This is a transcript of Episode 43.
Travis (00:24)
It’s April 1st, so for this episode, we are going to look at palaeontology’s long history of hoaxes and fakes, which seems pretty fitting for April Fool’s Day, Alyssa.
Alyssa! (00:34)
That’s right, from mysterious missing links that turned out to be less missing and more linked to fossils that were less groundbreaking scientific discovery and more elaborate practical joke. We are taking you on a journey through the weirdest moments in palaeontology.
Travis (00:49)
First though, some news. Our Paleo Pulse segment for the week is about a fossil fish discovery up near where I live in central New South Wales in Australia. I feel like this is a topic we keep coming back to, but you’ve got to go with what you know. This is a paper published by Matthew McCurry and colleagues out of the Australian Museum in Sydney. And it’s about the paleobiology of a new osmeriform fish species from that region in Australia, McGrath’s flat.
Alyssa! (01:04)
Absolutely.
Travis (01:18)
to be precise. So the McGrath’s flat site is a rare Lagerstatten site. So Lagerstatten, do you want to tell me from a paleontologist’s perspective what this is about?
Alyssa! (01:28)
Yeah, so Lagerstatte is a German word that basically means treasure trove and Lagerstatte or Lagerstatten, depending on whether you want the singular or plural, usually indicates that a site is of either very high preservation quality or is very species rich and species diverse. In some cases, the deposits can be both. In this case, McGraths flat is an incredibly unique location because the method by which these animals, plants and insects have, well…
Eh, insects are animals. Nobody tell my supervisor I said that. The method by which these animals and plants have been fossilised is incredibly unique. We’re not actually sure how they’ve been preserved in this way, but the precipitant that has replaced their bodies is iron-rich. It’s a goethite which is extra fun to say and another fun German word for us.
Travis (02:00)
you
So the site dates back between 11 and 16 million years and the particular fish that they found are about 15 million years old. The whole site is rich in plant and insect fossils, but in particular here they found the first fossil freshwater smelt or osmeriforms found in Australia. So it indicates when they arrived in Australia. They’ve named these fish ferruaspis brocksi
Broxeye after Professor Jocken J. Brocks from the Australian National University. So it shows when this form of fish, Osmeriformes arrived in Australia, offers really unprecedented insight into Australian ecosystems. But we haven’t actually said the most remarkable thing, which is that being a laggerstatten site, these have really remarkable preservation details. And this is what has led some of the coverage about this that you can even see with these fish ate for lunch, which is pretty…
Pretty messy. We love talking about food. Fossils and fiction.
Alyssa! (03:16)
least this time it’s not me telling you I want to eat the fish. This fish is already eaten.
Travis (03:20)
Yeah, so their stomach contents were fully preserved. There was a diet of phantom midge larvae in the fish. There was a juvenile mussell attached to one of the fish’s tails. so also, really excitingly, think, they’ve also been able to use fossilised melanosomes to determine the coloration. So they could see that these fish had a darker dorsal surface and a lighter belly. So they were darker on top and lighter underneath.
and they had stripes along the sides. So first time that melanosomes have been used to construct the color of an extinct fish species, which is pretty cool.
Alyssa! (03:57)
Australia just keeps coming up with some of the most amazingly preserved fish that I’ve seen in the fossil record and these are truly unprecedented finds. It’s rare enough that we get fish skeletons preserved in the fossil record, let alone impressions of skin, color, things like this. Matt McCurry and his team have been working on the McGraths flat formation for a couple of years now since its incipient discovery and everything that they find is just a completely new discovery.
First of all, how do you work with this material, even when it’s giving you this amazing level of preservation and detail, because of the presence of iron in some of the fossils, it makes doing this types of synchrotron scanning that we would normally like to do a lot harder, especially if there are magnets involved. So the team has had to be incredibly creative in how they investigate this find, but it’s also just so.
one of a kind. I’m absolutely fascinated by the McGrath slot stuff. I often feel like a little Dickensian orphan pressing my nose against the glass as they work on it. Like, how do you have insect bites on these plants? This is so cool. How is it iron rich? I’m such a nerd for this formation.
