June 3, 2023 • 38 mins
Almost everything you know about pterosaurs is wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't flying dinosaurs and they weren't all pterodactyls. Which makes this classic episode a great one for you to learn some new and amazing stuff about terrifying prehistoric beasts!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've
chosen our twenty sixteen episode on tarosaars, not flying dinosaurs, terosaars.
They were their own thing, and this episode brings out
the inner child paleontologist in me. I hope it does
for you too. There's only one way to find out.
Sit back, relax and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, just the two of us batching
it today. Yeah, that's my dad used to say if
he had to take care of me while my mom
was working, We're just batching it?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Is that? What was that what he said?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I thought that was a relatively new term.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
No, I mean at least the early eighties, all right,
Maybe my dad was like way ahead of his time.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Why hasn't there been a movie called batching it?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That's actually pretty obvious.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
The fact that it was around as a word in
the eighties makes me even more surprised that there's not
a movie called batch in it. Yeah that like the
protagonist has to put on like a car wash to
save their business or something like that.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, Owen Wilson, what did he do? Well? He would
just be the star of batching it, I imagine, right.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I guess. So could that guy be any more charming
than he is?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
He's pretty charming.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Speaking of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a
wonderful little beast named ketzil Coloattus north Ropie. Mh are
you are you familiar?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So, ketzel Colattis is named after the ASTech flying serpent
god quets old Colaudal. Yes, right, so it makes sense.
But this guy was a real thing. Not to put
down the Aztec's beliefs or anything like that, but this
is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the
(02:05):
late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call
a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd
be dead wrong. Pal. Yeah, what it really is is
a terosaur. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're
going to sort through, but the most important point is
that this beast right here is twenty feet tall, as
(02:26):
tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin
to about an f sixteen fighter jet and it was
a bad mamma jama. How's that for a leading That's good.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
I didn't even use the wayback machine, just trim the
fat gone.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Oh, you don't even need that old clunky thing anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
We just use our imaginations. We're not actually in the
Cretaceous period like we would be if we had used
the wayback machine.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Okay, uh yeah. These terra starts with the P of course,
the silent peace, that is from Greek meaning winged lizards.
And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They
were not dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yes, big big distinction here.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
They're close, it's like a sister to a dinosaur.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Perhaps they're from the same claude, which is archosaurs, but
it's a really wide claude. And all that means is
that they have in the very remote past some single
common ancestor with dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, and they were around roughly the same time period
and definitely and went away in the same fashion. So
it's normal, I think for people to say, look at
that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur, even though neither
one of those is necessarily correct.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. So just to get this across, one more time.
Pterosaurs were not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but
they weren't dinosaurs. They weren't birds either, And to confused
things even further, there were birds around at the time
of the dinosaurs and the time of the pterosaurs. And
to confuse things even further, there were such things as
(04:07):
actual flying dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
We call them velociraptors, right, and these vertebrates actually we're
flying long before birds and bats, by like millions and
millions of years.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, I think this how stuff works article. This is
a good one. I got to give big ups to
Clint pump Free.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The pumpuff Yeah, it sounds like an action house Stuff
works writer Clint pump Frey just b frock, you know,
uh huh. But he said, I think eighty million years difference,
eighty million years before.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, I mean that's that's a lot of years.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
It is. So there's a lot of like confusing stuff
flying around. And I think there's one other thing we
should probably address right out of the gate, is that
you you shouldn't call them pterodactyls, even though a lot
of people do. Pterodactyls are actually a specific genus of pterosaurs.
So to call all pterosaurs pterodactyls would be incorrect, but
(05:10):
you could call all pterodactyls pterosaurs.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Okay, yeah, And technically, like if you have seen this
this thing in movies a lot that they say that's
a pterodactyl, what you've probably been looking at this whole
time is one of the species. And they're you know,
potentially up to two hundred of these species right now.
I think they've identified about one hundred and one hundred
(05:33):
and thirty ish. But a tara tara nodone, is that
how you say it? I taranidon.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That's what I would have gone with.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I like tara nodone. Right, that's probably what you've been
seeing in movies all this time, that you've been saying,
that's a pterodactyl. Like if you if you look up
in image search of the taranodon, you'll say that that's
a pterodactyl because I saw it and can.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it's like this giant winged beast with kind of short,
stubby legs and a huge wing span and like a
weird crest on its head and a long pointy beak.
A pterodactyl. Everybody knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be
an idiot. Yeah, you saw in King Kong nineteen thirty three,
saw the same thing in Jurassic Park three in two
thousand and one. Right, things hadn't changed all that much.
But in that time span, it's actually kind of surprising
(06:22):
because our understanding of terosaurs had increased dramatically, and yet
we were still just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterodactyls,
which isn't the case.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, there was a paleontologist named O. C. Marsh who
was a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Sure, he
collected these first fossils in what is now and was
then Western Kansas in the late eighteen hundreds, like eighteen seventy,
and they've been well, I was about to say, they've
(06:57):
been digging up lots of these since then. They sort
of have, but not nearly as many as other types
of fossils, because these fossils are really highly breakable and dissolvable,
and they're tough to get a hold of and keeping
one piece throughout the process.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, we should, we should talk about that. Like, one
of the reasons there is so little understanding of terosaurs
is because they don't fossilize very well, Nah, because their
bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed
to allow these giant reptiles to fly.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah. They didn't say like, oh, we need to be
designed to leave our mark later. No, it's like we
want to fly right exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So early on, I think the first tearodon or the
first terosaur specimen was found in the late eighteenth century
in Germany, and by the time O. C. Marsh was
digging them up one hundred years later in Kansas, they
they'd been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been
abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that
(07:58):
were identified. Right, Yeah, Marsh started to dig him up.
This is a big deal. And because he was finding
virtually all of the same species, the Tyrannadon, that became
the common conception of what the terrasaar is. But it
was coupled with an earlier name, Pterodactyl, that had been
(08:19):
given to the entire species or the entire group by
George Cuvier and I think eighteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, and that first fossil you were talking about, no
one knows. No one got credit for that for digging
that thing up. But like you said, it was in
Germany in a lime in limestone, like one hundred and
fifty million year old limestone, late in the eighteenth century
that eventually found its way to a man with a
great name, Cossimo Alessandro Collini.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's a great man. When I first came across this
in this article, I was like, I'm looking forward to
hearing Chuck say that guy's name.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
That's him. He was Italian figure, and he was a
natural scientist, and he, like many others to follow, for
a long time, didn't really know what it was, since
since they found that in an ancient lagoon with all
kinds of seafaring creatures, he understandably thought it was a
seafaring creature.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, And some of the best preserved fossils that we
have of these things are found in things like lagoons
where something happened to them. They died suddenly quickly fell
into a like a body of water, which probably broke
their fall a little bit. They landed at the muck
and were covered up potentially in some anaerobic in an
(09:40):
anaerobic state, and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what
it takes to fossilize a terosaur.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, and Cuvier who kind of got it all wrong
by calling it a pterodactyl for everyone in the future.
