Episode 13 - That Time Everything on the Earth Died

Transcript

Speaker: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Wonder Camera. This is your podcast in which three dilettantes take turns opening up their cabinet of curiosities to share an object of wonder.

Speaker: So today, well, and every day, I'm Jen Rumpel, and I'm here with... Dave Powell. And... Tracy Anderson Powell.

Speaker: And I almost forgot to introduce us, but I did not. So, um, we can get right to it if you like. Yeah. Nailed it. And it is Dave's turn today to present a tale of wonder.

Speaker: What do you got? well, I have a story and, uh, Yeah, so this one's going to be a very different from what we've been talking about today in that we have primarily focused on arts and culture and history.

Speaker: And I'm going to really lean into the dilettante stuff here. Because when we say dilettantes, it's a sometimes a little bit tongue-in-cheek. We are actually good at some things and exceed the layperson in some things as well.

Speaker: There is an enormous blind spot in this podcast and in our collective wisdom, and that is science. So if anyone listening is a scientician, please understand that as I dive into the story, I have no science education beyond high school where I barely passed my classes.

Speaker: I'm doing my best. I read books and everything, and I'm going to get stuff wrong. So please send abuse to contact at thewondercamera.ca. right, thanks for that. Yeah, disclaimer. It's true. but Yeah, I've basically, like, high school biology.

Speaker: know, I did the, in university, I the Earth Sciences and Ocean Studies for my, they were very interesting and very challenging, but not, yeah, I don't have the hard science background either.

Speaker: But I've read a lot, you know, read some books, you know, read some, ah you know, pop science books sort of thing. Yeah. So, yeah. That's where I am. And this is also heavily influenced by a ah genuinely series of very good and well-researched YouTube videos that kind of inspired me along this track, as well as revisiting ah kind of a childhood obsession.

Speaker: So this is for the listeners, a picture heavy episode. So you can follow along on YouTube or follow on our website in order to check with the pictures. They aren't absolutely essential, but it certainly will help. And we can put a link we can put a link to the slideshow in the show notes.

Speaker: We will do just that. And I will try to paint Wordgood. Okay. And so for our wonderful dilettantes, I'd like you to go to the first image on our slideshow and just click on it.

Speaker: Our lovely logo. And so past the logo, you should see a creature. a dinosaur. Maybe. I was about to say, do either of you know the name of this cutie?

Speaker: And then what kind of creature it is? I never went through the dinosaur phase when I was a kid. So I i don't know. Hmm. I did a little bit, but I couldn't say.

Speaker: Totally fine. So need this is a Dimetrodon. Oh, okay. That name rings a bell. Yeah, it It's one of the more famous ones. And for the viewers, it's a large lizard-looking thing with a bitey face, splayed legs, and an enormous sail on its back.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. So I'm going to start telling a story of Demetrodon and the world it lived in and what happened. So the first fossils of Demetrodon were discovered in 1845 on Prince Edward Island while a farmer was digging a well.

Speaker: It originally had the name of Bathygnacus borealis and was described as a dinosaur. A few decades later, one of the heavyweights of paleontology with an amazing name, Edward Drinker Cope.

Speaker: Oh, I know this guy. I was about to shout out why we do know, began fossil hunting around Texas and Oklahoma. And I will shout out who I believe started this entire format of research, read and react, the dollop, for their episode on the Bone Wars featuring this incredible man.

Speaker: Yes. Or Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. One of the science I've read. Amazing book. Goes into the Bone Wars. It's a very, very yeah interesting tale, for sure. Other guy has a weird name, too. I think Marsh, Copenburg. Yes.

Speaker: Yeah. But I guess I remember this guy. So this site in Texas called the Red Beds of Texas in Oklahoma was a rich site for Dimetrodon fossils. And in the study of these creatures, Cope realized something.

Speaker: Dimetrodon could not be a dinosaur. And although his paper lists countless reasons, there's three I want to focus on. First, the red beds of Texas date to about 280 million years ago.

Speaker: The very, very earliest dinosaurs show up around 230 million years ago during the Triassic. So there is a 50 million year gap here. This is older.

Speaker: Yeah. And the second is dinosaurs and all lizards have uniform teeth. All of their teeth are the same. Dimetrodon had varied teeth for different purposes.

Speaker: which is very much not something that anything the din or dinosaur lineage or reptile lineage has ever evolved. And finally, and this one is very important to ah bone nerds and very uninteresting to us, but it is the biggest difference. I'm going to be on it a bunch.

Speaker: Is that the skull of Dimetrodon has a single hope but opening behind its eyes. And literally all reptiles and their descendants have two of these holes called temporal fenestra. So if you poke at your own human skull...

Speaker: What? Yeah. Yes. Huh? Yeah. Brain windows. Brain windows. If you poke your own human skull behind your eye, you'll find your brain window.

Speaker: That's your temple. That is a single hole. Dimetrodon. not a nest. No, no, we have it. We have a single temporal finestra. It's like not it's not like a huge gap, but it's definitely there. it's just more closed off in humans than in some other mammals. Okay.

Speaker: And so this is our temple, right? is that what you said? Yeah. And so Dimetrodon had a temple. And if you look at birds or any kind of reptile, they will have ah two holes or maybe sometimes one giant hole where the two have joined together. But the point is, is that this basic and very early differences in the skulls meant Dimetrodon was down an entirely different path from the dinosaurs and was, in fact, a predecessor to mammals.

Speaker: Oh, right. Okay. Not, ah yeah, I was thinking birds for some reason. I'm like, wait, no, then we wouldn't have the same. yeah and Like the, the, the temple thing going on.

Speaker: Birds are dinosaurs. That's right. Yes. And I'll get into phylogeny and how that works in a bit. But the key thing here is this is our great, greatreat greatre great, greatre great, great grandant.

Speaker: We're not in the direct lineage from Dimetrodon, but ah one of Dimetrodon's cousins very, very slowly over ah several hundred million years became us.

Speaker: Mm So these were originally called mammal-like reptiles, but the problem is it's not a reptile. So we now call them synapsids. And this story is going to talk a lot about them.

Speaker: I should clarify, the big split in tetrapods between one or two temporal fenestras split us into two major lineages, which then evolved into a variety of different shapes and sizes.

Speaker: Our temple is a dent, not a hole. Our ancestors had a hole that then sealed up over subsequent evolution. Meanwhile, a crow only has one temporal finestra, but that's because its ancestors had two, which then joined together.

Speaker: It's the same deal with teeth. Reptiles usually don't have varied teeth, but they can evolve into exceptions. We can all change into something else. See, I didn't learn about synapsids in like grade one when I learned about pterodactyl and brontosaurus.

Speaker: Right. And this is ah the reason I'm talking about this is I think synapses are some of the coolest things to have ever lived. and We don't really know anything about them. Because if you think about now the sort of the layperson history of life on Earth, it's like, OK, there's a goo, then there's critters and then a fish crawls on land and then something, something dinosaurs.

Speaker: Yeah, that's about my knowledge. Uh huh. This is about the something something.

Speaker: So that gap between fish crawling on land and getting dinosaurs, because it's a big gap and some cool stuff happens. So the first true mammals showed up shortly after the dinosaurs. So there are ways out. And I want to tell a story about our ancestors, the world they lived in, and the terrible doom that befell that ancient world.

Speaker: So this story is about the Permian period. The Permian spanned around 47 million years, ending with the start of the Triassic, which is the beginning of dinosaur times.

Speaker: And I want to take you back to this time and describe how, although this world was familiar, it was also very alien. First of all, the Permian was the time when the most famous of land masses comes together.

Speaker: Pangea. Yay. Hurry. yeah Next slide. saw the picture of Pangea in your slide. i'm like, oh, there's Pangea. Did you say next slide? I did. Okay.

Speaker: So at this time, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Antarctica, and varied... up Sorry, I say Asia twice. But Americas, Africa, out and art Antarctica are all crammed together. And Asia's kind of scattered around in these islands in the northeast to eastern part of this map here. That looks like a really fun Civ IV map.

Speaker: Well, I was about to say, and I'm going to tell some Civ IV stories because one of the problems is Pangaea was not fun, but I'll explain why. And as Pangaea forms over the course of the Permian, those islands in the east are going to cram northwards into that big northeast island, which is Siberia. And these eastern islands are China and Indochina.

Speaker: So China is actually composed of these, and Indochina these separate tectonic plates that are currently fused together. Right. Right. So within and so Pangea had a big C shape and within that C was um the C. Makes sense. yeah and It's called the Paleotethus and it was shallow and shallow means lots of light and lots of oxygen. So it's brimming with life. Most of our fossil record comes from that C. And while the deep ocean on the other side is more of a mystery.

Speaker: Honestly, it sounds nice. It sounds pleasant. Yeah, it does. Nice shallow ocean, get some sun, go swimming in there. Nice and warm up, probably. Where we currently live, Tracy and I, used to be a massive shallow ocean ah over these sort of early Cretaceous and Jurassic.

Speaker: And ah yeah, these shallow oceans are the best for... It's it's kind of a shame we don't have these three-foot-deep oceans around the world anymore because they didn't cool critters in them. Oh, they were that shallow? Yeah.

Speaker: ah It varied ah that the one ah during the Cretaceous or the Mesozoic was not that shallow, but you go earlier on. Absolutely. You'd have some absurdly shallow seas.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Yeah. So berries are which just a huge ocean. And so exactly. but

Speaker: So where was I? So I'm going to click for next slide.

Speaker: So among the ocean fossils from the Permian, one type reigns supreme, and these are the ammonites, which are these gorgeous, very collectible fossil shells. These creatures lasted an astonishing 340 million years. So they were ah kind of the kings of the ocean of the ancient world, not kings as in apex predators, just constantly around.

