Is it not obvious that plate tectonics are decisive for having either a hothouse or a icehouse global climate? Antarctica left the south pole so the hothouse mesozoic happened. Antarctica went back to the pole and our iceage began. Snow can not accumulate to large continental iceshields on the open sea. Thus way less albedo with no comtinent at the pole.

Great podcast.

love it

Question: do the crab-eating foxes ALSO eat krill?

So, t. rex ate bone like pocky?

I know this is years later. We love " the dinosaur lady" my preschool girls love it. Their favorite page is when they call the coprolites "poop".

"what has plate tectonics done for me?" ... spoken like someone who didn't have to fly across the Atlantic recently 😂😂😂

We use retroviruses and adenoviruses to genetically engineer animals so it makes sense that it could happen by accident too

The ending was fantastic 😂 really heartwarming. Love you guys. Can't stress enough how much I've learned from your podcasts.

"that's about as cute as eels get" i mean maybe, maybe, but ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sVku_ynBU-g.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3IQ2I-P8Ucw.html anyway great episode as usual guys and Shay!

Alternation of generations is my favorite thing in biology. Unrelated, I would love an episode about ferns or mosses

Siphuncle is short for simon and garfunkel

57:07 🎶When the jaws open wide and there's more jaws inside, that's a moray!🎶

51:45 "the ones the pokemon wigglet is based off of" 😂😂 you guys ought to play some more pokemon cause I think digglet is feeling some disrespect. Jk I laughed though love the podcast

1:01:17 Interesting to think of the Indian Ocean as the current successor to the Tethys Ocean. Does that make the Southern Ocean the next-next version of the Tethys Ocean?

Can you eel the love tonight... 🤭

Would like to say I found your guys podcast recently, and have been enjoying every single episode. Perfect mix of humor and science. Keep it up!!

There was a really cool study from 2016 that took an enhancer sequence for the Sonic Hedgehog gene from different organisms, then edited them into mouse embryos using CRISPR. These organisms included Coelacanths, humans, dolphins, platypuses and several snake species. The sequences from the non-snake species prompted normal limb development, showing the sequence is highly conserved. But interestingly, the DNA sequence of the enhancer from boas and pythons also resulted in normal limb development in mice (due to it being active, and prompting development of their vestigial spurs). However the other snake species resulted in deformed mice with no limbs (snake mice!). As a point of interest, the Sonic Hedgehog gene is famous in genetics for its regulatory enhancers being so far away from the gene (~1 million bp). It also has a cool name! It's kind of old now but might make a fun news piece www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2816%2931310-1 Edit: Perhaps there was loss of function in the python enhancer too, it's been a while since I looked at this paper.

Thank you so Much for this podcast. Wyverns are my Fav Type of Dragon. They are more plausible and look more aerodynamical. While classic dragons would be lizards with rib extensions, I like to imagine Wyverns as quadruped winged theropods. Because Wyverns tend to look more avian than pterosaur-like. Furthermore, in pterosaurs the patagio was connected to the legs while in Wyverns, however, the legs are disconnected from the patagio (like birds or Yí qi, and this last one had a stiliform element on their wings, making a Bat-like appearance). As for the tail, it being thin to lighten its weight and rigid to steer better, it is difficult to think that it could be used for any other purpose without it becoming too heavy to balance its weight. And already having teeth, claws and even a hypothetical spit, it becomes unnecessary to develop another defense. At least un my opinion. Perhaps, in addition to serving to direct, they serve to display (sexual selection). Although it would be a problem considering that the display element would already be on their heads (horns or bony crests). By the way, interesting fact about the posture. I like the idea that possibly the smaller species crawled like bats (or when they climb), but the species of substantial size stood in an upright position. 52:38 Nice interpretation 👏👍 this makes sense with Plinio's descriptions. P. S. May I enter to your Discord? I can't enter. :(

Aw dang I was looking forward to part 2, “fossils in the fossil record”

brb going to bother my cat for Science

You fellas look exactly like I pictured you in my head 😊

My favorite kind of convergent evolution is that things keep turning crab shaped. Also when you were talking about convergent evolution also applying to historical human technologies the first thing i thought of was warp weighted looms and ground looms

29:33 🎶And a par-triidge in a pear treeee~🎶 (sorry guys, couldn't resist...)

incredibly underappreciated work.