He was actually the same dude though, who did say, actually,
I think those are not paddles, right, And that was,
you know, a big breakthrough.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, and the reason he called them pterodactyls it means
wing finger in the Greek, right, So terosar means winged
lizard and pterodactyl means wing finger because as we'll see,
the front edge of the wing, the leading edge of
the wing is actually an extraordinarily long pinky.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I think so too. That's a good way to lead
up to a break too, don't you think?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Agreed?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Let's go Sish.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
It's stuff you should know. All right, Okay, we're back.
I feel like we kind of jumbled things out up
like a bunch of TerraSAR bones. Sure, so let's reset here,
shall we?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Should we reset with the head? Let's the head crests.
If you've seen a movie like Jurassic Park and you
saw what you thought was a pterodactyl and he had
that beautiful looking he or she, well maybe he, because
now they think that maybe only the malesh these head crests.
(11:29):
These things were sort of one of the staples of many,
if not all, of these species, but they were all
really different and some fantastic looking, and they're not exactly sure.
There's still a lot of debate over what they used
these big crests for.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah, they thought maybe they use them as a rudder
in the air to steer with as they are flying around.
It does make sense. Some people thought that they may
be used him as a marine rudder. Maybe they used
them for defense because they were like made of horn
and bone covered with skin, and they think possibly they
had coloring to them. Maybe they had feathers or light fur.
(12:07):
They're not quite sure. But because there's just such a
lack of understanding, and because terosaur fossils are so few
and far between, it's still basically anybody's guess what they
were used for. But then I think in Germany, and
I'm not exactly certain when this was discovered, but a
female terosaur was discovered and it had a or i
(12:30):
should say she had an egg in her oviduct. Still,
so it was the only terosaur to ever be positively
identified by sex in the history of the world. And
she lacked that headcrest, so it really lent support to
the idea that it was males only, kind of like
how a peacock has the very bright feathers and the
(12:52):
p hen does not. They think that maybe it's the
same thing or more kin to, like antlers in deer
or moose. Their male are the ones that have the antlers,
and they think they use it, maybe a little bit
for a defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm a
dude and I'm looking for some action. Check out the
sides of my antlers. They think it was probably the
same with tyrosaurs.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Now, yeah, and these things, like, it's amazing when you
look up these pictures. Some of them are just really
fantastically colored. Some of them are really big, like that
Tapahara imperator.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, if you look up one terasaar during this episode,
make it this guy.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, this is cool. This thing looks like it literally
has a sailboat sail on top of its.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Head, and like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like
what the artist's conceptions are. It just must have been
something to see.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, that niktosaurus is pretty interesting too. This one didn't
seem to have any sort of a It looked like
a sail without the sale, Like, what do you call
the frame of the sale. I'm sure there's some great
name for it.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The uh, the timber, the timber.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Sure, but these, I mean, it's they they like it
in this article the pump does to television intena and
they are really big and look only clunky to me.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, I mean it'd be good for skewering, I guess,
but it could also be terrible for skewing. Like if
you were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could
probably catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get
the fish off because it's they're just these antenna We're
just way too tall and long.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah. And then this terradustro is really you should look
that one up too, It's pretty amazing. This one looks
like this one looks like if a dinosaur mated with
a pelican and a toothbrush.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah. I saw one person described it as a toothbrush
with wings.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, like the lower jaw has like a thousand really long,
small needle like teeth, and it looks like this big
toothbrushy underbite.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, and it does. Like when you look at it,
you're like, oh, it's clearly got to be related to
a pelican. Again, it's not pelicans, a bird, and birds
were around during the time of dinosaurs, and if birds
are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs. But it
does look a lot like it, and it makes sense
that it would because from what we're learning about pterosaurs
now these days is that a lot of them were
(15:21):
ocean going, that they had the goods to fly across
an entire ocean over the course of a few days,
like maybe an albatross wood, and that they would fly low,
some of them, and skim the surface of these ancient
oceans on Earth and scoop up marine life with their jaws,
with their lower jaw, just like a pelican would. So
(15:43):
what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea that
this is going on one hundred million years ago, is
that pelicans are not related to these things, so that
this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more than one time.
You know what I'm saying. I find that fascinating rather
than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that, Actually they didn't.
(16:06):
That's just two different branches of the same tree developing
into something very similar.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Position in isolation. Didn't know what they call that.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Yeah, or no convergent evolution, Okay, I think yes, it is.
It's conversion evolution when like a trait or behavior characteristic
develops separately among different branches of the tree, rather than
developing once and then descendants all have that same trait.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah. And although they did certainly love a good seafood meal,
they used to think that was sort of all they ate,
And now new research suggests that they do eat or
did eat, all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah. The way that they're they describe them now is
that it's just like birds, Right, You've got birds that
eat all sorts of different things, that fill all sorts
of different ecological niches. That's what they're coming to to
the conclusion about with terosaurs, which I mean, chuck, this
is like a huge sea change from what it was
even back in the nineteen fifties or sixties or seventies,
and we thought there were just a few species, and
(17:12):
it turns out there were a ton of different ones
and a lot of variety and a lot of diversity,
and now we're starting to kind of get a handle
on that.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, and they think they were probably able after they
hatch to fly pretty quickly, to take care of themselves
pretty quickly, and like you mentioned, they're flying. They believe
now was they were kind of built for the long
haul that it weren't super fast, but could you know,
like a long distance jetliner.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
But some of them were small, some of them were
small songbirds, and I imagine they were flitty. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I can't remember the name of one, but there was
one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny, little little
flying terosaur.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Could you imagine anything more frightening than what you would
call a terodactyl the size of a robin?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I imagine a hundred of those.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Or it could look kind of cool like the little
UFOs and batteries not included, remember those.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I didn't see that movie.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Do you remember like the ads or anything from it? Though?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
No?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and
with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay, it was
very similar though, uh huh. I think Donna Michi was
in both Maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Why not had he had that market cornered.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
If you can get your hands on Donna Michi, you
put him in your movie.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Buddy, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So okay, where are we at, Chuck, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Think we can go. We can hop over to the
fact that for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds,
but bats was the other thing that people confused them with.
There was a an anatoby professor named Samuel Thomas von
Summering in the eighteen hundred. He incorrectly suggested that these
(19:02):
were bats. Another Paleontoller's named Harry Seely even wrote a
book called Dragons of the Sky in which he said
birds were the descendants of these And it's understandable why
these dudes were wrong. They were doing the best they could.
And when you look at those wings, it looks, you know,
(19:23):
that membrane, it looks like it would be a batswing.