Speaker: And they form gorgeous shells and are because they fossilize so well, you can get ah ammonite fossils for fairly cheap of various kinds. And as you can see, they vary widely in size. And ah the other image here we have is what a living ammonite looked like, which is one of these beautiful world shells with a squid sticking out the end.

Speaker: Those are amazing. If you've ever been to Lyme Regis in England, I went there a long time ago, 20 years ago, visit family, went to Lyme Regis. And that's where, I forget the woman's name, who's an early sort of paleontologist shell collector in the 1800s.

Speaker: But you after a while, you get sick of looking at ammonites and you close your eyes and all you see are ammonites. Because you go to Lyme Regis and they're everywhere, every like all the shops and you go to the beach and It's their yeah Ammonite city. There is an earlier version of this where I was going to focus on the Ammonites more because the Ammonite fossils are called snake stones around Europe. And because they are so common as fossils, they're associated with ah religious practice and myth and legend around the world so that ah there are buffalo sound sounding stones with the black foot or one type of ah stone.

Speaker: ah They are called ram's horns in China. They're associated with the horns of Jupiter among the Greeks. And ah there's sort of poetry and saint myth ah surrounding Ammonites in a town in England. So Ammonite fossils, because you can just go to the base of a cliff and just find these beautiful shells.

Speaker: It's pretty easy to start attaching mystical significance to them. And you know, Ammonite's staple of the Wonder Camera, staple of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Oh, God, everyone with a Cabinet of Curiosities must have had a few Ammonites in there. Oh, yeah.

Speaker: And I just love the term snake stone. What people would do is carve the end of it. So there's a snake head on it. That's cool. Because you think, you know, fossils obviously have been around for millions of years. And so people, you know, would would find them. And it's like that where dragon myths come from. Somebody finds a skull. Yeah. So it's like, oh, OK, you this is nothing like anything we've seen before. So an ancient race of giants came before us. Absolutely.

Speaker: Yeah. So um the other thing, and I'm not going to spend an absurd amount of time on the ocean because this is ultimately a story of land critters. Another one who was still kicking around and sort of the main character of the um Paleozoic, ah the sort of phytox.

Speaker: first big era of life on Earth were the trilobites. The trilobites were kicking around here. They were past their heyday, ah but the ah but again, what an absurdly long-lived species that, despite having constant, sorry,

Speaker: a Genus, I should say, countless different kinds of species all just kind of look like trilobites, sort of like beetles, actually kind of like ocean beetles. And they just were kicking around for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, one of the earliest forms of life. And we're a good way from the first life at this point.

Speaker: And. I'm going to get to one of the bigger folks in the ocean here because the Permian, it's not quite the time of fish, which had come before. And although different kinds of fish were around, they weren't the top predators. Something much scarier had to be the apex predator.

Speaker: And the Permian gave us that. Next slide. Oh, my goodness. Behold the face shark. face Somebody put his teeth on sideways. This chainsaw for a mouth, basically. Yeah, this little go getter is named Heliocoprion, a species of relatives of sharks called Eugeniodontids.

Speaker: For listeners, this looks like a normal shark, but with a buzzsaw instead of a lower lower jaw. That's right. Yeah. And very fearsome eye. and Yeah, it's just a terrifying creature. Imagine seeing this thing. It's a cute polka dots. So, you know, not all scary.

Speaker: And if you pop to the very human eye. Yeah. Well, and it's one of those fun things about paleo art is that, you know, you you have to evoke what you have.

Speaker: And if we go to the next slide, we'll see that what the paleontologists were mostly stuck with is this bizarre jaw fossil. And yeah what they were struggling with for decades is where the hell does this fit on the shark?

Speaker: Right. And so what you see with the other image is every possible way this weird whorl of a jaw could fit on this strange shark. And finally, more recently, they discovered that, okay, it's sort of encased in the lower jaw and was likely used for crushing up ammonites.

Speaker: Huh. Wow. Okay. And this is obviously, this is a photograph. So this and this this animal still exists. Well, fascinating um the animal does not still exist. On the left hand side, there is a fossil of Heliocoprine.

Speaker: That's not a photo. That's ah the piece of art. The one of the one you showed at the beginning. That's a painting. Yeah, that's paleo art. That is not a photo. I'm like, damn, these things still exist? Woo! Thankfully, no. Wow, okay, that's very detailed paleo art. I see. Okay, missed that. It's photorealistic paleo art. My mistake. yeah There are no heliocopryons out there out to eat you. Or face sharks, as I like to call them.

Speaker: Well, long you're ammonite. was thinking, oh, these poor guys, what are they eating? There's no more ammonites left. Yeah, all they've got are... They're just showing up on the beaches in England. Yeah.

Speaker: Was that Tracy? They're just showing up on beaches in England. Yeah, pretty much. yeah Just, you know, got to find those aminets. Ah, they're fossilized. There was a whole ah family of ah these eugenio daunted sharks, and they all had just bizarre screwed up faces. Many them with buzzsaw jaws or like scissor like jaws. And they just looked like sharks with wrong faces. Delightful creatures.

Speaker: Well, you evolution, they got try a lot of different things. You throw throw to the wall, some sticks. like literally Well, not literally, but that's how it works. That's fundamental theme in this episode. So ah we're going now that we've done dipping our toe in the ocean, har har, and getting bit by face shark. We're going to move on to land and start talking about life on land.

Speaker: So life had been slowly radiating out from the ocean onto land for around 70 million years at the start of the Permian. Now, I'll also, as a sidebar, talk about the word radiate, which is jumping on something Jen said here.

Speaker: Evolutionary radiation is the concept that where there is an available niche, whatever is around will evolve and evolution will radiate to fill that niche.

Speaker: And what's key here is that it's sort of first to get the resources. It's not necessarily what makes the most sense. And so all purpose generalist forms like rats or beetles or canines or or felids like there are certain forms or foxes that work really well and creatures tend to evolve into them. God crabs, right? There's the crabification of everything. Yeah.

Speaker: However, this is sort of a trial and error process over a very long period of time. And if you show up and there's available resources and it just means, well, what if my neck gets really long and I can get those resources? Then you look like a weirdo with a long neck, hence a giraffe. So this is something you're going to see a lot in the Permian because until this point, there was no vertebrate life outside of swamps.

Speaker: This is sort of the movement of vertebrates onto dry land. And so I'll give a bit of that history. So in order to understand how life got onto land, we're gonna take a look at a lungfish.

Speaker: Next slide.

Speaker: Oh. most most fish today are called rayend fish if you think of a fish it's rayend back in the heyday of fish rule in a period called the devonian a sibling branch were called the lobe finned fish and they were doing great at that time nowadays they're not doing so great and they're only represented by lungfish and seelacanths well Now, if you look at this lungfish and you imagine the, and for the viewers, this is a longfish with importantly downwards pointing fins.

Speaker: And if you imagine there's symmetrical fins on the other side, you see four fins pointing down. Okay, so it's not too hard to see how they would become legs eventually.

Speaker: Exactly. And this is a freshwater fish that exists in drought-ridden areas where the swamp dries out, it can breathe air, and then swaddle over to some more water. More water comes in, can lay its eggs and continue. But the point is is that it had lungs, and it is ah theorized.

Speaker: I think the fossil record kind of shows it, that a lot of lobe-finned fish probably had lungs. Interesting. Okay. and so if you see And so if you have these fish moving into freshwater areas who have fins that can evolve relatively easily into legs, we can go to our next slide.

Speaker: And we see some paleo art of tiktallic, which is considered a major transition transitionary species between the early lobe finned fish and tetrapods, which are four-legged critters on land.

Speaker: Yeah, he looks like a cross between a crocodile and a fish. There's a lot of crocodile-looking stuff as we go forward. Okay. Pretty cute, though. good you yeah little face Yeah, that is some cute art.

Speaker: It's a little sweetie. Some of these guys are adorable. Just to be clear, this is not a photograph, right? I'm just kidding. No, I learned. You're very clear this time. It's paleo art. Yeah.

Speaker: So, the and the fossils for Tiktaalik were first found on Ellesmere Island. oh Which is the for viewers, if you look at a map of Canada, there's a bunch of islands in the north and the most northern most and really big one is called Ellesmere. So pretty extreme far north. But again, the continents, they do move around.

Speaker: That they do. So the fossil record shows these four fins slowly learning to bear weight to allow the fish to move around during those drought periods and move further inland into drier habitats. Eventually, these fins become legs and the fish become tetrapods, which are the ancestor clade for all terrestrial vertebrates. And do you two know the term clade?

Speaker: No. It is something to do with ah you know how we describe and um classify animals. Like species, genus, that kind of thing, but I forget which where it falls in that.

Speaker: Well, it yeah a clade is a more universal term. It means a set. And what it means is all animal animals who are unified by the nearest common ancestor. If you think about it kind of like last names, even though, you know, you need two parents and that's not how evolution, well, it is, but you know you know you know what I mean.

Speaker: ah Because I'm a Powell, I'm in the clade Powell. And every single person who descends from that first Powell is a Powell. Mm-hmm. And so the most distant cousin I have with the name Powell, we remain Powell's because our nearest common ancestor is that first Powell.

Speaker: oh That is why birds are dinosaurs. It is not because birds are very dinosaur-like, unless you're looking at some specific kinds. It's because birds evolved from a branch of the dinosaurs.

Speaker: And these avian and birds survived the end Cretaceous extinction and continued on to bird all over the place. and you And one of the big rules is once a Powell, always a Powell.

Speaker: If you are in a clade. Right, Tracy? Yes, exactly. But what it means is you can't evolve out of a clade. Therefore, we are fish.

Speaker: Okay, because it's pretty high up because minor if I recall quickly, it's like kingdom phylum then clade. The clade can be any of those. Any those. really? Okay, that's the scripture. Okay, i understand.

