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0:00
[Music] a wall of water appears on the horizon rushing across the parched Earth you're standing on a Ledge above the flash flood the result of the first significant rainfall this arid landscape has seen all season and this flood is especially tragic because caught in the Swift moving muddy current are animals who had just moments earlier gathered at a small pond to take advantage of the rare drinking water they're slender creatures measuring up to 3 m long with
0:28
powerful hind legs you recognize them as caisis one of the most well-known early dinosaurs and these little meat eaters are being Swept Away by the hundreds their presence means that you were in the late Triassic around 208 million years ago and you found yourself in the middle of an event unfolding in what's now New Mexico just north of the equator on the supercontinent of Pangia it's a place that has become increasingly unpredictable the dry seasons have become drier and the monsoons that
0:59
punctuate them are more extreme scrambling to Higher Ground you survey the landscape beyond the flood an area that during wetter times is Rich with fields of seed Ferns and forests of conifers in the Hills above but now it's a bit of a wasteland as you walk along you notice that the air around you is warm and humid in the distance you see something darting across the landscape being chased by a seal of fisis that managed to find itself safely above the flood its prey is a longtailed early
1:31
crocodile relative called hesperos sucus which runs swiftly by balancing on its impressively long hind legs the animals at this time look well weird to you they are somewhat familiar but also different as if you've landed on another planet and things here are about to get interesting far to the southeast heat has been building up in the mantle beneath the supercontinent for tens of millions of years causing the crust to fault and ultimately Rift and it's about to blow flows of Basalt will begin
2:04
oozing out of a vast Rift that reaches about 5,000 km from north to south and roughly 2,000 km east to west it's the central Atlantic magmatic Province or camp for short and by the time it's over this will be known as the largest volcanic eruption in the planet's history the eruption is bringing in the in Triassic Extinction an event that would wipe out 76% of all terrestrial and marine species it's the fourth mass extinction the Earth has seen climate fluctuations will become more common and
2:38
extreme with volcanic Winters occasionally causing frigid conditions at the poles the sky will fill with a haze from distant wildfires and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase fourfold possibly reaching levels six times what it is today eventually the continent will break apart at the rift the Atlantic Ocean forming in its place Place many of the unique creatures that evolv during the Triassic like copis will become increasingly threatened entire groups of
3:07
evolutionary experiments in Jeopardy yet some of these early dinosaurs persist ultimately the extinction will open up the niches that will allow them to rule but before they can dominate the planet they must survive the entric extinction can [Music] you 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 cie Moore one of the hosts of PBS eon's a YouTube channel about the
3:41
history of life on Earth and I'm here with Michelle Barbosa Ramirez one of my co-hosts to figure out if we would have been dead or thriving if we were dropped into the in Triassic mass extinction event hello Michelle hi Callie hello I'm so excited to have you on again for our hypothetical time travel I'm pumped but I'm also scared because there's a lot more going on in this time period yes yes indeed so what's one thing you know about the Triassic girl this this time
4:14
period is bookended by mass extinctions on either side like the stuff in here cannot catch a break and I don't know if we're going to be able to catch a break yeah Darcy put this wonderfully it's the meat in an exting Extinction sandwich yes the meat and an Extinction sandwich and I think we might get roasted o yeah it's I don't think it I don't think this one is going to be real fun but you know after the great dying you have this incredible rapid evolutionary radiation
4:46
and you get a whole bunch of new groups that pop up and some of them are like super super weird are you familiar with the Japan are those the two- faced dudes that we made an episode about not the two- faced dudes these are like the weird little chameleon things that have like kind of like a birdlike head and they got prehensile tails with like a spike on the end of them that's class they don't even make it past like mid Triassic right cuz once it gets a little
5:14
bit more rainy and we move into the more like moist humid tropical Triassic I think that more of the like drier adapted uh archosaur started to you know hit the bucket and archosaurs I mean this is their time to shine right we talk about the mesic as being the age of dinosaurs or the age of reptiles and archosaurs is basically just that branch that contains all of these fun different reptiles that we're going to see so crocodilo morphs and dinosaurs and parasaurs and marine reptiles actually
5:47
are marine reptiles archosaurs the archosaurs are the ruling reptiles are like the ruling group I think is the name it's a very fancy name that they have given to them but you know that's how we do paleontologists are dramatic so dramatic but like you said we get early dinosaurs though in the Triassic too and they're competing with all they're the ones I'm scared of in the Triassic the phytosaurs are the ones I'm scared of in the Triassic and the phytosaurs like I mean imagine a Croc
6:16
that runs on two legs and a Croc that does basically every other little niche partitioning fill you can think of but it's not a Croc it's just convergently evolved to look like a Croc cuz it's using basically all the same things that are Croc would do it lives in swampy areas it has like you know it looks like a Croc Walks Like A Croc but it's not a Croc and those are the big bads like those dudes are chomping down on celop fisis so feel like that's where I got to
6:41
