Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash dino dig.
Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 533rd episode... It's time for April Fowls again. Or April Fools. Actually, it's a bit of both this year. Is this coming out on April Fools Day? We're one day late. The day after. Last year it was on April Fools Day, I think. Close enough. Yeah. Yeah.
We also have the continuation of our dino duels, dino duels and April Fools. Nice. We also have Dinosaur of the Day, Earl Sinclair, Godzilla, and Cryptids. Because that's what happens for April Fools. We had several requests. Yep. And Sabrina didn't want to let anybody down, so she's doing all of them. Woo!
We also have a fun fact, which is that turtles dance for food. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that was more fun to say. Also, doesn't that sound kind of like an April Fool's thing? It does, yeah. It also sounds like something that doesn't deserve to be squashed by a sauropod, one might say. Well, they're not. These are modern turtles. Oh, okay, good. So I don't have to worry about it. Killing my April Fool's buzz. Well...
Maybe I can excite you again by telling you about some new patrons that we got. Oh, okay. We have 10 new patrons to thank this week, and they are Jesse the Cryolophosaurus, Beagle, Adam J., Maria, Michael, Eray, Michael,
Winnie, Adam, and Michael. Three different Michaels. There are three different Michaels. And I should note that by default, we will thank you by your Patreon name. Unless it includes a last name, then we don't do the last name because we don't want to overshare people's personal information. If you want us to include a letter, though, like Adam J. did, he made his Patreon name Adam J. And then I was like, okay.
I can tell they want the J part in there. So if any of the Michaels want a different name or want to include a letter, send us a message and we will update it. And that goes for anybody. If you ever want to update your Patreon name, you can just shoot us a message and we will update it in our randomizer that gives us our shout out names. So we'll get it right next time. Yes. And thank you so much for joining and being part of our community.
Thank you to all the Michaels. Not just the Michaels. And these seven other people and all the other hundred plus. Yes. Who support us every week. And if you want to join our community, you can do so at patreon.com slash I know Dino. So it's time to catch up on our Dino duels and see how we did with our predictions. All right. This is a quick recap just to show where we stood before this.
You did much better than me in the first round. You got seven points out of the total eight. I only got five. But in the second round, I caught back up because I got six to your four. So we're both tied at 11 points. Oh, no. So it all comes down to these last couple polls.
So I'll start with the Triassic Jurassic Championship, which was a battle between Giraffatitan and Herrerasaurus. A battle on what criteria? That's up to the voters to decide. Could be cuteness. I didn't have a dinosaur in this fight. You didn't have either of them? Nope. Oh no, that's not a good start. It's not. So Giraffatitan won.
Which I'm lucky because I didn't have Herrerasaurus, but I did have Giraffatitan. All right. And I picked it as the winner. So that's four more points for me. Yay, sauropods. I guess it's bittersweet for you. You didn't get the win in your bracket, but you got the win for a sauropod. Yep.
I'm taking it. Okay. And then the much closer, actually, competition was the Cretaceous Championship between Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus. For a while, Deinonychus was out to a pretty strong lead, like two to one. Yeah, I was surprised to see that. In fact, Categotitan said, I think paleo lovers are coming to the conclusion that T-Rex may be getting a bit played out.
Or is it? But then there was a surge in Tyrannosaurus votes. Maybe as a result of that comment, I don't know, could have outraged the Tyrannosaur fans. Hard to say. Yeah.
But Tyrannosaurus narrowly won 54% to 46% with 48 votes. Just a very narrow margin of victory. That's only a couple votes that swung the balance. Did you predict Tyrannosaurus? I did. Okay. So you've got... I got all eight points this round for the first time. Yeah. I've done better each successive round somehow. I went five points, then I got six points, now I got eight points.
But you got four points. I've gotten worse, but... Because you went seven, then four. Oh, but also fourth this time because you did Tyrannosaurus also. I did. And I think Tyrannosaurus is going to win it all. So...
Well, we'll have to see. I did not pick Tyrannosaurus to win it all. So we'll see if Tyrannosaurus is in fact getting a little bit played out in this last poll. The battle of the Mesozoic, Giraffatitan versus Tyrannosaurus. Those are two very good dinosaurs, by the way. They are. It's cool that they made it to the final round there. So if you would like to vote,
on this then head over to our patreon patreon.com slash i know dino and there will be a poll for the dino duels championship overall mesozoic championship which i guess oh yeah because giraffe a titan is jurassic so it's jurassic versus cretaceous oh the herbivore versus the carnivore yeah
Both huge, both very cool mounts at popular museums. It'll be interesting to see. It will be. Still pretty confident. Yeah, I'm less confident, but we'll see. And speaking of poles...
Not only is there a poll on patreon.com slash inodino where you can vote on the Mesozoic Championship between Giraffatitan and Tyrannosaurus, there is also a series of polls or a survey, if you will, that is posted of
on bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25, and that is our annual survey. We're doing it extremely late this year. We like to do it in December. Blame it on the baby this year. Yeah. I mean, this time, for once, it actually is sort of the baby's fault because we were on parental leave, so we couldn't get the list or survey figured out while we were gone. So,
If you would like to tell us what you like about the show, what you dislike about the show, what your favorite segments are, what your least favorite segments are, people you'd like us to interview in the future, anything at all that's on your mind that you want to give us feedback about, we have a survey where you can share that information. bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25, the numbers two and five. It's the same format we've been using for years, and it is available now.
