Loading summary
Transcript203 lines
- [00:00]
Dr. Hone
The best dancers from across the globe are about to join me for the audition of a lifetime.
- [00:05]
Host
ABC Mondays. Do they have what it takes to compete and be the next Dancing with the Stars pro? I'm here to win.
- [00:12]
Dr. Hone
Nothing is going to stop me.
- [00:14]
Host
Our star judges will decide.
- [00:15]
Interviewer
This is what hunger looks like. It was 100% a wrong choice.
- [00:19]
Host
Robert Irwin hosts.
- [00:21]
Dr. Hone
The next era of ballroom starts right here on Dancing with the Stars.
- [00:24]
Interviewer
The next Pro.
- [00:26]
Host
All new Mondays, 8. 7 Central on ABC. Next day on Hulu.
- [00:31]
Interviewer
You basically have four pieces to a thousand jigsaw puzzle and you have to create the pieces yourself.
- [00:37]
Dr. Hone
We're probably missing some really weird and interesting branches of evolution and we will simply never know about them. The head is particularly big. The teeth are very unusual. So it is a strange animal. I think familiarity has led us to kind of forget about how weird it is.
- [00:56]
Interviewer
Just the skeleton alone. I think every natural instinct in your body would be fear. Thank you. Dr. Hone, paleontologist, author of How Fast Did T Rex Run? Which I have in my possession and I'm very excited about. Not just to get into the speed thing. One of the things in the book that, and I was briefly. Look, I will finish this book this week, but you talk a lot about the dinosaurs diversity. But before we get into that, just a little bit of background. What led you to this path because it's such a very interesting and there is a lot of conversation, I think more so than any other dinosaur. The T Rex, I think that is, at least in America, that is the dinosaur.
- [01:50]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, it is. And it's not just America. It's pretty much worldwide. And I get asked about, like, why is that so central to kind of everything? And I wish I knew the answer to that one, though. My best guess is at the time that it was found, it was actually quite an anomaly. So it's not like we didn't know dinosaurs got very big. You absolutely did. You know, we already had things like Diplodocus, brontosaurus and stuff like this. But it's a carnivore. The big carnivores that we knew of were things that are allosaurus size. Now, I wouldn't want to meet Allosaurus on a dark street.
- [02:23]
Interviewer
No, at all.
- [02:24]
Dr. Hone
You know, seven meters, you know, the
- [02:26]
Interviewer
head faster, hunted in packs. Yeah, not a, not, not a good day.
- [02:31]
Dr. Hone
Right. But, but T Rex is just so much superlatively bigger than that. You know, it really would be like going from, I don't know, a bobcat to a grizzly. Like, yeah, oh, they got that bit like, oh, this is a whole different ball game kind of thing. And so I think that really got it cemented into the public consciousness as this truly superlative animal. And again, it's kind of weird. Like, it does have the digital arms. The head is particularly big. The teeth are very unusual. So it is a strange animal. I think familiarity has led us to kind of forget about how weird it is.
- [03:07]
Interviewer
And also just the skeleton alone. I think every natural instinct in your body would be fear and.
- [03:15]
Dr. Hone
Yeah,
- [03:17]
Interviewer
it's just one of the things that you're also like, I'm glad it's not here anymore. Well, we would never would have. We never would have came out of bushes had they still. We would have still lived in burrows.
- [03:29]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. Or still up the trees. Yeah.
- [03:30]
Interviewer
Because it would not have been. And it had to be a really tall tree. So what now? I had a fascination. I remember my first dinosaur book, and it was Brontosaurus, and it was the Allosaurus, and they looked very different. You know, the tails were on the ground. They're very, you know, Triceratops. And Allosaurus was the biggest, like, the battle in the book, you know, and then you had the Claymation movies and stuff. But I. It was a life. It's always been something that I've always been fascinated with. And there was kind of a moment where it kind of dropped off for a while, and I think the. The Jurassic park movies really brought it. But it was always something that now that I have kids and stuff, it's one of the most fun things to talk to them about because I see their imagination and, you know, and, you know, to a point where they want to go on. On digs now and they want to, like. They want to discover their own dinosaur. And it's kind of. But it's always been a lifelong thing where it never really left for me. What was it? Something where you. From the time you. Was it as a kid, it was a fascination, a love that you turned into this magnificent career.
- [04:34]
Dr. Hone
I mean, the answer is basically yes and no in that I was always fascinated by animals, and that was the only thing I was ever interested in. So dinosaurs were absolutely a part of that. But I liked lions and ants and spiders.
- [04:47]
Interviewer
Oh, yeah, I'm with you.
- [04:48]
Dr. Hone
Dogfish. And just. Just everything. So I did a zoology degree. That was my undergraduate degree. Then I did a master's on taxonomy. So that's like how we name and classify things. And then I was hunting around for a doctorate, and one came up on pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, which is actually where I started, and I went, oh, that looks interesting. I'll do that. And then suddenly you've got a PhD and you're a paleontologist. And it was largely by accident. I, I was applying for stuff on fish behavior and biomechanics and all kinds of other projects. And if I'd been offered one of those, I might have had a very different career. So dinosaurs were always interesting to me and obviously still are, but it was never the, the only thing.
- [05:33]
Interviewer
It was just kind of chased. Yeah, a door opened and it's like life. I was a zoology, ironically, I was a zoology major myself, but I was playing football at a high level and the labs and practice became conflicting and I had some problems with, with the dissections. I'll be honest with you, I had a really hard time because I'm like, I just want to observe and record, you know, I just want to sit in a tree, watch hyenas hunt, see how they, you know, their behaviors are, stuff like that. And I have, to this day, I have giant fish tanks, I breed cichlids for fun, and I have reptiles. So I've always kind of been into it myself. It's just my path took another career. And then when they gave me a podcast, they were like, hey, we have these political. And I was like, no, I don't really want to do that. I would like to talk to scientists. I would like to get back to, to my roots because I think there's not enough eyes on some really incredible things going on. And instead of everyone complaining about politics, which is a never ending thing, let's have fun discussions like, did it run as fast as a cheetah or was it lumbering? Was it lumbering and slow? Was gravity a problem? You know, his, his prey animals weren't particularly fast, but they're heavily armored or super large. So that to me seems like a much more fun conversation. And especially when you're with your book, how fast did T. Rex run? It has been a contention of a lot of arguments, you know. Yeah. And I think probably one of the things that helps us with this is I think now it is accepted across the board that birds are dinosaurs. And so when you look at a bird and their movement, even like an ostrich, again, nowhere near Kasai, but bone density, they're not as thick, they're hollow. So in theory, again, you're the expert. I thought that they could move with fairly decent speed for considering their prey animals because it is an arms race. You can't be slow and have Great teeth. You got to be able to move.
