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0:01
it's cold dark and eerily quiet you feel like you've arrived in the middle of a frigid Winter's night but it's actually a spring afternoon this is just what spring looks like now one year since the astroid hit clouds of dust and soot and sulfur block out the Sun what Little Light reaches through to illuminate the Gloom reveals to you a bleak desolate Wasteland you spot the skeletal outline of a dead tree what was once some kind of Conifer its wood is black and charred
0:34
and its branches are totally bare and surrounding it are countless stumps of Fallen trunks of what was once a thriving Lake Cretaceous Forest but that was before the asteroid hit before the global wildfires that it triggered and before the impact witer descended on the world in its aftermath and now you're standing in an early paleocene graveyard of that once vibrant habitat every hint of G green has vanished replaced with only Shades of Gray and the whole place
1:04
carries a lingering stench of smoke and rot with the World cast Into Darkness photosynthesis has almost completely shut down devastating ecosystems across the world as you slowly creep through the decimated remains of the forest you start to wish you'd brought a flashlight on the ashy ground in front of you are faint depressions that lead towards the forest edge you follow them until eventually you see what might have made them an enormous skeleton of a sorod
1:35
dinosaur stretches nearly 30 m across the clearing patches of bone Peak through a layer of dust and Ash that has settled over its remains you kneel down and gently place your hand on its cold 2 m long thigh bone a small way of paying your respects to a species the likes of which the world will never see again you can't tell exactly what killed it maybe a mega tsunami just hours after the impact itself or maybe the firestorms that raged in the days after or perhaps
2:06
it was simply the loss of vegetation that the giant animal fed on slowly starving it to death in the cold dark weeks that followed this sorod couldn't know it but it was part of the last generation of its kind to ever walk the earth these Giants that once seemed invulnerable literally too big to fail are now gone along with around 75% of all species globally you solemnly walk the length of its gigantic skeleton but it's not long before you stumble upon the remains of another dead dinosaur the
2:38
skull of a Tyrannosaur with 15 cm teeth in its jaws gaping open its cause of death like the sorop pods is unknowable to you even if it survived the immediate aftermath of the impact it couldn't survive the loss of its prey for very long the giant carnivorous dinosaurs were merely the next Domino to fall in the chain of collapsing ecosystems they too are gone from the world the very last of the survivors having run out of corpses to scavenge but not all of the
3:11
dinosaurs are gone for good and as you continue trudging through the ashy Wasteland you notice the shape of something small and feathery rustling through the soil it's a Bird a rare dinosaur Survivor the only one you've seen so far as you watch it poke through the detrius with its beak you quickly reach realized how it's been able to survive for so long it's feeding on nuts and seeds that are lying dormant in the soil ones that have survived the firestorms sustaining some small
3:40
generalists until ecosystems can recover and it isn't alone because as the bird digs through the dirt another Survivor suddenly comes into view peeking its furry head out of the hole of a fallen tree trunk to investigate the noise it looks kind of like a cross between a shrew and a squirrel but it's actually the earliest own primate making it more closely related to you than to either of them its name is purgatorius and it too has somehow managed to survive in this
4:08
post-apocalyptic Wasteland you and your tiny Scrappy ancient relative are separated by 66 million years of evolution but right now you both have the same exact mission to make it through the darkest days of planet
4:28
Earth hello hello and welcome to Eon surviving deep time a podcast that gives you a human's eye view of what trying to survive in the past might have looked like I'm Calli Moore one of the hosts of PBS eons a YouTube channel about the history of life on Earth and I'm here with Michelle Barbosa Ramirez one of my co-host to figure out if we would have been dead or thriving in the aftermath of the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period hey Michelle hey
4:56
Callie that was pretty depressing I don't feel great about about this one this is going to be rough right this I'm making a call right now that we're not going to be thriving uh yeah definitely not thriving I don't think so uh all right let's jump into this what's one thing you know about the crous paleogene mass extinction not a time I would have chosen to time travel because the one thing I know about it is uh big old Space Rock falling from the sky killing
5:30
basically everything yeah yeah the The Vibes are as Bleak as they've ever been like this could be the single worst day in our planet's history truly cuz while this isn't the biggest mass extinction ever that goes to the end perian that happens over you know a longer period of time this is one day that ends it all if you're it justop there I'm scared is what I'm saying it's not it's not great you get tsunamis and earthquakes and Global wildfires and then on top of all
6:06
that the impact winter so all the stuff that goes up into the atmosphere and there's still volcanism happening on top of that too so it's just coming from all angles all sides everywhere I I got to say when we said we were going to be talking about the and Cretaceous Extinction I hear was like cool we'll be in the Cretaceous like we'll be here just before the meteor when the meteor comes then we just all die that's fine and then when you started reading and I
6:33
realized it's a year after I'm feeling like way worse I thought I was just going to get the sweet release of death you know when it came and I was just going to worry about surviving through dinosaur times but you're telling me I'm dropped into this post-apocalyptic Wasteland and then have to be surviving and right this is a whole new scenario that I was not prepared for um so I'm learning in real time and my one reaction is I I'm scared yep yeah I know the light is
7:04