For your polling enjoyment. Okay. All of the questions are totally optional. It is anonymous. But it really helps us to...
know how to make the show even better. Yes, because our goal is to make the show as enjoyable for everyone as possible. And that's the whole purpose of the survey. If there is a segment that everybody hates, and that is the scale, hate it to love it on some of the questions, then we know that we shouldn't do it anymore. And if everybody loves it, we know we shouldn't cut it. So if you want your voice heard, please fill out the listener survey. Bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25. Jumping into the news.
It's kind of a hodgepodge of news today. That's what happens with April Fools, April Fowls. We didn't even mention in the beginning that there was going to be news. Oops. But there is a lot of news. There's a lot of news and a lot of it has to do with birds. Surprise, surprise.
But first, are there shady dinosaurs? Shady? Yeah, there's at least one. Like up to no good? Well, I wish. But Shady the Triceratops, not nicknamed for being up to no good, but nicknamed for the town Shade Hill, which is near where the fossils were found. But still, it felt like the right kind of tone we were going for. Yeah. Yeah.
So Shady was found in South Dakota in 2019 by a rancher who found the tip of the horn while fixing a fence. Nice. That's pretty cool. And that's a good place to start, the tip of something that sticks out really far from the animal so that maybe a lot of the rest of it is preserved deeper in the rock. Yes. Well, over 113 bones have been found. There's researchers from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri that have been excavating, and this is one of the most intact triceratops found.
Awesome. And they're estimating it weighs about 3,000 pounds or 1,360 kilograms. So that's how much the stuff they're digging up weighs, not how much the animal weighed. Unclear. I'm guessing that's the weight of the fossils. Oh yes, that would make more sense. Because it'd be pretty light unless it was really small for a triceratops. Who knows with shady. Yeah.
Well, speaking of things that feel April Fool's-y, but aren't, but again, they just seemed right to include in this episode. So back in December, people were able to purchase shares of a Stegosaurus skeleton.
on a platform called Rally, and they paid $68.75 US per share. There's 1,314 investors, so they spent a total of $13.75 million US dollars. There are 200,000 shares. Jeez. Yeah. It's called the BCQ24 Stegosaurus skeleton. It comes from the bone cabin quarry, so BCQ.
According to the site, there is 70% or about 70% bone volume. Bone volume. I'm not entirely sure what that means. And Denver Fowler and other paleontologists actually talk about the interesting wording of specimens that go on sale in an article on Cowboy State Daily, which looked at how dinosaurs that get auctioned off are often a mix of real bones and 3D printed bones. And it's not always clear how much is real and how much is 3D printed. Yeah.
I feel like when you say we have this much bone volume, it's because if you did it as a count of bones, it would be way less impressive. Like maybe they only have 20% of the bones, but they got most of the big bones. So they're like, how can we make this sound better? Oh, we'll use bone volume, that well-known criteria that paleontologists use. It could be.
But yeah, so back to BCQ24, the Stegosaurus. The plan is to 3D print any missing bones. I'm not sure which ones are missing. They're still in the process of preparing the bones. And then it's going to be either listed at auction or privately sold. And interestingly, the page with the listing mentions the Apex effect. Apex, the Stegosaurus that sold for so many millions of dollars. Mm-hmm.
Apex is a larger stego, but this one is expected to be comparable in bone volume. Ridiculous. I mean, obviously you're going to draw all the connections you possibly can to something that's sold for 40 plus million dollars when you're trying to sell something. But I get the feeling that these investors might be a little bit
I don't want to say lied to, but misled in terms of the value of this fossil. Maybe they're just being very optimistic. Yeah, it does seem optimistic. You can count on one hand the number of dinosaurs that have sold for over $10 million. So the idea that because one Stegosaurus one time sold for $48, this one's worth $14 million, it's not super well substantiated. Wow.
Well, it depends how many shares you bought. It wouldn't be the worst thing if this was a catastrophic failure and then it reduced this kind of stuff happening in the future.
because we don't need the price of the fossil to go into the tens of millions every time a new one's found. It's nicer when they're cheaper and they can end up in museums easier. It's kind of cool though to be able to say I invested or I owned part of a dinosaur skeleton. At first, that's what I thought. I thought you were going to say it was sort of a crowdfunding to buy it and put it in a museum or something. That would be cool. And then you get your name on some document somewhere or something. But just to
pay money and then like own some of it and then get a little bit more money later on isn't as cool in my opinion. I just think it's really interesting. That's the direction that it's gone. Yeah. It's similar to a lot of those things that get securitized. You can buy like a little piece of all sorts of different stuff. Well, speaking of auctions, there was an Apatosaurus that went on sale in November of last year.
It didn't get nearly as much as Apex. It went for about 6.4 million USD or 6 million euros. That's still a lot. Still a lot. It's about 70 feet or 22 meters long. It weighed about 20 metric tons. Okay, that's just Apatosaurus in general, not the specimen. Oh, I thought it was the specimen. They probably conflated the two things in the listing.
Because there's no way a skeleton fossil weighs 20 tons. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, yes. The skeleton is about 70 feet or 22 meters long.