Speaker: Yes. So for example, we are, it is any grouping of light of related life. Oh, okay, I see. Yeah, so we are in the same clade as bacteria, because you go far enough, you get the first origins of life. And therefore, we just split off that much earlier.

Speaker: hmm. So any rule any grouping of animals is a clade, even the smallest grouping or the largest grouping. And the ah and the other rule is you can't evolve out of a clade.

Speaker: So therefore, we are both chordates, which means that we ah are descended from ah stuff that had a chord, which could be a spine or not.

Speaker: And we are also tetrapods, and we are synapsids, and we are mammals, and we are primates, and we are human, so forth, right? Oh man, too many things. we're so god that Everything belongs to a bazillion clades. That's the big thing That's right.

Speaker: Okay, sure. Yeah. yeah but like But like, what you mean is like, we could not evolve into a fungus. well ah Here's the, yeah, that's exactly, yeah. Oh no, my oh no. We could evolve into something that looks like a fungus, but we would never be in the clade of fungi. Yes. Okay. That's the thing where ah you could have, well, for example, there are a lot, of I'll give you a very good example of how we are monkeys, right?

Speaker: Not just apes, but monkeys. Old world monkeys and new world monkeys are not closely related. Hmm. So because we are more closely related to old world monkeys than old world monkeys are to new world monkeys.

Speaker: You follow? Yeah. So that gives you a hint who evolved where. Exactly. And so if you go and and yeah back up the sort of family tree, are nearest ah the new world monkey and old world monkeys nearest ancestor?

Speaker: we also descend from. Therefore, if both of our cousins are monkeys and we're in the middle, we have to be monkeys. Checks out.

Speaker: Even though you would commonly... This is also why whales are technically fish, even though they're not. Yeah, okay. But there's no such thing as a fish. that That's the other thing, is that there is no such thing as a fish because all of our definition of fish eventually excludes other definitions of fish. Phylogeny is insane.

Speaker: That's a challenge of classification. you know, things are just the complexity of life resists. Nature never gives it to you straight. No, no. To quote Lindsay Nicole. So I'm going to now. So.

Speaker: We're now talking about life on land is hanging out and turning into ah these tetrapods. and starting to hang out in swamps and turn into amphibious creatures.

Speaker: I want to briefly talk about the area of the era before the Permian called the Carboniferous. I'm going to go to the next slide because the Carboniferous is famous for being the age of giant bugs.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. Oh, I like this. wow You'd have the the the frightened man for scale, but I do appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Dragonflies the size of seagulls, scorpions the small size of small dogs, and an eight-foot-long millipede named Greg.

Speaker: That's amazing. Actually, his name is Arthroplura, but I want to call him Greg. Looks like a Greg. Friendly guy. Now, during the Carboniferous, the and ah trees had recently evolved and trees were like a huge evolutionary upgrade and they took over the joint. The Carboniferous was very warm and very swampy and rainforest-y.

Speaker: The entire planet was completely covered in a swampy rainforest. It was very carbon-y. Like, pole to pole. Mm-hmm. And... The rainforest did not last because two things spelled the doom of these trees.

Speaker: The first is the formation of Pangea. As the continents collided, and this becomes important, much of the land became too distant from the sea to get a lot of rain. In addition to shooting up, in addition, this shot up massive mountains as the plates collided with each other, and mountains create what's called a rain shadow effect, which is if you look behind mountains, you'll usually find arid lands.

Speaker: Yes. So, right. I said I took geography classes, but clearly I didn't remember very much. Well, like the Gobi Desert, for example, exists because of the Himalayas. Right. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Which exists because India is in a really low speed collision into Asia.

Speaker: hu Southwest is behind the Rockies in the United States. Yeah. yeah Yeah. Yeah. Checks out again. Now, the So the formation of Pangaea caused a lot of rain problems. And the other one is why the giant bugs existed.

Speaker: The mass amount of trees turned all of the CO2 into oxygen. And so the air had a far higher oxygen concentration than it does today, which is why the arthropods, the bugs, were able to get so big.

Speaker: Because they have a square cube law problem. Because of how they breathe, the lower their surface area, the harder it is for them to breathe. And a really small critter has a very high surface area.

Speaker: So ah that's why insects only get so big. Hmm. Because they get too big to breathe, basically. That's exactly it. But if the oxygen concentration is higher, they can get massive.

Speaker: Hence, eight foot long millipede. Yes. Yeah. But there's a problem here because how does climate change work?

Speaker: The more CO2 you put in the air, the warmer it gets. What happens if you take the CO2 out of the air? It's colder. It got very cold. And so this triggered an ice age.

Speaker: And the result of that is that there was what's called the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. And because all of these trees were in swamps, and it's theorized that the bacteria which would decay trees wasn't quite evolved that point because trees were so new. These trees went into swamps that also don't really decay things very well. You preserve very well in a swamp.

Speaker: And we created basically all of the world's coal from this one period. Right, right. Because, you again, we think of coal as dinosaurs, but it's not, actually. It's it's it's the vegetable matter, mostly.

Speaker: Mostly, yeah. oh Oil is, I believe, largely algae. But in terms of coal, coal comes from the Carboniferous almost always. Right. Because we have this one solid this one point in the Earth's history where the Earth was covered in trees and the trees didn't decay very well.

Speaker: So they all were able to get coalified over time. I'm sure there's a term for it, but I'm not a scientician. And it was buried under the ground where it should stay, but that's another story.

Speaker: Spoiler. Maybe it'll come up later. but Well, yeah. so Spoiler indeed. This is how we move from the Carboniferous to the Permian period. So the ah the Great Rainforest Collapse and then resulting extinctions,

Speaker: up move us in a massive climate shift and results in a lot of job openings and ecological niches. And what usually happens with evolution of radiation is that not only do you get creatures evolving to fill in new niches, they tend to push new territory.

Speaker: Like the evolution of like complex multicellular life likely came about after after a major extinction from snowballing the earth way back when, that sort of thing. okay And so now we can move to the concept of amniotes.

Speaker: I'll explain what those are. So everything was stuck in the water at that point because they had to lay their eggs there. Although they could venture further and further onto land, kind of like a toad, a toad, no matter how dry a toad might be, has to lay its eggs in the water.

Speaker: An amniotic egg, is the breakthrough that means you can lay your eggs outside of the water because it keeps a perfect environment for developing a critter. They're waterproof, and they regulate with the outside environment.

Speaker: And with the evolution of amniotic eggs, they could finally start taking over the joint. Everything on land... Sorry, i go on. We're thinking sort of like and at this point, the evolution of things that would become, say, a reptile egg, a chicken egg, and then eventually it made a human, like a mammal egg, you know?

Speaker: Yeah, exactly. and ah And so we are amniotes. It's just that we learn to do the amniotic egg internally. Mm-hmm. Because we do the entire womb placenta thing, but it's the same basic principle, just evolved to handle it internally. Right. So everything on land that has a vertebrae, a vertebrae evolves from these amniotes. And that means reptiles, mammals, and birds, and per phylogeny, birds are also reptiles.

Speaker: Does not necessarily mean amphibians because amphibians do not lay amniotic eggs. This is the clade thing. Amphibians are tetrapods, but not amniotes. We go down one set.

Speaker: ah So they lay the tiny eggs in water and that is not our way. And we shun those we left behind. So the amniotes moved into a land full of stuff. And at first, they all looked like ah primitive reptiles.

Speaker: Four legs, ah rough textured hides, sort of like elephants and big bitey faces. You'll see a lot of pictures soon. However, the great land of Pangea was one of vast opportunities. Many ecological niches were not niches were not filled.

Speaker: So they radiate out into new forms to get the delicious treats. And now we come back to what differentiates Dimetrodon from a dinosaur. The early amniotes split into two teams. And we can go to the next slide.

Speaker: So on the left hand side, we have team one hole, which is Dimetrodon and us. Sorry. yeah And then team two hole. My brain's going to just cry from too many jokes. just going to.

Speaker: I didn't set up that joke deliberately. I'm an innocent man. um So team so team one hole includes us and team two hole became the sauropsids, which includes reptiles and birds. All the birds are reptiles.

Speaker: whom And so with the advent of an ice age and everything on land being cold blooded, these new terrestrial critters were largely operated out of coastal swampland near the equator.

Speaker: One such location, thanks to continental drift, were these red beds of Texas and Oklahoma, which at the time were a big swamp and kind of a peninsula, sort of like a cross between Louisiana and Florida. ah Swamps are great for preserving fossils, and this gives us one of the best early Permian sites.

Speaker: Now, before we get on to the synapses and sauropsids, I do want to talk about those we did leave behind and remain in the water. And we're going to and so we'll talk about amphibious creatures. And when I talk about the word amphibian, amphibians technically evolved later. It's like how ah the face sharks are not technically sharks. They're not true sharks.

Speaker: Whatever. These are amphibious. So let's take a brief tour to moment to tour the strange world of the Temnospondyls. Next slide.

Speaker: Wow. Oh, wow. So on the left here, we have Diplocolis, a boomerang-headed fella whose bizarre skull shape is constantly up for debate.

Speaker: This fella was around a meter long, and my favorite theory is that this boomerang face let him go, ah like move vertically in the water very quickly. Cause you point your head down and then suddenly. And it is pretty smart.

Speaker: That's the coolest looking skull shape. I think I've seen. that' yeah so god absolutely is yes It's Yeah, basically, it's like, a yeah, the skull in this image is like, yeah, basically a fat boomerang with eyes at the sort of apex of the curve with a little with little protrusion, like a little snout. And yeah yeah the reconstruction, the eyes are on the top of its head, which looks kind of goofy, but that's yeah it's a pretty cool skull. I like it.

Speaker: I'm a fan. And then beside them, we see maybe less delightful looking critters, although they're still cute. They're pretty cute. The top one here is called Cacops, whose name literally translates to ugly look.