blocked out by this impact winter the photosynthesizers are failing and have failed ecosystems are collapsing Like Houses of cards most species are going to die out or soon will and the species though that go on Define and dominate the cazic era and eventually give rise to Modern ecosystem so we are at the cusp of our modern world at this moment but right now it going to be rough it's going to be and you all didn't even give us like a couple thousand years or like a million years one year it's
7:36
basically the day after like geologic sleep speaking Yeah and and we even kind of know like this happened in the spring so we're we're in I'm in Montana but we're on planet Earth and we're getting in the northern hemisphere we're getting close to Spring anyways and so it's like one one of these like nice spring days and then all gone for the rest of your life lifetime goodbye hope you enjoyed your last spring day yeah it was it was bad yeah so have you heard of the Tannis
8:06
site no what's the Tanis site so the Tanis site is this site in North Dakota where we have um evidence of the impact of the day and they used fish fish skeletons paddlefish and sturen and they have these little sphericals these little glass beads that come from ejecta so it goes up and then it rains back down as these little glass beads well they're like embedded in their gills in the fish in the fish like they died from the projectiles of like shock quartz just pew pew pewing into the whoa they
8:43
probably died of a lot of different things but they might have been fried yet but whoa but yeah so you get these little sphericals in the gills and then because of the way that fish grow they have annual rings kind of like trees so they have a fast growing season and a slow growing season and it looks like they were just just coming out of the slow growing season so it had to have been like early spring early summer I knew that the idea right now is like late or mid spring um based on another
9:13
factor which was the types of plants that were found during this time so I can't remember which plant specifically but I know that based on the two plants there's an overlap where one plant was already flowering and the other plant is about to start flowering so that also like helps us Nar to a season which like geologically speaking especially the further back we go in time we're happy if we get something within a million years a couple hundred th so the fact
9:38
that we know what time of year within an individual year this catastrophic day happened was very surprising to me but also like super exciting go paleobotany and paleo bio like wow okay I know and if you could if you could pick the worst time ever for an asteroid to hit it would be during like B season it's true everything's out of hibernation cuz the things that survived are going to be the things that are underground and missing the worst of it and so wow okay imagine
10:10
how differently life would have evolved on Earth though if it was during hibernation time and more of the different species had survived yeah it could be butterfly effect but the season effect bad days bad days are here we are in the midst of the bad days post Extinction so we have some concerns for survival and I have four main categories here we have climate we have environmental geological hazards we have animal hazards and food and water what is your first priority out of
10:44
those this is gonna sound dumb but it's it's a valid uh idea here I'm asmatic Kelly and being in a world that's basically just like dust and Ash and uh uh particulate matter in the air I know we usually talk about like what's the one thing we would bring with us I want to say inhaler but at the same time I don't know how many puffs I'm going to make it through so that's my number one concern all right if it had been before you know the meteor I would have been
11:14
like oh my God I'm gonna get eaten by a T-rex or something now I I'm just not going to be able to breathe so it's kind of a sad way to go out I rather would have gotten chomped on by a T-Rex right then just slowly suffocated right oh go on without me Kelly please use yeah it's going to be sad okay well let's start with environmental and geological hazards and and and air pollution yeah cuz like the air is still really heavy with dust and soot which is going to
11:43
make breathing uncomfortable we have both lived in Wildfire places here in the Pacific Northwest and down in SoCal for you earlier and now you're in the Pacific Northwest with us but that sucks that's not a fun time no trying to breathe in all that that Wildfire smoke and it's still going to be around we're still in an impact winter I mean apart from the fact that it's hard to breathe that wild well not Wildfire dust but that particulate matter is going to get
12:10
in all of what would have been our fresh water right like that's the other thing I'm thinking about is food obviously is going to be super hard to find but like just fresh water is it all going to be super Dusty and gross and Well on top of that we think that um the asteroid may have been rich in heavy metals many of those are toxic to vertebrates so it's polluting the land the air the water with things like arsenic cadmium lead Mercury great all in the air all in the
12:42
air and then you also have urum so the way that we found out about the kpg impact was through idium and it's one of the rarest elements on Earth today in Earth's crust but it's found in meteorites in much higher abundance and in this little layer in the kpg layer there's like a thousand times more than you would anticipate now naturally occurring idium is not radioactive um it's pretty stable it has two stable IB Isotopes now humans because we be crazy we can
13:12
bombard the stable and turn it into a radioactive member of uridium and that one can cause ex like Burns to your skin acute radiation sickness and even death and if you swallow it it can really mess up your stomach and your intestines now we don't know I could not find and none of the team could find what type of isotope of idium is at the kpg boundary but you can find it with a Geer counter so there is radioactive material in it that is now in the atmosphere as well
13:49
how did anything survive I don't like how was there any life on Earth right now I don't know I don't know I really don't know it was like really bad like it couldn't have been tragically bad everywhere or just the lifestyles of certain things where maybe they didn't need as much water or they weren't ingesting as much of the radioactive stuff but based on how we need to drink water every day and eat quite a lot every day I I think this is the fastest we're going to go
14:18