But you're right, apatosaurus weighed about 20 metric tons. So there was an anonymous buyer who said that they will allow it to be displayed in a museum. So that's cool. This skeleton is about 150 million years old and has 75 to 80% of the original bones. There's 300 bones. And it was excavated in Wyoming in the US. It was found back in 2018 and restored in France over a period of two years. That's pretty recent. Yeah. So I included that because it always feels a bit surreal how much dinosaur skeletons go for. Yes.
It does. Hopefully it ends up in a museum. Yeah. But just because the buyer wants to put it in a museum, like we've talked about before, a lot of museums won't display things unless they can guarantee they're going to stay in a museum forever. But maybe that'll be the case. Maybe. That'd be good. We're going to get into more news in just a moment. But first, a quick break for our sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. You can learn from the experts there this summer. Yeah, both in the field and in the lab, paleontologists there will guide you through the process of taking dinosaurs from the rock to a museum-ready showpiece. Ooh. Yeah, you'll learn the proper techniques for handling some of the world's most valuable objects, in my opinion, dinosaur fossils. No need to panic, because you'll know the proper techniques. Yeah.
I guess it's not just my opinion. They are extremely valuable specimens. In the field, this includes identifying fossils, digging them up, stabilizing them, and jacketing them for transport. In the lab, it means separating the rock from the bone, using an air scribe, and preserving them for future generations. There are sure to be surprises both in the field and in the lab, and having experts to help problem solve is invaluable.
Yes, and because you can learn so much in this program, you can get up to eight college credits if you're interested. So head over to cncc.edu slash dino dig to get all the details and make sure you register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig. So getting into the heart of our April Fool's episode.
We've got a bunch of new dinosaurs that fit our theme. And it's not all birds this year. It's mostly birds, but it's not all birds. Okay. So I'm going to start with Archaeocursor asiaticus. It's a new early diverging Ornithischian dinosaur that lived in the early Jurassic in what is now China. So how does that one fit in? Well,
Might fit in the best because back in 2011, the name Arceus Cursor was used as an April Fool's joke name.
It was published on a Polish forum dedicated to dinosaurs, which claimed that Archaeocursor was a feathered theropod that lived in the Middle Late Jurassic in what's now China and was so early in its tree that it showed evidence that dinosaurs were ancestrally covered with protofeathers, which is quite a claim. It's a weird April Fool's joke. Yeah. And they also said that Archaeocursor was part of a nuclid.
Baharia soroidea, and closely related to dinosaurs like Limusaurus. That's the one that starts with teeth and then loses its teeth as an adult. And they gave this fake paper a name. They named some real paleontologists as the authors, including Paul Serino, and it looked fairly official. The abstract sounded pretty good too. I don't know how I feel about that.
Well, on the Dinosaur mailing list, someone wrote how posting joke names with fake references for April Fools is out of fashion now because it's just too easy to get confused on the internet. And apparently Darren Nash has said he no longer does this because people might come across his April Fool's articles not in April and think it was real. Yes. That's why we make it very clear when things are jokes or not. Yes. And we don't really even do any fake things. No. Yeah.
But the reason I bring it up is because now the name Archaea Cursor belongs to a valid dinosaur. And this was published in January of 2025, which is pretty far away from April Fool's Day. So not a joke. It was published by Shi Yao and others in iScience and Open Access.
And it's really cool. It's the oldest Ornithischian from Asia. And Ornithischians, that's a group of dinosaurs. They mostly ate plants. They had hips similar to birds. The name Ornithischia means bird-hipped, but they're not that closely related to birds. And they include dinosaurs like Triceratops, like Shady, and Stegosaurus, like Apex, and the duck-billed dinos like Hadrosaurus. Oh, I guess there's Hattie. All the ones that... Have nicknames. Yeah.
So the individual found was a young adult, and it's small. It's estimated to be about one meter or three feet long. And it helps show that Ornithischians were in more places, they were more dispersed in the early Jurassic than previously thought. There were a lot of them in Gondwana in the south in the early Jurassic, and there were some in Laurasia in the north, but there wasn't as much diversity in the north. It was mostly armored dinosaurs.
It is possible, though, that psilosaurids, which were from the Triassic period, were early Ornithischians. So that would mean that they were around and dispersed more. But anyway, Archaeocursor shows that Ornithischians moved around to more places, including what's now East Asia, independent of and maybe even earlier than armored dinosaurs. And it seems they started in Gondwana, then went north, and then went east.
Although the authors acknowledge it's really hard to say based on just having the one bone. Yeah. So that holotype, it's a nearly complete left femur, a thigh bone. It was found in the
Zulio Jing Formation in Chongqing Municipality, China. It was found during construction. And it has similarities to Gondwanan or southern species, specifically Eocursor. That's the dawn runner that lived in the early Triassic. And the paleoart depicts Archaeocursors having long legs, a long tail, short arms, and an elongated head. And it looks like a runner.
There's a little bit of overlap, it looks like, in the paper between EO cursor and RKO cursor in terms of when they lived. They might have lived at the same time if RKO cursor is on the early end of the estimate and EO cursor is towards the late end, but RKO cursor looks like it's probably...
At least a few million years after the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. Yeah. So it's not quite as early as some of the other ornithus skins that we have from around the world, which makes sense with what you were saying about they probably started in Gondwana and then moved over. The full name Archaeocursor Asiaticus means old runner from Asia because the genus name means archaic runner. Then you got Asiaticus from Asia.