- [07:36]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, so. So I think that's where people get confused because, yeah, some of these big predators and Tyrannosaurus is like the largest terrestrial carnivore ever that we know of. Certainly it's not that fast. It's probably faster than me, which is more than fast enough to be worried about. But yeah, you've got to remember that it's. It's probably largely hunting animals that weigh several tons as well and they're not that fast. You need to be faster than your prey. If you're. Yeah. If you're a cheater and you're, you
- [08:07]
Interviewer
know, catch an antelope. The antelope runs 56. You need to run 60. Exactly.
- [08:11]
Dr. Hone
Right, right, exactly. But if they can only hit 20 miles an hour and you run 22.
- [08:17]
Interviewer
Yeah, exactly.
- [08:18]
Dr. Hone
Exactly. So, yeah, there's all kinds of. I should point out just in case anyone goes to buy the book off your. Thanks for the PR but like, how fast did T Rex run? Makes up I think about two and a half pages. It is not the.
- [08:31]
Interviewer
No, no. This is the title that the publishers gave me. What I was most. When I hopped into this. You cover everything across the board. And one of the things I was just fascinated with was you talked about the diversity of bodies and how everything at. Because, you know, some dinosaurs made full well use of their front arms that walked upright. You know, raptors different and Whereas the T. Rex just kind of left alone and you. I think you have a drawing skeleton of a dinosaur morph in that you're showing the development and if. And animal behavior. Which I am fascinated because you don't have a case study other than birds to talk about behavior of like a T. Rex or certain species of dinosaurs. I like to. And I hope this is. It's like an encyclopedia of that world that you're breaking down for us.
- [09:25]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. So with that book, my attempt, my intention was always to write a book about the stuff we don't know at the margin.
- [09:33]
Interviewer
Each chapter is fascinating.
- [09:34]
Dr. Hone
Every new book. This is an insult to my colleagues and fellow writers. It's always kind of like, what have we found out in the last five years? What have we found out last year? What's the biggest new discovery? And everyone's writing that and there's a good reason to. But I was like, I'm more interested in talking about the stuff we don't know because often that in itself is inherently interesting. So like. Yeah, you talked about the diversity. So one. One I love coming back to is Volcanic islands. If you want weird animals, they tend to live on isolated island.
- [10:04]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [10:05]
Dr. Hone
New Zealand, the Galapagos. Yeah. Mauritius, this. Right. Japan, Places like this. Now, the problem with volcanic islands is they basically don't form fossils. So all the places where the weirdest dinosaurs probably evolved, we basically will never find them.
- [10:23]
Interviewer
Right.
- [10:23]
Dr. Hone
And, okay, on the one hand, that means it's. I was trying to avoid getting into, like, raw speculation of, well, what might that look like? And you end up going down, like the kind of King Kong route of.
- [10:32]
Interviewer
Right.
- [10:33]
Dr. Hone
You know, speculative evolution, we call it, you know, kind of designing new animals and stuff. But I really want to emphasize the point that for all that we have found, obviously there's hundreds, quite possibly tens of thousands of species. We haven't. But also we're probably missing some really weird and interesting branches of evolution, and we'll. We will simply never know about them. And I think that's just an interesting idea that I don't think anyone has really talked about before.
- [11:02]
Interviewer
Also, when you think, for example, take Australia, for example, fossils that you would find there, and they're difficult, I would argue that those same fossils and many more would be in Antarctica because they were connected. And with Antarctica and with the patterns of the Earth changing a little bit and the weather warming up in certain places getting cold in the other, there might be some amazing discoveries if we're able to get out there and do some research. I mean, but it's a little hard and negative 30 or negative 60, you know, but there's got to be with technology and scans and stuff, I would imagine. And that land has been untouched during our existence. There would be some amazing discoveries out there and probably some new ones.
- [11:49]
Dr. Hone
So there. There will absolutely. We know there's stuff out there. We. We have dug up some bits. So there absolutely will be plenty of dinosaurs. There will be plenty of new species. My guess is they won't be that strange because Antarctica is really well separated now. But at the time, even at the very end of the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs were, you know, and finished and were off, it was still pretty close to Australia. Until pretty recently, it had been pretty close to South America. And so it wasn't that isolated. And so that doesn't give you that isolation that allows these weird lineages to evolve. Because what really kicks in is when something reaches a place first, you know,
- [12:32]
Interviewer
like what we see nowadays in the Galapagos with iguanas.
- [12:35]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [12:37]
Interviewer
Raft ended up there, ended up morphing into two different species that are completely
- [12:41]
Dr. Hone
divorced, but one of which is really Aberrant because it's marine.
- [12:45]
Interviewer
It makes zero sense. Yes. And a reptile eating in cold ocean
- [12:49]
Dr. Hone
every day in freezing water. Yeah, I know it's. It's really. It's right that that's what you want. Or things like cassowaries, giant flightless birds or the dodo. Giant flightless pigeon or giant lemurs in Madagascar and things like this. Yeah. You want smaller places. So not continent sized ones.
- [13:07]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [13:07]
Dr. Hone
But also you want them to be more isolated. So yeah, Antarctica is definitely full of weird stuff we haven't found. I suspect it's nothing like as weird as the kind of more ultrasound that I'm talking about.
- [13:19]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. Subspecies maybe of. Well, cause just recently I was reading they had got it wrong with the. It was a medium sized skeletal remains of what they assumed was juvenile T. Rex. Turns out an entirely different species.
- [13:34]
Dr. Hone
Nanotyrosis. I mean I've been part of that discussion for 10 or 12 years now.
- [13:40]
Interviewer
Was there always. Was there always a suspicion? Because there was even outlandish things that were the T. Rexes. I think the weirdest one is that the adults didn't hunt, the juveniles did and they scavenged. And I never. That never sat well with me.
- [13:54]
Dr. Hone
No. So that, that was an idea of Phil Curry's who's a phenomenal paleontologist and probably the most important tyrannosaur researcher we've had in the last 40, 50 years. But yes, as a behaviorist, which is my speciality, I don't buy that.
- [14:10]
Interviewer
Well, it'd be very hard to succeed as an. You have to wait for your eggs to hatch to eat it. Just.
- [14:15]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, right. And juvenile mortality is so high you have one bat bad year and suddenly everyone starts go extinct. Yeah.
- [14:22]
Interviewer
Yeah. So that's a lot of holes in that one.