out it could be it could be because like in all other Extinction events too especially the ones that are driven by like volcanic events and things like that we get acid rain you got to deal with that although it's not like Simpsons style like melting off your bowling jacket or anything but your eyes and your skin might become irritated it also can mess with the water it's gonna just be nasty and and you mentioned earlier the deck and traps are still going yeah we don't want to be anywhere
14:48
near India luckily it's in the middle of the ocean right now so it's going to be a little tougher to get to okay and there's probably not a whole lot of other volcanic eruptions going on I found a little bit of evidence for some in Scotland I don't know where we're at right now I'm assuming Northern Hemisphere but yeah but if we do run across any hot stuff any lava it might be a really good way to get our fires going to that's true maybe what was once our worst enemy is now our greatest Ally
15:20
right who knows oh man here's another baby thing to worry about and this is you know like a problem for later when we're surviving but like lack of sunlight that vitamin D baby I know that when we're up here in the Pacific Northwest during winter we like bust out our little daylight lamps if we're alive we're just gonna be sad it's gonna be sad yeah so for our that's a great segue I think into the next the next problem that we got to think about which is the climate so with our environmental
15:51
geological hazards you know obviously air pollution we still got acid rain we got volcanism but with climate though lack of sunlight is a definite thing so we're thinking two years of Darkness right now the current estimates have it about two years of darkness and I think up to like 15 years to get back to like 100% light but two years of darkness and so we're right at the the Apex of impact winter right now and so yeah we're gonna have to find vitamin D our eyes are not
16:25
adapted for two years of Darkness yes like we're gonna be stumbling around out in the like ashy dark again this is not voting well for us like we could literally just trip on a treee and fall on a rock hit our heads and go out again like the saddest we've gone out all the Predators I think are gone the ones that are you know like small things are surviving and then there's us so we're literally just going to go out of like starvation dehydration tripping on a
16:58
rock not having my asthma inhaler this is so sad this is not this is probably the saddest episode the saddest episode and also just like seasonal depression yeah we're just gonna be sad all around just all sad our circadian rhythm is going to get all screwed up because we don't have any sunlight to tell us when it's daytime or nighttime yeah low energy levels so cold we got to move like towards the tropics right because I know like even before the polar night happened um is that what
17:32
it's called before before the impact okay so I want to be somewhere near the tropics and the equator cuz even before all of this was going on if you were up near the poles you have like four months of darkness still right like they have their polar winter up there so that already would have not been super great for me but now we're adding in the impact winter well and and thinking about going and getting closer to the Equator is also tricky because like that's where it
18:01
hit you know in the Yucatan Peninsula and so anything within 2,000 kilometers of that impact was incinerated just poof gone it's just it's not there anymore and so like even though it would be warmer it's also like one of the worst places to be we just can't win no there's like really no there's no winning because like global average surface temps dropped by up to 25° C that's a lot so a lot of parts of the world are now a little below freezing so yes you're right staying warm is
18:41
definitely a priority how are we going to stay warm because like theoretically There Were Trees but there was Global wildfires after this right so a lot of the stuff's burned down or dead or like M and we don't have fur and like the things that do have fur are super tiny so unless we dedicate a lot of energy to hunting a lot of little mammals and building a scrappy little fur coat that's not looking great maybe we can find some of the little birds that are
19:10
left and pluck their little down oh this is getting gruesome but look it's a survival situation I think it's possible but it's going to be really hard yeah yep yep definitely cuz like a lot of the wood is already burnt you can't start a fire with burnt wood so that's going to be tough lighting so lighting a fire is going to be not easy I like your idea of actually getting closer to the volcanism like that that's just a pre-made little heater that we just got to got to stand here you know
19:37
warm our hands against the the magma the lava fire the the lava fires y I guess we could also like seek shelter you know find a little cave or a burrow and and line it with feathers and little tiny rat pelts pelts stay warm keep moving oh yeah geothermal Springs we still got hot springs we got H sprs they are still around maybe they're a little Radioactive from all the aridium but I mean lesser of any evil um yeah I mean there is a place called Radium Hot Springs and it has
20:16
elevated levels of radium and everybody we're already dying we might as well die by hanging out in some hot springs and having a good days be comfortable and warm as we die of radioactive sickness and stuff yeah and asthma attacks and Suffocation oh my gosh yeah so we got to keep moving though we got to find some type of shelter we're going to have to do something about insulation and keeping ourselves warm and dealing with the lack of sunlight so the climate is not really
20:49
our friend at all no and I feel like other times when we thought about time travel or like survival situations I'm like yeah we can like eat plants or use plants fibers to like build Nets and ropes or we can like whittle a spear or all these things where I'm like is any of that even left or is it just all charred and burned because we know that plants survived because their seeds survived but within a year those seeds will have not already sprouted and grown
21:19
into beautiful big usable plant material so we're kind of in this horrible limbo of good luck make it through cuz you're not going to see lovely plants for a while no well let let's talk about food and water actually okay what food what water what food what water right well we know the little birdies are surviving because they're eating nuts and seeds how many nuts and seeds per day do you think we need to eat survive Cal I I don't know it takes a really long time to starve to death