But there are some differences.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, there's some big differences. And you like a bat
in particular, I could see confusing it with right, like
an ancient bat, because with a bat you have four digits,
and three of those digits form the bones in the wing,
and you got one little digit wiggling free, so a
bat can climb around with its index fingers. Right, Yes,
(19:49):
with a terrasaar, you have three digits that are free,
and then the pinky. The fourth digit is the one
that forms that long sometimes ten twenty feet long bone
that's the front ende of the wing.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, that's crazy, but they had three.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
They had three fingers free. And this is really significant
because before they used to think and if you go
back and you look at how pterodactyls were drawn in
like the middle of the twentieth century, when they weren't
in flight, they were probably standing on their back legs,
and they realized that this is probably not how pterosaurs stood.
(20:30):
That instead, because their forearms were far more powerful than
their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that
they walked on all four legs, putting most of their
weight on their front way legs with their front forearms,
with their three free digits and their wings tucked off
(20:53):
to the side. And they look kind of like a
cartoon bulldog walks, is what I'm seeing. That's what they
think now.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Like a cartoon bulldog, not a real.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
One, right, Well, I mean a real bulldog doesn't walk
quite like a cartoon. Bulldog cartoon. Bulldog's more exaggerated pronounced,
you know what I mean. Sure, it's a cartoon.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Should we take another break? Sure, all right, we'll do
that and then we'll talk a little bit about how
they fly and other good stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Right for this pterosaurs, Josh.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Suis, Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh
am Chuck.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
It's stuff you should.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Know, should all right? All right, So you mentioned they
were quadrupedal m.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Four footed, four footed.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
And initially they thought that they would like birds because
we see birds do it, and it's probably especially back
in the eighteen hundreds, it was maybe they were all
working off the notion of the easiest solution is probably correct, Yeah,
because they would see a bird hop off those back
legs and think, well, this is clearly what pterodactyls did.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, and I never thought about that, but that's exactly
what a bird does. It jumps up in the air
from its back legs and flaps its wings and then
provides lift from that point on using its wings. Yeah.
I'd never really thought about that, but that's how birds fly.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, they hop around and if they want to. And
it is funny one of the other articles you sent.
One of those guys believed the pale tallers believes that
it even evolved into flying, that they used to hop
around on four legs and eventually they started jumping higher
and higher and then started flapping and then before you
knew it, they were flying.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to gliding to lying,
and they don't know. Again, they haven't found what you
would call a proto terosaar like whatever was the link
between ancient reptiles and terosaurs. But that's kind of the
current guess right now, is that they evolved from some
(23:16):
small white lizard that was good at jumping.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah, and they're they one of the big keys in
finding out and I don't think you said this how
strong their arms were. Yeah, that sort of was a
big breakthrough because when you think of like, you think
it all comes from the legs because they're jumping. But
because they found more fossils, they realized they were quadrupedal,
(23:41):
and they said, man, they actually have incredibly strong arms
and shoulders and these little tiny feet. So not only
are they quadrupedal, but a lot of that initial hopping
lift may come from the arms and not the legs
at all.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So they think, now what they do is it's just
basically pushed themselves off their front arms and legs to
an extent and just basically hop up into the air
and then start flapping their wings rather than like a
bird jumping off of their back legs. Is that what
you mean?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah? And then but most of that comes from the
from the arms and shoulders rather than the feed, right,
And the feed I think just sort of drag behind
and perhaps maybe helped with steering, is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
And they so there you can actually divide pterosaurs into
two groups depending on when they were around. One started
around one hundred and fifty million years ago, and then
one came later. And the first groups had long tails.
So if you look at old drawings of pterodactyls, you'll
frequently see with kind of like a long forked devil's tail,
(24:44):
you know, And it's actually kind of accurate. They think
that the original ones had longer tails to learn to
steer in the air, but then as they got more
and more adapted to flying gracefully, they lost their tails
to the ones, the ones that were around when the
Cretaceous period ended suddenly mostly called osdar kids, which is
(25:09):
not an easy word to pronounce that that they had
they had lost their tails because they had developed other
methods of changing how they fly mid flight. Right, So
like they because the wing membrane was connected to their
ankle from their shoulder with their finger, uh, kind of
(25:29):
providing the front of the wing. If they altered the
angle of their wristbone where they moved their ankle in
and out, it would change the actual dynamics of their
wing and they could dive and lift and do all
sorts of other things, which is this is a big
sea change in our understanding of pterosaurs too, because they
used to think that they basically had to run and
(25:50):
jump off of a cliff to gain.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Flight or hang like that.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, because they were so weird looking and so weirdly
developed in different ways, huge heads, enormous beaks, big heag crest, small,
puny little withered.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Feet, you know, like like mister Burns hands or yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's a good one, or David Cross in the Titanica
segment on Mister Show like that, right, that's like a
terosaur's legs. So it didn't make any sense, how they flew.
But now that we're starting to learn more and more
about him, we're like, oh, actually, they had a lot
of really really interesting adaptations, not the least of which
(26:33):
was their bones.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, I mean, are all of their bones hollow or
just those wing bones all of them? Wow? I mean
that made them incredibly light, obviously, But that also ended
up being one of the problems in trying to get
fossils of these guys, because they just they were very
highly destructible, non fossilizable, non fossilizable.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Do you remember a fossil episode that was like one
of the better old ones if you ask.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Me, Yeah, I agree, I learned.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I learned a lot on that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, we should trot that out in the selects soon.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
That's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
That'd be a good one. They also thought if they
were on water, like they had just had a little
snack on a lake, that they would use those wings
as paddles and just get going that way, pushing off
the surface and then flapping until they were, you know,
shaking it off twenty feet above the above the water.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Right, exactly a lot like marine birds do today. Right,
So those bones, like you kind of hit it on
the head they are extra. They were extremely light, right,
they were about a millimeter thick, something like the thickness
of a plane card I saw.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
But nuts.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
It is super nuts, especially considering that these things were
holding up like a bird that was up to twenty
feet tall, right, or not a bird, a terrasaar.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, not a cherodactyl.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Man I just averted so much email chuck, like a
millimeter thick bone wall. But the way that their bones
were made, they were made of cross sections of basically
like plywood, so they were really strong. And then if
you cut their bone in two and looked down the
hollow tube, you would see that there are little struts
(28:16):
criss crossing to provide even more internal support for those bones. Amazing,
So you could have a twenty foot tall terrasaar that
could actually fly because it was that light. I saw
one one of that as dark kids was something like
had a twenty foot wingspan, but it probably didn't weigh
(28:39):
any more than twenty pounds.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, and some of these, I mean, what were the
largest ones, like thirty five forty feet in wingspan.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, so about like ten to fifteen meters in wingspan,
like the size of like a jet plane. Like a
fighter jet.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I just flew in my first private jet.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Oh yeah, how was it?
Speaker 2 (29:02):
You know what? First of all, I've always wanted to
fly on a private jet, but never thought I would
have cause to, because, you know, unless you're extremely wealthy,
you only do that if you get invited to for
some strange reason, like you don't just book it.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
You should be on high alert if you some wealthy
person invites you on the private jet.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
And it was awesome. It was as awesome as you think.