watch my back although celop fisis and these tiny little dinosaurs are nothing to sneeze at because they are you know like I think uh what caisis was like three meters long you said so it's not huge in terms of dinosaurs but she's pretty big compared to me and she's a carnivore you know like I don't know like a cougar in modern day is not that big I'm still scared so yeah the things are coming at us from all angles this time and I'm not happy about it so our
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cold open was set in Ghost Ranch uh in New Mexico very can I do a quick little Flex about Ghost Ranch yes what is your I came I came prepared I have been to Ghost Ranch I got to go to Ghost Ranch uh during my undergrad uh my grad program was doing like a teacher training where we brought out K12 Educators and we literally got to stay at Ghost Ranch and like visit the caisis Quarry and spend like a whole week there so like I haven't dug up a cop fisis but I seen
7:39
the dug up celop fisis so I have anity big jacket with all of them in yes we got to go behind the scenes at the Museum so I know very little about the trasc but what I do know comes from that trip I only know about L Triassic cleric Tini and coral because that's what my old boss studied and that's what is like 40% of our collection is Stony Coral from the L Tri oh my gosh so many Coral I just went through some today actually oh my goodness so we've got Ghost Ranch
8:11
and we've got these little therapods and they were coexisting with these pseudos suian which are arasan reptiles that are more closely related to Crocs like igia and with all this diversity many groups were experimenting they were getting weird they were playing with upright posture and um just kind of looking like Dino wannabes really like really kind of you'd have to double check these if you were like I mean we would just be like looking at the teeth and if it's a sharp
8:42
teeth I'm walking away you know bye but we also have the extinction itself and really it's not that well understood like we don't know a lot about it like how did it work were there more than one pulse did it unfold over millions of years was it really fast how different was it in different parts of the world and we just know like a lot of stuff died so yeah I think the original idea or like the older idea that I hear about is that maybe there was like a meteor crash in the same way that the KP
9:15
which is the extinction that killed all the nonavian dinosaurs a couple periods later happened and then they hadn't found anything but now more what I hear about is Camp like we talked about which is just flood bals and like from papers that I've read they estimate that the amount of lava that came out onto our surface was like a third of like the moon's weight or something which I don't even know how that works that's what it said in one paper fact check me please
9:43
but like I think the point was that it's very big but also as you said like this was the rifting that created the Atlantic which means that like hey we live on one side of the Atlantic we could go see these in person and after doing the bare um of research for this podcast episode I want to visit you know the camp exposures on the East Coast so bad yes agreed agreed I mean we won't see fossils in them because they're ous rocks but I want to like stand at the
10:13
base of one look all the way up and be like damn that that's a lot of lava you know kind of feel the fear Feel the fear of all of the lava yes I agree with you I would love to see the Camp exposures on the East Coast for sure so we have some categories for concerns for surviving Okay so we've got the planet climate air we've got food and water animal hazards and environmental geological hazards which one of those is your first priority can I breath surviving always can I even
10:51
breathe can I cuz I don't know if we're going in a a cute little time machine that we've developed or we just like get snapped into the TRC either way the first day like if you can't breathe the rest of it doesn't matter so all right well let's start with the planet climate and air and really the air is we can breathe it but it's pretty gross so there's tons of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere as the result of the camp you know and this is
11:23
causing major warming and a whole bunch of other problems we've got carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and it increased three to fourfold so it's sound familiar at all I know what's happen doesn't sound great is what I'll say no does not sound great It ultimately warmed the planet about 4° Cel with some transient warming events potentially up to 7 to 9° celsus bro okay I'm going to be honest cuz when I read scientific papers that say that like I don't know what that means so I
12:01
did a little more research and at least in the last book that I read which was the ends of the Earth that's all about like and Extinction events and in time periods um it said that at the tropics the water was like 104 degrees uh Fahrenheit yes like the water the ocean and then on land it got up to like 140° fah so like water like sea water like that hot so I'm hoping that our snap does not land Us in the tropics cuz like even if we can breathe the bad air I
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think we'll just boil and die so that's also a hazard to watch for yeah really hot it's going to be really really hot depending on where we're at and of course all of that heat can lead to methane being released which is another greenhouse gas which is even worse than CO2 which makes the whole situation worse we get sulfur dioxide hydrogen sulfide and other volatiles release into the atmosphere even Mercury is in the atmosphere oh we're going to go mad okay
13:05
maybe that's for the best oh man and all that sulfur dioxide reacts to form acid rain and that soaks into the soils on land and it forms sulfur aerosols that reflect sunlight and rapidly cool the planet so not only are we dealing with super hot phases we're also getting super cold phases just like right the air is pretty gross but it's breathable I guess it's just going to be really nasty and there's going to be acid rain and hydrogen sulfide and all sorts of gross stuff like that but you know I
13:42
mean we're on Pangia so all the continents are assembled into the supercontinent Pangia and it reaches North to South it kind of looks like a big sea and the world overall is getting warm and generally getting warmer and there's no ice caps no permanent ice cap at this time the temperature in the climate very significantly As you move from the equator to the poles for example in the North in what's now China there's dense forests of tall conifers while the equatorial region is more