21:51
actually like a month sometimes we can e it out it's really it's going to be that water man it's going to be finding clean water that's not going to kill us from the inside out so yeah that's going to well okay so we can follow the little birdies to find the nuts and seeds but then we'll have the other little birdies whom we roast on a little fire and eat their little eggs so maybe food is possible it'll be kind of a boring bland diet but hey I it's been a lot blander on these
22:18
travels that's true I some birds and eggs and seeds and nuts that's true that's a Sherie yeah I know and I guess we could follow these little animals they got to drink water too maybe they found a clean Source maybe a spring I mean if we got hot springs maybe there's a natural spring that we can just like push our faces into yeah again follow the animal we'll have actually we should find some of the little mammals cuz if they're able to eat and drink that's probably going to bode the best for us
22:48
yes primates forefathers will guide the way yep yep definitely and nuts and seeds are pretty calorie dense so it's true I mean got the healthy fats and stuff yeah there definitely is a spike in Fern spores in the early paleogene and it shows that they were some of the first plants to recover okay uh but that's not likely until the impact winter is over so we might see maybe one maybe two ferns but for the most part it's probably like no no plants no plants look again as the resident
23:27
vegetarians I don't love this situation for us not at all I don't either like I don't oh I was really excited actually initially because I knew that in the Cretaceous is when we first get our flowering plants and by the late Cretaceous they've basically almost taken over and become the more common of our plants and so I was looking up like oo like what kinds of fruits might have been around and we have like figs and we have Magnolias and we have these things that are very similar to like finger
23:54
soaps and pawws which are this almost like tropical flavor little little fruit and I was like okay this is good I can lift off this this will be fun um but no y'all put me a year after the extinction event so all my beautiful plans of how I get to eat fruit and be in a hammock that I sewed and like wo together from Palm frons gone so thank you I was like actually very excited do I sound bitter I'm a little bitter H but you are a forager correct yeah but the places that I go foraging
24:27
are not where a wildfire earthquake meteor impact have happened my limits are only so far but but but another kind of a we call these disaster taxa that show up after a big disaster and they kind of take over for a while so ferns are one of them another one of them are fungi that was my next Point okay yes good yes so fungi are having the time of their lives right now they are abundant they're nonphotosynthetic composers they're feeding off the mass death and cool Darkness I mean this is
25:02
it for them this is Peak fungus at the moment but are you scared like I am because I only forage a little bit of fungi like I love a moral they show up after Burns but I've got like three fungi that I can ID and the other ones I'm like if I took a little bite of you I die then again in this situation I'll be like well it's my time Cali I get it's fine I'm not missing out on much so maybe yeah H and again we can watch what the mammals are eating because if they
25:32
start eating any of those fungi we know that they might be safe yeah so it might be a little Russian Roulette situation going on with the fungi but there are a lot of them okay I've had a thought okay yes okay so I've had a thought and if we are heading towards the oceans right most seaweed is edible is it all nutritious not necessarily but like are our oceans acid oceans and not safe can we fish at all because at this point we have a lot of seafood that would have worked for us
26:08
like clams are already there we've got lobsters and crabs all of our modern fish sharks the like big scary predators are gone goodbye mosasaurs goodbye plesiosaurs which before I would have been scared to go to the ocean but now I'm like I think we could handle a sturgeon like that might be a good way to actually get some good V vins some minerals some whatever you get from eating fish that we would yeah Cav yeah I want to eat caviar yeah yeah you're you're exactly
26:40
right the the marine ecosystems all of the big predators are gone we don't really have to worry about those sharks are kind of small at this point um all the big ones go extinct um not too bad not too bad however we could find fish and turtles amphibians crocodiles crocodile still around talk about more of those in a minute um there's still giant soft shell turtles around that some are as long is a meter and a half five feet wide turtle soup turtle soup we got Gars although as other ones gar
27:13
alligator gar are going to be pretty tough to get into because they've got like armored scales on them they're kind of a pain so yeah actually freshwater ecosystem saw the lowest levels of Extinction a lot of life is still happening in freshwater ecosystems okay still some stuff to eat in the oceans as well so maybe finding a a pond would be also good I actually want to swing back around and talk about fungus a little bit more because uh we might run into psychedelic magic mushrooms because a
27:49
new pre-print just came out as of what is this this is April 26 2024 um that says that the genus sosy Evol right after the kpg and so oh it might be around we might run into it and they oh no the researchers think that they developed their mind altering chemical defenses to ward off terrestrial gastropods like slugs that are like doing their thing after the the aftermath feeding on fungi man if there's ever a time that we need our wits about us it is right now that that
28:23
that could basically be our end again we're tripping we trip mentally and then trip physically over a rock and it's just this whole no oh oh no so yeah so we got we got magic mushrooms we got toxic mushrooms we do probably have safe mushrooms whether or not we'll find those ones first we have slugs I guess we could use the Slugs as bait I don't think I could ever find myself eating a slug okay I thought you were about to suggest that CU first you said caviar
28:49
