Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska - "the rarest among the rare"
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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 527th episode, we're talking all about a really cool paleontologist you may have heard of named Zofia. Yes, Zofia Keelan-Yavarowsky.

She's a paleontologist who led a series of Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi Desert and discovered many mammals and dinosaurs, including the fighting dinosaurs and Deinokyrus. Two of our favorites. Two of our favorites, yes. Well, three, if you count all the dinosaurs and the fighting dinosaurs.

True. And that leads me to our dinosaur of the day. We're revisiting Deinokyrus, which is the once fearsome, but now I would say more goofy herbivorous theropod dinosaur with enormous arms and claws. Once thought to be fearsome. Yes. We don't think it was ever actually that fearsome. Good point. Maybe to some small mammals. Yeah.

And our fun fact is that Zofia discovered the marsupial bone in multi-tuberculates, the epipubis, which may support the pouch in marsupials and are also in non-pouched mammals like monotremes and eutherians. But before we get into all of that and before we go on to thank our patrons, we are still on parental leave.

We are recording this before we are having our second baby, which we are expecting very soon. So it seemed like a good idea to get some episodes done ahead of time. Hopefully by the time you hear this, we will have that baby. Oh, we definitely should. We better. Yes. And with a toddler and a baby on the way, it was just a little bit too difficult to prep weekly episodes ahead of time. So we are experimenting with the bi-weekly format while we're on leave. So hopefully

Enjoy this episode. Yeah. And you mentioned that we need to thank some patrons. We have 10 patrons to thank this week. They are Lee, Thomasaurus, Claire, Tiffany, Miriam, Stefan, Wouter, Christine, Amber, and Ali exists. Amazing. Thank you.

I also just want to point out if we were completely ad supported, we wouldn't be able to do episodes on cool people like Zofia because she is not very SEO optimized. But thanks to our patrons, we can try out different

topics without worrying if every episode will be perfectly tuned to advertising and maximum numbers of downloads. So thank you to all of our patrons for helping us make episodes like these. And if you're not a patron, please consider joining and helping our mission of spreading dinosaur joy and science at patreon.com slash inodino. All right, so Zofia Keelan-Yavorowski, for this episode,

I found a lot of great sources where I learned about her and her accomplishments. And my goodness, there are many. If you want to know more about her, I recommend reading two books that she wrote about her work. One is called Hunting for Dinosaurs and another is In Pursuit of Early Mammals, which even though mammals are in the title, there is some talk about dinosaurs. So Zofia Kielan-Jaworowski, she was a Polish paleobiologist and had many accomplishments and

For example, she led a series of Polish-Mongolian paleontological expeditions to the Gobi Desert

She was the first woman to lead a dinosaur expedition, and she led seven of the eight Polish-Mongolian expeditions. She was also the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Science, and she discovered many dinosaurs. I mentioned Deinokyrus and the fighting dinosaurs, Protoceratops and Velociraptor. There's also Gallimimus and a lot more.

And she's had animals named after her, including chelanodon and zovia patar, which are mammals that lived in the Jurassic. She was also the director of the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, PAN, in Warsaw, Poland from 1961 to 1982.

She did a visiting professorship at the Natural History Museum in Paris for two years. She was a professor of paleontology at the University of Oslo from 1986 to 1995. She got a master's in zoology and a doctorate in paleontology at Warsaw University at a time where it was very difficult to be a student. And she completed her doctoral work in 1952.

Her early research, interestingly, was on trilobites and sea worms. She spent about 14 years collecting and describing marine invertebrates early in her career. And then she kind of shifted her focus to mammals from the Mesozoic in 1963. And she published so much. She wrote 220 publications. That includes 35 scientific papers, two books, 14 popular articles in just the last two decades of her life.

She named about 20 genera of Mesozoic mammals. And then, of course, she wrote those books I mentioned, Hunting for Dinosaurs, which came out in 1969, and In Pursuit of Mammals, which came out in 2013, just a couple years before she died.

She was the editor of the journal Acta Paleontologica Polonica, which is something we read quite often, especially for certain dinosaur of the days. Yeah. And she built a science network during the Cold War with Western scientists while she was still behind the Iron Curtain. She was also a member of many societies. She won so many awards, including the Walter Granger Memorial Award, the Righteous Among the Nations Medal, and the Romer Simpson Medal in 1986.

And as Zhu Xilu put in 2014, quote, she is the rarest among the rare. She's been a leader in making important scientific contributions and also a gregarious and charismatic figure, both of which have made paleontology a better science and paleontologists worldwide a better community. Quite an endorsement. That is.

So getting into her life a little bit, she was born on April 25th of 1925 in Poland, and she passed away in early 2015, March 13th, just a few weeks before she would have turned 90. In 1920, her family moved to Warsaw for five years for her dad's job at the Association of Agriculture and Trade Cooperatives, and then they kind of moved away for a bit, but they returned to Warsaw in 1934.