14:12
tropical with bands of arid deserts between the more humid belts there are even ice in some parts of China sporadically so scientists have reported finding ice rafted debris so rocks that were picked up by the ice that formed against Coastal land mass that drift I didn't realize that there was Ice during the Triassic I don't think I did either so I knew we didn't have ice caps because like Pangia doesn't reach all the way to either Pole right it's like centered around the middle of our planet
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but the fact that there was ice is pretty interesting I mean that really goes to show I mean you were saying was fluctuating between really hot and really cold because of those Cycles did that make sense and like we're saying that the temperature differences from the tropics to as we're going further up in the poles changes but also from the coastline to like the center of Pangia right I feel like that's something that uh I hadn't thought about but when my
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professors talked about it when I was in undergrad I was like oh my gosh of course right because you have this Coastal influence like I live up here in Seattle and it's nice and cool because we get that nice Ocean Breeze and like when I lived in La you wanted to be right by the coast because it's really hot in the center even just from like 20 miles apart but as you go further and further Inland like there's just not enough water it's going to dry out before it can get to the center it's
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like the center areas of Pangia are just dry Aid wastelands so also probably don't want to be dropped down there when we time travel uh cuz what are we going to drink we're we're not adapted for that we're not Aid creatures yeah so they we've got ice sometimes in the north um and these are probably due to volcanic Winters so the camp you know is spewing out that stuff we're getting these volcanic Winters it's just it's a rough time and also there was Camp that was just stretching
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across Pangia specifically in North America South America and Africa and it erupted we think in like four major pulses across 600,000 years and ultimately Camp spewed out 10 million square kilometers of lava that's like roughly the size of Canada and there was a lot of severe consequences to that yeah okay so we don't want to be in Jersey because I'm pretty sure you find Camp there and we don't want to be at sort of that like little Rift Valley area bad news don't want to be there
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don't want to be I mean it's just basaltic lava so we can outrun it but I don't think it's a great place to be I don't think it would be a great place to be like everything will have been burned down there's yeah no no so we're really we're starting to narrow down where we could even actually land and be I don't know KY are you going for like Tropics sort of area or do you want to stick in our tried andrue Conifer forests I don't know I feel like with the tropics being
17:09
like what' you say like upwards of 140 degrees that's like Death Valley yeah I mean okay I'm talking about like the edge of the tropics where it's like tropical but not the actual Tropics good point we don't want to be in the Tropic Tropics just like the more humidy uh psych I mean I don't know I I don't think I want to be I feel like it's be super humid I did grad school in Florida I don't need to go back to that life it's gonna be rough I I don't know if there really is a good place I guess
17:39
there's less worse places less wor less worse yeah that's what we're going for okay I will say this we probably want to beer near the ocean because Seafood now once again we're going into have to eat meat again goodbye vegetarian us Yeah but I feel like okay there's positives with seafood right like the first oysters ever I think show up during the Triassic that's something we still eat that's great but then when we get near the edge of the water uh we've got some marine reptiles
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that are starting to show up so I don't I don't know if that's super safe either uh yeah yeah so so let's let's talk about food let's talk about our food options and we'll start with seafood since since that's what you mentioned we got rising sea levels during this time the oceans are becoming more acidic and this actually might have contributed to the G uh dramatic extinctions in the ocean like the eradication of the codons I don't know if we would have really been eating conodonts at this time
18:45
they're pretty small they were pretty I guess they were kind of big back in like the ordovician but they they dropped in size so I don't know how good they would be but like there's all kinds of death happening there so I don't know if we want try to find food in the oceans or or not I mean we have acid rain on land we've got acid ocean and ocean so it's all all kind of equal at that point no yeah but I guess you mentioned marine reptiles too so we've got iosaur and
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they became massive during the Triassic so if if we think we can like catch a little one oh oh you're thinking oh yeah but you know what a little one is going to have it's big mama so yeah I mean oh that's going to be rough I guess we'll just have to be quick and yeah between the two of us and our opposable thumbs we might have a bit of an edge a little bit of an edge oh man yeah and the other thing is going to be catching them um we've got some estimates on iosaur speed from a little
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later this Jurassic iosaur but there were iosaur the same size back in the Triassic and it was like 1.3 to 1.8 m/ second it's similar to a modern tuna okay sorry our sound guy today is tuna so that's exciting but I don't think I could catch a tuna just like barehanded no dang uh well okay so if we're thinking about like building tools though we do have a lot more work with this time cuz there are trees we have gymnos sperms which are plants that have naked seeds so like our modern pine
20:36