Travis (04:59)
Yeah. And I think there’s so
much more to come there too, because it’s only been, as you say, a few years really that they’ve been working on the site and they keep coming out with these, these amazing finds from this kind of Billabong area. think they were saying it could have been a, an Oxbow Lake, so a cutoff lake maybe, where the fish were.
Alyssa! (05:15)
That’s right. And
I think that part of the theory is that the iron precipitant may have come down from different deposits that were in the area and leached into the Oxbow Lake once it had been cut off from other water supplies, which may have in turn affected the way that the communities in the lake lived and thrived. Really interesting.
Travis (05:33)
Fantastic. We’ll keep an eye on that site. I need to, I need to get out there one day. I know it’s on, I know it’s on private land. So, you know, I won’t be just wandering in, but one day I’m going to, I’m going to wander up there and, chat with Matt and the others, hopefully. So really cool.
Alyssa! (05:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, and I just got to show you, you
never know what’s in your own backyard.
Travis (05:50)
Yeah, it’s, it’s really, and it’s also a really good opportunity to show students and younger people and others that look, okay, we don’t have dinosaur fossils in this part of Australia. We have them elsewhere, right? But not here. But what we do have is, these amazing preserved fish. have, elsewhere, just a little bit further south. have fish from the Devonian period. So like we have so much stuff and it’s important to recognize that even if it’s not a T-Rex, right?
Alyssa! (06:17)
by some records you and I still fish. So if you want to check in on what your great great uncle was up to, Australia is a great place to figure out what he was having for lunch.
Travis (06:27)
I hope by now that anyone listening to this knows that people are fish. this is what you’re referring to.
Alyssa! (06:32)
But speaking of improbable truths, how about we talk about some downright falsehoods?
Travis (06:37)
Yeah, let’s, let’s do that. So I might start with Piltdown Man. So this is a kind of the blending of archaeology and palaeontology, let’s say, but either way, it’s a hoax. This is a species that was discovered in air quotes in 1912. And it’s one of the most infamous hoaxes in palaeontology. So this case is really notorious. It involved a amateur
paleontologist or archaeologist, Charles Dawson, who claimed to have discovered the missing link between apes and humans in Piltdown in the United Kingdom. And he named it the Piltdown Man, which the scientific name given to the discovery was Eoanthropus Dawsoni, which means basically Dawson’s ancient man, ancient human. So the Piltdown Man consisted of a human skull.
and an orangutan jaw and teeth, which were combined and artificially aged by probably by Dawson himself. He merged these two different fossils together and then claimed to have discovered them. And then it also turned out that he later on claimed to have discovered more features nearby in Suffolk as well and other teeth and things, but it turned out those teeth all came from the same orangutan. So.
He did a very good job of this forgery, I think. Some researchers, they challenged the finds straight away, even quite early on. So by 1913, David Watterson, for example, was arguing it was a chimera. So consisting of the ape mandible and the human skull. Others like the French paleontologist Marellin Boule Garrett Smith Miller and Franz Weidenreich also agreed with that. But
For over 40 years, this was still a kind of mystery and hailed as this fantastic discovery. It misled the scientific community. It influenced theories about human evolution. It also seems to have potentially stopped interest on African discoveries of the same time, because it kind of directed people down this false route, indicating that the origin of humans might’ve been in Europe. And so that became a kind of…
lost moment in palaeontology in a way, or again, in archaeology to figure out where human origins actually occurred. But then by 1953, the Piltdown Man was fully debunked through these rigorous scientific analysis. What I found really interesting, because I had known a little bit about Piltdown Man before I went into this, but in actual fact, lots of doubts and discussion about it consisted, persisted right up until 2016. And so there was this article published in the Royal Society.
Open Science Journal, which presented new genetic and morphological evidence that finally said Charles Dawson was the man who did this. You can’t blame it on any of the others. Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author and naturalist was another potential suspect in the fraudster, fraud hoax debate there. But it actually turned out according to this 2016 paper that Dawson was the one who did it and leave everybody else out of it.