So now on to the birds, which I know is what you're really looking for. Because it is our April Fowls episode after all, even if we're off by a day. I'll start with the Enantiornithines, which are the most successful early diverging birds. They're extinct now, but they were abundant and diverse. There was over a hundred named genera, and they've been found on most continents. Most of them had teeth and claws on their fingers, but otherwise looked like modern birds. And the name...
and antiornithines means opposite birds. They have shoulder joints that are opposite of modern birds. So the first new and antiornithine we'll talk about is Neobohionis lamadongensis. This was published by Saisha Shun and others in Scientific Reports, another open access article. They found a nearly complete articulate skeleton that
This enantiornithine lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Liaoning, China, found in the Jiufotong Formation. And the specimen found is much smaller than its close relatives, maybe about half the size. It's estimated to weigh about 47 grams, that's 0.1 pound. Wow.
And it had a humerus and arm bone length of almost one inch. Oh, boy. 25 millimeters. That is tiny. But the fusions in the bones may mean it's an adult or nearly an adult. Wow. I mean, I guess there are lots of small birds. Yes.
And it did have robust teeth. How robust could they be on a 47 grand bird? Wow. Robust for its size. Yes. And its close relatives are known for robust teeth. It probably lived in trees or spent a lot of time in trees based on how its feet looked. I think it could perch. They found traces of feathers on the body. And there's features that showed more advanced flight capabilities like more vertebrae in the hips or sacrum and a smaller thumb or a lular digit.
The genus name, Neobohyornis, refers to being more derived or newer than its relatives, its relatives being Bohyornithids. And the species name, Lamadongensis, refers to Lamadong near where the fossil was found. It's cool that they found feather traces. Mm-hmm. I think that happens a lot with enantiornithines. Yeah? Yeah.
It happens a lot in China. Yeah. And there's a lot of enantiornithines and other birds in China. So yeah. Yeah. Then we've got the enantiornithine Novavis pubisculata. This was published by Jingmei O'Connor and others in GeoBios. And it's an enantiornithine that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now China, found in the Xiago Formation. And it's known for its short pubis bone or hip bone.
Which might mean that affected takeoff and landing while flying. It couldn't contract its muscles as fast, but it might not have affected its ability to fly. That almost seems like it could be an April Fool's joke, naming something for a short pubis. Yeah, almost. So it's really just a regular hip bone? Yes. They found a partial skeleton including six or seven tail bones, parts of the hips, and most of the legs. It was preserved on a slab.
The genus name, Nova Avis, means strange bird, and then the full name, Nova Avis pubisculata, means strange bird with short pubis. Very descriptive. Next, we've got Navaornis hestiae. That's another in-anti-ornithine. It lived in the Lake Cretaceous in what is now Brazil, found in the Adamantina Formation. This was published by Louis Chiapi and others in Nature and Open Access.
They found a well-preserved skull and skeleton, and the fossils were found in 2016. It's got features of both in antiornithines and crown birds. So the genus name, Navaornis, means Nava bird. That's in honor of William Nava, who found the first fossils. And then the species name, Hestiae, refers to the Greek goddess Hestia, the oldest and youngest Olympian.
Because Nava Ornithus is an old bird with a modern looking skull. So you got the old and the new. And it had large eyes and no teeth and a tall head. It's one of those toothless in anti-Ornithines. I always think of the anti-Ornithines as the toothy ones. Yeah. But not so. It's about their shoulder. Yes. Or I guess in phylogenetic terms, it's about where they're related to other things. Yes. Not to do with the teeth. Although most in anti-Ornithines had teeth.
And then last for the new birds, we've got Bominornis jungensis. This was published by Runsheng Chen and others in Nature. And this was a basal, early avialin bird that lived in the late Jurassic and what is now China, found in the Nanyuan Formation. And those fossils were found in November of 2023. They found a partial skeleton with parts of the left arm, leg, hips, back and neck bones,
pygostyle, that's the last few tailbones fused together which supports tail feathers and muscles, ribs, and gastralia.
And what's cool and kind of controversial about it is that it's the oldest known bird to have a fused pygostyle. Before, the earliest known short-tailed bird was from the early Cretaceous, so 20 million years later. Wow. But there was discussion in the dinosaur mailing list that talked about how this wasn't a pygostyle, or they didn't think it looked like a pygostyle, but rather more like a synsacrum. Oh, that's very different.
The syn sacrum is like the sacrum, the vertebrae that are in between the hips, the typical one, and then it can extend either way out or both ways out.
So the thinking is that it could be a sin sacrum based on the size and how curved it is, how it fossilized, taphonomy, as well as some other details. So it'll be interesting to see if there are papers about this later. Yeah, because otherwise that's pretty significant going 20 million years earlier for a pygostyle potentially. Not definitively, though, because it could have just been the structure that later allowed a pygostyle to evolve. Well, this bird, either way, was about the size of a quail.
Estimated to weigh about one-third to two-thirds of a pound, or 130 to 300 grams. That's way bigger than the first one you mentioned. And it had some features of modern birds, like in the shoulders, which had adaptations to make it easier to flap to fly. But it had non-avian dinosaur-like hands, like raptor-like hands with fingers that could grab and slash.