trees for example are gymnos sperms and like we've got plant fibers we can work with we can theoretically build a net and or some sort of like spear thingy uh because now we have materials for building tools and things to hunt with the tools right so theoretically possible are do we have the dexterity and skill needed for that that wasn't the question the question was in theory so theor theoretically uh we could be okay and like hey pine nuts pine nuts are a delicacy they're very expensive
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when I want to make my own pesto we can paleo pesto paleo pestl except that we won't have basil so we'll have to find a basil alternative maybe yeah we don't have flowering plants yet uhuh so there's no fruit nope uh no fruit I don't think we have veggies yet we're just eating nuts no berries just nuts just nuts um just seeds that's it yep so we got the ice ferns exist we got ferns yep we definitely yeah so um ferns we have to be careful with because one they're
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exceptionally low nutritional values and the other is that they can be really toxic so I hope you have learned how to process ferns to be Ed I have good I have yes since moving to the Pacific Northwest I've learned some Fern processing oh you know what else would be around ginkos these are the early ginkos but at least what I know from Modern ginkos today they're fruits very smelly and the outer flesh can cause you to have rashes but if you peel it and eat the inside again I don't know if
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there's very high nutritional value or anything but you can eat it so I think you have to eat them in like small quantities and they have to be prepped in a very very specific way because they also are a little toxic but it's like a it's like a snack like you're not going to make a meal out ofo seeds you'll have a snack of them and maybe wait a couple of days before basically every plant that I looked up from this time period that still exists today had that it was
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like yeah you can eat it just don't eat too much cuz either like diarrhea or vomiting or all these things where like we have to be very uh delicacy specialist occasion things like there's horse Tales back then still around today you can eat the fresh shoots but don't eat too many because yeah don't eat them when they're too old or in their second their like second coming or whatever because you have the fresh shoots and then you have like the adult shoots or whatever and you can't eat the adults
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but you can eat the little ones and oh my gosh yes there's not a lot of room for experimenting back then I guess luckily we do know of a lot of them so we know what we're getting into like with sads you know like you you've got them but they're also poisonous yeah okay so I I'm I'm trying hard to be able to stick to plants and it it doesn't seem like it's working yeah it's going to be rough you know there's the plants are going to be rough we we've got them they're all going to
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be in small quantities and we have to make sure that we prep them correctly so we can eat them safely but these greenhouse gases are warming the leaf temperatures and this perhaps contributes to the 95% species level turnover of the mega Flora at this time yeah so basically you've got stada the little bean-shaped pores on the leaves and those take in the carbon dioxide and expel oxygen and this allows them to you know deal with the sugars to make their um photosyn is
24:28
and all that good stuffff but when they're open these pores allow water to escape and that cools the leaves down the way the sweating cools us down but there's definitely a tradeoff here so they can just like dry out basically right right so because otherwise you would think let me just poke more little holes in my little body so I can breathe in all the air but then all the air can dry you out so exactly so you've got that trade-off so it actually can get too hot for leaves
25:00
poor babies yeah they are not going to Fair very well here oh boy that's part of how we understand that CO2 levels got so high in the tric because we can look at the stomata and the leaves and as you go further and further into the Triassic there's less and less stomata because there's more CO2 right plants love to breathe in that CO2 and they're like hey I barely have to take a breath and I already have that level of CO2 I need great uh except you know then it was too
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much CO2 so down sto up CO2 and then everything dies a classic tail classic classic tail oh my gosh so we've got a bunch of death in the oceans we've got marine reptiles that we might be able to spear or net or do something with we've got to be really careful about the the plants but we also have terrestrial meat that we can try to get yeah because we've got like all reptiles in every shape and every size but just like with the plants we got to be really careful
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because reptiles have diseases and pathogenic bacterias and all sorts of nasty stuff but do you think our bodies as humans that don't evolve till like you know 200 million years later are so different that those diseases would even know what to do with us I mean there are early relatives of mammals on the scene so like I feel like our lineage is getting there we got yeah I just basically we got to cook everything to well done it needs to be crispy it's got
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to be well and this time we actually can make fires cuz there are plants to burn unlike when we were in the Cambrian so that's good we we can have nice roasted little stews we can make some little barbecues uh okay so we're we're on the right track here we can boil water yeah I'm feeling better you got to find a container though that's always the tricky part like what are you going to well the first Turtles are around now oh yeah we're going to have to kill some
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turtles and make their bodies bowls we also have aetosaurs and they're armored you might be able to like giant bowl a cauldron and aaur cauldron cauldron so aetosaurs are these omnivores maybe herbivores but they're armored and they kind of have upturned snouts they're actually really cute and they really giant shoulder spikes and small heads it feels like a lot of things wait a second Kelly okay cuz again my fear here is we're on land there's a lot of things that can eat us