Speaker: Oh, right. I feel bad for it. I've seen worse. I don't know. It sort of looks like someone crossed a crocodile with a pug.

Speaker: With some frog eyes in there. Yeah. and yeah So Khakops is only a foot long. And then you see towering over Khakops is the much, much bigger cousin who is over two meters long and probably 150 kilograms.

Speaker: So that's six to seven feet, around 400 pounds. these ah This is a big bitey beast who is a hanging out in the swamps and probably trying to eat all the diplocollises or boomerang faces that they can.

Speaker: Oh, well, maybe he'll get it stuck in his throat. And well, that's not nice. You know what? I'm not rooting for either of these guys because, you know, they both got to live. but um The second one, the the the larger fella of those two. they almost yeah like Yeah, he looks like a sort of cross between a frog and a crocodile as well. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. A frog-a-dile.

Speaker: Why don't I name these? All these Latin names are hard. Let's go to the next one here. We'll see it a really cute one. Aww. Aww. They're both pretty cute. On the left here, we have Prianosuchus, which appears to be somewhere between a crocodile and an an eel. So think of a free-swimming crocodile that's sort of like gliding and sort of like a... almost like a Chinese dragon in how it moves through the water, with a little boop on its snoot that I love, sort of like a gharial.

Speaker: It's like a gharial. It's a medieval maze, it's gharial. A gharial is a crocodilian, so relative of crocodiles in Southeast Asia, Indonesia.

Speaker: And they have these long pointy snouts with a little ah like a little round knob on the end. Yeah. They got a boop on their snoot. Ah, the scientific term.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. Now, the... The geico lizard over here. Yeah. One second. He could save you 15% or more on car insurance. And guess what the guy, and you're not going to guess what the guy code, love ah the letter's name is. This thing is called Kermit Ops.

Speaker: I wouldn't have guessed that. It literally means... discover nineteen eighty like know They discovered it they discovered it like a year ago. Oh, shit. Okay, well, that's a good name. That's a good name. I mean, it's Kermit, basically. This thing has a face of yeah it has a face like Kermit. And ops means face, so it's got face ah face of Kermit. And it's just a few centimeters long. Just a little fella. 15% on car insurance.

Speaker: Best I could do. So let's go to the next slide and we're going to finally move on to land and start talking about some of the delightful critters who were walking out around the swamps. These are hefty beasts. These are hefty beasts. We're going to talk about team two hole, the sauropsids.

Speaker: Although these were the predecessors to the dinosaurs, the most successful land animals of all time, during the Permian, they were not really in charge. They were not as specious and dominant as the synapsids, but they held their own.

Speaker: So on the top left, we see a captorinidae who are commonly around a foot long, but could get much bigger and smaller, ah ah bigger or smaller. And towering and stomping over them below that are the priosaurs who could reach up to a ton and are covered in weird armor-like protrusions.

Speaker: So we see a herbivore. I think my page is blank. Because have the Kermit guy and I flipped the next slide and it's blank. Is that correct? Nope. Okay.

Speaker: So I'm missing a slide. One second. I'll just screenshot this. Put it in WhatsApp for you. don't know what you're talking about. I'm going to this part off soon. Okay. Got it. Wonderful.

Speaker: Okay. Yeah, that was worth it because I want to see these little guys. This guy at the bottom left. This guy at the bottom left was a big dude called Brady Soros.

Speaker: And... This one would reach up to a ton. And yeah, it was covered in weird armor-like protrusions. And in the later Permian going on, we would meet Scootasaurus on the right, who's covered in scoots.

Speaker: but Scoots? They like little knobs. They're kind of like ah bumps, little bumps. No, the saurs didn't have the same ring to it, though. No, the saurs. Yeah, nob.

Speaker: I love Scootasaurus, though, because just scoots about. Aw.

Speaker: He's like an armored warthog almost. Yeah, though they're hard to describe. ah The Scutosaurus in particular looks yeah like an armored warthog or almost like an armadillo with strange legs, but covered in these little bumps, particularly all over the face. They're fascinating creatures.

Speaker: And... Moving to our next slide, this also shows the first terrestrial lineage to go back to the water, much like the whales did, because whales are evolved from ungulates, actually.

Speaker: And... you know, return to the water because that's where the good stuff was. This is Mesosaurus, not to be confused with Mosasaurus, who was around during dinosaur times.

Speaker: ah This is a one to two meter long marine reptile, clearly designed for the catching of little fishies with that long, thin snout, which is the universal sign of... Needle teeth.

Speaker: Yeah, those teeth are bitey. um And those long, thin, pointy snouts are the universal sign for eye catch fishies. Ah, so ducks, geese.

Speaker: um ducks ah du ah duck Ducks dabble. I think they're, I don't think herons. Yeah, you know, I have written a lot of fish bills. Look, I'm no ornithologist or biologist or paleontologist, but you gotta be all three.

Speaker: I'd like to see a duck take on a pike though. Hmm. It would try. having yeah it would give it a good shot. Especially if it was a Canada goose.

Speaker: Oh, yeah.

Speaker: All right. So ah we're going to leave behind team two hole. And although they're a part of the story, they're not the main characters. And now let's go to the real subject here. The synapses. Next slide, please. They're team one hole. Okay.

Speaker: Just checking. I love the crude. love the giant things. This is a plot of the other end as well, like the whole cloaca thing. am I just being... It's a brain cloaca? Because they have brain cloaca, then... Which slide are you on?

Speaker: have like a butt cloaca. You're seeing a bunch of sailed back guys, right? Oh, yeah. Okay, good, good, good. I was like, where are we on with the cloaca here? i Oh, no, no, because was thinking of the one hole. Right.

Speaker: Oh, right, right, right. Team one hole. Yeah, we revisited that. Which is weird because team one hole actually becomes team two hole. Well, team two hole remains with one hole because they largely use cloacas in team two hole. Aside from like hemipenes on snakes. But yeah. Wait, so the does it work out so they all have three holes?

Speaker: No. and How many holes are we dealing with, Dave? Too many. yeah This one here, however, this is confused. We are talking synapsids. These are team one hole.

Speaker: So predecessors to mammals. There are. And so Dimetrodon is, of course, the most famous of the synapsids and commonly mistaken for a dinosaur.

Speaker: There are multiple species of Dimetrodon recognized. And of course, the defining characteristic and subject for endless debate is the massive sail on their back. Dimetrodon were big bastards, probably over four meters and 250 kilograms at the at the largest. Their sail was popular and other contemporaneous creatures, as we can see here. There's two other kinds of critter here.

Speaker: And they're theorized as a way to self-regulate body temperature, as you can expose a lot of blood vessels to the sun to heat up really fast, which might be a potential early adaptation before endothermy or being warm blooded.

Speaker: oh Or they just used it for the purposes of kink. We don't quite know. They just want to be stylish, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Stand from the crowd. Yeah. You got leopard pattern here going on. Leopard trend. You got. If humans had those, we'd have them pierced.

Speaker: Totally have our sails pierced or tattooed. Yeah. Oh, I'd get a big tattoo on my sail. It's lot of surface area. Yeah. It would probably hurt, though.

Speaker: And oh so the other creatures shown here, ah to the bottom we have Adaphosaurus, who just looks like a Dimetrodon that's a little friendlier. ah which And then Sagontosaurus, which is a long fish catcher with that ah pointed snoot.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. Now, if we talk about Adaphosaurus, this creature is one of the first to develop a powerful new adaptation for living on land, herbivory, munching plants. The second lineage of synapsids went completely to town on, uh, and so we'll start again.

Speaker: So although they started this, a separate lineage of synapsids went completely to town on plant eating and the spirit of evolutionary radiation developed massive tank-like torsos for digesting plants at the expense of literally everything else.

Speaker: So ah for viewers at home, we're recording this at the around Valentine's Day. And I love you, Tracy, but I want to introduce you all to my true Valentine, the most beautiful, amazing and best animal to have ever lived.

Speaker: Next slide. Oh, ah wow. Behold the pride of Texas.

Speaker: Kotila Rankis, a two ton living football with a head, the size of a walnut. It's like the eraser head baby with like a huge, like if it grew up.

Speaker: Yeah. Right. And it had a big body. Like, it's like, it's very cute though. It's so cute. love this dude. That's adorable. This is the evolutionary radiation thing, right? Because the only thing that matters here is having a big tank to ferment plant material. Uh-huh.

Speaker: Yep. And so what works comes before what makes sense. This is a kind of creature called a casid, and other casids kind of have this vibe, but none are so beautiful as my best boy here. They're very common fossils in the ah red beds, and I like to think of them as like Permian cows.

Speaker: ah I was going to say, yes, he reminds me of a cow because the cow also is a huge grass digest digesting machine. Exactly. Yeah. And one of the key things that being a synapsid lets you do, and I don't particularly know about Cotillorhynchus' teeth, but when you have specialized teeth, you can learn how to chew. Because reptiles don't chew.

Speaker: Oh, right. they just They just chomp and swallow holes. And gulp them down. Yeah. That's exactly it. They can't, and so they don't have molars, right? They only have these sort of, you know, ah pointy teeth.

Speaker: And so as a result of that, these sort of advancements in evolution allow you to do different things. Mm-hmm. So... And I'm going to move a little bit beyond the red beds here because we're starting to go worldwide. Pangaea was a whole single continent and again, continued forming as the Permian continued. That meant the same species could be found in multiple places way far from one another, as well as further and further inland as things evolve.

Speaker: I'll note the South Africa's Karoo Desert, legendary site for Permian fossils. And also, as we continue our story, the Permian is going to get hotter and hotter as we move out of the ice house because we've had the collapse of that rainforest and we have the slow heating. That's usually the result of volcanic activity, putting CO2 back in the air.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: So next slide.