The genus name, Baminornis, means bamin bird. Bamin's the Mandarin word for Fujian province. And the species name, Jungensis, refers to the fossil being found in Jungho County. It lived around the same time as Archaeopteryx. This is about 150 million years ago. But they live pretty far apart from each other because Archaeopteryx has been found in Europe. And also, Baminornis had features that probably made it a better flyer. So that's interesting. Yeah. It helps show that birds were around in the Jurassic period.
Speaking of Archaeopteryx, our last news item is that a new Archaeopteryx specimen was recently described in January. Oh, cool. Yeah. This was published by Christian Foth and others in Fossil Record and it's open access. This specimen was found in Bavaria, Germany in the Tithonian Mornsheim formation. It's the third bird found in this formation and this is now the 14th Archaeopteryx specimen.
Although it's a little too fragmentary to assign it to a species. Oh, bummer. But if you want to know, it's S-M-N-K-P-A-L 10,000. That's the specimen number? That is, yes. If you want to keep that in mind for the future, if you're looking it up or something. The fossils were found in 2019. In the paper, they were very specific. They said it was May 31st of 2019.
And it was found in nine limestone slabs with brittle, flaky surfaces. There's a lot of changes that happened to it from fossilization, but the wishbone and some other bones show that it is archaeotrics.
They found a right arm and shoulder and parts of the left arm and both legs. The arm lengths are most similar to the Munich specimen of Archaeopteryx. And based on the length of its humerus, that's an arm bone, it's considered to be medium size for Archaeopteryx. And Archaeopteryx, just for context, was about the size of a raven.
I always like a new Archaeopteryx specimen. Yeah, there's only 14 total in the world now. That's more than I remembered. There have been a couple of recent ones that were added. I think last time we talked about Archaeopteryx, we were only up to 12. Yeah. And then I think there's one that some people say isn't really Archaeopteryx. It should have its own genus name. So it depends on lumping or splitting. And like you said, there's more than one species. And we'll get into our dinosaurs of the day in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.
All right. Like you mentioned, Garrett, at the beginning of the show, we've got kind of three dinosaurs of the day. Earl Sinclair, Godzilla, and Cryptids. That's why I say kind of. Cryptids is multiple. Yeah. I'm going to start with Earl Sinclair. This was a request from Marcus via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks.
This request actually came out, I think it was right after we recorded last year's April Fool's episode. Wow, you've been keeping track of it that whole time? Yes, I wanted to make sure it didn't miss out on any requests. Plus we like the show Dinosaurs. Yes, yes, because Earl Sinclair is a megalosaurus, Muppet, from the TV show Dinosaurs, and that show is from the 90s.
Is he technically a Muppet? I think so. Well, because you wear somebody warm in a suit. Yeah, I guess Big Bird's a Muppet. Yeah. So why not Earl Sinclair? And it's from the Jim Henson studio. Yeah. So he is 43 years old, married to Fran, and has three kids, Robbie, Charlene, and Baby. But only Earl and Baby are megalosaurus for some reason. Yep, that's weird. Mm-hmm.
His full name is Earl Sneed Sinclair, which Fran calls him that when she's trying to make a point with him. He pushes trees for the We Say So Corporation, but in his free time, he likes to watch TV. That's about it. And eat. Yeah. So he's pretty human-like in that way. Baby Sinclair calls him Not the Mama, often hits him with a frying pan.
It's probably one of the more famous lines from the show. And then on the puppet side, one person wore a full-bodied suit while another person operated facial radio controls. And then the voice was by Stuart Pankin. And Baby Sinclair was kind of a hand puppet, but the eyes and the arms were operated separately. Yeah. And I think he was based on like...
Right.
He wasn't too based on megalosaurs, the dinosaur. No. And it is crazy that they're all different genera of dinosaurs because the definition of a species is that you can mate and have viable offspring. They're not even separate species within a genus. They're like totally all over the dinosaur family tree. And they're supposed to be like biological children. Very weird.
Well, you don't think about it too much. Yeah. It wouldn't have been as exciting on TV if they were all the same species, I guess. Yeah, the stories you could tell would be more limited. I enjoy that show. It's so good. Well, next we've got Godzilla. This was a request from Tyrant King via our Patreon and Discord, so thank you. And Godzilla is a kaiju. Kaiju means strange beast in Japanese, so Godzilla is a fictional monster.
The 1954 movie Godzilla is often considered to be the first kaiju movie, and that movie was inspired partly by the 1933 movie King Kong. I never knew that. Or maybe you already told me, but I didn't remember it. It sounded new to me when I was researching. Now, Godzilla has appeared in 38 films, as well as a bunch of comics, video games, and other media.
It's unclear exactly how Godzilla got its name. It was Gojira. And then there's stories that it was named after a sturdy man that the producer jokingly called Gojira, and then later Gojira. And that's a portmanteau of the Japanese words gorira, which means gorilla, and kujira, which means whale. Because apparently he was sturdy like a gorilla and he liked eating whale meat. Funny.
But this might just be a tall tale. I thought it was just going to be that he was sturdy like a gorilla, but big like a whale. Not that he liked eating whale meat. Yes. Well, we don't know for sure if that's the real story behind it. But we do know that the name started as Gojira and then got translated to Godzilla for overseas distribution.
And Godzilla is this prehistoric sea monster that's awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. Godzilla is amphibious and reptile. It looks somewhat like a dinosaur. Stands on two legs, has scaly skin, bony plates on the back and tail, muscular arms.
