits,
you know, up in the water. Uh, you know, kind
of swan like ready to strike. And uh it's really cool.
So that that's that's one way they think he this
guy would have eaten. Um. So, so that's the Elasmosaurus

(24:33):
in a nutshell. But I found like one other, like
really cool um fact about about this particular prehistoric sea
monster and it actually takes place in the Old West,
all right, so um and I was not familiar with this.
This may actually merit the whole podcast at some point,
but there was a period during the Old West known

(24:54):
as the Bone Wars or the Great Dinosaur Rush, and
this just comes we should do a whole rush series
podcast because I also want to do one on the
uranium rush of the cool Yeah, yeah, if you guys
have fresh ideas for podcasts besides gold rushes, or maybe
we could do some interesting twists on gold rush besides
Also Sarah and Katie will we'll have that for second, miss,

(25:15):
But tell me about the So this one is you know, guys,
you know the gold Rush of course was you know,
people rushing out into the wilderness because there's gold out
there and we've gotta have it. This is more instead
of like grizzled old prospectors, this is like Yale educated
paleontologists rushing out into the American West to try and
find fossils. Yeah, and to get the prestige in honor of,

(25:37):
you know, of discovering these things. So uh, and you
have two guys in particular though, um, one name, one
name Marsh and one name Cope, Edward Drinker Cope. And
these guys like we're friends at one point, but then
just just totally had a falling out over competition for
these fossils and and and so they started feuding with

(26:01):
each other. And when I say feuding, I mean they
were resorting to bribery, theft, destruction of bones. Um, they
were attacking each other in the scientific publications, trying to
ruin each other's credibility and sabotage their funding. I mean,
these guys were getting really nasty about about about bones

(26:22):
and so so also they're you know, rushing to to
get things done, right. So what happened when they went
to Kansas. They went to Kansas, and uh and Cope
found an Elasmosaurus um fossil, and so he starts like
putting the you know, putting together the pieces and trying
to figure out what the overall you know, um body
of the animal looked like. And in in his haste,
he managed to put the head on the wrong end

(26:43):
on the tape, so he ended up with the head
on the tail. And then he sent this off, you know,
it's it goes to publish, and and when he finds
out what he did, he starts buying back the copies
at his own expense, uh, so that nobody will see
this horrible illustration, and he presented Mark his enemy. Meanwhile,
it takes just rich de light in this and just

(27:04):
starts like like hammering him even more, even though Marsha
later on made a similar mistake with Brona Saras skeleton.
So it sounds amazing. And there's actually a graphic novel
account of this titled, uh, Bone Sharps, Cowboys and thunder Lizards,
A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope Athaniel Charles marsh in
the Gilded Age of Paleontology. Uh, it looks really cool.

(27:28):
Check that out. And that's by kind of Jim Otto Vianni. Yeah, yeah,
there's a whole there's a whole comic book publisher publishing
house out there, and they just do awesome comic books
about scientists. So yeah, well that I'll have to put
a link to that pitch. So what about some I mean,
we don't have to go all the way back to
uh the Bone Wars to figure out some modern day

(27:50):
controversy around fossil finds. What about Predator X. Yeah, Predator
X is the big one just just came out last
year in two thousand nine out of believe um, a
Norwegian expedition yeah, up around uh Spalls Bard actually and
uh this was you know, studied by Oslo's Natural History

(28:11):
Museum and uh and they found these these fossils and
it looks to be a forty nine foot uh plosaur
very similar. Yeah, dub predator. Predator X is not the
official title. In fact, it has no like an official
species uh you know name as of yet, no official classification.