Alyssa! (09:39)
But my gosh, could you imagine, could you imagine if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made up a fake hominin just for shiggles? That’s amazing.
Travis (09:49)
Yeah,
there were all these theories going around that even that he sort of cops to it in the Lost World that he left clues in his novel, The Lost World. So it’s like this. This is on the humanities academics going overboard and analyzing the text, I think. So I’m going to I’m going to own this one. you know, analyzing these these novels to say, yeah, no, Conan Doyle definitely did this.
Alyssa! (10:13)
I mean, it’s a fun theory. I appreciate their vigor. I think that these are the sorts of folks who might have an I want to believe poster unironically up in their office.
Travis (10:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Well,
it seems like Charles Dawson himself was in that camp, right? And, and I guess there were a lot of people at the time who sort of wanted to, to believe that origin and that particularly because it was the human skull, with the eight mandibles that it kind of fed into this belief that the human brain developed first and then the rest of the body followed. it, it was kind of
know, at the right moment, was the right piece of information at the right moment to, to buy into science history. And Dawson, although it was a clear fake, he kind of just did this because he wanted the, the fame. He wanted to be known as a serious scientist instead of an amateur.
Alyssa! (11:02)
It wouldn’t be the first time that you see people in science kind of putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, with these discoveries that they think are somewhat inevitable in their line of research. So they make a little bit of fabrication to kickstart the effort. You see this a lot. I don’t know if any of you watch the Bobby Broccoli documentaries on YouTube about physics, but there are a lot of cases of this type of fraud in the physics and superconductivity community where people
Travis (11:26)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa! (11:27)
assume that the next element will be found in a certain way or that cold fusion will be discovered in this way and they kind of help it along a little bit with some not so honest research.
Travis (11:35)
Yeah.
I mean, that does kind of bring me to, was another pretty famous example relatively recently in the Tannis Site in South Dakota. it was an example where some data and findings were presented in a television documentary and in public, which then became disputed by the scientific process and the scientific literature and that kind of
You know, makes things really messy and, and murky. So it’s, it’s a dangerous trap to fall into to kind of get ahead of yourself and get ahead of the scientific process. And that’s exactly what the next fraud that I want to talk about is. This is Archaoreptile from 1999. So here we have an example where this one made headlines worldwide.
National Geographic magazine published an article about this animal, Archaoraptor, which they formally named Archaoraptor liaoningensis, meaning ancient raptor of liaoning in China. And they claimed it was a missing link between birds and dinosaurs. So we’ve moved from the missing link between humans and apes to the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. so what happened here was
It was published in National Geographic and given this formal scientific name or informal scientific name actually in National Geographic rather than in the scientific press. And again, once the scientists got hold of it and had a look at it properly, it was pretty quickly disputed. So there was a research team, including Phil Currie and they kind of identified the fraud. It seems a little bit murky about what exactly happened, but
The paper was submitted to Nature, which named Phil Currie and a bunch of others on it, but the paper was rejected because National Geographic wanted to go ahead and publish and not give Nature, the science journal, enough time to actually review the thing. So Nature rejected it. And then they sent it to the journal Science, which also rejected it because the peer reviewer said, A, it’s been illegally smuggled out of China, and B, it looks to have been altered.
We’re not going to go ahead and publish this. The Wikipedia article says that Currie and a few others express regret for their involvement in this, but also the way it’s worded, it seems like some of this writing was done without their knowledge, that they had kind of been pretty clear that they thought it was fraud, but maybe they just didn’t raise that widely enough. So it’s not that they were committing scientific fraud, so to speak, or trying to commit a hoax on people.
Alyssa! (14:00)
Yeah.