Speaker: aren't these creatures just great? Just so many delights. Magnificent. And so as the Permian progresses, we move into the middle Permian and say goodbye to Dimetrodons and their ilk and say hello to their descendants. These are the therapsids. And if you remember a word I'm going to say a lot, it's therapsid. While stem mammals were perhaps more primitive, stem being the sort of earliest kind of synapsids, the therapsid had more upgrades, such as more complex in our ear bones, less of a sprawling stance, and probably further progress towards endothermy.

Speaker: And as the permeant goes further and further on, paleontologists discover ah evidence of fur in coprolites. That is poop. That indicates someone was probably getting fuzzy.

Speaker: Probably not these folks, but as we go on, fur starts to become a thing. in this case, they don't know for sure, but they're they're not mammals, so they wouldn't have hair, essentially. Well, and they because we are moving towards mammals, mammal qualities will evolve ah point over point. So we have the complex in ear bones, the ah the varied teeth, and enothermia is understood to have evolved during the Permian.

Speaker: Which is also ah why, again, when you're in a cold environment, because the permian is still coming out of an ice age, it means you can just go farther than a reptile can. Because they the the trade-off is when you're endothermic, you have to eat all the goddamn time.

Speaker: ahhu When you're exothermic, cold-blooded, you only have to eat occasionally, but you require heat to function. right So there's sort of the trade-off. And during the Permian, the synapsids are taking over way, way more than psoropsids. The sort of stem reptiles are just not doing as well.

Speaker: And endothermy is understood to be one of the reasons they were so successful. Sure. Yeah. Because these guys look like... How do you describe them for the listeners? Oh, God.

Speaker: One of them looks like a Volkswagen. Yeah. It's like, ah yeah, it's hard to even describe, it's hard to even compare to other animals that we have now. And it's interesting that these aren't as popular. Like, I've never seen pictures of these creatures before. It's all dinosaurs. It's so a funny. Like, yeah dinosaur fandom just took over and, you know, but yeah, they're, they're yeah, sort of...

Speaker: Hard to describe. Dog-like shape. they but There is a dog-like stance, definitely, but more sprawled-out legs. And then these weird and necks and heads. The ah guy on the left here. So these are called dinosophalians. They're also really big.

Speaker: And ah they... I didn't have the species names here. It's all right. We just have two different kinds of dinocephalians. And I believe we have a carnivore and a herbivore here. But the guy on the right in particular was a tank. We're talking rhinoceros sized.

Speaker: yeah face the The animals during the Permian tend to i have the same kind of range of size that we see today, ignoring stuff like blue whales and all that. But when you think of dinosaurs and how absolutely massive they got, the Permian doesn't get there. But we do have some very large creatures, ones that I would not necessarily want to meet a person.

Speaker: And so and these ah the therapsids are really specious and taking of different niches, herbivores, carnivores. And although they would do even better later, the middle Permian gave rise to a close contender to our favorite boy.

Speaker: Going to go to the next slide and show you Staminosuchus. I can hear you. Oh, no. Oh, no. was a jump scare. i was on mute because I was drinking my coffee and I did it had a huge jump scare.

Speaker: When I changed slides, i I scrumped a little bit. Yeah, it's... It's tragic that we didn't get your scrump on on air. Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

Speaker: Next time, we'll be very careful. But no, it's a frightening looking creature. So these lesson i guess the one the picture on the right is the the horrifying skull of the horrifying. That's what a skull looks like. So we've got paleo art on the left and an actual fossil on the right.

Speaker: And what we have is a skull of a, you know, vaguely rhino-ish kind of creature with strange bony protrusions sticking out like a crown. Yes. Yes.

Speaker: They confuse everybody. And what the hell they're about is something that's a fun argument over beer for paleontologists. It's just insane. This creature once lived the roughly the size of a hippo and likely lived like a hippo wallowing in the ponds and mucking up vegetation and murdering anybody who got on their territory.

Speaker: You know, it's a living, but yeah, it's just, just wild. Yeah. they do Yeah. You wouldn't jump scare. Yeah. o Now let's ah move on from ah our gigantic creatures to the next slide and talk about some more reasonably sized critters of yore.

Speaker: Pictured here is Lycosuchus, a wolf crocodile, so-called because it looks wolf-sized and looks like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile. And it's just just a face only a mother could love on this guy.

Speaker: Yeah. The little guy next to him is a sad vampire. The sad vampire is called Bjarmosuchus and is another species of like moderately sized carnivore, which shows... ah And you can kind of see how this body type is, don't know, almost like a proto-fox or something like that, or a coyote. It's got that kind of vibe.

Speaker: It just looks like it's just more reptile-like because, well, they're... synapses are reptile like mammals not literally but you get the point and you also see that paleo art starts to include a bit of fur because they think fur is showing up about this point right and again we don't sorry then he ripped oh yeah well i'll talk about shrink wrapping uh which is an interesting one and that is paleo art can, sorry, ah commit an error that people are now very aware of, of not putting enough flesh on the skeletons. Right. what that means is that if you were to take a hippo and then not

Speaker: puff out its face, it would look like the most feral monster you've ever seen because it's shrink wrapped, right? The skin is just directly tied on the bones. And so that's something you always want to think of because it's hard to imagine what that extra flesh looks like if you don't have an imprint in the fossil record.

Speaker: Right. Or like with feathers later on with dinosaurs. Like dinosaurs would fall shrink-wrapped, but they might have been really puffy. Like there's a famous example of like a chicken. I think somebody did a drawing. If you took a chicken skeleton yeah and then put the flesh on it, it would just look like a naked chicken and they' be running around. So that's they assume dinosaurs look like. It's kind of like these, you know, naked chickens. So they might have more flesh or feathers or...

Speaker: That's exactly it. And it's interesting with feathers where there's been enough. ah and And the thing with dinosaurs is it's likely some dinosaurs absolutely had feathers, in fact, a lot. And again, birds of evolved from dinosaurs.

Speaker: um And but some dinosaurs did not as well. And there's I think there was even a fall. So where they ah were able to determine some of the pigments from the feathers and determine the coloration.

Speaker: it's It's really cool what people are continuing to find. We're kind of in a boom for paleontology right now. But nonetheless... Really? They dug them all up? That's good. Maybe these fellas were a lot cuter than they look, but... Yeah. So...

Speaker: yeah

Speaker: so Leaving on this lovely image, we're going to continue on the middle Permian because stuff starts to happen. The planet continues to heat up, the continents match together and mountains shoot up. And furthermore, we begin to see more and more volcanism. And this is where I'm going to talk about the climate in a little detail.

Speaker: One of the reasons the Earth sustains life is that it is self-regulating, partially because life has evolved to help regulate the Earth. like And so as we're ah aware, CO2 affects the temperature of the planet. It is not the only factor, but it's the most important one.

Speaker: Animals and plants manage to exist in a bit of an equilibrium because we breathe oxygen excel and expel CO2, and plants do the opposite. Right. In the Carboniferous, we saw that that cycle got knocked out of whack by the plants taking over and sucking up the CO2.

Speaker: It made the earth very, very cold. Well, as we know, those transformed massive coal seams in the middle of the earth is, well, it's made of lava. It's very hot. And so volcanism is what burns some of those fossil fuels and gets CO2 back in the air.

Speaker: So the activity of volcanoes takes that sequestered carbon and puts it back into the air. And then something neat happens. All the carbon dioxide acidifies the rain.

Speaker: And if the rain falls on grass or something, it doesn't do much. The CO2 remains in the water cycle. But if it hits a mountain and particularly limestone or other similar ah rocks, it is going to dissolve the limestone and create calcium. This pulls the excess carbon out of the rain, drains into the seafloor, and it gets turned into marine shells.

Speaker: Yes. well diet and dads and everything oh right And so the clams are pulling carbon out of the air because it weathers mountains. It's called the carbon s silicate cycle. And it is a very and it's a great way for the Earth to regulate because eventually the sea life dies, turns into sediment, buried, buried, buried, boom, back in the air.

Speaker: What a wild thought. Eventually in mountains turn into seashells. Yeah. yeah it's It's wild how this works. And so the earth has a thermostat and it it will regulate, but on a geologic scale. Right.

Speaker: And when we're talking geology, we're talking millions of years for anything to happen. And we're not alive for millions of years. We're only alive for a lot less than that. And if the thermostat is knocked out of whack, things get bad.

Speaker: So this is what happened in the middle Permian. With the death of the global forest and massive dryness, there wasn't the same plant life to take the CO2 out of the air, and the and everything kept heating up.

Speaker: And in the fossil record, we see a sudden drop of available species, and conveniently, a great deal of basalt, that is sort of solidified magma, found in southern China in Sichuan.

Speaker: So a study of what exactly happened is kind of ongoing, but the more people learn, the worse it gets. What happened were apparently called flood traps. When we think volcanoes, we think of like Mount St. Helens or like a big boom or even a slow rumbling volcano.

Speaker: Traps are when an area of land gets flooded with magma for a long period of time. okay And so the emission traps, they're around 500 kilometers around or around 250,000 squares kilometer of just nonstop magma sitting on the surface, constantly expelling CO2.

Speaker: And this fast forwarded the heating of the earth. this And so these catastrophic continental collisions and viciously violent volcanism cooked the joint and resulted in an extinction event.

Speaker: Now, this is not considered one of the big five extinctions, but it was a big one. It's not? Okay. the other ones are bigger. But it was, I'd say the should act there maybe should be a big six, but nonetheless.

Speaker: Most of the creatures we've discussed that were still around come to their end here, with particularly devastating impact on the oceans. The Ammonites make it through, and somehow the trilobites keep trucking, but this is the end of the face sharks.

Speaker: oh As a result in extinctions, the biggest and baddest are often the first to go, since they require a food web stable under them. So our beautiful boys, Cotillo-Reincus with his tiny head, and Estemano-Suchus and scaring the shit out of Jen, were no more.