And the most awesome part of it was the uh,
just the sheer lack of hassle. Yeah, like you Like,
I parked my car at the little tiny airport here
Intocab County, walked across the parking lot and into the
lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain,
(29:47):
and he was like, are you Chuck, And I said yes,
and he said right this way, and he walked out
the back door and there's a plane and they say
watch your head. You get on it, and he says,
you're ready to go.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
That's was it just you?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
No, no, no, that was like five of us on
an eight seater.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Everybody was waiting for you.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Uh yeah, I was the last person to get there,
and I was a little stressed. But then I thought,
wait a minute, that's the other perk is they don't
leave you. Yeah, like there, I mean there's a schedule,
but it's really late. Uh but it was cool. I
mean they're the one we were on. Was uh. I
mean it's not roomy, so it's not like Air Force
one or anything like you feel like you can just
(30:29):
walk around. But like when I was standing, I'm five
foot ten and if I said completely straight, my head
would brush the ceiling a little bit.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
M but uh, and you're just like, ugh private.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
But no TSA like you just you just walk on.
They fly you there and then you get off and
you're right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle,
And all I could think of was like, man, it
must be great to be a billionaire sure and never
have to deal than airport again.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
It was kind of cool. But then also once you're
up there, you're kind of like, eh, well, you know,
it's it's not like life changing.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah. You me, actually I've never flown on one. You
me flew on one, And she said basically the exact
same thing you did. That just the lack of hassle
and how fast you get somewhere yeah, is just just
beyond amazing.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah. I mean it takes away hours and hours of
airport crap.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
I know, you start to develop like that terrible sensation
where your eye's hurt for some weird reason, even though
you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like there's
a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to leave behind.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah. And it also when you're going to take off,
because just because it's small, it feels like you're going
as fast as you're going, whereas in a jumbo jet
it really doesn't. Right, Like I was kind of like, man,
we're going fast.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So oh hey, So speaking of you, me and flying,
I have an update. Okay, do you remember the story
about the Russia visas that we failed to get?
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I told her that I told that story and she
was like, you said we forgot And I was like, yeah,
we did, right, and she's like, no, we asked like
five different people, five different times, and we're told we
didn't need visas. So I wanted to let you know, Chuck,
that we actually are as buttoned up as you think.
We were just misinformed.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We got that great email from a new listener that
was like, listen to some dumb story about some guy
and his dumb visa. I was like, oh, welcome to
the show, brother.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah you should probably the door. Was that that guy?
That one guy? Uh huh oh okay.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, he's very turned off by your side about your
visa story. Yeah whatever, So anyway, thanks for indulging the
private jet convo.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, I'll bet that guy loved the private jet aside.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
It'll probably never happen again, but it was basically like
riding around on a terosaur. So that's how I wedged
it in there.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Nice work, that's nice. So I'm trying to think of
what else. Like tasaur is kind of to bring out
the little entertain year old to me. I don't know
if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my little outdoor archaeologist boots.
I see that white pull up crewse socks, and I'm
just a total little nerd.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
You keep dusting everything in here too.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I'm not even like one of those dinosaur nerds, but
some just getting into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that
to you two? It just kind of draws out like
the little kid.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I think so, And I think probably because at least
when I was and you and I were growing up,
I feel like public schools just like did such a
poor job of talking about these periods.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Oh yeah, you know, yeah I remember that. But I
also remember dinosaurs being kind of huge in the eighties. Yeah,
at least they were in Ohio. Does that an Ohio thing?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I don't know, I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic
Park obviously changed everything as far. Yeah, but when was
that nineties? Yeah? Early nineties.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, but I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among
the kids before that. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I hit
my head and don't realize it.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
I don't know, I know kids. I mean, my daughter
loves dinosaurs. So it's a thing.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, it definitely is a thing, and it's getting to
be even more of a thing the more we learn
about terosaurs too, which is somebody called the twenty first
century the Golden Age of terosaar research. So they're expecting
big things from the field.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, and like you said, hopefully they can find that
proto terosaur and that's when the community really gets all
excited when they can make those links.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Hey, you know, it's speaking of the community. I read
this article in National Geographic and God bless them. I
can't remember the guy who wrote it, but it's called
why Terosaurs were the Weirdest Wonders on Wings.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
It's a great article. And the guy basically just got
into all like the dirty laundry of the terosar paleontology community.
And apparently they're very well known among paleontologists for just
despising each other. Like the terosaur paleontologists don't like each other,
talk smack about each other publicly, and just snipe at
(35:08):
one another a lot, which makes the whole thing even
that much more fascinating, you know, huh. Like they're real
competitive and real backbitity.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Interesting. Yeah, and in this case that's a good thing.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, because they keep pushing one another. Agreed, You got
anything else?
Speaker 2 (35:26):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Are we done with terosaurs?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
I don't have anything else, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about terosaurs,
go to your local natural history museum and say, hey,
tell me about that pterodactyl. See if you can stump them.
And since I said stump, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I'm gonna call this one. Which one is this? One, oh, footbinding.
I believe we did this in a select episode. It's
one of our older ones, but a really good one,
I think agreed, and this goes like this. Hey guys,
I'm assumed to be grad student from Guangdong, China and
(36:08):
have been a listener for a couple of years now.
This is my first time riding in and it's about footbinding.
I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering she told
me that her grandmother had bound her feet. I asked
if great Grandma had trouble walking, and she said she
had never even wabbled a little bit. Because it turns
out she never made her own little shoes. She just
(36:30):
bought toddler shoes for herself.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's called making lemons. No, that's called making lemonade out
of lemons with your feet.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
That's right, she said. Great great grandma came from a
wealthy family and bound feet for more of a symbol
of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do
farming chores in catering to the male foot fetish at
that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born,
but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother,
was born in nineteen fourteen, she made sure that her
feet were never bound. She also put all of her
(37:02):
kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then.
Oh yeah, footbinding is certainly not something that I am
proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away
from having to get my own feed bound as supposed to.
Sitting here writing you guys right now, it just says
to me how far we've gone. Thanks for the show.
By the way, the Draft podcast, Josh was having trouble
pronouncing qi n G dynasty Q maybe roughly pronounced as ts,
(37:29):
not exactly the same, So just say sing next time,
that would do.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
I didn't. I don't even think I tried that one.
I tried every other phone me except for sing.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
And this is best regards from Ruoi.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Thank you very much, Ruoi. That's pretty cool and like
nice sense of perspective too. If you want to get
in touch with us with an awesome story like Ruoi did,
you can catch up with us on social media. Just
go to our website stuffishould Know dot com and you
will find all of our social medi links there. And
if you want send us a good old fashioned email,
wrap it up, smack it on the bottom and send
(38:05):
it off to stuff Podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've
chosen our twenty sixteen episode on tarosaars, not flying dinosaurs, terosaars.