Travis (14:01)
It turned out that the fossil was a composite. So it actually combined parts from this small theropod dinosaur, micro-raptor, and a primitive bird. So they are both on both sides of the kind of dinosaur bird divide. And so the bird fossil was Yanornis as it was named in 2002 by Zhou et al. And so they found that the head and the body belonged to this Yanornis and other parts were later named micro-raptor.
and it had been glued together. And so we ended up with this chimera again of a species or a specimen from two different species jammed together and claimed to be this brand new thing. So barely a year later, it was confirmed that Archaeoraptor was a composite and National Geographic had to withdraw their claims. So look, it’s a shame because it would have been a fantastic specimen and both, you know, both Microraptor and Yanornis are now
of part of the fossil record and this I think there’s some confusion about Yanornis’ name but both of them are in the fossil record both of them make really important contributions on their own there was no need to jam them together and claim it was that or ignore or more importantly ignore the evidence that that was the case.
Alyssa! (15:11)
I I mean, I don’t know a lot about this situation and like you said, I want to be careful here because these are people’s careers and I think if I’m reading this in good faith, right? Like as scientists, we generally want to believe that the other people in our field are going to be honest about their discoveries. And this is like sharply contrasted in the book Science Fictions by, it’s on my shelf, Stewart, Stewart Lastname.
where they talk about the publication pressures. Like lot of these studies get published without duplication, without a lot of the rigor of peer review that we would like to see because the people who are asked to do the peer reviewing are overstressed and there are all of these pressures to publish or to go public with your discoveries, to not get scooped. It’s a really tight rope to walk and I’m sure that all of us in palaeontology fear
a situation like that happening.
Travis (16:03)
Mm-hmm.
Look, I mean, I guess that’s the thing, right? Is often people can go into these situations with the best intentions in mind. Like they’re not necessarily trying to hide something, but maybe they’re willing to overlook it because they’re excited by the discovery or maybe they don’t want to upset other people in the team by, you know, saying,
this is clearly fake, even though that’s their kind of thing. And so they’re, they’re catching it in cautious words or not telling everybody whatever it happens to be. And then kind of just gets out there anyway. So that’s a bit of a shame.
Alyssa! (16:36)
Yeah. But I think you had one more example for us, a slightly older example that is less fraught with our modern problems in palaeontology.
Travis (16:42)
Yeah.
Well, this one is a deliberate, I mean, I guess the first one was too, but this one is a deliberate fraud and a hoax and it inspired a Simpsons episode. So we love that. We love to combine fossils and fiction as the name of the podcast would suggest. So this is called the Giant of Cardiff or the Cardiff Giant. It’s one of America’s most famous hoaxes from back in 1869.
What happened in this case was a 10 foot tall, quote, petrified man was discovered, buried underground in Cardiff in New York. The giant was actually a carved statue, which was made and then buried as a prank by this guy, George Hull. Now, Hull had actually created the giant to prove that people could be fooled, especially those who believed in a literal literal interpretation of the Bible.
because he wanted to kind of put this evidence of biblical giants out there in order to show that people could be taken in by it. So the Cardiff giant attracted thousands of visitors and significant public interest, but it was only up for a couple of months before it was actually exposed as a hoax. George Hull had the stone cut in Iowa shipped to a stone cutter in Chicago who then made the figure. And by this point, apparently he had spent the equivalent of today’s
about $60,000 on this. So he had spent a lot of money on getting this done, just to kind of win an argument, I guess. Several geologists and others inspected the giant. And they said early on that it was neither a petrified man, nor an ancient statue, but a modern construction. And yet it still attracted all this attention, all these visitors. People just.
again, kind of didn’t want to hear it, right? Even O.C. Othniel Charles Marsh, he of the Bone Wars examined it, but he declared it to be humbug. And so the New York Herald published an article about O.C. Marsh’s view of it, noting that his opinion offered great weight and that, the testimony of Professor Marsh finally settles the claim to be humbug, as he said.
Alyssa! (18:30)
you
Travis (18:50)
which I think is just fantastic. I wish we could have more scientists going out in public and saying this is just humbug.
Alyssa! (18:55)
Yeah,
and being taken seriously by major publications. Like the next time I’m at the pub and I call somebody out for calling a trilobite, like, I don’t know, like a fungus, I’m just gonna call it humbug. And if that doesn’t make it into the Sydney Morning Herald.
Travis (18:59)
Yeah.