Speaker: What was once... Yeah, yeah you're not sad to see that one go. What was once a chilly world with life clustered around equatorial swamps and expanding inland turned into a badass Mad Max desert planet?

Speaker: And that moves us to the late Permian. Let's click the next slide and like and look at Pangaea again. Okay, so a lot of changes. Still have the Paleo-Tethys Ocean there. Yes, and then you'll see the Tethys peeking out beneath it. So what's happened is the chain of continental islands that would one but day become China-Indochina keep drifting further north and closing off that Paleo-Tethys Sea while opening up a new Neo-Tethys Ocean. What?

Speaker: So not only is this actively setting off the Chinese traps, it's affecting the whole supercontinent. This leads to one of the coolest fossil records out there, which is on the other side of the world, a 400 mile fossilized coral lee reef was shot into the sky. Geologically, it took a while. And this forms the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas and in New Mexico.

Speaker: The fall record of the middle Permian ocean is literally suspended in the air. And you can go for a lovely hike around an ancient coral reef. If you happen to be in Texas and just walk by this fossilized coral reef.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Really? Yes. Wow. That's very called the Permian reef trail. Hmm. That is, I have hope to look that up. Yeah. Cause unfortunately, i don't know if i'll be going to America anytime soon.

Speaker: I wonder why. this um ah Yeah. So with the absence of the face sharks, something else had to take over. And a weird creature rose up within the ocean. And these are truly ancient animals. One of the biggest evolutionary adaptations among ah ocean vertebrates was jaws.

Speaker: But there were creatures that existed before jaws were evolved. And they somehow managed to ah stick through and then shot into dominance for a short period of time. So next slide.

Speaker: me hu oh my goodness staff these are called conodonts jawless eel things uh that just uh look like eel lamprey death things with giant eyes immediately i'm like ah you remember peewee's big adventure large marge yes look just like this but And their eyes bug out, and I'm like, oh my god.

Speaker: large Marge. Kind of. Very scary. It's the rows of, like, six rows of teeth. Yeah, they're just endless Every image of this. Constantly screaming.

Speaker: Yeah. yeah yeah The scream of daunts.

Speaker: That's a good name. Yeah. So let's get the hell out of the ocean because those things are scary and go back on land to the next slide with the therapsids.

Speaker: Oh, so the therapsid. Yeah. Now we're getting into like, gar and then you reward me with a cutie. So it's balancing out. Right. And so.

Speaker: whoa, whoa. whoa I think I want to go back to a previous slide and read it because I had it out of order. Sure. Is that okay? Back to the previous slide? No, a couple.

Speaker: Okay. ah You want to go to the one before Istaminosuchus. ah I think that's the map. That's the scary face guy.

Speaker: okay the one Oh, right. The one with the Volkswagen. Yes. So these Volkswagen-looking bastards, these are therapsids that are the flexible branch of one-hole synapses and truly taking over.

Speaker: Here we see Anteosaur, an absolute brood of a carnivore that was as tall as a human could weigh up to a ton, sort of like a desert-crawling polar bear. And opposite was a bony-headed herbivore with the delightful name of Moss Chops, noted for being a clade with a massive stacks of bone on their head, likely for head-butting rams, and not pictured as one of its close cousins, Tipinocephalus, with a name that translates to depressed head.

Speaker: which I'm sure many find relatable. who Totally. I'd be depressed if that Antinosaur was coming for me because that looks kind of like, ah it's kind of like dog ears on this with short hind legs. It's like a dog lizard, but really big. It's awful.

Speaker: And if you recall, Scutosaurus mentioned weight back covered in all little bumps. He's now really rocking out as we go to the late Permian. Mm-hmm. All right, next slide. And now we'll skip all the way back over to those furry guys.

Speaker: Okay. It's going to be fun to edit. Yep. These are guys du are cute little guys. Yeah. like yeah They look like little fish dogs or polar bears, polar bear head dogs.

Speaker: Right. And so on the nimble side, we have eutheriodonts. While the dysianodonts were big goons, the eutheriodonts were nimble carnivores that call ah that came in small, medium, and large. Or if you're Starbucks, big, big, and 20.

Speaker: but That's right. So the smallest ones are the cynodonts who are nimble and quick and perhaps akin to coyotes or even mustelids like weasels. For listeners, think of big heads, slightly sprawled legs and a body sort of shaped like an eggplant.

Speaker: Pictured here is a small and we believe adorably fuzzy critter called Prosynosuchus who occupied a smaller niche, like kind of like an otter. Yeah, the little otter tail.

Speaker: They don't have ears No, that's true. Oh, right. Maybe the ears didn't fossilize.

Speaker: know because they'd be cartilage. Maybe, ah I mean, they could have had pointy dog ears or something. Who knows? Interesting. I'm going to become a paleo artist and draw ears on all the cyanodonts. yeah Yeah, correct the record.

Speaker: And opposite is this little feller called Divinia Prima. who is an omnivore and probably clever. And if you look at these fellas, these are the closest to mammals we've seen from anything, right?

Speaker: ah And although they do not have great stonking tits yet, the defining trait of mammals, these are our ancestors out of the synapses. The cynodonts are the ones who go on to ah to ah eventually become mammals.

Speaker: Right. So let's go to the medium ones.

Speaker: These are the Theracephalians, staple remover looking motherfuckers with saber teeth and broad, long snouts. Sorry, have we moved to the next slide?

Speaker: Yes. Okay. So this is like a saber tooth lizard, tiger. Dog. Yeah. It just kind of looks like everything at once. That's what makes the pernium so fun.

Speaker: huh

Speaker: So these middle sized carnivores took up the niches of creatures, probably like wolves or hyenas. And fascinatingly, there are grooves in their teeth and sort of gaps in their skulls that indicate they may have been venomous.

Speaker: Oh, really? Yes. h I would not want to get bit by one of these for a variety of reasons. Yeah, there's any number of reasons I would like to stay away from that. Yep.

Speaker: And let's go next. I don't want my staples removed. I need those. Yeah. I need those to live.

Speaker: And we're on the next slide. Okay. no And on the beefy side, we have Gorgonopsids. You see this body type returning again and again with the sloped back, short tail, beefy legs and a big murder face.

Speaker: And that's a shrink-wrapped creature. This is this is definitely shrink-wrapped, right? there is ah they All they've got is musculature that's probably a little bit, you know maybe had big chubby cheeks or something.

Speaker: But i it's also the scariest paleo art of a Gorgonops that I saw. So screw it. I kind of love this and how horrifying it is. These were the size of... The face of a bunny rabbit or something. And we just don't know. Yeah. like I don't think... that um well This thing was a carnivore the size of a tiger.

Speaker: Weighing up to 300 kilograms of face murdering frenzy. Yeah, looks... well Yeah, it's it's mostly teeth. So muscles and teeth. Yes. And a big dent in the head. These are the ah big apex predators of the time. And, you know, somebody I would prefer to avoid terrifying creatures. Also Gorgonopsid. Cool name.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. And so as we come to the close of who discussed, ah whoa, that sentence makes no sense.

Speaker: I'm going to turn now to one last clade of animals during the late Permian. And really the main character going forwards. And I've said that a lot of times, but ah as time goes on, the main character shifts.

Speaker: We're going to talk about the Dysynodonts, another branch of the Therapsids. Next slide. Hmm. These are wiggly little dudes ranging from the size of a pig to a beaver, and they're fuck ugly.

Speaker: Yeah. you know, a lot of them, i was like, oh, I can see the cute, but these are literally like, oh, I can't even know. I do like the one with the turtle face.

Speaker: Yeah. yeah Yeah, that's cuter. It's kind of ah like a parrot beak almost. The big thing with these folks is they had a beak rather than teeth. They were really close to the ground and almost certainly very good burrowers. So the sort of fellows who like to get under the ground and get at the roots and tubers.

Speaker: And this is, again, a vital part of ah evolution is carving out a clade for yourself. And this might be one of the first indications we have of a real, like...

Speaker: rooting through the ground kind of animals. So these are, again, just weird little guys who are eating roots and just, just strange to look upon. You know what? And somebody's got to be a weird looking little guy to get those roots.

Speaker: You know, that's why they look like that. there it's They're, it's, they've evolved to the purpose. So, In the late Permian, in this brutal world of heat and deserts, the Synapsid had truly taken over.

Speaker: Despite the best efforts of the Earth to kill us off, life was genuinely flourishing, and they'd recovered from that extinction event pretty well. Even the trilobites, having been greatly reduced over time, were flourishing once more and spreading out in many new species. I haven't begun to talk about the plants and insects, but think of conifers, which were bearing seeds for the first time, lots of different ferns. And then the insects were a lot of the ancestors of successful modern arthropods, like beetles and flies, as well as dragonflies and centipedes and millipedes and whatnot. So there's a full thriving ecosystem going on here, despite this very difficult land to live on.

Speaker: And then the fossil record stops. Oh, hmm.

Speaker: Sites in South Africa, Russia, China, and Mozambique were key areas for fossils from the late Permian. And then there's nothing. The sea life just vanishes, save for a low oxygen clam called Clearia.

Speaker: The reefs are gone, replaced instead by stromatolites, which are stacked pillars of bacteria, the very earliest forms of life in our fossil record. What was once a vibrant ecosystem becomes in the ocean, to quote ah my primary source, the ends of the world, a slime world.

Speaker: So all this life pretty much starts just vanishes. Just... In place slime mats. Vanishes. Now... So if the History Channel has taught me anything... It was the Nazis. Alien.

Speaker: Alien Nazis. Yeah, it was alien Nazis. Alien Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. Aliens are Nazis, that's right. So fossils are never guarantees, and they can be destroyed from seismic activity or or just enough water. while the earth And so while the Earth has a seemingly limitless supply of them, the Earth is also grinding up fossils all the time.