- [14:24]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. It didn't sound plausible, but yeah, with the nanotyrano stuff like. That's an idea from. I think it's like 86, 88. It is an old idea and it has come kind of in and out of fashion with varying bits of information and hypotheses and the way we look at things like growth and development and how you tell adults from juveniles and stuff like this. And as I said, I've published several papers with various colleagues on the this thing is just a juvenile T. Rex side. But if you actually look at those papers because I think some of this got lost in the kerfuffle of the kind of, you know, resurrection of Nanot like it was always. Well look, this is the best guess we've got gaps in our data, if we find this, it will really tell us one way or the other. We're not certain how this works. I mean, I think it's notable that, like, one of the authors on a couple of those papers is a guy called James Napoli. James is one of the two authors on the paper that has resurrected nanotyranus. So it's the classic science thing of this is the best evidence we have, and now we've got new evidence, and it changed our opinion because it's beautiful the other way.
- [15:34]
Interviewer
Isn't that what makes science so great? You think, you know, and new information comes and science for a while, there should never be absolutism because everything is a hypothesis and a theory, our best guess. And it takes a. And I think that only shows greater knowledge, greater expertise to be like, we thought it was this. And now from the information we had, we came to this decision. New information has come to light. So now we see this. Like, the Spinosaurus is another example of that. The body morph has changed, you know, you know, Jurassic Parks and everybody like, oh, this was bigger than T. Rex and it could eat a T. Rex, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we're now realizing was more like a giant blue heron. And it was, you know, and there's been all kinds of theories that it was doing the jaw, where it set the jaw in the water. Like, we. And we get a good reference that now spinosaurus is a lot easier, I think, in terms of trying to estimate behavior, because it was. We have descendants that still hunt in that man or live in those environments, albeit completely different. But long neck, serrated teeth. Maybe it was ambush hunter in the water, you know, and again, it's prey wasn't as fast as the mammalians are. So sometimes I think we get it in our head a little bit, you know, because you want fantasy and stuff. But Jurassic park, at least the movie again, did the thing where first it was this giant thing, and the next one it hunted in packs and swam, was more aquatic, looked like it was maybe less bipedal and used as front. So. But that, to me, is exciting. And that's where it opens up this summer.
- [17:17]
Host
Prime video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Seattle packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack. Elle proves one law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle a New original series only on prime video. Watch now.
- [17:45]
Interviewer
So many cool conversations.
- [17:48]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, it's. I guess it's just the inevitability of data, particularly with paleontology because of course. And dinosaurs are actually particularly kind of good or indeed bad argument for a case for that because the data is often really sparse. You know, you look at things like fossil fish or plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, the marine reptiles. You know, we have so many more fossils of them because they're in the sea, so they're more likely to be buried. And so a lot of the dinosaur fossil record, I mean this is the nano tyrannos problem. We were basically running off four or five bits of skeletons which may or may not have comprised some. I mean even with the nanotrans resurrection, some of the stuff which we said was juvenile T Rex is probably still juvenile T Rex, just some of it isn't. So you can see how this, you
- [18:34]
Interviewer
know, you basically have four pieces to a thousand jigsaw puzzle and you have to create the pieces yourself.
- [18:42]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, but I think the. A kind of good analogy in following on from that is. But we've got an idea of what the box looks like. So yeah, you know, if you hand me a couple of bits of a mammal skeleton, I may not know exactly what it looks like, but it will be very obvious if it's a cat or a bear or a deer or a camel or anything else. And I know how big it is and I'll probably know if it's a juvenile or an adult because of the bone surface texture which then tells me probably how big it could get. And so, you know, yeah, you, you don't need a whole cat. You know, if I give you the front end of a lion skull, it's pretty obvious that it's a massive predator and it's a cat because it's got a short face. So you know quite a lot about it instantly. It's when you start getting into real nuances like this of well, how easily can you tell apart a line from a tiger, from a leopard, from a jaguar smashed up and you've only got a third of a skeleton. That's then it starts.
- [19:38]
Interviewer
That's a. That's a whole different then, then you got to do a little bit of. Because another argument. I have been a long time on the idea that most dinosaurs were feathered and especially when I always looked at the. And again, I'm by no means expert, just a novice guy who looks at birds and look, I won a lot of watch A lot of animals and behaviors and stuff. Sir David Attenborough is. He's my childhood, my adulthood. You know, he just turned 100 strong. I just finished watching his documentary on the descendants of. Of Ubu with the silverback gorillas and how the behavior. We've learned. So we've learned so much to where the point where we thought we know how things were and certain family groups work differently. Some silverbacks work together, some don't. So we're. So there's all these. And he just keeps going and going. I always thought with the smaller appendages that they were covered in feathers. That they were. And because you had to trade something off to have a. To have that bite power, you know, and it's just in the strong big legs and I think. And I recently saw a thing where they had one sitting down looking like a pigeon. They had a T. Rex. It was a drawing of a scientific rendition of what they thought it would look like with feathers. And it was like in resting where it just looked like a giant puffball like a pigeon. You know, when a bird's sleeping, they kind of puff up. And I was like, that would. That makes sense to me that there's. Because for such a long time we, I think we. Because if mammals, if you didn't go into fur, they would look very different. If you just colored in the muscles, they would all. They would look like, you know, the early, early. I always forget the name, but he was, he was the first. The Sucrose. I think it was Sucrose, the first like dominant male predator. He was rep. More reptile than dinosaur. And he, again, they had it more. You just kind of see the skin and the muscle and. And it just always felt incomplete to me.
- [21:39]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. So I think there's an increasingly good case that the vast majority of the theropods were feathered. So the theropods are the carnivorous dinosaurs. Yes, plenty of them were herbivores. But you've had Allosaurus, Spinosaurus, T. Rex, Velociraptor, Megalosaurus. You know, there's. I was going to say Gorosaurus. Hundreds, hundreds of species. Yeah, you can go on.
- [22:00]
Interviewer
Probably 100 more we haven't found yet.
- [22:02]
Dr. Hone
Oh yeah, again, probably thousands. But. But yeah, we already knew that a very large number of them were feathered because we literally have fossils with feathers on them and they're very, very close to birds. So that's kind of nailed on. It's the earlier half of that family tree is where it's been much less certain, partly because we just don't have the fossils that could even preserve soft tissue like skin or feathers. So we just have nothing or we have the odd patch of scales or scale like tissue. I should be more specific. And so it's just a kind of absence of evidence problem. So you don't really know. But in the last five or six years there's been a series of studies looking at where dinosaurs were appearing in the earliest part of the Triassic. Sorry, the, it's the late Triassic. It's the earliest part of dinosaur evolution. And interestingly, they're turning up in environments that were relatively cold where, where other reptiles weren't doing so well. And that's a pretty clear indicator that they were A more thermally active just generally. But B, probably had some kind of insulation to keep that heat in and therefore points to feathers being a very early appearance and quite probably pre dinosaur. In other words, feathers evolved before dinosaurs did. So I mentioned pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that everyone calls pterodactyls. They're not pterodactyls, don't call them pterodactyls, but pterosaurs. Pterosaurs had something very similar to feathers on them. We absolutely know that because we have the fossils. So. And pterosaurs are very close relatives of dinosaurs.