They were their own thing, and this episode brings out
the inner child paleontologist in me. I hope it does
for you too. There's only one way to find out.
Sit back, relax and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, just the two of us batching
it today. Yeah, that's my dad used to say if
he had to take care of me while my mom
was working, We're just batching it?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Is that? What was that what he said?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I thought that was a relatively new term.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
No, I mean at least the early eighties, all right,
Maybe my dad was like way ahead of his time.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Why hasn't there been a movie called batching it?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That's actually pretty obvious.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
The fact that it was around as a word in
the eighties makes me even more surprised that there's not
a movie called batch in it. Yeah that like the
protagonist has to put on like a car wash to
save their business or something like that.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, Owen Wilson, what did he do? Well? He would
just be the star of batching it, I imagine, right.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I guess. So could that guy be any more charming
than he is?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
He's pretty charming.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Speaking of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a
wonderful little beast named ketzil Coloattus north Ropie. Mh are
you are you familiar?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So, ketzel Colattis is named after the ASTech flying serpent
god quets old Colaudal. Yes, right, so it makes sense.
But this guy was a real thing. Not to put
down the Aztec's beliefs or anything like that, but this
is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the
(02:05):
late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call
a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd
be dead wrong. Pal. Yeah, what it really is is
a terosaur. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're
going to sort through, but the most important point is
that this beast right here is twenty feet tall, as
(02:26):
tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin
to about an f sixteen fighter jet and it was
a bad mamma jama. How's that for a leading That's good.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
I didn't even use the wayback machine, just trim the
fat gone.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Oh, you don't even need that old clunky thing anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
We just use our imaginations. We're not actually in the
Cretaceous period like we would be if we had used
the wayback machine.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Okay, uh yeah. These terra starts with the P of course,
the silent peace, that is from Greek meaning winged lizards.
And that's pretty on point because they were reptiles. They
were not dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yes, big big distinction here.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
They're close, it's like a sister to a dinosaur.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Perhaps they're from the same claude, which is archosaurs, but
it's a really wide claude. And all that means is
that they have in the very remote past some single
common ancestor with dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, and they were around roughly the same time period
and definitely and went away in the same fashion. So
it's normal, I think for people to say, look at
that pterodactyl, look at that flying dinosaur, even though neither
one of those is necessarily correct.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. So just to get this across, one more time.
Pterosaurs were not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but
they weren't dinosaurs. They weren't birds either, And to confused
things even further, there were birds around at the time
of the dinosaurs and the time of the pterosaurs. And
to confuse things even further, there were such things as
(04:07):
actual flying dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
We call them velociraptors, right, and these vertebrates actually we're
flying long before birds and bats, by like millions and
millions of years.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, I think this how stuff works article. This is
a good one. I got to give big ups to
Clint pump Free.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The pumpuff Yeah, it sounds like an action house Stuff
works writer Clint pump Frey just b frock, you know,
uh huh. But he said, I think eighty million years difference,
eighty million years before.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, I mean that's that's a lot of years.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
It is. So there's a lot of like confusing stuff
flying around. And I think there's one other thing we
should probably address right out of the gate, is that
you you shouldn't call them pterodactyls, even though a lot
of people do. Pterodactyls are actually a specific genus of pterosaurs.
So to call all pterosaurs pterodactyls would be incorrect, but
(05:10):
you could call all pterodactyls pterosaurs.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Okay, yeah, And technically, like if you have seen this
this thing in movies a lot that they say that's
a pterodactyl, what you've probably been looking at this whole
time is one of the species. And they're you know,
potentially up to two hundred of these species right now.
I think they've identified about one hundred and one hundred
(05:33):
and thirty ish. But a tara tara nodone, is that
how you say it? I taranidon.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That's what I would have gone with.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I like tara nodone. Right, that's probably what you've been
seeing in movies all this time, that you've been saying,
that's a pterodactyl. Like if you if you look up
in image search of the taranodon, you'll say that that's
a pterodactyl because I saw it and can.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it's like this giant winged beast with kind of short,
stubby legs and a huge wing span and like a
weird crest on its head and a long pointy beak.
A pterodactyl. Everybody knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be
an idiot. Yeah, you saw in King Kong nineteen thirty three,
saw the same thing in Jurassic Park three in two
thousand and one. Right, things hadn't changed all that much.
But in that time span, it's actually kind of surprising
(06:22):
because our understanding of terosaurs had increased dramatically, and yet
we were still just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterodactyls,
which isn't the case.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, there was a paleontologist named O. C. Marsh who
was a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Sure, he
collected these first fossils in what is now and was
then Western Kansas in the late eighteen hundreds, like eighteen seventy,
and they've been well, I was about to say, they've
(06:57):
been digging up lots of these since then. They sort
of have, but not nearly as many as other types
of fossils, because these fossils are really highly breakable and dissolvable,
and they're tough to get a hold of and keeping
one piece throughout the process.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, we should, we should talk about that. Like, one
of the reasons there is so little understanding of terosaurs
is because they don't fossilize very well, Nah, because their
bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed
to allow these giant reptiles to fly.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah. They didn't say like, oh, we need to be
designed to leave our mark later. No, it's like we
want to fly right exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So early on, I think the first tearodon or the
first terosaur specimen was found in the late eighteenth century
in Germany, and by the time O. C. Marsh was
digging them up one hundred years later in Kansas, they
they'd been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been
abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that
(07:58):
were identified. Right, Yeah, Marsh started to dig him up.
This is a big deal. And because he was finding
virtually all of the same species, the Tyrannadon, that became
the common conception of what the terrasaar is. But it
was coupled with an earlier name, Pterodactyl, that had been
(08:19):
given to the entire species or the entire group by
George Cuvier and I think eighteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, and that first fossil you were talking about, no
one knows. No one got credit for that for digging
that thing up. But like you said, it was in
Germany in a lime in limestone, like one hundred and
fifty million year old limestone, late in the eighteenth century
that eventually found its way to a man with a
great name, Cossimo Alessandro Collini.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's a great man. When I first came across this
in this article, I was like, I'm looking forward to
hearing Chuck say that guy's name.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
That's him. He was Italian figure, and he was a
natural scientist, and he, like many others to follow, for
a long time, didn't really know what it was, since
since they found that in an ancient lagoon with all
kinds of seafaring creatures, he understandably thought it was a
seafaring creature.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, And some of the best preserved fossils that we
have of these things are found in things like lagoons
where something happened to them. They died suddenly quickly fell
into a like a body of water, which probably broke
their fall a little bit. They landed at the muck
and were covered up potentially in some anaerobic in an
(09:40):
anaerobic state, and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what
it takes to fossilize a terosaur.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, and Cuvier who kind of got it all wrong
by calling it a pterodactyl for everyone in the future.