Speaker: So what happened was a subject from mass debate for a long time. Even as early as 1860, this strange gap in the fossil record was explained by a natural philosopher, John Phillips, as a second act of divine creation.

Speaker: Well, i mean, that's the thing. that's was that That was the answer to everything. God did it. i mean, why not? if If you don't know. If I don't know, he does. Well, I mean, touche. So a monumental discovery in 1980 was that, of course, a catastrophic asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and kicked off a sort of asteroid fever in paleontologists in terms of explaining extinction events. So any unexplained extinction has to be an asteroid. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: So there was a lot of work trying to find an equivalent crater, but nothing really bore out under scrutiny as people continued finding out what happened. One of the key figures to bring us the truth was Peter Ward, who began arguing that climate change was a causal factor in extinctions.

Speaker: So while in South Africa and foiled on an attempt to look for some Cretaceous period ammonites, Ward began asking some basic questions of about Permian fossils in that Karoo desert and the relationship to the Great Extinction.

Speaker: Grabbing some fossils, he put them in a mass spectrometer where he discovered an abundance of light carbon isotopes. Now, I don't know what those are. Nor do I. But now what my lovely sources tell me is that these are the sorts of carbon isotopes you find from burning fossil fuels. They are not the sort of carbon isotopes you normally find in the fossil record, but you can find in abundance nowadays.

Speaker: Yeah. Now, right prior to that, UC Berkeley geologist Paul Wren linked an area of Siberia are to the end Permian extinction. This area is called the Siberian Traps, and it's a field of basalt, which is like what we saw in China, cold lava, that is the same size as the continental United States.

Speaker: So paleontologists actually went out to these Siberian traps, which meant like river journeys, helicopters. It's very inaccessible. It actually kind of looks like to where Tracy and I live and realized. Yeah, actually. Yeah, it's not that different. No, Siberia, northern Alberta, pretty similar. Yeah.

Speaker: And what they found is that this, the traps were over top of an ancient basin called the Tunguska Sedimentary Basin. And so I'm going to quote from the ends of the world by Peter Brannan.

Speaker: A huge swath of Russia that had been accumulating strata for hundreds of millions of years since the Ediacaran period. Dave note that is the period before the first explosion of ah the the Cambrian explosion when we really started to see a lot of complex life. So very early on.

Speaker: The basin was filled with carbonates, shales, coals from ancient forests and enormous layers of salt from bygone dried up seas. In places, these sediments stacked up more than 12 kilometers thick. oh The Tunguska Sedimentary Basin is the world's largest coal basin.

Speaker: So this massive 12 kilometer thick stack of coal and salt was a bomb. oh And with China heading into a low speed collision with Siberia, the tectonic activity of Pangaea coming together shot lava through the earth Earth's crust and into the biggest stockpile of explosives in the history of the planet.

Speaker: You want to solve the Tunguska explosion? ah And yeah, kablam. An explosion of the likes of which the Earth has never seen since it was probably first formed, set off an unbelievable amount of CO2 and methane into the sky, and then magma kept coming.

Speaker: Flooding out for over a million years to cover this massive, massive area of land. Again, if we talk about the prior extinction, which is linked to an area in China that is around 500 kilometers in diameter, this is an equivalent ah thing, these two-mile-deep piles of magma covering the entire continental United States.

Speaker: Wow. that's It's so absurd. Mm-hmm. It's pretty much incomprehensible. You know, you try to picture it, it's... it's yeah Yeah, and that's just staying there for so long. It's theorized that if humanity burned all fossil fuels that we that we are aware of and get our hands on, we would burn 5,000 gigatons of carbon.

Speaker: And we're aware of the most catastrophic scenarios laid out for us in the worst cases of climate change. The estimates of how much carbon was burned during this event are double that, some even going ludicrously higher.

Speaker: So oceans that were once 25 degrees went up to 40 Celsius or 100 Fahrenheit. This turns the ocean into a hot tub.

Speaker: It cooks the proteins. The trilobites were put in a sous vide. um This event superheated the planet so much it basically sanitized it. Vegetation was so utterly annihilated that evidence of winding rivers vanished. And instead, the water just went in straight lines because there was no root system to ah like curve the rivers around.

Speaker: Wow. Huh. So it just huge yeah heat bomb. Yeah. So a bomb and then far and like this massive, massive superheating of the planet.

Speaker: Right. quite Quite literally boiling. Yes, you say boiling the proteins. Man, try to buy soup. Yeah. The explosion would have been catastrophic enough, but the heating brought on by putting this much CO2 in the atmosphere is beyond anything we've ever considered.

Speaker: Worse yet, the crap in that basin isn't you know wasn't like a high-octane gas. It was coal packed with salt, and the combined chemicals would probably have annihilated the ozone layer. Yeah.

Speaker: The evidence we have for this is something that fossilizes weirdly well is pollen. Oh, pollen doesn't destroy very well. And so it fossilizes beautifully. And the pollen from this period is mutated, indicating mass radiation across the planet.

Speaker: Oh, wow. In the oceans, the catastrophe was unbelievable. As we've discussed, mass amounts of CO2 acidifies the oceans as it forms carbonic acid in the atmosphere and water.

Speaker: The shelled critters don't want their shells to dissolve. There are multiple kill events in this apocalyptic extinction event, but likely the most serious was just this acid hot tub that the oceans turned into.

Speaker: Yep. There's a website you can find, 350.org, which talks about a big tipping point for acidification of our oceans, which is a point of catastrophe. And I want to capture in your mind the worst things you've heard about climate change. The gigatons of carbon dioxide that was released in this event would have increased the carbon dioxide parts per million to five times that 350 parts per million warning sign.

Speaker: The numbers come out of doing the math on how much CO2 went into everything and how hot it made the planet are so large they don't make sense. There's also further kill mechanisms that that go on as this domino effect.

Speaker: One of them is called anoxia, which is the lack of oxygen in the water. Mass decomposition, particularly of algae blooms, sucks up all the oxygen in the water and can lead to kill-offs. This is something we sometimes see as a phenomenon around the planet right now. Extreme heat also affects the water's ability to hold oxygen.

Speaker: So not only does it kill the critters, but the fossil record shows an abundance of nasty bacteria that releases the sulfur dioxide or manure gas. In low quantities, sulfur dioxide smells like shit.

Speaker: At over 700 parts per million, you die instantly. Oh my God, of the smell? No, i've of the chemicals. This is a serious worksite hazard if you work in fossil fuels.

Speaker: Yes. So the ocean could have been releasing inst instant death gas on top of everything else. So basically it's a vicious cycle and pretty much everything died. And then there's the hypercanes.

Speaker: Oh boy. Shall we scare it? It's when hurricanes are bigger than normal hurricane. Oh no, really? i don't know. That's exactly it. The Castro, on the ocean, it ruins global circulation, right? Yeah. Because we only see the weakening, the impacts of a weakening Gulf stream on our weather. It's what's causing this Arctic vortex nonsense.

Speaker: um And so Lee Kump at Penn state proposed a truly bonkers theory that I love. So with the ocean heating up so catastrophically, the circulation breaks.

Speaker: And so what he did is that he put the climate conditions of the end Permian, as we could best tell, into modern atmospheric research models. And according to what he figured out, this would, because we know that climate change produces hurricanes, climate change of this catastrophic scale and the oceans no longer circulating would produce hypercanes. So massive and destruction, they could pass over entire continents.

Speaker: Wow. So it goes inland and comes out the other side, sucking up the poison sulfur dioxide. So there's poisonous hypercanes destroying all life on land.

Speaker: I mean, that's amazing. I wouldn't want to live there, but it's pretty cool. It's so cool. I mean, i wouldn't want to live during that time, but yeah. so Hey, I'm going to get to. probably will. Yeah, never say never. Never say never, baby. We're on the way. Hypercanes.

Speaker: So how plausible are the hypercanes? Who knows? It's the result of putting Permian conditions into available models. But the end Permian extinction event was so devastating, it eliminated, at upward estimates, 96% of all species.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Particularly in the oceans. It is so significant, the other term for this is the great dying. Well... Name checks out.

Speaker: There is no event in our geological record that we know of, which challenges this for the worst thing to ever happen to life. It almost ended everything and it didn't even help the economy.

Speaker: i I mean, this is a paradoxical episode because on the one hand, it's like, you know, given all this, the fact that we're alive right now is Oh, it's astonishing.

Speaker: So we should not take that for granted. On the other hand, hey, we got hypercanes to look forward to. Yeah. 15 years. Anyway. So... fifteen years anyway so Some brave creatures survived because life did continue on.

Speaker: First of all, there was a lot of slime. And again, when things get bad, slime world, baby, blue, green algae, weird bacteria. I'm sure the jellyfish were just killing it, but jellyfish don't fossilize well. So we don't know.

Speaker: And this was also the end of the hundreds of millions of years of the trilobites. Rest in peace, little buddies. You did. so I was picturing jellyfish bones and I'm just ashamed. Sorry. You have repeat that. I was lost in my fantasy world.

Speaker: i ah This put the end to the hundreds of millions of years of the trilobites. Rest in peace, little buddies. ah No more trilobites.

Speaker: Unassuming little fellas did manage to pull through very, very slowly to evolve into the marine life of the Triassic and what came next. But what about on land? Obviously, a few cynodonts did survive, as well as psorapsids, who, of course, managed who managed to start to thrive in this extremely hot area where there was nothing to eat.

Speaker: Great time to be cold-blooded.

Speaker: However, one species did manage to really put the weight of the world on their shoulders and become the main character. Oh, sorry. Skip to the next slide, which is an image of the Great Dying.