27:32
are we going to use like aaur spikes and stuff to like build like Mad Max style armor to protect ourselves 100% Craft Time is Back Baby Craft Time is Back yes I want aaur shoulder Spike armor yes yes oh my God we're going to look so good we're it you will not want to mess with us in the late Triassic be small but we're going to be spiky cuz you know what that's an evolutionary tactic that works I'm starting to feel a lot better about our chances of survival
28:06
it's not too bad yeah I don't know about thriving but like surviving yes I think so I think so too yep cuz we do have mammals we've got early repti we've got early relatives of mammals are there they're all small and they're probably nocturnal like Morgan nucanon which is one of my favorite names in the fossil record I love it it just comes morganucodon it has a nice morganucodon it's got a nice little rhythm what does that look like it's like a shrew shrew
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looking creature it's only about four in long so it would I it wouldn't even really be a snack be like it'd be seasoning put a little morun nadon on my
28:50
Aur oh we can make a little skewers you know oh yeah like kebabs got kebabs we've got kebabs yes um we've also got large daod like lisso weia if we can take it down I don't know if we'd be able to do it it's like almost the size of a modern elephant it be it going be tough yeah it's about 4 and a half meters long 2.6 meters tall at the hips and it weighs five to seven metric tons so that might be a little out of our range I me I know also since it's a diodon it's not a mammal it's not a
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reptile it's a secret third thing a synapse lovely lovely little synapsid Proto mamal do you think if we keep an eye on what the herbivorous Proto mamals are eating and test those out at small scales yeah like maybe that's what we can eat because we don't know what else is edible there's so many extinct plants that we're like I don't know who you are but like maybe we we follow those little dudes and take some of the nibbles that they're taking I think so too I think
29:53
that's a great idea is to see what the herbivores are eating because we do have her that human brain right now yeah ha I have a brain and I have thumbs I'm unstoppable now if we move away from the equator we might be able to get some Pro sorod stuff um I know early early sorod so the long neck longtail dinosaurs in South America and South Africa um they were also starting to Trend towards large body size though so uh they would have been really big but right now it was
30:28
like 10 tons okay but here's another idea okay my understanding at least for most of the ones that I've seen they they live together like in communities right like herds and just like modern herd animals when a predator comes they protect the herd right like they're able to fight them off what if we get adopted by some prosauropods and get to live in their little Nest or nearby and when like aosa or some big scary dinosaur comes by we're like hey body guard can you go
30:58
deal with that please deal with this please uh look we we don't got to reinvent the wheel we just got to take advantage of the animals that are already surviving is what I'm saying maybe they would maybe they wouldn't see us as a threat or anything I haven't seen anything like that tiny little we so small and cute so small and cute yeah maybe people would like our big forward-facing eyes and flat oh it would look so gross to them I bet oh I bet I bet we would look just hideous so ugly
31:25
We're Cute maybe maybe we would be so different that we'd like come full circle back to cute yeah yeah hopefully we'll come in peace bringing offerings but okay there's one more thing we haven't talked about because we talked about water trouble we talked but we haven't talked about Sky trouble trouble terrasaurs are around in the Triassic and it's not like the kind that people imagine like when they think of like a pterodon it's the like ugly ones the basil forms it's I'm sorry they're kind
31:57
of ugly but they're really scary looking they they look like they look like if a T-Rex was on wings and the proportions aren't right yeah they got that little diamond on their tail which I think is super cute the long tails is cool I will say that that is cool um but like if that thing comes after us I don't know man oh man yeah well so for food and water though we we've seem to be doing okay at least everything is toxic so we got to be careful and everything well and cook it
32:29
right and there is water depending on where we are and when we are so if we're in the dry season maybe not so much water but if we're there in the wet season we'll have plenty of water we've got lots of different types of meat both on land and in the water if we want to deal with it fresh water during acid rain you might get like toxic algo blooms so you know if anything looks soupy and green or stinky and nasty don't don't touch it don't don't drink it but um um let's move let's move into
32:59
the animal hazards because I think you're right terrasaurs that's kind of scary they weren't that big though I don't know if like we would be like something that they would mess with like are we big enough that these little parasaurs would just be like me me fair fair but maybe we could get a big stick and just like knock one out of the sky baseball style and eat it what yeah like scramble terasa eggs maybe ooh yeah then we would make them mad but yeah yeah
33:29
would it be worth it that's our delicacy I wonder if they're like nesting like seabirds so you have like a whole bunch like a huge Colony that you can just go to and just be like take all the eggs well not all the eggs now we're getting somewhere now we're getting somewhere yeah no cuz then we are the cause of their extension C yes we don't want to WIP out we don't they're gonna be change the course of history they're gonna run into enough trouble at the the very end
33:53
of the tri that's true that's true we'll always leave a couple eggs we'll just take one egg from each nest and I've never eaten a turtle egg I think parasaurs are considered to have soft shelled eggs like the Le eggs I've never my best friend's roommate is a vettech for like a exotic animal clinic and they had to bring a tortoise or a turtle home when weekend and it laid eggs and they they tasted the eggs they made a scrambled eggs out of the tortoise eggs and they said they were very Sandy and