- [23:39]
Interviewer
Yeah, because they're reptiles like the mesosaurs. They are, they are the, the, the highest point and all. Because I always thought with mass extinctions and Earth, you know, has this, has this thing about life. We've had what, five mass extinctions?
- [23:53]
Dr. Hone
Yes, and dozens of others. It's, it's. Yes, there's the five big ones, but there's many, many more.
- [23:59]
Interviewer
Yeah, I, I would think it was the fact the ones that were able to survive during that mass extinction, I think feathers were the, the signing difference because of the insulation with the exchange heat, cold, lack of sun, all the things that you can go with a meteorite, meteor of that size hitting the Earth. I think it would be the ones who were able one to fly away would help and be able to be insulated with those cold nights and stuff with extreme temperatures. I. Would you give credence to that? Do you think that, that.
- [24:32]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:33]
Interviewer
Feather could have been the difference between making it and not making it, given that the, the level of that extinction?
- [24:41]
Dr. Hone
Broadly, yes. Though of course, you know, the story is always more complicated than that. For example, and amphibians are really vulnerable to extinctions. They, they're often very intolerant of different temperatures. They're very intolerant of any toxicity in water and stuff like this. They dry out very easily because of their skin. And the amphibians largely went through the end Cretaceous extinction. Not too badly.
- [25:05]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [25:06]
Dr. Hone
Which is weird. And then on the other hand, yes, birds survived. But it's not like all the lineages of birds just waltzed over the extinction barrier and carried on quite happily. Birds took a massive hit. Probably only about four lineages of about 12 survived that we know of. So it's not like birds were absolutely fine. They. They just kind of brush. Yeah. The populations went down, but they kind of brushed it off. They took an absolute hammering. And so they largely scraped through rather than walked through.
- [25:37]
Interviewer
Right.
- [25:37]
Dr. Hone
And then of course, the interesting thing is, well, why did some of the smallest dinosaurs not make it? Because they're also small and they're also feathered and have similar metabolism. And actually the birds that made it over weren't particularly good flyers. They were more like grouse and quail and chicken, like pheasants. So very are very often terrestrial ground birds. It's not that they couldn't fly, but they're not like ducks or albatross, which up and go 500 or 1,000 miles, you know, in a couple of days. So again, there's lots of dinosaurs that kind of fit that category. In fact, again, I have a chapter in the book on this. I am very happy with the idea that plenty of dinosaurs survived the initial extinction and were around for hundreds of thousands, potentially a few million years, but they'd be clinging populations in the same way that. Yeah.
- [26:27]
Interviewer
And with the opening and mammals kind of getting their shot, it could have just been a case of national selection.
- [26:33]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [26:34]
Interviewer
In the west coast, we grew up, when I was a kid, we had red squirrels everywhere.
- [26:38]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [26:38]
Interviewer
And the gray squirrel came along and it just kind of moved them out. And now you just don't see. I was in Yosemite a couple weeks ago with my family and, you know, they had the ground squirrels and they have the gray squirrels. And I told my daughter when I was young and I used to go to Yosemite, it was red squirrels. And you hardly ever saw a gray squirrel. And then it was just. And that's just a simple example of just kind of. They're both mammals, they both squirrels. Why is one thriving and the other one not?
- [27:09]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. Well, so it could be that the other possibility, which I think is probably a bigger explanation, is also we just haven't found them. So if you think about. Right. You know, this almost like we see in fiction, like this Lost Valley or this Lost island and the dinosaurs are absolutely fine there. Maybe they knock around for 2 or 3 million years, but the odds that we have access, you know, a fossils formed there because there was the right kind of deposition and the right kind of environment, and then be 60 million years later we have access to that bit of rock and it hasn't, it's not at the bottom of the ocean or it's not under the Amazon rainforest, or you haven't built a city on top of it. I always love saying both Paris and London are built on fossiliferous layers and we have dug up very little from them because we've built giant metropolitan.
- [27:57]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's a little hard to say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna take the muse down because we got a pretty good. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:05]
Dr. Hone
So that, that's an issue, you know, when, when you actually look at the dinosaurs. We have, yes, we have a ludicrous number, but the actual amount of rock which is exposed anywhere on the planet for any given time of, you know, the last 100 million years, of course you can go back as far as you want is basically minuscule and therefore right for something that may have only survived in a pocket of South America and a pocket of Australia and a pocket of Russia and a pocket of Africa. Have we got those rocks and were they the right kind of rocks at the right time? No, I mean, the odds are vanishingly small. So it's perfect. And again, islands, islands are great for things. You know, Lima's on Madagascar, you know, marsupials in Australasia, you know, islands are great for things. Surviving that shouldn't, shouldn't.
- [28:56]
Interviewer
That wouldn't have made it.
- [28:57]
Dr. Hone
They're cut off and nothing else can get, you know, if they can survive the initial environment, environmental disaster, they're not then going to run into all these other things like new advanced mammals or new birds or whatever it may be. So you absolutely run into those kinds of issues. So, yeah, I, I am very confident that lots of dinosaurs initially survived the mass extinction potentially for quite a long time. And I don't think that's a, actually a particularly weird or controversial position.
- [29:23]
Interviewer
No, I don't either. I mean, I see a living example of that. We'll never know, which is when I'm home, whenever I leave my house early in the morning at the airport, I'm reminded all the time of the neighborhood possum crossing the street. And I watch him walk and I'm like, this is the most unathletic animal. You know, he's a marsupial. He's seen it all. Now, how is it that he made it but a more athletic, moving marsupial that probably could have competed didn't? So it's, it's. It's a. It's literally like a mother Nature is like a lottery. You just. It doesn't make sense. Certain things made it that never should have. I didn't. How did a possum ever get away from it? You know, most likely they probably didn't even notice them, you know, except when they were missing eggs. But it's just. It's an interesting thing to wear. To your, to your point. There's so much with so little. Some just trying to connect the dots is an entire career. So when you do get a new discovery, it is exciting. It is exciting that scientists come together and saying, yep, we believe the most were feathered or this that. And I think you're the first paleontologist I've heard say out loud that a lot of species probably held on for a little while longer.
- [30:47]
Dr. Hone
And, yeah, I said in one interview when the book first came out, it's like I. I felt I was writing something that felt like a pub conversation or bar conversation with my colleagues. Like, not, not in. This is like some secret world, but like, this is the kind of stuff we talk about.