Gonna be upset. Yeah, exactly. So Hull revealed the truth to the press in December. It had only been on display by a few months, but he basically said, yeah, I did this. I wanted to take people in. I wanted to win this argument with kind of religious zealots as it is. And so it’s all a fake. Hey, how good am I? And then the Simpsons episode. This is a really good episode of the Simpsons. Lisa the Skeptic
They go on a school field trip and start digging. And Lisa finds an angel buried in the field. And it kind of sparks this debate between religion and science in Springfield. And then right at the end of the episode, we find out it was just a marketing ploy for a new mall being built in Springfield. And the angel kind of artificially flies across and becomes the symbol for the mall. So yeah, the Cardiff Giant. I don’t think George Hull
as much as he thought this was quite funny, could have ever predicted a Simpsons episode coming out basically a hundred years later.
Alyssa! (20:08)
And like a classic Simpsons episode as well. We’re not talking late season zombie Simpsons, like classic.
Travis (20:13)
No, no, no, we’re talking,
think 97, right? Like right in the peak of the golden era.
Alyssa! (20:18)
there’s some great memes from that episode. I did not know that that’s what inspired that. That is awesome. The longevity of some of these hoaxes is truly astounding. Actually, I’ve got an example of one from the 1700s that might be considered the OG palaeontology hoax. And I’m just going to talk really briefly about that and a couple of other things that I looked into when I was doing my own
rat’s nest style investigation of palaeontology hoaxes. So, I read this book, which is a collection of essays by Stephen Jay Gould, who is my little literary idol. I would love to write like he does. I especially love this essay because it’s like two thirds talking about this fossil hoax and one third talking about how much capitalism is destroying the planet.
But he talks about not just the nature of fraud, but kind of what goes into the decisions people make when they decide to commit to paleontological hoaxes and what the stories we tell about those hoaxes end up reflecting back on us. So in this telling of the story, the original story, the one that gets passed down in different paleontological departments, is kind of like a little fable and it goes like this. In the 1700s, there’s this jerk academic whose students hate him.
Travis (21:11)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa! (21:30)
enough to make up a bunch of fake fossils and hide them around the mountains in his town. In 1726, the jerk, whose name is ridiculously long, it’s Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Berringer, and in the honor of the Simpsons, I’m just gonna call him Bart, publishes a lithography on this area called the Wurzburg Lithology. This volume contained plates focusing on a series of increasingly and probably fake fossils.
Travis (21:46)
So, go for it.
Alyssa! (21:58)
Some of them are these really intact animals, fish with the scales on, lizards, whole lizards with eyeballs and everything to things that we today would raise some eyebrows about. Fossilized comets, fossilised stars, even a fossilised Hebrew Tetragrammaton, which is letters, essentially. So Bart is a man of science and he can tell that his fossils are
Travis (22:18)
Right, yeah.
Alyssa! (22:24)
different from the others that he’s read about, but he doesn’t speculate too much about why. He still goes ahead and publishes, and then he promptly gets absolutely roasted by the scientific community and dies in shame and obscurity to the point where in his final years he bankrupted himself trying to retract all of the publications he put out of these obviously fake fossils. And this becomes the tale of the Lugenstein or the Lying Stone.
But is it what actually happened? Not so. The original records from this town, which is a relatively small area in Germany at the time when all of this was going down, were later recovered. And it turns out that this was actually kind of a darker tale than you might think at first. So Barth was indeed a giant jerk. But in this case, it wasn’t students playing a harmless prank. He was defrauded by two colleagues who actually went to great lengths not only to make but hide these fossils.
in ways that were congruent with the ways that people found and thought about fossils at the time. And some of the people who helped make them just did it because it was fun. They just kind of liked making them. And Bart bought into it because he didn’t really know any better. And to him, these were things that were showing up in the same way and in the same places as fossils that were real and that he was familiar with. It was also long before people actually really knew what fossils were or what they meant.