She was only 14 years old when Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939 and the beginning of World War II. In her book, In Pursuit of Early Mammals, she wrote, quote, During the Second World War, the Germans occupied Poland for more than five years. The official aim announced by Adolf Hitler and his accomplices was extermination of most Poles, with the rest, those who could, quote, count to 500, sign their name, and not necessarily be able to read.

turned into German slaves. However, at the risk of the death penalty, Poles organized a clandestine, countrywide system of education at all levels. High school teachers and university professors continued to give lessons and lectures in private homes. Gradually, a secret network of instruction was established, constituting part of the Polish resistance.

At the University of Warsaw in 1944, approximately 300 members of the academic staff and 3,500 students participated in these studies. The majority of students served as underground soldiers at the same time. I attended the clandestine high school. Lessons were conducted in the private homes of the pupils in groups of six to eight persons. In 1943-1944, I attended the clandestine University of Warsaw, studying zoology.

These classes were suspended after the Germans put down the Warsaw Uprising of August to September 1944, in which I took part as a medic.

Wow. So I guess she used that zoology understanding to do some human medicine too. A little bit, but I think she got some separate training as a medic. Yeah, I presume so. Just, yeah, as a side note, she joined the resistance organization known as the Gray Ranks, which was an underground paramilitary group organized from scouting troops, and they were the ones who trained her to be a medic.

She wrote,

But not only was she studying in secret and helping as a medic, her family also helped hide two Jewish women during the war.

In World War II, Poland was the only Nazi-occupied country where the penalty was death for helping Jewish people. And in 1942, Kristina, Zofia's sister, got to know a new girl in her class, Janina Pratt, and they became friends. Janina eventually told Kristina that she was Jewish and she had left her parents hiding in a nearby town to come to Warsaw. She thought she'd survive better there. So Kristina and Zofia asked their parents to shelter Janina, and they agreed, and they took her in.

And later they arranged for her to stay with acquaintances in a village, but soon she was sent back after village authorities started suspecting that she was Jewish. Then one day in 1942, Janina and another young woman, Romana Lox, came to the Keelan's doorstep after her hiding place became too dangerous. And for a few months, they sheltered both Janina and Romana.

Romana eventually found a place in a convent near Warsaw until the area was liberated. And after the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, Janina stayed with the Keelans until the area was liberated. And then after the war, both Janina and Romana immigrated to the U.S. And they, along with Zofia and Christina, stayed friends for many years.

So just some background stories about Zofia. Yeah. That's a nice little feather in the cap. Yeah. Doing some heroic deeds. Yes. And it kind of shows who she was and how she was shaped. Tenacity. Yes. So Zofia started studying zoology in 1943. Wow.

She went to her professor Roman Kozlowski's home for lectures and learned about Roy Chapman Andrews and his expeditions to the Gobi Desert, which probably shouldn't be too surprising because they both ended up going to the Gobi. Yeah. And he was doing that about 20 years before she was studying. Yes. And Zofia also volunteered at the Zoological Museum in Warsaw in 1945 and helped restore it.

The university reopened in December of 1945, and that's when she met her professor. And it's because of him, Professor Roman Kozlowski, that Zofia decided to study paleontology. And then she married her husband, Zvinov Yavirovsky, a professor of radiobiology in 1958.

They met when he was a student of medicine in 1950, when she and colleagues from her mountaineering club invited her to join them on a trip to a lake, Morski Oko, known as the Sea Eye in the Tatra Mountains, to try high mountain climbing. They ended up becoming close friends, and then eight years they got married, and they had one child in 1959. Her husband was a renowned physician in radiation medicine and an expert in monitoring atomic radiation and climate change.

So how did Zofia end up in the Gobi Desert? Well, her professor retired in 1960, and the next year she replaced him as organizer and director of the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In her book Hunting for Dinosaurs, she talks about the first three expeditions that she led in the Gobi.

She said she first heard about the expeditions of Roy Chapman Andrews in 1946 when she was a student. And she said, quote,

The lectures, the first of their kind since the war, were attended by a group of six, two geology students, three zoologists, and myself, then a budding paleontologist. One morning they got there and on the blackboard were two mammal skulls that he had drawn, the earliest placental mammals known from about 95 million years ago. And they were discovered back in 1925 in the Gobi. She wrote, quote, it was then that I learned for the first time that the Gobi was a veritable Eldorado for paleontologists.

Gotta go find that gold. Yeah. And so 16 years later, she organized that expedition to the Gobi. What happened was she went to Moscow in 1955 for the first time and visited the Paleontological Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the museum attached to the institute.

She saw Tarbosaurus, Serolophus, and a lot of photographs of these Soviet expeditions to the Gobi that happened in 1948 and 1949. And her professor suggested that there should be a joint Polish-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi, and that led to these three-year expeditions. She was instructed by the Polish Academy of Sciences to organize and take charge of the scientific side of things. And that's how she ended up doing fieldwork in Mongolia over eight seasons between 1963 and 1971.

Now, at the time, the Gobi was closed to Western scientists, so it was a good time for Polish scientists to get permission and funding. Mm-hmm. They found a lot while they were there. In 1965 alone, they shipped over 35 tons of fossils back to Poland. Mm-hmm.

including the oldest complete mammal skulls found at the time, as well as entire or nearly complete skeletons of 11 dinosaurs, and that included a 65-foot sauropod. In 1971, that's when she discovered the fighting dinosaurs, Protoceratops and Velociraptor. But she also found other dinosaurs, Homolicephaly, Gallimimus, Nemectosaurus, and Deinokyrus, as well as a number of Tarbosaurus skeletons.