and now you're about to say eating slugs look just let me die so we we we do have mammals so there is a possib ability that we could milk one of those early mammals and make butter and then sauté our slugs in ancient mammal butter no let me die let me die I mean they got the mammals that we have are still like pretty small right right most of the things that survived are pretty small yes so like even if we're hunting mammals and eating those we'd have to get like a ton per day to
29:30
actually be able to get enough nutrition I don't know if the like energy we're exerting is going to come back with what we're actually hunting and foraging yeah the one thing we got going for us a tiny little silver lining a glowing Silver Lining if you will is that some of these mushrooms could be bioluminescent oh yeah so just like fields of glowing little mushrooms cuz uh bioluminesence at least one group that we know of being bioluminescent show up in in the Cretaceous like over a
30:04
100 million years ago so like I'm back in I'm back in it's a magical fairy land excuse me what a magical fairy land nightmare but yes H so we got some we got some light we could set up camp in a little field of bioluminescent fungi so we could kind of see and if we are able to get fires going you know and have a little like never ending fire with us cuz the air is already not great so we might as well throw more smoke in there oh it I don't know man it's still pretty
30:38
bleak I was back in for a second and then I remembered the reality of the situation it's gonna be rough I mean foodwise though we've mentioned quite a few foods that are available to us but do you think we can fish in the dark and teleport the mushrooms well enough in the dark it's like let's let's say that we are doing well and we managed to survive for 2 years and then the sunlight kind of starts coming back now I'm starting to feel a little bit better once we start seeing little plant
31:07
shoots come up those are probably edible but still but we're not two years out yet we're only a year out yet so yeah I mean we got we got uh well we got fungus we ain't got no plants there's no plants but we do have fungus we have Birds we've mentioned Birds we got little small Quail like ground dwelling species we got their eggs too we can take their feathers for warmth yep and eggs are also a good source of vitamin D which is going to help us definitely who needs the sun when you've
31:38
got wild game eggs yes wonderful tiny have you seen quail eggs I mean they're like they're like like to get a batch of scrambled eggs it's going to we're we're going to decimate whatever the Proto quails are we're changing the course of history we are we're gonna have to eat a lot when we when I thought we were going to like before the extinction I wasn't worrying about like altering you know the timeline because basically like literally 95% of species die out anyway
32:07
so it's like the possibility that the 5% is what we're going to hurt not that big but now only 5% is left and if we are now eating all the eggs of one of those I don't know all of a sudden the timeline is starting to shift yeah well we got to be careful I guess don't eat them all leave every leave one egg every time we collect leave one that is a good foragers rule yeah we also have mammals we've mentioned the little small rodent like generalists they are going to be
32:35
small it's going to be a snack but I guess we're not really looking for meals at this point we're kind of just snacking our way through the early paleogene also we got to eat their livers too why they're full of vitamin D eating will no longer be fun and delicious it will simply be a thing my body needs to go on and to what end I ask you before I was so excited to be in the past I had my little nature Journal I was like getting to observe how different animals interact I was getting
33:09
to do my like foraging and botney studies and now it's forever night with dust and I'm wheezing and maybe I have to eat slugs I'm so out on this one uh how do you feel about eating frogs because uh they did weirdly well during this whole thing we got a bunch of midsized frogs running around sounds better than slugs yeah so agreed yeah I guess I'm in yeah yeah uh some researchers think that medium-sized frogs were the ones that made it through because frogs need to stay moist to
33:45
survive and so small frogs absorb water fast but also dry out fast and big frogs can hold on to their moisture for longer but they also take longer to rehydrate and so like medium size is like the goldilock zone of like frog survival so they were especially resilient to this Extinction event so there's lots of little frog leg snacks we could eat not too bad okay well speaking of smaller things cuz that's all that's left you know initially I was worried about the
34:18
larger predators that might come after us but now I'm thinking are there snakes we have to worry about are there venomous spiders or little scorpions and stuff cuz I feel like little scorpions and spiders are going to do just fine so I don't know like it's kind of easier to build a barricade against a T-Rex and hide in a little cave versus when we're in the cave what if I sit down I put my butt against a rock I get stung goodbye I'm out again it could be quick but you
34:47
mentioned insects those are also a source of food so a we can eat bugs I know I know I know I know they we do see a hit like insects do take a hit in in this Extinction event mainly we find their Extinction through insect feeding damage on fossil leaves and we see that that damage decreases about 42% across the kpg so like they're still there but they were affected but what's also very cool is that some of them have learned to Glow as well so fireflies are around
35:25
and they since the kpg and think that they glowed green okay so maybe we bring mason jars to the kpg and we just collect little fireflies in our mason jars carry them around like a little Lantern and then that's kind of cute and then I have some Whimsy in my depressing life little bit of Whimsy yeah so food and water we got it it's small no plants we got fungi we got to watch out it's going to be scary but I think we're going to have to deal with it we got little birds we got little mammals we
35:57
got little frogs mediumsized frogs mediumsized frogs insects and then a whole bunch of stuff that's still living in freshwater ecosystems fish and turtles and amphibians crocodiles crocodilians have eggs turtles have eggs we can eat them we must cook them well to make sure that they don't have any parasites or any nasty stuff in them but like they're there so foodwise not the best smorgus board but like possible to survive right not delightful to survive but possible
36:29