Travis (23:22)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa! (23:46)
Fun fact, plate tectonics wouldn’t be invented or thought about seriously for another 250 years! So people just had no idea what fossils were. It seemed improbable that at any point you could crack a rock open on a mountain and find any sort of animal. So why not comets, right? That said, this guy was still making a lot of mistakes in how he handled this, right? Even Gould says…
I am no fan of Dr. Beringer. He strikes me, first of all, as an insufferable pedant. He was determined to publish about these things, and at first it was like a fun little, haha, wow, I found all these cool things. But then the two colleagues that were trying to defraud him realized that he was serious and he was going to go ahead with this. And they actually tried to talk to him, even showing him how they manufactured the fakes. And he just doubled down. He would not let go of this idea once he had it.
because of his pride, maybe his greed, or the sunk cost fallacy. He just committed to the bit and indeed he did get very much roasted. And in Gould’s essay, he talks about how this is like kind of a common mindset that still allows people to get defrauded today. And to that end, he did not have a particularly awesome example, but I have an awesome example. Travis already knows what this is.
So I come from the South. There is a certain subsect of the population where I’m from that would very much like dinosaurs to have coexisted with man. And to that end, we get a lot of children’s books that look like this but end up being about…
Travis (25:18)
Yeah.
And so the logic there is that if they existed at the same time as humans, it gives a kind of credence to the Bible, right? To Genesis.
Alyssa! (25:27)
Yeah. And this actually ties back to theories that would have been popular during the 1700s, right? Flood mythology and flood religious interpretations were originally how people thought that things like clams and fish ended up at the tops of mountains. So in a lot of ways, it’s kind of returned to form. But what I really love about this book, other than the fact that all of the illustrations in it are kind of horrible, some of the dinosaurs just look
straight up like zombies like this one I don’t know what’s going on there
Travis (25:56)
Yeah, that’s a very disheveled one. it Edmontosaurus? Yeah.
Alyssa! (25:58)
It
It was an Edmontosaurus. But what I find frustrating about it is that the book becomes very defensive and in the same way that the book that the worst dog lithology doubles down, this book also doubles down with its own hoaxes. So here you can see a fossilised mining hat that was left in a cave where cave water dripped on it and percolated through the material, preserving it as a fossil. They also talk about
Travis (26:13)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa! (26:26)
forget what the word is, but these fossils that seem to cross cut, yeah, poly straight fossil. So the idea that you have fossils that are vertical to sedimentary structures. They talk about a whale fossil as well as a tree trunk. And their postulation is that they’re just doubling down on these hoaxes that have been presented to them as evidence for their.
Travis (26:43)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa! (26:51)
for their belief system and it’s the exact same kind of defensiveness that you see in the 1700s.
Travis (26:56)
Yeah,
so that book is called Dinosaurs Unleashed.
Alyssa! (27:00)
Yes, and it is by Eric Lyons and Kyle Butt. Kyle Butt. You can see them just there. That is Kyle.
Travis (27:06)
We will.
Alyssa’s held the book up to the camera a few times. So if you’re only hearing the audio version of this, it’s worth jumping over to YouTube and having a check and seeing some of the imagery that’s included in this book. But we’ll also try and share some on socials as well. So, but the point here is that, you know, these stories kind of, sometimes they work because they play into people’s cultural, pre-existing cultural beliefs, right? And so they grab hold of something and put their hooks in.
Can I touch on Stephen Jay Gould though? He was in that episode of The Simpsons in Lisa the Heretic.
Alyssa! (27:37)
He was! He was!
Don’t do it, little girl!
Travis (27:42)
But he didn’t, Lisa asked him to debunk the angel and he didn’t do the tests.
Lisa Simpson (27:46)
Here’s Dr. Gould now.
Speaker 2 (27:48)
What were the results, Professor?
Alyssa! (27:50)
My favorite quote from him in that episode is definitely when he goes, I’m a scientist, whatever little money you have will be fine. But yeah, like it’s, think the running theme in his essays were that the fakes themselves tend to be products of boredom, necessity for money, pranks. They’re typically creative and almost
Travis (27:56)
Yes.
Alyssa! (28:11)
joyful in their creation. It’s often the people that then latch onto them or ascribe ideologies to them that makes them dangerous or upsetting or negative. So I guess this is kind of the same philosophy I have with all April Fool’s Day jokes. If everybody’s not laughing at your prank, it wasn’t a prank. It was just mean.