They also found what she called the Eldorado of Cretaceous mammals. In 10 days, they found 22 skulls, and over time, they collected 180. Wow. Yeah. That's impressive. That is. I guess it's just mammals. No, we learn a lot from the mammals, too. That's true. We're mammals, so. Touche. Anyway, many of them were multi-tuberculates, which were the early rodent-like mammals that

Their team also discovered new species of crocodiles, lizards, turtles, of course dinosaurs, birds, and mammals. And on the mammal side, some of the big discoveries were like Delta theridium, which is a rat-sized mammal thought to be a placental mammal. But then once they found more specimens in the Gobi, it showed that they were more like marsupials. Came back to those marsupials again. Yeah, marsupials are cool.

So their findings from the Gobi led to at least 50 scientific publications. And the Gobi region, when these animals, especially the dinosaurs, lived, it was near a sea and they had a moist climate. And there were large rivers and lakes. And on the steps away from the water, the climate was drier and small primitive mammals lived there. Because as we know at the time, dinosaurs were ruling, so mammals had to find their own spot. Mm-hmm.

We'll get into some of the specific findings that Sophia and her team had in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. It's your last chance to get your limited edition Allosaurus patch. Fun Allosaurus fact, there is evidence of Allosaurus cannibalism. It's unclear if Allosaurus killed each other or just didn't pass up on an easy meal.

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Again, to check out the new Allosaurus patch, sign up to get your own, or update your mailing address, head over to patreon.com slash inodino. Now, as for the dinosaurs, in the first few days in that 1965 expedition, they came across major accumulations of bones, pretty often.

There were some surface outcroppings of one, but as Zofia wrote, quote, these skeletons could no longer be extracted since the bones had been weathered by prolonged exposure and would disintegrate into splinters or powder when touched. Some of that paraboloid or some kind of...

Nice glue to hold them all together. Yeah. She wrote,

Which is too bad. I guess it was just a little too easy to get those skeletons or find those skeletons. Or they were there just a little bit too late. Yeah. There were also skeletons showing through the rock wall and they were overlaid by 30 feet or more of sandstone, which was also too hard to extract. So it was best when the skeletons were buried three to six feet down below the surface and protected from weathering, which is still kind of the case today. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that ideal situation where you find like the tip of a tail or a toe bone poking out of the side of a cliff. And then as you dig in, the whole rest of the animal is there is ideal. Yeah. The last thing you want to see is just...

the outline of where a bone used to be because it's already fully gone. Oh, we missed it. So they found a number of Tarbosaurus specimens, which Tarbosaurus was a carnivorous theropod, pretty similar to T-Rex. They found this almost complete, well-preserved Tarbosaurus skeleton that was lying on its side with its head thrown back. So it's in the death pose and

And it was about 25 feet long. It lived about 80 million years ago. It was actually kind of small for Tarbosaurus and it was young. It was found about seven feet underground in loose sandstone. So it was easy to excavate. And it was the first dinosaur they found. So that's a pretty good first dinosaur to find. Yeah. The people we've talked to who have been to Mongolia, uh,

I think two things stand out to me about what they always tell us. One is that there's a lot of amazing dinosaurs that they often discover. But the other is that the fossils are pretty easy to excavate, relatively speaking. Loose sandstone is pretty ideal. Yes. Sophia wrote, quote, when it was fully clear of the overlying rock, we drew an exact copy of it and photographed it at least a dozen times from all possible angles. We found it very photogenic.

It was hard for them to create and transport because it weighed several tons, including the rock enclosing it. And it was high up on a rock ledge. So they did have to cut the skeleton into sections for shipping. And there was a lot of plaster involved. But it was the first skeleton they found and also the, quote, first ever to be prepared and mounted in Warsaw. They made a cast of the skeleton, too. Hmm.

They also found a small Tarbosaurus skeleton about 13 feet long called the Magdalena skeleton. It was found by Magdalena Borsuk. That's kind of how they named a lot of their skeletons was by who found them. There was one Tarbosaurus found in the cliff face of a ravine some 10 feet above the bottom and the bones were covered by another 30 feet of sheer cliff. Yes, a Jersey Maleki found it and made a ladder out of a few boards and picked out bones while standing on the ladder. Wow.

But he found a, quote, big, beautiful tyrosaur lower jaw containing a row of small, sharp teeth with secondary serrations. Hmm. So, worth it? Yeah, I guess so. Sounds like he didn't get injured. I mean, working from ladders isn't that bad. I always enjoy working from ladders. I don't know, with that sheer cliff. Maybe wear a hard hat. They found...

some sauropods too which was exciting to read about including a large one at Alton Ula it was so large they had some challenges with excavating and creating it and the bones often broke but luckily they were easy to reconstruct so they set up a carpenter shop and a packing station where they measured the bones and they packed them in cardboard plaster and other materials and

And they got an almost complete skeleton. It was missing its head and neck. And that sauropod was named Apistocelucadia in 1977. Oh, it comes up a lot. It does. I remember because every time we need to pronounce it. A lot of syllables. Apistocelucadia. So this skeleton was, well...

set of fossils was very heavy. There were some blocks weighing 1,500 pounds. It was a 12-ton skeleton. It took them four weeks to extract, and they packed it into 35 crates. And in the end, it was about 37 to 43 feet long.