possible possible but you're right there are some things that we do need to worry about as animal predators so animal hazards is another category um that we need to talk about and you mentioned snakes snakes do take a hit in diversity as few as only six lineages actually make it through and they made it through though so snakes are around they probably lived in sheltered Burrows again everything that's going to survive has to get out of post-apocalyptic Wasteland somehow um so we need to be
37:01
careful when we go into caves or trying to find ourselves some Burrows because there might be snakes in there they can go a long time without eating they can hunt effectively in low light situations so kind of snakes were the ones that survived were kind of built for this life but that's going to suck for us because we don't know which ones are venomous yeah I want to say and you can fact trck me on this but I want to say if I remember correctly the earliest evidence that we found and how do you
37:29
find the evidence from a fossil I'm not totally sure but at least from what I've heard the earliest venomous snake that we know of in the fossil record was about 20 million years ago but we know that there are other venomous things right like the Rapids we think might have been venomous and those all away from the perian so this is a little more scary to me because we're used to being scared of snakes maybe they're just fine and there's other things that have
37:55
survived that we don't have fossils of of course and we're like wow look at that thing and then that thing bites us and then we're out so I don't I don't even know what to be afraid of anymore everything be aware and afraid of everything I feel like at this point in the game and so yeah Venom steak Venom did evolve much earlier than 20 million years and I think it's a a little pocket in the jaw there's a little Venom pocket and so you find that pocket in a fossil
38:23
and you're like hey that pocket held Venom cuz I think that's the reason why we know some or think possibly some they absence because they have a little pocket in their jaw but still though I mean not even knowing what to look out for I mean snakes before it was just I see big teeth I say be on your Merry way my good sir now I can't even see so that's that's a problem that's problem number one I can't see the threats that are threatening me oh my God Kelly we're just going to
38:56
have to hold hand through the kpg and like hope for the best yeah it's not going to be easy and speaking of just other reptiles that we got to worry about you know there could be some surviving dinosaur Predators like we don't know for sure but it's at least conceivable that a year after the impact there might be some medium to large siiz dinosaur predators that are still just about surviving and still around and they're desperate and we are the biggest snag around and the least well protected
39:31
oh no when I was looking into this I I did find a publication that said that um there were about 33,000 years between the impact and the mass extinction of like when everything was like gone so there's a very good potential that like there could be some stragglers maybe not a lot um based on a lecture at agu like the intervals of like 650 to 00 days of darkness led to about 65% to 81% Extinction across Hell Creek communities so with us being one year in we are probably around a 50 maybe 60%
40:13
Extinction event from the hell Creek moving into the early paleogene so a lot of stuff is gone but there's definitely potential for some dinosaurs to still be making our lives much tougher as we come this conversely that's a lot of meat and I bet take down one of those yeah they can't see us dinosaur jerky to get us through The Long Winter I don't know maybe this is good maybe this is good I'm assuming probably not the herbivores the herbivores are probably toast but
40:46
maybe some like little midsize dinosaurs are still still stalking around we might be able to get one build like a little pit trap or something for it that we hopefully don't fall into too cuz again it's very dark just like line it with bioluminescent stuff like carry around it's like a Target come here or don't oh my goodness yeah so we still got to kind of worry about dinosaurs who knows how much we have to worry about them but I bet there's still some around somewhere
41:19
yeah and if we're near some fresh water which I'm thinking will'll have to be they're also going to end up at that Watering Hole so mhm and they're going to be competing with what we know of as the largest and most dangerous threat to humans at this time crocodilians they make it through and they become like the biggest thing on land afterwards after the extinction event crocodilians are our biggest thing they can go without food for a very long time I think some
41:49
Modern Crocs can go like a year without eating so they're so they don't even have to worry about this whole impact winter they're just going to chill in the water and oh my gosh I seen pictures of like so crocodiles are starting to move north because of climate change today modern Crocs are moving North and they can be frozen they stick their little nose tips out of the ice and they're just like frozen around it but they they're they're yeah sign me up um I'm the king of the Apocalypse kings and
42:20
queens of the Apocalypse oh my God yeah so definitely Crocs Crocs we got to worry about one of the largest known survivors is Thor caurus and it was around 5 meters long that's 16 feet long so they were mostly fish catchers but I doubt they they would know our foot or hand from a fish so that could be a bad day for us yeah no chill swimming in the swamp highly alert we're definitely have to have a Pok and stick of some kind we're gonna have to test the waters pretty good like slap the water
42:55
and see if a giant crocodile comes out after it oh my gosh I mean again it's dark we're going to be like look at that log by the water's edge let us sit down and have a snack and then the log is a crocodile crocodile and it eats us yeah cuz 16 feet long even if it's a fish eater like I said it looks more like like a gerial than a normal crocodile but there was another one Boreal sucus we've got a lot of their fossils and it looks like more of your like normal
43:21
fat-faced crocodile yeah um and it was up to 15 feet long so it was also so another big one that probably would have eaten bigger prey like us yeah and if they have the market cornered on the freshwater ponds with the fish again not so great for us we can't do that whole moving up into the trees and building a cute little tree house town anymore because the trees are no buo every time my brain starts to go to oh maybe we could do this oh maybe we can do that