He was actually the same dude though, who did say, actually,
I think those are not paddles, right, And that was,
you know, a big breakthrough.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, and the reason he called them pterodactyls it means
wing finger in the Greek, right, So terosar means winged
lizard and pterodactyl means wing finger because as we'll see,
the front edge of the wing, the leading edge of
the wing is actually an extraordinarily long pinky.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I think so too. That's a good way to lead
up to a break too, don't you think?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Agreed?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Let's go Sish.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
It's stuff you should know. All right, Okay, we're back.
I feel like we kind of jumbled things out up
like a bunch of TerraSAR bones. Sure, so let's reset here,
shall we?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Should we reset with the head? Let's the head crests.
If you've seen a movie like Jurassic Park and you
saw what you thought was a pterodactyl and he had
that beautiful looking he or she, well maybe he, because
now they think that maybe only the malesh these head crests.
(11:29):
These things were sort of one of the staples of many,
if not all, of these species, but they were all
really different and some fantastic looking, and they're not exactly sure.
There's still a lot of debate over what they used
these big crests for.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah, they thought maybe they use them as a rudder
in the air to steer with as they are flying around.
It does make sense. Some people thought that they may
be used him as a marine rudder. Maybe they used
them for defense because they were like made of horn
and bone covered with skin, and they think possibly they
had coloring to them. Maybe they had feathers or light fur.
(12:07):
They're not quite sure. But because there's just such a
lack of understanding, and because terosaur fossils are so few
and far between, it's still basically anybody's guess what they
were used for. But then I think in Germany, and
I'm not exactly certain when this was discovered, but a
female terosaur was discovered and it had a or i
(12:30):
should say she had an egg in her oviduct. Still,
so it was the only terosaur to ever be positively
identified by sex in the history of the world. And
she lacked that headcrest, so it really lent support to
the idea that it was males only, kind of like
how a peacock has the very bright feathers and the
(12:52):
p hen does not. They think that maybe it's the
same thing or more kin to, like antlers in deer
or moose. Their male are the ones that have the antlers,
and they think they use it, maybe a little bit
for a defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm a
dude and I'm looking for some action. Check out the
sides of my antlers. They think it was probably the
same with tyrosaurs.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Now, yeah, and these things, like, it's amazing when you
look up these pictures. Some of them are just really
fantastically colored. Some of them are really big, like that
Tapahara imperator.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, if you look up one terasaar during this episode,
make it this guy.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, this is cool. This thing looks like it literally
has a sailboat sail on top of its.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Head, and like if the coloring is anywhere remotely like
what the artist's conceptions are. It just must have been
something to see.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, that niktosaurus is pretty interesting too. This one didn't
seem to have any sort of a It looked like
a sail without the sale, Like, what do you call
the frame of the sale. I'm sure there's some great
name for it.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The uh, the timber, the timber.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Sure, but these, I mean, it's they they like it
in this article the pump does to television intena and
they are really big and look only clunky to me.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, I mean it'd be good for skewering, I guess,
but it could also be terrible for skewing. Like if
you were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could
probably catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get
the fish off because it's they're just these antenna We're
just way too tall and long.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah. And then this terradustro is really you should look
that one up too, It's pretty amazing. This one looks
like this one looks like if a dinosaur mated with
a pelican and a toothbrush.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah. I saw one person described it as a toothbrush
with wings.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, like the lower jaw has like a thousand really long,
small needle like teeth, and it looks like this big
toothbrushy underbite.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, and it does. Like when you look at it,
you're like, oh, it's clearly got to be related to
a pelican. Again, it's not pelicans, a bird, and birds
were around during the time of dinosaurs, and if birds
are anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs. But it
does look a lot like it, and it makes sense
that it would because from what we're learning about pterosaurs
now these days is that a lot of them were
(15:21):
ocean going, that they had the goods to fly across
an entire ocean over the course of a few days,
like maybe an albatross wood, and that they would fly low,
some of them, and skim the surface of these ancient
oceans on Earth and scoop up marine life with their jaws,
with their lower jaw, just like a pelican would. So
(15:43):
what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea that
this is going on one hundred million years ago, is
that pelicans are not related to these things, so that
this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more than one time.
You know what I'm saying. I find that fascinating rather
than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that, Actually they didn't.
(16:06):
That's just two different branches of the same tree developing
into something very similar.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Position in isolation. Didn't know what they call that.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Yeah, or no convergent evolution, Okay, I think yes, it is.
It's conversion evolution when like a trait or behavior characteristic
develops separately among different branches of the tree, rather than
developing once and then descendants all have that same trait.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah. And although they did certainly love a good seafood meal,
they used to think that was sort of all they ate,
And now new research suggests that they do eat or
did eat, all kinds of things, even tiny dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah. The way that they're they describe them now is
that it's just like birds, Right, You've got birds that
eat all sorts of different things, that fill all sorts
of different ecological niches. That's what they're coming to to
the conclusion about with terosaurs, which I mean, chuck, this
is like a huge sea change from what it was
even back in the nineteen fifties or sixties or seventies,
and we thought there were just a few species, and
(17:12):
it turns out there were a ton of different ones
and a lot of variety and a lot of diversity,
and now we're starting to kind of get a handle
on that.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, and they think they were probably able after they
hatch to fly pretty quickly, to take care of themselves
pretty quickly, and like you mentioned, they're flying. They believe
now was they were kind of built for the long
haul that it weren't super fast, but could you know,
like a long distance jetliner.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
But some of them were small, some of them were
small songbirds, and I imagine they were flitty. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I can't remember the name of one, but there was
one that was extremely tiny, a very tiny, little little
flying terosaur.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Could you imagine anything more frightening than what you would
call a terodactyl the size of a robin?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I imagine a hundred of those.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Or it could look kind of cool like the little
UFOs and batteries not included, remember those.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I didn't see that movie.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Do you remember like the ads or anything from it? Though?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
No?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and
with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay, it was
very similar though, uh huh. I think Donna Michi was
in both Maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Why not had he had that market cornered.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
If you can get your hands on Donna Michi, you
put him in your movie.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Buddy, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So okay, where are we at, Chuck, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Think we can go. We can hop over to the
fact that for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds,
but bats was the other thing that people confused them with.
There was a an anatoby professor named Samuel Thomas von
Summering in the eighteen hundred. He incorrectly suggested that these
(19:02):
were bats. Another Paleontoller's named Harry Seely even wrote a
book called Dragons of the Sky in which he said
birds were the descendants of these And it's understandable why
these dudes were wrong. They were doing the best they could.
And when you look at those wings, it looks, you know,
(19:23):
that membrane, it looks like it would be a batswing.