Godzilla is very much a chimera. There's features from Tyrannosaurus, Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, and an alligator. Yeah, I always see Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus when I look at it. Me too. I think it's the plates. Is the Iguanodon maybe the arms? Maybe, although the fingers don't match up, I think, the number of fingers. I don't know what it's Iguanodon like about it, but it must be something. But it's got sharp teeth and forward-facing eyes like a carnivore, a short neck, and
Long arms. Maybe that's it, the long arms. And it's got four fingers on each hand. Guanodon had five. The skin texture was inspired by the scars seen on survivors of Hiroshima, which emphasizes its, Godzilla's relationship with the atomic bomb.
Godzilla does change a bit in appearance, like how in later movies it's got fewer toes and no ears or fangs, but then those features actually come back in more recent films. Yeah, they made it more dinosaur-like, I would say, for a while, and then it returned to its more amalgamation. Yeah, and its size changes from movie to movie. I think the biggest one is in the 2017 movie Godzilla Planet of the Monsters, where it's supposed to be 984 feet tall or 300 meters.
It's tall. Very tall. It's also got special powers like atomic breath, and it's been depicted in many ways, animatronics, CGI, stop motion. Although the first way was an actor wearing a very heavy latex costume. That first suit weighed over 220 pounds or 100 kilograms, and there were thin wires in bamboo wrapped in chicken wire for support. Oof. And it sounded very difficult to wear. I could not wear that, I don't think.
I prefer my inflatable dinosaur costumes. Yes. That weigh like one pound. Even those you can get really sweaty in. You can, but it's nice because it's got the airflow going. I think you're thinking of when you were dancing in them, which, yeah, would make you sweaty. It would. And did.
Alright, well that's Godzilla. And then also fitting for this episode from Tyrant King, who said that a fun idea for April Fool's would be an episode dedicated to various worldwide cryptids thought to be dinosaurs or other Mesozoic creatures. So we got into that a little bit. So cryptozoology, which is not mainstream science. One might say it's pseudoscience.
Yes. According to the Merriam-Webster definition, it's, quote, the study of and search for animals, and especially legendary animals, such as Sasquatch, usually in order to evaluate the possibility of their existence, end quote. Like going on a snipe hunt. Yes. Now, one of the people who made cryptozoology popular was Bernard Heuvelman, who lived from 1916 to 2001. And he wrote a book in 1958 called On the Track of Unknown Animals that was really influential.
Cryptozoology means the science of hidden animals. And Bernard was known for making overstated claims, according to one science writer. I would say so. And one of the most famous cryptids is the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie.
And we could spend a lot of time on Nessie. I'm pretty sure there's podcasts out there that cover her in depth. It's a she? Well, I think How I Met Your Mother makes me think of her as a she. There's a thing in How I Met Your Mother on Nessie? Marshall loves Nessie. Oh. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
Now, in Scottish folklore, Nessie is said to live in Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, which is a large freshwater lake. Yeah, Loch is Scottish for lake. Yes. And Nessie's been described as having sleek skin, being about 20 feet long, and looking like a sea serpent, but with some humps and then paddles. The head's been described as like a horse's in shape, but it's also had a head described as having a small rounded turtle shape.
The body and head are kind of like a plesiosaurs, if you go with the turtle-shaped head, with the small head, the long neck, and four long flippers. That's what plesiosaurs look like. And some plesiosaurs did probably live in freshwater. Nessie got popular in the 1930s, although the Loch Ness Monster has been mentioned as early as the 7th century. And it's described as a monster fish or sea serpent or dragon. That's quite a breadth of animals. Yes.
In 1934, Robert Kenneth Wilson allegedly took a photo of Nessie. This is called the surgeon's photograph. He was a gynecologist. Although now that photo is considered to be a hoax. It was created with a toy submarine and a fake body. Now, as for why Nessie looks like a plesiosaur, well, there's an interesting post by Darren Naish on the Biologist Royal Society of Biology about how cryptozoology can tell us a lot about how humans see nature.
And Naish also has a lot of posts on his Tetsu blog about cryptozoology if you want to dive in more. In this post, he talks about how cryptids are cultural memes and how what they look like and how they supposedly exist follows trends in pop culture. So one example is the Mokele-Membe, which is a water monster from the Congo River Basin that's been described as sauropod-looking.
As a side note, we had a bonus episode from the podcast Skeptoid that talks about Mokele Mbembe. So I didn't want to get too much into this one.
But Naish wrote that the sauropod-looking version of this water monster came out in the early 1900s when sauropod skeletons were being mounted in museums around the world. And Mokele-Membe, which is seen as living in swamps and amphibious, seems to look and behave the way that we thought sauropods looked and behaved in the early 1900s. Mm-hmm.
Yep. It's just like how UFOs always look like whatever the latest sci-fi version of a UFO looks like. Hmm. I never thought about that. Well, I'm not totally sure why Nessie is so plesiosaur-like, but it could be because plesiosaurs have been found on every continent.
Yeah, plesiosaurs were well known in the UK by the 1930s. And it was interesting to me when you were saying that it was known about as long as the 7th century. I was thinking, oh, that's way before plesiosaurs. But then you said, but they used to think, you know, sometimes it was a giant fish or a dragon. And that fits more with what you might expect in a much older legend. Yes. So it changes over time.