43:52
reality sets back in and says alas not at this time no no and it's not looking I mean again we kind of talked about the Marine setting a little bit earlier but like we got some sharks they survived they're mostly little like under 2 meters long there was a big Extinction of large stuff at at the kpg um so we get like less than two meter long they're mostly deep swimming species too so sharks we can't even access them sharks we can't but there are still fish but there is a marine crocodilla form
44:25
and it got up to 20 F feet long the dry as swords this is the group yeah and their snout they have like a really long thin snout that makes up to 68% of the total skull length so they look like very Derpy cool but they can hurt me great Derpy that can hurt me so really I mean we would be mostly safe to swim in the oceans but we definitely have to watch out for Crocs cuz they're there too yeah every time we said what about this what about that the end answer was it's bad and
44:59
then it stays bad and maybe it gets worse that's the theme of this episode are you having fun with us I yeah this was yeah this is GNA be so with our animal hazards we might have some leftover dinosaurs we definitely have crocodilians we have snakes of unknown venomousness we got Marine Predators man our food and water is all small we got environmental dangers it's going to be tough to make fire it's going to be hard to find fresh water like it's not looking it's gonna be cold
45:38
it's gonna be cold and be hard to breathe hard to breathe so now that you know a little bit more about the kpg what do you think about your chances of survival and do you still want to go well no I do not I'm out again I was thinking this whole time we were going to before the extinction event and I was so set and ready and excited and then I got this curveball thrown at me and then as we discussed it more it got worse and worse and I'm not about it I think
46:17
theoretically we can survive but at what cost and for what reason cie there's nothing for me there get me out of there never ever take me there I'm good have fun I'm out yeah agree agreed I don't I mean I do think we could survive it but I definitely don't think we were going to be thriving in any way shape or form it's going to be really hard this is actually one of the hardest that I think we've done like shockingly like I mean we were in the Cambry and where there
46:47
was hardly any oxygen and there's nothing to eat and I would almost rather go back to the Cambry and then do this again yeah nothing's going to eat you there and you can still see yeah and mostly breathe mostly is breathe yeah I don't know o all right so what's the biggest mystery we could solve about the event if we could just like go there I personally want to know why dinosaurs went extinct non- Aven dinosaurs went extinct because we know not all of them were big we
47:20
know that some of them were small and feathered non-avian feathered dinosaurs we know of burrowing dinosaurs we know of omnivores we know that there were insector like we know that non-avian dinosaurs had the characteristics of a lot of the survivors so what was it about the non-avian ones that were unable to adapt that's a great question that's that's at least what I want to know I don't even know cuz every time I start to think of a question I think think it's too dark you can't see get
47:59
out I'm so over this time period I just want to go home you guys I just want to go home let me out of here I need the 21st century yeah all right so what's one item you take there with you again everything I think of where I'm like a Flashlight batteries are gone solar power flashlight there's no solar inhaler I'm out of Puffs in like a week what about like the shake flashlight like oh you shake it and yeah but then again it's like what I shite it and I see a crocodile and I'm like okay great
48:37
you know maybe maybe I need like a little like motivational guide book or something to encourage me to stay alive because keep your spirits up maybe I'll bring a novel with me I can't read it's too dark Chicken Soup for the Cretaceous soul like my usual answer again of my little nature Journal useless uh a pillow a pill I'm taking a pillow my little inflatable back my backpacking pad actually at least you'll be comfortable I don't I don't need light to see that my sleeping bag maybe I I
49:17
will burrow in hibernate into my little sleeping bag and I'll be like Kelly wake me up in two years when this is over it's that's all I got my little comfort blanket oh man and I got a little mummy bag too so I will truly be like a little cocoon yeah I think that's it I'm going catatonic I'm out I'm bringing my little sleeping bag and I'm done so if you bring a sleeping bag maybe bring a terson one and we'll help stay warm and then I'll bring like the shake flashlight so we'll have light that
49:49
doesn't need the Sun or a battery and some have warm through the winter yes I didn't expect to get so sad and out on this episode I apologize but also I'm glad with my answer I just want a huddle I want I'm reverting back to like little baby mammal me you know I'm like give me a little cave give me a burrow wake me up when it's over yeah I think I mean that is definitely the survival technique of a lot of things is just to like cuddle and chill out and wait for
50:23
the worst to be over okay so what's one non-living souvenir you'd want to bring back with you to the present I mean I was going to say like some sort of meteor impact souvenir but you can get those today you can find shocked quartz today you can like go see the you can't get a piece of the original chickaloo asteroid though look though if we're in the kpg at that time I don't even know if we can get to the crater I doubt it it's probably hot I think the I think the asteroid still sticking out of
50:57
our planet by this time like I'm pretty sure the rock itself was like way bigger than Mount Everest and when it hit it was still sticking out of the planet bigger than Mount Everest like it is a feature on the landscape now even a year out yeah it is probably still like hot even like how long does it take for liquid crust to cool completely man more than a year I can tell you that it would be tough I don't even know who there's like nothing to bring back yeah what is
51:30