But there are some differences.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, there's some big differences. And you like a bat
in particular, I could see confusing it with right, like
an ancient bat, because with a bat you have four digits,
and three of those digits form the bones in the wing,
and you got one little digit wiggling free, so a
bat can climb around with its index fingers. Right, Yes,
(19:49):
with a terrasaar, you have three digits that are free,
and then the pinky. The fourth digit is the one
that forms that long sometimes ten twenty feet long bone
that's the front ende of the wing.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, that's crazy, but they had three.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
They had three fingers free. And this is really significant
because before they used to think and if you go
back and you look at how pterodactyls were drawn in
like the middle of the twentieth century, when they weren't
in flight, they were probably standing on their back legs,
and they realized that this is probably not how pterosaurs stood.
(20:30):
That instead, because their forearms were far more powerful than
their back legs, they were probably quadrupeds, which meant that
they walked on all four legs, putting most of their
weight on their front way legs with their front forearms,
with their three free digits and their wings tucked off
(20:53):
to the side. And they look kind of like a
cartoon bulldog walks, is what I'm seeing. That's what they
think now.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Like a cartoon bulldog, not a real.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
One, right, Well, I mean a real bulldog doesn't walk
quite like a cartoon. Bulldog cartoon. Bulldog's more exaggerated pronounced,
you know what I mean. Sure, it's a cartoon.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Should we take another break? Sure, all right, we'll do
that and then we'll talk a little bit about how
they fly and other good stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Right for this pterosaurs, Josh.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Suis, Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh
am Chuck.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
It's stuff you should.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Know, should all right? All right, So you mentioned they
were quadrupedal m.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Four footed, four footed.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
And initially they thought that they would like birds because
we see birds do it, and it's probably especially back
in the eighteen hundreds, it was maybe they were all
working off the notion of the easiest solution is probably correct, Yeah,
because they would see a bird hop off those back
legs and think, well, this is clearly what pterodactyls did.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, and I never thought about that, but that's exactly
what a bird does. It jumps up in the air
from its back legs and flaps its wings and then
provides lift from that point on using its wings. Yeah.
I'd never really thought about that, but that's how birds fly.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, they hop around and if they want to. And
it is funny one of the other articles you sent.
One of those guys believed the pale tallers believes that
it even evolved into flying, that they used to hop
around on four legs and eventually they started jumping higher
and higher and then started flapping and then before you
knew it, they were flying.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, maybe they went from leaping to gliding to lying,
and they don't know. Again, they haven't found what you
would call a proto terosaar like whatever was the link
between ancient reptiles and terosaurs. But that's kind of the
current guess right now, is that they evolved from some
(23:16):
small white lizard that was good at jumping.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah, and they're they one of the big keys in
finding out and I don't think you said this how
strong their arms were. Yeah, that sort of was a
big breakthrough because when you think of like, you think
it all comes from the legs because they're jumping. But
because they found more fossils, they realized they were quadrupedal,
(23:41):
and they said, man, they actually have incredibly strong arms
and shoulders and these little tiny feet. So not only
are they quadrupedal, but a lot of that initial hopping
lift may come from the arms and not the legs
at all.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So they think, now what they do is it's just
basically pushed themselves off their front arms and legs to
an extent and just basically hop up into the air
and then start flapping their wings rather than like a
bird jumping off of their back legs. Is that what
you mean?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah? And then but most of that comes from the
from the arms and shoulders rather than the feed, right,
And the feed I think just sort of drag behind
and perhaps maybe helped with steering, is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
And they so there you can actually divide pterosaurs into
two groups depending on when they were around. One started
around one hundred and fifty million years ago, and then
one came later. And the first groups had long tails.
So if you look at old drawings of pterodactyls, you'll
frequently see with kind of like a long forked devil's tail,
(24:44):
you know, And it's actually kind of accurate. They think
that the original ones had longer tails to learn to
steer in the air, but then as they got more
and more adapted to flying gracefully, they lost their tails
to the ones, the ones that were around when the
Cretaceous period ended suddenly mostly called osdar kids, which is
(25:09):
not an easy word to pronounce that that they had
they had lost their tails because they had developed other
methods of changing how they fly mid flight. Right, So
like they because the wing membrane was connected to their
ankle from their shoulder with their finger, uh, kind of
(25:29):
providing the front of the wing. If they altered the
angle of their wristbone where they moved their ankle in
and out, it would change the actual dynamics of their
wing and they could dive and lift and do all
sorts of other things, which is this is a big
sea change in our understanding of pterosaurs too, because they
used to think that they basically had to run and
(25:50):
jump off of a cliff to gain.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Flight or hang like that.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, because they were so weird looking and so weirdly
developed in different ways, huge heads, enormous beaks, big heag crest, small,
puny little withered.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Feet, you know, like like mister Burns hands or yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's a good one, or David Cross in the Titanica
segment on Mister Show like that, right, that's like a
terosaur's legs. So it didn't make any sense, how they flew.
But now that we're starting to learn more and more
about him, we're like, oh, actually, they had a lot
of really really interesting adaptations, not the least of which
(26:33):
was their bones.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, I mean, are all of their bones hollow or
just those wing bones all of them? Wow? I mean
that made them incredibly light, obviously, But that also ended
up being one of the problems in trying to get
fossils of these guys, because they just they were very
highly destructible, non fossilizable, non fossilizable.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Do you remember a fossil episode that was like one
of the better old ones if you ask.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Me, Yeah, I agree, I learned.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I learned a lot on that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, we should trot that out in the selects soon.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
That's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
That'd be a good one. They also thought if they
were on water, like they had just had a little
snack on a lake, that they would use those wings
as paddles and just get going that way, pushing off
the surface and then flapping until they were, you know,
shaking it off twenty feet above the above the water.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Right, exactly a lot like marine birds do today. Right,
So those bones, like you kind of hit it on
the head they are extra. They were extremely light, right,
they were about a millimeter thick, something like the thickness
of a plane card I saw.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
But nuts.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
It is super nuts, especially considering that these things were
holding up like a bird that was up to twenty
feet tall, right, or not a bird, a terrasaar.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, not a cherodactyl.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Man I just averted so much email chuck, like a
millimeter thick bone wall. But the way that their bones
were made, they were made of cross sections of basically
like plywood, so they were really strong. And then if
you cut their bone in two and looked down the
hollow tube, you would see that there are little struts
(28:16):
criss crossing to provide even more internal support for those bones. Amazing,
So you could have a twenty foot tall terrasaar that
could actually fly because it was that light. I saw
one one of that as dark kids was something like
had a twenty foot wingspan, but it probably didn't weigh
(28:39):
any more than twenty pounds.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, and some of these, I mean, what were the
largest ones, like thirty five forty feet in wingspan.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, so about like ten to fifteen meters in wingspan,
like the size of like a jet plane. Like a
fighter jet.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I just flew in my first private jet.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Oh yeah, how was it?
Speaker 2 (29:02):
You know what? First of all, I've always wanted to
fly on a private jet, but never thought I would
have cause to, because, you know, unless you're extremely wealthy,
you only do that if you get invited to for
some strange reason, like you don't just book it.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
You should be on high alert if you some wealthy
person invites you on the private jet.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
And it was awesome. It was as awesome as you think.