Travis (28:31)
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think, you know, taking someone in because of their naivety is potential, is, you know, not a, not a very kind of community building, humanitarian approach to these things either. So.
Alyssa! (28:43)
Yeah, just don’t do fraud guys. Don’t do palaeo fraud. Come on. Quit it.
Travis (28:47)
Don’t do palaeo fraud. think that’s going to be that’s the that’s the title of the episode right there. There it
Stephen Jay Gould (28:52)
I’m gonna be honest with you Lisa, I never did the tests.
Alyssa! (28:56)
well now that we’ve gotten all of our hoaxes out of the way, let’s talk about a little bit of good news. I didn’t get a chance to highlight this when I was first given this piece because Dinosaur Dreaming was quite busy and there was a lot going on, but since I recently framed this, I wanted to share with you guys a quick shout out to Jack on Instagram. I will pop up a picture of their Instagram with a link to their profile along with this picture on my profile.
But Jack is a lovely student at Monash. They are, I believe, in their second year. And they had a listen to the podcast. They’re one of our loyal fans. And they also stopped in for my comedy show the other week. And they made a lovely piece of custom art that I just got framed featuring some of my Trilobite and Anomalacaris long, long friends. They are ridiculous. If you.
Travis (29:47)
So if your memory
is not that great, when Alyssa came on the podcast as a guest, we talked about your work at that point, Alyssa, and you were telling me that you are mostly working on how trilobites, I hope I’m getting this right now, how trilobites develop the segments of their body, right? That’s kind of one of your main interests. And so, yeah, that’s why we get the long trilobite.
Alyssa! (30:02)
Yes. Yes.
Yeah, so the idea that I have, again, because I am always hungry for bugs, apparently, was that, okay, look, if the mid-segment of the animal is where all the meat is, right, then surely if you could master the laws of how the segments grow, you could just keep making longer and longer trilobites. Like, I do not want to bring the dinosaurs back, I just want a really long bug that I can eat. Like, if Pinchy were longer, his tail would be exquisite.
So Jack has rendered this in beautiful detail with a gorgeous pale blue trilobite that is just so long, so long, and anomolacaris in pink to match. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Highly recommend checking out their profile for more awesome art.
Travis (30:50)
that point they become
like those big two meter long millipedes, don’t they? Like, yeah. That’s what it looks like to me. It’s like, ooh, like big creepy crawly running through the forest.
Alyssa! (30:55)
yeah, I guess that’s less delicious.
I guess there’s only one way to find out, If you can recommend me a millipede that is good for eating, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.
Travis (31:12)
No,
no, but I’m thinking about the big extinct ones right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it
Alyssa! (31:15)
Arthroplura! Yeah.
Yeah! Aww. But Arthroplura could give you such a hug. He has so many arms to hold you with.
Travis (31:25)
Yeah, well a giant trilobite would too. They have legs attached to their each part of the body. Is that right?
Alyssa! (31:27)
Yeah!
Yeah, so each segment would contain a single pair of jointed legs.
Travis (31:35)
Yeah, so the longer it gets the more legs.
Alyssa! (31:37)
Isn’t that great? You could just, it’s a forever hug, like those long fur peeps.
Travis (31:41)
you
Look,
I think it’s a good chance to call out for people’s favourite hoaxes, palaeontology or related or otherwise. I would love to hear about more hoaxes. Let us know your favourites.
Alyssa! (31:56)
Absolutely. Give me a Wikipedia rabbit hole to go down. Thank you.
Travis (32:00)
Yes, like we need more random things to read instead of doing the work we’re supposed to be doing.
Alyssa! (32:06)
Speaking of the work that we will be doing, we’ve got some exciting interviews coming up for you guys in the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned to hear from some amazing people, both here in Melbourne and hopefully abroad in my own home state of Tennessee. Yeah. Thanks Travis. See you all next week.
Travis (32:20)
How exciting. Thanks, Alyssa.