Sophia wrote, quote, in the last few days, I jokingly begged my colleagues not to find any more big skeletons since we would never be able to take them back. They did find a sauropod skull in 1965 that they later named Nemectosaurus mongoliansis in 1971. Ooh, sauropod skulls. Yeah. And to preserve these large specimens, Sophia said they called it making monoliths. They'd take exact measurements and build a wooden frame around it. And

and then the skeleton would be covered with plastic foil and cellulocotton, and then they poured plaster to fill in the empty spaces in the frame. She wrote, quote, After our experience with the sauropod skeleton, removing a tarbosaur skeleton only 40 feet long was child's play. Another dinosaur they found was homolycephaly, a pachycephalosaur with the domed head. In the book In Pursuit of Mammals, Zofia wrote, quote, One day when walking in a canyon...

Sayre, in Mongolian, I noticed bones embedded in a wall some three meters above the bottom of the Sayre. I climbed up and noticed several relatively small dinosaur bones, partly sticking out of the wall. I turned the block over and was left speechless. I had in my hands an almost complete, beautifully preserved skull of a small dinosaur, about 18 centimeters later named Hamalicephaly.

The bones of this skull roof were over one and a half centimeters thick, and it was wrinkled and ornamented and well-preserved. That's pretty intense. Yes. She wrote, viewed from the side, very big orbits were looking at me. Mm-hmm.

She said she was so amazed she didn't notice that the ledge she stood on and was about to sit down with, while she's looking at this dinosaur, there was this brown viper lying almost touching her boots and the viper was nervous. So she ended up pushing the viper off with her hammer, but a few stones fell at the same time and some killed the viper.

Pretty Roy Chapman Andrews-y. I was thinking that, yeah. Her own... Near Miss Snake Encounters in the Gobi. Yes. I wonder if she was a little bit happy about that because she had read that book, right? Oh, yeah. Experiencing the same snake drama in the Gobi as someone who you wanted to follow in the footsteps of would be pretty cool. It would be. She didn't mention it, but maybe she did think of it at the time.

In 1971, they excavated an ankylosaurid skeleton. Hey, hey. And they had to, quote, construct wooden scaffolding with a platform on which we worked when uncovering the skeleton. They found a large skull, part of the thorax and scutes. And later in 1977, it was named Cycania, which we've talked about that dinosaur a bit on our show. The beautiful one. Yes.

There were also ornithomimids. They found an ornithomimid with a skull, which was the first ever found in Asia. It was small. The skull was about six inches long and it had a large eye socket. The whole skeleton was about eight feet long, though it was missing some neck bones and arms. And they decided to let the others know back at camp, even though it was getting late.

She wrote, quote, Teresa Marianska, the most stout-hearted of us all, offered to walk the five miles that separated us the very same night so as not to withhold the good news until the next day. It's pretty intense. The good news that they found in Ornithomimus? Yes. Well, Ornithomimid. That kind of explanation, I don't know, reminds me of Lord of the Rings being so stout-hearted.

Anyway, they found another ornithomimid shortly after that was about 17 feet long, and that one included a skull. Pretty lucky. Yeah. Some of the expeditions, they found several skeletons of ornithomimids, and later they named Gallimimus. Then Halska in 1965 found what Marianska and Osmolska in 1974 named Prinocephaly. They also found a third, less complete skull of Tilocephaly, and both Prinocephaly and Tilocephaly are pachycephalosaurs.

In later expeditions, they found bagaceratops material. There were also protoceratops skulls and dinosaur eggs. And they found a panacosaurus skeleton skull. It was an almost complete skeleton. And before, panacosaurus was only known from one incomplete skull. So that's a very good find. Yeah. Hashtag need more fossils. Not so much anymore. Hashtag found more fossils. Yeah.

It's not like we reject getting more fossils. True. There's also Dioplosaurus, which is an armored dinosaur that's now considered to be a nomodubium, but at least the species from Mongolia is, but the species from Alberta, Canada is still valid. And then of course there's Deinokyris, which I will get into more detail in our dinosaur of the day.

Zofia wrote, quote, She said it was really hard to leave in 1964, but, quote,

Sunny Mongolia. Yeah. Not the adjective I usually hear associated with Mongolia. Maybe sandy Mongolia. But I suppose it is pretty sunny. Oh, I'm sure. Which might help with finding fossils. Yeah. Now, some of the fossils from the Nemet Basin, as well as the Bayan Zag and other localities,

had a lot of uranium in them. They were radioactive. It seems that the uranium had accumulated in the bone from percolating groundwater, and the concentrations of uranium over millions of years had been transported in solution from a distant source.