- [31:04]
Interviewer
You just talking.
- [31:05]
Dr. Hone
We know we've got no evidence for it, but at the same time, these are such fundamentals to how we know evolution works that they're kind of an inevitability. But then no one's ever discussed them.
- [31:16]
Interviewer
So I thought I call it locker room talk.
- [31:17]
Dr. Hone
Put it down.
- [31:19]
Interviewer
You get a bunch of paleontologists together. If you're having a pint, I would think. And you're talking about shop. Your shop is awesome. When I was wrestling, we're talking about guys who couldn't work good. You know what I'm saying? Like in wrestling, stuff that other people wouldn't discuss, you know, and then when you. And then I'll see a TV show where guys are telling stuff behind the trade, and I'm like, why. Why are you giving away the secrets? You know, the difference is, is that your secrets also tell us a lot about our. The history of this planet, our own ancestral line, and a better understanding of how Mother Nature works. It can help with. With maintaining environments. I mean, because we're down to what, 30% of the. Of the planet are actually wild still.
- [32:08]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, probably less than that.
- [32:09]
Interviewer
Less than that, Yeah. I think David Attenborough's special came out. What what, four or five? Four or five years ago it was 30. So there are lessons in that and, and you learn and also I think it gives you an appreciation for how fragile life is on this planet to where something is awesome and is the perfect predator. When you look at something like T. Rex, if something like that couldn't make it, well, I mean give us all a check that we're all on borrowed time so maybe act accordingly with our environment.
- [32:44]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, I mean, I mean that is the simplest lesson of mass extinction events is there's been different causes. Mass volcanism, mass methane release bolide, impact from the KT extinction that took the dinosaurs out. But ultimately what they all come down to is climate change. Things got too hot or too cold or too cold, then too hot too quickly and that's things can't adapt. When things can't adapt, they die. And when one thing dies there's often this massive knock on effect. Trophic cascade. Yeah, exactly. So you, you think of, you know, this moth goes extinct and you think ah, it's just a moth. But it's the one moth that pollinates that particular tree, produces all the nuts that all the squirrels eat, that the hawks eat the squirrels.
- [33:28]
Interviewer
As you're seeing that in the rainforest with certain species are gone and the certain pitchers, plants no longer have that hummingbird or they no longer have that particular mammal.
- [33:38]
Dr. Hone
You know, so you lose, you lose one. And the thing is you often don't notice because if a tree lives for 200 years, that tree isn't going anywhere. You still see it every year, you still see it every generation. Oh, we still got those trees but they're not producing the new ones and eventually they're going to go.
- [33:55]
Interviewer
And Borneo has experienced that with the, with the orangutan. Whereas orangutan as, as Sir David, I've been trying to get that. I like the way you guys say orangutan better than we do. Orangutan is disrespectful. The, the wrongtong. I'm like, I'm in. I've been practicing with my kids. It just, it sounds classier, you know, but like they're experiencing the fact with, with he just moving around the trees, eating off different diets, spreading seeds everywhere. Yeah, they were the gardeners of the forest. And also slow down certain species from overpopulating. Of course now with palm trees it's all out the window anyways because the palm oil is more important than the environment. So as mighty as these as we, I think our own arrogance sometimes It'll probably be our downfall is we think we can change and fix everything or change a political party and spend a bunch of money to save polar bears and somehow that's going to be. Which, by the way, their population's doing pretty well. But we have these doomsday stuff and we have this. Mankind is. We're above it all, you know, we'll just live underground. I don't think it's that simple. I think when your number's up, it's up, you know.
- [35:07]
Dr. Hone
Well, we'll find out in another century.
- [35:10]
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, which is kind of
- [35:12]
Dr. Hone
the problem in itself, really.
- [35:13]
Interviewer
Like, people who build houses on beaches are furious that hurricanes are. Mother Nature is not like, hey, hey, hey, hey, they just built some nice houses here. So let's. Let's push the. Let's change the current this way, you know, so it's always. Because I live in the United States, we're very spoiled sometimes with some of our complaints, you know, a mudslide. And they're like, this is ridiculous. I'm like, well, don't build a house on a hill. You know, you dammed up the rivers, you dammed up all the things and it's. There's no, there's nothing. And you wonder why you have erosion in your mountains, you know, and that isn't necessarily pollution. That's just you're moving around and obviously pollution worldwide. And how we treat our oceans is terrible across the board. But we're starting to see a lot of ramifications. Like a giant to example, we've overfished so much, so now we have a giant squid explosion in population. And jellyfish in Japan, they're massive sizes. And of course, Japan's theory is, well, let's just eat these for a while, you know, it's like. But the rest of us, we're like, no, it's pretty much. It's changing. And when they're massive breeding these. And now the beaches in Australia are more dangerous than ever because they're little tiny offspring, the boxes, they're hanging out in the shallow water. So there is a ripple effect and we all have to kind of be. We kind of have to police ourselves. When I was a kid, it was save the whales and recycle, and people really got behind that. And I don't think if we had that type of movement, we wouldn't have a lot of the whale populations back to where they are today.
- [36:47]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, definitely. They've made a massive recovery. So, yeah, a lot of these things are reversible. A lot of these things are possible. I mean we're getting well outside of my territory.
- [36:56]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely.
- [36:57]
Dr. Hone
I do teach a couple of classes on this. But yeah, I think the situation is as bad if not worse than most people think. But, but actually a lot more of it is more repairable than most people think. So it's simultaneously worse and better if that makes sense.
- [37:15]
Interviewer
Yeah. So now I'm going to segue because we have to talk about it. We kind of briefly talk about it. Based off your findings, how fast would you estimate the T Rex was based on the information you have to this point?
- [37:31]
Dr. Hone
So there was a new paper out about their foot full pattern that came out about two weeks ago and I haven't read it yet.
- [37:41]
Interviewer
Breaking news. Okay.
- [37:42]
Host
Yeah.
- [37:43]
Dr. Hone
Doing all my end of semester exam grading at my university and I have not been keeping up with the, with the literature. These numbers go up and down. They are always estimates because of course, I mean one thing I love pointing out, grizzlies are the best example of this. A grizzly coming out of hibernation is a very different animal to a grizzly going into hibernation.
- [38:03]
Interviewer
Exactly.
- [38:03]
Dr. Hone
So one of the single biggest thing that determines speed is how heavy you are. And so mass estimates, you know they have like a 20% flexibility on them and a fat one is not moving as fast as a thin one. Right. But we're looking at the realm of 20, 20, maybe 25 miles an hour and so about 30, 35 kph.
- [38:25]
Interviewer
So they usain bolt in the race.