34:26
gritty and disgusting wonderful so I don't have high hopes for us but like you know uh we we keep saying it's the lesser of two evils so gritty disgusting eggs and being alive versus nothing yeah I'd do it I'd deal with it I'd deal with it I don't I don't think it's going to tastes very good I don't have High Hopes but I also don't think if unless they like gang up on us I don't think we'll have to worry about them either like and the only reason they'll gang up on us is cuz we're
34:54
stealing the eggs cuz we're stealing the eggs maybe we're go at night night missions to steal eggs or something oh my gosh oh God speaking of ganging up on us what about the seop fisis like it's we're probably a little bit too big for them to be like yes you are a meal but like I always think of like what is it jp2 Jurassic Park 2 with the comds they're much smaller they're much smaller I had the same thought I had the same thought well okay my first thought
35:26
was like SE if I is man they're not even that big and then I was like hold your horses MB they're bigger than you or like at least your size and things that are smaller than you right now that are not dinosaurs could definitely take you down so don't get all up and mighty about that so I feel like cautious respect between us in the caises caisi [Music] cais celop fisis lads uh might might be okay yeah yeah and also I mean with finding like hundreds of them all
36:02
together it makes me think that they kind of hung out together too so yeah so when we make our map and we're like this is caisis territory steer clear of them they'll steer clear of you hopefully I I think just cautiously staying away from them we should be okay I don't think you're right they're not going to like choose to come after us we don't antagonize them we like have our little uh on our arms and walk away yes yes exactly we'll just act like we're aetosaurus the whole time but we
36:35
definitely have to worry about the rians the group of archosaurs that look like crocodilians on toxic waste I don't know they are oh they're so big they're so scary do they do they only live in like swampy areas though H if we steer clear enough of like the watering hole areas then the only time we actually have to worry is when we're trying to get water true but that is going to be a real dangerous time for us though CU like postos sucus is a member of the lineage of archosaurs that
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includes modern crocodiles but they they hunted everything they we got small dinosaurs daod I mean anything that they could eat and they measured up to six meters yeah that's that doesn't bode well for us no like I don't even think we could outrun something that's 6 M long at least I can't we're going to have to get really good at climbing yes yes that's the only the only way out is up yep we're going to have to climb we're definitely going to have to climb remember to wear a belt so we can do
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like the little Loop thing yes no I was going to say like our little home is not going to be in a cave we're going to have to make like little tree houses oh yeah we are going to have to make treeh hous treeh house survival situation CU I don't know if like I think the things that climb are probably not going to be things that eat us and the things that eat us I don't think can super climb yet so that might be the ticket yeah it's all coming together we've got to go full primate with this
38:12
we have to full PR it worked for our ancestors it'll work for us yep yep get in those trees so they were on to something so none of the scary stuff can get us oh my gosh well not only do we have RW yans you mentioned this earlier with the phytosaurs so these semia aquatic archosaur forms and uh oh boy the weirdest thing I think it just blows my mind about these guys is their nasals were like behind their eyes they were I mean it works though if you're going to
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be in the water and you don't want to have to keep like sticking your nose up to breathe just put your nose up there yeah you great for him but like just not having the nostrils where you think of crocodile nostrils being it's just like it's just blunt no holes and then the nostrils are like way back up here yeah well then when they see us they're gonna be like dude did you see those weird things they had their nostrils like in front of their eyes and Below what
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what's going on oh man it's all relative it's all it's all relative yeah we're definitely going to look weird to them and we are going to want to stay away from them also like oh my gosh and then on top of the rukan the phytosaurs we got Tim npal those weird I didn't even think about them yes and they hang on until like the Cretaceous and they're so we call them toilet seat amphibians because their heads are really flat and they kind of look like a toilet seat I
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mean they do they really do they really but they got a lot of teeth and I think they even have teeth on the roof of their mouths uhhuh I've seen the Paleo art and it does not look I mean it looks really cool until you're there in person with them and you're like oh will I die now yeah probably cuz like there's one egg Ghost Ranch that reached at least 3 m long yeah so I guess I always thought of them as being smaller cuz they're like amphibians closely related to amphibians
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yeah but n i mean everything was weird in the Triassic everything was weird everything was big cuz oh yeah but do you think they're fast do we know how fast they are I don't know if we know how fast they were I can't imagine them being like big chunky salamanders being super quick or anything like the giant Chinese salamanders I don't think they're very quick either but in my head they're kind of slow and