"the fastest you're going to move is when you're falling" ambush style immediately made me think of leeches, and to a lesser extent of ticks.

I know this is like 6 years late but to address the point about whether or not two people procreating was preserved in Pompeii, off the top of my head I'm not sure about the act itself but art depicting sex has been found on the walls of the brothels, and I believe there are a number of positions that have been found depicted. I have heard it suggested that some of the pictures were being used by prostitutes to advertise which specific services they offered. So now this is here, in case anyone ever checks.

I have a bunch of episodes downloaded to my podcast app and i listen to them based on which topic i feel like at the moment and when doing laundry earlier today i listened to Hadrosaurs which can be relatively dated to Very Late October/Early November In The Year With Five October Saturdays 😂

Will's beard looks like a gator muzzle, and David's braid looks like a snake 🧐

Hello! please do an episode on Geckos, the most diverse group of lizards! I love them so much, so many shapes, sizes and forms. Greens, yellows, oranges, blues, half an inch to 18 inches, arboreal, terrestrial, and some even glide!

In true Victorian fashion: "Why, never by word or deed have I given the slightest countenance to eugenics. Segregation of the unfit, indeed! It is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already. Even now, the lunacy laws give dangerous powers to the medical fraternity. At the present moment, there are some perfectly sane people incarcerated in lunatic asylums simply for believing in spiritualism. The world does not want the eugenist to set it straight. Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft. "

I listen to these episodes again and again, always learning something new every time.

I imagine the hosts as Siamese twins

I love this channel and it's hosts.

Had a moment of deep confusion wondering how something could be both a caecilian and a dwarf elephant

Love the show. Love the content. Snakes... What a hole in logic they are... We(and my we I mean I) study fossil records and strata to describe they faults and failures of dead species. What they did wrong ect. But snakes.... I'm gona go ahead and give up LEGS! and still make it. What a gambit! You guys are the best! TYSM!

A very disorienting thing in this episode is the jump from discussing recent adaptive evolution in response to new conditions, to describing triassic reptilian radiations as "experiments." Given we dont know the specific changes in conditions and lifestyles that led to evolutionary changes in the triassic and can only describe the outcome we observe in the record, but just in context of the earlier convo "evolutionary experiment" never sounded so wrong to me

I listen to the podcast and not watch here but here I can comment. I was wondering how Aly could capture the diversity of leaves in ONE show. I think good job given the time. Some botany podcast needs to invite one of you on to speak 90 about all the types of animal digestive tracks. After all, it is only one kingdom so you can summarize that easy. Yes, I am being snarky. Love the show.

34:36 Funny because doesn't Raptor mean Thief😂😂😂

Another possibility for the flipped over Ankylosaurs. Maybe the flipping over is the cause of death rather than being post mortem? If sheep end up on their back and can't get a hand round again they die, and I believe a similar thing happens to tortoises

Leaves are just the tyrants of cyanobacteria! Justice for the invisible members of the biosphere✊

Do the leaf podcast!!!!!

Question at 1:23:47 you mentioned an Eocene dated Alligatoroid from Germany called "Barry-fracta" (spelled according to the recorded transcript, but probably not how the actual name. The only Alligatoroid genus from Eocene Germany I could find is Hassiacosuchus, but the name sounds different.

Wow, this is going to be great. ❤

The amount of excitement I felt when I saw the title of this episode would be hard to explain to anyone who doesn't listen to this podcast

Always great when it's a 5 episode!

Woop woop from the UK! : )

I would love to see you cover la brea the tv show in your silver screen science podcast

54:00 insects peeing is not something I've ever thought about before. But I will be thinking a lot about it now, now that you point out the physics of waste disposal are very nontrivial at such sizes.

Amazing podcast ;)