- [38:28]
Dr. Hone
It's getting close. Yeah. And that's for the big ones. So. And that's a full size 7 full grown adult female.
- [38:37]
Interviewer
Yeah. Because the females were bigger, were large.
- [38:40]
Dr. Hone
Well, we don't know that's been suggested. There's basically no data to back that up.
- [38:45]
Interviewer
Oh really? Because I was always. Yeah, you always see in the documentaries.
- [38:51]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, it's based on the. So this is true of a lot of.
- [38:54]
Interviewer
We see the eagles. Yes, yes, yes.
- [38:57]
Dr. Hone
There's lots of them where females are bigger because they live. And there's been. Yeah, and there's been various suggestions that theropods in general and tyrannosaurs in particular followed this pattern with this suggestion that there are two distinct size clusters of Tyrannosaurus and therefore probably sexes and therefore male and female and based on predatory birds, males, females would probably be bigger. There's loads and loads and loads of problems with this. There's loads of birds that don't follow that pattern.
- [39:25]
Interviewer
Yep.
- [39:27]
Dr. Hone
Probably part of the reason that female birds, female raptorial Birds are bigger, is less to do with egg laying and more to do with how they hunt. And that's probably quite different to a T Rex. So it's probably not directly relevant. The statistics of. Are there actually two clusters of adult T Rexes? Actually, when you run some better statistics with some more data, the answer is no. You can't really split them into two clusters. And even if you could, for T Rex in particular, though, it's true of quite a few other dinosaurs we're sampling across like 2 or 3 million years and a few thousand square miles.
- [40:02]
Interviewer
And if you look at elephants in
- [40:04]
Dr. Hone
Botswana, they're quite different to elephants in Kenya. They're the same species.
- [40:08]
Interviewer
I mean, even in Africa you take a forest elephant and you take the forest elephant next to a plains elephant.
- [40:15]
Dr. Hone
Savannah elephant. Yes.
- [40:16]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's a huge different. You know, this is the large and then the Asiatic, the. They didn't. It's not as hot. Their ears are smaller.
- [40:23]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [40:23]
Interviewer
You know, yeah.
- [40:25]
Dr. Hone
Have you got different populations? Have you got different species? Have they just changed over time? Because. Yeah, half a million years ago it was probably quite different and the environment was different, so the animals were different. So just lumping all these things together and calling it like the answer is really a good way of. Of dealing with this. There's a lovely study I found and I can. L me can't remember, I think the scientist was called King. It's from like the 90s and he did this brilliant summary of everything we know about sexual dimorphism. So that's male and female differences, particularly body size in reptiles in America. And there's this great big study and I think it doesn't matter exactly which one, but I think it was pond turtles. And on the Eastern Seaboard, mountain males are much bigger and on the Western seaboard females are much bigger.
- [41:16]
Interviewer
So it's environment more than is necessarily. Yeah, right.
- [41:20]
Dr. Hone
It's prob. Or. Or the, or the, or the reproductive system of how much competition there is between males or how much competition there is for nest space and things like this. But it just means that, yeah, if you then grabbed 50 random turtles, pond turtles from across the States and shoved them together, what would it tell you? Well, you, you'd probably equal out and you'd say there's no difference, but actually it just depends where you are. So, yeah, this is. It's, it's not a. It's not a great thing going back to where we were. So, yeah, a big T Rex in the realm of 20 miles an hour. The young ones probably rather faster, but we've done rather less work on that because actually we don't have very many good skeletons. Right. And it's.
- [42:02]
Interviewer
But it would, it would. I think it's a decent theory or hypothesis because they're prey items.
- [42:07]
Dr. Hone
Would be small, proportionally smaller. Yeah. And they're just lighter. I mean. So the fun thing about T Rex is it's very quick. Despite the fact that. And despite the title of the book, they can't actually run. So in a biomechanical sense, they never run because they never have both feet off the ground at the same time. You remember the old Olympic speed walking. You're walking if you permanently have one foot on the ground. So big T Rexes would be power walkers. But the thing is, when your legs are like three meters long, one step takes you a hell of a long way. So they're not running, but they're still very, very fast. And again, like, elephant. Elephants are kind of weird. Elephants are like. Yeah. So it's a common gallop.
- [42:51]
Interviewer
You wouldn't see an elephant running like a horse. No, it's kind of a. It's like a scurry, a trampoline scurry that could ruin your. Your, Your existence. But does it.
- [43:01]
Dr. Hone
But there's this wonderful paper my colleague John Hutchinson did on this where basically, if you work out the mechanics of how elephants move, again, running at speed, what they actually are is kind of like two bipeds stuck together. Like, they don't act as one set of four legs, they run as two sets of two legs, which is just the strangest thing.
- [43:22]
Interviewer
They're strange with, like, they're. The female's breasts are on her chest. Like, it's just. It's a. It's a. Again, evolution's crazy.
- [43:30]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. You know, there's a few things that have that. The other one is manatees, which are close relatives of elephants.
- [43:35]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [43:36]
Dr. Hone
So they have the nipple under the flipper. Yeah, it's. Yeah. If you give something 60 million years, it will come up with something
- [43:47]
Interviewer
every time you think. And I guess that's the. I can see how it could be frustrating, but at the same time, it's like, I think it's exciting because the more you unravel the onion, and this is a big effing onion. The more you unravel, I think the more it opens your mind, it challenges you. And I, I, I think especially for young people, because we have such a, you know, in this social media age where we're convinced that all they do is they sit on A keypad all day. And that's a small population. Like with, with your. As a professor and, and teacher, do you see, is there waiting lists for your class? Are you seeing an uprising of more interest, more young kid, Young people are like, hey, I want to, I want to get into this world. Is it, Is it.
- [44:34]
Dr. Hone
It's always been popular. You know, paleontology has always been a subject that people really want to get into because as you said, going back, like, there is barely a six year old on earth who doesn't think dinosaurs are cool. It's just the question is, at what point does that fade.
- [44:49]
Interviewer
Wear off? Yeah, fade off.
- [44:50]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, stop getting into it. So, you know, I still get emails every couple of weeks from I want to do what you do, or can I come to your uni or what? You know, for graduate students, you know, what are you offering for masters and you know, graduate research and stuff like this. So I don't think that's going away anytime soon. If anything, it's become a bit easier because of the digital age, because, you know, 30 years ago you may have seen an academic on TV or you may have seen them in the newspaper or read about them in the right kind of journal or newspaper or something like that, and you might have seen what museum they were at or university, and you might have written them a letter and if it got to them, they might have written back.
- [45:34]
Interviewer
Right?