So late Cretaceous bones from the Nemet Valley were highly radioactive and quote nearly twice as radioactive as the Polish uranium ore used by the Soviets to make nuclear weapons. Wow. It's very radioactive. Yeah. But the Paleocene bones from 65 to 55 million years ago were seven times less radioactive than the late Cretaceous ones. Because again, it just took time to accumulate.

Now, in these expeditions, they had a lot of challenges. We talked about a lot of these challenges when we were talking about Roy Chapman Andrews and all his near-death experiences. Yeah, and the desert didn't get much less hospitable between the 1920s and 40s. Right. Or even 60s. Yeah, they still had to deal with sandstorms, the lack of water. There's also just logistics in general.

The nearest well for them was 25 miles away during one trip, so every five days they sent a truck to bring back three 50-gallon drums of water. There were also large rock obstacles and uninhabited areas, so that was hard to drive through. And it was hot in the day but cold at night, and there were also high winds. One summer was unusually cool and rainy. In July and August, it was no more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, so that was considered cool. Hmm.

That does not sound comfortable to me. No, but in June it was even worse. It was 100 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and then the black gravel on the plateau would heat up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It's too hot. Yeah. Too much. But luckily they had constantly blowing wind, so that helped.

They did take long afternoon breaks up to four hours because it was too hot. You got to go kangaroo style and just sleep in the hot part of the day and get up when it gets cooler. Yes. For their 1965 expedition, they had a cook.

Wow. Yeah, seriously.

One of the sandstorms, Zofia wrote, quote, a gust of wind tore out the tent pegs and lifted the floor of the tent, turning the heavy bookcase standing on it, which served as our library, upside down. Wow. Yeah, that's quite the forceful sandstorm and wind. But at least the tent wasn't carried away by the wind because it had the floor and it was weighted down by that bookcase. That's a good glass half full. Yeah, but they did have to get out of the tent.

And all but one of their tents was down. So she ran up to one that was about to blow away and laid down on it with along with a few other people to save it. And she said after the wind died down, the camp looked like a battlefield.

Another challenge was that there was no radio communication between the groups of explorers and they often had to split up and go in different directions. And sometimes it would take a couple days to get to their destination. So messages were delivered by hand or left in prearranged locations. And they had to deal with some aggressive flies that bit. Some people got sick. Sophia wrote there were, quote, swollen faces, blistered arms and legs, itching and sleepless nights. Wow.

Yes, she also wrote, the flies, not the mammal fossils, were the main subject of conversation in camp and were indeed our most persistent problem. The camp was a disaster area every day after sundown, which was when the flies came. Nobody dared go around in shorts or in a short-sleeved shirt. Heads were wrapped in towels and faces were protected by gauze. They needed some good bug spray, but I guess they didn't have it back then. Yeah. They actually ended up having to move their camp a few hundred yards away because

They couldn't go too far because they needed to be by a small stream in a well, but it got to, quote, a point where the flies were much less annoying. That's good. Getting away from all that water probably helped. Yeah. Their camp was also full of lizards and occasionally had vipers. One person in camp didn't want to kill the vipers and even put one in a bucket and carried it over a mile away from camp.

And there were scorpions, though no one was bitten, so that's nice. But the scorpions like to hide under the floors of their tents, although not all the tents had floors.

Zofia's tent, though, had rubberized flooring. And she wrote, quote,

with the result that several generations of its descendants are now living at the University of Warsaw Zoological Institute. I don't know if that's a good thing.

Having a pregnant scorpion come across thousands and thousands of miles to your country. Well, now it's in a museum. Well, its descendants are in a museum. I hope that all the descendants are living at the museum and none of them escaped. Although who knows, they might not survive long out in Poland, especially with the winters. Very different climates. Yeah.

And Sophia also wrote, quote, even though we knew that scorpion bite can be dangerous, we bored the animals no ill will. Our hatred was reserved for the soul plug. Large spiders of the genus...

jaleotis whose bite according to mongolian tradition is very dangerous so the people would come into their tents and run flashlights over the walls and sleeping bags before they went to sleep to check for spiders they also dug garbage pits in each camp away from the tents but those were always visited by hedgehogs and one person was apparently a great lover of hedgehogs and caught one and took it to camp saying if they took good care of it it would become tame and not run away

So they put the hedgehog in a box and they took it for a walk every day. And then during meals, they let it loose and it walked around the table and ate everything that everybody tossed it. So they kind of thought that this hedgehog was domesticated. But then during a sandstorm, which upset the box, quote, it escaped never to return. Mm-hmm.

We then tried training two other hedgehogs, but these were shyer, refused to become domesticated, and also escaped eventually. That's the thing about wild animals. They don't always like sticking around. Yes. And apparently, especially hedgehogs and the goby. Yeah. So not only did they have these weather challenges and water challenges and different animals, Zofia also had some

other challenges related to injuries. Like she had a ruptured eardrum during a sandstorm in 1971. She had to go back to Warsaw for surgery and then returned to her field work three weeks later.

She wrote, quote, Jeez.

So basically she was bleeding out of her left ear. Yeah. I feel like I'd go to the hospital at that point. Well, she did go back. She was in so much pain, she stopped sleeping. And so she had to leave early. And Teresa was the leader in her absence.