And just for the record, Nessie is not real. The lake has been extensively scanned with sonar and other equipment and hasn't found any animal approaching the size of a plesiosaur or a giant fish or dragon. The final nail in the coffin was in 2019 when a group took environmental DNA from the loch.
Or the lake. Yeah, or the lake. Environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, refers to taking samples from the environment and then figuring out which animals are in the ecosystem based on the genetic material they leave around. Oh, interesting. Which is in the sample. It's a really powerful tool for conservation and all sorts of research you can do in the wild. And not something we talk about much with dinosaurs. No, because there's no DNA. Well, not enough to...
a polymerase chain reaction and figure out which animals were in the ecosystem. But all animals are constantly shedding genetic material all around us. And eDNA is so powerful that a study recently accidentally found that they could identify many specific individual people who had been in an area. Oh, wow. So then...
in that eDNA community, they started to raise privacy concerns. Like, how are we going to make sure that we're not accidentally publishing somebody's DNA in this research or, you know,
sharing where people have gone because they were basically trying to research the health of an ecosystem, but they got a bunch of human data with it. And there are laws about human privacy. So even when you're not trying to get something in the DNA, you often get it because it is very powerful. That is powerful. Wow. Yeah. So the DNA study of Loch Ness did not find any plesiosaur material in it.
And you might say testing a lake is one of the ideal places to do eDNA because with water, it gets all mixed up so you can take a sample of the water and get a really good sample of what's living in that water. Because it's all randomized. Yeah, and it just mixes well, right? Whereas if you're going out and you're getting a little bit of dirt, it's possible that an animal might not have passed through there if it's really rare and you might not get a sample of it.
But not only did they not find any plesiosaur DNA there, they didn't find any reptile DNA whatsoever in the lake. They did find over 3,000 species, though. It includes bacteria, fish, birds, deer, pigs, and of course, humans. Mm-hmm.
The most likely group, though, from the eDNA sample may have been eels. There are a lot of eels in the lake, it turns out. Oh, and they have a kind of a plesiosaur-like body. Yeah. At least they're long. Kind of, yeah. So maybe some Nessie sightings are overgrown eels. It's possible. Or it could just all be pareidolia and legends over the years.
Pareidolia is a phenomenon where we tend to see familiar or meaningful images from patterns or ambiguous photos. Like you can look at a random...
fuzzy texture and see a face in it or you can look at the sky and the clouds and you'll see all sorts of shapes in the clouds. I see dinosaurs everywhere, especially sauropods. Yeah. Like in wall patterns. So if you think that there's a monster in a lake and you're staring at it or you're looking at it at night or looking off into the distance, there's a good chance you'll see something that looks like a monster to you. And sometimes you might think it's a giant fish and sometimes you might think it's a dragon, whatever's on your mind in your subconscious or even conscious. Yeah.
Interesting. Good term to know. Pareidolia is a good one. Well, we won't get into too many cryptids here because this episode has already gotten fairly long. What with all the birds. Ha ha.
But one more dinosaurian-like one is the Arica monster, which is often depicted looking like a dromaeosaurid or raptor, although sometimes it's described as looking like an early kangaroo. So it's been described as walking on two legs, having sharp teeth, and having three-toed footprints.
It was allegedly first spotted in 1980 and then spotted a few more times in 2004 in the Atacama Desert of Chile in South America. And Arica is the province in northern Chile where the Atacama Desert is located. There's also a city called Arica. So the Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world. And it's the largest fog desert in the world, which also sounds like an April Fool's thing.
The fog gives the animals and plants enough moisture. What makes it a fog desert is it's got these lomas or fog oases where fog condenses against mountain slopes near the sea. Although there are still some parts of the desert that are too dry for any plants or animals. But a lot of birds live in this desert, like the Humboldt penguins and Andean flamingos. Those are the ones that parade inspired our Parasaurolophus parade.
Kind of makes sense because there aren't that many animals that can cover a lot of distance or inhospitable terrain. But if anything can, a bird can. Yeah. I mean, there are other animals. I just pointed out the birds, you know, April Fowls and all. Parts of the desert look like a dusty, rocky landscape. So it's been used to film Mars scenes like in the TV series from 2004, Space Odyssey Voyage to the Planets.
No dromaeosaurids have been found in Chile yet, because you never know. So maybe there's a strange bird that hasn't been named yet that people are seeing? Could be. Could be. As for fossils, there's some interesting finds in formations in the Atacama Desert.
There's the sauropod, Atacama titan, which was found in the Tolar Formation. It's a late Cretaceous titanosaur estimated to weigh between 8 and 16 tons. There's also an unnamed pterosaur found in the Cerro Compamento Formation in the Atacama Desert. This pterosaur lived in the late Jurassic. It had a long tail, a long snout, and it's part of a group that's estimated to have wingspans of up to 6.6 feet or 2 meters long. Hmm, they're pretty big. Although neither of those look raptor-like.
But then not too far away in Argentina, there's Psilocycus, an archosaur that lived in the late Triassic. And it looks dinosaur-like. It walked on two legs. It had short arms, a long tail, a relatively long neck, and it had some light armor. And its closest modern relatives are crocodilians. Sort of like a two-legged, more upright walking crocodilian. I thought you were going to say Godzilla. No. Yeah.