- [45:34]
Dr. Hone
Whereas now people just tweet it all
- [45:37]
Interviewer
day, like, hey man, 22 miles an hour. Prove it. Right? Yeah, I beg to differ, but you
- [45:46]
Dr. Hone
have that accessibility and you have that ability to communicate. You know, I've done a couple of podcasts, my own podcast, and I've done a couple of things on like, how to become a paleontologist, because just like every week I'd get the email and it just got to the point, it's like I just put a disclaimer out the. The same answers to the same questions again and again. So I wrote a big blog post, stuck it on Reddit and did a podcast episode. And now it's just like, just go read this. Just go. Try not to be rude. But it's like, I can't do this every. Just, just go check it out.
- [46:17]
Interviewer
Do you get a chance to be in the field a lot still?
- [46:20]
Dr. Hone
I never did. I've never really been a field paleontologist. Not, not because I don't want to be, but just because the way my career's panned out, so I've never done, like, if you added it all together, it's probably like four or five months worth of work over, like 20 years. I simply haven't done very much. And that's not uncommon. I don't thing.
- [46:43]
Interviewer
No, because when you're. Yeah. Again, you also can get a lot more information, a lot more things done in your positions. And opposed to being in Montana for 10 years to be like, I just found a knuckle.
- [46:57]
Dr. Hone
But. Right. But it also depends where you are. So, like if you're in Montana or if you're in Alberta or some Brits of Brazil, you know, or I was in. I spent three years in China. And places we go in Inner Mongolia and Liaoning, like, it's.
- [47:11]
Host
You.
- [47:12]
Dr. Hone
You just walk past stuff all the time and go, well, that's not good enough. So we'll wait for something better. Which, if you found it in England, would be the best thing we'd found in 20 or 30 years. So. Yeah, being a British paleontologist in Britain with basically no research funding, I do not have the luxury of time that way.
- [47:33]
Interviewer
Yeah, funding is. Yeah. That goes extinct. It's hard to do a lot of things, but.
- [47:38]
Dr. Hone
But then, you know, if I was in Alberta and I've spent some time in the field in Alberta, but like, if I lived in Alberta, even if I had this exact same job with zero funding, it would be very easy to hook up one of my buddies,
- [47:50]
Interviewer
get a brush and a pen.
- [47:51]
Dr. Hone
It's like, you know, get the permit, get a tent, and I could just go for a few weeks.
- [47:56]
Interviewer
Right.
- [47:56]
Dr. Hone
That wouldn't actually be too tricky. But when that starts with a transatlantic flight.
- [48:01]
Interviewer
Exactly.
- [48:02]
Dr. Hone
You know, the cost just goes through the roof before you even even started. So. Yeah, I don't think it's that uncommon in the UK or in actually a lot of Europe that we don't dig very much because unless we are collaborating with the Chinese or the North Africans or the Brazilians or whatever on their stuff, we don't have that much to dig. It's not that it's not there. And I helped name a couple of British dinosaurs a few years ago. But yeah, they're not coming out of the ground in the way that. Yeah. You again.
- [48:31]
Interviewer
It's like, yeah, I'm in New York. No one's gonna let me turn up Times Square to dig up a stegosaurus, you know.
- [48:39]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [48:40]
Interviewer
Possibly could be there. There's.
- [48:41]
Dr. Hone
There's some stuff in New Jersey, so it's not too.
- [48:43]
Interviewer
Yeah, well, yeah, I interviewed a gentleman who discovered. I think it was Kenneth who. And they have a dig site in New Jersey that They've opened up to like the general public where you can go down there and. And dig around stuff.
- [48:55]
Dr. Hone
So.
- [48:55]
Interviewer
And it. It's very. That museum's very successful. Successful and very popular and kids love it. And. But again, it's not always. And when you think about it, especially Europe. Europe has been the. I mean, the United States is relatively young in terms of super civilization. And you know, you can England and go all the way back to the rest of the very beginning ideas of government, you know, so there's not a lot of. There's more. You might dig up more people from the Renaissance era than you actually get a shot at getting. Getting down there in a dinosaur. What. Before I let you go, what has been the most significant personally find of yours or discovery or theory? I'm sure there's a lot. But like, what would be the one that you would just be like, man, I hang my hat on this one.
- [49:45]
Dr. Hone
Probably all the stuff I've done on sexual selection and communication. I think I've now got really quite a suite of papers and done with various colleagues. But I've definitely driven it about. Yeah. How these things were probably.
- [50:01]
Interviewer
And you picked the top behavior. And that's one of the. You literally are a Rubik's Cube with. With an. Absolutely. The colors every time you line it up.
- [50:12]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, pretty much. But yeah, the. You know, the classic example of this is the Ceratopsian. So things like Triceratops and my favorite. And the guy I've done most of the work on, I think of Protoceratops and like, what are the frills for? You know, the big head shield at the back of the head.
- [50:28]
Interviewer
And it's not just a helmet.
- [50:31]
Dr. Hone
No, no, it's. It's, it's not. It's very much this open kind of fan. And going back to one of your questions, like how do you deal with this is basically in two different kind of ways is can you show what it definitely didn't do and then can you try and show what maybe it did do? So there'd been arguments like it's a heat exchanger. And it's like, well, animals in colder countries can have a bigger one than hot countries, so probably not. Oh, it's arm regrets. Predators. Well, actually, if you look at how strong the jaws were of their predators, the predators could bite through it. So it's not much of an armor if it can't stop a bite. So you can start looking at things like this.
- [51:08]
Interviewer
I always thought it was a mating display of colors or communication and things
- [51:13]
Dr. Hone
like that that's been an idea for a very long time. The question is, can you demonstrate it? And what I realized is that you can in terms of their growth. So if you think about this is one of these things, this is what I love about biology and even about behavior is people often know or understand things without realizing that they know and understand things. So you look at stuff like, you know, cows and sheep, and you'll see them in the field and they're like 2/3, 3/4. Great. Now that's a good size animal. But. And they've got tiny little horns. And then you come back three months or six months later and they're a bit bigger. But now, whoop. Those horns have grown really fast. And that is basically a really near universal pattern for development. Because when you're young, your simple interest is not being eaten.
- [52:01]
Interviewer
And so when he's young, there's no man right in his prime, giant.
- [52:07]
Dr. Hone
You, you just have to grow to be big enough, A, not to be eaten and B, to start competing. Once you can compete, then sex is the most important thing. And then that's when your effort shifts from growth to get bigger to growth for your horn or your shield.
- [52:24]
Interviewer
My magnificent shield. Look at the colors, how healthy I am. I'm whatever you want to breed with me.