Speaker: Forgot to tell you about that. That's very dramatic. Oh, well. The poor face shark. Yeah. He's upside down. Yeah. like, well, yeah, I guess there's a dead fish for you. Poor guy. Yeah, no, all the Ammonites, they're going. Yeah. Yeah. The Ammonites did survive until the end Cretaceous, but the Ammonites, you know, certainly took a whack.

Speaker: yeah Should have had a belly up trilobite or something. But let's go to the next one. This isn't a photograph. This isn't a photograph. It is paleo art. I've got to clarify just myself. Yes. And next slide, we'll see who lives.

Speaker: Oh, yay. Wow. i get and That's our winner. That's our winner. The beaver-sized Lystrosaurus. Well... That's got a single expression. Burrowing little root grubbers clustered at the poles with the other remaining terrestrial life, and they thrived when other species could barely cling on.

Speaker: I cannot stress how successful this creature was. Huh. At one point, they accounted for 75% of all vertebrates. Oh, wow. Really?

Speaker: you've never underestimated them, you know? No creature has ever taken over the world so successfully. Really? Yeah. um And we don't learn about this in school. That is kind of, ah maybe we just learned, maybe they do now. I don't know. i was in school a long time ago. So we they still weren't sure that it was the Chichalube asteroid when i was in school. Yeah, no, they were no they wouldn't have been, right? They still weren't sure. So I was like... it's where You know what? They're still not entirely sure.

Speaker: Well, that's true. There was an active and a hot debate about whether it's the asteroid or volcanism, or my favorite theory, which I think combines them, is that tectonic activity affects all volcanism. it's ah The actual mechanism is hard to tell, but the chitil of asteroid hitting the Earth...

Speaker: very likely triggered ah volcanism on the other side of the Earth so severe, it created a mass outgassing, not as severe, but similar to what we have here, where the result is this one-two punch of the asteroid followed by superheating from CO2.

Speaker: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I like to think of it as the asteroid hit the Earth so hard that the Earth just squirted out lava.

Speaker: It's like laughing when you have a mouthful of tea. ah Yeah. yeah just Just up and But this is yeah debate this is current debate. So the asteroid definitely hit ah hit the Earth, but there is very much. ah And it's one of these things where, well, now that we know that all this stuff was related to climate change, therefore, climate change has to be involved in the dinosaurs, too. And there's evidence that it was. So i ah the notion that it's both is plausible to me. but Oh, yeah.

Speaker: So these Lystrosaurus are just rocking out as the and the only things that are the recovery from the end Permian would genuinely take millions of years. One thing I want to stress is the end Permian extinction happened in an eye blink geologically.

Speaker: The fossil record vanishes over a course of around 60,000 years. Oh, wow. That is only talking in the course of millions of years for everything else. So yeah basically instantly when you think in terms of geology.

Speaker: huh And so the start of the Triassic period was a miserable one as Pangaea became truly and fully formed and was dry and miserable and hot. And there were just these ugly little bastards everywhere.

Speaker: However, rain did eventually, eventually get far enough in to wear down the massive Pangean mountains and lower the temperature to a habitable level. Lystrosaurus and its descendants had their time, but died out with the rains as some ah new predators showed up who could eat these delicious little guys. And the Cynodonts evolved into small scurrying mammals who kept their heads low for a while.

Speaker: Going forwards, the torch had been passed to the Cerobsids and then the Archosaurs, who then finally conquered the world as the dinosaurs, holding on for 240 million years. And we'll end on that next slide.

Speaker: Wow. And that concludes my story of the Permian and the Great Dying. Huh. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot more dramatic than I was expecting.

Speaker: I wanted to build up to the drama with the ah cute critters and the horrifying critters and then just everything dies. Yeah. I know. You get all attached and everything and then yeah they're just...

Speaker: Looking at these cute little guys and scary little guys, and all of a sudden there are no little guys. No little guys. Except for one little guy. The Lystrosaurus. Yeah.

Speaker: It's so funny. No, and it's it's fascinating too, because it is like... scary because again, we're in a time of man-made climate change, which yes, is real. So we can look ahead and look behind to what the future might hold. because This is the thing about how real climate change is. yeah yeah yeah We know climate change is real. We can see it in the rocks. whenever And it's a very common climate change denialist argument to say, will the Earth climate changes naturally over time? Yes, the mechanism of that is burning fossil fuels.

Speaker: It's just the volcanoes burn them instead of us. Yes. Right. And so what we're doing is digging up and burning all the fossil fuels so the volcanoes don't have to. It doesn't mean the volcanism stops, though.

Speaker: And as a result, and here's the scary thing, is that although the scale of the Great Dying is well beyond anything we can conceive of, the rapidity by which we are burning our fossil fuels is faster than it was during the Great Dying.

Speaker: So, ah and we know what will happen. We have seen it. We know the oceans acidify. We know that the ah circulation of the Earth's currents change. We know that it gets hotter. We know that the weather gets catastrophic.

Speaker: What happens day to day is impossible to predict, but the geological record is there. And people have been talking about this for over 100 years. it's like... um and it's And again, denial of climate change is, ah it's an op, and it is simply based around people who cannot get over the fact that fossil fuels are really good for energy, and they're just really fucking good for it.

Speaker: aha But we're now the the fossil fuel industries are getting left behind because it's all renewables now. That is the future. And it's going to be, again, I think it's somewhat too late, to a degree. like i I think with climate change yeah currently, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Speaker: I think it might, in the future, it might get better, but it's going worse first because we cannot stop what started already, you know? Even we stopped today. and ah like People like to compare this to the ozone layer thing and the chlorofluorocarbons, but the trick is is that Those were kind of a niche industrial product that wasn't used in literally everything. That wasn't the entire basis of the world economy. That's why yeah the ozone layer is success. And again, I'm eternally optimistic about how we can probably move off of ah fossil fuels.

Speaker: But the... What is going to happen, what is happening is obvious and what will happen is known because it's happened many times over.

Speaker: Every single extinction event in the Earth's history has a relationship, if not direct cause, to ah knocking the carbon silicate cycle out of balance. huh so Yeah, because talking about the, you know, during that time when all the the acid rain is causing dissolution of the seashells of sea creatures, that's happening now again. yeah, the ocean is being acidified. Yes, yeah, yeah very rapidly, yes. yeah Yeah, no, the reefs are the reefs are getting bleach and you can find ah ah shelled creatures with holes in the shells and jellyfish and are doing like gangbusters slime world, baby. And the oceans are the ones that are always the worst hit and ah also the first ones to go.

Speaker: And the problem is that, well, the oceans over there, i don't need to care about it. But, you know, ah life is all linked together and all that kind of thing. No, and we really don't want the Gulf Stream to stop because, yes, there will be massive, massive, like, heating and cooling, like you say. It could be another. we don't know what it'll trigger exactly. I'm no climatologist. But, yes, it's all a bad scene.

Speaker: Exactly. So, again, I wish we learned more about this in school, you know, because, yeah again, depending on what the knowledge was for me 40 years ago, you know. Well, and a lot of what I'm talking about was discovered and well was discovered in maybe the last years.

Speaker: Right. Yes. Okay. So the Permian creatures were well known at the time we were in school. But then the nature of the Great Dying, ah really linking it to volcanism, the Siberian traps, is has been a sort of a running thing where the most recent papers that truly say, yes, we're confident are like 2020 so. Right. Right.

Speaker: right But nonetheless, I do think this stuff should be common knowledge because it's cool as hell. I'm fascinated by it. And again, we we know how climate change works because we've seen it. It is like written into the bones of the planet.

Speaker: um yeah I am going to shout out my sources and we can end there. So ah first of all, The Ends of the World by Peter Brannan is my primary source. and an excellent book, as well as endless online resources to get my details right on the various critters described.

Speaker: And I will also shout out the YouTubers who really inspired me along this because ah my go to sleep videos for the past couple of years have been paleontology videos. And that's really kicked off my childhood obsession. But I went with Permian creatures instead of dinosaurs.

Speaker: So Gutsit Gibbon is an educator on human evolution and a anthrop a paleoanthropologist working out of Kenya. And her incredible, the deadliest pattern in nature was what first taught me about the carbon silicon cycle.

Speaker: Lindsay Nicole is a wildly entertaining zoologist who does a great history of the yeah Earth series. And my absolute favorite is Steve, a fossil hunter with his paleoanalysis channel and his ongoing total history of the Earth. I strongly recommend everyone check out.

Speaker: And with that, I'm done. There's my foray into science. Yay. That's fascinating. Thanks, Dave. That was great. Super interesting. Because, yes, that it's paleontology is one of those things where, again, you sort of associate, oh, dinosaurs and like and like liking that kind of thing is a you know for kids or whatever. But, no, it's super interesting. And still don't know our...

Speaker: We should all know more about our own terrifying and cute little guys. look Dinosaurs are also objectively amazing. They ruled the Earth for so, so long. They're the most successful animals to have ever lived. like everything There were more species of dinosaurs than there were mammals by a long shot.

Speaker: long shot and uh they got gigantic uh and they're endlessly fascinating but there's other other stuff too and the synapses of the permian are uh you know are little heroes that we need to shout out because that's who we come from yeah and i'm gonna keep calling them little cute furry guys because i could not remember for the life of me the name of any of those creatures oh god in here so i'm gonna have to re-listen to this and learn again Just remember this one name of my beloved, Cotillarencus, the guy with the little head.

Speaker: Cotillarencus. Yes, the that's yeah the football with the tiny head. Exactly. Okay, well, thank you so much for listening to The Wonder Camera. And ah we love all of you equally. Actually, no, we love each of you more than the next.

Speaker: Exactly. Yeah, we do. Of course we do. That amount. I'm not a mathematician either. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Speaker: Good episode, Dave. Thank you for listening to The Wonder Camera. Find us under The Wonder Camera on Blue Sky, YouTube, and Instagram.