And then there's Forus racos, which is a terror bird found in Argentina that lived in the Miocene. The Miocene was about 23 to 5 million years ago. And it had two strong legs. It was almost 8 feet tall or 2.4 meters. And it weighed almost 290 pounds or 130 kilograms. And being a terror bird, it had a large skull that was 26 inches or 65 centimeters long.
It had stubby wings. It couldn't fly and a long neck to go with its large head that had a hooked beak. And it also had three toes on its feet. That'd be really cool if there was a terror bird somewhere. Oh, yes. I don't think there is, but it would be cool. It would be cool.
There is a satirical conspiracy theory known as the Acre Conspiracy. I want to thank our listener ACD for sharing this one with us. And Acre is a state in Brazil. It's relatively small. It's way out west. It's on the border with Peru and Bolivia. It's sparsely populated. Its largest city in the capital is Rio Branco with over 335,000 people, but other cities have 15 or 16,000 people. And it's mostly covered by the Amazon rainforest. And it's
pretty hard to get to. So there's a joke that Acre either doesn't exist or that only dinosaurs live there. And people from the state have embraced the joke. Back in 2018, one man started making videos of himself doing challenges in an inflatable T-Rex costume, like rowing a boat or shopping. Basically saying we are all dinosaurs here. Yeah. Or yes, there are dinosaurs.
As an interesting aside, Indiana University Bloomington had a blog post from 2020 that talked about seven species that used to be cryptids. So who knows, maybe we'll find a really weird bird that fits the Arica monster description someday. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. I won't get into all of the species from this blog post, but two of them include the Komodo dragon, which apparently it wasn't until 1910 when Lieutenant Steinvon...
Hansbrook caught and killed one that people saw that Komodo dragons existed. And then W. Douglas Burgin went to the island of Komodo in Indonesia and captured a couple live Komodo dragons, which went on display at the Bronx Zoo and apparently inspired Marion Cooper to write the 1933 movie King Kong. All these connections. Yeah. King Kong and Godzilla. So without Komodo dragons being brought to the Bronx Zoo, you wouldn't have Godzilla. Is that what you're saying? Maybe. I guess you could say that. Yeah. Yeah.
And then another species that used to be a cryptid is the kangaroo. Hmm.
It is super weird. Yeah. So the first description of a kangaroo was in 1499 by Amerigo Vespucci, who said, according to the blog post, it was a, quote, monstrous beast with the head of a fox, the hands of a man, the tail of a monkey, and a bag that it used to carry its young. A bag. That's fantastic. Makes it sound like it's got a shopping bag. Yeah. But it's like a pouch. Yes. Yeah.
So yeah, that does sound very strange. Yeah. There was one kangaroo captured in 1629, but it died on its voyage.
So it wasn't until Sir Joseph Banks rediscovered the kangaroo on Captain Cook's voyage in 1770 that it became more widely accepted. At least widely accepted by Europeans, I suppose. Yes, yes. But isn't that strange? That reminds me of our April Fool's episode on the dodo. That's what I was thinking too. Yeah, I guess it wasn't in their list, but that was another one where people didn't believe it actually existed. Yes, but then people didn't believe it went extinct either. Yeah. Yeah.
Which is how some of these cryptids are, right? With Nessie, people saying that maybe Plesiosaur didn't go extinct. So yeah, cryptozoology is interesting. I think for a lot of people, it's just sort of a fun thought experiment more than anything. If you want to hear more about the origins of dinosaur cryptozoology, I recommend checking out our interview with Edward Guimont in episode 361.
And now on to our fun fact, which I said at the beginning of the episode, is that turtles dance for food. Like, how is this not an April Fool's joke? Or maybe it's just like a cute thing. Or maybe I just wanted to include turtles on the April Fool's episode. Got the sauropods in already. I guess so. Had to get the turtles in. So there was a paper published in Nature by Kayla Goforth and others, and they learned that some turtles dance.
Specifically, the loggerhead turtle learns and remembers the magnetic signature of an area and then does a dance when it's in a place that it associates with food. It's almost like a happy dance for food. That's weird. Sea turtles are known for long distance migrations and then returning to the same feeding sites, but it's unclear how they navigate to these sites. So it could be that they use the magnetic field of Earth.
For the study, the team had juvenile sea turtles in tanks where they recreated magnetic signatures related to specific geographic locations. And the turtle spent the same amount of time in two different magnetic field tanks, but they only got food in one of the tanks.
And when they were in the tank that they associated with food, they danced in anticipation for their food. Oh, interesting. And the only way they knew it was the right tank was they had a magnetic field on. Both of them had magnetic fields, but only one of them they got food in. But the only way they knew that they were going to get food was the specific magnetic field? Yes, yes. Because it helps show that turtles can tell the difference between magnetic fields. They have this internal magnetic map. Okay.
So yeah, in other words, turtles do their dance when anticipating food, at least in captivity. And the dance includes tilting their body vertically, raising their head above the water, opening their mouth, doggy paddling, and sometimes spinning in place. And they just don't dance as much when there's no food around. There's a video that goes with it that shows the turtle dancing. It's pretty cute. Nice. I'll have to post that in our Discord. Yes.
And that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll have more new dinosaurs plus the thrilling end to Dino Duels, although I have a pretty good guess of how it's going to end. Yes, we'll find out who won the whole Dino Duels competition. The 2025 championship winner. Yes. And as a reminder, if you want to join our growing community, head over to patreon.com slash I Know Dino.
Thanks again, and until next time.