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GA water in there when it rains it's going be acidic water but like we won't get I don't I don't know it's yeah we're going to we're going to be on a tree next to the water lower we're going to lower down a little rope with a bucket made of a turtle shell oh and just dip it in bring it back up to us in the tree pulley system yeah yep we're we're we're g to just like fullon Ewok it we're just going to yeah all of our little Bridges connecting trees and it's going to be
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great kind of going to be a Vibe honestly living in the Trees of the Triassic holy smokes well all right we've got gross air but it's breathable we've got volcanic eruptions that are completely throwing our climate in disarray so we've either got monsoons or droughts or ice or freezing or hot or or lava or lava we've got boiling oceans in Death Valley on land and oh my gosh so that's gonna suck but there is stuff to eat though if we do it right if we do it right there are definitely animal
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hazards I think the last thing we got to worry about is environmental hazards I mean you just kind of listed off a bunch of them I know but there's there's more though so there's fire beyond the acid rain the monsoons the Death Valley on land the boiling water yep cuz what else are you about to throw at me fire cuz this is all being fueled by the warming climate and the drying climate so we'll have to keep our noses open for smoke and things like that that also like we described in the the cold
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open at Ghost Ranch flash flooding events okay but we're living in the trees we are living in the Tre once again points for the little Ewok village yes uh yes yes but we are going to have to come down though so we'll just have to be really careful not go into any like slot canyons and try to stay to high points and listen for distant Rumblings and things like that and yeah that's going to be it's going to be pretty tough and um then of course you know when we're not dealing with the
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hot and dry climate but we've also got like volcanic Winters from the camp eruptions and that's just a another huge bummer but nothing with fur yet that we can kill to make ourselves like a fun little like winter outfit but there's feathers there's feathers feathers had evolved by the triacid yes we think that that might have been one of the reasons why dinosaurs survived is because they had when the other archosaurs didn't yeah ins they had oh my gosh and it's like
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the little down feathers too cuz those are like the Proto feathers from my understanding so that's warm oh yeah yes so we're gonna have spikes with all these weird like girl we're gonna make down feather pillows we're gonna have down feather comforters this is getting more and more relaxy vacationy I'm liking this a lot now living in the trees with our shoulder spikes with our down insulation yeah okay other than like you know just like the sheer landscape destruction that's
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coming from all of this so you're going to have like catastrophic soil loss and deforestation so we got to we got to watch our forests so our little tree habitats um no don't get wiped out that's all we have left this is all we have we all just have our trees yeah wo we yeah so rapid erosion widespread removal of the soils vegetation diebacks forest fire seismic activity related to the camp like we we already mentioned in the acid rain but like o honestly again kind
45:02
of sounds familiar we're living through some of that right now so I don't know we're probably okay I know we'll take our 21st century climate change coping skills back to the late
45:16
Triassic oh my gosh oh so many things to worry about so many things to worry about I guess it isn't an Extinction event so it wasn't going to be like but ended by another Extinction event so like everything has barely just recovered from how horribly terrifically awful everything happened like worst mass extinction event in the history of Earth ever and then we arrive and then it's like here we go again yep here we go again oh man so food water environmental hazards I don't think
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we're going to starve but there is a good chance that something else could take us out be before we can get back to her our time machine yeah doable but doable but yeah it's gonna be tricky a struggle all right so now that you know a bit more about the intasc what do you think about your chances of surviving and do you still want to go I mean honestly I'm feeling a little bit better about going to the entric now than I was at the beginning at the beginning I was like I I don't know at
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all if I could survive but once we settles into this whole sort of like Treetop Village maybe getting adopted by some of the other lovely animals living on land I don't know like it could it could be a time really what told me was like our little shouldered armor uh clothing that we're developing I love a craft as we talked about in another episode and I feel like I F down to be there for a while yeah I don't think I'm going to be doing super great but I don't think we're just going to die
46:57
right away no I don't think we're immediately going to step off our our time machine and and die no I'm down to give it a try me too I agree with you I agree yeah plus I get to go with you and like we're going to nerd out so hard like we didn't even get to the part where once we're in the trees we just get to like we took I think one thing to the tric last time and I was a nerd and I was like I need to bring my little Journal so I could take notes so I'm just be taking notes from the Treetops
47:23
on like Triassic animal uh ecology and like what they're doing so you know what I just talk myself into it yeah let's go let's go all right so is that the item that you're going to take with you back to the triatic again is I love to journal like look it my journal's literally right here with me I got I got to record what's going on okay all right well while you're there journaling what's the biggest mystery that we could solve about the intasc if we could just