And the most awesome part of it was the uh,
just the sheer lack of hassle. Yeah, like you Like,
I parked my car at the little tiny airport here
Intocab County, walked across the parking lot and into the
lobby and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain,
(29:47):
and he was like, are you Chuck, And I said yes,
and he said right this way, and he walked out
the back door and there's a plane and they say
watch your head. You get on it, and he says,
you're ready to go.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
That's was it just you?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
No, no, no, that was like five of us on
an eight seater.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Everybody was waiting for you.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Uh yeah, I was the last person to get there,
and I was a little stressed. But then I thought,
wait a minute, that's the other perk is they don't
leave you. Yeah, like there, I mean there's a schedule,
but it's really late. Uh but it was cool. I
mean they're the one we were on. Was uh. I
mean it's not roomy, so it's not like Air Force
one or anything like you feel like you can just
(30:29):
walk around. But like when I was standing, I'm five
foot ten and if I said completely straight, my head
would brush the ceiling a little bit.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
M but uh, and you're just like, ugh private.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
But no TSA like you just you just walk on.
They fly you there and then you get off and
you're right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle,
And all I could think of was like, man, it
must be great to be a billionaire sure and never
have to deal than airport again.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
It was kind of cool. But then also once you're
up there, you're kind of like, eh, well, you know,
it's it's not like life changing.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah. You me, actually I've never flown on one. You
me flew on one, And she said basically the exact
same thing you did. That just the lack of hassle
and how fast you get somewhere yeah, is just just
beyond amazing.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah. I mean it takes away hours and hours of
airport crap.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
I know, you start to develop like that terrible sensation
where your eye's hurt for some weird reason, even though
you haven't even gotten on the plane yet. Like there's
a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to leave behind.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah. And it also when you're going to take off,
because just because it's small, it feels like you're going
as fast as you're going, whereas in a jumbo jet
it really doesn't. Right, Like I was kind of like, man,
we're going fast.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So oh hey, So speaking of you, me and flying,
I have an update. Okay, do you remember the story
about the Russia visas that we failed to get?
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I told her that I told that story and she
was like, you said we forgot And I was like, yeah,
we did, right, and she's like, no, we asked like
five different people, five different times, and we're told we
didn't need visas. So I wanted to let you know, Chuck,
that we actually are as buttoned up as you think.
We were just misinformed.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We got that great email from a new listener that
was like, listen to some dumb story about some guy
and his dumb visa. I was like, oh, welcome to
the show, brother.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah you should probably the door. Was that that guy?
That one guy? Uh huh oh okay.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, he's very turned off by your side about your
visa story. Yeah whatever, So anyway, thanks for indulging the
private jet convo.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, I'll bet that guy loved the private jet aside.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
It'll probably never happen again, but it was basically like
riding around on a terosaur. So that's how I wedged
it in there.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Nice work, that's nice. So I'm trying to think of
what else. Like tasaur is kind of to bring out
the little entertain year old to me. I don't know
if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my little outdoor archaeologist boots.
I see that white pull up crewse socks, and I'm
just a total little nerd.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
You keep dusting everything in here too.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I'm not even like one of those dinosaur nerds, but
some just getting into researching dinosaurs. Does it do that
to you two? It just kind of draws out like
the little kid.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I think so, And I think probably because at least
when I was and you and I were growing up,
I feel like public schools just like did such a
poor job of talking about these periods.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Oh yeah, you know, yeah I remember that. But I
also remember dinosaurs being kind of huge in the eighties. Yeah,
at least they were in Ohio. Does that an Ohio thing?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I don't know, I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic
Park obviously changed everything as far. Yeah, but when was
that nineties? Yeah? Early nineties.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, but I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among
the kids before that. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I hit
my head and don't realize it.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
I don't know, I know kids. I mean, my daughter
loves dinosaurs. So it's a thing.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, it definitely is a thing, and it's getting to
be even more of a thing the more we learn
about terosaurs too, which is somebody called the twenty first
century the Golden Age of terosaar research. So they're expecting
big things from the field.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, and like you said, hopefully they can find that
proto terosaur and that's when the community really gets all
excited when they can make those links.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Hey, you know, it's speaking of the community. I read
this article in National Geographic and God bless them. I
can't remember the guy who wrote it, but it's called
why Terosaurs were the Weirdest Wonders on Wings.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
It's a great article. And the guy basically just got
into all like the dirty laundry of the terosar paleontology community.
And apparently they're very well known among paleontologists for just
despising each other. Like the terosaur paleontologists don't like each other,
talk smack about each other publicly, and just snipe at
(35:08):
one another a lot, which makes the whole thing even
that much more fascinating, you know, huh. Like they're real
competitive and real backbitity.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Interesting. Yeah, and in this case that's a good thing.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, because they keep pushing one another. Agreed, You got
anything else?
Speaker 2 (35:26):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Are we done with terosaurs?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
I don't have anything else, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about terosaurs,
go to your local natural history museum and say, hey,
tell me about that pterodactyl. See if you can stump them.
And since I said stump, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I'm gonna call this one. Which one is this? One, oh, footbinding.
I believe we did this in a select episode. It's
one of our older ones, but a really good one,
I think agreed, and this goes like this. Hey guys,
I'm assumed to be grad student from Guangdong, China and
(36:08):
have been a listener for a couple of years now.
This is my first time riding in and it's about footbinding.
I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering she told
me that her grandmother had bound her feet. I asked
if great Grandma had trouble walking, and she said she
had never even wabbled a little bit. Because it turns
out she never made her own little shoes. She just
(36:30):
bought toddler shoes for herself.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's called making lemons. No, that's called making lemonade out
of lemons with your feet.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
That's right, she said. Great great grandma came from a
wealthy family and bound feet for more of a symbol
of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do
farming chores in catering to the male foot fetish at
that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born,
but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother,
was born in nineteen fourteen, she made sure that her
feet were never bound. She also put all of her
(37:02):
kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then.
Oh yeah, footbinding is certainly not something that I am
proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away
from having to get my own feed bound as supposed to.
Sitting here writing you guys right now, it just says
to me how far we've gone. Thanks for the show.
By the way, the Draft podcast, Josh was having trouble
pronouncing qi n G dynasty Q maybe roughly pronounced as ts,
(37:29):
not exactly the same, So just say sing next time,
that would do.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
I didn't. I don't even think I tried that one.
I tried every other phone me except for sing.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
And this is best regards from Ruoi.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Thank you very much, Ruoi. That's pretty cool and like
nice sense of perspective too. If you want to get
in touch with us with an awesome story like Ruoi did,
you can catch up with us on social media. Just
go to our website stuffishould Know dot com and you
will find all of our social medi links there. And
if you want send us a good old fashioned email,
wrap it up, smack it on the bottom and send
(38:05):
it off to stuff Podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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