- [52:30]
Dr. Hone
And we can do that from the fossils because for some of them, and Protoceratops was the key because we had everything from embryos to adults, you can see how big the frill is. And because we can cut into the bones and see at what point they get sexually mature because their bone texture changes. And lo and behold, the frill grows really, really, really slowly right up to the point that they sexually mature. And then the frill gets bigger really fast. And so that's 100% consistent with what we'd expect for sexual communication and display. And so we can knock down the competing hypotheses and we can bolster this hypothesis. And so, yeah, it's not my idea in the sense that this has been around for 100 years, but everyone just had it as an idea that's unprovable. And I think I largely came up with how we can test it.
- [53:16]
Interviewer
And then testing it, I would find it very hard to push up against that. Even, you know, humans, we don't necessarily have a display, but we have a pe when we, you know, there's a big difference between a 14 year old boy and an 18 year old boy and a 24 year old boy and a third, you know, there's just muscles are bigger, you're development, you're more, you know, you're at your peak and.
- [53:37]
Dr. Hone
But it's. And it's very similar for humans. Like we hit that growth, you hit that growth spurt. You know, the hormones kick in and you get bigger and you change pretty fast.
- [53:46]
Interviewer
Orangutans have one of the craziest where.
- [53:49]
Dr. Hone
Yeah.
- [53:50]
Interviewer
When they get the frill males. Yeah. I was absolutely. And the only thing I didn't know was like not all males get to that. It's a certain. Like the sub subordinates. It's like a select few when they get that and it's. They almost double in size, muscle everything. It's unbelievable. And so we see that in prime. And then when you see. Because I always tryceratops was always my favorite even as a grown man now I think I have every collection of Jurassic park one that comes out. And I always thought the big males would have big frills, you know. And you know, and I would think that's. You had to have something being that big and strong with those giant horns physically, just like with. We see with cape buffalo and stuff. Size is also a good way to determine we don't need to fight because fighting risks my survival. So only if you are at my level am I going to combat with you. And a lesser male will be like, nope, he's dominant. So I'm showing you you don't want none of this. I think that makes more sense especially with larger animals.
- [54:55]
Dr. Hone
Yeah. Because there if you need it. Because you might need it but half of it is proving that you don't need it. You don't need to go down that far because. Yeah, because that's. That's the thing is like it. And I've even written about this in the book like you actually a different book. But like, you know, ritualized combat. It's there for a reason. Like you see things like stags walk side by side and they size each other up. And I would argue you see it in humans.
- [55:20]
Interviewer
Oh yeah. Every time I'm in the gym, I walk by a guy smiling me. He'll puff up.
- [55:25]
Dr. Hone
Also they're trying to work out like, well, am I bigger than him? Because I'm not sure.
- [55:30]
Interviewer
And if I am, Jim, he's a real thing. How much you bench? Yeah. 400. How much you. You know. You know, like three. 3:20, you know, have a good day, man. You know, and.
- [55:40]
Dr. Hone
Right. But it's exactly that. So if it comes down to it. Yeah. You have to be able to back that up. But it's in everyone's interest. Because even if you are the much bigger guy with the much bigger horns, you can still get caught and that can still kill you. It might be less likely, but it's still not good. So selection will absolutely favor behaviors and patterns that avoid that if you can get away with it.
- [56:05]
Interviewer
One of the fish that I breed, it's a hybrid species called a flowerhorn. And the males get huge test. That's a big forehead and it's. They've been around for. The Japanese perfected them. And I started. Once I started, I was always in the front toes in the deep. The deep African cichlids. But I started branching off. It's a lot easier to breed the hybrids than it is the. Plus I don't have to worry about them getting pulled out of the wild. So you know, because. But what ends up happening is it was always considered very aggressive species. But I noticed that males with smaller humps can coexist in the tank. Fine. It's when you have two that are similar and it's always swim, swim. And I was for fun. I would. Instead of putting other fish, I put a mirror mirror in the tank and the fish would go from a small hump to a big hump to a massive hump. Then I take the mirror out and it would kind of go down again. And that's just basic playing around with. But it's instinctive. In pretty much all species you would always rather display than fight. And I think that is a brilliant discovery and I think it's amazing that you were. And again to put it together. And I'm actually looking at. Was it chapter eight, the mechanics and movements. I mean this is. I. I am excited. This is my weekend functions and features. It's almost like an owner's manual to the. The dinosaur. Like here's your first dinosaur. You need to read this. You cover everything, anatomy, life at different sizes, which we're kind of talking about habitat environments like you cover. This is great. And you know what? For those of you who need a picture here or two, there's some great photos of size compare. I always think that's important to show to exactly what we're look because I think even the TV screen and stuff doesn't give it justice. And when you're reading and thinking about. And again I'm looking at this diversity of diamonds. There's this. There's the picture I was looking for. I think this is phenomenal. When you just. It's like when you see this and this. Like you said, there's Thousands of other types that we don't even know about. And with the islands, we'll never get to know, but just being able to, to see how successful they were as a species is just awesome. Wouldn't it be, it'd be cool if we had this many different versions of human beings. Maybe we get along better, you know, but, but, and I'm just, I cannot wait to finish on that page. I'm four pages away from the picture. I'm at page 40 right now. So please, I'd like to have you come back. I want, once I get a little more research and maybe you get a chance to read some of those papers, to come back and talk about this. Because I guarantee you every few months there's going to be some new discoveries and you will be at the forefront of it. Thank you so much for today. And again, I'm assuming they can get this on Amazon and where all books are sold?
- [59:13]
Dr. Hone
Yeah, yeah. So the US Edition is Princeton University Press. So it's on Amazon Bookshelf, Barnes and Nobles, and paperback and audiobook and all the rest.
- [59:25]
Interviewer
It's in audio. I'm a reader. I'm a reader. But a lot of people, this is. If you got a long car ride, this would be good. Especially in America's. No one Wants to Fly Anymore.
- [59:35]
Dr. Hone
I, I, I have heard of people who've done exactly that. Like on their big road trip through, through Utah, going down and go to all the dinosaurs.
- [59:42]
Interviewer
Oh, yeah, this would be great. You got the kids and you want to get the kids off spongebob. Let them learn about some, them. No disrespect to spongebob. Great show, but educational. And they don't know they're learning something because they think it's cool. So again, Doc, thank you so much for coming on. Please come on.
- [59:57]
Dr. Hone
Again, thank you for having me.
- [59:58]
Interviewer
And keep with all your great success and discoveries. And I am so excited to, to finish How Fast Did T Rex Run? But if it's more than just how much he ran, you're going to learn how he worked, his environment worked and his cousins and those around him. There's some, here's some more cool pictures. I mean, this is awesome. This is just a great book. Congratulations, Doc.
- [60:18]
Dr. Hone
Thank you very much indeed.
- [60:19]
Interviewer
Thank you, sir.