(28:33):
I guess they're still working on that. But a lot
of people are thinking that it's a plosur like the Cronosaurus. Yeah. Yeah,
it looks very similar to the Chronosaurus and the Lapooradon Um,
I rushed through it the a pronunciation there because it
didn't have the word in front of me. But but yeah,
a lot of people think it's one of those two.
We're not one of those two, but very similar, you know,
except bigger. Um how big. They're saying that this uh,

(28:56):
this guy would have weighed around fifty tons um with
a foot long teeth and uh and yeah it would
be long, um and that's its head makes the t
rex is look like, you know, a bubble head. Yeah,
and we keep picking on t I feel bad, Yeah,
because the t rex, he's a land based animal. It's
like if you put him in the water and he evolved,

(29:18):
I'm sure he would have been bigger. That's true. We'll
lay off the t rex. So so the jury is
still kind of still kind of out on on Predator
X exactly what it was and and uh you know
what it was up to, but clearly it was some
sort of massive you know, probably a policeosaur and was
you know, at the top of its food chain. So
it's pretty pretty awesome looking. So there you have it. Um,

(29:42):
we've run through four really cool prehistoric sea monsters and uh,
there's some of our favorites you guys may have some
favorites out there for you love to hear him. Yeah,
let us know, um and do let us know which
one you think would win in a slugfest between various
sea monsters of the d Yeah. You can always send

(30:02):
us an email at science Stuff at has frix dot com,
or check in with us on Facebook at Stuff from
the Science Lab or on Twitter and lab stuff. Okay,
see what you got over there? You got some listener
you want to share some listener mail. We recently did
a really cool podcast on the Cardassian scale. Yeah, this

(30:25):
to remind everybody, this is the scale, you know, type
one civilization, type two, and it has to do with
energy useage of a planet and how you would like
the different levels of technological sophistication for a civilization. Yeah. Yeah,
so it shows up in science fictional lot um, so
we can put the collegible listeners. Hey, what's a good
example of a you know, type four civilization Cardassian on

(30:48):
which covers type one, two and three that's planetary, solar
and and galactic energy. So four would be something beyond
those three. So uh, some of you guys right in
with ideas. Yeah, yeah, so let's see we had we
heard from Marcus, and Marcus uh pointed out an example
in the Star Ocean RPG video game franchise. He says, quote,

(31:11):
it involves people who are in a type to civilization,
but in the game they have only just recently achieved
type two, and once they do, they write a way
discover intelligent life. The other civilization had always known about them,
but rules have been made, uh that type two should
not interfere with the natural development of under vulp civilization.
So it deals, uh, you know, to a large extent
with with kardashev Um classifications. Uh. Then we heard from

(31:35):
mo and Most says, quote, it seems to me that
that you could make another universe. That if you could
make another universe, you would somehow tether it, tether to it,
and find some way of using that tether to generate power.
If you needed more power, you would just have to
either wait a bit or build more universes. What you
don't solve your if you don't solve your energy problems, Um,

(31:56):
you know, one way to do it is to build
another universe. So in the just getting into again, this
is like crazy advanced you know, theoretical, uh, you know,
science and how we just threw it out there. Yeah,
let's just build another universe and parness the power from that.
Apparently they went into it in a there's a recent
like Radio Lab episode where it's like to uh, Robert

(32:18):
Krulitch just talking to somebody about, uh, do it do
it yourself universe is and what that would entail. And
certainly if you could create another universe to generate power,
that would you would be at least type four, maybe
I don't know, maybe type five to to to get
you know, real silly about it. Um. Then we heard
from Gary, and Gary said in Frederick Poll's Heachy novels Um,

(32:41):
I hope I'm saying that right, because it sounds kind
of silly. There is a race called the Foe who
were type four. They were actively trying to collapse our
universe into a big crunch and a tip in an
attempt to re engineer the universe when it big banged
again into an all energy, no matter universe, because it
would be better for their form of life. I'd say

(33:02):
engineering an entire universe from the start is type four.
And then he also pointed out that there's some examples
in the Stargate universe, but the stuff in Frederick Pole's
book that that's definitely yet type four and it sounds
pretty awesome. I really need to read some of his stuff,
all right, So that's cool. We covered cardashop skills, Monsters
of the Deep, and if you want to read more

(33:23):
about any of those things, check out our home page
at how star works dot com and thanks for listening.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
that how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot

(33:45):
com home page