So Zofia ends her book talking about being, quote, faced with the most interesting part of our Gobi adventure, the scientific interpretation of our findings. We like that part. Yeah, that's the mark of a scientist, I think, or researcher.

So yes, they had adventure and travel and exploration, but she wrote, quote,

The study of animals that lived on Earth millions of years ago is not merely a study of their anatomy, but first and foremost, a study of the course of evolution on Earth and of the laws that govern it.

That's a good point. It's not just about what the animals are. It's about what it tells us of the overall process of evolution. Yes. Yes. And she ends with, quote, study of the reasons behind the extinction of species on our planet and of the laws governing this process may yet prove to be highly important to our own species in shaping its future development on Earth, which is something we hear a lot from paleontologists. You study the past to understand our present and our place in it and to understand

kind of figure out the future in some ways. Yeah. Which does remind me, we're currently doing a series on the five biggest mass extinctions of Earth in our I Know Paleo episodes. So join our Dino and All community at the Triceratops tier above and you can hear them all. Good plug. Yes, thank you. Patreon.com slash I Know Dino. We'll get to our dinosaur of the day, Deinokyrus, in just a moment. But first, we're going to take another quick break for our sponsors.

And now on to our Dinosaur of the Day, Deinokyrus Revisited. Because Deinokyrus was our Dinosaur of the Day in episode 10, shortly after the latest findings were published. But I think we have a lot more experience in our Dinosaur of the Days since then, so it seemed worth revisiting. Those early ones were pretty short, skipped a lot of details. Well, there were a lot of details to discuss at the time because it was so exciting. But it was cool to go back and read again.

what Zofia thought about it too. Oh yeah. So Deinokyris was an ornithomimosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now Mongolia, found in the Nemet formation. It lived about 70 million years ago and the type species is Deinokyris mirificus. It was named in 1970 by Halska Osmolska and Iwa Roniwiz.

The genus name Deinokyrus means horrible hand, and it refers to the size of the arms and strong claws. In other words, it's horrible if it was something coming after you. Yes. Not so horrible for itself. Yes. And then the species name Miraphycus or Miraphycus means unusual or peculiar, and that's because of the structure of its arms.

That name ended up being very fitting. Yes. Of it being unusual or peculiar. Yes. What was going on with those arms? Well, the holotype was found on a small hill in poorly cemented sandstone. And most of that skeleton seems to have eroded away.

In Hunting for Dinosaurs, Sophia wrote, quote,

Nearby, a few large phalanges, almost a foot long, were sticking out of the sand. I began removing the sand from around the bones. Suddenly, I saw there in the sand an excellently preserved, powerful, strongly arched claw, 12 inches long. It was undoubtedly a four-limbed claw, but larger than any ever found before. The predatory dinosaurs known to have roamed the Gobi, the Tarbosaurs, had very short and shrunken four limbs, whose claws were never longer than two inches, even in the largest specimens.

The longer claws on the tarbosaurus hindlings were never longer than four inches. In other words, only a third the length of the claw I had just unearthed. The larger bivorous sauropods also had clawed limbs, but their claws were much smaller and quite differently shaped. The partly bare protruding bone looked like an arm bone. If this was actually the case, it meant I had come across a long forelimb-bearing claws bigger than any ever seen before. You can start to see where those estimates of a large predator are coming in. Yes.

She wrote, quote,

There at supper, I tried to tell the story, but my listeners were incredulous. A claw a foot long? There was no such animal. They ended up finding the shoulder girdle and two forelimbs, and they found three claws for one limb, but none for the other, as well as a few rib fragments.

The length of that shoulder bone was 5 feet or 1.5 meters long. And it's estimated that the forelimbs with the long, sharp claws were 8.5 feet long or about 2.6 meters. Oof. Very long. That is ferocious.

She wrote, quote, further digging unfortunately remained fruitless. The shoulder girdle and forelimbs were all that remained of the strange dinosaur, the remainder having disintegrated long ago. That's too bad. Although part of the fun was the mystery of this dinosaur. Yes. We can say that now that the mystery has been mostly solved. In hindsight, that was such a fun mystery. Yes. So Zofia looked through the literature and she couldn't assign it to any known family of dinosaurs.

The positioning of the fingers were the same as theropods. She wrote, quote,

And in the paper that named Deinokyrus, it mentions the left hand looked like it had injuries based on some grooves and pits and injury scars with rounded edges, probably from damage to the joint. That was a pretty long list of injuries there. Yeah. As they put it, they said, quote, Deinokyrus seems to be a very peculiar theropod, to put it mildly. Very peculiar is a nice way to put it. Yes.

So again, that holotype, it included both arms minus the claws of the right hand, the complete shoulder girdle, parts of three back vertebrae, backbones, five ribs and belly ribs, gastrelia. And then no more fossils were found for almost 50 years. So Deinekeirsch was this big enigma, this big mystery. And then two more specimens were described in 2014 and they were repatriated to Mongolia. And one was a subadult. It was damaged by fossil poachers.