there left maybe if we could find like a big glass spherical like a a big piece of glass that like rained down or something that might look cool on a mantle but that was my first thought like a shocked quartz or like some you know extra but then again like is that radioactive and kill it I mean we're dying anyway every day is a March towards death so yeah give it to me I guess we could get some fresh dinosaur bone and it would be it would be dead enough that there wouldn't be any like
52:00
crusties or goo on it it would be naturally bleached we could bring those back just a heads up a fresh T-rex skull like no but then when you bring it back it does it start to like decompose and rot so it would depend on how long it's been out there in the sun you know like old cattle bone what Sun cie what sun is I guess we just put it in a giant vat of like hydrogen peroxide and get the D rested to get anything else off of it yeah I mean there probably wouldn't be
52:30
any meat or stuff on it I mean there's a lot of scavengers and a lot of things still got to eat so I've had a thought yes you said a bone but what bone specifically um I'm going to take a whole T-rex skull okay I'm going to clean it up it's going to be my little side table like my little coffee table in my home wait a second I'm back in if I survive one year of the kpg and I get to bring this bad boy back to be my coffee table maybe I'm back in okay well I just I I have to be this
53:05
person cuz I've been asked this question on a tour by like a fourth grader and then I had to look it up and now I have it forever in my brain because I found out about it but we need a winch like a a thing that can pull not like a medieval bar lady but I'll take either we're definitely going to needs some power because like a fresh T-rex skull like no no muscle attached no tongue no eyeballs just the bone weighs like 350 pounds and uh we're not in the best
53:40
shape of our lives here okay that's what I'm going to say assuming we're getting to come back to the present that means there is a time travel machine and if we have developed time travel then I would like to believe we have developed a little pocket device where I push a button and a wench pops out yep I mean a winch not a wench well maybe a wench who's operating a winch and then that wench uses the winch to get my T-Rex and because I have a time travel machine it's just all going to work
54:08
out but yes I also agree that a fresh T-Rex go would be pretty dang cool if we could figure out how to get it in I mean our time machine could also be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside so hopefully we got space for it too so I C copyrighted music that we can't play right now but you who know you're playing it in your head yep everybody's playing it everybody's playing it oh man all right uh what are you bringing back hiie no I'll probably just help drag
54:41
that dang T-rex skull back to I mean but you could get another species I guess we could yeah and then we could have like matching little coffee tables matching coffee tables yeah I would totally bring back a te um a Triceratops skull which is probably twice as heavy as a t-rexx skull that's not the best coffee table Kelly no but it doesn't have to be coffee table just like above the mantle you know in my tiny apartment it'll take up my entire front room worth it yeah you'll squeeze it and
55:16
you know what it could be a good coat rack if you have a very big entryway because now we're moving you into a mansion and then you get home after a long day you hang up your coat you know on one of the horns and eyebrow horn that's your dayto day day to day yeah because now I'm a famous time traveler that survived a year after the impact oh my gosh like survived with scars I'm sure my goodness well all right everybody go outside and get some sunlight after this
55:47
enjoy not being in an impact winter Yeah Boy howdy eat all the good foods not slugs and toxic fungus my goodness well this was great to have you along I don't think thanks for putting up with me uh Together We Will Survive there's not been an impact or there's not been a time period that has beat us yet no so you know what cheers to you we didn't do too bad yes you've lost track of how long you've been immersed in this world of Perpetual Darkness but but all you know is that
56:27
it's time to leave whether it's the chronic lack of vitamin D or just the bleakness of this time nearly every moment you've been here has been a bummer trying to desperately cling to life after the most sudden and dramatic catastrophe in history has been no mean feat and while the cataclysm itself was rapid the planet's recovery from it will be slow it'll be months or years before photosynthesis restarts decades es before the impact winter fully ends Millennia for complex ecosystems to
57:01
rebuild themselves and millions of years for biodiversity levels to fully recover when that recovery is complete the world will be a very different place from what it was before the age of giant reptiles is over but the end of the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs will allow another cast of characters to take Center Stage when the Sun finally breaks through the CLS the stubborn survivors that you encountered will gaze Upon A New World filled with enormous ecological
57:33
opportunities among them tiny furry mammals like purgatorius will have a chance to Rise From the Ashes of this Wasteland and spread into new niches that they never occupied before and if they hadn't been able to eek out an existence through that ancient long night you and I wouldn't be around to hear about it now this Wasteland was not just a graveyard of an old world but the Cradle of a new
58:02
one thanks for joining us on this journey into deep time tune in next episode to hear us try to survive the time the Mediterranean Sea dried up in the meantime you can find us telling more stories from our planet's past over at youtube.com/ eons this episode was written by Farhan mea fact checked by me CI Moore and hosted by me and Michelle Barbosa Ramirez it was edited by Chris aniko and our sound design and mix was by Cali Dishman the show is produced by
58:30
Sarah suda our script editor is Dr Paige Madison and our editorial director is Dr Darcy Shapiro our executive producers are Seth Radley and Hank Green the executive in charge for PBS is marabel Lopez and John Campbell is PBS's assistant director of programming Eon surviving deep time is a production of complexly for PBS digital Studios and we are distributed by PRX until next time you can always visit us over at youtube.com/ eons for more stories from Deep time
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