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just go there my understanding is that we don't actually have a lot of Triassic locality exposed around the world like I saw a map image with them and it's like it's not a lot we don't we don't have a lot so I don't think this is a comat answer maybe it is but there's so many things that we don't even know that we don't even know about you know so when I get there what I want to be doing is like looking for everything that I've never heard of before and then all the
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paleontologists are going to be like oh my gosh there was a a thing that ran backwards and had three Tails I don't think that makes sense of ution arily speaking but we don't know it didn't exist so I'm going to be very excited about that now I did say the paleontologist will be excited I don't know how they're going to read my paper because I'm probably going to die the next day being eaten by I know to watch out for the phytosaurs and the tnos bondal and you know some other
48:43
archosaurs but I don't know how to watch out for the things I don't know exist so it's a double-ended double-edged sword there but like you know the scientist in me is just like what do I not know let me observe it and that's why I need my little notebook I can only imagine there's going to be so so many cool things that we would get to see what do you want to see I don't I don't even know I guess like I want to so some of these early mammals we do have early mammals well ear early Prem
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mammals early like Prem mammals like stem mammals Proto mammals were they like just like elephant skin did they have fur did they have whiskers did did they look cute or did they look like naked mole rats only bigger like what what was our lineage doing at this time like because I don't think we have found lystrosaurus from the late perian into the early Triassic and it did have like elephant skin but now we're at the late Triassic so like changing do they have
49:47
like little hairs on them yet okay so we just said that one of the reasons that the dinosaurs might have survived was cuz they had their little Proto they're down that kept them warm so I don't know it could make sense that these Proto mamals have a little bit of peach fuzz around them that's also helping keep them through those volcanic Winters yeah maybe we will get a cool hat out of them or like what color were the feathers were they drab were they bright were
50:14
they they flashy were they not like oh man there's there's so many things there's so many things dude the nature Journal is going to be fun I know the journal hopefully you brought color pencils too with your Journal so we can color things oh yeah okay I figured so what's one nonliving souvenir you'd want to bring home with you good call saying it had to be non-living you're limiting my options here I do have an herbarium that I keep at home and I like to frame all the like
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plants that I've pressed from my travels so I definitely want to bring a tri acic plant that I dry out in my herbarium and then frame and put on my gallery wall it is literally right next to me uh you know like I think it's a very decent souvenir it fits on the wall it's not going to take up a lot of space could carry it in my journal yeah I I want a cool press plant from the Triassic I'm definitely bringing my aaur um armor back that's okay well as long as one of
51:11
us brings it back yeah so we have one example of our armor yeah that's a dang that's a good one oh well I think we survived I think we survived baby not thrived we survived maybe thrived it's not outside the Realms of possibility for thriving let's say that yeah no theoretically thriving theoretically thriving before or during the start of a giant volcanic eruption based Extinction event look for it being basically a post-apocalyptic Wasteland that starts at an end mass extinction and ends at an
51:52
end mass extinction I say we're doing pretty good pretty good All Things Considered all thing yeah yeah well thanks for coming with me on this theoretical time travel oh thanks for having me what a joy what a joy and uh I'll see you next time later
52:15
Cy you leaned on your wit and ability to navigate a changing climate and get you through the fourth mass extinction but you found that it was an incredibly trying time to be alive while the extinction unfolded slowly the massive swings and Seasons left you freezing at times and overheating at others the air felt too choked with gases and your modern Reliance on flowering plants left you unprepared to forage here in the face of all these ferns when the dust settles at the end of the Triassic
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Extinction the world is a different place lucky for us the first mammals who appeared in the late Triassic make it through because while they are small and seemingly insignificant now their persistence will matter after the next mass extinction but overall the incredible diversity of the Triassic has ended hesperos sucus and many other archosaurs don't persist into the Jurassic only dinosaurs terrosaur and crocodiles survive from this once diverse group and from this reduction of
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diversity comes opportunity for dinosaurs it has been a formative transition some dinosaur and groups come through the event relatively UNS scathed and those niches that had previously been occupied by non-an archosaurs become voids for dinosaurs to move in and take over for copis it's too late but their therapod relatives go on to exploit these voids evolving into species including the massive Tyrannosaurs with the Triassic end it's time for the dinosaurs [Music]
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Heyday thanks for joining joining us on this journey into deep time don't worry this won't be our last encounter with Dinosaurs tune in next episode for our trip to the late Cretaceous Hots Island and 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 Dr paig Madison fact checked by me CI Moore and hosted by me and Michelle Barbosa Ramirez it was edited by Chris and Kiko the sound was recorded by Joseph tuna
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medish and our sound design and mix was by Cali Dishman the show is produced by Sarah suda our script editor is Dr paig 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
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youtube.com/ eons for more stories from Deep time
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