The other was a little larger than the holotype, and it had the same left arm as Deinokyrus, which is what helped them identify it. And it had also been excavated by poachers. They took the skull, hands, and feet, but left a toe bone. It probably got poached after 2002 based on some money left in the quarry. But between these three specimens there, we have about 95% of the Deinokyrus skeleton.

So one new skeleton was found in 2006, the other in 2009. This was in the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Expedition, but they were both missing parts, the skull and feet. And then Francois Esquellier, director of a fossil dealership in France, saw a skull and feet in a private European collection. And in 2011, he asked Pascal Godfrey from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science in Brussels to take a look.

It turns out those fossils had gone through Japan, China, France, and Germany. Wow. Yeah, a lot of places, which I'm not sure how they were able to track that down. The details are murky to me. Also, not quite sure how that was legal. I don't know if it was. Maybe a gray area at the time. But the point is that, well...

It sounds like Francois and Pascal had nothing to do with it. They just pieced things together because they found that the skull fit with the body that was found in 2006.

And the toe bone fit perfectly into the foot. The bone and sediments around it were the same color and there was no overlap in any of the bones and they all belonged to an individual that was the same size. So. A couple obstacles. But it's good. It all pieced together. So they acquired the fossil. They donated it to the Royal Belgian Institute, which has an agreement to repatriate stolen Mongolia fossils.

The fossils were repatriated on May 1st of 2014, and they went to the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, along with a tarbosaurus skeleton. And then in 2012, a Korean-Mongolian fossil hunting team found some belly ribs.

There is a rumor that there's a Deinokyris juvenile skull that was poached and it's out there somewhere. So maybe we'll learn more in the future. There's one estimate that hundreds of partial or complete dinosaur skeletons have been poached from Mongolia because there's just so many bones there and they're fairly easy to find, which we were just talking about. Yeah, the sandstone makes it easy.

In the 2014 paper by Yongnam Lee and others, it said, "...the discovery of the original specimen almost half a century ago suggested that this was an unusual dinosaur, but did not prepare us for how distinctive Deinokyrus is. A true cautionary tale in predicting body forms from partial skeletons, even for animals in which the relationships are known."

Tom Holtz said in an interview that Deinokyrus looked like, quote, the product of a secret love affair between a hadrosaur and Gallimimus. Now, before these other specimens were found and only basically the arms were known about Deinokyrus, there were estimates that it ranged from 2 to 13 tons and even larger sizes.

based on comparing its arms to those of Tyrannosaurs. But we now know that the largest specimen is about 36 feet or 11 meters long, and it's estimated to weigh 7 tons or about 6.4 metric tons. It's also about 16 feet or 5 meters tall. So it is pretty big, just not nearly as big as we once thought. Its body is similar in size to Tyrannosaurus rex.

A 2015 study cut into bone samples and found Deinokyris likely had a fast metabolism and grew quickly before reaching sexual maturity. It also had 10 neck vertebrae and an S-curved neck, a bulky body, but a lot of hollow bones or air sacs, which kept it lighter. And even though it was bulky, it was a narrow body.

It had a U-shaped wishbone and a large belly. And part of the hips were large compared to other ornithomimosaurs, which those hips helped support its weight. So even though it was an ornithomimosaur, it wasn't built for speed. It probably moved slowly based on having thick legs and wide hips. So since it couldn't run fast, its large size may have been its best defense against predators. Deinokyrus had a low, narrow skull with a long snout.

Its skull was over 3 feet or 1 meter long. It had small eyes, and based on CT scans of its brain case, it had a good sense of smell. Its brain was proportionally small and compact. It had a wide bill and deep lower jaw, like hadrosaurs. It didn't have any teeth, and its jaws were downturned. This lower jaw size was closer, though, to tyrannosaurids than other ornithomimosaurs, and it had a slender upper jaw.

The snout flares out to the sides. Owen had a round, flattened, keratinous beak. And then, of course, it had some of the longest arms known of any two-legged dinosaurs, which, as we said, they were almost 8 feet or 2.4 meters long with large blunt claws. And then the three fingers on each hand, they were all about the same length. It also had a large bump on its back, supported by its backbones, which could be a hump or a sail or a ridge. I think we mostly see it depicted as a hump.

It had relatively short legs and short, broad feet. And the last bone in the toes were flattened with a blunt tip, so it looked somewhat hoof-like. Its foot claws may have helped it wade in water so it wouldn't sink in mud. And its tail ended in a fan of feathers. It had something like a paiga style with at least two fused bones. So all in all, very different from what people pictured it to look like.

At first, we thought it was a predator that used his giant arms to tear apart prey. Although not long after, in 1970, Raj Dovensky compared its arms to sloths and suggested Deinokyrus climbed and ate plants and animals it found in trees. And then in 1988, Gregory Paul suggested the claws were too blunt for a predator but could be used for defense.

Dinocyrus probably was omnivorous, and it ate plants and fish. Plants and fish scales were found in one specimen, and gastroliths have also been found, so it makes sense. Because of its beak, it probably foraged for food in the water or browsed near the ground. It did have a weak bite force, so it probably ate soft plants or water plants. There was a 2017 study that suggested Dinocyrus could pull lots of plants out of water with its claws.

And it had a large tongue, which might have helped it suck in food from the bottom of water. There was one specimen found with over 1,400 gastroliths among the ribs and belly ribs. So that probably helped it grind food. It would definitely do some damage to some leaves. Yes. Although the 2022 study found Deinokyrus to be a specialized feeder based on the patterns of stress and strain on its jaws. Yeah, there can be a lot of evidence in the wear marks, especially when you're wondering what things an animal might have eaten. Yes.

Some bite marks have been found on Deinokyrus bones. Those bite marks match Tarbosaurus teeth, according to a 2012 study. They were found on two gastrelia of the holotype, probably from punctures, gouges, and more from Tarbosaurus, which could also be why the holotype was scattered. And the bite marks were not found anywhere else in the body, so it seems that the Tarbosaurus was focused on eating its internal organs.

On a lighter note, Deinokyrus lived in an area with a lot of rivers, and other animals that lived around the same time and place include mollusks, birds, and dinosaurs like the ankylosaur Tarchia, the pachycephalosaur Prenticephalae, hadrosaurs like Saurolophus, sauropods like Nemectosaurus, tyrannosauroids like Tarbosaurus, and troodontids like Xanabazar. Good names. Yeah.

So we did manage to include some new studies in our updated Deinokyris. Good job. Thanks. But it was kind of cool researching it now that I know a lot more about dinosaurs. And Zofia. Ten years later. Yeah. And Zofia. Such a great story.

Which leads me to my fun fact, which is that Zofia discovered the marsupial bone in multi-tuberculates, the epipubis, which may support the pouch in marsupials. And they're also in non-pouched mammals like monotremes and eutherians. So we've talked a lot about Zofia's work with dinosaurs because, well, this is I Know Dino. But she was a pioneer and expert on mesozoic mammals.

She proposed that multi-tuberculates, the rodent-like mammals, gave live birth instead of laying eggs. And she also discovered that marsupial bone. So she found a skull and pelvis in 1968 in the Flaming Cliffs and found the marsupial bone is peg-like. It's a pair of bones that project forward. Placental mammals don't have them. We don't have them. But scientists already knew that monotremes and marsupials had them.

So having this in multi-tuberculates, monotremes, and marsupials may mean that it was a characteristic of all early mammals. Now speaking of monotremes, monotremes are mammals that lay eggs. They're the oldest living mammalian lineage. The name monotreme means single hole in Greek and it refers to the cloaca, which we usually talk about with birds. I

I did not expect you to say that single hole referred to the cloaca. I would have expected like a single hole in the skull, maybe something going on in the hips or some other bone in the body. Not the cloaca. Nope. But here we are. Maybe Sophia has a good sense of humor. Well, she's not the one who named monotremes. Oh, true. But living monotremes include the platypus as well as four species of echidnas. And compared to other mammals,

Monotremes have differences in their brains, their jaws, digestive tract, reproductive tract, and other body parts. They certainly behave differently for the large part. So having differences in the brain would make sense. Yes. They have extra bones in the shoulder girdle and they have a reptile-like gait, like the legs are on the sides of their bodies. They also have a spur on their ankles, which the spur isn't functional in echidnas, but in male platypus, the spur has a powerful venom.

And monotremes' stomachs are small and non-acidic. Their eggs usually hatch within 10 days of being laid, but they still nurse their young with milk like other mammals. They lactate through mammary glands via openings in their skin instead of teats. Newborn monotremes are called puggles, and they're larval and fetus-like, and they can crawl around. They have well-developed arms, so they crawl to search for milk. The little puggles. I just wanted to say puggle again. I did.

Today's monotremes live in Australia and New Guinea, though in the late Cretaceous and Paleocene, they were also in South America and maybe Antarctica. A study in 2022 found that echidnas likely migrated to Australia from New Guinea. They were found in Australia from 2 million years ago, but genetic studies show they evolved from platypus-like ancestors tens of millions of years before that. Hmm. And maybe they moved during the beginning of the last ice age, which was about 2.6 million years ago. Hmm.

The oldest known monotreme, Tynolophos, lived about 130 million years ago when southeastern Australia was close to the South Pole. It lived in a frigid polar landscape that had forests, so chilly polar forests. It was estimated to weigh about 40 grams. That's the weight of a slice of bread, roughly. It may have had this electrosensitive mechanism to eat insects during the dark months in the winter, where it would dig its snout into moss and snow to find food.

But anyway, back to the modern monotremes. They take care of their young. They don't have teeth as adults, although Cretaceous monotremes had teeth. Platypus appeared on the scene in the Pleistocene, and they didn't have teeth as adults. Fossil monotremes in the modern platypus young have tribosphenic forms of molars, where the biting surface of the teeth have three cusps arranged in a triangle. It's one of the features of modern mammals. So that could be for competition for food.

They eat softer food to avoid some competition. And then echidnas eat insects and grind the hard shells in their mouth so they don't need teeth. Just some example. We're keeping the strange theme going. Yeah. Monotremes are definitely very strange. Yes. Are they stranger than Deinokyris? I don't know. Who's to say? Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed. Again, if you want to...

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